thecapitol | (no subject)

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Who| Eddie and Open
What| Eddie during the last week
Where| Various, see prompt.
When| Ditto.
Warnings/Notes| Drug use, serious angst. Let me know if none of these work for you and you want an in.

Obligatory party prompt|

He didn't want to be here, and it was obvious.

Even still, generally Eddie was pretty good with faking it. He knew the score. But today, he couldn't muster the charming grin.

The party was obviously effected. Between people who were sick, and people who didn't want to become sick, the turn out wasn't the normal hopping bunch. Still, by no means was the party dead. He suspected that most the people he saw who had any common sense weren't here by choice.

That wasn't all that was on his mind though. He hadn't hard from Henry. Business or personal...the latter wouldn't worry him, but the former?

He had a bad feeling about it.

So he was brooding, but couldn't exactly be a wall flower. That wasn't in the schedule. So he was seeking out, if nothing else, like minded people to linger around. People he didn't have to be on for. He roved the party, drink in hand, seeking out other tributes, mentors, anyone who hadn't ever in their life bet money on which 13 year old would live the night.

Bad Eddie doing bad things|

Logical Eddie knew that being here wasn't the best idea. This place was full of sick people, and it was too easy to get caught doing what he was doing.

And lately, he had been much more worried about that than before. He had, on some level, been aiming to stop.

But logical Eddie was out the window. He had run out of morphling in the place he'd been saying. He couldn't reach Henry, he couldn't get a hold of his contacts, and he needed the peace. Right now, zen was in short supply, and he knew he could find some in a bottle.

So here he was, in his District suite, risking the various illnesses floating around, so he could get that little bit of zen. What he had here was injected, which was far from Eddie'd favorite method but, well...beggars couldn't be choosers. He sat on the bed, arm tied off, not having noticed his door hung ajar, prepping the morphling for injection.

Well fuck|

He was numb.

This wasn't something he could process.

One death, maybe he had a chance. Death wasn't anything new.

But everyone? Everyone he'd grown up with, everyone he'd interacted with at home. Every place he'd been, everything he'd seen, everything he'd known.

Gone.

He sat on the edge of the road he'd been wandering home from, staring straight ahead, his communicator sitting between his feet where he'd dropped it. With no sun to gauge time, he had no idea how long he'd been sitting there since hearing the broadcast.

Gone.

Everything was gone.

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It takes a while, but eventually the quiet whirring of Susannah's wheelchair motor can be heard, coming closer. (She's only just got back these last couple days; they haven't had time to retrieve her prosthetic legs or fit them back on.)

And then the noise stops, the chair stops, and she's behind him now, on her knee-stumps, leaning up against his back, her arms wrapped around him.

"I'm sorry," she whispers into his ear. "I know it's not enough, but I'm sorry. And one way or another, those sons of bitches are going to pay."

No words are going to come out for a moment. Talking to Jessica took it all out of him.

But when he hears that whirl, he can already feel something tight in his chest unfurling. And when the comforting weight and heat of her body is against him, he sags into it. Gently, not tipping her over, but desperately.

For the first time he notices he's crying. Has he been crying before? Or did it just start?

She leans forward to kiss his temple.

"There's a rebellion," she whispers in his ear. "I-- don't know all the particulars yet, but there are people aimin' to take Snow and all his folk down. And-- I'm going to be part of it. I'm making this up as I go along, but I think we can do it, I think we can take Snow down, we just have to get organized and work together and... we're going to do it, Eddie. It might take a while, but they'll pay. For what they did to your home. For what they've done to the districts for decades."

He lets out an audible groan, closing his eyes and laying back against her.

Teeth clenched, he tries to be quiet, and tries to deal with both concepts warring in him. On one hand he wanted to burn this shit to the ground. On the other he wanted Suze safe.

"It's too...it's too much."

She holds him quietly, then, for a little while.

"Yes," she says finally. "It would be."

She's quiet again for a little while longer before saying, "We need to get you off that junk."

He's raw, and doesn't even have the energy to defend himself right now. Of course she is right, hasn't he been trying?

But now with everything...all he wants right not is a hit.

Still, he nods against her.

"Yeah. Yeah."

"Yeah," she says. She hugs him tightly, carding her fingers through his hair.

She wants to tell him about District Thirteen, what Carlos told her. But it would be too cruel, she thinks, to tell him about a District that wasn't really destroyed when from all she can tell his really was.

"Love you," she murmurs instead.

Eponine went to find her mentor later, when she had finally been unhooked from the drip. She didn't know Eddie very well, but she supposed he knew about her outburst, the cause of the trouble, as far as she was concerned. And she felt so horribly guilty.

She dressed properly, and staggered off to find him. "Monsieur?" She lowered her eyes so she didn't have to meet his. "Monsieur? I am so sorry. It's all my fault and... I am sorry. I didn't mean for this to happen, you know?"

He stares at her blankly for a long moment. A cold shower hadn't done much to clear the shock from his head, and things were still coming in waves, including, apparently, any sort of sense.

What the hell was she talking about?

"...the," His voice breaks as he tries to find a word to express it. "Attack?"

Eponine nodded.
"What else, Sir? And I am so sorry. I thought perhaps they'd hurt me, but not the whole of District Three. I am sorry. I did not mean for this to happen."

She was crying again, through her sorrow but also because of the pain and tiredness caused by standing up for a long time. She coughed blood and hid iton her sleeve and sank to her knees in front of Eddie.

"You need to help us, Sir."

She was sick, and it was easier to, for a moment, focus on that then on what she was saying.

It was ridiculous, right? It had to be.

Carefully he moved, scooping her up and taking her to on of the couches.

"Come on you. Rest." He said softly, voice still numb. "It's all the help I can give right now."

"But what will we do? Jessica is a mess - God, she tried to shut me up. But I was so mad for Ian I say so much stupid things! I wondered why no arrest - and la! Sir, I am so sorry."

She let him scoop her up and sit her down. She didn't have much fight in her.

"Monsieur, it's your turn now. You need to tell us where we can run to before they come for us too."

"They didn't destroy three because of you."

It was flat, but sure. There was a lot of stupid shit the Capitol would do, but they wouldn't cut of their nose to spite their face like that.

He frowned at the fact he was comforting her, right now, but maybe that was easier. In fact it was absolutely easier.

Let this be someone elses problem.

"And I don't think running is a good idea right now. They'll be watching even harder." Even with his brain as scattered as it had been, he'd already poked at that thought.

"Albert thinks it is, and his own too. As well as perhaps other things." Eponine reached out her hand. "You had family there? People you cared for?"

She shrugged at his refute of her plan though. "Then, Sir, what are we to do? Jessica is just crying - there is no sensible word from her at all. I know she is upset, but we do not know what to do for her."

"Well, it's not. You guys have next to nothing to do with it."

He doesn't want to talk about his family, and the people he cared about. Because every single one is dead. And right now that thought it too raw to deal with.

"Let her be insane with grief for awhile. She deserves it." He looked down at Eponine. "Just don't do anything stupid. That's what they're expecting right now."

"I know. I'm being good. God, Sir... to all this happen. Sir?" She starts, hesitating. "Sir, I know we are not friends. I know I drive you mad, and I know that I have made so much trouble even with my Papa, but Sir, if you need to shout or... or, well... as men do... well... I don't care. But please, will you help Jessica? I do not how to make any of it better for her at all."

Despite his determination to stay in his own room after he'd been revived and stare numbly at the wall, his intense thirst finally wins out on the heels of memories from the arena of dehydration and the threat of dying thereof. It's a terrible way to go and he won't be doing it voluntarily.

It's not until he's already on his way back that he notices the door ajar that's normally closed. He walks past, glancing aside mechanically with little thought of anything but crawling back into bed and shutting out the world, but the sight that greets him instead stops Albert still.

"So this is why you're such an absentee mentor?" He can't keep the derision out of his voice, nor a little of the fear. It's an old one, from repeated surgeries in the 60's when the only drugs they had were opiates and he'd spent nights in sweats and shivers, wishing over again he could die all because there was no real alternative yet to morphine.

Eddie jumps, looking up guiltily, eyeing the figure in the door way with a wary aggression.

Finally he snorts, setting down the bottle he was carefully opening, making sure to tighten the cap again.

"No, I'm an absentee mentor because I haven't been able to go home since I was a kid, because I've been training kids to die and not I'm suppose to train kidnapped stranger to die over and over, and oh yeah, be a capitol play thing in my free time." He looked up through the dark, shrugging. "It can drive a man to drink, what can I say."

It was a pity party, and he knew it, and it just made him angrier. At himself, not at Albert, but he wouldn't blame the guy for not knowing differently. It was pathetic. This whole mess was.

It also way more than he should be saying, but he can't help it.

Were he not fresh out of the arena, Albert might have been tactful. He might have tried to understand Eddie, really seen the cause of his actions rather than the effect. Hell, if this was the next day, after Cecil's announcement, he would have had an entirely different reaction, one of sympathy or pity instead of condemnation.

But it's none of those times. It's now, with Albert's head still swimming with guilt over the blood on his hands and the internal war against his own darkness where he wishes he could just sink into it but he tries because he has people who would see him try. Seeing Eddie's solution just makes him angry.

"Then you're weak." He growls, pupilless eyes flashing in the dim light as he tilts his chin up. "Funny, considering how proud of having you your wife seems. She immediately spoke of you when we met, calling your hers. Does she know?"

It's so low to bring Susannah into it especially when they'd met once. All she'd done was mistake his polite greeting for flirting and say that she was taken with Eddie, but Albert's angry enough to lash out without thinking through a combination of dark mood and jealousy of a solution that he can't and won't partake in. He knows drugs dull the pain, make it easier, but it's only so long as you're on them. If he started now, he knows he may never stop.

Anger flashes bright in his eyes as Albert mentions Suze. Because she was the one he was fighting to get over all this for.

Fighting and, clearly, failing.

"Oh, I'm sorry, should I have been stronger while my little sister died of hunger, or one of my best friends got killed on national TV and I had to watch and hear about what a 'disappointment' it was, or when I got to watch every moment of my own games over and over, or when I got to send a bunch of kids to their own deaths...real ones, you know. Not shit where they came back the next day. Nah, I got to take their little bodies home to mom and dad in a box. If there was anything left."

Albert had clearly hit a button, Eddie dropping the bottle on his bed and stalking towards the other man as he spoke. Finally he stopped himself, taking in a ragged breath.

If he didn't stop now, he didn't know if he would.

"Yes." If Eddie's looking for sympathy he'll not find it here.

"I've died, been tortured, experimented on, had everyone I've ever loved die either in my arms or in front of my eyes, had my humanity stripped from me, watched the entire world grow sick and insane and that's all before your fascist government deigned it entertaining to draw me here."

He draws himself up to his full 5'10", a veritable wall of ice.

"Your pain does not impress me."

"Welcome to the party. Sounds like this is exactly where you belong."

Nobody belongs here, but that doesn't stop Eddie from being an asshole about it, now does it. Carefully he sets down his needle, and pushes himself up from the bed. Clearly this wasn't going to just...not be a conversation.

"So I deal. And so can you."

"I have been dealing." His tone is scathing, but there's a ripple beneath it; Albert hasn't exactly been 'dealing' as well as he could. If it wasn't for Jet, he likely wouldn't be coping at all and still be buried under his covers if not found someway to end this torture himself. Really, in a way, Jet is his version of morphling, the drug that makes the pain go away for at least a little while.

It makes him angry just to think of the comparison. "Without being a non-present addict. I may not be a victor, but at least I've been trying to support the tributes in these suites."

Hypocrite.

Ian had been in the Reagan house when he heard, but he couldn't stay. He wanted to be back with the rest of the District 3 representatives. And anyway, he wasn't sure any more whether the house was safe.

He came across Eddie on the way to the Tribute Centre and sat beside him on the kerb. "I can't believe they did that," he said quietly. "Well, no, I can. They've already proved they're willing to do anything in order to get everyone to do what they want."

Eddie looked up as Ian sat down next to him, but couldn't manage much more than a weak shrug.

"I only can't believe they gave up their music players and tablets and high powered zit poppers." He mumbled, staring back down at the road between his feet. "They never gave a shit about us."

He suddenly let out a strange laugh.

"I guess there isn't an us anymore, is there?"

"There's a few of us. You and Jessica and those of us who got to visit the District and meet the people." They didn't have the same connection to them as Eddie and Jessica, but at least they could remember the people.

"Theoretically speaking, now would be the time for all the districts to rebel because the capitol can't wipe them all out." Probably. "But they won't and I don't blame them."

He shrugs, obviously not having the energy for much more.

"They can try. They'd wipe us all out if it meant they lose. Fuck the human race."

He didn't know if it was true, but right now it certainly seemed true.

"You guys...I'm glad you got to see it." It did make him feel better. Just a little.

"So am I." District 3 - Eddie's home - was a more pleasant topic than talking about what happened to it. "It was good to see what we were fighting for. Who we were fighting for. And to see more of this place. One city's much like another when you're stuck in it."

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I am so sorry for him, lmao

He needs it. I'm sorry he's being a drama queen.

uh-oh, looks like a manpain competition up in here

Start your engines.

vroom vroom

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