thecapitol | this place is a narrative mess

Entry tags:

this place is a narrative mess

Who| Closed to Guy and his close CR
What| Guy is brought back to the Tribute Center
Where| District 6 and Guy's room
When| The night of the expose when he's returned and the next morning after.
Warnings/Notes| CW: Possible mention of bidding, mental trauma/dissociation, the usual for someone's that dealt with Penny

When the Peacekeepers brought him back, Guy was silent, floating along like a ghost next to them. His face was still blotchy from the crying and his eyes were red-rimmed but there was no emotion on his face. He'd shut down. Sometimes it was okay to take time to be sad and sometimes you got so sad you had to not think but it had never been like this.

He had always been someone that dealt with his feelings as they came and only shoved them aside for later if he was facing something life or death. Then when it was over, he dealt with them, felt them, and moved on.

This had finally pushed him beyond that. He'd felt so much - so much fear and despair and misery - that something had collapsed in itself and now there was just a dull buzzing behind his ears.

The world no longer made sense and the worst part of it was that the things that did make sense, like his story, like the life he'd shaped for himself, had been taken away from him. His story had been twisted into something else and now it didn't belong to him anymore.

Now it would be what they wanted it to be and he would be the thing they wanted him to be and there was nothing he could do about it, except hope that he got boring enough they cut the thread that tied him to this new life and let him drift away. Now his life would be just like the emptiness inside a shell instead of the patterns on the outside or the sounds it could make.

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Mindy nodded quietly, and this was a rare occurrence indeed. She was, as far as she knew, awfully blunt when it came to being sympathetic, and she tended to chide weakness. But this was Guy, who never showed it, who was strong enough to kill a kid out of mercy. He wasn't someone who fell easily, and this made her hate Penny even more.

"I knew it was garbage. Knew it the moment they started in on the Croods. They were never going to give a nice story. Its just not what they do."

"That's not what I mean. It's not -"

It wasn't just the story that was. It was the story now and the one still being written.

"It's not just the expose."

They'd taken everything, every part of his story. Faithful mate, loving father (what kind of father did that, did the kind of thing that would tear his family apart?), proud hunter and trapper and the one who sometimes brought light to others.

What did fire matter in this place? How could he have any pride if he was reduced to...to...

All the cleverness meant nothing here. All the kindness was instantly undone by the cruelty they were responsible for.

And there was no way out. He couldn't even die as he was, take control of the ending. That would bring suffering on other people instead of him, on the friends he left behind - like Mindy.

He pulled on the hair at the friend of his head so hard he almost ripped it out and gritted his teeth as if he was trying to hold in a scream.

Mindy rested a hand on his head. If he hurt himself by himself, that was one thing, but she was here now, and despite everything, she wouldn't let him just suffer alone, and certainly not let him hurt himself.

"Just keep talking. If its not just the expose, what is it? A part of you knew that it would be bullshit: hell, we were all gathered together to laugh because we suspected that. They did the same thing to Venus and Shepard, only they had dubious pasts. You didn't, so they had to mess with it. So what else is there?"

She could guess of course (she had felt pretty awful with him being taken to begin with) but she wanted to hear it from him.

Now he held his hands over his face, especially since she was making it harder to tug on his hair.

"I can't tell you."

Too young. She was too young to be told about these things and even if she already knew about them - even if it was the kind of horror she already knew about since her world seemed filled with so much more than his - she still shouldn't have to know it was happening to a friend.

"It's just bad, okay?" he said shakily.

Mindy sighed. It always came back to that, and he didn't have to hear him say it to know that TOO YOUNG was part of it. That, from him, irked her so much she had to look away because her face had a moment of very noticeable anger.

"Fine. Bad. It's not like I deserve the details, I guess. But if you're not gonna tell me because I'm too young, just fucking say it. Enough people say it already, and if they don't I can guess. But you know what? Try giving me credit. We're in this, and so are other people, together. If something happens, I'm here so you don't have to hide in your mind by yourself."

She was shaking now. Damn it, she meant everything she said too, and more than anything, she hated HATED being emotional. She couldn't even steer away from this.

He felt her hand shaking against his hair, and without looking, he knew that it was upsetting her just as much to know something bad was going on without knowing what it was as it might upset her to know the truth.

Maybe it was upsetting her even worse.

As time went on, would he really be able to hide it? Would he be able to hide trying not to crawl out of his skin? Would he be able to hide the shame?

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and bit his lower lip so hard it almost bled.

"It's a grown up thing," he said, his voice cracking. "It might make you feel worse if you know."

"Not knowing what's going on with you makes me feel like shit now." Mindy said, narrowing her eyes. "It can't make me feel worse if its a thing neither of us can help, right? The Capitol does what it does."

A grown up thing? What the hell was he talking about?

Something more had happened that he couldn't talk about, and that was, as she'd said, angering her more. Secrets between friends (she was that now, right?) would stay that way, always. Mindy didn't talk about the bad things that happened in her friend's lives, never would.

"Just tell me," she said quietly, smoothing his hair down. "I can handle it."

He didn't know how to say it or if he even should, but she knew more about evil than he did. She'd talked about bad things people did that he didn't even have the imagination to think up.

But didn't that mean he should protect her from this?

On the other hand, was having it so she watched him struggle and suffer without knowing why (because he knew he wasn't going to be able to hide it) the opposite of protecting her? Who wanted to see someone they cared about suffer without knowing why? Without knowing if it meant they were self-destructing and falling into the dark?

He had to hope it was the right thing to do, telling her. He had to hope that having something terrible be named made it less horrible than having it be some terrible unknown.

Because he wasn't going to be able to hide it. Maybe he'd be able to hide what was causing it, but he knew he wasn't going to be able to smile and laugh and act like normal the times he didn't need to, to survive. And what then? How would she be able to deal with that if she didn't know what the despair meant?

Still pressing his hands to his eyes, he said quietly, miserable, around a lump in his throat, "I don't belong to myself anymore." He started sobbing again, tears streaming out through his fingers. "That's how she punished me for standing up to her. I don't belong to myself anymore."

Edited 2014-05-16 06:50 (UTC)

He didn't belong to himself anymore.

It was strange, how that was phrased. To most people, listening to that it could be interpreted in a lot of ways. how could you not belong to yourself? You were the only person in charge of yourself, so theoretically, anyone in the Capitol didn't really belong to themselves.

And that was why Mindy understood what he was saying. In a blunt manner, no, you belonged to the Capitol, but on a personal level, you were you. So now he was saying he didn't belong to himself anymore.

Mindy had an awful imagination, it came from living in an awful world. If a woman had said these words, you'd know what they meant. Mindy had paid attention to talk, so she knew about bidding. Seeing how Guy was breaking down like this in pain, it was clear what had happened. She closed her eyes.

THAT FUCKING BITCH I WILL MURDER HER IT WILL BE SLOW AND SHE'LL WATCH EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF HER COMING APART AND I'LL MAKE SURE SHE'S AWAKE AND FEELING IT AND I'LL FEED HER HER OWN FUCKING EYEBALL FOR GOOD MEASURE AND THEN I'LL DISMEMBER HER AND GOD, I WILL KEEP HER ALIVE UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE, BECAUSE HER BODY GOES TO THE FUCKING DOGS AND FLIES

She opened her eyes. She didn't look tranquil, but focused. No. Those feelings could come, and she would wait. There was no getting around that. But Guy, he needed her now, not Hit Girl. No one needed Hit Girl.

Yet.

She put her arms around him and pulled him in, hugging him hard. Anger mingled with pain in his pain, knowing he was hurt more than he could bear to show, but she could bear it and she would.

"They can only take what you give them." She said it quietly, soft, but it had an air of promise. "If there's no way, if you don't have a choice, know that. Because that's what she wants from you, and you don't have to let her have it."

She'd figured it out, just from that, hadn't she.

What kind of world was she from, that someone her age knew about things like that? What kind of world was this that something like this could even happen?

Then she hugged him and that pretty much opened the flood gates.

"I can't," he sobbed out. "She said she'd take them away. She said she'd take my memories of my family and Belt away. With her poisons."

He'd lose them in the worst wall possible. In some ways it was better because at least they'd live, but he'd lose even the ways they'd touched him and changed him and made his life better.

"I wouldn't be me anymore. I wouldn't even be sane."

No Belt. Living alone had already left him a little unhinged by the time he'd met Eep but at least he'd had Belt. At least he'd had a friend and had mostly been happy even if he kept hoping he'd find Tomorrow, a place he could be happier.

No Belt meant no friend meant remembering his life as an entire life alone, from childhood on.

"And if I try to just end it, she said she'd take it out on my friends."

And who knows? maybe she'd take it out on his family too, just out of bitterness. That meant there was no way out. She'd made it so there was no way out.

He sobbed openly, uncontrollably, falling apart and hating himself for doing it in front of someone he should have been strong in front of. He was the adult. It was his job to be strong for her not the other way around.

But right now, he felt like he couldn't be strong for anyone.

Edited 2014-05-16 07:31 (UTC)

It was a new thing for Mindy, to actually BE the comforting person to someone else. It had never really needed to happen given how Mindy never really interacted with her peers back in her world. Time here, however, had softened her to people and their feelings, and she found that she could think pretty logically sometimes while other people's first instinct was to go to their emotions.

"What you just went through was torture Guy, literally. Penny didn't just want you in pain, she wanted you in fear, falling apart all over the place so you could thoroughly be fucked up inside and out. I've seen people like her before, though usually they end in physical torture. She's going for mental and emotional too. Think about it: what was the worse thing you did to her? You mouthed off. Does the punishment fit the crime? No. But she does work for the Capitol, and they know how to fuck with us. She didn't just want you sorry, she wanted you under her thumb."

She sighed. "It's not in their best interest to have you forget that stuff anyway. They spun the story in their shitty expose of poor, damaged but lovable Guy, the noble savage or whatever. If they undid all of it, what would be the point? It would just show the cruelty of the Games. Good enough for us, but pretty bad TV."

Mindy rubbed his shoulders. It was odd for her, but she knew he needed the physical contact, and honestly, so did she. Seeing him like this broke her heart, but that was enough for her to hate these people and that was an emotional she was just fine with when the dust settled.

"You're brave, and smart. You'll see you are stronger than this."

"Can I just have a hug for a while?"

He just wanted to lay there against her leg with her hugging him.

He didn't know if he'd be strong enough to do this. He didn't know what he was going to be. He didn't know if it'd make hatred take over his life and change him.

What he did know was that he had be able to accept suffering that way to protect what was important. He had to remember his family to know that he had to fight to get back to them and he had to hang on so Penny didn't hurt his friends - his new family, like Mindy.

"I could give it a shot."

So she hugged him, and that was fine because he couldn't see her face. Tears danced on her eyelashes, but looking into her face would tell it wasn't sadness. No, she could feel bad for him, but was she personally feeling sad? No. More than anything, what she felt was a dark calm in her. She could offer all the advice she could muster, but in the end he'd feel what he had to.

But the Capitol? They would pay. Mindy was already not satisfied with winning the games because she wanted everyone free of them. With this new development, she could feel the rage like a burning orb amassing girth. It was a quiet process but it was there, and she could feed it slowly.

"What are you thinking?"

"I don't know," he said slowly, his voice now a little hoarse. "I guess I'm just wondering why they need to make everyone else as broken as they are."

Why did the people of Panem feel the need to spread their sickness everywhere?

"I don't know about you," Mindy said, running a hand through his hair, "but being broken just doesn't suit me. Did you know I didn't even have friends to give a shit about until I got here?"

She grinned. "Now I have a few that make me feel protective and crap. I worried about you. I'm just glad your tongue and your bones are still intact."

At her saying, 'being broken doesn't suit me' he opened his eyes a little bit, staring at the wall.

The truth was, it didn't suit him either. Right now, he needed his time to grieve, because he was moving through a door he couldn't walk back through. Fear and death and hardship and pain - these were all things he'd experienced at some point in his life. This was a new kind of suffering, the one that was to come and it wasn't something that would be instantly undone, not even by someday getting free of this place and going home.

At the same time, he didn't want to be broken. He didn't want to spend his life wallowing in the misery that Penny wanted him to wallow in. If he couldn't fight back by escaping in any way without losing the things most important to him or making others lose their lives, then maybe the only way to fight back was by not giving her what she wanted.

She wanted him broken. She wanted everyone broken.

But it didn't suit him. Broken didn't suit him.

"I guess that's better than nothing. I'm not dead, not hurt. I can still speak."

Even if he'd be more careful about what he said.

That was it, wasn't it. He would be more careful about what he said but he didn't have to change what he thought.

After a moment of thought, he drew a shaky breath.

"I'm not going to stop," he said, without quite explaining what he meant. He was still trying to pull his thoughts together.

Edited 2014-05-18 06:03 (UTC)

He didn't have to explain what he meant. Mindy had been around him long enough to know exactly the type of man that Guy was. She knew that Penny had placed him in her web of amusement and torture, a safe place for those capitol elite that loved reminding them they were subject to their whims.

He had killed a girl needing death, and he could do more. Much more. She could see that clearly. He was not done, not defeated. Just hurt.

"No, you're not. But if you need a shoulder to balance on, who better than the girl that did it in our last Arena? I can do that for you. Just ask."

"I might need a hug now and again." If he was even going to be able to stand being touched. "But a lot of this is gonna be fought up here."

He tapped his temple with a finger. Taking a deep breath, he finally sat up to face her, face red and blotchy.

"You know what you can do to help me most, though?"

Edited 2014-05-18 06:19 (UTC)

"Well. I'm working on that. I AM a cold and heartless bitch, remember? ALL the capitol and anyone worth mentioning know it, you know."

She even put on one of those "better than you" snooty voices when she said it, just for the hell of it.

"Yeah. I know. Trust me, I know."

The last question mad her pause. "Huh? What?"

"You said you didn't have friends before here. I'm - I'm not going to stop being me. I'm going to be nice to people and care when I shouldn't and - and protect people and do the hard things but only when they're right."

Like when he'd mercy killed her.

"And I'm still going to make people laugh when I can." He nodded slowly. "I'm going to follow the light and - and help other people follow it, too."

He went on, "And part of that is - is the making fun of movies and the museum and things like that. The places you get to be a kid, where you get friends to laugh with. I know you're strong and you know some things about people I would've never known if I hadn't been brought to this place because my world is a whole lot brighter. But you deserve those times and it makes me happy to bring them. So what you can do for me is still sometimes be a kid, let me be the grown up or - or the older brother that helps you do it. And don't feel like you just have to protect me, like you just have to be the one I lean on. Because you deserve to still have the times to laugh and lean on somebody else, too. You deserve the times where someone else is the grown up for you, even if you don't need them."

He didn't want things to shift where she was trying to be the one he leaned on, where she was just taking care of him.

"If I ever get too caught up on everything going on with me, remind me I promised you I still wanted to give you that. Because it'll help me still be me."

Edited 2014-05-18 06:36 (UTC)

It was a reasonable request: hell, she could deny it all she wanted, but it was something she needed. In all the time of worrying, hating Penny and Azula and training and smarting and laughing about it, no one was really going farther than what what they thought she should be. Guy had, since their first encounter, given her the benefit of the doubt that she was strong and that she could shoulder just so much. She needed that.

"I like that feeling. I mean, yeah, we're fighters, but I like to shoot the shit too, and laugh and make jokes. It makes this place bearable, makes me feel like I could do anything. If you want me to be a kid though...I have to let you in. I won't lie...that scares me, ok?"

Because this was a power she was wiling to give him over her. That always made her pause.

"Then only be a kid as much as you've needed to be a kid so far. I just need it to not be about everything that's to come. And part of who I am is making things brighter for other people wherever I can. So just know that - I'm there whenever or however you need me. I just don't want you to feel like it'll mean I can't look out for you if you need to be the one that's scared or sad. Okay?"

She didn't have to be vulnerable or let herself be a kid if she didn't want to. But him dealing with hardship and pain and sometimes needing people who cared about him - he didn't want that to make her hesitate if she was the one who needed someone. He didn't want her to hesitate if it was a time she needed to reach out.

He wanted to still be himself that way.

And she deserved to have someone there if she needed it, regardless of what was going to happen to him.

Damn it. Damn him. He was, above all, someone who knew best how to draw the line in the sand without making things some dumb fucking trope or a overused speech. Because she could look in his eyes and tell the truth from the bullshit, and he simply would never do it to her. He was true. That, more than anything, fostered her hatred foe Penny.

She lowered her eyes. "Dad was here. But you know, that's impossible. Insane. Dad died in my world. I was there. I saw it. I tried to stop it but it was no used. He burned. They brought him back, and it was just like old times. I didn't care what anyone thought of me, we could do anything. And then they took him away."

Mindy put a hand to his shoulder. "And the more things change, I start to realize my feelings are shock value."

He nodded at her.

"Yeah. Yeah, that's what they want for all of this. The shock. The - the pain of what they inflict and what they take away."

He pulled her into a hug.

"But they can - they can poke and prod and twist as much pain and sadness out of us that they want and the things that matter. The real things, they stay the same. They stay the same."

He could cut through to the truth, to the simple things that they tried to make him feel stupid for seeing, when they over-complicated evertything to hide their cruelty and self-delude.. He could try to do it always.

"What stays the same is your dad loved you and you still love him. That stays the same. Just like - just like me saying these things and caring about you. That can stay the same, too. And that's how we can keep them from breaking us."

"I'm not broken," Mindy mumbled, hugging back, hard. "He was around enough that I felt happy, you know? I was glad to have him around. But that's just it. He was from a time where I needed him, and we were still working toward this one goal. That time is over now. This, right here? This is the new goal."

Depressing and long termed, exactly as she expected it and had no control over. What else could you do? If anything, it was important that Guy get his groove back: they had marked him, and were trying to work him down. So long as Mindy was around, that would never happen.

"Glad you're back." It was brief, but there was a lot unsaid there too. How she' been worried, how she had sought every short, vaguely destructive thing she could to distract herself.

this place is a narrative mess

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cw: suicide

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wanna end it here?

Totally fine!