This City's Already So Full of Bodies It Does Not Need One More [Open]

[vissernone]

WHO| Eva Salazar and open
WHAT| Eva's alive and not well.
WHERE| The garden behind the Training Center
WHEN| Week 7
WARNINGS| Brain damage.

They brought her back, but they did not bring her back whole.

Eva's vaguely aware of the mechanics behind how the Tributes are revived, and knew going in that the Mentors would only be brought back with experimental technology. She didn't know what that meant until a few hours after she woke up from death, reading and rereading the pamphlet about blood flow to the brain without retaining information. Your brain was dead. We brought it back.

Bright lights and loud noises take a physical form, smothering her, smashing through her thoughts like bullets. Crowds seem to raise the barometric pressure in a room. Her words are jumbled at times, missing patches of sentences at others. Reading, her usual passtime, has become difficult, as whole parts of lines seem to disappear, flaking off the page like mange.

It'll get better as the brain starts to heal itself, they say. She hopes they're right. For now, she keeps away from large gatherings and wears a sheer veil over her face to protect her eyes from the worst of the light.

Unable to get her mind to cooperate enough to read, she instead turns to tending the earth. The garden outside the Training Center is a good place to start, the little isolated, tranquil corner behind the building. Trellis, small fountain, marble path, and a hundred varieties of crossbred flowers.

She rips up weeds and shreds them in her fingers. She tells herself it's physical therapy, using her fingers like that even when they only obey her half the time. She doesn't bother to go out and make apologies to the people she killed. She doesn't look for her allies, either. Without her mind, she feels more alone that ever, just a rickety shell taking up space and muddling through each hour.

At least she'll have Eponine with her. It's something.

Comments

[polyturtle]

Don had gone into the garden himself. Not to dig up weeds, but for other reasons. Being alive, and yet so confused. Everything was confusing, really.

Right now, your fight is to endure.

The what seemed easy. The why was hardest. Before, he'd had a why, and the why hadn't been him. Never had been, not even at home. Not even after that future...but, even knowing his importance to his family, when before he hadn't, he'd always felt it was because all of the turtles had been around.

Now he wasn't so sure, and the idea that he'd have to focus on himself somehow frightened him, even more than the Shredder, or the Arena, or even - in some ways - the realization that he wasn't even himself. How did he focus on himself, and be so...selfish--

That was when he saw the figure to his side. He stopped immediately; he hadn't expected anyone up here and hadn't been paying attention, so lost in his thoughts as he was. Much less her, tearing up the dirt as she was.

"Eva."

[vissernone]

She recognizes him by voice. Sound cracks through her brain like electricity these days, bright and paralyzing, but it's still recognizable. Maybe she should thank God for the small blessings.

"Donatello."

One of hers. One that she hadn't even been watching last Arena, thanks to being down in the slop with everyone else. She undoubtedly would have killed him had she run into him - or vice versa. She doesn't lift her head, nor divert attention from ripping up some dandelions.

"Care to join me?"

[polyturtle]

Likewise. Though of course, depending on when, had they met, he would have hesitated. Everything is simply so confusing, not clear-cut. And he hadn't the heart to surge forth and find the answers, like he would have before.

Which was fine, for the moment. He knew he'd have to confront it later.

"Sure."

Right now he found himself kneeling down.

"Just...tell me where you need me to go with this."

The dirt was practically torn up, in a good chunk of the dirt. How long had she been working on this?

[vissernone]

For many, many hours now. The time she would have spent quieting her mind with poetry has been devoted to unearthing the enemies she's made of the weeds.

"These," she says, holding up a plant with soil dripping from the roots, "are the weeds I'm killing. The infestation is damaging the roses here."

She gets back to work with a huff. "You'd think they'd be able to engineer roses that could defend themselves, but apparently not."

[polyturtle]

"...Right."

Quietly, he began to dig as well. As Eva said, there was, in fact, a lot of weeds. Too many. It was clear there was a level of neglect in the garden that seemed very odd. Especially in a place like the Capitol.

But then again, there was that rather stunned feeling Don had in the pit of his stomach. The elephant in the room, after all. She was right next to him.

"They said you were dead."

[vissernone]

Eva blinks and reaches up, rubbing a finger to her temple before returning to the earth. She leaves a smudge of dirt on her forehead. "I'd appreciate if you didn't check my pulse to verify their mistake."

[polyturtle]

"I won't," Don replied quietly as he managed to get out a nice tangle of vines. He had many questions on his mind. Something was wrong and yet she'd been revived. Cloned? Or- "But...never mind. How long have you been doing these weeds?"

[vissernone]

"A few hours. I've found my attention's been wandering too much for reading the past few days." Is it trauma or brain damage? It's hard to tell. "You have something on your mind, dear. You can say it."

[polyturtle]

"I do," Don responded quietly. "You came back differently from the Tributes. I want to know why."

It wasn't a question directed towards Eva, per se. She had the feeling that Eva probably didn't know the answer. Or, maybe she did, but telling him would end up with Peacekeeper guns pointed at them.

[vissernone]

Eva stops and brushes the veil and a lock of hair from her face. "Why would you think that?"

[polyturtle]

"Your attention," Don replied quietly. "As you said, isn't exactly as it should be. 'For the past few days'...since you came back."

He set the clump of weeds he found to the side.

"Even for someone who'd just been revived, like myself, our cognitive ability to focus on more than one action isn't generally impaired where we can't read. We're fully healed up physically. What you've mentioned...and..."

Just...the way she was. He couldn't explain it, it was that gut instinct that had alerted him to the wrongness of that Arena, even if it didn't explain the what or the how ot the why. It was just not right. His animal instinct, or whatever it was, like a pet sensing the master was ill. It wasn't a scientific feeling, but given what had happened before, he knew better than to simply ignore it.

"That's generally indicative of damage that wasn't repaired."

[vissernone]

"I've never died before. I don't know how well you remember the first time you died, but it's not exactly something I'm terribly equipped to cope with."

She grimaces at Don and returns her attention to the weeds. "I'm desensitized to the deaths of others, not of my own. You may want to pay attention to the symptoms of trauma."

[polyturtle]

"Pretty well," Don replied quietly. "But...its not..."

He bit his lip. He hadn't mean that kind of trauma, of course. But it was clear Eva didn't want to pursue it further.

"...Never mind." He dug his hands into the roses. "I'm just...postulating."

[vissernone]

"It's not a postulation worth pursuing, Don. You're lucky that I'm one of the more amiable murderers here when it comes to people prodding about my recent resurrection." She narrows her eyes behind her veil. "Do you want me to start inquiring about how you felt after you died this time?"