this place is a narrative mess

[acroodawakening]

Who| Closed to Guy and his close CR
What| Guy is brought back to the Tribute Center
Where| District 6 and Guy's room
When| The night of the expose when he's returned and the next morning after.
Warnings/Notes| CW: Possible mention of bidding, mental trauma/dissociation, the usual for someone's that dealt with Penny



When the Peacekeepers brought him back, Guy was silent, floating along like a ghost next to them. His face was still blotchy from the crying and his eyes were red-rimmed but there was no emotion on his face. He'd shut down. Sometimes it was okay to take time to be sad and sometimes you got so sad you had to not think but it had never been like this.

He had always been someone that dealt with his feelings as they came and only shoved them aside for later if he was facing something life or death. Then when it was over, he dealt with them, felt them, and moved on.

This had finally pushed him beyond that. He'd felt so much - so much fear and despair and misery - that something had collapsed in itself and now there was just a dull buzzing behind his ears.

The world no longer made sense and the worst part of it was that the things that did make sense, like his story, like the life he'd shaped for himself, had been taken away from him. His story had been twisted into something else and now it didn't belong to him anymore.

Now it would be what they wanted it to be and he would be the thing they wanted him to be and there was nothing he could do about it, except hope that he got boring enough they cut the thread that tied him to this new life and let him drift away. Now his life would be just like the emptiness inside a shell instead of the patterns on the outside or the sounds it could make.

Comments

Re: For Everyone Else

[dividedgirlofmine]

When Susannah sees the cave, she kneels down in front of it on her prosthetic legs. "Can I come in?" she asks in a shaky voice. "I-- I wasn't sure if you were going to come back, you or Bunny. I'd like to touch you if that's okay, just to make sure."

[acroodawakening]

"You can come in."

He was on a much more even keel than earlier, but he still didn't really want to come out. Not yet.

"I could use a hug right now," he said shakily. "I'm not suffering from a hug drought because all my friends have been coming and giving me really nice hugs but I need a lot right now."

He sounded like his world had been shaken up and as if he'd collected the pieces but not managed to put them back together again.

[dividedgirlofmine]

She crawls into the cave and holds him tight to her, twisting her hands in his poofy hair, breathing in the scent of it. "I'm so glad," she murmurs. "I'm so glad you're alive. I thought they were going to kill you."

[acroodawakening]

Guy hugged her back, almost ferociously. He had been taking a great deal of comfort in his connection to other people. His family may not have been here but his friends definitely cared about him and it helped offset that feeling of being a thing, of being some unloved, worthless something.

"So did I," he admitted.

There was a small part of him - a very small part - that wondered if that would've been better.

"I don't know about Bunny, I - I wasn't really in a position to ask questions."

He closed his eyes tight, hoping that his mistakes hadn't led to Bunny's death or avoxing. He already knew they had to have led at least to his suffering.

[dividedgirlofmine]

"They hadn't brought him back to Dee Ten when I left," Susannah says, "so far as I know, but they hadn't taken the card with his name out of the holder either. I... I don't know. The longer the wait, the more sure..."

She closes her eyes too, hugs him tighter. "He was stupid," she whispers. "Punchy too. You don't attack the police, not here. That's the quickest way to get lynched if you're a Negro--and we all are Negros here, even the whites are, we're all slaves." From slave to free to slave again in four generations, oh Lord. "Never attack the police. They can make you disappear. Probably easier here."

[acroodawakening]

"What's that word mean?" Guy asked slowly, of the word 'Negro' wondering if it would help him understand this place better. "And the other word. 'Lynched'?"

Then he paused.

"Or is it another one of those things that I keep finding out about that I didn't know people did and wish I didn't know the second I find out?" His voice trembled slightly. "There have been a lot of those."

[dividedgirlofmine]

"A Negro," Susannah says after a long moment, "is someone who looks like me. People whose ancestors come from a place called Africa. Joly's a Negro too. So's Venus and Howard and that one stylist from Dee Twelve that's so popular, Cinna. Or-- that's what we were called when I come from. Howard says we're 'blacks' when he comes from, but I still think that's a rather rude way to put it."

She sighs and hugs Guy tighter. "Our ancestors were kidnapped and enslaved and brought to America--well, mine and Venus and Howard's--and there was a civil war about a hundred years ago for me which ended with us being set free and slavery being outlawed. But we weren't considered equal even after we were free. Especially in the South. It was better in the North, which was where I've lived since I was a little girl, especially if you had money, which we did, but even there..."

Another sigh. "In the South, when I come from, if a white man--whites are people with pale skin, they look like your escort--if a white man commits a crime against a Negro, the police won't really care or bother to do anything. But if a Negro commits a crime against a white man-- or if he didn't do anything, but the white man said he did-- well, sometimes they'd get lynched."

Not as often as they did when her parents had been young. But sometimes, still. Too often.

"When someone gets lynched, it means a mob of people got together to punish them, because they didn't think they'd be punished enough according to the actual laws. So they break into the jail and take them out and kill them. Hang them, usually."

She pets his hair and wishes she didn't have to explain this. "It... doesn't seem like they do that here, at least in the Capitol. But I'm fairly sure that the Peacekeepers could make anyone disappear and that's another thing that sometimes happened to Negroes who got in trouble. But when I say we're all Negroes, what I mean is that the people in the Capitol don't really see us as people like them. We're something less."