Chapter Text
People always underestimate the power of spite.
Spite is the emotion that has kept Johanna Mason alive since everyone she loved was picked off one-by-one. Her spite and vitriol for President Snow has given her more lifeblood than anything else since.
Johanna spent years waking, living, breathing, and existing just for the hope to watch the Capitol burn to the ground.
The rebellion gave her spite fuel. It’s the way she was able to keep existing with all her loss. It is what made Johanna bite down and swallow all her unfair indignation about everything revolving around Katniss Everdeen.
Sure, she’s just some seventeen-year-old girl put through similar horror as Johanna by the Capitol.
But Katniss represented exceptions for every single cruelty Johanna was handed.
When Johanna showed mercy in the arena by removing a Career’s sword from her district partner’s body to speed up his suffering, the story was distorted and manipulated by Gamemakers to make Johanna look like a blood thirsty victor who killed someone from her own district.
Whereas Katniss just had to pull out those dumb berries and they just let her keep Peeta alive.
When Johanna woke up from her games, her breasts had been altered without her consent. Her mentor, Archer Thomas, and the other District 7 Victors tried to stop it and were all beaten to a bloody pulp for it.
When Katniss won her games, they tried to do the same but stopped when Haymitch pitched a fit.
When Johanna acted out, her mom was killed.
When Katniss acted out, she was revered for it.
When Johanna was forced into prostitution, if she didn’t do it perfectly her loved ones were still killed.
Katniss never even was forced into sex slavery.
When it was announced that the Quell was going to be reaped from the existing pool of Victors, the rebels immediately jumped to Katniss’s aid.
The plan was always to bust the Mockingjay out of the arena.
And despite all of Johanna’s disdain, she agreed to lay down her life in that arena for both District 12 tributes. She agreed to be the disposable pawn the rebellion needed her to be.
Hell, she spent months reading anatomy textbooks and practiced for hundreds of hours on how to properly remove the tracker in her arm – which turned out to be futile in the end since Johanna had to remove the tracker under duress with Brutus and Enobaria, the tributes from District 2, closing in on them.
And when the plan worked and the arena was blown out, the rebels saved their first priority.
Katniss fucking Everdeen.
They couldn’t even be bothered to come back for her other half. Leaving Peeta behind to be tortured by the Capitol.
She is certain that the rebels coming back for Johanna was never even in the realm of possibility.
Much like everything in her life, Johanna only had herself to depend on. It is why she had originally planned on cutting her own tracker out to be rescued.
But when that arena blew out, she was too far away to make it to the lightning tree in time and cut out her own tracker.
They’ve shown her the clips of the arena blowing up while interrogating her.
The forcefield exploding incapacitated all the remaining tributes. It’s how she now knows that despite Johanna and Peeta being much further from the lightning tree than the rest, both were knocked unconscious.
And at that point her only chance of rescue when things went that awry would’ve been if Finnick could’ve come to rescue her.
But he couldn’t.
Or he just didn’t.
She doesn’t know, she knows they’ve purposefully not shown her the clips of him specifically during the escape to probably mess with her head.
All Johanna knows is that minute and a half where she was unconscious is what secured her ticket to her current hell.
If she wasn’t knocked out for that long, she would’ve had time to save both herself and Peeta from punishment.
Death would’ve been so much better than this.
But neither were that lucky.
In fact, if you asked Johanna, she would say that Peeta Mellark and herself are the unluckiest sons of bitches in Panem.
Both are being tortured continuously for weeks on end as a punishment for Katniss’s transgressions.
Okay, she’s not an idiot.
She knows none of this is actually Katniss’s fault. Rather it is the fault of the government and rebellion that treats them all as pawns. But she can be jealous and angry that she is so inconsequential that she has been left behind to rot in a dank cell.
In the last several weeks of hell there has only been one person that hasn’t made her feel abandoned and forgotten.
(Although, it is very hard to keep track of time here. Johanna has resolved to scrape a tally on the wall with her bloody thumbnail every time she wakes up. Seeing as there are no windows and music is always blaring at random hours, it is not an accurate system).
It is no surprise that person is Peeta.
Being torture neighbors can really do that to you.
Bonds a friendship real quick.
Before this, Johanna knew how kind of a person Peeta is. The entire damn country knows. But she definitely didn’t expect Peeta to immediately stick his neck out for her in this place. Especially since it was only hours after she tried to goad him into killing her by saying awful things so she could avoid capture.
And Peeta doesn’t even know, but that specific incident where he stuck his neck out for her was pertaining to Johanna’s biggest fear about capture– sexual violence.
Johanna had been on the receiving end of the Capitol’s depravity enough for one lifetime in those months she tried to comply with President Snow’s forced prostitution. It broke her until she couldn’t do it anymore.
She lost everyone because of it. And all Johanna had left was control over her own body.
She knew how commonplace groping or worse would likely occur in captivity; it was about eighty percent of what fueled Johanna’s panicked attempts at suicide in the arena when she realized she wasn’t going to be rescued.
And once she was captured, she had the resolve that if anything like that happened, she would be like a rat stuck in a glue trap. Even if they put her in a straightjacket, cuffed all her limbs, and put her in a padded room – she would find a way to fucking take herself out before any of that misery could happen again. By literally any means possible.
She just couldn’t endure that again.
And it was within hours of her capture from the arena that handsy guards didn’t waste any time. Both Johanna and Peeta were naked, shackled, decontaminated, and dehumanized.
And once one of the guards’ sexual harassment didn’t get a reaction from her – she refused to interact – he took it a step further.
The slimy guard was only able to grope her chest for a couple seconds before Johanna managed to snap several of the perv’s meaty fingers backwards. If she wasn’t cuffed, she would’ve ripped his fingers off.
In response, Johanna was slapped so hard she was knocked to the ground, and when the man made her stand and was about to try something again, Peeta intervened.
He was a force of power in the claustrophobic elevator– headbutting a guard to get out of his grasp and plowing into the creep to punch him in the chin.
Peeta immediately paid for his intervention, being punched in the gut so hard he instantly spewed vomit across the glass elevator walls.
He owed her nothing at that point. And he even continued when the guards tried lying to his superiors as to why both victors were battered and not captured ‘camera ready’ as instructed. Johanna still wouldn’t have even talked, but Peeta kept defending her and called out the guard’s groping only to receive another blow to his side with the butt of a gun.
It turns out Peeta announcing that to the guard’s superior officer revealed to Johanna the singular perk to being the sole captured tribute that was in on the rebel plot.
She’s a high priority prisoner and they desperately need her – for information and to punish for the plot.
And that gave her a mark that made her ‘code black’ to the guards. She has learned in her time here that it basically means it is the only prisoners guards face actual repercussions for if they molest, grope, or rape.
Who knew it could be such a relief that any and all touch she has received has been violent slaps, punches, and kicks?
It’s not like the Capitol is doing it for her best interest.
It would just be an inefficient and wasteful way to torture her.
The president is not a wasteful man.
Snow has made her torture effective, symbolic, and as painful as possible.
But she has a steel resolve, and a large part of that foundation since her arrival here was that feeling of solidarity with Peeta through the wall.
Some weird codependency formed between them that first night. Maybe even before the elevator when Peeta’s desperate grip on Johanna ensured the pair went down in a combined heap when the stun gun was shot into Peeta’s back.
From capture, Peeta looked to Johanna as the only semi-trusted adult figure for him. He had no clue any of this would happen and he was captured to be tortured for information he didn’t have.
She was the only familiar and safe thing for him.
In their first few days there, Peeta’s only form of torture was being starved and forced to listen to Johanna being beaten to a bloody pulp, have her head shaved, be waterboarded and electrocuted for information.
But when her torturers would leave her in her cell – Johanna laid there, freezing, damp, and uncontrollably twitching.
The only things that kept her sane were the tips she already knew for post-electrocution and Peeta talking to her through that wall.
They thought they could break her.
And maybe they could have if they hadn’t already royally broken her years ago.
She had only become the indestructible spiteful husk that they designed her to be.
It’s not even that she had self-preservation, she honestly wanted to die more than anything. But she knew as soon as she told them anything they would kill her.
Johanna refused to speak at all in the first few days they tortured her. Anyone who has known Johanna in her short twenty-one years would know that’s a nearly impossible feat for herself.
She would only grunt to Peeta when he called desperately to her through their wall asking for proof of life after hearing her torturers leave the cell.
She spoke aloud to her torturers for the first time after they electrocuted her so severely it made her lose control and piss all over herself. If she had any food in her stomach, it probably would’ve made her shit herself too. And the only words she said then were, “Fuck you!” and other explicative from the severe pain.
Johanna spent hours shaking, having little control over her limbs while lying in paralysis, and trying to stay sane afterwards.
Thanks, a fucking lot for that one, Volts. They’re only doing this because of the stupid trap. If I ever get out of here, he better hope I don’t garrote him with his stupid fucking precious wire.
Peeta would talk to her through the walls about nothing, and it kept her from fully succumbing to the pain and just losing it.
She didn’t see Peeta again until both were dragged out of their cells to be done up, dressed up, and placed in front of cameras.
Johanna was as awful at complying as one could imagine, and it takes most attention off of Peeta. She scowled in every picture they made her pose with beside President Snow. He was so close that day and her fingers itched to reach out to rip his throat out.
That night for her failures to comply with being a good prop, they beat her senseless. Bruising her only in places that will be covered up by garish outfits.
The next morning, they forced her and Peeta to film pro-Capitol propaganda with the President. They were stricter than the day before, lashing a whip across the back of Johanna’s calves when she risked a glance to look over at Peeta who stood only a few feet away.
At that point they’d only fed her garbage scraps, and she was so tired. She knew there was no way out of filming this and she would have to spew pro-Capitol bullshit. So, she gritted her teeth and tried.
They kept punishing her since she was a shit actor.
And then they started punishing Peeta for her shortcomings.
After his kindness of talking nonsense to her while she twitched in agony most nights, she felt some need to be protective of him too.
Johanna steeled herself and forced herself to do a perfect take for the propo tape. While in the middle of one of her lines, she remembered a subtle form of dissent that was prominent in District 7 leading up to the Dark Days and had resurged in the months leading up to the Quarter Quell.
To dissent, people would stick their hand in their pocket in the presence of Peacekeepers.
During the Dark Days, it took years for the Capitol to figure out it was a way the citizens of District 7 were outright mocking them. It resulted in Peacekeepers killing people on sight for having a hand in their pocket.
It is a fact that was omitted from their history but trickled down through the words of ancestors.
Johanna only learned about the gesture because of her sister, Katherine. She was so smart, too damn smart. And she always was hungry for knowledge, which is how she managed to pull out the tale from their grandmother.
She remembered how on her second reaping day, Johanna wanted to shove her hand in her pocket, but didn’t want to draw attention to the gesture thousands were doing in the crowd with the Capitol none the wiser.
But she could do it when the Capitol was forcing bullshit out of her mouth.
Thinking of Katherine is what gave her the courage to do it. She could practically see the imagery of her sister’s brain splattering out of her skull and against a train car as she seamlessly slid her hand into the pocket on the ridiculous white jumpsuit she was put into.
Johanna managed a perfect take for their stupid propo, and she felt smug and defiant while saying, “To the people of my home, please lay down your arms. For the good of District 7.”
All she could hope was that her home district knew her well enough to know she had no choice in her words and to notice her signal of dissent.
And then her days became occupied with agony, patches of loss in her memory, the dank cold yanking at the tethers of her sanity.
There has only been one reprieve from her pain and the source of that is probably one of her worst moments in this prison so far.
Once beatings and electrocution were unable to pull anything out of Johanna besides curses, the Capitol went for the psychological torture by giving Johanna her own version of the jabberjay section of the arena, but so much worse.
They strapped her to a chair, injected her with paralytic shit that kept her from being able to shut her eyes or move, and then she was forced to watch the recording of Daisy’s torture and execution.
It was hands down one of the most gutting and painful experiences that actually drove her to a suicide attempt.
Despite the paralytic that froze her body and glued her eyes open, Johanna spent the entire time trying to bite her own tongue off to put herself out of her misery. She managed to do significant damage after hours of using her upper teeth as an awful saw, but once blood started pouring from her mouth and down her chin, they finally noticed the attempt and stopped her.
The next time her torturers came into her cell, they barely began trying to torture her before Johanna basically relayed to them that her tongue was so sliced up and swollen that she was unable to talk. Even if she wanted to blab, she couldn’t.
Johanna hoped it would mean a few days of respite from torture until it healed itself. But that would’ve been wasteful.
She was taken to surgery shortly after that so they could repair the damage on her tongue. And those moments where anesthesia made her forget she existed were the best moments since she was captured. When she finally woke, the pain medication from the surgery managed to dull down her pulsing injuries for a few hours.
And within the next day, they resumed her torture. But they never pulled out that Daisy tape again.
As her torture became worse, Peeta slowly lost it. His comfort talking through the wall evolves and mutates into something beyond repair.
She tries, she really does.
Johanna tries her best to talk to him after once they start doing whatever they’re doing to him. But she’s often in so much pain, still trembling from her torture, or so far out of it that she struggles to say much to get his attention.
On a lucky day, Peeta may mutter some half-nonsense back at her. More often than not her only responses through the wall are silence or sounds of a warped madman.
A madman who has a very limited vocabulary by the sounds of it. Johanna starts a game when she is mentally aware enough that involves her predicting how often Peeta will scream out the word ‘mutt’ or ‘Katniss.’
She always guesses so far under.
It is a day. So many days later, but she can’t be sure how long.
Johanna can’t keep track of anything. She’s constantly trembling and on the brink of dying of thirst. The water in her torture makes it impossible to even drink. Especially since most days the only form of water she could feasibly drink from would be from the tank of the toilet.
Her captors wake her by spraying a power hose over her body.
She jolts up, automatically. The cuffs on her wrist are raw and yank painfully.
Every moment awake is agony.
Every moment asleep is nightmares.
All she ever hears are Peeta’s screams and the loud music they blast to keep them from sleeping.
Today they shove in a battered figure with a bag over their head. As they rip the bag off with embellishment, Johanna just looks at them dumbly.
Who the fuck is that?
It looks like a husk of a man who is near tortured to death. The man is of an indiscernible age, missing numerous digits and teeth, emaciated, and battered.
“What? Giving me a new roommate?” She snarls sarcastically.
As usual, they respond to her sarcasm by spraying her with the hose again. Until she is sputtering and certain she is about to drown with the spray coating down her throat.
When they finally let up, she is wheezing and on the brink of passing out. They did that for longer than they usually do. Maybe she is getting closer to goading them into killing her.
Death would be so nice right now.
“Ashford, say hi,” one of the guard’s snarls and kicks at the skeletal man’s thigh.
Johanna gives them little reaction. She has nothing left in her to care to be shocked.
If she’s being honest, she thought he would’ve been killed weeks ago when they were busted out of the arena. But it looks like they’ve been torturing him for information. Which is as dumb of an idea as trying to torture Johanna for information.
Because if there is one other person who lives by their spiteful hatred of the Capitol more than Johanna, it is her fellow District 7 victor, Ashford Flint.
His eighteen-year-old son was reaped, and Ashford was forced to mentor his kid who made it to the final two to only be taken out by a Gamemaker trap. Ashford would sooner be tortured into pieces than ever give up anything to these people.
And while they haven’t even been close, just neighbors in Victors Village who interacted for things with the games, the pair always had a mutual understanding of loss.
He is the person who found her sitting outside her nephew’s school after he was killed.
She’s too busy gasping in wet air while they give some dumb speech about how she needs to talk or they will hurt Ashford more.
As if he isn’t already mangled and tortured into something unrecognizable.
Johanna barely glances at them.
She only looks over when one of the guards says, “And you think your little stunt will do anything, but all it did was bring death to thousands in your home district.”
“What the fuck riddles are you speaking in, Baldy?” Johanna screams.
She screams everything now.
Every slap and kick she gets for being defiant or spitting in their face is one step closer to death.
Johanna smiles insanely at him with blood in her mouth after he backhands her.
“Your little pocket stunt.”
And they are such fucking idiots. They just gave her so much fuel to keep up her resolve of not breaking. Why would they tell her that her pocket stunt during the propo made the Capitol look like a bunch of fucking idiots?
That’s the best things Johanna has heard in weeks.
It means it gave people back home fuel to their fire.
She giggles, deranged and cranking up in volume.
She’s happy, this is the happiest she thinks she’s ever been.
Another backhand stings brutally against the other side of her face.
She only laughs harder.
Doubling over and clutching at her bruised and probably cracked ribs from weeks of kicking. Johanna is letting out deranged, joyful giggles, “You fucking idiots. How dumb are you? It sounds like my people are fighting back and winning. And all I did was make you guys look fucking stupid, then again we already knew that! Pathetic, sick, depraved, small, incompetent -”
Her words are interrupted by a loud bang of a gunshot nearly deafens her. It makes her jump because of the suddenness. But the smugness of her captors faces at Johanna startling drops into rage when Johanna cackles louder.
Because the punchline gets better.
Ashford’s head limply hangs, smoke coming out from the back of his skull. His brains and blood spatter onto the tile wall. It’s like a pretentious abstract painting of one thing that doesn’t exist in the Capitol – mercy.
These guards just continue being idiots.
They’ve always underestimated her, even in this game of torture.
Because she played those guards, manipulated those hotheads into losing their tempers and taking that poor suffering old man out of his endless misery. Who knows how long they could’ve kept him alive to keep carving away at like that?
Consider it a parting gift, Ashford.
Johanna throws her head towards the ceiling and laughs. She smacks at the wall beside her where she knows Peeta is chained.
“Peeta, do you hear these fucking numb nut idiots? They’re giving me everything I wanted. Maybe I should ask for steak dinners for their lovely guests,” she giggles. “How do you want yours cooked, bread boy?”
They nearly kill her for it.
Hours and hours of endless electrocution.
It lasts so long she forgets she exists in some moments.
In other moments her entire existence is only ever knowing agonizing shocks.
Once they tire of that, they chain her cuffs to a ceiling and spray her down with a hose to get all the blood and waste off her. They whip her back, and she can feel her body slowly seeping her soul out of the multiple gashes.
She can’t even keep track of how many wounds have been snapped open on her back.
But she can only distinguish on her upper right shoulder where they spend lots of time torturing her for her stunt. They do anything possible to further poke, prod, and torture the wound, not ever letting it heal or close.
More days have passed.
And she thinks from the pulsing and relentless agony on her back it means she’s close to death.
Her body sweats and shakes with a fever and the weakness she feels settling inside her make her think the wound is getting infected.
Hopefully it will kill her soon.
She tries to goad them into killing her constantly with little success.
Peeta’s screams are worse and constant in her ears. But Johanna barely has anything left in her to scream for it to affect him.
Honestly, he seems so insane by now he may not even remember Johanna is next door. Or even remember who she is.
The constant torture and information they want is mainly names of people involved in the plot. They also want names of those in District 7 who are rebels since they clearly couldn’t get it out of Ashford.
She’d sooner die before betraying anyone from her home district like that.
And as they press and press her for names, she truly realizes how limited her access to rebel names she had. She mainly had one person she interacted with most for rebel stuff, and it would be beyond a big revelation to the Capitol.
But Johanna can’t. She won’t.
It would mean betraying the one person she has left. The only person alive that probably even cares that Johanna is captured and being tortured.
Virginia Venatrix.
Johanna never even lets herself think of her, just to avoid chance of mumbling out her name in pain or in her sleep. Because surviving this would be so much easier if she could let herself think about Virginia, so many of Johanna’s favorite memories were with her.
But it is a liability to let her mind cling onto the memories even if they may provide the slightest fraction of respite from her torture.
If they knew Virginia was a spy and what she was to Johanna…it would make that Daisy tape look like a childish cartoon. And they’d do it to Virginia, directly in front of Johanna.
She refuses to let it happen.
Maybe that also is what makes her force herself into not breaking.
Mind over matter – becomes a mantra she lives by each time the lever is yanked by her electrocutioner.
One day they amp up the voltage even higher as they interrogate her, it is one of the first times she genuinely feels herself struggle to stay silent. It hurts so bad, and she just wants it to be over already.
“We know Plutarch left several of his little agents behind,” the man barks. “Johanna, just give us one name and we can stop for the day. We’ll even give you some real dinner – your choice of dish.”
Virginia is all she has left. And Johanna is all Virginia has.
She just can’t.
With the mention of Plutarch in so many questions, another name often pops in her mind that she forces herself to swallow down – Isolde. Virginia’s super shitty, creepy ex who went through the same spy training. She’s a Gamemaker and a genuinely bad person, Johanna could feel righteous saying her name.
But Johanna can’t risk it, it could too easily be connected right back to Virginia.
When the mouthguard is yanked from her dry mouth, her unraveling mind only has so much strength. Her frail body has been obliterated and chipped away, and Johanna can feel that she is about to give them a name.
Anything to make it stop.
But she can’t say either name, so she begins with the list of ghosts.
Those who they tried to erase.
She will never let them.
“Al-“ Johanna’s dry mouth cracks.
“Al? Al who?” They press.
Johanna licks her cracked lips, iron blood wetting her tongue, “Alberta.”
“Alberta?”
“Conner,” Johanna coughs when they press. “R-river.”
“Three people,” the other guard mutters to one.
“Willow,” Johanna continues.
This is when her captors realize that she is listing out her loved ones names.
“Nobody asked for the names of your stupid dead family,” the man barks after spraying her down with ice cold water.
Johanna rapidly tries to spit out the remaining names that are all engraved on a piece of expensive marble at a graveyard far away in District 7. “Katherine, Ja-“
The mouthguard is shoved back in her mouth, silencing her.
The next jolt of electricity sent through the wires on her skull make her body contort in agony. It lasts for centuries. Her jaw clamping down harder, her wrists gush blood from the yanking on her restraints, her nerves sizzle and fry through her entire body, the room reeks of her blood and singed flesh.
The shock ends, it felt strong enough like it should’ve been enough to end Johanna’s life and somehow manage to revive her.
And they don’t intend to stop.
The torture session only ends when she finally breaks and gives them something.
But when she is dumped back onto the damp tile floor, she shivers and could laugh if she had anything left in her.
The name she gave? Sylvia Whatknot.
Her awful, cruel, untalented stylist who is a Capitol loyalist through and through.
The idiots think they actually got crucial information out of her.
After Cinna’s move of turning Katniss’s wedding dress into a mockingjay on interview night, the Capitol has uncovered several rebel stylists. She knows this well enough from the fact that Portia, Peeta’s stylist, has been tortured several times in front of him. It’s like Johanna still could still hear Portia insisting that Peeta knew nothing between screams.
So, Johanna went with that, said it was Sylvia who had similar views to Cinna and Portia and held her ‘cover’ for over four decades by pretending to be a staunch loyalist. The way Johanna was begging for the shocks to stop and how she sobbed while finally spewing those lies seemed to sell it.
Maybe that fake lead will actually get her shitty stylist offed, but all Johanna knows is that she got the torture to stop for the day and was actually fed.
She’ll be punished for it more later since she led them astray, but every punishment is a step towards death.
It makes her motivated to use her tiniest bits of brainpower to try and weave lies she could continue to feed them. Make it impossible for them to justify keeping her alive.
Anything at this point to end her misery.
Death is Johanna’s only goal.