exsiliumlogs | There's a battle outside and it is ragin'

Entry tags:

There's a battle outside and it is ragin'

Date & Time: Today, late at night
Location: A random hallway of the moonbase
Characters: Lea (

promises_to_keep) and Peeta Mellark (

peeta_bread)
Summary: Late night wanderings and meetings
Warnings: Nightmares with blood oops

Peeta!

Where was she?

Peeta!

He can hear her screaming, but he can't find her. He pulls himself up from the ground and he realizes there's blood running down his hand. He looks at his blood covered knife, then down to the body on the ground.

Katniss.

He surges up in bed, covered in sweat. He can't go back to sleep. Not after that.

He's in a t-shirt and pajama pants, decent enough to be seen in, but he doubts anyone would be up. He slips on some shoes and starts lumbering down the hallway, lost in his own mind.

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Peeta isn't the only one wrangling with insomnia. Lea's no stranger to being up at all hours of the night, and after staring at the ceiling in his room for a good hour and a half he decided to just get up and go for a walk. He's brought Dusk with him; the little cat hates being left alone in the room, and so dressed in a pair of plaid PJ pants and a black wifebeater, Lea just wanders down the long corridors headed nowhere in particular, with a cat on his shoulder.

Turning a corner, he spies a young man with blond hair and a weight to his posture, apparently having the same issue. He watches a moment as this stranger shambles down the hall, and then carefully sidesteps out of the way to avoid getting bumped into.

"Sleepin' at the wheel, pal?" There's no malice in the words; he's more amused than anything.

Peeta's head immediately snaps in his direction and he stops, startled. He looks over at the cat curiously before looking back at Lea.

"Sorry. I..." He rubs at his eyes. "Sorry. Just can't sleep. You having the same problem?"

Lea shakes his head. "What're you apologizing to me for? S'a free hallway." He leans against the wall and folds his arms. "Sleep and I haven't been close in a long time, unfortunately."

He notes the lingering glance at Dusk, grinning a bit. Nodding his head toward her a little, he adds, "This is Dusk. I'm Lea."

Peeta nods and smiles. "Same with me. I'm Peeta."

He leans against the opposite wall, a spark in his eye when he looks at the cat. "Can I pet Dusk?"

Peeta's never been allowed to have a dog or cat, but he used to like to feed the strays.

"Pita? That's an interesting name." There's no derision in his tone, he's genuinely interested. He's met all kind of people with unusual names--hell, look at the people he worked with.

When he asks about Dusk, though, Lea grins a bit.

"Oh sure, she loves people," he says, plucking the cat from his shoulder and holding her out toward Pita. He could hold her if he wants, she's quite friendly, eagerly nosing her head beneath his hand. Lea studies Pita's face a moment as he pets the cat, noting the haunted clarity of his eyes. Sadly, he's familiar with that look; it's the look of someone whose nightmares follow them even in waking. Takes one to know one.

"You look like you've had a long day," he says mildly. "Wanna siddown?"

"Yeah, so it seems. People like to make fun of it here." It was made of twice and he didn't like it.

Peeta raises his eyebrows and looks surprised. He didn't think he'd let him. He reaches out tentatively and takes the cat in his arms. A smile spreads on his face as he pets her.

When Lea says that, though, he looks up, the carefree smile from when he met Dusk gone. He's tempted to spill everything out at Lea. He's so tired, so tired of hurting and hiding. But Lea had his own problems, and could he even be trusted?

"Sure." He's not sure if Lea means here or somewhere else, so he waits to see what he does.

Oh. Well, far be it from Lea to make fun of someone having a bad day. No, really, he's kind of a jerk, but not that much of a jerk.

"Ah, well that ain't too nice," he says, scratching his cheek absently. "I feel your pain; i got teased when I was a kid. People said Lea was a girl's name. How do you spell it, anyway? Yours, that is." Maybe he just heard wrong.

When Pita agrees to sit down, Lea hesitates a moment, then just shrugs and takes a seat against the wall. The chairs in the cafeteria aren't that comfortable, and the hallway is quiet and less likely to be occupied anyhow. Drawing up one knee and draping his arm over it, he regards Pita curiously.

"Well, I ain't gonna pry if you don't wanna talk about it, whatever it is," he says with a shrug, "but I've got two good ears, if you do."

Lea has his own problems, sure, but despite the shadows behind his eyes that speak of a harsh wisdom learned through trials and not years, Pita can't be much older than Roxas. He's been having a hard time taking the mentor hat off, as it were, and even if he's not always honest, he can definitely keep a secret. It was kind of his job for a while...

Peeta sits down opposite of him, still stroking Dusk.

"P-E-E-T-A."

He regards Lea with the same curiosity.

"I just don't like to talk about it much. People start to look at you like you're some poor thing that needs to be taken care of."

He hesitates, not sure if he's doing the right thing. But nods. "Sure. I'll tell you what's keeping me up if you tell me what's keeping you up."

Welp, there goes his joke. He supposes it wasn't really very funny anyway. Peeta it is.

"I know a guy named Pete," he says, deftly redirecting away from the joke angle, "but he's kind of a jerk. Peeta sounds a lot friendlier anyway."

Dusk quickly settles herself on Peeta's thigh, purring loudly as he pets her, and Lea chuckles.

"Looks like you've been adopted; she's never gonna let you stop petting her now," he says, and then sobers a bit at Peeta's words. He presses his lips together and shakes his head. "I don't believe in pitying people," he says. "Everybody's got problems, and feeling sorry for someone doesn't do a damn thing; got it memorized?" He threads his hands behind his head and leans back against the wall. "Giving someone a hand is one thing, but whatever doesn't kill you just makes you who you are, right? So I won't look at you that way."

Lea grins then. Oh, a trade? Okay, he can handle that.

"Deal."

Peeta smiles at him. "Thanks. And, hey, I think your name's cool."

Peeta looks pleased when Dusk does that. He just has to find a pet. Maybe when they get back to Exsilium... or he can just keep bugging Lea and Dusk.

He listens carefully to what Lea says next. He nods in agreement. It's never done anything for him before except make him feel worse.

He glances over at him nervously then. "Um... well, in my country, there's this thing called the Hunger Games. You see, there were 13 districts and they rebelled against the Capitol. In response, they blew up the 13th district and started up the Hunger Games. The 12 districts had to give up, in penance, one boy and one girl from each district to fight to the death in a televised show. Guess who got picked? Me and the girl I'm in love with. We've been through it twice. And all I can see when I close my eyes is blood and death. In my dreams... it always turns out that it's my fault... In my dreams, Katniss always dies."

He chuckles a little--hey, at least someone thinks he's cool. (He gives Peeta like half an hour of knowing him before that changes, but it's nice while it lasts.)

As Peeta speaks, though, Lea's expression shifts from interest to surprise to appall to shock, then makes a brief stop at horror before settling on moderated consternation. His kneejerk reaction is to gasp, 'you're kidding, right!?', but that haunted look is back in Peeta's eyes, and he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt this is no joke, and no exaggeration either.

He exhales the breath he didn't realize he was holding, his shoulders sagging a little, and then rubs the back of his neck. Mentor hat indeed.

"Uh... wow." He's usually more articulate, really. He looks at Peeta for a moment, but there's no trace of pity in his eyes. There's something like empathy, though Lea isn't sure he quite remembers how to feel that just yet. "That's... quite a story. Sounds like a pretty screwy world you come from. Kids fighting to the death is awful enough, but for a TV program? That's just..."

Something in him is angry. Something in him wanted to believe that Xehanort was the only person cruel enough to take a couple of kids and just use them that way. Even the Lord of the Underworld wasn't that cruel.

He shakes his head.

"I know how it feels, to think it's your fault," he says quietly. "There's a lot of stuff I've done that I shouldn't have... and times I did nothing when I should have." Something clicks in the back of his mind then. "Oh, Catness? I spoke to her on the network earlier, actually," he says, recognition pulling his face a bit away from its dour contemplation. "Kinda stern, needs to work on her sense of humor?"

He's not indicting those traits; he had a best friend just like that for a long time.

He's glad for that, at least. Perhaps it wasn't nice to spring all that on a stranger, but for once, he doesn't feel so alone.

He clenches his jaw as he listens. He did take a lot of the blame for things. But Lea knowing how it felt... that made him feel a little better.

But when he recognizes the name, the sides of his mouth pull up into a grin.

"Yeah, that's her."

He looks up at him. "Um... your turn. Unless you want to know anything else."

He knows it's a lot to take in.

After all that, Lea's not even sure where to begin.

"That's definitely some nightmare-worthy stuff, I'll give you that," he says, running a hand back through his hair. "My deal is... a little more complicated."

How the hell is he supposed to explain this?

"Uh... well, when I was about fifteen, the world I grew up in was destroyed," he says, figuring that's as good a place as any to start. He waves a hand. "Not just the city, or the country... the whole world. It's a little hard to explain, ah. Where I come from, there are many worlds that are all interconnected. But that's... another story for another time." There's seriously seven games' worth of history here dude, you're getting the extremely abridged version. "An-anyway, ah. The world was consumed by darkness, and everybody who lived there... lost their hearts and turned into monsters." He hesitates a moment, meeting Peeta's eye as if to check and see if he's even following, then clears his throat. "Some of us, though, when we lost our hearts, we didn't become monsters," he says, absently rubbing his thumb over the left side of his chest. "We kept our souls, even if our hearts were gone. There were a bunch of us, and we spent a really long time trying to get those hearts back."

He pauses a moment, collecting his thoughts, then rolls his shoulders.

"But we were lied to," he says. "The guy in charge of our organization, and his right hand man, and the man they answered to, Xehanort... they'd been duping us all from the beginning. We weren't doing their dirty work to get our hearts back, we were all nothing but pawns. One by one, Xehanort took over the minds of the members of the Organization. He turned them into pieces of himself, they were nothing but... mindless shells, vessels for darkness." It sounds so dramatic in as many words. "He needs thirteen. We just barely managed to stop him from turning a good friend of ours into the final piece, but it only bought us time. He only needs one more, and when there are thirteen vessels of darkness and seven wielders of light, we'll have to face him again." A sigh. "If we lose, then he'll have created the most powerful weapon known to the worlds, and the whole universe as we know it will be destroyed. ... No pressure."

He lets that sink in a moment, then frowns down at his hands.

"Thing is, that's not even what keeps me up at night," he says. "What gets me is... Xehanort has my childhood friend. He got him, probably pretty early on, at that, and I..." He shakes his head. "I was right there the whole time, right beside him, and I never even saw it." Or worse, he had seen it, and had ignored it. Had he? Could he have done something to save Isa before it was too late? "Whether we lost our hearts at all, I'm not even sure anymore, but... I have it back now. And it"--he sort of coughs--"I forgot how much a heart hurts." He shakes his head. "I couldn't save my friend," he says darkly, closing his hands into fists, "and I dunno if I'll ever be strong enough to."

Huh. That wasn't as hard as he thought it would be. Maybe he should talk to strangers more often.

That's a lot of information to take in, but Peeta understands for the most part, nodding encouragingly as he goes on. He gets angrier and angrier as he goes. He just used them like pawns. Just like Snow.

"That's not fair," he breathes out at the end. "None of that's fair! No one should be used as pawns."

He takes a breath and lets it out. "That's horrible. But you've got to win! I know you can do it! You can save your friend and defeat... the bad guy." He doesn't even want to try to pronounce his name.

He can't help a little smile at Peeta's enthusiasm.

"I appreciate the vote of confidence," he says sincerely. "I've got a long way to go, I know that for sure, but..." He pauses, taking a deep breath and exhaling through his nose. "There are people who believe in me, and that's more than I can really ask for. So I'm gonna do my best."

He nods to Peeta then.

"Your girl, Catness," he says, shifting a bit where he sits to straighten the heavy bend of old grief in his spine. "Sounds like you two've been through a lot together."

He nods and smiles at the beginning. He's glad he's trying.

He's silently pleased that he referred to her as 'his girl' as if they were going out. Katniss would hate it, and Peeta would have teased her. What was a few words after all they'd been through?

"Yeah, we have. She's... I'd give up anything for her, you know? I did... it should have happened." He stops himself from saying he should be dead, but the implication is there. There's so much they need to talk about and he's been wasting time on this love stuff.

He shakes his head. "Just don't call her 'Peeta's girl' to her face. She hasn't exactly said I love you back."

Lea nods. "Mm, I get that; I've got a few friends I'd do just about anything for," he says. "There's a lot to be said for having people worth dying for, you know?" Yeah he... actually did die for a friend. He got better, though. And he's not gonna try and explain it, it would take way too long.

He chuckles softly.

"Just 'cuz she ain't said it doesn't mean it's not there," he says wisely. "People show their feelings in different ways, after all." He grins a bit. "But don't worry, I won't call her that. She seems pretty stoic, and I don't make a habit of pissing girls off on purpose."

"Yeah, definitely."

Though he doesn't really think it would matter if he disappeared. Sure, Saul and Katniss would be a little upset, but they would get over it. They would move on. No one needs me.

He smiles a little at that comment. "Yeah, I guess you're right. Still... you won't tell people I love her, right? I don't want to upset her any more than I already have."

He lets Dusk go back to Lea. "Did Dusk come with you or did you get her in Exsilium?"

Lea chuckles and waves one hand. "Nah, they're not my beans to spill," he says. "Don't worry, I can keep a secret; got it memorized?"

He shifts to allow Dusk to climb up onto his leg, and then extends his arm so she can scale up to his shoulder, which is her favorite perch. He tweaks her tail fondly as she butts her head against his temple.

"I found her," he said, "back before we came up here to the moon. Or... well, I guess she found me, might be more accurate. She kind of adopted me without my consent, but I always did have trouble saying no." He reaches up to scritch her back and then grins. "I was gone for a while, but my two best friends made sure to save her during the evacuation."

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There's a battle outside and it is ragin'

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not sorry

LOL

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