there is a pseudo-intellectual in me; open

[orestes]

WHO| Enjolras and open!
WHAT| Happenings around the Capitol.
WHERE| Commons and the Tribute Center at least. I'm cool if you want to start something elsewhere, too. c:
WHEN| Generally in Week 2.
WARNINGS| Highhanded philosophical ridiculousness, probably.



[1; training center]

Generally speaking, Enjolras avoids the designated training areas. It isn't that he has something against physical fitness, or is somehow embarrassed by his decidedly modest combative skills. No, it's that they exist as a stark and concrete reminder that the Tributes live for a purpose solely destructive. The best they can hope for is to live and die perpetuating a barbaric system. It isn't something he ascribes to personally but there is a certain inevitability to the reality of it.

That said, he has only ever experienced the training areas when they are inundated with his fellow Tributes. With the Arena on that isn't as much of an issue. In fact, the training areas are more or less deserted in the middle of the day, those Victors who do choose to workout mostly keeping to an actual regimen rather than doing so out of a futile attempt to avoid the disappointingly ubiquitous television broadcasts.

Nonetheless, it's with an uncomfortable tug at the thin cotton t-shirt clinging to his skin that Enjolras climbs onto a mat clearly intended for boxing. He hadn't been much for fighting of that sort in Paris, but he had a cursory knowledge of it from Bahorel and oddly enough, Grantaire, and it had to be more useful than fencing or canne de combat, at any rate. And if he could focus his attentions on his own destructive capacities, perhaps he could block out those happening in the Arena.

[2; main lounge of the tribute center]

Ostensibly, he's reading. There's a pen tucked behind his ear, just visible under blond curls, and a paperback with a distinctly worn cover resting on his lap. Nevertheless, Enjolras' attention is focused on the television coverage of the Arena. He glances down every now and then, seeming to pick up a line or a passage, but it's a farce. He isn't making progress, and even if he were, it isn't any information he didn't already know. He closes the book, finally glaring daggers at the statistics on the screen, at last unable to hide his disinterest.

Never the less, a terrible cycle presents itself. Every seven minutes or so --when the advertisements for luxury cosmetics, designer cupcakes, and whatever else the Capitol is fond of this week begin to run-- he'll stubbornly reopen the book, struggling to find his place again and slowly losing interest again once the programming resumes. It's a losing battle, he should really just move to a different room, away from all the pageantry, but his curiosity forces him to stay. It's a vicious, nagging thing. He wants information about his friends, and yet he also fears what the television might tell him.

Comments

1

[savedbyasong]

Shion usually avoided the training room as well, when everyone else was here it just reminded him how out of his depth he was. How useless at fighting and surviving he was compared to every other tribute.

But when most people were still in the arena, he could at least focus on the few things he could do. Knot work, making traps. His attempts at using weapons usually ended in disaster but he sometimes still tried.

The more he watched of this arena the more he realised he had to try harder. Even though he could try and gather sponsors he couldn't really help Rat here, couldn't stop him from dying or being hurt.

He hadn't managed to stop him being hurt whilst he had been there either, and that was why he had to train harder.

Of all the people he expected to see, Enjolras was not one of them. He blinked, "You fight?"

[orestes]

He looked up, puzzled at the interruption. It took him a moment to recognize the source of the noise, however. He couldn't recall meeting Shion ever in person, but he had a favorable, if incomplete, impression of him from their brief conversation over the communicator.

"Yes, I fight." The reply was vague enough to be technically accurate, even though Enjolras suspected he was doing better by virtue of the fact that the punching bag couldn't fight back. An actual partner would be much more difficult to manage, however friendly. Still, such a statement was misleading, and he amended it quickly: "Not well, not like this. But I do, on occasion, fight."

[savedbyasong]

Shion nodded slowly, he hadn't expected it even though Enjolras was a victor. He had thought he was more like Shion; well perhaps not like Shion, he had proven himself capable of surviving after all whereas Shion had yet to live past the second week of any arena.

"Did you fight in the arena?" He asked, he couldn't remember seeing him do so, but he hadn't seen all the footage, in fact he had actively avoided some of it.

[orestes]

"Not really," the admission was soft, surreptitiously whispered in an unfriendly environment. Still, it wasn't inaccurate. He hadn't really fought through the Arena, only at it's end. And even so, Enjolras regretted his actions then. If he could repeat the past, he would have fallen, let he monster win. It would have been better that way, for everyone.

He swallowed hard, pushing the regret and what he was beginning to recognize as acerbic self-loathing from his mind. "I hid for a very long time. That is the only reason I won."

[savedbyasong]

"It worked." Shion blinked at him, it was still a feat to be able to hide that long without being caught and without being hurt and manage to survive until the end.

"At least you don't have to do it again." Hopefully, unless they put the mentors back in. But hopefully now they had done that once they wouldn't do it again, at least not too soon.

[orestes]

"Instead I am here and forced to watch all of you die with no way to intercede." There was a derisiveness to his tone. The implication that victory was any sort of escape from the Arenas could only truly be postulated by someone who had never considered the reversal of perspective. Was it even fair to expect that someone in the thick of it should consider such things? Enjolras wasn't sure. It seemed like a very quick way to deprive the Tributes of hope, but perhaps hope was not what was needed now either. "Forgive me, what I mean to say is that I preferred a more active role, in spite of its brutality. I do not like fighting for its own sake, but I find this life of captivity and complicity even more troubling."

[savedbyasong]

"I'm sorry..." The apology came automatically the moment Enjolras spoke, Shion looked down and studied the ground. He imagined it would be awful to not be able to help those you cared for, kept safe yet forced to watch them fight and die.

"I understand... I don't think I would want to stay behind... even if it meant not having to fight again." If it meant leaving Rat to fight alone, leaving him to die.

Alright so Rat was fighting alone now, but that wasn't from Shion's lack of trying to stay by his side, Shion was just bad at survival.

[orestes]

"Some people are not suited to the Arenas and will never be." He thought of Cosette. Even Marius with his fanciful daydreams could be fearsome when he needed to be. Cosette was of a rare sort of beauty, more innocent than seemed possible in their own world, let alone this one. She would never, ever be capable of committing the horrors it took to survive in such a place. Moreover, she should never have been forced to so much as witness it.

A tight frown worked its way across his face, drawing tiny pensive lines around his eyes and mouth. "My role as a mentor is to provide sponsors and support for the Tributes of my District while they are in the Arenas. They tell me that this is how I can help them, I... Well, it all seems rather irrelevant, if I'm to be quite honest."

[savedbyasong]

"You think it is irrelevant?" Shion blinked at him, since that was how he tried to help those he cared for once he died. Though he didn't have as much power or influence as a mentor. However if Enjolras thought even his own efforts were for nothing, then Shion's were not helpful at all.

He didn't like to think that way, since it was the only thing he could do to help anyone.

[orestes]

"I think that the Games are decided in a manner that is not quite arbitrary, but is, nevertheless, ultimately meaningless." There was a dogma to the statement and it came not without a certain desperate assertiveness. He had a logical basis for the argument, there was no doubt of that in his mind, with every reification of the Capitol, it was eroding away. The erosion left him with little more than a bitter arrogance, a moral conceit carefully and jealously guarded.

"At best, they are an argument for the right of the strongest and one which is unsatisfactory at that. In the first tradition of the Games, to think that one child adequately or accurately represents a population is to propagate a fallacy. In our modern practical situation, we are not even of this world. Our success or failure has no bearing on the biological or evidential validity of any one group in Panem." His words were clear and crisp as he spoke, unrehearsed, but certainly considered. "And, if they were a contest of strength, I certainly would not have won as I am not very strong at all. The same could be said for Mademoiselle Ryugasaki, or, indeed, a fair number of the other Victors. Thus, I am forced to see them as a petty subjugation, a culling of undesirables, or perhaps ritualized intimidation and massacre. Hardly arbitrary, but certainly without any sort of moral fulfillment."

[savedbyasong]

Shion hung on to his every word, nodding along when he agreed, which was most of the time. He supposed someone should tell Enjolras that such words were dangerous, such thoughts were dangerous and he was going to get himself, and those he cared about in the arena killed.

But Shion wondered if he cared, or if he was such a person that his ideals and his sense of justice was greater than caring about the lives of himself or others.

"I don't think even those in the Capitol believe it is any kind of moral or even historical necessity anymore." He said after a moment where he had gathered his thoughts, putting them into words. When he had spent his life not talking about such things, finding words to use was hard. "I think they believe it just entertainment, that's all..."

[orestes]

Shion would have found such warnings to fall on deaf ears, even if he had spoken up. It wasn't that Enjolras could deny the danger of so vocally holding his opinions, it was that he had nothing else. To compromise, even in terms of expression was to give up, to admit either weakness or, worse, that his opinions on the matter might not actually be sound. He had to attach himself to them as fully as was possible, to vocalize and express his discontent with every fiber of his being. Even if tangibly, practically, he could do nothing against their captors.

"I have no doubt that some of them considered the Games to be pure entertainment from the start. The taste for politics has been bred out of many of these people and they cannot be stirred because they, very simply, lack the capacity to see that they are wrong." It had been a difficult realization for him and the tension reflected in his brow. It knotted itself together, eyes falling closed briefly as he considered his thoughts. "Those who do understand the politics are more dangerous, I think. They enjoy this in ways far more wicked than those of the average sadist."

[savedbyasong]

Shion nodded, understanding that. It had been the same in No.6 people had been unable to protest because it would have not every occurred to them that their way of life was anything outside of perfect.

He nodded, "I can understand ignorance, if no one has been taught otherwise but when someone knows and understands what is going on... yet still supports such a thing." He nodded, feeling slightly ill.

[orestes]

"It is unconscionable." Enjolras completed the thought for him, not happily, but with a certain assurance of their accord. It was good to find someone who held a similar perspective to his own. Left in the Capitol with the others fighting, he so frequently felt like the one sane man in a madhouse, or conversely like the one invalid being nursed.

"Do you fight?" He asked suddenly, redirecting them from the morbidity threatening to overcome the conversation. "You asked me if I did and I should like to know your answer to the same question."

[savedbyasong]

Shion shook his head, "Not really... I mean I tried to learn but I'm not very good." And he wasn't sure he wanted to be, he remembered how it had felt to have a gun in his hands, to shoot it, to kill out of cold rage.

He wasn't sure he wanted to feel like that again.

[orestes]

"It is about having the proper motivations, I think." He hadn't been motivated to fight until he had gone to Paris. Prior to that it had all been theory independent of practical action; combat as a gentleman's art, and art for art's sake, or perhaps because it had simply been expected. Regardless, school and its bullies had necessitated learning to defend himself, then Paris itself had become motivation enough. No one liked to be defenseless against thieves, no one liked to be powerless during an uprising.

"I learned because I had people I wanted to protect. I am not especially strong, and I have known better fighters both here and in my home, but every man is capable of improvement." He bit his lip, glancing pensively from the boxing equipment to the boy in front of him and back again. "Practice makes perfect, as the old saying goes."

[savedbyasong]

Shion nodded, he understood that. He had never even contemplated wanting to fight until he had met Rat, and then he had killed for him. His eyes danced between Enjolras and the equipment. "I guess I will need a lot of practice... if I'm to be of any use to anyone."

He couldn't rely on Rat to protect him, it wasn't fair, and he didn't want to have to be stuck out here unable to help Rat, so he would have to learn and get better.

[orestes]

"As will I," Enjolras concurred, although perhaps he was better suited to such a life than some people. He had an intensity and singleness of purpose that seemed to adhere itself to any study almost codependently. He was, frankly, uncomfortable without a project, and if training in the pursuit of helping his friends could be that project, if only for a while, then so be it.

"There are other methods than fighting. You should know how to defend yourself, but just as essential as combat is knowing how to avoid exposure." That, and luck, had been the only reason for his victory, after all. "It is difficult to train oneself to be resourceful, but that is, I think, what is needed in such a situation."

[savedbyasong]

Shion nodded, "I understand." Being resourceful was hard, even if it was something Shion was better at than fighting. "I think there are places here to learn how to conceal yourself." He should look into it, as well as fighting. He nodded, his face set. "I have a lot to learn."

[orestes]

"We all do," he replied easily, though his sentiment was dark. When his friends returned there would be much work to do both for matters in and out of the Arenas. Just thinking of it made him at once excited and weary.

"I was about to leave; I feel a mess after too long in this place, but would you like to spar with me sometime? Perhaps we can help each other to learn." The invitation was more a matter of courtesy than true interest, but Enjolras wouldn't have felt put upon should the not decide to take him up on it either. They were in similar enough positions, they should be helping each other. They all should be helping each other.

[savedbyasong]

"That would be good." Shion smiled, it was always better to learn with others, sometimes more so than from others because then he felt less stupid, less like he was the only person who didn't know these things.

"I am sure I will see you soon then."

[orestes]

"Certainly," he agreed easily, turning his back to walk away and gather the few belongings he'd brought with him to the Training Center.

"You can call on me sometime in the District 5 suites, if you like. I avoid the city most days, so I am fairly easy to find. Perhaps there is an error in my predictability." Towel, duffle bag and water bottle secured, he made for the entrance to the small room. Pausing by the door, Enjolras offered a small wave. "I wish you well, my friend."

[savedbyasong]

"I will then." Shion would probably do his best to warn if he was going to turn up. "You too," He smiled, "And thank you."