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

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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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It's not really the first time he's seen her without the brand, but there's still a little flash of surprise, not quite used to it - he'd only ever known her with it. He feelts guilt settle a little bit in his chest, when she opens the door in a robe and no makeup.

"I woke up you," he says, but it's quiet, and he's talking to himself more than her, there. "I just-" -wanted to see you, but he doesn't feel like that's a good reason for waking her up.

"I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about putting on a movie or something, thought you might want to join me, if you weren't already out."

"Nah, I was just settling in for the night. I'm a long way from sleep." She shakes her head. She could tell Sam that he's not the only person in this District with sleeping issues, but she's sure he already knows that. The walls here are thin.

The irony is that people sleep better in the Arena, when they have less time and more danger at every corner. Something about survival hews away neurosis.

"Let me get my bunny slippers." She kicks them on, then slips into the doorway, resting against the frame. "What kind of movie are you thinking about?"

Yeah, he’s definitely figured out that district five has its fair share of sleeping issues - if the thin walls hadn’t done it, the enforced curfew’d sure as hell clued him in. It’s another reason he would have felt terrible, if he’d actually woken her when she was finally managing to get some sleep.

But her assurance makes him smile a bit, and it grows when she retrieves her bunny slippers.

“Haven’t had a lot of time to check out Capitol movies, actually. They similar to what we’ve got back at home?” He pauses, remembering that he and Venus aren’t necessarily from the same place, then adds, “For you, anyway, I guess we’ll have to see about mine.”

The glass-eyed pink rabbits look up at him. There's a bow on the ears of one, as if they're supposed to be a matching pair, a Mr. and Mrs. Slipperbunny. Venus glances down at them as she walks and suppresses the slightest giggle.

"They're like what we had back home if Michael Bay and Baz Luhrmann co-directed everything. Glitter, sequins, musical numbers and explosions. It's pretty good brainless stuff that's easy to follow, though."

Maybe if she ever gets out of the Arenas - and she really has no intent to, not at the expense of others - she'll try her hand at acting again. She remembers auditions used to be excruciating, nerve-wracking processes when she was a teenager, but she can't imagine she'd have the fragile ego she did back then. The neediness of her youth, that desperation for validation, has waned with age. It'll never be gone completely but it's there.

She feels something in her chest shudder when she looks at Sam's bedroom door and remembers the last time she was in there, but it doesn't show on her face or her skin. They all live on a floor full of ghosts. They all carry new ones, too, and she wonders about the ones in Sam's head, the one he didn't say was dead but she realized he memorialized in a tattoo.

"Means you can have a conversation in the middle of it without losing track of who's kissing whom or who the evil twin is."

He's looking at her probably a little too much, he realizes. Not that looking at the person you're having a conversation with is a bad thing, but there's the appropriate conversation level of looking and then there's looking, like part of you's having a hard time believing the person in front of you is really there, that they're really talking to you. His is a little too much of the latter.

For the most part, Sam's doing a pretty good job of faking it to make it. It's not the first time he's done it, back when he first started making progress in recovery, and he remembered to smile a little brighter, to be a little more charming, so he didn't scare the girl at the grocery store or make the guy at the bank look at him funny. It'd worked then, both to give him practice remembering how to be a normal person and to make small steps in how to feel like one, and it's working now - but only for now.

It's different when you only have to do it for long enough to run errands, when you can take small steps so it feels more like practice than like hiding. In the Capitol, even in the Tower, surrounded by people he doesn't know, sooner or later, it's going to become hiding. And it's exhausting, keeping it up.

So it slips, when he's around people he trusts. He slips, just a little, but he doesn't think that's a bad thing, not unless it makes them uncomfortable.

He smiles at her assessment, and it's not a very good one, but at least it's real. "They sound perfect, then. What do you say to some hot chocolate, or popcorn?"

"Can it be kettle corn? I've got the worst sweet tooth known to man." Which he likely already knows from watching what she does to her coffee, as if she's trying to get an equal benefit from the sugar rush as she would from the caffeine.

She's used to being looked at by men, used to being consumed like woodchips into a furnace, used to calling the resulting heat power. She was a model, after all, a celebrity and a superhero and a recording artist and an actress. All her energy was projected outwards, into a shell of visual and audio that kept her nice and safe and with a glazed coating that let her go down easy to their stomachs.

It's different than the way Sam's looking at her. He sees past that - not through that, because it's not as if he's unaware that it's there - but into something deeper, and ultimately, something more whole. He's seeing her existence and checking it like a pulse.

She doesn't take a seat on his bed, but she does pluck his remote from the windowsill and turn on the TV, reducing the volume. "Hang on, I know a good one. How do you feel about unicorn tamers? Because that's totally a franchise here."

"You and your sweet tooth, remind me to make my mom's cookies for you sometime," he says with a grin. "Kettle corn it is."

He was planning on making a move to go get it, but he gets caught up in watching her again, as she moves across the room and switches on the TV. He should probably get a handle on that, or else he's going to end up looking at her more than the movie, but nah. She's the one who mentioned they were good for having a conversation without having to pay too much attention to them.

"Unicorn taming, you serious? Yeah, let's do it, I gotta see that. You get it going and I'll grab the kettle corn?"

"Sometime? Honey, you make a promise like that I'm going to demand you start tomorrow." She likes watching him cook, her on the common area couch while he puts together breakfast, her with her books and magazines and him with his recipes and both of them distracting themselves from the reasons they're awake so early in the morning.

"Unicorn taming. It's a franchise called Hooves, and it's terrible, but great for background noise. I'll get it set." She grabs the remote and sits on his bed, getting everything ready.

And while he gets the kettle corn, she sits there on the bed, letting her face fall a little as she remembers these walls, this floor, things that should not carry memories because they were assigned, not chosen, no more personal than a barcode. She thinks of how long she's been here while so many other people never came back. She doesn't think at all of the frozen frame of a man riding a horned horse on the TV screen.

Sam's smile turns a little bit pleased. "Done. You know, could be I was just looking for an excuse to make them." Not that he needs one, especially not since coming here and using cooking as a distraction, but knowing she's looking forward to them is an extra incentive.

"Sounds perfect." He ducks out, but he isn't gone long. While the kettle corn's going in the kitchen, he pads back to the room with a couple of bottles of water, but stops just before he makes it completely into the doorway. His gaze'd automatically gone to her, to the way she's looking at the walls without really seeing them - or maybe seeing so much more than them. He remembers her telling him that her ex used to stay in this room, and takes a few steps into the room.

"There's more room out in the common area. Closer to the kitchen, too." He doesn't know if that's what the problem is, or if it's a problem at all - but he wants to give her an out, without her having to say why.

"I'll be your excuse for anything you want to cook. I'll even put in extra time at the gym just to be your taste-tester," she calls out after him as he goes, realizing somewhat belatedly how that sort of statement might sound to their roommates down the hall.

"No no, this is fine. I already have everything pulled up." She waves a hand. She's told him enough that she knows he knows what palimpsests there are over this evening. She's sure that there are rooms in his life, attics and lobbies and barracks, where the air goes cold from a figment of the imagination, from an uninvited synapse crackling as it imagines its name is called.

She wants to ask him how he's been sleeping, if only to hear him confirm the answer she knows. But instead, she turns to the muted television, turning on the subtitles.

"I think the worst thing about Capitol television is that they do quick cuts to everything. It's like they worry their audience will get distracted and wander off if they have to look at one shot for longer than six seconds."

“We can work it off together, because I’m absolutely gonna take you up on that,” he calls back, not at all realizing how that might sound to their districtmates. With the way he hasn’t been sleeping and how late it is, his thought processing isn’t exactly as quick as it usually is. That, and at the moment, there’s only room for one thing on his mind - and that’s her.

“All right,” he easily, not pushing at her response. He’s pretty sure that she’d answer honestly, if she did have a problem with it. Enough that he’s going to take her at her word, and he deposits the water bottles on one of the nightstands and disappears back into the kitchen to grab the finished kettle corn.

He hands her the bowl when he gets back, then settles down on the bed, sitting up against the headboard as he quirks an amused smile. “They might not be wrong.”

She picks the first piece of popcorn out like a lady, striking a pose and lifting a pinkie as she does, before popping it into her mouth. And then with comic timing, she takes a whole fistful and all but shoves it in.

Then she goes and backs herself up against the backboard too, letting her knees drift across him ever so slightly, bringing their bodies close together but not touching.

"You know, I don't believe you actually sleep. You get up before me and you're up now, and I know I at least crash on the couch during the afternoons. Unless you're just timing your sleep around when I won't catch you." She raises an eyebrow, inviting him to talk about it without pushing it, giving him the escape hatch of teasing.

It makes him laugh, low and affectionate, and there’s nothing but fondness in his expression as he looks at her. Most of the laughter he’s been doing lately is the kind that’s been startled out of him, it feels good to have something nice and easy like this.

He grabs a handful of popcorn as well, munching on it a piece at a time as he thinks about her comments, trying to decide which way he wants to go with that. He thinks about making a joke about being a robot or something, but… he’s pretty sure it’d fall flat, for a number of reasons.

“Nightmares,” he admits quietly after a moment, giving a slightly self-deprecating smile. “I get enough to get by, but I think a good night’s sleep is going to be a while off, until I can get my shit back to being sorted.”

She nods, then reaches over and rests her free hand on his wrist, a comforting gesture that's the least invasive she knows. She rustles some popcorn with her other hand, matching his self-deprecating smile with a kind one instead of the concern that's threatening to overwhelm her. Keeping it light.

"I got a prescription for that, but I'm guessing you know well as I do that that's just a stopgap." She knows, too, that it's probably not just the Arenas, but the violence there exhuming ghosts even older than that. Trauma never exists as its own entity, but rallies an army of the dead behind it. Foul necromancy.

"It's weird, it's almost easier to sleep in the Arena than it is here in a fluffy bed with a security system."

When he looks at her smile, Sam's really glad he's not in a place where kindness was hard to accept. He had been, once, but he's long past it, and he's relieved to see that at least that isn't one of the old ghosts that the arena'd dragged up. Now, it just makes him feel a little warm inside.

"Yeah, does it work for you?" He's not sure he'd be willing to try it for himself - he doesn't trust the Capitol enough that it might just give him a worse night's sleep, with how much he'd be worried over it - but he's curious.

"It's the beds, they're way too soft after the arenas." They both know it's way more than the beds, just like they both know having a prescription to help you sleep isn't really a longterm solution. But it's his way of agreeing with her without going into the details of his particular brand of hauntings. It's not that he doesn't trust Venus with his baggage - he does, more than most - but at the moment, he's a little too conscious of what the Capitol made be listening in on.

"Works well enough, I guess. Keeps me the chipper self you see most days. But honestly, it's just the same stuff I was on before I came here." Her troubles started long before Panem, long before adulthood, and she idly wonders if he put that together back when she referred to her brothers in the past tense and mentioned dropping out of school. She doesn't ask, though. There's a time for baring wounds to each other, not in competition but in solidarity, but she knows now isn't it.

"You sleep on the floor sometimes too? Or in the bath? I mean, you got your own bathroom, you could totally set up a blanket fort in there." She puffs up the pillow behind her and settles in more, indicating that she's not going anywhere for a bit.

He nods thoughtfully. Even back home, he hadn’t much liked using a prescription to help him sleep - but he had, on the nights when it was really bad. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

It’s something he’s already guessed, that she had baggage even before she found herself here, like he did. He’s only put some of it together, but that’s mostly because he doesn’t want to speculate. She’ll tell him, eventually, just like he knows he’ll tell her.

“The floor’s my go to, yeah. Here it might as well be a second bed, with the carpeting they got,” he teases. “Hadn’t thought of the bathtub though, that’s a good one. Might have to borrow that idea, I’m kind of a secret blanket fort fan.”

"Shag. Shag carpeting. Somehow we're in the future what, a hundred years? And it's still the damn 1970's," Venus says, resting back in her pillow and laughing. "I don't think I've met anyone who doesn't like the occasional blanket fort. It's kind of a universal thing."

On the television, a shirtless man arrives atop a pegasus. Lens flares radiate off his body.

"None of this used to bother me, you know. I think I was immune. Then I pulled a Grinch and my heart grew three sizes and now everything's awful."

"You think that makes it retro still, or is it officially in 'antique' territory?" Antique shag carpeting, he never thought he'd see the day. Compared to some other things he's seen in the Capitol, though, it's not the worst.

Neither is the flashy pegasus guy on screen, but it's still terrible enough for him to make a face.

He can't help but give an amused snort at her comparison, but his smile is wry. “Immune to caring about anything, or just the bad shit?”

"I'd know the answer to that if we had any idea what year we're in. Which, you know. We don't."

She snorts a little at the face he pulls, making one of her own.

"Anything. It's easier when you don't have friends. I was a foster kid, you know. You get used to not attaching to people." She gives him another piece to start putting together the puzzle she's made of herself. "It's like the opposite of the military, where it wires you together."

“...good point. I keep forgetting that.” He’s been keeping track of the year in his head, kind of - it’d been 2014 when he got pulled, and he knows they went through Christmas, so it’s 2015 now to him. But even that’s off, since he’s missing quite a few months in 2014. It’s probably better not to over think it.

Foster kid. He adds that to when she used past tense talking about her brothers, and feels another little bit of her slot into place. “That’s one thing to be said about the military. Or about being here, for that matter.” It’s wired him in close with a few people just as well as the military did. “How long were you in foster care?”

"Two years and four months. My family died when I was eleven, then my aunt kicked me out a year after that, then I spent a little while drifting before I got picked up for a charity school for superheroes." She doesn't sound proud of it, sounds like she's straddling the line between detached and ashamed. "I'd say don't tell anyone, but the Capitol had a whole exposé on me back in the day, if you ever want their version of the details. But they also said I was into voodoo, so."

She settles deeper into the bed next to him and pats his shoulder, replacing that somber expression with a grin. "Promise I don't got a doll of you anywhere that I'm sticking pins in, and I double promise that I didn't come in here to take a lock of your hair for my effigy of you."

Eleven, shit. That's so damn young. He wonders what the story is behind that school that'd made her take that tone talking about it when really, going to a superhero school would be a dream come true for most kids he knows.

Still, he gives a little chuckle at her promise. "You'd be outta luck anyway, I don't got much to work with. Besides, I'm not interested in their version of you, I like the real thing a lot better."

He pauses for a moment, unsure if he wants to go there tonight, but eventually asks, "It's okay if it's not something you want to talk about, but what happened? With your family?"

"You're sweet. I bet you tell this to all the cute girls." She pats his chest, resting her head on her hand, before her eyes seem to follow some movement he can never see as she chases it into the past.

"I killed them in an accident." At least, she thinks it was an accident - the footage was less than clear. "Superpowers, you know? They're a bitch."

She knows Sam has his ghosts too, and she wouldn't be surprised if they were more than just your typical soldier stories - not that those aren't horrifying in their own right. People who get brought to Panem tend to have secrets deep and wide enough to swallow you.

Edited 2015-03-28 01:10 (UTC)

"Nah, I can safely say you're the only girl I've ever had to make sure knew I was more interested in her than some crazy Capitol soap opera. Cute or otherwise."

The playfulness in his expression fades when she answers his question, though. Oh. Oh, now that's a whole other level of guilt and blame, beyond 'I got someone I loved killed.' That's on friendly fire levels, on 'it was an accident but I'm still the one who pulled the trigger.'

He pulls her in a little closer, one hand curling around her upper arm and almost absently running up and down it. "Superpowers is a little out of my area," he admits. "But I'm guessing it doesn't change a lot from any other way of causing an accident like that. I'm sorry."

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

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get dat 40 comment and finished thread bonus!