-Peeta-

I don't register much as I'm rushed forward on a stretcher besides the voices of many people around me, tension thrumming through the air, and the fact that my head is pounding and I feel like I'm going to be sick. My head lolls to the side and I stare blurrily at the person who runs alongside my stretcher, yelling things that I can't concentrate on.

I hear a long string of cursing and I manage to pry open my eyes again to see another stretcher being shoved past mine in the semi-thin hallway, and even though I get only a glimpse of her, it wouldn't take a genius to know that it's Johanna. She has to be strapped down to her stretcher, and she's thrashing around, her face contorted with pain, fear, and fury. I don't know if she even understands that she's been rescued yet. I'm glad they got her out, too.

Then I'm turned down a corner and she's wheeled down the hall, and I lose sight of her.

"You're going to be just fine, Peeta," a soothing voices tells me as I'm pushed into a room and masked doctors start to crowd around me, attaching wires and needles here and there. I stare at the ceiling and wonder if I'm in shock. I can't feel anything except for the distant burn of my torture-inflicted injuries, which hardly seem real now. My vision blurs black at the edges, and I try to blink the darkness away, but it keeps growing.

I'm tired, so tired. Someone tells me that it's the gas that was filtered through the Capitol building where I was held—it's slowing down my system and making me sleepy. I fight back my weariness because I don't want to sleep, but my eyes seem to close of their own free will.

It seems like only seconds later that I open my eyes again, and maybe it is, because I'm still in the same room, with the same doctors hovering over me. Maybe I wasn't asleep at all. My mind feels oddly alert now, the sluggish feeling gone, and I cautiously sit up with the encouragement of the doctors.

"There you go, Peeta," one of them says with the kind of warmth never shown at the Capitol. Her eyes crinkle into a smile and she takes my arm to steady me. "Just take it slow. Sit right there on the edge of the bed. Don't try to walk yet, you may be a little woozy."

I look around at them, bewildered by how they're fussing over me, reading off charts and looking at the machinery I'm no longer attached to. I try to ask them what's going on, but I don't think they're listening anyway.

The man that rescued me, the older one who dragged Gale out, pokes his head into the room. His eyes find me and he smiles. It's strange, seeing him smile; after the way I saw him shoot at those Peacekeepers, his eyes dead serious, I didn't think he could have any other way about him. But he looks kind now that he isn't fighting for his life.

"Good, he's waking up," he says. "I'll go get her."

Her? I feel even more confused. Her who?

"That's Boggs," the woman doctor tells me with another crinkling smile. "He's the one that got you out of…you know." She looks a little embarrassed, like it's indecent to talk about it.

"There's something unidentified in his blood stream, sir," one of the younger doctors says, sounding nervous. A senior doctor comes to look at the monitors that hold my data on, his brow furrowing in confusion the more he reads. "What the…"

"Look right at my ear, Peeta," the kind woman doctor says, and she shines a light in my eye. "We're just going to check you out to make sure you're healthy."

I don't know why she bothers saying that, since it's obvious I'm not healthy. The last time I saw my reflection, I was skinny, pale, and sickly looking, not to mention wild-eyed and frightened. I probably look even worse after my crazy escape. But her calm way of talking makes me feel better.

And then I see someone else step into the room, and I look over automatically.

At first all I see is Haymitch, unable to keep himself from grinning, and I would have grinned right back no matter how sore and how scared and how confused I am, because I've missed him. But I barely have time to register him, because my eyes move to the person at his side, and the entire world stops.

Because it's her, she's standing there in the flesh, the face that I've seen in my memories and visions and nightmares, looking at me with eyes that shine and are full of wonder, like she can't believe what she's seeing. She looks the same and yet she looks nothing like I remember her. Her hair is still dark and braided back, her eyes are still gray, her skin is still tan. But her eyes are not cold, merciless, empty, her hands don't clutch a bow as she points the arrow at my heart, she isn't covered in the blood of the people she's killed.

For a moment it feels like my brain will shut down entirely, because all of the contrasting worlds I've lived in for the past weeks are colliding, melding into something I can't begin to understand.

I look at her and I feel the pain of everything I went through in the Capitol. I see Hanshaw smiling at me with his too-big mouth, I feel the agony of the Bender as it jerks my arm in unnatural directions, the heat of the table as it scalds my back, the fire of the venom as it courses through my veins like poison—

It's all Katniss Everdeen's fault.

I push the doctors aside, and one of them has to stumble back against the wall. A small, idle part of my brain wonders why they don't stop me. That part wants them to stop me. It is the part that screams at me to sit down again, to control myself, that I'm seeing everything all wrong, that—

I shut down that part of my mind and I stride toward her, my arms already coming up to receive her, my blood boiling in my veins and my heart pounding in my throat. I see the kind doctor smiling again. Expecting me to be happy? Yes. Happy that I can finally end this. I can finally do what I'm meant to do, and end the anguish that this girl has put me through.

She steps toward me, her face breaking into a smile like the sun coming over the tops of the trees, her arms open wide like she's embracing her fate, her doom, me, as I reach toward her. Her lips part, and I know they will form my name, and the very thought fills me with such rage that I have to stop her before she can say it. She has no right to say my name. She has no right to look at me that way, with joy and wonder, when I know she will kill me the first chance she gets.

Unless I kill her first.

I wrap my fingers around her throat and squeeze.

Her eyes bug out, full of shock and horror and disbelief, and her hands automatically reach up to grab my wrists, but she doesn't do anything to tear them away. She is weak. She is cowardly. I can kill her right here, right now.

I am dimly aware of people screaming around me. I see Haymitch standing frozen over Katniss's shoulder, his mouth open in total shock. I squeeze harder and feel strong arms around my chest, dragging me away.

"This is for your own good," Boggs's low voice grunts in my ear, and I try to lunge forward to readjust my grip on Katniss's throat, but something hard strikes me in the head, and everything goes instantly black.

They tell me that I loved Katniss. They say that I would have gladly given my life for her if given the choice. They say it all like it should be obvious to me, like if they say it enough I'll miraculously remember everything that has been stolen from my mind. And the pity—they look at me with so much of it, like I'm a wounded animal and it's only a matter of time before they have to put me down.

They don't understand. It's not as easy as all that. I can't remember the things they tell me. When I think of Katniss Everdeen, all I feel is hate, fiery and harsh, and the desperate need to see the light leave her gray eyes as she falls at my feet. Dead.

But they won't let me kill her. I try to tell them what she's done—how can they not know?—but they don't listen. They just look at me with pity and tell me that I'll get better soon.

But their eyes say otherwise.

They have me strapped down now, afraid that I'm going to lose it and hurt someone. Maybe I already have. Nothing is clear anymore.

When they sent Delly Cartwright to see me, I felt good. Almost…normal. And then she told me. She told me about the fire. She told me that my family was gone. And it brought back so many memories, bloody visions of Katniss standing over my parents, smiling over another kill.

Don't trust her, Delly. I did, and she tried to kill me. She killed my friends. My family. Don't even go near her! She's a mutt!

Those words poured out of my mouth in a wild frenzy, and I don't regret them. At least, mostly I don't. But there's that tiny sliver in my mind, the one that begs me to stop, the one that shivers in dismay when I say things like that. I don't listen to that part, because it doesn't know. It doesn't know what the rest of me does.

And now they look at me like I've done something wrong, like I've hurt their precious Mockingjay's feelings. They say it's the venom making me say these things, that I've been "hijacked." They say it's messed with my brain, my body, everything about me. It's changed me. But the venom has nothing to do with what I know about Katniss. I try to tell them about her.

They never listen.

That irritating part of my brain reminds me that I can remember the venom. I remember being strapped to tables and studied and the hallucinations. But they weren't hallucinations, were they? They were memories dragged back to the surface, things I tried to suppress. Things about Katniss.

That same part of me weighs me down with despair, and even though I can't understand all it tries to say, I know that somewhere, somehow, I went wrong. I did something I wasn't supposed to—something those people that captured me and tortured me told me I would, something I swore I wouldn't. Sometimes I get snatches of something: words whispered in my head that disappear as soon as they come. I won't harm a hair on Katniss Everdeen's head, Peeta. I'll leave that part to you. And I try to clutch at those words with desperation, but they always vanish. I try to think past the ache in my head, try to summon up what I know to be true and what I know to be lies.

Is Katniss a mutt? She must be. That's what I remember. And yet something stirs in me when I think of her, something beneath the hate and bloodlust, something I'm not sure I'll ever understand. I can only focus on the things that I know, and I know I have to kill Katniss for the things she's done. Everything would be so much easier if I had all my memories back, if I knew who I am, who Katniss is, who we are together.

But I just can't remember.

Well, that's the last chapter! Thank all of you SO much for reading! I really hope you enjoyed it! You are hands-down the best reading audience ever. I could not have finished it without you.

I'm thinking about writing a sequel to Hijacked. Maybe the rest of Mockingjay from Peeta's POV or what happens after the third book, Katniss and Peeta growing close again and all that (but probably with a bit more action rather than pure fluff). I'd love to hear any suggestions! If I ever write a sequel, I'll post a notice on this story in case you want to check it out.

Again, thank you all so much! Love ya!