thecapitol | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Who| Everyone, pretty much. Particularly Secret Santa people and those Creuntus is fucking with.
What| Holiday times!
Where| The Tribute Training center
When| The whole week, but Creuntus' gifts arrive today.
Warnings/Notes| none atm. Please add any in thread headers. Also, for secret santa, if you are the giver start a thread with your giftee's name (unless you two have worked something else out between you). You can use the District threads below, or choose a different setting of your own.

Every floor public space is dripping with holiday decorations.

The decorations are themed, ridiculously so. Every surface is covered, and a table sits proudly full of holiday treats and spirits, kept stocked constantly by the avoxes. Cheerful music plays softly throughout the whole building, though luckily for everyone the Capitol doesn't really know what Christmas carols are.

Those with secret santa's have a cheery, passive-aggressive note reminding them not to disappoint anyone and ruin their holiday.

Those that have expressed a want for some object from home will find a box on their bed sometime during the day, with a merry holiday greeting from Cruentus. Inside they will find the object of their desire, or something similar, crafted from their words.

In blown glass. Pretty, decorative, utterly useless.

Bert's guns, Punchy's goggles, Sigma's music box, Maximus' leg, Mindy's knife, Terezi's dragon cane...on and on, as many gifts as Creuntus could find out. Those that were with them when they were pulled are more perfect replicas, those that they have just described obviously have an artistic touch to them.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She nods mutely, leaving Terezi in the main room to fetch a blanket. A small one that usually lay at the foot of the bed was crumpled up in her little pile of sheets and pillows set in the middle of the bed. Tugging it out spilled a few pillows on the floor but she left them there. She'd set it all to right before the Avoxes tried to make the bed in the usual way. She'd try to express that she didn't care but that had made no difference. It's slung over her shoulder as she returned.

"This will have to do. Any bigger and I'll have nothing to sleep on tonight."

"That's fine. Lay it out and we can pile up the pieces and throw them away." It's the simplest solution to the problem. They're not going to get all of the pieces, of course. But the avoxes shouldn't have any trouble picking up the rest of those.

In the meantime, Terezi starts trying to carefully brush the pieces into a pile for easier relocation. She doesn't say anything at first, just works quietly to get as much of the mess picked up as possible. But there's still something weighing on her mind, and she won't be content until she says it.

"I don't know what I have to do to make you believe me," she says after those few minutes of silence. "I'm not going to bend over backwards. Either you take my word for it or you don't. But I don't have a single problem with your ideals. I think they're admirable. All of my problems are with him."

She quietly lays it out, smoothing it flat with careful brushes of her hands, quietly picking up the first piece, a broken loop of green and placing it near the center. Cleaning up is simply and easy to do without thinking about much at all.

It's the things that Terezi says that make her think, pause as she holds glass delicately in her hands. She still doesn't understand. Signless and her, they were two facets of the ideals, one who spoke them and relayed them, one who wrote them and cherished them. They believed in much the same things, how could it be that different.

"I believe you. I simply don't--know why you find us so different. We believe almost exactly the same things. I might have done similar things in his place."

Would she have? Perhaps. Not openly revolting perhaps, but a boiling need to change things, she could feel. She still felt sometimes. She knew better than to try right now, with so many people she cared about on the line. Perhaps in the end that was the difference, she had lost people to her need to change things when it was all fresh and new.

It crosses her mind, not for the first time, that she wished she had been brought here before everything had broken.

"But you wouldn't have done them for the same reasons. And you wouldn't have known what he knew. And I wouldn't find the blood on your hands to be quite as thick or nauseating for it."

Terezi plunks another piece of glass into the pile, a bit more aggressively than the others. It's been months since she found out, and it still bothers her. She's not sure that it's ever going to stop bothering her. All those lives--on both Beforus and Alternia. The lives he led to a futile end. The deaths he tried to throw away. All of her friends that he could have doomed, if he'd had his way.

Edited 2014-01-31 06:27 (UTC)

Her lips press into a thin line, staring at the glass as she picks it up. It still doesn't make sense, it still doesn't understand the difference between them, why she herself rings...purer to Terezi. Or whatever this means.

"Do you specialize in being cryptic?"

"I specialize in not telling people things that they aren't meant to know," Terezi answers with a shrug, dropping another piece of glass into the pile. She likes the way that they clink together from the drop.

"It's not my place to explain, but I don't want you to get the impression that I'm okay with the way that things were. If that means I have to be cryptic, then I guess that's that."

"I see." She spends a few long moments simply working at the task, dropping the glass into the pile without much outward emotion. She didn't know how to feel about that, being kept in the dark about something that clearly seemed to affect Terezi's judgement.

"I..." She trails off, not sure what she wanted to say that wouldn't be repeating herself. Asking got her cryptic answers, saying they were the same only got denials, and she just wishes Terezi...trusted her enough to say it. Part of her knows it's not really trust that's the issue but things needing to come from the right place, but it still hurts in some way. She's not sure why, Terezi doesn't owe it to her to trust her or anything.

It just sort of does. Like she thought after the things she said, there would be more openness.

She shakes her head, "I don't know what I was going to say. Never mind."

It's a lie, and Terezi knows it. She didn't forget what she was going to say. Something made her decide not to say it, and Terezi has a feeling that she knows what it is.

"I'm not trying to hide things from you," she continues, despite the Disciple all but dropping the topic. "If I could tell you, I would. Not that you would want to know. It's not a kind truth, but... It's still not my place to say. If you really want to know, then you should ask the Signless where his visions really came from. If he doesn't tell you, and you still want to know? Then you can ask me."

At the very least, he deserves the chance to tell his matesprit first. Even if Terezi thinks he should have told her the moment he realized.

She presses her fingertip against the point of a piece of glass, just to feel the sharpness. It doesn't cut, not yet, and she shakes her head.

"I never knew if they were real or just a dream. An ideal. It felt like a dream, the things he spoke about, when we lived in the world we did. I don't understand how asking where they came from would help at all, they were visions of a place where things were better. A place we were trying to create or recreate I suppose, depending on if you thought they were real."

"He lived there though, in his visions, I think. We all did." She doesn't know what to think of any of her thoughts. She'd gone back and forth on whether those visions came from a real place, if their hatchnames, the names he spoke of in his visions, were more than just coincidence or really just wishful thinking.

"It was a real place. A real place with real consequences."

Terezi doesn't really want to say more. She can't stand here and tell her that the world they lived in used to be like that--except for the choice that she and her friends made. That Alternia was as horrible as it was because of them, whether intentional or not.

"I told you. If you want to know, ask him. I'm trying to be nice here. He deserves the chance to tell you first."

She tosses the glass shard aside and looks at Terezi. It's frustrating being told to ask someone else when the answers are in front of you. But she understands somehow. Things not being her place, letting someone else be the one to give a harsh truth.

"I will." She stands to find something to sweep up all this glass dust, eyes far away as she thought, "I'm sorry. It's...frustrating."

Her gaze sweeps over all this mess, recalls her trembling words and she squeezes her eyes shut, "God I said--say such stupid things."

"It's okay. We've all said stupid things." Isn't that the truth... There's more than a few times where Terezi can turn back and cringe at the things that came out of her mouth. She can more than sympathize with wishing she hadn't said something.

Terezi gets to her own feet, and there's something in the Disciple's expression that makes her reach out and touch her arm, just above her elbow. It's light and brief, but it's there.

"I won't tell anyone. We can pretend it never happened."

She kind of wants to reply that she doesn't mind Terezi knowing, knowing her thoughts about everything, the harsh things that she thinks deep down. Terezi doesn't seem to judge her for them, she doesn't expect the Disciple to be perfect and it's a relief sometimes. But that's more than she wants to say, more than she thinks is right to say and she just nods.

"I'll go get a broom or something. An Avox must have one somewhere."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only