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Peeta is four years old when his mother hits him for the first time. He’s seen her do it to his brothers, but it’s hasn’t yet happened to him. Today, though, he’s practicing his letters at the kitchen table when he knocks over the jar of ink. He watches in a mix of fascination and horror as the black seeps into every nook, stains the wood dark like a bruise. And, before he can even look up, he’s getting a bruise of his own.
His mother comes from behind and hits him over the back of his head so hard that his vision goes white. Then she grabs him by his collar and drags him out of the chair, bending him over one of her knees and bringing her hand down again and again on his backside, all the while shouting about the ruin of the table, the color of the wood. After the first few blows the sting turns to a burn and he tries his hardest not to cry, because he’s heard his brothers say it’s worse if you cry, but the longer it goes on the more difficult this becomes. Just as he thinks he won’t be able to hold back the tears anymore the beating stops and she lets go of him. He turns and looks up at her, his mother, and she stares down. After a moment, however, she kneels and kisses his forehead. “Don’t make me do that again,” she whispers, and his body is on fire with pain but her voice sounds like mama’s regular voice. And her touch feels like mama’s regular touch. So when she hugs him, he hugs back.
They buy a tablecloth.
Peeta is four years old when his mother hits him for the first time but, despite what she whispers to him, he does make her do it again. A dropped tray of rolls, a mumbled word, a low grade. As he gets older, the beatings become more frequent, and more often does he go to school bruised.
He’s a good liar, though.
So when he tells his friends and teachers that he and his brothers got a little too rough in their play-fighting, that he slipped on the stairs, that he got honey in his hair and that’s why there’s a clump missing, they believe him. Or, at least they don’t argue. Most of his teachers heard the same lies from the other Mellark boys, and sometimes, Peeta wonders if they know; if they’re just good liars, too. But he doesn’t ask, because if they do know, there’s not much they can do. And, besides, he doesn’t want to talk about it, because his mother is a pendulum, and yes, sometimes she breaks his skin open and fills him up with poison, but when she swings the other way, she is kind and caring and he hasn’t yet learned to let that go.
Katniss Everdeen is far too thin. Peeta notices when he is eleven, notices that her skin is yellowing, that her bones are sticking out. He has always watched her, ever since he was five, and he knows she’s never looked this thin. Every child in 12 is skinny, and the Seam children have always run on the starving side, but Katniss looks different. He remembers back to his aunt, his mother’s little sister, who lost the baby girl Peeta liked to hold so much and then refused to eat. He remembers her body in the pine wood box as it lowered into the ground. He remembers the yellowness, the sour smell, and the bones. And he realizes Katniss is looking a little too much like his aunt.
He tries, once, to ask her about it. He knows her father was one of the miners who died in the latest accident, and he tries to approach her, to comfort her, to say anything to her. But he’s been trying for six years, and, like every time in the past, he doesn’t succeed. She is sitting alone at lunch, eating nothing, and he gets within two tables of her when she looks up with a stare so cold he can’t move forward. One of his friends comes up behind him and asks what he’s doing, and Peeta says nothing and sits down.
The bread is coming out of the oven when he hears his mother yelling. He glances through the window and sees her, Katniss, running away with a armful of rags. His mother is righting their trashcan and Peeta realizes immediately what happened, and decides that the bread can stay in a little longer.
When he sees her next she is smiling at a dandelion, and he decides he would take the feeling of a wooden spoon to his ribs a million times over to see that smile.
Her sister’s name is called at the reaping, and Peeta knows, at once, what is going to happen. He’s watched Katniss hunch over the little blonde girl for years, watched them marvel at the cakes in the bakery window, watched her hardened face relax whenever Primrose appeared. He knows it like he knows when one of his mother’s moods is coming on, like he knows which days his father will step in and which days he will leave the house and go for one of his long walks, unable to prevent what’s occurring under his roof. He knows it maybe before she knows it herself, but she gets there quickly, and is shouting, begging to volunteer before the rest of the district can even comprehend what’s happened.
He’s in the middle of planning how to best sneak bread to her family when his name is called, too.
She barely speaks to him on the train, but that’s alright. He hopes she’ll make it home. His mother had faith she could do it and, if there’s one thing he’s sure of about his mother, it’s that she’s a woman of strong convictions.
Peeta vomits up the rich food they eat their first night in the Capitol. They’ve both been gorging themselves on the train, but tonight is different, and his new, shiny and clean body rejects whatever was in his special helping of potatoes. The next morning, Haymitch admits that it was a preventative serum, designed to stop him from growing facial hair, that made him ill. Peeta has never had much luck in the department, anyway, but still, he asks, why? And before his mentor can reply, Effie Trinket is tittering out, “Well, we don’t want the boys looking feral, now do we?”
The inject the serum into his arm, instead.
They’re calling her the girl on fire, and he thinks of this as her score of 11 flashes across the screen. She is the girl on fire and he is the boy with the bread and there is such a stark difference between those titles. It’s the difference between an 11 and an 8.
Haymitch says she could survive. He tells Peeta quietly, at night, when Katniss is asleep. She could really do it. And Peeta realizes that maybe this is why he was reaped, to make sure she really does.
She’s got everything, Haymitch says, but appeal. The sponsors and the people, they love her costumes, they love her score, but they don’t love her. They love you, kiddo.
Peeta thinks he must be insane, for a moment, because how could anybody not love Katniss? But his mentor has seen so many of these games. He knows what the people want. And so Peeta thinks back to learning about the transitive property in school. If the people love him, and he loves Katniss, maybe they’ll love her, too.
Caesar Flickerman is delighted by the confession, Peeta can tell. He’s delighted because if anything will boost his ratings it’s a love story, he’s delighted because Peeta is now lover boy and not just baker’s boy, he’s delighted because Katniss, who he tried so hard to help during her own interview, is now a desirable young woman rather than just a small, starving girl. It’s a big day for Caesar, Peeta thinks as he stands and waves at the screaming crowd. But the words felt like acid in his mouth, like ripping out the rawest part of his soul and revealing it to ten thousand neon lights. It’s a truth he’s held onto so closely for so long, and now he’s tied it up with a little bow and given it to these people to consume. But Caesar Flickerman is smiling, so Peeta smiles, too.
Katniss attacks him for it and, as he picks glass out of his palms, he thinks of his mother. He understands her anger, and forgives her when she apologizes. He’s dead anyway, so what could one more beating hurt?
The careers approach him on the last day of training. Cato and Marvel and Glimmer and Clove. Peeta is most afraid of Clove. They ask him if the star-crossed lovers thing is real, voices thick with a taunting sort of threat. Peeta tries to walk away but Marvel grabs his arm and asks again. There is no escape from the question, Peeta realizes, and he knows they expect his answer to be yes, yes it’s real, I love her and to kill her you’ll have to kill me first and that, after he says it they’ll laugh and promise to do just that, ruffle his hair, let their teasing run down his spine like a knife. They’re trying to figure her out, he realizes, because they want her gone. And if he can convince them he can help with that, he can lead them far away from her. So he tells them no. It was a lie. All he wants is for her to look weak, because the weaker she looks the less sponsors she’ll get. They’re surprised, at first, and Cato tells him that it was a stupid plan. Peeta agrees, and asks if they’ll help him fix his mistake. I can help you find her, he tells them. I can help you kill her.
He looks away when they cut the silly girl’s throat. What kind of fool builds a fire at night in the Games? When they decide she’s not dead, he goes back and tries to figure out the most painless way to do it. But he has no weapons besides a blunt knife and she is gasping, clutching the hem of his pants, staring at him with eyes so wide he thinks he can see the whole universe in them. “It’s okay,” he tells her in a shaky voice, kneeling and pulling her head onto his lap. “It’ll be okay, now.”
She bleeds out. Her death settles deep into his bones and he knows he will not be the same.
Katniss wasn’t meant to be in that pond, wasn’t meant to be in this tree, this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. Peeta paces below her as Cato climbs. He realizes that maybe, after all this, they’ll both die. But Cato falls, and Peeta convinces them to wait, and the next thing he knows she is dropping a hive on their heads and he is stumbling, running, trying not to trip over his melting hands, screaming at her to get away. And then there is the feeling of a long, sharp wooden spoon burrowing into his leg.
The riverbank is a nice place. Peeta thinks he wouldn’t mind dying here.
His brothers come to visit him. They squat and squint through the setting sun, ask what he thinks he’s doing. What kind of man lays in the mud and waits to keel over? His father comes and sits beside him and promises that he’s done what Peeta asked, made sure Prim and her mother stayed fed. His own mother comes and stands over him. She tells him he will not embarrass their family like this. She kicks at his wound and he looks down to where her foot is making contact. And he sees, through the fever, that it’s really a mouse-- grasshopper mouse, he thinks groggily, remembering the few hours he and Katniss spent reading up on wildlife-- nibbling at his rotting flesh.
The riverbank is a nice place. Peeta is content to die here. And then they make that damned announcement, and he knows Katniss won’t let him.
And she doesn’t.
Something wonderful happens in the cave, something that creates foggy and feverish memories which Peeta will later cling to. Something happens, something grows between them, and Peeta thinks maybe she loves him, too.
They revoke the rule change and he knows, instantly, what he wants. It is never a question. Katniss will live. He’s dead anyway, really. He’s been losing blood for hours.
And so, when she holds out those berries, he is astonished. Not because she wants him to live-- she’s made that plenty clear-- but because she is willing to die for him. To leave Prim, her mother, that boy she spends so much time with. She would rather die than be without him. He takes those berries because he really believes it.
Until he doesn’t, anymore.
When they get back to 12, his father hugs him, his brothers tackle him, his mother hits him. He is sixteen years old. She says he had no right to speak about their family like that. She’s getting older, now, and the pendulum refuses to swing out of cruelty, out of hatred. She hisses she would have rathered he died on that riverbed than share their business for the whole country to hear. His father steps in at this point, but Peeta is fine. He is numb to it. Because he’s killed people now, see, and Katniss can’t look at him, and really, what is he but a shell of a boy? No, he thinks, not a boy. A victor.
He lives in the village alone. His family stays at the bakery, his mother refusing to share in his blood money, but it is illegal for him to stay there, too, so he lives in the village alone. He makes sure Haymitch hasn’t yet drowned himself in liquor, and he paints his nightmares. He sees Katniss, on occasion. He knows that, logically, he shouldn’t be angry-- that she is just as much of a victim as he is, that all she wanted was to keep them alive-- but still. He can’t look at her, either.
At night, he thinks of the cave, and the berries. The berries especially. That, he knows at the very least, was real.
The day the train leaves for the victory tour, he wonders if he could just get off somewhere, run away into the fields of 11, the forests of 7, the oceans of 4. Katniss sobs to him and Haymitch that Snow is not convinced of their love and Peeta is angry, angry that “their love” is a fake thing that the world needs convincing of, angry that he fell for this selfless, selfish girl, angry that she spent all their time since returning with Gale Hawthorne and now, on this train, she clings to him and trembles. But none of it matters when she sits up in her bed, panicked and sweaty, and asks him to stay with her. He climbs in and tells her always and he knows that, despite all his anger, he means it.
The career districts are the most difficult for Peeta. The families of his former allies watch him speak with even gazes. They respect victors here. Even victors who manipulated their children, victors who broke promises, victors who ran. Clove’s family scares him the most. They are, like she was, cold and unforgiving.
That night, at the party, it is almost too much. The room is spinning and Cato’s mother has to be escorted out. The mayor is laughing far too loudly. Katniss has shrunk into herself.
“Try this,” a server says to him, and hands Peeta a small glass of pink liquid. He swallows it absentmindedly and it tastes of sugar, smells like the frosting he spent so long creating but never got to taste. It doesn’t smell like Haymitch, which is the only scent Peeta associates with alcohol, and so he has another.
He is escorted back on the train by the man himself. Haymitch holds Peeta up with all his strength and walks him to the bathroom. “Shoot, boy, didn’t your daddy teach you how to hold your liquor?”
Peeta shakes his head. Haymitch gets him ready for bed and tells him to get a good night’s sleep, but Peeta can’t sleep without Katniss, so he makes his way to her compartment.
She flies up when the door opens, and he apologizes too loudly. Then he walks to the bed and gets inside, fumbling with the blankets. His body feels like lead and the room is tipping over. “You’re drunk,” Katniss whispers as he lays down beside her. It is a statement, void of judgement, void of any emotion at all.
Peeta considers this. “Mmhmm,” he says after a moment, staring up at the ceiling. And then, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be.”
Katniss does not rest her head on his chest but after a long time she tells him, “That’s alright.” Her voice is empty. Peeta wonders if this is what heartbreak sounds like.
“We could get married,” she says later, voice still empty. He feels it now, too, the emotional void that is growing inside both of them.
And he knows he was right about the sound of heartbreak as he agrees.
They fail. Snow doesn’t believe them, and now they must run. Katniss whispers it with urgency, but Peeta knows he will never make it. And then their plans are changed anyway, because there are new Peacekeepers in town, the type who flog and lynch and shoot on sight. And Katniss must stay, for Gale, who has been whipped into a bloody slab. She sits beside his sick bed, and he mumbles her name in his sleep. Peeta can do nothing.
The plant book becomes all that they have. Maybe it could be enough, if the numbness he felt on the night of his return and during the tour weren’t spreading out through his whole body. It’s like the ink, he thinks sometimes, staining every cranny of his being until he feels nothing at all. Until he can only sketch pictures of nightlock berries and think maybe he should’ve swallowed some when he had the chance.
The night of the Quell announcement he is in the bedroom, TV on but unwatched. Katniss’s weddings dresses have been the focus all evening and he can’t. But when he hears Snow’s voice he comes down, and he is on the staircase when the announcement is made. The existing pool of victors, they say, and it’s almost funny how quickly the numbness dissipates. It is replaced immediately by rage, and a determination so strong he is lightheaded. He doesn’t hear the rest of the program. Katniss will not die in this Games.
So they train. He knows Katniss and Haymitch have been talking behind his back again, as usual, but he tries not to pay it attention. Haymitch has promised him things, too, and neither he nor Katniss will really know what their mentor is planning until that plan is seen through.
The reaping day arrives and Peeta can see how difficult it is for Effie to read Katniss’s name. She is kind, in a confused way, and Peeta knows she doesn’t want to do this. Katniss looks at her with teary eyes but a blank face and steps forward, the female tribute of District 12 in the 75th Hunger Games. Now, all Peeta can hope is that Haymitch’s name is called. He knows that, if it’s his, Haymitch will take his place, and he refuses to have Katniss enter the arena without him. Effie sighs with relief as she reads the slip of paper, and Peeta thinks of how ironic it is that he feels lucky to volunteer.
Training is different, this time. He and Katniss are already a team, both in front of the others and alone. They share a bed once more. Peeta thinks that life could be okay again, if things stayed like this. But one of them will be dead in a month, despite what Haymitch has been calling the baby bomb, and so their hours spent on the roof eating fruit and napping on each other are meaningless, really. Peeta tries to remember not to take it for granted, to live in each moment, to love Katniss like he always has for what little time they have left. “I don’t want to be with anyone else in there,” she whispers to him. “Just you.” And he tells her okay. He wouldn’t mind being alone with her, either.
When their pedestals rise up, Peeta is blinded. Last time, he was incrediably relieved to discover the landscape the Gamemakers had prepared for them. A forest was something he and Katniss could survive. But now, as he blinks through the brightness, Peeta’s stomach drops. He doesn’t know how to swim. He doesn’t even know how to float. He looks around wildly for Katniss but can’t find her and he realizes that, unless she comes for him, he’ll be stuck here like a sitting duck. The canon hasn’t even gone off yet and already he’s failed his only goal, to protect her.
Sixty, says the announcer. Sixty seconds until they will all either sink or swim. Peeta tries to calm himself down, but panic is rising up his throat like bile. Focus on the colors, he thinks to himself. He’s never been this close to the sea. It is a brilliant blue, just like he’s always heard, but there’s something more to it. It’s multidimensional. The surface is teal but if he squints he can see the color deepen, change to cobalt, navy, midnight. Then blackness. There are glimmers of sunlight, too, that make the color even more complicated. Peeta wonders how deep the light goes. Forty seconds left. There is definitely green here, a quiet green. Not like the woods at home, not like Katniss’s favorite color. This green takes a back seat to the blue. Peeta thinks that, to paint it, he’ll to layer color after color. Then he remembers he will never paint again and looks to the tribute next to him.
It is Johanna Mason. Peeta thinks of her stripping in the elevator in front of him, the glare Katniss shot him after he helped her to unzip. He almost smiles at the memory, because Katniss is, despite her claims, so pure and so gentle. He looks for her again but still cannot find her. He remembers her quiet story about her father and their lake and thanks a god he doesn’t believe in that she knows how to swim, won’t be stuck here. Like he will be.
He looks back to Johanna, and she catches his eye this time. Gives him a grin that speaks of nothing but trouble. Twenty seconds. The girl who stripped in front of him to get under Katniss’s skin is preparing to kill him. That’s alright. He’ll just have to kill her first.
On his other side is Enobaria, and she is poised in a diving position. He wonders what they do to train the careers in swimming. Pools, yes, but can they create waves? Obviously, those from 4 don’t need any automated storms. Finnick Odair must be on top of the world right now.
Five seconds. Peeta tries to come up with any sort of strategy. He knows humans are supposed to float but he is dense and strong, not thin and lithe like Katniss. He tries to visualize the paddling motion he knows goes along with swimming. Could he figure it out, if he just jumped in?
Three, two. Peeta tries to copy Enobaria’s stance. One. She dives in. So does Johanna. He doesn’t. He simply stands on his pedestal in that awkward, semi-crouch, and does nothing. He looks at the long stretch of rock a ways away from him that leads to the Cornucopia. Johanna is already heaving herself onto it. He wonders how she learned to swim in 7. Is he the only one trapped here? He looks around and learns that no, there are others. Wiress. The morphlings. Beetee is in the water but he’s barely moving. Peeta takes another deep breath and looks to see if Katniss has entered is eyesight. No such luck. Seconds drag by and he is consumed by the need to get to her. The water is turning red. Katniss, he thinks, where are you?
When he finally spots her, she is with Finnick and jealousy flares up in him so quickly he has to shake his head. It is foolish, maybe even insane, to be jealous of anybody now. But “just you,” rings through his head and he has to remind himself of the berries, the train, the rooftop. The fact that she is, again, ready to give up her family to save him. Come on, he thinks, pull yourself together. Get to her.
But then she is pointing at him and Finnick is diving into the water. He swims through the carnage towards Peeta astoundingly quickly and when he pops up, golden hair plastered to his forehead, he reaches out one arm.
“Hey there, ally,” he greets, and Peeta internally groans at the sight of the golden bangle on his wrist. “Get in,” Finnick continues. “Your chariot awaits.”
These Games feel different. The last were so raw, so unpredictable. Just him and Katniss and 22 other children. And yes, there were careers, but they were children, too. It was just 24 children in the woods trying to stay alive. This isn’t like that. It is 24 people who have already had their lives taken from them by these Games, 24 victors. And they are trapped in a mechanical, artificial dome that presents new horrors every hour, some sort of twisted, sadistic clock that Seneca Crane didn’t live long enough to appreciate. The first Games felt like a nightmare, these feel more like a simulation war. But Peeta is with Katniss, at least, and for some reason, now more than ever, he is feeling again. Relief, when he wakes up after what he comes to learn was the near death experience of the forcefield to find Katniss sobbing over him, holding him so tightly. Pain, when that first tendrel of fog licks at his body. Anger, regret, pity when the female morphling dies for him. Horror at the sound of Prim’s screams, at the realization that he is stuck behind an invisible wall and Katniss is on the other side, going out of her mind. And love. Love when she smiles at him so sweetly because of the pearl. Love when she curls up to him at night. Love when she tells him, “I do. I need you.” And love when she kisses him so hard and so long he forgets how to breathe. He thinks of telling her, saying those words, I love you, but he doesn’t.
When she is walking away from him that evening, promising to see him at midnight, he regrets it.
Everything after that is a blur. Brutus kills Chaffe and so Peeta kills Brutus. Finnick is gone suddenly, and Peeta loses track of the canon count. He screams out for her, sprinting through the jungle, twisting, turning. Midnight must be drawing close. Electricity crackles in the air and he cries out louder. He knows suddenly and certainly that whatever is about to happen will end these Games. “Katniss!” he screams, voice turning horse. He thinks, for a moment, he hears her calling back, and he runs in that direction, runs until the world lights up such a bright and brilliant white that it reminds him of the first time his mother ever hit him and the color that exploded behind his eyelids. And then that white is replaced by the darkest black and Peeta sleeps.
A hovercraft. A claw.
Peacekeepers.
A hand touching his face. Something else touching his face.
A thunderclap so loud it wakes him. He is alone. He is bound. He whispers her name and goes under again.
When he wakes for a second time, he’s in a small, dark cell that smells like the deepest part of the cave did when he was the most sick. He’s on his back. He hears someone say, “Finally, Sleeping Beauty decided to wake the fuck up,” and he turns and Johanna is sitting across from him. There is another girl, too, a tall girl with long red hair. She has her knees drawn to her chest and she is trembling and mumbling and Peeta recognizes her as Annie Cresta. “Hopefully you’ll be better company than crazy over here,” Johanna scoffs. She lets her head hit the concrete wall with a painful sounding thunk.
“Where are we?” Peeta asks, sitting up. His body feels too heavy, too foreign.
“Can’t you tell?” Johanna laughs, and Peeta can’t help but think that each time she speaks she sounds more insane. “We’re in the President’s fucking palace!” She stands and starts pacing. “They were supposed to come get us, see, that was the whole point to the stupid plan-- we would keep your fucking girlfriend safe and, in return, we wouldn’t die! But apparently--” she starts to shout, as if whoever apparently left them is listening, “they decided to leave the non-essentials behind!”
Peeta watches her pace and then shuts his eyes. “What plan?” he whispers.
“Didn’t I just tell you?” Johanna hisses. “We- me and Finnick and Wiress and Mags, basically the whole fucking lot of us besides the career pack-- would keep little miss Katniss alive, and then, when the time came, Haymitch and Plutarch and the rebels from 13 would break those of us who were still alive out! But turns out Finnick, Betee, and of course precious Katniss were the only ones worth saving.”
Annie’s mumbling becomes louder. Peeta opens his eyes again. “They got Katniss out?”
Johanna looks up at the ceiling and laughs. “Of course that’s all you care about,” she mutters, and then says to him, “You know, I really thought the whole star-crossed lovers thing was just a bad act until I saw you two tongue-fucking on the beach.” She pauses. “Yes, the got Katniss out. They would never leave their Mockingjay behind.”
“Their what?” Peeta asks.
“Mockingjay,” Johanna repeats. “That’s what they call her. In their plan.”
The cell is smaller than Peeta first thought. Their situation begins to sink in and he stands. “You-- you said there are rebels in 13?”
“Yep,” Johanna tells him, “they’ve been there all this time, too. No help to us, of course, just ‘preparing their arsenal’ and waiting for the perfect moment. And now that moment has come.” Peeta stares at her, dizziness and nausea sweeping him, and she shakes her head. “You still don’t get it, dumbass? This is the rebellion!” She starts screaming again, slamming her fists into her pants. “It’s finally happening and we’ve been LEFT in this SHITHOLE to ROT!”
Annie starts crying. Peeta vomits on to the floor, and Johanna mutters, “Fucking fantastic.”
For four days, they are left alone. Nobody brings food, or water. After the first day, they don’t speak, save for Annie and her mumbling. At one point, she begins to shout, and Johanna walks to her and pins her to the ground and presses both hands to her mouth. Peeta drags them apart with what little strength he has left and then sleeps.
On the fifth day, three peacekeepers walk in. They have watery soup and bread like bricks and a whole gallon of water. All three of them scramble to the food, like it will bring them back from the dead, and the peacekeepers watch them eat. When they are done, one of them points to Johanna and opens the door. The others train their guns on Annie and Peeta as Johanna is escorted out. The screams start a few minutes later, and they don’t stop for a long, long time.
Johanna is returned to them the next morning, thrown back into their cell on her hands and knees. She is soaking wet and shivering and when Peeta asks her what happened, what they did, she can’t respond. The peacekeepers point to him next and the dread Peeta feels is like nothing he has ever experienced.
They bring him into a room with a wide screen and a single chair. He is strapped in and another man enters, a doctor, Peeta thinks, with a syringe full of pretty- and obscene-looking orange liquid. He recognizes it immediately, and thinks back to Katniss dropping that hive on him during their first Games. They stick the needle in his arm and he is at once reminded of facial hair that never grew and melting hands and Katniss go! Run! Get out of here! and pink drinks that made him feel like the room was spinning, just like it is now. The venom runs through him quickly and he tries to stay focused, tries to hold onto what’s real, but then the screen comes alive and he is watching the cave, only it isn’t like he remembers it.
The venom still has him in its grasp when he is thrown back into the cell, and he can’t hold his head up, can’t steady his hands, can’t unjumble whatever Johanna is saying to him. He feels drunk beyond anything he’s ever felt and his body is on fire with so much pain he can’t see straight. He presses his head to the cool concrete of the ground and Johanna’s hands feel like nettles on his back.
They take Annie next, but Peeta doesn’t notice until she is already gone.
They stop keeping track of the days. It is always the same cycle-- Johanna, Peeta, Annie. At first, he wonders why they allow them recovery days, and then he realizes they don’t want them dead. He doesn’t know what they want. All he knows is that it takes so many hours for the venom to get out of his system. During the in-between time, when he’s in the right state of mind but not yet back in the chair, he can only try desperately to untangle his memories. Annie tells him he screams about Katniss when he’s still under the venom, screams that she is a murderer and a mutt and that she has been trying, all the time, to kill them. “They’re trying to make you hate her,” Annie whispers, “they’re stealing her from you.”
“No,” Peeta says back, “no, I won’t let them.” But after awhile the in-between times grow shorter and shorter and the days slide into each other and the he becomes so swollen, so engorged with the venom that it sometimes feels like the only thing keeping him alive. Food disappears. He remembers Johanna feeding him, but he never eats on his own. His hair starts falling out, turns to snakes. He takes all his clothes off, because the fabric feels like fire against his skin. There are no more days, no more nights, no more sleep, no more wake. Peeta is only a consciousness, only a boy in the body of a beast that is trapped in a box because of a girl who let him be taken away, who pointed arrows at his heart, who kissed him on screen and kissed Gale Hawthorne off screen, a girl who cut his leg off and ate it, a girl who fucked his brothers, who burned their home to the ground and killed everyone they’ve ever known, a girl who wants him dead so badly she is standing in front of a burning hospital and screaming that he will be next. “They’re taking her,” Annie whispers still, now sitting across from him, legs drawn to her chest while he rages that he’ll snap her neck the minute they let him near her, and he doesn’t protest, this time.
They drag him out to see Caesar Flickerman once, twice. The first time he is only slipping and he reads from queue cards and makes them promise she won’t be hurt. The second time he can’t read anymore and someone whispers lines into a chip in his ear and when they tried to prep him the feeling of hands made him lose it so they let him go on looking like a corpse and he wants her dead, he really does, but according to Johanna it’s been a week since his last treatment and maybe Annie’s right, maybe they are changing her in his mind. When she flashes across the screen he is stuck by something that feels like love and he screams a quick and desperate warning about their plans to bomb 13. He regrets it, instantly, when they cut the broadcast and throw him to the ground. She has hurt him, again, and he’s let her, again.
Venom.
Pain, excruciating pain.
Katniss.
Monsters.
Johanna, Annie. The cell.
Vomit. Piss.
Katniss.
Venom.
The chair.
The screen, the chair. Katniss.
One day, he chokes on spit and bile and blood and thinks maybe he’ll finally die. But they must resuscitate him, because next he is with the monsters again.
The cell.
Katniss.
Katniss.
Katniss.
Eventually there is a long time between sessions, and Gale Hawthorne comes into his head with people he doesn’t recognize, which is odd, and Peeta fights and thrashes until they give him more venom and he sleeps.
He wakes to bright white lights and more doctors. Another session. They poke and prod him and his eyesight goes in and out and he shakes, trembles, dissolves, vomits again and again. Whatever they’re doing to him now is different, worse, and he wants to go back to the cell and hit his head against the wall because that always grounds him, a little, and he wants to see Annie and Johanna because sometimes their faces pull him back into his body. The doctors sit him up and he has another Katniss vision and this time he is unbound, maybe, or maybe he’s delusional, so he tries to make good on his promise and he grabs her by the neck and slams her into the ground and watches her eyes turn red, watches her morph into the mutt that she is, and he hates her, he hates her with such a cold anger that even though this version feels more real than normal it still doesn’t feel like enough. She claws at his shirt and he tightens his hands further, watches her gasp like a fish, and then it goes black.
Peeta wakes. This is a new cell, a white one. He is bound again, to a soft bed that makes him want to peel his skin off his muscles, his muscles off his bones. They tell him he’s in 13 now, he’s safe now, they can’t hurt him now. But they are they are they are they, just faceless doctors who are still hurting him, whether it is 13 or the Capitol. The only difference now is that he is alone.
Delly comes in. Peeta warns her about Katniss. She argues, and he knows she is too far gone.
He tries to kill himself. Slit his wrists on their bindings, if that’s possible. If he can’t kill her, he might as well kill himself. But whenever he gets too bloody they knock him out.
It takes weeks for him to realize the venom has stopped coming. “Why aren’t you using it anymore?” he asks one of the doctors while they check up on him.
“Using what?” the doctor asks.
“The venom,” Peeta says, because that’s all he’s known it as for a long time. But the proper term suddenly comes back to him and he clarifies, “The tracker-jacker venom.”
The doctor sighs and sits down. He looks at him with a sad smile and says, “This is District 13, Peeta. You are no longer in the Capitol. The reason we aren’t using tracker-jacker venom on you is because we never have. You were being hijacked by the Capitol. They were using the venom to alter your memories. But you’re safe now.”
The words settle into his bones and he shuts his eyes. 13. Hijacked. Safe now. He lets his head settle into the pillow. 13. Safe now. Maybe it could be true.
“Annie and Finnick are getting married,” another doctor tells him. She has long blond hair like Primrose. Peeta tries to understand.
“Married?”
“Yes. And they want you to bake the cake.”
A baker. He remembers being a baker. But Annie and Finnick can’t be getting married. That would mean they are really rescued, and this is a truth he hasn’t yet accepted. But the thought of baking a cake makes his heart pound and suddenly he needs to do it, so he says yes.
The ingredients are pre-measured. Peeta’s shaky hands would never allow him to be precise enough. And he isn’t allowed to use anything they think could be weaponized. And he isn’t allowed near the oven. And his ankle is chained to a pole the whole time. But the frosting alone makes the whole thing worth it.
He remembers the color of the sea surrounding the Cornucopia in the Quell. It is a real memory, he is sure, because it isn’t overly vivid like the ones he is beginning to realize have been altered. He remembers thinking of how to paint the color, thinking of how he would never paint again. He remembers looking for Katniss and his hand jerks and he ruins the wave he has been crafting for the last twenty minutes. He takes the flat knife and begins again.
“She never wanted to hurt you, boy,” Haymitch tells him. It is hard, seeing his old mentor, but by now his blood has stopped feeling like poison and he think maybe it is a good thing, too. “She loves you, even if she doesn’t know in what way yet. She’s cared for you since the moment you threw her that bread. And I watched her start falling for you in the cave. She loves you.”
The bread. Peeta remembers the bread. That is real, he thinks. But the cave…
“She cut off my leg.”
“No,” Haymitch shakes his head. “She didn’t. Cato tried to, but she saved you. She even healed you up right. Only, at the end of the Games, a wolf mutt got you. You lost too much blood and there was an infection. The Capitol amputated it. You would’ve died if they hadn’t.”
Peeta tries to think through this. It sounds true, but he can’t believe it. “How can that be real?” he asks, shaking his head. “I can’t-- when I remember, I--”
“They got in your head,” Haymitch says. “They changed you.” He seems to choke up at this and looks away. “You were the best of us, kiddo. Nobody decent ever wins the Games, but you--” his throat closes. Peeta is fascinated and horrified. “Just try to rest, boy,” his mentor says, and then he is standing and walking to the bed and pushing back Peeta’s sweaty curls and giving him a gentle kiss on the forehead.
Dr. Aurelius becomes more than just ‘a doctor.’ He sits with Peeta for hours each day and tries to talk him through what is and isn’t real. Once, they give him morphling and make him watch the Games again. It makes things worse. They don’t repeat the experiment.
But time passes. And Peeta improves. He begins to believe that maybe Katniss is safe. That maybe she is truly just a skinny 17 year old girl who Peeta loved. He tries to find any of the love in him now and feels only a void. But he begins to believe that it could have existed, once. He begins to believe that it must have.
And then Alma Coin, President of 13, says that he is going to be a part of the Star Squad. They all argue-- Haymitch, Dr. Aurelius, Annie, Prim-- but President Coin is insistent. She wants Katniss dead, Peeta realizes quickly, because he knows what it looks like to want that. But he doesn’t like this new President, and if Katniss really does love him, he’ll have to do his best not to kill her.
They give him an unloaded gun and a canister of water. The team consists of Finnick, Katniss, Gale, and others Peeta doesn’t recognize. No one but Finnick is happy to see him. Katniss tells him, one night, all sorts of things. He always double-knots his shoelaces, she says, but his hands aren’t steady enough to tie his own shoelaces, anymore. She says that he always sleeps with the windows open but that seems strange too because he can’t really remember the last time he was in a room with a window. But, still, the things she says seem real. He’s getting better at knowing and, when he doesn’t know, he begins to ask.
He kills a man. He doesn’t see it, he sees a monster and a vast black ocean and he smells salt and disinfectant and Katniss, Katniss who caused this war and he can think only of killing her but someone steps in between them so he kills that man instead. The flashback dissipates and he is back in the street and he doesn’t know what happened, can’t move his feet until Finnick is dragging him. They reach a building and he watches himself kill a man on screen. Seems the cameras are always rolling when he does that. He remembers the silly girl who lit the fire in his first games. He remembers Brutus. He wants to kill himself again, no longer as an escape but to protect those around him. He tells them, “Your next move is to kill me,” and they say that’s not an option. They move underground. Masala dies. Jackson. Cressida. The other sister. Finnick. Finnick. Finnick. Peeta can’t do this anymore, after Finnick is dead, because how can Finnick be dead and Peeta be alive if Finnick was a husband, soon to be a father, and a good person, a kind and brave person, a real person not a mutt programmed to kill them all, how can Peeta be alive when he is nothing but a monster and--
Katniss kisses him. He shudders against it. Half of his brain is screaming at him to snap her neck and the other half is telling him they were all right when they said he loved her because this feeling can’t not be love, it is so strong and so painful and so worthwhile that he-- he has to kill her he-- “Don’t let him take you from me,” she whispers, and Peeta is brought back to Annie in their cell, they’re taking her from you, Peeta, stealing her, they’re-- “Stay with me,” she says. Stay with me.
And he feels his heart rate settle slightly and he can see her again, really see her. And there is nothing he can say besides, “Always.”
“You had two brothers,” Gale tells him one night soon thereafter. “They were both older than you. Rye was in my year. We were friendly.”
They are in the basement of a store owned by a woman so mutilated Peeta doesn’t like looking at her. He is chained to a pipe. Gale Hawthorne is telling him about his family.
“I remember that much,” Peeta says, letting his head hit the wall.
“What don’t you remember, then?” Gale asks.
Peeta considers it. “I don’t know,” he says. “I have so much… in my head… and I don’t know what’s missing.” They sit in a long silence. “What were my parents like? Sometimes I remember them as… good and nice, but sometimes… I can’t…”
“Your mother beat you,” Gale says, and Peeta snaps his head towards the other boy. He knew it, deep down, but he liked to believe it was just another side effect of the hijacking. “All three of you. Pretty bad, too. You all tried to hide it, but most of the town knew.”
Wooden spoons, knuckles, swollen lips, bruises. Peeta scrunches shut his eyes. “If everyone knew, why didn’t they do anything?”
“What could we do?” Gale asks him, shrugging.
Peeta doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything, really. So he changes the topic. “And me? People say I was nice, but you… you don’t seem to like me very much.”
Gale scoffs. “Hey, I like you fine,” he says. “You’re just… Peeta Mellark. You know?”
“No,” Peeta shakes his head. “I have no idea.”
Gale considers this. “I don’t not like you,” he repeats. “None of our problems were ever personal. And as for what you’re like, well… nice is a good way of putting it.” He stretches. “Nicest damn guy I ever met. I think that’s what made having a problem with you so hard. You’re just so nice to everyone.”
They sit in silence for a few moments. Peeta still doesn’t understand exactly what Gale means by nice but he chooses not to ask. He wonders, for a moment, if having amnesia would be better than this. At least then he could take what people told him at face value. Now, every piece of information he learns has to be scrutinized, held up to the ideas the Capitol planted inside his head. He tries, sometimes, to rely on older and untouched memories, but even those have been damaged. And building people up based on what little he knew of them during his childhood years is an impossible task. Haymitch is more than a crazy man who lives in one of those big houses, Katniss is more than a little girl in a red dress. Katniss. Peeta looks at her sleeping form. The shopkeeper had said no one knows what to do with her, and Peeta considers this. Someone must understand completely her, right? He brings it up to Gale.
“Well,” the other boy says on the topic of knowing what to do with Katniss, “we never have.”
Gale laughs, and Peeta mimics him, but he doesn’t know what that means, either. Even now, especially after the kiss, it seems clear that what she needs is simply some calm and some care. But then again he is still relearning how to be calm, how to give care, so maybe he’s wrong. He thinks of this war, the one they were both thrust into so quickly and cruelly and thoughtlessly. What will Katniss do after this? Go home to 12-- although there is no 12 anymore, he reminds himself-- to hunt each day? Stay in the Capitol and become some sort of officer? He is struck with a memory of her telling him, after their first Games, that now they had to try and forget. Will she apply that same logic here?
“I wonder how she’ll make up her mind,” Peeta thinks out loud.
Gale scoffs.“Oh, that I do know,” he says. “Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can’t survive without.”
Peeta turns to him. He realizes Gale is answering a different question than the one he asked. And, in that answer, he makes Katniss sound cold and calculating and affectionless. They were both in love with her, or so he’s been told, but in this moment, Peeta thinks that this isn’t how you talk about someone you love.
Everything after that happens too quickly. Prim dies. Peeta watches her burst into brilliant flames and he feels something in his heart snap, something he didn’t know existed anymore, as if Snow found that one last place to sink his teeth into. But he can’t dwell on it because Katniss is on fire, too.
The war ends, somehow, but nothing feels finished. Katniss votes yes to another Games and he is confused, sent immediately back to that shiny place where she is a monster, only this must be real because it’s happening right in front of him. She cannot want another Hunger Games. She can’t. He looks at her from across the table and watches her glance at Haymitch, who follows her lead. Peeta feels like maybe he’s still completely insane after all. Or maybe they’re still just keeping secrets. The latter seems true when Katniss kills Coin. He hopes, at least, that this was always her plan. But then she is going to bite down on her nightlock pill and he realizes that if this was her plan, it was her final one. He sprints to her. She bites down on his hand, instead, and looks at him with hurt and anger and defeat in her eyes. “Let me go.”
The crowd stampedes by them, but he holds on. For a moment, they are just a boy and a girl protecting each other again. And, even though Peeta doesn’t fully understand it, but he tells her the truth: “I can’t.”
And he doesn’t.
His room at the psych ward is light purple. Lavender, Peeta thinks. It is the color of morning mist. The color of the mountains. The color of the edge of a fresh bruise. “How are you feeling, Peeta?” Dr. Aurelius asks every day, and Peeta laughs, because what kind of a question is that?
For months, he lives in the ward with Annie and Johanna and others who were tortured. Annie doesn’t stop crying. She is so pregnant she can barely stand. Johanna will be angry forever, Peeta thinks. But then he thinks that it’s a cruel thought, because if she can’t recover, what hope does that leave for him?
They eat lunch together. Dr. Aurelius didn’t know if it would be good, having the three of them together again. But it provides solace. And maybe that’s only because to Peeta, their faces will always symbolise the end of another hijacking session, but it doesn’t matter. He can’t imagine eating with anyone else. During one of their discussions, he thinks back to the tablecloth his mother bought to hide his stain, and realizes that was a silly solution. The stain was still there, all the time. The only way to truly fix it would have been to scrub the ink away slowly, thoroughly. And yes, it might have never completely disappeared, but that would have been alright.
He asks about Katniss often. Dr. Aurelius says she is on probation in 12 with Haymitch, and Peeta realizes she didn’t have the chance to make up her mind after all. But regardless, the thought of her in 12 with only their old mentor for company worries him. He has recovered enough of his memories to understand that he truly, without doubt, loved her as if she were the morning sun. And he has almost reclaimed enough of himself to find that love again. Now, even when he is quaking and blind to reality, grasping the backs of chairs that feel like cold iron bars in his hands, he’s able to orient himself with the thought of her. Convince himself that she is not a mutt, but rather a sad, lonely girl with no freedom, and no comfort, and no sister.
“I think you’re ready to live on your own again, Peeta,” Dr. Aurelius tells him one day, after group therapy. Peeta has just explained the differences between his shiney memories and his real memories to another hijacking victim, a young woman who betrayed the Capitol and began to work as a spy for the rebels. When they found her out, the poisoned her mind, though not to the same extent they did Peeta’s. Dr. Aurelius nods once. “Yes, I think it’s time. The only question is, where do you want to go?”
The purple of his room isn’t lavender, he realizes in that moment, it is the color of the mint flowers that bloom in 12, the color of the plant they use to make after-dinner tea. “Home,” he says quickly. “I want to go home.”
When he first sees her, her clothes are damp and sticky with something he hopes isn’t puss. Her hair is still singed on the ends. She is skinnier than he has ever seen her. Skinnier than she was when we were eleven, he thinks, and although it is a terrible one, he cherishes another memory returned to him.
“You came back,” she says. He wonders exactly what she means, but instead of asking he tells her yes and gestures to the flowers behind him.
A year passes.
There are still days when he can’t see or hear or smell what’s real and instead drowns in the altered world that the Capitol implanted in his brain, where he throws things and punches the wall. There are still days when she cannot leave bed, cannot eat, cannot open her eyes. He is sick of being crazy, and he knows that she is, too, but they can’t change all at once. So they try to be okay as they are. They go to the lake. Peeta begins baking in their kitchen, even selling his goods when enough people move back. They eat with Haymitch and feed his geese when he forgets for too long. They take walks. One evening, she panics at the loss of his pearl, the pearl he gave to her during the Quell. He doesn’t quite get it, but he helps her look, and once they find it she is sobbing and telling him their story through her eyes, begging for his understanding, his forgiveness.
“You love me,” he asks her at the end of it all, because it is the one question he has never been able to answer for himself, “Real or not real?”
“Real,” she tells him.
He thinks of the bread and the reaping and the train and the cave. Of the victory tour and the bed that they shared, of the day on the rooftop of the training center, a day it took her so long to rebuild in his mind. Of the beach. Of the small, skinny, beautiful girl she was when she held out those berries to him. Of the boy that he was when he took them. The girl on fire, the boy with the bread. She takes his hand. “And you’ll stay with me?”
He doesn’t hesitate to tell her, “Always.”