XLVI: The Capitol - Rose Point Estate.
Soran Faerber, 19
Applicant #8
As stereotypical as it sounds, he has zero concept of time stuck in here.
There are a few windows in the library but he rarely wanders that far. There's not that much useful in the stacks for this particular endeavor, that's what the computer is for, and so he doesn't feel the need. There's enough space here to spin in circles and not fucking get anything as is.
Crynn was in here watching him, and left. Evander came in, picked up the post, and has since left. Only Pandora is still here, and he's beginning to suspect that she's fallen asleep. It's impossible work, trying to figure this out. He's surprised she didn't fall out of it sooner.
He's exhausted, too. All of his limbs feel like lead. He really ought to sleep, but he doesn't want to, not even to escape the headache lingering behind his eyes. Every blink hurts. He hasn't felt like a seriously viable human being since they got out of here - the brief death part of it all probably helps with that. He wants to, though. He wants to sleep easy and not feel very single sick pound of his heart in his chest.
It'd be easier to do this if he wasn't dealing with all of that.
It's too much for one person; he knows it, and he also doesn't care.
He doesn't care what anyone else thinks, either. This is the better way. There's less risk in him doing this than any of the others. Bringing any of them into this feels like stepping onto a path that ends with one, or several of them, very much dead.
Pandora turns to her side on the chaise lounge and the pen that had been resting on her chest clatters to the floor. Only then does she seem to notice just how out of it she was, and she scoops it up quicker than it even fell.
"You don't have to sit in here with me, you know," he tells her. "You can go to sleep."
"It's not even that late."
"Well, clearly you're tired."
"Been tired a lot lately," she murmurs. She looks as tired as he thinks he feels, but even those feelings are hard to pin-point. He's got a lot going on. So does she, evidently; the eyes that she turns to the ceiling are deeply troubled, before she turns them to him.
"What?" he asks. "Did you want me to ask you why you're so tired?"
"No. Sorry."
She definitely did. He stares for a moment longer, but she goes back to focusing on the ceiling. There sure isn't much interesting up there, not that he can tell, anyway.
He sighs. "Why are you so tired?"
"From all of this, I guess," she says instantly, rolling the pen anxiously between her fingers. She still looks troubled. "And I think — I think I might be pregnant? I'm not sure."
He blinks a few times, and then a few more. "What?"
"What do you mean, what?"
"Did you just," he starts, and then waves his hands around as if that will get the point across. It doesn't. "You can't just say shit like that so casually, and what do you mean you think? Do you not actually know?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I haven't gone to the doctor, or taken a test? I don't know! I just realized a few days ago, I'm still trying to process it."
"Wait, am I the only one that knows?"
She turns her head back to him. He puts his own in his hands.
"Why did you tell me first?" he groans into them.
"Because you asked!"
"I didn't really want to!" he insists. "Jesus. Fuck."
"I mean, I'm not sure, if that helps," she offers up. It doesn't help, if he's being honest. He doesn't want to be saddled with this information. "I've just been extra tired and sick, sort of. Nauseous but I haven't thrown up. Should I have?"
"Why are you looking at me like I'm a baby doctor?" he asks. And why is he saying the word why so much like he can't understand it either. "Seriously, can you tell Crynn, or something? I don't want to be the only one that knows."
"But what if I'm not? Then I'll just get his hopes up."
"Find out first then, for fuck's sake. It's not that hard."
Pandora sits up, setting both her papers and the lone pen in her hand down on the chaise's side table. That doesn't stop her from fidgeting any - now he's stuck watching her leg bounce up and down too many times in too few seconds. Any more and it's going to detach at the hip, and that won't help anything that's currently going on. He already feels the same way - fidgety, anxious, stressed without any exact thing to pinpoint it on. He's not sure he can handle the amount that's radiating from her on top of that.
"What are you so scared of?" he asks. "You know, besides the whole giving birth thing? Whatever happened to Evander - is that bullshit genetic, or something?"
"There's an inheritable condition that's been known to increase the chances of it, but for the most part it's spontaneous."
"Spontaneous?"
"Yeah, like he was mostly fine and then got a bad case of vertigo while he was in army training. They didn't even take him to the hospital - they took him to a clinic and did a scan. You know, they called my mom and told her over the phone that they found signs of two brain tumors?"
"That's not very nice." Not even to their apparent witch of a mother. No one deserves that, not really.
"Yeah. Benign, of course, but they still completely fucked his hearing."
"Well, the bright side of that is your kid probably won't get that," he says. "Probably."
She puts her head in her hands; it's a good thing he finally took his own out. "This is terrible. This is such bad timing."
Well, he's not going to argue her on that point, and you couldn't pay him to. It's one more thing piled on top of the rapidly growing heap that is their current life. And now he's thinking of it as a joint thing, which makes it even worse.
"Did you not want kids?"
"No, I did, I just... shit."
"Yep," he agrees. "It's still not a for sure thing though, so..."
"Right," she agrees, and gets to her feet. It looks like she's dangerously close to crying, and she even sniffles as if to prove a point. If she starts crying on him he might just die. "Right, I should probably go check for real."
"You should, yeah."
"Okay. Okay, I'm going. Are you going to stay here for a while?"
He nods. She nods, too, but she still looks as if she could go spinning in circles. He sort of feels that way too, but he won't admit it.
"Can you at least try to sleep tonight?" she asks. "Please?"
Soran did try last night, is the thing. He tried for several hours. Every time he closed his eyes his mind just started to race with every single little thing he could be doing instead, picturing every name on that list and trying to envision which one was the worst of them all.
He tried, but he doesn't tell her that. He just nods once again, and she seems to take that alright. She smiles at him, although it looks forced, but at least it makes her look slightly less distraught. He gets it, he really does. It's the definition of bad fucking timing.
But chances are it's happening. He knows that even after she leaves; she wouldn't have breathed a word of it if she thought there was a possibility that she was wrong.
She'll have to figure that out on her own, though. He still has work to do.
He puts his head down and gets back to it.
Emmi Langlois, 17
Applicant #13
"Okay," she starts. "Okay, so this is what we're going to do. Everyone listening?"
Icarus nods. Tarquin stares at her, completely blank-faced. Ria gives her what she would consider a slightly cheeky little thumbs-up if Nyx didn't bat her hand down instantly and then latch onto her fingers with his nibbling little mouth.
So, the cat likes her best. For some reason Emmi isn't surprised by that in the slightest.
She scoops up the tablet she lifted from downstairs, the one that she's increasingly sure belongs to Tycho. He had been looking at her when she had made several apparently not very careful side-steps towards it on the kitchen counter, but he hadn't said anything. Or done anything, for that matter, because she was up here with it and he hadn't come looking for it.
He won't miss it for a few hours, she's hoping. And hopefully if he does he just decides to give her a break.
"I think the best place to start would be finding out just exactly who was hunting us," she says. "We know Carnelia, obviously, but there were nine others. If we can find a connection to them that could lead us to someone else."
"And how do we do that, exactly?"
"Well, the government released a full compilation of everyone in that facility from the time the Sentinels started to when they ended it. Names, pictures, ages, District of origin... you know, shit like that. There's got to be like, thousands of them, but if we can find them..."
She trails off - the others already look like they're settled in on the idea.
Ria looks down at the file folder she's pulled up on the tablet. Tycho's going to have some weird things on here, after today. "Do you think the government identified the bodies already?"
"Probably. Why?"
"They didn't release that information, did they? That might make it easier."
"I don't think so," she hums. "But we could look into that too."
"Alright, I'm going to go look for another one of those," Icarus announces, gesturing to the tablet. "No way I'm crowding around one with three of you all day. I'll see if they've released anything, you get started on that file."
"You're missing out on all the fun," she sings, getting an eye-roll in response for her efforts. It makes sense, though, to be at least splitting this up. They don't need four sets of eyes looking at the same pages all day long. It really is hundreds of them, too - they've got numerous people with less information shoved onto single pages, but it's still an almost unbearable amount of information.
He departs, and Tarquin drapes himself over the chair he's sitting on to look over her shoulder. Ria inches closer and props her head up on her knees, using her fingers to zoom alongside the left side of the screen, where the photos are. That's really all that matters. Who knows how old some of these photos even are, too. They could be unrecognizable to the people that hunted them. Emmi is just hoping that someone, somewhere, chooses to give them a break for once and allows this to be somewhat easy.
She's not overly hopeful, but she's trying to be.
There's no rhyme or reason to it, though. They scroll through the first few faces and some of them are marked deceased from fifty years ago, while some were alive until the Capitol bombings only fourteen ago. Older people, younger people. She can't help but think of how many people saw these images and saw someone they knew - a spouse, a sibling, a child.
All the way from the Snow Era after the 75th all the way to the 155th... every year the Capitol killed twenty-three kids and killed even more of them where no one could see.
It's no wonder everyone hates them so much.
Every once in a while one of them will pause and scroll back up almost hesitantly, as if dreading the recognition they're all waiting for. It could've been someone they killed, at least in the case of herself and Ria. Tarquin's the only one who doesn't look nervous about the whole thing, but he keeps glancing at the two of them as if they're smoking bombs waiting to explode.
"Hold on," Tarquin says at long last. His voice nearly makes her drop the tablet in the otherwise quiet room. "Just one up. Isn't that—?"
He looks at her, then, eyebrows slightly raised. She scrolls back up and stares at the grainy image of the woman before her now. It hardly even looks like her - her hair is a smidgen lighter, her face much younger and fuller. Emmi tries to compare that face with the woman who's face she utterly ruined when she killed her. At first it doesn't look impossible, but the longer she stares...
It has to be here.
"Flora Benson, District Seven, would be thirty-five," she says quietly. "Can you write that down?"
It also says deceased during the year of the 155th, which wasn't obviously true, but the Capitol never cared who their lies hurt.
Ria obliges, scribbling the name and the rest of the information down for her. She can't stop staring at her face, a younger and much more innocent her before the Sentinels ultimately broke her and before Carnelia Trevall finished the job. It was Tarquin that recognized her, too, not Emmi. If he hadn't spoken up she never would have believed.
She'd like to believe it was the pain of the moment and that there's nothing else to it, but it's not quite that. In reality she's already beginning to erase the face of the dead from her mind, most importantly the ones that wound up dead because of her. It's almost like that will make it easier.
And it sort of has been, which is beyond fucked up.
"Alright, guys, hold on," Icarus insists. He's got something that looks suspiciously like a phone in his hands - she doesn't even want to ask where he stole it from or who's about to come looking for it. He kicks the door shut and then locks it, flopping onto the bed next to Tarquin and nearly sending him onto the floor. "Look at this shit - they've only released one report, on Carnelia and her. It doesn't even look like it's been widely circulated."
It's the other woman, the one that looked the most important save for the named big bad. The one that had the great misfortune of being manhandled and dragged out of the car when she let Soran get too close.
"Oh, sweet," she says. "What's her name?"
"Khia Rhodelle."
He says it in such a way that it feels like she's meant to understand something deeper. She rolls her head back until she can catch sight of him and he shoves the phone in her face, a half-inch away from her nose. The picture is definitely vaguely familiar.
"Okay?" she tries. "That's good?"
"Does that not sound familiar to you?"
"Should it?"
"Rhodelle," he repeats, and then brings the phone back to type something else in. "For God's sake - look at this."
It's a new page entirely this time, though he shoves it just as close to her face as before. She tugs it out of his hand to get a better look, this time at another woman. This one is even more familiar.
"That's Kestrel Rhodelle," he continues. "She's a fucking member of New Haven. Both from Twelve, seven years apart if all of this is accurate."
"So cousins, maybe? Ria asks.
"Or worse," Icarus says. "Siblings."
"Fucking hell," she mutters. "Write that down, god, write that down right now."
Ria scrambles for the paper and misses all of the lines entirely as she jots the information down. Cousins, or worse, siblings. Seven years apart. Coincidences like that just don't happen, and that could be why it's not widely released. If you went looking, sure... but how many people really will?
This could be their inside man. And Soran murdered the fuck out of her possible-sister not very long ago.
That's more terrible than even she expected.
"So what do we do?" Tarquin asks. "Who do we tell?
"Is there anyone we can legitimately trust?" Icarus wonders. "And by trust I mean to actually do something, not just run to the President or the nearest Peacekeeper. They're not on our side."
Not really, no. Pandora and Evander aren't the same thing. She wouldn't expect them to do anything that could potentially be this dangerous. Sure, it may just be nothing. Maybe Kestrel isn't tied into this the way Emmi already believes; if she is, though, and she's already spoiling for a fight, then Emmi doesn't doubt she'll do whatever it takes to beat back against them. She's already tried enough - murdered their parents or gotten someone to do it for her, tried to make their lives a living hell.
And it's working.
"So we do it ourselves, then," she says.
"Do what? We can't leave the Estate."
"Not yet," she says slowly. "Not yet."
Everything is always a matter of time. They need to find the rest of these names, just in case. They need to come up with a plan, no matter how long it takes, and they need to execute it. They need to get out there and do something.
Emmi hasn't decided what the something is yet, but she'll cross that bridge when she comes to it.
Or burn it, first.
Whatever seems like the better option.
Tarquin Vierra, 16
Applicant #4
He sits there until they hit five.
Six, really, because they had Carnelia all along, but five just feels more poetic. Poetry has always felt like a safe thing to him, a comfort. He was never very good at it, but he still liked it.
So they were at five new ones, now - Khia, Flora, one other woman, and two men. They were just about halfway through the files, but he hadn't been actively paying attention for the last twenty or thirty pages. It's hard to look at all of these faces and imagine what happened to them. A lot of them, he knows, died in the bombs the Capitol dropped on them after the 155th. Up in flames just like Fallout Three.
And the few that survived ended up here, only to die anyway. It hurts for some reason to think of the four of them out there against whatever remaining Sentinels still hunted them while he did... nothing, really.
He knows it's not nothing, and it's silly to call it that. But that's what it feels like.
"Does anyone mind if I go to sleep?" he asks. Emmi and Icarus give him near identical thumbs-up and he almost smiles at their similarity - almost. He's already gotten half-shoved out of the way so that Icarus can better look over his shoulder, but it's like he said, he wasn't really paying that much attention lately anyway.
Ria looks at him for a second, though. "Tired?"
He nods. He is, don't get him wrong, but it's a weirder feeling than before. He's scared to try and go to sleep.
That's probably not very good for his mental health.
"Do you want him?" she asks, gesturing to the lump of fur in her lap. Nyx has hardly left her side since Tarquin found him under the couch, but it kind of fits. And it made her smile, so he's good with that.
The cat is fast asleep, and he feels a twinge of guilt at the thought of even taking him away from her. It's Ria that slides her arms underneath him and holds him up, stretching until she can safely transfer him to Tarquin's arms. He's as warm as a space heater, purring faintly still, and hardly even wakes when Tarquin hauls him up to cradle him against his chest.
He's a very strange little creature. A strange creature for even stranger people.
"Night," he says quietly, stepping over both her legs and Emmi's as he heads for the doors. It's echoed back three times over, in various volumes. He's not even sure that it is night, and it probably isn't judging by the light filtering in under the bedroom curtain. It's even slighter brighter out in the hall. The sun has just sunk below the horizon; it's not even close to a time when he would go to sleep normally, not unless he had something big the next day.
He's not sure why he feels the urge to try now, when the thought of closing his eyes makes him want to throw up. How old is he, to be scared to fall asleep? He feels like he's afraid of the dark now, too, of whatever could come out of it. There was so much darkness down there it threatened to swallow him whole.
Maybe trying to sleep while there's still a faint amount of light left will help. Maybe.
He treks the short way to his room and deposits Nyx at the end of the bed - the cat takes in his new surroundings and then marches up to his unused pillow on the left side and then plops down on it. It's a good thing he didn't favor that one, or anything. He wouldn't have the heart to take it back.
After how much time he spent alone you'd think he was used to that, too, but now he just hates it more than ever. He hears every creak of the house, every sound of someone outside the door, passing by harmlessly. Not one of them is walking past with the intent to hurt him and yet his brain tricks him into believing it every single time; he waits for the moment the door will open, when someone will come in and do something.
And it never happens. He wish he could stop thinking it.
He doesn't think anyone would protest if he asked to sleep in their spare chair, or on their floor. He's not even sure that would help, he's just not sure what else would at this point.
When he lays down he feels pulled too tight, not relaxed in the slightest. He curls up as tight as he can manage and then pulls one of the blankets over him all the way up to his chin, facing the window, all the light that's left. He feels Nyx stretch out and then a second later a paw bops him in the back of the head, claws catching in the end's of his hair before he retracts them once again. He's so close he can still hear him purring.
"Why can't I sleep as easy as you?" he asks. Unsurprisingly, Nyx doesn't answer.
He could talk to someone, too. No one would fault him for it. Maybe the doctor, but he never found him even after Ria's warning. He's not sure that's the answer anyway.
Maybe he should open the curtains all the way, at least until it gets dark. Maybe he just needs more light.
Tarquin gets up and throws the curtains open before he settles back down in bed. The room floods with warm, leftover light. Now the room just looks bathed in fire instead of the darkness, and he's not sure that's better.
There's not a winning scenario in this for him, not when he can't close his eyes without seeing all of the horror.
He rolls over. Nyx's head is a mere inch from his, now, and his yellow eyes are wide open, unblinking.
"You too, huh?"
He makes a funny little chirping nose and then, after what looks like a moment's consideration, gets up. Tarquin forces himself still while he climbs ever closer and then up onto the flat of his chest. That's where he chooses to settle of all places, plopping down just above his stomach. He reaches a hand up to scratch under his chin - Nyx's eyes narrow into content little slits, and then close entirely.
Nevermind what he said. The cat's sleeping better than him, no surprise there.
He doesn't even know why he bothered trying to sleep, when he knows it's not going to happen.
There's no use in deluding himself any further.
Pandora Quinn, 29
Member of the New Haven Federation
She wasn't wrong.
She knew it all along, but seeing it confirmed... she definitely wasn't wrong.
That makes things infinitely more complicated.
She wasn't lying to Soran - she did want kids. Maybe. One day. When things were settled and her mother could possibly stand the sight of Crynn's face without actively trying to avoid him. Crynn had always wanted them, that she knew. When the world was better, when they were safer - that's what they had been working towards.
They blew that right out of the water, clearly.
She heads back to the cottage just shy of nine in the evening. She's certain that's where Crynn's gone - there's nowhere else the two of them would go this late. The only issue is it appears as if Evander went with him, or at least wandered out back not long after. Maybe it's not so bad, though? This could be just killing two birds with one stone.
If she can even get the words out without throwing up.
It was different with Soran. She hadn't really expected him to care for more than a few seconds before he went back to his research; that was the priority, not her possibly untrue worries. She hadn't even though before she had said it, it had just come out. And he had looked like he cared, at least incrementally so, and incrementally was more than she thought he would. If he hadn't gotten on her case she might have managed to avoid telling anyone else for a few days, until she could work up the nerve to do it properly.
She was just going to do it. March through the front door and say it. Possibly throw up, after, through nerves or nausea. She's not sure which.
She opens the front door. Evander's shoes are tucked just to the right of it. Okay, that's a good thing, she reminds herself. He's nowhere in sight, though. Crynn turns to her, lounged across the love-seat, and smiles. Normally that would make her feel better, but it has almost no effect now. She still sits down next to him on the inch or so left of the couch at the edge and he curls an arm around her waist like he does nearly any other time to hold her there.
Evander appears down the hallway and shuts the bathroom door behind him, wiping his hands down on his pants. "Is it my turn for babysitting duty?"
"No. He's fine."
"You sure? I don't care."
"I'm just hoping he'll go to sleep if we leave him alone. Besides, I need you to stay here for a minute."
He perches at the end of the and looks down at her, expectantly. Right, he probably doesn't have all night. She knows him, and regardless of what she's telling him he's probably going to wind up popping in the library at least once. That's just who he is. He stares, and she tries to rack her brain for something that sounds at least mildly intelligent.
"Uh," she says. Off to a great start. "I'm not really sure how to say this, so I'm sorry if it comes off, uh, weird? Or wrong. I'm not sure."
"Are you okay?" Evander asks.
"Yes, but no, too. I think. I'm kind of freaking out so I'd appreciate if neither of you did, though I know that's asking a lot, and I'm aware that it's seriously bad timing, but—"
"God help us," Evander mutters. At least he only sounds slightly exasperated at her rambling.
"I'm pregnant," she announces. Crynn sits up so fast he nearly knocks her off the couch, though his arm is still wrapped safely around her, keeping her in place. Evander's staring gets worse by the second as his eyes widen, to the point where she worries that they're about to fall out and roll under the couch. It's awfully dusty under there.
"You're serious?" Evander asks. "Oh my god, you're serious. Wait, is this bad? You don't look happy, are you not happy?"
"Of course I'm happy!" she insists. Her eyes watering may have something to do with how hard Crynn is squeezing her. So he's happy too, evidently. "I'm just stressed, okay. It's bad timing."
"Who cares? Everyone else will just have to deal with it."
"And me, considering it's mine."
"It's his, too," Evander points out. She can't see Crynn's face because he's still tucked behind her, face pressed to the side of her neck, but she can feel just how huge is smile is, and something in her eases at that. "And c'mon, look at me. Best Uncle Material ever, am I right?"
"Guess we'll have to see."
He swats at her, but at least he looks amused. Sure, she's the older sibling and she's always taken care of him through everything, but he's taken care of her too. She has no doubt that he'll continue to do so through all of this no matter how difficult it gets. And Crynn is here too, he's been here for so long now. He's not going to leave now just because things get slightly more difficult.
Maybe that's the type of situation they were born to thrive in, anyway. It's been leaning that way for a long time.
"Can I please tell mom?" Evander asks suddenly. "Oh, please let me tell her. I want to see the look on her face."
"You are not telling her," she laughs. Even the thought of having to tell her mother is horrific and here she is laughing about it. She'd probably start crying for real if she didn't laugh about it. There's a strong chance she'll make Evander come with her if only so she has some real back-up. It's always felt like it was the two of them against the world, but now there's more than that. She has so much more.
And in a day not so far from now, that will only grow.
It doesn't seem quite so terrifying when she thinks of it that way.
My other filed under: Evander option was just bonking him in the head during army training, which apparently wasn't enough, so he got bilateral acoustic neuromas instead. Thanks for that, google. I'm sure he's happy and thankful for it too.
But hey, with this chapter I've officially passed the big fat one million words on this account. Kill me, I guess. Please
Until next time.