Chapter 10)
{"there's so many wars we fought,
there's so many things were not,
but with what we have,
I promise you that,
we're marching on."}
~Marching On. By One Republic.
~~~
katniss POV
The hospital is in chaos. Doctors shouting orders, nurses shuffling patient to patient. People being wheeled to their beds.
A gurney brushes my shoulder. I turn my head to see a shave-headed, young woman, her skin is sprinkled in bruises, her scabs are long, and oozing. She is Johanna mason.
She has paid the price for knowing rebel secrets. I turn away.
I catch a glimpse of gale, he's stripped to the waist. I'm pushing my way to him, when a nurse, who's much bigger, pushes me back and shuts me out.
Somewhere behind me someone is shrieking, the shrieks inch closer and become slightly more audibly understandable
"Finnick! Finnick!"
A young, lovely woman, who carries bright sea green eyes and dark, slightly matted hair, comes running in just a sheet.
Finnick and her are both stumbling and pushing their way past people to get to each other.
They ended up backed against a wall, holding onto each other tightly, as if, if one or the other loosens their grip even a fraction of a bit, the other will disappear.
I look at them longingly, not for either finnick or Annie, but for their certainty.
I don't know if I've ever felt that way about anyone.
Someone taps my shoulder, I turn to see prim smiling up at me,
"Boggs has been looking for you two," she tells me and Haymitch.
She points toward Boggs. He waves us over. Haymitch and prim both motion me to go first, I smile and step forward. He's alive. Peeta is alive, and he's here.
I increase the size of my steps as I get closer to Boggs.
He motions for us to follow him.
I feel a soft yet firm pressure on my shoulder, I go stiff until I realize I recognize the touch, I turn my head over my shoulder to see a grinning Haymitch. Behind him I see prim, four, Christina. They all give me small grins. I'm so nervous that I can't make myself smile back. So instead, I rotate my head back towards Boggs and follow him up to a room.
TRIS POV
It's not until I resort to going on the tips of my toes that I see Peeta; he's sitting on a bed, looking confused and a bit terrified. He looks at Katniss. He looks to almost be in a daze. Then instantly, he rises from the bed, he's pushing past the doctors, his feet stumble slightly as he runs to meet her. She's quickly moving toward him too. Her arms have already been extended to meet his embrace; his hands are reaching for her, but toward her face. I knit my eyebrows, and the smile that adored my face is replaced by a small scowl
I stretch my neck more to the right to see over Haymitch's shoulder, her lips are slightly parted, but no words or names escape her mouth because Peeta's fingers are wrapped around her neck.
Tobias had eventually drifted toward Haymitch while Katniss and Peeta had been running towards each other; I internally winced when I saw Tobias form his hands into deadly fists. It was obvious what was coming next. He moved swiftly and strategically almost gracefully as his fist connected with Peeta, pushing him away from Katniss, followed by Boggs' tackle.
The rest of us were left as statues.
KATNISS POV
It will all be fine, they tell me. The Mockingjay will be, "just fine," and with a voice.
I'm not supposed to talk, which means I can't even thank the person who helped me… again. He had visited me with Boggs
"Getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air," Four had said to me. Boggs had only shrugged saying it was true. The doctors tell me that it was good that Four moved Peeta when he did, before any permanent damage had been done.
Prim is reaching to grab another blanket on the counter across from me. She gently spreads it over me and returns to her seat next to my bed. She reaches for my clenched hand just as two doctors come in and remove the collar from my neck.
In the hall I hear Haymitch's voice speaking to someone. I hear the doctors give them clearance and soon enough Plutarch, Haymitch and Beetee come in. Plutarch gets the doctors to leave. He even tries to get Prim to leave, but she sent him a glare and took a firm grip on my hand. He reluctantly gave up after Prim threatened to tell our mother of everything that happened. Haymitch chuckled quietly, and quickly made a lame attempt to cough when Plutarch gave him a pointed look.
Prim stayed.
Plutarch stood in front of my bed, resting his hands at the end of my bed.
"Obviously Peeta has been abused. Now we believe something more was going on. That the capital has been subjecting him to a rather uncommon technique known as hijacking. Beetee?"
Beetee opens his mouth to continue the explanation, when the door behind them clicks open, revealing Tris Christina and Four walking in. They pause when they see the other people in the room. They comically take a slow step back.
"Should we leave?" Christina asks.
Haymitch shrugs, and Plutarch looks like he was about to say yes, but prim squeezed my hand to silently get my attention
"Do u want them to stay?" she asked me quietly.
I squeezed back gently to tell her that it was fine.
She looked back up at them and said, "They can stay," she completely ignores the look she gets from Plutarch. That's my girl.
Beetee just looks back at me.
"Im sorry" he says. "But I can't tell you all the specifics of it, Katniss. The capital's very secretive about this form of torture. But I do know that it's a type of fear conditioning. Most people are using the term hijacked. The word comes from an old English word that means "to capture" we believe it was chosen because the technique involves the use of tracker Jacker venom, the jack suggests hijack. The venom targets the part of the brain that houses fear." There's a small gasp that escapes Christina's lips, and she looks like she really wants to say something, but she stays quiet. After a small pause, Beetee continues, "You were stung in your first games, so unlike most of us, you have firsthand knowledge of the effects of the venom,"
Terror. Hallucinations. Nightmarish vision of losing those I love. I start to feel sick.
Prim asks the question that I'd probably ask if I could, "Is that what they've done to Peeta? Taken his memories of Katniss and distorted them so they're scary?"
Beetee nods in confirmation, "So scary that he'd see her as life-threatening. Enough he might try to kill her."
My eyes wander behind Beetee to see Four's fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, his eyes closed. His back is slightly hunched. He is leaning against the back wall. Tris is standing next to him, shaking her head and whispering something to him.
Prim is asking another question to Beetee but I soon drown out their voiced, focusing on Tris and Four. Christina is stiff by their side, her face is emotionless. As long as you don't look closely to how her hands are clenched and whenever her eyes skip over to Tris and Four, her eyes narrow ever so slightly, they hold a mixture of anger, and pity.
She looks back down to the ground. After a moment though, she takes a breath and walks out the door, her back slightly hunched forward, her hair easily covering her face. A soft click of the door closing startles Tris and she looks up and looks around confused finding the absence of Christina. She takes a breath and a look of guilt flashes over her face, before it goes blank. She gently wraps her hand around Four by his bicep and leads him out of my hospital room. He drops his hands to his sides, and silently follows her out. Just as the door is swinging back shut, he turns his head back toward the room, and our eyes meet. His eyes lose their hard stare, but he turns away quickly.
Before I process what that look meant, he's out of sight.
I turn my attention back to Plutarch's conversation.
"Apart from his memories of Katniss, we don't yet know what else has been tampered with," he says.
Haymitch mentions his doubts of Peeta's recovery, and Plutarch gets irritated.
"Peeta's damaged, but he's here with us. And that's a definite improvement over his situation 12 hours ago. Let's keep that in mind, alright?"
Plutarch tells me the news of another 4-5 murders, which include Peeta's prep team, and possibly Effie.
I'm fighting back a sob, but in the end I end up gasping. They finally have no choice but to sedate me.
When I wake up I can't help but think that, that might be the only way I sleep, with bittersweet drugs being shot into my arms.
I'm not allowed to speak for a few days. Not that I have anything to say. Much less anything I want to do here.
My sanity is held firmly with one single thought. I will kill you, accompanied by the image of snow's face.
My mother and prim take turns nursing me. People come in just to give me updates on Peeta and his condition. Neither Four nor Christina come back to visit me.
Gale's not supposed to visit due to a shoulder injury, therefore confined to bed. But after the 3rd night he manages to slip into my room, he graces his fingers ever so slightly on the bruises on my neck, softly places a kiss on my clutched fist, relaxing them, and then disappears.
On the 4th night I receive an unexpected visit; her short mop of dark-blond, hair, swiftly enters my room. The halls and rooms' lights have been turned down to a low dim for bed time. She's alone, and she avoids my gaze. She moves quietly until she reaches the chair next to my bed, where prim usually sits.
She shifts momentarily, then meets my gaze. I search her face for a possible threat, but she isn't very threatening, but there's something that has been defiantly hardened in her blue-gray eyes. I'm not sure why I hadn't noticed it before. When she looks into my eyes, I wonder what she sees.
Her gaze softens when she gets in a position where she can see more of the varied purples, blues and yellows imprinted onto my skin in the shapes of Peeta's fingers.
Her hand slowly inches toward me as to not alarm me. When I don't flinch to her touch on my arm she softly squeezes it.
"Hi" she says finally. If the room hadn't been as silent as it was, I probably wouldn't have been able to hear her.
When she realizes I'm not going to respond she clears her throat with an awkward cough.
"I think Peeta is going to get better," her statement is so right up to the point, that for a moment I'm wondering what she's talking about. But when I process what she says, I'm still left confused. Why would she be so certain? Is she trying to pep talk me? I bet she's one of those really optimistic people.
"Tobia- I mean Four, he … well I..." her voice trails off and she looks away.
"I don't know if you believe that were not from here, but it's true. We had a war recently. It was very different from yours, but during this war, a woman was doing a lot of experimenting… and killing. You know by know how close me and Four are..."
This was true; I hardly ever saw them separated. She looks back at me.
"… I can't help but feel like you and I are a lot more alike than you think. The reason I'm telling you all of this is because I need you to understand that we really want to help you with your war,"
I still didn't understand how this had to do with Peeta though. Tris saw my confusion written on my face and took a deep breath.
"That woman I was telling you about? Her name was Jeanine Mathews. She was afraid of me," she let out a humorless chuckle. "She was afraid she couldn't control us- me. I'm a thing known as "divergent. I'll explain what that is some other time, but what happened was that four and I were taken to her office, she put something in four that altered something in his brain, making everything that was good seem like it was bad and vice versa. That meant, he thought I was the enemy. Jeanine sent me away, I was to be killed. But I got away. The second time I encountered him he was still under that altered mind-set. He tried to kill me. I had to fight him, and I almost had to kill him in order to help fix the war" she paused and took a breath. I had a hard time imagining her fighting against someone as big as Four; I guess I might have underestimated her a lot more than I thought. "A big number of people were just like Four, except they acted more as robots. I had to turn it off, but Four wouldn't let me. He had a gun to my head, but I couldn't kill him, I expected to die but I couldn't stop myself from trying to get him back I don't exactly know how or why, but he did."
My jaw could've mopped the floor if I was standing.
Her gaze had never left mine and as crazy as what she said sounded, I believed it. I nodded my head slowly.
Despite the odds Four had come back, why can't Peeta?
I gave her what I thought would look like a small appreciative smile, but I couldn't form it fully on my lips, so I just reached for her hand and squeezed it gently and gave her another nod.
She smiled a small smile. And just before she left she whispered "we won that war, and so will you." And just like that, she was gone. The door slowly, clicking shut after her.
A/N let me know what you think so far(: