She takes a bite of her own, chewing thoughtfully.
"We had cows, growing up. They would wander through the walnut trees and eat the nuts and grasses. They'd make cheese from the milk before they moved the cows to a new forest." The cheese puffs were special treat despite being so simple to make.
It's such a simple snack and it reminds her of when she was young, too young to realize the shit world they were born into.
He may have bitten into it hard, but he savors the taste and chews it more slowly. "I had not had any until I came here."
To the Capitol. There's a lot of food he hadn't tried until he was fourteen years old, despite a good portion of it growing in his District. He guiltily enjoys everything he eats while he's here, wondering if someone he knows (knew?) helped bring it to the table. How much of the food at all his Victory feasts had been part of his own harvest? He wondered that a lot, every time he bit into some fruit laced in dips or spices.
"We do not have many animals in Eleven. Nothing that cannot be used to help in the farms and orchards. We never had pets." A beat, where he washes down the snack with another sip of his drink. "Now I do."
That feels surprising but maybe it shouldn't. Maybe they are all lonely and had pets to replace people and Jyn has never asked or thought about it so she didn't realize. Maybe she could keep a cow in her backyard. They're effectively large, lumbering dogs. One time she sat down on her break and a cow sat down next to her and fell asleep on her legs.
She thinks about telling that story but instead reaches out to take Cassian's drink. Sharing is caring.
She showed up one day at his door, begging for scraps. Cassian had tossed her a piece of cheese and that was it. He had a cat friend. He was hesitant to name her, simply because he seems to lose everything and everyone. This friend couldn't talk but it still felt like a risk to show attachment in something as simple as a name.
"You have your own," he states, even though he doesn't fight her. What he does instead is reach out to take hers. Since they're sharing at all.
"I was trying to catch up with you," Jyn grouses, reaching over to take her drink back. Now she is double fisting drinks and she had been avoiding that but whatever maybe it will make this shit life bearable.
"Does she have a name?" Jyn used to name the cows. Spot and Splotch and Blot and Smudge and Fleck. Buddy.
Jyn is going to offer these names, as a way to distract Cassian from the fact that she has both drinks, setting one out of his reach unless he stretches all across her which she know he won't, until one of the victors passes alongside their couch and Jyn feels her stomach bottom out. The victor is clutching a toddler in her arms, another clinging to her dress, as she hurries across the room.
Jyn, stricken, downs the rest of her (his) drink and reaches out to take his hand, snatching it up. "Come on. Let's get out of here." Hopefully in the opposite direction.
Cassian frowns, because now he is drinkless, which is the opposite of what he wants tonight. "I still need one," he grunts. Doesn't matter that he is already quite inebriated. "No. No name."
It suits them both just fine, probably. No names shared, only food. Sometimes the cat shares his bed and Cassian pretends it isn't nice to have company.
He watches her put the drink out of reach, and he's just drunk enough to actually consider leaning over her, but instead he follows her line of sight to watch the victor with her children. Cassian has seen her before, and every time he does he wonders how the hell she could have brought herself to have any kids. He's long ago given that notion up, maybe even before he was Reaped.
The instinct to jerk his hand from Jyn's is strong, but he strangely doesn't resist. Maybe it's because it's the first time someone's touched him without hoping to take a picture or talk about the Games. His brows still furrow. "And go where?"
She stands up, hauling him with her and despite winning her games, she knows most people are shocked by how strong she is. As if swinging an ax all day for years doesn't do anything for upper body strength.
She cleaved her ax through human bodies, still being underestimated after all that is an annoyance she wishes would end.
Luckily, Cassian is well on his way to being absolutely trollied and Jyn pulls him to standing easily. Now he's taller than her and she blinks owlishly up at him, green eyes bright in the garish Capitol lighting. "Come on." Her arm loops around his waist and she starts pulling them toward the lift. "I'll put you to bed."
His posture stiffens when she hauls him up and shifts her arm around him for support. Again he goes against instinct to shove her off, but maybe it's the alcohol. He had wanted to drink enough to escape his regular self.
Jyn is very strong, a fact that does not entirely surprise Cassian. He's got a knack for picking up what someone's real strength might be, and he's not someone who forgot how Jyn won. The only thing he didn't realize (remember?) is how green her eyes are.
"It is too early to sleep," is what he finally says, offering no fight as she guides him down the hall. He knows the route; if he gets too concerned about where she might be leading him, he can pull away. There's still fight in him.
There's still fight in all of them. But right now Cassian is just tired.
It's not a proposition but it certainly sounds like one to Jyn's own ears and she decides, fuck it, and doesn't not clarify she really meant they could eat in his room and like read a book. She remembers the intensity in his eyes when she told him about her father, she maybe wouldn't mind some of that directed toward her pants situation.
(Maybe she should stop thinking of it as her "pants situation".)
It sounds like a proposition, but he's honestly heard so many of them tonight that maybe he misheard. Maybe he's just assuming. Sometimes it's easier to assume and have an awkward misunderstanding than to be caught off guard. He isn't sure what would be easier with Jyn. But why not? Why wouldn't she? Everyone else does.
He simply does not acknowledge it at first.
"I need another drink. Since you have stolen mine." Maybe they can go somewhere and drink. Maybe that's what she meant.
"You don't need another drink," she counters. He needs to stop drinking, she needs to stop drinking. She was drunk at 10am, she understands the urge but she has decided that both of them need to not be alcoholics. Every time she sees the other drunk or drugged out victors she feels a swell of disgust (followed closely by annoyance at herself and then seething rage at the Capitol) and she doesn't want to feel that when she looks at Cassian.
She doesn't know why, of course, her brain focuses on Cassian. It is just a stray emotion. Like gravity.
"We can eat, I'll show you District Seven." She's scrolled through the window screens and walked through her own district enough to recognize one of the timber forests in Seven as the picturesque forest in one of the pictures.
He's not a drunk. He refuses to go down that path because as much as he wants to be numb sometimes, it's only sometimes. He can't bear the idea of being wholly unaware all the time. It's too dangerous. But right now he's just too angry and too hollow and it's the only viable outlet.
"I have been to District Seven." It's been seven years, but he was there once. Not that he saw much of the expansive forests. He's just being argumentative because he can. For once. He doesn't get the sense she'll mind.
"The Justice Building made entirely of plaster and cinder block doesn't count." She rolls her eyes, but not with any sort of annoyance. "No one from the Capitol ever seems to notice the irony."
Of course they don't, they don't notice the districts starving either.
With her free hand, Jyn's fingers run across the wood panelled walls of the tower. The glossy stain is thick, meant to bring out the grain of the pinkish red wood and instead is coated so thickly that the grain looks like psychedelic waves. Real nature turned fake in the Capitol.
"The Justice Buildings are all basically streamlined."
There are probably differences, but Cassian doesn't honestly remember from his tour of them. The speeches are all blurs, and he mostly remembers being shuffled along like cattle, smiling and waving and already learning how to flirt.
No one from the Capitol notices anything, he wants to say, but he catches himself, thankfully distracted by the way her hands move over the wall. "Maybe you cut down that wood yourself."
"Mmm," Jyn murmurs, a hum of consideration. If she had, she would be furious that the beautiful wood was disrespected like this, but she knows this is not her handiwork.
"It's tulipwood. There's no groves by the coast." Therefore, not any of her trees.
She wonders, briefly, if he was raised far south enough to live by the water or if he had been landlocked like some of the other districts. Every time she thinks of the first three districts her skin crawls. She can't stand the idea of living away from the fresh salt air. Maybe that is why she and Lando get on so easily despite that he annoys her quite a bit when he is acting his playboy part.
Hmm, maybe Four cuts them off entirely from the water, she isn't really sure of the geography. They didn't learn the details in school.
It takes him a second to parse what she means, mostly because his head is foggy. He knows Seven is big - it has to be for all that lumber - but the exact geography is lost on him. He's pretty sure it's designed that way, so no one District knows anything useful about another besides what they produce. Contact is minimized, grasp of territory certainly is too.
"You live by the ocean?" That's his takeaway.
He used to live near the water, but Victor's Village is far more inland. Now it's just streams or ponds, a large chunk of them man made for irrigation.
"Yeah, the Village is on the coastline so they didn't lose decent planting land." Saw had raised her after her mother was murdered but they'd remained in the Erso homestead -- still near enough to the water since evergreens can grow in sandy soil. Jyn had only ever been to the Victor's Village once before she moved in herself, alone, but she'd always been by the chilly water.
She pauses at an intersection of corridors, trying to remember which way is toward the lift before she leads them in that direction.
"It's on the other side of the Capitol, from you." They'd had to go up and around and through the mountains just to get to the Justice Building for the reaping, loads of children bussed in to stand in their best, cleanest clothes to be chosen to be murdered once a year and then bussed back to their hometowns to keep working because the Capitol may demand they watch the highlights every night but it also demands not a second of lost productivity.
"I used to," he says. Used to live near the ocean is the implication. He's quiet for a second, remembering the breeze. "We lived on a coffee fruit orchard. But I could smell it."
He gets more coffee now than he had the fruits as a child. Even the mangoes his mother would occasionally bring home are far more plentiful, but he doesn't enjoy them as much anymore. They just make him think of her.
Jyn leads him to the elevator, and the doors closing up behind them make him think of Eleven's Village locked away somewhere in the middle. Like they're locked here in the Capitol. "I suppose that is what happens when your District is presumably large."
"I never knew how big Eleven was until I took the train through it. Lando says Four is big too." Saw used to mumble about how the Capitol kept the districts apart, kept them down, but Jyn hadn't listened. That was the whole point of the Games, she knew that. Now she thinks he might have been talking about a different way of keeping them down all together.
She presses the button for Cassian's floor and the lift jets them up with a soft whirr.
Her arm is still looped around his waist and when she looks up at him she is struck by how close he is. The dusting of hair on his jaw does little to soften the sharp lines of his face, but Jyn finds herself appreciative that his district's stylists don't insist on shaving little designs into his stubble.
"You were right, about Albina. Once I figured out how she wanted me to look it was easier to suggest something less offensive." Her stylist struggles with her, she knows, because Jyn doesn't fit into any of the categories the Capitol wants her to fit in. She is just a lonely girl, but that doesn't make for good viewing, so Albina has tried her best to make Jyn look like a softer, innocent looking woman. What was the word? An ingenue. Maybe that way the Capitol citizens she is begging for help will actually help her. As such her hair is in her normal long bob, slightly curled, usually pinned back with a sprig of holly or pine needles or some other tiny remnant of her home -- today it's a cluster of tiny white flowers.
Jyn doesn't think it is working, maybe because of how she won her own Games, but the dresses the put her in are a hell of a lot more comfortable than what she was wearing before.
"Eleven, Four, Seven. Ten is fairly large too." He took note on his Victory Tour; it was easier to focus on the landscape than the idea of confronting the families of dead children. They don't like any of the Districts to know details about each other, but naturally that hadn't stopped him from paying attention. From doing his best to chart out a map in his head.
Cassian recognizes she's taking him to his room, he's not so far gone that he can't tell.
It takes him a moment to remember the advice he gave her, but he blames it on the fuzziness in his head. In combination with how close she is. Was she always pressed in like that? Was it so comfortable that he hadn't noticed? He could walk the rest of the way on his own surely, but maybe he wants to see how long she puts up with him.
"We have to do what we can to make it bearable where we can." A beat. "They have... ideas for us. Before our Games, during, after. I am glad it worked for you."
"They couldn't figure out what to do with me after my games. They made me too innocent and then..." She puffs out a breath which will have to make do for an explanation of her games. She was so covered in blood when she won that they couldn't run with innocent anymore.
"Well you saw it."
The elevator zip zips up and Jyn thinks they're close to his floor but she doesn't want to turn away from Cassian to check. Does he always smell this good? How does he smell so good.
He snorts, though it isn't at Jyn so much as the Capitol's self created dilemma. It happens time and time again, pictures of innocence ruined in the arena. "You bloomed from girl to woman under the cameras, and they will take credit for that. Is that the angle they are pushing?" He hasn't quite been able to figure it out, but after the Victory Tours are over, he doesn't particularly pay attention to the other Victors in the interim period. "They wanted me to be touchable. Instead I am untouchable. A dream."
With familial graves to prove it alongside the form fitting suits and colors that draw their gazes into a dream he will not allow to come true. He is probably being a little too free with his words, but he blames the drink. It's not in public, at any rate.
"Yes. They all do." He'd been so fascinated by them as a child, in those last few days before he stopped being a child and committed his first murder. Now they just sort of exist, and only on occasion does he choose the citrus bubbles when he can handle the reminders of his mother.
The elevator pings open, but Cassian only wobbles in place. "It surprised me, when I first got here."
"You smell nice." Which is a normal thing for normal people to say in a normal conversation. Even Jyn, who has the social skills of a porcupine, realizes that this is largely inappropriate, but she doesn't take it back.
He does smell nice.
"Come on." With her arm looped around his waist, she tugs him out of the elevator. He's higher than her, almost the penthouse, but the apartments are all the same according to Lando and Bodhi. She likes Bodhi, a sweet and incidental Victor who managed to win almost solely because he outlasted everyone else in a frigid desert. He'd won the year before her, gentle compared to the sheer violence of Jyn's win. Both of 12's tributes are still inexplicably alive, but Baze and Chirrut is mentoring them this year. Jyn thinks he and Baze are giving Bodhi a break, as if it will soothe his shaky anxiety.
"Which side is yours?" She can't remember if there is another Victor from 11. Maybe he has the run of the place.
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ohnofeelstho2018-12-08 12:59 am
no subject
She takes a bite of her own, chewing thoughtfully.
"We had cows, growing up. They would wander through the walnut trees and eat the nuts and grasses. They'd make cheese from the milk before they moved the cows to a new forest." The cheese puffs were special treat despite being so simple to make.
It's such a simple snack and it reminds her of when she was young, too young to realize the shit world they were born into.
no subject
To the Capitol. There's a lot of food he hadn't tried until he was fourteen years old, despite a good portion of it growing in his District. He guiltily enjoys everything he eats while he's here, wondering if someone he knows (knew?) helped bring it to the table. How much of the food at all his Victory feasts had been part of his own harvest? He wondered that a lot, every time he bit into some fruit laced in dips or spices.
"We do not have many animals in Eleven. Nothing that cannot be used to help in the farms and orchards. We never had pets." A beat, where he washes down the snack with another sip of his drink. "Now I do."
no subject
That feels surprising but maybe it shouldn't. Maybe they are all lonely and had pets to replace people and Jyn has never asked or thought about it so she didn't realize. Maybe she could keep a cow in her backyard. They're effectively large, lumbering dogs. One time she sat down on her break and a cow sat down next to her and fell asleep on her legs.
She thinks about telling that story but instead reaches out to take Cassian's drink. Sharing is caring.
no subject
She showed up one day at his door, begging for scraps. Cassian had tossed her a piece of cheese and that was it. He had a cat friend. He was hesitant to name her, simply because he seems to lose everything and everyone. This friend couldn't talk but it still felt like a risk to show attachment in something as simple as a name.
"You have your own," he states, even though he doesn't fight her. What he does instead is reach out to take hers. Since they're sharing at all.
no subject
"Does she have a name?" Jyn used to name the cows. Spot and Splotch and Blot and Smudge and Fleck. Buddy.
Jyn is going to offer these names, as a way to distract Cassian from the fact that she has both drinks, setting one out of his reach unless he stretches all across her which she know he won't, until one of the victors passes alongside their couch and Jyn feels her stomach bottom out. The victor is clutching a toddler in her arms, another clinging to her dress, as she hurries across the room.
Jyn, stricken, downs the rest of her (his) drink and reaches out to take his hand, snatching it up. "Come on. Let's get out of here." Hopefully in the opposite direction.
no subject
It suits them both just fine, probably. No names shared, only food. Sometimes the cat shares his bed and Cassian pretends it isn't nice to have company.
He watches her put the drink out of reach, and he's just drunk enough to actually consider leaning over her, but instead he follows her line of sight to watch the victor with her children. Cassian has seen her before, and every time he does he wonders how the hell she could have brought herself to have any kids. He's long ago given that notion up, maybe even before he was Reaped.
The instinct to jerk his hand from Jyn's is strong, but he strangely doesn't resist. Maybe it's because it's the first time someone's touched him without hoping to take a picture or talk about the Games. His brows still furrow. "And go where?"
And why him? That's the part he's stuck on more.
no subject
She stands up, hauling him with her and despite winning her games, she knows most people are shocked by how strong she is. As if swinging an ax all day for years doesn't do anything for upper body strength.
She cleaved her ax through human bodies, still being underestimated after all that is an annoyance she wishes would end.
Luckily, Cassian is well on his way to being absolutely trollied and Jyn pulls him to standing easily. Now he's taller than her and she blinks owlishly up at him, green eyes bright in the garish Capitol lighting. "Come on." Her arm loops around his waist and she starts pulling them toward the lift. "I'll put you to bed."
no subject
Jyn is very strong, a fact that does not entirely surprise Cassian. He's got a knack for picking up what someone's real strength might be, and he's not someone who forgot how Jyn won. The only thing he didn't realize (remember?) is how green her eyes are.
"It is too early to sleep," is what he finally says, offering no fight as she guides him down the hall. He knows the route; if he gets too concerned about where she might be leading him, he can pull away. There's still fight in him.
There's still fight in all of them. But right now Cassian is just tired.
no subject
It's not a proposition but it certainly sounds like one to Jyn's own ears and she decides, fuck it, and doesn't not clarify she really meant they could eat in his room and like read a book. She remembers the intensity in his eyes when she told him about her father, she maybe wouldn't mind some of that directed toward her pants situation.
(Maybe she should stop thinking of it as her "pants situation".)
no subject
He simply does not acknowledge it at first.
"I need another drink. Since you have stolen mine." Maybe they can go somewhere and drink. Maybe that's what she meant.
no subject
She doesn't know why, of course, her brain focuses on Cassian. It is just a stray emotion. Like gravity.
"We can eat, I'll show you District Seven." She's scrolled through the window screens and walked through her own district enough to recognize one of the timber forests in Seven as the picturesque forest in one of the pictures.
no subject
He's not a drunk. He refuses to go down that path because as much as he wants to be numb sometimes, it's only sometimes. He can't bear the idea of being wholly unaware all the time. It's too dangerous. But right now he's just too angry and too hollow and it's the only viable outlet.
"I have been to District Seven." It's been seven years, but he was there once. Not that he saw much of the expansive forests. He's just being argumentative because he can. For once. He doesn't get the sense she'll mind.
no subject
Of course they don't, they don't notice the districts starving either.
With her free hand, Jyn's fingers run across the wood panelled walls of the tower. The glossy stain is thick, meant to bring out the grain of the pinkish red wood and instead is coated so thickly that the grain looks like psychedelic waves. Real nature turned fake in the Capitol.
no subject
There are probably differences, but Cassian doesn't honestly remember from his tour of them. The speeches are all blurs, and he mostly remembers being shuffled along like cattle, smiling and waving and already learning how to flirt.
No one from the Capitol notices anything, he wants to say, but he catches himself, thankfully distracted by the way her hands move over the wall. "Maybe you cut down that wood yourself."
no subject
"It's tulipwood. There's no groves by the coast." Therefore, not any of her trees.
She wonders, briefly, if he was raised far south enough to live by the water or if he had been landlocked like some of the other districts. Every time she thinks of the first three districts her skin crawls. She can't stand the idea of living away from the fresh salt air. Maybe that is why she and Lando get on so easily despite that he annoys her quite a bit when he is acting his playboy part.
Hmm, maybe Four cuts them off entirely from the water, she isn't really sure of the geography. They didn't learn the details in school.
"We grew birch and evergreen."
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"You live by the ocean?" That's his takeaway.
He used to live near the water, but Victor's Village is far more inland. Now it's just streams or ponds, a large chunk of them man made for irrigation.
no subject
She pauses at an intersection of corridors, trying to remember which way is toward the lift before she leads them in that direction.
"It's on the other side of the Capitol, from you." They'd had to go up and around and through the mountains just to get to the Justice Building for the reaping, loads of children bussed in to stand in their best, cleanest clothes to be chosen to be murdered once a year and then bussed back to their hometowns to keep working because the Capitol may demand they watch the highlights every night but it also demands not a second of lost productivity.
no subject
He gets more coffee now than he had the fruits as a child. Even the mangoes his mother would occasionally bring home are far more plentiful, but he doesn't enjoy them as much anymore. They just make him think of her.
Jyn leads him to the elevator, and the doors closing up behind them make him think of Eleven's Village locked away somewhere in the middle. Like they're locked here in the Capitol. "I suppose that is what happens when your District is presumably large."
no subject
She presses the button for Cassian's floor and the lift jets them up with a soft whirr.
Her arm is still looped around his waist and when she looks up at him she is struck by how close he is. The dusting of hair on his jaw does little to soften the sharp lines of his face, but Jyn finds herself appreciative that his district's stylists don't insist on shaving little designs into his stubble.
"You were right, about Albina. Once I figured out how she wanted me to look it was easier to suggest something less offensive." Her stylist struggles with her, she knows, because Jyn doesn't fit into any of the categories the Capitol wants her to fit in. She is just a lonely girl, but that doesn't make for good viewing, so Albina has tried her best to make Jyn look like a softer, innocent looking woman. What was the word? An ingenue. Maybe that way the Capitol citizens she is begging for help will actually help her. As such her hair is in her normal long bob, slightly curled, usually pinned back with a sprig of holly or pine needles or some other tiny remnant of her home -- today it's a cluster of tiny white flowers.
Jyn doesn't think it is working, maybe because of how she won her own Games, but the dresses the put her in are a hell of a lot more comfortable than what she was wearing before.
After a pause. "Thanks."
no subject
Cassian recognizes she's taking him to his room, he's not so far gone that he can't tell.
It takes him a moment to remember the advice he gave her, but he blames it on the fuzziness in his head. In combination with how close she is. Was she always pressed in like that? Was it so comfortable that he hadn't noticed? He could walk the rest of the way on his own surely, but maybe he wants to see how long she puts up with him.
"We have to do what we can to make it bearable where we can." A beat. "They have... ideas for us. Before our Games, during, after. I am glad it worked for you."
no subject
"Well you saw it."
The elevator zip zips up and Jyn thinks they're close to his floor but she doesn't want to turn away from Cassian to check. Does he always smell this good? How does he smell so good.
"Does your shower have the scented bubbles too?"
no subject
With familial graves to prove it alongside the form fitting suits and colors that draw their gazes into a dream he will not allow to come true. He is probably being a little too free with his words, but he blames the drink. It's not in public, at any rate.
"Yes. They all do." He'd been so fascinated by them as a child, in those last few days before he stopped being a child and committed his first murder. Now they just sort of exist, and only on occasion does he choose the citrus bubbles when he can handle the reminders of his mother.
The elevator pings open, but Cassian only wobbles in place. "It surprised me, when I first got here."
no subject
He does smell nice.
"Come on." With her arm looped around his waist, she tugs him out of the elevator. He's higher than her, almost the penthouse, but the apartments are all the same according to Lando and Bodhi. She likes Bodhi, a sweet and incidental Victor who managed to win almost solely because he outlasted everyone else in a frigid desert. He'd won the year before her, gentle compared to the sheer violence of Jyn's win. Both of 12's tributes are still inexplicably alive, but Baze and Chirrut is mentoring them this year. Jyn thinks he and Baze are giving Bodhi a break, as if it will soothe his shaky anxiety.
"Which side is yours?" She can't remember if there is another Victor from 11. Maybe he has the run of the place.