all_inclusive | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Johanna tilts her head to the side, sympathy and pity and disgust and impatience warring to make it through to her face. "The Hunger Games," she says. "The Capitol's way of punishing its districts for a rebellion so many years ago. Twenty-four children from 12 to 18 fight to the death and only one of them wins."

But that's not true, either. No one ever really wins the Hunger Games.

It's the pity he catches because that's the one he hates the most and Chuck shoots her an aggravated, sidelong look. "And I thought my world had gone to shit," he says. At least they weren't rounding up and killing kids.

She can't be much older than him, he thinks. Not much older than eighteen.

"Trust me, no matter how bad anyone else's world is, at least they can probably say that the people aren't so horrifying that they would send children into an arena to kill each other. Sometimes, more than once," she continues sweetly, though the bitterness has begun to eat away at her words.

"Jesus, yeah." He gives her a long look, regarding her now more like a wild animal who might attack.

"Personal experience?"

She smiles, sweetly, and looks up at him. "Twice." She likes him, she's decided. Maybe not as a friend or an ally, but he's plenty nice to look at and sometimes Johanna just wants the simple things in life. "There's plenty of crap where I come from, I've just learned how to go with it. And sometimes, that means being outside." Because it reminds her of Seven. It reminds her of home.

"Simple pleasures," Chuck agrees, as if he knows. He doesn't, not really. Since he turned twelve, pretty much the only thing he's had on his mind are kaiju and the killing of them.

Hobbies, life. They could all wait until after.

Johanna watches him, now that she's abandoned watching the circle of flowers that tell her where to find her weapon. "And what do you find simple?" She doesn't even know his name, but she's finding out so much about what makes him tick. Isn't that really more intimate than names?

Chuck shrugs, not quite bluffing. "Doing my job, knowing I've done it damn well. What else is there?"

"Some people would say love," Johanna suggests. "I'd say money, spending it, and living your life with the privacy and the riches you've deserved." She doesn't mention the thrill of using her axe to slice someone open because someone who isn't a veteran of the games wouldn't understand feeling the kind of power and control that comes from killing someone who wants to kill you first.

If she were to magnify the axe to a jaeger and the enemy to a kaiju, Chuck would say he knows exactly what it's like. "I suppose they would. Never been loved and never been rich. Just knew how to kill kaiju."

"Well, I've been loved and been rich and only one of those two things is something I can still hold a claim to," Johanna says, looking him up and down. "What's your name?"

"Chuck Hansen," he replies, catching the girl's appraising gaze and returning it. It's part of the game, isn't it, of being a superstar Ranger?

Given what she's told him about her world, he doesn't ask which of the two she still is. Or why.

"You?"

"Johanna Mason," she replies, draping her arms over her bent knees. "I've never heard an accent like yours before," she says. "Where are you from? Where you have kaijus and talk like that...?"

"I'm Australian." It seems odder than the rest of the combination combined that she doesn't know basic geography, or at least seems not to know. He forgets how different their worlds very well could be.

Johanna still stares at him blankly, shaking her head given that she doesn't understand what that means. "Am I supposed to know what district that is?" she asks, even though he's definitely not from their world.

Americans, Chuck thinks. Or, at least, he'd thought. "Don't you call them states? And Australia's a bloody country."

"We have twelve districts," Johanna replies, her good mood faltering. Her words are even now, her tone less than friendly. "I'm from seven. We produce lumber and no," she simpers, holding his stare, "I've never heard of an Australia or any bloody country apart from my own."

"...hell of a slip of the tongue," Chuck says, realizing that an emphatic curse for him is a painful reality for Johanna. For both of them really.

"I don't know a country with districts and you don't know about kaiju. Seems we're not from remotely the same world."

"No, it seems we're not," Johanna agrees, forcing herself to her feet. Even when she straightens up to her full height, the man towers over her. "How about we open a bunch of doors and see whose nightmare scares us worst?" she challenges without really meaning it.

"Don't think I can go back to my world or I'd take you up on the offer."

And even if a door does present itself the way that it has for Raleigh, Chuck isn't sure what'll happen if he tries to cross that threshold. He's not alive in that world, he's certain. Maybe he'd just vaporize.

"Why, did you get banned?" Johanna asks, not sure why he wouldn't be able to go back. "I thought you just opened a door and stepped through. Isn't that on the brochure or something?" she jokes.

Chuck straightens up, puts himself at a Ranger's attention, as if he's delivering any other report. "I died, over there."

"Bully for you," Johanna replies, without much sympathy. After all, there was a high chance she'd walked into the arena to die. "If you want a change of pace, you can go to my world," she says. "And do the killing instead," she says sweetly.

"Not unless there're kaiju." He's switched on the bravado now, the devil-may-care, no-fucks-given attitude of a confident ranger. Kaiju are deadly, challenging, and familiar in a terrible way.

"Well, then you wouldn't do very well where I come from," she says, finding him to be a lot like Finnick when he looks and talks like that. "You don't get something as simple as a monster to kill. Our lives aren't that kind."