abraxaslogs | (no subject)

WHO: Eponine and open
WHAT: Catch all for between events
WHERE: the cells, the yard
WHEN: Between July and August events

NOTES Eponine is a walking trigger warning so just be aware
If you want anything specific, please let me know.

1. The cells

It's dank and depressing in the cells. Eponine's days are filled with boredom now there are less and less prisoners there to talk to. Not that Eponine feels like talking so much these days. Since coming back from the Horizon, she's been unusually quiet. There, for the first time in her life, she had experienced a grandeur that she's always aspired to and knew she'd never achieve. She'd been free to play and wander through forests and lie in sunny fields for hours and hours.
And now she's stuck behind bars. Again.

As the days drag, she becomes more and more listless. She's already weakened from her stay in solitary: her face is pale with dark bags below her eyes and her eyes, oddly green now, are becoming more and more dull.
She sits by the bars of her cell, clutching them and reaching out for anyone who comes past. Hopefully they stop.
Maybe the other prisoners notice her too?
Or maybe not.

The Horizon

Eponine can't sleep, can't concentrate, can't focus on anything. She lies awake in her cell listening to Flagg's breathing for hours on end. After the endless lights of solitary, she finds the darkness unsettling now, like there might be monsters lurking ready to pounce and consume her.
It takes ages for her to be able to return to the Horizon, and when she does, she looks around with curiosity. It's not surprising that she built a house. Nor is it odd, when she wanders through the rooms, that so many are filled with dolls.

If she had been carrying the water, if he had bought her the doll, how different her life would be.

She finds her favourites scattered on the floor: Azelma, brown haired and slightly chipped and worn, and Nina next to her, black hair matted. And Euphraise. Her perfect Euphraise. The doll's hair shines like the sun. It's dress is rich with golden threads and fine materials, finer than what the other two are made of.

For a long time, Eponine just stares at the doll, remembering suddenly who Euphraise is. And then she starts to scream. Her scream is loud and long, echoing through the dusty rooms of the mansion, and out over Eponine's domain.
And suddenly now, Eponine hates her prized doll, hates Euphraise, hates the name, the stupid, beautiful hair, it's pretty face and she hurls it as hard as she can from the window to the hard ground below.
Good luck if you happen to be visiting, for soon the garden is littered with smashed dolls that are routinely launched from the windows, to the vicious cries of the girl inside.

3. Choose your own

None of these tickle your fancy? I'm up for anything so go where you will, or hit me up on plurk

pineapplesoda should you wish to plot anything further!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She still winces, just gently, at the F word, but it's mostly just reactive. None of the intense fear from when she didn't know there weren't actually any Keepers there, except the nightmare of her own. "Like you're one to talk about fancy names."

On the other hand, she feels her face grow warm at the warmth glowing from Eponine's face, and her leafy hair bristles as she folds a branch behind one ear (though to Eponine it's still just a stray curl).

"Seriously, you need to start slowly. Maybe just some fruit or something, or like- some of the pastries. We can come back later to get more, it's pretty much always here."

“My mama we’re a great lover of the romances. We all have such names - my little brother is Gavroche, and my sister is Azelma. Such long names with our surname - our real one. But I have had lots of names since Pa took up thieving and that.”

She chuckles darkly, almost immediately relaxing.

“You mean you can come as you like and eat? You can eat anything? Oh!”
She looks longingly at the soft bread rolls and the butter.

“May I have one? Or an apple? Just an apple?”

She clanks over to the table and slides into a seat. Carefully, she picks an apple and bites into it. That first squirt of juice across her tongue is like ambrosia, and she closes her eyes in bliss.

“Coraline. It is so delicious. The nicest I’ve ever had! Gosh, it’s been so long.”
She hastily crunches the apple, almost afraid it’ll be taken away from her if someone else sees. She slurps the juice, licks her hands and crunches it all, from stem to seed.

Coraline, for her part, just sits next to Eponine. Not next to next to, she's a few feet away, just shy of arm's reach, and pulls a knee up to hug to her chest as she watches Eponine with something like pity in her eyes. It's more than that, really - some deep kinship of pain and sympathy - but she doesn't let herself think more on it.

"I'm not sure I'm good enough to sneak you and Jon and the others food," she says evenly. "The guards get shitty if you're too obvious about bringing shit to prisoners. But I can start bringing you out more, so you have something better to eat. No-one's gonna care what I do with you if I bring you upstairs."

She's aware the words of that sentence themselves could easily be a threat, but she's pretty sure that Eponine wouldn't even consider raising a hand or word against her now. Not when there's a promise of more food, not with how utterly insane her desirous Glamous is right now. If she was Spring she'd absolutely claim this girl for a permanent Glamour spring.

Eponine's smile fades. "You don't have to bring me nothing. I've seen you with 'em. Though why you bother, Miss, for they'll have his head in a basket soon enough."

She shrugs coldly. "Why feed a dead man?"
Why feed a half dead girl? She curls her toes beneath the table, scrunching them up to distract herself from her awkwardness. Coraline's threat hasn't gone unnoticed either, though Eponine's docile and calm right now.
"I don't think they'd care what you did downstairs, either, Coraline. Nobody cares what happens in the cells, do they? Not to prisoners anyway. It should be a different story if I were to hit you, no?"
She shrugs again. "But that is how it is. Me, I were the same for a servant girl I had. I used to smack her and my Mama would laugh, but if she had dared to raise a hand, my Pa'd've leathered her. And he don't go easy. If you can take a beating from my Pa, you are strong indeed. Me, yes, but Cosette and my sister, Azelma? No."

She reaches for a bread roll. "Will you really let me out to feed me here, Coraline? It is better, I think. It is nice to see summat other than them nasty cells."

She narrows her eyes at the cold indifference. "Because he's my friend. And he's not going to die, I'm gonna make sure of it."

She's happy to let the awkwardness simmer, though, to let Eponine fill it with meaningless drivel about her life. She can't say she's particularly impressed by everything she's collected on her so far. For all that she screamed in Coraline's face about how she was a horrible person, Eponine didn't strike her as much better.

The long game was fucking exhausting.

She glances back when she sees Eponine take a roll, and reaches out with her free hand to take a sweetbread, something that smells salty and spicy, she didn't care what. "Yeah, of course I am. If they're not gonna feed you, someone has to, and I like annoying the guards by making them let us walk out on our own." She lifts her arm and rests her elbow on the table as she chews. "Besides, if we die here it's real, not like in Horizon."

"I don't care about that either," Eponine says nonchalantly. "It might be nice, to sleep proper and that. Don't you think?" She thinks so. In fact, she longs for sleep, that deep eternal sleep of nothingness. As luck would have it, though, death has so far eluded Eponine completely.
"But only, I don't want to go as a prisoner. They'll make it hurt. I want it to be just like a dream, you know? But I shan't say no to food."

She licks the bread and nibbles just some crumbs off it.
"It ain't so bad in these cells. They give you a bun and that. But in the one all alone, I screamed and screamed and nobody came, and just a plate you shouldn't give a dog was pushed to me each day."

Eponine pushes the bread into her pocket. "I ought not to complain, really. You know, in prison in Paris, in Les Madelonnettes, where I were, they fed us the flesh of the condemned. Just bread and water and mayhaps gruel if you could get to the bars in time, but the condemned on a Sunday. Here is not so bad as there."