thecapitol | The End, It Plays in My Mind All the Time [Closed]

WHO| Venus Dee Milo and Shepard
WHAT| Making up...kind of...?
WHEN| Over a week after the mission.
WHERE| D5 Living Room.
WARNINGS| None yet.

Venus doesn't gloat. Even if she were the type to - and she's not, because she knows to draw positive attention to herself without bragging, because that's part of her calling as a celebrity - there's nothing to gloat about with her being right about a few people in the Tribute Tower. So she had a heads up on fingering a villain. So what. The guy practically reeked of selfish life choices and tying maidens to railroad tracks anyway.

She sits in the District Five living room, being subtle about the fact that she's only been eating liquids lately, mild soups, that she hasn't bared any skin between her knee and her shoulders since the mission, despite the good weather. Under her clothing there's a bruise the size of a newborn child that's only gotten darker and deeper since she received it, and she's been running a mild fever since Saturday. Thankfully, both Venus and the District Five Style team are deft with a makeup brush, and so the lines of pain that would be drawn into her face are smoothed away by coverup and matting powder and a little bit of tape hidden behind her ears.

She hasn't spoken to Shepard in a long while. They've coexisted as roommates, silently and without quarrel or warmth. Venus hasn't taken any passive-aggressive shots at the woman who talked her into suicide, and Shepard hasn't gone out of her way to make life miserable for the person who once killed her boyfriend. Venus doesn't much exist in the District Five Suites or anywhere, lately, just a watercolor imprint of a person going through the motions, with rare exceptions when she's talking to Sam or Phil or Jet and her face lights up with a frenzied sense of purpose that she no longer has the wherewithal to hide. The sparks in her are guttering but when they flare, they're bright with desperation.

It's been a hard year, she thinks, and when she sees Shepard come out of the elevator from wherever she's been, she realizes it has been for more than just her.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Each day, just the same as before. It was the routine that dulled the edge, that sharpened her appetite for more-- it wasn't that she didn't appreciate predictability. No one spent as long as she had in the military without acquiring a taste for structure, no. But there were times she jumped to put her neck on the line just for variety, for the glimpse of hope, like the glint of an unwary scope-lens that let you know where to aim.

But today was a little different, maybe. Today was terseness and an itch like fire in her shoulderblade where she'd had fragments dug out in a blind spot of a bathroom and rinsed the blood down the sink because-- well. Today she'd seen the beaming face of Black Tom in the newsfeeds and the last time she'd seen him had been sneering down at her from the other end of a pointed branch, twisting in her gut. Bastard. Well, never let it be said she couldn't own to a fair cop.

Shepard moved casually, almost without her usual purpose, and set down what she was carrying in front of Venus. Expensive stuff, looking more like a tub of caviar than what it was: yogurt. Healthy yogurt, with whole fruits and a host of live cultures, and fewer calories per sinfully delicious bite than the equivalent volume of air, if the label was to be believed. Sixteen goddamn fluid ounces of it.

"So, you were right."

It's as close to a real apology as she is likely to get.

Venus wasn't expecting Shepard to be the first to call a truce (a truce to a war that's less a battlefield than just a no-man's land), but she supposes Shepard's never about to stop surprising her. Maybe it's grief that Thane is gone. Maybe it's the simmering discontent among Tributes, the petty grievances starting to fall away as the real enemy emerges as if from clay on a rotating table. Maybe she's just never going to understand the Commander she shares a floor with.

She looks at the yogurt not with skepticism, but like she's trying to recall the first line to a poem and that when she does that the rest will fall into place in the back of her head, lined up to be recited. She chews the side of her mouth and looks up at Shepard, taking her feet down from the coffee table.

"I didn't realize we were taking bets on when Cassidy would show his true colors." She smiles - apology-ish gesture accepted, as much because Venus is exhausted and bored of not having Shepard as an ally as because of anything Shepard's done.

"If we were, the stakes woulda been a hell of a lot higher than yogurt."

And that was true, after a sort. The stakes almost were that high, in truth-- but it wasn't money or honor or friendship on the line, such as it were. She didn't like the idea of gambling with outcomes. Her missions were too damn important for that.

So here she was. Making friends. Apologizing, after a fashion. Shepard uncrossed her arms and flopped down onto the seat across from Venus. It's a new era.

"I don't know. I feel like if you're going to bet on something that's totally a foregone conclusion, you might as well make the stakes yogurt." Venus gets up (not to avoid Shepard, but to avoid summoning an Avox) and grabs a spoon from the kitchen before returning at a laborious speed. She's trying very hard not to let on the injury she's hiding under her clothes, but she has to sacrifice speed to keep from limping or cringing, and she's sure Shepard can see it.

She cracks open the tub of yogurt and starts in on it, closing her eyes and smiling. It's good. Everything to be eaten in the Capitol is good, and though Venus is quicker to forget that than some, right now she doesn't.

"How've you been?" she asks, because it's less awkward than are we cool now?.

"Eh. You win some, you lose some."

Terrible. Her boyfriend is dead-- gone, for good or otherwise. Even if the raid was a success by technicalities, the casualties have turned it sour. And in any case, they're all supposed to be very sad about that terrible incident. So sad.

Between Azula, and Kurloz, she's running out of allies she can trust. There's only Garrus left, of the true inner circle.

"Can't complain too much; I've had worse. You?"

"I don't know. Discovered my vagina's cursed. You know, the usual." She smiles and takes another bite of yogurt, using her lips to leave the spoon looking sparkling clean after each mouthful.

"Starting to think that you and me are going to be the only old vets left at this rate, which with our roommate the clown getting, you know." Venus makes a 'cut your throat' gesture, but against her cheek to indicate Initiate's tongue.

"Sandy's still kicking around. That kid's been here as long as any of us. Signless too. But...yeah," Shepard pushed past the memory of Kurloz like shouldering the straps of a pack. You could either bear up against the weight or you couldn't, but you'd damn well die before complaining. "It's gettin' a little sparse around here."

Strange, to think of them as the 'old guard', really. What was it that made them keep these particular people around so long? Did even the Capitol know?

"Wait, your what is cursed?"

"Do you want me to go through a list of euphemisms?" Venus leans back on the couch, setting the cup of yogurt on her stomach. "Every time I sleep with someone they die right afterwards and don't come back. I'm pretty sure the Capitol is fucking with me."

Which would be a joke except that it's also entirely possible - maybe even probable.

"Sorry about, you know." Thane. Venus looks awkward about it but she sounds like she means it.

"Don't."

Shepard could be casual, could relax her guard and be civil, even, if she wanted to, but not about that, about him. That one was off limits.

"You're not cursed. Either it's the Capitol trying to get to you, or coincidence. You could always widen your pool," Is she flirting? With Venus. Is that wise, Shep? "See if that gets your theory any ground."

The End, It Plays in My Mind All the Time [Closed]

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