thecapitol | Drown the Stale, Owning Stares All Around You [Open]

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Drown the Stale, Owning Stares All Around You [Open]

WHO| Venus and Open
WHAT| Venus reacts (or doesn't) to the exposé.
WHEN| Directly after the exposé and over the following days.
WHERE| Various cafes in the Capitol or her bedroom.
WARNINGS| None yet.

She'd braced herself. She could at least credit the Capitol for giving her a little warning before they character assassinated her, which is more than could be said for some of the paparazzi and celebrity news outlets back home. She was expecting the usual: skank, shallow airhead, probably slept her way to the top, all things that she was more than equipped to brush off. Her family's come up a few times before in the media, usually as an example about how mutants were dangerous and ought to be controlled, and the politics of it felt so divorced from her experience that it somehow didn't penetrate her armor.

She's ready, sitting in her bedroom with a pint of raspberry sherbet, fresh from a shower in one of those fluffy robes that's never seen cheap laundering before, when Insider Tales comes on and manages to slip past the fortress she previously thought impervious.

As soon as they show Jamal, she finds herself, for the first time in years, feeling outright breathless with a panic she can't explain. She holds her hand over her chest and she gasps and tries to remember the mental exercises she taught to Joly, tries not to let this suffocation feel like an old friend. She gets that under control just in time for them to show the footage of her family's death, which she never saw before, which cameras never saw before, and torn between panicking or shutting down, she does the latter.

Maintaining the illusion of apathy is a trying enough task as to be distracting, and she protects herself with that. She finishes her sherbet, even though it seems to sit unmelted in her stomach like a stone. She convinces herself that she can act her way until it's real - fake it until you make it - and she tells herself that she's fine with that.

And yet she can't convince her to go look for people, to explain herself or admit guilt or clarify or do any of the things she needs to do, and so she isolates herself for the next several days. Aside from the gym, she hides. She keeps up the happy starlet act for only the amount of time it takes to get to the secluded backs of cafes or between the bathroom and her bedroom. And then she spends her time staring at books she doesn't turn the pages of, focusing all her energy on never letting them see her cry.

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Susannah hadn't been inclined to leave her own room much either after the mini-arena, even after she'd had her prosthetic legs returned and fitted back onto her. But enough time had elapsed since then that she felt like she could try to go outside the Tower, to interact with all those Capitol citizens who'd seen her evil half go wild on the television.

She'd decided to go to a coffee shop she'd been fond of before, but when she'd arrived there'd been a CLOSED sign on the door and a note that the proprietor would be away on vacation 'til the end of the week.

The cafe next door is open, though. She goes inside, makes her way to the back where she hopes she can hide, just a little, and sees Venus.

She just stands there, then, for a long moment, looking at the other woman, before she blurts out, "I don't care what they said on the television. True or false, it doesn't matter, you're still someone I want to get to know. And I'm-- I'm sorry about the fire."

Edited (icon argh) 2014-04-28 07:47 (UTC)

Venus is 'absorbed' in a book when Susannah speaks, if that word can adequately describe sitting there staring at the letter 'R' in a word on the page until it ceases to look like a tool of language. She can't actually say that she's absorbed anything in the last chapter she's read, even though it's taken her the better part of four hours to get through the three pages it takes up.

She's reliving it all in her head. It used to be in the first person, but now she knows what it looked like from the outside. Now her memory has multiple angles to come at her family's death from.

Her head snaps up. "The fire- oh. Right. In the Arena. Courfeyrac."

She's seen the footage of Susannah snapping. It stirred the empathy in her that can only come from the fact that she's had her own struggles with her head for the last ten years.

"That...that was my fault. I should have held onto him tighter." She gestures at the hair across from her. "You can sit down. We can be the crazy black ladies together, make a whole new stereotype for ourselves."

She smiles softly, sympathetically.

Susannah finds herself smiling tentatively back as she slips into the chair. "Something like that, I guess." Except she really was crazy and Venus... Venus had seemed sane to her.

"When are you from?" she asks after a moment. "If you don't mind me asking. I know you're from my future or else you wouldn't be calling us 'black' but are you as far forward as, well, Howard, I guess?"

"Two-thousand six. Which means I got my own footing more than some people here, less than others."

Venus rubs her hands over the ceramic of her coffee mug, breathing deep between her lips. "And you're from the time when things just started getting going for us folks."

Susannah nods. "I got to see it start, then got pulled away before it finished." She hesitates for a moment before saying, "Although I suppose we're all Negroes here in Panem, not just you and me and Howard and that pretty French gentleman. Is 2006 far enough forward for that Mr Obama fellow Howard told me about?" she adds almost immediately afterward.

"I'd say I wish I'd been around to see it, but I figure that'd make it sound like I don't know that I've benefited from the time I was born. I had the luxury of dropping out of my integrated school."

Which is something that's coming to bite her in the ass, as the life she used to be fine with - that she expected only to keep her warm the short while that she ushered herself to death - loses its sheen. As greater causes call her.

"No. We had an awful president in my time. And we were at war again."

But Susannah smiles at her instead, gently and shakes her head. "No, no, it's flattering. That we changed things enough that people would have wanted to be there, changing it with us... I was part of the Movement, you know. I'd been going to meetings since the late fifties back in New York. I was down to Mississippib registerin' people to vote as part of Freedom Summer, just before I left my world for Roland and Cuthbert's. It-- didn't end well," those poor dead boys, all those days in the jail cell, "but we got good things done in the meantime."

After a moment she adds, "I'm sorry about your president. Mr Johnson wasn't Mr Kennedy, but he was better than some of the other fellows it could have been.

"I admire you for that, you know."

Venus didn't know. As it stands she wonders if, back then, she would have had the strength to stand up for people like her. She knows she wouldn't have been able to stand for herself. Even standing up for mutants was something she could hardly manage in her own time.

"I was too young to vote when we put him in office. By about two weeks. Not that I know I'd have made the right decision anyway." She doesn't even know if she would have voted, but she figures it's wiser not to say that to Susannah. Not when in Susannah's time, people were dying for the right to get to a ballot box.

"I was lucky," Susannah says, her hands playing with a napkin. "I lived in the North and my daddy had money, but there were so many people who weren't lucky-- but they were all just like me, but without money, without the illusion of safety that New York City provided. So I almost had to do it. Because it was luck that I had it that good and they didn't and no one should be treated the way we were under Jim Crow."

"So I heard. We still got, you know. The shadows of that back in Savannah, where I'm from."

Not the laws, but the history that lurks in the shadows. Venus watches Susannah play with the napkin as she fidgets in her own way, stirring that sugary confection of a coffee.

"You get those morals growing up?"

"Oh," Susannah says quietly. "I suppose you would."

Her hand continues to play with the napkin. "I suppose I did," she says, after a moment. "My parents tried to raise me to do what was right. They wanted to spare me from what they'd lived through, of course, that's why we were in New York, but... well, once things started going and people in the circles I was in started talking about it..."

She's got it all twisted up in a spiral. "And of course I was Odetta then. Nearly all the time, really, before I lost my legs. It's easy to be moral and good when all the parts of you that aren't have been shuffled off to another woman."

Venus doesn't remember what her parents gave her, what morals they put in her. She knows they did, she has memories of over a decade with them, and yet it feels like the trauma did all the formative work.

"And were you always-?" Venus stops herself, realizing that she's probably about to be rude, but the way her eyes flash down to Susannah's prosthetics probably communicates the rest.

"I lost those when I was twenty-five," Susannah says. "I was waiting for the A-train and a sonovabitch named Jack Mort pushed me and I fell and the damn subway train cut them right off at the knee. Someone improvised a pair of tourniquets, they got me to the hospital in time, and I survived it somehow. Before that, I had legs like anyone else." She rubs her forehead. The motion doesn't mean what it did when she was Odetta-and-Detta, but as an unconscious gesture it's endured into this new life of hers. "He'd been the one who dropped the brick on my head when I was little that stared the whole mess. One of those odd coincidences, like in a book."

Her mouth screws into an odd expression. Of course it was like a book. She'd been in one.

Once upon a time she might not have really flinched at that, and yet all the violence of the Arena has, rather than desensitized her, made her more thoughtful about it. About the effects it has on people who aren't like her.

"That...that's horrible. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked." She thinks Susannah's face is contorting with pain at the memory, at the brick, at the skull cracking beneath it.

Susannah shakes her head. "No. It's all right, you're not the first person I've told and you won't be the last. People always wonder about the legs. I just gave you a little more detail than usual, that's all." She turns her twisted-up napkin around in her hand. "What about you? I saw some of the footage from in the museum, how you poofed in and out. Have you always been able to do that?"

"What you saw in the exposé was just about truth. When I was eleven I started exploding at random and killed everyone around me. By the time I was sixteen I could control it." She sighs. "Personally, I'd have taken the trade."

Susannah reaches forward to pat Venus' hand. "You'd think their lies were the worst of it," she says, "but they find just the right way of framing the truth and it's worse than a lie could ever be."

"It's enough to make you doubt yourself." She very nearly pulls away, but instead drinks from her coffee using her other hand. It's hard to accept comfort you feel is unearned.

"And doubt's the kind of things ladies like us-" sick in the head, crazy ladies- "don't need extra of."

Susannah nods. In the wake of the whole affair with Mia--oh Lord, was it really a year ago by now?--when she'd been feeling a bit more plural than she had in a long time, one of her consolations had been that feeling plural or not, she had confidence in being able to choose who to be.

What had happened with Harley... she had made all those promises and she thought she knew how to make sure it would never happen again, but could she really be sure?

"It really isn't."

"They think it's funny, using it against us." The Gamemakers, setting Susannah up in the mini-Arena with Harley, taking Venus' meds away. "I just don't know what we're supposed to do about it. I guess I should be glad that I'm still me through all of it, though - sorry, I guess that's insensitive too."

"Sssh," Susannah says. "It's all right. I'm not offended. Anyway, that bitch is a part of me, much as I hate it. She's just not the me I want to be." Her thoughts go to Mia 'borrowing' her body her body again--what it was like to have a to share with a true foreign presence and not just the pieces of herself.

"Maybe if we're lucky they'll think repeating themselves is tacky."

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Drown the Stale, Owning Stares All Around You [Open]

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minor spoilers

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