thecapitol | Sun Breaks Over the Same Human Race By Whom You Were Erased [Open]

WHO| Venus and you!
WHAT| Venus catches her second wind.
WHEN| Week three and onward, until a little past the end of the Arena.
WHERE|
WARNINGS| None.

When she first wakes in her bed, she's afraid to touch her face. She knows, deep down, that they won't have taken away the brand. She knows when she looks in the mirror and catches sight of that sprawling spidery blight, she's going to feel her stomach drop beneath the bed. She knows that the instant she puts her fingertips to her face she'll feel that warped, wrinkled slickness of scar tissue. She knows it'll destroy her all over again.

It takes her nearly half an hour of staring at the ceiling, making a mental list of the people she needs to make sure survived the Arena, before she reaches up and strokes her unblemished cheek. She all but catapults out of bed and stumbles to her dresser, to the mirror on top, where she stares with an uncharacteristic slackjawedness at the way she looks. She looks as if nothing has happened to her besides an unfortunate asymmetrical haircut. No being tied to a chair and mutilated. No nightmares that didn't end just when she left that jail cell.

It's stupid, probably, to care so much about how she looks, but it's difficult for a woman who's traded on her beauty to find purchase in anything but her body when it's mauled and mutilated, when its every corporeal reminder is one of torture and interrogation. And for a moment, just for a moment, she can imagine herself back in a time before so many of the people she loved died.

She can imagine herself renewed.

She returns to the Capitol with fresh energy, no longer curled into herself even though the windows in her have still been blown out. Her architecture no longer sags and creaks. She sings to the coffeemaker, sits on the couch of the District Suite with sodas and milkshakes, practices at the gym as a way to stay strong rather than merely to forget. She's social again, greeting people not out of a defensive way to hide her own pain but out of genuine interest in their lives.

She mourns, but it doesn't reduce her to some barely-functioning binge-drinking tragedy like it has in the past. At some point she realized that she was in love with all of humanity, rather than a handful of people. For the moment, she tries to hold onto that feeling, that hope that she so previously denied herself. For this moment, she makes herself free.

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He frowns at the device and then pulls out his own - he'd shoved it into one of the myriad pockets they'd put on him and hadn't looked at it since. He was planning on just sort of waving at someone once he was hungry and demanding they feed him, but now that she was starting it up, his interest was piqued. He took the seat next to her and immediately tried to figure out how she'd just done that, fiddling with his out.

"Dorian, of the house of Pavus," he said, frowning at his network device, and shaking it, before he managed to figure out how to turn it on with a brief 'ah!'.

"I suppose the polite thing to do would be to inquire after yours?"

Venus isn't a half-bad teacher. She tilts her device so that Dorian can get a good look at it, hovering over each thing she clicks before she does so. "Venus Dee Milo. You said his name was Cullen? Does he have a last name or a house or something? He sounds like a Gryffindor from the description."

She half-laughs, to let him know she's joking even if he doesn't understand the reference.

Dorian isn't a half bad student, either. He's starting to see the logic behind the clicks - some sort of data system, as bizarre as it was. Organized...

"Commander Cullen Rutherford," He said, frowning as he pressed a wrong button and lights flashed and some fast talking Capitol talk show appeared on his device. "And no- his house is associated with Lions, not Griffons. They're extinct."

He gives a slightly bemused smile. "I can't say I've heard of the house of Gryffindor, however. Are you from Thedas?"

"No, you can close that, here-" she reaches over and clicks the little red button on his device, and the Capitol show disappears. "Griffons exist on your world? In mine, they don't exist at all."

Which, she supposes, may preemptively answer his next question.

"No, we have no place called Thedas where I'm from. Or Gryffindor, actually, that was just a joke. Oh, look, here's your boy." She taps on her screen. "Nice cheekbones he's got."

"They did, once." His face falls, a bit, at 'his world'. He really is not used to this yet.

He was about to ask her where she hailed from instead, but was distracted by Cullen's face magically appearing on her screen.

"Ah! Yes, that's him." He leans over to touch the screen. "Absolutely remarkable. I have no idea whatsoever what magic they use, but that is undoubtedly him."

"It's a picture. Do they have photographs where you're from? It's like a machine that draws an automatic picture, and this is just showing us that."

For all she knows he thinks Cullen's inside the screen. It's good to clarify things.

"And from what I can see he's alive and well."

"Photographs?" He asked, his accent thick upon it, mangling it. "With a machine? How strange! No, no, we have mirrors, of course, and paintings, but nothing like this."

He smiled slightly, out of relief, a touch of an honest expression making it all the way to his face. "Well, that is good to hear, at least. What about Cole? He is here as well."

"Welcome to the future. It's got its perks." She smiles, and her eyes duck into the apples of her cheeks for just a moment before the expression falters; she knows all too well that the future is as disappointing as it is dazzling.

Humanity should have been able to do so much better than Panem, or even Venus' twenty-first century.

"What's his last name?"

"Whatever this is, this is hardly Thedas' future," Dorian said, with a slight frown.

"He doesn't have one," he explained after she asked. "He is simply... Cole. And even then, it is a name he took for himself."

"Hey, he wouldn't be the only one here with a chosen name. I hear the Capitol even named one girl here because she didn't come with her own." She whisks through images on her devices, no longer tilting it to teach. She brings up a picture of a boy with sallow skin, big teeth, sunken eyes. "This guy? He looks kind of like a scarecrow..."

"Ah, yes, that's him," Dorian said, a flicker of a bemused smile on his lips. "A scarecrow... Not as accurate as you'd think."

The crows doubtless would never even notice he was there.

He relaxed slightly. "So they are both alive, then? ... Remarkable. I don't understand this place, but that, at least, is a blessing."

"Yeah." She sucks her bottom lip for a second, wondering if it's worth it to bring the conversation down and deciding that if she doesn't, someone else will in time. "For now. Look, it's not, ah, guaranteed that people come back each time. It's always an unknown."

She's been here long enough to see too many people vanish into the ether, only footage of them in the Arenas and their imprints on her brain reminding her they were there at all.

"That they come back at all, even sometimes, is remarkable enough for me, I assure you," Dorian said, still looking at the little face on the screen, before turning his head to give Venus a warm, if slightly sad smile.

"You needn't worry on my account," he said, after he noticed her hesitation, "I'm well used to the concept of imminent death."

At least the Inquisitor wasn't here.

"Good!" Venus says, then realizes about a moment too late how absolutely terrible that sounds. "I mean, me too, and it helped me adjust to this place quicker. That's all I meant."

She looks back at her device. "What about, um, Cole and Cullen...are they used to it too?"

Sun Breaks Over the Same Human Race By Whom You Were Erased [Open]

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