thecapitol | The Crowning of Enjolras

The Crowning of Enjolras

WHO| All Tributes and Victor, plus a few Capitol guests
WHAT| The Crowning of Enjolras
WHERE| The Tribute Center
WHEN| A few weeks after the end of the Arena
WARNINGS| Forced medical experimentation, needles.

The atmosphere surrounding the Crowning is both tense and secretive. The style teams flutter around listlessly, having received no information from which to draft their designs. Newspapers take bets on when it will be announced where the Crowning is being held, descending into grousing when no press release is given. Peacekeepers pour in and out of the Tribute Center, accompanied by scientists who occasionally pull Tributes aside and look at the veins in their elbows. Even the Avoxes seem jumpier than usual.

Aside from the Tribute Center's new giant marble statute of a nude Enjolras, posed like the famed David, one could almost forget the party is supposed to be celebratory.

When the day arrives, the Escorts and their assistants don't lead the Tributes to their style teams to be gussied instead. Instead, they hush the Tributes and bring them to their bedrooms, where a Peacekeeper, a white-coated citizen and several Avoxes await them. The Escorts instruct the Tributes to lay down in their bed and close their eyes, and a needle is inserted into their arms that the Escorts insist will 'take them to the party'. It's soon followed by a series of sensors taped to the forehead.

Just relax, the Escorts say, and they do their very best to make sure their Tributes feel minimal anxiety. If the Tributes resist too much, more Peacekeepers are called in, and the Tributes are forced into submission.

The first effect is a sort of paralysis - not the terrifying inability to move, but a signal to the brain that says why move? Moving is so much effort. It's quickly followed by drowsiness, and then a chill that radiates from the needle into the body, and finally, unconsciousness.

And that is when the party begins. The Tributes, now dressed in luxurious 1830's French clothing of a quality beyond even what their Stylists could manage, wake up in the front row of a large stone theater setting reminiscent of, simultaneously, Greek and French architecture. The floor of the theater is filled with buffets of every imaginable sort of food. Rose petals fall from the sky, which displays a sunset worthy of award-winning photography.

For his part, Enjolras sits in a throne made of books on the ring of the amphitheater, flanked by Marius, Cosette, Eponine, and bizarrely enough Venus Dee Milo and Ellie, seated on lush pillows and carpets made of dinosaur skin (with the heads comically attached and eyes lolling).

"Welcome, welcome, our Tributes and Mentors, to the first ever somnofestival, sponsored by Hypnogogia!" Caesar Flickerman, noted talkshow host and Games presenter, appears in a fabulous sequined toga in the center of the amphitheater. He doesn't need a microphone; the acoustics here are flawless. "And congratulations to our Victor! Let us hear it for Enjolras!"

He awaits applause.

"As you may have noticed, you're inside a shared dream, due to the just fantastic technology from the Capitol and certain, ah, biological contributions from our dear favorite Aunamee." He holds a hand out and gestures to Aunamee, anticipating wild applause. "We thought that for our most philosophical Victor yet, we should celebrate in a way that's a little bit…cerebral."

Caesar laughs and gestures at all the food, then puts a cheeky finger to his lips. "By all means, enjoy yourselves. Even the most indulgent desserts here won't show up on your hips tomorrow. The party only last three hours, so you might as well get started!"

He vanishes into thin air, leaving the Tributes to celebrate. Occasionally, the Tributes will hear voices in their heads - chatter from the Peacekeeper and scientist and Escort still in their room, in the waking world. Otherwise, this is a party like any other, if somewhat surreal in nature.

-/-

The party begins the same way for all the Tributes. For an unlucky few, however, it soon diverges as they come under an unfortunate glitch in the system.

They'll look around and find only a handful of their fellow Tributes around them. The sky, rather than being a magnificent splay of color, is now blank white, and yet the lighting in the theater seems dim. A sense of panic, detached from any conscious thoughts, surges forth in them like the tide.

For them, this isn't a shared dream. This is a shared nightmare.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Of course I'm fucking terrified by this," Ellie said, ducking her head under the table to see him better.

"But if they're in our heads I don't really see how running around under non-existent tables is going to help. Do you?"

"Um. Not really," Guy admitted. "It mostly just makes me feel better and I'm really bad at pretending things are okay so hopefully it means they won't think I'm making a scene doing that if I'm only doing it under here."

"Well fuck them," Ellie said soundly, with the full certainty and wisdom of a fourteen year old who had all right to hate on the authority.

"I don't see why we have to pretend it's okay when they fuck us over." She paused, glancing down the length of the table, looking at everyone's feet under the table cloth. "... Though it's pretty swank down here, I gotta admit. You want anything else? I can lift it for you."

Guy smirked at her attitude. He remembered being around that age, a time when he was brimming with defiance. With a lack of authority figures to direct it at, he projected it at the world at large, deciding that if nature wanted to kill him it was certainly welcome to try.

It was during that time that he'd earned his stripes and figured out all the little tricks to thrive instead of just survive.

Basically, he liked the cut of her jib, despite not knowing what a jib even was.

"Is there any melon up there? Feel free to join the party, by the way. I like meeting new people. I just don't feel like doing it out there."

"Melon..." She checks over the table, spots some, and reaches across to grab the bowl. Target acquired, she slips under the table and joins him on the floor, crossing her legs and holding out the bowl.

"Ellie," She says, introducing herself as she stuffed a piece of melon into her mouth.

"I'm Guy," he said, picking some melon out of the bowl. With his free hand he poked at her poofy sleeve. "Why is your - I don't know what this is called - why is it so poofy?"

"Sleeve" wasn't a word he'd come up with yet since the only shirts he'd ever made didn't really have sleeves so much as flaps that draped over his arms.

He tilted his head to peek out from under the table at the rest of the people at the crowning.

"Why is everyone so poofy right now? I had to take some of it off because it was choking me."

"Nice to meet you, Guy." She looked down at her dress as if only just remembering she was wearing it, and plucked at the poofy sleeves.

"Sleeve. And fuck if I know," She says, frowning at it. "I've never seen a dress like this in my life, though sometimes in books and stuff they where things like this." She reached down to the hem of her dress, one of the embroidered giraffes twisting its neck up to look at her. "I guess you could also ask why the fuck my dress moves but."

She looks over at him and then chuckles. "So you just... stripped. In the middle of a party. Did anyone pay you?"

"First of all, I don't know what paying is or why someone would do that for me taking off my shirt, but I'll have you know that aside from it choking me - and looking ridiculous - I also have a bad reaction to shirts. My skin turns purple and just breaks out in boils. All over. Hideous boils."

He popped another bit of melon into his mouth and spoke around it as he chewed.

"It's not a pretty sight and there's no reason it wouldn't happen here like it would in the real world because this isn't exactly the kind of place you can count on the best case scenario. And purple's just not really my color, you know? More tans and browns - and green. Green compliments my eyes a little bit but purple? No. So yes, I stripped in the middle of the party."

Somebody wasn't feeling like taking anything seriously at the moment.

Edited 2014-01-03 10:26 (UTC)

Ellie snorted, obviously not taking him seriously but amused none the less.

"Purple boils. Okay. Sure. I hear you. Horrible purple boils." She rolls her eyes a bit and stuffs one of the pieces of melon into her mouth. "So where the fuck do you live where it's warm enough to never wear shirts?"

"Tomorrow," he said with a smile. "We call it that, anyway. It's...complicated. But it's really hot most of the time and there are deserts and dry grasslands and jungles like the one in the arena, and if we wore as many clothes as all this -" He gestured to the party around them, full of puffy dresses and waist-coasts - "we'd overheat and die. Everyone just wears a few skins to cover the important bits and that's it. It's really uncomfortable when you're not used to it."

"Tomorrow." She repeats the name with an arched eyebrow, but hey. Place names are weird as fuck sometimes, so she isn't going to argue.

She's pretty sure that people wear shirts in even hot places - she once had an illustrated book of 1000 Arabian Nights, after all - but he had just been talking about purple boils, so maybe he was exaggerating. Or maybe where he was from was really, really hot.

"Fair enough, I guess. I'd rather be wearing my hoodie, that's for sure." Not that they'd let her wear a hoodie since she'd got here. "Still, you better be careful. If you run around half naked people might think you're looking for a buck."

Hot and humid. That was very different from hot and arid. Where he was from, you were better off letting the moisture evaporate from your body than trying to cover it up.

"I don't know what that means," he said. "Like a - like a deer? Why would I want a deer?"

He popped some more melon in his mouth.

"Den again I doh get haf of wud people say here."

He swallowed.

"Different frame of reference. Most of you are from places that are weird."

She can't help but smile bemusedly at him asking if she meant a deer - it was almost a pun.

"Uh - yeah. Sorry. Money, I meant. We have people who-- you know what? Never mind. A joke really isn't that great when you have to go into an explanation of economics to make it work."

She tilts her head. "So what's it like where you're from?"

Probably better he not know anyway, what with the confusion and slight horror that would result.

"Oh, it's, ah, different." Yeah, that part was obvious. "Very, very different. Like some of the people here seem used to the things like the buildings and cars even if it's different where they're from but nothing here is anything like anything back home. There aren't any buildings. There are just plants and animals and trees and mountains. The only thing that's the same is everything is trying to kill you but it's only people sometimes and animals are easier to kill back than people are."

"No buildings?" Ellie asked, raising an eyebrow. She leaned out to grab a chocolate strawberry from on top of the table, ate it, and then leaned out to grab the whole bowl and bring it back under instead.

"Weird. So like... does that mean you're from the beginning of time, or are you from like... the end of time? Or are you an alien too?"

"People keep throwing around the words 'prehistoric' and 'Neolithic' and saying I look like people did 10, 000 years ago where they come from, so I'm guessing closer to the beginning, but not that much closer. The world's pretty old where I'm from. Old mountains, old bones, and people have stories about when the world was younger, passed down for generations. It's all relative, you know?"

He shrugged.

"I don't even know if I'm from the same places as anyone here or if it's really a matter of time. It might just be that my world's newer. That we're at our beginnings and it matches the beginnings other places had."

Ellie shrugged, smiling helplessly.

"Who the fuck even knows," She offered. "Does it really matter? We're all stuck here now. I don't think this place is like anything anyone's ever been to, and we're all going to have to get used to it. You'll catch up."

"Oh no," Guy said, shaking his head vehemently. "No, I'm never giving them the satisfaction of getting used to this. Even if I know I can't fight back - everyone tells me not to do that."

He pressed a few fingers against his chest and then made a gesture like something was flying away, fluttering his fingers.

"Even if my body is stuck here, my spirit - it's going to live back home. That's where it's going to live instead."

He nodded decisively to himself, looking off into the distance a bit, as if there really was a part of himself that could detach and fly off somewhere impossibly far and he was looking at where it had fluttered off to.

Edited 2014-02-04 00:05 (UTC)

The smile slipped from her lips and she stilled, frowning as she watched him.

"That's... Well, that's pretty great, to have a place like that," Ellie admitted. She sure didn't. She reached out, pressing fingertips to his chest where he'd had his before.

"But it's not really what I meant. This? This will always be yours. No matter what." She withdrew her hand. "But that can only survive if the rest of you does, right? Endure and survive. That's what it comes down to."

She tried to offer him a reassuring smile. "You don't gotta give them anything at all, I just wouldn't want to see you hit by a car or something."

Guy's head flopped to the side as she did that, in the way adults sometimes did that thing where they thought someone younger was precious. Not a condescending 'you're so precious,' either, the one where they were genuinely endeared.

What a good kid.

"Oh, you mean adjusting like not getting run over by the thingies and all the...weird stuff. Yes, I'm working on that. I really don't, ah, want to get hit by one of those again. Because...that kind of happened already. You really just don't expect them to be rolling around out there," he said awkwardly.

Luckily he'd just gotten bruised and scraped up a little because they'd almost stopped in time.

Still, something she said stuck with him, and he asked gently, concerned, "You don't have a place like that?"

She winced in sympathy as he told his tale - she'd been in a car accident, once, on the other side, and really couldn't imagine how much it'd hurt to be on the other.

At his question though, she glanced away and shrugged.

"Nah. Plenty of decent views, but uh... My world is kind of-- well. In the middle of an apocalypse. 'End of the world', you know." She pauses, and then adds in a small voice: "For humans anyway," before she forces herself to perk up again, pushing it all behind her.

Because it was. She had abandoned it, whether she wanted to or not.

"But, you know, it's alright. The world isn't just humans. I saw some giraffes, once, and they'd never be there if we were still around as much as we were, so life'll go on."

He...he felt her on that end of the world thing. Until he'd learned more about the sun and the stars and, you know, plate tectonics, he thought he'd survived that with his family, too.

Now he knew better, that they were just escaping a catastrophe, but at the time it had been pretty terrifying and even knowing it wasn't the end, that they hadn't jumped to a new world, didn't make it any less terrifying. It had still been a disaster.

But being the way he was, someone wandering alone, meant he really hadn't had much to lose and in the end, he'd gained a family instead. He knew that might not be the same everywhere.

"Sorry," he said gently, sincerely, and then shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe, as bad as it is here, it might lead to good things if this...if something ever changes, if we ever get to go home. Maybe that would let you go somewhere else."

He added, "We did that - me and my family - we got away from...it was like the world was collapsing around us. Earthquakes, lava, the ground opening up. We found a new world - well, not really a world, but...close enough. If it's even possible we're all in this place, maybe that means you'll be able to find a new one, too, if -"

If someone saved them. If they saved themselves. If the status quo changed in their favor. But he knew they shouldn't talk too much about that.

"I hope it does."

Edited 2014-02-04 03:47 (UTC)

She looked down at her hands, spreading out her fingers, needing to look at something, as she knew just how little truth were in Guy's words.

Not that he was lying to her, of course.

But hopefulness for the future just wasn't something that was bred easily in an apocalypse.

She forced a rueful smile to her lips.

"Yeah, well. We'll see I guess. Things can't get worse, right?" Yes, they could. They always could.

They always could. His hope wasn't one born entirely of naivete.

Right after it started to rain, after you slipped down a ravine, after you twisted your ankle at the bottom, there was always a chance that time, right then, was when a predator would decide to show up.

Life wasn't easy. That was why he'd said he'd hope for her rather than talking about thing getting better as objective fact.

"Even if they do, none of us will be facing it alone."

That at least was the truth, even if 'everything will be okay' wasn't.

"I mean look at me. Terrified they're in my head, freaking out and hiding under a table, and here you are trying to be nice and get my mind off it."

That got an honest smile.

"... Yeah. People aren't so bad here, really." It wasn't the same back home, but little was. "But I dunno, for someone terrified you seem pretty okay to me," She teased lowly. "Not that it looks like I'm doing a great job of getting your mind off it."

The Crowning of Enjolras

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wanna wrap it here?