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.

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His Escort would've probably been frowning at Guy's posture here - she'd have said something long the lines of that's not how you use a chair, honey and you have to fill the chair! Make it yours because the Crowning Throne will be so much bigger! Stuff like that. R only stares. Leaves it alone.

He's...surprised by this Tribute. A few months in the Capitol, up close and personal with the Living in ways that don't involve survival every day, every week, and he'd started to think he understood them. Now he's dangerously close to gaping.

He says he's from a world that - aside from the lack of walking corpses - doesn't sound that far off from R's. Hunting for your life/un-life; check. Peaceful if proper distance is maintained. Yet this boy (man? he's in that awkward stage it's hard to tell) has a surprisingly optimistic worldview where it's kill or be killed. His head doesn't loll to the side or sag like it normally would, his eyes fixed on the human.

"Makes sense," R says with a thoughtful wheeze. He shrugs, as if he doesn't really care he got stabbed. Maybe he would've felt differently if it'd actually, you know, hurt. "I'm R, by the way. Just R. Like the...letter."

This right here, this is totally progress. R's starting to relax himself now, that rigidity in his back relaxing. With the dead man on the table in the way and how his killer is curled up, it doesn't seem like a good idea to go for handshakes. Just a hunch.

That was the kind of thing that happened when your world was dangerous but not a total wreck, when there was plenty that was beautiful to make all that surviving worthwhile. There was a lot about his world that was reason to curse the darkness but plenty of ways to walk in the light.

"I'm Guy. Guy Crood."

There was a long pause.

"So two questions: one, whaaat exactly are you? Clearly a person, I'm not downplaying that part, but there's a what I'm interested in finding out there. And two, what's a letter?"

In his head, it was Arr, like the noise, which actually was a perfectly respectable name for people where he came from.

Edited 2013-12-19 06:43 (UTC)

"Guy...?" R repeats, not because it's a terribly hard word but because it's...well, it's weird. Like that guy Guy. Awkward for other reasons.

At least it's an easy name to pronounce. Hard to forget. R opts to go for that second question because the first is awkward. Hi, we're the Dead and we're here to eat all your brains if you don't mind kind of awkward. He doesn't want to talk about corpsehood yet. R's grey face transforms to a confused look as he blinks - he remembered to blink! - at Guy.

"You don't - okay. Ughhhh...." R stalls, defaulting to a groan out of habit. "They're like...building blocks. Language. Speech. Communication..."

He falls silent, stymied. This is probably the part where he should've paid more attention to class when he was alive. Staring at Guy, he just shrugs again, as if that proves his point.

"I think I get it."

He didn't get it but then that was because the building blocks of communication were sounds and Arr was a sound so he didn't know why it was called a letter. Maybe it was a sound that was part of other words though and letter was a word for some kind of root sound. Like if someone was just named "ooh" or "uuuh."

He noticed that careful dodge, though, and he wasn't letting that go.

"Yeah, so, the other question? I notice you didn't really, ah, answer that one."

That was the one he'd wanted an answer to most. He was even tapping his fingers against his knee as if he was a little bit on edge anticipating it.

"I was...answering the letter one. One thing at a...time," R mutters. What would help was if he could bury his face in his food's guts, ostrich-style, and pretend he didn't hear the question because he'd have an excuse then. Guy as quick on as feet as he is with that spear, he's starting to realize, and he can't even pretend he's too busy groaning to answer.

Tough customer.

R finally gets to it. He looks and feels too alert to sell the swaying zombie routine and something tells him that Guy would be onto him. This is the kind of Tribute his Escort would've loved to groom: sharp and squirrely with plenty of hair to work with.

"I'm a zombie. Dead? Goes uggggh brains?" R searches for that "oh yeah" moment in Guy's face. "It's like being sick but...you don't ever get better."

Well, for awhile, you might. Bite someone's frontal lobe and you could at least feel like you belonged for a few seconds. It probably didn't quality as an overall improvement, though.

The thing with the dead was that they were supposed to stay dead. That was the thing that happened in a nice, orderly world. That was why they did a whole little burial ritual to celebrate their lives and mourn them and send them on their way. In his world, with all its wildness and unpredictability, death was one of the only certainties in life. While it was a sad, terrible thing, having that certainty yanked out from under his feet was enough to leave him shaken.

But R wasn't the one to have smashed that little foundation of existence and cause him to topple over into a rubble pile of anxiety. The Capitol had done it already by reviving him, by bringing Guy himself back after he'd died, by ripping him away from his world, by watching him constantly with little buggy eyes.

There was a lot to fear about someone who'd been eating someone's liver just a few minutes before, but R was also talking and could clearly think and didn't actually seem to be that bad of a person. Joan had even said that about him, that it was only when he was hungry that he tried to eat people.

So even though R's mere existence was tugging at every little string at the base of his brain, causing Guy to want to flee in terror just because of looking at him, the other parts of his brain won out - like the parts that did that whole logic thing and took care of that whole messy business of empathy.

"You wound up this way because - because you got sick?" he said slowly, and then his expression made a little melty transition from fear to sympathy. His words were stilted because he wasn't sure how to talk about something like this. "I'm sorry. Then. That you - that you got sick."

Then he started babbling a little bit.

"To be honest, I really have no idea what to say here because I'm not sure 'I'm sorry for your loss' applies when you're talking to someone about themselves, but I guess I'm sorry you can't - that you can't get better."

The good news is Guy hadn't ran into a hungry zombie - or a pack of them. Nothing more fun than a hunting party who has to feed an airport back home. All the screaming and flailing in the world probably wouldn't have saved him.

R nods. Yeah. Sick, in a way. He has no idea where - when? - Guy is from just by looking at him. A place that really hates shirts, he guesses. Plus zombie-free. Sounds like an improvement.

"It is what it is," R says. He was dumb and/or not self-aware about his surroundings enough to get bit. Maybe he cared too much or too little not to use that bullet for himself when he had the chance, back there by the river. He heaves his shoulders in a shrug. "Helps to think of it...glass half full? Getting through life."

He pauses, wondering if Guy knows what a glass is. This is the human who has an aversion to shirts and even the chair seems like it's one small step for man.

"Positive attitude," R adds. Honestly, he's more interested to find out what makes Guy tick than going over what you can or can't say to a walking corpse. Less awkward that way. He's never met anyone before quite like Guy, after all.

R got a very genuine beaming smile at his optimism.

"That's a good attitude to have. There's a lot to life that's worthwhile, even if you're only halfway, uh, alive."

It was the same attitude Guy himself would probably have if he was in R's place. There were still flowers and color and birds and sky and people, a million different reasons to want to exist. Someone that kept trying to be happy in that condition wasn't to pitied - they were to be admired for sticking it out.

"If I hadn't though that way growing up I probably wouldn't be here." That little confession was just a bit personal so he shrugged an awkward shrug, as if he wasn't sure if it was the kind of thing he should bring up in idle conversation. (He really wasn't sure what was appropriate, largely because he'd spent a very big chunk of his life talking to just a sloth.) "Like I said, it can get rough where I come from, but there are also plenty reasons to be glad to be alive. There's always some way of - of following the light."

It's what's kept him going despite the rising body count. R bobs his head in a nod, groaning thoughtfully to himself before he realizes it's a little creepy.

"Follow...the light," he repeats, enjoying the way those three words roll off his tongue.

It's a beautiful way to put it, actually. Elegant. Surprisingly elegant. R studies at Guy as he reaches up and idly scrubs the corner of his mouth. People like him are a rare breed. It's usually just roughing it out, living day to day because the void out there is even worse - that or he existence of being a zombie but most sane people don't allow themselves to turn these days. If Guy's from a world where there are no Dead, than what's his idea of "rough", what does he need to fight to follow the light?

"I think it's easy...to forget," R says quietly. "Some days there isn't...any light."

It's something he hasn't talked about too much with, well, anyone. M's seen it before in his eyes when they run out of things to groan to each other. When there was too much blood in their mouths. Too much silence. Now he searches Guy's face, almost hungry for something.

"That's why there's always Tomorrow," Guy said, with a little roll of a shoulder that fell just short in its ambitions of being a shrug.

The subject of his parents was always a sensitive one. It wasn't because he was still sensitive about it, because he'd long since grieved and moved on and was comfortable talking about it now, but sometimes people didn't like to hear about death. That made it a subject Guy didn't just bring up in idle conversation. R was dead, though, and Guy saw that hungry look in his eyes. Guy's natural inclination was to help other people, to give, to feed, to comfort, so he wanted to feed him - provided it wasn't his flesh that he was hungry for.

He settled in his chair a little bit more, looking as if he was going to tell a story.

"The things in my world? All furry, with claws and teeth." He bent his hands as if he was brandishing claws and made a growling noise, doing an impression. "Big, too. Some of them are very big. Then others are small but just as bad. Piranhakeets, for instance? They're teeny tiny, but they fly in a massive flock and they can strip an animal down to its bones in the space of three heartbeats. At night, all you can hear is the growls and the howls as they hunt things down and their prey squealing. Night isn't the only time the animals hunt, though. There's always something hunting, all day every day."

In his world there were real monsters hiding in the dark.

"The arena was a lot like home, actually. The death lizards, hiding in the grass, those were like animals from home. The people even - most of the people in my world are peaceful, but not everyone. It wasn't as bad there as the arena but I've had to kill before."

He'd been leaning forward slightly, his body animated as he'd explained the monsters and now he sat back, one hand idly picking at the leather cord holding his leg wrap on.

"My parents died when I was about seven," he said slowly. "Tar pit. They're the ones that told me to follow the light. They told me not to hide, that I'd make it to Tomorrow."

He didn't tell R about how he thought that meant that Tomorrow was a place until only recently. It didn't matter anyway. He'd still found his Tomorrow even if it was more a state of being than a place.

"I couldn't remember how to make fire at first since my parents were always the ones that did. I had to hide in caves, in little holes the animals were too big to fit in. They'd be - they'd be scratching at the entrance in the dark. Sometimes all I had was the thought that Tomorrow would be better."

Another shrug. "But I was right. It wasn't every tomorrow, but it did get better one tomorrow at a time. I figured out how to make fire and all the little tricks to survive so that it got pretty easy. I found this little sloth who was smart enough to communicate even if he couldn't talk and we became best buds. Sometimes I ran into people and even though none of them wanted an extra mouth to feed, sometimes they taught me things, gave me stories. Then two years ago I met my mate and her family and now I have a daughter. We just wander and see everything and our world is so big and so beautiful that we never get tired of it."

He held up a finger.

"Every day you're still breathing - or, I guess in the case of some people, still awake - that's another chance that tomorrow will be better. Even the bad days still have something - something beautiful. Or comforting."

Edited 2013-12-24 16:46 (UTC)

R sits through it rapt, held captive by the words spinning into a story before him. Guy's good. Like, really, really good at this. His face transforms, lights up, something in his voice shifts. Even R, his brain withered by death and decayed by the cycle of murdering and shuffling, can picture the words coming alive. It occurs to him that Guy's a lot better at storytelling than he is at killing people.

The good news is R's a (scary) good listener: unlike others, he doesn't do much fidgeting, he doesn't interrupt with questions or throat-clearing or coughs. He stares. Studies the way Guy moves, the way the corner of his mouth twitches as he speaks. The pulse threading its way through his neck.

What he gets from Guy's story is a few things: Guy's a survivor, through and through. He knows death doesn't sleep, that it can kill you with a small bite or rip you limb from limb. Somehow he still has in it him to ask why instead of who cares. It's amazing. Maybe even M would wait, listen for a change instead of chewing first. Guy just has that force of presence.

"Sometimes...it's easy to forget," R says quietly. He pauses again to collect his thoughts, first from necessity and now from habit, and continues.

He seems to curl in on himself despite towering over Guy, an inward slouch as if he's tired of the murdering, the mechanical up-and-down of his mouth when he feeds and feeds. How he couldn't - can't - seem to stop. What it feels like to exist without knowing why. The lives he stole, the looks on their faces when it sank in what was coming next. R's finger drums on his thigh as he thinks about what he wants to say next. If there had been more Guys in his world, maybe things would've been different. Wouldn't have spiraled.

R looks up, fixing a stare on Guy. "I'm...sorry. About your parents. And that you had to be constantly looking...over your shoulder."

"It was my older sister, too," he said, not because he was seeking extra sympathy but because every time he spoke about them, it was a memorial. Memory was memorial in a world without gravestones and statues and photographs and she needed to be acknowledged.

Sometimes it was the missing his parents that hit him harder, sometimes it was wondering why he had that chance to go on when she didn't. He remembered her face, scared and desperate as she saw him standing there on steady ground, almost hungry for it.

But he also remembered her shouting at him to go when he hesitated, when he tried to stay. She'd been too young to die but old enough to be unselfish, to want him to have what she was never going to.

"But thank you." R got another ghost of a shrug. Guy apparently did that a lot when he wasn't sure what body language was appropriate to communicate what he was feeling. It was a very noncommittal gesture, wasn't it? "I'm at peace with it. Even the looking over my shoulder. I've had a lot that was beautiful. A lot of...moments. And I'm sure if I lose it all, if I don't get to hold my daughter again, for instance, I'll grieve. Naturally."

He had to take a moment to not let too much feeling burst out of him with his next words.

"But that I still got to hold her at all..." He went on, "There's a lot of peace in those kinds of things."

That was the trick. People. Hands splayed out in the direction of the sun and then clasped together like banyo roots. Paintings of dreams on rock walls. Sunrises and sunsets. Music. Holding a little girl in his arms and watching as she laughed for the first time. Making those little moments R saw every time he ate a brain.

"I could help remind you, if you want."

It came out of nowhere, but the words had been stewing ever since R said it was easy to forget.

Guy's expression grew furtive, like he wasn't sure if it was an offer that was socially inappropriate somehow. He liked people but you didn't learn the proper ways to make friends with them if you didn't run into them for years at a time. Guy was kidnapped into his current family and he was still figuring out how it worked the other way around. And he didn't know how the rules worked in other worlds.

"You - you said it's easy to forget. I like making new friends. I like helping people see beautiful things. It's just something I like to do."

Connection to other people was a beautiful thing and the humans of Guy's world were all about the social ties. Offering out a line for someone else to grab was as natural as breathing even if Guy wasn't sure of the right way to do it.

Well, at least as natural as breathing was to Guy.

Guy’s so very human it almost hurts to be around him. The same life-scent wafts off Guy as the other Tributes, the Escorts, the Capitol citizens despite the perfumes and the silks. At the same time, though, R listens and stares and wonders that he can put all this into words.

“Peace…” R echoes. He thinks he knows what he’s talking about. Appreciating what you have when you have it. Letting go when you need to. Before they were just words spinning around in the dusty recesses of his skull. Hearing them spoken outloud, seeing the expression on Guy’s face, and suddenly they become more than just words trapped with nowhere to go. They’re a little more real, a little more within even a zombie’s reach.

He shoots Guy a startled look at his offer. They technically just met. If R had a mouth at the time, he might’ve even tried to take a chunk out of him, spear or no spear. That body is still bleeding on the table, glistening and tempting and fresh. And he still offers. R doesn’t say anything at first. Just stares. Puzzles out how he feels about it, what that strange feeling starting from his chest and spreading out must mean. His hands have laced together in his lap, grey but without his usual clumsiness.

“I’d, uh, I’d like that,” R finally says. The look he gives Guy now is a mixture of shyly guilty. He’s been literally caught red-handed and still, he’s being offered a lifeline, another connection. “You’re…” He pauses. Impossible? Crazy? You’re way way too nice to survive? “It’s not…‘just something’, Guy. It’s special.”

Where’s he going with this? He’s thought of himself as fairly eloquent for a zombie, at least in his head, but Guy’s thrown him for such a loop that he feels like he’s stumbling around after his vowels again. R looks down at his hands. He’d like to sit here and bask in what it means to (maybe) make a new friend. But there’s the Arena out there, the dead man on the table. Knowing he’s not even the biggest monster out there Guy could run into.

R blows out a resigned sigh. “Just…be careful.”

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The Crowning of Enjolras

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Could leave this as a closer?