thecapitol | There's a High Wind in the Trees [Open]

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There's a High Wind in the Trees [Open]

WHO| Eva and everyone
WHERE| Training Center room and the District 9 living room
WHAT| Eva gets back from a night of greasing palms and hosts an advisory meeting. Also punches things.
WHEN| A few days before the next arena.
WARNINGS/NOTES| Some mention of the Sponsors.

Eva's hit another dead end. Any of her attempts to sleuth information about the recent attacks from the Peacekeepers have been shut down, or have come perilously close to making her look treasonous, so for her own self-preservation she's backed down and tempered those curious instincts.

She balms her ego by reminding herself that the rebels attacked are a particularly inopportune time for her; given that the new Arena is coming within the week, Eva's had palms to grease, and the meetings with Sponsors has left her running ragged. Not for the first time, she wishes her fellow District 9 Mentors were more involved with the Tributes, because she feels that hers have been neglected while she was cozying up to the rich and powerful.

Her makeup today is a splay of painted orchids dripping from her hair line down to create a mask around her eyes, a clever ruse to hide the dark circles forming there. She's wearing fashionable gloves to keep herself from picking at her lips and biting her cuticles; she's always been bad at hiding her fidgety impulses when she's tired. Thankfully, the elaborate makeup and beautiful embroidery on the gloves distracts from how functional her plain dark dress is, and to an extent how rumpled the fabric is. She didn't have time to change from last night's encounter with a Sponsor with some unsavory interests in one of her Tributes; the argument took them long into the night, and Eva ended up walking away with one less person willing to support District 9, but able to catch a few hours of sleep without guilt.

Prior to doing what she came here to do, she spends a little while in the Training Center, removing her gloves and wrapping her hands in tape so she can take a few swings at the punching bag. She's no longer in peak physical shape and tires quickly, but it's a good, healthy way to work the stress out. She restrains herself, focusing more on form than on power, and ceases long before she can work up enough of a sweat to make the fact that she hasn't showered this morning evident.

She's carved out a few hours today to talk with her Tributes, if they're willing. She goes up the elevator and waits in the District 9 living room with a plate of fanciful cheeses and some wine bottles, which she's inconspicuously opened and partially vanished the contents of already. While she waits she doesn't, in fact, have the television on, but reads a small book of poetry she's stowed in her purse instead.

[OOC: The District 9 party is open to her Tributes only, but her other subthread is open to absolutely everyone in the Capitol who wants to get some threading in before the Arena!]

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Not far from the punching bag, towards the entrance of the room, an anemic whistle emerges from the silence. It is faint, fragile, filled with air. The notes waver and sway and barely hit their marks.

But the melody is clear. Amazing Grace.

Katurian waits with his hands in his pockets, his own sallow skin smoothed with foundation. He is trying to look stronger these days, even though no make up can hide his sharp angles and skinny chest, the hollowness in his eyes.

Eva pauses, but rather than respond with words she starts to harmonize with humming, more fully than the lullaby-ish quality she used last time she hummed to him. Her voice is rough and deep for a woman, and would be ugly except for its aptitude at clinging to exactly the right notes. It's clearly of a different vein than the glitzy, smooth silk of Capitol music; it's rich with a sort of culture.

"You," she finally says to Katurian, after she's finished unwrapping her hands from the tape, "should not give up your day job."

It's good to see him, and it's good to see he looks healthier, if not whole. It's a tall order to ask for any Tribute to look whole after a death like his. She pulls her gloves back on.

"How are you? In comparison." Their lives should always be measured in comparison to their worst. It's the forward propulsion they need to get through the day.

Katurian doesn't answer with words either -- at least not immediately. At her question, he simply looks down at himself and laughs, the sound not much stronger than his earlier whistles. He lifts his arms, a meek demonstration. Look, his movements say. I'm alive. I'm standing.

"It takes more than a stomach bug to keep me down," he says, allowing himself a wry smile. A private joke. "I'm pretty fucking stubborn."

He is not comfortable with her. Not entirely. Katurian is well-versed in betrayal, in warm embraces becoming suffocating caverns. But he imagines that somehow, someday, he could be comfortable with this woman, and that in itself is significant. She helped him when no one else would. Her voice rolled like the waves of the ocean.

"How are you?"

"Good to hear. You look much more handsome when you're not hunched over a garbage bin." She brushes at some of the flyaway hairs that were loosened during the punching. "I've been worse. The week before the arena is always a little hectic for the Mentors."

There it is, the elephant in the room. In a few days he'll be right back where he started, and the worry that this next time might break him entirely has slipped into Eva's mind a few times. It's not unusual for her to care about Tributes outside of her district. She didn't used to allow herself, back when they died for good, and she doesn't know if now is any better, because she gets to watch them suffer over and over.

"Come on, take a walk with me. I could use the exercise."

His face falls at the reminder. It won't be long before he's scrambling and scraping and begging for his life. It won't be long until unimaginable pain.

"Right," he says at her offer, his lips fluttering into a brief smile. "Sure."

She tries to look warm when his face falls like that. She tries not to let how much it saddens her work its way onto her face. She tries not to feel sad at all, really, but something human has stayed alive in her, like embers in the coal, in spite of being doused in a lifetime of this world of Panem.

No one should be able to see fear and pain like that and feel nothing. She feels it pluck at her chest and guts like a fishing hook latched into her stomach.

She crooks a finger at him. "I want to show you a place, if you don't mind. It's a bit unusual, but...I've found it helps."

Edited 2013-03-12 19:03 (UTC)

Thank you, he wants to say, but he's afraid that his voice will crack, and so he says nothing, instead nodding his head with his mouth wired shut. That was why he came here, to thank this woman (he can't remember if he learned her name that night, but he learned it since: eva like eve like the beginning), but faced with her sympathy, he feels small once more. It's easier to give in, to drift with her urgings like the waves of the ocean.

To receive comfort. Not debt.

"I don't go out very much."

She knows she's using him, and she doesn't care. She knows she's using him as a way not to alleviate guilt, per se, but powerlessness. Because she sat next to Ariadne while the Baron fondled the new Victor and she said nothing, because she watches as the Capitol dresses up human sacrifices in feathers and silk and she says nothing, because she watches them kidnap children and strangers and tune in to see them slaughtered like animals and she does nothing. Because they took away her little boy and she did nothing.

Eva, like avian, the Capitol's flightless bird of prey, tethered forever to the bidding of the falconer.

Every few weeks they send innocents like Katurian out to the bloodbath and she stands aside, because it's futile to speak up, because she's scared of losing the opportunities she yearns for in the future. She can tell herself a hundred times it isn't selfish, that wanting your life to matter in the Capitol isn't some foolish flight of fancy, that it's justified to wait for the right moment to strike, but the truth grows like algae at the bottom: in Panem, putting any stock in your life at all is a self-serving delusion.

All she can do is ease a little suffering while they're here, outside the Arena. She walks with Katurian through the Capitol, not saying anything until they reach a small restaurant with plush red velvet chairs in the 'waiting room'. The hostess recognizes Eva.

"Two, please." Eva raises two fingers. "For lunch. Bring us broth and vegetables. And hot bread with honey." Then she looks over to Katurian, adding, "you need to put a little meat on those bones".

The hostess nods and gestures to the dining area. It's a door, and Eva opens it to reveal pitch black and the slit of light from the waiting room falling on red carpet, like a mouth yawning with a hungry tongue at the base. There are pillows inside to sit on, scattered around and receding into the pit of darkness. It's warm and soft and secret inside.

"Think of it as crawling into the womb," she says to Katurian, "or under the covers."

Katurian has a curious relationship with the dark. It is his friend. It is his enemy. It is his savior. It is his torturer. When he sees where Eva has taken him, that expansive darkness, his breath leaves him, catching in his throat like a solid object. Most of Katurian's childhood memories take place in the dark. He can hear everything. Remember everything.

(Michal's screams reverberate off the walls of his bedroom, and Katurian writes, writes, writes until his fingers are blistered and bleeding, and the only thing that saves him in the end are pillows and blankets and covers.)

He makes a small sound, that first successful breath. The world twists underneath his feet.

"I never want to leave."

He whispers it, soft as a secret.

"Neither do I." She takes his hand in hers and enters the pitch blackness. She's been here often enough that she knows how to navigate it as the door closes behind them, sealing off the last of the light. She nudges her feet around, finding pillows, then leads them to take a seat.

"It's supposed to be an experience, you know. About how turning off one of our senses enhances the others, so the food will be more enticing." Her hand pulls away from his. In the dark, the pride leaves her muscles and returns to her head; she slouches, her lips fall into a frown, her eyes lower in an unseen expression of defeat and exhaustion. She knows what she is so she has no need to pretend for the prying eyes of others. "But I've always thought of it as..."

She lets the thought hang in the air. Around her the shadows are gelatinous and inky, black on black on black, tricking her eyes into seeing movement and blurs where there is no light to communicate anything.

"Tell me about the happiest memory you have. Visually. What did it look like?"

But Katurian doesn't want to think about his memories. He doesn't want to think about autumn mornings under the oak tree, about the sound of coins clinking down a wishing well, about school plays and Michal gripping his arm and begging to teach him how to act.

So Katurian grips her arm, searching for balance. And he tugs.

Begs.

"Tell me about yours."

"Alright."

She closes her eyes, even in the dark. "It's, um, it's when I was sixteen. There was an orchard beyond our slum where they grew apples, and they policed it to keep us from stealing off the job, but during the summer it was just flowers for about a week. My older sister and I used to sneak in during the morning, under a hole in the fence, and we covered up the hole with..."

She moves her hands in the dark, acting it out. Her voice is rough and textured, coming from a place deep in her head where she keeps the memories.

"We covered it with the do-not-trespass sign, and my sister pulled it up that morning and told me to come in. The sun was just starting to come up, so the grass looked all violet, and the little industrial rows looked like the arms of a highway. I had my baby in my arms and was covering his mouth with a washcloth, so he wouldn't cry. Clara, she kept shushing him even when he wasn't making any noise. And we crawled on our knees through the hole and she was worried that they'd know we'd been in the orchards because I got mud on my pants. I ripped the hem of my pants off up to the thigh to hide it, and I had this tan, you know, the kind where you have a band around your ankle from where your shoes and your pants don't match.

"And we went to a grove of the stunted trees, the rejects, we called them, and we sat there and watched the sun come up, and I was breastfeeding my baby, and the flowers were like..." She makes a noise as she tries to think of the word. "Like little pom-poms cheering for us. Or fireworks. They were a celebration when the sun hit them and turned them from grey to pink to white. It was a private show just for us. And there were petals in the grass, little crushed bruised things, and petals getting stuck in our hair whenever the wind hit them, and it looked like snowflakes, but smoother, more stylish."

Then she'd heard the alarm sound and they'd had to crawl back under the fence. She'd washed her knees in a pail of water near the well. But she doesn't have to mention any of that.

It is easy to forget, at times, that the quality of living varies considerably between the districts and the Capitol. Katurian knows that he's been assigned to District 12, yes, but he's never even see pictures of the place he's supposedly representing, let alone the districts of his supposed 'rivals.' When he compares this world to his old world, he often thinks of it as nearly the same, yet better. Katurian understands surveillance and lock-downs and police snatching up your neighbors without even the slightest warning, but he has never seen such decadence, such wonder, such technology. But maybe everything is worse after all. Maybe the rest of this world is broken, even more broken than the world he came from. Isn't that what organized child murder suggests, at the very least?

But the words are nice. The words are like silk in his ears. She is sharing things with him, things that seem so personal, so intimate. He closes his eyes in the darkness, too.

That is beautiful, he wants to say. You're a mother? Where's your family? Was this before the arena?

Is that when your good memories end?

"Why me?' he says instead, and although he tries to bite back emotion, his voice trembles with sorrow, doubt. "I'm-- I'm supposed to be your enemy. Why me?"

"Because." She pauses as she hears a door opening, hears feet moving in the dark. She finds his wrist in the dark and gives it a squeeze. "Don't worry, they're just bringing us our lunch."

The waiter, unseen, finds their hands and guides them to sippy-cup like ceramic vases, hot with the soup within. Eva waits to say anything more until she hears the door open and close again.

"Because I already made enemies of people on the District's say-so once in my life. I don't need to do that anymore. I'm free of it." She pulls her hand away from him. "Because you're in needless pain, and I've seen decades worth of needless pain."

Because the last people she bothered to get close to, back when they were from her district, are dead. In the 74th Hunger Games, the boy was stabbed through the back at the Cornucopia, and the girl received a spear through the gut and lasted five hours before bleeding out in the woods. Because Eva saw thirty-odd years of that and she remembers the names of every single one.

Because to not reach out to anyone to protect her own heart would be to sacrifice its worth.

The squeeze is good. Necessary. This is because when the door opens, every muscle in Katurian's body tenses, and he shrinks, small and afraid, crumbling like a dog who's been hit too many times. He does not trust the darkness, the things he cannot see, and so when Eva pulls her hand away, Katurian hangs on, desperately craving an anchor. His fingers shake against her skin.

Eva doesn't think he's a freak. She doesn't cringe when he forces fake laughs, when his hands flinch and jump. She is the one light in the darkness. And so he opens up, just slightly. Like a flower at dawn.

"I have an older sibling too," he says. "A brother. But he's sick and he can't live on his own."

These are things he hasn't murmured since Wesker, since he was half-dead and delirious in the snow.

"I'm afraid he's dead, because I'm here."

The words come as a whisper.

She offers her hand again, although this time not linking palms and fingers but gently stroking his forearm. So he knows she's there. So he knows she's alive and warm and with him in the dark. She then guides his hand back to the soup, and rests her hand on his knee after a bit of fumbling. "Eat something, Katurian."

Perhaps this is what drew her to him. Maybe she saw something in him, that fear for someone else, and it plucked the cords deep down in her where she worries for her son, where she's afraid that he, too, is dead. Maybe there's a sort of kinship that extends beyond what words are spoken. Maybe that was what compelled her to help the pale man bent over the wastebin back then.

Or maybe she'll just always be a mother, even when her baby is grown. Gone. Maybe dead.

"Not knowing is hard, but there's nothing you can do with that. What you can do is survive, harden, persist." And it goes unspoken, the someday...

Eva has to believe in a someday. "Look after his future by looking after yourself."

He nods and grips the cup. Yes. He nods and brings the cup up to his mouth. Yes. He nods and sips with shuddering fingers. This is the one thing that keeps him from suicide, from stepping down off the explosive platform at the start of each and every arena until the gamemakers grow tired of bringing him back.

"That's why I need to win," he says, once the muscles in his throat remember how to swallow. "I-If I win, if I play the game just as they'd like me to and I win, t-then maybe they'll decide they're done with me and send me back. Or maybe they'll bring him here and they won't hurt him."

He doesn't believe those words, they won't hurt him, and it's obvious in how his voice drops and trembles at the end. He swallows harshly.

"Did they let you see your family? Once you won."

It's instinct for Eva to want to say no, don't, don't become a Victor, there's no relief at the end of that road. But it would be cruel to rip away Katurian's hope, and she doesn't know that it wouldn't crumple him up entirely. He seems to her made of paper, staying together only by artful arrangement and not by much internal strength except for this one thing to hold onto and believe in.

So she reaches and finds his shoulder and rubs it a little, then takes a sip of her own soup. "I'll be praying you win, then."

And really, is being a Victor any more hellish than being a Tribute? One dies a thousand times in bed and another dies a thousand times on television. You get numb to both eventually, she suspects.

"Yes. I had many good years with my son, after I won." It's the truth. A sad truth, because it's the past tense. Because she can't hide that she's a broken woman, now. She can't pretend her life is peaceful and happy because Katurian's already seen evidence to the contrary.

Katurian is trained to recognize the past tense. He's been primed to find things that once were but now aren't, endings, staggering shifts and crumbling realities. It takes him no time to recognize the implications.

"But not now."

There is no smugness in his words, no gotcha. His tone is a hug in the pouring rain, a soft comfort that does nothing to keep out the cold. And he knows it.

"Where is he?"

It takes Eva a long time to answer. Too long. And when she does her voice is high-pitched, wet, brittle, like a crack in a piece of porcelain. "I don't know."

There's a sound in the dark as she swallows hard on her soup, that formerly tasted fine but now feels slick and greasy and too wholesome in her throat.

Katurian has never been very good at comforting people. Maybe it's his cynicism, or maybe it's his stunted social skills. (His parents never let him keep friends. You're a writer, you should be writing.) Maybe it's an inherent selfishness that burns deep within, a preference to wallow rather than reach out.

And when he wants to reach out, like now, then what?

The word 'sorry' seems too hollow. Inadequate. He takes the hand she left on his shoulder and squeezes it to show that he is there, that he listening. He rubs her skin, soft little circles, before lowering his forehead against her shoulder. A hug without arms.

Eva is silent for a while, silent in the dark, and she lets herself hold onto the selfish fantasy for just a moment that it's not Katurian leaning against her shoulder but someone else, someone of her own flesh and blood.

When her son was a teenager - when he started to understand the extent of what the Capitol had done to his mother, how it had ripped her up inside into strips of a person who couldn't get out of bed some days - he held her sometimes, and she hated it. She hated that she needed it. Everything was wrong, reversed, and she hated that she looked so weak and shaken in front of him.

When she speaks again her voice is hoarse, firm. "That's why we persist."

“That’s why we persist,” he answeres, soft and hollow like a call and response. But that’s not enough, is it? What if the catch caught him right now and preserve his uncertain words for all eternity? Just a quiet voice in a well of shadows, just a broken man trying to comfort a broken woman. Is that how he wants to be remembered?

“That’s why we persist,” he repeats, stronger. He lifts his head. “That’s why we won’t go down without a fight.”

"Careful, careful, dear." She doesn't want him to say anything incriminating, but reaches over and touches his cup of soup again. "You don't want to spill."

She prays he can understand her entendre. She likes him, but she would have to throw him under the bus if they suspected her of treason here. She has too much invested in her position here, and her inevitable betrayal of her masters.

“In the arena,” he clarifies a touch too quickly, his eyelids twitching and tensing in the darkness. Rebellion is never something Katurian can afford. Not in this world. Not in his old world. “We don’t go down in the arena without a fight.”

It’s only half true, and he knows it. Eva, oh, she knows how to survive. She knows how to take the steps that matter, how to quiet the screams in her head long enough to make it out. But what can Katurian do? Cry and scream and then lightly nick his murderer in the neck?

“I need to do better,” he says, answering the thoughts out loud. "I can do better."

There's a High Wind in the Trees [Open]

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