Note: This multiple chapter story recounts what Peeta went through with the Capitol, from the torture he had to endure to the highjacking. I may also write a bit from his rescue to after when he's brought to District 13.

Please review and comment. Ideas are always appreciated.

~ Maria

Chapter 1: The Avox He Named Delly And The Meat She Produced

His life was over.

Peeta Mellark accepted this grim reality the moment the clutches of the Capitol closed on him, crushed him, spit on him. They took him back to the metropolis, stripped him bare, searched him, but they didn't beat him. He sought Katniss amidst the chaos, his eyes wandering everywhere at once, sometimes so fast his vision was nothing but a blur and yet in that amalgam of colors and visions, he would have noticed her: her dark hair, olive skin, grey eyes - he would have seen her. He would have seen her through hail and dust, through clouds of deadly mists - he would have seen her.

But he didn't.

They explained briefly that Panem was in shambles. A group of rebels had materialized from the bowels of a district thought long gone: District 13. They explained Katniss Everdeen had gone with them. They explained that the balance of Panem rested on his shoulders, now that it was dangerously tipping. They explained that he was needed for the cause. They explained they could get to his lover, get to their ( imaginary ) baby, if she were to listen to reason. They explained that they could help if he helped them. They explained a lot of things but he listened to very little of it.

He made an appearance on Ceasar Flickerman's show the next day. He did not believe nor cared for President Snow's words, but he went along if only to give Katniss time. If only to let her know he was alive, that he would find her. He called for the ceasefire. He got mad at Ceasar for claiming she'd done on purpose to destroy the arena. They knew nothing. He knew nothing. The show was over. It would air a month later but he couldn't know that.

And he was taken away.

They didn't bring him back to the luxurious room he had resided in for either games. Instead he was dragged down elevator shafts, sterile white walls of endless corridors for what seemed like hours. He grew tired and they edged him on, forced him forward. His moment of glory was over, he decided then. His purpose had been served. Defuse the bomb he and Katniss had set, drown the rebels in the gallows with his pretty words and the charms of the master manipulator. It was selfish to think of one person, a girl on fire, when thousands upon thousands of people suffered a war they'd created over a stupid fruit. He found he was fine with that. He could live with that thought, as long as she was safe.

He lost track of time. Hours turned into days, days into weeks. At first his internal clock still worked, trading the illusion of night and day until at some point he wasn't so sure. He was told once that very day was a Thursday. Then, on that same day, he was told it was a Monday. Some claimed it was September, and Johanna Mason, from the cell across from him, claimed it was December. The guards knew, obviously, but they played along with different dates and times. Annie Cresta thought thirty years had passed. She was adamant on it. Time was important for the prisoners of the Capitol and it was spoon fed to them like you would feed pulsing maggots to a baby. And with that, Peeta Mellark's mind slowly began deteriorating.

At first he would cling to the memory of Katniss. He would reminisce on the feel of her skin, the silk of her hair, the tempo of her breathing. He would recall the time they lay in the caves or the trains leading to the Victory Tour - the Quell. He focused on her voice, her words, her mannerisms; How, for example, she sometimes bit her lip when she was unsure, or she bit her nails when she was upset.

But as time passed, the clear vision of the girl he loved, the one he had been paying attention to since he was five years old, took the undertone of a rippled glass under water. One night when he could not remember the creases of her lips against his own, could not conjure them in his mind, he wept silently. For the first time in days, weeks or months, Peeta mourned his fate and the knowledge that he would never see her again.

Once, when they had neglected to feed him for days, they sat him in a chair, bound at the wrists and ankles. He was so tired, exhausted mentally and physically. Lack of sleep - they kept him awake with a constant flow of drugs and to this point he still had no idea how long he had been awake in this maelstrom of time. He felt ill, his chest constantly clutching like a warrior's fist. It tempered and crushed his insides. His eyelids felt heavy but the influx of blood kept them opened until he had to force them closed if only to moisten the dry globes beneath them.

He heard a faint whimper which he thought was his own until the lights came on, bathing him in yellows and whites and deep shadows. He was not alone. The sound of hurt and despair he'd heard had come from the red head shackled tight to the wall in front of him. Everything around them was silver, metal, looking sharp and deadly.

Peeta shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The woman with the red hair was familiar until he remembered she had been Delly Cartwright. Well no, she was not. But to Effie Trinket, who had witnessed Katniss' moment of kindness to the Avox, she had been named Delly Cartwright, so with a ball of lead in his throat, Peeta decided her name was Delly until he was told otherwise.

She was naked, adding to his discomfort. Her flesh was so light, white as cream, and every scar she possessed - and there were many - appeared pink, wet and rubbery under the light. She was so pale that her crimson lips appeared obscene in comparison. She was thin, her ribcage protruding grotesquely below near non-existent breasts. She'd been shaven of any and all hair save for the fiery mane upon her skull. In all this, she had every quality of a moth caught in a spiderweb, awaiting the inevitable end when the nightmare would wrap its long, crooked legs upon it and suck it dry of life.

Peeta wanted to speak, opened his mouth, clicked his tongue, realized the futility of having a conversation with an Avox, how offensive the sound of his tongue must have been to the empty mouthed girl, and gave up, pressing his lips back together into a thin, apologetic line.

She cast her eyes upon him. He knew she recognized him and their gaze locked together just as men in white coats entered the room. One of them possessed a thick halo of charcoal hair with bright red feathers sprouting from his pink skull. It reminded Peeta of a plucked bird and thought Katniss would have had a good laugh. That made him feel sad, so instead he caught the image of the man's head exploding but stopping mid-way and forgetting to continue. That was more rewarding to think about, he figured. The second man had dark skin and a golden mane, reminding him of a lion, and the third donated his nose and lips for a long yellow beak. As a whole, together, it was like a bird man had been split into three entities.

They looked ridiculous, yet terrifying. Peeta could not settle on which and so he watched them as though he was the hunter and they were prey despite the obvious fact that it was the other way around.

"Peeta Mellark", the man with the feathers asked of him. Silence greeted the Capitol man. He sighed and cleared his throat before he was heard again, more stern, his voice heavy. "Is your name Peeta Mellark?"

Flatly, Peeta responded: "Yes."

The man with the feathers nodded in approval, then brought a chair forward - clean, white, antiseptic looking chair with no sharp corners, only round sides of plastic. Peeta challenged him with his gaze, hard and determined; The eyes of a boy who knew what was coming: Interrogation and punishment. They would ask about the rebellion. They would ask what he knew. Ask about the Girl on Fire. And they would torture him and the Avox he'd baptized Delly Cartwright because he had been honest when speaking to Ceasar Flickerman all this time ago; He knew nothing.

The man with the blood feathers sat on the chair, smooth in his action, fluid, almost liquid like. He returned the challenge Peeta was sending him, then spoke in a polite tone that made his words cut like razor blades across the moist pink of a tongue. "Do you have any idea how much I hate you?"

This took the boy aback. What was he to answer to that? Shouldn't it be the other way around anyway? He looked at the man in silence, dumbstruck.

Behind him, the other two men approached the red headed girl strapped to the wall. There was the sound of steel on steel, the glimmer of light as it hit the blades, and then a lot of red. It leaked like paint, thick, bright red drops leaking down the white flesh of Avox Delly's skin, tainting it. She made a sound of desperation, a moist sound like siphoned honey, which may have been words had she had a tongue to express herself with.

"Well let me tell you, how much I hate you", the man sitting on the shinny, plastic chair mentioned as though nothing horrible was happening behind him; except the Capitol man's voice was bitter and cold. Raw. Malicious. "Scum like you, who decide one day to try and stand up to superior people don't think about consequences. You're selfish. You only think about yourself. Everything that will happen from now on will be your own doing."

Peeta listened - half listened. His eyes watered because Avox Delly's shrieks were bubbling with phlegm with every slice of skin, of meat, of steak; the man with the beak and the lion man were cutting off thin slices of her flesh. Some of the pieces were so thin that as they flopped from her body, Peeta could see through them as though they were membranes. Each cut was calculated, meticulous. Artistic.

"Stop! Stop it", the boy pleaded, "what are you doing? That's not...! You can't!"

They ignored him. The man with the feathers continued. "You see, if there had been no rebellion, if the districts had not made any sort of uprising, we'd have the components to make an anesthetic for Lavinia here, and she wouldn't feel the pain. Unfortunately, well, as you can see, it isn't the case."

Peeta stood frozen in horror. Even after he'd been a part of two back to back Hunger Games, even after he'd seen people die, had killed, himself, a couple of tributes for his own survival, there had been no preparing him for the torture bestowed before him. It was senseless. There were no questions asked. They were hurting this girl for no reason. It was a sport and the hungry reflection of sadistic pleasure in the men's eyes as they removed more and more of Lavinia's flesh was sickening.

"And so, my friend, I can hardly stand to look at you, but she, on the other hand, won't have any such reservations, I believe." He looked back over his shoulder at the girl whose name had once been Avox Delly and was now Lavinia. The Capitol men went about slicing her thinly, their blades sharp as diamonds, cutting through her flesh as they would if she were made of butter and they used hot knives.

The man in front of Peeta laughed darkly. "How long will it take for her to go in shock? To die? Oh, because we're not going to save her, Peeta, oh no. She will die. In pain. In misery. Because of you. Peeta. All because of you. Because you and your coal mine bitch couldn't play the game as per the rules."

Peeta begged them to stop once more, thrashing against his bounds like a caged animal.

They didn't stop.

Layer after layer of skin, red as the blue steak he was served during the Victory Tour, were removed. He watched helplessly, frustrated, as her muscles and bones were exposed slowly, at her thighs, her stomach, her arms. She began drooling. A dark yellow stream of urine slipped down her legs and from there came the heavy smell of ammonia, filling the room. Her shrieks turned to whines and whimpers after some time because her voice had gone too coarse and feeble to produce anything else. Her eyes were wide, pleading Peeta to do something, until he witnessed her consciousness turn hollow. By then her cheeks were non-existent and revealed her teeth below, just as the bones of her ribcage peeked forth where her breasts had once been. She was a piece of meat on a stick, crucified upon a sheet of silver metal. All meat. The human qualities she'd possessed once had been stolen from her. She was eyes, all eyes, but there was nothing left in them. She drooled and gagged and shook. She rolled her eyes back and forth and left and right but would not settle anywhere specific.

The men stepped back when they felt they were done, like artists proud of their latest piece of art, and nodded calmly toward the man with the feathers. He got up and waved his hand dismissively at Peeta. "Ah, the hell with you, boy", he said at last.

They were left alone. The Boy With the Bread and The Woman With No Tongue.

Alone.

Blood pooled at her feet, long streaks of maroon like paint leaking down the wall and around her. She looked like a painting. And he would paint her. Later, when he would return to District 12, when he would be taken by a powerful flashback, he would paint her as she was in the end: moist, inhuman, mutilated, humiliated, but not dead. He would try. Oh god, he would try to paint her dead, but he could never paint the right expression, or lack there of. Even as her jaw hung slack, her eyes were rolled back, her limbs were exposed to the bone, with blood covering the white as snow skin, matting her hair into thick clumps, she never looked dead - she eternally suffered, in his head, with the last conscious glance she'd given him - hate, so much hate for The Boy With The Bread - leaving a thick layer of scar tissue upon his mind.

"I'm sorry... I'm so sorry...", he whispered over and over again, even as he knew she could not hear him any longer.

It lasted hours. It lasted days. It lasted weeks. He didn't know. He couldn't know. But come the end he was wailing. He'd promised he wouldn't break. He'd promised he would be strong for Katniss, for Haymitch, for the cause - the right one, which he truly believed in. But now he was filled with guilt. Lavinia's excruciating death - it was slow, so very slow, every animalistic sound she made scratching at his sanity, making hole after hole - had been cruel and for naught. There had been no questions, no interrogations. They had simply murdered her. They had made him watch. And he was to blame.

He was to blame.

He had murdered her.

That night, in his cell, they brought him food. A plate of cheese and meat over a lettuce leaf.

Peeta heard someone laugh. It came from all around him, yet it didn't come from anywhere. It was the laugh of a man on the verge of lunacy, filled with pain, agony, filth and at the same time, it was empty. It hurt the hinges of his jaw.

The meat was thin sliced and raw.

The meat was still bloody.

The meat smelled like ammonia.

The meat

End of Chapter 1