injected by society ✟ arwen&pietro

a r w e n    m o r t u u s   .

The director grants me clearance, and I follow her intently. Blessing Fenwick's Hospital of Mercy is truly a wonder to my senses, being here is fantastic. It feels as if I'm finally where I belong, surrounded by peers of my own stature, until I learn of the Capitol facility. Now that is enticing. 

So that is where I imagine myself next. I'm unsure of how I will get there, but it would stitch a deep pain I feel whenever I picture my cousins and their upbringing. How their fall to district twelve would parallel my rise; perhaps I would finally feel good enough to close that chapter. Even as the director names me something special, I never feel as if I'm living up to my own potential. I know, I know I know I know what I deserve, and I have been starved from it for far too long. District 12 would want me convinced I would never amount, but here I can finally masquerade as something capable. 

In the capitol, I would be something to fear. Finally. 

They want me to work hands on with a patient they keep confined to solitude - what a miserable existence I expect. There is a clipboard with basic profiling of a Ki-tae, but they insist I call him... "Pietro?" 

"Yes, he will not respond to any other name."

"That sounds like the name of a clown."

"Sounds like you know what you're working with." 

I grimace at the thought, but his file says he is a boy from District 4. Homeless, a drug addict. I may not relate, but addicts and obsessions go hand and hand, that much I can understand. How can that be so? How does a wealthy boy from four fall, and fall, and fall harder to land here? He is not a patient as much as he is an experiment, and I wonder what makes him so special. Why him? There is an expectation I place on his story before I ever walk through the door, holding the clipboard in both hands as I reread the finer details. The director tells me of my purpose, to check in on him daily, gauge his drug resistance and increase in doses when I see fit. 

"How will I know?" 

"When he begs for it, simply give him more." 

There's a surge of power that comes from those words, beg. I find myself timid here in a way I hardly felt at my own hospital, and I wonder if that is by design. I wonder not, though, why me. They chose me because they see me, of course. I walk in to find him hardly conscious, his body so limp but his eyes look up to my expectantly. I have seen corpses with more life in them, the pity emitting from him is disgusting. I look back to the director just in time to watch her close the door behind me, and so the hour begins. 

"Hello, Pietro," I muster a welcoming smile, one that I have practiced and practiced again to get right. First I am to meet him and assess his status, and then to provide for him how I see fit. I think I will run him dry first, for it would be most interesting to see him in a state of depravity. See him in desperation, to see how he begs for a stupid drug, but I can't risk letting my own interests get in the way of the hospital's study of him. 

The clipboard takes place under my arm, and I clasp my hands together as I take the room in before returning to him. "I am a student nurse, and I will be working with you on your drug dependence, among other things," I say, speaking slowly and clearly as his eyes flutter. "You may call me Mortuus," how I miss the moniker of doctor. One day I will truly deserve the title, and that starts with none other than Pietro. 

Little, little clown, "first, how are you feeling? I imagine it's been a long wait for you." 

How he must be itching for it so.