thecapitol | When someone says things could be worse, they are worse.

Who| Peeta Mellark and OPEN.
What| Peeta is back after being sick for a long time.
Where| District 12 lounge, the roof, and the park.
When| During and after the mini-arena.
Warnings/Notes| He's been gone awhile, so expect him to ask your character to catch him up on what he missed for them if he knew them, especially if they're a D12 tribute.

The last time Peeta could remember being sick, really being sick, was when he was twelve years old. It was the year of his first reaping, and he'd been terrified. He'd been lucky in not being picked that year, but afterwards he'd been so sick that his parents just thought the stress had finally caught up to him. Instead, turned out he had chicken pox, but the stress certainly hadn't helped in getting better from that. The illness had taken a lot longer to finish then it may have normally, or what they assumed was a normal amount of time.

Being sick had been like that, except there had been no getting better after the first week or two. Peeta had thought getting sick in the arena was bad, with the very real threat of death in there, couldn't be topped.

Obviously, since he was finally leaving the hospital now, that was not the case. So much had happened, District 3, Effie, his tributes, so much, and yet he still needed to sit down and write replies to people who had sent him letters with their hopes for him to get better (how could he leave Katniss alone, after all?).

But he was allowed to be slow with things. And there were more pressing issues, but it was easy enough to multitask, so he could answer letters while waiting for people to pass through the lounge, hoping that he might see anyone on the roof, or even going out to the park to get some fresh air, after being cooped up inside for way too long.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

After losing Effie it was a great relief to see at least one familiar face in the lounge. The District 12 staff had been seemingly dropping like flies as of late and he'd begun to worry that Peeta just wouldn't come back.

He sat down across from him where he sat writing, picking up a muffin from a plate.

"It's good to see you back, Peeta."

Peeta looked up and smiled, setting his things aside without a thought. It was good to see a familiar face; he'd been both hoping and not hoping to see some of them. If they weren't here, then there was the possibility that they'd gone home.

But Peeta liked his tributes, and maybe this was how people in the Capitol felt? "It's good to see you, too. I'm sorry I haven't been here. I would if I could have." And he really would have, he would have been here everyday, if he could.

"How are you?"

"Better." Which wasn't the same as okay, but certainly enough to be getting on with in Panem. He didn't hate himself anymore. He didn't want to die. He didn't want to push away everyone he cared about out of some misplaced need to make them happy. So: better.

"Mostly I've been working to undo the mess the last arena made for me."

There was a new face Peeta hadn't yet seen, a young man stumbling his way up to the roof. He was stumbling because he could barely see. In his arms was a stack of books that went just above his chin - which he was trying to use to clamp down on them so they didn't tumble out of his hands.

He stumbled under their weight, a quick step saving himself from a fall, a clinking sound giving away the fact that the leg he'd stepped with wasn't flesh and blood. The prosthetic left leg was strangely complicated, as if the metal was meant to be retractable, and creaking sounds gave away that there was some kind of spring mechanism inside.

The other foot was wearing a leather, fur-lined boot that matched the blue sleeveless tunic, grey leggings, and leather belt he was wearing. He looked like he'd stepped out of some kind of storybook.

Oops, speaking of books, one slid off the stack. As he tried to bend without leaning over, the rest of the books fell out of his arms to the roof.

Awkward.

"Don't mind me," he said to Peeta in good humor, now realizing he was there, bending down to start stacking them up. Ultimately he decided to just park himself next to them rather than trying to move them somewhere else on the roof. "Just doing some light reading."

When he heard the roof door open, he'd already been looking toward it, to see who it was. It could be someone he knew, after all, but it was more likely that it was someone who he didn't know anything about. There were just too many new people for him to know everyone, but he was trying.

This guy was new. And even if he couldn't hear that creak, he would have known right away. You didn't have a prosthetic leg for awhile and not see how other people walked with one, too.

"It's okay." Peeta smiled at him. "If that's light reading, then anything I do must be miniscule or something. What are you reading about?"

"This place. All of it's pretty much as biased as can be, but you can pick out some truth if you read between the lines."

They were also older books, hence being actual physical books. A bit old fashioned. Nothing the Capitol would have censored but slightly more informative than any of the digital reading.

"I figure the more I know about how everything works here, the better my chances at surviving."

And rebelling, but he was absolutely not saying that part aloud. Instead he'd leave it at just "surviving," which made sense. After all, knowing enough about Panem to know what not to say was a survival trait. If he meant it was for anything other than that, he wasn't telling.

Sandy grimaced as the TV was showing some highlights from the most recent arena.

She liked to spend her afternoons in the lounge now because of how hot it got outside but the downside was that the TV was almost always on. She hated it but she knew it was important to pay attention to current events.

Turning that attention back to a notepad in her lap she resumed sketching a black hooded figure swinging between buildings. The figure had a spider on her chest and a row of knives on her belt. Duck was sitting comfortably near her chewing on a pencil. So absorbed was she in her work she didn't notice Peeta's arrival.

It was very important to keep up with whatever was going on in the arena these days. Outside of the arena, too, and Peeta was trying to keep up. Keep up and catch up. So when he took a break from the letter writing, he had to keep appearances.

Keep appearances and catch up at the same time. But it was nice to see that he could catch up with a few of the tributes he had that he had since he started being here. And then he immediately felt guilty.

"Sandy?" Peeta said softly, coming to sit by her. "Hey. It's good to see you."

Sandy's head snapped up and she spotted a familiar face.

"Peeta." She greeted him with a wary smile. "Where have you been?"

She tried not to sound accusatory but given what had just happened to poor Effie it was hard not to resent him for somehow avoiding her fate.

He made a habit of taking his lunches out. The weather in the Capitol was generally mild, and while Buddy Glass might have been an open and accepting victim of his more reclusive tendencies, he found them, funnily enough, easier indulged in the people that swirled, brightly dressed and painted, around the Capitol than in the sterile, monochromatic walls of Peacekeeper headquarters. He, generally speaking, watched the passersby with the polite disinterest of an administrator chaperoning children on a particularly mundane trip to the zoo. He didn't, generally speaking, make eye contact except for when it became absolutely necessary so as to avoid harassment for it at a later date.

Unfortunately, there was nothing altogether typical about running into Peeta Mellark. Or, more accurately, observing him over the top of a less-than-satisfying pastrami on rye. Wasn't the kid supposed to be deathly ill? His coloring didn't look great, but then again, it never really had. Buddy sighed, absently finishing off the last bits of the dry bread as he contemplated his move. Peeta had been on his shortlist of Tributes and Mentors with whom it would necessary to pursue some sort of rapport. It was better done now, presumably, than at some party which neither of them would actually want to attend. Truthfully, Buddy felt some small amount of kinship with the boy. They both seemed like terribly bad mixers just offhand.

He folded the thinly foiled deli paper once, twice, taking extreme care with something that was only to be thrown away momentarily before dusting himself off and beginning his approach. Upon reaching his target, Buddy offered him a small smile that probably came off as more pained from the sunlight they were standing in than it did polite, but what was done was done. His true lamentations would come from the greeting ("Peeta Mellark? Do you have a moment?") which was delivered altogether too stern and too cop-like for his liking.

When someone says things could be worse, they are worse.

Lounge

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Roof

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Re: Roof

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park