[OPEN] The morning dove sings

[atouchofka]

Who| Alain and YOU
What| Alain's not-so-triumphant return to the Capitol
Where| Central commons; D4 suite (specifically seeking Roland, but open); D7 suite; anywhere else you'd like!
When| End of week 6, early week 7
Warnings/Notes| Death things, I guess?

Death is, somehow, easier than Alain expected. Embarrassing - of all the ways he expected to die, he didn't expect it to be at the hands of a child, and a girl-child at that - but easy. It's waking from it that's hard, pulling himself out of the darkness and fully expecting agony in its wake. But of course, there is no agony. He's whole again, and when first he awakes, he looks with wonder at the fully-formed callouses on his palms, which were so recently reduced to raw new skin and blisters. Wonder, and a kind of creeping disgust and horror. This is wrong. Even knowing it was coming, it's wrong. He spends several moments just checking himself over, flexing his hands and testing his weight on his no-longer-broken leg. That creeping horror doesn't fade. At last, unwilling to be left alone with the evidence of his own unnatural recovery, he heads out of the room into the Center proper.

i. Central commons
He makes for the stairs first, not sure what he hopes for, just knowing he doesn't want to stay sitting around in the aftermath. It doesn't hurt that the bars are down there; after everything, he could use a stiff drink. The crowds are a relief, after the echoing silence in his own head, although the numb lack of the Touch is nagging at him again, dragging at his attention like a loose tooth. He keeps his head lowered, though, not making eye contact until he's at the bar. Company is well and good, but he isn't interested in replaying his embarrassment in the Arena for Capitolite ears.

He settles down in the corner of the bar with a double whiskey, scanning the crowds, looking for a friendly face. Or at least one that shows something more than vulturous curiosity.

ii. D4 suite
After a couple of drinks, the noise and press of the place starts to get to him, as does the aching emptiness that's all that answers his Touch. He no longer craves busyness so much, and he has his own concerns to attend to. Some people don't come back. Has he really gone so long without making sure Roland isn't one of them? Sluicing down the last of his whiskey, he gets to his feet and starts back towards the stairs (the elevators are something he doesn't think he'll ever be comfortable with, trapping yourself in a tiny prison in the hands of a machine), but not back to his own suite. He stops at the fourth floor, takes a deep breath, and heads inside, going to knock on Roland's door.

iii. D7 suite
He can only stay out so long. Eventually, he ends up back on his own floor, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he curls on an armchair, leafing through his well-thumbed copy of Homilies & Meditations without really reading. He's tried to shake the heavy thoughts that have weighed on him since his awakening, but they won't leave him.

Death is a heavy thing. It isn't that he wishes for it to last - not for himself, not for Roland, not for anyone who's fallen that way - but he's a man who believes in things in their place, and death is, above all else, meant to be an end. It isn't just that this feels like a mockery. It feels dangerous, coming back time and again from things that ought to send you to the end of the path. He can't help how it makes his skin crawl to think of it.

He'll sit there for a very long time, even sleep there a night or two. He has a lot to think on, but nothing that seems fair to say out loud.

Comments

[atouchofka]

Alain shakes his head dumbly, not sure himself whether it's in answer to her comment about powers or about the Arena. Closing his eyes, he takes a long drag of smoke (it tastes flavourless and dry to him, even with the filter broken off) and another slug of whiskey before saying quietly, "I made it maybe halfway through this week. A week longer than Roland. But we both should have done better. Cort would roll in his grave if he saw us."

He knows that means nothing to her, but that isn't the point. He's talking half to himself now. Another drag of his cigarette, though, and his eyes focus back on her. "As for powers, they've been taken from me here. No doubt because they'd be too dangerous to be worth the risk."

[tucky]

She shifts uncomfortably, because she'd done worse than him, placing-wise. If he's disappointed with himself and thinks he did badly, he'd probably look down on her if he knew. Hell, maybe he does know. It's not as if Arena deaths are kept secret.

"You just got that... mind thing. Right? Or do you have other stuff too?"

[atouchofka]

He shakes his head, putting down his glass and tapping a little ash off his cigarette. "Only the Touch, though there's a little more to it than I told you. And there's things you might think powers, as some do in the Outer Baronies, but they're only training. Training, and blood. It's that," he adds after a moment, "that ought to have seen Roland and me further, and didn't."

He's been thinking a lot about that, of late. Those are gunslinger traits, and ever since Roland's death in the Arena, he's been thinking long and hard on what a gunslinger is in a place like this. If there's even space for one. We fought thousands with maybe five hundred men, and we survived. But when it comes to this test, we fall like everyone else.

[tucky]

"What's an Outer Barony? Is that a district thing?" Or something from his home, maybe. "What district are you from? I mean, what district did they give you?"

[atouchofka]

Again, a little shake of the head, and Alain takes a long huff of smoke. The Baronies wouldn't be too hard to explain, but they no longer exist in the same way even in his home world, and certainly bear no relevance here. Instead, he just answers her other question: "Seven. For what little difference it makes. And you?"

[tucky]

"1. Why doesn't it make any difference? Ain't you proud to be from District 7?" She sure is proud of hers. It's given her something to cling to and ally herself with - almost as much as she's allied herself with the Capitol. And allying with the Capitol has been even easier. It gives her praise, positive feedback, and attention - all things that she desperately craves.

[atouchofka]

"How can I be?" Alain's tone is serious. He isn't unaware of the need to curry favour with the rulers of this place, but this isn't sedition, only fact. "I don't know the place, nor its people. I will fight for them, if that's what I'm here to do, but how can I be proud of a place that is only a number to me?" He takes a deep breath of smoke, and another swig of whiskey, before continuing. "I'm proud to be from Gilead, from New Canaan, from the places I grew up and that shaped me. I'm proud to be my father's son, Roland's brother-in-arms, Cort and Vannay's student. I'm proud to be fighting for the cause of peace here, where before I was fighting a losing war. I have pride in a lot of things. But no matter how grateful I may be to this place, which has brought me back from the edge, given me time I would not have, let me see that my friend will go on living... No matter. I am still a gunslinger of Gilead, not a Districter of the woodlands. Pride is a queer thing, and not so easily shifted."

That's quite a speech for him, and unusually personal for someone generally so self-contained. But he's in a thinking mood, and this isn't his first whiskey. He falls silent when he's done, settling back in his seat and giving her a rather apologetic smile. If they wanted him to be proud of his District, he thinks, perhaps they ought not to have set it against his dinh.

[tucky]

"... I know. You're right. You got a point. I guess I'm proud to be from Waynesboro--" But not completely, because her feelings towards her heritage are mixed and complicated. "-- And I'm proud to be in the Capitol now." And she definitely notices that he's listed far more things, places, and people than she has. It makes her feel inadequate, and she shifts uncomfortably on her bar stool.

[atouchofka]

Alain frowns at her clear discomfort, then touches her arm very lightly, giving her a little smile and sipping his whiskey. "I cry pardon if something I said upset you. It wasn't my intent." He has a suspicion of what her discomfort might be over - which, as it happens, sits pretty close to the mark; he's guessing that two places must seem a short list - but he won't assume.

[tucky]

"Nah, I'm okay. I ain't upset." She looks down at his hand on her arm. "Why are you so nice to me?" It was surprising in the arena (after all, they hadn't been allies) and it's still a little surprising here (where he doesn't have to worry about talking her out of trying to kill him).

[atouchofka]

He frowns a little, tapping ash off his cigarette, and runs his hand over his mouth. "You're not my enemy," he said, as if it should be obvious. "I wouldn't say we're friends yet, either, but you've done me no real wrong." The attempt on his life notwithstanding, but he held no ill-will for that. It had been something she had been forced into, and that made a big difference. "No sense in making enemies here if I don't have to. But I'd gladly make a friend."

[tucky]

"I'm not supposed to make more friends," Tiffany replies - though maybe Ransom had only meant she should stop making friends in the Arena? Maybe being friendly with the other tributes is okay when they're in the Capitol.

She'll have to ask, later.

[atouchofka]

"In my youth, we were counselled to the opposite." It's more thinking out loud than anything else, but it's true. Cort and Vannay didn't believe in blind trust - nobody could afford to, when they were training gunslingers - but they knew, and taught their charges, the truth that men who stand alone usually die quickly. Raised in such a martial society, it's no surprise that Alain holds high value on the bonds of friendship. Raised in that setting with the kind of sensitivity he ordinarily has, it would be a miracle if he were otherwise.

"But then," he says, taking another drag of smoke, "I guess I was raised for battles between armies, not battles where only one man can stand alive and victorious. Perhaps whoever told you that was right." Then, with a little half-smile, "Though it seems a lonely way to live your life, say true."

[tucky]

"I got the Capitol," she points out. "They'll help me not feel lonely. And there's some people here that already like me. If I do even better in the next arena... then they'll like me more." And that, right now, is her primary motivator.

[atouchofka]

Alain considers this for a moment, nodding, tapping ash off his cigarette again. At last, he says quietly, "Then I wish you well of it. People ought to have people by their side. Being alone too long, being closed-off... it does strange things to a person. Leaves scars."

She may be able to pick up on the fact that he's not entirely talking about her any more. Roland has been on his mind a lot lately, and his worry over how his old friend has changed might be spilling out, lubricated by whiskey and melancholy.

[tucky]

Tiffany looks down at the table, falling silent. She doesn't want scars - any kind of scars. And that's why she needs the Capitol. The Capitol people are nicer than the tributes.

Most of the tributes. This guy isn't so bad.

"Are you sad you didn't win?" she asks suddenly.

[atouchofka]

Alain is quiet a moment before answering, his brow furrowed. "Sad? No. Angry. Embarrassed. Guilty. But not sad, not truly." It's true. He was sad when Roland died, sad for the girl Arya when she killed him, but his own death brings him no sadness. Why would it? He didn't want to win, particularly, so the loss of it hardly stings.

"Confused," he adds, after a moment. "I do not understand how I can be dead - twice, by my accounting, including how I died before coming here - and still awake. It feels..." Wrong, he thinks. Sick, he thinks. "Strange," he says, and leaves it at that.

[tucky]

"It's not really dead," she retorts, which is what she tells herself to keep from spiraling into an existential crisis. "That's just what people call it, but they... they got really, really good doctors in the Capitol. It's more of their magic shit. But nobody really dies. Your soul doesn't go anywhere." Death, to her, means going to heaven or hell. If you just come back to your regular old life, it can't be true death.

[atouchofka]

"Guess you're right." He can't deny it, but he doesn't sound particularly enthused by it, either. "Though it must be magic, true enough, if it can bring a man back from being bled dry, or burned to a husk." He's seen too many people after that kind of death. There isn't enough left of them, often, for him to imagine reconstructing it by any means.

Besides, is it really such a good thing, to know that you never get to rest, even when it ought to be over? Even with the warning Roland and the others had given him, he had half-expected to wake in the Clearing, with his family and his lost comrades. Although part of him is glad that it is otherwise - that he can still fight, still stay at his dinh's side - a greater part of him is just exhausted by the thought.

[tucky]

"Medicine can do amazing things," she says, more than a bit stubbornly. "Doctors do heal real bad burns. And you ever hear about people who get brought back from the dead? Their hearts stop, but they get started up again. So maybe it ain't even magic." Even just talking about it makes her feel better. Trying to convince him is trying to convince herself - and for her, at least, it's working.

[atouchofka]

"I've never heard of people brought back," Alain says quietly, "until this place." Which is all he'll say in reply, but his unease is clear in everything from his expression to the tension in his shoulders to the hasty way he knocks back another mouthful of whiskey. It isn't entirely true that he's never heard of people resurrected. Say, rather, that he's never heard of it in a way that doesn't lead to evil consequences.

And there's another side to it, too, one that's not discomfort but simple grief. Hearing that it isn't only this world where people can be brought back from death... well, for a man who's seen so many of his loved ones die in front of him, that's always going to be a kick in the teeth.

[tucky]

"Oh sure, it happens. People are medically dead, or are in comas for forty years, and then doctors find a way to fix 'em. It's a fucking miracle." The longer she talks about it, the more relaxed she gets. That must be what happens here. No one really dies. She hadn't really died.

[atouchofka]

"Medically dead?" Alain shakes his head, signalling to the bartender for another slug of whiskey. "I don't get it. You're dead, or you're alive. There's no medically dead. You either stay in this world, or go on to the Clearing." He stares into his empty glass, looking very maudlin and a little bleary-eyed. "What did you do, Tiffany? Before you were here, I mean. Who were you?"

[tucky]

"Nothing much. But I don't know anything about no Clearing. And you can be medically dead. Any doctor'll tell you."

[atouchofka]

"Maybe." Alain shrugs, giving the inside of his whiskey glass a rather maudlin look. "I'd be the first to admit I've not known many doctors. And most of those I've been acquainted with haven't been too close on the fine detail of life and death. More along the lines of how to stitch up a man from chest to belly quickly enough that the question doesn't come up."