thecapitol | In Every Atom, Broken, Is a Name [OPEN]

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In Every Atom, Broken, Is a Name [OPEN]

WHO| Venus Dee Milo and open
WHAT| Venus shows people where the blind spots are.
WHERE| The corner of Castor and Juvenal.
WHEN| After Lonestar's post.
WARNINGS| Likely some mentions of torture and suicide.

Venus does the perfect approximation of just lounging at a bus stop, playing on her network device and checking her receipt for all the things she bought at the jewelry store. Capitol citizens passing by pay her no mind, except to sneer at the brand across her cheek. She knows she should be wearing it like a badge, but no amount of conviction seems able to stop her wincing every time that look of disgust crosses someone's face.

She feels strangely detached, as if she's spent all of her energy either in berating herself for her laundry list of recent mistakes or in acting like they haven't brought her down. She knows that there's chaos around her, and yet she feels like the shrapnel and debris in the air misses her, that the wind doesn't touch her. She knows that she should feel the hum in the earth as the water behind the dam reaches a breaking point, and yet there's nothing. Nothing but the sun beating on her face, her scarred, ugly face.

She's accomplished nothing here. Even Wyatt and Maximus' safety was incidental to anything she did. She has a fistful of locations where someone, anyone might go forth and make fire with a spark that she's to dim to light.

She sits there, browsing some tabloid on her device, and she waits.

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"It's all that's left of her." Eponine looks at the page blankly. Tears still roll down her cheeks and she sobs. It seems ridiculous, what Venus and Eva are telling her to do, though in her heart of hearts , she can understand it. She would be in trouble again if the Capitol found it .

"Is it not that we can't hide it here ?" Eponine asks. She reaches for Venus' hand, clutching it between both of hers. "what should I do if I forgot her words? God, I miss my mama. Do you not miss people? What should you do?"

"People come in and out of this bathroom all the time. It'll be found." She shakes her head and squeezes Eponine's hand. "I'll memorize it too. I'm good at that, I used to do some acting, you can ask me if you ever forget it..."

She doesn't know if she can hold to that promise, but it's something. Venus sighs and looks at the page, tracing the letters into her inner voice.

"I miss my mom, too."

Eponine doesn't look at Venus. Not out of rudeness or sadness or anything else except that she knows in her heart that Venus is right. She can't save Eva's writing but she can save Eva's words.

It's the first time she's ever had to memorise anything properly, but Eponine's a clever girl and she is soon able to recite the short note. Only then, when she's certain she knows it by heart, she looks to Venus.

"Was your mama here as well? Have they killed her?" She shakes her head. "You know, I am sick of what these people do. It is not even an arena. That's bad. It's just them always taking the people you love and hurting them or killing them, and leaving you alone to know it is your fault. That is why I am glad so many people hate me. Nobody shall make me feel so again. Now, they can't. There is nobody left at all."

"I killed my mother. It was- it was an accident." Venus never fully sounds like she believes that, and the footage the Capitol showed her in the past has only muddied this swampy terrain in her mind more. This is the delta in which her memory and her self-esteem mingle, in which water and silt are indistinguishable.

When Eponine talks, all Venus can hear is a younger version of herself saying the same thing. Never out loud, but believing that isolation kept her cocooned and safe from loss, from rejection, from grief, from everything that human entanglement required.

"It's not worth it, Eponine. To shut yourself out like that."

"Killed?" That captures Eponine's attention. And Venus' words could be Eponine's own. That's what gets her. They could be her own.

"How? I mean, it is so if you do not wish. It is a horrid feeling, innit? To know you did it. I killed my Pa as well. That were an accident as well. Only I could't stand for him hitting me again and he were gonna kill me, so I just... well, I thought it'd stop him."

It's nice, in a way, to share that with someone. It's sort of comforting. It's nice to find someone so similar to herself, and yet someone so good. Someone who has obviously taken all of this hurt which Eponine uses to harm herself over and over again to a good place and made it into something productive and good and... and it was just good for Eponine to realise she had a role model in Venus.

And perhaps a less destructive one than Eva.

"I don't know though. I don't know what else to do. I am too scared that I will hurt people all the time. Perhaps I am such a person that needs to just be kept alone."

"It was an accident. I- it's complicated. I was very sick when I was young. I got angry and I didn't realize at the time what I could do-" But she doesn't know if she would have stopped if she had. That's the part she'll never be able to quite recollect - if she absolves herself, she's convinced it's a lie. If she condemns herself, she wonders if it's her self-loathing talking. "I know all about hurting people without meaning to."

She would stop talking about it entirely, but she doesn't know that she can just brush off Eponine like that, a younger woman who's so much more recently lost her mother.

She rubs Eponine's boney shoulder. "You know, I grew up on the streets too."

Edited 2014-11-26 23:53 (UTC)

"Yeah?" There's hope in Eponine's eyes when she looks back up from the letter at Venus. It's such a horrible fate to wish on anybody and yet... yet it is so nice to know that she is not so alone.
"And you're so good. Even if... well, people say it is not my fault for murder, and I can say to you it is definitely not so, but if you are as me, then it won't make a jot of difference what I say, no? It's still there in your belly, innit? All the bad things... because you always think it is your fault and I do not know how such a feeling ever truly goes. But..." She leans her head on Venus' side, stroking her fingers over her brand.

"We have to be proud too, yes? I think the Capitol were so mistaken to give me a brand like this. I think they thought it would upset me, but no. I am proud to say that I hate these people. I am proud they hate me."

"I'm not good, Eponine. I've killed more people in the Arena than anyone left here. And that was and is my fault. I choose to do that."

Venus can't help but cringe when Eponine touches her brand. It has nothing to do with Eponine's calloused fingers, but with the memories of the jail she was tortured in, of picking at the scabs on her brutalized face and making it scar all the worse.

"You're a braver person than me. I think they might've burned out my soul when they scarred my face." And how she hates herself for that, for mourning her beauty when so many of the people she has loved are dead or missing. For considering her looks an integral part of her identity so much that she didn't realize how easy she was to break with their destruction.

"Not brave. Just... you lost beauty. Me? I didn't have none to lose so it don't matter. Maybe you have never been hated before. I don't know, but for me, always do people hate my kind. So it don't bother me, people staring. Let 'em, and I say I do not care."

The only benefit of being so completely broken and battered as Eponine is, is that there is nothing left to hurt. No pride, no sense of worth, no happiness to destroy. And so Eponine has taken that last bad experience and made it positive, mostly because of Eva. Mostly because it reminds her that she can be happy and loved and that she would do anything for the people she loves, even in such a world. It makes her think that there is something at least a little bit good inside her.

"I don't believe you're bad, Venus. I promise that. To put up with me for a start - most people hate me, you know? And we have all killed a lot. It is what they make us do... but you shall never believe me for that either, I know."

"Oh, believe me, hon, I been hated." What better word is there for a child who killed her family, who eventually was cast out with nowhere to go? For the foster kid too old and too mutant to be worth the meager money the government shoveled in her wake? "My beauty's all I had, I think sometimes."

She doesn't know how to tell Eponine that it's what she did even before Panem made her do it. But she squeezes Eponine's hand. And she brings out the makeup tools. Something to explain how long they're taking in here, and to cover the flush of the cheeks Eponine has cried onto.

"I should be more like you, I think. I haven't seen anyone treat the brand like- maybe I should start treating it like you treat yours."

"You know? Even if they make it go away one day, if my stylist makes them let it go when I die, I shall have it put right back on, and I shall have it so until they leave me alone." Eponine's quite definite about that. She wants to keep her brand, as mad as it sounds.

"Don't you think if you decide to like it, it makes their power a little bit less. It is like spitting at their feet or swearing or some'at. Don't you think, Venus? I don't have no other way to say nothing. I am so scared if I don't do as I am told to and say as they want me to, they will hurt more of my friends. But this - they did it to me, but you know, I am to be as Eva said, and brave. I shan't be kicked about so no more."

Venus wishes she could have that bravery; the idea of the brand lasting her until the end of her life is knit around her bones in a vice, making her wither from the middle. She thought it better to be dead than maimed as she was when she woke up from the last Arena and caught her horrifying visage in a mirror.

"I think you're right. I think it just- it takes more backbone than I got. Especially these days." Maybe if she were still warm and happy as she was when she had her array of friends around her, her lover and her mentors and her surrogate younger siblings - but now she is in ruins and her life is strewn not with corpses, but with absences. "I see what it was Eva loved about you."

It's the same spiteful fire in Eponine's face that she saw in Eva's broadcast.

"My stupidity?" Eponine laughs. "She called it brave too, but not really. It's stupid because so many have died because of me. So you see why I say what the Capitol wants? All the broadcasts and all? I don't mean it, but I must say it and do it so people do not die no more. And everybody hates me for it." She sighs theatricality. She's given up on anybody much liking her, and as much as she knows it's her own fault, she can see as well that any attempt to make amends will be scuppered by her pretence of grudging loyalty to the Capitol.

"You know, one day, I shall have President Snow's head in my hand, and an axe in the other, and his head shan't be attached to his body. I promise you that." And she means every word.

"I understand why you do it. You understand why I kill in the Arena, right?" She rubs Eponine's shoulders, then starts to apply the makeup. As always, the bright colors only seem to make the brand more lurid. "And I don't hate you. I don't know if I can hate anyone anymore."

She tried to stab Cecil to death in the Arena. She made him the locus of her hate and then she let him go.

She wonders if it's a good thing to have such a fire in her extinguished.

"If anyone is allowed to do it, it should be you, I think." She's lost so much.

"Of course I understand. It don't make you a bad person though." Eponine holds still whilst the makeup is applied.

"You reckon? I don't think anyone will let me do that. But I think I should. Besides perhaps Wyatt, I think I have been stuck here longer than anybody else. But... well, nobody likes me, do they? They'll choose someone everybody likes, like stupid Enjolras or Maximus or someone to do it."

"Enjolras and Maximus are dead," Venus says, and those five words twist inside her gut like a knife. She feels as if her very soul has been flayed open. She aches. She can't stop the tears from rounding her eyes like hungry wolves.

But they don't fall. She blinks them away and continues doing Eponine's lips, putting a blushing pink over chips and scabs. She's really a beautiful girl, under it all.

"I'll vouch for you to do it."

"Is that true? I thought..." Eponine can't help grinning, as she says, "Good!" But she reels herself in as she realises that Venus definitely isn't anywhere near as happy as she is about their deaths.

"Oh... oh, you and Enjolras. You were his woman, yes? Oh, Venus, I am sorry. I don't mean offence to you. Just that Enjolras and I are not liked to each other."

"Yeah, I...I was. For a little while." They split before Enjolras died. It's probably a mercy that they did. She doesn't feel wed to a ghost. She swallows and puts a little bit of concealer - highlighter on her, but it works well enough on Eponine - on a scab on Eponine's chin. "And there were a lot of people who didn't like him, so..."

His death left a hole inside her that sits like a honeycomb cavity next to the ones for her family, for her parents and her grandparents and her little brothers. For Maximus and Wyatt.

She takes Eponine by the shoulders and turns her around to look in the mirror.

"There. Like you've never cried at all."

"I wish it were so easy to wipe away the feeling as the look, you know? In Paris, where I were from, it didn't matter at all whether you looked to cry or no. You looked how you felt - and I fear I am still not so good at not looking how I feel. Even with the men I were sent to and that - well, they didn't care about the faces I pulled if I did as I were told. But here, yes." Eponine shrugs. To her, it seems really silly that they all have to hide their emotions all of the time, but she's at last starting to see the sense of it.

"Would you not like to do this as a job? You have a good thing - you could be a Stylist, Venus. You could perhaps save yourself from an arena without dying. I would rather have a stylist like you than those awful Capitol ones who just change me as they like."

"Well, wiping away the look is the first step on obliterating the feeling." She squeezes Eponine's shoulders. "You know, you're not- I wasn't ever like, used like that as an adult, but..."

Maybe it worked in the reverse for Venus. She got good at hiding her feelings because she so deeply repressed things, nightmares only brought to life again by the Capitiol.

"You're not the only one."

She lets Eponine go, then tries to cheer things up. "I'm not trying to get out of the Arenas, anyway. The audience would miss me."

"I know." Eponine knows that she's not the only girl to be used in such a way. Weren't there dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of girls like her in Paris? And Perhaps more and more in England and America? And now here as well... nothing changes. And perhaps, perhaps Venus is just like her?

"Eva was a whore." Eponine states. It makes her feel better, not in a malicious way, but just knowing that someone so strong and so brave as Eva was the same as her made Eponine feel strong as well.

She grins. "I cannot believe you care what these bastards think of you. I don't care if they hate me. I want them to hate me. I should not care to be liked by such miserable people who enjoy to see so many murdered and hurt. Pah." She spits at the floor, contemptuous of the Capitol.

Having got that out of her system, she plasters a fake smile on her face. "Here. This is what I shall do."

"You're not the only one here, I mean."

And that's all she can bring herself to say, as if saying the name of the crime committed against her in childhood itself is beyond her capacity. So she fluffs Eponine's stringy hair a little and looks at the face in the mirror.

"I care what they think of me because that's what makes me powerful." She uses the toe of her platform shoe to smear Eponine's saliva into the tile, cosigning the statement. "And that's why we got to keep smiling."

"You as well?" Eponine reaches for Venus' hand. It is a hard thing to admit to, prostitution. It is a dirty, embarrassing thing, that makes Eponine feel like scum when she thinks about it properly. Lower than scum, really. And for someone nice like Venus, who had everything going to her, it must be absolutely devastating. At least Eponine had no prospects, nothing to lose when it had happened the first time. At least she was used to it by the time it got here. But it is nice to have that bond, to share the strength that Eponine has eventually learned to draw from it.

"Yeah, well, I don't have power, smile or frown. I am sick of being bottom of the pile, no matter what I do. I have no supporters, only the tight men who don't never give me nothing. I have no magic. I have no schooling. I don't even have good looks, or nobody to love me. Not so many like me, and I am watched constantly. I am so fed up. So perhaps for you, it matters. But for me, I am beyond caring what they think. I want this place to hurry up and change for the better, or hurry up and let me die. This is not living. Venus, I just want to be free."

"Not prostitution, but- yeah." She can't say more. She hasn't claimed it and welded it to her bones like Eponine has. She opens the beast's mouth now and then closes it, shoves the monster back into the closet where it belongs.

She looks at Eponine's face in the mirror. "Think Eva'd be pretty pissed if you went and died on her. Her letters looks a bit like she was banking on your future. Okay, come on. They're going to get suspicious."

She pats Eponine's shoulder and opens the door to the restroom, back to the hall. Back to the constant, oppressive surveillance.

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