Test Drive Meme!

[hey35andholding]

HOW TO PLAY:

* Tag into this post with a pup you're thinking of apping to the bar with a brief EP set within Milliways and/or its universe. You can be new to the game, or simply want to test out a fresh pup.

* If you already play at Milliways, feel free to tag in with your own characters and interact with the new pups. You can also post your own EPs for these new characters to thread with.

* Mingle, post, and have fun!

Comments

[pickledtribute]

He turns, surprised - that almost sounds friendly, and his hallucinations are never friendly. He wanders over, his balance wobbly but stable enough that he doesn't actually manage to fall over.

Squinting, he studies the boy in front of him for a long moment.

"You're... Mellark's boy, right? The baker."

[real_or_notreal]

Oh. That was going to be interesting.

He had heard a lot about the potential time frame differences, and there was Rue, who he'd considered sort of outside of the example since he found her covered in the flowers of her passing, but Haymitch?

"Yes." It's the easiest answer, and honest. Even if he lived far across District 12 from the bakery now and next door to the man in front of him, in a flower dotted house, that couldn't look less like it belonged there no matter who The Capitol tried.

[pickledtribute]

He nods - there's still two from that family he's in danger of having to watch die. He also helps himself to a seat, without so much as a by-your-leave.

(He pretends he doesn't care what people think.)

(Sometimes it makes it easier.)

(This is also a lie.)

"So what would a town boy be doing here?" If he's going to start hallucinating kids he hasn't had to mentor now, he might actually have to make good on his threats to find something stronger than drink to deal with it.

[real_or_notreal]

"Same as you, likely." Peeta made a motion with one hand, over his shoulder to the door, before dropping the flat of it back against the curled side of his other hand. Considering what to tell him, and whether he was sober enough to remember it if he did.

"Walked in the door, end up somewhere I didn't mean to."

[pickledtribute]

"Oh, I'm exactly where I mean to be." Alternate worlds do not happen. Hallucinations, those happen. So he's basing his current theories off of a lot of fact. "And next time I run into Greasy Sae, she's got some explaining to do."

[real_or_notreal]

Peeta let his hands fall on the back of a chair. The position assumed at this point, though usually with Lily. Never with someone from home, certain not Haymitch.

Who he'd left sleeping on the floor this morning, after dropping off two loaves of a bread. Today being one of those miraculous days where doing so hadn't required dodging a knife thrown at his head.

"She doesn't come here." And Peeta hopes it takes some time before Haymitch realizes how much more alcohol he could get here than than at home.

[pickledtribute]

"No. No, she wouldn't." He agrees, scratching at the back of his neck. "Can't figure why you're here, though. It's been Seam kids for the last ten years or so, last Townie was a girl."

[real_or_notreal]

"Because the odds were in my favors." It's a little too sudden, and a lot sharp, without being an insult. Just a sudden, too easy quip, ad made of so much truth he could choke on it.


But he has a lot worse truths than that to choke on now.

[pickledtribute]

There, if Peeta looks, is the horror he never lets show on the other side of the door - the reaction he's trained himself to not let out, just in case the Capitol might be looking, to deny them pleasure in it.

He knows Peeta's parents. They were classmates. His father stood three boys away the day his name was pulled from the Reaping bowl.

"God, isn't it enough to see past tributes?"

[real_or_notreal]

He catches it, but doesn't react. Doesn't call attention to it. Like the faces when he's startled awake, from a pile of alcohol and vomit. Too true. Too deep and broken and words would only make it worse.

"I'm not a hallucination." Though he doesn't correct the other part.

He's had enough of lying since the 74th Hunger Games ended.

[pickledtribute]

"..."

He's watching Peeta carefully, with the same patient calculation (if a bit muddled at the moment) of the boy that managed to win the second Quarter Quell.

"No." He knows lies by now, the taste of them, the sound of them. That wasn't one.

[real_or_notreal]

"No," Peeta said again, as though that single word from the man might have been a question. Without a question, without a wonder. Just the same note. Not a hallucination. He was real. What was left of him, at least.


Peeta glanced down at the seat his hands rested on, and back over to him, at least asking. "Do you mind--?"

[pickledtribute]

"Help yourself." There's another step - the boy did not say he came here from the arena. Not from the arena, not from the Capitol.





He doesn't know how to accept this strange thing called hope.

[real_or_notreal]

It's the easiest thing to be trapped and gutted by, isn't it? Hope. It is soulless and almost undeniable, and it wounds irreparably, throbbing even once it has been shattered.


Peeta slid down into the chair, still the edge of childhood to it, but also with a strange attention to how he settled one of his legs. He'll start somewhere easier. He always does, if he can.

"This place is called Milliways."

[pickledtribute]

Injury - old injury, one he's used to. An injury you wouldn't get as a baker's son, not and retain that kind of mobility.

But he doesn't comment on it. If he brings it up, he has to ask the question that follows, and he's not quite ready for that jump.

"And it appears in peoples' hallways?"

[real_or_notreal]

Not as old as it could be, but he refuses. The cane. Any noticeable limp. They've changed what can't be undone, he refuses to give them any more inches than they've blooded him of already.



"Sometimes. Mine took me from the doorway of a .. bedroom."

The third upstairs, but who was counting, really. He lived alone, in suffocating opulence. He liked to just barely pretend it was an art room. If that was laughable too, when the art displayed was a gruesome horror show.

[pickledtribute]

".... a bedroom." It's not a question.

It isn't.

Except for the way that it really, really is.

[real_or_notreal]

There's a faintly pinched expression.
And so Peeta gives him a long look.



"The third one. On the second floor."
In his cookie-cutter Capitol house.

[pickledtribute]

He knows Twelve like the back of his hand (or, even better, like he knows his alcohol tolerance). He knows where the Mellark family lives.

There isn't a third bedroom on the second floor.

But he knows where one is.




"How did she die?" There is only ever one Victor of the Hunger Games. He's still approaching the idea that eventually, one of the tributes actually survives sidelong.

[real_or_notreal]

It's not a long decision. It's actually far too easy. "When are you from?"



Somewhere long enough ago not to understand he'd protect her still.
When it's absolutely nothing she'd ever deserve from him now.

But they're alive to split those hairs and hate each other.

[pickledtribute]

"Just ended the Seventy-Second Annual Hunger Games." Which explains why he had been, before being interrupted, attempting to drown himself in liquor. It was a pretty hard-core attempt, even for him.

"He didn't survive the Cornucopia. She made it to the feast. Damn food was poisoned."

It took her a full twenty-four hours to die, too well hidden for the remaining Careers to find her and give her an easier end.

[real_or_notreal]

There is the split of grimace, as he nods. Peeta remembered watching that game, with his older brother and parents. Old enough to be guilty-grateful it wasn't him, without giving up being horrified by all of it.

Young enough to not know that horror was a shadow of what it could be.
Young to not understand he had it better than he ever could have known.

[pickledtribute]

Haymitch sees it, and nods. He'd thought she'd be able to make it. She'd had that survival instinct, that knack for being able to take care of herself.

There hadn't even been a damn thing he could do to help her at that point - she'd been delirious within an hour. Even if he had found a rich enough sponsor, which was something of an impossibility for what he wanted, she wouldn't have known to use what he sent.

Effie hadn't even protested when he simply gathered up all the bottles and set them on the table as he watched, slowly knocking them off.

[real_or_notreal]

"The 73rd isn't much better." Peeta rubbed a line in the middle of his forehead with the tip of his fingers. "Not that any of them are, no matter who wins."

The way he turns that last sentence it's obvious. No one wins. Even the Victors lose. Maybe especially the Victor's, going on to new rounds of torture each year as the price of succeeding.

Peeta doesn't know yet. He can only supposed, watching Haymitch so close these last months. The Victory Tour is only two months away, and he doesn't want to know anymore than he does. But it's all going and time won't stop anymore now than it ever would before.

[pickledtribute]

That is obvious, and one other thing is obvious too.

The 72nd was hell, and he wasn't expecting any reprieve in the 73rd...

But he didn't mention the 74th.

Well. He can hold on that long. Surely he can. He'll be damned if he'll consign another District Twelve winner to the demoralizing experience of a Capitol mentor.

"You haven't toured yet, have you?" The boy is a looker, which is unfortunate, for him.