thecapitol | So I Found Some Ground to Stand [Open]

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So I Found Some Ground to Stand [Open]

WHO| Bayard and open!
WHAT Bayard adjusts to the modern day.
WHEN| Before and after the Crowning.
WHERE| Throughout the Tribute Center.
WARNINGS| There may be period-specific racism since Bayard's from 1863. Please let me know which prompt you're using!

I.

Ever since Sam showed him how to use a ballpoint pen, Bayard has taken it upon himself to be District Twelve's resident artist. That isn't to say that he's any good, but he fills sheets and sheets of paper (that seem to come to him for free whenever he asks it!) with crude sketches of men with swords and rifles, riding horses, of cannons and bears and dogs and sometimes of other Tributes. He doesn't throw away any of the pages, instead tacking them to the wall with another of the future's great inventions, Scotch tape.

It's a much better medium than drawing in the dirt with a stick, or begging Granny to use some of her pokeberry juice on a scrap of cloth, and the best is that it seems endless. Whenever he's done with one drawing there's an Avox who seems ready to bring him another fresh sheet of paper, in reams larger than any book Bayard's ever seen.

If anyone walks in on him 'at work', he's eager to explain to them that he drew that art on the wall, thank you, isn't it nice? He'll draw something for you too if you stick around long enough.

II.

Every few hours throughout the day, and usually once at night, Bayard can be heard running down the stairs from District Twelve, past every floor, and out the door to the lobby, whereafter there will be silence for a few minutes, and then he will return, bounding back up the steps to the twelfth floor with the indefatigable energy of youth. Because he has discovered how the kitchen sink works - what a fantastic invention! - he politely washes his hands when he returns.

"It's queer that they would build a bedroom so far from an area to relieve yourself," he says to the nearest person as he washes, as if trying to subtly brag that he's civilized, thank you. "And even more strange that they would make such a tall building and not put a single outhouse in the area."

He also hasn't showered yet, but one night he can be found getting towels wet in the sink and washing himself diligently with a bar of soap. He's decided that hauling pots of water up the stairs to the twelfth floor to fill the bath tub is just something he isn't up to doing.

III.

A wiser man than him, Bayard thinks, might stop making himself ill with all the food here. He's sure that Granny would chide him and remind him of the virtues of temperance if she could see him, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, sampling a little bit of everything. He mouths out the words, syllable by syllable, on every label, thinking that some of them sound like ingredients from the recipes Granny used to read him and Ringo for entertainment and some of them are words that look made up.

He surrounds himself with Chips Aha!, salsa, soy sauce, Froot-O's, canned tuna, Meataroni, sour sugar worms, and about ten different sorts of pastries from the drawers, once he realizes that they're hiding in plastic wrappers (how strange that they aren't in cloth or paper!).

Every once in a while, if he tries something and pulls a face, he puts it in a spoon with a sugarcube and gives it a second chance, thinking it's only right to give every strange delectable a fair shake. And just about everything tastes better with sugar dumped in it.

He has the decency to look a bit sheepish when anyone catches him in the act.

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"To have your freedom taken from you is a sore burden indeed." Her voice is rather caustic, the bitterness slipping out of her before she can stop herself, and she swallows it back. Clearing her throat, she takes the bag from him with a politic smile. In all probability, no-one but him heard that. Still, she has to remember to mind her tongue better.

The candied fruits are far more familiar than the cookies. They bring back memories of childhood, ducking through the kitchens of Edoras and stealing treats. She only eats a couple, then puts the bag aside, turning her attention fully to the boy. "Is it some manner of war, then, which plagues your homeland so? Or some longer travail?"

"Are the Yankees fighting you too?" Bayard's eyes flash up at Éowyn, with a sort of sympathy and also a kind of hope, that someone might understand what he's talking about. Even if she doesn't know the Yankees, she knows war.

And then he feels a little sick with himself, wishing for awful things to happen to others just so he feels less alone. It's not proper. It's not honorable.

"Yes'm. We're trying to overthrow the yoke of the North, Father says, and protect our way of life. It's been about a year now but they been quarreling at the Capitol much longer than that."

His understanding of the war isn't of politics, but of deprivation. Of being prepared to bury all their silverware at a moment's notice, of hiding the livestock so it can't be stolen or slaughtered, of not being able to afford food because the trade routes are severed and the market dried up to nothing but scam artists and price-gougers. It's of fearing for his father's life while convincing himself that to be the orphan of a fallen soldier is a respectable fate. It's hunger and insecurity and never knowing which relative you'll hear dead of next. It's brutal, ugly, one-sided and localized.

His understanding of war, as an abstract concept, is less informed, more the product of stories and imagination than fact.

"I've never heard of these Yankis," Éowyn says carefully, but she smiles down at him, and her sympathy is genuine. She's seen how war can end childhood, especially for boy-children, and just as it stung her to see Rohan's children caught up in the fighting, so it stings her to think of this child in the same state. "But I was in a war, too. One that lasted many years, and is still echoing through the land. For us, though, 'twas not the North but the East which plagued us. We lost... we lost much. I lost much." Her parents, for one. Her cousin. Her uncle. For a time, her hope.

But that's not to be dwelt on. She shakes her head, taking another few candied fruits and popping them into her mouth. "In those days, we lost much of our trade, too, for Orcs and savage Men harried our merchants. But such things pass. They ever will."

"I'm right sorry to hear that, ma'am," Bayard says softly. They're two years into the war where he's from, and more family than not have lost someone. His own family has already lost an uncle, one Bayard remembers from stories more than his own memory, one that shared his name, the first Bayard Sartoris.

"Was it your husband?" He thinks that if that were the case, Éowyn is the right picture of a war widow, dignified and sorrowful and persevering. She'd be respectable, where he's from. She'd be aspirational, even; if women must lose their men, they would strive to retain their nobility like Éowyn has.

"No." She smiles a little, sadly. "Though he came close to dying in the war, ere ever we met. In truth, had he not been so endangered, we should likely not have met at all." But that's another story. Putting the bag of sweets aside, she reaches for another packet at random and lets the smile fall from her face. "My father first, in the days before the war reached its height, slain by the Orcs he pursued. My mother withered and died after he was gone, and we were left to the care of my uncle the King. But he fell into a great shadow after his own son was slain." She clicks her tongue, her expression shadowed. "Much of the war, I spent caring for him, for he had sent my brother away. And then my uncle, too, was lost in battle, though I buckled on sword and armour to defend him." She smiles a little, but her smile is a strange thing, rueful and sad. "Truly they speak when they say that war orphans us all."

It's a heavy talk to have with a child she's just met. Still, she feels a little better for it, as she often does - as if speaking matter-of-factly of those things, as if they were far and distant, will make them so.

"I'm sorry," Bayard says. He has a thickness to his throat, a gravity to his tone that belies that he's had nightmares of losing his father more times than he cares to count up, that he has no words to talk about them with because the pains of the ones left at home are paltry in comparison to the risks made by the Southern champions of the Confederacy. Bayard's to keep a stiff upper lip. He's to bear the long absences and the uncertainty with dignity.

"My uncle died in the war too, in the first few months of it." He bobs his head slightly, solemnly. "And my mother wasted away when I was born, which might have been a mercy to her, my Granny says."

He reaches out to pat her hand and then pauses, remembering that she isn't family.

"Will you let me take your hand? I promise I don't mean anything untoward."

She answers in kind, taking his hand and clasping it with a rather sad little smile. "I should not dream for a moment that you did, boy. And I thank you, for your honesty and for your kindness." For a moment, she's silent, considering, then says gently, "It is a heavy burden to bear, especially for one so young as you. And the worst part is, in some ways, that it passes."

"I reckon it would have been worse had I known him well, ma'am. Now I just carry his name for him, and all I can do is make sure I do right by it." He nods sagely, giving her hand a reassuring pat and then a tight grasp. His hands are rough, callused, used to working and playing in dirt and stone and reeds.

She nods back, returning that grasp. Her hands, too, are calloused, though her callouses are differently won, and so sit differently on the skin - on the pads of her palm, from sword and spear, and on the tips of her fingers from needlework and handling herbs.

"I do not doubt that you will carry it proudly as ever he could," she says gravely, letting go of his hand. "Were all men so steadfast in my land, we should have beaten back Mordor's forces ere ever I set hand to my blade." That's flattery, of course, though well-meant. Although there were some men who shook before the Shadow, Rohan's folk are a proud people, and every bit as steadfast as some lonely child in a lonely place. But she likes the boy, from what she's seen of him, and wishes to reassure him in the burden of his ancestry.

"Thank you, ma'am." He gives her hand a squeeze, feeling how different it is from any white woman's hand he's known, not like his grandmother's with her skin loose and joints jutting like her whole hand is a lattice of collarbones, but like a slave woman's or a man's, rugged from work and expertise. Differently calloused, but calloused nonetheless.

"Yes'm. It's why the South will win," Bayard says, still steadfast in his blind and naive belief. "I can only hope your land will as well. I'll include you in my prayers, if you don't mind. I reckon the Lord can forgive me begging his ear a little longer."

"If it gladdens you to do so," Éowyn agrees with a little nod, smiling. She sees no reason to pray, and would not even if prayer was something common in her land. The Enemy is defeated; all that remains of his forces is stragglers and wayward bandits. In a year or two, she trusts, even they will be swept from the land, and all will be clean again. But let him pray, if he thinks it helpful. It is hardly as though she can begrudge someone who would hold such hope, especially in a place like this.

There is one thing, though, which makes her wonder. She hangs back from asking, fearful of offending him, but at last curiosity wins out. "What lord is it, if I may ask, to whom you pray?"

It's not the first time that Bayard's been asked to explain Jesus here in Panem, and he's mostly gotten over the despairing feeling that he'll have to make a convert of everyone. With naive and steady optimism, he has become fully convinced that if he speaks his limited knowledge of the gospel honestly, then the religion will come into being as fully-formed as Athena from Zeus' cracked skull, and its presence will bring the unsaved flocking to it. He needn't evangelize; the Truth will come from him like a breath of air and find a life of its own once he's expelled it.

"Jesus, ma'am. Or, rather, the Lord himself and his son, Jesus." He looks not offended, not even worried, but blissfully happy just to be sharing information, the same way he might if he were called on to give someone directions to an address and could improve their day a little that way. "Do you have Bibles where you're from, ma'am?"

"Bibles," Éowyn repeats, rolling the word thoughtfully on her tongue. "I fear not, for the word means nothing to me. What are they, these Bibles?" She asks with honest curiosity. A Bible could be anything, so far as she's concerned. A man, a beast, a place... for all she knows, it could be the name of this Lord Jesus' servants.

"They're a book, written by the Lord. Or by his apostles. I don't remember. They're the word of God." Bayard looks sheepish for a moment again, like he really should remember it better. "Granny would make me sit and study for not recalling it precisely, I'm afraid."

Maybe that's why there's no Jesus in these other worlds - a dearth of Bibles. Bayard will just have to track some down.

That, at least, Éowyn can grasp. There are no such books in her land, but there are tales telling of Creation and of the Valar, and that is enough to take a guess at what Bayard's Bibles might contain. She nods, reaching for another packet of food at random.

"In my land," she says thoughtfully, "there are no such books. Though the Elves will speak of the song of Creation, and how it still echoes through the world. I suppose, in that, our own Creator left his words." She smiles a little, rather self-consciously. "I never had all that much time for such things."

"Oh!" Bayard perks up a bit. "Sometimes we call Him the Creator too. Lord God, Creator, the King of Heaven."

It's easier to just believe Éowyn has different names for religion than that she's an unbaptized heathen. She seems too kind to be an unbeliever, a role which Bayard believes is filled only by the Indians of rumor and legend.

Éowyn sees that hope in him, and is actually rather sad to have to shake her head. "Eru is neither lord nor king. When the world was sung into being, others were placed to shape it and rule it. Your Lord God sounds closer to Manwë, who is first among the Valar. But we do not worship him, though the Elves do him honour. He is far from us, and his children are the Elves, not Man."

Religion, at least in the form that Bayard knows it, is a foreign concept to her. She can get her head around it in a way, but the kind of organised faith he means has never even occurred to her.

Bayard tries to follow along, but his mind is too busy trying to reconcile what she tells him with Christianity to actually understand the story on its own terms, and he emerges from it all looking confused and a little upset at that. He decides, without reason so much as necessity, that he's just going to ignore the inconsistencies until he has more time to puzzle them over - not to fight them now, but to absorb what she says and rather than making a determination now, think on it later, when he's in bed with the hologram wall showing him an image of silently falling rain as he tries to sleep.

"I don't know much about that," he says, not angry or dismissive but honestly admitting that he's at a loss. "I'll have to think it over to understand it, I think. Wouldn't be the first thing I didn't understand at a first glance in this place, though."

And with a smile, just like that, he manages to relegate Éowyn's world and beliefs and mythology to the same sort of trivia and pleasant obstacle as he's placed credit cards and air conditioners.

"I'm none too sure I understand it myself," Éowyn says truthfully, with a little twist of a smile. "Such things are the preserve of scholars and historians, I fear, not of ladies. In the main, I let it to those who are drawn to its study, and keep my own eye to what's real and tangible." She doesn't consider that a fault. She's spent far too much of her life, she feels, with her head in the clouds, filling herself up on songs and stories. The war brought her down to earth, and that's where she means to stay.

"Nor of children," Bayard says, bobbing his head. "But I won't be one much longer, so I suppose I'll have to learn those things too. I'm nearer a man now than I was yesterday and even more than the day before that."

As if maturity is something you reach by stepping forward in time, something added to uniformly by the steady progression of days.

"What sorts of things are real and tangible to you, Miss Éowyn?"

Éowyn smiles a little at the thought, nonetheless. It's that strangely innocent balance of naivety and resignation, the hurdle onwards towards adulthood that she, too, felt as a child. In short, it's a very childlike thing to say, and for all that she is sick to her stomach at the thought of a child in a place like that, it's nice to have something so profoundly free of artifice.

The question gives her a little more pause, though. "The land," she says, at last. "People, and their needs. And a horse under you when you ride, a sword in your hand when you fight, the herbs clinging to your skin when you heal." She smiles, rather self-consciously, at her own answer. "The things you work with your hands, I suppose, and the things that come of them."

"I'd agree with that, I think. The one thing I miss is working the earth. I never thought I would miss that." He looks at his hands, already softening from the few days in the Capitol of leisure. "Back on Sartoris I built stock pens with Father, and buried our silver, and rounded up the mules. Now I ain't got anything to roughen me up."

He looks a little maudlin for a moment, and then it passes, as if whatever shadow were in front of his inner sun has crossed.

She considers for a moment. "There's always training," she says, after a moment. "It's not the same work you're speaking of, but it's something to keep you from getting weak and soft. There's a training gym here, all the weapons you could think to bear. Sword and spear and shield, and more besides. I could teach you a little, if you'd learn."

It's how she's been keeping herself occupied, burning off that energy and futile frustration from being cooped up in this place. It isn't home. But it's something.

"Ain't the same." Bayard gives a wistful sort of whistle. "But I'd be grateful if you'd teach me some. I only know how to use a musket, and that just barely. I reckon my Escort would be glad to see me spending more time learning to fight."

And maybe it'll be better with a partner. Bayard feels guilty using the Avoxes and he gets bored on his own.

"Can't say I know what a musket is," Éowyn admits, with a little laugh, and nods. "But I'd be glad to teach you, if you'll learn. A boy ought to know such things, especially in such a place as this."

So I Found Some Ground to Stand [Open]

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