A/N: Hey guys! I know you all hate me right now (sorry!) but this is a filler chapter that explains what Hunter has done to Peeta under Snow's orders with some twists I hope you guys didn't expect.

Disclaimer: I don't own the Hunger Games

Chapter Four

"Did it work?"

Hunter nodded, twirling the empty syringe around between his fingers. Mya's whiteboard sat between them, the markings of the green pen standing out against the plain white material. "Yes," he said. "It did. Peeta is with his family. Erm, his 'family'." The second time he said the word, he used sarcastic finger gestures. Mya nodded. Hunter would have thought that she had been happy to hear that the plan had worked but she seemed neutral, unimpressed. "It's odd, it only took fifty minutes."

Mya took up the pen, wiping it clean with her sleeve. "That is expected. He has been exposed to tracker jacker posion before. His system is vulnerable to it."

"Tracker jacker poison is hard to come by," Hunter stated. "I'm not questioning how Snow got his hands on the venom himself but if you're saying that he has been exposed to it before, who exposed him to it?"

Mya chewed on her lip, knawing on a loose piece of skin. "Me."

Hunter stared at the red headed woman. They sat across from each other at a table in one of the many dining rooms in Snow's mansion. It had been nearly two years since they had spoken to each other and even though they used to know each other like the back of their hands, there was now an awkward air between them that they couldn't shift no matter how hard they tried. "You?" he asked in disbelief.

"Don't you remember? Those nights in the basement hoking the kid up so he'd trust us?" Mya asked. "I wasn't kidding when I said I had a guy."

Hunter didn't remember much from his old life. Only what he was told. A part of him wished that Snow hadn't resurrected him. It was a process that still had glitches. Even six months later, Hunter still experienced twitches and sharp stabs of pain, the wires in his head and body sometimes sparking and snapping. "I barely remember anything, Mya, you know that."

Mya rolled her eyes. "Okay, well, you remember trying to convince Peeta that I was his aunt?"

Hunter frowned. "Vaguely."

"Things like that doesn't just happen. It wasn't like Peeta was a tender age when his mother gave him to us. An age where we could tell him something and he'd believe it. Like four or five years old. But he wasn't. He was fifteen. To convince a fifteen year old of something of such magnitude, you need some help. So we injected him with tracker jacker venom. Not a great lot but enough to convince him that I was really his aunt," Mya explained. "Even when he was taken away and went to through the therapy sessions that told him that I wasn't, his system was officially diagnosed as vulnerable. It will be vulnerable for the rest of his life."

Hunter pieced the new information together in his head. It made sense. Any victim of tracker jacker venom-the ones lucky enough to survive-would forever be vulnerable to the poison. "So Snow thought it would be smart to re-use the venom to control his thoughts and change who he was altogether?" he asked.

"Is that disgust I hear in your voice, Mort? When did you become so sentimental?"

"I'm not Mort anymore," Hunter said sharply. "Don't call me that." The feeling of his name as he said it made a wire spring loose in his neck. His head twitched violently. Mya didn't react, knowing herself that the wires hooking her old partner up to life were still untrustworthy and unreliable.

"Sorry."

Hunter knew she wasn't one bit sorry.

"So Snow came up with this grand plan to turn Peeta into another person, to believe different things and make out that Cato has been the one trying to conform him into false beliefs?" Hunter asked. "I don't understand why I had to pretend to be a buyer."

"The venom can induce nightmares, realistic visions of things that didn't happen but seem real. But the nightmares are formed with images of things that have happened to the victim before. We coudln't rely on the memories of things Harold Woods have done to him because since the man's MEA has been cured he has been treating Peeta better. It wouldn't have worked. We needed more memories, something that could come in his dreams and scare him, to make it seem more real."

"Wouldn't the dream then be of me doing the stuff to him?"

"Because everything gets mixed up and jumbled, your image will be replaced with Cato's. It will be heightened to the point where he'll think that the nightmares are of Cato hurting him. Raping him. It will convince him even more that what the venom is trying to covince him is true."

Hunter rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was always tired now-a-days. Snow told him he'd be tired. An effect of the wires. "Will Snow tell me the truth, now? Of my life before the resurrection? He promised," he said.

Mya brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. "Your life was nothing before the resurrection, you know that. All you were was an accomplice, an assistant of mine who kidnapped kids to sell them as sex slaves. Before that you were nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Don't worry about the before when you can live in the after."

"What about my family? My loved ones? Friends? Anything?" Hunter insisted. "You were my boss, you had to know something."

Mya shook her head and wrote more out on the board. "You came to me because you had no one."

Hunter's eyes slid to stare at the mahogany table. "That's what I feared," he said quietly.

Mya laughed. Hunter's eyes widened in horror. What an ugly sound!

"Cheer up," she wrote. "Things can only get better from now."

Another wire slipped and Hunter's right eye twitched. "Yeah, I guess," he said, unconvinced. "So what do we do now?" His eyes were focusing solely on the table, on the smooth surface that screamed expense. When he looked back up, Mya's board was wiped clean. Except for three words.

"We get on."

~xXx~

"Hello Emily, hey baby girl."

Emily giggled at her big brother, tugging on his sleeve and sucking her fingers. She was a beautiful little girl, all blond curls and wide smiles. Peeta couldn't believe he had once thought that she had been poisoned by what he had thought was the evil of his mother.

"We're so happy that you're better now," his mom said. She sat on the edge of the sofa and handed him his syringe. When he took it, she told him, "For quicker results, inject it into the neck."

Peeta nodded and tapped the tube, ridding it of air bubbles. As he pressed the needle into the vein in his neck, Auntie Mya came into the room with Hunter following close behind. Mya was wearing a smile but Hunter actually looked somber for some reason. When he pushed the plunger down and the drug went into his system, Mya lifted the board in her hands and wrote, "How's it all going, champ? Are the drugs helping?"

"Yeah," Peeta replied, gritting his teeth through the pain. More images flashed into his mind. Most of them of Cato, the man he thought he loved. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to fight through it. It was difficult. There really wasn't a set amount of times you can watch someone you thought loved you kill your brother before you get used to it.

His mom sighed and brushed her hand through his hair. "How are the nightmares, sweetie?" she asked.

"Getting better." This was a lie, of course. They seemed to be getting worse rather than better. Memories kept resurfacing of things Cato used to do to him that he couldn't remember until now. It never got easy, seeing him like that. There was still a small part of him that ached for his ex-partner. But it was dominated by the part that wanted to kill him for everything he had done.

"You know your family and I will always be here to help you if you need us," Semira told him. "You know that, don't you?"

"I do," Peeta replied, fiddling with the pieces of carpet by the fireplace. "Just . . . sometimes it's hard to accept. Everything I thought was true was wrong. I can't believe Cato would do such things to me."

"I know but that's what tracker jacker poison does to you." Semira smoothed his hair down and straightened his collar. "It makes you believe things that aren't true. When Mr Hadley discovered that Snow was onto him about what he was doing to you, he started drugging you with the poison so that if a peacekeeper ever stopped you and asked about how you're being treated. He convinced you that he had chosen you in 12 out of an act of love, a need for closeness and intimacy. He made you think you were in love so if he was ever in danger of being arrested, you wouldn't sell him out as a domestic abuser."

Peeta nodded, believing every word his mother told him. Why would she lie to him?

"We know this is all very hard to accept," Mya wrote. "But it's okay, these things take time."

Peeta looked up from the carpet at his aunt. The drug was still swirling in his veins but as he stared at Mya, a voice crept into the back of his head. "She's not your aunt!" His hand went to his neck, cupping the spot where he'd stuck the needle in. "When can I take my next dosage?" he asked.

"A few hours," Hunter answered. "Why, is something wrong?"

"Did Cato try to convince me that Mya wasn't my auntie?" Peeta asked, a frown furrowing onto his features.

A pause followed that seemed to go on forever.

Semira nodded. "Yes, he did," she said. "He hated her. It's why he mutilated her the way he did. She came to 2 to visit you and caught him hitting you. She wanted to tell the authorities but he knocked her out and cut out her tongue so she couldn't. He's a physchopath."

Peeta closed his eyes and exhaled. "I'm so sorry, Mya," he said, turning to his auntie. "I'm sorry that I thought I loved him." He heard the board marker squeaking and he opened his eyes to see what she had written.

"It's okay. As long as you're getting better, I'll be fine."

"I am. I promise," Peeta told her.

"We're all here for you," Semira said. "We all love you very much. And we're going to take care of you. I promise."

~xXx~

Harold slumped in his seat, his thumb rubbing over the Wednesday print ontop of his pill containter. Everything was so complicated. His neck itched and he scratched the old injection site. A part of him wished to forget the days of poison but the knowledge of what Snow was going to do to Peeta brought it all back to him. The syringe of turqouise liquid, the needle, the pain of the drug.

When he was five, his mother was killed in the street riot that was soon to be known as 'The Riot of HG 50." After the 50th Hunger Games, when Haymitch Abernathy used the force field to kill the last girl standing, the entire District 1 went into disarray, claiming injustice that their tribute had been killed by a fault and that it shouldn't count. His mother had been in the crowd watching the Games outside and was trampled in the fray.

After that, he and his father moved to the Capitol, where their relationship immediately went on the rocks. They didn't get along at all. They always yelled at each other, both of them fuelled by the grief of his mother's death. Harold wondered if that was why his father did what he did. Because there was always a part of him that blamed his son for what happened his mother.

Being an experiment child wasn't as bad as it sounded, in the end. Snow tested all sorts of things out on him. The biggest one being tracker jacker venom. It was one of the reasons he ended up being diagonsed with the MEA. Because when the experimenting stopped, his body wasn't used to it and everything that could go wrong, did. Flu, scarlet fever, penumonia, at one point even a suspicion of Cancer. He got cured of it all but the one that stayed was the MEA, which Snow then used against him, forcing him to use it as a weapon against the people he was out to get.

He wasn't a pedaphile, that was a backstory Snow wrote for him. Something that made him come off as the bad guy in everything. He hadn't went to 12 looking for a child to buy and use as a slave, he had been sent there by Snow to find out if there really was funny business going on in the outskirts of the District. To find out the truth about the missing children. Harold was not a pervert. He wasn't. But who would believe that, anyway? It all sounded so far fetched.

Harold knew that they were going to do this to Peeta. He didn't know in what pretences they were going to use the venom in or what they were going to try and convince Peeta of, but he knew it wasn't going to be good. And it was going to involve Cato in one way or another. Because that's what Snow did. He manipulated people to fit his mould of perfect and anyone who didn't fit was either adjusted or terminated. It was an idea, an idea the president hoped to make real in the next thirty to forty years. It was why he had been looking for people willing to be experiments in the first place. Why Harold's father had sold him to become an experiment child.

He couldn't bear the idea of Peeta going through what he had. And, even if they ever did rescue him, then they could never take him off the venom. Never. Because if they did, he was at great risk of developing the illness that Harold had. But in 13 they didn't have the medical faculities to treat such illnesses and it was a 90/10 change that Peeta would die within five months of being taken off.

There was no way out.

No way out at all.

A/N: If you're confused by anything (something tells me a few might be confused about Hunter and his identity) more will be revealed as the story continues. So bear with it, okay? (:

Please R&R! :D