application ♦ capeandcowl ♦ complete
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Annwyd
AGE: 25
JOURNAL: annwyd
IM: Annwyd Hates You
E-MAIL: annwyd [AT] gmail [DOT] com
RETURNING: Keith Anyan (prodigitalson) || Vriska Serket (arachnopho8ia) || Zevran Arainai (niceassassin)
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Peeta Mellark
FANDOM: The Hunger Games trilogy of books
CHRONOLOGY: He's coming from the end of chapter 23 of Mockingjay.
CLASS: Hero, just also kind of crazy.
SUPERHERO NAME: None, probably.
ALTER EGO: Just a regular desperately traumatized teenage boy.
BACKGROUND:
Hundreds of years into the future, disasters have turned the nations of North America into one much smaller nation known as Panem, consisting of a Capitol with thirteen districts under its rule. Or at least, that was the case until the districts rebelled, District 13 went underground (after being in official records bombed out of existence by the Capitol), and, as retribution for the rebellion, the Capitol instituted the Hunger Games: an annual nationally televised "sporting event" where twenty-four tributes--a teenage boy and girl from each district--battle to the death.
This is the world that Peeta Mellark grows up in.
Unlike the impoverished majority of coal-mining District 12, located in what used to be Appalachia, Peeta did not want for material things in his childhood. He came from the richer merchant class of District 12: his father was a baker. He didn't really have close family ties, though. His mother (perhaps bitter that her husband freely told their children he was in love with another woman, although that hardly excuses her actions) was strict and abusive, and he never developed strong bonds with his two older brothers. On top of that, while he was merchant class, he was still merchant class in the poorest district in Panem. He never starved, but he grew up eating stale bread for meals.
All of that could have made for a very dull life.
The first inkling that it wouldn't came when he was five, on his first day of school. There he heard Katniss Everdeen sing, and then he fell in love with her, in the way that only five-year-old Peeta Mellark could. He never particularly expected her to notice him, after that. She was a Seam girl--her father was a coal miner--and he was a baker's son. But he loved her from afar, and he watched her quietly when he could.
The rest of his childhood progressed as normally as it could in District 12. Peeta went to school. He helped out at the bakery. And he kept an eye on Katniss Everdeen. When they were both eleven (a year away from having their names put into the reaping ball from which tributes were selected), he heard that her father had been killed in a mine explosion. But there was nothing he could do. He was a stranger to her, and she was too proud to accept comfort from a stranger. He knew that even then. So he watched her grow weaker, more tired, and thinner.
One rainy day, his mother went to the back door of the bakery to yell at some child from the Seam who was rummaging through their trash. Peeta looked out to see that it was Katniss, looking hungrier than ever. So when his mother closed the door, he did something a little devious. He burned the bread he was helping to bake (a hearty bread, a meal bread, the sort of bread that would feed a starving family for a few days) just enough so that it wouldn't sell. His mother struck him and yelled at him for this, told him to go take the bread out to the pigs. As soon as she was looking in the other direction, he instead threw it to Katniss and dashed back inside, knowing that if his mother found out, he would earn a beating. It wasn't much, but it was all he could do.
Even now, he remembers seeing Katniss in school the next day, staring at a dandelion. At the time, he had no idea of the significance of what he'd done--she and her family had been on the very brink of starvation, and the bread had been enough to tide her over and inspire her to remember how to use plants to feed herself. But he still watched her, and eventually, he noticed that she was getting better. He learned that she'd started hunting--often with another Seam boy, whose name Peeta didn't know. He knew about the hunting because his father bought squirrels from Katniss and cooked them for the family.
Peeta clung to little details like that, assuming they were all he would ever have of Katniss. She had a strangely magnetic personality even if she didn't realize it herself, and a lot of other boys liked her. Besides, she was Seam, and he was merchant class. All of that changed when Peeta was sixteen, and reaping day came around. From the girls' reaping ball was drawn the name of Katniss's little sister, Primrose. In an extraordinary act of devotion, Katniss stepped up to take her place. Peeta didn't think things could get any worse.
Then a name was pulled from the boys' reaping ball, and it was his own.
He was afraid, at first. He cried, not thinking or caring about how it would be a sign of weakness. But gradually, he came to a conclusion: maybe, terrifying as it was, it was better that he was there. Because it meant that he could do something to make sure Katniss was the one who made it out of the Games alive. There was no way he could tell her this just yet, of course. There was too much of a whirlwind of activity as they were whisked to the Capitol and prepared for the Games. They trained and they readied themselves, struggling to find a slim chance of survival surrounded by better-fed and better-trained tributes.
There were ups and downs along the way, but the real turning point was the televised interview with each tribute. Peeta, so adept at watching and understanding people for his sixteen years of life, knew that this was his chance. If he confessed his love here, he would turn Katniss and himself into a heartbreaking and captivating pair of star-crossed lovers in the eyes of the entire nation of Panem. They would earn sponsors, gifts, and maybe, just maybe, a fighting chance for Katniss in the arena. So, live on national television, Peeta told the world that he loved Katniss.
She didn't react well. He hadn't thought she would. For one thing, she didn't believe him; she thought it was some kind of ploy to make her look weak. Once she'd been convinced that it made her look desirable, not weak, she relented, but still, the idea that Peeta was telling the truth didn't even seem to occur to her. That was how they went into the Games.
Once in the arena, Peeta teamed up with the "Career Tributes," children from the wealthier districts who had made training for the Games their life, in order to lead them away from Katniss. It almost didn't work. In the end, he had to turn on the strongest of them, Cato, and attack him to keep him away from Katniss. She was spared for the time being, but Cato gave far worse than he got, slicing open Peeta's leg badly. Peeta stumbled away from this and hid himself, but he would have died except for one thing: an announcement was made that if both tributes from a single district could survive, they would both be crowned victors in the Games. The next thing he knew, Katniss was cleaning him up and dragging him to a cave to rest.
Finally, it seemed she actually cared for him. She even seemed to be falling in love with him as well. But her care wasn't enough: he had blood poisoning and would die without strong medicine. The only way to get the medicine was to go to a "feast" where all the other surviving tributes would be. Peeta would never have let Katniss go, but she used a gift of sleep syrup to drug him into unconsciousness and flee to the feast to retrieve the medicine. When Peeta woke up, he felt better, but now he had to tend to Katniss's wounds. So they took care of each other, and Peeta dared to hope: that they would win, that he would win Katniss's heart.
They finally faced down Cato, the last other surviving tribute, and won the Games...except at the last minute, the rule alteration was revoked. Only one of them would be allowed to survive after all. Peeta threw aside his knife and told Katniss to kill him, but she wouldn't. Instead, she came up with a wild spur of the moment plan: she and Peeta would use poisonous berries to play chicken with suicide, and at the last moment the Gamemakers would let them live, because they needed at least one victor.
It worked. But Peeta was badly wounded from the fight with Cato, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up with his left leg replaced by a prosthesis from the knee down. Still, it didn't seem to matter much. He'd survived the Games, and Katniss loved him back. That buoyed him up through the celebrations and right until their train ride home.
Where Katniss, having finally realized that Peeta wasn't faking his love for her, confessed that she'd been faking hers for him.
A chill descended between them even as they soaked up their new status as victors. The bond they'd shared in the Games was frozen and untouchable. And just to top it all off, Peeta started having nightmares about the Games, nightmares where Katniss didn't survive after all.
He got both a reprieve and more torment when it came time for the Victory Tour, when the most recent victor (in this case, for the first time, victors) toured Panem. Katniss was back to having to pretend to be in love with him--and she seemed to genuinely need him on some level as well. After all, she had nightmares of her own. But they were painfully aware that it was still an act on her side, and to make matters worse, Peeta found out that President Snow had made a threat to Katniss. The districts were on the verge of rebellion, and her act of defiance with the berries in the arena had provided the first spark. She and Peeta had to convince all of Panem that they were nothing but a pair of silly lovers, or Snow would have everyone they cared about killed.
So Peeta proposed to Katniss on national television, and they hung off each other on parties, and in every way they acted the part of lovers without actually being them. But it wasn't enough. The spark was still setting the districts ablaze. A new head Peacekeeper was sent to District 12, and he cracked down on them harder than ever. In the midst of this, Peeta and Katniss waited for the other shoe to drop.
It did with the announcement of the Quarter Quell--the Seventy-fifth Hunger Games. Every twenty-five years, a special Hunger Games was held, with some condition to make it especially horrible. This one was all too convenient: the tributes would be picked from the pool of existing victors. Katniss was definitely going back into the arena: she was the only female victor District 12 had. There was one other male victor besides Peeta--their mentor, Haymitch--but Peeta refused to let him go into the arena with Katniss. When Haymitch's name was picked from the reaping ball, Peeta stepped forward to volunteer instead. He was going to do his all to make sure that Katniss survived. This time, there would be no trick with the berries; he knew he would have to die for her to live. Now more than ever, he was satisfied with that. He made Haymitch promise to focus his efforts in gift distribution and all other ways on helping Katniss survive.
There was one problem: Katniss had determined that Peeta was going to be the one to survive. He did everything in his power to win Katniss audience sympathies once again. In the interview, where before he had confessed his love for her, now he told everyone she was pregnant. But she was still determined to die to save him.
In the arena, he very nearly got his wish too early when he walked into a barrier that stopped his heart. But Finnick of District 4, with whom they'd allied, revived him, to the sight of a very distraught Katniss. And he began to notice other strange efforts by several tributes to protect him and bend to Katniss's wishes. Mags, the female tribute from District 4, sacrificed herself to allow Peeta to continue through the arena. Johanna, from District 7, brought Katniss the allies she had asked for. It looked like there was some kind of conspiracy to help Katniss. And that was bad news for Peeta's plan to sacrifice himself against her wishes.
He tried to change her mind. He gave her a locket he'd carried into the arena, a locket containing pictures of her family and her best friend, Gale. Proof that she had people to love after he was gone. In the arena's little artificial sea, he found a pearl and gave it to her. When she took it, he knew he hadn't succeeded. She was still trying to save him.
After that, things got crazy fast. What had started out as a plan to trap and kill some of their remaining opponents turned into a way for Katniss to destroy the entire arena, and in the darkness and the chaos, she and Peeta were separated. The ground heaved and the barrier surrounding the arena shattered, and the next thing Peeta was aware of was waking up in the hands of the Capitol. It turned out that all along there had been some kind of plan by an organized rebellion. But they'd rescued Katniss--their symbol, the Mockingjay--and not him.
He was afraid, but he refused to change his ways. He did what he could for Katniss, trying to convince the Capitol and the people that she hadn't really been intending to bring down the arena, that the rebellion was using her. But then he couldn't think about Katniss anymore, because they took him away and tortured him, both physically and psychologically, to find out everything he knew about the rebellion. The answer: nothing. So they came up with another idea.
They hijacked him. It was a special brainwashing technique using the venom of genetically modified wasps known as tracker jackers. It took selected memories from the victim's mind and altered them, taking out whatever happy sentiment had existed in them and replacing it with fear and hatred. In Peeta's case, they hijacked his feelings for Katniss. He was left half-mad, convinced Katniss was a monster, and utterly unsure of anything about himself. After all, his love for Katniss had been what everything else about himself revolved around.
After a couple months, the rebellion finally rescued him and took him to the mysterious underground District 13...where they found out what had happened to him. When he saw Katniss again for the first time, he tried to kill her.
As Katniss and the others fought in the rest of the rebellion, Peeta struggled to recover. Different methods were tried with limited success. He still couldn't separate his altered memories from his real ones. And Katniss, horrified by the changes in him, was cold and dismissive the rare times when she did see him. He became sane enough to move about on his own, eventually, but he still couldn't fathom what it was he'd ever felt for Katniss. And so he was still, in essence, lost.
Finally, he was well enough to train to join the rebellion. He was sent to join Squad 451 in the Capitol...the same squad as Finnick, as Gale, as Katniss. He didn't understand why they were doing that, but he could only accept it...and try his best not to hurt anyone who was supposed to be on his side.
It helped that at this point, Katniss began to understand just what he'd been through and open up to him again. It helped that he devised a game--"Real Or Not Real"--to help him distinguish which of his memories were real and which were falsehoods planted by the Capitol. But it wasn't enough. During one frantic attack, Peeta snapped and attacked a squad member, throwing him to his death. After, with the surviving members of the squad trapped and under attack by the Capitol, he begged them to kill him. He didn't want to put them in danger again. He didn't want to exist like this anymore.
Katniss refused, and they set off deeper into the Capitol on a mission she had conjured up to assassinate President Snow, dragging a handcuffed Peeta with them. A race through the sewers away from hideous genetically modified killing machines, "muttations" or "mutts," ensued, leaving only Katniss, Peeta, Gale, and two others he didn't know alive. At the end of it, Peeta felt sure that he couldn't hold out much longer. When the mutts had come, he'd felt the urge to join them in attacking Katniss. If he continued like this, he would turn into a mad thing as bad as one of them. He begged Katniss to kill him once more.
Again she refused. This time, she kissed him. And something turned inside Peeta. He remembered what he had felt for Katniss. It was still a confused memory, but...he had some grasp on his old reality now. Thanks to Katniss. Once again, they were protecting each other. Because it was what they did. Katniss said so.
So, with the rebellion in full swing around them, they hid in a basement and waited for their chance to get close to Snow and kill him. The last thing Peeta remembers, before finding himself in the City at the mercy of the 'Porter, is talking to Gale about which one of the two of them Katniss would choose in the end. It didn't really matter: they weren't likely to survive the next few days, anyway.
PERSONALITY:
Once upon a time there was a boy who was a bundle of goodness and light. He always tried the kindest methods of getting through a situation first. He loved a girl who, he was sure, would never even take notice of him. But she did, even if she didn't love him back, and that only made him more determined to protect her, no matter what the cost to himself. Above all, he wanted to remain true to himself, no matter what life put him through.
Then they broke him.
All right, so it's a little more complicated than that. Or maybe a lot. The boy that Peeta Mellark was is still there, and he's slowly resurfacing, fractured and crippled as he is. So it's probably best to start with a description of that boy.
First off, he's incredibly likable. This isn't just a matter of him being nice. He knows how to play to another person or to a crowd; he knows just what to say to get sympathy. Some might call this manipulative. In fact, it kind of is. He's also a really good liar and rather devious in his plans. Let's face it: in another world, Peeta Mellark could have been an evil genius. But not in the world he comes from. In that world, he's just too genuinely good and kind.
And then there's Katniss. It's hard to be outright evil when you're sweetly, innocently, purely in love with a girl you know and accept may never love you back. For Peeta, though, his feelings for Katniss Everdeen are more than the childhood crush they might once have been. His world revolves around her. By the point in canon he's from, she is everything to him. He would sacrifice himself completely to save her--in fact, he's tried very hard to do just that in the past. It simply seemed like the sensible thing to do: if only one of them could survive, it had to be Katniss, because if Peeta survived and she didn't, there would be nothing in the world left for him.
This may not exactly be the healthiest or most sensible attitude. After all, until recently Peeta had a family and life of his own. But it all came second to Katniss. What this means, more than anything, is that when he feels something--be it love, compassion, sadness, or even the rarer anger--he feels it strongly and truly. He's not a love-blinded fool, though. In fact, Peeta is a very smart and insightful individual, picking up on things that most people miss and distilling complex situations to their essence. Once again: strong and true.
The "true" part is more important than it seems. For all that his life revolves around Katniss, Peeta values himself as well. It's not his life he's so concerned about, but his heart and spirit. In a world that crushes people and grinds them down, he longs to keep hold of what's real and true. He wants to be himself in a world that would take that away from him, and he'll fight both physically and mentally for that sake.
To sum it up, Peeta is soft and squishy on the outside and hard and true as steel on the inside. The problem is that right now it's warped steel--he's not sure of what's real and what's false, and sometimes that makes him prickle where normally he would be utterly nice.
The kid is traumatized. He was already suffering in the aftermath of the first Hunger Games he survived when he was thrown into another one, and promptly following that he was tortured and brainwashed. It broke him completely. So what do you get when you take a nice boy and break him? Well, the first thing you get is a monster, a bewildered creature of fear and hatred. But Peeta has been coaxed past that stage and is now in an infinitely more difficult place: aware enough to know that he's been twisted, but still too riddled with damage to untwist himself.
Where once he hung onto his own identity, especially his love of Katniss, as a guiding light in a world gone mad and cruel, now that's been taken from him. The result is someone more bitter and sad than gentle, someone more self-destructive than self-sacrificing. He's still entirely willing to die to save Katniss and others, but now it's a desire full of self-loathing and fear rather than a pure-hearted wish. The spiritual compass that was his love of Katniss is damaged (he fears perhaps beyond repair), and with it gone, Peeta no longer knows what's real and what's illusion. Even as he tries to salvage what's left of himself, he questions every step he takes.
With the help of those around him--especially, as always, Katniss--Peeta is slowly making his way back to what he once was at heart. So, under all those layers of brokenness, just what is that? The answer is simple enough: he's the boy with the bread. He's a giver of kindness and a force of life. For all his quick thinking and clever manipulations, he doesn't have lofty goals or great ambitions. His desires are simple. He wants a life with Katniss. He wants to take care of her and make things better for her. It's just that he no longer knows it in his heart as he once did.
POWER:
Super-Strength
The 'Porter was not particularly creative with this one. Peeta's most immediate asset in combat back home was physical strength, so that's simply been enhanced here. Now that ability is at superhuman levels. He can lift or throw up to half a ton of weight with ease and up to a full ton with great effort. Blows from him pack a proportionately superhuman wallop.
Nightmare Painting
Back home, one of the ways Peeta coped with his trauma in the Hunger Games was by painting the troubling images that haunted his dreams. He also turned to art--in the form of frosting cakes--as a means of therapy for starting to recover from his hijacking. This power draws from that talent and outlet and transforms it into something new and strange.
When Peeta draws or paints in any medium (from chalk on a sidewalk to frosting on a cake), he taps into the nightmares of the nearby populace around him (within a radius of about ten to fifteen miles) and creates something based on one of them. This is an unconscious process and he will have to learn to control it enough to turn it off so he can paint anything but other people's nightmares. It's also unconscious in that he doesn't experience the images in his head: he just starts painting (or drawing, or frosting...) and finds that the image he's creating is a representation of someone else's bad dream. It can be stylized or realistic, but it will always be recognizable to the person whose dream it is.
There will be a permission post for this ability; in the absence of player characters volunteering information for it, I will assume Peeta is tapping into the nightmares of NPCs when he paints.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[ video ]
[There's a teenage boy staring intently into the camera. He looks more than a little disheveled and, judging from that stare, not entirely here.]
The Capitol has a machine that can teleport people. Real or not real?
[A pause.]
That part isn't really difficult to believe, you know. They can do a lot of things to people. But I think if they had it, they'd be using it on Katniss, not me. So I don't think "real." That's why it's all right for me to be broadcasting my location like this. Because none of this is real.
[He adjusts the position of the communicator; somewhere very nearby, off-screen, there's the clink of metal. The device is set down, taking that staring face out of the frame. Instead, he thrusts a pair of hands into view--a pair of hands with handcuffs on them and bandages on beneath the cuffs.]
I need someone to come take these off. They were helping to hold me together. There's not much point in keeping them on now.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
There was nothing to do in the cramped cellar where they hid. Everyone was painfully aware of it, Peeta included. He knew, though, that he wasn't the most aware of it. He still had gaps in his focus, moments when time slid by out of his reach. At least he'd gotten better at identifying them and shutting himself into quiet when they happened, though. That way, they didn't consume him. They didn't turn him into something else, like the mutts the Capitol had sent after them in the sewers. A part of him remained himself even while detached from reality. At least, he hoped so. He still wasn't entirely sure.
There were still a lot of things that slid into the strange space between certain reality and definite illusion, for Peeta. He thought of the one glimpse he'd caught out the window of Tigris's shop this morning, of the refugees streaming into the center of the Capitol. An old man had fallen, and--and then what? Peeta wasn't sure. Had someone else in the crowd helped him up? Or had they stampeded over him, crushing him? He didn't know, because instead of staying in the present, he'd been forced into a flashback at the sight. He'd remembered the toxic fog advancing on them during the last Games they were in, and how in order to save him, old Mags had willingly run into the mist to her death. That was what Finnick had told him had happened, anyway, when he'd asked back at camp (it seemed like a year ago, not just a few days).
"During the Quarter Quell," Peeta had said, "for a little while it was you, me, Katniss, and Mags. A killing mist started advancing on us, and after I got caught in it, you had to carry me. So you couldn't carry Mags. Katniss had to. Real or not real?"
"Real," Finnick had said.
"But you shouldn't have trusted Katniss," Peeta had continued. "Because she threw Mags into the fog, and Mags died." But there had been a thread of doubt in his voice, because there was something just slightly distorted about that memory. Shiny.
Sure enough: "Not real. Mags chose to go into the fog so that you and Katniss could survive."
"Thank you," Peeta had whispered, and he'd realized then that there was a small part of him, growing like a flower first starting to open at the very start of spring, that was glad to hear that Katniss wasn't so horrible after all.
Back in Tigris's cellar, in the present, with Finnick, like so many others, now dead, Peeta realized that he'd spaced out for a moment. A strangely compelling rhythm drew him back to what was, as far as he could tell, reality. It was Katniss, pacing back and forth. Her graceful hunter's legs moving across the little cellar, then back. He realized, after a few minutes of watching her, that the others were starting to look annoyed. It wasn't hard to see why, he thought. Katniss's pacing would drive anyone crazy in such a confined space. Except for him. For some reason, he wasn't bothered. Maybe, he thought, a weak smile tugging at his mouth, it was because he was already crazy.
No, he knew that wasn't it. Or wasn't all of it, at least. He was crazy--he'd accepted that, even urged the others to kill him for it. But Katniss didn't make him crazier. She brought him back from the brink. She'd been the heart of his world, before the Capitol had distorted it into their horrible creation. Now he would rebuild it around her. It seemed right. She was the realest thing there was. That was why they'd twisted his memories of her in particular.
Watching her move like that frightened him a little. It reminded him that she was a cool and composed killer, raised the flickers of doubt he still harbored about her and threatened to fan them into flames of hatred. But more than that, it soothed him to know that she was still capable of moving. He felt like his world moved with her, growing a little more real with every lap of the cellar she made.
The others didn't make that connection, though. After a while, Gale said, "Katniss, you should rest."
"You mean I should stop annoying the rest of you," she said. Peeta could read the lines of guilt in her face, and he knew they weren't just about upsetting a few allies and friends (and him, what was he? No, he couldn't think about that right now). She was thinking of all the people who were dead because of her. The real Katniss would do that, and it would hurt her. Yes. That was the truth.
"I think it's all right," Peeta said. The others looked askance at him, sitting there with his wrists handcuffed to a stair support just in case he lost it again. He hoped he wouldn't lose it again. "So long as we're annoyed, we're not as scared." He chose his words carefully. Scared, because fear was to be expected right now, and it was a sane and natural reaction, and he wasn't bringing up any new topics by mentioning it. But of course, there were other things that annoyance kept at bay as well, and the greatest of them was grief. There were so few of them left, now.
Peeta wondered if he deserved to be among that number, broken and at least half-crazy as he was. He'd urged them several times to kill him. But each time, Katniss had refused. He wished he could know for sure whether it was out of cruelty or kindness. But he couldn't. All he could do was watch her move and pretend to himself that his world reassembled itself a little more with every step she took.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
Someday I'll be satisfied with the characters I already have. Today is not that day.
NAME: Annwyd
AGE: 25
JOURNAL: annwyd
IM: Annwyd Hates You
E-MAIL: annwyd [AT] gmail [DOT] com
RETURNING: Keith Anyan (prodigitalson) || Vriska Serket (arachnopho8ia) || Zevran Arainai (niceassassin)
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Peeta Mellark
FANDOM: The Hunger Games trilogy of books
CHRONOLOGY: He's coming from the end of chapter 23 of Mockingjay.
CLASS: Hero, just also kind of crazy.
SUPERHERO NAME: None, probably.
ALTER EGO: Just a regular desperately traumatized teenage boy.
BACKGROUND:
Hundreds of years into the future, disasters have turned the nations of North America into one much smaller nation known as Panem, consisting of a Capitol with thirteen districts under its rule. Or at least, that was the case until the districts rebelled, District 13 went underground (after being in official records bombed out of existence by the Capitol), and, as retribution for the rebellion, the Capitol instituted the Hunger Games: an annual nationally televised "sporting event" where twenty-four tributes--a teenage boy and girl from each district--battle to the death.
This is the world that Peeta Mellark grows up in.
Unlike the impoverished majority of coal-mining District 12, located in what used to be Appalachia, Peeta did not want for material things in his childhood. He came from the richer merchant class of District 12: his father was a baker. He didn't really have close family ties, though. His mother (perhaps bitter that her husband freely told their children he was in love with another woman, although that hardly excuses her actions) was strict and abusive, and he never developed strong bonds with his two older brothers. On top of that, while he was merchant class, he was still merchant class in the poorest district in Panem. He never starved, but he grew up eating stale bread for meals.
All of that could have made for a very dull life.
The first inkling that it wouldn't came when he was five, on his first day of school. There he heard Katniss Everdeen sing, and then he fell in love with her, in the way that only five-year-old Peeta Mellark could. He never particularly expected her to notice him, after that. She was a Seam girl--her father was a coal miner--and he was a baker's son. But he loved her from afar, and he watched her quietly when he could.
The rest of his childhood progressed as normally as it could in District 12. Peeta went to school. He helped out at the bakery. And he kept an eye on Katniss Everdeen. When they were both eleven (a year away from having their names put into the reaping ball from which tributes were selected), he heard that her father had been killed in a mine explosion. But there was nothing he could do. He was a stranger to her, and she was too proud to accept comfort from a stranger. He knew that even then. So he watched her grow weaker, more tired, and thinner.
One rainy day, his mother went to the back door of the bakery to yell at some child from the Seam who was rummaging through their trash. Peeta looked out to see that it was Katniss, looking hungrier than ever. So when his mother closed the door, he did something a little devious. He burned the bread he was helping to bake (a hearty bread, a meal bread, the sort of bread that would feed a starving family for a few days) just enough so that it wouldn't sell. His mother struck him and yelled at him for this, told him to go take the bread out to the pigs. As soon as she was looking in the other direction, he instead threw it to Katniss and dashed back inside, knowing that if his mother found out, he would earn a beating. It wasn't much, but it was all he could do.
Even now, he remembers seeing Katniss in school the next day, staring at a dandelion. At the time, he had no idea of the significance of what he'd done--she and her family had been on the very brink of starvation, and the bread had been enough to tide her over and inspire her to remember how to use plants to feed herself. But he still watched her, and eventually, he noticed that she was getting better. He learned that she'd started hunting--often with another Seam boy, whose name Peeta didn't know. He knew about the hunting because his father bought squirrels from Katniss and cooked them for the family.
Peeta clung to little details like that, assuming they were all he would ever have of Katniss. She had a strangely magnetic personality even if she didn't realize it herself, and a lot of other boys liked her. Besides, she was Seam, and he was merchant class. All of that changed when Peeta was sixteen, and reaping day came around. From the girls' reaping ball was drawn the name of Katniss's little sister, Primrose. In an extraordinary act of devotion, Katniss stepped up to take her place. Peeta didn't think things could get any worse.
Then a name was pulled from the boys' reaping ball, and it was his own.
He was afraid, at first. He cried, not thinking or caring about how it would be a sign of weakness. But gradually, he came to a conclusion: maybe, terrifying as it was, it was better that he was there. Because it meant that he could do something to make sure Katniss was the one who made it out of the Games alive. There was no way he could tell her this just yet, of course. There was too much of a whirlwind of activity as they were whisked to the Capitol and prepared for the Games. They trained and they readied themselves, struggling to find a slim chance of survival surrounded by better-fed and better-trained tributes.
There were ups and downs along the way, but the real turning point was the televised interview with each tribute. Peeta, so adept at watching and understanding people for his sixteen years of life, knew that this was his chance. If he confessed his love here, he would turn Katniss and himself into a heartbreaking and captivating pair of star-crossed lovers in the eyes of the entire nation of Panem. They would earn sponsors, gifts, and maybe, just maybe, a fighting chance for Katniss in the arena. So, live on national television, Peeta told the world that he loved Katniss.
She didn't react well. He hadn't thought she would. For one thing, she didn't believe him; she thought it was some kind of ploy to make her look weak. Once she'd been convinced that it made her look desirable, not weak, she relented, but still, the idea that Peeta was telling the truth didn't even seem to occur to her. That was how they went into the Games.
Once in the arena, Peeta teamed up with the "Career Tributes," children from the wealthier districts who had made training for the Games their life, in order to lead them away from Katniss. It almost didn't work. In the end, he had to turn on the strongest of them, Cato, and attack him to keep him away from Katniss. She was spared for the time being, but Cato gave far worse than he got, slicing open Peeta's leg badly. Peeta stumbled away from this and hid himself, but he would have died except for one thing: an announcement was made that if both tributes from a single district could survive, they would both be crowned victors in the Games. The next thing he knew, Katniss was cleaning him up and dragging him to a cave to rest.
Finally, it seemed she actually cared for him. She even seemed to be falling in love with him as well. But her care wasn't enough: he had blood poisoning and would die without strong medicine. The only way to get the medicine was to go to a "feast" where all the other surviving tributes would be. Peeta would never have let Katniss go, but she used a gift of sleep syrup to drug him into unconsciousness and flee to the feast to retrieve the medicine. When Peeta woke up, he felt better, but now he had to tend to Katniss's wounds. So they took care of each other, and Peeta dared to hope: that they would win, that he would win Katniss's heart.
They finally faced down Cato, the last other surviving tribute, and won the Games...except at the last minute, the rule alteration was revoked. Only one of them would be allowed to survive after all. Peeta threw aside his knife and told Katniss to kill him, but she wouldn't. Instead, she came up with a wild spur of the moment plan: she and Peeta would use poisonous berries to play chicken with suicide, and at the last moment the Gamemakers would let them live, because they needed at least one victor.
It worked. But Peeta was badly wounded from the fight with Cato, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up with his left leg replaced by a prosthesis from the knee down. Still, it didn't seem to matter much. He'd survived the Games, and Katniss loved him back. That buoyed him up through the celebrations and right until their train ride home.
Where Katniss, having finally realized that Peeta wasn't faking his love for her, confessed that she'd been faking hers for him.
A chill descended between them even as they soaked up their new status as victors. The bond they'd shared in the Games was frozen and untouchable. And just to top it all off, Peeta started having nightmares about the Games, nightmares where Katniss didn't survive after all.
He got both a reprieve and more torment when it came time for the Victory Tour, when the most recent victor (in this case, for the first time, victors) toured Panem. Katniss was back to having to pretend to be in love with him--and she seemed to genuinely need him on some level as well. After all, she had nightmares of her own. But they were painfully aware that it was still an act on her side, and to make matters worse, Peeta found out that President Snow had made a threat to Katniss. The districts were on the verge of rebellion, and her act of defiance with the berries in the arena had provided the first spark. She and Peeta had to convince all of Panem that they were nothing but a pair of silly lovers, or Snow would have everyone they cared about killed.
So Peeta proposed to Katniss on national television, and they hung off each other on parties, and in every way they acted the part of lovers without actually being them. But it wasn't enough. The spark was still setting the districts ablaze. A new head Peacekeeper was sent to District 12, and he cracked down on them harder than ever. In the midst of this, Peeta and Katniss waited for the other shoe to drop.
It did with the announcement of the Quarter Quell--the Seventy-fifth Hunger Games. Every twenty-five years, a special Hunger Games was held, with some condition to make it especially horrible. This one was all too convenient: the tributes would be picked from the pool of existing victors. Katniss was definitely going back into the arena: she was the only female victor District 12 had. There was one other male victor besides Peeta--their mentor, Haymitch--but Peeta refused to let him go into the arena with Katniss. When Haymitch's name was picked from the reaping ball, Peeta stepped forward to volunteer instead. He was going to do his all to make sure that Katniss survived. This time, there would be no trick with the berries; he knew he would have to die for her to live. Now more than ever, he was satisfied with that. He made Haymitch promise to focus his efforts in gift distribution and all other ways on helping Katniss survive.
There was one problem: Katniss had determined that Peeta was going to be the one to survive. He did everything in his power to win Katniss audience sympathies once again. In the interview, where before he had confessed his love for her, now he told everyone she was pregnant. But she was still determined to die to save him.
In the arena, he very nearly got his wish too early when he walked into a barrier that stopped his heart. But Finnick of District 4, with whom they'd allied, revived him, to the sight of a very distraught Katniss. And he began to notice other strange efforts by several tributes to protect him and bend to Katniss's wishes. Mags, the female tribute from District 4, sacrificed herself to allow Peeta to continue through the arena. Johanna, from District 7, brought Katniss the allies she had asked for. It looked like there was some kind of conspiracy to help Katniss. And that was bad news for Peeta's plan to sacrifice himself against her wishes.
He tried to change her mind. He gave her a locket he'd carried into the arena, a locket containing pictures of her family and her best friend, Gale. Proof that she had people to love after he was gone. In the arena's little artificial sea, he found a pearl and gave it to her. When she took it, he knew he hadn't succeeded. She was still trying to save him.
After that, things got crazy fast. What had started out as a plan to trap and kill some of their remaining opponents turned into a way for Katniss to destroy the entire arena, and in the darkness and the chaos, she and Peeta were separated. The ground heaved and the barrier surrounding the arena shattered, and the next thing Peeta was aware of was waking up in the hands of the Capitol. It turned out that all along there had been some kind of plan by an organized rebellion. But they'd rescued Katniss--their symbol, the Mockingjay--and not him.
He was afraid, but he refused to change his ways. He did what he could for Katniss, trying to convince the Capitol and the people that she hadn't really been intending to bring down the arena, that the rebellion was using her. But then he couldn't think about Katniss anymore, because they took him away and tortured him, both physically and psychologically, to find out everything he knew about the rebellion. The answer: nothing. So they came up with another idea.
They hijacked him. It was a special brainwashing technique using the venom of genetically modified wasps known as tracker jackers. It took selected memories from the victim's mind and altered them, taking out whatever happy sentiment had existed in them and replacing it with fear and hatred. In Peeta's case, they hijacked his feelings for Katniss. He was left half-mad, convinced Katniss was a monster, and utterly unsure of anything about himself. After all, his love for Katniss had been what everything else about himself revolved around.
After a couple months, the rebellion finally rescued him and took him to the mysterious underground District 13...where they found out what had happened to him. When he saw Katniss again for the first time, he tried to kill her.
As Katniss and the others fought in the rest of the rebellion, Peeta struggled to recover. Different methods were tried with limited success. He still couldn't separate his altered memories from his real ones. And Katniss, horrified by the changes in him, was cold and dismissive the rare times when she did see him. He became sane enough to move about on his own, eventually, but he still couldn't fathom what it was he'd ever felt for Katniss. And so he was still, in essence, lost.
Finally, he was well enough to train to join the rebellion. He was sent to join Squad 451 in the Capitol...the same squad as Finnick, as Gale, as Katniss. He didn't understand why they were doing that, but he could only accept it...and try his best not to hurt anyone who was supposed to be on his side.
It helped that at this point, Katniss began to understand just what he'd been through and open up to him again. It helped that he devised a game--"Real Or Not Real"--to help him distinguish which of his memories were real and which were falsehoods planted by the Capitol. But it wasn't enough. During one frantic attack, Peeta snapped and attacked a squad member, throwing him to his death. After, with the surviving members of the squad trapped and under attack by the Capitol, he begged them to kill him. He didn't want to put them in danger again. He didn't want to exist like this anymore.
Katniss refused, and they set off deeper into the Capitol on a mission she had conjured up to assassinate President Snow, dragging a handcuffed Peeta with them. A race through the sewers away from hideous genetically modified killing machines, "muttations" or "mutts," ensued, leaving only Katniss, Peeta, Gale, and two others he didn't know alive. At the end of it, Peeta felt sure that he couldn't hold out much longer. When the mutts had come, he'd felt the urge to join them in attacking Katniss. If he continued like this, he would turn into a mad thing as bad as one of them. He begged Katniss to kill him once more.
Again she refused. This time, she kissed him. And something turned inside Peeta. He remembered what he had felt for Katniss. It was still a confused memory, but...he had some grasp on his old reality now. Thanks to Katniss. Once again, they were protecting each other. Because it was what they did. Katniss said so.
So, with the rebellion in full swing around them, they hid in a basement and waited for their chance to get close to Snow and kill him. The last thing Peeta remembers, before finding himself in the City at the mercy of the 'Porter, is talking to Gale about which one of the two of them Katniss would choose in the end. It didn't really matter: they weren't likely to survive the next few days, anyway.
PERSONALITY:
Once upon a time there was a boy who was a bundle of goodness and light. He always tried the kindest methods of getting through a situation first. He loved a girl who, he was sure, would never even take notice of him. But she did, even if she didn't love him back, and that only made him more determined to protect her, no matter what the cost to himself. Above all, he wanted to remain true to himself, no matter what life put him through.
Then they broke him.
All right, so it's a little more complicated than that. Or maybe a lot. The boy that Peeta Mellark was is still there, and he's slowly resurfacing, fractured and crippled as he is. So it's probably best to start with a description of that boy.
First off, he's incredibly likable. This isn't just a matter of him being nice. He knows how to play to another person or to a crowd; he knows just what to say to get sympathy. Some might call this manipulative. In fact, it kind of is. He's also a really good liar and rather devious in his plans. Let's face it: in another world, Peeta Mellark could have been an evil genius. But not in the world he comes from. In that world, he's just too genuinely good and kind.
And then there's Katniss. It's hard to be outright evil when you're sweetly, innocently, purely in love with a girl you know and accept may never love you back. For Peeta, though, his feelings for Katniss Everdeen are more than the childhood crush they might once have been. His world revolves around her. By the point in canon he's from, she is everything to him. He would sacrifice himself completely to save her--in fact, he's tried very hard to do just that in the past. It simply seemed like the sensible thing to do: if only one of them could survive, it had to be Katniss, because if Peeta survived and she didn't, there would be nothing in the world left for him.
This may not exactly be the healthiest or most sensible attitude. After all, until recently Peeta had a family and life of his own. But it all came second to Katniss. What this means, more than anything, is that when he feels something--be it love, compassion, sadness, or even the rarer anger--he feels it strongly and truly. He's not a love-blinded fool, though. In fact, Peeta is a very smart and insightful individual, picking up on things that most people miss and distilling complex situations to their essence. Once again: strong and true.
The "true" part is more important than it seems. For all that his life revolves around Katniss, Peeta values himself as well. It's not his life he's so concerned about, but his heart and spirit. In a world that crushes people and grinds them down, he longs to keep hold of what's real and true. He wants to be himself in a world that would take that away from him, and he'll fight both physically and mentally for that sake.
To sum it up, Peeta is soft and squishy on the outside and hard and true as steel on the inside. The problem is that right now it's warped steel--he's not sure of what's real and what's false, and sometimes that makes him prickle where normally he would be utterly nice.
The kid is traumatized. He was already suffering in the aftermath of the first Hunger Games he survived when he was thrown into another one, and promptly following that he was tortured and brainwashed. It broke him completely. So what do you get when you take a nice boy and break him? Well, the first thing you get is a monster, a bewildered creature of fear and hatred. But Peeta has been coaxed past that stage and is now in an infinitely more difficult place: aware enough to know that he's been twisted, but still too riddled with damage to untwist himself.
Where once he hung onto his own identity, especially his love of Katniss, as a guiding light in a world gone mad and cruel, now that's been taken from him. The result is someone more bitter and sad than gentle, someone more self-destructive than self-sacrificing. He's still entirely willing to die to save Katniss and others, but now it's a desire full of self-loathing and fear rather than a pure-hearted wish. The spiritual compass that was his love of Katniss is damaged (he fears perhaps beyond repair), and with it gone, Peeta no longer knows what's real and what's illusion. Even as he tries to salvage what's left of himself, he questions every step he takes.
With the help of those around him--especially, as always, Katniss--Peeta is slowly making his way back to what he once was at heart. So, under all those layers of brokenness, just what is that? The answer is simple enough: he's the boy with the bread. He's a giver of kindness and a force of life. For all his quick thinking and clever manipulations, he doesn't have lofty goals or great ambitions. His desires are simple. He wants a life with Katniss. He wants to take care of her and make things better for her. It's just that he no longer knows it in his heart as he once did.
POWER:
Super-Strength
The 'Porter was not particularly creative with this one. Peeta's most immediate asset in combat back home was physical strength, so that's simply been enhanced here. Now that ability is at superhuman levels. He can lift or throw up to half a ton of weight with ease and up to a full ton with great effort. Blows from him pack a proportionately superhuman wallop.
Nightmare Painting
Back home, one of the ways Peeta coped with his trauma in the Hunger Games was by painting the troubling images that haunted his dreams. He also turned to art--in the form of frosting cakes--as a means of therapy for starting to recover from his hijacking. This power draws from that talent and outlet and transforms it into something new and strange.
When Peeta draws or paints in any medium (from chalk on a sidewalk to frosting on a cake), he taps into the nightmares of the nearby populace around him (within a radius of about ten to fifteen miles) and creates something based on one of them. This is an unconscious process and he will have to learn to control it enough to turn it off so he can paint anything but other people's nightmares. It's also unconscious in that he doesn't experience the images in his head: he just starts painting (or drawing, or frosting...) and finds that the image he's creating is a representation of someone else's bad dream. It can be stylized or realistic, but it will always be recognizable to the person whose dream it is.
There will be a permission post for this ability; in the absence of player characters volunteering information for it, I will assume Peeta is tapping into the nightmares of NPCs when he paints.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[ video ]
[There's a teenage boy staring intently into the camera. He looks more than a little disheveled and, judging from that stare, not entirely here.]
The Capitol has a machine that can teleport people. Real or not real?
[A pause.]
That part isn't really difficult to believe, you know. They can do a lot of things to people. But I think if they had it, they'd be using it on Katniss, not me. So I don't think "real." That's why it's all right for me to be broadcasting my location like this. Because none of this is real.
[He adjusts the position of the communicator; somewhere very nearby, off-screen, there's the clink of metal. The device is set down, taking that staring face out of the frame. Instead, he thrusts a pair of hands into view--a pair of hands with handcuffs on them and bandages on beneath the cuffs.]
I need someone to come take these off. They were helping to hold me together. There's not much point in keeping them on now.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
There was nothing to do in the cramped cellar where they hid. Everyone was painfully aware of it, Peeta included. He knew, though, that he wasn't the most aware of it. He still had gaps in his focus, moments when time slid by out of his reach. At least he'd gotten better at identifying them and shutting himself into quiet when they happened, though. That way, they didn't consume him. They didn't turn him into something else, like the mutts the Capitol had sent after them in the sewers. A part of him remained himself even while detached from reality. At least, he hoped so. He still wasn't entirely sure.
There were still a lot of things that slid into the strange space between certain reality and definite illusion, for Peeta. He thought of the one glimpse he'd caught out the window of Tigris's shop this morning, of the refugees streaming into the center of the Capitol. An old man had fallen, and--and then what? Peeta wasn't sure. Had someone else in the crowd helped him up? Or had they stampeded over him, crushing him? He didn't know, because instead of staying in the present, he'd been forced into a flashback at the sight. He'd remembered the toxic fog advancing on them during the last Games they were in, and how in order to save him, old Mags had willingly run into the mist to her death. That was what Finnick had told him had happened, anyway, when he'd asked back at camp (it seemed like a year ago, not just a few days).
"During the Quarter Quell," Peeta had said, "for a little while it was you, me, Katniss, and Mags. A killing mist started advancing on us, and after I got caught in it, you had to carry me. So you couldn't carry Mags. Katniss had to. Real or not real?"
"Real," Finnick had said.
"But you shouldn't have trusted Katniss," Peeta had continued. "Because she threw Mags into the fog, and Mags died." But there had been a thread of doubt in his voice, because there was something just slightly distorted about that memory. Shiny.
Sure enough: "Not real. Mags chose to go into the fog so that you and Katniss could survive."
"Thank you," Peeta had whispered, and he'd realized then that there was a small part of him, growing like a flower first starting to open at the very start of spring, that was glad to hear that Katniss wasn't so horrible after all.
Back in Tigris's cellar, in the present, with Finnick, like so many others, now dead, Peeta realized that he'd spaced out for a moment. A strangely compelling rhythm drew him back to what was, as far as he could tell, reality. It was Katniss, pacing back and forth. Her graceful hunter's legs moving across the little cellar, then back. He realized, after a few minutes of watching her, that the others were starting to look annoyed. It wasn't hard to see why, he thought. Katniss's pacing would drive anyone crazy in such a confined space. Except for him. For some reason, he wasn't bothered. Maybe, he thought, a weak smile tugging at his mouth, it was because he was already crazy.
No, he knew that wasn't it. Or wasn't all of it, at least. He was crazy--he'd accepted that, even urged the others to kill him for it. But Katniss didn't make him crazier. She brought him back from the brink. She'd been the heart of his world, before the Capitol had distorted it into their horrible creation. Now he would rebuild it around her. It seemed right. She was the realest thing there was. That was why they'd twisted his memories of her in particular.
Watching her move like that frightened him a little. It reminded him that she was a cool and composed killer, raised the flickers of doubt he still harbored about her and threatened to fan them into flames of hatred. But more than that, it soothed him to know that she was still capable of moving. He felt like his world moved with her, growing a little more real with every lap of the cellar she made.
The others didn't make that connection, though. After a while, Gale said, "Katniss, you should rest."
"You mean I should stop annoying the rest of you," she said. Peeta could read the lines of guilt in her face, and he knew they weren't just about upsetting a few allies and friends (and him, what was he? No, he couldn't think about that right now). She was thinking of all the people who were dead because of her. The real Katniss would do that, and it would hurt her. Yes. That was the truth.
"I think it's all right," Peeta said. The others looked askance at him, sitting there with his wrists handcuffed to a stair support just in case he lost it again. He hoped he wouldn't lose it again. "So long as we're annoyed, we're not as scared." He chose his words carefully. Scared, because fear was to be expected right now, and it was a sane and natural reaction, and he wasn't bringing up any new topics by mentioning it. But of course, there were other things that annoyance kept at bay as well, and the greatest of them was grief. There were so few of them left, now.
Peeta wondered if he deserved to be among that number, broken and at least half-crazy as he was. He'd urged them several times to kill him. But each time, Katniss had refused. He wished he could know for sure whether it was out of cruelty or kindness. But he couldn't. All he could do was watch her move and pretend to himself that his world reassembled itself a little more with every step she took.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
Someday I'll be satisfied with the characters I already have. Today is not that day.