ghosts that we knew: A mockingjay fanfiction

34

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Chapter 34

Gale

"Hijacked."

The word itself barely sounds human, so it's fitting that this is what the doctors have concluded as Mellark's diagnosis.

"Hijacked?" Madge repeats, her voice frying so lightly at the end of the word that I can hardly make it out. I wince. Hearing it again at all doesn't make it sound any less terrifying.

From where he and Beetee stand at the foot of my hospital bed, Plutarch Heavensbee nods solemnly.

"His condition is shocking, and that's putting it lightly. We had merely assumed that the psychological damages and post-traumatic stress, coupled with his physical deterioration and abuse, had been what sent him over the edge in the new environment, but test results seem to conclude that there was something more going on behind closed Capitol doors," Plutarch explains, rubbing his hands nervously along his thighs and sending his gaze to anywhere in the room but to me and Madge.

"What do you mean?" Madge asks, panic creeping into her tiny voice as she inquires about her childhood friend. "What did they do to him?"

Beetee chooses to come forward next. Behind his thickly-rimmed glasses, the man offers me the faintest hint of a sympathetic smile. Unlike Plutarch, Latier does a better job at keeping up his composure around us.

"It is a highly secretive form of torture, hijacking, that is. We know very little about it. The word 'hijack' comes from Old English. It means 'to seize'. The process involves a type of fear conditioning that uses strong doses of tracker jacker venom, which, you may recall, has the ability to cause powerful hallucinations. We believe that the Capitol had been in the process of using this device on Peeta, as we found suspiciously high doses of venom in his blood stream, which would explain all of his...abnormalities."

It takes several moments for me to piece together the information that Beetee is relaying, but when I do, the realization knocks the wind out of me:

They seized his memory. Those assholes took his damn brain from him.

"So...they altered his memory?" Madge speaks my thoughts aloud, as if they are her own. "Psychologically tortured him in addition to physically torturing him?"

Heavensbee bows his head. "It appears that way, yes. We don't know to what extent his memories have been altered, but we do know that most of the conditioning had to have been geared toward making Katniss a trigger to his destructive behavior."

"What do you mean? Katniss as a trigger? Destructive behavior?" Madge pries.

Plutarch pauses for a long moment, I presume to come up with the best phraseology possible for what he is about to tell us.

"He-he tried to kill her when she went to go and see him. Wrapped his hands around her neck and tried to strangle her."

If I was angry before, I'm furious now. As Beetee rambles on to explain to a nearly-faint Madge that there is no known cure or rehabilitation to hijacking, all I can think about is the mess of a man I rescued from the Capitol harming the girl he allegedly loves.

I can't believe it. Mellark's so far gone that he tried to kill Katniss.

Katniss...

"Does she know?" I ask suddenly, disrupting Beetee's lengthy explanation. My voice is harsh and dry, like sand paper. "Does Katniss know what's going on with him?"

I do not realize that I have sat up and begun to lurch at the two men at the edge of my bed, as if I have already anticipated that they would be withholding the information from the person who most deserves it in their usual fashion, until I feel Madge's feathery touch pressing lightly on my uninjured shoulder. She holds me back from trying to kill Heavensbee in my presumptuous rage, guiding me back against my pillows and straightening the covers over my lap.