𝐑𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐆𝐄 ‣ 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐢𝐫

iii. dead by morning

act three, chapter three – dead by morning

The time passes by in flashes, floating in and out of Fallon's conscious. Every moment is wasting away in the cell, slowly dying, her brain decomposing. Or trapped in Hijack simulations. Every time it's different, but even if it was the same, she wouldn't know. Whenever she goes under, all she knows is what's in front of her. Waking up screaming and sobbing must annoy Johanna and Peeta by now because every time she insists it's real. But the feeling is mutual. Peeta's head is full of mush. Every day he conjures a new opinion about Katniss and Fallon has to bring him back to Earth. Johanna, miraculously, hasn't lost her usual spunk, but the torture is clearly getting to her as well.

The only thing she knows for certain is that nothing is. Truth become a vacant word meaning nothing more than the funny way they feel on her tongue. The only time she trusts anything is when Peeta or Johanna calm her down in her cell. Other than that it's the dreadful moment of realizing the questioning is over and another simulation is starting. Sometimes they put her under a simulation and she wakes up, only to have woken up to another simulation.

Slater targets the people she cares about the most. Finnick. Aris. Iris and Callum even though she has no idea what has happened to them; for all she knows, they really could be dead. Peeta. Johanna. Katniss sneaks in often too. He likes to be experimental on purpose, to drive her farther into insanity, because the sadistic causes their deaths are things she couldn't even conjure in her darkest dreams. Sometimes she watches them kill each other. Last time, she was in the Hunger Games and she had to kill them all herself because she had no control of her limbs. Like a puppet manipulated by its masters strings.

Reality has lost all meaning to her. Deciphering real from not real is nearly impossible. The only indicator that time passes is how Peeta's face slims down a little more each day. How her bones begin to poke out from under a ghostly layer of skin.

"Peeta," Fallon says. It's nighttime in the cells. Under the the twilight glow, faces are recognizable. There's still a lightness that never seems to leave. It always stops her from getting a full night of sleep. The only time she sleeps in when the torture knocks her out for days on end. But that never leaves her feeling refreshed than before.

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry." Her words drowned down a combination of varying emotions that she's forgotten how to describe. All of it's catching up to her now. Stuffing the simulations into the back of her mind wasn't an option anymore. It condenses and presses against her skull, getting closer and closer to the explosion.

"I am too," he whispers. Their fingers intertwine through the cold bars.

The silence is harmonic. Nighttime always warrants nightmares from the three prisoners. But nights like these, when one of them is quiet enough and the other have the slightest amount of calmness from the bareness of the place, are the highest form of bliss.