Nightingale

Chapter 5

Peeta

I watch through the window as doctors move around Katniss. She's heavily sedated, as that's been the only way they can move around her. Haymitch stands beside me and he looks stone cold sober, and deeply regretting it. He looks at me, at the thick bandages around my neck from Katniss literally trying to tear my throat out and despite being this weak and frail, nearly succeeded, puncturing my windpipe with her sharp, unkempt nails. Her hair is ratty and there are bald spots on parts of her head. the muscles in her leg look thin and atrophic like far too many people unable to work who were injured in the mines back home. 

"How the hell did they do that to her in less than two months?" Haymitch asks. He bangs his hand against the glass and I look at him. I shake my head and  he sighs. "Yeah, figured you wouldn't want to talk about it." I point at my neck and he sighs. "Just cause it hurts don't mean you can't talk. She didn't touch your damn vocal cords." 

"Do you think I want to sit here and theorize how they turned my wife into a walking skeleton who wants me dead?" I ask, my voice strained and horse. He turns back to the glass and sighs. 

"I have a meeting to get to," he says, turning and leaving the room. I stay where I am, just watching her, not knowing at all how pour screwed up lives went and got this screwed up. Finnick walks in, Annie beside him. I look at both of them, before turning back to the window. 

"Peeta?" Finnick says and I don't look at him. "Annie, she told me what all happened and if you're ready, she's ready to tell you about it."

"Do I want to know?" I ask, "Or am I just going to feel worse about how long it took me to convince them to get you out of there?" 

"You should listen to what she has to say," he says. "If only to clear up what happened so you have the truth." I look looking at Katniss and Annie moves forward and takes my hand. 

"She fought," She says. "Kicking and screaming as loud and angry as Johanna. But she couldn't do much against them, with her leg gone. They took her once a day, usually right after Johanna got back. Some days, it would be to paint her up and sit her in front of the cameras to rant about you, beating her until she'd do it. Sometimes they took her to the medical torture rooms, which is where the track marks on her arms came from. She was told that it was  something to cause the baby to draw all of her resources away, to turn the baby into a parasite more so than it already was seeing as they barely fed us." I look down and she squeezes my hand. 

"What else?" I ask. "What did they do to make her this scared of me?" Annie turns away. "No, they can't be that fucked up." Finnick looks away from me. 

"You know they are, Peeta," He says. "They pimped Annie and me and countless other children out for years. They hate her because she is the symbol of all the hope the rebels have. You think they wouldn't let her be used like that?" 

"She's pregnant," I say. 

"They injected her with Tracker Jacker venom," I hear Johanna say and I look back at her. "Then they raped her and in the haze, were able to convince her that you raped her, that you never loved her, and only used her to full fill yourself, casting her aside when she got pregnant with a baby she didn't want. She pulled out her own damn hair and they whipped her repeatedly. Branded her too, which honestly is kinda bad ass looking. But she's better than she looks, considering it all." Annie looks at her angrily and lets go of my hand. 

"Johanna," she says. "He didn't need to hear that." I shake my head.

"It's fine," I say softly. "I, I needed the truth, not some watered down version." I look back at Katniss and see her arm s moving slightly. Her doctors are out of the room and walk around, over to me.