sixthiterationlogs | 'cause when the sun sets, it upsets what's left of my invested interest

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'cause when the sun sets, it upsets what's left of my invested interest

WHO: Alex Rider
WHERE: The fountain
WHEN: 12/12
OPEN TO: Everyone
WARNINGS: slight deep water phobia, reference violence maybe?
STATUS: Open

Alex opens his eyes to the all too familiar sensation of drowning in deep water and tries very hard not to panic. This shouldn't be happening. He should be home and safe in Chelsea, or at the very least drowsing wearily on the plane flight back to London, not... not this again. His chest feels tight, and it has nothing to do with needing to breathe.

This isn't fair, he thinks viciously, and his eyes burn. He never asked for any of this and he doesn't want to do this anymore.

Frigid water presses down all around him and Alex squeezes his eyes shut, his hands into fists until his nails cut into his palms. When he opens his eyes again his heart is beating loudly in his ears, but he's clear headed enough to look around and get a fix on the way out. And then he's swimming, long, powerful, slightly desperate strokes to the surface. He's gasping for breath as soon as he clears the water and flinging himself over the edge of the fountain before he even takes a moment to register his surroundings.

Of course, then he does, dragging himself up into a seated position, leaning back on his hands and giving the fountain in front of him a wide, wild eyed look. "What?" Who on Earth was going around leaving him in fountains, of all places? That was hardly an effective way to try and kill someone.

They hadn't even put a shark in there with him or something.

He shrugs the weight of a bag from his shoulders when he registers the pressure, and then pauses in analyzing the contents of the bag when he realizes that the shrug hadn't hurt like it should, no burnt skin pulling uncomfortably tight. With slowly dawning disbelief, Alex reaches up with one hand to press to his shoulders, and feels only the slightly upraised pale pink skin of a new scar.

"What." He says, once more with feeling.

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"More like a gordian knot, actually." Alex says with something approaching wry humor, taking a moment to scan his surroundings a bit while also making sure to keep Johanna in his periphery at all times. "Or maybe some sort of mobius strip." The way he twisted back in on himself and always seemed to be repeating all of his past mistakes with no respite, it seemed as apt a shape as any.

He spares the briefest half second of taking his eyes off Johanna entirely to glance back over his shoulder at the fountain that seems to loom behind him and he can't but shiver as he looks away again, the memory of being trapped under all that water leaving his breathless all over again and much colder than the surrounding temperature has managed thus far. "Is this a regular occurrence then?" Alex asks, shoulders hunching. "Leaving people in that fountain?

"Y-yes." He adds a second later, almost as an after thought. "A bit cold." Understatement, he was becoming quite good at it. Ian would have been proud. Maybe.

He's clever. Well, isn't that just a fun new kind of dangerous that she doesn't want to really deal with. At the same time, clever means interesting ands he has been a little bored lately. "It's not so much leaving as you come up out of it," she clarifies, seeing as she's done it herself (though with a lot more guarded wariness and a sharp weapon, to boot). She looks him up and down and decides that clever or not, she probably shouldn't leave him to freeze. It might be seen as some kind of murder. Sighing, she finishes the meat with a large rip of it with her teeth, swallowing it down, and hopping out of the tree.

"Come on," she coaxes, sounding more bored than anything despite the fact that she's about to help someone. "I'll show you where you can go so you don't freeze to death." She guesses she owes this, seeing as people had helped her when she'd come out of that thing. So she'll pay it forward, just this once, and maybe it'll pay off or maybe it'll come back to hurt her. Still, if he turns out to be someone here to hurt her, Johanna's more than happy to welcome the challenge. It's been a while since she's been allowed to throw a punch and she's feeling more than a little pent up.

Her explanation about the fountain doesn't manage to explain much of anything, but Alex hardly expects anything less. People only ever bother to simply hand him the answer when it fits their narrative, and when that happens he knows better than to trust it.

At least this girl doesn't appear to have any personal stock in the fountain.

(Not that this helps him relax around her any, there's something blatantly dangerous about her, sharp, like jagged glass. In some ways, focused destruction was much easier to deal with.)

Alex does his best to appear mild mannered and unassuming when he smiles at her, but it's hard, because he hardly remembers what a normal boy his age is even supposed to feel like. More frightened, probably. Which, it isn't that he's not scared, he's just spent so much of the past year feeling that way that it's all turned into a sort of white noise in his head instead.

"I would appreciate that, thank you." Alex tells her as he steps forward to follow, making sure to stoop down long enough to catch a strap of the bag on the ground in one hand.

Whatever is in there, it can't possibly hurt to take it with him, and he's going to need every single advantage he can get, he's sure.

Edited 2016-12-15 12:01 (UTC)

Soon, Johanna's going to have to stop perching in trees to observe the people around her when the cold gets too biting that even her District Seven inured tolerances fade away, but this gives her the opportunity to scope out who's coming, who's dangerous, and who she ought to form alliances with, just in case. She glances at him taking the bag, gesturing to it with her fingers. "You're definitely going to want that," she guarantees. "The only coat you're going to get in this place is in there," she says, tweaking the collar of hers as if to show off the fashion show of what it looks like.

"Unfortunately, whoever packed didn't exactly think that food or tools is necessary," she says sharply, annoyed that her survival has been reduced to clothes and not the necessary things like food and weapons that you'd actually need.

Alex still long enough to get the top of the bag open and pull out said coat, dragging on with stiff, frozen fingers and then immediately shoving his hands into the pockets to shiver heavily in an attempt to build up his body heat again. The steady drops of water from his hair sliding down his neck past the collar of the coat are not helping the matter any, of course, and his shivers are set off all over again every time.

Still, he manages to zero in on her complaint and the information present in it with little trouble, eyes narrowing and mouth thinning at the implication. "Whoever?" He asks, widening his eyes a moment later in an attempt to look curiously disturbed, or at the very least, more surprised than he currently is about some shadowy large scale plot that he has once again managed to get caught in the middle of.

"How many people has this happened to?" Alex doesn't have to work very hard to get a little bit of horror into his voice this time when he speaks. It's all so very genuine.

"What, you think these things just magically put these things in a bag on your back?" she says dismissively, not sure why, but everyone sounds really stupid when they start talking about things happening here without outside influencers and Gamemakers doing things to them. "It's about fifty," she clarifies, which is why she knows it's not a Games. She thinks it has to be a prison, has to be someplace that they're putting the rebels so the Capitol doesn't have to deal with them. "What did you do to get yourself here?" is all she asks, because she figures that something had to get him knocked into the shittiest place possible.

From her standpoint, she's going to get out of here and she's going to make whoever put her here pay, and there's no doubt in her mind that someone's done this to her.

Alex willfully resists the urge to roll his eyes at Johanna's first comment, but only because he'd rather not try to find this purported inn on his own when he's in this condition and holding his tongue is simply easier. Of course someone is responsible. Considering the scope of what he's witnessed so far, probably more than simply one someone.

He's just not a big fan of the faceless shadowy threat that vague words like 'someone' bring to mind. A known enemy is always much easier to fight.

'What did you do to get yourself here', Alex can't quite manage to hide his flinch at those words, hand coming up to press against his chest like he can still feel the burn of the bullet there before dropping back to his side again, eyes distant. What did he do? Which time? It would honestly be easier to ask him what he didn't do instead.

"I'm sure I don't know." Is all he says in response though, and he's not even really lying when he does. There's simply no way to be certain without finding out who was responsible for bringing everyone here in the first place.

She raises her brow at him. "You know, lying to me is just going to piss me off and draw out the inevitable where I find out," she tells him, even if she probably doesn't have enough tools at her disposal to get through to him on her own, but that's what Finnick and Annie are for, especially Annie with that whole sweetness routine where people can't help but like talking to her.

"Same thing goes for not telling me things," she adds. "It's not like there aren't a hundred and one ways to piss off the Capitol. It's kind of like picking your favorite, getting locked away, I figure." And Johanna had gone out murdering the Capitol's darlings (or trying to), which had felt good to the last.

"The... Capitol?" Alex says slowly, making sure he didn't mishear her as he tries to figure out the context. She could be talking about a capital city, of course, but there's a certain measure of importance behind those two little words when she speaks that it can't be anything other than a very specific, very important designation. A place maybe, or an organization?

Not one he's ever heard of it that's the case, which, he's not sure if that's a good sign or a bad one, at this point. He'll have to wait and see. In any case it makes his answer just a little bit more sure when he repeats it back to her, slower now.

"I don't know. Honest. I've never even heard of The Capitol." He adds after a moment's consideration, deciding that revealing his unfamiliarity with the subject is less dangerous at this point than pretending he knows anything. She doesn't seem like she'd play along very well if he went fishing for information through misdirection, and he's honestly not feeling up to finding out if she's going to live up to her threats just yet.

Maybe later after he's managed to catch his breath.

"Though I suppose if they're as easy to anger as you're suggesting it is possible that I managed to do something to displease them." He's almost certain that his name is on a list somewhere at this point, after all.

"Don't worry, if you do something to piss them off, it won't take very long before you find out," is Johanna's dark reply, seeing as they had been very vocal, quick, and loud about taking her family and her life away from her. This place seems a lot more subtle than that, though, mostly given that no Peacemakers have showed up to take her away and lock her up. Or maybe that's just what happens next.

God, she hates this. She hates waiting for something to drop out of the sky and catch her by surprise, but here she is. "What should I know?" Maybe he's not Capitol, which means that she has a chance to actually find out some information. She might as well try, right?

It won't take very long before you find out. Alex is more than willing to believe that. Be it through his own investigations or the inevitable need that people like this always have to lord their accomplishments over him (megalomaniacs are always so dramatic, Alex wonders if there's a class they're supposed to take).

The problem is that he's not even sure he cares to find out what he's supposedly done this time.

"What should you know?" Alex echoes in near distraction while he tries to wade through his own muddy feelings about this whole situation and keep on his feet at the same time. He doesn't have any extra energy to parse through her words and figure out what she's asking him.

"I just woke up in a fountain, I'm sure that whatever it is, you know more about it than me."

"Not the fountain. You," she says sharply, letting her razor gaze slide over him so firmly that if he were glass, he'd be cut into little ribbons by now. "What should I know about you? What can you do? What can you offer me?" Even if this isn't an arena (and she's fairly sure it's not a real one), everyone's got talents and skills. If not, they're useless to her and she can stop talking to him so she can go find someone more useful.

It means figuring things out, though. "I can tell you about this place, but it won't make much difference. Just know it's prison," she advises. "That's all you need."

Alex meets Johanna's sharp stare with his own unflinching one quietly for a moment while he considers her demand and what he can safely reveal to her without inevitably bringing more trouble down on himself later. Because she clearly isn't going to accept nothing as an answer, and he's in no hurry to create an enemy in this place already.

"I'm pretty good at karate." He offers her, tone unassuming and mild. Like he's trying to disappear into the scenery. "I can speak a few languages, French, German, Spanish. And ah." Alex ducks his head now, eyes disappearing beneath his fringe and shuffling his feet against the ground, like he's embarrassed to admit the next part. "My uncle taught me how to shoot guns and pickpocket?"

Hopefully that will be enough to appease her for now. At least until he can get a better handle on this place on his own.

Languages are for the kind of people who want to charm the Capitol and all the viewers and still believe in political machinations. Johanna raises a brow at him, but then he goes on to talk about actual useful skills that might come in handy. The pickpocket thing is definitely good for things like food and the gun part? Well, she always did like someone on her side that could be lethal.

That meant keeping him on her side. "C'mon," she encourages, gesturing to the inn as she stomps heavy up the last few steps. "Let's feed you and you can tell me why your uncle taught you those two things, of all the talents in the world."

'Lethal' was a complicated word for Alex. Because theoretically? Between Ian, MI6, and Scorpia's meddling Alex absolutely had the knowledge and skills to be so. But even after everything, after Sarov and Yassen and Ash and the truth about his parents, after his time spent in the jungle organ farm and the poison dome, after Africa... he still wasn't sure if he would ever have the resolve for it.

There's a list in Alex's mind that he carefully cultivates, a system of tally marks and names; people who died for him or because of him, because it's all the same in the end. He never really means for it to happen, but the list just continues to grow, and Alex isn't sure what he's going to do when he runs out of space for them all.

Or if his own name will join the list first.

Alex stills for a moment at the steps to the inn and looks up at Johanna. He scrubs a hand across his face like he's tired, suddenly. Or in this particular case, is concerned with what sort of expression he might have been making at her observation. A complete stranger could tell there was something strange about the way Ian had raised him, and Alex had never even suspected until it was too late. He really was the worst sort of spy.

"Is that the only conversation topic that comes with food?" He asks as he follows her up the steps, sounding a little weary and a lot resigned. "It's just, I'm sure there are more morbid things we could talk about than my dead relatives, but at the moment I'm hard pressed to think of any."

She raises a brow when he names the uncle as dead. "Don't worry, if we're talking about dead relatives, we could always start with mine," is her deadpan, though it's not like she's in much of a rush to get to that. After all, 'everyone died' is a fairly short story and it probably won't take too much time, because she's not giving more details than that, especially since it's not like she wants to talk about how her refusal to give up her body had led to that.

"Any of 'em still alive? Or is that not proper mealtime conversation either?" she asks, pushing into the inn and dropping her coat haphazardly on the first chair she finds without much care for the mess.

He can't quite help the faintly wry quirk to his lips when Johanna refers to her own dead relatives so casually, and it's just another strange, terrible little similarity that they seem to share. Alex wonders if it means anything. Or, more than the obvious, at least.

Alex follows her into the inn, stilling for a moment at the entryway to scan the interior for any potential threats or additional exits. Neither is terribly reassuring at first glance. Quietly, he shuts the door behind him. Considers Johanna's question before answering with a muted, "Not that I'm aware of anyway."

"Then you don't have to worry about awkward family meals during the holidays," is her calm retort, keeping an eye on him just in the corner of hers, in case he decides to pull anything on her that might require retribution. Lucky for her, she doesn't think she's been off her guard in the last four years, not since her name came up in the reaping. She collapses into one of the chairs, popping berries into her mouth and chewing them slowly, all the while keeping her eyes on him.

"This is the inn," she says with a gesture around them. "I'd offer to show you around, but I don't really give a fuck about those kinds of things."

Alex offers her a lazy half shrug as he eases himself into his own chair across from her, pushed out just enough from the table that he's out of immediate reach because, well, he sort of gets the feeling that with her it doesn't hurt to be too careful really.

Or that she would even mind.

"Didn't have many of those even when my uncle was alive." He admits, because especially near the end Ian had been gone more often than he had been home, and if Blunt was to be believed, he didn't have a single distant relative that could have come calling either.

Not that Alex had ever thought to ask, of course. There were a lot of things Alex never thought to ask Ian.

Alex's eyes dart around the inn once more at Johanna's gesture, taking time to linger now on the people inside and their general disposition. Which in general was far too... settled for Alex's peace of mind.

Johanna seemed to be something of an outlier among the populous. "... I don't blame you." Alex says slowly, frowning faintly.

She doesn't blink as she watches him, constantly keeping an eye on what he's doing and how he's reacting. "What?" she asks, as soon as that frown shows up on his face, because it's not really typical for people to be so quick to agree with her when it comes to these things, seeing as usually people just think she's being too paranoid or too sharp or too goddamn mean, when Johanna thinks she's giving just the right amount, especially when you look at the kind of life she's already lived.

"Or do you always charm new friends with that frown?" she asks, with a gesture at him.

In Alex's experience, there was honestly no such thing as too paranoid, or at least, there had yet to be so far. And as for mean? Sometimes you just didn't have the time or freedom to be nice. Alex didn't need people to be nice to him, he'd settle for mostly honest.

He arches a single eyebrow at Johanna, mouth settling into something flatly amused when he answers her with a dry, "I've been told it's my stunning good looks, actually." At least, according to Sabina it was. Sabina said a lot of things though, and Alex had never really had the energy to take them at face value.

They were pretty, meaningless words to throw around and help soothe his nerves a little, that's all.

Johanna's used to dealing with idiots who think their good looks are going to get them through everything. Worse, she's seen it work, both with Finnick and even herself when she intends to turn on the charm in the rare situation she doesn't mind applying it (like those occasional times with Haymitch and some of the other victors). "Why, where did you put them?" she deadpans with a smirk, feeling like even though she's just met him, she can at least poke and prod at him a little.

Rather than look offended, Alex makes a show of patting his pockets down as if he's searching for something, only to come up with empty hands which he offers her with a regretful expression. "I must have left them in my other pants pockets, sorry." He says.

"It's a shame they dumped me here without my things, I hope Jack doesn't wind up putting it through the dryer while I'm gone."

All right, so he might be annoying, but he can be at least a little clever, she'll give him that. She absolutely set him up for that and she smirks and shakes her head, wondering how on earth she's been cursed to meet so many young men and boys who think they're just so adorably clever. "They'll shrink," she says knowingly, playing along with it, since she's the one who started it.

"All of it, and probably wrinkle too."

"I might as well just buy a new one at that rate." He says with a suitably weary sigh, like this absolutely the most important thing for him to be worrying about right now. "But it's so hard to find a reliable one."

He doesn't mind the conversation one bit, is honestly enjoying himself pretty well. It's one of the first times in awhile that he's had an exchange like this that didn't involve his imminent death, and as an added benefit he's apparently managed to distract her from trying to find out why he agreed with her level of paranoia.

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