XLI: The Capitol - Rose Point Estate.
PART II: THE RAPTURE
You're fascinated with the old me,
and I bet you hate it when we don't scream.
You're stuck in the past and I'm not looking back.
I didn't do it just to make you happy.
I do it for the ones still clapping.
You're stuck on the fence and I'm over it.
It's easy from the outside, you're fighting to get in.
It's not all gold and glory, I gave my life for this.
They never fail to judge me, no matter who I am,
I can't change my story,
but I'll do the best I can.
Emmi Langlois, 17
Applicant #13
In the simplest terms she can manage, everything inside her shuts down.
Her body goes off first. She takes a few steps down the hall and sits down in one of the lone reading chairs in the corner with a thump and doesn't move after that. Her brain, much to her dismay, powers off slower. All the while she mentally wills it along, envisions each switch and button. Off, off, off.
He's dead. Her father is dead.
Pandora's crying. There's other crying, too, that may be Ria or Tarquin or Icarus or all three - she can't fucking see to tell. Her eyes are burning but nothing will come out.
He's fucking dead. She's alive and he didn't know. He died before he found out.
There's someone to blame for that, she knows, but it doesn't come to mind as something overwhelmingly important. That bit is reserved for the word murdered. Someone went there with the intent to kill them, and maybe if it was just him that could be marked down as a coincidence. Those things happen, sometimes. Once in a while.
Not this time.
She looks up. Ria is gone. A vague working-type looking person sees the group of them and flees back in the opposite direction. The man she does not entirely know just yet is consoling... Pandora?
For christ's sake.
Soran is trying to ask questions. She can tell even though she's waiting for her ears to pop so she can hear properly again, like she's been underwater for too long. It doesn't look like he's getting very far anyway. Pandora is in hysterics. Whatever he's asking isn't being answered quick enough by Evander, who's head looks as if it's about to explode.
Hers feels like it already is.
Tarquin kind of stumbles off. No one makes any move to stop him. Icarus looks at her; she imagines they look much the same. The shock fit before the emotion, an overwhelming tidal wave of icy cold paralysis that shut her down before the weight of it could make her collapse. To be honest, she's surprised he's still standing, but there's no where else to go. The floor, maybe.
"How have you not found any fucking evidence?" Soran snaps. "You're telling me seven fucking people got murdered overnight and you have not the faintest inkling as to—"
"We've had investigators on every scene since we found out," Evander breaks in. "Forensics is on it. If there's anything to find they'll get it."
Seven people got murdered overnight. Her father was one of them.
"You thought we were safe," she says hoarsely, and everyone turns to look at her, for the first time. "You thought, and we knew it wasn't true, and you wouldn't listen to us. Someone's still plotting."
"I know," Pandora chokes. "I know, I just don't know why. I don't know what someone is getting out of this anymore."
"A win," Soran snaps. "They're winning, isn't it obvious? Us surviving was not in their fucking cards, whoever set this all up. They had a group of Sentinels after us who never planned on having a victor in the first place, you think they're happy that five of us made it out?"
Evander is looking at him the way you'd look at someone who's about to lobotomize you, she reckons. It's not the greatest brother to brother meeting she's ever seen in her life; she's not even sure they've been properly introduced. Then again it's not like she had a benchmark for these types of things, and there's probably not many people you do. And she thought the Pandora first look was tragic.
"As soon as we have any kind of information the pieces will start to come together," Evander says, and it's not a promise in words but it sounds like one.
She's not sure she really believes in those anymore.
Besides, she already has too many pieces. He died alone, strangled. Probably didn't even see it coming but had a few terrifying, too long seconds in which his reactions did nothing at all. Was he scared, really? Did he embrace it the way her mother did when she knew there was no other option, looking at it as if he was joining the two of them?
Did he have time to think at all?
"We need to find out," she says. "They're not gonna stop. They didn't do this and just decide they're done."
It looks as if Icarus considers that two seconds before he turns around himself and continues on down the hall they have yet to explore. Soran looks after him, but he's got no hope of hell in catching him in his current state, and then to her. They're the only two left. Her because she's not sure she has it in her to move anymore and him because he lost it all long ago.
Maybe being untouchable now is a good thing. They can't take anything from you if it's already gone.
"You don't have to do anything," Evander says, and his voice is an entire magnitude softer when he looks at her. She feels like a child, which is a hard thing to be anymore, or an abused animal, the type that doesn't trust anyone no matter how long the person gives. "I don't want you to feel like this is all on you. We can figure this out."
He's freaked out too. Not as much as her, the rest of them. No, that would be impossible. He's a physically impressive person, in the least; the hearing aids she notices tucked in both his ears don't even begin to take away from that, but there's something overwhelmingly gentle about him that she absolutely does not fucking understand.
Being gentle is bad. Being gentle gets you killed, really.
"I don't think you get to say anything," Soran insists. If she's the scared, abused animal he's the reason why signs get put on front doors, why people don't knock when they realize there's a dog with a mouth full of teeth inside. "If you had just let them go home—"
"I wish it was that simple."
"Then make it that fucking simple!"
Them, not us. Soran doesn't really have a home. She's aware of that now.
She wishes she could raise the same amount of anger that's registering in him now; her body feels too heavy to do so, too weighed down. It's the same weight that settled on her when she woke at the bottom of the cliff and realized what lied ahead of her.
She survived that, though.
It doesn't feel so much the same, anymore.
Tarquin Vierra, 16
Applicant #4
They're still yelling.
He's still crying.
It feels like a wheel that never stops turning. It also feels like someone's turning the crank too fast on it and he's getting tossed around, whiplash inevitable, worse injury probable.
Arden had done that to him once, two summers ago. Put him on a ride down at the mid-July fair they always held down by the lake and made him go three times around it without stopping. He had gotten off and nearly thrown up in the grass.
That, in comparison, feels like a real sort of child's play. They're in the thick of it now.
He can't breathe, a feeling he thought he had gotten used to. The air was thick down in the mines, stale, worse when he set fire to a large chunk of them and spent hours upon hours struggling through to find a new exit. They had taken special measures in the hospital to monitor the state of his lungs, but he wasn't the one who had a hole in the right one, so it hadn't seemed like a big deal.
It feels like a big deal now, because he's not so sure any of the doctors really fixed them at all.
There's a doctor on sight, they said. He has half a mind to go looking for whoever it is and make them fix him properly this time. It feels like he's splitting apart at the seams.
They didn't say anything about anyone else. What if Arden is dead, Velia or Calix too? His distant aunts and uncles, his other friends from the troupe - is it all of them? Or just his parents, designed to hurt the most, due to wedge it's way into his heart in a way that makes it stuck for good. A truly wrong part of him wants to find a broadcast. The other part wants to get lost in this maze of a place and never let anyone else find him.
He hears the sobbing before he gets very far. Ria went this way, too, and he suspected she didn't get very far but this is just around the corner, hidden behind a closed door. He closes a hand around the handle but stops before he can get it open. She ran for a reason, went away from them all to get away for good. She's the complete opposite of him; not entirely unemotional but much better at hiding it. It could just come from not talking very much in the first place, but he's been passed that point since he learned how to talk in the first place.
"Ria?" he asks. His voice is a pathetic croak, but he thinks it gets the point across. There's a pause in the hysterics, briefly.
He cracks the door open before he chickens out. She's sitting at the edge of the bed, one hand pressed to her stomach and the other lifted away from her face, two actions he immediately understands. Trying to keep everything in. Trying to hide it.
Failing miserably, too.
She looks at him for all of two seconds before she's sobbing again, face buried in the safety of her hand, but it's a smidgen quieter. He probably wouldn't hear it anymore if he was standing out in the hall, but it's loud as day when he sits down gingerly next to her.
This is one of the many rooms Evander pointed out when he was giving them the choice of where to stay. It was unintentional he's sure, but he's pretty sure this is Ria choosing.
"I just wanted to go home," she says, muffled into her hand. Home that doesn't exist anymore, really. Now they're just buildings like any other, not even filled with the stench of death because they found the bodies too quick.
Was it one person, traveling overnight? Was it multiple listening to one order? Who went first? Who lasted the longest?
He has a million questions in his mind, a million thought processes that don't ever finish.
While he was trying to sleep in his hospital bed both of his parents were being murdered, none the wiser as to what was going on some several hundred miles away.
And now they never will. They died thinking him dead too, mourning their only child, the one they sent off for only a few days. He can only hope in the very least that it was quick, a few seconds of pain before they went under. He can hope that they didn't know what was happening, didn't see it happening to the other before it happened to them too.
He can see it in his mind, one of them helpless a few steps away, watching the other die.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree if that's the case.
It doesn't seem right that they're still alive anymore. There's no sense to it. All that work he did to get out, to find the others... why did he even fucking bother?
"We should've just died," he says, voice a hollow rendition of what it used to be. His dad said he had such a good one too, a commanding stage presence, a voice worthy of listening to.
It doesn't really matter what his dad used to say.
Ria peers up at him, eyes peeking over the top of her hand, a slight concern for something other than her own situation floating in her watery eyes. It's not the greatest thing to say, he's aware of that. Not the most reassuring, either, and Ria doesn't need to be worrying about him on top of everything else.
"I really wanted to live," she says.
"Me too."
He's also wanted a hug for a few long, agonizing days at this point. Since he hugged her in the mountains, really. Nobody else really seems appropriate to hug - decidedly not the hugging type or anything of the sort. Even Ria only did it at that time because she was half out of her mind, too thick in the delirium to really do anything other than cling back to him.
He hesitates a second before he scoots closer those last few inches and wraps an arm around her shoulders. She curls towards his side, bringing her knees up to make herself even smaller. For someone her size that shouldn't even be possible. It works, though, and she slots in under his arm easily. It's not even close to a hug, but it's not bad for two people who are shaking and crying too much to do anything else.
"At least they found them," she says thickly. "At least..."
"At least what?"
She shrugs. His arm shifts upwards at the motion and then resettles even tighter over her shoulders.
There's more to that, he can tell. Something he doesn't know about. They found them, they have the bodies, but even then it doesn't matter. They'll never see them. They won't see them buried, either.
Being found used to be such a good thing, a miracle as Pandora would call it. Since the border patrol picked them up it's felt like the opposite, everything tilted on it's head until backwards makes sense.
It also used to be that alive was the good thing, too, not dead. You're a fighter, a survivor, a victor in this world.
And he doesn't feel like a single one of those things.
Soran Faeber, 19
Applicant #8
"You don't have to follow me around," he snaps, to someone who either doesn't want to talk to him or can't.
Crynn's shadowing him like he's planning on taking it up as his next hobby. Pandora tried to come along. Evander stopped her.
He doesn't even know who this guy is.
He's not like Evander - Crynn can damn well hear every word that's coming out of his mouth without assistance and is just actively ignoring him. He's been staying a few feet behind him, stopping when he does, picking up the pace when he tries to get away no matter how futile it is.
It's like he has a flashing red light over top of his head that says fuck off. And if not, he really wants one.
"You know, if you're going to be generally here you could at least help me find him. Search and destroy instead of watching me like a goddamn hawk."
Crynn doesn't respond to that either, absolute shocker. What he does do is grab Soran's arm just above the elbow and pull him to a stop, doing so in one of the only ways that wouldn't cause any flare of pain to rise up. While he appreciates that, it's really hard to appreciate being stopped in the first place.
"What?" he asks, beyond vexed at this point. Crynn holds up his hands in a placating sort of way and then goes rooting around in his pocket until he pulls something free, slightly bigger than a phone. He types something out and then turns it around until Soran can see it.
Don't know where he went.
"Great," he says flatly. "So are we just going to stand here, then?"
Crynn doesn't miss a beat in scrolling down to the next line. You need to be resting. Not running around looking for him.
"Oh, God," he groans. "She's already been on my case about that, I don't need you doing it too. Just look at me, marathon sprinter - dude, I'm managing a rough half a mile an hour right now, do you think I enjoy walking around?"
He really doesn't. It hurts tremendously to do anything other than sit and even that doesn't always feel so great. But he can't just go and sit down, sleep and ignore it. Tarquin and Ria are off wallowing together, at least, and Emmi looked him dead in the eye and said go, which was her equivalent of fuck off and don't ask me how I am, so he wasn't about to.
But Icarus, in a stunning twist of fate, is missing in action. Things haven't always gone so well when that's happened in the past.
He just needs to find him, preferably quickly. And Crynn's not helping much.
Crynn makes a noise, weirder than most other things he's heard, and types out something out. Soran counts down the remaining seconds he has until he really does try running off.
The hallway goes on for a while, and into the east wing. It's a lot of rooms. There's an emergency exit staircase at the very end, but it would've made noise if he had left. So—
Soran doesn't bother reading the rest of it. "So he's still up here. Got it. Thanks."
He backtracks a bit first, leaving Crynn standing there erasing the last of his message, and starts opening doors. No one in their right mind needs this many rooms in a house. You could probably comfortably fit the entire population of Twelve in here and still have room at the dining table for guests. How the Quinn family and their immediate relatives even see each other every century is a miracle in this place.
Not one of the rooms looks the same, though. There are a lot of bedrooms but most, if not all, are laid out different, filled with different colors and pieces of furniture. There's a few sitting rooms scattered between them, a behemoth of a room that looks suspiciously like an entire library. There's one that's just filled with musical instruments and expensive looking paintings, another where the outside walls and half the ceiling are glass, showing the rapidly darkening sky.
All of these rooms and not one thing looks recently touched, though everything is suspiciously free from dust. He remembers Evander saying the south wing was dedicated to the workers, which means there's an entire armada of people that both live and work here to keep the place up.
God fucking dammit, he really doesn't want to be here.
It takes him nearly a half hour of poking through room after room before he finally finds one with any indication of disturbance, a faint light peeking through a door all the way on the other side of the otherwise dark room. A bathroom, probably. He's only found half a dozen of them otherwise in his searching.
He looks back; Crynn is nowhere in sight, anymore. He slips carefully into the room and shuts the door soundlessly behind him.
Upon further inspection as he enters the room there's one other sign, too, an open cabinet door in the dresser-shaped thing leaning against the wall to his left. He can hazard a solid guess as to what's in there, or at least what used to be considering it's been left open, on the way to the light. He doesn't bother looking, though. He's going to find out right now.
He inches the door open and leans against the frame. "Trust you to be able to find the liquor in a goddamn mansion."
Icarus doesn't so much as look up at him as he raises the bottle and waves it back and forth. There's already enough missing that nothing spills out from the open top. He's sitting up against the wall, legs crossed. Soran can't decide if him not crying is a good thing or not.
"Call it a talent," Icarus muses, and then takes another small sip of it.
"I'm gonna hazard a guess and call you a lightweight."
"Fucking rude," he answers, which means it's true. That makes it all the more concerning with how much is gone. He's about to go downhill fast, if he isn't already.
He probably is.
Soran can count on one hand the amount of times he's ever drank anything in his life, every time some god awful brand of something someone had mixed up in their room and then smuggled out to everyone else. Turns out making moonshine isn't a talent of the Ones - who would've thought? His alcohol knowledge is brief, at best. It's not like he ever had the money for it.
He reaches for the bottle and takes a swig for himself. It tastes, predictably, like shit.
"You shouldn't be drinking while you're on meds," Icarus points out, voice half a mumble, which is true but also boring.
"It tastes like garbage anyway."
"It's a thousand dollars, easy."
"Thousand dollars worth of garbage."
Icarus stretches a hand out, waving it around like he wants it back. Soran grabs the lid off the counter and caps it, for which he earns a very unimpressed, more than slightly on the way to drunk look. He expects something else to happen, for Icarus to move or put some effort into getting it back, but he lets his hands drop back into his lap, silent.
"You wanna get up?"
"Nope."
Well, that means he's getting down, then. That's going to be horrifically painful. He grabs the edge of the counter anyway and very slowly lowers himself down until he's settled down on his knees, ignoring the fiery pain that erupts all over his side for his troubles. Icarus mental state must be a wonder for him not to react to that considering how much he's been hovering since he woke up in the first place.
He's staring at the opposite wall right now, eyes glassy. Not really looking.
"I hated them, you know," he says weakly. "They were awful parents."
"So I assumed."
"Like, I guess I shouldn't say the worst, you know? It's not like they beat the shit out of me or anything they just... didn't care. I was never anything to them. Maybe I was, but it felt that way."
It really goes to show that money can do absolutely nothing for you if you really let it. And it doesn't matter that they never put a hand on him - sometimes the psychological damage is worse. He doesn't know what's more terrible - having parents that aren't exactly the word itself, or not really having them at all. And it's not like it matters, anyway. The paths for both of them led here anyway.
He's just not suffering for it now, which seems cruel when everyone else is.
"I hated them," Icarus repeats, but his voice is thicker, eyes more watery. Oh, it's definitely happening, the downward slope beginning even quicker than he thought. "I hated them, so I don't know why I'm—"
He breaks off to take a breath, shuddering on the inhale. His knuckles are white where they're digging into his knees, a few seconds passing before several tears finally slip over the edge.
"They were still your parents," he says quietly, and Icarus nods, which seems to open up the fucking floodgates if he ever did see it. For once, though, Icarus is oddly silent, openly sobbing without making any noise to really show it. An occasional sniffle here and there, a breath in and out. Besides that, nothing. It's almost more alarming than him sobbing in the first place.
It's not, though. Soran has never had a clue what to do when people start crying in front of him, though it's not like he's the pinnacle of experience. A few people here and there in training, although no one he was that close to. It wasn't his thing to fix when it wasn't someone he cared about.
And Icarus...
He's not prepared to even finish that thought.
He holds onto the counter for support again while he gets his legs out from underneath him, maneuvering about until he's sitting properly on the floor in front of him, just to the left. There's no way this is ever going to feel great, and he's going to pay for it whenever he gets off this damn floor.
That time probably isn't coming anytime soon.
He holds out his arms and Icarus doesn't hesitate a second before he's leaning into them, still sobbing, shaking, trying to process something that won't ever make any sense. He lets go of his own stomach to wrap his arms around Soran, instead, once he realizes he has that option. Soran could've predicted aloud that he was a clinger the day he met him.
At least he's right about something.
It hurts like hell, though, Icarus' arms keeping a constant gnawing pressure on his side whenever he so much as shifts his weight. It's not like he can very well say anything, can he? Icarus doesn't mean it. He's not thinking of anything right now; he's in hysterics, halfway drunk, crying on the bathroom floor in Soran's arms and God, how the fuck did they end up here?
The whole path doesn't make sense. Doesn't need to.
All that matters is the here and now, and it's like he said - they're not getting off this floor anytime soon.
Soran leans back against the counter and ignores the blistering pain, tightening his arms around Icarus' quivering form. It feels a lot like he's keeping him in one piece, and hopefully he can.
It's going to be a long fucking night.
It'll be even longer if he can't.
Evander Quinn, 26
Volunteer Support Service Personnel; Army Branch
It's a few long, painful hours before he gets to do what he's wanted to all night.
First he has to herd Pandora off, which is a process in itself. After that he tracks down Crynn, who managed to lose Soran at a rather impressive pace, and sends him after her.
Emmi is still sitting silent in the hall when he goes by for the third time in his quest to find the others. She's the only one there, so he makes sure to pick her a room. He told her to try and sleep - she probably ignored him on that front, if she even heard him in the first place, but at least he knows she can sleep, if she decides she wants to.
By the time he finishes all of that there's not a peep he can make out in the entire house except for someone working away in the kitchens, no doubt prepping for tomorrow's breakfast.
After that, he heads for the third floor.
He remembers when he was little, when it was off limits while his parents were working away. One of the nannies would always catch him no matter how many times, no matter how far he made it. One step from the bottom or only one from the top, they always managed to pull him away and distract him with something else. They got quite good at it with all the time they spent around him.
It still feels weird stepping foot up here even after all these years, like it's off limits even though he's an adult.
He knows he's not going to find her anywhere else, though. By the looks of things she's been holed up here all day.
Every year he wonders more and more about the hidden cowardice inside each of his parents.
He heads to the end of the hall and knocks twice before he steps inside. The fireplace in the corner is recently stalked, a few new flames catching here and there. He can't see her, but she's awake.
"Mom?" he calls, but he gets no response. The massive wall projection is on across the room, replaying the broadcasts of the day. It's exactly as he expected - grainy footage of the various houses, the emergency vehicles that had collected the bodies. No conclusive evidence, they all said at one point or another, of who had done it or what had happened or why it was their parents, specifically.
Everyone in this house knows why. It still doesn't make sense even though he knows.
"Sweetheart?" comes the voice, and his mother steps from the bathroom wiping away the last of the water from her hands onto the front of her robe. "I didn't think you'd be up this late."
He's not even sure what time it is, if he's being honest. It must be past midnight.
That doesn't explain why she's still up, though.
"Busy day," he replies. She's still alert, moving quite fast, but sits down in the chair that's just always been hers a few feet away from the fireplace. They got rid of his dad's a few months after he died. He's not sure why.
"So I would assume."
"Have you been up here all day?"
She takes a sip of her coffee, tea, something - coffee if she's still up, he reckons. "I didn't want to get in the way."
"You don't have to bullshit me, you know," he says. "But you can't avoid it forever."
Oh, but she'll try. They got all of their stubbornness from her, him and Pandora both. They got most of their personalities from her if he had to hazard a guess. He doesn't enjoy that fact as much as people would assume.
"I'm not," she answers, and smiles at him. She looks worse than usual, tired. Not in the anxious, worried way that he was, losing sleep wondering about all of this. No, his mother's just angry, and hiding it. If he didn't know her like he does he wouldn't be able to see it, but people didn't spend half his life calling him a mama's boy for no reason.
"You sister shouldn't have offered this," she continues. "There were other places for them to go."
"He's my brother."
"In theory. You don't actually know him."
"And who's fault is that?" he fires back. "You and Dad had him sent away and you spent all the years after he died continuing to hide it, and for what? I would have never known if this didn't happen. You really think Pandora would've sent him away - you think she would have sent any of them away?"
"I didn't want him here. Any of them. It's too risky."
"Do you think they want to be here?" he asks. "Do you think Soran, if given the choice, would've asked to be born?"
"Your father wasn't opposed to the idea, you know. The plan was always to get rid of his mother one way or another, but he had a family lined up for adoption in the city. Keep him here, but keep him far enough away."
"And you said no."
She takes another sip before she turns to look at him. It's not all that far off from the look she would give him when he was younger, when he had done something accidentally but was about to get into massive trouble for it anyway. She can't keep him locked up in his room now, though, can't keep dessert away from him or keep his friends from coming over.
She doesn't have any leverage now.
"You said no," he repeats. "Don't lie to me."
"I said this family was what mattered."
"He is my family," he points out. "And he nearly died because Dad harbored a Sentinel that killed him and then almost killed Soran nine years later. He nearly died because you had him sent off."
He can't remember the last time he saw his mother display any great sign of emotion, and it's slightly terrifying. There are re-broadcasts of the murder of seven different people just in front of her and she doesn't seem to care.
"He nearly died," she says slowly. "Because he went along with it. All five of them did. There are nineteen other kids dead because of them, and we're giving them sanctuary."
"The Sentinels did this."
"The Sentinels who are dead. Who else is there to blame? You're more naive than I thought if you still think of them as just children, not after what they've done."
It's well and truly done then, isn't it? He has no idea who she is anymore. Even when Dad was still here she was always the colder of the two, but he remembers her hugs like he's gotten one recently, even though he hasn't. She was so warm with them, so kind-hearted. She was everything she's not being now.
Regardless of what she says, they're children. He still believes that.
"Remember when I was in the hospital?" he asks. "Remember that? You made Pandora leave and you told me that nothing had changed, that even though it was no one's fault you would still protect me and love me and that you were going to fix it. What happened to that?"
She turns her eyes back to the projection. Evander has never been more grateful in his life that he looks nothing like her - even after everything he did, everything he failed to do, he'd still rather look like his father than whoever this is sitting in front of him now. She's a stranger, a foreign being, a shell of a mother who pretends and carries on charades about how much she cares. Maybe her caring went away when Dad did.
Maybe it was never really there and he just failed to notice.
He gets no response, either, just a thick, heavy silence hanging between them, broken occasionally by the hum of the projection.
"Maybe you were right," he says. "It is best to stay up here. Don't go near them - any of them."
He'd get a scolding for that tone of voice if it was a different time, if he was a different person. This time he turns to leave before she can possibly respond and is out the door before she even realizes he's walking away.
It's better that way. A cleaner break. An easier separation.
That doesn't stop it from hurting, though.
She's not dead, but it feels a lot like he's lost another parent, too.
Yes I went and renamed the bloodbath as 'part one' after the fact so that no one would notice. And what about it?
Happy November/almost winter fun times to everyone! Hope you're all having lovely days thus far.
Until next time.