GONE (The Hunger Games)

"I'm Not Asking"

Here you go guys. Two chapters in two days! The end of this chapter is from a Mockingjay deleted scene, just so you know :) 

A deep dull ache starts from my neck, and creeps over to my head like poison ivy. My second dosage of the tracker jacker serum has gone in, and its causing my head to throb in pain. 

I’m laying here, on the bed of the laboratory that they make the serum in, and from now on will be injecting in me every two days. I’ve squeezed my eyes shut, somehow feeling that this will keep the growing pain at bay. Bright mushy colours and prints pop up on my inner eyelids as my eyeballs press against them hard. I would always be curious and would wonder about what my vision would see when I closed my eyes. It was never exactly black. Sometimes green, some red- or at least that was what my brain would be able to decipher. But really, it’s just nothingness. I feel like this is what the big, endless word NOTHING would be. An empty view, completely unexplainable, the one thing the genius human brain would not be able to explain just exactly what it was.     

Thinking deep into this has somehow actually helped me take my mind of my intense head ache now. I guess I was always one to be able to get lost in art and words. But realising this just brought reality back to be like a big slap in the face, ha, not like I haven’t had enough already. 

The serum is in once again, and I’m steadily just going to get worse, become more Capitol supportive. 

But, supporting the Capitol is good. It’s what everyone should do, especially Katniss! 

I groan out loud in frustration over the thoughts that keep interrupting my clearly uninviting mind. 

“Something a problem Mr. Mellark?” The doctor who is observing me and taking down notes from a chair beside my bed asks. 

I just glare at him in response, that one look enough for him to shut his sarcastically oblivious questions up. Huh, of course he know there’s a problem. Hell, he’s the one causing the problem!

What problem? The capitol has fixed my brain from all the brainwashing Katniss did to me. I should grateful! 

The door opens, and the red head doctor who first injected the serum in me walks in. 

“Follow me. President Snow would like a word with you.” And with a flick of her red locks, she struts out the room, a peacekeeper grabbing me by the arm and taking me along with her. 

I scramble to my feet for a second as the peacekeeper pulls me, but I soon have my footing under control, so I shrug off his arm and walk by myself, wondering what Snow has in store for me know. 

We reach a large mahogany door, with the Capitol’s coat of arms imprinted in gold in the middle. All of a sudden, I’m reminded of Effie, and the time she yelled at Katniss for stabbing the mahogany dining table. 

“That is mahogany!” she had exclaimed, and I can’t help but let a small smile appear, nostalgia washing over me in huge waves. That had been the morning after one of the worst day’s of my life- when I was reaped, but somehow, those days seem brighter in my memory, the current ones, the darkest of all. As the memory is relived in my brain, I can’t help but feel a small tugging feeling when I think of Katniss. The almost non-existent feeling has a slight anger, hate and irritant touch to it. Something that worries me. The serum is going to make me hate Katniss. Hate Katniss!   

But I do hate her! She lied to me about everything. She knew about the rebellion. She betrayed me, so she has every single reason to be hated on!

I’m digging my nails into my hands so hard that I feel blood slowly pouring out, warm and sticky. Unnaturally familiar though. No human should be familiar to the feeling of blood on them- except Snow perhaps.

I enter the room, and I see Snow sitting on a green velvet sofa. 

“Come in, m’boy. I was just fending off some of your rabbit fans. Now, sit down.” He motions for me to take a seat on the sofa opposite him, across a bronze table. I sit down, and he continues.

“I called you here, to thank you.” He says.

“Sir?” I ask, with my eyebrows tilted up in confusion. 

“For the success of your interview.” He explains.

My mouth hangs open a bit. What? He’s acting like the last visit we had never happened. Like he didn’t just inject me with a serum that will soon have me thinking what he wants me to. He’s unbelievable!

“You surpassed my wildest expectations.” He says.

I look off for a moment, trying to register his compliments. I shake my head slightly, but my Capitol-mind takes over after that.

“I was just saying what I felt”  

“Which makes it all the more effective. You know the difference between reality and destructive adolescent fantasies. You were always the thoughtful one, less impulsive than Katniss. If Panem follows her arrow into a civil war, we’ll witness something far worse than the dark days.” He tells me.

I’m trying hard to keep my Capitol-mind away, so quickly, with my voice wavering a bit, I say, “She never wanted a war.” I want to make it clear that she is good, before my Capitol-mind takes over too much. 

“And there won’t be one if Peeta Mellark still has something to say about it.” He says.

I shake my head slightly again. “I don’t know what more there is for me to say.” I give him a grim look. I gulp, and reason in my head what I should say.

No! Don’t say that! Are you crazy, that’s rebellion supporting talk- in other words, absolute nonsense! 

But I don’t listen to those thoughts. “I’m sick of the blood. And from what I’ve seen, it’s more from the hands of the peacekeepers.”

“My boy,” he sighs, with a small smile playing on his lips, and an amused glint in his eye, “there may be a hundred things in a home that need to be fixed, but that doesn’t justify bringing it to the ground. We agree a war might end humanity. Keep saying that- with the sincerity that comes so naturally to you.” He pauses, before going on again. “Mr. Mellark, sometimes in this world, whether we intend it or not, we become symbols. Since I am the symbol of power and formality like that seal on the door, that means I can’t always reach  the living room. That has to come from a friend, from someone people feel they might know- a bakers son. The sooner these uprisings are put to a rest, the sooner you’ll see your home again.”

I frown at him in confusion, “So your asking me to be your what, sir, your voice of reason?” I ask him.

His expression is serious now, power written all over his eyes. “You’ve understood everything except for one detail: I’m not asking.”