sixthiterationlogs | ψ it's all too quiet and i can't trust anything now

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ψ it's all too quiet and i can't trust anything now | closed

WHO: Finnick Odair
WHERE: House #57, the Windemere
WHEN: Late on the night of February 6, immediately after he leaves Jyn and Cassian in House #56, the Worthington
OPEN TO: Annie Cresta
WARNINGS: References to suicidal ideation. Likely references to sexual assault/abuse/quasi-slavery, Hunger Games is a terrible canon. Passing references to character death.
STATUS: Ongoing

It's light enough to see, even without the snow to bounce the light of the moon. It's long into the night by now, judging by how far the moon's moved, but the auroras are still blazing, and in the distance, over the woods, there's the occasional fizzing crash of a lightning strike. None nearby, though: that's holding true, just as it had during his search of the empty houses on the outskirts with Jyn.

Maybe the Gamemakers only wanted one death from the strange stormless lightning.

It's not the storms that Finnick's thinking of as he circles around back behind Johanna's house towards the house he and Annie are living in. He's thinking about Jyn Erso, about the man he'd brought her to. Cassian. The man who'd been so desperate to be told about Jyn when he'd first arrived, but who'd still wanted to take him into some room in the inn and have him.

~~The man he'd almost wanted to let do it.~~

He'd told himself he was avoiding Cassian because he didn't know how what to do with the sense of loathing that stirred in him. Because he was afraid he might feel some renewed spark of attraction, betray Annie again in some feeling he couldn't control. That wasn't what he'd felt, though, when he'd seen Cassian again. He'd felt that rush of fear, knowing the power Cassian had held over him in that moment.

He's shivering, telling himself it's cold, when he finally makes it up the steps of the house. The goslings and the four brown-speckled whatever-they-ares start up a clamor of their whistling peep-peep, a noise which will surely alert Annie to his presence even if she hadn't heard him open and close the door.

"Annie? Annie, I'm back."

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She's not asleep. It's late, she knows how to read the moon as well as anyone in the Districts who grew up outside a manufacturing district. As well as anyone in District Four. And she knows, too, that the goslings and the other baby birds would wake her up when anyone comes to the door - anyone, but hopefully just Finnick. She could curl up by the stove and sleep a little.

But she doesn't. She waits. She weaves while she waits, crafting a watertight bowl, and she keeps her ears open and senses sharp.

Then the birds start up their sleepy but loud chorus.

"In the kitchen," Annie calls out, softly. It's hard to stop at this exact moment without ruining her work, even as relief floods her. He's back, he's back, he's back.

She worries. Always. She worries that one day, he won't.

Edited 2017-03-05 08:04 (UTC)

Annie's voice is gentle as she calls the direction to him, but it carries over the noise of the birds, carried through the lounge room from the same corner of the house.

He hadn't meant to be out this late, wouldn't have been gone this long if he hadn't wound up on the task of delivering Jyn to her ... what was he? Boyfriend, husband, lover? Hard to know.

He doesn't stop by the fire, though the cold of so long spent outside in the nighttime during his and Jyn's search for Cassian has seeped deep into him, and the fireplace is tempting. But there's a stove in the kitchen, and Annie waiting for him.

When he steps into the kitchen, the baby birds start their calls again in greeting (or warning; he hasn't worked out which it is, yet). Annie's seated at the table, her hands busy at work on a weaving project. He watches for a second or two, then decides she can't stop what she's doing, so he shrugs off his backpack and sets it on one of the chairs, then slips into the one next to her.

"Hey. Sorry, didn't know I was going to be gone so long."

The birds have their own basket, padded out with dried grass and allowing them to snuggle in together. Except now, when they have their heads raised to watch Finnick. Yell at him, maybe - for the late hour, for the joy of seeing him, something. They are very loud birds, the goslings and the not-goslings.

Annie, too, watches him, her dark green eyes scanning him even more intently than the birds. The birds just love him; she worries and knows him.

"Any trouble?" she asks. It's a phrase which could cover many things - trouble with people, with environment, with a task. He's not hurt, at least, she can tell that much by the way he moves.

Star, the largest of the not-goslings, is fixing him with a particularly intent stare, and lets out an indignant piping sound that cuts above the honking of his? her? gosling siblings.

"Hey," he tells them, though of course they won't understand him. Still, it gets him a couple of tilted heads from the more alert-looking birds, including Star.

It's Annie, though, that he's here for, not the birds, as endearing as their simple demands for attention and affection can get. She's worried, it's there in the way she studies him, her stormy-green eyes questioning him deeper than her words do.

"Ran into someone just out of the fountain and had to help her out."

He leans forward, pressing his forearms against the table, and lets his head hang a little before it he turns it back towards her.

"She was looking for Cassian."

Annie works as he greets the birds, as he settles himself down. The bowed head is - she doesn't know. Interesting. Concerning, potentially. She's not quite sure how to read this mood, never mind the late hour.

No, keeping in mind the late hour. That's important.

She moistens her lips and finishes off her row, then sets the basket aside. Folds her own hands on the table and wonders how much of his wording she should pick at. Nothing? It's just.

Cassian. She still doesn't entirely know what to make of that man, and the effect he's caused.

"Why was she lookin'?" Annie asks then, lifting her chin a little. It says a lot for a person to turn up in an arena, somewhere like this, and then start trying to find one particular person.

He'd made a judgment, at the start, about Cassian, and he's been on and off, back and forth about it ever since. He'd thought the man had been asking about someone he loved, so deeply that she was all that mattered, when he'd arrived. What had happened after that had made him doubt, but he'd been so sure, at first. It was why he'd been so determined to help him. And Jyn had the same desperation Cassian did, the disbelief of someone wanting something to be true but being afraid to let herself believe it. The way she'd run off without even waiting for Finnick once he'd told her where to start looking had been exactly something Finnick himself might have done were their situations reversed, and Jyn telling him that he knew Annie.

"I think they're lovers."

He holds Annie's gaze, letting her study his face for whatever she's looking to find there. He knows she's uneasy about Cassian, her own meeting with him inconclusive if less emotionally chaotic than Finnick's encounter with the man had been.

"He mentioned her name when he arrived. I think she's the person he was hoping was here, so I thought I should help her."

He still thinks it had been the right thing. He's not going to forget the way Cassian mouthed his thanks to him over Jyn's head, locked in a desperate embrace with her. That, though, only makes Finnick's situation even more shame-inducing and guilty than it already was.

"Oh." Annie chews on the inside of her bottom lip. "The woman he wanted to be killed over? When she wasn't here?"

Maybe it's petty of her, or maybe it's just that for all his familiarity, she still registers Cassian as a threat and it's an interesting weakness. Data point. Weakness, lever, will Cassian now be distracted enough to leave them alone?

And yet, alongside that calculation is something far, far kinder: it's good to help reunite them. No one should have to deal with that level of despair. No one.

"Did you find Cassian for her?"

He gives a brief nod of confirmation: Cassian hadn't asked about her by name, but it hadn't been hard to draw the connection.

"He was shouting her name when he came out of the fountain."

There'd been a despair in his voice that had cut deep into Finnick's fears, not because he thought it meant anything had happened to Annie, but because he'd heard it as his own voice if something did. It was the kinship he'd seen between him and Cassian from the start, even if it had been shaken later.

Not that he thinks what nearly happened between him and Cassian means that Cassian doesn't genuinely feel for Jyn. He's been in enough people's beds to know that lust and love aren't irrevocably intertwined for everyone the way they'd always seemed to be for him until he'd found himself feeling so unsettlingly drawn to Cassian on their first meeting.

He's idealistic about love, though. When it's real, when it's consuming, it's something Finnick believes in deeply, because so many times for him it's been the only thing he has to hold onto when everything else about him is shame and fear.

"Yeah. That's what took me so long, I was trying to work out which house he was in."

"Oh no. How terrible," Annie says, all deadpan and dry. "You were being a decent person." There's something of a truth there - after all, they are Careers - but at the same time, she means the light sarcasm. This is a different type of game.

And yet, she appreciates the silent apology for having worried her by his absence. They are partners, above all else.

"Did you work it out?" More information seeking. Certainly not so she can keep an eye on the man. "And what's... what's she like?"

There's more being asked there then just personality, but Finnick knows that. They share information and she's asking for physical description, potential weapons and martial training, wilderness survival, state of mind.

And, too, it's all useful for working out Cassian. Who does he love?

When he'd been able to step back from the immediacy of Jyn's problem, he'd worried about worrying Annie. Over the course of their relationship, she'd spent a lot of time waiting for him, while he's in the Capitol, while he's out fishing, while he's caught in his own mind and can't leave his house to walk the short distance to hers. He knows how much it worries her, and he's tried to avoid it here, whenever he can, and when he can is most of the time. He tells her where he's going when he goes out, whether he plans to do something afterwards that means he'll take longer than he usually does.

It's not that they expect to be always at each other's sides, but they both know the clear dangers and fear the unclear ones that this place holds.

"Completely against my nature, right?"

He's teasing himself, a little, just like she is, and he's playing to whoever's watching them. It would be completely against the nature of Finnick Odair as he's presented to Panem, a man constantly chasing gratification but moving on before it becomes too dull. This relationship with her defies that; he has to be careful to maintain enough of that face he shows the Capitol not to make it seem like the lie it truly is.

He nods again, shifting in his seat to lean more comfortably against the table.

"That brown and gray one," he says, lifting one hand to wave it in the direction of the house he'd found Cassian in.

It's close, very close, to his and Annie's. "Probably thought the same way we did when we chose here."

The other question requires a little more thought as he runs back over the brief conversation he'd had with Jyn before she'd mentioned Cassian and everything had been redirected towards the hunt for her lover.

"She's very direct. Practical, impatient. Kind of stubborn. At first she didn't believe what I'd told her, when I said I knew Cassian. I think ... she didn't want to hope. But once she believed me, she didn't want anything else except to go find him, and to know whatever I knew about him."

He pauses, and when he speaks again, the tone he'd been using: straightforward, no-nonsense, reporting back to his ally, is softer, more personal.

"She thought he'd died. Maybe he had, back where they're from."

Of course he's that close. The Gamemakers must love this. She shakes the thought, concentrates on Finnick and his words and his tone. That makes it easier to smirk at him back, all fond and teasing.

It's an expression that fades as Finnick keeps talking, replaced by thoughtfulness and an element of compassion. "It would fit, if he... did. As weird as all that sounds. There are others here who claim the same thing, to be dead."

She's still not sure what she thinks of all that. Nor of this situation, although that description of the woman makes her think of herself, a little.

"He was happy to see her?"

"It fits," he agrees.

If he'd died -- if she'd died, because Cassian had said they'd been together before he got here -- then the desolation and utter despair Cassian had shown when he arrived here would, indeed, fit. It's been hard to describe to Annie just what he'd been like when he'd come out of the fountain, how little will he'd had for his own survival. It was ... another thing that had spoken to Finnick's own experience, to his mind and the darkness it sometimes delves into, when nothing but death seems like a good idea.

It's a desolate, lonely thought, and it makes Finnick shift, slightly, towards Annie, reluctant now to have this conversation without being pressed up close against her, feeling her warmth and the sense of acceptance and understanding just being with her can give him.

It's been hard, these weeks since he met Cassian. Hard trying to remember himself in the uneasiness he'd felt because of how close he'd come to accepting Cassian's suggestion. So he reaches for Annie's hand, first, not sure if he'd be welcome to curl up against her, which is all he really wants to do.

"He was," he confirms. "So happy he didn't seem to think it was real."

Annie takes his hand. There are words he is saying, words she should maybe mull over and reply to, but she ignores them. It's been... She hasn't liked the past few weeks, not at all.

This is normal, them touching. Fingers lacing through the other's, skin to skin and their hands curled around each other. It feels right and reassuring, and she's never doubted his feelings for her but she's maybe needed this, too.

"Well," Annie says, softly, "that's his problem now." Not Finnick's, not Annie's, except in so far as Cassian's mental state is something to be watched. Finnick returned the man's lover to him, and then returned to Annie, and that's all she really wants to care about now.

There's a selfishness in that statement, and Finnick's tired of being selfish. It's not that she's wrong. Not here, where their priority is each other and each other's survival, and the selfishness of putting yourself and your allies above anyone else that is how Careers operate. It's how the two of them have operated in the months since they arrived here.

It's tiring. There's only so long Finnick can switch off compassion for. He's good at playing callous, cool, uncaring, but he plays it for the Capitol, and goes home to Annie and the few people who know him, who know better than to say the things that would bring out those lies. It's always hard, being himself with anyone other than Mags, Annie, and Johanna, but he could, before this place. Sometimes, at least.

Here, when they're being watched, he can never be truly himself, though he's closest when he's alone with Annie.

Annie's fingers wrap around his, and he takes it as an invitation to lean towards her, press his shoulder against hers, and tilt his head so it rests against hers.

"I didn't want to worry you, but it was important."

It's said softly, taking advantage of his head being so close to hers to whisper.

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ψ it's all too quiet and i can't trust anything now | closed

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