Eva Salazar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
vissernone) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thecapitol2013-12-01 05:23 pm
vissernone) wrote in thecapitol2013-12-01 05:23 pm
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.
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.
no subject
She straightens the veil over her face. "I don't owe you an apology. I might have, but I no longer feel as if I do."
no subject
but no. The hell with it. The hell with this. With her.
"I would have helped," or at least tried to, like he had oh so graciously done for Holiday. And damn her too. "I wouldn't have hurt a damn hair on you." Or the kid, but God damn it if that didn't go without saying, with the way they were standing off like this. He still wouldn't, he thinks in a fit, because she'd be sporting a broken nose otherwise. Every word out of him was a plea he'd taken the measure to disguise. The insistence, he supposed, might be telling on its own. "I don't want your damn apology!"
And Christ, it was so hard to not stand up. He hated being on her level. His hand goes to make a circle in the dirt. If only he could fling it at her.
He felt fire under his skin. Why the hell didn't anybody else?
"I don't want it because I wouldn't believe it, not even if I had been hit by a tank beforehand. Not if you were the last woman on this earth."
no subject
Eva practically spits the question. The one safety she had as a Victor so many years ago was that she didn't have to face the people she'd killed - the fourteen year-old she garroted with her belt, the District Nine boy she shot in the back, the Career who'd died begging for his life. She had to face their families, of course, but not intimately, not up close, and they understood.
The cost of living in Panem was the chance that a girl like her, still flabby around the waist from her pregnancy, would kill your child in a televised bloodbath, and that you would have to celebrate her.
"If you want answers, they're self-evident. If you want context, watch the tapes. If that's all you're here for, let me be."
no subject
He's afraid to even move his hands, because he thinks they might shake and he didn't want to shake around her. He won't. His voice will, because he can't control the surge of adrenaline. Boneheaded, him? Why yes. Thank you. It just so happened that he had all the answers to everybody's problems. "You- you're giving me excuses. 'They told me to'. That's for kids. I wanna know what the hell you were thinking when you wanted me dead. 'I protected the girl'. I wouldn't have hurt her. I wouldn't have hurt you. I don't want an answer that the- the projections show. I don't want you reading off a cue card. You're going to tell me, right now, what the hell you think gives you the right."
no subject
"What was I thinking as I wanted you dead? I was thinking that I wanted to live more than I wanted not to kill you. I was thinking that it would eventually come down to me and someone else anyway. And I was thinking how very, very lucky it might be were I not raised from birth knowing that I might have to make these choices, and how very, very much I resent the people born elsewhere." Her grip tightens around the gardening tool.
no subject
"You took the choice because you want the cameras on you and the people to watch. You like being in center stage," he said, he guessed, he couldn't think of anything else. "Nobody wants to be here, but we don't all think like animals." Some of them had intelligence- a few-- someone out there had to know what the hell do to next. Somebody else out there refused to kill, he knew-- rather, hoped. "We don't all act like them."
Born elsewhere- what could he or anybody do about it? Why did it always come up? North or South or here or there, but what was right was just that, and what wasn't, wasn't. And how stupid was everyone else to not understand? Resent was for children, the kind she had for them all. But the kind that was pooling in him was entirely different.
no subject
Eva's lunging forward before she even realizes that she's doing it. The words Hawkeye launched at her slid under her defenses and into the dragon's lair. His guess is so wildly off that it turns from offensive to enraging.
She would have given anything to not have been selected that Reaping so many years ago, to have continued living a quiet struggle of a life with her parents and her sister and her child, the child they took from her when her fame dragged their eyes to his misdeeds. She would have flipped the Earth and rent up the fields of her hometown to be anonymous and forgotten if it kept him safe.
And now he dares to say she kills for attention, that she enjoys the cameras and lights that have so damned her.
Her arm swings in a downward arc, bringing the trowel down like a dagger at his thigh while she slams into him with the full force of her body weight.
no subject
After the initial struggle, short lived and holding back tears (he was scared, too, damn it all), he lets out the hot breath he'd been holding only to find his chest was burning, too, and with it he manages a scalding "Oh, fuck you." He shouts again- shrinks into himself then sits up (and damn it, he will sit up), ballistic, presses a hand to his thigh where the tool's point and more is embedded. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck her. Christ, he could cry but he won't, but he can't. His arm tenses, bent over himself as he was, and he swears the wait is worse than the hurt. He sucks in a breath and grabs the handle of the trowel and pulls it off- fuck, fuck, fuck that hurt- and he hisses and whines all through the small action. "Next time I'll bark, make sure you understand what I'm saying." He couldn't move his damn leg if he tried. The tension was winning over the adrenaline of the fall- Hawkeye gulped in air and tried not to scream for a third time. He balled his hand into a fist- pressed down on the wound. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. If Eva had moved, he was blind. He wouldn't care, he tells himself. Damn her. "What the hell's the matter with you!?"
no subject
She picks herself up off the ground, stumbling slightly as her left leg goes numb. Her nerves aren't all correct yet, her brain not used to sudden motions anymore, and tension pools between her eyes and starts to throb.
"The medicine here will fix you. All that is is pain." Her eyes are narrowed, highlighting wrinkles on the top of her cheeks, a scar over the bridge of her nose. "Don't speak to me again until you get your facts straight."