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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"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.

She eyes him and decides that maybe he's not entirely worthless, even if most of his skill comes of a few languages that won't do anything here. "Someone else can probably give you the low-down about this place better than I can," she admits. "Mostly because I don't care enough that I can give you a full breakdown." She knows well enough about it, but it'll take ages to really get into it.

"There's a woman here, Kate, she's a bleeding heart. You want to know about this place and get taken care of? She's your woman."

Identifying the bleeding heart of the group was dreadfully good for self-preservation in the long run, and Alex can appreciate the fact that Johanna knows this, and spared him the effort of having to discover this detail for himself.

Especially considering the exhaustion sitting in his bones has him loathe to discover much of anything for himself right now. That might (hopefully) change later, but for now it's good to be able to hit the ground running in one regard at least. He takes a moment to imprint Kate's face in his mind so he'll remember her. Just in case.

He nods. "I'll keep that in mind."

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

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