There's Plenty of Ways to Know You're Not Dying [Closed]

[celebrityskinned]

WHO| Shepard and Venus
WHAT| Districtmates have a rough confrontation.
WHERE| Some space store in the mall.
WHEN| Week Six, before Venus gets crushed by the gate.
WARNINGS| Shep's driving Venus to suicide, so it's going to be ugly.

Venus' head is spinning. Somewhere between dehydration and sleep deprivation, she's lost her sense of balance, and as such she's holed up in the bookstore, arms wrapped around herself as she weathers another round of chills from her withdrawal.

She's alone in this Arena now. She tries to read a book and yet her eyes seem incapable of sorting letters into words. She paces around the bookstore on her mangled feet until she's bled through several layers of band-aids. She cries and she stares at the ceiling and she waits for someone to come and kill her as she lies, unwilling to defend herself, on the floor.

Everyone she loves is dead.

No one comes to spare her this existence. After two days she woozily gets to her feet and wanders towards the cafeteria, gets lost and winds up in some sort of space-themed store. She pulls her jacket tighter over herself, looking, with her brand and unkempt hair and unchanged clothes, less like District Five's diva and more like the street person she was as a teenager. She takes a seat behind a row of models and chews her nails. Pieces of polish still fleck them, but not smooth and pretty, not maintained.

She stands up and looks beyond the rack of models when she hears someone entering.

"Shepard."

Comments

[earthborn]

It's been what feels like a long time since Sigma's bonfire. Longer still, since Joel and Tess spent a night with her in this very room. The shelves are restocked, the char swept away, and floors polished by industrious robots. The space gives a muffling sensation, so that the echoing cavern of the arena mall seems far away, a separate place. This is a haven. Mordin wants electronics components for his traps, and the toys here represent the easiest source for it. So here she is, red glow through a display. Something cute, like little plastic aliens, big eyes and gelatinous limbs, she didn't spare it the attention.

Her hair is flat, body liberally splotched with bruises and cuts, the broken bones of her hand shielded with a makeshift brace and a fresh bandage, thanks to Azula's machinations and the Professor's prudence. The brand stands out, clean but livid, in a face of defiance.

She likes the scar; it's something real.

Shepard is unbowed, unbroken; for the first time in a very long time, she has a mission and she is damn well going to see it through. Confidence shows though, in her posture, in her face, in the calm way she evaluates her options. It's been months since she spoke to Venus. A lot has happened.

"Venus," You can put a lot of meaning into two syllables, if you try, "Are you armed?"

Yeah, she's still mad, though.

[celebrityskinned]

"No." She hasn't seen the point in it. There's no violence left in her; whatever anger she was harboring inside turned inwards and broke when Kankri died. Nothing has flooded in to fill that empty space, and despite being the same size she's always been, despite still being as strong and capable physically, Venus seems much less than she was last time Shep saw her. So much less, and in comparison to Shepard, practically a waif.

But behind the brand and the wilt that's left her like a plant after sudden frost, there's still defensiveness there, a certain sense that injustice has been done to her and she isn't sure who to blame. Something that wants to defy Shepard out of stubbornness instead of reason.

"You look like you're doing okay."

[earthborn]

She's used to that, the defiance that flew in the face of reason. Most people would attribute Shepard's experience to her own obstinance, but in this case she felt she had been more than generous.

"And you look like shit," Because she cannot turn her back on this woman, particularly now. There is no world, in Shepard's mind, where even this apparently downtrodden Delilah doesn't immediately turn around and attack, "Venus, what do you want?"

[celebrityskinned]

"You walked in on me." Venus shudders again and pulls her jacket tighter; the room seems to recede and then come back full force, wreaking havoc on her depth perception. Or vice versa.

"Unless you got a mood stabilizer shoved in that brace of yours, you got nothing I want." But she would ask. That's how desperate she is, sick and like a damn junkie who would beg.

[earthborn]

Something about that reminds her of the stakes and she relaxes again. Venus had been drinking the water, and even if she'd realized how screwed up she was, there was no going back. She was sure the viewers back home were on the edge of their seats.

"Aw, are you feeling a little down, Delilah? Get over it. Pretty sure that by now anyone who cares is already dead."

[celebrityskinned]

She wants to scream at Shepard that Shep doesn't get to use her real name, that she wasn't someone entrusted to that ill-kept secret. She would if the fire that it sparks in her weren't immediately quenched under Shepard's next words.

So her next words are quiet and sad, desperate but hopeless. She can only try and take revenge for Ellie and Kankri's deaths. She can't do anything for them in here.

"Did you see who did it? Who killed them?"

[earthborn]

"You'd believe me if I said I did, wouldn't you? I could tell you anything. I could set you on whichever sad-sack I wanted, like a trained dog," Desperation was a peculiar thing, it made honesty trickier than lying. Venus was like a young woman in tears because someone told her a rumor of an unfaithful lover; Shepard had always been an artful bluff, "Even if I did know who killed them, I wouldn't tell you. You don't get to know."

It was petty, yes, but she was that too, on occasion. When she had reason to be.

"What the hell are you even trying to accomplish? Why are you still here?"

[celebrityskinned]

Shepard's right, of course. This is the wet paper version of Venus, flimsy and worthless. Desperate beyond reason, beyond purpose. A gun with no one to aim her and aching with a chamber of ammunition.

Once, Venus would have responded with an outburst, with exploding and shouting and siphoning off a little of that bottled-up hurt. But she isn't that person now; she seems like a schoolgirl apologizing for coming in late from recess, eyes falling first to Shepard's feet, then to her own.

"Because no one's had the fucking decency to kill me yet." She pauses, then steps closer to Shepard, hands clearly empty and chest bared.

"So go ahead. You hate me, right? I don't even know why but you can get yourself a nice shout-out on Panem Nightly for taking out a fellow traitor."

[earthborn]

"Like I give a damn what 'Panem Nightly' thinks of me," Stepping up to the plate was a poor decision on your part, Venus. Shepard steps right back, with something very akin to a snarl, "You don't listen to anybody but yourself, you're inconstant, unreliable, and the bitchiness I could forgive if only it came with some goddamn utility. Hell, you're not even pretty anymore, and isn't that just such a bitch? I gave you one job, I asked you do to one simple thing, and you couldn't help yourself. You couldn't leave well enough alone."

What it came down to was a clash of philosophies. What it came down to was Shepard's lack of compassion. She was at the end of her own impressively long rope and mercy was nowhere on Jane's agenda. District Thirteen could have someone else; Venus would live to see another day.

"You want to be the queen of the traitors? Fine. But so far as I'm concerned, you're not even worth the effort it takes to hate you. You are useless to me, and if you want to die so damn badly, you can do it yourself," she turned smartly on her heel, and stalked away, "I don't have time for this."

[celebrityskinned]

Venus doesn't follow her. She doesn't stand in shock, either, even as Shepard's words rattle along inside her brain like the premature tremors of an earthquake. She slinks back into the dark, shivering, blinking as if that could make the world line up with her shaky sense of balance.

It's not that she believes herself a traitor. A traitor has some agency, has effected some action that sends ripples throughout someone's trust. She and Shepard never had trust between them.

Venus doesn't have agency. She's a bullet from a gun, pointed by other people, ripping through anything in her way and causing nothing but damage.

And so she continues to follow orders, because she has nothing better to do, no options that are any more useful. She does it herself.