thecapitol | The Capitol giveth, and the Capitol taketh away.

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The Capitol giveth, and the Capitol taketh away.

Who| Joan and OPEN
What| Everything is terrible, and Joan deals as best she can.
Where| District 11 suites
When| After Joan's death in week 4 of the arena: when she wakes, and a couple days later.
Warnings/Notes| Death and angst.

I.

Joan woke with a quiet gasp.

She was alive. She hadn't been sure she would be.

She wasn't surprised that Sherlock wasn't with her. He had died at the Cornucopia, yet had not sent her any gifts in the Arena. There was some hope, she supposed, that he just hadn't been brought back yet. Both Sherlock and John had been brought back late after the last Arena. Maybe this was the same thing.

She didn't believe it.

She rolled onto her side, drew her knees to her chest, and stared at the wall. Trying to think. Why did they bring her back? Wouldn't it have just been easier not to? She had never towed the party line, had never ceased to criticize the Capitol. Were they keeping her here to threaten somebody else? Did they bring her back just to break her? Make an example out of her?

It didn't make sense. She latched onto the question, though, the question of why, and turned it over in her mind, over and over and over.

Because she had to think about something, something that was not Sherlock, or her father. Something that might actually have an answer.

She stared at the wall for a long time.

II.

Joan had to work.

She didn't had anything specific, nothing that was sufficiently cohesive to be a "case." But she knew that the Capitol's bright and shiny facade of lies hid a seething mass of corruption. And she knew that if she looked hard enough, close enough, she would find the cracks. She had to find the cracks.

She shut herself away in her room, and watched program after program, all kinds, life in the Capitol, life in the Districts, news programs and kids programs and reality programs. She didn't sleep, barely ate. She had to keep working, to figure this out, to find a weak spot.

If she stopped, she'd think of Sherlock, of Gabriel, of her father, of those dead and lost and suffering because of her. So she didn't stop.

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Orc had been knocking around the common room for a few hours since being brought back to life and noticed that of all the rooms in the suite only one was still being used. Everyone else had come and gone but Joan was still locked away.

Joan was always a nice enough woman, and Orc liked her despite not knowing what to say to her most the time. She was an adult and so much smarter then any of the adults he knew back home.

A stone fist gently knocked on her door as Orc stood with a plate of various foods from the kitchen and a large bottle of juice.

It took a moment before the knock made its way into Joan's awareness. She turned her head to look at the door, frowning faintly. She could have just ignored it. Go back to the show she was watching (a candid camera thing with the very thinly veiled threat that the treasonous citizens hilariously caught out by the undercover host were...taken care of).

But she wasn't quite to that point. Yet.

She turned off the screen, stood (a little stiffly...she'd been watching for hours) and crossed to open the door.

"Orc," she said in mild surprise upon seeing her visitor. "Hey."

He nodded gently and held up the plate, "You've been in here a long time. Thought I'd make sure you were still with us." It was an innocent lie told mostly to make sure he didn't sound like a creep.

"You OK?"

She lifted her eyebrows at the plate, again surprised, and touched. "Oh my goodness, thank you." She gave him a smile, and lied easily. "I'm fine, I've just been watching some TV."

She paused, then shook her head a little.

"Sorry." She stepped to the side. "Come in, please."

Moving slowly in case she had anything valuable in her room he entered and cast a look around. He'd never been in here before and rarely in any other tributes rooms.

"Not alot of good on TV." he observed knowing how hard it was to find anything non-violent when the arena was active.

"You're not wrong." She took the plate and bottle of juice from him and gestured to one of the chairs, sitting in another and setting the food on the coffee table between them. "It's hard enough, trying to avoid the arena cams."

She wiped her hands on her pants, and gave Orc a small, weary smile.

"I haven't seen you in a while. How have you been?"

He looked wearily at the chair and lowered himself into it tentatively. It groaned under his weight but did not break. There was a look of relief when he settled and it remained in one piece.

"Alright I guess...not drinking as much." He explained "I think Howard's mad at me for something but I don't know what?" He was dancing around what was really on his mind because admittedly he was trying to avoid thinking about it.

"That last arena...it was strange." He concluded. "Half the time I just wanted to sleep, the rest of the time I was so angry."

"I experienced that, too," she answered. "I thought it had to do with how I was feeling about things, but now that I most people noticed the same thing...it's pretty clear it was something in the arena itself."

She didn't go into any specifics, about Sherlock and her father.

"How long have you been back?"

"Couple of days." He answered vaguely and shrugged his massive shoulders "Got into a fight with a troll after the arena brought...someone I knew from back home." He caught himself and tried to roll passed it, but the guilt was in his eyes.

"The troll killed me." He added. "The tall one that shouts alot."

She blinked and looked away. They had brought Sherlock back for her. Or, rather, some sort of creature that looked like Sherlock. But that was another tie to things she just didn't want to talk about. Or think about.

"Trolls. You mean...the people with the horns and sharp teeth?"

He was greatful she didn't press him on the issue. His display would have been seen on the broadcast anyway. Big powerful rock monster screaming in terror from seeing a young teen girl. He'd been so overwhelmed he'd run away crashing through a house to escape.

"Yeah, them." He nodded gently. "I guess that's what they are. They don't talk to me much." Most people didn't actually and he liked it that way. But sometimes he was curious.

"I think I've only talked to one of them, actually. It was a while ago."

She could understand why people might be cagey to talk to Orc. Then again, she would also bet that people were cagey about the trolls, too. Which was just a sad statement on human nature.

Well. Not human. Person nature?

"Ya know what's weird?" Orc suddenly realized "They all seem to know each other...like from before they came here." He pointed out feeling suddenly proud of his observation. He had so few of them.

"I mean...it's not like I know every human from my world who shows up here. do you think they're world is just really really small?"

"Huh. That's a good point."

She thought about it for a moment.

"I guess their world could be small. Or maybe their species is really localized on their planet, and the population is small. Like platypuses. If platypuses were intelligent and social, maybe they'd all know each other."

"Platypuses?" Orc asked desperately racking his brain for a mental image of what the creature was supposed to look like.

"That's...some kind of lizard right?" He suddenly felt foolish and though his stone skin didn't show it, he was burning with blush.

She blinked and raised her eyebrows. He had never heard of a platypus? She tried to rein in her surprise, not wanting to embarrass him.

"No...it's a mammal, but it's really weird. It has a bill and webbed feet like a duck, and it lays eggs, but it's warm blooded and nurses its young. You can only find them in eastern Australia."

Public education had not done Orc any favors.

Orc tried to imagine the creature but years of telling himself it was better not to think and at least a year of heavy alcohol abuse had made imagination one of his weaker skills. The creature he came up with looked more like a duck with fur and big fat breasts.

He smiled all the same.

"I wonder if the Capitol knows about them. I wonder if they even have an Australia."

"It's a good question. We don't really know anything about what is going on outside Panem. If there even is anything outside Panem."

There would have to be, though, right? It seemed unlikely that every other country in the whole world had been destroyed.

Orc took a breath and sighed "You really think so? I mean...we've seen what they can do. Big impossible arenas and monsters and...all of that. What if this really is all that's left?" The idea was so horrible he could barely comprehend.

"If this was all that was left is it even possible to fix the world?"

"I believe it is."

She had to. They were stuck there, weren't they? She had to believe there was some hope.

"I don't think they could have destroyed the rest of the world. Not without killing themselves in the process."

That seemed to relax him a bit. Joan was a smart person so if she said that's how it was then that's how it had to be.

"Do you think they would destroy the world? If they can't get things under control? Like flipping a table when you're losing at checkers?"

Because Orc had been a poor sport in his childhood and knew what that was like.

Edited 2014-06-29 11:06 (UTC)

"I don't know."

The idea worried her. The Capitol had acted very foolishly in a number of ways, all but ensuring their eventual destruction, in Joan's opinion, at the hands of the people who had nothing left to lose. But would they actually be the ones to push the button and end it all?

"I hope not."

"Me too." Orc agreed feeling foolish for having asked. It's not like just because Joan was a smart, older woman she had all the answers.

"So um...are you OK? There are alot of sick people around and you've been in here alone for...a long time." He couldn't guess for how long. Beady eyes scanned over her like she might suddenly dissolve into hysterical coughing fits.

"I'm fine," she reassured him, and it was at least partially true. She wasn't sick. She hadn't had enough contact with actual people outside the Arena to catch anything. "I've been keeping an eye on things in the news, that's all." Also technically true, even if she doesn't share her motivation. Her attempt to drown out her grief with the search for some chink in the Capitol's armor.

"Who do you know that's sick?"

"My girlfriend." He answered automatically "They told me she was sick but I couldn't find her. So I came back here in case she came looking for me." Which was seeming less and less likely.

"The last time people around me got sick, they coughed so hard their organs came out their mouths." He added in a grim sort of casual way. "I hope that doesn't happen again." He shuddered visibly.

"Oh my god," she said, pulling a horrified face. "What happened? When was this?"

Anthrax? Ebola?

"Back home." Orc clarified feeling foolish for horrifying her.

Then again there was an odd sort of comfort in telling people how bad things could have been.

"The sickness spread through town but we couldn't figure out how to stop it. Not even the girl who healed people could fix it. They would cough and cough and just...bleck." He shuddered.

"That's horrible," she said. She knew his world had been a bad one, but...

"Did they have a name for what was happening to them?"

Orc shook his head.

"Just "He's sick. She's Sick. They've got it too." Stuff like that." He explained "I guess one kid called it the plague. Weird sounding word." He mumbled as his memories inevitably wound back around to his own failures during that crisis.

"It was a really bad time." He concluded as his eyes grew dark and he heaved an exhausted sigh. He'd wanted so badly to die back then, but everyone around him kept dying instead.

She reached out to touch his hand. It might have been a futile gesture, since she wasn't sure he could even feel her. She needed to try to comfort him, regardless.

"Where and when I'm from, there were a couple things that would do things like that. I never actually saw people with them, though."

He nodded his heavy head and offered her a weak smile.

"Kinda makes everything happening here not so bad considering what life was like where I came from." He half joked. "At least here I'm not starving. People aren't afraid of me." Well some were but most thought of him as some kind of an amusement.

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The Capitol giveth, and the Capitol taketh away.

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