Thor hides behind the sound of thunder. (intonare) wrote in districtmarvel, @ 2015-12-04 15:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | thor odinson |
ᴡʜᴏ: Thor Odinson + OPEN
ᴡʜᴇʀᴇ: Various places around the Capitol.
ᴡʜᴇɴ: [ʙᴀᴄᴋᴅᴀᴛᴇᴅ] The entire week after these texts.
ᴡʜᴀᴛ: Stane is parading Thor around like a show horse.
ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢs: Talk of blood, injuries.
sᴛᴀᴛᴜs: OPEN, ongoing.
ᴏᴏᴄ ɴᴏᴛᴇ: Feel free to have characters react to/approach him at any of his appearances.
The soreness had not yet set into his muscles before Thor found himself unwillingly whisked by train to the Capitol. It had only taken one short phone call to convince him of his best interests and years of living under the thumb of Panem's great President led Thor to know better than to try to argue. Not all lives were meaningful to that man, some where only useful by means of who they were attached to and Thor had too many a proxy soul connected to him to understand that the President's courtesy calls never posed a choice. An escort had greeted him at his home and his old stylist had met him at the train platform. The women fawned over him, complementing his features and how he had supposedly not aged a day in over seventeen years. Thor knew better than to counter their prattling (or disagree), letting them talk mostly between each other and at him without really bothering to listen. What he had heard, however, was that there had been explicit orders from the President to not attempt to really make him look Capitol-ready or try to cover up any of his scars or healing wounds. Stane wanted the hero from the mines this time, not the handsome Victor for whatever plot he had concocted. Despite having been a pawn in Stane's ongoing Games for almost two decades, Thor couldn't profess to really understand the way the man thought. While he understood the President's desire for uniformity and dependence from his people, all the manipulations, all of the small things that were only small brush strokes on a larger canvas… those were the things Thor couldn't comprehend. There was something brewing though, Thor could sense it, and it was something that Stane felt too if his pulling his 57th Victor from the mines meant anything. It was only a matter of time before Thor could no longer hide inside the Nut, but he had always hoped for another day, another month… another year. He had been lucky this far though he had sold his soul for his freedom and Thor never forgot the rancid deal he had made, nor could he blame Stane for its conception; it had been born out of a moment of weakness and desperation and it has been a dark cloud over Thor's head for all these years. Soon, Thor was left on his own as his escort vanished to her rooms to begin to write speeches and the stylist retreated as well to begin to design something to fit the President's rather strict requirements. In the meantime, Thor sat in the open seating area turning his flask over in his hands and every once in a while draining just a little more of the bitter liquid out of it. The burning numbed him from the inside out and the throbbing headache he'd had since part of the tunnel collapsed on him during the rescue lessened just a little bit more each time. There was still a gash in his forehead that bled if he pulled his blond hair back too tightly, the stitches weak and poorly placed by his own hand the night after the cave in. The ride into the Capitol always felt too short, too quick, and as the glittering city rose up around him, it felt like an immoveable weight settled on his chest, making it hard to breathe. Something about the shining towers and flashy clothes unsettled him. All of it came with a detachment and falseness that hadn't sat right with him since he had returned from the Games. As a young and naive eighteen year old, his first impression of the Capitol had been awe and he couldn't get enough of all the sights but now, it all seemed drearier than the stone mines he'd spent the majority of the last decades staring at. It had taken Thor years to realize that he detested the Capitol because nothing in it felt real. From the clothing to the technology to the body modifications and attitudes, it was hard to believe that these people existed in the same world where children sold their futures to the Games to get just a few more scraps of grain and oil to survive. The citizens of the Capitol saw hardship as having to wait a few more hours at the salon or that they had to wait another year for another Games. None of them ever wondered where their meals would come from, none of them were plagued by guilt or nightmares, none of them ever stayed up at night fearing the new year's Games would reap their only child. The fakeness of these people bothered Thor, their naivety and their fickleness disgusted him. Though he had fallen out of taste following his lacklustre appearances after his victory, the train platform was flocked with brightly coloured people all waiting to see him as he stepped out. The clothes the stylist had put him in felt strange on him as if they didn't fit despite the fact they had been tailored to hang off him perfectly. She had dressed him in something he assumed the Capitol citizens must assume a miner must look like. The fabrics were all wrong — too thin and fragile and cold — but this was style over function, something meant to look nicer than what he had been picked up in. His hair had been pulled back to expose the stitches though there had been mild panic when they had started bleeding again. In his pocket were a stack of heavy notecards for him to read off of and in another sat the flask which he had hidden from both women to prevent either of them from confiscating it. Stepping through the doors, Thor had been met by the shrill cheering of the men and women and children lined up alongside the train, all of them waving and calling out to him as if they hadn't forgotten his existence in the years since his Games. His old charming smile found its way back onto his face — though it would never quite reach his eyes, as if that really mattered to these people — and he amicably greeted the people who were closest to the doors as his escort ushered him along. Quiet enough where the others couldn't hear, she kept giving him little prompts and words of encouragement, proud that all his years in the mines hadn't stripped away all his civility. From the station, he was escorted to the President's mansion and his entire trip through the Capitol was televised for all the people unable to make it onto the train platform. Exhausted from forcing all the smiles and pleasantries, Thor allowed his face to fall once he was inside the mansion, knowing full well that Stane rarely allowed cameras inside. Thor braced himself for the meeting with the President and made the effort to appear attentive as Stane gave him instructions, to play his part and to do so convincingly. The longstanding threat that hung in the air between them hadn't needed to be stated in words — neither of them had forgotten it was there and Thor had never felt inclined to try to force Stane to do more than imply its existence still lingered. Hearing the vague words the first time had been enough to make his blood run cold and was something he would rather go without feeling if it could be helped. That night, Thor had been interviewed by the same man who plastered himself all over the screens across Panem, the same man who had interviewed Thor and so many other tributes and Victors over the years. It was strange how easily Thor had fallen back into the same rapport with the man he had all those years ago when he sat across from him as a young eighteen year old volunteer, all too eager to jump into the Arena. They talked about Two, about the mines and the Nut, talked about the new Peacekeepers in training and made jokes at each other's expense, all to lead up to talk about the cave in and the dangers of the mines. Thor had been prompted with a lot of the gory details, but also to present the Capitol responders (however sparse they had been) as heroes, though the interviewer had frequently turned the hero epithet back at Thor while addressing both the live crowd and the viewers at home. All the while, Thor played his part as dedicatedly as he could manage. He was praised for his performance that night via a short recored message from the President. Another day and Thor was dressed more flashy, styled more heavily, and he stood in front of a crowd of Capitol children and cameras to broadcast the message to children in all the rest of the Districts to give a speech about responsibility, about teamwork. Those notes written by his escort, no doubt reviewed by Stane, had him comparing each of the rescuers in the tunnels to the Districts. To keep each other strong and safe, every District had to play its part. The words felt hollow and bitter on his tongue, but he recited them all with a practiced tone. That night, he was praised again. One of the events was a charity party which, to Thor, was perhaps the hardest of them all. It was that much harder to be truly genuine while being groped and tugged in various directions, to hear the overly languid and oddly accented voices all talking to him or about him, regardless of where he was in the room as if they were only talking to hear themselves. All the money they were supposedly donating to the miners and their families would likely never leave this room or it if it did, it wouldn't escape the Nut where the Peacekeepers were kept. None of the hardworking and injured men he worked with would ever see a cent of this money and it made Thor sicker than the overly rich food did. In spite of his ill feelings, Thor was acutely aware of Stane's scrutinising glance and continued to speak with the guests in as compliant a tone as was manageable. Again, an appreciative message. Thor's apparently impeccable acting filled his heart with a horrible but unidentifiable feeling. Nothing about this place or what it stood for was something Thor loved or wanted to fight for, but here he was, falling into line like the well-trained little puppet he was, babbling all the right words and smiling the entire time. He wished that he could be the same man he was after his Games, the kind of man who had spent his last few months in the Capitol nearly raving about the monstrosities of the Games, how there wasn't a single night where he didn't feel as if there was still blood caked on his hands and no amount of scrubbing would ever really remove it. He wished he could have looked at the camera and told the world there was nothing real in the Capitol, how they all existed in this pristine bubble with no idea what it truly was like to feel lost or scared, hungry or in pain. But he didn't. Like always, Thor was a coward. |