There's a High Wind in the Trees [Open]

[vissernone]

WHO| Eva and everyone
WHERE| Training Center room and the District 9 living room
WHAT| Eva gets back from a night of greasing palms and hosts an advisory meeting. Also punches things.
WHEN| A few days before the next arena.
WARNINGS/NOTES| Some mention of the Sponsors.

Eva's hit another dead end. Any of her attempts to sleuth information about the recent attacks from the Peacekeepers have been shut down, or have come perilously close to making her look treasonous, so for her own self-preservation she's backed down and tempered those curious instincts.

She balms her ego by reminding herself that the rebels attacked are a particularly inopportune time for her; given that the new Arena is coming within the week, Eva's had palms to grease, and the meetings with Sponsors has left her running ragged. Not for the first time, she wishes her fellow District 9 Mentors were more involved with the Tributes, because she feels that hers have been neglected while she was cozying up to the rich and powerful.

Her makeup today is a splay of painted orchids dripping from her hair line down to create a mask around her eyes, a clever ruse to hide the dark circles forming there. She's wearing fashionable gloves to keep herself from picking at her lips and biting her cuticles; she's always been bad at hiding her fidgety impulses when she's tired. Thankfully, the elaborate makeup and beautiful embroidery on the gloves distracts from how functional her plain dark dress is, and to an extent how rumpled the fabric is. She didn't have time to change from last night's encounter with a Sponsor with some unsavory interests in one of her Tributes; the argument took them long into the night, and Eva ended up walking away with one less person willing to support District 9, but able to catch a few hours of sleep without guilt.

Prior to doing what she came here to do, she spends a little while in the Training Center, removing her gloves and wrapping her hands in tape so she can take a few swings at the punching bag. She's no longer in peak physical shape and tires quickly, but it's a good, healthy way to work the stress out. She restrains herself, focusing more on form than on power, and ceases long before she can work up enough of a sweat to make the fact that she hasn't showered this morning evident.

She's carved out a few hours today to talk with her Tributes, if they're willing. She goes up the elevator and waits in the District 9 living room with a plate of fanciful cheeses and some wine bottles, which she's inconspicuously opened and partially vanished the contents of already. While she waits she doesn't, in fact, have the television on, but reads a small book of poetry she's stowed in her purse instead.

[OOC: The District 9 party is open to her Tributes only, but her other subthread is open to absolutely everyone in the Capitol who wants to get some threading in before the Arena!]

Comments

District 9 Living Room

[vissernone]

so stop me if you've heard this one

[polyturtle]

And - lo and behold - one of the Tributes is there. No doubt Eva heard about the turtle. There might even be a chance that Eva ran into one of Donatello's perennial Sponsors - that one giddy fangirl and her friends who tend to get drunk at Sponsor functions. You know, the ones who stood around and squeal inhumanly about how they just love Donatello and he's so different and how his chivalry is so incredible and lovely and tragic, what with how he died for two girls who became Victors! And of course that doesn't stop him from killing people in such a fantastic fashion-

Well, no doubt Eva probably got her ear talked off by them and a few others at functions. But definitely by them. And now, there he was. The darling of drunk women everywhere. He was still reading Compendium Tributum, and frowning the whole way. How surprising that someone would be disturbed by the way a book waxed poetic about children dying horrible!

[vissernone]

Eva's familiar with Donatello - enthusiastic drunken fans aside, she's made the effort to at least watch a few clips from the games she's missed lately. As such, when she sees him she waves her hand almost as if addressing an old friend.

"Mr. Hamato." She smiles and pats on the seat of the couch. "Or do you prefer Donatello?"

To tell the truth, that he's a turtle doesn't bother her so much as unsettle her. It makes it too easy to forget the brutal nature of the Games, seeing not humanity but some other form of sentience reflected back. At least, Eva worries that that's how the rest of Panem will see it.

[polyturtle]

Another form of sentience that was...still very human-like. It was what separated his family from nearly every other animal.

"Huh?" He quickly looked up from his book, only to see the woman offer him a seat. He closed the book, smiling sheepishly as he walked over. "Uh...sure. Donatello's ok. Or...just Don."

Who was this? Surely this wasn't someone who'd bid on him...?

[vissernone]

She holds a hand out to shake. "Alright, Don. I'm Eva Salazar, your mentor. Forgive me for not being here the last few rounds."

She meets his eyes; her expression is chipper, but there's a depth to it, like she isn't trying to fake happiness like so many of the escorts, and like she isn't vapid like so many of the stylists. She understands the severity of the situation and is choosing to smile anyway.

Training Room at the Punching Bag

[vissernone]

[teethofneedles]

Karis doesn't particularly like this place, even with the promise of mayhem and the ability to kill some poor assholes without any repercussions. It's bright and shiny and full of breathers and her handlers keep trying to get her to wear makeup or hide the holes that have rotted in her face. She keeps telling them to go sit on it and spin, but they keep bothering her about it and they keep wanting to put her infancy clothing instead of something practical and she hates that too.

In fact, just like always, she hates just about everyone she comes into contact with. None of it's familiar, but the thought of being able to take some of her anger out on some of the chuckleheads she's seen keeps her motivated. At least for now.

Their training room is nice, at least. Someone catches her attention - a woman in makeup jabbing away at a punching bag. Karis watches her for a minute or two and then sidles up to get a closer look. She's never been one for form when it comes to brawling - just hit the other person until they give up works for her. So she watches, waits and picks at her teeth until she thinks of something to say.

"Never known anybody to train in makeup before. Not even elves and they're prissy little assholes."

Karis pauses and then flashes a nasty-looking grin when she's sure she has Eva's attention, "Pretty, though."

[vissernone]

Eva's aware another person's there - she can hear Karis picking at her teeth and sucking her fingers f

"Yes, well, I'm a woman on the go- oh!" Eva starts a bit as she turns and sees Karis, the brackish, decomposing corpse mask that she calls a face. She freezes for just a moment, her muscles rigid as she tries to piece together whether this is some drunken hallucination and she's finally cracked, or, the more likely explanation, that it's some new Capitol fashion. She relaxes a little bit, hiding both the fear and disgust under a heavy veil of composure.

She starts to untape her hands, letting the tape grab and bite at little bits of hair on her arms.

"I'm sorry, I don't believe we've met. You're not in my District, are you?"

[teethofneedles]

Karis watches her silently for a moment, eyes following her movements in strange, jerky little movements. Well, that's all of her movements. Jerky and sudden without any of the natural flow that seems to come with anyone who's alive.

"Karis. Karis Needleteeth - they said I was District 10 now, but what do I care about that?"

She shrugs and glances at the punching bag.

"What's a pretty thing like you doin' down here? You're not one of us tributes, are you?"

The way she drawls the word 'tributes' makes it pretty damn clear what she thinks about being called that.

[vissernone]

"Well, I imagine if you're hitting on me, you'd want to know if I'd be making regular visits to your suite." She raises her eyebrows, clearly joking. "But it looks like it's not to be, because I'm promised to another district."

She supposes she's been hit on by weirder people than people dressed like the dead - the Sponsors are usually a pretty repulsive bunch, and Eva would happily take decomposing over some of the other people she's been forced to spend time with. It's a convincing costume, though, and the hair on the back of Eva's neck starts to rise with the suspicion that it may not, actually, be just a costume. They brought a talking turtle here, after all.

"I'm Eva Salazar, and I've already won the Games, so I'm no longer a Tribute. Now I just get to sit on the sidelines with my popcorn."

[downbeat]

Not far from the punching bag, towards the entrance of the room, an anemic whistle emerges from the silence. It is faint, fragile, filled with air. The notes waver and sway and barely hit their marks.

But the melody is clear. Amazing Grace.

Katurian waits with his hands in his pockets, his own sallow skin smoothed with foundation. He is trying to look stronger these days, even though no make up can hide his sharp angles and skinny chest, the hollowness in his eyes.

[vissernone]

Eva pauses, but rather than respond with words she starts to harmonize with humming, more fully than the lullaby-ish quality she used last time she hummed to him. Her voice is rough and deep for a woman, and would be ugly except for its aptitude at clinging to exactly the right notes. It's clearly of a different vein than the glitzy, smooth silk of Capitol music; it's rich with a sort of culture.

"You," she finally says to Katurian, after she's finished unwrapping her hands from the tape, "should not give up your day job."

It's good to see him, and it's good to see he looks healthier, if not whole. It's a tall order to ask for any Tribute to look whole after a death like his. She pulls her gloves back on.

"How are you? In comparison." Their lives should always be measured in comparison to their worst. It's the forward propulsion they need to get through the day.

[downbeat]

Katurian doesn't answer with words either -- at least not immediately. At her question, he simply looks down at himself and laughs, the sound not much stronger than his earlier whistles. He lifts his arms, a meek demonstration. Look, his movements say. I'm alive. I'm standing.

"It takes more than a stomach bug to keep me down," he says, allowing himself a wry smile. A private joke. "I'm pretty fucking stubborn."

He is not comfortable with her. Not entirely. Katurian is well-versed in betrayal, in warm embraces becoming suffocating caverns. But he imagines that somehow, someday, he could be comfortable with this woman, and that in itself is significant. She helped him when no one else would. Her voice rolled like the waves of the ocean.

"How are you?"

[vissernone]

"Good to hear. You look much more handsome when you're not hunched over a garbage bin." She brushes at some of the flyaway hairs that were loosened during the punching. "I've been worse. The week before the arena is always a little hectic for the Mentors."

There it is, the elephant in the room. In a few days he'll be right back where he started, and the worry that this next time might break him entirely has slipped into Eva's mind a few times. It's not unusual for her to care about Tributes outside of her district. She didn't used to allow herself, back when they died for good, and she doesn't know if now is any better, because she gets to watch them suffer over and over.

"Come on, take a walk with me. I could use the exercise."

Re: Training Room at the Punching Bag

[shambler]

Ever since meeting Aunamee, R has taken to hiding out in the Training Center whenever he can shuffle away. It’s the last place his Escort would think to find him. They've pinned him as a lost cause in survival training (or training at all) and R thinks he's okay with that.

The sound of a fast thwack-thwack draws R in. Odd sounds still pull, anything out of the ordinary flatline he’d been used to back at the airport. Usually it means food, memories, eating someone’s memories. It’s not the same case here. The problem is the Capitol is full of weird, different sounds, coming at him from all angles, and most of the time he has a hard time focusing on any one thing. As he shuffles closer, he sees a Living woman going at a punching bag, parts of her face sparkling whenever the light catches her at certain angles. R watches her for a few minutes from the shadows, his hands limp and gray at his sides, settled back in a comfortable slouch now that he doesn’t have his Escort nagging him about his posture.

(He dabbled in the idea of standing up straight…on his own terms. He’ll keep on slouching just to prove a point to his Escort).

R waits until the woman looks like she’s done getting that punching out of her system before coming closer. With the luck he’s had meeting new people, new people who can talk and remember their names and everything, R feels almost like a person himself.

“Nice right hook,” R says with a wheeze. The zombie drags his feet a little closer, watching as the punching bag swings eventually to a stop.

Re: Training Room at the Punching Bag

[vissernone]

Eva hears R coming, but doesn't turn around until she's done punching. She could hear the soles of his shoes scuffing against the floor as he slump-shuffled closer, and while she's the paranoid sort, she's pretty certain anyone who means her harm isn't going to have noisy dragging feet. Back in the Arena, she learned the first night when she blew her cover that you couldn't jump and investigate at every sound, especially in the dark. She learned to listen, and make calculated decisions based on risk. She learned to observe without moving, without seeing.

At night she lies in bed staring at the ceiling and she hears the creaks of her house as if they're the footsteps of killers. But when she's awake, when she's in daylight, her discerning ears serves her well. So she punches another ten times, then shakes her hands out as she turns around.

"Thank you." She immediately notices something off about the young man, something more than just the strangely pale makeup that's in fashion in some circles. He looks worse than just painted, worse than tired, he looks dead. She tries not to let that she's processing that and trying to make sense of it show on her face, which she mostly just keeps frozen in a flattered-but-confident 'of course my punches are flawless' expression.

"I'm sorry, I don't know your name. I'm Eva, District 9's resident den mother." Her smile widens a bit, her top lip wrapping into the weird scar she never got fixed after the arena. It's a sad smile, because she knows that she's getting attached to people she's going to watch get butchered on television. At least they come back these days - usually. Somehow, that doesn't make it any easier.

[shambler]

Finally, someone with a reasonable name. It's so short it's almost a Dead name. R decides he likes Eva just for that alone. He's easy like that.

"Rr," he says. Can they trade Escorts or den mothers or whatever? Because he already wants Eva: she doesn't have an obsession with sea-foam teal, for one, and she speaks like a normal person, no weird lilts and anything, just up-front and he thinks she might even have a sense of humor, if he's reading her right. "Nice to meet...you."

R can't help but appreciate that scar slashed across her mouth. Being dead long enough around the same other zombies, day in, day out, and eventually you start to notice the little things, like how scar tissue looks. Scars have stories. Usually they're question marks, but Eva's alive and that means she could actually tell hers if she wanted. R drags his eyes back up from her mouth.

"A...rena?" The zombie turns to look at the punching bag.

[vissernone]

"Nice to meet you too." She holds her hand out to shake, wondering if his hand will be dry and cold compared to hers, which are clammy and hot from the exercise. She almost asks him to repeat his name, because she didn't quite catch it, but decides that asking him to waste more of his words going back over it is just cruel. She'll look it up in the Tribute profiles later.

Her face flashes into an almost paralyzing awkwardness. "You don't know about the Arena yet?" She's never had to actually explain it to anyone. She wasn't around for the most recent foreigner crops of Tributes, and before that it was just ingrained in the culture. The idea that she has to tell this young man that he's going to go and die, again and again, on camera is a bit much for her to bear, and she swallows. She can't hide the sympathy in her face.

Well. She had to explain it to her son, once. She tries to push that memory away. R looks nothing like Marco did. He's an adult, for one, and her son was a mere few years old, just starting school.

[buildingreality]

Ariadne thought it slightly strange that Eva was down there with that sort of incredible makeup on as she was. Of course, she couldn't really say much, as there was probably a reason for it - Eva didn't seem like the type of woman to just dress herself up and flounce around, like some of the other Victors Ariadne had seen around before.

And though it's been a while since their last interaction, that dinner with Baron (she cringes just to think of it), Ariadne still recalled well wanting to actually get to know the older Victor a little bit. It seemed to her like she might know something. Or a number of somethings.

She only just came downstairs, dressed down for her own excursion in the Training Centre, and stopped when she saw Eva. Her direction changed when that happened, and Ariadne sidled over to Eva, moving to grab and slow the bag as the other woman stopped, making sure it didn't hit her.

"You come down here often?"

[vissernone]

"Ariadne," Eva says, catching her breath slightly. She turns around and smiles, but there's a kind of wariness in her, because she knows she's harbored deep resentment for the people who sat aside while she was violated. Maybe Ariadne is the more understanding sort. "Not as often as I should. Someday they might throw me back in the Arena, and then I'll be dead meat as soon as the cannons fire. I'll throw out my hip or something."

She redoes the clip in her hair, pulling back the stray locks that came all loose and messy during the exercise and trying to flatten a wrinkle from her dress. "And you? Spent much time supervising your Tributes this week?"

She'd rather not mention the Sponsors. They're both well aware of how Sponsors are.

[buildingreality]

There was a little bit of resentment stemming from that incident, but at the same time, the rational part of Ariadne's mind allowed her to put it aside. No one wants to die because they spoke up at the wrong time, and Baron was one of those who, without a doubt, would have someone killed for one wrong word. If Eva had tried to stop it, Ariadne had a feeling she wouldn't be around to have this conversation with.

Or at the very least, those bruises hidden beneath the make up would be that much worse.

"You're not that old," she pointed out mildly, having seen a remote handful of older Mentors around the place. If they were to do so, Eva wouldn't be alone in fretting over a potentially thrown out hip.

But she nodded slowly, "As best I can. There's more of them now. It wasn't like that before, was it? Having more than the initial male and female pair?"

[bangbangkerpooow]

"Heya, Eva."

Billy has a way of drawling his words, of adding melody where no melody is necessary. He's less like a singer and more like a child on the playground, spinning out chants and brandishing rhymes. When he walks, he strolls, and that's exactly how he approaches Eva and the punching bag. His clothing is garish and loud, but not because he's adhering to Capitol norms. He wears a collection of mismatching patterns and clashing colors, orange on green on red.

He looks her up and down, his lips pursed, his hands crossed in front of his chest. He gives an impressed whistle.

"You're lookin' fancy today. What's the occasion? Party I wasn't invited to?"

[vissernone]

"Bickle." Eva stops punching as soon as she hears his voice. It's not a voice she's used to hearing, but the cadence is unmistakeable. Her own response is as serious and monotone as the flat line of a heart monitor on a corpse. The muscles in her shoulders are tense.

She composes her face and turns around with her eyes hooded in an amused expression. Her eyelids are on guard for her soul, she thinks. "I don't imagine I get invited to parties where you aren't a feature. For all you know, I'm just dressing up for my weekly game of checkers with the other old bags."

[bangbangkerpooow]

"Yeah," he says, letting a laugh slip between his teeth. "For all I know, you're all dressed up to play checkers with the other old bags. That's why I'm asking."

He slides on up to the punching bag and rests his elbow up against it, leaning comfortably like a restaurant owner in his own restaurant. He's not far from Eva, not hardly -- where he's standing, he's only about three feet away. He watches her, that half smile never quite leaving his lips.

And then he tilts his head suddenly, not unlike a playful dog. His teeth flash in a grin.

"So, y'gonna let me in on it?"

[vissernone]

"I'm doing my duty as a Mentor to provide my Tributes with some advantages in the Arena. Nothing special. Probably something you should get used to doing, since nowadays yours aren't raised by birth to slaughter."

She decides to keep the tape on her hands. She can't foresee any scenario where she gets to deck him in the head, but it's a charming fantasy. Panem may have nuked District 13 but she'd have chosen either of the career districts, personally.

She rests her hands on her hips and raises an eyebrow at him. "Why, do you need me for something, or are you here to fill my free time with inanity?"