I am awoken by the sound of quickly paced footsteps coming towards me. I sit up and see that I am surrounded by metal walls with a small window looking through to another room. I am unrestrained, but I am numb. I move my fingers and toes until I regain feeling and then get up and walk to the opening in the wall, I look through. There lies my fellow tribute, Johanna Mason, unconscious, lying in a pool of blood.
"No," I whisper to myself, "This can't be happening," I sit cross-legged on the floor and try to remember what was happening what felt like just moments before. We were in the arena, everything was going crazy. Something had gone wrong with Beetee's plan to electrocute the salt lake, I knew this when the wire snapped. Before I knew it, everyone had gone crazy. Finnick was running, calling Johanna's name, Beetee lay unconscious on the ground with a coil of wire wrapped around a knife. I came upon a clearing and saw both Chaff and Brutus there, I watched as Brutus slashed through Chaff's torso with a sword, and before I knew it, my own knife and sunk deep into Brutus's head. Then I was frantically searching, screaming out, calling for. . .
"Katniss," Her name escapes my lips, "Where are you?" I realize I must be in some sort of Capitol prison, and if I'm here, Katniss is probably here too. Before I can devise a plan to escape and find her, the door to my prison cell opens.
"Peeta Mellark," The man's snake-like lips form my name, "What a pleasantry it is, meeting you here," I sit there unresponsive, not daring to look into his eyes. "If you aren't going to speak to me, perhaps you'll speak to some of my. . . Colleagues," He lingers on the s as he speaks. Before I have time to say anything, to save myself, to escape, two large, burly men burst into the room and grab my arms. I am lifted from the ground and dragged out of the room by their undeniable strength and force. I struggle, I thrash, nothing works, I am too weak to attempt anything. As we near the end of a long corridor, a door opens and I am seated in a chair inside. My arms are restrained by leather straps and my feet are buckled to the floor.
"Welcome," A woman says with an evil grin, "You'll be here with us for a while, I presume, for some. . . Lessons," She gives a maniacal laugh and grabs a syringe full of an odd, purplish fluid. Just then, on a screen above the doorway comes a clip of the first arena. It is Katniss and I, in the first arena. Me, trembling with fever and ache, my leg cut open and bloodied, I watch myself ask for Katniss to tell me a story. I see the pain, the longing, in my eyes. Katniss devises to tell me about Prim's goat, I listen to the story intently, a couple of minutes in, I feel a sharp jab in my arm and see the purplish fluid entering my body. Pain erupts from the point at which the needle broke skin. The next thing I know, I'm back in my cell, I hear Johanna whimpering and screaming from the other side of the wall. I tremble with fear.
"What are you doing to me?" I cry out to the darkness. I curl up in a ball on the cot in the corner. A voice breaks through my head
"Katniss's fault," it says "She did this to you."
"No!" I yell out as I fight the voice. But it whispers to me, in my own voice, it tells me I hate her, that she hates me. For hours, this goes on, I give up and hide in the corner of my cell, whimpering and screaming just as I heard Johanna doing before. Are they doing this to her, too? What kind of torture has she endured? These questions and more run through my head.
"Peeta, it's okay," Her voice echoes through the room, and then she's there, right in front of me, moving slowly towards me.
"Katniss," I sigh in relief, "What's happening to me? Why have they let you in to see me?"
"I don't know, Peeta, I don't know any more than you do," Katniss says, shrugging her shoulders.
"Katniss, I love you," I whimper, trembling. She comes toward me and I look her in the eyes and she disappears, turns into thin air.
"She doesn't love you," The voice echoes through my head, "She's the reason you're here."
"She loves me, she just has to," I screech.
"No," The voice tells me, "If she loved you, you wouldn't be here right now, she would've saved you. Katniss did this to you. She didn't save you, she didn't even try."
"Yes she did," I scream, "She was yelling my name, she was trying to save me just as I was trying to save her."
"No," the voice erupts through my head. The single word rebounding for minutes and minutes on end.
Just then, the woman bursts in with another syringe full of the putrid purple liquid. Before I can think to fight her or to move out of her range, another burst of pain is erupting in my arm. I fight to keep consciousness. Then I'm just screaming.
"I love her!" I yell, "You can't take that from me!" Then I hear her in my head once again.
"Stay with me," she whispers. As the poison takes full affect, I give her my final promise.
"Always."