milliways_bar | (no subject)

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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.

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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.

"..... Dead people."

Why yes, that quick look around was looking for specific people.

Nineteen tributes.

One ax-wielding girl with a grudge.

His little brothers.

His mother.

There's a list, and it only gets longer every year.

Peeta wouldn't be Peeta if it wasn't for this second.

Even if it's working. Working so well Haymitch nearly pales and flinches, those so familiar eyes, widening in search of any number of years of deaths. Even if it's working, he hates that he's used so true, and so effecting, to deflect his entire existence from focus under.

There's a characteristic to Peeta -- if maybe uncharacteristic to this conversation thus far -- drop to his tone. Quieter. "There aren't many people from Panem who come here."

He drags his gaze away from a girl that for a moment, until she turns her head, looks like the girl he'd been trying to come home to once upon a time.

"Who does, then?"

"Two others my age from 12." Gale would argue, but its close enough. "I met a man and woman from 7 once, but they never came back. A little girl from 11." Who very much is dead.

He would need to figure out what to say to Gale, Katiss and Rue about this. Note at the bar for the last. She would be too telling. Rue was too young to know better than their being reasons maybe not to tell Haymitch everything now.

Did he actually want to talk to Katniss, again for a Milliways-reason?
He could leave her a note, too. If she came. If he was big enough to tell her.

"We're a popular district." He notes, wryly. Popularity, he's found, isn't always such a good thing, and he wonders what it means here. "Any good reason for this?"

Dry, "The odds never did like us?" Until lately. But then?

Peeta's pretty sure this year proves the odds hate District 12.
They can't breathe without being aware The Capitol wants to stomp them.

Haymitch is fairly sure that the odds will never be in District Twelve's favor, ever again. But he still has hope.

Just a little.

That he really doesn't share with anyone.

What else was important? He doesn't have to ask if Haymitch can still see the door, since the man opened it. Dead people. Gods. Oh, right.

"There are three rules, too." Peeta shoved his hands in his pockets not really looking as thought it really mattered. Compared to their lives. These are not rules, they are common sense. "No violence, no nudity, and no outside business."

Edited 2012-04-09 03:37 (UTC)

"... Outside business?" That sounded like a dodge, and Haymitch isn't a big fan of those.

It is. A dodge, or a blind eye. A gag, a blindfold, a forced peace.

"Basically, that it's neutral ground for everyone on every level."

"... you're funny, boy." Because no,, that's not how it's going to happen. He sees Snow here, and the Games are right back on. Right here, right now.

"I am." It's so wry, flat, even for the flippancy, and absolutely no lie.

He's the boy who mounted the stage and befriend Caesar Flickman and an entire audience. Having them laughing and smiling from his first, intimate, as though to a best friend, word. Before he bared his heart to all of them as though that intimacy was both deserved and rewarded.

"But they have a security force to back it up, and a magical jail cell."

Edited 2012-04-09 04:18 (UTC)

"... a magical jail cell." The disbelief is back so thick you could cut it with a knife.

But really.

Magical jail cell.

Now we're just being silly.

"Haven't seen it, but they do like to talk here. You can't really get them to stop, if you ask the right questions." There's a generic shrug to his shoulders. "Apparently, it can keep expanding to hold any number of prisoners and is escape proof to all of the types of people who come here."

Beat. "And Baby, which is what they call her, likes to talk to the people in her."

It sounds crazy, but honestly. His life is made of such crazy in every direction.
This is just another part of it he's come to accept since winning The Games.

Edited 2012-04-09 04:59 (UTC)

"... You sure she isn't a mutt?" It sort of kinda definitely sounds like the sort of thing they'd do.

Peeta's jaw tightens. Instantaneously.

The nightmare is barely hours old.
The event not even six months.

He shook his head. Fast, trying to shove through the feeling that he's shaking it through having turned into ice. "She isn't. At least not like home. She's more innocuous. A companion without any sway in how your stay is spent."

Heeeeello.

Haymitch suddenly takes a whole new interest in his companion, because unless he's managed to royally screw up some point in the future, he can't see the Capitol letting the more vicious mutts loose against District Twelve. That'd be a sure way to start an uprising.

"That strike a chord, son?"

Peeta would curse himself for reacting, but in some part, hard and unyielding, at least it meant it still mattered to him. The horror of it all. Not numbing or blocking it out of himself.

There was only truth or spin to it now.

"I'm really not a fan."

Or the mutts. Or jail cells.

Or even Haymitch on a lot of days.

But he wasn't the one, of the two of them who spent every encounter, biting the hand that helped him. Even if it was the one that had chosen for him to die. Just like everyone else. That wasn't a card to be used like a knife until certain times.

He'd argue that to his dying breath. He didn't choose to let anyone die. He there's only six people he chose death for.

But that is a shouting match for another day.

"Tell me someone who is, and I'll show you a Gamesmaster in training."

"Given," Peeta conceded. Which wasn't very giving.

Not terribly, no.

"So, what's your story, boy?" Things don't just happen to people. The longer he's a Victor, the more he wonders who pissed off Snow in the past that his name got pulled out for the Quarter Quell.

The public one was all the rage. But he wasn't sure either were fit to be giving a man, who lived when he wasn't even a consideration in his parent's future yet. No matter how current that situation might be again.

"Why do you want to know?" It was questioningly toward bland, thinking of how would have considered or taken to any exchange with Haymitch before the 74th Hunger Games. When all he saw was a drunken, slightly rotund man, making a fool of the District as best he could.

"'Scuse me for being neighborly." He's already getting a bit of the general condemnation that becomes more popular in Peeta's time. It's as if, having being given the miracle of a living tribute, they thought that now there was no way they'd lose both tributes every year ever again.

So far, he hasn't brought anyone home alive.

It's not really going over well. Even if no one's actually said something about it.

The harder part is trying to remember, how he couldn't see what he can't miss now. Both for the better and worse. Sharp as one of his knives, no matter that he had the world convinced he was a damn fool, or grown to maybe wish in some part it could be true.

But it wasn't, and if Peeta couldn't miss that when the man was drunk now, he certainly couldn't miss it on the near enough to a sober spectrum to count as good as it got. Peeta shifted his mouth. Thinking. Before his shoulders sank some.

"I've been coming here for a few months back home, but almost a year and half here. As I said, time is...weird here."

Edited 2012-04-11 05:32 (UTC)