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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]

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.

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Worry tightens his expression, and he reaches behind him to open the door again.

Through there, Mags is still lecturing on about the best use for alcohol in the preparation of fish (both from Four are doing just fine, with a hefty pack of sponsors to keep them that way - Mags can take time off to socialize a bit). She's even on the same sentence.

Slowly he lets the door close.

[real_or_notreal]

Peeta waited, trying not to let his expression change any. For the voice on the other side, softer -- no, just younger -- but still familiar.

He simply waited, eyebrows raising faintly, in an undistinguished question of at least this truth, when Haymitch finished with the door closing.

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"Why she thinks she knows what to do with a freshwater trout when she hasn't had anything but fish from the sea except at the Capitol, I'll never know."

Because it's Mags, and as one of the oldest Victors, she knows all. That's just one of those rules no one tells you about.

[real_or_notreal]

"Because she does," Peeta said, with a small raised shrug of his shoulders. Almost agreeing, both with the ludicrousness of it and the inability for anyone to ever disagree.

Even nearly twenty years later, she always knew a little too much. Or claimed to. Who were they all to argue with a woman who seemed determine to outlive them all.

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"Because she does." He agrees - if he ever bothered to try any of her tips, he's sure they'd turn out wonderful.


"So. A townie boy." He'd always thought, just a bit, that he survived because he was both old enough to have learned how to hunt and support his family, and because he was Seam. With a knack for surviving and keeping an eye on anything that might threaten that.

Turns out he was wrong. Who would've thought?

[real_or_notreal]

Peeta's eyebrows stayed up, as though challenging whether that should matter. He'd heard so much worse from Haymitch at this point. It's almost as relieving, as it is disconcerting, that he doesn't have the sharpest knives of his knowledge to use here and now.

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"Not lacking in attitude." He notes, not entirely (or at all) disparaging of this fact. Attitude can keep you alive.

It can get you killed too, but lack of attitude will get you killed all the time.

[real_or_notreal]

It might be one of the few things truly keeping him alive now. Because it isn't winning. Or Katniss. Or Haymitch. Or painting and baking, that were more about surviving being alive, than living. Peeta conceded, twisting it, "Everyone has to have a flaw."

Though his greatest one was the world-renown one.

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"Yeah... mine's a real short temper when I don't know what's going on. So you were explaining what this thing is?"

His flaw is definitely not the drink.

The drink keeps the pain down to a low roar.

[real_or_notreal]

Coping mechanisms. They all have a hand of them now.


"It's supposedly an establishment--" Oh, yes, he avoids the word bar for the moment, without a pause or beat or shift. "--outside of time and space. No one knows why people are picked out, why they get bound or get to keep their doors. There are normal people, but, also, dead people and gods."

And insane assortment of a lot of things. That he'd rather not beat around the bush about. Like he said. The best lies can be drown by the truth, and that works with omissions of truth, too.

[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!)