but if you're worried about the weather, then you picked the wrong place to stay.

[vidal]

WHO: Reyes Vidal
WHERE: Finnick & Annie's place (House 57)
WHEN: ~handwavey general siege times~
OPEN TO: Hawke, Finnick, Annie
WARNINGS: Violent geese!! Probably some violence to NPCs.

---

Since Reyes had been attacked, the two hunters had taken to walking the village armed. Hawke had more of a tendency to look in on her loved ones, and so today they were doing the rounds together, checking in on their famously reclusive married friends out at the outskirts, like performing a neighbourly check-in. Except instead of spare a cuppa sugar or want to come in for some coffee?, it's so how about those mysterious attackers, huh? Reyes still has a blossoming bruise darkening one eye from his own altercation, and he's leaning his weight on a crude spear as they stand outside in the pleasant sunshine, chatting and watching as Finnick and Annie fuss with booby traps that pique his interest. For all intents and purposes, it all looks like a nice and normal spring day out in the garden -- except that they're battening down the hatches, readying for something potentially awful.

The yard has the visitors surrounded by birds, too, and Reyes has to keep sidling further and further to the left as a particularly large goose keeps stalking closer. He's not quite sure if it approves of him or not.

"You know, I'm lamenting the fact that no one ever taught me how to build booby traps," he says. "I'm starting to think my life skills are sorely ill-fitted for this planet."

(Understatement. He's been thinking that since the day he got here.)

Comments

[treadswater]

Annie isn't bruised from her own previous encounter, but there is an edge to her. Her dark green eyes are too bright, her movements too quick until she remembers, deliberately slows herself down. The birds, too, are agitated: louder than normal, more territorial. Which is why, when Annie looks up and notices South starting to sass to Reyes, she says, "Oi! C'mon, my boy, it's okay."

South ruffles his feathers, making disgruntled goose-noises and keeps eying Reyes. Annie huffs at him, then realises that Reyes is talking.

(Her attention is strange, sharp and precise, and foggy and distracted, all at once. She knows this state and it's beyond frustrating.)

"Not really? You've got, uh, got different skills. People-ones? You've found alliances. Always important in the arena. Besides, um, we've got illegal knowledge anyway."

Careers. That's what they are, her and Finnick. Illegal, all that training and all those contacts, all from breaking. But it's useful. It allows Careers to win, if you run the numbers.

Except she needs to be careful, thinking about the arena. Thinking about alliances. At some point, those break, but this is a different arena and she likes Reyes and Hawke.

She'd like most of her Career back, too. In her games.

Fuck.

[fishermansweater]

Finnick is working near Annie, setting a tripwire for the net trap they've been laying out. With the geese around, he can't set lethal traps, but those had never been his specialty. He'd set traps that caught people, left them dangling for him to deal with with the spears and knives he'd gotten out of the Cornucopia. That it was over ten years ago doesn't matter to him, and it hasn't seemed to matter much to Annie, either.

Victors wear the sharp edges of their instincts close to the surface, and it takes less than the attacks that have been happening to bring them to the forefront. But he has something he didn't when he was 14 and fighting for wealth and fame. He has Annie, someone to protect, and he has a handful of other he'd consider allies, even friends. What really matters, though, is Annie. He's quietly observing her, sees the way her attention twitches between Reyes, South, her work, and he reaches to place a hand on the ground in front of her where she can take it if she wants.

"We were supposed to learn everything we needed to know in three days before the Games. Officially."

[vidal]

That strange mood and demeanour has been coming over her more often: a faraway glaze to her eyes, an abstracted distraction as if she's paying attention to something he can't hear. Reyes had met Annie in a good period, an upwards swing, so it isn't something he recognises himself. But by the way Finnick treads gently around it, he seems well-accustomed to... this, whatever this is, that keeps jittering into his wife.

Then, at that piece of information, Reyes raises one skeptical eyebrow. "Only three days?" The easy, practiced way that they go about building their traps and hunting and just plain living in this village, it's already clear that they've got more than that under their belts. And from all that he'd heard from Finnick, the fact that they'd both survived a murderous death arena speaks volumes alone.

"I'm assuming you got a head start, if the official party line was only three days."

[treadswater]

Annie's mouth twitches. It could be into a smile, a smirk, but it's a little too bitter for that. She's back to looking at her hands, at the hook she'd been using on the net. She'd carved it herself, like any good daughter of District Four. "It's illegal to practice," she says. "Illegal to have the set-up, the resources. The weapons. But it's kinda funny, what you have lyin' around on the docks, yeah?"

They'd had excellent set-ups up in District Four, even from the start. For a people who have warehouses and warehouses of boxes, crates, rope, fishing spears and fishing knives. Then as more and more from District Four won, the gaming of the system had more money behind it, more bribery to keep it going, more weapons, more food, more resources.

And the more games there were, the more arenas that were broadcast, the more information there was to learn, to game it even further.

"You called us lambs when Finnick was explaining it to you, before? We're not. We weren't. More like... dolphins."

The Careers were called wolves by the other tributes, the other districts. They were called a pack, the pack. But she can't quite remember that, and wolves aren't a creature she knows much of. But dolphins, those she knows.

Then she laughs quietly, almost to herself. She misses dolphins. And her beautiful blue boat she'd named the Doña Dolfina. A boat she'd bought with money for surviving the Games.

Not that she'd used her training in ways that would count. To kill. She won because she was a fishergirl who knew how to swim, not because she was a Career.

Which makes her want to laugh again.

"Finnick was still an idiot for volunteering at fourteen."

tw: child murder

[fishermansweater]

"This one's ready," he murmurs to his wife as he finishes setting the tripwire. He gently shoos a curious goose away from the trap and reaches a hand to press against his wife's, a silent reminder in their shared language that says I'm here, it's okay. It's a softness that's belied by her half-explanation of the Careers, an elided metaphor that owes a lot to the sardonic hints and suggestions that are all anyone in Panem can ever make about the Games. About the Careers in particular, that open secret of One and Two and Four that nobody ever openly admitted to even though it was obvious.

"Finnick had a family to support," he says. He'd already told Reyes the baser reasons behind his decision: fame, glory, the ability to make more of himself than just a fisherman. But it had been about that, too. About a family that needed the money a victory in the arena brought with it.

"I told you in our district, we volunteer. To protect the children who are Reaped. I didn't tell you we can do that because we train. For years. Helps that the fisher children already know how to use knives and spears and nets. That's what the Games is supposed to be. What you already know and three days to turn what they know into how to fight. But not us. We train and we fight, and we hunt in packs. Or pods. And often it's a tribute from the pod who wins. And then they go on to help train more tributes."

He glances away from Reyes, because sometimes he hates the Careers, hates that they can kill so many. They tell themselves it's so they can protect the other children in the district, but nothing's ever that simple about the Games.

[vidal]

He absorbs all that information thoughtfully. It sounds like a steadily-turning wheel, a self-sustaining system, a snake eating its own tail. The wins and the resources go into training more children to kill, who then go on to win, and bring back more resources to make the next child even better-trained.

The Vidals' own life had followed a feedback loop, too, but one with a downwards trajectory. One debt incurring another and sliding them even further into that pit of obligation, until the only way to climb out was to get your hands dirty too. Muddy. Bloodied.

"I've never seen a dolphin," he admits after a pause. Station boy. Space-raised. "I've only ever seen them in the archives. Photos and videos of them. They seem like they have fun; is that an odd thing to say?"

One of the geese honks aggressively at him; Reyes shoos it away again with a boot.

[treadswater]

The feedback loop Reyes is thinking about, it happens in the districts, too. Less blood and gangs, but a downward spiral is easy to achieve. A part of the system, in Annie's opinion. Hadn't her own mother wagered her - Annie's - life, accepting money and support so she could keep the rest of the family, and her boat, afloat?

(Annie never played her; her father did.)

But Annie isn't thinking about feedback loops, or the issue of children supporting their families. No, she's been distracted by Reyes' pause, and ignorance.

It shouldn't be a surprise. Education in Panem is a laughable mess, she's been learning while she's here, and most people in Panem wouldn't know a dolphin if it jumped out in front of them. And yet-

"No?"

She shakes her head, sharply, trying to clear it. "No, not odd. They are, they're wonderful. They'll follow along with the boats and jump around them, and they like to show off? So sometimes they'll do spins. Just because they can."

Much like Careers, or fisherkids, doing somersaults and flips just because they can.

"Some of the friendly ones, they like scritches. Yes, like you," she tells East, who flaps her wings and ruffles her feathers in disagreement. Fancy her being like a dolphin.

[fishermansweater]

"Hey, behave." Finnick waves a hand, gesturing to the geese who have been getting too close to Reyes.

He keeps his head down as Annie talks, staring at his trap so that the fact he can't help from grinning at her description of dolphins isn't immediately obvious.

"A lot of fishermen think it's lucky to see dolphins," he says. "Course it helps that they herd fish together when they're hunting, which is good for the fishermen as well as the dolphins."

That's what Annie had been getting at with her analogy. Not their playfulness or their elegance or the way they seem, like Reyes says, so joyous. It was that they hunt, and hunt in packs.

Finnick stands up and heads to a tree, where the materials for a snare have been placed. It's going to hang enemies upside-down by their feet from the tree once it's done.

"I'm glad you still have videos of them. Everyone should get to see them, even if it's in a video."

[vidal]

"We're missing a lot of things back home, but at least there's extensive recor--"

Reyes' voice trails off as his gaze follows Finnick out to the tree-line and he suddenly sees, further out into the forest, approaching figures. From outside the village. Not following the usual trails that the hunters or smiths take; these are forcing their way through the underbrush, and they're dressed in shabby dirty clothing that he recognises. Like the ones that had attacked him before.

Goddamn Odair and Cresta and their hermitic house out on the absolute far edge of the village. Reyes straightens, no longer lolling lazily against his spear, his hands instead tightening on its grip.

"Cresta," he says sharply, the humour suddenly bleeding out of his voice. Her husband is still out by the trees.