capeandcowllogs | (no subject)

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(no subject)

WHO: Bucky (

catnipped)
WHERE: Citi Field
WHEN: Forward dated to the vague-ish weekend, when the Mets host the Braves.
WARNINGS: Baseball, denial of reality.
SUMMARY: Bucky and Katniss go to a Mets game.
FORMAT: I started with quicklog, but feel free to respond however, I will match.

[Bucky stared at the box office and scowled. Twenty-eight dollars for the nosebleed seats. Twenty eight dollars to see a baseball team that shouldn't exist, and to not see 'em too well, at that. It was a crime, what baseball had come to, a veritable crime.

But he still wanted Katniss to have the experience. He had a feeling that she needed it. So he waited outside of the ballpark, penny loafers and everything, hands stuck in his pockets, fingering the quarters he knew he'd have to fork over soon. Waiting for her.]

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[Katniss showed up a few minutes later, after taking some time to ensure Haymitch wouldn't accidentally sit on Jasper the kitten or anything.

Anyway, she recognized Bucky even from the fleeting glimpses they'd gotten of each other during the vampire battle, and headed over with a slight wave.]

Hi.

Hey. [A nod of recognition.] I hope you could find it okay, but I guess it's pretty big.

[He stood there for a moment, silent, hands still in his pockets.] You gotta take a moment just to savor it. [It smells like grease, and Queens street corners.]

It is. Just asked around.

[She gave him a skeptical look, but -- was willing enough to stand there and 'savor it', like he said.] ....If you say so.

Part of the whole point of baseball is acting real superstitious about baseball.

[He went up to the ticket line and tried not to mumble too much about the price.]

[She followed along, glancing around a bit cautiously. She's still not entirely used to huge crowds, but she can deal with it easily enough.]

Alright.

Where do you reckon you wanna sit? You gotta play more to sit up close, but sometimes you can catch a ball, or heckle the pitcher so he can hear you.

[Despite Bucky's whining about the cost of things, he made enough to get by and a fair bit more.]

...Let's sit close. I want to see, and I have money. [It's a little odd to think of it still, but -- hey. She doesn't buy much, she can afford it.]

[When their turn comes up in the line, Bucky asks for tickets along the first baseline, tries not to wince at the price, and hands over the money. It'll be worth it, he tells himself, it's baseball, and he wants Katniss to have a good time. It seems like, wherever she comes from, she might need it.]

Now we can get hot dogs.

Shouldn't we, uh, find our seats first? [She's -- not used to this kind of thing, at all. Sure, watching the Games -- but those had always been from the safety behind a television screen, at least until she was there and in them.]

Or can that wait?

We bought the seats, and they aren't going anywhere. [He shrugs. It's probably more usual to go and see the seats first.]

I thought you liked hot dogs.

I do like hot dogs. ...Whatever you want to do, we can do, though.

How about this— we walk to the seats, and you see anything you want, you lemme know.

[It wasn't wall-to-wall crowded, yet, but there were still quite a few bodies milling around. Straight past the ticket gate was the rotunda, set up like some kinda Mets hall of fame. Bucky scowled. They'd strung the thing up with Dodgers pictures, but the Mets were the Mets, not the Dodgers.]

That's baloney. [He says, gesturing to one of the pictures on the wall.] This ain't Ebbets Field. Pee Wee Reese was never a Met.

Okay. [So Katniss followed along, giving the rotunda a bit of a curious look.]

...He was one of the Dodgers? [Look, she gets it!]

Yeah, I don't know why they got to hang it up here. The Dodgers didn't fold, they just moved to L.A.

[And Bucky wasn't from New York, so it bothered him a lot less than it probably should've, that they'd packed up and left town. If anything it made them feel more like his hometeam, instead of the team that he picked out of a hat and stuck with. After all, he was an army brat, so he was always packing up and leaving.]

You'd think the Mets could hang up their own guys. They won the World Series twice, much as it's less fun for me to admit it.

I don't know either, if the Dodgers didn't even play here. ...Did they play here? [She was going around, now, looking at some of those pictures with interest.]

They just built this place up a few years back. [And the Dodgers moved fifty years ago. He doesn't say that out loud, because it makes him feel old.] The Dodgers were in Brooklyn, anyhow, and this's Queens.

...Oh. I didn't know there were different names for places here.

I don't know if it's here, exactly. We called it New York, where I come from. Here they just call it City. [He shrugs.]

Well, it's almost the same, right? Still looks too much like the Capitol, I think.

It's not as… it's not as tall, where I'm from. [There weren't so many colors, neither. That was what struck him most, when he first got here, how many colors there were. Colors on the cars, colors on the people. During the war, all that stuff was ransomed, everything was green drabs or the red white blue of a flag.]

But I'm not from New York. I just visited, the once or twice.

Oh. [She looks around the stadium for a moment, silent.]

It wasn't -- tall, in District 12, either. Victor's Village had some two-story buildings. Mostly everything was small and covered in coal dust. [And now it's all gone, firebombed and gone to ash because of that coal dust, because of her.]

Army bases're always flat. That's where I grew up.

[And then, as if remembering where they were, and why they're here, he adds—] The seats are this way.

...Oh, right. [She'll be starting to follow him again, then.]

District 12 had woods. But otherwise it was mostly flat. There were mines.

Yeah, sounds a bit like West Virginia.

I've lived all over, but I never left base.

What was it like?