Chapter Text
They never sent me to District 12.
That was the mercy I thought I’d won, but mercy does not come from Dr. Gaul.
No, she kept me. She viewed me much how youngsters view harmed toys: fun, taking apart, awaiting faults. She wanted me, while I still bleed, still break, still learn.
I had cheated, and she knew. Lucy Gray’s victory had been mine only because I bent the rules, slipped my hand where it did not belong. I thought it clever, thought it brilliant even. A Capitol boy outsmarting the very Games themselves. She smiled at me when the truth reached her, even laughed, her sharp teeth flashing under those painted lips. But it was not delight, not admiration. It was possession. I saw it in her eyes, glinting like a scalpel’s edge. I was hers now.
Her laboratory was not a place of study, nor of medicine, nor of science as any sane mind would name it. It was a tomb dressed in marble, where light never changed and the clocks never mattered. Every surface gleamed with sterile white, but beneath the glass and steel, nothing was clean. The air reeked of chemicals sharp enough to claw at the back of your throat. The potent reek, one I grew to recognize: sour, dense scent from decaying objects.
I can still see it, even now when I close my eyes. Rows of tanks filled with cloudy fluid, each one holding a body that should not have existed. Some pressed their faces against the glass, eyes too wide, too human, begging without words. Others were ruined past the point of recognition: spines twisted in impossible angles, mouths sewn into silence, flesh sprouting feathers or scales that blistered and peeled. A few had too many arms. More often, they had none.
And they moved. That was the worst of it. They twitched, shuddered, breathed. Some screamed, the sound muffled by liquid and walls, but unmistakable all the same. Screams that rattled through my bones until I wanted to claw my own ears shut. And sometimes… sometimes, there were voices that whispered. Broken words, slurred and bubbling, as if language itself was being stretched and torn apart along with their bodies.
She made me watch. She made me write. At first I thought it was punishment, but I understand now—it was a lesson. She wanted me to learn the truth of power, stripped bare of pity or disguise. To think life forms could shrink, re-form, bent by any knife wielder.
The first time she handed me a set of restraints, I told myself I couldn’t. My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped them. But her eyes were on me—cold, expectant, amused. And on the table before me, the thing trembled, its breath coming in ragged gasps. It had once been human. I told myself it was better not to ask where they came from.
I fastened the straps. One by one, with careful, steady fingers, as its body convulsed beneath my touch. I learned to keep my face blank, to keep my eyes dry. I learned to press the pen across the page without hesitation, recording details of agony in neat, clinical lines. I learned to touch the glass of the tanks without recoiling when something inside pressed back, desperate for warmth, desperate for release.
It was survival. That’s what I told myself. Over and over, like a prayer. Survival was the only language the Capitol rewarded.
And then—there was Sejanus.
I remember the first time he found me in the corridor, the reek of burning flesh still clinging to my clothes. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking, though I held them at my sides. He called my name, soft, uncertain, and when I turned to face him, I saw myself reflected in his eyes. Hollow. Pale.
Pity, concern, anger—they all burned there, twisted together until I could hardly stand to meet his gaze. For one fragile moment, I wanted to tell him everything. To spill it all—the tanks, the screams, the endless white light that stripped me raw. To tell him how I felt myself breaking apart with each passing day in that place.
But I said nothing. Because I knew. If I spoke, if I let Sejanus see too much of me, he would reach for me, drag me toward his doomed ideals, his reckless rebellion. And I would fall.
So I swallowed it. I swallowed everything.
That was the first lesson I learned in the labyrinth of white walls:
To survive, you must let the screaming belong to someone else.