He knew it would be bad. In fact, he was positive that whatever awaited him when they got to where they were going would be unbearable in every possible way. No matter what he tried to imagine, he was sure the reality would be even worse. It would hurt. He would surely lose his courage. He might even beg for it to stop. So he decided to stop imagining what was coming in the naive hope that if he did not conceive it, they would not be able to outdo his imagination.
He was only dimly aware that his hands and feet were tied, which was particularly awkward given his prosthetic. His head was covered with a sack and he was gagged. He had to admit, he was scared shitless but he got a handle on it. They'd bound him up right after his interview with Caesar Flickerman and tossed him like so much refuse onto some kind a transport – probably a hovercraft from the sound of the engines.
"Okay, Peeta," he said to himself, "Here's how it goes. I'm going to have to forgive you in advance for your weakness, for asking them to make it stop, to be willing to do anything just so they'll go away. I forgive you because you've got other priorities."
He didn't have the chance to sort those priorities the way he'd wanted to – the transport stopped and he'd been picked up and carried to a room. When his hood was removed, he noted that the room resembled a hospital ward. The white surfaces glared in that painfully sterile way only Capitol medical units could be – it was not humanly possible for any space or color to be so white. There was a large screen across the wall and counters that gleamed with stainless steel accoutrements – the only interruption in a sea of white that threatened to drown him. He was far too textured, too colored, too dirty for this environment. The pure, uninterrupted monotony was the first thing to put terror in his heart.
Peeta sensed that when his handlers finally arrived, he would lose these precious moments with himself. So he visualized the most important part of himself like a small grey bird that he carefully picked up and put inside a cast-iron cage. The door was decorated ornately but it was solid and whole and there was a heavy lock over the handle. He envisioned this part of himself, the part that sang from the merest hint of beauty, and took flight whenever she was near, even in the most absurd and dangerous of circumstances. He shut the door on this tiny, fragile creature as it rolled itself into the smallest possible shape, trembling behind those bars in hope and terror.
From its place in the cage, that tremulous thing watched as Snow's honeyed words gave way to beatings, more interviews, painful injections and demented images. Pictures and words and lies – so many lies that sometimes, the bird seemed to shrivel up and get lost in the battering and pounding of the caving metal. At one point, the lies became so convincing, the little grey bird of morning began to doubt the truth he'd carried within him into captivity. The cage of his mind bent and bruised but the bird hid inside, safe, if somewhat weak from lack of nourishment, from the perpetual darkness and the pain that invaded its soul. Several times, it almost died. Perhaps it did die and came back to life as an altogether different creature, much less gentle than the one that had arrived. It was hard to tell in a place where day and night, good and evil surrounded him with the same uninterrupted pallor as the hospital room.
But he remembered. In the middle of that storm of relentless agony, he remembered his priorities - to keep his bird safe, above all else, even when the bars started to snap and the evil thing reached inside to capture him, those wicked fingers searing the feathers and setting them on fire. To not forget the sunset, the color of light on white fur and her, the one who needed him to be whole.
The space around his bird grew smaller and smaller and he knew that soon enough, all his resolutions would come to nothing. He could not endure this forever. And even that was a small lesson in itself. His father once told him that no one really ever knew just how strong they could be until they had no choice but to be strong. But Peeta had gained knowledge that few others would ever attain. He had reached his boundaries. He knew how much he could take and had been carried beyond the limits of his strength, where everything afterwards had become one endless act of dissolution. He had surely died a thousand deaths tied to that gurney until his bird was stripped of feathers and lay panting on the singed bottom of his cage.
So when they finally came for him, there was nothing left but bones and a croaking sound that was not a song but the memory of a song.
The windowless door of his soul did not open smoothly, but in jerks and fits, sometimes letting too much light in, sometimes not enough. He was no longer in that white room bereft of all human heat. His cage no longer rattled from the outside. But everything hurt and the visions that did enter his cage were ones he could not trust – of mutts and a monster who masqueraded as the one he loved and sought to destroy that beaten, unconscious thing inside of him.
There were explosions, futile battles and dying children. He underwent a violent becoming, not into a singing lark but a phoenix aflame, with no way to quench the fire except to let it ravage him to the marrow of his bones. He was caught in power struggles and thwarted suicides until finally, the peace and serenity was granted to pluck the ashes from that piece of him that had huddled hidden, been beaten and starved. Slowly, after many lost days, he gave it a shape similar to the one it had once possessed. It was then that he heard the song his soul once sang – deeper, sonorous, more mournful than the one with which he'd entered the cage.
When the memory of his song became stronger, the tiny bird stirred to life and took stock of its scars – its additions and subtractions. It counted up its memories and affixed them like stars on the backdrop of the night sky. Limping on broken legs and fluttering its frayed wings, it sang its lonely song. And in that moment, he recalled the priorities for which his bird had struggled so fiercely – to not forget the sunset, the color of light on white fur and her, the one who now needed him to be whole again.
XXXXX
"Ye know the fortress I told ye about, the one inside of me? [...] Well, I've a lean-to build, at least. And a roof, to keep out the rain." J. Fraser, Outlander