Finnick Odair | Victor of the 65th Hunger Games (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fishermansweater) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ten_fwd2015-03-19 01:56 am
fishermansweater) wrote in ten_fwd2015-03-19 01:56 am
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He hasn't, it's true, had a lot of energy on a lot of the days he's been here.
Finnick tends to waver between the extremes: some days, he's too listless to leave his house unless Annie drags him, and some days he has the sort of restless energy that drives him to run and run along the breach and then swim for hours, to take a trident and drill himself over and over like he used to when he was in training.
Ever since the Quarter Quell was announced, he and Annie have been training together harder than ever, though neither of them ever really stopped training, not even after they'd won. Not until they wound up here; so much of his time here, Finnick's been too caught up in Annie to want to even be out of her sight.
(He'll never forget what it felt like to think she was dead.)
Now, though, he is restless, and his explorations of the ship have brought him as far as the gymnasium, so he's started to make regular visits there. It helps to keep his mind clear and his body focused. Panem or not, this place is still somewhere he needs to be alert. He can't fall into that haze again. Not with Annie and Katniss here to protect. Not with Prim and Peeta, Peeta for whom he'd risked his life over and over in the arena.
So, dressed in an athletic shirt that hugs his upper body and leaves his finely sculpted arms bare and a pair of comfortably loose pants, he heads for the gym and into the martial arts area. He starts at a punching bag, and it begins as simple boxing. His form's good; boxing is taught around Panem, even in those districts that don't train their tributes. But as he warms to the fighting, it becomes less simple, less orthodox, less like a practised art than a survival skill. He's not just punching now; he's kicking, high and low, striking with different blows, and if there's a pattern to the drill, it's not easily recognizable.
What is recognizable, however, is how many of the blows he lands would incapacitate or kill a human opponent, if delivered with the right speed and power.
That becomes even more obvious when he moves on from the kickboxing to collect a staff and start running through moves on one of the mats, moves that sometimes look like he's practicing for a sword, and sometimes for a spear. It's with the staff in his hands that he looks truly dangerous, moving with a natural grace that's deceptively easy to watch.
Finnick learned to fight to kill.
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(If she kills someone, even if it's 'killing' and a staged part of the show, it's with a gun. Swords might be a weapon, but mostly they are a symbol.
Talking is, of course, the very best weapon.)
Still she stops, practice cutlass in hand, and watches while Finnick destroys wave after ghostly wave of... attackers? Opposition at the very least.
The movement is actually prettier than he is.
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He's never, in truth, minded honest admiration. Not the sort that comes when someone's eyes are drawn to him by his beauty, by the way he moves, the low, decadent purr he puts in his voice for the Capitol or the piercing quality of his eyes. Never minded feeling the looks run up and down, seeing the smile, or looking across and seeing someone entranced with him, asking themselves is that Finnick Odair?
He's drawn looks all his life. Mostly, he'd once enjoyed the attention. It was only after his victory that he noticed the hungry edge to some of them. Those are the looks he minds: the ones that say I want you, you should be mine.
That's not how the girl's looking at him. When he straightens up from another round of the same sort of drill they used to put him through at the Academy with a staff or a spear in his hand, he sees her, holding a practice sword in her hand, and watching him.
Finnick straightens, flashing the girl a grin. She's young, maybe around the age of the older tributes in the Games.
"Hi there."
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Marika gives her head a little shake to dismiss the last of the fallen foes that don't actually exist. A good imagination is burden some times.
This is probably the first time she's glad there isn't anyone form the school yacht club around. He might get them to stop mooning over her helmsman.
Marika is, of course, married to her ship. Metaphorically.
"More hand-to-hand training happening on this ship than I expected at first," she says, "Were you looking to practice alone?"
latest of the late, omg sorry
He hasn't spent much time in here to see if anyone else had been doing hand-to-hand training, but if he had, he'd have paid close attention, because he learned a long time ago how to pick apart an enemy's -- or even an ally's -- fighting style for its weaknesses. After all, it's all the same, in the arena. In the end.
"Not necessarily," he says, flicking his wrist so the staff twists under a ripple of his fingers.
"You're welcome to join me."
Pft, this delay is nothing
"I know when I'm out of my class," she says, "And I don't know what kind of a challenge I'd be. Everything I've learned is about either opening up enough distance to run or shoot or to put on a show."
Which also ends with someone being shot. Blanks and blood packs are wonderfully dramatic. Also, the faces on the crew when they see the 'dead' guest walking around unconcerned still showing a softball sized wound from a holdout pistol? Hilarious.
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That earns an interested cock of his head, what had been a slyly teasing smile turning into a slightly keener interest. The Careers learn to fight for a show, too, but a show so carefully orchestrated that it looks like it's just ability, not training. Not learning how to fight to impress the sponsors watching on television. To win the public over to your side. To make them think victor instead of tribute.
Opening distance to run or shoot is a tactic he's familiar with, too: if you don't think you can handle someone at close distance, or if that's not your skill, you do that. Regroup. Come back to them later.
This sounds more like getting away, though. Avoiding the fight. And that makes him curious.
It shows, a little, in the cock of his head and the way he sets the staff aside, rolling back his shoulders to test the tension in the muscles there.
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"Part of what I do is entertain," says Marika, "I'll act like I'm fighting for part of that, and I'll fight for real if I have to, but they aren't the same."
She gestures with the hand that isn't holding the practice sword.
"And neither are the same as what you've doing."
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If there's a hint of bitterness behind the easy way the words slip out, perhaps that's only natural. He was a Career, twice a tribute, a victor, a mentor: he knows just how entertaining the Capitol finds fighting. And in the Games, it's not an act. In the Games, it's do or die, and 23 of them die for every year's victor.
Finnick's eyelids droop for a moment, and there's something almost coquettish in the way he blinks a couple of times before he gives her an easy smile.
"And what am I doing?" he asks, that same light curiosity still there as he starts teasing tension out of one of his arms in a deep stretch.
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"If you're fighting a regular human? Putting them down," she says with her free hand making aborted movements to vulnerable points - eyes, throat, abdomen, "Killing them depending."
Depending what they're wearing for protection, depending how they block or dodge, depending it Finnick has a staff or a trident or a spear or just a stick from a tree.
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"You know what you're looking at." His lips twitch into an amused half-smile. "For someone who fights for show."
It's something of an admission that she'd read the movements right.
He wouldn't be surprised if, for all she says about fighting being for entertainment and only for real as a last resort, she had some talent with that practice blade she's holding.
(He can use one of those, too, he's just never had the skill he did with a trident, when he'd grown up using one.)
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If he wants to see talent, he should see what she can do with a small craft - air or space, either works. She can fight, but flying is where she shines. Or just a space where the gravity is turned off. It takes a special sort of talent and spacial awareness to avoid flashing everyone while wearing a miniskirt in microgravity.
"I couldn't help but see them from where you would hit. Where you took a longer step over one you'd just hit to reach the last one, or the shorter one that kept going to your right. They were there for anyone who was looking."
Marika wasn't raised inside the culture of pirates, but she was raised to be one anyway. Seeing these sorts of things was learned so long ago she doesn't remember not being able to.
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"I fight for show, too," he says. "But I fight to kill as well. They go together, where I'm from."
Her insight, though, does little to abate his curiosity. "I haven't met many people here your age who know much about fighting."
That, too, is different from Panem, or at least from District Four, a Career district where a small group of teenagers train to kill for the glory of the fishing district.
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Because fighting to kill as a show, as entertainment, makes that obvious.
"To be honest, the people here that got picked up by Q, one of the parts that sticks out the most is how many of them don't know about space and other planets. Not having something so basic is just, it's weird."
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Given the horror in the eyes of the few people he's told about the Games, the revulsion Doctor Bashir had shown, Natasha's anger: yes. Most people here are from somewhere less violent than Panem or, if not less violent, then somewhere the violence takes a less horrific form than the annual Games. But that's not all it is: there's the repression, the constant threat of the Peacekeepers, that you could be gunned down if you and your crew don't have the proper approvals before you leave port. The threat of being made an Avox if you speak traitorous words, or of being lined up and shot in front of the Justice Building for taking part in a failed revolt.
When that's all you've known, though, it's hard to judge it.
Finnick's gaze has dropped, for a moment, a little duck of his head, and when he looks back up, he shrugs.
"We were never taught any more about space than we needed to navigate. By sea, not in space. If our world ever had any of this technology, it was lost, long ago."
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"We still learn that too, but the constellations change when you get to a different world. I could show you a couple I know later, if you're interested. The stars are the same, at least, even if the stories are different."
Marika might not have Ai Hoshimiya's memory and obsession with local constellations but she knows the one for Sea of the Morningstar at least.
"My name's Marika Kato. I'm from Sea of the Morningstar, but they call the planet Tau Ceti III here."
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He'd been good at navigating by the stars, even if he hadn't delved further into astronomy, like Annie had. He knows the skies and their patterns, and how they move, because out at sea overnight, or watching traps on the beach, those are important things to know, and he'd been raised as a fisherman before a Career.
"Finnick Odair. I'm from Panem. Earth," he corrects, after a moment. "Or, a version of it."