"Katniss."
The dark edges of his nightmares transform, taking a hard, definite shape, her face, her eyes red and her mouth dripping foam. His entire body seems to hum with this chanting desire. All he knew was he had to reach out and kill.
Kill Katniss.
They want to kill Katniss.
Peeta slams awake, thrashing and calling out her name. She is there, a bow in her hand, pointed at him, this twisted look across her eyes. But it's not a look of malice. It's a look of pain.
"Katniss, get out of here!"
She hesitates, her bow lowers marginally. "Why? What's making that sound?"
Doesn't she see? She has to get away! This one thought, this one desperate impulse, is the strongest thing he has felt since waking up in Thirteen. "I don't know. Only that it has to kill you. Run! Get out! Go!"
The ensuing chase and fight with the lizard mutts is horrific, and Peeta can feel the games all around him again like he had with the can of soup. This time, though, it's the deaths and the screams that come back to him, that make his memories, shiny and non-shiny, screech across his mind. Still, he holds on. He keeps them moving. He holds onto that one impulse.
He has to protect her.
You're still trying to protect me? Real or not real?
Real. Because that's what you and I do.
The screams of Finnick dying threaten to unravel his hold. Peeta forces them up the ladder, clamps down on his deteriorating grasp of reality long enough to see her whisper "Nightlock, nightlock, nightlock," and drop it into the hold. Then he retreats into the hard surface of the concrete wall and pulls against his cuffs, feeling the metal dig into his flesh, and he tries to anchor himself to that pain.
Kill. Kill Katniss. Kill the monster. Kill the mutt.
No, he's the monster. He won't be the mutt. He won't be like them.
Kill.
They have noticed now, but it's too late. He hangs onto this one thought while he still can. They have to keep going. They have to get Katniss away from him.
"Peeta?" It's her voice, and his brain echoes her hiss as she stood above the rubble of his bakery laughing, squealing as she crushed the skull of his father under her leather boot.
"Peeta?" And then she kneels down. Her face mutates into something with horns and black eyes. Something he has to kill.
"Leave me." His voice is choked. "I can't hang on."
"Yes! You can!"
He blinks, tries to shake his head to see her face, her real face, but he can't. He doesn't want to be this thing, this monster, the Capitol pawn that killed Mitchell. But he can't…he can't hold on…
"I'm losing it." He begs in his mind that she hears what he can't say, pleads that she runs. "I'll go mad. Like them." She can't see that. Not again. She has to get away.
All of a sudden, the mutt leans in, and there's a warmth against his lips.
She is kissing him.
A smell comes to him, the scent of salt water and wet sand. Laced over it, the smell of mint, lavender, and sweat. The same as he can smell now. It's her smell. Her taste. Something stirs within him. Something warm.
His body strains to reach out to her, to choke her, snap her neck, gouge out her eyes, cause her pain, any pain.
No. He clamps down on his muscles so hard that they shake and ache. No, he won't. He won't hurt her.
There's a hard grip now on his wrists. The pressure on his lips is gone, and he gasps for breath, his heart thundering against his chest. Her eyes pierce through his fog, gray and hard as granite, unyielding. "Don't let him take you from me."
That's right, he did this, he made him a mutt. Peeta tries to remember, but there is so little of Peeta left.
Kill her. That's what he wants.
"No. I don't want to." What Peeta is or was, Peeta doesn't want that.
"Stay with me."
Stay with me.
The memory struggles to surface, little more than image, hazy and soft, like trying to chase a dream after you wake. But it's the feeling of it, something tucked deep, a morsel inside his chest, something he saved…Yes, that, that is real.
His chest tightens, and he pants with the effort, but he drives back the mutt inside him. He lifts his eyes and manages an answer.
"Always."
It's the only thing she'd ever asked him for, so he'd kept it close inside his chest.
Katniss Everdeen didn't ask for favors. Those were just debts to pay back. Even when they were young, when she was starving, and she went house to house, he remembered the threadbare piece of cloth in her hand that she was trying to trade. She didn't beg. In all of the videos he watched and all of the memories he could glean out of his patchwork quilt of a mind, Katniss did. She acted. She could be selfish, and she could be cutting, and she could be calculating. She tried to protect all of them by asking for them to do things like run off into the woods looking for a district burned to ash. She didn't question him when he crawled in bed with her on the train, force him to leave. But she didn't ask for things, not for herself.
Except that once.
Katniss Everdeen had asked for him. She had asked for him to stay.
That feeling then had seized him, buried him, smothered him. Anything she asked, he would give her.
Same as now.
The basement is chilled, an almost wet cold hanging in the air. But there are dry animal pelts and a notable lack of lizard mutts, so that's alright. Besides, there's something about it almost comforting. Peeta wonders if it is because he's found refuge in cold, dank places before.
Gale's face is white, the blood that would color it now coating his shirt and his neck. They help him onto a pile of fur coats, and Katniss looks around for a moment, biting her lip. She seems to be considering. Then, she grits her teeth, kneels, and takes out a needle and thread from their first aid kit. She bends over Gale.
The violent monster lurches again in Peeta's chest, and he sits and faces the wall. He runs his hands under the tap that Katniss had started, trying to let the cold chill seep all the way into his bones. They shake, and he closes his eyes.
"You know what's happening right now, don't you? You are here. You are here all alone, and Katniss is with him. He's probably slamming into her right now, burying himself deep in her, fucking her, while you are strapped to this table." The voice above him purrs from behind a sterile white mask. "But we know Katniss, don't we? She can't take that for long. So she'll flip him over and ride him and touch herself and let out a scream. So, in a way, perhaps you do at least sound the same while you lay here for me."
Peeta swallows, the tip of the electric spoke that just jabbed into his side coming into view again. "Good." He coughs, and he tries a grin. "Good. That was the plan, after all. Die in the Games and let her go home." He twists his head and raises an eyebrow. "I'm just surprised at how long you're taking to make that first part a reality. I'm a little disappointed."
The pain comes hot and sharp, and he does scream because his bones are on fire and his eyes roll back and god, why didn't he let Brutus just slam his head against the tree?
He knows why. He had to try give her a shot. Give her a shot to get out of there.
So she could go be with Gale.
All of a sudden, the current cuts off. His body rattles with a few last spasms, and he can hear them moving as he tries to lick the spit from his lips. "Turn the clip on," he hears them say.
"No!" His mind is jumbled, but he knows what's about to happen. There's a click and a slight woosh as the venom is injected into his arm. "No!" He tries to swing his arms, but they rattle against the metal cuffs.
The clip comes on anyway, the video of Gale kissing Katniss in the woods, but they must have distorted it somehow, made it different, because now he's backing her against a tree and they have no clothes on and he's inside of her and she's moaning, screaming, howling…
With a sharp twist, Peeta shuts off the tap and turns around.
Katniss stares at the hole in Gale's neck and draws up the thread before knotting it. She dabs ointment on it, wrapping it with gauze. He swallows a couple of pills she hands him. "You can rest now. It's safe here." He nods and leans back against a pile of pelts.
Then she turns to Peeta.
He wants to pull away, but she sits in front of him. Her eyes take him in. For a moment she opens her mouth, and his mind inserts a growling hiss, the sound of a snake, but it's just in his head because then she kneels and washes his skin. She winces with each pat, her face reflecting the hurt there. He recalls the set, almost tortured expression she had worn when stitching Gale. Peeta considers an old image he had watched on the screen of their first Games, a Katniss with a green face drawing pus from his leg.
Katniss is squeamish.
It's a weird realization at a time like this, but Peeta latches onto it.
"You have to keep these clean. Otherwise, it could get infected –"
Suddenly, the cold of the basement is the damp chill of the cave. He's there. "I know what blood poisoning is, Katniss, even if my mom isn't a healer."
Her eyes dart up. There's something in them, a light. "You said that to me in the first Hunger Games. Real or not real?"
Peeta swallows. "Real." He studies her, remembering what came after. "And you risked your life getting the medicine that saved me?'
She shrugs, her face blank, as if getting the medicine had been like a trip to the apothecary's shop in District 12, not a fight to the death where a girl sat balanced on her chest and traced her lips with the point of a knife. Just the memory of it makes Peeta's heart pound and his blood course. He's angry. Angry she did that.
Angry she risked her life for him.
His head is swimming and pounding, but Katniss goes on. "You were the reason I was alive to do it."
Peeta blinks, trying to remember. "Was I?" He struggles through images, mud coating his face under the rocks, the fight with Cato, her dropping the nest of tracker jackers. Her dropping the tracker jackers and laughing as swarmed around his body because she was a mutt, she was trying to kill him.
No.
But between his memories of her with Gale and her in the cave and just her, the shiny images are getting harder to push back. "I'm so tired, Katniss."
"Go to sleep." Her voice is smooth, water falling over pebbles, not at all the screech of her his mind hums to him.
He's not safe.
"Hook me." He raises his cuffs. "Hook me to that chair."
Katniss looks at him. Her eyes dip and stir, but she does what he asks. Peeta lets himself drift into the black, the sound of her cries with Gale and her smooth, protective assurances competing in his mind.
She leans over his leg and gnaws on it, her teeth sharp and pointed, stripping his skin. She stares up at him and grins, her teeth red, before cramming berries and poison down his throat. He waves his arms, and suddenly she is racing for a small bag that says 12 before a knife slices open her forehead. She comes back and lays down beside him, but gets up when Gale comes into the cave. She pushes Gale into a back corner, where Peeta watches her shadow as she strips him and impales herself on him. But the cave, he's stuck in the cave, stuck where he has to watch.
"You're stuck here, Peeta, so scream for me." The white mask bends closer.
No.
She's on the floor beside him on the cave, a dark pool of blood around her head.
No.
He jerks to, his chest heaving. His eyes crawl over the dark forms in the basement until they rest on her outline next to Cressida and Pollux. A hand is curled up next to her mouth. If possible, her face looks more haggard in sleep than in does while awake.
With a sigh, Peeta leans back and drifts off again.
Katniss turns to him. "What do you think, Peeta?"
Peeta jerks, taken aback. She had just confessed what they had all known; there was no mission to infiltrate the Capitol and kill Snow. Of course there wasn't. Gale and Cressida argue with her, and their words bounce back and forth like the tetherball outside the old school (or what he thought was the tetherball outside the old school – his memories feel like scattered puzzle pieces from six different puzzles).
But Peeta had been more fascinated by the way she tosses her hair back over her shoulder, the way she slashes the air in frustration, and the pure drip of self-hate in her voice. Her eyes swirl. They look like clouds swirling over the mountains before a hard rain.
He saw it, the same thing he saw when she watched him over the fire when he was assigned to the squad. How lost she looked. Her doubt. How she tried to carry it all. A mutt could never be this vulnerable. A mutt never fought to shoulder all of this.
He sees her spirit, the thing a mutt could never have.
"I think…" he began slowly, tasting his words. "You still have no idea. The effect you can have." Her eyes flicker, clouds parting and closing again. "None of the people we lost were idiots. They knew what they were doing. They followed you because they believed you really could kill Snow."
At the end of his speech, a change settles over her face. Her muscles tighten, and her jaw sets. She turns. "Where are we, Cressida?" They go to work on it, back to the mission.
He sees, too, her resolve.
They discuss ways to try and draw Snow out of the mansion. Katniss, of course, volunteers one plan.
"I bet he'd come out for me." Something in Peeta wants to sigh, but he really can't because she's serious and they might all take this seriously. "If I were captured. He'd want that as public as possible. He'd want my execution on his front steps." She pauses and looks around at them. A panic rises in him, the same that woke him to the sound of lizard mutts. In a weird way, he relishes it. It grounds him, and he knows what he has to do. What he must keep from happening. Katniss goes on, "Then Gale could shoot him from the audience."
"No." His answer is immediate. Peeta concentrates on a level volume. Katniss responds to reason, not raised voices (probably why she doesn't get along with Haymitch). "There are too many alternative endings to that plan. Snow might decide to keep you and torture information out of you. Or have you executed publicly without being present. Or kill you inside the mansion and display your body out front." This last statement makes Peeta swallow.
Katniss turns away from him. "Gale?"
Peeta fixes his gaze on Gale, and he's more afraid of this man than he ever has been before. He's Katniss's oldest friend, and he has almost as much fire as she does. He could get her killed.
After a moment, Gale shakes his head. "It seems like an extreme solution to jump to immediately. Maybe if all else fails. Let's keep thinking."
Peeta lets out a breath. For right now, Gale is his best ally. He's got fire, but he also cares about Katniss. And Gale assured him that he would shoot him in case Peeta turned mutt again. Together, maybe, maybe they could keep her safe.
Because that's what you and I do.
He can't sleep. He keeps nodding off to alternating visions of Katniss poisoning him with berries and leaving him to die/ running off to get the medicine that can save him. It's the same beginning, but her face changes form, sometimes laughing and hissing and sometimes just watching him with a sad, desperate look. Each time, it ends the same. After the fourth time he sees her bleeding out on the cave floor, he rests his back against the wall and keeps a vigil the shapes sleeping in the dark. He keeps a vigil over her.
"No one knows what to do with you, girlie."
Peeta blinks, and he turns to find Gale glancing at him. After a second, Gale gets up off the ground, finds an old can of soup they had eaten from, and turns the faucet on low. He lets it run and rinses the can before letting it fill with water. He brings it over to Peeta, and Peeta nods. He tilts back his head against his hands shackled again to the chair and swallows five good gulps down his throat. He hadn't realized how thirsty he was.
"Thanks for the water." Peeta nods.
"No problem." Gale sits back down on his furs and nods. "I wake up ten times a night anyway."
"To make sure Katniss is still here?" He takes another glance in her direction.
"Something like that." Gale follows his gaze, and, again, Peeta understands.
"That was funny, what Tigris said." Peeta allows a smile. "About no one knowing what to do with her."
"Well, we never have." They laugh together, and Peeta feels something. He almost feels normal. Normal because something in him wants to hate Gale, but he can't. He just feels a jealous, quiet resignation.
That must have been what he was like before.
"She loves you, you know." Peeta glances back to him. "She as good as old me after they whipped you." Her face is still clear in his head, red on one side from sleeping on the kitchen table beside him. Not shiny at all.
"Don't believe it." Gale shook his head. "The way she kissed you in the Quarter Quell…well, she never kissed me like that."
A white hope flares in him quickly before he has a chance to understand it. Hope? Hope of what? But it means, it does mean, that those videos of Gale and Katniss together were distorted. But, he reminds himself, so was the purpose of that kiss. "It was just part of the show." Still, he can remember it. The heat pressing against their backs and the way she clung to him, and the small noise in the back of her throat as their tongues tasted each other.
"No, you won her over. Gave up everything for her. Maybe that's the only way to convince her you love her." They both sit back and consider that for a moment. Peeta plays the memory of the kiss again in his mind and then thinks of what he had given up.
"I should have volunteered to take your place in the first Games. Protected her then."
Peeta smiles and shakes his head. "You couldn't. She'd have never forgiven you." And he hits that truth that is starting to make itself clear to him. Katniss didn't care about protecting herself. If she had, they all wouldn't be here together in this dank basement. None of this would have ever happened. "You had to take care of her family. They matter more to her than her life." He realizes, in an instant, so do they. Both of them. The thought makes him both warm and sad.
"Well, it won't be an issue much longer. I think it's unlikely all three of us will be alive at the end of the war. And if we are, I guess it's Katniss's problem. Who to choose." Gale yawns and leans back. "We should get some sleep."
"Yeah." Even though he doubts that either of them will get a good night's sleep, he figures they should try. It will probably take both of them to protect Katniss during her brazen battle to take down the whole Capitol single-handedly. Peeta slides down and leans his head back against the chair that is his cage. "I wonder how she'll choose."
"Oh, that I do know." Gale turns over, and his words almost disappear into the fur. "Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can't survive without."
It is so dark he can almost see shapes swim in the dank air. Peeta considers Katniss, thinks about who she would say judge as the one she could not live without. Her life has always been a matter of survival, ever since he remembered her out under that tree when he threw her the bread. Even in his tattered memories, she was reclusive and aloof at school, and she would vanish out into the woods every afternoon. But she would always wait for Prim, straighten the girl's jacket around her shoulders, and walk her all the way to their cabin in the Seam. And Gale. She would always come to trade at the baker's backdoor, a few squirrels for some bread, with Gale at her side.
Gale has always helped her survive. More to the point, he has always helped her family survive. Peeta sighs and feels that sad tug again in his chest. He figures he knows who her choice will be.
Of course he knows. She's just a mutt devised to play with him, torture him.
He shakes his head to clear the thought. Still, a new memory plays in his mind as he tries to get some sleep.
"No one really needs me."
"I do. I need you."
And, again, there is a brief white, hot flare of hope.
There is a shrill scream. Annie. He shivers in a ball on the floor, and the door cranks open. The white masks come closer, and then he's screaming and begging them to stop. He catches the glint of a knife, and it draws a hot, red line down the side beneath his ribs. And then he looks up and it's her. She's holding the knife with a small, dangerous smirk. She runs her fingers along the edge and studies the blood, his blood, and then slams it down into his leg, his leg that is somehow still there. Gale stands at her side.
And then she is gone, gone, gone, and he here's the crash of lightning and the boom of the cannon. "Katniss!" he screams. He's running through the jungle, the knife is in his hand. "Katniss!" He can't reach her.
"Stay with me."
He can't reach her.
He watches them as they disappear into the kitchen, but, when they return, their plan is fairly clear. If he goes out with them, he could endanger them again. That much he can accept as true. But Peeta's not about to sit still.
"I'll go out after you guys. Far enough away where I won't be a concern, but within sighting distance."
"To do what?" Cressida tilts her head.
Peeta gives a small smile and shakes his head. To be useful. To not be the piece they made me to be. "I'm not sure exactly. The one thing that I might still be useful at is causing a diversion. You saw what happened to that man who looked like me."
"What if you…lose control?" Katniss is staring at him, placing her words carefully.
"You mean…go mutt?" He turns his smile to her. "Well, if I feel that coming on, I'll try to get back here."
"And if Snow gets you again?" Gale looks at him now. "You don't even have a gun."
"I'll just have to take my chances. Like the rest of you." He meets his gaze, and then Gale does something he doesn't expect. He digs into his own breast pocket and brings out the nightlock tablet. He places it in Peeta's hand.
Somehow, in all of this, Gale really has become someone he can depend on.
"What about you?" Peeta worries that if he takes this, his fate will become Gale's too.
"Don't worry. Beetee showed me how to detonate my explosive arrows by hand. If that fails, I've got my knife. And I'll have Katniss." Gale flashes him a smile. "She won't give them the satisfaction of taking me alive."
Katniss, meanwhile, looks half sick. "Take it, Peeta." She closes his hand around the pill. "No one will be there to help you."
The touch, just a moment, triggers a howl within his mind. But it's easier to push back. There's no reason to attack someone wearing that face. She's already in pain.
The look she gives him after he says it…it's so full of wonder Peeta almost forgets what they're all about to go do.
Tigris had dressed them, done them over so well that they would be able to pass for any Capitol citizen on the street. He nodded at her. "Never underestimate the power of a brilliant stylist." Tigris bowed her head, and that's when he saw it.
Her gray eyes are so clear, so bright, it's like the sun itself is behind them. Suddenly, he thinks he's seen that look before.
She's sitting behind a table, Effie's hands over her mouth, Haymitch scowling.
"You would have thought we planned it." He smiles at her.
"Didn't you?" Portia rubs her eyes.
"No," she says. "Neither of us even knew what we were going to do before we went in." And she looks at him with those eyes, and he knows it was worth it, whatever hell it might rain down upon them, to earn that kind of gaze.
And then it's time for goodbyes. Katniss unlocks his cuffs, and he stretches his fingers, flexes his wrists. He holds them, testing them. He doesn't feel the mutt in them right now.
"Listen." He glances up, and her face is hard. "Don't do anything foolish." She's worried.
"No. It's last-resort stuff. Completely." His answer isn't a lie. At some point, during these last two days, even after watching what he did to Mitchell, he is starting to think there's a chance. A slim one, but a chance all the same. A chance he could get himself back. And he doesn't want to die like he is.
Suddenly, she wraps her arms around his neck, clutching him tightly. He sucks in a breath, and he feels a scorching rage in his chest, wanting him to grip her and throttle her. But he breathes in that scent, lavender and mint, and that urge within him dies. He reaches his arms around her and pulls her close. He recalls all of those times he has had to watch himself hold her in both Games, comfort her, and he thinks he is beginning to understand. He doesn't want to let her go.
But she releases him, gives Tigris a kiss, and then she and Gale step out into the street, swept away by the streams of Capitol refugees, tailing Cressida and Pollux. Peeta takes a moment, straightens the coat that Tigris has wrapped him in, and follows after the agreed upon amount of time.
Snowflakes dig into his face, and he turns, looking for them. The day is overcast, and the light is soft and unsubstantial. Gunfire rattles buildings in the distance, and people shiver beneath their hats and scarves. But he spots her red cloak, and Peeta bends his face down and walks after them.
After some minutes, he comes to an intersection where Peacekeepers indicate which way the crowds should split. He thinks he sees Katniss turn, once, but she is too far ahead to tell for sure. Then, shots ring out throw the street, and people fall to the ground. Peeta drops and rolls behind a vehicle, poking his head out over the bumper to try and see. Where is she?
The gunfire is coming from the roof. Even in the hazy light, he can make out the forms of bodies lining the road. It must be the rebels, but helping them breakthrough is not his mission. It's his mission to keep going, to see if he can help them in any way. Help her.
He scoots forward, using the cover of the vehicle to duck into the frame of a door. He keeps pushing his way forward. After about fifty feet, he spots the crumpled form of a little girl in a yellow jacket. He pauses, and a sick bile burns at the back of his throat.
Rebels start pouring out into the street, taking position and shooting at the approaching force of Peacekeepers. Peeta barrels through the next intersection just to trip over bodies with skin melted off, pink and boiled. He picks up a gun from a dropped Peackeeper because gunfire ricochets off of buildings and lampposts, with everyone shooting and very few aiming. A dark shadow barrels toward him, and Peeta takes the shot. The shadow falls. He presses ahead.
He stops when the gray light is interrupted by a deep purple glow. A spatter of red grows within it, and Peeta ducks behind the corner of a house until he checks and the glow is gone. When he runs up, he sees more dead people, all of them covered by blood that has leaked from their eyes and ears and fingertips. But the ground shudders with the approach of more troops, and Peeta launches himself into the pile of the dead. He feels a few boots grind into his back, but then they are gone, and he raises up.
Peeta is about ten feet into the next block when he senses the crack beneath his feet. He glances down, and the whole street is tilting in like a trapdoor. Without hesitating, he turns back the way he's come and sprints for the intersection, jumping up where he can see the street now rises five feet above the pod. He rolls on his side and turns to see as people fall and slide into the depths below, their screams echoing back up to the asphalt above. There's a putrid stench, something that smells like rotting fruit and death.
He scrambles to his feet and runs to his right, taking the first left that he comes to. Here, he sees where scorch marks have burned into cement and pavement, but he grits his teeth and sprints down the road. One blow just misses his neck, singing a shoulder and shattering the window of a car on his right. He pants and takes another street on the left. The road is narrow, sharp spikes sticking out of the pavement, a few with soldiers and civilians speared on top. Peeta weaves through and comes back to the original street they had been following to the President's mansion.
He looks up and down. Where is she? There is no red cloak. A cold fear bubbles in his stomach. His mind revisits the pods, all of the bodies. He chokes and gags on the smoke in the air. He stumbles forward.
No. He refuses to think that she's dead. Not when he's just started to figure her out.
At the next intersection, beyond the next block, he sees it. It's the gate to the President's mansion, and tiny fingers stretch into the air to grasp at falling parachutes in front of the fence. And then he sees nothing but red.
Peeta charges through the crossroad, the gunfire momentarily halted. People wearing white shirts and aprons swarm into the scene, and he sees her, her hood now black against the rush of white. She leans against a pole, her profile just visible, only half a block away. She starts as if she has found it, found whatever she was looking for. Peeta glances to where her gaze is fixed.
"Prim!" Her voice is clear, desperate. The same as it was at the Reaping that changed it all.
There's a turn, the swish of an apron, the twist of a blond braid.
Katniss steps forward. Peeta tries to follow.
Then she's flying, twisting, burning. She is a mutt, a mutt made of fire.
And so is he.
