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It's easy, to get lost in the Capitol.
On nights when she can't sleep, which is most of them, Johanna walks through the streets, aimlessly wandering away from the bright-lights center of town, out toward the fringes the television screens pretend don't exist, the dusty streets where people look at her from the corners of their eyes, cautious, skeptical, wary. People who don't look much different from the folks in the districts, whose faces aren't painted and stretched out to cover signs of age. People who come out of their houses when the sun comes up, in uniforms, in work boots, people who do real jobs like fixing the plumbing. Women with tired eyes and snot-nosed kids, walking towards the center of town.
It's good to see something real, here in the center of the spectacle, and Johanna might spend a lot of time trying to escape reality but right now she craves it. Her brain feels wrung out and her hands twitch and her eyes burn so she walks out to the edges. Buys a pack of cigarettes, imagines the sneers, the upturned noses at a dirty, low-class habit, and lets the smoke sear her throat, watches it rise curling into dim sky.
If you go far enough, there's a wall. There's always walls in Panem, brick and barbed wire and electricity keeping people in and out and shut away. The road that runs along it is well-kept and wide, and she ducks into alleyways to avoid the Peacekeepers in armored cars who make their rounds, regular as clockwork.
She scrambled up a fire escape once, on a building near the wall, and she might be years out of doing anything physical but she still likes climbing to sit somewhere high.
There's trees beyond the wall, scrubby pines that climb up the dry hills until they turn into mountains and the scrub turns into forest. Johanna imagines disappearing over the wall, climbing up into the woods, the feel of thick layers of needles under her feet, the resiny smell, sap leaving sticky traces on her hands. Maybe this is homesickness, wishing for a place that wasn't man-made, and Johanna despises the Victor's Village but the forest surrounding it is a good place to lose yourself.
Supposedly there's wild animals out there, bears and mountain lions, and every kid Johanna knew growing up was scared of them, wouldn't go out alone, and the adults liked it that way because they were easier to keep track of. But once you've won the Hunger Games, the woods don't seem so terrifying. Johanna's spent nights out there in summer, stretched out under a huge oak tree. Spent hours up in the branches of a maple in fall, watching out through a haze of gold, leaves brilliant in the frosty air.
And she's never seen a mountain lion, or a bear, but once or twice she's seen deer, careful and skittish, and she held her breath up in the trees until it moved on, and wondered where it was going.
Up high you can see whatever's coming before it sees you. People don't look up, not usually. And even sniveling scared little girls can climb trees, if they're from District Seven, just like they can swing axes by the time they're old enough to be Reaped.
Not that any of that helps you, after. After is about the city and the people and doing what you're told, and Johanna's never been good at any of those. Never knew what to do with concrete and brick, silver and gold and silk and lace.
She's coming up to the wall now, and Johanna puts both hands on the rough brick, still nighttime cool. Wonders how far she'd get if she ran. Hears the rumble of the Peacekeepers coming and backs away, because the answer is "not far enough."
There's other means of escape though. Johanna's found a few of them, burrowing as far as she can into a world that's at least unreal on purpose, that doesn't try to claim it's anything but an illusion for a night. Trouble is, it always ends, always dumps her on her ass back in the same place she started. Further down, if she's honest, until by the end of the Games it'll be impossible to do anything beyond trying not to dream.
The sun's full up now, her feet hurt, she's tired, she's lost, and the two dead bodies of the latest Seven tributes are lying in a morgue somewhere, ready by now to be shipped home. They'll have been looking for her, calling her for her reaction for the late-night shows, sending photographers to all the clubs to catch her losing herself, losing track, losing time like she loses those kids every year. Most years maybe she'd be okay with getting caught but yesterday she watched for hours while the boys from One and Two and Four played games with her tributes and watched them bleed out.
And Finnick hadn't been there, had been off at an appointment, and Mags had just watched, her mouth a thin line, and the mentors from One and Two had watched with narrowed-eyed interest and phoned sponsors and been so fucking professional she wanted to vomit. The Seven tributes haven't lasted that long since Johanna herself, and Blight had sat next to her from the countdown and told her not to hope for anything and she'd rolled her eyes and said "of course not" but when they got caught she still swore low under her breath and dragged a bread knife across her forearm just deep enough, once for the girl, once for the boy, digging her fingers into the cuts every time they moaned in pain.
And when the kids died, finally, Blight had said something to her but she didn't hear, because she was out of her chair and out of the room and halfway across this fucking city before she could breathe properly or hear above the ringing in her ears. Out here nobody will recognize her, not with unwashed hair, jeans and t-shirt because it was Blight's day to fuck around with sponsors, until that stopped mattering.
And now that the sun's up, her brain's awake enough to pull her back to her real-unreal Games-time life, where she's going to have to go back and talk to Caesar fucking Flickerman about how well her tributes did, how maybe next year and if they'd just had a few more sponsors to buy better weapons, with a wink towards the camera so that maybe someone will take a gamble next year on a kid with broad shoulders from hard work instead of sending more money to the kids who've had help from training and steroids and years of enough food to bulk up.
Because she can't do much for those kids, but she can do this, given enough to drink that she can smile but not so much she can't speak clearly. Blight will do it too, but she's the one with the most media pull, and so fuck everything but she's the one who can do the most good.
She stops into a corner store because she can't think about this sober, slugs a good dose of whiskey from the bottle and lights another cigarette, turning downhill towards the brightest lights and widest avenues, and tries to think about what she can possibly say to these people to make them care.
There's 27 messages on her phone in the Training Center, and Blight's sitting on the couch when she comes out. He hasn't slept either, she guesses, and when she hands him the bottle he takes it, drinks without even wincing.
"Caesar called," he says, wiping a hand across his mouth. "Wants us for the recaps."
Johanna nods, flops on her back on the couch nearby. "What time?" she asks, looking at the clock and calculating dosages in her head. They have six hours, not long enough for sleeping pills, so she'll just stay up. The stylists come by later, howl at both of them. Venia takes the bottle with a curl of her lip, rolls her eyes and sends Johanna to shower, and by the time they have her dressed up and transported to Caesar, she's just sober enough to fake it for a while.
And when she's done she needs a shower and to bleach her goddamn brain, and she needs out of the fucking Training Center so she collects the handful of things she cares about and checks into the just-skeezy-enough hotel she's settled on by now.
And this morning she needed to walk, to clear her head as much as that's possible, but tonight she needs to go out and forget every fucking thing for a few hours, needs it like she needs to take a breath. Needs anger and dim lighting and sex that blurs all the lines of pleasure and pain and needs to be fucked up in a nasty, searing way, and two hours later she's in a basement where the music's raw and loud and screaming, cutting lines on a beer-sticky table and looking around for someone who'll fuck her in the alley against the rough brick walls. And she's a Victor in a short skirt with a wicked smirk so it doesn't take long. Not nearly long enough, so she laughs and shoves him away and twists when he grabs her hands and tries to pin her against the wall.
"Nice try," she says, over her shoulder as she heads back in.
She goes home alone, near dawn, to the hotel that's got nothing to do with the fucking Games because the Games are over for her but she still can't fucking leave, and fuck it, nobody needs her today so she swallows enough sleeping pills to knock her out till tomorrow morning and drops onto the bed, groaning in relief as they drag her under.