brew me a cup for a winter’s night [Closed]

[treadswater]

WHO: Annie Cresta
WHERE: #57 The Windermere
WHEN: Creepy Gift Day, and the snowstorm days that follow (20th-22nd December)
OPEN TO: Finnick Odair
WARNINGS: TBA
STATUS: Closed | Ongoing

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It had all taken time. Time to find all the boxes and envelopes marked with their names, time to carry them back to their house. The house they have been using as shelter. (Their house.) Time to talk to some of the others, back at the Inn, about why, how, who, when. To try and understand what this 'Christmas' is that some of the others kept talking about, and how the boxes are filled with things that they have thought about giving the others. Johanna and her axes, gleefully leaping into Finnick's arms with thanks, when there had been no way for anyone to get anything.

But after enough time, all the boxes are in the living room and the envelopes are in the kitchen. Thirty-one boxes for Annie, and five envelopes: thirty-three boxes for Finnick, and another five envelopes.

An additional box from Kate Kelly, containing a hand-powered clothes washer. The young woman had said she hadn't needed it, and Annie wasn't about to argue with her. Not with the state of her clothes.

Two of the boxes, one for Annie and one for Finnick, contained food. Food that had once been hot and drinks that had once been rather more cold. The drinks - milkshakes, Finnick calls them - get stuck outside, on the kitchen porch, to thicken up with cold, while the burgers and fries are warmed up in the stove's unreliable oven. Or maybe it's not unreliable, maybe they have just not gotten used to it yet.

The snow is coming down heavily down, the sky darkening. It seems like the kind of weather that is sticking around, or maybe a better way of putting it is weather that is reclaiming its ground after the gentleness of the past few days.

Not for the first time, Annie is glad that she and Finnick are in a sturdy shelter, with fire and supplies. It'd be miserable out there, and there is a kind of security from those heavy snows which she is growing to appreciate. It's the only time she finds herself truly relaxing, for no one can reach them in this weather.

It's even... nice, in a way. Surrounded by cold while warmed by fire and stove.

Comments

Snowed in!

[fishermansweater]

It's been snowing all night and into the day, with no sign in the low-hanging clouds that there's a break in the weather to come any time soon. This morning, a glance out the windows of the bedroom they've been occupying shows it drifted up against the house, and it makes him glad that all their wood and supplies are safely inside, because there'd be no getting to them now.

The first thing many mornings has been food. Checking their supplies, having something quick to eat, then going out to check their fishtraps.

This morning, the first priority is heat. Wood for the fireplace, stoking up the coals to set them back ablaze after they'd died down overnight. Wood for the stove in the kitchen, so they can boil water and maybe make some hot food, like they avoided doing for too long.

It's Finnick who carries the wood into the kitchen, so it's Finnick who sees the box. It's not like the ones from the Inn, all bright paper and ribbons and card, the sort of extravagance that seems strange even to a victor. It's like the ones that had appeared together out the front of the house, and it's even more impossible than those, because in this snow, who could have delivered a box?

He's stopped, staring at it, when he hears a scratching sound, and then a noise like some sort of bird.

Peep! Peep-peep!

"Annie!" he calls. "There's another box here!"

When he approaches it, he sees it has her name on the tag.

[treadswater]

Annie is brushing her hair. She'd been able to wash it yesterday. Wash it, thanks to whatever Allison Argent had thought about. There'd been fancy soaps. Shampoo. Conditioner. She'd had a bath and scrubbed herself clean, letting the conditioner sink into her hair. Even today, it's better, her hair. And so she's brushing it, with a brush from a Raven Reyes. It'd been braided yesterday, by Finnick, and she'll braid it again soon. But there's a delight in being able to brush her hair, detangle it, that she has missed.

Her hair needs some devoted pampering after the past few months.

But the instant Finnick calls her name, Annie's reverie is switched off like a light. Dropping the brush onto the sleeping bag, she's pulling on her boots and leaping down the stairs. Mostly leaping: once she reaches the landing between stair sections, she swings herself over the bannister and jumps down to the floor, lands, and runs to the kitchen.

"How did it get in here?" she asks. Not that she's in the room. Not directly. She's standing sideways, peering in. Making herself a small target.

Peep-peep! Peep! Peep!

[fishermansweater]

She looks good this morning, her hair clean and shiny, her skin properly washed for the first time in weeks thanks to that pack of toiletries they'd both gotten in gifts from others in the village. They both have new clothes, too, and new hairbrushes. Basic things that they've been without here that exist even in poor homes in the districts.

It doesn't matter, though, because she's here now, at his back, if not in the room. She's here, looking at the box with the same suspicion she'd given the first ones, though nothing they've received here so far has been an immediate danger to them.

"Nobody could have. Unless they came overnight and the snow got worse afterwards."

Even as he makes the suggestion, he doesn't sound like he believes it. "Everyone said nobody could have left those gifts in the Inn, either."

There's another cardboardy scratching sound from the table.

Peep! Peep-peep! Peep!