thecapitol | so here's my hope, my tired soul. ( open )

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so here's my hope, my tired soul. ( open )

She's been here for a day now, enough time to convince herself that this isn't some kind of awful dream. In a lot of ways, it's almost surreal. For one, she's clean for the first time in months - actually, truly clean. In part, thanks to the efforts of her prep team, who had tsked at the filthy and matted state of her when she'd been brought in.

So here she is, squeaky clean and sitting in the corner of the common area in front of one of the many television screens. Watching one of the programs that seem to run around the clock. This time, it's highlights from the last arena.

Beth's no stranger to violence. Her life has been full of it for the last two years, ever since the dead stopped staying dead. She's seen a lot of it. But this is a full highlight real of awful, grisly murder being narrated by people with chipper voices like some kind of sick sports event.

"I'm gonna be sick," she mumbles quietly, mostly to herself.

TRAINING CENTER RESTAURANT

They give her more food than she's ever seen in her life, and Beth looks down at it like it's an alien thing. Like it can't possibly be real. She's perched on the edge of the bar on a stool with a plate heaped high and for a moment, she doesn't make any move to eat it. Because even before everything went wrong, they never had food like this on a farm where they grew mostly everything they ate.

She sort of just looks at it, fork in hand, like she's in shock.

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"It's going to get cold if you don't eat it." comes a helpful piece of advice from a young girl, currently clambering up onto the stool next to Beth's. It's a bit high for Clementine and she might be more comfortable sitting at one of the tables but she liked getting to swing her legs and secretly felt more grown up sitting at the bar.

It wasn't like they'd serve her alcohol or anything.

Clem picks up the menu to peruse what's on offer today, the meals regularly changed and somehow, always, were delicious prepared despite that.

As she does she gazes sidelong at the woman beside who seems a little stunned at the food on her plate. She wonders if it's the quality or the quantity, or both.

Call it protective instincts, but Beth immediately looks over when Clementine slips up to the stool, legs swinging without touching the ground. She's very young, probably younger than Carl was when they'd first met. She hopes that maybe she just lives here, instead of actually being a participant in the games.

Though from what she's seen, it doesn't seem likely.

"I know," and she gives her food another glance-over before sighing. Breathing in the deliciousness. "I guess I'm just not used to havin' so much. Or eatin' anything that didn't come out of a can. Or snakes, this is way better than eatin' snakes."

"I know how that feels. First time I got here? I ate everything. Which turned out to be a bad idea, I got pretty sick for a while." she watches this girl curiously now she mentioned that, "I'd go slow with dairy food if that's what you're used to."

Clementine cocks her head, smiling, "I didn't know you could eat a snake."

Though that mention has her wondering, since Luke and Nick turned up then maybe...

"You can, but it doesn't taste very good," she kind of wrinkles her nose at the memory of it. Even at the time, in the midst of starving, it had still been pretty crappy. But she'll take Clementine's advice under consideration - go slow. Okay. Small bites.

It's delicious. It's pretty much the best thing she's ever tasted, and that includes everything from before the infection spread. Better than apple pie, better than frozen yogurt and Christmas dinner and all of that combined. It's. A little bit overwhelming.

It almost makes her a little bit emotional, that this isn't something she can share with the people she loves.

"What does it taste like?" Clementine asks, hoping for a comparison. She wonders if the Capitol ever serves snake meat, she bets they do and they probably advertise it as some kind of delicacy.

She watches the woman eat, smiling when she see's her reaction. "Guess it's been a while for you since you had anything good. If there's one thing they do right here it's the food."

While waiting for an answer Clem puts in her own order.

"Mostly like...ashes, honestly. We cooked it over a fire. It's kinda...rubbery?" not to mention the tense atmosphere between her and Daryl at the time had made it a really stellar experience all around. But she can't help but smile at Clementine, because she's sweet and it's been a long time since she's seen anyone this young. Like the kids at the prison, or maybe slightly older.

It's nice, having children around. Like it reminds people that all is still okay in the world.

"It's amazin', like...we never had anything like this, even before. It's sort of unbelievable."

"Ugh, maybe I'll wait to ever try snake then." she decides on hearing that report. It mgiht just be the fault of the way the snake was cooked but the word 'rubbery' is instantly off-putting when it comes to food. Ordinarily back home she wouldn't be picky about it, back where food had ceased to be what you did and did not like and simply become the means to keep moving another day (she's eaten some gross stuff before), but at least in the Capitol she can choose to eat only what she likes.

"Before what?" the question is out before she has time to consider and then there's no taking it back. "I know what you mean. Wait till you get to dessert."

Before what is kind of a loaded question, and even though it's a fact of life for her, being met with disbelieving stares when she tried to ask people when she tried to ask where all the walkers were has tipped her off that it's not a regular thing here. But Clementine seems to understand in ways that others haven't. She's seen hardship of some sort, at the very least.

"Before...well. Before people started gettin' sick. And they came back as...somethin' else," she still picks at her food, but with a little less excitement than before. "Dead people don't stay dead, where I'm from."

Clementine's eyes widen as she Beth goes on, her mouth parting and then she swallows thickly.

"Walkers. You're talking about Walkers. You call them that, right?" Not zombies, not infected. Walkers. If this girl calls them that then maybe they're from the same world and with Luke and Nick so recently arriving it doesn't seem like a far stretch to believe.

Beth's eyes widen, and the fork in her hands clatters out of her hands. And the feeling of sad sympathy returns again, knowing that Clem's just come from their awful world and straight into something possibly worse. But there's something affirming about this, too. The understanding that everything she went through was real, and someone else understands. "You know what they are? You're the first."

"Yeah, I'm from -- we must be from the same place!" she leans forward, ignoring as a plate of fries and barbecued wings are placed in front of her. "No one else here knows! I mean, they didn't know, not until the past few days. I've been the only person here for months who comes from a place with Walkers for months."

"I've been askin' people where the walkers had gone, and they just looked at me like I was crazy," she's leaning forward, too. "We were in Georgia. Where are you from? Is it any better where you were? Things...got pretty bad in our part of the country. The military's gone, the government. Everyone."

"No way!" she exclaims further once Beth says that, "I'm from Georgia too! I used to live right outside Atlanta before it all happened. But we left a while ago, when when I got brought here... we heard about this place, Wellington, it's supposed to be safe there so we were heading north. It's in Ohio."

They'd been travelling ages to get there, leaving behind the familiarity of Georgia for colder climates.

She leaves out so much in telling Beth that. She leaves out all the details of the three years between the outbreak and heading north, all the people that had been lost, all the things she'd gone through. "Yeah, we never saw any military either, just their stuff that got left after the Walkers got them."

She's leaning forward so far that she's at the edge of her stool, probably a good inch or two from toppling over altogether but Beth doesn't give that any mind at all. After going years without hearing any news from outside her small rural area, it's easy to forget that the rest of the world exists sometimes.

"Are things...better in Ohio? Do you know? We haven't heard anythin', the radio's been dead for years now. We haven't gotten any news from outside the state in forever," she's trying not to get her hopes up, she really is.

"We hadn't got there yet but other survivors said it was safe there. They said the cold slowed the Walkers down and this place was really secure. I don't know if it was true or not but enough people said it that me and Christa--" Christa, "my friend, we decided to try."

"Maybe...maybe they're right. We spent the winter runnin' around, but it doesn't get cold enough in Georgia, I guess. We didn't see any change in them," moving north might have been a good idea, but it probably wouldn't have been possible. Too many people and too few cars, not to mention the severe lack of gasoline. "We lived in an old prison. It was safe, for a while."

"It was colder up there, by a lot." Clementine says, with a hint of complaint. "Christa said it would get a lot colder when we reached Wellington. There'd be snow." snow was a rare event in Georgia, Clementine couldn't even rightly remember seeing real snow before, just the fake kind they put in the mall and other places around Christmastime. "Sure would be easy if we could all go north and be safe."

Too easy, she thinks, for it to work that well. Even the north got warm in summer. "Sounds like it would be secure. My... the people I started with, we lived in a motel for a while. A prison sounds more secure."

The cold might actually help them out, but it might also have the added effect of probably killing them. She's lived in Georgia her entire life, she's not sure if she could survive a winter up north.

Judith might not have been able to.

"Nothing's safe forever," is all she says, and Beth's learned that it isn't pessimism. It's practicality. She had been stupid to think that those walls could have kept them safe indefinitely. But she doesn't really want to talk about the fall of the prison right now, not when it's something she's never stopped thinking about since it happened.

"What's your name?"

She's absolutely made the decision just now to keep an eye out for this girl in the future.

"No... I guess it's not." Clementine agrees after a moment, finally turning her attention to her food and glass of cola. She sips first and picks up a couple fries to eat while she turns that thought over in her head; sooner or later, living or dead, someone always came after you. Whether it was for the stuff you got or the place you lived.

"I'm Clementine. What's yours?"

"Beth. It's nice to meet you, Clementine," and she absolutely means that. It's nice to meet someone with similar life experiences after the ridiculous and mind-blowing decadence of the Capitol. "Did you have anyone lookin' out for you over there? Or here?"

Because she looks far too young to be in either of these places alone.

"Nice to meet you, as well." it's said with sincerity that equals Beth's own. These past few days have been something of a whirlwind for Clementine but it's the truth, it's always good to meet someone who could be a friend, doubly so someone who gets where she's coming from.

"A few people. Most of the Tributes are pretty good towards us kids."

"That's good to hear," and maybe it's enough to give her a little bit hope. Just because they're thrown in here to fight to the death doesn't meant that they have to.

Kindness always exists, somewhere. Beth knows that, it's just...hard to remember it, sometimes.

"Maybe we don't have to fight. In the arena, I mean. Maybe if everyone said no...somethin' could happen."

The two times Clementine has died, once was to a giant spider put in the arena by the Gamemakers, the second because of another kid... and roombas. She'd never actually been attacked by any of the adults.

Beth's suggestion has her biting her lip and then shaking her head. "They want us to fight, they'll make us fight. It's not just the other tributes to worry about. They put other stuff in the arena's that can kill you or give you reasons to fight." her voice quietens. "A friend... Steve, he tried in the last arena to give a speech so nobody would fight at the Cornucopia. The Capitol blew up some of the tributes there because of it."

They didn't really tell her a whole lot about the arenas. Just that they'd have to kill each other, and impressing the right people was apparently part of surviving. She knows that the tvs will have some footage of the games that she should probably watch, but getting food first had seemed like a good idea. Just in case what she saw robbed her of her appetite.

"Oh," it hadn't been a a particularly consolidated hope to begin with, and it doesn't hurt much when she shrugs it away. It doesn't mean she's going to give up on anything that might keep her from having to kill strangers she's never met. "Have you ever...?"

Killed anyone, that is. Because Beth knows that they'll try to tell them that it doesn't matter. Everybody comes back in the end.

It matters. It still matters.

That's the Capitol, giving Tributes as little information as they could. It was alright if a Tribute arrived between arena's where others could fill them in on the details, not so much for those who were brought straight into the Games and really believed they had a one-shot chance at living or dying.

Clementine shakes her head. "No..." then clarifies, "...not here."

Back in their world was another story.

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schnapp - 2014-12-07 07:42 (UTC) - Expand

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smarterthanthem - 2014-12-09 23:07 (UTC) - Expand

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so here's my hope, my tired soul. ( open )

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