thecapitol | Kids Grow Up and Kids Get Numb [Closed]

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Kids Grow Up and Kids Get Numb [Closed]

WHO| Jason Compson and Emily Finch
WHAT| A Mentor and an Escort working late.
WHERE| D7 Suite
WHEN| First night of the Arena.
WARNINGS| Just your usual Compson fare.

Jason remembers watching Cornucopias when he was a child. He and his siblings would all sit on the couch together, exchanging bets over which Tributes would last longest, wagering candy and toys and keeping secrets about late bedtimes from the servants rather than money, relentlessly teasing each other over losses. Benjy, unable to understand concepts like mortality, liked the light of the television and was mostly silent, sitting in Caddy's lap. Quentin would watch the scores over his glasses as he purportedly read a book, although the pages never seemed to turn except during commercial breaks. Jason would save up his crackerjack toys and holiday treats for the entire year to have the most leverage for his gambling, and he'd deposit them at the beginning of each Cornucopia in the bowl Caddy set out as the 'pot'.

It was the nearest the four of them ever came to peace, suckled at the teat of violence as entertainment.

These days Jason doesn't enjoy Cornucopias so much. These days they mean overtime without pay, mean baring his belly to Sponsors who want to toy with him before they guarantee they'll support his charges.

They finally managed to get food brought up from the kitchen downstairs, but as most of the mute staff's energy lately has gone into both the crowning dinner and getting the Tributes prepared for the Cornucopia, it's not up to the usual standard of the tower. Jason pokes at a meal gone cold with his fork as he makes notes and sends off emails, pausing chewing every time he has to make a phone call and forgetting to take it back up again afterwards for a good twenty minutes at a time. Headshots of each Tribute, covered with notes written in colored pen, litter the coffee table in the living room. Cassian's has a red X across the face, and has been crumpled and tossed aside.

He's just gotten off the phone with another Sponsor. He sits back on the couch, realizing with a glance at the clock that he's been on the clock for nearly eighteen hours at this point. There's at least another hour's more work to do, but most of it's on hold until the official Cornucopia results are announced. Emily's already excused herself to try and take a quick catnap in the Mentor's suite.

He sets an alarm on his phone for thirty minutes and kicks off his shoes, pulls off his suit jacket and slings it over him like a blanket. His head lies against the backrest of the couch, and he pinches and massages at the bridge of his nose for a few moments before his hand flops down to his lap. He's almost at rest when he hears Emily screaming.

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Cornucopias had always filled Emily with a sense of dread. As a child it had meant gathering in front of the television in their cabin, her mother gathering the four of them close, grasping their hands and stroking their hair, having to continually confirm to herself that this wasn't a hallucination borne of wishful thinking, and that all of her children had been spared the lottery this year. The younger boys found it exciting at first, the action of the fighting and the Capitol commentary carrying them along. But then one or both of the District Seven tributes would inevitably fall, and the anguished wails of their families piercing the night. Then the reality would really sink in and the tears would flow, and they'd sit late into the night holding each other.

After her Games, they'd become even more difficult to stomach. It was one thing to see friends and acquaintances killed in the bloodbath, but another entirely to watch, powerless, as the Tributes she was responsible for as Mentor were cut down before they even had a chance to fight back. Watching it alone in the Capitol was far harder than in the cabin in Seven, with Ash and Garth still in the draw for the Games, knowing that either of them could easily be dead in the arena - though they'd only the slimmest chance, they'd never need tesserae with Emily's winnings. She'd emerge from her rooms sombrely, only to find the stylist team chattering excitedly about the drama they'd watched unfold, as though the dead were merely characters for their amusement up on the screen rather than children with families grieving in Seven for them right that moment. Even looking at anything in the vague shape of the Cornucopia horn made her feel sick, reminded her of the smell of blood and the sense of her failure as a Mentor.

Em pushes her food around the plate unenthusiastically, her fork clattering to the floor as the camera closes up on a knife plunging into Cole's ribs, the blood spattering. She ducks under the table to retrieve it, staying down there a little longer than is necessary, determined not to let Jason see how her breathing has become a little erratic. She can feel her heart pounding in her chest, hands trembling... And when she feels a little more under control and emerges, Cassian is dead, and she feels that she's failed all over again.

She makes her fair share of phone calls, managing to keep her voice level, advocating as best as she can for people she's only met once or twice, and hasn't really had time to get to know at all, with how late before this Arena she arrived in the Capitol. There's only so much they can do now, though, the initial excitement of the Cornucopia only going so far in terms of sponsor support, the rest having to wait both until the official results are out, and until the Tributes had begun to spread out and form alliances. Rubbing her temples, her elbows propped up on the table, tiredness crashes over her. She's not sure what's kept her running this long, but it won't go on much longer. She excuses herself, leaving Jason with the notes they've scrawled on the tributes, flopping down on top of her bed in the Mentor's suite without so much as removing her shoes, passing out the second her head hits the pillow.

The blades of the knives and spears in the centre of the cornucopia are bright, glinting. Then a cloud moves in front of the sun, and the glinting goes away. Emily steps off the platform into the desert. Her feet sink into the sand. It's pulling her down, rooting her to the spot. Calder tries to pull her out, but someone twice his size runs at him with an axe. Emily's feet stay in the sand, but her eyes run, they see the sky instead of the axe and blood and useless flesh. Then the sand swallows her. She crawls through it and the desert goes away, and she's in the snow. Around her people are hitting, kicking, lunging, stabbing. She sits in the snow and watches. Then the people have gone. They've left behind limbs and entrails. The snow was white before, but it's red now. She tries to stand up but her feet are still stuck. She looks down and there are hands grabbing her ankles, soft hands with long nails the same red as the snow. The fingers wear rings that glint the same way the steel of the weapons did. Capitol hands. The more she tries to move the more hands are there. She'll never be able to leave the Arena. The faces of the dead change, but they're the same people really, beneath that. All with the same story. Her story. She'd just lived longer, that's the only difference. The Capitol had destroyed all of them.

When she awakes it's to the sound of screaming, and it takes her a moment to realise that the voice is her own.

"Emily!" Jason wrenches the doorknob so hard that it gives his hands a friction burn, and somehow that frays the last of his nerves from the last few hours. Of course she would lock her door - she's a Mentor, after all, they're all paranoid, and it's not like Jason doesn't keep his own bedroom door locked at all times - but somehow being denied immediate access to the sound of the commotion fills him with fury at himself and at her and at whomever in the history of humanity invented pins and tumblers.

His anger spirals outwards as if by centrifugal force, spires like the radiance of the sun as he uses his Escort card-pass to open her door. He kicks her door open and finds her, tangled in sheets, writhing like a fish in a net, and immediately he goes to her bathroom and fills a glass up with cold water. He's back out and about to splash her with it, to break her out of the trance of her nightmare, when he realizes she's already awake and still screaming. She stops, her mouth gapes for a moment.

"Are you done?" he hisses, slamming the water down on her nightstand so hard that some of it sloshes over the rim. It's not the first time Jason's woken a Tribute or a Mentor from a nightmare, and what he lacks in bedside manner he does make up for in his sense of priorities - reminding her where she is, that she's safe.

"You're in the District Seven Suite, in the Capitol, in the Training Center, and you haven't been reaped. You're a Mentor. You never have to go in the Games again." His voice is firm, factual. "You were dreaming."

He sits down on the bed next to her not out of any sort of closeness, but because he's exhausted too and usually bringing a Mentor or a Tribute down from these sorts of things takes a little while.

When she snaps out of her daze and realises someone's in the room with her, it doesn't register immediately that it's Jason, and when it does, it seems far more like he's reprimanding her than trying to assure her. She flinches as he slams the glass down on the nightstand, mistaking the sudden sound for the booming of the cannon signalling a fallen Tribute, gazing about in alarm for the dangers of the Arena around them.

Slowly, his words begin to make sense to her. She's in the Capitol. She's not in any immediate danger. I survived, she tells herself, I won. She doesn't feel like she's won anything except an extension of her suffering, wishes she'd gone down in the Arena and didn't have to deal with any of this.

Instinctively she reaches out toward him, needing something tangible to ground her in the here and now. She breathes slowly, deeply, expecting him to pull away from her touch.

"I'm okay," she whispers, more to herself than him. "I'm okay."

To his surprise as much as hers, he doesn't pull away. Instead, he goes a little rigid, thinking of his mother, of how when he sits at her bedside she paws at him and embraces him with arms that feel to him more like grand talons, mewling again about how glad she is that it was Quentin who died and not Jason, how lost she would be without him, how helpless.

So there's an awkward pause, and then he decides to be utilitarian and try to do the bare minimum to comfort her. He lets her take his hand and he squeezes hers back. He lets her hold on to flesh and bone that won't hurt her or need to die for her to survive.

"Yeah. You're back in the civilized world of unpaid overtime. Here, drink some water." He pinches the bridge of his nose, recites the date and the postal code for her to cement again the details of her current safety. He imagines her coming up out of a dream like a carved plate rising from water, details emerging first until the full picture is clear. "I'm guessing that half-hour of sleep you got wasn't really rejuvenating."

She squeezes tightly, focusing on the little things: the sound of her heart pounding and the blood rushing through her ears, the beads of cold sweat that trickle slowly down her back, the warmth of his hand pressed against hers. She inhales slowly through her nose, gazing around somewhat more lucidly now, staring and walls and floor and ceiling and accepting that they're not going to melt away or morph into something monstrous, that this is about the safest she's going to get. Gradually her grip on Jason loosens, and she reaches over with her other hand and drinks some of the water he's brought. It's only after she's put the glass back on the nightstand that she realises she's still holding onto him, and she slowly pulls away, looking a little embarrassed, but smiling softly at him, all gratitude, thinking maybe he's not so bad.

"I'm sorry you had to see that." And deal with it, too. She doesn't want to become a burden to him; it's hardly his fault he got stuck with a shell-shocked Victor to work with.

"I've seen it before," he says, thinking it's magnanimous. "Most Mentors have it, and half our Tributes do too."

Her smile doesn't draw the same response from him; in fact, it doesn't seem to draw any but the faintest twitch of his lips. For the extremity of her emotions, his seem dull and blunted right now. She's one in a long line of Tributes and Mentors who've had this problem, whose bedsides Jason's sat impatiently by with the vague awareness that he should care more than he does, that he shouldn't feel so inconvenienced by the weaknesses of others.

But he doesn't remove his hand from hers, letting her squeeze if she needs to or let go when she's ready. He smells the sweat on her bedsheets and makes a mental note to have the Avoxes change them sooner rather than later. He thinks about suggesting she buy candles that smell like the furthest thing from her Arena.

"Do you need to talk it out?"

"I guess that's one downside of having the Tributes come back to life. Lots more screaming in the night." At least Jason had a home to go to, when they weren't working overtime like this, to escape it. Emily knew that if the Tributes were as bad as she was, it would just make her own nightmares worse. It was still the only downside that Emily had been able to find.

"I don't know how much there is to talk out, really. They're all the same. I'm used to the killing, and the bodies." Although she was relieved there hadn't been any decomposing this time. "It's not that that gets to me, really - it's the chaos. Sometimes I'm drowning, or suffocating. This time it was hands pulling me into the ground. ...We had an earthquake, my Arena. Maybe that's where that came from."

Well, it's not like Jason gets away from the screaming when he gets home. To tell the truth he would take nine Tributes and a Mentor with nightmares over Benjy's bellowing.

He doesn't know what it's like, sudden chaos like that. The riots that swept the Capitol when Eva Salazar hacked the network are the closest thing he's seen, and he watched that from afar. The personal chaos of his family is something else, because he's never been in physical danger; the threat was always to something he found more important, his way of life. And it was a grind instead of a sudden catastrophe.

"That's a reasonable enough explanation." He doesn't extricate his hand quite yet. "Just remember. Nothing bad happens in the Capitol."

There's enough of a wry tone to those words to show how little faith he puts in that.

Emily sniffs in dry amusement, darkly wishing that something bad would happen in the Capitol, that they would see what it feels like for a change instead of delight in the chaos of the Arenas, the tearing apart of families and villages. She swallows the impulse to retort as such.

"Right. I'll try to remember that."

She brushes her hair behind her shoulder, rubbing at her eyes. She feels more exhausted than when she lay down, but there was no way she could sleep again now. She looks over at Jason, a mix of gratitude and concern. "I didn't wake you, did I?"

Before he has a chance to say anything, his phone alarm goes off, its uncustomized beeping accompanied by the screen saying WAKE UP in glowing letters. He shrugs and turns it off as soon as it's out of his pocket.

"I was hardly sleeping." Now that she's released him he takes his hand back and brushes hair from his eyes again, runs a hand over his face, feels that tight numbness and itchiness around his eyes from exhaustion. In the Arenas, they're likely feeling the same, only with added terror and cold, but he doesn't seem to understand that. "You haven't missed anything, by the way. I made a few calls and got someone to underwrite a week's food for each of the Tributes."

"You did? That's wonderful." When she'd seen the icy wasteland they were being flung into, getting food to keep them strong had seemed a much higher priority to Emily than weapons. Perhaps they could starve out some of the other districts. "Thank you, I appreciate you holding the fort."

"Don't thank me yet. There are going to be debts to pay back at the end of this Arena if we don't get a Victor out of it." He shrugs, he always shrugs when someone thanks him for his work, as if he resents them taking away his excuse to feel unappreciated.

"Beth and Dorian made out with a nice bit of supplies. We haven't started off as badly as some Arenas." Back when they had two Tributes per District, many Arenas started out with Seven out of the running. "Do you need more sleep?"

"That so?" She sounds surprised, and impressed. "It's already one of my most successful Arenas, then." Not as successful as the year Johanna won, not yet, but she felt a lot more confident with more of them in the running and a couple with good supplies to boot.

She shakes her head insistently, blinking the sleep from her eyes. "No, I'm fine. I can come help out. Or take over, if you want to get some rest." She's not fine, but it's easier for her to press on and martyr herself than it is to give herself the space and rest she needs.

Edited 2015-02-20 21:26 (UTC)

"True, we don't have a great track record in this District." He sounds less impressed than she is. Since the Never-Ending Quell started, a good Cornucopia run tends to not factor into survival all that much.

"I could stand an hour or two." He rubs at the corners of his eyes. "Have the Avoxes clean up here and meet me in the common room. I'll show you all the updates and rest on the couch."

"I guess that's another upside of the Capitol reviving them. If they actually put in the work to train between Arenas, anyway. We're bound to have a Victor out of them sooner or later."

She stands, straightening the bed covers herself out of habit rather than leaving them for the Avox to do. "Sure, I'll be right through."

"For a quarter the bonus," he says, perpetually sour as smoke left on old clothes. "And for you, a quarter the supplies to your District."

He gets up off the bed, and in the light filtering from her video-wall it's evident how bad his posture is. "Alright. Oh, and next time you're going to have a screamer, you don't need to lock the door. There's no one here in the Suite but me and the Avoxes."

"It's still better than none at all." Emily knew that all to well, having to subside rations of grain and oil that didn't cover all six of them, having to take tesserae so the younger boys could eat. It was made all the worse by the abundance of wildlife in the forests of Seven, but the Peacekeeper presence was so strong in the District that no one dared to poach them.

She runs the tap at the sink in the corner, splashing some water on her face and leaving it flowing for a moment afterwards, feeling a little better just hearing the sound breaking through the thick silence that hung over the night outside of the both of them. "It's not like I can predict when one's going to happen."

"If we have low standards, sure."

Jason calls out from the common room. He rubs his eyes and puts his glasses back on. They slip down his nose - having gone the last thirty-something hours without a shower has made his skin a bit greasy, as the pince-nez of his spectacles seems eager to let him know. "Good, that means you're not having them every time you close your eyes, at least."

Back in District Ten he could be certain that just about any time some of the Mentors laid down, they'd wake soon enough screaming or shaking or vomiting or just generally upset. They never seemed to rest at all, just run, through waking and sleep, as if they were only a step ahead of the nightmares that plagued them.

"I actually need to shower more than anything. I'm starting to smell like an eighth-District spindle slave." He doesn't think anything of the cruel idiom.

"When you're starving, standards change," she replies, feeling her teeth grit and her blood pressure rise. She'd been so full of warm feeling and gratitude toward him just a few moments ago, but his true colours had shown themselves through that. It's a harsh reminder of just why she hates the Capitol.

She rolls her eyes, looking at him in disgust. "You really are a charmer."

He doesn't see her roll her eyes, back to her as he clears up the coffee table, but her tone's clear enough.

"What? It's not like you're from District Eight." He flicks through some of the pages of notes he's made, noting the point where his handwriting got flat-out terrible. "Besides, it's just a saying."

"So? It's still not nice to hear." But she decides it's not worth the energy lecturing him on why, on the awful conditions that the people of both Districts had to live in. She knows from experience that most Capitolites don't care. And even the ones who say they care don't listen or understand. Jason certainly fits in the former category.

"I'm not in the mood to tiptoe around your delicate feelings, Finch." He doesn't dignify that with a look either, instead biting the inside of his mouth as he looks over where their Tributes have landed themselves since the Cornucopia. Some have found their allies; others haven't. Some are uncomfortably far away from the action and might be driven back into the fray by Gamemakers; others are too close to enemies who may kill them.

"Alright. I'll see you in a moment." He snaps an order for an Avox to find him a fresh set of clothes and he goes to shower.

Emily wanders through to the living area, not bothering to change out of her clothes which are still rumpled from sleep. She perches on the sofa with her legs drawn up and her chin resting on her knees, watching the live Arena footage with the commentary muted. For now the bloodbath is over, and the Tributes are fanning out in ones and twos, getting to grips with the terrain. The calm after the storm - this was something that was easier for her. She picks up the cards with the sponsors' numbers on and begins to call through them, affecting a tone that's enthusiastic and bubbly, playing up the drama at the Cornucopia and listing reasons why Seven's Tributes were the ones to back. She can barely stand listening to herself, sees it as a betrayal of her own experiences to glamorise the Games like this, but it's what has to be done.

When Jason emerges, it's in a knit sweater and overlarge jeans, nothing he would ever wear in public but enough for finishing up the work here. He doesn't feel like dressing up for Emily, doesn't owe her fine presentation. His hair's length is more evident when it's plastered against his head, and he runs a towel over it and leaves it in messy spikes. He sends his suit down to get dry-cleaned and starts another pot of coffee.

"I miss anything? You want coffee?" He looks a little more alive, at least, now that he's bathed. "By the way, I'm going to have to talk to you about that District sensitivity. I'll put up with it but I don't want you making us look bad as a team with you telling Capitolites how to feel."

She rubs at her temples, elbows resting on her knees and her head in her hands, glancing over at him when he enters. "Coffee would be wonderful, thank you." She turns her gaze back to the screen, though it's just showing a recap of the costumes worn by the Tributes at the Crowning at the moment. "It doesn't look like there's too much going on at the moment. They've all spread out and are getting the lay of the land. We haven't lost anyone else yet, anyway."

She glowers at him as he continues. "I know when to hold my tongue. Trust me, there are bigger things at stake than making you look bad."

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Kids Grow Up and Kids Get Numb [Closed]

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