Pure Torture: a Hunger Games Fanfiction

Chapter 24

Katniss

"You can try to take us, but we're the Gladiators." -Lorde

" I'm Peeta Mellark, and I too am alive..." Peeta starts.

"We're together. We're fighting together now. Snow may have tried to rip us apart, he tried to destroy me. That's what we're here to talk about." I say.

Peeta starts with what he's been told to talk about.
"I can't even begin to say how lucky I am that Katniss is out of the Capitol. I don't think anything I could ever say could amount to how much her being there really meant." He says.
I turn my head to face him.
He looks at me, and gives me a look that asks if he should talk about how I'm doing.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. They're all going to know about my demons and my problems if he talks about it and it's aired, but if he doesn't talk, nobody will know about what Snow's been doing.

"Go ahead." I say, looking into his eyes.
He turns back to the camera and talks.

"Katniss... She'd been in the custody of the Capitol for a month. They tortured her, they almost killed her when she was shot. The Games put her through enough trauma and pain, but now this? You can't blame her for what's happening with her..."
Peeta pauses and looks at me. I don't look at him back. Instead, I think about Everyone knowing my secret.

Peeta doesn't speak.
"Peeta? I said you could." I say.
He closes his eyes and shakes his head.
I place my arm around him.

If he's not able to talk, then I guess I will.
"They call it Hijacking," I say, "They would take me from my cell and strap me down on a table. Then they'd inject me with Tracker Jacker venom. They'd play memories of myself and since I would have all that hallucination-causing venom in my body, I would do just that. I'd hallucinate and my brain would change the memories around. They would beat me, cut my skin, electrocute me... And that way, my memories of myself would be so scary I couldn't handle myself. After that, they'd throw me back into my cell to starve or bleed out." I say, "I know what you're thinking, but these memories can't be fixed all of a sudden. I won't just wake up one day, and be totally better. Sometimes, I get flashbacks. Lots of different things trigger them. When I have a flashback, I'm totally unreachable. I go in and out of reality. The only people who can bring me back are the ones I love."

Peeta looks at me, hearing the words I just said.

"We don't want you to think that this is easy for us, spilling out all of this information that we would rather keep inside, but you all deserve to know. You all deserve to know what Snow is doing and what he has done. We want you to see that this man will never ever treat us fairly. And if you think he will, you're lying to yourself! Look at what he's done to her, to Katniss! He's never going to change his ways. You all need to understand that." Peeta says.

"I'm ready to fight. I'm ready to take down this man who's done so much to me. He's destroyed my home, he's tried to destroy me. I want you to know that I'm fighting these flashbacks and I'm not giving up. I'm not rendered useless. Snow has tried to take everything from me, but I'm not letting him." I say.

I turn, again, to look at Peeta. He looks at me, putting a small smile on his face. Keeping that smile on his face, he looks at the camera.
"Neither should you." He says.

Cressida calls out, ending the filming.
She gives us an approving nod and we stand up.

I take a deep breath through my nose, breathing in the fresh air.
"I wish we could stay out here forever..." I say, wishfully.
"Me too... But we can't." Peeta replies.

I wish we could just live out here, away from 13 and away from all of our problems. We wouldn't have to think about them. Not even my problem. Out here, everything is beautiful... nothing to trigger me or set me off.