I smash a bottle deliberately, hard against the kitchen sink. The noise is abrasive, rubbing briefly across my ears like a smack to the face before silence, silence as I clutch my weapon and he waits, stalking me, hunting me. Peeta is after me.
We weren't always like this. He used to love me, cherish me. Hold me when I was frightened and kiss me when I was in the middle of saying something. Stare at me in wonder and then pin me gently to the sofa to hug me and tell me secrets. But then he was hijacked by monsters creating another monster and all the treatment in the world couldn't close his eyes to the truth of it, the reality of it.
It takes one to see one. It took the venom of a mutt to make my perfect boy, my boy with the bread into a killer but he did it, he became it in the end. And then suddenly he understood evil, could see it within me. Could hold the body of a lifeless bird in his hands and see me with my bow, hiding and watching and then striking – killing humans and animals alike.
They made him into my worst enemy. They made him into something that understood the demons I carry, those that fight to break out and bathe in the blood of all those who would harm me and my fragile, cracked peace. The selfish, cruel part of me that Peeta worked so hard to silence before finally surrendering to. Before the monster he is now took over and set out to save me from myself.
He is waiting and watching, a hunter after prey, a knife in his hand and the time of innocence a dream that lingers in his half-gone mind. Finally we are the tributes the Capitol wanted us to be – aggressive, armed, dangerous and soulless. Blood will be spilt tonight.
~ KATNISS ~ PEETA ~ WAR ~ KATNISS ~ PEETA ~ WAR ~ KATNISS ~ PEETA ~ WAR ~
It is the grey and gold statue all war heroes were given that I use to kill him in the end. It was Peeta who designed it, a grey mass made of skulls, piled to resemble the cornucopia with a single mockingjay made of golden flames, flying with an arrow in its beak and into the sky. I use the base. The blood makes it sticky.
Peeta did many images for Paylor's government. Mockingjays fighting eagles, watched by the rising sun and a silhouetted child. Arrows of destruction and a ring of fire that hung over the honoured like a halo of bravery. They were to hold a lasting reminder in our minds and all others that even though we had suffered and toiled and burnt for the rebellion, it had created something worth all the blood spilt for it. Or at least that was the idea.
Standing there in my own living room, Peeta's blood on my hands and on my face and drying into my hair, it was a little hard to believe it. It was a little hard to believe in anything. I fall to my knees beside him – he was just a boy after all, my boy, my angel boy. He never deserved the brutality of war or the repetition of one corrupt government replacing the next. He never deserved snakes in his mind, talking to him, convincing him, poisoning him with whispers of fear and hatred.
He never deserved to be my monster.
A/N: Well, that was mental. Not really sure where that came from. Oh well, it was fun killing him.