redshiftlogs | {closed to Ben}

Entry tags:

{closed to Ben}

Who: Annie Cresta, Ben Hargreeves
What: First meeting
When: Mid-July
Where: Anchor | Bottom Levels | Park
Warnings: Anxiety, possible anxiety attack. More TBA as needed

Exploring the arena is important. It's not the first priority for Careers, or even the second, but it's high up on the list. Explore the arena, learn the terrain, see what is available, where the dangers are. Here, without many active threats, Finnick and Annie can take their time. Be thorough. Go over already explored areas to see what has changed. It all takes a while.

Today, the pair are exploring the plaza and park. At least, they were. Now it's Finnick alone, and Annie?

Annie is sitting by the pool, trying to control her breathing.

She's not sure what set her off. Something. Anything. The constant, higher-than-normal stress of suddenly being here, a strange place, yanked without her knowledge. Maybe that. Or maybe just the weight of all the buildings over her, of being underground and not having seen the open sky for weeks, not having seen a clear stretch of water for months. Or maybe just because her mind decided to be a fucking asshole. She didn't want to give up, go back to the room she and Finnick have claimed, so here she is. Sitting. trying to control her breathing.

She's not going to hyperventilate.

She's not going to laugh.

She's not going to go away somewhere only Finnick can call her back from, no, she's not. He can explore and they can remain in view of the other, and she can sit here. She can breathe. She try to detangle her hair with her fingers and she can look at the water.

And she'll be fine.

She will.

She just needs to keep breathing.

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Up close, Annie's older than her size initially makes her appear. Mid-twenties, and she never did take particular care of her skin when outside, on her boats. But her nervousness has always made her seem younger, that wide, frightened rabbit look. Which she is directing straight at Ben's way. She'd noticed him. She had. She'd just been quietly hoping that he'd... She doesn't know.

Go away? He's a stranger. He's tribute-aged, and she knows exactly what tributes can do. But this isn't the arena. He doesn't have the wariness of one, and no one's killed anyone. Yet.

People are being...

Nice.

Sorta.

And he's being quiet and, and, and she.... she can do this. Finnick's around. He'll be watching.

"I. Sure? You can. Sit here."

"If you'd like, I can just be quiet."

One of the advantages to having so many siblings is that Ben had seen up close how different people respond differently to intensely stressful situations. Klaus was comforted by touch, by as much noise and chatter as Ben could provide. Diego preferred silent presence, that gave him the space to find the words as slowly as he needed to. With Luther, suggesting some kind of activity, action, anything so long as it involved moving around, was the way to go.

So he doesn't assume there's only one possible way to help with whatever has got Annie so scared. He just quietly sits himself down and presents her some options.

"If you'd rather talk, we can do that. I'm a pretty good listener."

The one thing he isn't doing is pretending that he'd come here by accident or that it isn't clear she's going through a bit of something at the moment. It would be a lie, and a bad one, and Ben doesn't see any possible benefit to it. No. There isn't anyone around for her to be embarrassed in front of, or so he thinks. Might as well just be direct. Even though his words and suggestions are very pro-active, Ben keeps very still, doesn't sit too close to her, or move at all once he's settled. He had always been good at being still. That was something that pre-dated being a ghost.

"Or if something happened, and you maybe need a little help, I could try to do that, too. I'm Ben Hargreeves, by the way."

She doesn't answer. Not right away. She breathes, slow and controlled. She tries not to twist the hem of her grey jacket. Everything about her screams that she's trying to keep a panic attack at bay, that she's trying to keep still enough to think. She doesn't keep her eyes on him, but when she glances at him, she concentrates on hands, on feet, on limbs that might move. Those are more dangerous than faces.

Then,

"Annie Cresta."

Another moment, a beat too long.

"Most folks don't..." Her voice trails off as she rethinks what she wanted to say. Instead, she shakes her head a little, glances up at his face again. He's older than she first thought, but she just files that away. "Do you wanna talk?"

"Annie's a nice name."

Ben doesn't seem at all perturbed by her not making eye contact, or by her apparent fear of him. He's a random stranger and she's right to be wary. He knows he intends her no harm, so he doesn't mind her not being so sure yet. As for that broken-off statement he can only guess what the end of it would have been. Most folks who offer help don't mean well? Most people don't talk to her? Who knows. She discarded it, and Ben lets her.

Her question, he thinks ... maybe that's a prompt, that she doesn't want someone silent, or a patient listener, but someone to talk at her for a little while. He is fine with that, too.

"Sure. I love it down here. I think this is one of my favorite places in the whole - I don't know, would you call this a city? I like how wild it is. Somebody is probably going to trim all this at some point and it'll look classier but I kind of think it's cool like this. The smell's nice. And the water is a good addition, too."

And, still moving slowly so as not to startle her, Ben dips his hand down into the pool, moving it idly through the water, just feeling the weight of it, the way if moves over his hand. Reminding her of concrete, sensory sensations she can focus on. But... it's true, what he's saying. He does like it here. And all those sensory things he's reminding her of are things he still hasn't quite learned to take for granted yet. It stays strange, smelling and tasting and feeling things after fourteen years of, well, not.

No reaction at her name. Not the combination of Annie and Cresta, no, just a compliment that sounded nice enough. No hidden malice. Okay. Okay. That's okay. It actually is okay, even if she's still confused by it. And he is, apparently, being nice. She's not used to strangers not pressing her about things, trying to make her explain as if that'd made it all better.

He talks, and for a moment, there's a flicker of a smile. Small, but grateful. The wariness isn't going away, but she's...

She's willing to stay here, and listen. For now.

Her eyes fall to follow his hand, although not consistently. She watches the rest of him, too, as if his hand and the water could be a trick. A distraction from an attack.

"Water's not stagnant," she says, as if it follows. "Haven't worked out where the filter is. But. You're right. It's. It's nice."

Ben is encouraged by that small ghost of a smile, no matter how fleeting it was. There had been nights, awful nights, when he had desperately just tried to get Klaus to laugh, even a little, to relieve the pressure of how awful everything was. To try to keep him going for one more day. So he knows this game, or a variation on it.

"See, I never would've thought to even look for a filter. Is it good to know where it is? I mean - does it help with anything, or is it just interesting?"

He thinks the question might be a safe one to ask; unless this water (and that would be a shitty coincidence) is the source of her anxiety, it's a topic he can ask about that is concrete, related to her own knowledge, and isn't personal. He's just a guy wanting to learn stuff. And the truth is, Ben's interested. It's not just phony.

"It's kind of a long and boring story why, but for years before I showed up here, I couldn't feel stuff. Like physically. And I totally forgot how nice water feels. I know I must sound high or something, but honestly I could just sit here and do this all day."

There's a giggle. Annie knows what it is in response to, that, I know I must sound high, but there's a delay enough it could be unclear where her amusement is directed at. Still, there's another quick expression, one that clearly says that Ben hasn't even begun to reach the depths (or the heights?) of the drug-induced shenanigans she's seen. Stuff like that happens when you live in a victors' village.

She opens her mouth to say that she understands, that he doesn't sound crazy or high for wanting to just sit here, by the water, paying attention to how it all feels. Particularly if he couldn't feel anything-

But she can't. It's too close to the white, white cells.

So Annie falls silent for a minute or so, trying to loop herself back to somewhere safer. She can tell that he's trying, and fuck it, but sometimes she gets so lonely. So she wrestles herself to try and open her mouth and say something.

"It's. Stagnant water isn't good. There's plants here, so there'll be insects and algae. They can like stagnant, but like it too much. So it gets unhealthy."

Any of her district teachers would be beyond frustrated at her right now, she knows. She must sound inane and incoherent. But she's trying. Words are hard.

"Filters... They help. Filter the water, and keep it moving? It could be our drinking water. There's plants that naturally filter water, but I'd. Um. There should be something around here, do it all properly."

Ben isn't sure what provoked that giggle, but hey, it's a giggle! And it didn't sound like a hysterical or ironic one, either, so he's counting that as another win. Even if she's laughing at him, he's fine with that. Ben is willing to make himself a bit ridiculous if it will help her feel better. Dignity is so overrated.

Then she's quiet for a while, and Ben waits, lets her find a way to an answer in her own time. And it does sound like something she knows a bit about, from some kind of environmental perspective. Which, Ben can't help thinking, sounds like a useful skillset for a place like this.

"Gotcha. It's not a total gross swamp, so it must be filtered somewhere in there. Makes sense to me."

Her wording itself might not be the most coherent, but her explanation gets the point across. Ben thinks keeping her talking about this is helping, so he risks a slightly more personal question.

"Are you a biologist or... engineer, maybe, who deals with water, or are you just smart?"

She's not entirely sure what he is doing any more. It's been so long since anyone not Finnick, not Mags, have tried to talk to her in this state, that her normally sharp, analytic mind is still frazzled. But he's not mocking her. He's not laughing at her.

"Oh, no," she says, then blinks as she mentally goes back over what he just said, again. Well. Hopefully he doesn't think that she just said she was stupid. Moving on.

"Um, I'm from District Four? We... We fish." People here don't seem to know Panem. She's picked that up already. It's weird and strange and she doesn't understand, but okay. She can roll with it. "And it's not just boats and nets and trawling, yeah? It's, it's also, we also learned about tanks and hatcheries and correcting chemical levels in water. At school, anyway."

He doesn't know what a district might be, in her world, but the fishing at least makes sense, gives a context to her familiarity with the topic of discussion. It is easier to follow her speech now, too; he isn't sure if it's a case of gradually calming down and communicating better, or if talking about the place she's from had done the trick. Either way, he listens with genuine interest.

"That sounds cool, actually."

His own education had been a complete patchwork of whatever things Reginald had decided were necessary and useful for him and his siblings to know. His definition of usefulness, however, leaves something to be desired. He hadn't taught them how to make things, how to maintain systems, how to keep people fed and water clean and fish alive. He'd been much more focused on teaching them a hundred different ways to disarm or maim or kill.

(And, foolishly, Ben just assumes that Annie would not have been taught any of those things, that the kind of violence he'd been raised to do would shock and dismay her.)

"I didn't go to school, I've always kind of been jealous of people who got to."

It's the first thing he's said since he wandered over that wasn't entirely calculated based on whether it might make her feel better. It's just conversational; something he'd wanted to say, for him.

"So, then: what's the best kind of fish?"

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{closed to Ben}

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