To Finish What We Started

“No! NO!” Peeta screams as the peacekeepers chain him by his hands and ankles to the hovercraft. They slip a handkerchief between his lips, and he gags, and almost vomits at the idea of not being able to control his own mouth. “Let go of me you rotten jerks!” Johanna screams as well, punching and kicking, and even biting for them to let her go. But they don’t, and they chain her next to Peeta. At least he has arm room, they chain Johanna so tight her arms are above her head almost pulling on her. She catches her breath, before screaming one last time, before the hovercraft door closes, and the tropics of the arena get smaller, and smaller as they fly away. Peeta is able to shake the cloth out of his mouth, so it hangs around his neck. “Katniss! Katniss!” Peeta tries screaming her name one last time, probably, literally, one last time. “They’re gonna kill us!” Peeta panics, trying to pull his arms free from the chains, kicking and squirming. “Oh won’t you stop it! You’re invading my personal space” says Johanna Mason, who has calmed down enough to accept her fate. “How can you be so calm?! They’re taking us, to God knows where! And no one can tell what they are going to do with us once we get there!” he pants, still can’t believe this is happening. “This was destined to happen, Peeta, you know that” Johanna begins. “After you and that girl got out of the arena, you two were causing all sorts of trouble” she says, pronouncing “girl” louder than the other words. She rolls her eyes. “First, her name is Katniss. Second, don’t you dare blame this on us, WE were the ones actually trying to make an effort to stay alive, because we love each other” Peeta says, annoyed more than anything in the beginning part. “Love? You’ve got to be kidding me” Johanna rolls her eyes and laughs, vigorously. Peeta gives her a perplexed look. “You’re not telling me that you still think she loves you, right?” asks Johanna, sounding as if Peeta is stupid. “Peeta! Wake up!” she snaps her fingers that are still tied up above her head. “Katniss doesn’t love you, it was, still is, and always will be an act!” she rolls her eyes. Peeta still looks at her, as if he isn’t understanding what she was saying, because the love was real to him. “Katniss is using you!” she says slowly, making sure Peeta can read her lips just in case he’s in too much of a mental problem to hear her. “No, she’s not!” he screams back at her. “She loves me! And I love her!” she scoffs at his response. “Will you two shut it?!” a peacekeeper screams from another room on the aircraft. “Oh you shut it! You’ve kidnapped us, the least you can do is let us talk!” Johanna snaps back. “Look, I don’t care about your and Katniss’s relationship, alright?” she tells him, annoyed. “Just try to get some sleep, because something tells me we won’t be getting much of it once we get to where we’re going” says Johanna. She slightly turns her body, to make it just a bit more comfortable for her hands, which are tied very tightly to the wall, but it still hurts. But who is she kidding, if she can barely sleep in her own home in district 7, too afraid of the nightmares that haunt her mind, she won’t be getting any sleep here. Tied to an aircraft, about to be executed by President Snow. As she tries her hardest to pass the time, imagining what “could be” of her life, she hears the slight sound of whimpering. She looks over, causing the chains to make a loud sound, so she immediately looks her direction again so Peeta doesn’t know she was looking at him. He really does love her, she thinks, as tears roll down Peeta’s face. She scoffs out loud, until she actually does doze off. She’s very roughly awakened by peacekeepers. Peeta is standing up next to her, which makes her feel small, like anyone could trip over her at any moment. She groans as the peacekeeper, which she thinks is the same one who yelled at them last night, or yesterday, or this morning- she honestly doesn’t know what day or time it is. “Oh yay, you came to rescue me” Johanna scoffs as the peacekeeper, with dark, almost black hair with a couple of very noticeable gray ones, uses a key to unlock her handcuffs from the wall. Finally, she can put her hands down, allowing the numbness of her hands to fade, and the blood to circulate through them. Reddening them from their pale color. “Quiet, Mason!” barks the peacekeeper. “Aw and you know my name! We’re gonna be friends I can tell” says Johanna sarcastically. Peeta and her are very quiet, unlike before when they were kicking and screaming. They walk, with the peacekeepers holding onto their arms. Just as they leave the aircraft, just before Peeta and Johanna could soak in just a second of precious sunlight, the peacekeeper throws a fabric bag over both their heads. “We can’t have them seein where they are!″ Johanna can hear the peacekeepers whisper to each other. They walk, as the peacekeepers guide their way. Not until they have stopped, does the peacekeeper remove the bags on their heads. He rips it off of Johanna’s head, taking some of her hair with it. “Hey!” she screams, really just wanting to punch him across his smug face. “That was for not shutting your mouth!” he scoffs. She looks over to her right. Peeta stands there, his face red and puffy, probably from crying, or the lack of oxygen they received in the bags. The peacekeeper throws the bags on the ground. And look them both down. “Put em’ in cell 4 and 6!” He screams at the other peacekeepers that push them, almost pushing Peeta to the ground, down the hall, around a corner, and finally, into a room full of jail cells. They toss Johanna in one cell, not even caring if they hurt her, because she comes crashing into the back wall of the 10 foot room against her shoulder, and she hits the ground with a thud. She croaks out a scream until she hits the wall, and the air is knocked out of her. They do the same to Peeta, but he isn’t thrown as far, into the cell across the 6 foot hallway. They are straight across from each other, and can see each other through the bars of the cells. She crawls onto her hands and knees, and tries to catch her breath. “Jerks!” she yells just as they close and lock the door to the cell room. Her and Peeta are left alone, not tied up, thankfully, but locked in a cell. With nothing but some dead bugs in it, and she’s pretty sure she sees a dead rat in Peeta’s cell. The floors are hard concrete, they didn’t even give them a mattress or blanket for cushion. The walls are made of thick, old, chipping gray brick, and there aren’t any windows. And the 3 lights that hang from the ceiling flicker, and barely illuminate the right side of Johanna’s cell. There’s much to say about the bars of the cell. They’re old, very old probably. Rust covers most of them, and they are very loud, they squeak at the slightest touch. And Johanna notices the chains hanging from the back wall. If she’s not in them now, she’s sure she’ll be in them later. Peeta slides down the back wall of his cell, and sits. He shoves his face in his knees. He doesn’t sob, he just sits there, as if he’s given up. Johanna slowly makes her way to a sitting position, but she’s sure she has bruised her shoulder. But she knows that by the end of this, the shoulder will be the least of her problems. They both sit there, across the room from each other, facing each other, in silence. Johanna thinks Peeta fell asleep with his face in his knees. But Johanna sits up in her cell, with the right side of her arm barely touching the cell bars. They sit there, for it seems like hours, until a door, which Johanna is pretty sure is on the other end of the room, not the one the peacekeepers used before, because that one doesn’t open, and she can see it in her sight of view, and she can hear the muffled sound of a meek, quiet cry, and a thud, followed by the sound of a cell locking, and the door shutting. She stands up, tries her best to squeeze her face through the bars to see who it is, but she’s pretty sure whoever is here, has been placed in the cell next to her. Which she can’t see, because instead of having 4 walls of bars, the cell is made up of 3 walls, the back and sides, and only the front wall facing the hallway has bars. “Hey! You, new guy, who are you!?” Johanna asks, in her mean, but not really mean fashion. She hears a gasp followed by a meek, quiet, high-pitched voice saying “Annie-” then she abruptly stops. “Wait?!” Johanna recognizes that name anywhere, the name that Finnick kept saying in the arena, or quietly while he slept. Annie. Who other Annie would be here?! In the jaws of the Capital? “Annie Cresta?!” exclaims Johanna. “Y-yes, do you know me?” She sounds frightened, like she doesn’t know what’s going on or what’s going to happen. Even Peeta knows that, that’s why he sorrows in self pity in the cell across from her. This gives Johanna a slight bit of hope that Finnick is probably still alive. Annie has done nothing to the capital, to Snow. It’s Finnick he wants. If he can’t have Finnick to torture, because he was rescued by district 13, or disappeared some how, he’ll torture Annie, the one thing Johanna knows Finnick cares about. President Snow will torture Annie, and rub it in Finnicks face, to torture him from the inside out. And that’s probably what he’s doing to Peeta as well, to torture Katniss, but why is she here? There is no one else Johanna loves, no one to torture through her. Johanna is there merely for Snow’s entertainment. “No, but I know Finnick,” says Johanna. She can hear the pure happiness through the wall that separates them. “Really?! Is he okay!?” exclaims Annie, wanting every answer in the world about her precious Finnick. “Yes, I think he is” Johanna answers her, positive in her recent new thought. Annie sighs, but doesn’t say anything else. Minutes pass, until Annie laughs. Johanna waits for her to speak more, but it’s followed by silence. Oh, I almost forgot, she’s crazy, Johanna thinks, and lets the awkwardness go. A couple more minutes pass until the same peacekeeper comes back again. “Miss me?” Johanna says, expecting to be let out and be led to some sort of torture device. “Hardly. And I’m here for him, so sit your butt down!” he scoffs at her, she does so, not wanting to get in more trouble than she’s already in. She watches as he unlocks Peeta’s cell, and drags him up to his feet. “The president would like a word, Mellark” the peacekeeper says. The mention of Snow surprises Johanna, and she is standing holding onto the bars, hoping to hear more. Peeta just nods, obviously ready for this to be over. As he passes by her, Johanna gives him a look. But he’s not sure what it means at the moment. Whatever he asks you to do, no matter the threats, or the punches, don’t do it, Johanna thinks, hoping Peeta has the right mind to think the same.