Captured || Book 1

Chapter 15 | She's Gone

Peeta POV (AGAIN! I promise though Katniss' POV is coming up)

The bandages wrapped my hands are a constant reminder of what the Capitol has done to my love. A constant reminder of how much they want to destroy me. A constant reminder of how I actually am only a piece in their games. The sick twisted game that I played along with. The game that left me in this position now, staring at a broken and scarred girl through a one-way wall. 

At one glance you could not tell that this was Katniss, you'd think it was some lady in a mental asylum. Though I see differently. I see someone who resembles me in so many ways; confused and scared. 

I think many times of how I could have prevented this from happening. I could've done so many things differently to prevent what cruel torture Snow has inflicted on this girl. 

To start with the many reasons this is my fault, the many ways I could've saved Katniss, I could've listened to her when she told me to run away at the beach. But I didn't because of my own selfish ways. I was too busy playing allies.

Even if I didn't run away from the rest with her I could've insisted they didn't separate us at the lightning tree. All of this happened because of that moment at the lightning tree, the moment I could've prevented from happening just by leaving with Katniss.

The words Haymitch had told me ring in my head all the time.

"It's called hijacking," He had told me. "They take your memories and twist them into something you fear, something that isn't real. We don't know a lot about the process, the Capitol mostly keeps it secret, but we think we can unhijack her. We're going to try to make her better boy, I promise."

Everything I heard that day had left my mind with new ways to torture me. But how can I complain? With all that Katniss went through I should be glad for the nightmares that haunt my waking moments. They're better than what she had to go through which was pure torture. They told me that they used torture and tracker jacker venom to move the process along quicker, which only left me with more nightmares and the loss of the one I love.

"That's not her," Plutarch says next to me, breaking me from my thoughts that always seem to overtake me and leave me in a world of my own. We stare at the crazy girl, trying to pull the restraints off of herself with all her might, but fails because of how strong the restraints are and how weak she currently is. She is the strongest person I know, but with everything she's gone through you'd expect her to be weak. 

"No," I say, my voice broken and cracked like it always is but worse this time because I have truly been broken. "It's not her,"

"We're going to make her better," he says. Everybody tells me this, I try to believe this but it's hard. Sometimes I think she will get better but it will take her ages to find her way back to me. Other times I think she won't get better and she will end up hating me for the rest of her life. I can live with her hating me, what I can't live with is this broken girl that I can't get near because she'll try to kill me. At least if she just hated me she could live with me being near her, but now I can't. They've taken the one thing I love and turned her against me.

"How do you know she'll get any better?" I ask. "She's starting to look worse then when she got here, what have you been doing to her?"

I simply smiles a small, sad smile not meeting my eyes. Everyone refuses to make eye contact with me, afraid I'll snap at the littlest comment.

"We're trying something new today," he says. "We're going to send someone in that she knows, someone she trusts. See how she reacts to it."

"What if she lashes out?" I ask softly.