I'm going to take you out, I don't feel like it's wrong

[cigne]

Who| Swann and open
What| Her worst nightmare: people are talking about her mom
Where| The lobby restaurant
When| Several nights before the Reaping
Warnings/Notes| nahhh

Swann's done her best to hide the fact that she's obviously overworked and hasn't been sleeping or eating properly; she never does when she's stressed out. But years of covering up the same behaviors have left her an expert in covering it with makeup, making herself look so flawless that you can barely even tell she's a real person, rather than a doll.

Not unless you get really close.

Hunger finally cracked her, though, and she decided to take a break from her work, heading downstairs to sit at the bar for dinner (it's... a side salad, and something pink with flowers floating in it as a drink). The bar stools are always high for her, their rungs an inch too low for her to reach with her feet, so they dangle idly as she eats, occasionally flicking through her phone to check for messages.

With all the Victor retrospectives and Tribute exposés, pretty much every station on television has gotten into doing "where are they now?"-style specials, highlighting everyone from politicians to models to famous animals.

It's been a while since the last Arena.

The screen nearest Swann at the bar is turned on one of the music-based stations, and the program keeps telling her that they're remembering Lost Divas!!!!. She's paying it little attention until she hears the familiar beginning of a song she's been hearing her whole life, and her blood runs cold as she looks up at the screen in horror to see someone who could be Swann herself, with a few minor tweaks in the face. The girl on screen is maybe five or six years younger, less curvy, and far taller than Swann, but otherwise, they could be fraternal twins.

"The bombshell known by the single name Viatrix had only one hit before her star faded too soon," the voiceover announces, "and now she only appears in public once in a blue moon. Let's trace her comet trail and find out more."

There's a freezeframe of Viatrix in the video, and it morphs into the last picture of her that Swann knows to have been taken in the Capitol, when she was home at Christmas. She'd only stayed for two days this time, left before it was even Christmas Eve.

The food sits forgotten on the bar.

Comments

[cigne]

She can only furrow her brow more and make a confused humming noise, like she's trying to figure out how to explain. The TV screen is not being helpful at the moment, and so she turns to her purse, pulling out a copy of Celebrus (it's full of little color-coded tabs, for notes she's taken) and opening it to the page where they list all the editors and things like that.

At the bottom of the page, there's a logo, and if Jack's ever paid attention to any form of media credits, he's seen it often -- it shows up in movies, magazines, books, at the end of every television show. Swann points to it.

"Honeymead Media Holdings, that's my family's company. That's what we do, we make all the TV shows and stuff. Well, I mean, we make them through subsidiaries, but we oversee it all, and we're the link to President Snow. We've been doing it since before the Dark Days."

[drinkupmehearties]

Jack leans forward to get a better look. He's definitely seen the emblem in the past, plastered at the end of shows and the like, but has taken little note of it beyond that. He hadn't really realized that her family had such a pervasive hold over the Capitol's media -- Swann has always just simply been the dainty, perky, basket-giving District 8 Escort to him.

"Blimey, I hadn't known that. I imagine whoever decided to put on that -- " He indicates with a short nod towards the TV, " -- will rightly catch hell for it, then, eh?"

[cigne]

"Mm, yeah. Daddy's going to be angry." She says it delicately, not much differently than she regularly speaks, but she knows the truth and so do many Capitolites; whatever executive made the poor choice to air this programming will, at the very least, never work in this city again. More likely, they'll never be seen in this city again.

They wouldn't be the first person Swann's known to just up and disappear after upsetting her father.

"But that's what we do." She perks up suddenly, smiling. "I used to have TV shows, and I wrote a book, and of course my mother was in music. I'll have to run the whole company some day, but I figure I'd rather do something else until then."

[drinkupmehearties]

With a family linked to Snow and so expansively connected to the rest of the Capitol, Jack could almost take a good guess at the fate of whoever's done this without her outright saying it.

The blunt shift in demeanor is welcome, at any rate, and Jack's brow lifts. "Running the whole company, bloody hell. That's a fair bit of responsibility. I don't envy you in that at all." But an intrigued smile perks at his mouth. "What sort of shows?"

[cigne]

Swann keeps smiling, even when she gets that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that she always gets when she thinks about taking control of the company. She's never wanted it in her life, and she doesn't get a choice in the matter, because the Honeymead company stays in Honeymead hands -- the best she'll ever be able to do is marry the right man and let him take it over, once he's part of the family.

It makes her throat burn.

"Oh! Well, first I did segments about fashion on a tabloid show, and then I had a whole show about just fashion and stuff like that. I used to go to District Eight, you know, the factories. Then I had my own talk show, I interviewed people? Celebrities and politicians, and we had makeover episodes sometimes, other fun things." She does seem genuinely happier talking about this than she does most things. "I was on for about four years, five days a week."