"What are you doing here?" Who: Katniss and Peeta. What: Meeting properly for the first time. When: Way backdated - late February. Where: Baxter's Bakery. Rating/Warnings: Low / Talk of dreams. Status: Complete.
Katniss was fed up of the cold. Wrapping her jacket around herself against the wind she quickly ducked into Baxter’s Bakery to warm up again. As she stood inside the door of the shop, she pushed the hair that had been whipped around her face back, feeling the warmth of the shop heat her chilled extremities. She pulled her bag around to her front and made her way up to the counter to order a hot chocolate.
Peeta had been pretty focused on the customer at hand. He liked working the till, actually, and it wasn’t super busy so he could chat to people as they came through. He was grabbing some change for the person when two names caught his attention, and he glanced up.
And there was Katniss.
Peeta nearly dropped the change as he handed it over, and then he cleared his throat. He was going to talk to Katniss for the first time in … Well. Ever. And that filled him with a strange sort of terror. He cleared his throat. “Uh. Hi. Welcome to Baxter Bakery.”
Katniss pulled up short as she saw the boy from her dreams stood behind the counter. She gaped for a few seconds like a fish before finding her voice. “Peeta?” she asked quietly.
Oh. She knew who he was. He swallowed, having hoped maybe she hadn’t dreamt yet. With nothing left to do, he cracked what was the most awkward smile of his life. “Uh. Hi, Katniss.”
“What are you doing here?” Katniss asked, in voice that didn’t sound like her own. She was still rooted to the spot at the sight of him. Sure she’d met Portia here and seen Haymitch posting on the Net, but to actually see someone else from her dreams, someone who, it seemed, was going through the same thing she was about to was shocking.
“Uh. Working?” Peeta just blinked some more. He was sure her question was more along the lines of what is he doing not in her dreams but in the real world, but that was a lot harder to answer.
“No. No, I mean...here, in this world? I just...they were only dreams...weren’t they?” Katniss rambled as she looked the boy over.
He cleared his throat again. “Well, in my defence, you’re here and not just in my dreams, right? And so is Portia. And Haymitch.” This was more awkward than he could ever imagine. “I. Uh. It’s nice to meet you?”
Katniss could only think about the horrible feeling she had woken up with after dreaming about the Reaping. Seeing the boy who she shared that story with in front of her was far more shocking than seeing Portia ever had been. “I...I guess?” she muttered, reaching a hand out to shake his hand on auto-pilot and feeling as if she wasn’t completely ‘present’ in the situation.
Peeta glanced at her hand, then held out his own, shaking hers a bit awkwardly. Yeah, it was definitely a turn in his day that he hadn’t been expected. Especially knowing that, in their dreams, one of them was likely to kill the other. “Can I get you a drink? Or something?”
“Sure, um...a hot chocolate?” Katniss asked, shaking her head a little to try and clear it. “How long have you worked here then?”
Peeta actually cracked a grin. Hot chocolate. Like they had on the train to the Capitol, and he loved it so much he was dipping his bread in it. “Sure. One hot chocolate, coming up.” He rang it in and shrugged. “Almost a year-ish? I’m not around much because of school, but I like it.”
“Thanks,” Katniss offered him a hint of a smile as he turned away to deal with her order. “What school are you at?”
“UCLA,” he answered. There wasn’t anyone else in line behind her, so he didn’t mind chatting a bit. Honestly, it would probably be good, right? Portia was fine to talk to but she couldn’t ever understand the dreams the way Katniss would. “I study art. And fashion design, mostly to get into movie make-up and stuff.”
Katniss nodded at that, trying to force herself to have a normal conversation with him and not ponder too much on their shared dreams. “Do you know Portia then? She’s into fashion too,” she said to him.
“I do!” He looked a bit brighter at the mention of Portia. “Even before the whole … Well. You know.” Peeta shrugged. “She showed me around her studio and everything.”
Katniss nodded, keeping her eyes downcast at the aborted mention of their dreams. She had a feeling that despite how horrible the reaping had been, what was to come was going to be far worse. “What um...what have you dreamt about so far?” she asked quietly.
Peeta glanced around a bit, then got one of his coworkers to take over so he could take his break. It just felt like the sort of thing that should be talked about at a table somewhere and not over a counter. “Not a lot, I think,” he said, leading her to a quieter spot before sitting down. “We’re in training now?”
“I’ve not had that yet,” Katniss shook her head as she watched him. “All I know is that I’ve been picked for something awful. We’ve been taken away from our home and now we’re being...prepared,” she closed her eyes against the thought. She didn’t want to think about the dreams getting any worse.
“Ugh,” he said. He didn’t know what all she had to go through, but he remembered being scrubbed down and polished with all sorts of things. Even when he woke up he felt like all his skin had been sandpapered over or something. “I mean. I try to look at it like this, the more dreams I have about all this stuff, the further away all the bad stuff is.” Because the bad stuff had to be coming, right?
“Seriously?” Katniss eyed him sceptically with a raised eyebrow. “Wow, such optimism,” she gave a little laugh and shook her head as she looked down at the drink in her hands. “If you could find a way to bottle the stuff, you’d be a millionaire,” she told him.
“Hey, if you want to start dreaming about everyone killing each other, be my guest,” Peeta said, holding up his hands a little. “Honestly, I’ll take being parading around the Capitol any day over that.”
Katniss pressed her lips together and dropped her eyes to the table as he said that. "Portia told me what's coming, I didn't believe her," she told him after a little while. "Hearing you talk about it as well..." she shook her head slowly. "Nothing's ever going to be the same again, is it," she said.
“Not for dream-us, anyway.” Peeta let out a laugh that wasn’t at all amused. “One of us in those dreams is for sure going to wind up dead, and if the other lives, then that’s gotta be a messed up future. Here, though, I’m not going to try and let it get to me. That’s not my life, that one. This is, you know?”
Katniss quirked a smile at that. “Yeah...might need some help on that score,” Katniss told him. She took a deep breath and sighed it out, looking up while plastering a small smile on her face. “So you work here, huh? Ever the baker, huh,” she replied.
Peeta just ducked his head, trying to hide the embarrassed sort of smile that crossed his face. “Yeah, who’d have thought, right? My dad’s one, like in the dreams, too. It’s sort of funny.”
"Funny?" Katniss asked curiously. So far she wouldn't count her Dreams as funny exactly.
“Not like … Hilarious,” Peeta said, holding up his hands. No, there was definitely nothing funny about their dreams. “But like. Weird. Weird-funny.”
Katniss quirked a smile at that and looked at him sideways before laughing a little bit. “Yeah, I think I know what you mean,” she told him, hopefully they’d end up more amicable than in her dreams so far.