thecapitol | It's a symbol without meaning.

Entry tags:

It's a symbol without meaning.

Who: Sandy and you
What: She's back from the arena and doesn't like what she sees
Where: District 12 common area.
When: After the arena
Warnings: TW: Self harm, child suffering, mentions of violence and death...all pretty standard hunger games.

The District 12 suite may have had plenty of residents but without Effie it seemed cold and empty.

Sandy had awoken to a clean room as she always did. Her paintings were removed from the walls and ceilings again.

Normally she would start painting right away, to get all the demons and nightmares out of her head. But today felt different. Today she rose and shuffled over to the mirror to see who would be looking back at her.

Pale and thin, the same way she'd arrived. Brushing back her bangs she saw the brand as clear as day. The Capitol logo, the perfect circle. A mark of ownership and weakness.

She hated it. It made her stomach twist with self loathing.

She brought her hands up and scratched at it leaving deep red marks through the middle. Something about the way it burned felt good to her. It felt like defiance. She scratched again, and again till the red grew darker and her forehead felt like fire.

She needed something more. Something that would really disfigure the symbol. Before she knew what she was doing her arm lashed out knocking a gaudy looking lamp from the desk. When it shattered her desperate fingers groped through the wreckage and found a long thin piece that came to a point.

Perfect.

With trembling fingers and wide eyes she pulled back her bangs once more and attacked her forehead with the glass, slicing clean through the circle from the top left to the bottom right. Then the opposite side making a perfect X. Then down the center of the X. Then across.

By this point blood and tears were running down her face and dripping onto the vanity. She had to grope for tissues to wipe it from her face but the thin paper wasn't enough though and she grabbed for a shirt out of her wardrobe.

With her tools at hand she resumed her work while her breathing became ragged and her skin darkened with flush. A shine of sweat mingled with the tears and blood as evidence of the effort it was taking her to continue. When the pain became more then she could handle the glass fell from her fingers and she let out a pathetic whimpering cry.

Looking into the mirror she saw blood and fear. She was looking into the eyes of the monster Penny as blood gushed from a stomach wound. She'd learned how painful and deadly a stomach wound could be, but once she'd buried the knife in Penny the first time she couldn't stop herself from doing it again and again. By the time she'd stopped stabbing penny she was covered in the woman's blood.

The memory faded and Sandy realized she was looking at her own blood, not Penny's.

She's gone...she can't hurt anyone ever again.

She would take a shower, clean her fresh wounds and pull a hat on to hide it from others.

She didn't deserve their pity or worry after so many failures.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"You'd be amazed at what torture, losing an eye, getting no sleep and seeing your friends die will do to you," Mindy replied. "Even an adult would have a fucking problem with that. I'll even flip it. Say Joel came by and saw Pruna push Ellie to her death. Now, Joel's, what, in his late thirties or something, he's an adult, mature and all of that. He sees his kid go off a cliff, what do you think he's gonna do?"

She was already reapplying the alcohol carefully, looking at the cut, screwing up her face. "So...how did this happen?"

"I dunno, would Joel kill a little girl?" Sandy shot back idly. She didn't know Joel or why it would matter to him what happened to Ellie.

As for the scar she had gone through so many emotions in the last few hours that she couldn't bring herself to lie.

"I got sick of looking at it. I didn't want to be wearing their symbol like they've beaten me. So I fucked it up."

She'd already been cleaned by Pruna once but she was eyeing the rubbing alcohol warily.

"Depends on how it happened. He'd be pretty murderous about it though: Ellie is the closest thing he has to a kid. Clem is...I dunno, I like her. She's sweet and scrappy and shit like that. She gets kind of a raw deal, being turned into shit she hates, winning the Arena and not being a mentor, then thrown down a ravine or whatever."

Not that their deaths were all too nice.

"Yeah," she said, making a face. "I understand that. More than you know. Still can't sleep right these days. Like some fucked up PTSD."

Sandy sighed and closed her eyes feeling even more exhausted then when she had woken up.

"I used to complain about my home being unfair but this place takes it to a whole 'nother level."

After a pause she added, keeping her eyes closed.

"I don't care how upset you get, Pruna's a good person and the only reason she dropped Clem is because she didn't know Clementine. She's the most loyal person I've ever met."

Sandy would just ignore the secret that Pruna had attempted to kill her rather then let her get arrested again. That was still in itself an act of friendship.

"It's not Pruna's fault we're in these situations. And we don't get to go crazy or break down. The adults already don't trust us to help with anything. We're lucky any of them even train with us."

Reaching up to rub at her head she could already hear the noise starting up again. It had been quieted down by her fight with Mindy but now that they were settling down it was like there was a crowd of screaming voices in her brain all telling her to do different things. She couldn't focus on any of them for long without another one butting in.

"We gotta be better then this. All of us."

Mindy laughed. "Sandy, I hate to break it to you, but Pruna is definitely not a good person. I don't know if that's what you tell yourself, but come on. I've been watching the same tapes as you. I saw what she did to that Fenton kid and plenty of others. At the very least, Pruna is like me, and I sure as hell don't think I'm a good person. But that's love for you, I guess."

It made you blind, that was for sure. But at least if Sandy fell for anyone, it was a girl like Pruna. She was bound to keep you safe. Mindy didn't doubt the girl was loyal.

"Fuck that. The adults are not the be all and end all of this place: they're as caged as we are, they just have experience. There are teens you can train with too, you know. I'm already going to be doing that."

Don't get to crazy? That was a good one.

"Do we? Huh. I guess that's to fight against what the Arena is? Well, I'll tell you something, Sandy: you better remember this advice you gave me. If there comes a time they take Pruna away, that's what they'll be going for. The torture we got, that was the warm up. Hell, I bet they never found out who killed that bitch."

Sandy was clearly not impressed as she brought up a single unenthusiastic hand with her middle finger extended.

"Would it kill you to just once agree with me? Maybe trust my opinions?" She groaned fed up with Mindy's contrition.

"Seriously do you act like you know better then everybody or am I a special case?"

"I dunno, you're always such a bitch about it," Mindy replied, but she couldn't hide the smile on her face.

"If I can't win an argument with goddamn Harley Quinn, you can't with me, all right. But obviously you're special, or I would have kicked your ass for the punch. I made Eponine eat the dirt just for spitting at me."

"Yay." Sandy twirled her finger in the air with a lack of enthusiasm.

"I don't know why you think I'm special when all I do is point out when you make stupid choices. Am I the only person who does that? Or am I the only one who keeps forgiving you for making the stupid choices and fighting with her best friend? Because right now I'm just tired and confused."

"What? No, plenty of people tell me that shit and I don't care about that. But I think of you as a friend, and as you've noticed, those get fewer ans fewer by the day. The Capitol has a tendency of killing them on me. That girl I was trying to save, she's already gone, and it was her first Arena...and one in my district, she's gone too. She was Ellie's special friend."

Ah yes, nothing like counting down the list of people you'd lost. Sandy's grew more every month to the point that for awhile she considered just not introducing herself to new people.

"Well it's not like it's your fault they died." Sandy objected "You may be their mentor but you're not all powerful. Even the gods they brought in are just people now." She presumed Mindy was feeling guilty about all those lost tributes because...well the guilt was inevitable.

It still didn't excuse the fact that Mindy had gone after Pruna pointlessly but clearly that argument was lost.

This was pretty much becoming a normal thing for Mindy too, although it made it worse for her, knowing that she wasn't the most social person in the world.

"They were in my stead, and think about what my line of work was. If you're the mentor, the most experienced person, and you have a crew, you feel responsible anyway. So when you start seeing them dying around you, and you KNOW what you do, its not something you duck responsibility out of."

Let it go Sandy, that argument was going nowhere.

"Sounds like alot of pointless guilt to me." The younger girl commented closing her eyes and feeling exhaustion creep down her neck. She being hypocritical in a sense but Mindy wouldn't know about the real guilt she was carrying with her like a backpack full of rocks.

"If you did the best you could to protect them then that's all there was to it. You didn't cause the things that got them killed. And none of them blame you. Aren't you the one always pushing me to move on?"

"I thought about that," Mindy said, and here a little of her exhaustion showed. "I mean, its just another run in the Arena, right? They disappear, I go on, which I did, sort of, and eventually got picked off just like one of them there. It didn't feel pointless, though. If they were, say, sidekicks running with me, I'd feel a little responsible too. I kinda feel like that until I train 'em myself. That way, if they die, its on them."

It was Chibi Usa's that hurt the most, of course, but that was better left unsaid.

"Yeah," she said, "and I did. Granted, even I know when too much shit drags you down. I wasn't in the best state, after everything. Glad to know that I can last as long as I did."

"Yeah obviously you haven't gotten lazy or let your skills drop." Sandy rolled her eyes with her head turned to the ceiling so Mindy wouldn't see.

"That's a pain in the ass too having to rebuild my muscle every time I die. It feels like all this work we're doing is pointless if we can't even change anything big."

Except she had changed something big. Something that still had the Capitol pouting apparently if the brand on her forehead was any indication. They could have taken it off her but they'd opted to leave it on so clearly they were still mad.

Closing her eyes Sandy decided she wasn't ready to leave her room yet after all. If she fell asleep Mindy would understand.

Mindy looked at Sandy, hard, a moment. "I spend every day I can training. I bust my ass at it every time, and if I lose, I just go back and train harder, because that was never an option home. If you lose, you die, final death and everything. With this, its like, maybe you won't die for real, but maybe they don't bring you back. So you have to think 'well, good shit, means I don't have to see them suffering every time.' Another part of you though, you think you're slipping."

Whatever tragedy Sandy was going through(a lot, of course), Mindy held herself to higher standards, and when she failed she was hard on herself.

"We don't even age, I bet. Probably an offset to bringing us back to life. It messes with your psyche that way. Helps to keep us in line too."

She sighed. "I hate feeling depressed and not having an outlet for it, like breaking shit."

"Plenty of shit to break in the training hall." Sandy pointed out, not particularly ruffled by Mindy's views on life, death and training. Yet another miscommunication that would go uncorrected.

"It's not as much fun as breaking something outside the training area but it might do for now." Everyone had their coping methods she supposed. She tried the breaking stuff method but it left her feeling empty inside.

"There's not enough things I can break, and they'd just stop me anyway." Seriously, those bastards stopped Mindy from doing any REAL damage, and that was really starting to piss her off. Maybe if there was an undercover fight club, SOMETHING that at least killed some of the aggression, she wouldn't have to keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. That was pretty much all this damn place did for you anyway.

"BUT," she said, looking casual, "I might also not just be content with resting. Lines in the sand are already there, its just a matter of choosing where to go next. If I didn't, I'd be pretty fucking uninteresting, wouldn't I?"

"You're not the one who has to worry about how interesting you are." Sandy countered in a grumble. "I'm the one who stops getting brought back to life if I get boring. You're the one who'll get spirited away in the night or thrown back into the arena if you act up too much."

The way she saw it, being a mentor was only marginally safer because most mentors could simply lay low and wouldn't have to worry about any more horrible deaths.

"Don't do anything I would do." She finished seeing as between the two of them somehow Sandy had become the more reckless of them.

"I don't think you were ever boring," Mindy said, looking amused. "You've stuck around this long, haven't you? By now you're probably a crowd favorite, and considering what you've done, I'd say you're at least as vigilant as any mentor. Better to have that fire than be done with the Arena and be content."

Which, obviously, Mindy wasn't. She'd done her best to play the game, so to speak, on mentoring and keeping her head down, and they'd found a way to get to her anyway. So at this point, appearing to keep her nose clean was important.

"There's a lot I would do," Mindy said, grinning, "that you're starting to do yourself. It's just starting to piss me off you beat me to it!"

That was enough to get Sandy to open an eye and peer confused at Mindy through her eyelashes.

"What do you mean? What am I doing that you can't do?"

"They're watching ME, for one thing, more closely since I'm a mentor. If I were to have conflicting interests, I doubt they'd want me mentoring people in the district. Eva's 'betrayal' is likely to put Harley and I both on a 'to be watched' list. You can at least fly under the radar."

If Mindy had been smart, she knew, she wouldn't have gone to Eva's funeral, she would have immediately shunned what she'd done and had no part. That, though, was not something she'd be willing to do.

She had a point and Sandy nodded thoughtfully.

"Yeah I guess the cameras never turn off. You just don't have to worry as much about being boring. Alot of Mentors just sort of fade away after awhile because they can't do much else."

She'd seen it happen before and she couldn't imagine Mindy would ever fade away, but the option was there.

"I'm not into fading away even if that's a good idea," Mindy said. "I couldn't even if I wanted to anyway: its not like having a co-mentor like Harley is going to calm things down. That, and there are more people coming into our district. Spots...to be filled."

She looked a little pained at this: after all, one of her favorite people were gone from her district now.

"That's a whole lot of extra work on your plate." Sandy observed sounding at least respectful that Mindy was helping out where she could.

"Do they yell at you as much as I do?" Sandy couldn't imagine having Mindy as a mentor with how often they clashed on what was right and wrong.

"I'm glad for it," Mindy admitted "To be honest, I'd rather the thrill of the Arena than being that person just staring at you guys from the sidelines, like some coach or whatever. I can do it, of course, but its still fucked up."

She grinned. "When they can, sure. I am a trouble maker, after all. I piss them off when I get into all of these fights. They think I'm trouble. You can tell how broken up I feel about that."

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