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

Entry tags:

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He squeezed her tightly but gently in return, his smile only growing in the face of hers, though it had to be dim in comparison. Right now, Venus wasn't a black hole, she was the sun.

"Whatever the reason, I'm just glad to see you smiling. Happy Holidays yourself. You busy here, or d'you think you could find some time to hang around for the holidays? Unless you've already got plans, that is." He wanted to spend Christmas with her, but not to the detriment of her own plans. Even a little while would be good enough.

"I got no plans. I gave Eponine her thing - figured the poor girl wasn't getting anything from anyone else - and put Kankri's thing under his door and left stuff on the counter for the Avoxes." Her listing it all off is less for his benefit than hers, as if she's checking off a mental to-do list.

"Are you-" She pauses for just a moment, as if in the moment before grabbing for something she truly wants. "You inviting me over for Christmas morning? I haven't had a family Christmas in-"

Nearly a decade now. And for a moment, it doesn't break her heart to realize that.

Jet offers a sympathetic smile. "Yeah. Me too. Guess that's why I thought, maybe this year, it could be a little different. Maybe it won't be perfect or anything, but it's something, right?" He hoped so, hoped maybe it'd mean something to her like it did to him. Neither of them had had families to spend the holidays with in years -for different reasons, but the end result was the same- and the didn't have everyone they'd like to spend it with, he was sure...but even if it was just the two of them, he knew he'd like that a lot.

The sympathy morphed into hope, but a fraction of embarrassment had him ducking his head and finding the ground with his eyes. "I mean, if you want, it's cool if it's not your thing or something..."

"It's cool. It's cool, it's totally cool!" Venus almost says too fast, trying not to sound desperate; that perfect superstar veneer lies shattered by the honesty of her excitement and a neediness, too, something beneath the good that tells her to cling to this now while it lasts. Something that makes any friendship she earns feel stolen, as if she were taking something that belonged to the human race and claiming it for herself without their knowledge.

She reaches over and takes Jet's wrists in her hand. "Just wait for me to get your gift from upstairs? It's nothing big, it's just, you know, something gross and sentimental."

While her response sounded too fast to her, it was exactly what Jet wanted to hear and it made him grin wide and unfettered by any of that uncertainty that had shadowed his words before.

"Yeah, alright. I'll go get yours too. Half the point of this thing's to be sappy together, right?" Hopefully she'd like it. He'd spotted it the day he'd woken up from the arena and decided to go for a walk in the city. It was seriously last minute, largely cause he hadn't known what to get her, but once he'd seen it, he knew it was what he wanted to get. Nothing big, but hopefully something that said the right thing to her.

"Meet you back down here!"

She races up the stairs, not bothering to wait for the elevator, excitement making pistons of her ankles. It's desperate, she knows, to be so gleeful over something most people very near take for granted. It's hungry, undignified. And yet she doesn't care.

When she returns to the lobby, she has a tiny box tucked into her pocket. Her cheeks are slightly flushed from pounding up the stairs.

"It for you and Albert. I hope you don't- I hope you don't mind that it's a joint thing?"

Her excitement is contagious and he finds he's almost racing her in his head to see who got back down faster. They were being a couple of kids but who even cared?

When he met her, he had a small bag in his hand that held a velvet box inside. Now that he actually had it, he was both really excited she'd love it and terrified she'd hate it. It was a really dumb feeling and he was glad she had something for him to think about instead.

"No, I don't care and he won't either. He'll probably just be happy enough that you thought of him; Christmas is his favorite holiday." He held out the paper bag with it's box that held the actual present and gave her a questioning look. "Who should go first?"

"You're making me make decisions? Jet Link-Heinrich, you're actually the worst." She takes the paper bag, pulling the box out and eying it, resisting the urge to jangle it and see if it clatters. She holds out a gold metallic bag to him, stuffed with tissue paper.

"You go first."

Inside is a single, simple gift for him and Albert - a glass ornament with two doves with ribbons in their tails, flying in such a way that the ribbons stream behind them into an infinity symbol. A small token, a keepsake, an heirloom for them to keep that simply says First Christmas Married on it in prim font.

And because it says 'first', it implies there will be future Christmases to be shared between the two of them.

His smile said he definitely did not mind frustrating her in the slightest and it held in place up until he got around to fishing out the present. His smile changed then, faded nearly completely as he took in the glass birds and their ribbon, then reformed into something gentle and honestly happy. 'First Christmas married' the first in what would be a long line of Christmases ahead of them, no matter what else happened. For infinity. Carefully, he lowered it back into the bag for safe keeping and pulled Venus into a tight hug, his fingers threading through her hair affectionately. "Thanks...thank you. It's--awesome." He half-winced at his own word choice, but the fact his vocabulary fled him when he most needed it was a sign his emotions were running too high for him to comprehend them and the English language at the same time.

He pulled away after a moment and shrugged, eyes fleeing from her face one moment then shyly returning the next. "You next. I hope you like it. If you don't, just say so and we'll go get you something else right now."

When Venus finally opened the velvet box, she would find a pendant on a delicate silver chain.

What his words can't convey, the expression on his face and his body language does. She squeezes him back enough that she's sure he can hardly breathe, but it hardly matters. And then it's her turn.

She opens it with surgically delicate fingers. When she looks up at Jet, her eyes are teary and cloudy as the galaxy in the pendant.

"When I was like, sixteen. When I got my first agent, I chose the name 'Nebula' as my superhero name. Boom, first piece of mail I ever receive is a cease and desist because this other D-list chick named Nebula is claiming I'm violating her trademark."

She unclasps the necklace she always wears and adds the pendant, looping it through to a double chain with the gift's original.

"Now you know all my names," she says quietly. "Thank you."

"I still like all of them, too. You're welcome." He smiled, pleased down to his core that she'd liked it after all. His fingers brushed through her hair affectionately, but then fell to lace with her fingers as he took her hand.

"What do you want to do for Christmas? Sky's the limit."

That was an idea. Oh how he wished he could take her up into the night sky to get that perfect view of space, the full-blown and crystal-clear replica of what he'd just given her to place around her neck put on display as far as the eye could see. The sky was the most beautiful gift he felt he could ever give anyone and it was locked away from him with his ijiva tamped out. But that didn't mean he couldn't give her a Christmas to remember or the chance to smile like she put the sun in the sky. If he could do that, it'd be just as good.

"God, I don't even know." She wants to dredge on her own memories of Christmas a child, but somehow those seem still too painful, as if they exist as a diorama inside the most fragile carved and painted egg. She can't touch them yet. She thinks of things she's seen in movies, commercials, seen other people doing.

"I've never roasted chestnuts or been old enough for eggnog. Maybe that and- I don't know. Card games? Snowball fights? Help a girl out here." She absentmindedly paws at the pendant, as if continually reminding herself it's still there.

"Anything but listening to Jinglebell Rock again."

"Hey! That came out when I was twelve, it's a classic!" His 'upset' didn't seem even remotely convincing considering his smile and the laugh in his voice, but he gave the question some serious thought before taking her hand and leading her towards the front doors.

"Come on. Eggnog and hot chocolate and who knows what else, we'll decide it as we go, but we're definitely building a snowman. Sorry to tell you I've never roasted chestnuts either, but maybe we can find something else Christmas-y"

"God damn, you're old," she says, laughing, still laughing. "You know, if we asked they'd probably give us chestnuts to roast. They send us to our deaths every few months, the least they could do is give us some damn chestnuts."

She walks hand in hand with him, refusing to let him outright lead by staying by his side rather than behind him. "Thank you, Jet."

Side-by-side felt nice, natural. Normal. This whole thing felt so normal, even their situation barely static in the back of his mind. That alone made it priceless.

"Damn straight. We'll get some and...we'll find out how you roast chestnuts, can't be all that hard, right?"

His hand squeezed hers and his tone softened, practically boisterous before, now it was softened by affection and a genuine happiness he didn't expect to feel when so many of their friends were still in the arena. "Thank you, V." Once again, he found he couldn't even begin to voice the feelings swirling in his chest but, this time, it didn't seem like such a bad thing. Just as he could feel and hear and see the emotion coming from her, he was willing to bet she could see all the same from him and that made the lack of prettier words just fine.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

/start wrapping?

sounds good!