thecapitol | People In Glass Houses...

People In Glass Houses...

Who | Timaeus Nadir and guests
What | Timaeus is hosting a picnic get-together/catch-up.
Where | The picnic will be taking place in the Tropical Habitat Dome.
When| We'll be using a bit of wibbly time so that people who want to attend can.
Warnings/Notes| None as of yet.

(This is an opportunity for me to make some new CR as well as catch up with ongoing relationships, but I also want to encourage tagging around between characters! Feel free to do whatever you like in the setting with whoever you like! Also I will be backtagging this so don't feel you've missed the boat if you haven't tagged in immediately <3)

Timaeus certainly knew how to organise a gathering- even if it wasn't an outrageously opulent celebration to be held on one of his own yachts. This one was to be held under the expansive dome of the Tropical Habitat- the entire location rented out for the day to Timaeus and his guests, a loosely private affair- formal invitations as such hadn't been extended, but those welcome knew they were. Naturally, all tributes and victors were included in this group.

The Dome was a beautiful piece of architecture in itself, though antiquated when compared with the technology used for the Arenas. Rather than invisible forcefields, the climate of the interior was separated from the outside by elaborately curving steel and glass. Inside, tropical plants of all types thrived- there was a still, green pond and, deeper inside, a cascading waterfall. Butterflies in hundreds of colours, sizes and shapes flitted about, tropical birds swooped between the trees, brightly coloured fish darted in the water.
Blankets and cushions had been scattered in the main clearing with hampers of food, but there was plenty of space for the guests to break away from the gathering if they so desired- the dome was full of winding paths through the greenery- some even climbing around the trunks of the largest trees and leading to viewing platforms above. In a temporary gazebo in the clearing, a string quartet played music that wasn't quite the classical pieces Tributes were familiar with.

Timaeus himself seemed in a brighter mood than he had been for months, more than happy to make conversation with anyone who approached him- though he was certainly keeping an eye open for particular individuals. Some that he'd met, some that he'd lost and had returned to him, and others still that he had yet to meet.

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He hasn't spoken to Julie since Disneyland, and certainly not since the disastrous incident with the bear traps. He told himself for a long time that he was giving her her space, her time to heal, but the truth is always more self-serving that that. He wasn't ready to face her. Now, when he catches the splash of blonde hair and feels his stomach twist, he doubts readiness was ever going to be an option.

He hasn't ignored her. He left little gifts outside her room for her in District 12's Suite, the kind of outdated shit she found so interesting when they raided that gift shop. Timewaster things. A barrel of plastic monkeys, a full chessboard, salt-shakers in the shape of pugs. It's served a better apology, in his opinion, than the mouth that ate her could form.

Starved-tiny again, he's stuck wearing a padded suit that's supposed to make him look healthy and instead makes him look like a yoga mat, in his opinion. There's a splash of gold glitter on his eyebrows and cheekbones, which his stylists have assured helps him to 'look alive'. Apparently, he has a tendency of giving Julie's not-boyfriend a run for his money in the dead-looking department.

He doesn't tap at her shoulder, instead waiting for her to turn around from whatever conversation she's having.

"Julie?"

After all that hiding behind a very blank and very forced smile, after answering questions about starvation and R and the one that Julie's brain turns into Why do you keep looking for a corpse that only ends up dead again?, it's pretty much the last damn expectation in her mind to be seeing Howard again.

Truthfully, every part of her was hoping she wouldn't. The avoidance thing? It's two ways. She'd even asked R about the gifts, found out they weren't his. She's only got, like, three people on a good day she'd count as friends.

Guess which one ate her a few weeks ago.

Dad would kill her for getting so twitchy. Like her instincts for survival have been shot to shit. But she turns and flinches, and there's a split second where real, dawning horror comes over her face. It's snatched up in a soft gasp of surprise, smoothing out into --

A face that is trying really damn hard to be neutral.

"Howard." You got over R eating your boyfriend, Jules, what's the big deal here? "Jesus, I haven't seen you --" Okay, just get straight to the point. Dive the fuck right in. Boy, you haven't looked so human since that one time I let you kill yourself. But hey, looking good now. "Fuck." The neutral thing isn't working. Her hand cleaves through her hair. Her eyes can't seem to linger on his face for any amount of time. "R told me you were Living again. Capital L."

Aw, shit. Howard was so wrapped up in his own angst about the subject that he didn't consider that Julie's mixed feelings about the incident would run deeper than a convenient excuse to stay out of her space. His face freezes up into some miraculous expression halfway between a grimace and a rictus grin, which ramps up the levels of awkward from a six to a respectable eight-point-five.

"Yeah. Uh. The zombie stuff didn't take." He runs a hand over his hair and starts looking to the side, behind her, behind himself for a tray of h'ors d'euvres or something to conveniently distract him. Since the eye-contact avoidance tango seems to be a pretty solid sport around here, he can hold off tackling that waiter with the sausage weenies for a few minutes, he guesses.

"Are you, hmm. How'd you been?"

It's not so much that he ate her that's the problem (although that is a problem). It's that he ate her brain, too. It's that he was privy, for a few blissful moments, to all the private memories in that blonde head, behind those eyes that crack the facade of neutrality with old fear and dancing around. Every thought she had was his.

It doesn't matter that he doesn't remember. The point was that it happened.

Going on nine. Didn't take. Yeah, well, call her traumatized for the rest of her life. The zombie thing lives on because she's sure as shit gonna remember what getting eaten alive feels like. To hear R moaning in the background in some kind of twisted mix of hunger and despair. Both of them knowing that R was the one who did this in the first place.

"How've I been?" Her voice might've grown a little incredulous. Girl's got issues now. Combined with old ones. "Oh, you know. Living the fucking life."

Apocalypse was easier. She should've known that first week that all the glam and the glitz and the people -- it was too good to be true. It wasn't the calm she felt, laying on the grass and dreaming about airplanes. It wasn't the quiet she felt, blowing off some guy's head when she was twelve. This was worse. Dying over and over. Nothing changing except where her corpse falls.

It all goes out in one breath; she's left with loose shoulders and an expression that's almost contrite as she manages to look at the point of his chin. "Sorry. About that first Arena." Maybe the latent guilt isn't helping anything. "I figure we're even now."

That first Arena. Somehow, that death didn't really stay with Howard the way the one that preceded it did. Maybe it was the fact that it was his own hand that brought the knife down into his throat. Maybe it was that it was fast, or that Hyperion barely bothered to tease the way Aunamee had. It strikes Howard as disrespectful, somehow, to have shuffled that memory off to the side when it was Julie's first death, and the fact that she was a virgin to her own murder at the time only now occurs to him.

"Yeah. Even." He doesn't believe it, because he doesn't blame her for anything, but he'll take it to avoid feeling like he has to grovel. He won't correct her presumption of his victimhood. "Anyway."

It just comes out. Stupidly. Apropos of absolutely nothing, except that it's common ground that isn't necessarily about being dead, even if it's tangled up in their own mortality.

"R really likes you, you know. Like, like likes you."

That had been obvious enough at Disneyland, but Howard couldn't tell with Julie how much of that was just her being a patient cool female-friend making the best of a death-match and how much had been actually reciprocal. How much of it she'd realized and, more importantly, bothered to ponder.

She doesn't believe it either, but it's better than getting so full of her own vile disappointment that she just drops the conversation and leaves. Better to, you know. Say something. Awkwardly shuffle their feet and hey, look, she's almost looking him in the face now.

Anyway.

Julie blinks stupidly, her mouth open to say something -- truthfully, it'd probably be her echoing anyway -- and it just hangs there, like she's gone corpse herself. She doesn't know how the hell the whole first-death thing somehow shifts to R, and especially how he may or may not be into her in any way beyond a conversational partner.

And instead of saying something cool and accepting because, duh, she fucking knows, she just goes, "He does?" Then she's just nineteen year old Julie with a dead boyfriend so far in the past that sometimes she thinks she's forgotten how bright he was when he smiled and a few hundred nights alone which, like her mom, were tearing her apart. "Does he talk to you about me?"

"Um." The sad thing is that Howard can remember pretty much everything R's ever said to him - whether that speaks to his attachment to R or to R's general lack of verbal skills isn't certain. "He asked me for dating advice and honestly, have you seen him following any other living girls around?"

Besides, isn't it obvious? R's not that great at stolen glances with a reaction time like that.

"I mean, I'm terrible at romance and even I've picked up on all that." He raises an eyebrow. He knows Julie didn't have the typical Disney movie childhood but jeez.

Give her a break, asshole. It's -- you know, bad enough Nora rode her ass about her crush on a zombie, whatever, we all have our vices, yours just happens to be dead dick, but it's worse that it's a thing. Like. An Arena thing. A couple thing. She hasn't forgotten, unfortunately, going shopping with the corpse and getting fans following them.

"I'm not exactly stalking his Panem life," she bites, a little unfairly. "I know. It's." She stops and raises her hands, like she means to grab onto an explanation that's better than zombie puppy love.

Except it feels worse. All those times he saved her life. Keeping her safe from the other Dead. "It's fucking weird." Also weird that R's bringing it up with other people. Other guys. Is that a thing they do? "What'd you tell him? Buy flowers and hope for the best?"

"It's all over the TV? Yeah, yeah it is." Howard shrugs. "I'm just, you know. Doing the bro thing and trying to matchmake. Except it looks like you don't want to be matchmade, so..."

He pokes the tips of both his index fingers together. His cheeks flush red.

"But yeah, you're right, it's really fucking weird. Who's going to have a thing for corpses, right?"

Oh. Cool. So there's another reason to avoid any and all contact with television. Her first time seeing a working one? Super novelty. It'd been awesome. Until the celebrated televising of murder. So. That happened. Kind of ruined the magic, especially when she was one of them.

Doing the bro thing. She tries to resist rolling her eyes. She really does. It just kind of happens and --

Whoa, when did I say that? She bites her lip.

"Yeah," she answers lamely. If Howard's red, she's pretty much burgundy. Why are they having this conversation? "Right." Not her, obviously. Definitely not the kind of thing she'd do. Or tell Nora about. Or get shit from Nora about.

Guess Howard was her new Nora. Because she can't, you know. Help it. "But if he wasn't a corpse." Yeah. If. "It'd be different."

Wow.

"Whatever you say. That's some weird taste, if you ask me."

Yeah. Not hypocritical at all, given that Howard made out with R in a closet. But miraculously, the Capitol hasn't released that footage, and thus as far as Howard's concerned what Julie doesn't know won't kill her (or him).

Howard could not more conspicuously jam his hands in his pocket and start whistling if he tried - on the upside, at least he's found the one conversation topic more excruciatingly awkward than killing her, so, well. There's that.

There. Is. That.

"So how'd you die last time?"

Christ he just cannot help digging a hole for them to cozy up in.

She stares at him. What, was she hoping for Nora's companionably well, yeah, he's okay. Kind of hot past the gore. After a beat she bites her lip and messes with her dress. "I'm used to severely limited options. You know. Most people being dead and all. I'm lucky if I can find a guy with both arms."

Her options being the drunks at the bar who loved to leer, the Dead, and. Nope. That was it. The soldiers? Not an option. Not after Perry. Not after she's seen what Dad did to them. What being outside did to them.

Actually, with that new attempt at conversation, Julie's pretty sure talking about corpses was easier. "Seriously? Is that the new ice breaker around here?" Howard, what the fuck. Sensitive topic. He was probably still digesting pieces of her face, Christ. "I starved. Threw up a lot. Then I'm pretty sure I got eaten -- again -- by an escapee from Jurassic Park."

"Hey, I guess I shouldn't judge. I'm not exactly rolling in girls." His face flushes yet again as he manages to continue burrowing as deep as he can into his own metaphorical grave.

He rubs his wrists together and flips his gaze up towards the ceiling. "Well, it is a common factor that we all have. The other common factor is like, how much does this party blow, have you eaten yourself stupid yet, and what's the weirdest place your Stylist has tried to shave you."

Howard didn't even know the top of his feet needed shaving.

"Maybe I should just..." He jerks a thumb as if to say 'head out and stop destroying their previously perfectly fine relationship'.

At least he manages to pull a laugh out of her. Okay, she knows she's -- high-strung. At the moment. Sure, moving past the whole zombie thing. But. "You're like. The third person to ask me. I'd rather talk about how much all of these parties blow."

Food was good, though, even if she hadn't had a taste of that boat's pad thai again.

Stupidly, she grabs his wrist. Not like she was gonna cry out wait, don't go but sealing that... it wasn't totally ruined. Pretty good considering he'd eaten her. And maybe she didn't have, you know. Any friends. "Sorry, I'm nuts right now." And then she drops her hand, suddenly awkward. She wipes her palms on her dress. "I should go do interviews, anyway. Or whatever I have to to suck up." Maybe get a gun one day. She's still holding out for that. "My fingers, by the way. She shaved my fucking fingers."

Howard snaps his wrist away from her hand as if pulling it from a fire. It's instinctive, unconscious, a reaction coded into his bones rather than calculated out in emotions and impulses. For a second, his eyes take on a glassy expression, looking beyond the person holding his wrist.

He looks sheepish when he snaps back to.

"Fingers. That's intense. Do you have really awful knucklehair? Do blondes even get knucklehair?" He laughs weakly and raises his eyebrows, sneaking his hands into the safety of his pockets. "Try doing a different accent for each interview. It makes them go faster."

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People In Glass Houses...

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