Remade (After Mockingjay Story)

Chapter 10 - Secrets

Katniss

Just when I thought things would start to improve, everything started to get worse. Peeta exchanged his hellos and good mornings in the morning, then he would rarely speak for the rest of the day. On his good days, I could get a conversation going, but there's barely a connection. When Dr. Aurelius calls me, he tells me that even he noticed something strange about him, I tell him about how non-communicative he is, and he tells me how Peeta always sounds so hesitant and unsure when over the phone. He asks me if he's alright with taking his medications, and I admit that I haven't seen him with them.

"Katniss, you must ask him about it, it's important that he takes them."

So I decided to ask him when he comes back from getting food from that market tent they've set up by the train station like they have with everything else. As I stare at the phone in deep thought, I hear a small crash come from upstairs.

"Buttercup." I mutter.

I look down the hall when I reach the top of the stairs, every door is either closed or cracked a little. Every door except for Peeta's.

I walk through the opened door, and the first thing I see is his dresser. There's nothing much on top of it, a paint pallet, his paintbrushes, and a single piece of paper only slightly folded, the envelope beneath it, clearly opened.

My curiosity gets the best of me, I walk over to the letter and lift it open a little, only glancing at it at first. The handwriting is scratched on, not very neat, but it's readable.

Peeta,

Plutarch called me to tell me about the building we were prisoned in. He said he "wasn't going to tell you yet" because the doctors insisted your condition wasn't "tame enough," I thought that was bullshit and you have the right to know. The prison was under the training station, it was 160 feet wide and 350 yards long. That was where they kept every single one of their prisoners. That's where they tortured information out of captured rebels, punished rogue citizens, and created their Avox servants. That bloody lab they kept taking you to was in the training center too, all of the peacekeepers and doctors that worked there are being charged for their inclusion. That whole damn place is destroyed now, so I guess we don't have to worry about it anymore. Just so you know, I don't blame you for what they did to me, I could hear everything that bastard told you, he was going to do it anyway, he was just messing with you. Don't believe anything they told you, their only aim was to hurt and confuse you in every way. If those doctors keep "checking up" on you too, lets hope they leave us alone soon.

Johanna.

I set the letter back onto his dresser. The tone of the letter didn't seem to be Johanna, but I guess her tone towards anyone who isn't me would be much lighter. Also, they must have some sort of connection after being imprisoned in the Capitol together. I think of what the letter said, it's the most information about his imprisonment that I've ever gotten. He hasn't told me anything about it.

From the side of my line of vision, I see Buttercup move out of the room from behind me. I turn around to see where he came from, he was in the closet. I can see what he knocked over, it looks like paint canvases. So many are stocked up in the closet, they vary in many different sizes. He tells me about how he paints when I'm gone, but I've never actually seen much of what he paints. I pick up the one Buttercup knocked over, it has very dark colors, I can make out bars of a jail cell, with two hands, one gripping them and the other reaching out of them. Behind the bars I see odd figures that appear to be bloody, I can't exactly tell what they are. After staring at the painting in horror, I set it back down onto the ground. I glance through the other paintings, each one more morbid than the last.
They're filled with grim images full of blood and death. I see images of bloody Capitol Streets, glistening water around a shadowed cornucopia in front of a faint sunset, a burnt down bakery...
I almost stop looking through them until I come across a painting with very warm yellow and orange colors. I pull it out from behind the others. It's a painting of me, asleep in the covers of my bed, covered in the morning sunlight.