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

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

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.

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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."

"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."

"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.

"Well, right now it's as simple as killing. I'm going for these ones." She gestures to some of the weeds crawling up from between the flowers. "If you wouldn't mind lending the hand."

And with that she lowers herself back down to the earth, as if standing up for even that long is exhausting.

"We don't really appreciate reading here. It's a shame - I grew up in a home where I saved bulletins from the Peacekeepers for reading materials, and yet here we can't be bothered to invest in the written word." As if that's the worst set of priorities here.

"You want me to pull weeds?" That makes her laugh, the assumption that she'll stoop down and dirty her hands with some flowers. They've been dirty with a lot worse before.

It's this thought that gets her to set the book and pen to the side, coming over to a spot near Eva. Close enough so they could talk to each other, but far enough that personal boundaries are respected.

"I didn't really grow up reading a lot, but everyone I know grew up reading books. Books take you to places that you want to go to." Cindy started pulling the plants Eva had pointed to. "Or a place that you don't, but anywhere might be better then here."

She looked at her handful of weeds. "You guys have some of the shorter stuff around here, though. Maybe that's what people need to be writing more of; brief, easy to understand booklets. Anyone can read those."

"I'd rather you pull weeds than stand there boring holes into the back of m, of my head," she says, stumbling slightly over the words. Her mouth feels numb, as if one side's been injected with Novocaine.

Eva pauses in her routine. Her lips thin slightly. "People have very short attention spans these days. If it isn't something they can digest in twenty seconds, they don't bother. The Capitol citizens have never had to work hard."

She doesn't want to end up like Eva is. Cindy wasn't entirely sure about the whole bringing back to life process here. It was definitely different then back home. Snow survived a fucking bullet to the head, and she came out pretty well, except for that cane.

Maybe it was some side effect that the people who were originally here had to deal with? "Who knew reading was so difficult?" She looked amused. "Still, I think the booklet idea is good. Maybe it takes a minute or two to read a short story, but sometimes those things stick with you forever. Like a nursery rhyme."

"And how would you do that? Posting story hour to the network?" It's not a disparaging comment; Eva's honestly interested to hear Cinderella's proposal now. She sits back on her heels and watches the side of Cinderella's face as she works.

"Story hour to the network?" Cindy repeated, and then shook her head. Most of the dirt digging things was left to the side, as she tried to figure out how to say something without giving much away.

"Paper is still a big deal. You guys have a lot of gadgets, but something printed on paper? It's almost collectable, right? Story hour on the network sounds more like an audio book, with someone reading the book to you. The quick man thing to do."

She looked down at the ground nonchalantly. "No, I think it would be nice to give people something they could hold on to." She paused. "Like... hm. Have you seen those little things left all over the place? It's like, what, five pages or six? Short and quick to the point, that seems like what works best for you guys here."

"You sound positively like you have..." She struggles, grappling for words. Her mouth opens and closes like a fish breaching the surface. "Like you're strategizing something legitimate, rather than speaking in whimsy."

She wipes her hands and runs a hand over her face. Her face tightens as a twinge of pain runs from inside her ear to the base of her skull.

"I know where prints are done, you know."

She just waits patiently for her to finish what she wanted to say. A cruel thing, but it was like listening to someone with brain damage, and you couldn't rush because it'd be rude. She could remember seeing Eva at least once before, and she had not been like this then. Just another thing the Capitol fucked up.

"I wouldn't know how something like that is done." She knew how it was done. "I mean, I'll be honest, I ain't no kind of writer." Cindy was definitely not a writer.

"I'm pretty good at editing. Grammar Nazi and all that, it helps out when people need some help." Cindy raised a brow. "Really? So if I ever decide to make a pamphlet or something about..." Politics? No. "...fashion, you'd know where it could be printed? A good place, right? I mean, it looks like those things are printed at really awful places."

Eva nestles up in that pause between Cinderella's words. She waits inside it, trying to figure out what it is going unspoken, whether Cinderella actually is asking for help or if Eva's just reading what she wants to see into it.

"I quite like those awful places. They smell like ink. The tablets hurt my eyes." Especially now that she can barely handle sunlight without intense headaches. "It's not somewhere one takes a Tribute, though."

It's difficult, because the help that she's been getting has been by pretending. A lot of pretending. She's a good pretender, and a great liar, but at some point she knows she needs to trust more then one or two people.

And that's tough. "It's not?" She sighed. "I was looking for a good place to copy all of my fan mail replies. You know how you get so many letters, but why bother writing something different each time when everyone wants the same thing? I write maybe five six different letters a week or so, go to this Fedex kind of place, and get them all copied."

Cindy paused, looking at her seriously. "Five or six pages, once a week. Maybe a hundred copies or so, I find that's a good even number to go with. Six pages, they make a nice little packet when they're put together, and people love long responses. If I got a friend to do it for me-- like a mentor or escort-- would they know where to go?"

She's putting it out there, in a way that's easily deniable, but gets across certain aspects of what she really means. This is the tricky part.

"You don't want to lavish individual attention on all your devotees? Tsk, tsk." Eva reaches over and gestures to some of the weeds that Cinderella's been overlooking, tricky, stealthy invaders that cloak themselves in the garb of their victims.

"I would know where to do it, but of course I'd insist on being an editor. I'd be loath to back something that could lead to a dangerous plunge in social esteem."

"There's just so many of them, and mostly faceless. What's a girl to do with so much attention?" Yeah, she'd totally forgotten about the weeds, and she looked down, starting to grab them up. Really, garden work isn't her forte, but she's making a good go at it.

"You would be an editor. Is that more like the editor, or is there room for two?" Basically, what part does she play? Because she knows that Enjolras wouldn't trust someone from the Capitol doing this, so already Cindy is that go between. It's a system, and it needs to be a well oiled machine.

"There's room for multiple editors, or at least, collaborative input. I imagine that I'm probably more versed in what flies with the culture here."

Still, Eva fully plans on having the final say. She's the one at the end of the line for printing, and can afford to hold that as leverage.

"From what it seems like right now, is that you would basically take over my little adventure here. You want final say for everything, I assume? Where this sounds like it could go." Cindy narrowed her eyes, looking at her as straight on as she could.

"Simply put: you are coming to us. Not us coming to you. Right now the fashion is being done by a friend of mine, which I will then use, and show to you. Think of me now as the go-between, because I want to make sure this mag is the best." It;s unstated, but Eva should know. It's so hard to find people who are trustworthy these days.

"Not final say. Veto power." Eva shakes her head, despite the fact that it hurts her neck and throws off her vision. And she frowns.

"Simply put - I'm offering something to you that you'll be unlikely to find elsewhere, with the guarantee of insurance. All I'm asking is that you don't publish anything stupid."

Veto power. Now, there's the idea that could work. Here Cindy thought she would be the one looking at it in the process. But now it would be Cindy and Enjolras, and then go to the top gun. Yes or No. All that jazz.

She wouldn't be finding a better assessment anywhere else. It was just the trust thing. Guarantee of insurance.

"Okay. You've got my vote, but I work in a partnership. And if they say no, then some things might need to be worked out. But I say yes." She paused. "I'll be honest, the one part of this whole fashion magazine business that worries me." Time to use metaphors!

"What happens if a larger magazine comes to you and asks you to tell them what we're doing at ours? How do we know you'll be loyal to what we're saying?" She's heard some rumors.

"You'll just have to understand that I back underdogs, being from an underdog District myself. I don't align with the...predominant culture. In fashion."

She folds her arms, standing up. The evidence still points to her loyalty being to the Tributes, not to the Capitol. She'd like to keep it that way. "Besides, I like privacy in all my endeavors. Publishing included."

She wasn't sure. That's what it came down to. She just wasn't sure, but at some point, trust would have to be given. And Cindy, no matter who or what was going on, didn't trust easily. Too many times being burned, is what the problem was. Too many times.

It had to be earned, but how was it earned in a place like this? Cindy gave a nod, pushing her hair back.

"I guess I'll have to learn that. But like I said, I need to talk to my partner, first. What's the best way to get in touch with you?" Not even asking if there was a way without anyone knowing, because even Cindy wasn't sure if that was possible.

"I can be found around the Training Center. I prefer in-person communication." Less of a paper trail, and Eva doesn't trust other people not to blow the secrecy - she wants to be able to do instant damage control.

She holds a dirty hand out to shake Cinderella's. One of her fingers is slightly crooked, healed wrong from being broken years ago.

"That's good. I'm much more of a talker. It's what I do best, in a sense." Cindy grinned at her. It was definitely easier to do then the writing part, for her. She left that to the professionals; she got the rest.

But she's wary of this one. And she's sure he'll be wary, too. Together, they'll come up with a solution. And if not, then nothing could be traced back to this whole conversation.

Without hesitation, she takes Eva's hand and gives it a firm shake. "Thank you for helping me relearn how to pull out weeds."

"You're welcome." Eva's shake is firm, almost aggressive, like a preemptive attack, but she lets Cinderella's hand go. "Drop me a line on who to talk to. I'll follow through on my end of the arrangement."

She brushes dirt away. "After all, I hardly have anything better to do while you all fight to the death."

"I'll do that as soon as possible." Cindy was a little surprised by the handshake. Last time she felt that grip... well, nothing to really worry about. It meant certain things.

"Maybe you should take up knitting." That gets a smile, and she claps her hand to get the dirt off. "See you soon." As she walked out of the garden, she was thinking. Calculating it all in her head.

Could she be trusted? First things first. She had to find her partner in crime.

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

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/end!?