thecapitol | Suspects' Holding Cell

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Suspects' Holding Cell

The vans drive for what seems like an hour before they come to a stop, and Peacekeepers blindfold and forcefully drag even the most cooperative suspects into a building.

The suspects are all held in one cell, a large, metal room with a thick door and a single ledge that serves as a bench. Bright fluorescent lights beam from overhead. There are no windows and no clocks, no sign of where they might be.

The Peacekeepers take off the blindfolds, though without much care for whether they come off all the way or chafe or stay slung around the suspects' necks. The suspects' hands are left cuffed behind their backs, and even the most ingenious of them won't be able to pick the lock on their restraints, but they're otherwise left to roam freely through the space.

Suspects are removed, one at a time, at unpredictable intervals, by Peacekeepers armed with tasers. Some take three hours to return, while others are back within only a minute. Each of them comes back having been clearly roughed up and pressed for information that they may or may not hold; some are bleeding or sporting the beginnings of black eyes.

They'll be sleeping here tonight.

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As the hours had worn on, he'd acquired had more than the bloody nose. Now an eye was blackened, his lip was split, and he was fairly sure there were bruises all over his face.

When he saw the women with false legs wheeled back in without them, he let out a little gasp.

It was a dehumanizing thing to do, to take away what little mobility she had, to make her feel powerless. He wondered how long it would be before they did the same to him.

He limped over to the woman, putting his curiosity over how she looked aside (he'd never seen anyone with skin as dark as hers, even with all his traveling). She looked shaken and terrified and like she was barely hanging on.

"Hey," he said gently, sitting on the ledge near her. "Hey there, you still with us?"

Susannah wonders if she's supposed to know who this strange white boy is. He's only vaguely familiar, like someone she might have seen on the television or walking around on the street, but no one she's ever talked to before. "I-- maybe," she says. "Who are you?"

"I am very, very new as of the last arena. The name's Hiccup," he said softly.

This was so awkward. He didn't know most of the people he was in here with and was fairly sure they'd all been stuck in Panem longer than him. That made it so there's almost a terrible futility to trying to be kind to someone else.

What did it even matter in this place? He almost wondered if anyone he tried to be gentle with would just see it as some kind of naive sentimentality. What use was kindness against this?

"I just - I just wanted to see how you were holding up, that's all. We've all gotta look out for each other, right? And hope that gets us through this."

She can't help it. She laughs. Even in this terrible jail cell she laughs. "Hiccup? Oh Lord, I'm sorry." She smiles at him, or at least attempts to. It's a tired expression and fades off her face pretty quickly. "I am sorry," she repeats. "No one deserves to be a tribute. No one deserves this either."

"Nope, but here we are, so I'm glad you got a laugh out of my name. Don't worry, you're among very good company. If I had a silver piece for every time someone laughed at my name, I'd own my fleet of ships by now."

The way he smiled at her, small though the smile was (it hurt too much to smile any bigger) made it clear he was glad he'd gotten her to smile, too, even if just for a second, even if it was at his expense.

"I'm sorry, too," he said. "I saw that they, uh, they took your -"

He pause and lifted his left leg up to show off the peg leg. "Figure it's only a matter of time until they take mine. That's okay, though, if we ever get a chace to have a go at them, we can just both roll on 'em a bit. Try to make it all elbows."

He wasn't sure if the humor would hit the mark. But it was such a terrible thing, what they did to her, showing her that they had that much power over her. He wanted her to feel less alone and what they'd taken was something he understood personally and something he'd probably have taken soon, too.

"Susannah," she says. "I'm Susannah Dean."

She looks at his own peg leg, handmade and primitive compared to the fancy prosthetics she'd got in Panem. "It's all right. I went without fancy mechanical forspecial legs for five years before coming here, I can do without a little longer. Especially when my stumps stop feeling like fire." Said stumps have been bandaged, although her skirt is long enough that they're hardly visible. "They might not take yours. Yours look like you've had them for a while. Mine... I think they were tryin' to demonstrate that what Panem giveth Panem can also taketh away."

Hiccup smiled at her, pleased to find that much spirit in her despite how out of it she'd been when he'd come over.

"Yeah, well, I think we both know it's not what's missing that matters, it's what's left and what's left doesn't really have much to do with anything physical."

Hopefully, those things were something that couldn't be taken away, but he didn't know that for sure yet. He didn't know if he'd be strong enough to not let them wrest certain parts of himself away from him. This was undoubtedly going to get worse and he'd never endured anything this horrible before.

"It keeps surprising me to meet people here that are as tough as the people back home," he admitted. "S'not every day you find a little bit of Viking in people that aren't Vikings."

Anyone he'd run into on his travels that wasn't Viking tended to be the "run for the hills!" types. To be fair, he usually ran into them while on the back of his dragon, but Vikings unfamiliar with the dragon peace just ran towards him if they saw him, axes at the ready.

"What's it like where you're from?"

Edited 2014-08-04 05:14 (UTC)

It helped a little that Hiccup's silly name had helped her focus on the here and now.

"Depends on which place you mean," she says, "the place I was last before here or the place I lived most my life. They're very different." That was quite possibly an understatement. "Are you a Viking? I always pictured them, well... hairier."

"Oh, they're plenty hairy, oftentimes the women included. I'm not exactly your typical Viking. For instance, my name is Hiccup, right? A 'hiccup' is the same word we use for the runt to of the litter back home. Most of my people are almost a whole head taller than me and about five times more broad across the shoulders."

He grinned at her.

"But enough about me. How about you tell me about both places you're from? If you're comfortable with it, at least. And I can tell you anything you want to know about where I come from. Maybe if we talk enough about places that are different from this we can forget we're here just a little bit."

Her mouth twitches. "You might be right," she says. "Where I spent most my life is a place called New York City. Picture an island in the middle of a river, near to where it empties in the sea. There are people everywhere on that island and on the land on either side of it. Millions and millions of people. So many that they build tall buildings, dozens of floors tall, so that they have room to fit all the people."

She pauses then to give him time to picture this.

His eyes popped open wide.

"Millions?"

They had a word for that number only because you needed something akin to "infinity." That's how many stars there were in the sky, that's how many fish were in the ocean.

"As in more than one-thousand thousands. A thousand being a hundred hundreds. A million people. There are - there are that many people? Existing. At once. All on one island." A pause. "And in general. That many people exist in general where you're from."

He'd never been anywhere other than his island and the surrounding ones he'd been exploring. He didn't even know there were millions of people alive in his own world.

"Millions," she confirmed. "Of course, New York City was the biggest city in the entire country, one of the biggest in the whole world. And a lot of 'em weren't in Manhattan itself--Manhattan's the name of the island it's on--but livin' on either side of the river. Places like Brooklyn. That's where my late husband came from. And... if you're a viking, I'm from about a thousand years in your future, give or take a couple centuries. So there's been time for that many people to happen."

"Woooow," he breathed out, his voice hushed.

Perhaps it said something about him that even here, in this room of terror and suffering, there was wonder on his face, a strange sort of delight in the possibilities the universes offered, even if the one they were facing was a horrible one.

"So, New York City, and I'm guessing a city is a huge,huge village, with towers of stone that people live in that go up to the sky. That was one place, right, your river city? So what was the other place like?"

"Stone or brick or sometimes steel and glass," she confirms. "The other place... the one I was before I came here... it was old. That's the best word for it. Older than you can imagine, I think. Older than I can imagine. Once it had been full of people, had cities like the one I'd come from... but it had moved on from that. The whole world had moved on. We saw the ruins all over while we traveled. Oh, there were some settlements, but not very many. And the entire world was held together by invisible beams, like the spokes of a wheel. Twelve of 'em, although I don't know all their names. My friend whose world it was, he'd know it. And where all the beams met, in a field of scarlet roses... that was the tower, the Dark Tower, that my friend Roland spent his life searching for."

"Was it somewhere else in the world? Or a different world altogether, like this place?" he asked. "It sounds almost lonely."

His voice went soft and distant as he thought about it, tried to picture it. It sounded like something he would've liked to see, the field of scarlet roses, but he wouldn't have wanted to stay there.

"Beautiful, but lonely."

The Capitol had the power to open doors to other worlds. Why didn't they just want to walk through them? There was so much out there to see, enough that he could imagine a life of endless doorways and endless sights. He could live that kind of life as long as he could always take a door home. How could a people have that kind of power and waste it on horrific things like this when they could see everything there was to see?

Edited 2014-09-06 03:51 (UTC)

"A different world altogether," she says, "but not much like this place. And yes. Yes, it was. Days, weeks, maybe even months would go by before we'd see other people besides the five of us on the quest for the Tower. But we never got there. None of us did, except Roland in the very end."

Her own voice is distant as she pictures it, the five of them sitting around a campfire somewhere. Happy together. If only she could get back there to the past, get back and hold tightly.

It simultaneously sounded horrible and got his heart thudding in his chest as he thought of what it might look like to see that from above. If only this place wasn't the nightmare it was.

"What happened?" he asked, briefly breaking away from the mental picture of a land of scarlet roses passing down below. "What was in the tower?"

"I don't know," Susannah whispers. She closes her eyes, blinking away sudden tears. She wants them back. Jake, Eddie--New York's Eddie, any Eddie--and Oy. "I'd ask Roland, but..."

But she remembers how he'd been when he'd first showed up. Right after he made it to the tower, it seemed.

"I'm sorry," she says.

"Sorry for what?"

He was confused. What could she be sorry for?

"It's okay if you don't wanna talk about it or if you can't."

"That I don't have an answer." She exhales, a slow, shaky breath. "It's... it's been a long day. Night. Whichever it is by now."

"I'll let you rest then," he said quietly. He gave her a little smile. "But, uh, maybe when we get out of here, I wouldn't mind exchanging stories if you don't. I've got a few of my own. Whaddaya say?"

He had to treat it as a when, not an if.

Edited 2014-09-27 04:45 (UTC)

That wrings a tiny smile from her too. "I would like that. Thank you, Hiccup."

"No need to thank me. It's nice to talk to people here. Have something else to think about."

So far she'd been a good distraction herself and now he had something other than blood and misery and bruises to picture in his head.

A different world under a different sun, that maybe if he was very, very lucky, he might live long enough to someday see.

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Suspects' Holding Cell

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sorry for the long wait, was busy from the move, we can keep going or wrap soon, your call

i'm good either way, dude

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wanna wrap?

yes! man, it's gonna suck a little that they bonded and then she goes to d13

That's okay! He'll probably be the first one I send to D13 myself (and that's a wrap)