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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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That's what Finnick wants. To be able to start a life here. But his hopes and wants have always been incredibly secondary in his life -- and Johanna knows this incredibly well. It seems impossible to think of them just staying here, especially without paying some kind of price. It seems to be a trick of the greatest sort for anyone to tell him that he and Annie can just be happy together, for them to raise their son in a safe place.

He drinks too quickly, and can't help the smile that forms on his face; this is a bit familiar, at least. Him and Johanna get tanked together. It's almost like they're right back in the Capitol.

"Oh, we'll never be normal, Jo," Finnick says, touch of playfulness in his voice, because he needs something to knock the dreary thoughts of out of the air. He leans over and tousles her hair, fully expecting to be punched in the ribs.

She snorts at the idea of her being a normal girl. Maybe if she'd never set foot in the Games, whatever fierce inkling of violence that ran through her blood would never have been set afire, but she has no way of knowing that. "If you touch me like that again, I hope you'll be able to hold your baby without your pinkies," she warns calmly, inhaling before taking back the strong liquor, feeling like this has to be some kind of mentor tradition by now.

"You've always been more normal than me," she accuses, like it's a bad thing. "You fell in love."

"I'd like to see you try to cut off my pinkies," Finnick answers easily with a wry grin. This is a more normal conversation for them -- and probably the most normal they will ever have. After all, there aren't many people who can joke about cutting off their friend's pinkies -- especially when both those people have killed before. Over the years, it's certainly something he's come to appreciate about Johanna.

There's no point, he knows, in getting drawn into a debate about which of them is more normal. Neither of them are. Neither of them will ever be. He volunteered for the Games at 14 and killed kids older than him with a trident. She pretended to be something she wasn't and killed plenty of people viciously with an axe. Both of them were famous, worshiped, for it. But, he probably sought a normal life more readily than she did. He had tried, and failed, to compartmentalize himself into two people -- the victor and the normal man.

"You've got a whole life ahead of you to find someone who enjoys threats to their pinkies," Finnick points, his tone still light. He doesn't want to wallow about dying, but she does have a good damn chance of building something worthwhile.

"If you're lucky, it'll be your pinkies," she says, with an inclination of her chin towards his nether-regions where little Finnick lives. She wouldn't really have many qualms about doing that to an enemy and so long as Finnick stays on her good side, she wouldn't do it to a friend. "I may have a whole life ahead of me, but I'm hardly whole goods now. If I go back, I get to be splintered apart by the Capitol."

"Some things, we don't get," she says, shaking her head. "And that's okay," she admits, raising her fingers to get them the bottle, rather than just another round.

"I knew you'd want to touch my dick one day," Finnick responds, feeling it's too good of an opportunity to waste. Almost anybody who doesn't want to sleep with him is bound to become his friend, and there is probably no one who has less interest in sleeping with him than Johanna Mason. He suspects that any comment with the word "dick" in it to her is bound to get him injured in some way, but it's a risk he's comfortable with.

"So, you'll stay here with us," Finnick says, shrugging his shoulders. "Be Auntie Jo to the baby."

He knows how little he wants to go home and doesn't think that he'd want to go back if he had Johanna's future sprawled in front of him either. She's right. She lives, but is further decimated by the Capitol with no promise of anything happy coming her way.

"If we had sex, Snow would film it and blackmail us and show it to the world until my eyes bled from the sheer regret of giving in to you, sugar," Johanna says, as bitter and sharp as ever. The words feel sharp as they come out, like the more she says them, the more they cut up their tongue. "I'm not going to be an Aunt, Finnick," she says, shaking her head with disbelief at the thought that she could ever be in that kind of position.

"I won't fuck up your kid," she says, after a long pause. "How's that for a promise?"

Edited 2014-03-04 01:51 (UTC)

Finnick knows the dark prediction Johanna plays out without having to hear her say it. He's pretty sure there's no other victor he could sleep with that would stir up more gossip -- aside from maybe the freshly minted Girl on Fire. Somehow, he can't see ever having this conversation with Katniss though.

"I'd make it the best night of your life though," Finnick quips, pasting on a Capitol grin just to cement the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

"Sounds like a good promise," Finnick answers. Sounds like a promise an aunt would make, Finnick is tempted to say, but he figures that might be a step too far to push Johanna in this conversation.

She gives a laugh that's devoid of any actual warmth and humor. Maybe he would've given her a better time than the vapid men she's lost herself in over the years, but she likes keeping emotions out of things. She inhales deeply and stares at the alcohol, wishing (not for the first time) that her tolerance wasn't so high.

"You know, they've trapped us here," she says. "Now we're so scared to leave because you'll die and I'll get splintered. So every door could be the wrong one."

"Don't," he says quickly, because it's a thought he's not ready to hear said out loud. "There are prisons everywhere, Jo," he tacks on dismissively, the best he can come up with.

He doesn't know if he really feels that this is one or not. In the right viewpoint, he does think anything can be a prison. This, he supposes, is only one if they make it one. And it is worlds better than their own home, perhaps just unsettling because they can't see who is drawing the strings here or why. He downs the rest of the drink he's holding.

"Don't what?" she echoes, even though she knows what he means. Maybe there's just a part of her that wants to hear him say it, because she's not exactly the nicest person she knows. "I know there are prisons everywhere, but I want to find my way to the kind where I don't watch over my shoulder for peacekeepers and assassins."

"Don't frame it so that it becomes impossible to be here," Finnick answers. He knows she's goading him. He feels as if she's unerringly good at it sometimes, because she understands most of the tricks and lies he regularly employs.

"There haven't been any peacekeepers and assassins here," Finnick points out. The only ones that have appeared have been imagined, the lurking remains that never quite leave their minds. "We might not understand this place yet, but we don't know it's bad yet, either."

He didn't care before, but he has something to protect now, and he feels a fierce need to not be forced to their own world.

She smiles at him like she knows exactly how to take him apart. The scary thing is that she does, but she wouldn't. She'd never destroy him unless it was the last possible option she had, but right now, in this situation, she wants him alive and here with her. Because, really, when it comes to friends, she's sadly without. "Don't worry," she sighs out the words. "I'm not exactly going to wait for a door to open back to the arena and shove you back in. I can let the revolution fade if I get to live," she says, which is the bitter truth in all this.

She has no one back home waiting to be rescued. If she's going to get tortured the instant she heads back, then she's happy to stay exactly where she is.

Finnick still doesn't fully understand what happens to their world with them here. Especially because they're from different times. Obviously, even though he didn't go into the Quell, Katniss did experience him being there. They were allies. Annie, from even further along than Katniss, has memories of him post-Quell -- their wedding, her pregnancy, his death.

He's too drunk now to wonder over what that means about the flow of time or the concoction of the hotel -- and what the ramifications mean for their revolution at home.

"I guess I won't shove you through any doors then either," Finnick replies teasingly, desperately trying to steer the conversation away from a serious topic.

Her laugh is almost ugly as she lets it out, a crow of delight aided on by how much she's had to drink. Trouble is, she really just wants more right now, because she's having a good time and she wants to keep chasing that high because it feels so damn good. Finnick will probably want to go back to Annie and the baby, because that's going to be their lives now, isn't it?

"Do you think we should get jobs?" she asks, suddenly struck by the thought. "Doubt victor's money is going to keep coming in, here."

"Jobs?" Finnick echoes, and he can't help the grin that splits wide across his face. He knows that it's a practical question, and probably one they should have thought of before now.

But the notion of the two of them getting jobs is really quite hilarious from a certain perspective. Their marketable skills are distressingly low -- unless you count having massacred a bunch of kids when they were younger and reaping the rewards of being famous for that. She's got sarcasm down to a perfected art, and he's made a life off of being pretty. Not exactly traits that lend themselves in practical everyday life.

"Going to be the town lumberjack, Jo?" Finnick asks, unable to help himself.

"I'd make anyone think twice about taking advantage of me while I had an axe in my hands," she points out with a wicked grin, not sure she'd ever really want to represent Seven's trade on a regular basis. "I don't know. There has to be something around here that isn't completely and totally menial and horrifying."

"Sweetheart, anyone would think twice about taking advantage of you even if you didn't have an axe in your hands," Finnick returns easily, figuring that it's the best compliment he could possibly pay her.

"I suspect most things here are going to seem menial though," he guesses. So far, the hotel has been relatively calm and most of the jobs seem to be related to the daily upkeep of the hotel -- which make complete sense. But also aren't, perhaps, exactly what people like him and Johann were made for.

She turns on him, as if disappointed that she can't carry off that doe-eyed, frail little girl anymore, though it has been seven years and her patience has slowly been getting cut down, more and more, because...well, when wouldn't it? "Maybe there's another door out there with a better life. Maybe that's where I'll settle," she says, but it's abstract and far from definite.

After all, the Capitol looks pretty on first glance before you start digging down below the surface.

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