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A man stumbles through the front door, more off-balance than anything.

Off-balance, and slightly tipsy.

He's waiting, you see. No one likes to bet on District Twelve early - odds really aren't in their favor, never have been, other than a couple damn miracles. But he's got the names of a couple people who could be swayed, if the tributes show promise.

One hasn't already. Thankfully a clean kill, he can send the girl home to her momma looking decent. But the boy, the boy's still in this thing. If he can survive two more tributes, he might be able to get a damn sponsor.

So until then, he can't get blinding drunk.

...

So right now, Haymitch Abernathy looks really confused.

Comments

[real_or_notreal]

It's far too late, the cruel grasp of morning closer than it should be again, and Peeta isn't looking up from wiping paint from his fingers with a turpentine rag. Not expecting this door anymore than the person who he runs straight into.

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"Steady there..." Haymitch's hand is firm on Peeta's upper arm, his alcohol intake having been tamped to a low roar with the Games on.

...

This is a Twelve boy. A merchie, but he'd bet cold hard money on it. What the hell is a boy from Twelve doing here, outside the arena?

[real_or_notreal]

The first impulse is always to jerk away. Between the nightmare, and the painting, and the there being absolutely no reason someone -- no less, "Haymitch?" His voice scrounged together from the hellside of nowhere.

There are paint flecks all over him, but he blinked, focusing on the very unexpected and well-known face. As Milliways finally came into focus around him.

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He doesn't look a whole lot different than the man that is Peeta's neighbor - the Capitol won't let him age much, any more than they would let him grow a proper beard, or let him go back to the life they interrupted. Maybe a bit healthier. Not any less cynical. If he was asked, honestly, he wouldn't bet on his boy still in the arena surviving the night, never mind living longer than two more tributes. But someone has to believe. No one else is.

"What the hell are you doing here, boy?" That accent is Twelve, confirming his suspicion and striking fear into a rightfully paranoid heart.

[real_or_notreal]

Peeta stared at Haymitch, before reaching up and ruffling his sleep-mussed ash-blonde hair, with that same not quite confused, or pleased, expression, of deeper recognition at the sharp question. The whole of the world was coming back to his thoughts, his awareness, in a way that didn't involve paint.

Didn't involve the the sharp incisor's of dog's with human eyes.


"I didn't know you came here." Not that he'd given anyone here a reason to watch for anyone else. Those of them that came here, didn't really talk about The Games if they could help it.

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"Who the hell else would come?" Haymitch demands, giving the boy a short, sharp shake. "Don't play stupid on me now, boy. What's your name?"

[real_or_notreal]

Peeta's head tilted just barely.

Questioning two very real possibilities.

Horrifyingly vivid nightmares or Milliways, itself.






Both not being something he could plan for.

But that look of lacking recognition.

The one on Haymitch's face.

"Peeta Mellark."

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"Mellark... They have a boy - little boy, knee-high to a grasshopper. You want to give that another try?" But his voice is slightly less tense, slightly more puzzled. He's gotten entirely good at reading intent and honesty in the faces of others, over the years.



The boy isn't lying. That, or he an ability to lie that many would be envious of.

[real_or_notreal]

He does. When he wants to. It's how he got his moniker.

But he doesn't really want to try that again.
(Doesn't want to think what happened then.)


Not really. Not when the bile in his stomach, would like to make a rise against the sense of it. Haymitch far more sober in the early hours of morning than Peeta would ever expect to find him. ....and nicer dressed. Keeping up appearance, not in District 12, nice.


Instead. Peeta raised his eyebrows, barely, before letting his gaze go to his hands, returning to taking the paint off the insides of his fingers. His voice evenly, no give or take. "They have three."

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"One. There may be another on the way - most 'spect so, but they haven't said, so neither do we."

Three? Mellark is a braver man than he'd give him credit for.

[real_or_notreal]

From between his brothers? From before he was even born. The decades fall like weights against his chest, even when he made the extra effort to keep his hands from stopping. Focused on a blue smear on the back of the top of his pinky.


Something else then. "You haven't been here before." It's not a question. This conversation would be different if he had. Every conversation after his first, and especially, after Rue appeared here, was.

Looking up at the last second, flat blue eyes, almost daring him to deny.

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"Son, I come here every damn year." His voice, which had begun to lose that terse edge which was half worry, half exhaustion, tightens again. "Now how the hell did you get here all the way from Twelve without the Peacekeepers getting word?"

[real_or_notreal]

"This isn't The Capitol." It is an effort not to tack on his name at the end. Not to make it sound more familiar than it should. Not to feel a wave of both pity and annoyance. "This is Milliways."




Beat. "It's not even in Panem." Technically.

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That earns a quick, darting glance around the room, looking for the signature uniform of the Peacekeepers. You just don't say something is not in Panem, that there might be something other than Panem, not where Snow's watchdogs can hear. When he doesn't spot even one, the tense set of his shoulders relaxes.

A fraction.

"Go on then. Can't leave it there and expect me to buy."

[real_or_notreal]

You don't acknowledge in Panem that there might be a land outside Panem. That there was ever a time before Panem, either. Peeta can't say he loves this place. It wouldn't be true. But he doesn't hate it. And that ... says a lot these days.

"Nothing to buy. It's true." He raised a hand, yellow slash of paint across the curve of his thumb knuckle, as he hitched it back at the door. "Magical door, that no one can explain, that takes you from wherever it feels like it and brings you here."

Shifts for pulling the thumb into a curl of fingers, for pointing beyond them. "Even crazier window, that most people avoid, as though just seeing something could break them."

That last line is almost droll. But it's entirely honest, too.
And in large, between it and The Games, why it doesn't phase him.

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He looks up, eyes the Window and the explosions behind it for a moment, and shrugs.

He finds more fear in a white-flowered rosebush.

"Alright, so let's say there's a magical door in the Capitol that leads to a magical fairy land with a window people don't like. Doesn't explain why there's a boy from Twelve hanging around in it."

[real_or_notreal]

"It's not really picky." Is such a lie. At least about himself.

But it's also unassailable truth, too. Several people here are as ordinary as they come. Peeta stopped trying to find a common reasons for why they were here, to know why he was here, a while ago.

"I hadn't been aimed for here, when I walked through the door either."
The best lies were drown in a whole lot of truth, after all.

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He glowers at the boy for a long moment (the kid's young enough to be a tribute, but there's something wrong with that idea that he hasn't pinned down yet), but he can't find the lie.

"So, where were you aimed for?"

[real_or_notreal]

"A bathroom," is blandly, obviously, put, as he lifted a hand, with the wiggle of fingers, showing the only half-cleaned mess of paint splatter. As those the rest of him isn't dotty with it.

He didn't really care about the rest as much as his hands. It all came off well enough either in a good scrubbing under blistering water, or in the wash.

But rather than wait for another question, he threw it back. "Where were you headed?"

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There's a slightly annoyed, slightly feral look - one Peeta and Katniss were favored with often the first few days, when Haymitch hadn't yet decided that he might have actually been handed a chance to not bring home two bodies.

But he admires pluck. He remembers when he once had the courage (or the audacity, or the plain stupidity) to mouth off to just about anyone. So he answers.

"The District Twelve apartments - Woof is watching my boy for a moment while I stretch my legs a bit."

[real_or_notreal]

It does the good job of distracting him. Which is what it was meant to.


Not that Haymitch doesn't have his own box somewhere buried inside Peeta, filled with a bitter fury that goes beyond understanding why he'd done what he'd done, but he takes no pleasure in lying to him here and now. Only a shallow relief, and a need to keep quickly figuring out what he will do with this turn of events.

Even when he wants to ask, who the person named is, which game this is, it's easier to keep directing away from anything that might direct back to him. At least until he decides. Tilting the conversation with little effort, by following Haymitch's own words.



"You have as long as you want for that." He tipped his head, slightly back toward the door. "Time here can stretch a very long time, even weeks and months, and on the other side of the door only seconds might have passed."

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"... Might have?" It's important, it's very very important, because as hopeless as he thinks it is, he has to be there when his boy starts moving again.

Has to.

He might have to find a quick way out of the world if he didn't.

[real_or_notreal]

"It's incredibly unlikely?" Peeta said. "Put there are some people who've mentioned missing seconds or minutes. I usually end up back right at the time I left. A lot of people here do."

Though it had taken Peeta a while to figure that out for himself, given living in a gargantuan house all by himself where no was there to notice if he had been gone seconds or hours.

[real_or_notreal]

[OOC: As much as I am adoring this, and I am, quite a bit, because I should have gone to bed forty minutes ago, I must bow out gracefully for being able to wake up in five hours for work. I'm gone on a trip this weekend, but will try to tag in when I can, and will return in earnest Monday evening.]

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(OOC: Sleep is awesome, and so are trips out of town - catch you again on Monday!)