thecapitol | 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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"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.

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

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[cw: sexual abuse]

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