[MINGLE] Wendi-go-go to the inn

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: 6I Village and Inn
WHEN: 27-31 July
OPEN TO: ALL - Mingle
NOTES: The Wendigo threatening the village will be killed mid 28 July, with a Blue Lily, per these threads. Plot details here. Note: The final fight is close enough to be seen from the upstairs inn windows.
WARNINGS: Wendigo attack mingle, please warn in comment headers if discussing violence, gore, or related trauma. Possible mentions of character death.

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The urgent warnings come from villagers returning south from the lake: a creature twice the size of a man, antlered and voracious. Larger than any they've seen on the plains, stalking its way to the main village. Some might have their own names for this hunger in a skin of shadow; others might remember that it was the first to claim a life, in their village's short history.

Whatever context one has for it, best to secure all pets and loved ones before it arrives. With weapons and food stores at the inn, the call goes out to gather — And to bring back any tools, because there's no telling what doors and windows can do to stop such a creature.

Comments

[juststayalive]

He has no problem with waiting outside on the porch for what he knows Finnick is doing inside. It's better than being impaled with something, of course, and while the passage of time doesn't make the truth any less true, it means that he has that much more time before he has to tell Finnick about it.

He squeezes inside the door and is content to stay in the open corner. He takes a moment to scan around the room, not to make sure they're alone (Finnick wouldn't have let just anyone inside, after all) but to survey Finnick's work, even disassembled as it is. He'd made a real effort to protect his house, and Haymitch can't fault him for that.

He sighs and steels himself for the task he's come here to do, the one that he can't really foist off on someone else. "Peeta's dead too. Killed in the attack."

He survived two arenas for this.

cw: child death, trauma

[fishermansweater]

Finnick is used to people dying.

Everyone in Panem is. They have to watch it every year. And Finnick had been mentoring for ten years. That's sixteen dead tributes from District Four, and two victors. Tributes he'd mentored, or been involved in the strategy for as his partner mentored them. Tributes he'd seen die live on television in front of the whole nation.

But not like this.

Peeta's dead too, Haymitch says, and the bottom drops off the world.

Peeta's dead too, and Finnick had gambled everything he had left to lose on Katniss and Peeta, on the hope that an unwillingly charismatic teenager whose story had captured the nation could sweep up the districts in a rebellious wave, and it had always been made clear to him: Katniss without Peeta wouldn't work. It had to be both of them. He had to save both of them. That was going to be his job, in the Quarter Quell. Look after Katniss and Peeta. Make sure they survive, because without them, there's no revolution.

No hope outside of this place, if this place even is hope when a mutt has just killed one of the people on Snow's hit list.

The sense of the world crashing around him doesn't abate; it swirls around him until he can barely stand, leaving him stunned and staring, sinking onto the edge of the table because his legs don't want to hold him up any more.

Peeta's dead too.

"I'm sorry, Haymitch."

Sorry because he can't imagine losing a victor he'd nurtured through the Games. Sorry because he didn't do what he'd been assigned to do.

Sorry because aside from everything else, he'd liked the kid.

Sorry because now that's seventeen kids he'd been responsible for dead.

[juststayalive]

Haymitch is used to death, certainly, more than he should be. More than anyone should be. He's seen more of it up close than most people in Panem, but that doesn't make it any easier to handle what just happened. He'd been resigned to losing the tributes he mentored, because someone from District Twelve winning had only happened a couple of times in the history of the Games.

Until Katniss and Peeta. Mostly Katniss, because she had the skills and the spirit required to have any kind of chance at winning, but Peeta had surprised him plenty, too. It makes a macabre sort of sense that after Katniss had disappeared, that Peeta was lost, too, because since their first victory in the arena, it had hardly been one without the other. One to be the symbol and one to get everyone to like them.

"There's talk of having a funeral. Nothing big. Just some words." Which is all anyone from District Twelve usually gets anyway; what little they have is too precious to bury with a body.