Despite my huge crush on Peeta Mellark and my deep empathy for Katniss as a big sister, I don't own them. Everything in this work pertaining to them or to any other character is Suzanne Collins. I also want to apologize, as usual, for the wait, I am never quite as prompt as I intend to be. Thank you to anyone still reading this. I thoroughly appreciate it.
This at least was my conclusion, for as I lay sleeping that night I was haunted by a terrible dream. I dreamt that I was fighting with a boy, and that try as I might I could not see his face. We struggled and I could feel the boy's knife penetrate my eyes. Blood trickled down my face and I was blinded. The pain was terrible and it seemed to paralyze me, even while it drove me to madness. When the pain reaches those heights, the man is enveloped in a screaming animal, an animal ravenous to stop the very pain that drives it. It was all consuming and it was in this pain-filled haze, half driven by the adrenaline of survival that I swung my ax. It must have hit something for I could fill the rush of warm sticky blood hit my fingers. At this, the weight of the boy that had been on top of me staggered away and I thought for a minute that I had won. That through some wild chance I had reached a vital organ with my ax and that I would survive. I would survive and go back to my family. I could see my little sister and I could imagine my mother's face when I came back to her. I would escape. Then I felt a heavy weight hit the back of my head and for one impossible second my eyes cleared and I saw the face of the boy. What happened at this point I do not know. Only that I awoke with Peeta scrambling to his feet from the chair beside and from my throat came some form of continuous agonizingly painful grunt that, if my larynx had not been injured would have been tortured screams.
It was painful, but I couldn't stop. The horror was forced through my throat past my battered vocal cords to fill the air with my pained gasps of terror. I imagine they themselves must have been terrifying, both in their intensity and in their resemblance to the sounds that an animal would make as it lay dying. I had heard such coarse grunts of coming from deer in their last moments. I never thought I would be making them myself.
If Peeta feared them, it seemed only to be that I was forced to make them. For as he scrambled from his chair, he had first made a visual sweep of the room before wrapping his arms around me and doing his best to soothe me. For some time, this was a vain task. Despite the fact that he was warm and steady I was horrified by what I had lived through. I was horrified by what I, in my dream at least, had done. Some things you can never go back from and I knew that this was just one more of those things in the long list of life-changing events that seemed to be plaguing me. Eventually, Peeta's soothing broke through and I began to calm. If my throat had ached before, there were no words for the pain that inflamed it now. Peeta, after calming me down wanted to leave the bed and return to his post on the chair, but this I could not allow. I needed him. I needed him for the warm the warmth he could give me. I needed the companionship, and perhaps most of all I needed him to wake me from the nightmares. For apparently not even sleep was a haven from whatever terror the White People saw fit to impress upon me. made all the worse due to my inability to communicate. So that night I lay once more in Peeta's arms. As I lay there, I found myself reliving over and over all I had seen and could not stop myself from shivering. The boy that had killed that White Person was no other than my father figure, teacher, and mentor, Haymitch Abernathy.
The worst part of it was that I knew why he had done it. If he was like the person, he killed he had just wanted to go home, but I didn't want to believe. We all live with a belief that if forced to kill to survive that we would. But to face that your mentor killed another child when he was little more than a child himself is a hard pill to swallow. Although I knew of Haymitch's drinking problem, I guess a part of me always believed that he was inviolate in his way. Inviolate and impregnable, he was the closest thing to father I had ever had, and in my heart of hearts, I loved him like one. Seeing him as a hurt scared young boy, killing another girl was painful and was a realization that my mentor is only human with his own flaws, sins, and past. I was somewhat aware of the first two, but the last came as shock. Not because I had never thought of Haymitch as having a past but because I had never been forced to confront the fact that he was young, hearty, and scared in that past. I suppose I had always seen him as a smaller version of his adult self, not as a young vulnerable boy that would kill to get home.
Another thing that I was starting to realize was that every vision the White People had given me had a purpose. Rue was to familiarize me with the idea of the White People and their unique way of reaching me. I think they must have understood her similarity to Little Prim and accordingly my ability to easily sympathize with her. Cato had been chosen to show me the portal. Now they apparently wanted me to talk to Haymitch, but how could you bring something of this nature up. There was no easy way. I pondered these and many more questions that had appeared from the strange mess that the fabric of my life had taken, warm and safe in Peeta's arms until eventually, sleep overtook me.
The next day Dr. Aurelius came back and I was told that the damage that I had done to my throat the night before would take a week or more to repair. I think that Peeta, or indeed anyone with eyes, could see how adversely this affected me. There was much to be said and I was desperate to voice the contents of my dream to Peeta, I was also desperate to obtain a more thorough explanation of his own fit from him. Yet all this would have to wait until I could once more speak. Peeta tried to communicate with me via note and other written forms of communication. We also all got very good at miming, but it is nigh impossible to have a deep soul-searching conversation on paper. The topics that we were going to explore would be difficult and I wanted for us to both have the full use of our ability to communicate before treading into the dark the passages that I wanted to explore. Do not take from this that I spent this week in bed. Will you believe me when I say that I spent it almost entirely in my mockingjay form. Peeta had been familiar with the idea of me as a shape-shifter, but this was his first real experience with me as a mockingjay. Indeed, this was my first experience as a mockingjay for any true length of time. It was both as glorious as it was taxing. Glorious due to the unique freedoms that this form gave me. It was also glorious because it gave me a fool-proof excuse for not telling Peeta of my dream and putting my family before him to be judged. Taxing, because despite my form I was still imprisoned with only my own mind for company. The thoughts that coursed through could find no other resource but more of the same thoughts to keep them company, no the solace that I might have been able to find by sharing them. No resolution to the fear that haunted me, how would Peeta be able to trust a girl raised by a murderer. Nonetheless, there was much to enjoy in my chosen form.
Not least among these was Peeta's look of delight at my initial transformation nor the ease with which he accepted my new shape. I was as ever in his company in these days as I ever had been in human form. I would fly about him as he painted or sit on his shoulder as Cinna, Portia, and he conversed. Dinner was perhaps the biggest difficulty, but none of the company I met with in these days seemed opposed to me taking the soups that were my main food option as a bird. I would dip my mouth into the soups and then pull back abruptly to swallow. Even in this form allowing the muscles in my throat to work was painful, unfortunately, my injuries didn't just vanish as I changed shape, a phenomenon I found often in the fictional cases that had comprised my initial look at my time as were-bird, for lack of a better phrase, a shape-shifter. I wish it would have been the case. It would have been a useful perk to my bird form, both at this juncture and later in our adventures.
At length the week passed and after a thorough examination Dr. Aurelius cleared me for any activity that I might choose to pressure, short of being strangled again, including but not limited to talking. I was thrilled. At any other time, my inability to talk would have been a minor inconvenience, but at the moment I, for once, had so much I wanted to say. As soon as we could be excused Peeta and I made our way to the orchard and through it to the same field where I had taken bird form so long ago. It may seem strange to say after my soliloquy on how I had longed for speech that neither of us spoke on our way there. Peeta and I could do that, not speak for long periods of time without either of us feeling uncomfortable. At the time I was unaware of his thoughts, but I knew mine, and they were more than enough to trouble me. I was anxious to know how his fit felt to him. Is fit the right word, it was more like a hijacking of his mind by some other force. Perhaps I will call it hijacking, for lack of a better word. However, there is simply no good way to approach your close friend, and perhaps a little more, about their body being used by another entity to strangle you. The next thing I wanted to approach with him was my dream.
This, however, was a more personal note and I was anxious about it, to say the least. Peeta had never met Haymitch and I wanted them to like each other. How, then, could I tell Peeta that my father figure was a murderer and closely attached to the story we seemed to be living? How would it affect him? Could he trust and love the foster daughter of a man who was a killer even as a child. Speaking would also force me to confront my own thoughts about the dream and see them in the tangible form that writing or speaking words makes ideas take. As of yet my own confusion about what I had seen had been forced into the confines of my own mind, how was I to make enough sense of it to speak of it to Peeta.
Even after we reached the field neither of us spoke for a time, we simply laid there in the long grass with our faces shielded from each other by the fronds of nearly waist-high grass that made us separate entities in the same world only feet away from each other. To my astonishment, it was Peeta who spoke first,
"You have to be wondering about that . . . thing . . . the thing that made me . . ."
At this interval, his voice broke off, so I continued for him,
"I am calling it hijacking because something else took over for you. I know it wasn't you Peeta, but I am curious."
I think my boldness was aided by the shelter of the grass, I did not have to see his face and could ask the questions without seeing what effect they had on him. He was silent then I heard his voice, every bit as hesitant as it had been before.
"It has – happened before, but never like that – I mean I've never hurt anyone before. Portia actually used to call it my genius, as a joke. I'm an excellent artist in my own right and the picture that actually got Portia's interest, to begin with, was mine, I mean I was just me when I painted it." He seemed to be reassuring both me and himself of his own skill at this point, something I never doubted.
"But all my life I would have these . . . spells - fits, maybe, I guess hijacking works, but in them, I would just not be there for a time. I'm not sure how to put it. I don't know Katniss; I would paint something I couldn't remember painting." Here his voice was half frantic as he sought to make me understand, even sitting up to look in my face from his former lying position. Cocooning us both into the bubble of his thoughts and fears. I raised my hand and for one glorious moment felt the softness of his hair and the prickliness of his cheek as I ran my hand down his face.
This affectionate act seemed to make him continue and there were tears on his cheek as he said more calmly,
"The first pictures I ever showed you were done when I was, what was it called it? Hijacked. It seems to allow me to draw things beyond my understanding, I had thought it was like your White People visions, but now... ." and he paused hopelessly. Then I cut in,
"Now it is still like my White People visions and we deal with it. I'm not sure what it is, but, um, we're not really sure of anything here, are we? That got me a watery smile and he said,
"No, I suppose it's all conjuncture."
This joint acknowledgment seemed to ties us together again as we shared a look that was half tenderness for the person we looked at and half thankfulness that someone else in the world was as helpless as we felt.
Then Peeta spoke again,
"So, what was your dream about?"
That was the question I had been both anticipating and dreading, now it was my turn to be hesitant.
"I dreamed of . . . one of the White People."
He looked at me expectantly and I could see in his eyes the question, so how is that different from any other White People vision. So, I continued,
"The person I was I living through . . . Peeta it was brutal, I've never seen something so terrible, none of my dreams have been like this, but that wasn't the most terrible part. Peeta, the person who killed her was Haymitch."
The silence that followed these words was full and absolute. Perhaps it was just imagination but it seemed as if even the birds and the wind were silent. The world seemed to wait, just as I was, for Peeta's response. It was as if everything I knew depended on his reaction and I could not help but wonder if this was how he felt when I was choking out my words of understanding just after his hijacking. Then he said slowly,
"So, how do we feel about that?"
Hearing his response, I felt the words flow out of me as if they were a torrent.
"I'm not sure. I now know that these kids were forced to fight, and they seemed to think that winning would let them go home. I don't know yet who took them, but it seems those kids that were taken so long ago, two by two were forced to fight to the death in some way. The reward seemed to be to go home. Haymitch was one of them, but Peeta does that mean the victors did come home or did he escape by some other means. He was so young, no more than fifteen, that is so young to kill a person. Is that why he drinks? Peeta, what happened to those kids, why did they fight and what were they fighting for? And if Haymitch was so old how was Primrose so young? She couldn't have been more than twelve and then she would have to be a small twelve. A very small twelve. Rue was small too, why children?" I have so many questions and no answers and it seems to keep getting closer and closer to me. Peeta they want something from me, I am a part of this. You are a part of this, and Haymitch, Portia, Cinna, and maybe even Sae. I feel so helpless I don't even know what they want of me, much less how to do it, and what if the White People are hurting. Did they all die like that? Are they all murdered or can they be from any form of death, Peeta, I'm so lost . . ." And at that I began to sob, I was so overwhelmed and Peeta just took me in his arms and let me cry.
I feel as if both Peeta and I cried so much during these events, but it was so much. It is one thing to look a horror you understand in the face and accept it as it is, but it is another to feel so lost. We were lost swept away by forces that were overwhelming us. It had to go that way and now I understand but as Peta held me without answering and my tears subsided it seemed like too much. So much during this time seemed like too much, and the result was tears.
There seemed to be no words to say after this, there was a cloak that had settled over us both, a cloak of tiredness and we just lay there staring at the clouds. My head lay on Peeta's chest my face still crusty from the salt of my tears and his shirt bearing the same signs of my distress. After a long period, I felt his voice rather than hear it as he said,
"I suppose you'll want to go home then?"
My voice was small and frail as I answered him,
"Will you come with me?"
Then he forced a shaky smile from him as I heard the word that would later become our promise to each other
"Always"