First Entrance

[real_or_notreal]

It only takes one step.

To know this is not his house in Victor's Village.
Not any place found in District 12.
Not Seam or Merchant or Hob.






Peeta's not one of the best people for random surprise locations.
Especially after The Capital & The Arena & Victor's Village.



[Tiny!Victor Tag: Peeta Mellark
Everyone's thread to take place after Gale's.]

Comments

[real_or_notreal]

And Peeta chest, like his face seizes, even when he forces himself to hold still. They know a lot of different girls in common. A lot of them. They went through a lot of years of school only two years off from each other. They live in the same very tiny, sparsely populated, never to be traveled from, District.





Why should it matter that only one comes to mind.

[setsthetrap]

Because she's the one who matters.

That much is clear.

In fact, Gale doesn't even have to say anything else because he knows Peeta understands who he's referring to.

[real_or_notreal]

Here. They both come here.

Because illegal, publicly known and sanctioned trip to the woods, outings aren't enough. They both come here. He'd really like to wipe what he's interpreting as silent smugness off the face in front of him.

All of it helps to remind him, he's really not anything to them.


It's frosty, even when he forces himself. "Katniss was here."

[setsthetrap]

Please. Peeta's the one who got to spend lonely, rainy, stormy nights in caves with Gale's best friend.

He's the one she kissed over and over again, the one she ran into the Cornucopia for, if only to retrieve a tiny syringe of medicine that wasn't even guaranteed to save his life.

He knows he had a duty to fulfill back home, taking care of Prim and Mrs Everdeen; and he'd be scared shitless, but it should have been him out there in the Games.



"Yeah. She was here. She's been here longer than you and I. A few weeks, she told me."

[real_or_notreal]

His brow furrowed.


He hates that his first thought -- the very first one -- is that would mean that either Gale knew before finding Milliways, or Katniss hadn't told either of them. But Gale's mistrust of Milliways, even with his saying it wasn't crazy, leaned to the later.


And he hated feeling he was in the same boat with Gale the next second after hating him for being here with her.
She had a magnanimous power for breaking down his logic.







"She's gone now?"
The frown is more curve than line. He's trying to be logical.

[setsthetrap]

He nods.

He's quickly learning that logic and this place don't exactly mesh. If anything, he's been forced to hang his logic up by the coat-racks because doing otherwise only frustrates him.


"Yeah," he answers. "She went back home. I had to stay here, though. Just to see if I hadn't hallucinated this whole thing."

[real_or_notreal]

Peeta is trying to shove away that Gale even saw her. It's a Sunday, anyway. Which works mostly not at all when combine with the relief (and regret) that she isn't here. It isn't as though he hasn't half-mastered avoiding her while she's living right next to him.




A dark neutral is really where he's settling.


"What'd she think of it?"

[setsthetrap]

"Same as us, I think," he says slowly. "Thought she was going crazy. She looks like she's had time to get used to it though."

The faintest of smiles quirks at his lips.

"She was having breakfast when I first saw her."

[real_or_notreal]

She was eating the food. The food on the tabs. In the random, impossible building, in their district and no where. It's so innocuous, and rebellious, so...

So Katniss.




Had been here a while.

Peeta that over, looking at the room.
"Then we may be stuck with this for a while."

[setsthetrap]

"Yeah," he agrees. "Looks like."

Gale isn't sure how he feels about that right now.

But he's wondering about Peeta.

"You going be okay with that?"

[real_or_notreal]

His answer is bitter, but quiet, and not directed at Gale. It's directed at several things, several situations in his life, that don't all preclude Gale, but it's not at Gale.


"Never mattered before."

And it wouldn't, even if he wasn't, again.

[setsthetrap]

Gale isn't sure how to respond to that.

First of all, Peeta is technically his 'competition', if he allowed himself to think of this entire debacle as such. To console the guy, to hear his problems out ... that's not his role to play.

Still.

The end of the universe is a lot to take and Peeta's from his world. What more, from his District.

As much as he might rival him, he's the one who was able to take care of Katniss in the arena when Gale couldn't.

So.

"It matters now."

[real_or_notreal]

Peeta snorted, looking over at Gale. It's a brittle, ice blue, serious pair of eyes. His comment had nothing to do sharing his own wars, nothing to do with wanting pity. It was only the truth.

From their lives in the District to the Games to Milliways.



"Really? And who asked you if you wanted to come here?"

[setsthetrap]

He shrugs.

"No one," he answers, point-blank.

You do not make it easy, Peeta Mellark.

"But I'm asking you now. You can leave as you please, here; the door's right there."

[real_or_notreal]

Oh. He does. For everyone usually. There's a world of videotape proving it, seducing an entire nation to how easy and evocative he can be.

He doesn't love being dropped into a new shiny place, with too much possible and impossible, unwritten rules that he's sure have some enforcement, that he can't choose. With Katniss. Again. And now Gale, as well.




"I think that," As he's fond of telling himself now -- he's survived worse. Right now it was only a too bright room with unknown rules. And them. Only. As compared. "--we'll see. We hardly know anything about it yet."