thecapitol | Living inside the shell

Entry tags:

Living inside the shell

Who| Mindy, open
What| The victor returns to the Capitol.
Where| Various Places
When| After being patched up
Warnings/Notes| Mindy, so foul language and descriptions of violence.

After the last few weeks, it was a breath of fresh air to be back in the Capitol. It was not something she would have easily admitted to herself, but at least here there was a sense of ease, knowing that she didn't have to be watching her back for death.

Mostly.

It was strange too. She almost felt alien, coming back here with the win. Death had at least made her an equal: now she was an object, to be striven for or hated or stared at or asked questions to. The crowing would come soon enough, she knew that, and what a pain that would be. Words to say,things to plan, and really, all she wanted was to make sure all her friends were all right. certain ones would hare her now, of course, but that was expected. She had, after all, let the games' nature affect her.

She was more than happy to be restored though: all the bleeding and the aching had taken a toll on her, and she was ready for aching she at least only inflicted on herself. There were several ways of going through with this.

1. The Training room. It was always Mindy's "go to" place, and even now there was no reason not to go. She was aware of the stares and the whispers, but she ignored these: after all, she'd come here last time after her defeat, why should her victory be any different? Mindy is hard at work on the treadmill, looking to see if she can increase her speed. There was a lot to think about, and this was the perfect way to NOT have to do that right now. Cut everyone out, hear some mindless music, run like the wind. Easy.

2. Eventually though, there's a place she needed to go: over to District 12, at the top tower to see Sandy. She hated, more than anything, to apologize or even explain herself unnecessarily but in this case it was needed. Sandy wasn't just some girl to her: she was one of the first friends she made, and after what she'd done, she needed to at least talk to her about it. The girl might not listen or care, but Mindy still needed to explain herself. She might run into anyone in District 12 though.

3. In her own tower, she made the unwise choice of attempting to sleep. After that, she thought a mushroom trip might have been more peaceful. Now she just had visions of the worse things in the Arena: beheading, throat slitting, bombs going off, and all of the dead looking at her as if she were the cause. It was pretty gory, and Mindy had awoken wide eyed and breathing hard. So anyone in the Tribute tower, especially in her District, can see the girl sitting in the room now, oversized shirt on, watching a replay of the games, almost glassy eyed.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

For a while, Eponine simply watches Mindy. She's sat cross-legged on a pile of mats, not attempting to work out at all. She's not actually doing anything. In fact, Eponine looks like she's just woken up.

After a while of watching, though, she clambers down and approaches Mindy on her treadmill. She stands just to the side with her shoulders hunched, and her arms folded tight across her stomach.

"Mademoiselle?' She asks, quietly at first, though she repeats the word louder after a moment. "Mademoiselle? Why do you run? You have won, you know? You do not have to fight again."

Mindy looked over at the speaker. Oh right, she remembered her from the last crowning. Now she had a sinking feeling, of course. SHE would be the focal point of that now.

"Hate to break it to you, but some of us have fight in our blood. The real fight is never really over that way for us. Besides, I like to stay fit, sharp. I'm going to be a mentor, so I'll be helping adults too. Gotta work twice as hard to prove myself."

"Why?" Eponine stepped closer. "There is nothing for you to fight again." She couldn't understand why Mindy was training so hard. "Should I offer you congratulations? Or are you sad that you cannot kill again?

"You think that huh?" Mindy knew better. Good grief, there was a lot to fight. Why people thought the games were the be all and end all was exactly the kind of thing she wanted to fight against.

"Congratulations is fine. I don't think I'm too hurt not to be killing people I care about anymore."

"Well, you shan't be in the arena again - at least, it is perhaps not so. It is not often that mentors are forced back again, you know?"

She sighed. "How did you win? I want my friend to win but I do not know how. But you must do!"

"If I have to go back in, I'll go back in," Mindy said, shrugging. "But I hope that's a little while from now. The Arena rocked my ass hard. Anyone who makes it without getting torn up is a good hider."

Mindy look startled. "Uh, your friend? What about you?"

"The Capitol shan't let me win. But I don't mind." After two attempts to run away, and the disruptions she'd caused in the Capitol, it was unlikely, at least in Eponine's mind, that these people would let her have the relative freedom that came with victory. Rather, they'd prefer to leave her in arenas so that they'd at least know where she was.

"Ian is good, you know? He's never murdered no one. I want him to win."

"Normally I would say the Capitol has better things to do than keep you here, but I've seen pieces of you and situations. If this were a show back in my world, you would be, like, the one people fucking hate but can't bear to see leave, because then everyone you're involved with might get boring. So you serve a purpose-a shitty one, but that's neither here or there."

She nodded. "That's why he won't win. I like him well enough, but maybe you saw me in the arena replay? I was no girl scout. Couldn't afford it."

"Oh." Eponine bit her lip. She was the person that everybody hated. She tried to laugh. "Perhaps that is why there is never a present for me in the arena?" Her laughter became real then, and she laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a way of blocking out the pain. Hated. And if she was hated, as Mindy seemed to think she was, would it ever get better?

After a few minutes, she quietened, and went to rest her hand on Mindy's arm, to make the girl listen to her. "Mademoiselle, I have not watched. I could not bear to watch. But you have told me before that you fight, and I can believe that you do. But there must be a way for him... but you say 'fight' first, no?"

Ok, little bit of a freak out there, but considering what they were talking about, Mindy was hardly surprised. "It's better not to think of it like that. Would you really want to be a jewel for the Capitol's eyes? Think about it: the imposing one, the one that causes trouble, still has her purpose. These people want entertainment, whether at your misery or your happiness. It's all the same to them. If you're disliked, own it. Or at least, remember whatever you do, they're watching you and wondering what you're doing next. Surprise them."

That's what she would do anyway.

She looked at Eponine long and hard. "My way isn't the way everyone goes. You guys are dictated by your emotions and your feelings. Even though you know you'll be brought back to life, you still try not to kill, or hold on to allies and loyalty. What I did, I put that shit aside. I had my eyes to win, and at times I did it with honor, at times I couldn't. In the end, you live with what you do, and see if it ends in what you wanted."

"How are you a child, Mademoiselle?" Eponine had listened to Mindy's reasoning in silence. And, out of all the long explanations and theories she had heard in the Capitol, it was Mindy's that made sense - even more than Enjolras'. It was difficult to believe that the girl was so young.

"But... But I could kill, I suppose. I could kill everyone, until there was just Ian and I. And I could die then, and he'd win. And he'd be safe, like you. It's not fair, you know? You have only fought an arena or so. So many people have fought more and got nothing."

That. That question was always there, wasn't it? Joel, Hawkeye, Holiday, probably Don when he wasn't being noble...they all just looked at her and wondered that. It was a cold fact, one she accepted, one she knew HAD to be, because it kept thing where it should.

"You don't get to be me like that. You don't think I came here on grace, did you? I was trained to kill, to destroy the people in my world, those outside the law. They take things, work within a system that's supposed to protect people like you. Corrupts. So what happens is someone like me comes along and reminds them that there is always a better killer, and that they're not always out for themselves. That scares them. People who don't sit around on their ass and fuck things up ALWAYS scares them."

"But you're a child. You are not so much older than my brother, I shouldn't think. How is it that you kill so efficiently? Is it not that it is adults who do such things in your world?" Eponine really couldn't understand Mindy very much.

"I get that a lot," Mindy said dryly. "But yeah, I was trained to do it as soon as I could form words. There are adults, yeah, but they don't exactly like the idea of working outside the law, and especially not getting killed for their trouble. There's adults in your world too, but does that stop crime? Hell, how many kids have you seen who are professional thieves, or even hook to make ends meet?"

"What does hook mean?" Eponine chewed on the inside of her bottom lip. "But of course, there is only thieves where I live, all of us, thieves and beggars and murderers and scum, all of us together, dying in one big heap. All of us are thieves, the children as well. My Pa had me on it as soon as we went to Paris, and before that, I were helping him at the inn. But is it true crime if you are starving? To rob a man of a few pence when he has a big round belly and a nice, warm fire?"

"Hook is short for hooker. You know, prostitution. I'm pretty sure that went down in your time rampantly. Maybe it didn't, I suck in history. But its a crime, yeah. Would I do it? Probably, if I were starving myself. But our worlds, hell, our time, are different. What you did was a product of where you live. What happened with me, well, that's not really a regular thing."

Oh. Prostitution. Eponine had seen that. She'd experienced a form of it. She sort of nodded at Mindy's assertion, not quite meeting the younger girl's eyes.

"Yes. There is such a thing where I am from. There were a lot of girls in the Prison for it."

She pondered over Mindy's words though. "So why was it you? Police are usually men, and adults, no?"

"Yeah, I figured. You'd think they'd have better reasons to arrest someone."

The question, yeah.

"Well, my mentor was a cop. Framed because of crooked cops, and doing ti-uh, prison. He got out. Adopted me since my parents died because he knew he couldn't work within the law to do it. He trained me so we could slowly take his men and destroy their little syndicate. I finally succeeded, but my mentor didn't make it."

An abridged version.

"Well, they chased me all through Paris. God only knows why - I weren't proper on the game anyway, and they still did. I was on all sorts of charges but they had to let me go when I swore up and down that I was only thirteen."

Eponine raised her eyebrows when Mindy said that her mentor had been with the police. And she looked surprised when Mindy said that he bad been in jail.

"I am sorry, Mademoiselle. For your mentor." She wasn't sure what a mentor was, but it sounded more like a father to her. And she could understand the sorrow of losing someone so close and so important.

"What do you mean, proper on the game?"

She could guess, but then she might be assuming something fucked up about Eponine that wasn't true, and today she was trying to avoid fights.

"Well. He died doing what was right. I can barely talk about him to fucking adults though. They keep harping on about my 'spoiled childhood,' like doing what I do makes me something tainted."

"I were never stood on the corners, never waitin' in the park for a man." Eponine hugged her arms to herself. "I just did what I were told. Better to close your eyes and end with a full belly than go back to a cold room with no money and a beating waiting for me." She didn't look at Mindy.

She shrugged though, at the girl's annoyance and laughed a hollow laugh. "Who am I to judge you, Mademoiselle, when I am so myself? You have lived a strange life - but it is yours. And now perhaps your life will be better now. They are jealous, I think."

"I see," Mindy said quietly. "Actually, in that way, maybe you're braver than me. I always had a fear of what would happen to me if I ever got taken alive. You know how some really, really vicious men are. When they want to beat you, they want to do it full, complete. And I hurt enough of their guys for them to want that. That's why I learned how to fight, with my dying breath."

But she did feel bad for Eponine. She'd heard people who hated her, who called her selfish. Well no wonder. Eponine, like her, was a product of her environment. It didn't forgive everything, it just explained it.

"I'm not used to comfort. If anything, that'll be new. I just want to make things better for other people. Like, my District."

"You can't think on it. You just... let them. It's easier than fighting." Eponine swallowed hard.

"If I see my Pa again, or Montparnasse, or the rest of the gang, they'll kill me. They'll beat me to death. Perhaps Montparnasse will have mercy and stab me, but perhaps not. He is fond of his fists. But that will be my end, and my body left in a ditch till the winter thaws and then I'll be tossed in a big pit outside Paris. But it is not so bad. It'll be longer if I fight it. I ain't gonna. I will just... let them do as they wish. My Pa will make it slow - I have lost him a lot."

She shrugged, and a sad smile stretched her lips and she sniffed.

"There is comfort here - but I do not know if you can help the Districts. I do not think they like us to interfere. The Peacekeeper said that the girls who hid me were whipped. You must be careful."

"I don't submit to anything easily," Mindy said, trying to keep her voice. Eponine had been nice enough not to do the whole shock a her words part, so she wasn't going be horrified by all the fucked up shit she was hearing about what had happened to this girl.

"You shouldn't either. Why let any fucker touch you or beat you like that? It hurts. It causes pain. Worst, they do it to make you feel like nothing. That's a fucking horrible thing to do to someone. People you're describing, they're the ones I make have a slow, painful death. And you make me feel less and less bad for it."

Actually, that was a lie. She never felt bad about that.

"I'm always careful. Careful enough anyway. But you're not, so that's why you're telling me to be, right?"

"Then that is what there is for you then, Mademoiselle. You must learn to give in. In Paris, Madame, I am nothing. The people who do it to me - us - I am a lucky girl, Madame - all of us, we are all nothing. We are dirt, scum. We don't matter. So you give in, for there is no fight to be had. "

Eponine shrugged flatly. "Madame, I should pray that you do not have to learn this - it is a hard lesson for a child - I learned it and I did not like it. But it is good if you can practise a little, before you have to. I just do not want you to be hurt."

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