Fic: Ritual (The Hunger Games)
Dec. 9th, 2013 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Title: Ritual
Characters: Brutus, Beetee (Gen)
Rating: G
Warnings: OC, MotherHen!Brutus, and other indulgences
Summary: District Three sits much further south than Two, so on the occasion of the first snowfall after the Villages are merged, Brutus stops by to make sure all is well.
A/N: I write desperately slowly.
myfieldnotes has been encouraging me to try timed exercises, to try to up my output speed. This is my attempt at a 120 minute ficlet. It, er, actually wound up being a 210 minute ficlet, but I was still moving at a noticeably faster clip than normal and decided to just finish the thought and see where it ended up. The ficlet is set in the chemistry 'verse, and as such cribs extensively from the work of
lorataprose, particularly her story of Brutus's childhood and Games, the exquisite To Love a Beast. No actions, thoughts, or other elements of this story are binding on
lorataprose's 'verse. This wee ficlet is brought to you by
lorataprose, Swiss Miss cocoa, Sarah McLachlan's cover of Song for a Winter's Night, and the first snowfall of the season, which enchanted my afternoon.
Brutus has several concerns about the possible effect of the first snowfall on the Threes, but he’d not gone so far as to imagine he’d find one of them on their porch, trying to catch her death. But there’s Eibhlin—in a coat and jeans, at least—bent over some piece of equipment, wearing the look of intense concentration Brutus knows is almost impenetrable. He knocks his booted feet hard against the edge of the wooden stairs before asking, loudly, “What are you doing on the porch?”
Eibhlin startles and pulls back from her equipment, but doesn’t turn around. She appears to ponder for a moment before answering, “Beetee won’t turn the heat off and open the windows.”
Ask a silly question.
“Yeah, he’s cruel that way.” Brutus mounts the stairs, but before he can knock on the door, Eibhlin—who is still bent over her equipment—anticipates him.
“It’s open. Beetee’s in the front room.”
Brutus knocks anyway (because the idea of opening other people’s closed doors without notice is never going to seem right to him) and waits for Beetee to ask him in. Brutus enters to find Three’s other Victor ensconced on his couch, surrounded by a portable computer, two datapads, and stacks of (apparently sorted) loose papers. Beetee finishes marking a paper and wedges a pencil behind his ear before lifting his eyes and greeting Brutus.
“Is there something we can do for you?” Beetee offers.
“Well, actually--wait,” Brutus crosses the room and pulls a crochet blanket off the back of the couch, then walks swiftly back to the porch. He calls Eibhlin’s name and makes sure she’s alert to his presence before moving to drape the crochet over her shoulders. Brutus turns back to the door, then pauses, yanks the woolly hat off his head and pulls it down over Eihblin’s, making sure to cover her ears. She turns back to him with a puzzled look.
“You’re killing me, kid. Do you own any gloves?” Eibhlin continues to stare at Brutus as though he’s speaking some foreign language. He shakes his head and goes back inside.
Brutus motions with his thumb toward the porch as he takes his gloves off. “What is she doing?”
Beetee puts down a stack of papers and pushes his glasses back up his nose. “Eibhlin is interested in the morphology of snow crystals. She’s examining growth dynamics and pattern formation.”
Brutus translates Three to English. “She’s looking at the snowflakes?”
Beetee smiles. “Yes. It almost never snows in Three, and certainly never accumulates. With the microscope, she can see the facets and branching. It’s… quite pretty.
“She saw snow on her Tour, of course,” Beetee continues, his expression flattening, “but we had other things on our minds.”
“Speaking of the weather,” Brutus interjects, sensing an interruption would be entirely welcome, “I’d like to check the boiler and furnace. It feels like everything’s working right, but better safe than sorry. I don’t know if you’ve worked with heating oil before...”
Beetee crosses to bench near the front door and pulls his shoes on. “The systems at home were natural gas, and they were maintained by an outside engineer, so I’d appreciate if you would show me everything I need to know.”
Brutus leads the way to the back of what he can’t help but still think of as his mentor’s house, and flicks the light on before descending the stairs to the basement. “This system is older and needs a yearly oiling, which is ideally done before you switch it on for the first time each fall. Also, you’ll need to clean the blower and check the belts before that first use, and clean the blower again mid-season. I’m sure there are some extra filters here, which should be replaced every two months.”
Brutus locates the filters and turns off the power to the unit before walking Beetee through the maintenance routines.
“You’re quite proficient,” Beetee compliments as Brutus finishes and leads them back upstairs. “Did your teachers ever note your sense of mechanics?”
“No, it never came up.” There were technical courses available, even in the poorer, more rural part of Two Brutus grew up in, but by the time he was eligible for any kind of training that would have kept him out of the quarries, Brutus was already in Residential. “That’s all my father. As soon as I could be trusted to hold the tools, he’d let me help him get the heater ready for the winter. We’d always run the maintenance again on the day of the first snowfall, just in case. Nothin’ worse than being snowed in and having no heat.”
Brutus and Beetee enter the front room to find Eibhlin on the couch, feet tucked beneath her and crochet blanket wrapped all around her body, only her eyes (obscured by fogged-up glasses) and Brutus’s wooly hat protruding. They stare at each other for a moment before she finally offers “It’s cold outside,” as if that’s news to anyone.
Beetee shrugs at Brutus before sitting the bench near the front door to store his shoes again.
Oh, for Sn—goodness’ sake.
Like the other houses in the Village, Odin’s house has a large slate fireplace. There’s a small amount of wood and tinder stacked next to it, probably the same wood that’s been there since before the Threes moved in, and a metal box of matches on the mantle. Brutus takes in Eibhlin’s shivering, heroically refrains from rolling his eyes, and moves the glass safety doors to begin building a fire. “Have you used this yet?”
“No,” Beetee answers, voice filtering back from the kitchen, “I don’t know much about fireplaces, other than if you don’t operate them correctly you can set the house on fire or fill it with carbon monoxide. There wasn’t a manual, so…”
So naturally using common sense and asking someone for help didn’t occur to you. Brutus layers the tinder and kindling, then arranges a couple of thin split logs on top of it and strikes a match. Once the fire catches, he grabs a chair from the dining room and arranges it near the side of the fireplace.
Brutus instructs Eibhlin to take the chair, but she’s moved from the couch to the front window and, once again, is transfixed by the falling snow.
“Eibhlin?” Brutus moves behind her and announces himself one more time before taking her shoulders and steering her to the chair next to the fireplace. Eibhlin sits, but scoots around so she can look out the side window.
Brutus kneels once more before the fireplace and adjusts the logs with the poker to feed more air into the fire. He gets up to find Beetee and make his excuses when—
“Are there any District Two customs associated with snowfall, or the beginning of winter?” Eibhlin asks, still staring out the window.
Caught completely off guard by the break in the silence, Brutus startles. “What, kid?”
Eibhlin leans forward to breathe on the window, then runs her finger through the resulting condensation. “Recurring natural phenomena are a frequent focus of cultural rituals. Are there any rituals for this time period in District Two? I’ve tried to find some anthropological texts, but the library at the Justice Building is wholly inadequate.”
“Eibhlin,” Beetee scolds as he enters the room holding a tray with three cups and a plate of cookies, “Brutus is our friend, not our ethnographer.”
“I used a friendly voice,” Eibhlin counters and continues staring at the falling snow, unperturbed.
Beetee makes an apologetic face at Brutus and nods his head toward the coffee table. Brutus moves the stacks of paper and computer equipment so Beetee can put the tray down. Beetee puts a mug in Eibhlin’s hands, sits and waves toward the other side of the couch, indicating Brutus should take a seat.
“Well, we have the harvest festival, like everyone else, but that’s not for another month. I don’t…” If Brutus hadn’t just had cause to be thinking of his parents, he doubts it would have occurred to him at all, but the fire crackling and the mugs wafting the smell of steamed milk and chocolate trigger sense memories, and he can’t help pausing over it, just for a moment.
Unfortunately, that’s all the time Beetee needs to figure out something’s up; the man may be deficient in basic survival skills, but he’s not otherwise lacking in perception. He peers over his glasses and makes eye contact as he blows on the steaming liquid, then looks away, giving Brutus the choice to share or not.
Brutus wraps his hand around his mug and tries to find a place for his eyes that doesn’t involve Beetee or Eibhlin, and settles on the fire. “There aren’t any public holidays, or anything, but… when I was young, I was always excited to see the first snow. Pretty sure my parents weren’t as thrilled, because the weather could make work in the quarries more dangerous, even shut them down for a few days, which would stretch the budget just when we needed to buy fuel, but still… The way the snow covered everything, turning the familiar into something new, was like magic. On the day of the first snow, my mother would steam some milk, find a bit of cake, and we’d camp in front of the window and watch.
“She told me…” Brutus adjusts his grip on the mug and sees beyond the flickering flames, to the little house he scarcely remembers, and tries to reconstruct it in his mind along with the memory. “When we saw the first flakes, she’d tell me that it was magic, and I should make a wish.”
Brutus continues to stare into the fire, letting the confusion of contradictory emotions that accompany the memory of the woman he’s barely let himself think of since he last saw her in the waiting room at the Justice Building shortly before he left for his Games wash through and over him. He doesn’t know how much time has passed when Beetee finally places his mug back on the tray, and rises from his seat to stand behind Eibhlin, resting his hands on her shoulders.
“Anyway, I’m not sure how widespread that belief is, but, I’m pretty sure there are a lot of kids in District Two who were raised to make a wish on the first snowfall,” Brutus turns the mug in his hands, not wanting to taste anything as sweet as cocoa at this moment, but not wanting to let go of the warmth of it, either.
Eibhlin turns suddenly, jolting Beetee from where he’s leaning on her. “Is it too late?”
“Too late for what,” Brutus asks, confused.
“It’s been snowing for hours. Is it too late to make a wish?” Eibhlin looks seriously concerned.
Brutus gives the idea due consideration; his mother never mentioned any time limit, but he was always so alert to the flurries, making his wish before almost before the first flake hit the ground. He’s not sure what the rules are. Brutus glances out at the window at the world, already so different from the one he was raised in, much less certain, but with many more possibilities as well.
“No. No, I don’t think it’s too late.”
Beetee squeezes Eibhlin’s shoulders before pulling Brutus’s knit cap off her head. Eibhlin tilts her head back with the movement, and Beetee leans down to deposit a kiss on her forehead. He strokes a hand through her hair before the settle themselves facing the window again.
Brutus places his mug on the tray, stretches his legs out, settles more comfortably into the couch, and turns toward the window, to watch the snow transform the world again.
Characters: Brutus, Beetee (Gen)
Rating: G
Warnings: OC, MotherHen!Brutus, and other indulgences
Summary: District Three sits much further south than Two, so on the occasion of the first snowfall after the Villages are merged, Brutus stops by to make sure all is well.
A/N: I write desperately slowly.
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Brutus has several concerns about the possible effect of the first snowfall on the Threes, but he’d not gone so far as to imagine he’d find one of them on their porch, trying to catch her death. But there’s Eibhlin—in a coat and jeans, at least—bent over some piece of equipment, wearing the look of intense concentration Brutus knows is almost impenetrable. He knocks his booted feet hard against the edge of the wooden stairs before asking, loudly, “What are you doing on the porch?”
Eibhlin startles and pulls back from her equipment, but doesn’t turn around. She appears to ponder for a moment before answering, “Beetee won’t turn the heat off and open the windows.”
Ask a silly question.
“Yeah, he’s cruel that way.” Brutus mounts the stairs, but before he can knock on the door, Eibhlin—who is still bent over her equipment—anticipates him.
“It’s open. Beetee’s in the front room.”
Brutus knocks anyway (because the idea of opening other people’s closed doors without notice is never going to seem right to him) and waits for Beetee to ask him in. Brutus enters to find Three’s other Victor ensconced on his couch, surrounded by a portable computer, two datapads, and stacks of (apparently sorted) loose papers. Beetee finishes marking a paper and wedges a pencil behind his ear before lifting his eyes and greeting Brutus.
“Is there something we can do for you?” Beetee offers.
“Well, actually--wait,” Brutus crosses the room and pulls a crochet blanket off the back of the couch, then walks swiftly back to the porch. He calls Eibhlin’s name and makes sure she’s alert to his presence before moving to drape the crochet over her shoulders. Brutus turns back to the door, then pauses, yanks the woolly hat off his head and pulls it down over Eihblin’s, making sure to cover her ears. She turns back to him with a puzzled look.
“You’re killing me, kid. Do you own any gloves?” Eibhlin continues to stare at Brutus as though he’s speaking some foreign language. He shakes his head and goes back inside.
Brutus motions with his thumb toward the porch as he takes his gloves off. “What is she doing?”
Beetee puts down a stack of papers and pushes his glasses back up his nose. “Eibhlin is interested in the morphology of snow crystals. She’s examining growth dynamics and pattern formation.”
Brutus translates Three to English. “She’s looking at the snowflakes?”
Beetee smiles. “Yes. It almost never snows in Three, and certainly never accumulates. With the microscope, she can see the facets and branching. It’s… quite pretty.
“She saw snow on her Tour, of course,” Beetee continues, his expression flattening, “but we had other things on our minds.”
“Speaking of the weather,” Brutus interjects, sensing an interruption would be entirely welcome, “I’d like to check the boiler and furnace. It feels like everything’s working right, but better safe than sorry. I don’t know if you’ve worked with heating oil before...”
Beetee crosses to bench near the front door and pulls his shoes on. “The systems at home were natural gas, and they were maintained by an outside engineer, so I’d appreciate if you would show me everything I need to know.”
Brutus leads the way to the back of what he can’t help but still think of as his mentor’s house, and flicks the light on before descending the stairs to the basement. “This system is older and needs a yearly oiling, which is ideally done before you switch it on for the first time each fall. Also, you’ll need to clean the blower and check the belts before that first use, and clean the blower again mid-season. I’m sure there are some extra filters here, which should be replaced every two months.”
Brutus locates the filters and turns off the power to the unit before walking Beetee through the maintenance routines.
“You’re quite proficient,” Beetee compliments as Brutus finishes and leads them back upstairs. “Did your teachers ever note your sense of mechanics?”
“No, it never came up.” There were technical courses available, even in the poorer, more rural part of Two Brutus grew up in, but by the time he was eligible for any kind of training that would have kept him out of the quarries, Brutus was already in Residential. “That’s all my father. As soon as I could be trusted to hold the tools, he’d let me help him get the heater ready for the winter. We’d always run the maintenance again on the day of the first snowfall, just in case. Nothin’ worse than being snowed in and having no heat.”
Brutus and Beetee enter the front room to find Eibhlin on the couch, feet tucked beneath her and crochet blanket wrapped all around her body, only her eyes (obscured by fogged-up glasses) and Brutus’s wooly hat protruding. They stare at each other for a moment before she finally offers “It’s cold outside,” as if that’s news to anyone.
Beetee shrugs at Brutus before sitting the bench near the front door to store his shoes again.
Oh, for Sn—goodness’ sake.
Like the other houses in the Village, Odin’s house has a large slate fireplace. There’s a small amount of wood and tinder stacked next to it, probably the same wood that’s been there since before the Threes moved in, and a metal box of matches on the mantle. Brutus takes in Eibhlin’s shivering, heroically refrains from rolling his eyes, and moves the glass safety doors to begin building a fire. “Have you used this yet?”
“No,” Beetee answers, voice filtering back from the kitchen, “I don’t know much about fireplaces, other than if you don’t operate them correctly you can set the house on fire or fill it with carbon monoxide. There wasn’t a manual, so…”
So naturally using common sense and asking someone for help didn’t occur to you. Brutus layers the tinder and kindling, then arranges a couple of thin split logs on top of it and strikes a match. Once the fire catches, he grabs a chair from the dining room and arranges it near the side of the fireplace.
Brutus instructs Eibhlin to take the chair, but she’s moved from the couch to the front window and, once again, is transfixed by the falling snow.
“Eibhlin?” Brutus moves behind her and announces himself one more time before taking her shoulders and steering her to the chair next to the fireplace. Eibhlin sits, but scoots around so she can look out the side window.
Brutus kneels once more before the fireplace and adjusts the logs with the poker to feed more air into the fire. He gets up to find Beetee and make his excuses when—
“Are there any District Two customs associated with snowfall, or the beginning of winter?” Eibhlin asks, still staring out the window.
Caught completely off guard by the break in the silence, Brutus startles. “What, kid?”
Eibhlin leans forward to breathe on the window, then runs her finger through the resulting condensation. “Recurring natural phenomena are a frequent focus of cultural rituals. Are there any rituals for this time period in District Two? I’ve tried to find some anthropological texts, but the library at the Justice Building is wholly inadequate.”
“Eibhlin,” Beetee scolds as he enters the room holding a tray with three cups and a plate of cookies, “Brutus is our friend, not our ethnographer.”
“I used a friendly voice,” Eibhlin counters and continues staring at the falling snow, unperturbed.
Beetee makes an apologetic face at Brutus and nods his head toward the coffee table. Brutus moves the stacks of paper and computer equipment so Beetee can put the tray down. Beetee puts a mug in Eibhlin’s hands, sits and waves toward the other side of the couch, indicating Brutus should take a seat.
“Well, we have the harvest festival, like everyone else, but that’s not for another month. I don’t…” If Brutus hadn’t just had cause to be thinking of his parents, he doubts it would have occurred to him at all, but the fire crackling and the mugs wafting the smell of steamed milk and chocolate trigger sense memories, and he can’t help pausing over it, just for a moment.
Unfortunately, that’s all the time Beetee needs to figure out something’s up; the man may be deficient in basic survival skills, but he’s not otherwise lacking in perception. He peers over his glasses and makes eye contact as he blows on the steaming liquid, then looks away, giving Brutus the choice to share or not.
Brutus wraps his hand around his mug and tries to find a place for his eyes that doesn’t involve Beetee or Eibhlin, and settles on the fire. “There aren’t any public holidays, or anything, but… when I was young, I was always excited to see the first snow. Pretty sure my parents weren’t as thrilled, because the weather could make work in the quarries more dangerous, even shut them down for a few days, which would stretch the budget just when we needed to buy fuel, but still… The way the snow covered everything, turning the familiar into something new, was like magic. On the day of the first snow, my mother would steam some milk, find a bit of cake, and we’d camp in front of the window and watch.
“She told me…” Brutus adjusts his grip on the mug and sees beyond the flickering flames, to the little house he scarcely remembers, and tries to reconstruct it in his mind along with the memory. “When we saw the first flakes, she’d tell me that it was magic, and I should make a wish.”
Brutus continues to stare into the fire, letting the confusion of contradictory emotions that accompany the memory of the woman he’s barely let himself think of since he last saw her in the waiting room at the Justice Building shortly before he left for his Games wash through and over him. He doesn’t know how much time has passed when Beetee finally places his mug back on the tray, and rises from his seat to stand behind Eibhlin, resting his hands on her shoulders.
“Anyway, I’m not sure how widespread that belief is, but, I’m pretty sure there are a lot of kids in District Two who were raised to make a wish on the first snowfall,” Brutus turns the mug in his hands, not wanting to taste anything as sweet as cocoa at this moment, but not wanting to let go of the warmth of it, either.
Eibhlin turns suddenly, jolting Beetee from where he’s leaning on her. “Is it too late?”
“Too late for what,” Brutus asks, confused.
“It’s been snowing for hours. Is it too late to make a wish?” Eibhlin looks seriously concerned.
Brutus gives the idea due consideration; his mother never mentioned any time limit, but he was always so alert to the flurries, making his wish before almost before the first flake hit the ground. He’s not sure what the rules are. Brutus glances out at the window at the world, already so different from the one he was raised in, much less certain, but with many more possibilities as well.
“No. No, I don’t think it’s too late.”
Beetee squeezes Eibhlin’s shoulders before pulling Brutus’s knit cap off her head. Eibhlin tilts her head back with the movement, and Beetee leans down to deposit a kiss on her forehead. He strokes a hand through her hair before the settle themselves facing the window again.
Brutus places his mug on the tray, stretches his legs out, settles more comfortably into the couch, and turns toward the window, to watch the snow transform the world again.