I Want Your Flowers Like Babies Want God's Love [Closed]

[celebrityskinned]

WHO| Enjolras and Venus
WHAT| The ship finally sails.
WHEN| End of week 6, a few days after Venus dies.
WHERE| District Five Suite
WARNINGS| Shippy shit. You've been warned.

As with all Tributes upon their return, Venus isn't conscious when she's returned to her Capitol bed, isn't conscious when she's revived from death. She's brought back into her roof, dressed in soft pajamas, having already been prepped slightly by Stylists in the interim. Her hair's in soft, big curls, her fingernails done. There isn't a scratch on her, and she's entirely unrecognizable from the bloody mass of entrails and bone smeared across the floor in the Arena, in footage that's still being played at least once an hour.

She sleeps for a while. She dreams, and that's the first she knows she isn't dead. In her dreams someone is playing Operation on her body, and they're replacing each of her internal organs one by one, but it doesn't hurt, and she isn't scared. You're going to be a whole new person, they say.

And for the first time in a long time, she isn't sad that she wakes up this morning. She's sad when she wakes up, because she knows Kankri and Courfeyrac are still back there in the Arena, now thoroughly traumatized by her badly thought-out decision to spend the moment of her death with them (in retrospect, she should have gone out with dignity in the fall to her demise). But she isn't sad to be alive.

It's a strange feeling. She gets up and wrinkles her toes over the carpet in her room, looking at the rosy pink paint on them, and runs a hand over the bridge of her nose where Kevin cut her up. She takes a moment to cry, but she isn't sure why, and she can't put words to the strange sadness that settles into the folds of her brain, or to how fast she forgets it's there.

And then she feels her pendant from District Five around her neck, and opens the door to her room and into the District Five hallway.

Comments

[celebrityskinned]

Something in his digression about the Greek doesn't sit well with her, and it takes her until a few beats after he's done pondering on the Capitol to find a way to fully articulate it.

"I think we can flourish here. I think I've seen flourishing." She reaches over and rubs at the injury on her mouth as she fishes for the right words. "I think the way you're talking, either you've got total freedom or you've got none at all, and that's not right. It's got to be a sort of spectrum. You're talking political freedom and freedom to do what we want with our lives, but we have more freedom still, don't we? Not just like, leisure time, but..."

Absolute freedom would include freedom from their bodies, freedom from social quandary, maybe. Venus imagines freedom and she imagines isolation, and suddenly the prospect becomes much less inviting than it once was.

"We have free will, how to respond and how we think, how we play the game and, you know. How we treat others and ourselves. So we're not absolutely chained, we're just kind of..." She puts her hand up in a shrug. "Half-shackled, maybe. So we half-bloom. It's sort of like...if you see a tree that's growing through concrete, do you say it's flourishing in spite of the concrete or that it's a shame it's not growing in soil?"

She yawns and rests her head back down on the pillow. After a moment, she fishes around behind her and finds the blanket to pull around her shoulders. "I don't know if that makes any sense. It probably doesn't."

[orestes]

"Well, I believe that you have hit on the classic corporeal/incorporeal dichotomy and the problems that accompany it." There's an enthusiasm to his tone, a passion for the debate which seems ill-suited to the low lights of the room, and her half sleeping position. Still, he can't help the passion for the subject that possesses him. Metaphysics are less his interest that the ethics of political philosophy, but they have happened on a subject that seems to marry the two. And, indeed, he has missed their talks.

"My attack on that argument, were I to make one, would be two-pronged. In the first place, I have yet to decide whether or not free will is truly a factor here as we are not truly autonomous entities. Secondly, and I suppose that this is not an argument exactly, but you are entirely correct. As Rousseau so eloquently put it, Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains. The moment we gain a consciousness, we know that there are rules and limits to our existence, and not just those of nature. I am, in as sense, merely assigning an arbitrary designation of free and unfree, and hoping for everything to fit within that paradigm. " He pauses to breathe, and abruptly something in the thought catches him. Enjolras sinks back into his seat, apparently deep in thought.

It is interesting, he thinks, how she can inspire this within him. And truly, it isn't just about Venus, but rather it's a play between them, a mutual exchange of ideas and thoughts. And suddenly with that thought, the thing that made him pause seems entirely clear. He leans forward again, not quite rounding on her with mock-accusation. "And you, my dear, are accusing me of clinging to a new absolute even while I attempt to entertain the subjective."

[celebrityskinned]

Ironic, that he should bring up corporeality with a girl whose body is, in all likelihood, not really her own. For a moment, Venus runs her hand through her hair, fingernails, digging at her scalp just to feel it, as she processes what he says. He's going a little too fast for her, but she's gamely trying to keep up, spurred forward by the enthusiasm in his voice, the barely-smothered smile at the corner of his lips. He looks younger when he talks like this, more alive than he's seemed in so many ways elsewhere.

"Caught me. I am the Inquisition." She smiles back and raises a hand slightly, calling for a moment to breathe through her thoughts. "But, okay, you're calling for subjective happiness but saying you need a certain threshold of freedom for that to exist, right? I guess I'm asking why you set the threshold where you did, because that sounds absolute."

She pats at the bed next to her. "You should come closer so I don't miss anything you say."

[orestes]

His expression shifts, eyes widening ever so slightly. They've already crossed the boundary of good sense and propriety, but what she's suggesting seems like a level neither of them are truly ready for all the same. It's not the potential for any sir of sexual mishaps that have him on edge, that's a factor of course, but one which he feels confident enough can be avoided. Rather, it's the intimacy itself that strikes him. There is, after all, a difference between napping haphazardly together in a common space and sleeping together in a bed. Regardless of the pretense.

Still, she has a point, and the pillows look softer an more accommodating than the armchair. And it was her invitation and not his perceived or implied imposition.

Resolutely, he gathers up the book, still willing, or in fact needing, to maintain at least some of the appearance. Less than comfortably, he settles next to her, all too aware of the heat of her legs next to his, and the firmness of her shoulder as they brush against each other. Thank God for the blanket between them.

"I suppose," he begins, once his heart isn't racing. "That I do not know any other standards which I can set. The trouble with subjectivism is that ultimately too much becomes dependent on the individual. I may define happiness as freedom for all men, or a grand romance, or something equally lofty, and you may define it as a particularly good bowl of strawberry ice cream, and under a subjectivist perspective, those things are both correct. And I find that as frustrating as it is appealing."

[celebrityskinned]

She doesn't press any further, just letting her face sink into the pillow a bit and feeling his weight on the bed shift her. She wants to teach for his hand but, god willing, there will be time for that in the future. Time for her to cup his cheek in her hand and tap noses without feeling as if they are crossing some boundary neither of them have seem for to draw out loud.

She closes her eyes, and realizes that she absolutely trusts him. There's no thought that he might hurt her or take advantage of her vulnerable, sleepy state, and it's not a sense if peace she's assigned to most men. Most men have, after all, seen her body first and her soul second, her mind never.

"But that's arguing against being subjective, not arguing for being absolute. You haven't told me why you think absolutism is a better idea."

She sighs, not out of sadness but simply to let all her energy roll out if her like the tide.

[orestes]

"I like having a standard. I like having something to which I can point and say this is good, and this is not." She might be perfectly willing to relax, but he is not. They're at eye level now, or they would be if her eyes were open, and Enjolras watches her keenly. Every shockingly even breath she takes is quietly noted, every pull at her brow considered and investigated for its potential deeper meaning. She is like an obscure code he needs to break, something wonderfully complicated and purposefully incomprehensible. The closer he gets, the most he understands and the more questions open up to him again.

"That isn't an argument, and you should have been a lawyer. I think you would have been very good at it."

They lay there for a time, enough time at least for his breathing to even out again. His heart has calmed down too, the danger of it jumping out of his chest and up into his throat seems gone for now. Boldly, perhaps missing the adrenaline, he reaches for the her hand that's clutching the blankets by her shoulder. It immediately sets off a new tightness in hist chest and a blush that burns out slowly, spreading from his cheeks to behind his ears.

"I-- that is to say," he falters, voice less certain than it had been even a moment ago. Philosophy and politics are so much more his element. "Would you mind terribly if I were to kiss you again?"

[celebrityskinned]

"A lawyer? Really?" She smiles, edges of her lips turning upwards in a mirror of the curve of her lashes. She feels his hand find hers and it surprises her, sends a little electrical static shock through her chest, and she opens her eyes in surprise - but not unpleasantly so. "Maybe you just like a simpler world than I do, Mr. Standards. Monsieur Standards."

His hand fits in hers so perfectly. If she didn't know better she'd think it was some divine intention, that he is the convexes to her concaves, but she doesn't believe in that sort of stuff - and besides, their kisses are proof positive that they weren't designed in each other's images. Pleasurable as they are, they're awkward, clumsy.

Which means they should practice, she thinks, and as much as she tries to project confidence she feels as uncertain as he does, as if there's a soft layer of cotton between her flesh and her skin full of softness and of brambles. It's as if this moment and everything inside it is made of the most fragile glass, exquisite and yet so, so fragile that she's afraid to even breathe too loudly.

"I wouldn't mind at all."

[orestes]

At her permission, he leans forward, propping himself up on one arm. In this position, with their hands laced together as they are, he's leaning half-way on top of her. It's inappropriate, he realizes, before abruptly concluding that he doesn't care. Still it isn't a position in which he ever really thought he would find himself and particularly not so enthusiastically.

"Monsieur Niveau sounds almost as if it should be a name." He says before dropping his lips onto hers ever so softly. Their kisses still lack anything more amorous, they're all softness and gentle pressure, nothing threatening to either of their boundaries, nothing can be misinterpreted as too pushing. Any forwardness is due to their positioning together, practically entwined on his bed. He wishes he could forget about that, at least for the moment.

[celebrityskinned]

"I like your name the way it is. Now that I finally know how to pronounce it."

She kisses back, and everything is chaste and tender, hungry but restrained. It's nothing like the facesucking that she's faked for TV, there's nothing terribly wet or semi-painful or twisting or arousing about it. It's safe, it's gentle, it's honest. It's sweet, and Venus wishes there was a word for that that didn't sound condescending or diminutive, because she thinks it's both that sweet and also everything she wants at the moment. She is without complaint, even from the strange angle of her shoulder into the bed right now, the sting on her lips of Azula's wounding.

They'll go no further today, but she's alright with that. She'll fall asleep in personal splendor, knowing that happiness can be an aspiration and can be the tint of a moment, this moment.