thecapitol | Mouths are dry, hands are tied.

Entry tags:

Mouths are dry, hands are tied.

WHO| Venus, Wyatt, and later Max
WHAT| Jailbreak fail.
WHERE| Capitol Jailhouse
WHEN| During the appropriate jailbreak time.
Warnings/Notes| Torture and talk of such, including branding. Suicidal thoughts and talk of such. Swearing. Possible (likely) blood and gore. Basically... terrible things, okay?

Wyatt had hoped. He had dreamed.

Of course he had, and of course he had planned for success. He'd carefully packed away the few belongings he thought they would miss (his tokens, Max's little figures...), and took them to the Speakeasy. Asking them to hold them until he returned.

When his communicator had beeped, the now familiar star bursting onto the screen, he'd left Ferox with an Avox, telling him to take the cat for a walk that night, near the Speakeasy.

He'd planned. He'd hoped. He'd dreamed.

But, truthfully, he'd never really expected to succeed. Had accepted, that they likely wouldn't - not just the three of them (himself, Venus, and Max) - where a whole district had failed.

So when started to come down around them: the alarm screaming, the light blotting everything in white, he couldn't say he was unprepared. He couldn't say he was hoping to turn it around.

He just wanted, then, to give them reason enough to take him where Max was.

To maybe, if he was lucky, give Venus opportunity enough to run.

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She jerks at the sound, almost as if she expects it to come with another blow, but she's aware enough that it's him that she rouses. After a moment she rolls and pushes herself along the floor with her hands tied.

"Wyatt," she whimpers, crawling and dragging herself over to the forcefield. She can see, barely. Her vision's still swimming from pain, white hot spots flashing across her view. She can make out Wyatt's figure more than his face.

Shame. She wants to make out his face. She wants to see kindness, sympathy, care. Someone who loves her. She melts back to the floor, the effort of moving three feet having completely exhausted her. Her knees tuck slightly, body arching around herself in a feeble attempt to stave off pain.

"Is it bad?"

He looked across her, head dropping to the floor. His cheek was torn, grit from the floor pebbled across his skin. His lip was swollen, his face was darkening, bruises blooming.

"We're alive," he murmured. "An' so is Max."

And that was something, wasn't it? That's what he'd come for. Just to be with Max, however long they had left.

"...I'm sorry. I shouldn't'a asked ya to help me."

He hadn't asked, she remembers. She volunteered. That makes it worse, almost, knowing that she can't blame him and use her anger to foist some of the pain onto someone else. "I'd have come anyway."

Snot drips from her nose onto the hell of her upper lip. She snorts and blows ugly bloody bubbles, unfiltered for an audience. And she sobs and contorts her face as if there were some way to force the pain out like a splinter.

"Oh my God, Wyatt, it hurts, I never felt hurt like this..."

What could he say? They'd been caught, they'd been beaten, and before the day was out, they'd both be wearing those traitors' brands he'd once joked about. And then they'd have more beatings, more taunting, more pain to forward too.

There was nothing he could do. No comfort he could offer.

He couldn't even touch her, with the force-field humming between them like a wall of angry bees.

"...It's hurt," he rumbled lowly, hands flexing uselessly - helplessly - under his cuffs. "A wound like any other. It's bad now, but hurts heal. They stitch an' they mend. ...You an' me, we've been through worse."

It sounded lame, even to himself, laying there on the cell floor, but at least it was true. They knew true pain, they two of them. Those hurts beneath the skin.

Heartbreak and loss, uncertainty and guilt.

She clenches her eyes shut and doesn't respond for a bit. Her stomach and chest heave for breath.

They've failed. All they've done, if anything, is make things worse for Max. All her life has been spent running towards something, accomplishing nothing. She could die here for no reason other than to galvanize Wyatt and Max's tears. It would be the greatest failure, to die mourned and a complete waste of potential.

She can think of nothing but the mistakes she's made and the people she's killed and the net loss that was her time in this life.

She says nothing more to Wyatt now, even though she should try to comfort him and prepare him for his own brand. She can't. She cries and she slips in and out of consciousness and she wishes the burden of her well- being was removed from his shoulders instead.

Maximus wasn't even looking where he was going as he we was led to the cell. He was a shadow of himself - he hadn't eaten since he'd been taken in, convinced that poison could be in any swallow, and they hadn't exactly convinced him otherwise.

Maximus had known torture, before this. He'd met death and walked with him, and wasn't surprised to meet him again.

The pain was nothing to the words. They told him Wyatt was dead. Venus. Everyone that he cared about. They described their deaths - his fault, of course, for a murder he didn't commit but was quickly wishing that he had.

The fight was totally worn out of him - exhausted and hungry - as they shoved him into the cell.

They didn't bother to tell him about the forcefields before he raised his eyes, and met his ghosts. His heart dropped through his stomach and he surged forward immediately, a word on his lips that was lost in a roar of pain as he ran straight into the force field.

It was a relief and a torment all at once to see him. To know he was alive, but to be able to see the damage done while Wyatt had been outside, sitting on his hands. Unable to help.

He struggled on the floor, fighting to turn himself toward the man.

"Max--!"

His call was lost under the sharp zap of the forcefield -- cut off by the sharp jerk of the Peacekeepers hands, dragging him back.

Max's roar is enough to rouse Venus from the depths of her ugly half-sleep, the painful bed inside her skull that she's rest her consciousness on. Her eyes are closed and she sees nothing but the colors of pain like green and yellow lights across the landscape of her body. It's an aurora borealis of agony.

And then she's sitting up so fast that her brain seems to lose its footing inside her head. Her vision tilts, her balance tilts further, and she nearly topples forward. It takes her a minute to see that Max has hit the shock field, that Wyatt's being pulled back. She feels bile at the back of her throat as she hears the sizzle of steam on the brand, knowing what's coming for Wyatt next. The same gruesome mauling as her own face recently received.

"Don't touch the field! Max, we're okay!"

Edited 2014-08-18 01:09 (UTC)

The voices seem enough to give him pause - as if he thought all ghosts silent - but he doesn't have his own, not yet. His throat is parched, his lips cracked, and he seems more confused and lost than anything else - the grief had long since overwhelmed him.

He obeyed, however, his body wracked with pain after he had fallen to the floor, but he stayed there, looking dully at them both.

A second later, however, his sight caught up to his brain, Wyatt being held back by the peacekeeper, the vision of Venus' face -

Not dead. Not dead, but mutilated. The pain clicked off, the rage clicking in instead, almost blinding him with hatred. He gave another roar, this one not of pain but of pure rage, and hit the shock field again, shoulder first, the pain immense as it sent him hard back again to the floor.

Wyatt knew what was coming even before he saw the brand, glowing a hateful red, appear in the corner of his vision. His mind called up the still fresh memory of Venus' burning flesh, the flash and hiss....

He knew too that there was nothing he could do to stop it. Even if he could fight, it would only be worse in the end.

But there was one thing he could do.

Peeling his eyes from the brand, he found Max, just as the Roman hit the forcefield again.

"Max!" he cried, a husky bark of a name as a Peacekeeper wrenched his head to the side (looking for the best angle, wanting the show to be good). "Max, don't. It's alright-- I'll be alright. Don't--"

He'd had the chant going, in the back of his head. Telling himself that it would hurt, but he would live. He just had to hold, he just had to accept the pain for what it was-- but there was no preparing for it.

The searing metal came down on his skin and all his intention went out the window.

He jerked and struggled, an instinctive bid to escape, and then came the sound. More animal than human. A cry of torment, a scream of pain.

There's nothing she can do. She wonders if she would have had the courage to do something if she could get past the force field, but then Wyatt's screaming and she knows that she wouldn't need courage to try to hurt these people. Love supplies rage and bravery enough to make up for any moral failing; love cannot abide the smell of burning flesh, the cries of rage from one of her dearest friends and pain from another.

"Max, stop!" Her voice is hoarse and raw from the crying she's done. "Stop! You'll make it worse! Wyatt!"

She struggles to her feet, finding no solace in being able to see from above the floor. She still can't pass the field.

"Wyatt, the pain fades! It's temporary!"

It's a lie, but one she has to tell.

He hadn't cried. Even when the torture was at its worst, even when they'd described Wyatt's burned and broken corpse, every scrap of burnt and twisted flesh left of Venus. He'd had no tears, then.

But the smell--

The smell.

The voices could have been a thousand miles away, for all they mattered. The smell of burning flesh filled his nostrils, made them flare, caught in his throat and made him choke. The tears pulled at his eyes before he even recognized they were there - and he didn't try to stop them once they were.

He let out another ravaged roar, a symphony of pain and grief and flame, and he could see them burning - Wyatt, Venus, his Wife, his Son - wait, his husband, his daughter? He wasn't thinking straight, his entire body shaking with pain because he'd thrown himself against the force field again - and again - before his body crumpled and he knelt, sobbing, on the floor. His strength was gone, his will was gone, and he was certain that in a few seconds he would be watching the only things he cared about in the world taken from him, too.

Edited 2014-08-18 03:23 (UTC)

He heard their voices - the crack of the forcefield again and again - as if from a great distance. A canyon between them right there in the tiny cell. He could hear the rage and the despair and the pain, theirs and his, but it wasn't what stopped him.

He would wish later that he could say it was. That he was brave enough, strong enough to be able to save them his pain... but in the end, he stopped simply because the pain did.

The brand peeled away, pulling pieces of his burned, blacked skin with it and the pain melted into a throb of heat. The damage so much, he couldn't even feel it anymore.

Voice falling away to the rough pant of his breath, he was shoved roughly back down to cold floor of the cell. The weight of a Peacekeeper's boot a distant pressure in the small of his back as his heart beat a wild rhythm against the underside of his ribs.

His eyes sliding closed just as someone spat at him.

Edited 2014-08-18 10:32 (UTC)

Venus' face crumples further into tears, the folds of her face accentuating and highlighting the ripped and melted flesh across her cheek and jaw. She stays standing but she sways. Behind her back, her hands clench into fists, and when she stretches her fingers they're shaking.

"You got all that paperwork signed?" the Peacekeeper over Wyatt asks, and his comrades nod and affirm until the sound of the alarm going off again cuts them short. The boot leaves Wyatt's back. "Think about what you done while we deal with this."

They leave and there's silence, marred only by sobbing, by ragged breathing. Venus kneels again, next to the forcefield, as close as she dares.

"Max. Max, we're alive, we're..." Broken but alive. "We're alive."

The words didn't break through immediately, through the wracking sobs - of a hurt deeper than was visible. He lowered his forehead to the ground - cold concrete grounding him, somehow, the tears and snot mixing to pool just below his nose as he drew in shaking breaths. But slowly he came to - Venus's words getting through to him, finally. They were alone. And they were alive.

He raised his head, his attention immediately snapping to the Wyatt's form on the floor, and he reached out again, his fingers immediately snapping back as they met the forcefield.

"They told me you were dead--" He said, his voice rough, fingers curled, hovering next to the invisible field.

At first, all he could do was lay there, forcing himself to breath. To swallow down the smell of cooked meat, to ignore the strange humming of his own flesh, to set aside the sharp jolt of knowing what they'd just done to him -- what he would see when, if, he saw himself again.

But then he heard Venus, and then Max.

Alive.

And for whatever else, he'd gotten what he wanted. (They were going to take them both, one way or the other.)

"...I told ya..." he coughed, throat raw and aching, and turned slowly to look at Max, the wound black and terrible on his face. His eyes moved over his partner's face, heart twisting at the bruises, at the gauntness. Something cold and hard settling in his gut at the healing brand on Max's face.

He couldn't reach back, his hands still bound, but his fingers twitched and curled, wishing he could.

"...Ya weren't gunna get rid'a me easy."

"Jesus, you guys. Get a room," she interjects, then laughs, a hoarse, gurgling sound. She sits back on her haunches and starts to examine the injuries that have been done to her. Nothing worse than the things she's pushed through in the Arena, the brand aside.

The difference this time is what was at stake. They went in half-cocked and they lost the chance to get Max out for good. That they're together now is a small comfort given what awaits them.

"Pretty sure if you were going to kill Penny, you wouldn't have done it in the privacy of her own home." She imagines Max carrying Penny's decapitated head through the streets of the Capitol.

The rage, bubbling and broiling within him, had not yet died - and at the sight of Wyatt's face is flowed right threw him again, hot and painful and aching. (Vengeance, his soul cried, not for the first time.)

"If I had killed her, everyone would know." He said bluntly, the rage the last thing really left living in him - the rest so beaten down and bent that it wasn't there. The strength, the honour, gone. Even the love was twisted with grief.

But rage? Rage was his consistent companion.

"I would have hardly ended with her head."

Wyatt hadn't given any more thought to Max's possible guilt in the passing days than he had when he'd first learned of the accusation. It simply didn't matter then, and it still didn't matter now.

He just looked between Venus and Max, and gave a small nod of agreement, good cheek rubbing the floor.

"I ain't a marshal anymore, but I like to think I'd have noticed somethin' when ya got back," he muttered wryly. He shifted carefully, turning onto a hip and sat up slowly. "...We came for ya, didn't quite go to plan."

He looked across at Venus, apology heavy in his eyes.

"I'm pretty sure no jury of his peers would have convicted him." She meets Wyatt's eyes with a stern look of her own, one that accepts no pity, that gives and expects no quarter. "It was a shitty plan, and at least half of the fault lies on me."

The handcuffs beep, and for a moment Venus is convinced they're going to explode- but then the high-tech gadgets release automatically, letting free her hands. Max's and Wyatt's soon follow.

"Little mercy, there."

"I did nothing," He said heavily again, wanting so badly to reach for Wyatt that it was taking all his strength to keep back - the lesson of the force fields finally seeming to have gotten through his thick skull. He rubbed his wrists slowly.

"I... I am only glad that the two of you still live," He said, gravel in his throat. "They have been telling me of your executions for..." He trailed off. He had been about to say 'days', but realised he had absolutely no idea how long he'd been in there.

Wyatt's handcuffs clattered to the floor, but for a long moment his hands lingered, coming back around slowly as his eyes moved over the near invisible wall between himself and Max. Finally, he seemed to accept there was nothing he could do and they settled - one next to Max's, just on the other side of the forcefield.

"I'd have come sooner," he said lowly. "But they wouldn't tell us nothin'. Not where ya were, if they were gunna let'cha go, not even if ya were still alive."

Venus decides it's better not to reveal where they got the information. Anything they say could have consequences for someone else, even if the Capitol already knows.

Her wrists are bloody from the cuffs, from struggling against them. She has red bracelets of weeping lacerations. She pulls up her shirt slightly and notes the broken skin where she was kicked particularly hard in the stomach.

She's sure it won't be the last time. There'll be more soon.

"They can't kill me. I'm too pretty." She means it as a joke but her laughter turns into an earnest sob at the end, at realizing how false that is now that they've mauled her so.

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Mouths are dry, hands are tied.

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