[EVENT] The Simulation Ends

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: 6I Fountain Park & Elsewhere
WHEN: April 1
OPEN TO: ALL - Mingle
WARNINGS: N/A

---

In the snug circle of an old park, a fountain sits burbling beneath a broad, midday sky.

Once-neat paving stones have buckled and cracked from the slow nudge of wayward roots. Benches stand covered in lichen and rust. Three paths push into the underbrush like the spokes on a wheel, the encroaching forest creating lush tunnels through the dark.

But the fountain stands singular and pristine, brightly splashing in open rebellion of the deep, muffled sounds of a place long ago gone to seed. A vibration hums through the ground, there and quickly gone, and the water in the fountain trembles, lapping against the high walls of its cool, pale reservoir.

Far, far away, in a place that isn't really there, people begin to blink out of existance.

It is the first of April.

It is precisely ten o'clock in the morning.



[Please see event details and guidelines here.]

Comments

[fishermansweater]

As much as he knows Annie as well as he knows himself, the places her mind goes can still be unpredictable to Finnick. That she'd react badly to being dragged out of the arena they'd been in and dumped into this place would always have been likely, but he's not sure exactly which part of it is causing her to shrink away from sounds and cling so close to Finnick instead of taking up a defensive rearguard, which has become a normal pattern for them.

So he's not expecting the suddenly overwhelmed look on Annie's face when he mentions the birds' water. Often caring for the flock they'd raised from chicks together grounds her, but this apparently isn't one of those moments, and Finnick notes that he'll have to check the water once they've established that the house is safe, or at least secure.

His gaze goes from his study of Annie's face, back to the pen with most of the birds in it; East is still sticking close to Annie.

"It's our fence," he says, because that's obvious; the weave they'd rigged to make their fence sturdy and strong is easy to recognize, the knot on the fencpost closest the porch is exactly the same shape and size as it had been.

He glances back at Annie.

"We should check inside. Keep watch for me?"

[treadswater]

She doesn't understand.

There's something here, a pattern, a motive, a rationale and an explanation, and she can't see it. She can't find it, she can't even feel what direction to stumble in. She sees everything around her, she can feel it and smell it and none of it is forming any sort of cohesive thing she can grasp.

She doesn't understand. Not anything. But she understands keeping watch, even as she makes a soft, unhappy sound. She doesn't want to watch for Finnick, she wants to cling to him so he never vanishes again.

But she can keep watch. In the doorway. That way she can... she can keep him in her sphere as long as she can.

"Okay," Annie says, her voice as small and unhappy as her unconscious sound of protest.

Still, training is training is training, and she stands at the front door, East in her arms, as she glances between the main living space and the outside as Finnick pokes around the thing that might be their house.

[fishermansweater]

He hadn't wanted to put the pressure of being rearguard on her, of asking her to protect him. Asking her to do anything with the possibility of fighting would have been too much when she's like this, wrung out and clinging to him. He doesn't want to leave her when she's like this. But neither does he want to expose her to the sort of danger that would come from being ahead of him -- or with him -- if this really isn't their house.

The noise of protest she makes clutches into his chest, ripping at his heart, but she doesn't argue, just lets him go and scoops up their avian escort into her arms. Finnick rests a hand on Annie's shoulder as she takes up her position where she can watch out into the road and around the house.

He doesn't have the things with him that he always carries, no flashlight or knives or trident, but he still has years of training that have been honed by so long in that (this?) arena that they've melded back into the instincts that once kept him alive in the Games. He edges through the door, quickly, ducking down under the windows so anyone watching from the darkness will have their sight impacted by the light. He moves a little way along the wall before he pauses, crouched, to let his eyes adjust to the dimness.

The outlines are familiar, the shapes of the furniture that he's become accustomed to seeing in low light from the time before their home had electricity. A chair there, the sofa here, a patch on the wall in the place where the fireplace should be. He doesn't risk calling out, but he nods to Annie before he works his way behind the sofa and towards the dining room. That takes him away from the line of sight from the doorway, but he's not gone for long. There's no sign of anything in the dining room that's unusual except for dust, and the same for the kitchen -- except his backpack, left there as though he'd prepared to leave in the morning and never actually done so.

He grabs the pack, then turns back and heads to the door, where he holds it out to Annie.

"Nothing wrong on the ground floor except dust."

[treadswater]

Nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. Nothing wrong except, no, that's not right, because everything is wrong. Everything. All of it. Annie stands there, holding East close, and stares at her husband with uncomprehending eyes.

She can't. Not any more. She's reached her limit and for the next few hours, Annie really isn't there at all.

She can never explain where she goes, when she shuts down like this. Just that she goes away, and then she comes back. This time, she comes back properly to herself curled up in the kitchen, braced in a corner with the counter walls a comforting presence either side of her. East has gone, but she dimly remembers the bird getting bored. Standing is too much for just now, so Annie breathes and lets her sense return to her slowly.

Then, softly, she calls out.

"Finnick?"

[fishermansweater]

A lot of Careers, a lot of victors, would get angry or frustrated with an ally who reacts to the stress of this place the way Annie does. But Finnick knows that response well; it's as much a part of the Annie he loves and works with as anything else.

He can see when he offers her the backpack that she's not understanding what he's saying, that the slip in her mind has fractured her ability to be in the now, so he sets the pack down and invites her into the house, guiding her towards the kitchen, where it's safer for her to be if she can't stand watch.

"You look after each other, okay? I'm going to check upstairs."

He doesn't want to stay away long, doesn't even want to leave at all. But he has to check the rest of the house; he's not even sure if he can trust what he's already checked. They have no precedent for anything like this, no way of knowing what the Gamemakers are doing with this new move. But checking the house is the first thing he can think of to explore.

Upstairs is as quiet but unsettlingly abandoned as the downstairs is. Their stuff is there, Annie's backpack, the things they'd been gifted, the nets and ropes they'd made. But there's still dust everywhere, which Annie had cleaned months ago, damage unrepaired that had been long ago fixed, almost the same but not quite right in the same way that the village and park were.

When he gets back, Annie is curled up on the floor with East, and he can't get her attention. He sits with her for a while, but eventually, he has to go explore the house more thoroughly than he'd been able to do in the dark, in his initial checks. He takes the flashlight and a knife out of his backpack, and this time he goes over everything carefully.

Once he's done that, all he can really do is return to Annie and wait. He's sitting at the table when he finally hears a shift in her breathing, and he looks over to her just as she calls out.

"Hey," he says, pushing back his chair to stand from the table. He goes to her corner, crouched low so he's at her level, and pauses just within her reach. "Feeling better?"

[treadswater]

She makes a small sound and then crawls over him, headbutting his arm in quiet affection. He's asked a question, and it's a decent enough one; she's just not sure how to answer it.

"I've been thinking," Annie begins, still resting her head against him. It's not exactly an answer, but it's not exactly a dodge, either. She has been thinking. She's just also still lost.

"I don't have any conclusions. It's. I don't." She sits up, rubs at her forehead a bit. "Either we're in a replica of the old arena. Or, um this is the old arena, just we've been taken out of it for ages? So, your beard. But I don't understand our stuff or the fence."

[fishermansweater]

Usually, when Annie can speak again after she's slipped like that, it means she's back, that whatever it is that twists away in her mind has righted itself and she can reach out from within her mind. When she crawls over and butts up against him, he reaches out to caress the side of her head for a moment. Her hair's oily and tangled, far longer than it had been the day before -- or the apparent day before -- but that doesn't matter. Annie's what matters.

He tilts his head a little when she speaks. She sits up, and he moves to sit with his arm pressed against hers.

"Star and the peahens haven't grown any more. The others still look the same. If we've been out of here this long," he adds, gesturing to his beard, then Annie's hair, "they'd look different."

He lifts one hand to his other wrist and starts to fiddle with the watch, trying to pull it away from his wrist, but just like when he tried to smash it earlier, he can't make it move.

There's more he want to say to her, but he has to pause. There are things that can't be said out loud in an arena, and he doesn't know what rules, if any, might have changed.

He holds his hand up, silent, and tips his head to the side.

And what about this? says the unasked question.

[treadswater]

He holds up his hand, and Annie shrugs. It's a tracker, she answers. She hasn't thought about it. Another way of tracking them all, but this time with a visible way of toying with them. Time is so easily manipulated.

His gentle rebuttal is of more interest. It's a good point. It's one of the reasons why she doesn't have a firm conclusion at all.

"So why the difference?" Annie is half asking him, half thinking out loud. "It can't be for aesthetics, not with you looking like that."

Her hair is fine. It'll be a pain in the butt to untangle, but she's always suited the wild-haired waif look. Not so Finnick.

"Unless it's just all to confuse us. Maybe."

She wouldn't exactly put it past their captors.

[fishermansweater]

They don't need a tracker like this, not an obvious one. Finnick and Annie (and Johanna) have had them implanted in their arms before, the hard little under-the-skin lumps injected there before their Games. Maybe they're afraid of someone working out how to get the things out, but the question then is why tracking them -- or being seen to be tracking them -- is important now when it wasn't before.

Finnick drops his hand back down, but Annie's comment about their hair makes him lift it up to his face and run it along the mess of hair on his chin.

"I've never grown a beard this long," he says. "It's got to be months' worth."

Yet the still-young peafowl haven't grown since he saw them the morning before he found himself here. If it was the same morning.

His head rolls back and he stares at the ceiling. There's still the light fixture there, though he hasn't checked if there's electricity. It makes no sense, not by the rules of the arenas he's so long ago learned to try to read, where everything is about the balance between the deaths of most of the tributes and the ability for one of them to survive.

"Keep us guessing as some sort of distraction?" he eventually offers, a sort of tentative extrapolation from Annie's suggestion.