Prompt: milliways_bar DE Challenge
Challenge: Peeta in relation to Milliways
Spoilers: This takes place in the latter half of book three.
Disclaimer: Peeta Mellark and Katniss Everdeen and all things The Hunger Games belong to Suzanne Collins. The Door is all by its wonderful lonesome from milliways_bar. Title from Martha Gilbert Dickinson's 'Reality.'
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"Katniss!"
The hiss that was defiant insistence of her named demanded her from her already less than restful sleep on the hard ground. Her eyes snapped open on Peeta only feet away, direct on the chain between the cuffs on his hand. Stretched so tight the links in the middle were shaking while a trail of blood was running down from his wrist into his clenched fists.
Her hand was going for her knife before she even reached his face. Questioning if this was the moment, when her hand would be forced. But he was looking beyond her. Wild eyed, chest rising and fall, and so completely focused he didn't even see her. Not the earlier confusion and fear that had given him reason to plead for her to end of his life, but full blown terror. "Real or not real?"
Her hand tightened on her blade, even as she had to turn her back on him to look.
Her shoulders sagged as she spotted it – the open doorway to Milliways waiting in the arch way that had given their infiltration party this room to rest, and her gaze shifted to the sleeping bodies around them. Frozen. Frozen so that it didn't even look like they were breathing. While people moved inside the arch way around tables laden with food and drinks, talking and passing by each other happily, in a room full of light.
"Real or not real?" His voice demanded, again, louder now. Panic still ramping.
Katniss looked back to him finally, and he could hear the exhausted annoyance born in it. "Real, Peeta. It's real."