thecapitol | The Crowning of Mindy McReady

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The Crowning of Mindy McReady

Who| Everyone ~~who's anyone.~~
What| The Crowning.
Where| A warehouse on the edge of town.
When| Starting from early evening till late into the night.
Warnings/Notes| Be sure to check the linked thread for plot purposes, even if you don't tag into it.

The party is brightly colored.

The theme, subtly, is super heroes. Boldly paints city scapes are splattered across the walls, and hallways are made to look like dingy, potentially crime ridden alleys. From the upper walkways of the warehouse, party goers can get hooked into harnesses and swing out over the dance floor. Above them, tributes and VIPS can find themselves on a clear plastic dance floor levitated above everything, looking like they're hanging in air.

Masks are passed out in plenty, and capes are easy to find, while brightly colored drinks themed around super powers are plentiful. None of them actually work, but many of the Capitol people are happy to pretend, mocking super strength or invisibility with each new beverage.

Under the dance floor a catacomb of tunnels and rooms full of obstacles is splashed with black light receptive colors. Party goers are given vests and laser guns, marked green for villains and red for heros, and set loose to hunt each other in the laser tags playground. The screens in the dance floor keep a running tally of which side is winning, displaying the players on the screens around the room, along with clips from the arenas.

About half way through the night, everyone is gathered to the main stage for a special announcement.

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"No," he said slowly, though he didn't pull his hand away.

"See, the thing about adapting is it means you change. You have to change. Survival changes you. Who I am now? Very different person than I was as a kid, before my family died."

He dug down deep for old memories to find a way to explain.

"When I first met Eep's family I didn't know it was her family at first. They were growling and on all fours about to attack me and she'd talked to me so far. She'd been curious and I could tell she was smart enough to want to learn. I didn't realize they were related. So I got out my knife and got her behind me and told her to close her eyes while I killed them."

He went on, "They were a threat. Even her little brother and her baby sister were a threat. She stopped me but I'd have done it. I've done it before. Some of the people here have never killed before this or if they did, they never meant to but that was life for me. That's what I became when, as a kid, one time I cried because I accidentally squashed a bug."

He added, "I had named him Gronk."

He briefly pressed his lips together. "I know I'm going to survive but not as this. Not as I am now. Just like the me I was when I was little died a long, long time ago. That's what adaptation is. A whole bunch of little deaths, and maybe, if you're lucky, you can hold onto bits of yourself from one life to the next."

His face was anguished.

"But sometimes you can't. Sometimes a little kid that can barely talk becomes someone you're fine with killing because she has sharp enough teeth."

A few tears plopped down his face.

"I'm going to die here. Who I am right now - that's going to die here, even if I survive."

Venus lets him talk it out. She's been taking her cues from her past therapists lately - not the advice, but just the demeanor, the things she benefited from when she was a scared kid who didn't understand what she did wrong to end up how she was. And that means listening.

When he's done, she does what her therapists never did, and reaches forward to wipe his tears away. Gently, slowly, so as not to startle him.

"And a new you will be born. That's how stars are, don't you know? People are like that too - you die a new death but you get born again. And you don't know that the next person will be worse. You really don't." She shrugs. "I'm a better person today than I was last year. You don't have to let this break you."

The fear made it so he kept crying but the reassurance only added to it. Amid all the fear and misery and cruelty, kindness meant something.

Far from being started by her touch when she wiped his tears, he leaned into her touch, clearly starved for human contact.

"Can I have a hug?"

He didn't feel right just lunging in for one.

Venus doesn't respond with words. She just wraps her arms around him, gentle and careful, the way she would have wanted to be hugged if anyone had bothered during her teen years. The Charles Xavier Hug Tee Em that she got when she was given her containment suit and officially accepted to the School for Gifted Children.

"I got your back for this, okay?"

"I promise I'll get it together before the arena."

He wasn't going to drag anyone else down with this.

"It's just right now. Right now it's just..."

It wore on you, as time went on. But that was the whole point, wasn't it? To batter them all into violent, reactive messes. To turn them into animals.

"They're pushing." They were pushing him, messing with his coping mechanisms. He needed his downtime, his time to stop and smell the flowers. "I like the time between arenas. I get to learn things, I get to meet people, I get to joke around with my friends. I haven't had it like this - where it was just one thing after another, no rest, no time for happy things - since I was little. Before Belt. It takes me right back to a bad place, you know? I don't like being there. I don't like my head being there. I don't like what I am there."

Scared and furious and nearly feral.

That was why he was afraid that if they kept pushing he might turn into that permanently.

She nods. It's not the way she's felt it, really; the X-Statix was a lifestyle, not an occasional task. Her holidays were always entwined with her work, and she adjusted to Panem's life rather easily.

She likes to believe she can divide the two, the Venus for the cameras and Delilah deep inside, that the latter is dead and irrelevant. It's only recently that she's realized that that isn't true or even what she wants.

"It won't be like this forever," she says, squeezing him a bit tighter. "Even if it's dying, you know there's rest in the long run. You just have to keep yourself together until then."

It wasn't the ending he wanted and the way his eyes shut tight made that clear.

Dying was the thing he'd always been running away from, something to keep fighting to the end, and every instinct told him it wasn't something to welcome.

Still, before he got here, the idea of dying was a reality he had to live with. It was something terrible and inevitable, but maybe it just meant he'd make it to another Tomorrow, where his family would catch up with him someday.

But learning that the end of the world you knew was the result of shifting tectonic plates and that you couldn't do things like ride the sun because it was a giant sphere of superheated plasma (whatever that was) took the magic out of things a little bit.

It made him wonder if there was anything at all that was big and strange and wonderful out there. It made him wonder if there was just nothingness after death.

He opened his eyes just enough to look at the bone bracelet on his wrist as he tried to remember what it felt like to hold one of the hands that carved it, as he pictured his daughter's tiny hands reaching up for the rattle.

When she lets him go, he's still looking at the bone bracelet. She brings her own hand to the necklace and the pendant resting between her collarbones, a little above her sternum.

"Is that your token?" She scoots in and sits hip to hip with him, looking for some way to take his mind off things. "You should tell me about it."

He nodded and held it for her to see better.

"Eep and I carved them for each other when we decided - when we knew it was real. We promised each other we'd be together as long as we both lived. I've heard people talk about something called 'marriage'? It was sort of like that."

He ran his fingers over the carvings, which seemed to have more meaning than the bracelet itself, judging from the way he looked at it.

"We carved them together so you can't even tell which of us did what parts. You can only tell a little bit because her marks are deeper - she's stronger than I am. And the rings - I added those for the baby when she came along."

"Can you tell me about your baby?"

Because that's why he needs to stay strong. There's a chance that somehow, someday, he will see his baby again. She fondles her collarbone, where previously her necklace lay.

"When I was little I thought I'd like to have kids someday, but...pretty sure that won't be in the future for me. But it's a nice thought."

"It might be. You never know."

After all, him getting back to his daughter was pretty unlikely all on its own. If he got away, maybe Venus would get away to the kind of life where she could have the things she wanted.

"Her name's Bug. She's - I'm glad I know what buttons are now just to say she's as cute as one. She's the happiest lil' baby, all the time. Laughs and laughs at everything, hardly ever cries. Mostly she just tries to look at everything with these big eyes like she's taking it all in - we can already tells she's going to be curious. She looks a lot like her mom - we could - we can tell already she's going to take after her a lot, but she has my eyes. She's - she was four moons - four months when I got pulled here."

She was getting closer and closer to that first year mark and he was probably going to miss it.

"Before I came here, I was asleep with my family. We made camp in these grasslands by the sea and she was sleeping on my chest..."

He held out his hands as if he was imagining still holding her.

Edited 2014-04-19 21:36 (UTC)

"That's a nice name." A strange one, but there's something Venus finds charming about 'Bug' - like something small, fragile, something vital to the ecosystem. Venus hates insects but she's trying to see it from another point of view, and she finds that in this case she can.

"I bet her mom's taking good care of her. Whenever you've talked about her she seems like a pretty sturdy personality."

"She's so strong," Guy said. "She's like me in how she sees things. She looks at it all as - at the whole world as beautiful. Her family spent so much time in the dark, afraid to leave their cave because they didn't have the things they needed to survive outside it, but after getting out she hasn't looked back. She only has as much fear as she needs - as we all need to survive - and she just throws all the rest away because there's too much to see."

He went on, "And she's physically strong. She'll keep her safe. She'd topple mountains to keep Bug safe."

He frowned. "I just don't want her to be sad. She'll be so sad just like I'm sad without her."

Venus would say something about how he sounds like he really loves her, but it's so self-evident as to be stupid. Instead, she reaches over and gives his wrist a squeeze.

"Have I told you I might've found a- well, not a mate, that sounds real permanent, an, um, lover?"

"Is he nice?"

He didn't pay quite that much attention to all the romance rumors going around and while he remembered Venus' comm post about the proper way to ask someone out he wasn't quite sure who had done it.

He thinks he may have vaguely seen someone on the TV though, but you never knew how much of that was true.

"Is it Rah? I thought I saw something on the TV about you and Rah."

"He's...he's good. He's not always nice. But he's got, what's the term, good moral fiber. All the way down to his core."

In many ways, that makes Enjolras her opposite. She who had no core before, but good impulses that knit an exterior - and they both seem to cultivate that missing part of each other.

She raises her eyebrows, unfamiliar with that name. She must have missed that footage of the Jurassic Park Arena. "I don't know a Rah. Who's that?"

"Ahn-juh-la-rah. I can't pronounce his name, it's a mix of basically all the sounds we don't use all in a single name. So I just call him Rah anytime I have to say his name," Guy said with a shrug. "It sounds like the names we have back home."

Venus laughs, because as she recalls, her first attempts to pronounce his name were similarly disastrous. "Yeah, that's him. I just call him Enj, mostly. It took me weeks before I could say his name right."

She gives Guy's knee a pat. "He hasn't left a horrible impression on you or anything, has he?"

"No, he's been pretty polite. He asked me a lot of questions about back home but like he was trying to understand instead of just making assumptions."

He scratched at his cheek.

"I actually appreciate that. He knew I probably got a lot of rudeness so he made extra effort not to be."

"That's good." Venus grins, a lop-sided expression that goes to the side this time. "He rubs some people the wrong way with all his talking, but like I said. He's made right under all that."

She leans back against the leg of the chair. "Under all that hair, too. That Arena's humidity was not kind to him. He looked like a dandelion."

Now Guy actually laughed a little bit, finally inching his way away from the terror and despair.

"You and I appear to have very similar tastes then." He leaned out from under the table to reach up and grab a glass of some kind of pink soda-like beverage.

Then he dipped his finger in it and drew on the floor, a little face, with pretty round eyes and a big smile and...hair that fanned out like a massive mushroom.

"That's my mate's hair. She doesn't carry around a bag or basket or anything like the rest of us do because she just - " He gestured to his own hair "- keeps things in it. I mean, everything. I've heard some people here talking about women's purses, but nope. No purses, it's her hair that holds every odd and end in the world."

He was smiling widely as he talked about it, though, like it was just one of those little quirks that made him love her all the more.

Edited 2014-04-26 06:10 (UTC)

"We do, but somehow I don't think Enj and your mate would immediately see the similarities." She laughs.

"I found a paperclip in Enj's hair once. I don't think he noticed. I think he falls asleep at his desk sometimes."

It makes her sad, in a way - it's not as if her boyfriend's workaholic tendencies aren't an obvious attempt at distraction to her. She worries about those days he spends alternating only between the bed and the desk with pages and wine as his companions. But those days seem less now, or so she hopes.

"I don't know what that is but I bet you'd find it in Eep's hair even though it hasn't been invented in our world yet. You would find everything in there."

He looked a little smitten, even though he was just looking at the little doodle on the ground.

"It's the little things I miss, you know? Like she growls sometimes in her sleep and kicks her legs a little. Like she's chasing something. Then she gets pouty every time I tease her about how it's the same thing our cat does. She has a cute little pout, though. I mostly do it just to get to see stick her little lips out like this."

He imitated it briefly.

"Those are the things you remember. The little things." A pause. "The paperclips."

Edited 2014-04-27 05:43 (UTC)

"Yeah."

She knows what he means. It's the shading and the undersketch that fills in the portrait. She knows that others look at Enjolras and see the stuck-up, rigid pontificator, that others look at her and see the murderous, shallow starlet, that they see a charmingly primitive caveman in Guy and would likely have similar feelings about his mate.

But the little pieces - the paperclips - always write different stories. It's how she's managed not to become the image that she portrays, because there is something beneath so much smaller and yet able to hide from the camera for its size and evasiveness.

"Are you ready to come out from under the table?"

"I need a little more time to myself," he said, "but I'll be okay I think."

He needed the world around him to be small for a little while, instead of being big and scary.

But he felt a little better, less like hiding there forever.

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celebrityskinned - 2014-04-29 01:57 (UTC) - Expand

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