CHAPTER 6: Hijacked

Katniss couldn't help it.

She knew full well what might happen to her. She knew that this was not on her schedule, no. The purple tattoo on her wrist showed that she should be sleeping now, safely tucked away next to Johanna in a hospital bed. Probably drugged. Katniss had never really been one to follow instructions.

She was fully aware that it was almost two in the morning. This made sense to her. What didn't make sense to her is why it looked exactly the same in this wretched place at all times of the day or night. She assumed that it would make more sense to dim lights at night, or even turn them off. Maybe in other areas the lights were turned off, she realized, just not in here, not in the hospital.

Katniss was a huntress. She knew how to move quickly; she knew how to move quietly. So here she was, padding heel-to-toe down the brightly-lit hallways. She only vaguely remembered where she was headed. She just knew that she had to go there.

The nightmares would not stop without him.

Katniss had done a lot of things in her life to procure a good night of sleep. She had signed up for tessarae and illegally hunted in the woods to feed her family. She had tied herself to a tree and allied with people who she believed wanted to kill her to stay alive in the Arena. She had gotten engaged and pretended to be pregnant to keep her family safe. None of these things had ever spared her from the gruesome nightmares that plagued her now.

No, the nightmares raged, boiled and burned at night without him. Something about Peeta Mellark made it possible for her to sleep, and Katniss had not had a good night of sleep in a very long time. So long, in fact, that she didn't particularly care if Peeta strangled her for coming to him. She felt as good as dead as it was. Sleep or die, it was simple. The morphling never helped, and nor did any dose of warm milk with honey, chamomile, melatonin, roots of valerian and belladonna.

So, it had to be him.

"And here he is," she thought, standing in front of the door. She couldn't see him; the room had no windows.

She insisted, before he was put here, that she would have a key, that she would be let in, no matter his condition. It was possible that they'd changed it since then to keep her safe, after he tried to strangle her. She didn't think so. There had been too many other things going on, and she had a feeling. Years of hunting and two stints in the arena had made it easy for Katniss to rely on her instincts.

There was no one in the hallway to observe as she flashed the key over the pad. There was no one to watch her as she slipped inside of his room, into the darkness.

She was in, standing with her back flush against the closed door, ready to bolt. She had a fleeting thought that perhaps she could sleep right there, perhaps his nearness was all it took. She knew in an instant that it was this kind of thinking that was caused by lack of sleep. It was stupid.

However, surprising him seemed even stupider in that moment, and so she whispered, "Peeta?"

It was so quiet, so tentative that she hardly recognized her own voice. He did not stir. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness so that she could see that he was sleeping, but not well. His brow was glittering with sweat, and he had a grimace on his face that she recognized. He was dreaming.

"Peeta," she said again, just a little bit louder. He moved. His eyes fluttered open and locked on her. She knew he was improving as she watched his eyes narrow, and his pupils dilated and retracted quickly. He was fighting.

"Katniss?"

"Yes," she said, standing firm across the room.

It was very quiet. The machines hummed a strange cadence.

"What are you doing here?" She could tell he was trying to be calm, and she felt selfish, ashamed.

"I couldn't sleep," Katniss answered honestly, holding her palms out and open to him. "I wanted to..." she struggled for the words, "To see you."

"To see me?" Then he scoffed and shook his head and wiped the sweat from his brow, "Aren't you afraid of me? I remember staying alive being your number one priority. So why are you here when the last time we spoke I tried to strangle you?"

"If you kill me," she chose her words carefully, "at least I will know I died the way I expected to, in your arms, in the middle of the night, in a very strange place."

He seemed to consider this for a moment. In the light from the machines, she could see his eyes doing that strange thing again, his pupils enlarging and contracting. He shook himself and looked at her with that steady blue gaze. To her, he seemed clear-headed.

"You should go. I'm not safe for you. I can't- keep you safe," he whispered brokenly.

It was like a safeword. There was enough of him present to tell her to go away. This was how she knew to take a step closer, and when nothing happened, another step, until finally she was reaching for his hand.

From an outsider's point of view, it might have looked like the two of them had never met, that Katniss was introducing herself, holding her hand out to shake his. This could not have been further from the truth. She reached for him as a lifeline. They looked strange, him in his hospital gown, her in the gray pajamas issued to everyone in District 13.

The feeling of relief was almost instantaneous as their hands made contact. Katniss watched Peeta struggle, and waited. She had no way of knowing what was going on in his mind, and truly, she wasn't sure whether she wanted to know more than anything, or never, ever wanted to find out.

It wasn't pretty in there, that was a certain thing.

Peeta tried to think scientifically about what he was experiencing. The doctors had coached him what felt like a thousand times. He had slowly learned how to recognize that strange shininess that came from the Tracker Jacker memories. What he felt now was called a tactile delusion, the sensation that the feeling of Katniss' hand was alternately warm and rough as he remembered it being, and hard, cold and like strange marble - and yes, weirdly beautiful and shiny. Tactile delusion, he reminded himself as he ran his thumb up her palm. Feeling something that isn't really there, or misperceiving what is there.

It wasn't that some part of him didn't know that she was real; a human, the girl who sang in class when they were children, the girl to whom he gave bread when she was starving, the girl who saved his life in the Games. That same part of him felt overwhelming love for her, and relief that she was here, but another part of him - the part that felt things and experienced the world - was severely confused. He breathed deeply and tried to connect more steadily to the part of him that made sense, the part that told her he was real.

He had tried to do this before with the doctors and with Delly, but it had only been marginally successful. This felt a little different, somehow. He had felt so certain that she wouldn't return to him; in fact, the part of him that loved her so deeply didn't want her to come back, fearing for her safety.

Now that part of him rapped quietly at his being, asking to be let in as Katniss looked at him. His eyes adjusted to the light some, and so he could see her more clearly. Peeta could tell that something was wrong with her, maybe she was sick or upset, but mostly she looked tired. She looked like she did in the arena, and that quiet part of him, the only part of him that didn't feel cold and angry, wanted her to be close to him. She seemed to be waiting for him, for his permission. He tugged gently at her hand and immediately regretted it, as she transformed into a muttation almost immediately.

He tried to keep a grip on that tiny part of him. She looked incredibly dangerous. Her teeth were incredibly shiny and sharp, her skin shifted from purple, to green to pink and back again, her eyes flashed a strange, unsettling shade of emerald green that certainly didn't occur in nature.

This though, was where the Capitol failed. They made her look dangerous. They made her look different. They made her look inhuman, but the nature of the tracker jacker venom is such that she was still beautiful. Her usually dark-brown hair was incredibly sleek, and black as night; her lips were a violent red, like she had painted them with blood. And she shone. Though he feared that her shiny skin held an incurable poison, he pulled her close to him.

He was right, her skin was strange, and his hands slid weirdly, wonderingly down her arm. It felt too smooth to be the arm he knew to be incredibly damaged from Johanna Mason ripping out her tracker in their second games. There was a disconnect between what he saw and felt, and what was really going on. Her terrifying, emerald eyes flashed up to him as she climbed into the bed next to him, cold and hard, like a lizard, shining all the while.

Then, just as suddenly, she was back to herself - warm, chestnut haired, and smelling like the forest. He exhaled deeply and held her close to him. He had so many things to say to her, to ask her in this moment, but all he could do was bury one hand in her hair and use the other hand to hold her close to him. Perhaps he knew that this was all he could handle.

Then, she was cold, and that part of him that loves her seemed oh-so-quiet. He knew it was the venom, the torture telling him this, but all he could think was that Katniss came here for herself. She clearly did not come to see if he was okay, she was here to fulfill her own needs. To use him as she has always used him.

With her strange, elongated fingers, she reached up and stroked his face.

"Peeta, are you okay?" Her voice was so real to him that she was all earth-tones and warmth against him again.

He breathed deeply, and drank her real form in with every sense he had, and then nodded carefully. She was Katniss. Her body was solid, warm and soft. Her breathing and her voice were quiet. She smelled, as usual, like outside, but also like medicine, and much like all the other people living in 13. He kissed her head, and felt her soft hair against his lips. The part of him that knew her, loved her, and wanted to protect her was quietly gaining strength in the back of his mind.

She moved against him, nuzzling into his neck like a cat. She made a quiet, blissful noise, and he catalogued it. This was Katniss. This was what it was like with Katniss. She had not come to leech life from him. She had come because this is how it should be. She had come, he knew, because she could not sleep without him. Because there was something between the two of them, between him and his...

Enemy.

Enemy was the first word that pops into his head. Her lizardlike body was coiled around him now, dangerously, like a snake. She had come to finish the job, finally she had used him up to the end, broken his mind. Now she would crush him to death with those lissome fingers. It was clear to him that this was the end. That Katniss had come to kill him. That he was about to die by the hand of his wife.

And this thought sparked the memory of the secret toast. Her hands now seemed to be resting harmlessly, one at her side and one right where his heart was beating. His wife. His wife. No matter what anyone said, no matter even what Katniss said, he had married this woman. She now seemed to have normal hands, but they were still glowing, their color shifting like a dark sunset, green, purple, black, dark pink.

He could hear her breathing. She had fallen asleep. The image of her face was so bizarre that he found he could not take his eyes from it. The strange colors were draining off of her like so much paint until she was her own color again. She slept peacefully, taking deep, slow breaths, nestled perfectly against him.

It was only now that he remembered he had been sleeping only minutes ago. He looked at her again, and pressed a kiss to her forehead for good measure. He held her securely and closed his eyes. Peeta was not sure how many more times, or if he would ever, get to sleep next to her again. He also knew that whatever form she took, she would ward off the nightmares of the arena.

This was enough for him, as he slid back into blackness.