CROSSPOSTS |FROM MY AO3|

ONE OF THEM | HUNGER GAMES

She's fourteen summers old. Last year she was thirteen. At thirteen summers old, she drove an axe into another kid's head. At thirteen she watched as someone bled to death at her feet.

She still feels it, the whispering cry of monster, monster, monster and she knows it's true, that there is no other word for someone who killed five people, some of which could probably be called cold-blood murder, but in the arena it isn't murder, it's survival, and there's only survival. You do what you have to, but what nobody tells her is that the hardest part comes after. Victor. Monster. Same thing. Same thing.

From early on, she could feel something different about her. How when other children cried, she screamed, and when the others teased her and mocked her, she didn't run for the teachers, she teased and mocked right back, only louder. And more recently, when the boys started getting a little too nice, she didn't hesitate to hit them where it counted. The urge to fight picked at her like an itch in her bones, and when she couldn't find an argument, she started one. If she was a bit small and scrawny for her age, what did it matter? Her tongue could kill anyone, and if it couldn't, people underestimated the strength of jagged fingernails.

Obviously, she wasn't stupid, no matter what the others said. When her name was called- one slip out of thousands, some said it was rigged, that she'd been marked as a troublemaker, a rebel- she knew she had no chance against the Ones and Twos who knew fifty ways to make you bleed to death, and it didn't help that she was thirteen summers old and not especially attractive, with her sharp, scrawny frame and pronounced nose, and that she would be labeled as dead meat early on. But rather than give up the way that the others from the outlying districts did, cry and sniffle and wait to die, Johanna planned, and she knew her best chance, ironically was to come off as completely and utterly useless.

It was hard, and Johanna had to scramble every bit of willpower to make it happen. Pretending she was afraid of the big, strong eighteen-summer-olds, not quite comedically much, but just enough that she looked like she was valiantly trying to hide her fear, and failing because she was a weakling from Seven, refusing to hold any of the blades, even convincing her mentor- a sixty-year-old lady named Kathy who had a loose tongue and a tendency to be untrustworthy- things that served her well in the Games but not in the aftermath- that she was useless, which forfeited most of the sponsors and support, but she could kill with a sharp stick just as well as a polished Capitol-branded longsword. Dead was dead, and only Careers cared about making a show of it. Sniffling through her interview, shaking in front of the Gamemakers, what the people back home must think of her, especially the old bullies, seeing snappy spiky Johanna making a fool of herself, but none of that mattered. Only survival. You can't prove someone wrong if you're dead.

Killing the cocky, arrogant Four was the first. And guilty as it made her feel, Johanna felt some of that old spark of satisfaction coming back to her, watching him loom over her with a sword, waiting, playing up the brutal angle- in his interview, he'd sworn to kill everyone, kill them all- and he had to be manhandled off the stage by Peacekeepers, dead, but she didn't let herself get sucked down that hole, that was what made tributes mad, and the Capitol didn't like letting the insane ones win, she formed a brief alliance with the boy from Ten, until he'd attacked her with a knife in the middle of the night and she was forced to beat him to the ground until she could reach the axe- and the others, quick bouts of fear and guilt, but she needed to survive, and through it all, she swore to make them pay.

So when Johanna Mason of District Seven made it out of the sixty-seventh annual Hunger Games, she thought it was over. But it wasn't. The Victory Tour. The senseless killing and dying never ended, and each year she ended up back at the Capitol. Around and around.

She hadn't expected the other victors to receive her kindly, only Finnick had seemed civil, but that was Finnick and he was nice to everyone whether he liked them or not, Haymitch Abernathy was drunk more often than not, the Career victors aloof and self-important, and nobody had a place for a half-starved, angry District Seven.

What she didn't know is that being forced into a sadistic gladiatorial blood-fight does something to a person that only others who've done the exact same thing and suffered the exact same horrors can share, and that family borne of blood and bone and scars was the strongest kind of family.

And for her, it would soon be the only kind of family.