sixthiterationlogs | 03. (Not) Shooting Things

WHO: Baze Malbus and OTA
WHERE: Outskirts of town, 6I
WHEN: September
OPEN TO: Any and all
WARNINGS: Look out for flying projectiles

After a couple weeks of being too sick to do much, Baze is getting back into life in 6I, despite the lingering cough and occasional shortness of breath. He's checking his traps in the morning, offering to fix anything people need that's broken and that he can figure out... and attempting to shoot things.

Two weeks of being confined to one building means he had a lot of time to try and carve bow staves and whittle arrow shafts, and to try and twist strings out of cloth, leather strips, and guts from fish and rabbits, anything he could get his bored fingers on. So he has three bows put together, and he spends at least some of his time every afternoon attempting to shoot things. "Attempting" is the operative word, there, because only one of the bows is remotely serviceable and that one was an experiment with bending the staff the other way when he hadn't really intended it to work, and his arrows-- merely sharpened and straightened sticks, at this point, since he wasn't going to waste stone or metal on tips when he's just learning-- don't fly very well.

There is a lot of cursing going on, when one catches him at it.

Of course, he's also available at the normal places: the inn, helping in the kitchen or attempting to whittle some better arrows; around the village, carrying things or pausing to cough or catch his breath; up on a roof battering down leaks; or peering across the divide into 7I, though he doesn't spend much time there. He may be attempting to shoot foxes sneaking across the border, but again, he's not that great at it.

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Finnick has been largely out of things for the past few weeks, too, though for reasons of his own that were unrelated to the illness he's since heard about. Unrelated, and maybe a factor in neither him nor Annie catching the disease that had swept through the village. It's been a slow recovery -- and recovery probably isn't the right word, because he's never actually better, just not as bad as he had been.

Still, he's back to helping Annie check the traps, even though it takes more time and energy than it used to. He still sometimes runs into people; he has the whole length of the river to walk, but others use it too, and sometimes he's there at the same time as someone else. This time, he's alerted to another presence by the sound of some words he doesn't recognize in a tone he does, that says they're some sort of swearing.

A few steps in that direction and Finnick's in sight of a man holding what looks like a makeshift bow. Very makeshift, the sort tributes make in the Games when they think they have no other choice, that hardly ever work. This one looks better than most he'd seen in the Games, but still nowhere near as good as a proper bow, the sort they'd trained on when they covered archery in the Academy. Finnick was never an expert archer, but he knows a bad shot when he sees one.

"Make that yourself?" he asks.

Hey, Baze is a very good shot, thank you very much. He just doesn't have good enough tools to work with, and he's more used to having plasma or laser ammo than wooden ones. He lowers the not-quite-weapon at the sound of the voice, glancing over at Finnick, and snorts.

"That obvious, is it?" Obviously it's obvious. The bow looks rough and it isn't shooting straight.

"I've seen a lot of people try to make bows."

The use of the word try there is deliberate, because he's also seen how few of them worked. It was something a tribute might try if they had a knife and some sort of string or line and not much else, and hadn't spent enough time with the instructors to learn how to make decent traps. Bows are, unfortunately for most of the tributes, harder to make than they look, and Finnick himself knows very little about how to do it. He's not even a particularly good archer himself, though he'd had a little training years ago at the Academy.

It's still his habit here to hold back from being too genuine when he meets people, the same detachment he'd taught himself to use in public in Panem, where everyone knew what they expected from him, and it was easier to play into their expectations than anything else. Not that he still thinks everyone here knows who and what he is, but it's easier to fall back into what he's used to than to force himself to act against those habits.

Still, he's aware that it's particularly unhelpful to point out what's obvious without offering anything else, so he moves a little closer, using the end of the trident he's carrying to lean on.

"Having any luck with it?" That, too, might be a little obvious, but it's also an opening.

Nice to know he's not the only one who's failed spectacularly, around here. "This is the best one I have made so far," Baze grumbles, looking it over. It's the one he bent backwards, accidentally creating better tension for arrows to fly further, but since he hadn't meant for it to be bent backwards when he carved it out, it isn't very attractive or accurate. "And I can only hit something I am aiming for one time in six. So no, not a lot of luck. Why, do you have advice?"

He might, maybe, even take it.

"More on surviving in the wild than on making bows," he admits, and his tone is a little softer, loses the faint sardonic edge that long ago became his habit when speaking to anyone other than Annie or Mags. It's not that he has no experience or knowledge of archery, but the training they'd received in the Academy had always been based on the idea that they'd had a weapon, one seized from the Cornucopia or sent by a sponsor.

"I haven't had an archery lesson in a long time. Better at throwing things."

He comes a little closer, his head tilting to one side as he studies the bow. He's quiet, but the pause is thoughtful, and a faint furrow in his brow shows his consideration, as he thinks back to those old lessons.

He's long tried to remember the old lessons in case he needed them, as a mentor. And he'd been studying the Games that still had surviving victors before he came here, in preparation for the Quell.

"The arrows. If you put feathers on them, it stabilizes the flight."

"Throwing things is an option, too, but this makes them go faster. Or it should." He glowers at the bow before turning his attention back to Finnick. "I saw that, and once I have a bow that works and arrows that are halfway decent, I'll take the time to do that."

He's still just fumbling around in practice, right now, and he doubts feathers will be quite enough to make it work the way he wants to. But he'll keep that in mind.

Instead, he asks, "What was your name again?" He's seen Finnick around, of course, but if he's heard the boy's name he's since forgotten it.

"I've heard that," he agrees, genuine amusement curling one corner of his mouth into a half-smile. He's sure it's true, though he doesn't know enough about science to be able to say why: physics wasn't considered necessary for the fisherfolk of District Four to learn.

Katniss Everdeen would no doubt have agreed with the man, and she'd probably even have been able to advise him on what to do with the bow. Finnick himself has feathers in large supply -- with a gaggle of a dozen geese, plenty of feathers are shed in his and Annie's front yard -- but he'd turned his attentions to the spear and makeshift trident he'd gotten materials for shortly after he'd arrived here, and he'd been happy with those weapons. They were far more his style.

"Finnick Odair. I don't think I ever got yours, either."

Eventually, he'll regularly remember to introduce himself without being asked, but it's still scattershot at the moment, after so many years spent never meeting anyone who didn't know his name.

He could also harvest the chickens at Clint and Wanda's, though their feathers are probably too soft for that sort of thing. "Baze Malbus," he answers. He's not usually the polite one, but he is making at least sort of an effort to get to know people around here, so exchanging names with a friendly young man who's offering advice is a good start. "Probably because I never gave it to you before. Don't think we've actually met. Have you been here a long time?"

Not staring at him with the bow, of course; he means in this dumb little village entirely.

Finnick had spent a long time with the whole concept of introductions not working in the way it does for people who aren't victors. People had been thrilled to give him their names and he'd made it a priority to remember them. He's just still not used, here, to actually needing to ask people for them.

"Pretty long," he says. "Hard to tell here, maybe a year."

It's the seasons that have given him the best way to guess that, and it had been fall or late summer when he'd first gotten here.

"You've been here a while, right?"

They may not have met, but Finnick keeps an eye on the people coming and going from the village, as best he can without being fully involved in the community itself. He's still good at watching and listening, even outside the Capitol.

"A few months, now. Not as long as most of you." Baze looks grumpy about it. "Even Bodhi was here before me, and we died at the same time." Give or take a few minutes. Baze has gotten a bit casual about mentioning the fact that oh, right, he died. These days he almost feels like things would be easier if he'd just stayed that way.

03. (Not) Shooting Things

cw: references to depression

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