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

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.

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Venus doesn't remember what her parents gave her, what morals they put in her. She knows they did, she has memories of over a decade with them, and yet it feels like the trauma did all the formative work.

"And were you always-?" Venus stops herself, realizing that she's probably about to be rude, but the way her eyes flash down to Susannah's prosthetics probably communicates the rest.

"I lost those when I was twenty-five," Susannah says. "I was waiting for the A-train and a sonovabitch named Jack Mort pushed me and I fell and the damn subway train cut them right off at the knee. Someone improvised a pair of tourniquets, they got me to the hospital in time, and I survived it somehow. Before that, I had legs like anyone else." She rubs her forehead. The motion doesn't mean what it did when she was Odetta-and-Detta, but as an unconscious gesture it's endured into this new life of hers. "He'd been the one who dropped the brick on my head when I was little that stared the whole mess. One of those odd coincidences, like in a book."

Her mouth screws into an odd expression. Of course it was like a book. She'd been in one.

Once upon a time she might not have really flinched at that, and yet all the violence of the Arena has, rather than desensitized her, made her more thoughtful about it. About the effects it has on people who aren't like her.

"That...that's horrible. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked." She thinks Susannah's face is contorting with pain at the memory, at the brick, at the skull cracking beneath it.

Susannah shakes her head. "No. It's all right, you're not the first person I've told and you won't be the last. People always wonder about the legs. I just gave you a little more detail than usual, that's all." She turns her twisted-up napkin around in her hand. "What about you? I saw some of the footage from in the museum, how you poofed in and out. Have you always been able to do that?"

"What you saw in the exposé was just about truth. When I was eleven I started exploding at random and killed everyone around me. By the time I was sixteen I could control it." She sighs. "Personally, I'd have taken the trade."

Susannah reaches forward to pat Venus' hand. "You'd think their lies were the worst of it," she says, "but they find just the right way of framing the truth and it's worse than a lie could ever be."

"It's enough to make you doubt yourself." She very nearly pulls away, but instead drinks from her coffee using her other hand. It's hard to accept comfort you feel is unearned.

"And doubt's the kind of things ladies like us-" sick in the head, crazy ladies- "don't need extra of."

Susannah nods. In the wake of the whole affair with Mia--oh Lord, was it really a year ago by now?--when she'd been feeling a bit more plural than she had in a long time, one of her consolations had been that feeling plural or not, she had confidence in being able to choose who to be.

What had happened with Harley... she had made all those promises and she thought she knew how to make sure it would never happen again, but could she really be sure?

"It really isn't."

"They think it's funny, using it against us." The Gamemakers, setting Susannah up in the mini-Arena with Harley, taking Venus' meds away. "I just don't know what we're supposed to do about it. I guess I should be glad that I'm still me through all of it, though - sorry, I guess that's insensitive too."

"Sssh," Susannah says. "It's all right. I'm not offended. Anyway, that bitch is a part of me, much as I hate it. She's just not the me I want to be." Her thoughts go to Mia 'borrowing' her body her body again--what it was like to have a to share with a true foreign presence and not just the pieces of herself.

"Maybe if we're lucky they'll think repeating themselves is tacky."

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

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minor spoilers

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