Eva Salazar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
vissernone) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thecapitol2013-09-26 02:35 pm
vissernone) wrote in thecapitol2013-09-26 02:35 pm
Entry tags:
All I Want is to Be Your Harbor [Closed]
Who| Eva and Eponine, Eva and Timaeus, Eva and Eridan
What| Business as usual in Evatown. Team momming all up ins.
Where| Timaeus' penthouse, a Capitol cafe and the District 3 Suite.
When| Before the Aliens plot.
Warnings/Notes| Sexual abuse and prostitution in Eponine's thread.
She makes a point of checking on Eponine, bringing a little gift with her each time. She never presents it, but she always leaves it where the girl can't possibly mistake it for someone else's. Today it's a fine silk scarf, folded up into her pocket, with embroidery of elephants and birds on it. Not anything Eva would ever be interested in wearing, but the colors will look nice with Eponine's eyes.
She mostly wants to subtly remind Eponine that someone's watching out for her, that someone would notice if she tried to run again. She has no inclination to explore Eponine's romantic relationships, and as such won't rely on them. She needs to keep an eye on the girl herself.
And so every few days, she's at Eponine's District 3 door, patiently waiting.
-/-
By noon she's making another visit, this time to the winding labyrinths of Panemian penthouses. It's a path she knows well, and the people have seen her here often enough, since she was just a teenager with saggy skin around her belly.
It sickens her, to use Timaeus as her safe harbor. She isn't sure when the roles reversed, but sometime in the last year her tide of alcohol and bad decisions pulled her out to sea and washed him to the shore. It's not that she hates to rely on others, although she loathes that as well; it's that she should be taking care of him, as she did when he was just a child.
But she knows it cheers him up to visit, and he seems a bit out of sorts lately. She doesn't respect it, but she loves him, and so she coddles his melodramatic angst as best she can. And as such she shows up at his door every few days, having done her best to hide the injuries, to carry herself with a pride she has to artificially inflate.
Sometimes she just tells him that her back hurts when she slouches.
-/-
The bombing interrupted her prior plans with Eridan, and she imagined that the last thing the young Victor wanted to see of one of his favorite Mentors was her bruised and bloodied face. It's only once the piss-yellow of the bruises finally fade that she reschedules for their coffee date, for her attempt to give him advice. The whole affair seems rather laughable now. She should be the last person to be giving advice.
She arrives early, as always, and sits in the back of the cafe. Capitol citizens tend to give her a wide berth these days, although the clip in her hair, a beautiful glittering piece made of what appears to be a bird with its neck conspicuously broken, seems to attract some stray glances. She drums her fingers on her coffee mug and sucks the inside of her cheek as she waits, cursing her punctuality for always making her worry she's been stood up.
What| Business as usual in Evatown. Team momming all up ins.
Where| Timaeus' penthouse, a Capitol cafe and the District 3 Suite.
When| Before the Aliens plot.
Warnings/Notes| Sexual abuse and prostitution in Eponine's thread.
She makes a point of checking on Eponine, bringing a little gift with her each time. She never presents it, but she always leaves it where the girl can't possibly mistake it for someone else's. Today it's a fine silk scarf, folded up into her pocket, with embroidery of elephants and birds on it. Not anything Eva would ever be interested in wearing, but the colors will look nice with Eponine's eyes.
She mostly wants to subtly remind Eponine that someone's watching out for her, that someone would notice if she tried to run again. She has no inclination to explore Eponine's romantic relationships, and as such won't rely on them. She needs to keep an eye on the girl herself.
And so every few days, she's at Eponine's District 3 door, patiently waiting.
-/-
By noon she's making another visit, this time to the winding labyrinths of Panemian penthouses. It's a path she knows well, and the people have seen her here often enough, since she was just a teenager with saggy skin around her belly.
It sickens her, to use Timaeus as her safe harbor. She isn't sure when the roles reversed, but sometime in the last year her tide of alcohol and bad decisions pulled her out to sea and washed him to the shore. It's not that she hates to rely on others, although she loathes that as well; it's that she should be taking care of him, as she did when he was just a child.
But she knows it cheers him up to visit, and he seems a bit out of sorts lately. She doesn't respect it, but she loves him, and so she coddles his melodramatic angst as best she can. And as such she shows up at his door every few days, having done her best to hide the injuries, to carry herself with a pride she has to artificially inflate.
Sometimes she just tells him that her back hurts when she slouches.
-/-
The bombing interrupted her prior plans with Eridan, and she imagined that the last thing the young Victor wanted to see of one of his favorite Mentors was her bruised and bloodied face. It's only once the piss-yellow of the bruises finally fade that she reschedules for their coffee date, for her attempt to give him advice. The whole affair seems rather laughable now. She should be the last person to be giving advice.
She arrives early, as always, and sits in the back of the cafe. Capitol citizens tend to give her a wide berth these days, although the clip in her hair, a beautiful glittering piece made of what appears to be a bird with its neck conspicuously broken, seems to attract some stray glances. She drums her fingers on her coffee mug and sucks the inside of her cheek as she waits, cursing her punctuality for always making her worry she's been stood up.
no subject
"He gave me this the night I ran away. He thought I was running from him - but Madame, it is not so. I have never had.... I've never had someone who loves me. Not properly. P'raps Montparnasse, but it is not the same with him - he were too often making me do things or threatening his knife on me."
She sighs again. "I love Howard, you know. I didn't think I did, but I do. I would die to save him, you know? And when we kiss, I have a feeling in my belly that I have never had before. It is like bubbling, as if my belly is upset. But no - it does not feel bad. It is nice. I let him touch me, you know? I let him take my blouse from me so he could see - touch. And it wasn't bad. It made me feel... it made me feel proper. Like I... Like how it should feel. I would have let him... you know? I DO love him - so much. If it made him happy, I would have... I would let him pick me up. That is love, I think.
But Marius..." She look guiltily at Eva. "I think always I will love him. He made me see, you know, how wicked I am. He is so, so good. It hurts how good he is. And it hurts me to know how horrible I am and how horrible he thinks I am. It hurts inside me. But it makes me want to be better. Howard, he is as wicked as I - or perhaps no, but nearly so. He is a thief too - but Marius... he shows me that people can be good. Do you know, in Paris, he talked to me on a time. He gave me back my begging letters when another man would have had me arrested. He was the most beautiful, the kindest man I have ever known. And of course he loves Cosette, for she is beautiful... They are of the same class. He could not have a whore and a thief for his wife, could he?"
no subject
When Eponine is done, she says, "don't imagine that the Arena won't debase him just as much as Paris has degraded you."
She reaches over. "Let me braid your hair."
no subject
"Madame, that is your answer to everything. I tell you I have been executed in the woods, and you braid my hair. I tell you I am a whore, and you wish to braid my hair again, Madame, I do not CARE about my hair. I DON'T CARE. I DON'T CARE. IDON'TCAREIDON'TCAREIDON'TCARE!"
She begins to yell, to pace, stopping only to snatch her necklace from Eva.
"Do you know? I say he LOVES me - that I love him, that he made me feel PROPER. For ONCE in my life, I thought he LOVED me. But you know after I let him touch me? You know what he did? He told me to get out. He told me that he couldn't see me now. That, if I were a whore, he would not pay for it. Do you KNOW how that feels, Madame?"
She stops and chucks the necklace as hard as she can against the big window in her room. Of course, the necklace just bounces off it and falls to the ground.
"And that is all I'll ever be, isn't it? I see it now. Whatever I do, wherever I am, however I look... I'll always be a WHORE and nothing more. The girl that nobody likes. The girl that they just give THINGS to for charity. Well, I have had enough. I WILL NOT play along with it any more."
She starts, somewhere in the middle of her rant, to sob in earnest. She lashes out at Eva, but it's nothing to do with Eva really. It's just every bit of pent up rage that Eponine has had over the years, that she has never been able to express before, boiling to the surface.
"It's not fair. It's not fair, it's not fair. But what does fair matter? You know what they used to call me in Paris? Even my Papa - my own Pa? They call me a slut and a bitch and a whore. And what can I say? It is true. I will go with a man when they say to - because otherwise there is a beating and I don't like that. But Madame, to be a whore - to sleep - to - and he locked me away in that horrible prison, with chains about my wrists and my feet and they made me sign on as a prostitute and - and do you know what it is, to be dragged into the yard of the prison, and laid on a table, with your skirt on the floor, and men lifting your legs so a doctor can stare inside you? Madame, it is HORRIBLE. HORRIBLE. It is the worst thing I have ever had. But -"
She sits down heavily on the floor, her face hidden in her knees. Her shoulders heave with sobs, with rage, with disgust and sorrow.
"But Howard is the second worst."
[cw: sexual abuse]
"I braid your hair because I want you to know that touch doesn't have to be about violation or control," she says, gathering Eponine's hair up.
When she was a young Victor, she remembers plenty of fits, tearing things off her walls, clawing her own hair out, beating Avoxes who couldn't fight back. Screaming at her baby when he cried too loudly, or when he didn't cry at all. She would come back from a bidder and throw her clothes on the ground and stand in her underwear, ripping her fancy dresses apart with her fingernails and shrieking at Marco to shut up, shut up, she doesn't want to feed him yet, he can't have any milk now when those parts of her body have been squeezed by foreign hands.
"I don't know what that exactly feels like, but I know what it's like to be used as a whore."
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
"You're a - but -" Her surprise turns to horror, though, as she begins to understand what Eva might mean. But Eponine wants to deny it. She doesn't want Eva, as silly as it sounds,to have ever suffered that.
"But... but - here? But Valeria said - she was lying, wasn't she? When she said nobody would ever touch me here? But - oh, Madame."
She begins to cry again, quietly, this time, the tears just rolling down her cheeks as she stares at Eva.
"I hate it here. I hate what they do to us - all of us."
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
She reaches her arm around Eponine's skinny shoulders and pulls her into an embrace, fiddling still with skinny locks and making small, elegant knots. "We've all survived, dear. That's what matters. We survive."
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
She cuddles into Eva, twisting so that she faces her, resting her head against Eva's shoulder.
"It's not fair. 'Surviving' - it is not nice - and for what? To be killed again? And to be used. I thought he loved me - I thought, for once, a man truly, truly loved me. I thought Howard loved me for me, and not just because he wanted to touch my breasts -" She snorts. "Though they are not even mine. I'm telling that Sybill. I'm telling her - I won't have them and that is all, and if they make me then I will run away... I wish I could run away. I wish I could live with you."
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
She finishes plaiting Eponine's hair and strokes Eponine's head, holding it to her chest.
"Would you like to? To live with me, I mean?"
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
"Eva, you have been a mother to me - more so than my mother at home. And perhaps my heart goes to yours in a way I have not felt since I was a little girl and loved my mama and my papa very much. It's silly, isn't it? But... See! You make me smile when I am vexed. You help me wash when I am hurt - and you ask for nothing. That is a mother, no? Or am I wrong? You mustn't tell me a lie; you must tell me to - how is it? - buzz off!"
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
But what does it matter, when Eponine may end up dead anyway? When she knows that going in?
"I'll make some inquiries. I can't promise anything, Eponine." She smudges her thumb against Eponine's cheek. "But if I have my way, my home will be yours too, alright?"
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
"You'll take me away from here? You know, you make me feel like Cendrillon; you are like my fairy godmother and Howard is my handsome prince."
She snorts. "Perhaps I will only have a god-mother. But I suppose that won't be so bad."
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
She sits back, appraising Eva. "But I think you are beautiful. I don't think it is much coming from me, Madame, but it is a compliment anyway, isn't it?"
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
She moves her hands from braiding Eponine's hair to calmly massaging the girl's hands and wrists. "It's a fine compliment for me. Thank you, dear."
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
She smiles a little bit as Eva begins to massage her hands.
"I think I'm going to ask the stylists again if I can be left alone.It is nice to be beautiful, but you know, I don't feel quite like myself. I suppose you know, since you have been here for a hundred years."
She catches one of Eva's hands in her own, trying to copy Eva's massage techniques. "Do you think they'll let me? I do not think anyone will look at me if I am ugly."
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
"I think we could spin it as a dramatic fashion statement, don't you?"
Re: [cw: sexual abuse]
Eponine has barely noticed that she's slipped from her formal 'Madame's when addressing Eva, but she likes it all the same. She continues to massage Eva's hands,oblivious to the idea that her touch might be uncomfortable. She imagines her touch to be similar to Eva's own, which, despite the strength in her grip - or perhaps because of it - has always been comforting to Eponine.