This City's Already So Full of Bodies It Does Not Need One More [Open]

[vissernone]

WHO| Eva Salazar and open
WHAT| Eva's alive and not well.
WHERE| The garden behind the Training Center
WHEN| Week 7
WARNINGS| Brain damage.

They brought her back, but they did not bring her back whole.

Eva's vaguely aware of the mechanics behind how the Tributes are revived, and knew going in that the Mentors would only be brought back with experimental technology. She didn't know what that meant until a few hours after she woke up from death, reading and rereading the pamphlet about blood flow to the brain without retaining information. Your brain was dead. We brought it back.

Bright lights and loud noises take a physical form, smothering her, smashing through her thoughts like bullets. Crowds seem to raise the barometric pressure in a room. Her words are jumbled at times, missing patches of sentences at others. Reading, her usual passtime, has become difficult, as whole parts of lines seem to disappear, flaking off the page like mange.

It'll get better as the brain starts to heal itself, they say. She hopes they're right. For now, she keeps away from large gatherings and wears a sheer veil over her face to protect her eyes from the worst of the light.

Unable to get her mind to cooperate enough to read, she instead turns to tending the earth. The garden outside the Training Center is a good place to start, the little isolated, tranquil corner behind the building. Trellis, small fountain, marble path, and a hundred varieties of crossbred flowers.

She rips up weeds and shreds them in her fingers. She tells herself it's physical therapy, using her fingers like that even when they only obey her half the time. She doesn't bother to go out and make apologies to the people she killed. She doesn't look for her allies, either. Without her mind, she feels more alone that ever, just a rickety shell taking up space and muddling through each hour.

At least she'll have Eponine with her. It's something.

Comments

[gardienne]

And have Eponine she does. Eponine in all her Parisian glory, complete with missing teeth and bruises and bones poking through dirt-stained skin.

Eponine had been looking for Eva since she had woken up. And at last, she's found her.

For a few minutes, Eponine simply stands behind Eva, watching her tear at the ground. Is she cross? Is she mad? Not at Eponine, of course, but at - at the Capitol? But after those few minutes, Eponine runs forward onbare feet and flings her arms about Eva's neck, almost lying on the poor woman's back.

"Madame! Eva! Are you glad to see me?"

[vissernone]

She hears Eponine behind her. She hears, but she can't find it in her to turn. It's not because of Eponine's disheveled state - god knows she's seen Eponine in worse states, the last Arena included - but more because of personal shame. When she closes her eyes she cannot picture Eponine as anything more than a face in the sky, and because she can't drag her mind away from that image she needs to scrape it out.

Her heart lurches into her throat when Eponine throws her arms around her, and she smothers a scream, knowing in her head she isn't being attacked even as her adrenalin spikes. And she wraps her hand over Eponine's bony wrist, and she smiles, and the warmth comes back to her face.

"I am." She turns and wraps her arms around those skinny shoulders. "I was worried I might not see you again."

[gardienne]

Well, Eponine at least, is glad that Eva didn't turn. She thinks her joke is hilarious and she chuckles without stopping.

"Oh, do not be silly, Madame. You know always they will make me come back. These people, they think me too funny with the Monsieurs. But look - this is I, Madame. How I am really - well, perhaps they have me so to laugh at me, but I do not care."

She hugs Eva back, stooping so she can lean her head on Eva's shoulder.

"Now tell me the truth - you were in the arena, weren't you? You carried me and looked after me before I ran off - I didn't imagine it, no?"

[vissernone]

She likes Eponine's head there. She pats the hair, gently undoes a knot. The hair's thin and brittle now, patchy from malnutrition, but Eva doesn't mind that.

"I was. I was right there with you." Until Eponine left, but Eva doesn't dare blame the girl for that. With Sigma dead, R wandered off and Eva having to search further and further for food each day, it was little wonder that Eponine found her footing elsewhere.

[president_evil]

There were lilies in the garden - or a cousin of some variety. Their pale, silken trumpets striped with ribbons of red. They're mild scent ripened, sweetened as they died.

Wesker liked to keep some, a small bunch in his quarters.

Those little Umbrella flowers.

They made him smile.

He could have sent an Avox to do the work for him, but this - this he enjoyed. Pinching the stems between his own fingers, that gentle snap and pull....

"Ms. Salazar," he murmured aloud, almost to the flowers, when he came upon Eva hunched over the beds. "Welcome back."

[vissernone]

"It's g-" She crumples her lips for a moment, faltering over the word, over the lie. How fitting, to stumble before someone whose respect and cooperation are valuable currency. "Good to be back. I've missed warm baths."

She digs with her fingernails at a root to some stubborn weed. The earth wedges between her flesh and fingernails with a sort of pain she finds she enjoys. "I see your record remains untarnished."

[president_evil]

"For the moment," he replies, sounding unconcerned as he slide a thin, green stem between his fingers. Rubbed his thumb against the silken underside of a white petal. (The slash of red like a thick vein against his skin.)

"Grace seems to be a perilous position here." The stem snapped and the bud came free. He raised it toward his face, sniffing. "So very fickle."

[vissernone]

"I can see why you would be loath to leave it."

She stands up, picking at a leaf absentmindedly, before letting the plant drop and reaching up to put her hair in a knot. "I haven't w-watched the footage yet. Has there been anything exceptional I should know about?"

[fire_punk]

Kevin hasn't been out to this garden before. He hasn't even been to the rooftop garden yet. But he needs to talk to one of the other mentors and not one of the new ones, either. He'd overheard someone saying Eva was out here.

"Hey," he says quietly, nervously. He hasn't forgotten the first time they talked.

[vissernone]

Eva winces at the voice, bringing a soil-covered fingertip to her temple. It leaves a light smudge on the veil over her face.

"Mr. Prentiss." She turns from where she's sitting and looks at him. "You're less standoffish than you were last time."

[fire_punk]

He shrugs. "Yeah, well, people..." Because figuring out people is still hard for him. "How does this mentoring thing work?"

[vissernone]

"You see a lot of people die, generally." She folds her dirty hands in her lap. "And you prostitute yourself out so it takes them a little longer to do so."

[justoutrunyou]

Sandy was rather amazed with all her exploring she had never noticed the garden before. But the woman tending to it had somehow drawn her eye.

She was an important person wasn't she? A mentor?

She slunk closer watching her work as she racked her brain trying to remember...

And then it all came crashing back into place. The woman on the TV screens. The woman who had ratted out the bomber. The mentor Eva.

The woman who had sent her that note...

A chill sank into Sandy's stomach and she watched in silence, not sure what to do about this discovery. She wished she had Pruna with her. Pruna had this way of simplifying Sandy's mind when she was over thinking things.

[vissernone]

Eva senses Sandy by the way a bird darts away, startled. She doesn't turn around, waiting for whomever's there to announce themself, and when they don't she turns her head just enough to see their shadow.

Satisfied that the person here isn't a threat, she turns around slowly, voice gentle but steady.

"It isn't..." Eva gropes in the dark of her mind for the words. She finds nothing, nothing at all. "You shouldn't sneak up on people. They don't all take to it as kindly as I do."

[justoutrunyou]

"Why do you take to it kindly?" Was the first question that sprang to mind. And foolishly it leapt out of her mouth before she could think to stop it. Her face burned with obvious embarrassment but it was too late to take back the question now.

[vissernone]

Eva pauses. It's not a question she's equipped to answer, in the state she's in.

"Because there's no point in starting a fight, I suppose."

[swill]

He'd been in the Capitol a week. He kept tally of the days in a notebook he'd scavenged as if he couldn't ask for his own or even pay for it with the updated Diners Card he'd been given. He took a pen and a pencil and a marker- a green one, and shoved all his supplies under his bed like a child. And at night he'd write letters to his dad.

He'd wake up early and lounge in the commons. He'd heckle. He'd sleep like a wino who had laid claim to a particular park bench. He'd drag himself away from the projections-- but they were everywhere and he learned, eventually, with a string of expletives, that they were entirely unavoidable. He took a day to walk with his eyes closed and had never made it out of his own room. Long room, big room, he swears not even the Ritz has suites as great. Everything was foreign, but he wasn't a dolt. He'd figured out how to move the devices and have them not quite blow up in his face, so he scored his adaptability high. Every part of him still wanted to scream at the sight of anything too lavish, of anything ludicrous. And there was a lot of that around. A sane man could only take so much. Hawkeye counted himself as sane. It was a title he didn't want to lose, even if it was self-bestowed. So he wandered without looking at where he was going. That was how he found himself in the garden, and when he realized what he'd found, he was glad.

The flowers were different, but he loved them anyway. The fountain wasn't a flowing river or the ocean, but he loved it anyway.

So it was that he found himself loving the garden for a full thirty seconds, and when Hawkeye saw the woman pulling weeds- and when he tells himself to stop thinking of the camp's chaplain- he tells himself it was thirty seconds too long. He should turn back but he moseys on forward. He drags his feet. He kicks at stray pebbles. He's afraid to get too close. He stops behind her, his voice sickeningly sweet as he drawls out, "Hello, Honey, funny meeting you here. I thought you left the country. I hoped you'd left left the country." And his shoulders were squared instead of stooped, and he felt his legs stiffen as if he'd run all day and night for his life. Christ, she deserved his obnoxious, nasally voice. Christ, he didn't know what he was thinking, being this close to the woman who had wanted him dead. "I'd offer gloves but I know you love to get your little hands dirty." And he hoped she heard the sincerity in his voice.

[vissernone]

She hears Hawkeye enter the garden, she looks over her shoulder to see if it's anyone important, and then she returns to curating a flowerbed. An Avox has brought her fat bulbs with strange leopard spots on them, a new hybrid tulip from District 9, her home. Looking at it, she sees no connection to the wheat fields she once worked in until her hands were bloody with splinters and her muscles felt tied tight together as if corseted. She hasn't visited her home in so long that she sometimes forgets that the years move by without her, and that touching back down becomes more and more difficult.

She sniffs. Everything smells like garlic. She knows it's one of those passing phantom senses, one of the side effects of having life literally pumped back into your slushy brain, and she supposes it's better than some of the other things it could be. When she was young, after her first Arena she didn't sleep and tasted imaginary blood in her mouth whenever she ate. She wonders when, exactly, she bid goodbye to the part of herself that could feel such remorse.

She's surprised when Hawkeye approaches her, although she supposes she shouldn't be. Her teeth grit, expecting an attack that comes only in the form of words. The way he berates her is almost kindly compared to the things others have said to her, and the things she's been telling herself.

"You do not want to stand so close behind me." Eva's voice is a snarl, something like a dog backed into a corner. Her shoulders, thin with muscles like cords from the time spent in the Arena, tense, and her eyes wander across her gardening tools to a hand trowel. Her fingers, guided by some impulse she doesn't intend, clench.

[swill]

She wasn't hard to look at-- at least, she wouldn't be if he didn't know her like he did. The snarl sparks a reaction, a want to lurch forward without any true intention. It's subdued the second he sees her hands move and, hey, her hands showed age the rest of her didn't. They weren't a terrible thing to notice either, because he's sure the clear signal kept him from getting gutted. On the other hand -see the pun?- this was now a little more than a confrontation and Hawkeye was sure he hadn't been the one to escalate it. He wouldn't be able to bear to walk away, though he's wary as a wolf.

So he saunters on, takes some paces around where the woman was crouched and he never lets his eyes leave her. He feels skittish, but feels like he needs to press on to save some part of him he'd lost with ever becoming unnerved. He's careful about not stepping on any flowers or bulbs or strange grasses and supposes it's a habit Mulcahy had drilled into any officer's head. But he plants himself in front of her and even lightly stomps a boot on the ground like a parked mule. She wasn't the only ass here. He lifts his arms- shows his open palms to her in a parody of surrender. "How about in front? For old time's sake." He wanted her attention, needed it to not be murderous, but his blood was boiling and he wasn't sure how to get what he needed yet. His head's swimming and he's scared of her and the gardening tool and he's coaching himself not to be through trial and error, and this was Trial One and possible Error One, too. He continues with a suffering sigh, begging the girl at the bar to give him her name. "We never got to know each other, ya know. All those wonderful nights." Some girl to give his heart to, even if it wanted to leap out of his throat in disgust.

[polyturtle]

Don had gone into the garden himself. Not to dig up weeds, but for other reasons. Being alive, and yet so confused. Everything was confusing, really.

Right now, your fight is to endure.

The what seemed easy. The why was hardest. Before, he'd had a why, and the why hadn't been him. Never had been, not even at home. Not even after that future...but, even knowing his importance to his family, when before he hadn't, he'd always felt it was because all of the turtles had been around.

Now he wasn't so sure, and the idea that he'd have to focus on himself somehow frightened him, even more than the Shredder, or the Arena, or even - in some ways - the realization that he wasn't even himself. How did he focus on himself, and be so...selfish--

That was when he saw the figure to his side. He stopped immediately; he hadn't expected anyone up here and hadn't been paying attention, so lost in his thoughts as he was. Much less her, tearing up the dirt as she was.

"Eva."

[vissernone]

She recognizes him by voice. Sound cracks through her brain like electricity these days, bright and paralyzing, but it's still recognizable. Maybe she should thank God for the small blessings.

"Donatello."

One of hers. One that she hadn't even been watching last Arena, thanks to being down in the slop with everyone else. She undoubtedly would have killed him had she run into him - or vice versa. She doesn't lift her head, nor divert attention from ripping up some dandelions.

"Care to join me?"

[polyturtle]

Likewise. Though of course, depending on when, had they met, he would have hesitated. Everything is simply so confusing, not clear-cut. And he hadn't the heart to surge forth and find the answers, like he would have before.

Which was fine, for the moment. He knew he'd have to confront it later.

"Sure."

Right now he found himself kneeling down.

"Just...tell me where you need me to go with this."

The dirt was practically torn up, in a good chunk of the dirt. How long had she been working on this?

[undercoverprincess]

They'd brought her back, like they brought her back before. She'd heard the phrase, somewhere down the line, that waking was an almost natal state. You woke up every day, but along the way from sleeping to opening your eyes, you needed to rearrange your life. To remember your past, so you will know your future. To wake a new born without knowledge, without anything else, except life.

Cindy had it a little easier. She woke up, and was awake. She didn't have to wait to rearrange her life. She didn't need to do much of anything. Give her a book of fairytales, and as she read through them, the memories came into place, asserting themselves into what the story should be. Followed, closely by, the people (Fables) that she knew.

Still, she needed some time to do that. It was stupid, to go to a place to escape, to hide out among nature, when she was a girl who usually did not like nature. But to go out there and find a place with a small book? It was unmarked, looked like a journal, perhaps, but the pages definitely weren't her own.

"Weeds or flowers? Or does it matter?" Cindy asks the back that she sees, before sitting on the edge of the fountain.

Wait a moment, though, she knew this one. "You're one of the mentors, right? Eva? I can't remember talking to you before."

[vissernone]

"Weeds. Of course it matters."

Eva decides, based on two things, that she likes Cindy. The first is that Cindy bothers to announce her presence, something that so few people who pass through this garden think to do, as if their paranoia is just their own and not endemic among Tributes and Victors. The second is that Cindy is carrying a book.

"I don't believe we have. Cinderella, isn't it?" Eva stands up - slowly, crookedly, like a mechanical crane raising itself back to the sky - and wipes her hands on her dress. "Mind if I ask what you're reading? Literature's a hobby of mine."

[undercoverprincess]

"You've got me, I'm crap when it comes to gardening. I couldn't keep a cactus alive, even if I tried." She had one plant, years and years ago. You'd think a fairytale princess would be able to do certain things, like keep a plant alive. Or sing.

"Yes, but everyone calls me Cindy." She gave a small smile, crossing her legs and looking down at the book. "This? I picked it up on a whim, I believe it's some kind of story about life in the Capitol. You guys do have some crazy reading material, I'm always surprised, here."

She kept the pen on her lap, as well as the book. No one had ever asked what she was reading, honestly. Cindy was getting the sense that books weren't as big here as they were back home.