thecapitol | open!

Who| Carlos and anyone
What| He's been a sad scientist lately, and a reclusive scientist, and an obsessive scientist. He is a scientist who is bad at remembering that he has friends, and he can do things with friends, and that the world does not revolve around memorizing a blueprint.
Where| The coffee place on the ground floor of the Tribute Center.
When| Late this week/possibly this weekend, any time you feel like finding him
Warnings/Notes| None so far.

I almost have it. I almost have it. Just a few more days, and I'll be able to recreate the blueprint completely accurately.

Carlos can't make an actual recording of his progress, since the Capitol would both confiscate his recording device and record him making the recording itself, but that doesn't mean he can't pretend to take voice notes in his head.

Steve, Tony, and Bruce have been a huge help. Steve especially. Between the three of us, I'm sure we can reverse-engineer this machine.

He sits at a small table, hair artistically mussed and one shoe half-untied, and sips a cup of coffee. The steam makes his glasses fog up, but he only seems to notice so much. That is, he is repeating a cycle of actions: he takes a sip, his glasses fog up. He wipes the lenses with the sleeve of his lab coat, and sips again. He does not seem to get agitated, nor does he seem to realize that he could avoid this by removing his glasses. He just repeats the motions again and again, too lost in thought to take any further action.

I'll be ready when I go to District 13. If I go to District 13.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I thought you'd gone home, Sir." Eponine, sweaty faced and a little smelly, paused next to Carlos. For once in her life, she had been training.

"I have not seen you in ages. I am glad you are still here."

Oh, it's her! Carlos hasn't seen her around in a while, either.

"Hi, Eponine," he says, letting his mug of coffee rest on the table as his glasses un-fog. "Yeah, I'm still here." He gives her a half-hearted smile. "What do you know?"

The attempt at cheer is half-hearted.

"At least it's better than being dead."

"I am glad, really." She slips into the seat opposite him. "I know that is selfish of me, but... it is nice to have such a handsome face to see." She laughs - but she's not joking either. Just seeing nice men makes Eponine a little bit happy.
"What have you been doing, Sir?"

"Uhhh..." With any luck, the Capitolites monitoring the cameras will take Carlos's awkward moment of hesitation as embarrassment about being called handsome and not a sudden panic to find an explanation he could give Eponine that is not trying to reconstruct the device that brought us here. "...I've been doing science, Eponine. Of course I've been doing science. I'm a scientist."

"I know you are." Eponine smiles warmly. "You cured my tuberculosis, yes? Have you been doing that? Curing sickness? You know, you must be so careful. I do not want you to die."

It's a thinly veiled warning, either, but definitely not something she could be pulled up about, and Eponine is quite proud of herself for thinking of it.

He breathes out a sigh.

"No," Carlos admits with genuine sadness. "They haven't let me do any science since the outbreaks. They arrested me instead." His tone is longsuffering but completely casual; he might as well have been talking about being passed up for promotion.

It's kind that she's concerned about him, though. It was a well-delivered warning; it's good to see Eponine navigating the dangerous waters of a heavily surveilled totalitarian dictatorship.

"Yeah, me also, over breaking Mama out. And they have locked me in my room every night since she... Well." Eponine doesn 't want to dwell on it. Its too sad.

Her fingers find the delicate gold necklace about her neck, and she carefully strokes the little cross.

"Perhaps I should be ill again for you to do science. I don't mind - so long I don 't die. But you'd cure me before then, no?"

"Of course I would," he says earnestly, but goes on with sadness, "if they let me. But I don't think even another outbreak would convince them to let me back in a lab. They'd probably find somebody else to do it. I didn't mean for them to think I was this dangerous, but for some reason, they've gotten the impression that I'm a troublemaker."

Which he is. No question. But he never meant for the Capitol to know that.

She leans in close. "Are you in trouble, Sir?" Her expression is tinged with sadness as well. The Capitol is destroying too many dreams and ambitions, and of good people as well. It's not fair, not in the slightest, and what makes Eponine mad is that she can do absolutely nothing to fight back. In Paris, it hadn't mattered. She had never seen what a life outside of the Patron Minette, a life with prospects could be. She had nothing to fight for. But here... it is cruel.

"I'll help you. I swear. Whatever you need. I am not much, I know. But I will help you, I swear."

"Eponine..."

It pulls at his heart to hear her offer of help. The poor girl -- Carlos doesn't think he can tell her about District 13, and even if he could, he isn't sure he should, but it means a lot to him to hear her make that kind of promise. It pulls him a little more into the present, away from the last Arena and District 13. There are still people in the Capitol who matter, Carlos remembers. He does have friends here.

"I'll remember that. Thank you."

She nods. She knows she's useless, and not trusted by anybody besides, but at least he's pretending to take her seriously.

"I hope you do, you know? I am not as bad as everybody says, I promise, and I would do anything I could to help you, you know? But we have to just... just keep going. This cannot last forever, can it? Would they be so cruel as to show us what life can be and give me a dream and then lock us in a nightmare forever?"

"They might mean to," Carlos says to her, "but it's important to remember that nothing lasts forever. Nothing," he repeats heavily, in a tone that may or may not remind her a little bit of Cecil, "lasts forever. Not us. Not cities, or countries, or even Planet Earth. Even the universe itself will one day either collapse in on itself or expand until all energy reaches an equilibrium in a great heat death or be consumed by the black holes in the center of its galaxies or tear itself apart because it is fundamentally unstable." A beat of silence. "But that won't happen for billions of years," Carlos adds, cheerfully. "Life as we know it probably won't exist by then."

"Then I don't care." Eponine says, comfortably. She doesn't really get what Carlos is saying, but it all sounds a bit doom and gloom. "I only care if it is affecting me - us. But even this. I think they'll just kill us all when they're through with us."

Carlos thinks about that.

"It seems to me," he says, slowly, "that if there's no way to get out, we either win, or we eventually aren't brought back. If Panem keeps using the Hunger Games as the lynchpin of its culture, then sooner or later, we'll all win, or we'll die, one by one. After all, none of us are aging, so we won't die of natural causes."

It is doom and gloom, but Carlos isn't in the most hopeful of moods right now. He can't tell her about the device he's working on or District 13, which are the only bright spots he can think of. Sorry, Eponine.

"If there's no way to get out."

"I always knew that I would not grow old." Eponine smiles wanfully. "Had I been in Paris, I would have been dead two years ago by my Pa's hand, or more likely, Montparnasse's knife, left to die slowly so I know the feeling. Or hunger or cold would kill me... but after that with the gang - " She shrugs. "Nah, no peaceful death. And nothing here either. Oh, but I so wish you get out somehow. You could be a citizen, you know? You don't have to do this."

He looks at her and gives her a sad smile.

"I don't know," he says. "I don't think I'd like being a citizen. The people in the Capitol are kind of..." Carlos trails off, and thinks better of finishing it. "...you know. I like the other Tributes a lot better. Most of them, anyway."

Tom Cassidy was the notable exception.

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