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

Eponine couldn't. She couldn't release herself from the guilt. And it wasn't the guilt exactly that made her unwilling. It was more her conviction that she was bad - she was bad; there was no debating that. But if there was a single ounce of goodness left in her, it was that she hadn't stooped to murder. At least, she didn't think Alex had counted as murder. She just wanted to be a little bit ladylike. Unfortunately, the Capitol didn't seem to care about what she wanted.

So she pushed and shoved Draco towards the bars which somehow miraculously became more widely spaced, wide enough for Draco's head to go through and Guy's arms to reach in. Draco's taunts grew louder and more vicious as he was manhandled towards the bars - but as she reached them with him, his shape morphed and changed: the figure shrank, and his skin darkened, his hair curled, unti it was Howard who stood in front of the bars. Howard who was going to be strangled.

And Eponine stopped pushing immediately.

"You can't kill him."

"Agh." That was a noise of frustration Guy made. He recognized Howard and dream aside, he was a lot more uncomfortable strangling a dream him rather than a stranger. "The nightmare's cheating."

He huffed out a few panicked breaths.

"Okay. Okay. So we can't get you out that way." He waved a hand at her. "C'mere. Just - just c'mere for a minute. Don't listen to anything he has to say. Just...give him a shove and pretend he's not there for a minute."

It was Howard. Howard spewing all that rubbish at her. Telling her that she was worthless. Telling her how he prefered to kiss men to her, because she couldn't do it right. Because she's stupid and worthless and scum.

And Eponine would be able to take every word of it. Usually, it wouldn't bother her in the slightest to have someone calling her names. But these people, they meant something to her. Draco, who she had tried to impress, who had driven her to bite Howard's face off, and Howard himself, dear, hateful Howard who forgave her and loved her and touched her and left her. She couldn't concentrate on Guy. not whilst Howard was there. Not whilst his image shifted and changed again, growing taller and fatter and longer hair and Latina skin. Eva. Eva, her adopted mama spewing the vile about her.

Eponine turned back to Guy. "Not Eva. Anyone but Eva." She was breathing heavily, panicking just a little bit, trying to keep control. Still, she shoved past the thing, standing right in front of the bars. The creature came behind her, and wrapped Eponine in it's arms, whispering lovingly into her ear.

"You're disgusting. Do you know why I keep you around? To laugh at you. To make me feel better about myself. You're vile, Eponine. You don't deserve happiness. Just pain. You didn't deserve Howard. You definitely don't deserve Marius. You deserve to die."

Eponine, under the dirt, paled as Eva whispered on and on, pouring more poison into her ears. Finally, she cried out,

"Oh, Monsieur, the knife. Pass me the knife so I might end it all!"

He got the distinct feeling she didn't intend to use a knife to stab the horrible nightmare-thing and he didn't have one anyway.

So he did the best thing he could think of to do, reaching his arms through the widened bars and punching the image of Eva in the face. The moment she recoiled back, he reached out and gently grabbed Eponine by the shoulders.

"Nothing it says matters. Nothing," he said gently. "Come here. Come here."

He rested his hands on her shoulders in half of a gentle embrace.

"I don't know you but I don't need to know you to know you don't deserve someone being that cruel, because no one does. No one."

All he could do now was try to fight cruelty with kindness.

"Why are you being kind?"

Even so, she hid her face against Guy's chest, her cheek pressed against bars and bare skin. She tried not to listen, she tried her best not to listen to Eva - the thing - as it continues to spout malice, but it's so difficult.

"She said she loved me...she said - OH!" She pushed away from Guy, suddenly furious. "It's always the same, isn't it? People pretending to like me, but this, always is what they think. Well, I shall show her. I will. I don't care. If she thinks me horrible, than I shall be horrible."

"Anyone who would try to make you think you're horrible is horrible. That's what horrible people do - make other people miserable and try to cause them pain."

Guy pointed to Eva. "What she's saying is just - it's mean. It's cruel. The reason I'm being kind is because everyone deserves that from someone. Everyone deserves someone being kind."

He tugged futilely at the bars again.

"And because I can't - open - this stupid - door." He stopped and banged his fists against it. "I don't know how else to help you. Being kind when something or someone else is being so cruel is all I can think of to do."

It was just his nature to want to be kind, to want to fix things. He liked to feed people and not just food - with love and hope and thoughts of a better world.

"I don't know you and maybe if I did I wouldn't like you, but right now, for at least one moment, in this moment, you deserve someone being kind."

She was in chains, for goodness sake.

"She said she loved me. She said - She looked after me. She plaited my hair and washed my feet and my face. Do you know how long it has been since anyone did that? Years! Not since I was a little girl in Montfermiel."

She looked back at the figure, slowly morphing from Eva to herself. And then back to Guy.

"Are you really so kind all the time? That is a good thing to be - and even to a strange woman in prison? That is a good thing to be - you know, I know of no-one who does that."

As guy kept banging, perhaps he'd notice the bars slowly weakening under his fists, little puffs of dust escaping from the top, cartoon style. Perhaps it isn't murder, but kindness that will save Eponine from herself.

Guy noticed the bars weakening. Maybe this dream was like...more like a story than reality. Maybe a lesson had to be learned, maybe the monsters being fought here weren't physical ones. Guy knew how stories worked, how they could be layered in all different meaning.

Maybe to get a good ending to this one, the story had to hit on the right ideas. Maybe that was the way to get a good ending to the story, to the dream, for her.

"Yes," he said quietly, his face open and gentle. "My world is dangerous, with things - there are things like the monster from earlier. My family died when I was very young and I was alone for a long time just trying to survive and that means I - I like people. Some of them can be cruel and some can be dangerous but a lot of them are good. So I try to be as kind as I can be. The only time I stop is if they're hurting me somehow and I need to get away. But even then I still wish I could just be kind rather than fighting or running away. Everyone has something - a little something beautiful in them. A little...a little light inside them, even if there's darkness there too."

His gaze grew a little distant. He held out his hand as if holding something small and precious, as if a butterfly was alighting on his finger.

"I feel like kindness helps protect that, helps it grow."

That distant gaze went sharp again as he looked back to her.

"It sounds like people have hurt you," he said gently. "And it sounds like you're angry and sad because of it, which makes all the sense in the world. But it also sounds like you just want someone to love you. And maybe - maybe like you wish that it was safe enough to love them back. I think - I think that if the way you react to being hurt is still wanting love, that might be part of the little light inside you. Just like - just like the fact I can still be kind even though I spent so much time in the dark, in a world that was unkind, and I still want to be kind - that's the light inside me."

Edited 2013-12-26 10:00 (UTC)

She doesn't think anyone, not even Eva, has ever spoken to her so kindly. Never, ever. Not even as a child. She finds herself pressing her head closer and closer to the bars, listening intently to Guy, the creature all but forgotten about now. And indeed, the more she listens to Guy, the more she lets his kindness swallow her up, the smaller and the quieter the creature became. And the thinner the bars.

They grew thinner and less substantial, so that at last, Eponine lurched forward, suddenly finding herself clutching nothing more than thin air. She righted herself and dropped into a curtsey immediately.

"I do not know how you are such a kind man, Sir, if what you say about yourself is true. I do not know how you keep your light alive, indeed. But - thank you. Thank you for making the bars disappear."

She didn't want to acknowledge what he had supposed about her. She didm;t want to think about wanting someone to love, and to love her. She couldn't think again about Howard right now.

He would have been sad to hear that, that no one had ever been that kind to her. What was wrong with some of these other worlds that kindness was so difficult to find?

It seemed that it had been enough for now, to free her from her cage.

"I'm glad I could help," Guy said and his voice hadn't lost any of the gentleness of earlier. "I'm Guy. What's your name?"

"Eponine, Sir." She laughed a little. "Is that really your name? Guy? That is a strange name."

Now Guy laughed a little.

"Oh, you're one to talk! I'm not even sure I can pronounce that. Epon - Ep - I'm just going to call you Neen. That's all I can manage."

Before either of them could make light of anything else, their situation darkened. Literally. Though they could still see somewhat, the light of the prison suddenly dimmed, making it more difficult to.

Just as it did, growls echoed up from the one end of the hallway.

Guy's face fell. In the space of a moment he stopped looking like the grown man he was and looked instead like a small child, lost in the dark.

"We have to move," he said, voice hitched with fear, grabbing Eponine's hand and tugging her in the direction opposite the growl.

Edited 2013-12-29 04:44 (UTC)

She ran. She didn't even question, just ran. Vaguely, she remembered the layout of the prison a little bit - if it was the one from her nightmares, it was Les Madelonnettes, and there the corridors stretched on and on, lined on one side with wide, barred doors, and the other was stone, interspersed now and again with staircases to the higher storeys.

"What is it?" She panted out as she ran blindly through the darkness, still clutching Guy's hand.

"Remember how I said the world I grew up in has monsters?" Guy said, his voice high and thin.

Behind them, the creature let out a deafening, gravelly screech. Ahead of them, the way only got darker. There were no growls in the dark in front of them but they also couldn't see what might be there.

Guy was trembling so much that Eponine would feel it as she held his hand, shaking movement that wasn't just because they were both running. His breathing was hitched, as if he was barely keeping his panic under control.

He hated the dark. But going back wasn't an option.

"This is it?" She panted out. "Your monster?"

Eponine didn't slow her step. She was completely unafraid of the dark. Even, the sounds of the monster didn't bother her as much as they seemed to Guy. She squeezed his hand as she ran quickly through the blackness, her free hand outstretched so she wouldn't run face first into a wall. She slowly took the lead: Eponine, for all her thinness, was a swift runner and she pulled Guy behind her.

"What must we do to rid us of it?"

The dark was his monster. The monsters in the dark were his monsters.

When he lacked the tools to live in it, when fear was clouding his mind and making him feel like a child instead of a man that had beaten the odds, the world was his monster.

He was almost hyperventilating now.

"I don't - I don't know - I don't -"

There was a part of him that feared the darkness would go on forever. That they'd be trapped here for a relative eternity, running in the dark, being chased by something worse than the dark, never waking up.

That part of him was wrong to fear it, because the ground suddenly sloped in front of them sending them sliding and rolling down a rocky scree.

Guy's hand was wrenched from Eponine's as he slid down the slope in a tumble of limbs, yelling in alarm.

When they landed at the bottom, the dark finally gave way to light but it was not a warm light, not a welcoming light. A gray-yellow sky was above them and the sun was harsh on their faces. They were in a pit, with steep, sloping earth covered in shifting stone at the sides of it, possibly climbable but not without difficulty.

The air smelled strange and plastic, with hints of sulfur.

The reason for that was what was at the center of the pit. There was only a little bit of flat ground at the bottom, but that dropped off into a pool of sticky, inky black tar. Viscous bubbles rose to the surface, popping messily, giving the impression that the whole thing was boiling even though no heat was rising from it.

As Guy sat up and saw what was in the center of the pool, he let out a low moan of horror and turned away, covering his face, threading his hands through his hair like he wanted to rip it out.

For right in the middle of the tar pool were three sets of arms, sticking up in the air. They were rotting, bits of flesh picked away - most likely by the vultures circling overhead. Bone was visible in a few places. The heads and torsos attached to those arms were slightly visible, but sunken under the tar, as if the three of them had flopped over forward and backward into it as they'd died.

One set of arms was small, as if their owner was barely more than a child, maybe thirteen or fourteen.

Not far off there was the faintest sound of a little boy crying in the most piteous way possible, his voice full of anguish and barely bridled terror. It was followed by the sound of him trudging away, small feet making little pitter-pats in the dirt and shifting stones.

Edited 2014-01-02 08:18 (UTC)

Eponine shrieked as she tumbled, and groaned as she landed face down amongst the rocks. But she was soon on her feet, shaking off her bruises and rubbing the bump on her head. Astonished by the sudden turn of events, she looked around.

"What is it?" Even as she spoke, she edged closer to the tar pits, and went to jab at the edge of it with her bare toe.

She held her hand up against the glare of the sun, and stared hard at the branches - branches? - no. Arms. And the sound. The child crying. The footsteps. She looked around fearfully.

"What is it, Sir? What does it mean?"

He didn't look, couldn't look. He'd run away before they died. They didn't want him to see and he'd needed to find water and food. So they told him to leave and they'd said the words he'd carried with him for the rest of his life.

He tugged at his hair, eyes still squeezed shut.

"My family," he choked out. "I was seven. The rains made the paths unstable and there was a rock-slide. They fell in, I didn't, and they couldn't get out. No one gets out of a tar pit."

Then they'd said the words and he'd left them to die of thirst and exposure.

"Why is it showing me this? It was a long time ago..."

He'd grieved. He'd moved on. He'd found a new family.

It mostly just hurt to see what had become of them. It was something he'd tried not to see even in his imagination.

Eponine looked from Guy to the arms and back, horror on her face. Now this - this was worse than her nightmare. Worse by far. And he had saved her so she had to save him.

Trouble was, Eponine wasn't very good at saving anyone.

"Sir?" She moved to stand right in front of Guy. As skeletal as she was, she was unable to completely block his view of the pit, but she did her best.

"They show you because the Capitol is a cruel, cruel place, Sir. This is why they lock me in prison, and why those people say those things. Sir, they want us dead, do you not see? They show us to make us dead. Sir, we cannot die. We cannot. Not here, not like this. Do not look. Do not look as I did not listen. Sir, I do not know what to do."

Guy just nodded as he listened to her. This was just to cause them pain, that was all. He couldn't let himself be consumed by it.

"We have to try to get out. Climb," he said, reaching out a hand to her. Maybe if they helped each other, even though the sides of the pit were steep, they might make it to the top. "Maybe we can help each other to the top."

He was prepared to just stubbornly push his way through this, but a gurgling sound from the center of the tar pit made him freeze in place.

It was the sound a throat might make if it was being cleared of something very sticky.

Then came the sound of a raspy voice speaking and name bubbling, "Guuuy..."

Guy turned, slow and horrified, to look again at the center of the tar pit. The bodies slowly raised themselves upright, turning in his and Eponine's direction. Then they started to crawl, dragging themselves through the tar with a strength that was beyond human, doing what no living person could do. Their bodies twisted and contorted grotesquely as they made their slow crawl towards them.

"Why did you leave alone to die?" rasped the corpse of his mother. "We never should have let you leave."

Guy let out a pitiful, terrified cry that was just an adult version of the one the two of them heard earlier.

Horror turned to outright fear as the bodies crawled towards them.

"Don't listen. Do not listen." She shouted over the rasp of Guy's mother. "Monsieur, please." Her hoarse voice broke through sheer fear, and she went to place her hands on Guy's shoulders, to push him into a crouch on the floor of the ravine.

"Sir, close your eyes. Close them, I say. And you cover your ears."

At a complete loss of really what to do, she scanned the ground for the biggest rock that she could lift, and threw it, as hard as she could at Guy's mother.

Did it count as murder if they were zombies? Would this nightmare stain her forever?

But what else could she do? Guy could not be left to kill his own family. She could sacrifice her honour - her morals that she had so fiercely protected for over a year - for a man who saved her from the poisonous hisses of her loved ones and Draco.

He tried but he could still hear it, the hissing cutting through everything else.

The rock caved in Guy's mothers head but still she kept crawling.

"You replaced us," his father hissed. "You've forgotten us."

"It's not fair," gasped his sister, once older than him, now younger, since the years had carried on and she hadn't.

The guilt hadn't started until Grug had told Guy it was okay to call him 'dad,' and even then he'd buried it, shoved it down deep, and tried to move on, knowing it was foolish when they'd told him they wanted him to have a good life.

"You told me not to hide!" Guy cried out. "You told me to live! You said to follow the sun and that I'd make it to Tomorrow. I did. I made it. I found a mate and she loves me, I found a new family -"

"You replaced us," said his mother mournfully. "You couldn't even honor us in memory..."

"I found other people that love me. Is that so wrong?"

The answer to that question they might give him would not help him, but Eponine could perhaps give him another.

"Yes."

Eponine's answer was a hiss, low, and she sank to the floor, and put her head right down between her knees.

"Yes it is. It is wrong. We cannot love anybody. And they will not love us. Not really. We only pretend to ourselves."

Her voice cracked: she didn't know what else to say. She sighed and looked up at the far side of the ravine, past Guy's parents. On the top of the ravine, a young man, dressed to the height of early nineteenth century fashion, albeit a shabby form of it, looked down at Eponine and Guy. Slowly he drew a knife from his inside pocket, and blew a kiss to Eponine.

"You see him up there? He loves me, but I do not love him. But he is all I will ever have. His knife at my throat and his lips on mine. And you - you will have this. That is it. That is what the Capitol wants. And what can we do?"

For some people, when they were in distress, what they needed to hear was the opposite of their fears. They needed words of hope. They needed to be told that everything would get better.

But Guy had spent a life finding hope where there was sometimes none. That meant that sometimes being confronted with a lie, with despair, still made it so that he was able to find that light in the dark, out of sheer bloody-minded defiance.

"No."

He looked at his father, still clawing his way through the muck.

"My dad - my dad and I didn't fall all the way. He got me to higher ground - and that's why he fell in. He could have saved himself."

For just a moment, the corpse flashed to something else, to man who was whole, who was alive, one who looked an awful lot like Guy. He was reaching out a hand, but it wasn't one trying to pull Guy in to die with him, it was one gesturing for him to go, to live, to find someplace better. There was hope on his face and love that was desperate and real.

His voice echoed from somewhere very distant.

"Just follow the sun. You'll make it to Tomorrow."

Then it was a corpse again and Guy knew what to do.

"No, you're wrong. They just want us to think that, that love isn't real. But I know it is." He pounded a fist against his chest. "Every time I see my mate smile, every time I hold my daughter in my arms..."

He looked over at her. "And you - you still tried to help me, when you say you don't think you can love anyone. If you can't love anyone, you wouldn't help anyone, let alone a stranger."

He stood up, facing his family. They were almost to the edge now but the fear had gone.

"What can we do? We can love anyway, even when it hurts, even when it causes us grief - or guilt."

With those words, he started to walk to the edge of the pit.

Edited 2014-01-03 00:21 (UTC)

"Don't!" She reached out for Guy, as if to hold him back with her. She had listened to his words in silence, mulling over what he said. But she didn't believe it . Instead, she watched enviously as Guy's father transformed, as his voice boomed a message of hope, as Guy recounted how his father had sacrificed himself for Guy. Her dad would not have done it, rat that he was.

"You will kill yourself, Monsieur ." Her voice was emotionless, tired.
"You will die."

The Crowning of Enjolras

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

warning for corpsey stuff

Re: warning for corpsey stuff

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)