for penfold-x: Postwar Brutus, Eibhlin & Bears
Brutus receives a proposal.
Brutus nearly trips over the dossier when he steps outside. Would have, except his screen door pushed it out to the side when it opened, so he only skitters and hops on one foot like a dumbass instead of face-planting. Even so, he takes a look round for any telltale signs of Lyme or her girl before bending down to pick up what appears to be an official report sitting on his front porch.
He’s got a nice little heart attack brewing over what this could all be about until he cracks open the binder and finds himself staring face to face with a picture of a bear. “What,” Brutus says, “the fuck?”
URSINE COMPANION PROJECT: PRELIMINARY PROPOSAL reads the title page. A muscle in his eyebrow twitches, but Brutus digs deep and finds the strength to keep turning pages. Health benefits, reads one section, claiming exercise and also daily berry collection, apparently. Emotional benefits include increased serotonin production and a bunch of other stuff that boils down to ‘fire therapist, cuddle bear instead’.
Brutus makes it through to financial benefits (Village security!) before he has to stop and pinch his nose. He leafs through the rest of the pages, looking for a RISKS AND CHALLENGES section, benefit of the doubt and all that, but looks like that never made it in. Of course it didn’t. Why would there be any risks with bringing a live fuckin’ bear into the Village. Brutus takes a deep breath, lets it out, and stares up at the spring sky, pale blue thick with white, fluffy clouds. Then he sticks the report under his arm and heads over to Odin’s old place, now home of the Threes.
Technically there’s no author, but there doesn’t need to be. The last time Eibhlin saw a documentary on turtles she woke Claudius up at two in the morning with flashlights and tried to convince him to go down to the lake and dig up the hibernating pairs down at the bank. Whatever genius at the Capitol decided that nature programming was a nice, politically-neutral way to showcase the various districts in the fledgeling days of the new era or whatever their reasoning, Brutus really wishes they’d stopped for two seconds to consider the impact on decent, hardworking Two folk just trying to make a living.
Beetee answers the door when Brutus knocks, and his eyes flick down to the dossier under his arm. “Ah,” he says, adjusting his glasses. “Your turn.”
Not an apology, Brutus notes wryly. “Been at you for a while, has she?” he says, stepping inside.
Beetee shoots him a look that says he’s not going to bother dignifying that with a response and disappears into his office. Brutus snorts and follows the sound of a low, crooning voice to the living room, where Eibhlin is talking with her rabbits. “Hey, bug,” Brutus says before he turns the corner, giving her lots of time so he doesn’t startle her. “Got your proposal. You know we’re not getting a bear, right?”
He rounds the back of the sofa to see Eibhlin fix him with a very disappointed look over the top of a fluffy rabbit’s head. “Did you read the proposal?” Eibhlin says, lines forming in her forehead deep enough to hide tributes in. Snow’s mercy. “While new ideas might be strange or unwelcome to traditionalists like yourself, it’s important to consider all avenues before rejecting -”
“Eibhlin,” Brutus says, giving her a hard look, and sure enough there’s a bit of a twinkle when she falls off. Yeah, he thought so. Traditionalists like yourself, for fuck’s sake. “We are not. Getting. A bear.”
Eibhlin huffs, her breath ruffling the rabbit’s fur. “Counterarguments?”
“It’s a fuckin’ bear?”
“Black bears are a nonaggressive species,” Eibhlin says, dogged. “Even a mother bear protecting her cubs will attempt to bluff or run rather than attack. I noted that in the section marked ‘common concerns’. Are you perhaps thinking of grizzlies?”
Brutus bites off the profane retort that rises over that one, because this is Eibhlin, not Misha trying to get a rise, but Snow on fire. “It’s still a wild animal, not a puppy. You don’t make friends with something big enough to take your head off with one swipe.”
Eibhlin raises one eyebrow. “Like overly muscular Victors who are twice one’s size, I suppose?”
He points a finger at her. “Don’t you start. Just because you’re better at arguing doesn’t mean you win. Articulate ain’t the same thing as right.”
“I believe an entire profession would disagree with you.”
“I personally invite every fancypants Capitol lawyer to come down here right now and wrestle with a bear,” Brutus says. No wonder Beetee failed, he was probably doing his mentor’s best and trying to logic her out of it - problem is, you can’t use logic against an argument that’s bugfuck-nuts from the get-go. That’s how they get you. Stubborn wins against logic any day. “No bears.”
She searches his face for a minute, eyes narrowed, looking for any openings that might allow her to penetrate his defences - but no, no, Brutus might be soft as hell for this kid but there are lines, damn it, and eventually she slumps. “It seems unfair,” Eibhlin says, her face drawing into a pout that should probably be categorized as a war crime. “If bears are not for pets, why do they look so soft?”
“Just one of those things,” Brutus says. And there, he did it, he got her off her crazy horse, now he should go home and leave her to Beetee to manage the disappointment, only - she has her nose in the rabbit’s fur, her shoulders hunched, and ah, fuck it all. “You can’t have a bear,” Brutus says, fast, before he can change his mind, “but I can show you one.”
Eibhlin sits up straight. “Show me?”
Which is how Brutus ends up dragging himself out of bed at three o’clock in the fucking morning to bring Eibhlin out to a blind he built the day before in the middle of the woods near what he’s pretty sure is the den of a mother and her cubs. “This is gonna be a lot of waiting,” he warns her. “We might not even see any.”
Eibhlin, dressed in an oversized jacket and hat and armed with a notebook, Odin’s old binoculars - much too big for her - and enough trail mix to keep them fed for the next three days, just in case. “This is fascinating already,” she says, eyes wide and luminous beneath her hat, skin pale in the darkness. “I can’t believe you never told me about these ingenious contraptions before! Think of the possibilities!”
“People use ‘em for hunting,” Brutus says, shifting in the small space. Not the most cramped he’s ever been in his entire life, given years of Arena training, but this is definitely up there, and he hasn’t been sixteen for a long time. “Most people aren’t up here for research purposes. But now we gotta hush, or we’ll scare everything away.”
Eibhlin nods gravely and turns back to the opening in the blind, the notebook balanced on her knees.
As the hours tick on and the forest shifts from black to blue to grey and the time spent crouched makes itself felt in Brutus’ knees and the small of his back, a low uneasy fear settles in the pit of his stomach. Sitting in the trees in silence, waiting for ages without making a sound - wouldn’t take much for this to feel an awful lot like an Arena.
Brutus is too old for triggers (you hear me, brain) and so he resolutely ignores the tension building at the back of his neck, but he can’t stop glancing over at Eibhlin. She’s come far since the war; the last thing she needs is to get knocked back five years into her recovery because Brutus had the genius idea to hide in the woods and wait for bears. But Brutus has a pretty good handle on Eibhlin’s twitches by now and she seems calm enough, pencil scratching lightly across the paper as she records twitters of birdsong. She catches him looking at her and redirects him outside with a sharp gesture, unwilling to miss even a second of potential bear-spotting time.
The sun is starting to creep up the tree trunks and Brutus is working out a potential ‘tell Eibhlin it’s time to go home’ script that has enough legal sidebars and counterarguments and who the fuck knows what else when Eibhlin stiffens. She flails a hand sideways and grips Brutus’ arm with surprising force, blunt fingernails digging into his skin, and Brutus blinks himself out of a mental rehearsal of no we can’t start setting up camp every single morning, no you can’t map out an expanding concentric grid pattern for possible blind placement, don’t give me that look to see a mama bear and two cubs lumber out onto the forest path.
Brutus does not get the thing people have with animals. His parents didn’t slip out beyond the fence for illegal poaching like some of the others in town, but even without seeing them on the dinner table Brutus never grew up thinking of wild things as warm and fuzzy. Quarry life is hard and practical: there’s no romanticizing the feral creatures that make the land their home. Snapping their necks by hand in his kill tests at the Centre only further separated the distance for him. Even Ronan’s hounds, lazy lugs that they are, were originally bred for a purpose.
For Eibhlin, though, raised in a city in the middle of a desert, animals have practically taken on the sheen of mythology. Brutus ignores the bears, the mother walking in slow circles as her cubs roll and tumble in the new grass, and watches Eibhlin, chin on hands, face caught in rapt fascination. Her pencil lies forgotten in her lap, notes forgotten.
Eventually the mama bear rounds up her cubs, nudging them with her head as they chase after her and nibble at her fur. Eibhlin waits for several long minutes after they disappear, then slowly clasps her hands to her chest. “Remarkable,” she says, her words little more than breath. “The bond between mother and cubs is unmatched in nature. Seeing it in person is a privilege I couldn’t hope to experience.” She turns to Brutus, eyes shining. “I see why removing one of these creatures from its habitat would be grossly inadequate, although perhaps if we attempted to replicate its social hierarchy, perhaps by mapping the bears’ communal needs -”
“Eibhlin…” Brutus warns, hearing the rise of excitement.
She sighs, pushes her glasses up her nose. “This was very kind of you. Thank you for this experience.”
Brutus coughs into his fist. “Yeah, well. Let’s get going before something smells us and decides to come looking.”
Eibhlin chatters the whole way back, stopping only to scribble notes in her book, and punctuating the stream of words with stabs of her pencil in Brutus’ direction as she pesters him with questions about his observations. “This is important information,” Eibhlin says. “I need to capture everything as accurately as possible if I’m going to compare my notes to later samples.”
Brutus nearly groans. “Later samples?”
“But of course!” Eibhlin blinks at him, eyes bright behind her glasses. “Cubs stay with their mothers for over an entire year. These ones will remain with her until next spring. Plenty of time for observation. Think of all the data!”
Brutus drags a hand down his face. “Great,” he says. “That’s fantastic. Maybe you can bring Claudius next time.”
Eibhlin brightens. “That is an excellent idea,” she says, bouncing in her seat. “Third observer would allow for triangulation of data. I’ll let him know about this exciting opportunity as soon as we’re home. I’m sure he’ll be more than pleased to lend his eyes to such an important discovery -”
Brutus snickers a little to himself under his breath and makes a mental apology to Claudius, but not too much. Three in the morning is damned early for a man who’s pushing fifty, and he’s a Victor, not a saint.
Beside him, Eibhlin’s scientific reporting devolves into a somewhat less technical recount of the perfect fuzziness of the bear cubs’ little ears and noses, and Brutus chuckles to himself and lets her talk.
Brutus nearly trips over the dossier when he steps outside. Would have, except his screen door pushed it out to the side when it opened, so he only skitters and hops on one foot like a dumbass instead of face-planting. Even so, he takes a look round for any telltale signs of Lyme or her girl before bending down to pick up what appears to be an official report sitting on his front porch.
He’s got a nice little heart attack brewing over what this could all be about until he cracks open the binder and finds himself staring face to face with a picture of a bear. “What,” Brutus says, “the fuck?”
URSINE COMPANION PROJECT: PRELIMINARY PROPOSAL reads the title page. A muscle in his eyebrow twitches, but Brutus digs deep and finds the strength to keep turning pages. Health benefits, reads one section, claiming exercise and also daily berry collection, apparently. Emotional benefits include increased serotonin production and a bunch of other stuff that boils down to ‘fire therapist, cuddle bear instead’.
Brutus makes it through to financial benefits (Village security!) before he has to stop and pinch his nose. He leafs through the rest of the pages, looking for a RISKS AND CHALLENGES section, benefit of the doubt and all that, but looks like that never made it in. Of course it didn’t. Why would there be any risks with bringing a live fuckin’ bear into the Village. Brutus takes a deep breath, lets it out, and stares up at the spring sky, pale blue thick with white, fluffy clouds. Then he sticks the report under his arm and heads over to Odin’s old place, now home of the Threes.
Technically there’s no author, but there doesn’t need to be. The last time Eibhlin saw a documentary on turtles she woke Claudius up at two in the morning with flashlights and tried to convince him to go down to the lake and dig up the hibernating pairs down at the bank. Whatever genius at the Capitol decided that nature programming was a nice, politically-neutral way to showcase the various districts in the fledgeling days of the new era or whatever their reasoning, Brutus really wishes they’d stopped for two seconds to consider the impact on decent, hardworking Two folk just trying to make a living.
Beetee answers the door when Brutus knocks, and his eyes flick down to the dossier under his arm. “Ah,” he says, adjusting his glasses. “Your turn.”
Not an apology, Brutus notes wryly. “Been at you for a while, has she?” he says, stepping inside.
Beetee shoots him a look that says he’s not going to bother dignifying that with a response and disappears into his office. Brutus snorts and follows the sound of a low, crooning voice to the living room, where Eibhlin is talking with her rabbits. “Hey, bug,” Brutus says before he turns the corner, giving her lots of time so he doesn’t startle her. “Got your proposal. You know we’re not getting a bear, right?”
He rounds the back of the sofa to see Eibhlin fix him with a very disappointed look over the top of a fluffy rabbit’s head. “Did you read the proposal?” Eibhlin says, lines forming in her forehead deep enough to hide tributes in. Snow’s mercy. “While new ideas might be strange or unwelcome to traditionalists like yourself, it’s important to consider all avenues before rejecting -”
“Eibhlin,” Brutus says, giving her a hard look, and sure enough there’s a bit of a twinkle when she falls off. Yeah, he thought so. Traditionalists like yourself, for fuck’s sake. “We are not. Getting. A bear.”
Eibhlin huffs, her breath ruffling the rabbit’s fur. “Counterarguments?”
“It’s a fuckin’ bear?”
“Black bears are a nonaggressive species,” Eibhlin says, dogged. “Even a mother bear protecting her cubs will attempt to bluff or run rather than attack. I noted that in the section marked ‘common concerns’. Are you perhaps thinking of grizzlies?”
Brutus bites off the profane retort that rises over that one, because this is Eibhlin, not Misha trying to get a rise, but Snow on fire. “It’s still a wild animal, not a puppy. You don’t make friends with something big enough to take your head off with one swipe.”
Eibhlin raises one eyebrow. “Like overly muscular Victors who are twice one’s size, I suppose?”
He points a finger at her. “Don’t you start. Just because you’re better at arguing doesn’t mean you win. Articulate ain’t the same thing as right.”
“I believe an entire profession would disagree with you.”
“I personally invite every fancypants Capitol lawyer to come down here right now and wrestle with a bear,” Brutus says. No wonder Beetee failed, he was probably doing his mentor’s best and trying to logic her out of it - problem is, you can’t use logic against an argument that’s bugfuck-nuts from the get-go. That’s how they get you. Stubborn wins against logic any day. “No bears.”
She searches his face for a minute, eyes narrowed, looking for any openings that might allow her to penetrate his defences - but no, no, Brutus might be soft as hell for this kid but there are lines, damn it, and eventually she slumps. “It seems unfair,” Eibhlin says, her face drawing into a pout that should probably be categorized as a war crime. “If bears are not for pets, why do they look so soft?”
“Just one of those things,” Brutus says. And there, he did it, he got her off her crazy horse, now he should go home and leave her to Beetee to manage the disappointment, only - she has her nose in the rabbit’s fur, her shoulders hunched, and ah, fuck it all. “You can’t have a bear,” Brutus says, fast, before he can change his mind, “but I can show you one.”
Eibhlin sits up straight. “Show me?”
Which is how Brutus ends up dragging himself out of bed at three o’clock in the fucking morning to bring Eibhlin out to a blind he built the day before in the middle of the woods near what he’s pretty sure is the den of a mother and her cubs. “This is gonna be a lot of waiting,” he warns her. “We might not even see any.”
Eibhlin, dressed in an oversized jacket and hat and armed with a notebook, Odin’s old binoculars - much too big for her - and enough trail mix to keep them fed for the next three days, just in case. “This is fascinating already,” she says, eyes wide and luminous beneath her hat, skin pale in the darkness. “I can’t believe you never told me about these ingenious contraptions before! Think of the possibilities!”
“People use ‘em for hunting,” Brutus says, shifting in the small space. Not the most cramped he’s ever been in his entire life, given years of Arena training, but this is definitely up there, and he hasn’t been sixteen for a long time. “Most people aren’t up here for research purposes. But now we gotta hush, or we’ll scare everything away.”
Eibhlin nods gravely and turns back to the opening in the blind, the notebook balanced on her knees.
As the hours tick on and the forest shifts from black to blue to grey and the time spent crouched makes itself felt in Brutus’ knees and the small of his back, a low uneasy fear settles in the pit of his stomach. Sitting in the trees in silence, waiting for ages without making a sound - wouldn’t take much for this to feel an awful lot like an Arena.
Brutus is too old for triggers (you hear me, brain) and so he resolutely ignores the tension building at the back of his neck, but he can’t stop glancing over at Eibhlin. She’s come far since the war; the last thing she needs is to get knocked back five years into her recovery because Brutus had the genius idea to hide in the woods and wait for bears. But Brutus has a pretty good handle on Eibhlin’s twitches by now and she seems calm enough, pencil scratching lightly across the paper as she records twitters of birdsong. She catches him looking at her and redirects him outside with a sharp gesture, unwilling to miss even a second of potential bear-spotting time.
The sun is starting to creep up the tree trunks and Brutus is working out a potential ‘tell Eibhlin it’s time to go home’ script that has enough legal sidebars and counterarguments and who the fuck knows what else when Eibhlin stiffens. She flails a hand sideways and grips Brutus’ arm with surprising force, blunt fingernails digging into his skin, and Brutus blinks himself out of a mental rehearsal of no we can’t start setting up camp every single morning, no you can’t map out an expanding concentric grid pattern for possible blind placement, don’t give me that look to see a mama bear and two cubs lumber out onto the forest path.
Brutus does not get the thing people have with animals. His parents didn’t slip out beyond the fence for illegal poaching like some of the others in town, but even without seeing them on the dinner table Brutus never grew up thinking of wild things as warm and fuzzy. Quarry life is hard and practical: there’s no romanticizing the feral creatures that make the land their home. Snapping their necks by hand in his kill tests at the Centre only further separated the distance for him. Even Ronan’s hounds, lazy lugs that they are, were originally bred for a purpose.
For Eibhlin, though, raised in a city in the middle of a desert, animals have practically taken on the sheen of mythology. Brutus ignores the bears, the mother walking in slow circles as her cubs roll and tumble in the new grass, and watches Eibhlin, chin on hands, face caught in rapt fascination. Her pencil lies forgotten in her lap, notes forgotten.
Eventually the mama bear rounds up her cubs, nudging them with her head as they chase after her and nibble at her fur. Eibhlin waits for several long minutes after they disappear, then slowly clasps her hands to her chest. “Remarkable,” she says, her words little more than breath. “The bond between mother and cubs is unmatched in nature. Seeing it in person is a privilege I couldn’t hope to experience.” She turns to Brutus, eyes shining. “I see why removing one of these creatures from its habitat would be grossly inadequate, although perhaps if we attempted to replicate its social hierarchy, perhaps by mapping the bears’ communal needs -”
“Eibhlin…” Brutus warns, hearing the rise of excitement.
She sighs, pushes her glasses up her nose. “This was very kind of you. Thank you for this experience.”
Brutus coughs into his fist. “Yeah, well. Let’s get going before something smells us and decides to come looking.”
Eibhlin chatters the whole way back, stopping only to scribble notes in her book, and punctuating the stream of words with stabs of her pencil in Brutus’ direction as she pesters him with questions about his observations. “This is important information,” Eibhlin says. “I need to capture everything as accurately as possible if I’m going to compare my notes to later samples.”
Brutus nearly groans. “Later samples?”
“But of course!” Eibhlin blinks at him, eyes bright behind her glasses. “Cubs stay with their mothers for over an entire year. These ones will remain with her until next spring. Plenty of time for observation. Think of all the data!”
Brutus drags a hand down his face. “Great,” he says. “That’s fantastic. Maybe you can bring Claudius next time.”
Eibhlin brightens. “That is an excellent idea,” she says, bouncing in her seat. “Third observer would allow for triangulation of data. I’ll let him know about this exciting opportunity as soon as we’re home. I’m sure he’ll be more than pleased to lend his eyes to such an important discovery -”
Brutus snickers a little to himself under his breath and makes a mental apology to Claudius, but not too much. Three in the morning is damned early for a man who’s pushing fifty, and he’s a Victor, not a saint.
Beside him, Eibhlin’s scientific reporting devolves into a somewhat less technical recount of the perfect fuzziness of the bear cubs’ little ears and noses, and Brutus chuckles to himself and lets her talk.