thecapitol | [where did the party go?]

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[where did the party go?]

Who: Neffa a Reyeth and Asha Greyjoy
Where: District 7 suites
When: After the execution, before the Arena
What: Neither of them is the kind of person who deals well with trauma alone.
Warnings: Talk of violence, probable shameless innuendo, very probable making good on shameless innuendo

Two hours gone, and Neffa's all but worn a rut into the carpet of his room. He couldn't stay out long - the sight of the feast made him nauseous, his reward for being too unobtrusive to murder.

It's too many different kinds of fear at once, is the problem - there's the constant glance-over-the-shoulder wariness that's part and parcel of life in the Capitol, of course, the kind that cuts sharper every day before the Arena, the kind that had put circles under his eyes before Ariadne ever pulled her stunt. Then there's the fear of Ariadne's stunt, the biting knowledge that the Tributes are not truly safe even from each other. Hard on the heels of that, there's the implicit warning of the feast, the cuffs-- it isn't really fighting for your life, is it, he thinks feverishly, until you know you they can't just kill you, but kill you.

He ends up in the common area long after the rest are gone (retreated to their own rooms or the suites of more sympathetic companions) and the feast has long grown cold. He considered, for a while, trying to wrestle the communicator into providing him with some conversation, but he's already feeling-- well. Less than eloquent. The silence is nerve-wracking, but he's not even sure what he'd open a conversation with-- there are only so many variations on a cheerful gruesome, eh? he can think of.

The block of cedar he didn't turn into a gift for Timaeus was there, lying temptingly under the pile of clothes where he left it, and they didn't execute him for the first conduit he carved; and so he sprawls in an armchair and takes a knife to it, buries his terror in the rhythmic scrape of the blade against the wood, whittles half-signs of protection and scrapes them down to nothing again, runs through all twenty-three signs in his head forty times, and it's almost close enough to not thinking to count. Almost.

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She's seen executions before, with varying degrees of brutality. The Ironborn drown them, or at least, they're supposed to; Ironborn shall not spill the blood of Ironborn, so they let the water do the deed for them, or else declare the offense so drastic that the accused is turned into a stranger. She'd thought that was harsh, and then she was taken by Stannis, who burns his men to make the snow stop. The Northerners get roused by a simple execution, but in the Stormlands their king can burn the whole lot alive to clear up the weather and they mutter that it should have happened sooner.

She maintains that the fire was worse; there's no smell of burning flesh or ash settling in the air with every breath she takes, and while she knows that the magic of the screen would shield her from anything like that here, it's enough. The girl didn't scream, either, and she admires her for that, even if she can't forget the blood seeping out of her mouth. It might be better than the fire, but it still looked painful, some sort of poison that caused excruciating pain. She didn't forget, she couldn't forget, why she was here and who brought her here, even if she chooses to fight over lay idle, even if she plays along so she can live another day to do it. Some people fought back, even if this wasn't the right time, and she wouldn't forget it. Even if she stays kneeling for now.

She wouldn't forget, but she does need a distraction. If she was back in Westeros, with her crew, she could count on Qarl to grin and shove her up against a wall, take her mind off it for a few hours and then leave her clear-headed and ready to face the next challenge. As it is, she finds herself wandering downstairs.

"You got food?" she asks, the hint of perpetual amusement missing from her voice for the moment. "I should complain."

He notices first that she isn't wearing a cuff. He's not sure whether or not that's a relief, but he's glad to see her unmarked by the Capitol, at the least. As desperately as they all usually claw for attention, after the events of the day, he's glad to feel beneath their notice, and glad to see one of the saner people he knows join him in obscurity.

He sits up, brushing cedar shavings off his lap for some Avox to sweep up later. He's glad to see her, glad that she sought him out, because people are always the best distraction-- he doesn't want to be alone and frightened and furiously helpless, but he can hardly convince himself he isn't. So long as one other person in the world believes he's not drowning in his own terror, who's to say it isn't true?

"It wasn't well thought-out," he says, with a smile that can only generously be said to be trying. "A feast to follow a poisoning? When you consider how good they are at keeping to theme..." A disappointed shake of his head. (He's downright proud at how little the knife trembles in his hand.)

He hasn't seen an execution like this before, she realizes, never seen someone's life taken as a warning to the rest to play along. But at least he's making an attempt to play at smiles, which is probably the safest anyone could do right now, realistically speaking. At least neither of them seemed to be specific recipients for the message, just a few tributes in the crowd instead of the ones who got half a manacle in a much heavier warning.

"I wouldn't worry about being poisoned quietly in your bed," she says, because of course there's no sense of doing it without making a scene of it, a lesson, but it's not safe to say it and she wouldn't want to linger on it even if it was. "As it was, all we had were a handful of bracelets passed out."

He's never seen an execution before. They go on, he knows, but even his parents, working in the courts, never had to deal with them - they're rare in Ristopa, and always undertaken privately, never made into a-- a spectacle, no matter how heinous the crime of the one condemned. Dying, Neffa's always been told, is the most private thing a person can do - his gods aren't here and he knows it, but to see someone robbed of that most basic dignity, to be forced to watch...

"None for you, though." He glances down at the knife, the unfinished conduit in his hands, as though he'd forgotten for a moment that they were there; he sets the knife down on the table beside him, but keeps the cedar in his hands, turning it over and over, without looking at it. "We're both of us too charming to cuff, I suppose.

"There's wine," he adds, pointing with the conduit at the table. "Lukewarm by now, of course, but-- if you'd like--" It's an invitation, as close to outright as he's willing to make. Sit with me. Stay.

"I got rid of mine by coming here, I would hope I'm not getting them again." Because that month of three days from Winterfell had left her with nothing more than a desire to strangle someone between her chains, while at least here she could move her arms apart. If they took that away from her, kneeling would be a lot harder.

She doesn't even wait for the qualifier, pouring herself a glass before wrapping her hand around the neck of the bottle itself and bringing it along. "You know me well," she says, a little toast before she tosses back her first of many and settles irreverently on the adjacent side table, something white and impractically shaped like everything else in this bloody city. "You deal with lumber now? Watch how you handle your wood."

His laugh is forced, but it's a laugh, and more genuine than his smile was. He looks at her, because he's been staring at a fixed point between his hands too long already this evening, and because she's altogether a better thing to focus on - all the better for being so near, near enough that he can lean to the side, tip his head back against the high arm of the chair and take in all of her sidelong.

"District Seven," he reminds her, reaching up to tap her leg chidingly with the conduit. "They tell me I know how to handle my wood better than anyone in Panem."

“I’ve no doubt you’ve plenty of practice, since no one else will handle it for you,” she agrees kindly with an air of effortlessness that she almost doesn’t have to fake, falling back into the easy banter like it’s turning her brain off—not putting it out all together, not entirely, but it’s a thoroughly more comfortable place to be. But at least it would shake the both of them out of this—she has things to focus on tomorrow, playing well but not too well, enough to demonstrate she’s no thoughts of rebelling but not risking her only outlet at this point.

Maybe not her only outlet.

“A pity it’s so small,” she continues, though in place of her smirk she merely offers the neck of the bottle over to him. “You’ll find a lady for your splinter yet.”

"And what experience are you speaking from?" He puts on exaggerated affront, and ruins the effect by taking the proffered bottle entirely without protest. "Been hiding in my closet and watching me undress, have you? Found out where they keep all the screens?"

He drinks, reflects that he is starting to associate conversation with Asha with the taste of wine, decides that that isn't a bad thing, and does not give the bottle back. "No, of course you haven't. You obviously speak with the voice of ignorance."

"Undressing? There's no need, when I can see it right there." She shakes her head in an equally put-upon play of innocence, spoiled by the grin as she taps the conduit with one finger. "What a crude man. You'd like me to talk of your cock, would you? You, who leaves his wood out in the open, and touches married women with it?"

She raises her eyebrow as she takes a drink of her own from her glass-- she'd need a way to pry that bottle out of his hand, the rate she's going, but he might need it more than she does.

He's preparing his retort before she finishes her sentence, pleased to be caught up in the speed of the back-and-forth - he'd handed her that round, walked straight into it, and he means to score a point back--

--and then she really does finish, and every angle he could come at her from is suddenly the wrong one.

He covers a second's hesitation with another drink, and tries to think what she really means - what meaning 'married' could carry in their endless word-game. He comes up distressingly dry.

"I assure you, lady," he finally goes for, "that I am a paragon of honor in the handling of my wood. I can't know what cruel rumor has whispered to you, but it has never known the touch of a woman under contract to another."

His mock affront falters, against all his attempts to keep it up. The part of him that is still too stuck in his own head adds, half-laughing, in a voice begging her to confirm the absurdity: "...I mean-- really, you don't mean you're--?"

"A woman wed?" she finishes, the corner of her mouth turning up in a smile that seemed to lack most of its good humor. She settles back, taking a good, deep drink of her wine as she does so, emptying the glass and regretting it almost immediately. "So they tell me. I heard the ceremony was lovely."

Or as lovely as an Ironborn wedding could be, bleak by nature and made moreso by the fact that a seal was standing in for the bride.

"You shouldn't have to worry about him. He's not here, and even if he were, he can't stand on his own power." She says it teasingly, but it's the only thing she can assume is the problem; maybe surprise that she's married, yes, she could expect that, but not an inability to believe it true. Especially not with him, who seemed to be from something closer to her world than most of the others.

It isn't unbelievable-- not exactly. But Asha flies firmly in the face of everything Neffa has always assumed about marriage. He's seen marriages born of family politics, of course, and marriages held together by duty; but the people involved in them have always seemed more... well. More dutiful. Marriage is for people done with their wild days, done sharing flagons of wine with near-strangers and joking about their cocks; it's for people settled in a world formed of obligation and respectability. It's a choice. Asha simply doesn't seem to him the kind to make that choice.

"Next to all we've been given to worry about here, your husband in another world ranks rather low on my list of fears," he says, and is pleased with how light it comes out, considering that he can't keep his eyes narrowing as he looks at her, tries to connect her again in his mind with marriage, and fails. (You've never been with a married woman, his mind helpfully reminds him-- of course not, he reminds it irritably, because married women have no reason to be with me. They're married.)

He proffers the bottle to her again, turning it to make the wine slosh inside it as he speaks (and it's less skepticism in his voice than badly-disguised confusion)-- "Was the reception that good, that you can't remember the ceremony?"

She takes the bottle gladly, taking a solid swig without bothering to indulge the middleman and pour it in her glass first. “Doubtful,” she says, listening to the wine crash back against the glass as she lowers the bottle. “Our feasts are bad enough as they go. Thankfully I was spared from this one, as no one thought fit to invite me.”

She eyes him for a moment, the talk leading them further away from what she had been expecting tonight. It’s not as though she’s bitter—she feels nothing about the marriage, aside from a grudging acknowledgement that her uncle did something smart through it. It’s not as though she could return home if it hadn’t happened, after all.

“It’s not usual,” she adds, knowing the question would be coming and wanting to save him the trouble of figuring out how to stumble over it. “Usually they at least force the girl to be there, but it was easier to find some other animal to stand in than it was to find me.” She says it seriously, but only in the sense that it lacked the playful mocking characterizing most of their innuendo; it's not something to linger on, whether that's by discussing it overmuch or by drawing it out by playing coy.

He can't blame her for not wanting to talk about it. She fell into this trap from another trap, it sounds like, and gods know one is more than enough for him to deal with. More than that, it's... uncomfortable, somehow. Some other night, some other place, maybe he'd have been ready to talk about this, to commit himself more solidly to plumbing the truths of Asha, to making this more than it is. But the world is uglier and more frightening and more confusing than it was a day ago (and it was already terrible then)-- he thinks, a little defensively, that he has shown more than enough courage today already.

Questions are transactions. Neither of them is here to do business. Neffa makes a decision.

Concern's easy to put on, not far off at all from the confusion he's already feeling, and he levels a furrowed-brow look at her. "...Is he better-looking than I am?" he asks, with exaggerated worry. "That would be cruel to you, to have to move from disappointment to disappointment."

She snorts, only realizing right then that it was how she was hoping he would react. Move on with humor instead of having a serious conversation, put them both back on more familiar ground, lead them back on the path to maybe doing something more than sit like mourners at a funeral contemplating how difficult their lives are.

"Incomparably," she says, grinning with all teeth and a healthy amount of leer. "With his majestic beard, flowing white from his fat, wrinkled, red face?" And maybe it was the wine, but she brushes the back of her hand against his face, perhaps not as teasingly as she had meant it to be. "No, I'm afraid you've no chance."

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[where did the party go?]

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oh my god that was literally the worst accountfail ever

Re: oh my god that was literally the worst accountfail ever

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