Drown the Stale, Owning Stares All Around You [Open]

[celebrityskinned]

WHO| Venus and Open
WHAT| Venus reacts (or doesn't) to the exposé.
WHEN| Directly after the exposé and over the following days.
WHERE| Various cafes in the Capitol or her bedroom.
WARNINGS| None yet.

She'd braced herself. She could at least credit the Capitol for giving her a little warning before they character assassinated her, which is more than could be said for some of the paparazzi and celebrity news outlets back home. She was expecting the usual: skank, shallow airhead, probably slept her way to the top, all things that she was more than equipped to brush off. Her family's come up a few times before in the media, usually as an example about how mutants were dangerous and ought to be controlled, and the politics of it felt so divorced from her experience that it somehow didn't penetrate her armor.

She's ready, sitting in her bedroom with a pint of raspberry sherbet, fresh from a shower in one of those fluffy robes that's never seen cheap laundering before, when Insider Tales comes on and manages to slip past the fortress she previously thought impervious.

As soon as they show Jamal, she finds herself, for the first time in years, feeling outright breathless with a panic she can't explain. She holds her hand over her chest and she gasps and tries to remember the mental exercises she taught to Joly, tries not to let this suffocation feel like an old friend. She gets that under control just in time for them to show the footage of her family's death, which she never saw before, which cameras never saw before, and torn between panicking or shutting down, she does the latter.

Maintaining the illusion of apathy is a trying enough task as to be distracting, and she protects herself with that. She finishes her sherbet, even though it seems to sit unmelted in her stomach like a stone. She convinces herself that she can act her way until it's real - fake it until you make it - and she tells herself that she's fine with that.

And yet she can't convince her to go look for people, to explain herself or admit guilt or clarify or do any of the things she needs to do, and so she isolates herself for the next several days. Aside from the gym, she hides. She keeps up the happy starlet act for only the amount of time it takes to get to the secluded backs of cafes or between the bathroom and her bedroom. And then she spends her time staring at books she doesn't turn the pages of, focusing all her energy on never letting them see her cry.

Comments

[burnedbrighter]

Azula had enjoyed the piece in all honesty. If she could find the writers who put it together she might send them a basket of cheap gifts.

But despite how easy it would make selling Venus to sponsors, she had noticed the girl shying away from her usual routine in response. It seemed she was not going to take it as well as Shepard had.

And so Azula had waited until Venus could be cornered before approaching the room and knocking.

"May I come in?" It was a formality, Azula would come in one way or another.

[celebrityskinned]

"Wouldn't keep you out," Venus says, although she doesn't open the door. She closes the book and sets it aside. Even if she's been staying in, she still bothers to dress up and look like she's ready to go somewhere. It helps disguise her urge to avoid people.

If it weren't for the break in the pattern or the fact that she hasn't been smiling much, she might look as if everything were totally normal. She leans over in her armchair so she can see Azula when she comes in.

"So you forgave me for shoving you into a fridge?"

[earthborn]

Commander Shepard, of all people, knew guilt.

You didn't kill as many people as she had without realizing, somewhere along the line, that they probably had families. Mothers who'd mourn daughters they had known and raised for centuries before you came along to cut them short. Lovers who would never get a return call when their merc boyfriend didn't come back to the console. Children she'd orphaned— no, she knew that last one for a fact.

She understands regret. Feeling lost, unmoored, and broken. Wanting to die, but unable to get past the people who needed you to live. Hoping for the lucky bullet, the enemy strong enough to take you down. End things clean, here and now. Oh, those guilty, hopeful moments, oh those hopeful upturned faces. Venus isn't coping. This isn't what coping looks like. This isn't the face of the confident, bitchy murderess the Capitol wanted to paint up in rouge and send to the races.

This is panic.

She lets it go for a day, reasoning that it's not her place to offer comfort or succor; hadn't Venus made herself clear? But that's old logic, like a wounded animal, from days when you didn't dare appear weak if you wanted to go on living.

One day's wait. Maybe two. Three at most, or four. But then she sets herself as ambush in Venus' chosen coffee-hole, and waits. Stake-outs are boring as hell, but for the price of patience there are good rewards to be earned.

[celebrityskinned]

"You know, Shep, I live down the hall." Venus sits down across from her with a chai latte vanilla bean java chip something or other in her hand, then places straight black coffee in front of Shepard. She figures Jane's the type of girl to take a coffee straight. "If you wanted to find me, you could have, you know. Knocked."

She sits back in the cafe booth, making a very good front of nothing being wrong, at least, nothing serious. She's sure Shepard doesn't believe it, but that hasn't been what's bothered Venus. It's not character assassination so much as having to relive a moment that had been previously confined to behind the fuzzy lens of memory, muted by a decade.

Shepard's a smart enough woman to know not to trust the Capitol, and Venus has certainly done her share of high-handed pontificating to distance herself from the image of the "blood queen", as they called her. She doesn't need to prove herself right now, she just needs to- Venus doesn't know what she needs. A better coping mechanism. A vacation. Coffee drowning in sugar and artificial flavoring.

"I'm more bothered wondering how they got that footage than anything else. That must have been some snazzy camera work."

[privilegecheck]

Kankri sees the exposé, of course. He could hardly not see it. And it pains him to see them treat that old pain he had glimpsed so callously, twisted into something so maudlin and sensationalized. But he knows it'll pain Venus more, and he knows that she'll pretend it doesn't.

So within less than ten minutes after the special report is over, he's letting himself into her room, having not even bothered to knock or ask if he can. He has obligations as Venus's moirail, and he intends to do right by her. He sits on the bed, resting against her gently.

"Hello."

[celebrityskinned]

"Hey."

She knows she shouldn't lie to Kankri, and she tells herself that she isn't, that she's merely sparing him the burden of having to deal with her being a hot mess. The truth is that she doesn't want to break down here or now, not when she's sure she's being watched. The image the Capitol has of her is the last protection she has left.

So she smiles and wraps an arm around his shoulders as if nothing's wrong, as if everything is just fine and every cell of her isn't pulsing with anxiety and hurt.

"Some news footage, hmm?"

[hit_girl_mindy]

After the expose, Mindy went looking for Venus. She had only gotten to see the woman with certain crowds (Ellie and guy respectively) but hadn't gone seeking her on her own. She figured now was a good time as any, and after telling her dad she was going out by herself, was going though Cafe's. It had worked for Shepard, and sure enough, there was Venus, by herself, reading a book.

She walked over and sat, ordering (begrudgingly) a Latte. She then turned to Venus.

"So. Voodoo. They must have been bursting with glee to report that on one of their tributes."

[celebrityskinned]

"If voodoo is stamping on ants, then yeah, I'm a voodoo queen." Venus glances up from her book, realizing she's been on the same page for the last twenty minutes and absorbed absolutely none of it. Frowning, she closes it and sets it aside.

"I thought your dad was supposed to be here. Doesn't he know better than to let his little girl talk to witches?"

[the_marshal]

Of course he saw it. Even as preoccupied as they all were the productions were required viewing for everyone.

And of course he didn't believe a word of it. Even the footage of her, the words coming out of her own mouth. He knew all too well how easily the Capitol twisted things, turned to suit their needs. There was surely more they weren't showing.

He knew Venus. Knew no woman who would die for her friends, who thought only of getting them out of the arena was not the heartless piece of work the Capitol tried to paint her as.

Leaving Doc to his devices (he pitied the pockets of District Five), he made his way down to Ten. Ignoring the curious looks he got from the escort as he asked after Venus.

Knocking on her door, he waited politely on the other side, sliding the brim of his old, worn hat under his palms.

[celebrityskinned]

Kankri's left by now, and Venus is pretending to sleep, as much for her own benefit as for the cameras that she's sure have her room bugged, waiting for some dramatic reaction. She outright surprised to hear someone knock on her door.

She gets up and puts some slippers on and wraps a robe around herself.

"Oh. Hey." She gives him a smile that's almost sheepish, as if she's trying to merely cover for how flat her hair is on one side. As if she's not crushed inside and held together with nothing but the glue of her own stubbornness. "You saw all the TV show too, didn't you."

[keep_surviving]

There's barely a knock before a dark haired teen comes into her room and throws herself onto the plush bed beside Venus.

Because Diana does know what personal space and privacy are, she just likes to ignore them most of the time so they'll appreciate it all the more when she pays them some attention.

"You didn't tell me you were a TV sex symbol."

[celebrityskinned]

"You couldn't tell by the sexy saxophone music that plays every time I walk in a room?" Venus grumbles, pulling the blanket off from over her head and sitting up, giving Diana a bit of a 'you couldn't wait for me to put on pants?' scowl.

"Are you looking for pointers or something?"

[medecin]

After that...bit of programming, there was only one thing for Joly to do, and that was making his way to Venus. His first thought was to try her room, and so he made his way down and in, where he knocked on the door, imagining Enjolras and the scarf, and what that moment must have been like, for a second, before screwing his mind to the task at hand.

What had been spun by that broadcast certainly gave a reputation, but it was not one that Joly thought his friend would like to cultivate. While a part of him wondered what bits of it were true, a larger part just wanted to see how Venus was dealing with such a thing, so when she opened the door, he was ready with a sympathetic sort of smile.

"I cannot say I've any idea how you must be feeling now, but should you need a friend to lean on, I am here."

[celebrityskinned]

She's been lying the outside world as much as herself, lately, and that's why when she opens the door for Joly she almost looks as if this were any other day, as if that had been any other program. The effervescent peppiness that she usually carries with her only falls away into a tired sort of abashment when she sees that it's a friend she can be honest with.

"Sweet of you." She casts her gaze down, but she does smile for him. In this strange way they've found spaces to be kind to each other, her and Joly. It's been a constant of their interactions.

"I could, you know. I could stand a drink. Or a coffee. Something."

[dividedgirlofmine]

Susannah hadn't been inclined to leave her own room much either after the mini-arena, even after she'd had her prosthetic legs returned and fitted back onto her. But enough time had elapsed since then that she felt like she could try to go outside the Tower, to interact with all those Capitol citizens who'd seen her evil half go wild on the television.

She'd decided to go to a coffee shop she'd been fond of before, but when she'd arrived there'd been a CLOSED sign on the door and a note that the proprietor would be away on vacation 'til the end of the week.

The cafe next door is open, though. She goes inside, makes her way to the back where she hopes she can hide, just a little, and sees Venus.

She just stands there, then, for a long moment, looking at the other woman, before she blurts out, "I don't care what they said on the television. True or false, it doesn't matter, you're still someone I want to get to know. And I'm-- I'm sorry about the fire."

[celebrityskinned]

Venus is 'absorbed' in a book when Susannah speaks, if that word can adequately describe sitting there staring at the letter 'R' in a word on the page until it ceases to look like a tool of language. She can't actually say that she's absorbed anything in the last chapter she's read, even though it's taken her the better part of four hours to get through the three pages it takes up.

She's reliving it all in her head. It used to be in the first person, but now she knows what it looked like from the outside. Now her memory has multiple angles to come at her family's death from.

Her head snaps up. "The fire- oh. Right. In the Arena. Courfeyrac."

She's seen the footage of Susannah snapping. It stirred the empathy in her that can only come from the fact that she's had her own struggles with her head for the last ten years.

"That...that was my fault. I should have held onto him tighter." She gestures at the hair across from her. "You can sit down. We can be the crazy black ladies together, make a whole new stereotype for ourselves."

She smiles softly, sympathetically.

[acroodawakening]

After seeing Venus' expose, Guy wasn't sure what to think at first. The magic alone was mindblowing. Everyone in the Games was depowered, barring the odd fluke, and while the technology almost seemed like manage, the idea of someone not even being a physical thing, being alive and yet not solid and real, was difficult to grasp.

But it was also amazing. It didn't have to be ugly, that kind of possibility.

As for the rest, yes, she came off as selfish but she didn't come off that way now. At least the times she wasn't killing people in the arena...which got him all confused. But that didn't matter. He could talk to her and figure out the things he didn't understand.

What mattered most was the little girl standing there in a charred and broken room, screaming.

That was why, when he saw Venus leaving the Tribute center on his way back to it, hoodie up, sunglasses on, looking all the world like she was trying to hide, he made a beeline for her. He didn't call out her name since it seemed she was trying to avoid attention. Instead he walked up next to her and as soon as she saw him, he pulled his poncho up over his mouth, Darkwing Duck style, as if he was hiding, too.

"So where are we going to make our escape to?" he asked conspiratorially, as if he'd been part of the plan to sneak off all along.

[celebrityskinned]

She knows he's there, of course. Awareness of her surroundings protects her both from threats and bad edits in the Arena, and so when she sees him from behind her wide sunglasses, she knows he's approaching. She doesn't run away or make any effort to get away from him.

It's nice to be approached by someone you want to be doing the approaching. On the one hand, she wonders what he thinks now, knowing that she's the root of that pain they found as common ground, that her loss was her fault and his was by accident and fate.

On the other hand, he has made kindness something of his calling card.

"Somewhere quiet," she says, glancing over at him behind the glasses. "I'm not big on crowds today."

[orestes]

If he's to be honest with himself, Enjolras still doesn't like their relationship being played up in the public eye. The footage of them walking hand in hand, or of his arm around Venus' shoulders, stings before the misrepresentation of her abilities ever begins to set in. He hasn't found a time, as of yet, to ask properly about precisely the way in which she had died in the previous Arena. The teleportation could have easily been excused as a lent ability, one gained from the mask she'd held. Many people, after all, had exhibited such abilities. Many people were not, however, supposed to be witches.

If he's to be honest with himself, Enjolras does not believe in such things. He pays proper attention to the church, maintains a sense of piety not necessarily to a Christian God, but to the belief that he (and humanity at large) is not the most powerful force in the universe. He would like to believe in a sense of define benevolence. He would like to truest that providence will dictate the proper course of history. He does not have a mind for such things as voodoo. They seem an exotic and sensational concern, and, Venus, having never discussed them before, seemed up until that moment, to be an entity entirely separate from them.

Which is why it takes him a few hours to collect his thoughts, to make peace with what he is to say to her. The segment airs at what he has come to know as prime time. Midnight ticks by with him contemplating the wine he keeps in the kitchen. The first hour of the morning finds him disregarding that idea as unwise and ultimately, the enemy of proper communication. He cannot handle her as he would handle Courfeyrac, Marius, or Joly. He cannot simply propose that they get drunk and have their problems out by words or by fist. She isn't the same sort of entity in his life. That realization is no more or less striking for the situation in which it arises.

By two, he made his way to her door. By five past, he's ventured a knock. It seems like a good idea of progress, considering the almost five ours he's spent in thought. "Venus, are you there? Please answer me."

[celebrityskinned]

She knows that no one would knock on her door at this hour unless they were someone who cared for her (and by that matter, whom she cared for), and because of that she closes the book she's 'reading' and gets up out of the armchair she's in before he even speaks her name.

"It's two a.m."

And yet the shoes she still has on, the book she has folded over her finger in her hand, the light from her lamp filtering through her curls, indicate that she wasn't sleeping. Her face is puffy, tired under her makeup, tense in spite of and because of her attempts to seem unaffected. She steps back and holds the door for him.

She wants to fall into his arms and cling onto reassurance and love and comfort, and yet she knows that there are a variety of reasons that she can't do that just now. Not when she doesn't even know which of the many tacks he will take in this conversation. What remains of the story will need answers now that he's had several hours to filter them through his head.

"Let's not have this conversation in the hallway."

hopefully this works!

[aintyourdad]

There are certain cafes that Joel has scouted out - close enough to the tribute center to be walkable, but unpopular enough that he can usually expect to have a little privacy. With Tess here, it's like there's even less privacy than usual, but he still needs to get away at times. His morning ritual of walking out for a coffee is one way to do that.

He's already ordered at the counter when he spots Venus - no getting away from her, and after that ridiculous expose the other day, it's no surprise that she looks like she's trying to hide. Joel hates the fact that the Capitol already seems to know everything about him - he'd hate it even more if they did something like that to him, spreading it all over the screens for everyone to see, distorting the truth to shock people as much as possible.

He doesn't like Venus - not one bit. But he feels somehow responsible for the people Ellie considers friends, no matter how much he dislikes them personally. Maybe that's what draws him to her table once he has his coffee in-hand.

"You don't need to hide," he says without preamble, almost as though he were talking about the weather.

yep!

[celebrityskinned]

"I'm not hiding," she says, although it sounds a bit like a sulk. Her own coffee - frilly enough to give Joel cavities, she's sure, with chocolate and caramel drizzles atop a spire of whipped cream, skewered by a stick of cinnamon - lies in a mug on her lap, where she's cradling it like a kitten. The hood of a stylish jacket is pulled over her head, and she has big sunglasses on.

Still, she can't outright disguise herself without making it obvious she's trying to avoid eyes, and that in itself draws attention.

She sighs and shoves the book she's barely been reading aside. "You here to tell me to step away from your little girl before I hex her with my black magic?"

[onlyimmune]

She turned the screen off half way through.

She was angry. Incredibly, incredibly angry. Not at Venus, who she assumed the Capitol wanted to be angry at, but at the bastards who had aired this piece of shit video. That would take that kind of pain and trauma and--

Ellie fumed, and immediately set off to find Venus. She wasn't in her room, however, and Ellie had no idea which of the myriad cafes she could have been in. After a futile effort she made her way back to Venus' room, to find the door closed. So she was back. And in there. Ellie sighed, pressing her forehead to the door before she knocked on it.

"... Hey, Venus? It's me."

[celebrityskinned]

"Hey, Ellie."

She opens the door, and it's clear she's done minimal sleeping since the showing. Even her makeup can't hide the lines under her eyes, around her lips; she looks as if she's fresh from an Arena, even after only a few hours.

An Avox has been bringing her tea and milkshakes and cocoa all night. She's got the latter in a mug in her hand now.

All this, and yet the Capitol hadn't shown some of the many reasons Venus feels like a kindred spirit to Ellie. "I guess you see why I make bad life decisions, now."

[gluteus]

She'd already told him about what had happened to her family. Seeing it on the screen was different, of course. He could barely believe the raw power displayed - and it reminded him of when he had met Morrigan, convinced that she was a demi-god. He'd lost such convictions since, but the same kind of awe took hold in his chest.

Along with something else.

The utter knowledge that he'd been right, in his judgment. No one could blame a child for what had happened there. No one could give a child greek fire and not expect to be burned. Men had to be trained to use blades, no one knew how to wield one from birth.

And Maximus couldn't have imagined such a natural weapon before coming here. He doesn't go looking for her - he thought that had such a thing been said about him he would not be in a mood to see anyone. So he keeps to his schedule, to spending time with Juba while he was there. It didn't stop his training regimen, however, in the gym every morning, and it was there that he finally found her.

"Do you require a training partner?" He asked in a careful, low rumble.

[celebrityskinned]

"You're just about the only one up to my standards," she says, all put-on cockiness and sass. All forced, the usually seamless facade evidently cracked and warped.

It's difficult, seeing Max now. She doesn't believe him to be some sort of father figure, but he's the first and only person she told about this awful event prior to the showing. There's a wariness she regards him with, as if she's expecting the kindness to be suddenly revoked.

They're the only two here right now, up too early for even the insomniacs. She finds herself with the childish urge to run to him, to let him wrap his arms around her and reassure her that she is no more a walking dead woman than he is a ghost buying time.

She starts to wrap her hands. "I heard my life story was mandatory viewing."