thecapitol | (no subject)

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Who| Eva and Billy
What| Billy is getting petty revenge.
Where| Tribute Tower
When| The night of the Cornucopia.
Warnings/Notes| Misogynistic language, some violence.

The plan starts out slow. Stealth-like. Billy crosses rooms with soft-footed feet, slipping away one moment and slipping back the next, always carrying a wine glass. Sometimes it is empty. Sometimes it is full. As the hours go on, however, he grows bolder, and by the end, he’s whistling a vague little tune, something cheery and upbeat, while he goes back and forth, back and forth, between the party celebrating the Cornucopia to the bathroom located just a few doors down.

Don’t touch my wine, she said. You’re crippingly insecure, she said.

Really, bitch?

Billy is systematically pouring each and every glass of wine down into the toilet.

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"Whoops," he says, and he clasps his teeth over the edge of the wine glass as though he were a teething infant. This holds two advantages. One, it threatens scratches, marring an otherwise elegant wine glass.

Two, it highlights how empty it is.

He turns for the door (to return to the room that holds said wine) with the glass still between his teeth. He hums while he goes. Muffle muffle muffle. Muffle muffle. The glass around his mouth fogs up.

Eva grabs the back of his collar before she even realizes she's doing so. She knows what game he's playing; he's trying to provoke her.

Lucky for him, she's easily provoked. Manhandling the Avox wasn't enough. She's angry. She just watched one of her Tributes have his arm torn off at the socket. She watched the spray of blood on the ground and watched the people around her laugh, and she joined in because that is the monster they've made of her.

That is the monster people like him are so able to become, without any of those pesky conscience pangs that tear her up on the inside. Like a thousand meathooks pulling at her lungs and guts.

"Don't. You. Dare."

"Oh, I dare," he says, and everything chipper and cheery vanishes from his voice in an instant. The words are muffled through the glass. He spits it out, a thin trail of saliva leading from his lips to the edge. He rubs his sleeve across his face in a smooth, slow motion as though unsheathing a sword.

"What're you gonna to do with all the rest of that wine, Eva?"

He says her name like its a curse.

"Mercy-kill your tributes after they come back?"

"Would that they were so lucky."

Eva can't help herself. Somewhere deep down, she's been looking for an excuse to do this. Granted, were she sober, she'd have a better excuse than 'he drank my wine', but in her current state even the slightest provocation becomes a justification. A glorious, glorious justification.

She grabs the bottle of wine off the back of the toilet by the neck, then swings it like a short baseball bat at Billy's face. With the cramped confines of the bathroom he won't have much room to dodge.

His scream sounds fake at first, and that's because, to an extent, it is. He's caught more by surprise than he is by the pain. In the split second after the bottle hit, his vision went dark and it felt like he was among the stars. Now the world is jittering and blinking and strange. What is this? How should he react? Is a scream the right thing to do?

Reality hits him at the same time as the pain.

"Fuck!" he screams, now genuine, now agonized. He tries to straighten his back but the world tilts with his head and he stumbles, nearly dropping down to the ground. He cradles his head with one hand and slams his other backwards into the wall behind him. He's covered in wine. In blood. "You crazy fucking bitch!"

"I told you not to touch my things!" She sets the neck of the wine bottle down on the counter and selects a single shard with delicate, precise grace, but her next motion is unruly and violent. Uncontrolled. Animal. She grabs the collar of his shirt and throws her body into him, slamming his back against the door, pinning herself to him.

Her voice drops to an ugly whisper, like a bloody smear against the air.

"You touch my things. Your Tributes slaughter mine. Your District and your little Capitol friends take everything I have and you just can't help yourself, you just can't keep your hands-"

She takes the wet, wine-covered shard and slams it into the hand that steadies him against the wall. "-to yourself!"

Edited 2013-04-03 22:59 (UTC)

The next sound he makes isn't even a scream. It's a shriek, high and desperate, his entire body going rigid against the wall. This is pain like he hasn't felt in a long time. This is arena level pain right here, the kind that goes beyond bruising and into scars, nerve damage, permanence. This is incredible. This is awful.

This is perfect.

His shriek twists into a laugh. It's a manic cackle that rebounds off the walls, that goes on and on as he twists in her grip. The hand she impaled has gone numb, his fingers twitching and jerking like a dying spider.

"Oh wow," he says, the giggles practically erupting between the words. "Just look at you!"

There's a knock on the other side of the door, a pounding behind Billy's shoulder that surely doesn't help the pain in his head. "Open up in there! Peacekeepers!"

Eva ignores them and presses up against Billy, letting her words slither into his ear. He's hit a nerve, of course, so she's using getting this close to hide her face, to mask the shame of losing control that's wrung up her eyes with wetness.

"I think you ought to be taking a good long look at yourself, Bickle. Picking fights with the Victor from the wheat-picking redneck district. Oh, how the mighty child champion has fallen."

And then she jams her knee up between his legs.

Eva's words hit a nerve in Billy as well, and it's obvious in how he blinks the smile right off his face, how he opens his mouth to speak, inhales, and then --

There's no chance for an exhale. He pitches forward into Eva (where else can he go?) with a strangled scream, his legs nearly giving out beneath him, his back sliding down the door. This has stopped being fun, oh, about 0.2 seconds ago, and he needs to grit his teeth and clench his fists (or fist) to maintain his self control.

He is not going to hit her. He is not going to hit her. He is not going to hit her. He is going to let her thrash around like the monster he knows she is and the one she pretends she isn't.

"You forget how I won my Games, Billy."

The Peacekeepers pound on the door again, and Eva knows her time is up. She shoves herself off Billy and stands over the counter, giving him one last sneer while he writhes around on the floor.

"Everyone always forgets how I won my Games." She won because she was brutal, yes, but also because she was desperate. Neither trait has left her.

She runs her hands over a corner of the marble counter with the basin in the middle, clenches it in her palm, and narrows her eyes. Then she removes her hand and smashes her forehead into it.

Her vision explodes in pain and blotches, and recedes not into clarity but into an ugly, half-blind world. She's done some sort of damage to her nerves, to her brain, because she can't see from one eye and couldn't even if the blood spurting down her eyebrow and eyelashes were gone. One half of her mouth twitches and jerks as if she's trying not to laugh, but it's muscles firing in confusion.

She collapses to her knees like an empty handpuppet. Stupid, clumsy, sloppy work. She brained herself too hard. If she'd knocked herself unconscious she'd have no chance to explain the situation. And if she were a worse liar she'd be in trouble, but lying comes easier to her than breathing these days. She's had forty years, almost, to perfect the art. She's one the best liars the Capitol's ever had.

The Peacekeepers wrench open the doors, revealing a bloody, wine-soaked scenario before them, Billy crumpled with his fists clenched between his legs and Eva struggling back to her feet with one hand clasped over the spattered countertop and the other to her bleeding head.

Edited 2013-04-04 22:20 (UTC)

The wet crack of Eva's head reminds Billy of a baseball bat. (Standing on third base, acting like a run is some sort of accomplishment.) From his place on the floor, through his pain, he follows her every jerk and twitch as she drops down to his level. Billy makes another sound that might be a laugh, but it's really more of a sound of wonder. Awe.

This is fucking incredible. This is some machiavellian shit right here.

-- Or maybe he's pissed off because he could have hit her after all, because he's in agony and now the Peacekeepers are going to fuck him over, he doesn't know, his head is a mess, a sea of drifting colors and thoughts, and whenever he tries to move his legs or whenever he tries to breathe, his body forces him to curl over, fetal and weak. Pathetic.

He pulls the glass from his hand with his thumb and index finger.

"Hey officers." He is going for casual. Nonchalant. He turns and twists the bloody glass as though it were a prism. Patches of light migrate across the stained tile. His words are slurred. "How's it shaking?"

"On your feet."

Two of the Peacekeepers file in, making the bathroom intolerably cramped. One grabs Eva's arm by the elbow and the other grabs Billy, and they're both hoisted up. There's only so much kindness the Peacekeepers afford to Victors; they aren't Sponsors, after all, and in large part Victors are just drunks and addicts and crazies who get into fights or make strange demands or cry whenever someone makes a loud noise. This isn't the first time two of them have gotten into a skirmish, nor will it be the last.

"What happened here?"

Eva spits out a bullshit explanation before anyone else can get a word in. Her words are slightly slurred, from alcohol as well as the head injury. "He attacked me, Officer. You know how Careers are. I fought back."

One ushers Billy outside the bathroom while the other keeps Eva from toppling over into the sink. One who's been waiting outside goes to get medical help. Eva sways a little, feeling as if the inside of her head is half-melted ice cream, sloshing around inside a container that's become too big for it. One eyelid droops, the other flutters, and the contrast between the two makes it seem as if they're in competition to make each side of the face look more dazed than the other. Locks of bloody hair stick to her jaw and lips, get in her teeth.

Eva can still see Billy through the slit where the door hinges, and most importantly, she can hear him, and he can hear her. The officer asks her something in a low, private tone of voice and she laughs, loudly, cackling until it turns into a moan of pain in her chest.

"Oh, not attacked like that, we all know he can't get it up for women."

Most people would fight this. Defend themselves.

Billy is not most people.

Authority figures have always left a bad taste in his mouth, dry and gritty like the bottom of someone's shoe. Peacekeepers are no different. As he is escorted out of the bathroom, Billy rolls his tongue against his teeth and tries to decide how many insults he can attribute to his so-called brain damage. But faking means nothing when you're living it, and although he's sure he had some pretty good zingers, his journey out of the bathroom is alternatively spent trying not to vomit and making sure his feet actually touch the ground. The Peacekeeper helps him, at least -- he grips Billy's shoulder and props him against a wall. His grasp is not violent, but it is too harsh to be paternal.

Billy nods along to his questions. "Did you attack this woman?" "Yeah, sure, I guess." "Why?" "Who knows, man, I'm a pretty volatile guy."

Vol-a-tile. Now that's a good writer word.

His entire interrogation is made up of slurred contradictions. Lies. When he hears Eva's quip, he breaks off his side of the conversation completely so that he can shift his eyes towards the bathroom. He drags his teeth along his lip, his bleeding hand resting palm up against his other arm.

"Or maybe," he says, rolling his eyes back to the Peacekeeper. "You're just dealing with a fucking lunatic."

Eva's whole complaint isn't much more lucid than Billy's. She's got the basics down, but the details are a mess. She's not quick enough on her feet with this kind of head trauma to come up for a compelling reason why she had to stab his hand.

"Do you want an investigation?"

"God no, no," she says, wiping drool from her mouth. "Whole world doesn't need to see me this drunk."

They have, in tabloids, but it's the only excuse she can come up with. She sways and catches herself on the counter. Her eyes drift over to the mirror, where she can see a splatter of wine droplets sticking and running down. There's the barest hint of a smirk on her face, but it's obscured by the way the corner of her mouth keeps tugging.

"So no official statement?"

"Wouldn't want to trouble you, officer."

"Alright," the Peacekeeper says, "I think we've seen enough."

The one with Billy starts to escort him away. The third goes down the hall to make sure no one's going to be coming in until all the glass and blood - the 'biohazard' - is all cleared up. He punches in a call for Avoxes.

"Let's get these two drunks cleared out before the newer Mentors see them," the Peacekeeper says, as Eva lurches forward and vomits rather spectacularly into the sink.

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