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It had taken her a long time to find it, but once she has it in her possession, they'll have to pry it from her cold dead hands to get her to give up the small, but functional axe she'd found on the grounds in a shed. It's probably the remnant of some old gardener, but in her hands, it could be the difference between life and death.

She wishes there were tall trees around, the kind of soaring redwoods that adorned Seven. She'd learned to wield the sharp edge of her blade on thick trees standing hundreds of times the size of her. Meek, weak, and a little mousy, Johanna had learned that everything can fall if you apply enough pressure and cut them down at the right angle. Everyone falls and everyone bleeds.

Johanna hefts up the axe and makes her way outside, careful not to appear too overtly threatening. There are strangers roaming here and she needs to maintain the facade in case she has to play them. The axe has to be hidden where she can find it and she needs to seem like the little girl who frightfully entered the Hunger Games. She makes her way to the English Gardens, settling cross-legged on the ground as she starts to dig a hole in the ground. It's nowhere near six feet deep, but it makes her think of the grave she'd basically dug for herself by joining the rebellion.

Once she gets three feet down, she gets the axe in there, covering it up quickly and dragging over several blue bell flowers to mark the spot in a circle. She wipes the sweat from her face, smearing her cheeks with dirt like a hasty camouflage.

She's going to keep protecting herself, no matter the cost.

Johanna catches movement in the corner of her eye and she softens her posture and her expression, careful not to look too aggressive. She draws her hand over the soil and keeps the shadow in her peripheral vision, always wary. "Did you come to look at the flowers?" she asks quietly, head down, eyes averted.

Meek, weak, and murderous if given the chance.

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"It's gone," Katniss confirms, rubbing at the spot. There's a disgusting scar there several inches long and it's raised up and red in a way that tells her that it's never going to heal; she's seen enough injuries at her mother's side to know that.

"Not that it matters, I'm sure they're monitoring us here with cameras if nothing else."

"Someone's always watching," Johanna agrees, stretching out her legs as she stares at the pocked mark on Katniss' skin, unable to help her proud smile at the efficiency with which she'd managed to get it out, even while having trained killers on her tail. "There's other worlds out there, you know. Other places we could run, if you felt like abandoning everything and everyone you ever loved."

It's tempting. It's so tempting to just quit this game once and for all and go hide somewhere behind one of the other doors but any time Katniss puts serious thought to it, she sees Prim's face. She sees the hungry faces of Gale's family, too poor to buy food with his mining wages and unable to hunt for it themselves. She sees her mother, pale and drawn back into her numb place and unable to do anything but stare. She sees Peeta and Haymitch and even Cinna, a blur of faces and names of people who depend on her.

"I can't. You know I've got to get back to 12 eventually. My family needs me. There's a lot of people who need me, you know?"

"Don't worry, I didn't forget," Johanna says, rolling her eyes. "As if I could. Katniss Everdeen, the girl on fire. What they should really call you is the girl who doesn't know how good she has it." Johanna laughs darkly, shaking her head as she slams the heel of her hand into the dirt. "You're lucky that Snow didn't kill them as soon as you'd won. It's one of his favorite things to do. Pull the trigger while the fireworks are still going off so no one even notices one more little bang."

"It's because everyone has seen my sister and knows what I did," Katniss says, thinking it through. This isn't her strongest suit but she can think strategically if she puts her mind to it.

"If something happened to Prim, they would have to spin it really well to keep from upsetting anyone. It would have to look accidental and be really played out on screen. They couldn't just kill her and hide the body."

She's right, too. Johanna knows that she never would have volunteered if a family member had been pulled up for the reaping, so maybe Katniss has earned this little reprieve. She's sick of Snow controlling their lives, anyway, given that winning is just a step on the path towards being broken until you're so dependent on the Capitol that you won't do anything to pick at their weaknesses.

"Have you tried to get back to her?" Of course she probably has. She probably sits up at night testing doors to get back to Prim and that hunk from 12.

"Every day," Katniss admits. It's not something she should admit probably; Prim is definitely a weakness of hers and she needs to try to play those close to the chest if she can. Then again, Katniss has never been very good at hiding her emotions or hiding who and what she cares about.

"I try and try but I don't get anywhere but the arena or one of the other worlds. What if they're all arenas, Johanna? And this is like, a central hub or something?"

"Then we would probably already be dead," Johanna says, eyeing Katniss critically. "I've been able to get a leisurely eight hours of sleep without having someone guard my back." True, she'd barricaded the door, but no one had barged in during the night and no muttations had been waiting for her. "You really think the Capitol wants to keep us on this long a leash? We'd be dead if this were their plan. Maybe they screwed up," she suggests. "Maybe we found a glitch in the system. It happens all the time. Haymitch could tell you all about it."

"Yeah, Peeta and I saw," Katniss says, thinking of the video of Haymitch's games. It had been desperate and he had been lucky but more than that, Haymitch had figured out a way to beat the system. He had figured out a way to use the Capitol's weapons against them and they'd retaliated swiftly and forcefully. Katniss shudders; she doesn't want to think about her mother and Prim bearing the brunt of her bad decisions but that's the way it always plays out when Snow is involved.

"We watched the tape of his games before we came out."

Johanna settles forward, elbows on her knees. She doesn't take her eyes off of Katniss for a single second. "Does that mean you spent some time watching little old me?" she asks, her voice small as she bats her eyelashes at Katniss, deliberately trying to rile her up with the act. "After Annie won, I think they were happy to have a little bloodshed."

"Yeah. We watched the tapes of all the living victors so we could...prepare. We focused in a little once we realized who got reaped."

Katniss feels like Johanna might be trying to put her on edge and she wishes that she wouldn't but there's nothing she can do about it now. "Me personally, I would rather try to wait for everyone else to murder each other before I get involved."

Johanna feels a little pride at the idea of being watched like that. She really had given a show-stopping performance and she wants to be admired for that, especially given how much she's been made to suffer for being her own person at the end of things. "I watched your games, too. I was mentoring," she says. She shakes her head with disdain. "Idiots, both of them, trying to get to the cornucopia."

Katniss relaxes just a little. This is possibly one of the first real conversations she's ever had with Johanna and while she isn't exactly comfortable, she's a little more comfortable than she's been since showing up and it's a nice respite from being strung tight all the time.

"Yeah, the first thing Haymitch told us was to stay away from the Cornucopia and run straight into the woods. I did exactly that. Peeta...well. He hooked up with the Careers."

"The difference is that you listened to your mentor, even if he is belligerent, drunk, and completely untrustworthy, at times," she says, the words coming off her lips like they're both old friends and they're just kicking around, insulting each other. "And Peeta is smart. Careers are inevitable. You either team up with them or figure out a way to survive longer than them."

"Yeah, I guess so. Besides, we're sort of teamed up with Finnick right now and he's technically a career. Still, no career would have ever stuck with Mags and I have to give him credit for that."

Katniss had liked Mags, the little she'd gotten to know her, and found her to be smart and kind. She hates that Snow made her go back into the Arena...she hates that she had to make the choice to volunteer for that other poor girl from 4.

"She's family to Finnick," Johanna says evenly. She doesn't have anything like that herself and while she tries not to let that affect her, it still gets at her sometimes. After all, it's not like she had mentors who coached her through this. They had looked at her thin form and had expected her to die. Part of her wants her own kind of victory against them, too. "She wouldn't have let Annie die." Not when Mags knows very well what Annie is to him.

"Annie. Annie is the girl he loves, isn't she? The one he heard when we were trapped with the jabberjays?"

Katniss had seen how he reacted, saw how it tore him in two. It had been just as bad as her own reaction to hearing Prim and Gale's family.

"She won the Games the year before mine," Johanna says, raising both brows at once to answer Katniss' question that yes, she is the girl that Finnick Odair loves with all his heart. "And, you know, went completely bonkers," she adds without much sympathy. It takes strength to get through the games and the ones who luck into the victory title usually pay for it after. "Yeah. She's the girl he loves. Fat lot of good that did for Finnick's debt to Snow."

"Debt? What debt does he owe Snow?" Katniss knows that Snow is powerful and can take out someone's family - he did as much to Haymitch after his games. Still, she doesn't know what exactly happened to Finnick, only that he doesn't seem to be as shallow as he is on the surface. There's something deep and warm there beneath the pretty boy flash and Katniss likes that a lot better than the show.

"The debt we all owe him," Johanna replies, giving Katniss a dubious look. "He won the Hunger Games. Victors aren't allowed to live in peace," she says, as bitter as she gets. "I wouldn't let him do what he did to Finnick, so I got mine in a different way." Not a new way, though, given that removing everyone she loved is a tried and true Capitol trick. "You think you're the only one Snow hates? He hates us all."

"He hates us because we flaunt the system," Katniss says, realization dawning on her. "We made good, we rose up and didn't let ourselves be pawns. We aren't little worker bees for the districts so he has to squash us down in any way he can."

Now it seems naive that she'd thought she and Peeta were the first to beat Snow at his own game. They weren't. They've just been lucky so far as consequences go.

"Now you're getting it," Johanna says, not taking her eyes off Katniss as she digs a hand into the soil, levering herself upwards. "We all hate Snow. He hates us. It's a very mutual situation in which we all want to kill each other with as much bloodshed as possible."

"Yeah, I can't help but agree there," Katniss says bitterly. She wants nothing more than to be the one who kills Snow but she thinks there has to be a strategy about it. Cutting off the head doesn't necessarily mean the end of the Capitol.

"We've got to figure out a way out of here so we can do it."

Johanna remains calm, but she tips her head to the side as she regards Katniss as if she's just honestly suggested what she has. "I have no intention of walking back into a world that wants me dead," she says slowly, as if she really has to remind Katniss about this. "There's no one waiting for me back there that I need to salvage."

"I'll just have to ask Finnick, then," Katniss says. Really, should she have expected any different? Johanna is right. She has nothing to go back to, as sad as that is, and she and Finnick have people they care about.

"At least we could get the others here. Maybe. I'm not sure how to get back to 12."