no destinies ordained [AV:LNC | Day One]

If Wander had thought about it, ve would have expected down time. Ripred knows ve's seen enough Games to know that no one can fight nonstop, even the Careers. The Capitol audiences don't want that, anyway; they want relationships, comebacks, drama. Still, after the blur of the training center and the wild dash of this morning, it feels wrong to sit down and do nearly nothing. Wander keeps finding verself snapping around to look over ver shoulder, in case—ve doesn't know. In case Eve has passed out again, or someone has snuck up and murdered everyone without ver noticing, or... just, in case.

Fishing is probably redundant, given the sushi, but Wander didn't really trust that before ve stepped on it. Now that some of the squishy green fruit inside—and like heck Wander is going to swallow vis District Four pride and ask someone, but is sushi supposed to have that?—has smeared against the clear plastic top and the frantic flight from the bloodbath has shaken bits of rice into the corners, it just looks gross. Only almost gross enough to ditch after going to all the effort it took to claim, but definitely gross enough that ve would rather snag a good clean fish than so much as look at any of the assorted food in the basket inexplicably delivered to the team as they recuperated.

Without any ice, the fish will look as nasty as the sushi before too long, and probably smell worse. Then again, Temple sewed Wander's arm and Eve's whole life up with the same needle, so they all got a crash course in getting over sanitation practices this morning. Everyone's going to have to hope that one of them goes home before they have to worry about it, that's all.

There's a lot that Wander's steadfastly refusing to worry about right now: the kids, Annie, vis parents, not knowing how to feel about Carter after seeing him slice open Eve's stomach. (They all always knew this would come to that eventually, didn't they? But not so soon.) None of it can be helped right now. The best ve can do for vis family is try to stay out of trouble. Ve'll see Annie's face in the sky tonight, or ve won't. Ve'll face down someone who would have been a friend in a better life—Carter, or Carmen, or Quest—or, one way or another, ve won't. Planning didn't help at the Cornucopia and it won't help now.

Even the things immediate enough to actively worry about here are more or less dealt with. Eve still looks tattered, but the bleeding has stopped and she's at least conscious enough to have found plants for Wander's arm, which pulses in time with vis head—all that coffee catching up with ver one last time, no doubt—but which ve can now move freely. Temple escaped the fight unscathed; not knowing where Bette had gone was scary for a while, but she made it back from scouting with only burned soles. Thanks to someone—multiple someones, judging by the assorted parachutes and that cart—they're pretty well set for supplies. (Not that Wander can figure out what some of this is supposed to do. Armor, yes; fishing line, of course, and a helpful hint that the water below would hold fish; but the rhinestone jacket and rainbow flag that came with them? With the mesh jacket torn and soiled it's nice to have something else covering vis back, at least, even if Jizav might have audibly screeched watching ver put it on.) Unless they wanted to go chasing tributes, which Wander doubts any of them would push for even with Eve up to going anywhere, there's not much to do but rest and keep an eye out.

If anything, at this point, underneath the lingering terror Wander is getting bored. You do, in fact, have to sit there all afternoon with a fishing pole, and as tedious as ve told Quest that could get, it's infinitely worse when you're fishing all the way down a cliff and wouldn't have been able to see the bobber even if you had one. Ve has to perch on the edge of the cliff, line in hand and the near end anchored on the trident behind ver, waiting for the tug of what might be a fish but might be the wind, or vis imagination, or on one particularly irritating occasion a heavy clump of seaweed that Wander only managed to identify after hauling the line almost all the way back in.

The second time that happens, ve reels the rest of the line in faster just to get to the satisfaction of chucking the seaweed back into the water in disgust. "Ugh, okay, I need a break." The rest of the line joins the bit wrapped neatly under the trident's tines, where Wander hopes it should obstruct neither vis grip nor any stabbing. That done, ve stands carefully, tugging the astonishingly intact lace skirt this way and that out of the way to pull vis feet back to solid ground.

The trident drops back into the supply pile with a clatter, followed a little more carefully by the fish, and Wander leans down to scoop up the mystery black box from earlier in return—a camera, ve had realized once things slowed down and they all had time to actually look at what they had brought with them. At first glance ve only recognized it vaguely, from seeing tributes hold the same type of box a few Games ago, but an experimental photo of the ocean—now tucked with painstaking care into a pocket on the back of the camera—confirmed the guess.

(It's not the real ocean. Can't be. That doesn't mean that Wander, bloodied and terrified and homesick for what felt like years, didn't cry a little at seeing it, or again as ve settled down to fish, face turned into the brine and away from the others. If not for the smudge of dark rock and bright iceplant in one corner and the wheeling, honking bird in another, that could be a picture of home.)

As ve rejoins the rest of the group Wander gives Eve's hair the shadow of a ruffle, trying not to jostle her, then plops down in the scrub next to her with the camera held aloft in one hand. "We should all take a picture! While we're—" While we're all still here seems unnecessarily morbid. "While we have some time, c'mon."


Actions: Wander receives an armored vest and fishing line from sponsorship, fishes with said line, uses medicinal plants found by Eve, and is as baffled as I am as to why anyone would put avocado in sushi.

Mechanics-wise, the rainbow flag that floated down in the parachute is one of the ones from the sub-Wealth basket random event; I asked for permission to fudge that a bit because I'm attached to the NPC I wanted to have send it. Also, I'm pretty completely sure that Polaroid cameras don't have that little pocket, but it's a Polaroid camera From The Future, so: my city now.

Title is after the track on Austin Wintory's Abzû OST, which is in turn named for an excerpt from the Enûma Eliš.

From the outline stage of this post: "coooouuuld angst about [various things] but actually that all sounds like a problem for Future Wander! cool!"