If You Wanna Be My Lover [Closed]

[celebrityskinned]

WHO| Venus, Enjolras, Maximus and Wyatt
WHAT| Double-date! Awkward dinner, and then rebellious alliances.
WHEN| The day after the Barricade Boys Barfight.
WHERE| District 5 Suites, then a restaurant
WARNINGS| You can say they're going out for fish and ships.

Before Enjolras went out last night, Venus called him aside and told him they were going to have plans for the next evening. She isn't sure how much of it he retained, being on his way out the District Five door to greet Courfeyrac, but at the very least when she grabs him tomorrow for their first double-date - and first date proper, actually - he won't be caught entirely unawares. She then sends a message to Maximus and heads straight to bed, exhausted by her mind and body readjusting to the medication the Capitol likes to shoot up her arm every week.

She spends the next day training, attacking dummies with the practiced, callous strength of someone who possesses technique and vigor but no passion for the exercise. She eats yogurt, and she spends some time with Kankri, and tapes a map to her wall, coloring in areas she's certain have camera coverage. She doesn't say out loud what she's doing.

That evening, she gets herself gussied up in a purple gladiator dress that she finds punny without being too suggestive, does her hair up, and covers her cut lip with a deep red that camouflages the scab formed there. She goes to find Enjolras, and stops in the doorway to his room, both because she figures he'll find it presumptuous should she enter, and because the sight of him surprises her. She expected he'd be reading something, but she didn't expect to see him with his lip puffy and swollen, his eye in a bed of pink and purple and blue, a blow subdermally draining blood around the corner of his mouth like a grey and red coffee stain.

Her first thought, naturally, is Peacekeepers, and Enjolras' big mouth.

"What happened to your face?"

Comments

[celebrityskinned]

"If you're not hungry we can get something to split," she says, stroking her chin as she looks over the menu. Her Stylists have told her not to do that now that she has a human body (touching your face too much will give you acne, dear), but it's a force of habit. When she isn't doing that, she's rubbing her thumb over the side of her fingers.

Normally she wouldn't be so nervous, and she believes that if she were having dinner with three people who all wanted to see her dead, she'd be much more at ease. Under the table, her knee touches Enjolras'.

She leans in. "Anyway. Anyway." She's finding that's a verbal tic she's been returning to a lot lately. "I didn't invite us all here to stare awkwardly at each other. I invited us here because I want us all on the same page regarding who our enemies are."

[gluteus]

Maximus didn't bother reading the menu. His reading comprehension was still awful, so he'd taken to just ordering whatever they had on special. He wasn't picky. Food here was never as it was, back home.

He frowned as Venus finally got to the point, and tensed slightly, glancing at Wyatt.

"I would have thought that would be clear enough," He said vaguely, his voice careful.

[the_marshal]

Wyatt shifted slightly, and met Max's quick glance out of the corner of his eye.

"Unless ya got someone more particular in mind," he added after a pause, voice lowering a fraction as the barmaid approached with his usual bottle and wine for Max.

It wasn't just himself he took care for: it was Max, it was the pretty little thing bringing their drinks. For the folks he knew were in the back,... including Elias, he remembered with a jolt.

(He'd been meaning to get Max and the mentor together, introduce them. Here Venus was, reminding him of something he shouldn't have forgotten.)

[orestes]

His eyes darted from the menu to search for Venus' when their legs touched, but Enjolras is able to choke down the urge to tell her that it's improper. Fortunately the conversation moves along quickly and interestingly.

"We have all been in enough Arenas to make enemies." Instead of looking at her it's more productive to look to the two men seated across from them. He still can't know them enough to predict how such a comment would go over. "Both in and out of the Games. I think that Venus has the right idea. If we are to be allies, we must know explicitly where we stand with each other."

[celebrityskinned]

She doesn't go any further with her knee under the table, but she does meet Enjolras' eyes with a question in her face before turning back to Max and Wyatt. Is this okay? It's still so difficult testing the boundaries of what they're both comfortable with, so invested in each others' minds and hearts that they have no idea what to do with flesh and blood.

"Really? Because the infighting between the Tributes tells me we've lost focus." She takes the lemon out of her drink and wrinkles her nose a bit as she sets it aside. She's found none of the fondness for sourness that she has for sweets. As if to make her point, she glances over at Enjolras' black eye and split lip, and rubs her finger over the cut on her own mouth.

"We have sentiment on our side, but you can't tell me that there's anything in the way of proper organization. And I'm not the organizing type, honestly, but someone out there has to just...not tapping all the good will they've got from the Tribs here."

[gluteus]

"Gladiators do not generally organize their own sentiment," Maximus said, his voice even and steady, not looking over again at Wyatt no matter how much he wished to. It wasn't even true, memory flashing back to his own arenas, to the whispers from the gladiators as he prepared for battle.

Spaniard, Spaniard, Spaniard...

[the_marshal]

"As I recall," Wyatt chose his words carefully, gaze ahead on Venus' as the back of his neck prickled.

As he imagined eyes boring down them. Ears leaning in.

"That's all of us were brought here. To pacify folks who were organizin'."

[orestes]

"And they needed to be pacified. Which implies that they were considered to be a threat." Which, in turn, meant that they likely hadn't simply disappeared. Technology may have changed since his time, but Enjolras would have placed all the money of his family estate on the bet that sentiments of rebellion were more or less immutable. People could be silenced, of course, but rarely did the people simply give in, when no true action had been taken.

He fished the lemon away from Venus' area of the table, tentatively biting into it as he let the sentiment settle over the rest of the table. The citrus burned into the cut on his lip, immediately making him reconsider the move. "What do we know about them, other than that we were a reactionary move to their efforts?"

[celebrityskinned]

"We know that a little bit before you and I got here, they supposedly bombed the Training Center and killed a Tribute. We know that they can hack the network, or at least someone can who makes it look like them."

She folds her hands, one over the other, and rests her head on them, elbows to the table.

"It's not much, but it's enough to believe that there's organization going on somewhere. Just not within the Tributes. The Arena's an, um, a microcosm of the District rivalries. We're too busy trying to survive to organize."

[gluteus]

Well, that made everything all too clear, and Maximus' lips thinned sharply as he glanced hard to Wyatt. There was no beating around the bush now.

"I hadn't been aware that you were so interested in their dilemma," Maximus said, more to Venus than Enjolras. He couldn't speak for that man, after all, but he hadn't thought Venus to have major rebellious tendencies.

[the_marshal]

At Max's side, Wyatt was silent, but attentive, looking from Venus to Enjolras and back again. Watching their faces, hers especially, and waiting for the reply.

If they meant it, if he believed it (and they would have to be damn convincing, with everything Wyatt stood to risk), then the way forward would be clear to him.

[orestes]

"It is not merely their dilemma, monsieur." Enjolras' eyes bounced from Maximus to Wyatt on the opposite side of the table. He knew were Venus stood on the matter, had known for some time now, even if he required somewhat regular notes of confirmation. The other two were a mystery to him. They were, after all, her friends, and he had only a passing familiarity with either man.

"They have dragged us into their fight with no thought as to our opinions on the matter. Some Tributes would, perhaps, rather return to their homes, and some, perhaps, would stay here and contribute to the state, but we are given no say. We are as good as slaves, dead, so long as we remain in our present situation." The irony of lecturing a gladiator on his position as a slave didn't entire escape Enjolras. If anyone could relate to this, it would probably be Maximus. "I would like to live my life, but if I am already dead, I would like to think that my existence had amounted to something. In us, the Districts have the opportunity to fight against their oppressors without concern for how their children might be tormented."

[celebrityskinned]

"I visited my District." Venus reaches up to the pendant around her neck, the crude thing that doesn't really match her otherwise polished exterior. "It's easier to ignore people when you don't have to put a face to them."

And easy to turn a blind eye to the death of your comrades when you haven't gotten close to any of them.

"Something has to change soon. If it's not us making the first move, it'll either by the Capitol or whoever's on the networks."

[gluteus]

Enjolras lecturing him didn't exactly go over well, his eyes darkening. If he had fur, it would have bristled. "Don't assume my silence is inaction, or disinterest," He said a little stiffly. It had only been Wyatt's caution that had kept him from murdering Snow in cold blood, after all.

"I know well how loosed tongues can cost men their lives." He looked at Venus. "... And do not take my silence as distrust. But if Enjolras had approached me thus on his own, I would have soundly seen him to the door." He looked at Wyatt, not willing to give away any of the man's secrets, so he spoke only for himself.

[the_marshal]

Wyatt's knee bumped Max's gently beneath the table, thigh resting against the other man's in what he meant to be a soothing gesture.

"There's a lot at risk," Wyatt said finally. "There ain't many places the Capitol ain't got it's ears an' eyes. An' jus' talkin' can lose ya yer tongue. Ain't hard to understand why they might be playin' their cards close."

[orestes]

"Is it anything that we do not risk simply by existing?" It was his typical rhetoric, delivered not with condescension, but with an absolute sincerity. What they're saying, the caution, makes sense if one considers their enemy to be reasoned. But the fact is that Panem is not reasoned, and that makes them at once more and less terrifying.

"We also know that they killed a Victor for rebellion, and as I warning, I assume, to all of us. That means that they do consider the rebellion, or the idea of their Tributes rebelling, to be a threat."

[celebrityskinned]

She levels a look at Max that's steady and unimpressed. It's a silent simmer down, a peevish reminder of her earlier statement that they were too busy fighting internally to coordinate.

"They'd be stupid not to. That's why they keep us in the Games, to keep us from building a coalition. And that would work except that they keep bringing us back, so the stakes are different." People become fire-forged friends rather than corpses. It isn't like the Victors from the Arenas where only one walked away alive.

"What I want to know is if, when the chips are down, we'll all have each others' backs. And who else to keep an eye out for."

[gluteus]

"You will always have my sword," Maximus said firmly, to her, rather than to Enjolras. Is there anything that we do not risk simply by existing? He wondered, darkly, if Enjolras ever had to come home to find his family's burned remains hanging from his door.

Only the young talked so flippantly about risk.

Maximus had only just found a reason to live again. He wasn't about to throw it away for someone he didn't know. Venus, on the other hand... Venus, he trusted with his life.

[the_marshal]

Wyatt didn't know either of the other two, not really. His impression of the woman was fine enough, but truly, all added up, they'd only spent a few minutes together.

And the young man... well. One step forward, two steps back -- with just about every well intentioned word out of his mouth.

But Venus had Max's trust, and that was good enough for him.

"What I said in the arena's as true out here as it was there."