Natasha Romanoff (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fallaces_sunt) wrote2015-02-12 02:29 pm
fallaces_sunt) wrote2015-02-12 02:29 pm
Entry tags:
PL: Finnick Odair
Spike Velikan had planned things carefully, with all the cunningness contained within him. He'd watched his new Person and her Roommate, observed their movements, and plotted his escape. Seizing his chance, he'd grabbed his favourite squeaky toy and made a DARING ESCAPE!!!!
Which is why there is currently a small dog running around the hallways on Deck 7. A small dog boasting long golden hair, scales down his spine, a long hairless tail (currently wagging in excitement), a pair of red-and-white stripped antennae and an elegant horn. And, most important of all, a purple dinosaur in his mouth, which currently squeaks in time to his footfalls.
Spike Velikan thinks this is the best idea ever.
Natasha, meanwhile, is also out in the hallways, calling for him. She is far less impressed with her dog's cleverness than he is.
Which is why there is currently a small dog running around the hallways on Deck 7. A small dog boasting long golden hair, scales down his spine, a long hairless tail (currently wagging in excitement), a pair of red-and-white stripped antennae and an elegant horn. And, most important of all, a purple dinosaur in his mouth, which currently squeaks in time to his footfalls.
Spike Velikan thinks this is the best idea ever.
Natasha, meanwhile, is also out in the hallways, calling for him. She is far less impressed with her dog's cleverness than he is.
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Look at the scientists who had designed her augmentations.
Not that any of this really shows on her face: his eyes might be startlingly, shockingly clear, but hers are opaque.
Then again, her very control is a tell all of its own.
"Velikan, if you look on the computer, you can read up on his species. His planet, even."
The puppy drops his toy and tries to throw himself after it, but she tightens her grip so instead Velikan is left with his head dangling over her hand, staring at the toy on the carpet.
"Weapons against....who?"
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"What is his species?"
His face is as coolly controlled as Natasha's, in its own way, though his version of cool still has something of the coyly flirtatious in it, because even when he's not on display for the Capitol, that's still a tool he can use, and one of his best. He distracts people. He rattles them.
Right now, he's not even doing it on purpose, but that doesn't stop the fact that when his gaze drops from Natasha back to the dog, there's a little more lowering of the lids than is needed, and he looks at the dog through his lashes for just a moment before his eyes open fully.
"At first, against the rebels during the Dark Days. They created birds that could spy and wasps that could make people hallucinate and all sorts of other mutts. Now..."
He shrugs. "Now they use them on the tributes in the Hunger Games. They've gotten really good at mutts."
The thought of the jabberjays' screams still makes his expression falter, just a little.
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He's a gorgeous man, is Finnick Odair, although she wants to say 'boy'. It's not so much how old he looks, or even the way he's starting to flirt as the startlement fades, but how old he makes her feel.
His reactions are far, far too familiar to someone who was born in 1928, in a city on the banks of the Volga.
"The Hunger Games," Natasha repeats, slowly.
Tributes.
Tributes in games with animals to toy with them.
Tributes when the boy was staring at her foolish, small dog like Velikan was an actual, viable threat, when he sounds weary and matter-of-fact.
But the speculation, Natasha keeps to herself. Old habits, she wants to see what he'll say first.
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He's not, to be true, entirely familiar with dogs, though there had been some, of course, nosing around the docks back in Fishery 8 when he was a kid, and if they'd seen someone with something they wanted that they were kept from, they acted just like the little dog in Natasha's arms, necks stretched out, little whimpering whines coming from their throats.
It's staring at the thing it had dropped, the little toy, like a baby that's dropped something and is waiting for its parent to pick it up.
Finnick looks up from the dog back to Natasha.
"The Hunger Games," he says, echoing his own words and her repetition.
Of course she'd be ignorant of them. She showed a flicker of curiosity at the name of District Four, she asked which Capitol he meant, she says she's from a country that in his world, he can only assume is gone and uninhabitable.
"It's an annual spectacle in which twenty four children from the districts go to the Capitol as tributes to fight to the death in a specially designed arena. Mutts tend to feature."
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Children.
She's seen awful things, has Nataliya Alianovna Romanova. Survived awful things, done her own share of supporting a cruel, dysfunctional regime, but she's seen more. She's seen, too, a number of things that seem milder in compariason. Training, training of children, of little girls, into spies and killers. Underground fights, too: dogs, people. The former to the death, the latter...
Well. Weren't the gladiatorial games the Romans adored popular for a reason?
(And didn't some of those little girls kill each other?
Yes.)
His phrasing implies, heavily, that he's seen these games - she'd lay odds on him having personal contact with these mutts, but at the very least, he's most likely seen them. That leads to some other implications of its own, although she doesn't have enough clues yet to work out the details. But it's not that which is tripping her.
She's not shocked.
But spectacle implies entertainment, and Natasha is, coldly and abruptly, furious.
"I see," she manages. Her voice is even, cool even: her expression, in contrast, might still be controlled, but anger is leading a distinct tension to her jaw, to the set of her mouth, to her eyes.
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Even if they say nothing, their fury is there. People who'd known children who'd died in the Games. People at the tributes' funerals he's attended, who knew the children who'd died, who saw him as an agent of the Games because he'd been their dead child's mentor and he'd failed.
"It's a reminder from the Capitol to the districts of the cost of rebellion."
If they can take your children and do that to them, you mean nothing. You are powerless. Hopeless. Broken. That's the message, as much as the hope the victors embody.
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The smile deepens to one side.
"Sorry. Won't ask you to agree."
Either he believes, he doesn't, or he's trying to believe when he can't anymore: any of those states can be dangerous ones, and expecting him to agree to righteous anger from an outsider is selfish.
"You from the same world as that dark-haired girl with the bow?"
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He knows the line. And it's a very good weapon of fear.
Natasha's voice is heated, though her expression has a smile, a hard one, not unlike the one he sometimes wears himself.
He won't say anything to her about agreeing or not agreeing with her, but she at least gives him that much. He takes the chance she gives him to bend down and pick up the thing the dog is whining after. Its head follows him, its whimpering gets higher pitched.
Finnick holds the thing for a long couple of moments after he straightens up, then offers it, gingerly, to the little creature.
His expression is perfectly controlled.
"Katniss." He only knows one person here matching that description. "Yeah. We were in the Games together."
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Reverently.
For a moment, Natasha's smile softens. Then it fades away.
"She mentioned games when she arrived. A lot of things make sense now." So many things. "You mentioned District Four...what's your country called?"
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There's a loud squeaking sound.
Maybe it really is just a dog. An alien dog, not a mutt, just like those people with the strange color and texture to their skin are, apparently, not Capitol-enhanced, but people from other worlds.
"Panem."
He still remembers, even after the fog had lifted, somewhat, from his mind, the conversation he'd had with the girl who gave him the ribbon. About Panem. About what that means.
"What sort of things?" he asks, something slow and suggestive in the corner of his smile.
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Then she thinks of a boy she'd walked out with in Moscow during her first year of university. Andrei. Classics major. He'd think it was funny.
(They hadn't walked out for very long.)
Maybe North America was taken over by Classics majors.
Then her expression settles to just being amused. "Oh, you know. Things like having to talk her down from shooting everyone as soon as she arrived." Her tone is conversational, chatty, with just the faintest burr of sarcasm to highlight the rest. If he picks it up.
But he's recovering well from being scared, and if he's come from the kind of country she thinks she has, and can still pull on a subtle flirt as he breathes while surviving this long, then she thinks he will.
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He'd had to be talked down when he arrived here himself. Katniss hadn't been pulled here straight from the arena like Finnick, but she'd survived two Hunger Games and the revolution, and Finnick knows victors.
He still doesn't know just what the Quarter Quell has done to him, but he knows his constant edginess, his wariness, his sharply honed reactions are all more sensitive than they were. It had taken a lot for Doctor Bashir to persuade him to stand down enough to lower his weapon.
"Victors of the Hunger Games tend not to react well to sudden changes."
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"No, you wouldn't. People who survived violence, and violence like that...No. We don't tend to react well to situations like being dropped here."
Her use of 'we' is deliberate, as is the clarification about survivors.
The Games, no matter how horrible, no matter how much they clearly have written themselves into the brains of Finnick and Katniss, aren't the only thing that makes people act like they do.
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It was lucky for Doctor Bashir that Finnick, while he has sharp, practiced reflexes, also knows how to assess a threat in an instant, and act on it, and Doctor Bashir had been assessed as not an immediate threat to his life.
Still, there's no abashment in Finnick's words: Natasha has given away something about herself, and that honestly, at least, deserves the frankness of his reply.
"I only know victors," he says, shoving his hands into his pockets. "But I do know victors. None of us would have taken being here well."
Even aside from the constant fear of the Capitol and their spies, that shock would unsettle any of them with the wits left to be unsettled.
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If more victors, from your world, arrived. Would you know them? Be able to talk them down?"
She was able to talk down Katniss, at least. But Katniss and Finnick have too many similarities in the jumpy and potential for violence. If more arrive...
Well.
Natasha does take trying to protect civilians seriously.
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Not all victors, but almost all. And they'd been reaped, all of them who are here: Finnick, Annie, Katniss, Peeta, Prim, Haymitch. Finnick, Katniss, and Peeta had been reaped once and volunteered once. Annie and Haymitch had been reaped twice. Prim, the once. All three of them saved, once, by someone volunteering for them.
In truth, he's already done precisely what she's asking about, when Annie arrived. He'd soothed her, talked to her, assured her that it was going to be all right, though Annie hadn't been about to offer violence.
She had been frightened and confused and high on morphling, though.
"I'd know them," he says. "I've known the rest of them for years." Except Katniss and Peeta, but they're already here.
"Whether I'd be able to talk them down or not..." He shrugs, and for an excuse not to look at her a moment, looks down at the dog in her arms, apparently entirely contented now it has the toy back.
"Most of them don't like me enough to trust my word."
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"Ah," Natasha says in the tones of one who is really saying damn. "Well, worth a shot. I think we'd all prefer people not to get hurt just because someone's having a freak-out."
She sighs then.
"Well. I should be getting back to my place before Velikan falls asleep on me."
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He says it quietly, but he's sincere and that's there, in his voice, for someone who's listening. He knows victors. They've been most of the people he's known and socialized with for years. He knows how dangerous they are when they're frightened or threatened. They didn't all survive by killing, but most of them did, and even those who didn't ... they're still uneasy.
"That includes the victors."
Whatever people might think of them, there aren't many victors who won because they enjoy killing. Not even Finnick, though he'll kill when it's needed, kill for his own protection.
He nods, giving her a slyly teasing smile.
"I guess having to wake him up to put him to bed would be counterproductive."
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Natasha's expression turns into a crooked little smirk. "Just a little," she says. "So, I'll be seeing you around, Finnick."
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They don't hear the screams in the night the way he and Annie do.
And here, in this situation, they'd see the violence without thinking of the reason for the snap reactions.
Natasha, he thinks, gets it. So he nods, and he looks at the dog again, letting his smile grow a little in response to Natasha's.
"Kind of hard to avoid someone in a place like this," he points out easily.
Avoiding each other isn't the point, and if he sees Natasha again, he won't avoid her. Or her dog.
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She inclines her head in farewell, and walks back down the hallway the way she came. Her back is to him - it has to be - but she doesn't walk away faster. Call it a pointed act of social trust.
Because, yes.
She gets it.