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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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."

I'm sorry is always such a small phrase. For some people, those words seem bigger than what they hold, like they don't have the empathy or thought to even earn the right to say 'I'm sorry' because they'll forget the orphan girl ten minutes later, because they don't stop to consider what it means for her, don't want to stop and consider.

For Sam, she knows that the words aren't big enough, that they're busted up and overflowing with empathy because he's so familiar with seeing that sort of guilt so much that he doesn't have to wonder how she feels - he knows, automatically. He's seen it enough, had close enough feelings.

She watches his hand, exhaling deep from her nose. "You get kind of- you get addicted to not thinking about it, by surrounding yourself with gunfire and explosions, right? At least that's how it worked for me. Hero stuff, screaming audiences, parties, two hours of sleep a night- you don't have time for guilt."

Saying I’m sorry to shit like that is always a risky move. Everyone reacts differently to it, and Sam’s had the gamut of reactions from people who accepted the empathy he was trying to offer to ’why the hell would you be sorry when it wasn’t your fault’ to people who were downright pissed, thinking he was offering empty words, spitting out the standard phrase he was supposed to say like he was reading it off a cue card.

He’s learned to modify it, to clarify and twist the phrase around so he’s offering something else other than sorry - but with her he doesn’t feel like he has to. He thinks they know enough about each other for her to know that when he says I’m sorry what he really means I understand. Not completely, of course, but as much as he can.

“Anything loud enough to drown out the noise in your head telling you all the things you shouldn’t done different,” he confirms, giving a small, humorless smile. “The first time I joined the military. The second time I left it, because I guess sometimes it turns out the explosions don’t drown out the guilt as much as they add to it.”

She understands. Grief, like so many sorrows, hones one's perception of others. She can smell out phoney condolences as easy as she could a rotten egg.

The movie continues in the background, unconcerned with their life stories or the way the air between them has gotten thick and humid and heavy, sagging with the weight of their mourning.

"What've you got to be guilty over?" Even as she asks, she does so with a tone so gentle, so demure that it could never be mistaken for a demand, that she's accepted and dismissed as unneeded his apology already if he declines to tell her. She knows things come at their own times.

“What don’t I got to be guilty over?” He’s teasing, smile playful and tone light, even though there was a time when he thought that was true.

It’s not the only answer he’s giving her, though. Maybe because he’s giving him more than enough room not to, maybe because he trusts her more than enough for this. He doesn’t tell her about Riley. Sam’s told a lot of people about Riley, over and over again, because the repetition helps him work through it, and because knowing the story helps other people work through theirs. In a way, Riley’s easier. It’s not hard to understand the guilt of a soldier unable to save his best friend from being shot down right next to him.

He hasn’t talked with very many people about his dad. It’s old and put to rest, but… it’s still there.

“My dad was murdered, long time ago. Tried to break up a fight with some dumbass kids I knew, and they ended up killing him instead.”

There are some things that are never gone, never really. Wedding rings buried in the ground, family photos lost in floods but impressed onto the mind, love letters burned. The ghosts of your family are in your DNA, Venus thinks. They're braided into every cell of who you are.

"I'm sorry." She doesn't say it's not your fault because she knows how hollow that is to come from someone who wasn't there. She doesn't say anything else at all for a moment. Instead she reaches over and places her hand over his, her palm over his knuckles, linking them in their shared guilt and sadness.

"I can't imagine that he'd be unhappy with who you came out to be, though."

There’s a twitch of a smile in acknowledgement when she says she’s sorry, though he doesn’t say anything else, either. Her sorry is the same as his had been, and he’s grateful for it, but it’s not something that needs a response.

He stays quiet as she covers his hand with hers, shifting his hand up gently so his knuckles press very lightly against her palm. It’s empathy as much as the ‘sorry’ had been, and he finds himself more grateful for the quiet touch than anything else.

But her last words make him think. She’s not the first person to say that, and he usually agrees or makes a joke in response, because he does agree, for the most part. But there’s some things he’s done that he really hopes his dad couldn’t see, and with her, he’s more honest.

“Nah, he wouldn’t be. Might not agree with some of my choices, but he wouldn’t be unhappy.”

"I don't think there's a person alive who can say that everyone they love agrees with all their choices anyway. Then again, I wouldn't know."

It's been a long time since she's had loved ones; she's surrounded herself with agents and lawyers and teammates but not family, not until recently, and it seems that Panem just strips all the choices out of people. There's not much chance for them to become soldiers or doctors or teachers or saints. There's only a limited and manipulated set of options each Arena.

Maybe that's what makes it important, when you manage to do right not between many good options but when you can barely redirect yourself from the wrong path between two choices.

She gives his hand a squeeze. "Are you happy with who you came out to be?"

He feels a brief stab of guilt, that he's over here talking about how he's not sure his dad would be proud of some of the things he's done, when no, of course she wouldn't now.

But it's gone quickly enough. It's not like he's inflicting the conversation on her, and he figures she'd tell him if she was done with it.

And she's the one asking the hard questions, anyway.

"I'm getting there," he murmurs. "I'm a lot further down that road than I was a few years ago, anyway."

"Me too." When she smiles at him, she means it; the gesture is warm and encouraging and with the kind of near-childish happiness that comes from sharing something with someone, from being able to say "I understand" with absolute conviction.

Two years ago, when she came to Panem, she was miserable and faithless, with no goal aside from a beautiful period to place at the end of the life sentence she was serving, a myopic fixation on her own death that precluded caring about anyone or anything, mortal or ideal. And over two years she's opened up like a lotus in a pond and let it all in, the love and the hurt and the philosophy that animates her now while death remains nothing but a tempting peripheral distraction.

She doesn't know if she's still miserable. She does know that every day she wakes up and she doesn't regret the sunlight pouring into her eyes to tell her that morning has come and that life, that sweet complicated awful struggle, has come for her again. That she now lets people like Sam in.

"Do you want me to stay here tonight?" She looks concerned for a moment. "I don't mean- I mean, on opposite sides of the bed. You know, hearing someone breathing and all."

When she smiles at him like that, he relaxes a little. So many people haven’t gotten it - they think that happiness is an all or none kind of thing, and when he tells them that he’s getting there, they just assume that means he isn’t happy and something needs to be done about it, right now. Usually it comes with a lot of opinions on what that something is.

But he’d kind of figured she’d understand, that she wouldn’t be one of those to think he was looking for someone to fix his lack of happiness.

He smiles a little bit at that concern, though, soft and fond. “Yeah. Yeah, I get you.” He’s still a little relieved she clarified. If she’d been asking for a different reason, he’s not sure he’d be capable of saying no right now, even though he knows that saying yes’d probably take them down a road he isn’t sure he can handle.

He knows he wants her here, though. “I’d appreciate that. I miss it, sometimes.”

It goes both ways - if he had asked her to stay, she would have assumed he meant for something more amorous, and she wouldn't have said no even though she isn't sure that's what she wants right now. She's still hurting from the last time she loved someone like that, with her body, the way that people have always expected of her, the way people have told her is her god-given way to love and heal and help and serve someone.

But 'people' aren't Sam, and Sam doesn't seem to be among the multitude of whispering faceless figures that have told her that her body was all that she was worth, and so they can settle into something both more innocent and more honest.

She kicks aside a blanket and crawls under it, pulling it over her shoulders. "I took some drugs before I came over, so I'll probably be out like a light all night. You don't need to worry about nightmares or anything with me. But you know, wake me up if anything happens, alright? Fire alarm, awesome hand at late night poker, you know."

If he needs a friend.

That isn't what Sam wants from her, not right now. She's - she's a friend, she's someone he trusts and cares about and feels a connection with, feels that similarity between them that's always made it easier for him to ask for help.

Even if that help is something as simple and as complicated as asking her to stay the night so he doesn't have to face this one alone.

He doesn't have the words to say how grateful he is that she brought up nightmares first. Sam hasn't slept in the same place with many people since he retired, and the nightmares are a big part of that - he didn't want to have to explain them, or to have to wake up from one with someone there.

"You're something special, V," he murmurs, stretching out on his back under the covers. "Thanks."

"Don't thank me. Just get whatever rest you can." She smiles and rolls onto her side, facing the wall, not waiting for his permission to let sleep take her (the nightly cocktail of mood stabilizers and tranquilizers to keep her own nightmares at bay rolling over her not like a wave but like a front of fog down a mountainside).

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

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