thecapitol | We Are the Makers and the Breakers [Closed]

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We Are the Makers and the Breakers [Closed]

WHO| Maximus and Venus
WHAT| Some holiday mourning for a relationship that barely was and a relationship that wasn't.
WHEN| Before the wedding.
WHERE| District 3 Suite
WARNINGS| Mentions of psychiatric medication and family death. Probably drinking, at some point.

People try at Christmas. Venus appreciates that, she supposes.

Still, it's a holiday filled with the void of where her family isn't, a day stuffed with memories of assembly-stuffed stockings at Xavier's with her name misspelled, with her saying thank you but no thank you, she's much too old for that now. Of relatives who couldn't bear to see her in any other way sending Christmas cards summing up the year. Your cousins are getting so big, they ask about you all the time, but of course you understand why they can't see you in the state you're in... Of candy canes with her therapist's business card taped to them.

Teleporting to some beach in Bermuda to pretend it's June. Taking enough of her sleeping medication to spend eighteen hours of the twenty-fifth in bed. Missing, missing, missing her mother and father and the sound of her brothers fighting over who got to open their presents first.

The chill that's fallen in District Five - not a bitterness like last time, but a sort of awkwardness of unspoken thoughts and assumptions between her and Enjolras - hasn't helped. So she turns to District Three, instead. The lights on the tree sparkle to the beat of a glitch-hop Christmas carol. A little robot snowman greets her as she enters. She walks on by.

She knocks on Maximus' door, looking cheerful and flawless and unruffled, as she always does. As she's made such a career out of being that it is no longer even tangentially related to her inner state. She holds a piece of jerky in her hand to throw for the tiger.

"Hey." She bites the corner of her tongue. "Figured you'd be spending this holly jolly day alone too. Wanna see if there's a Starbucks or something wringing holiday pay out of its employees?"

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Whatever relaxation had slipped into his expression immediately disappeared.

"It doesn't matter anymore," He said, his brows furrowing as he watched her spike their drinks. He waited until she had finished with his before pulling it to his lips and taking a sip. He made a quick face and put it back down. Too hot, yet.

"I didn't deserve it in the first place, and now it is done."

She purses her lips and shakes her head at him. "Well, now that you're being cryptic, you have to spill. You know, bleed the pus out, make it feel better. I'm a great listener."

She really isn't, and honestly, she probably shouldn't be bringing up pus when they're settling down to drink.

He looks at her. Just looks, with that piercing blue gaze that he gives when he's quite sure that he does not want to do whatever he was just told to do, though the mention of pus would never turn his stomach.

(It's a lot less effective, when you've seen as much as he has.)

"I doubt it would help," He says, flatly, before pulling the coffee back up to his lips and gulping some down, even though it burned his tongue. (He almost preferred it that way.) "The point is, we've both survived this long. Perhaps we can continue to defy the gods."

He was fairly certain the guilt would never be escaped.

Edited (tenses....) 2013-12-31 05:40 (UTC)

Venus meets his gaze back, eyes as dark and unyielding as the commas on a page, demanding a pause.

"You know, this whole thing about being friends that I'm trying to do, with the teddy bears and all? That involved you not being a jerk." She reaches forward and wraps her hand around his on the mug handle.

There's a flash of defiance somewhere deep in his eyes but it is quickly smothered by shame. He drops his gaze, and his shoulders.

He didn't need to know the exact definition of jerk to know that she was right.

"... My apologies." He said gruffly. "I am still smarting from arguments left incomplete. You do not deserve to have them drawn out onto you."

"Well, you've put them in the air now. What's on your mind?" She blows on her coffee, sending a waft of steam over. It's a bit of an incorporeal sort of olive branch, and it dissipates well before it reaches him.

"Look. As someone who has arguments here, it's better to complete them fast, before the Capitol decides to take advantage of the opening."

It occurred to him, at that very moment, that he hadn't actually spoken of his brief - what? affair? - with Wyatt to a single living soul. Sure, he'd whispered more apologies than he could count, but only to the dead. He frowned, his brows furrowing as he stared into his cup before taking another long drink.

"The argument is as complete as it could be made, even if I have no said my piece. It has been made very clear that I will not be given a chance to." He paused, breathed in deep, and let it out.

Then he met Venus' eye.

"I'm sure you cannot be completely oblivious to the rumours."

"Picking up on gossip is kind of second-nature to me. Hell, half the time it's about me." Which is part of why she's here drinking spiked coffee. She props her feet up on an abandoned chair and brushes some drops of melted snow from her hairline. "So. You and Wyatt Earp."

She twitches her feet inside her boots to the rhythm of the jazzy rendition of some crappy Christmas song floating overhead.

"There's never no chance to say your piece to someone until they're dead, you know. Even if they don't want to hear it." She blows on her coffee again and stirs it. "You probably shouldn't be going to bed mad, I mean, when odds are either of you could die and not come back soon. That'd be like, guilt squared."

He was more grateful than he could have every possibly said that all it took for her to understand the situation boiled down to a simple phrase. So. You and Wyatt Earp. He did not think he had it in him to explain, so the fact that he doesn't have to was an immense weight lifted.

"My piece doesn't matter. He knows my obligations. He knows that I-- He knows what happened to my family. The fact that I forgot myself is beside the point, once he was reminded of my obligations he decided it was best to withdraw himself from my company."

Those last few words weren't bitter. Nope. Not at all.

The muscles around Venus' eyes twitch slightly as she tries to dig through what Maximus says and suss out a logical story. In a way, it's simpler than the whatever-she-has with Enjolras.

"'Once he was reminded'?" She releases Max's hand and warms hers on her mug of coffee instead. "Look, I mean, I get- I get it. Being kind of explosive about family stuff. What did you say?"

He didn't reply right away - instead raising a hand to rub calloused fingers into his temples as he closed his eyes.

"Plenty." Was all he said at first, flatly, and with no little amount of shame. He rubbed vigorously at his forehead before placing his face in his palm.

"I only-- I can't bear them any further dishonour. Everything I've done-- Everything that I am, here, dishonours them."

Venus leans back in her chair, watching him over her drink, then lets a long breath out as she finds what to say.

As far as she's concerned, any day she walks on the Earth dishonors her family. There's just nothing short of dying that she can do about it, and people - paramedics, the roommate who found her the first time, the janitor who found her the second - keep insisting she not go through things that way.

Hence, the public suicide of a career in superheroing.

She knows the guilt Max feels is a fault line in his landscape that cannot be repaired. Sometimes it's merely a cliff, and sometimes it's earthquakes, and she's sure that Wyatt probably derives some awe and fear from the canyon in Max's psyche. Feeling that strongly for your family is a virtue as much as it is a crippling flaw - what she sees is admirable, if frustrating in its likeness.

"What kind of penance could you ever do here that'd honor them, anyway?"

He shakes his head roughly and pulls the coffee to his lips - no longer scalding but hot enough to be uncomfortable, and drinks the rest of it down.

"I cannot. The man who killed them is dust, dead for two thousand years, and I can never avenge them." He set the mug carefully down on the table again and pushed it away from him.

"Death is all I can offer and I cannot even offer that. And for a moment, I- I did not even want to."

Venus takes a while before she answers that, gesturing to the barista for more coffee and then just staring at her reflection in the coffee's surface, eyes hooded.

What's it like to love someone so much you want to live?

"He made you happy?"

He doesn't answer right away, because the truth hurts - hurts more than he cared to imagine, before this moment. But he can't lie. Not about this. Not even to his wife's memory, as much as he wishes he could.

"... Yes," He said, tightly, though he fell silent as the barista came over and poured him another mug. He waited until she'd fallen out of earshot again before he broke the silence.

"I did not think it was possible, but I was wrong."

Automatically, Venus brings the flask back out to spike the drink.

"Are you one of those people who don't deserve to ever be happy? Because, I mean, from what I understand..." She twists her mouth to the side. "By that logic, if you're condemned, I'm completely fucked."

He gave her a somewhat sideways glance as he waited for her to finish spiking his drink again.

"I was happy. I had my happiness, and it was taken from me. How can I possibly ask for more without tarnishing their memory?" He tilted his head as he looked at her. "You? You're what - nineteen? Twenty?"

He breathed out, pulling his mug towards him and warning his hands on the cup.

"Not even the gods would claim you weren't allowed a chance at happiness. I simply already had mine."

"Twenty." One more year and it will have been a decade. "And you may have gotten a good long life in, but you probably didn't kill your whole family in a fit of rage."

There's a deadness in her voice, something that says this is not the truth, but this is how I see the truth.

She takes her first sip, long and slow.

To say that he was stunned would be an understatement - he stared for a long moment, frowning as he watched her.

He could hear it in her voice, something unsaid, but he had never been good at seeing underlying meanings until they were laid bare for him.

"... Did you mean to hurt them?" He asked after a long moment.

She shrugs. "I don't remember. I was a kid. I didn't know that I even could hurt them."

She stirs more cream into her coffee, lightening it paler than the hand holding the spoon. Having made such a bold statement, she shrinks back. The faux-fur around her neck seems less a lion's mane than a mouse's nest in which she hides.

"But that's why 'they would have wanted you to be happy' always felt like a crock of shit to me. What's your excuse?"

He tries to think of it. If instead of his family dying, he'd died by his son's hand. As a child.

"There is not a way in the world I could have blamed him," He murmured, lowly, before realising he'd said it out loud. He looked up. "My son, I mean. Had our positions been reversed. But they weren't. I was meant to protect him, and I failed. My family needs me, still. In life, and in death. I failed them, and until I join them, I continue to fail them."

Some of her relatives blamed her. She can still hear the words rolling in the back of her head whenever she goes to sleep. She doesn't know if her parents would have, but part of her thinks hoping they wouldn't would be a lie.

You take her. I have too much going for me to live with a mutant time bomb.

It's not our fault you got nowhere to go, Delilah. Maybe you should have thought of that before you blew my sister to kingdom come.

Max stokes the little spark of hope and she isn't sure she likes that.

"If there's nothing you can do about it, since their killer's dead, then denying yourself happiness is just kind of...I don't know. Self-serving, isn't it? They can't hold you to what's actually impossible to do, and neither can you."

"It is not completely impossible," Maximus said after a moment, his lips thinning. "Dying in the arena may be impossible, they may bring us back on a whim, but here?"

He breathed in, let it out.

"I watched them execute Ariadne. It is not impossible, if I had real will to see it done."

Edited 2014-01-01 23:47 (UTC)

"So what, suicide?" Venus can't really criticize there. "People here wouldn't be happy about that."

She pauses. "Don't you owe anything to the people here? I mean, your people here?"

He shook his head. "Taking my own life is not an option. If I did, I would never meet them in the afterlife." Only heroes went to Elysium.

He sighed, and rubbed at his temple.

"Of course, I owe many of them. I certainly owe Wyatt my life, many times over. But what is that life worth if it is wholly without honour?"

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