very unbottled lightening

[treadswater]

WHO: Annie Cresta
WHERE: The Village, around
WHEN: 26th February
OPEN TO: ALL
WARNINGS: TBA
STATUS: Open | Ongoing

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Auroras, snow, no snow, lightning attacks: a girl's still gotta eat and work for her living. Or something like that. Annie knows she could just stick to the river and fishing with Finnick, remain on the outskirts. But she's been making baskets, bowls, over winter and those need to be dropped off at the Inn.

It's not as bad as a blizzard, she tells herself and her boyfriend. It's merely unpredictable. She can handle that. She's handled waves and storms on a bucking, frightened boat, and even if there is another earthquake, as long as she doesn't lose her head she knows that the shaking ground will stop and then she can move.

(It's an unfortunate choice of words, even within her own skull. Losing her head. Well done, Cresta.)

Naturally, it happens when the small woman is half way between her house on the outskirts and the Inn. Her instincts, honed by Career Academy and the school of the docks, tingle, twitch, pull at her, and Annie hits the ground as a ball of lightening crackles into life where her torso had been half a second earlier.

She hits the ground, rolls, curls up into a ready crouch ready to run, roll, move again if she has to. There's the sudden smell of burnt hair and she's guessing the end of her braid got singed, and the mud is cold against her shin and hands, but she doesn't move.

Not until the lightening is gone.

Not for a long, long moment after, where she stares at where the ball lightening had been. Where it nearly killed her, yet didn't.

"Oh," says Annie. Quietly, Distantly. "Okay."

She'll move, soon. She should. It's not safe, crouching here. She's just going to catch her breath first.

And try very, very hard not to giggle.