hey shrimpeh]] and cocktails!

Dancing is menial in the scale of a Capitolite's life.

Dancing is a mechanism to begin a friendship, a relationship, a hook-up. People dance not for the joy of it, but only because they know its a means to an ends. Cassedy remembers more clearly the feel of hands on her hips, like a ghost pressure or a missing limb that still twitches during the night. She remembers turning to face her partner earlier this night, and seeing shut eyelids that did not hide the greed and craft of her pursuer. She felt lust and saw visions of a night that would not play out, a night planned out since the moment he had walked through the door and into the party. Here is a party, I'm going to find a girl and make a night of it, he'd thought and known he would not be fulfilled until he'd made it so. Cass had drifted through the same door under entirely different pretenses, only intending to dance with a gentle boy, and never questioning his importance in her life as a romantic aspect of her existence.

She didn't have a checklist and agenda to fulfill with a deadline on who, what, when, where and why she would feel an "intimate connection" with some other person. To Cass, life was all about the moment, because memories fade and futures are uncertain. Dancing embodied the power and grace she wished to possess, the power to choose her own life without pursuing like a hell-hound, and the grace to accept - to accept.. life, life and reality. The reality that I may not get what I want out of life, because what I want out of life is different to what others want. I just wanted to dance, thats all.

She looks at her true companion of the night and wonders at how easy it had been to find what she wanted as soon as she stopped looking. Its always the last place you'd think to look, that you find what you've always been searching for. Was he a tool, was a he a means to an end, and was this dance a means to an end? The twitch of grimy fingers on bare flesh of hip-bones vanishes, replaced by soft, smooth hands with an interesting texture that is unlike the unworked hands of her half-boy counterparts, the ones she usually encountered at social outings. They usually made bravado-driven claims of manhood and talked her ear off till Cassedy felt compelled to just kiss their sloppy, running mouths to shut off the constant noise. He was different - literally, this boy was not a tool, he was a wonderful experience to be had, and so for a little while Cass enjoys drinking in something sweeter than flavorful wine and bubbling beverages, its a moment she's experiencing unlike any other, but it gets her as drunk as any other night.

Words would only get in the way of this moment, so Cass plays a speechless part, mirroring the wordless brevity that the red-eyed boy displayed. She was itching to reach out and touch his eyes, but no - Cass was proud of her control as she reigned in desire. When you're out of your mind smashed, and you feel like reaching out and touching anything, its always better to just not or you do something you'll regret. Like stabbing this boys wonderful red eyes with her manicured nails. The good thing was though, that he seemed strong enough to Cass, that she wouldn't be able to clumsily stab him unless he was into that sorta torture thing some guys dug. And, in fact, to reach out and touch him would mean the dance would end. She was transforming under the power of the spell, Cass would never let her hands move from where he had them placed, never. Not for anything in this world, not in this moment when her eyes stung with pain and her heart sung out to her that life was not worth living. The people were cruel, the food stunk, and the parties were an affliction on the name of passion and dance. And yet she wanted to live, deep in her heart she knew she did. It didn't stop her from asking a question that sounded sulky and broke her heart the moment she spoke it, because making it audible to a person besides herself made Cass feel vulnerable and light-headed. (Not much different to any other night, again, she was usually the passed out drunk girl with does make for a light-headed vulnerability..)

"Do you ever feel like not living?" Cass murmurs gently, voicing her discontentment without breaking out of the trance. Her aqua eyes were glazing over and her body hummed with relaxation and a hidden tension all at once. It's the feeling that something is happening within, but that you don't have control, and you fear the end is near. A tear rolls down her cheek and Cass frowns, she turns to look away at the loveliness of the room, how it sparkles and shines like any other, but how it too is enraptured by the moment. The walls lean in and the chandelier lightly tinkles and whispers in anticipation. Cass is ready to answer her own question now.

"Sometimes I just don't understand why I can't be happy. You see, I know that by any other scale that matters, I'd have a nice life. I'm well to do, I don't need much work done, I have a nice laugh and sometimes guys ask me out, but it doesn't seem very real. Like it's all forced. If you took away my mom's money and I couldn't get my eyes dyed then guys wouldn't like me. And then I'd really be sad and I wouldn't laugh, and what would be left? What?" Cass is suddenly struck by the thought that her lifestyle is not necessary, she's seen the way the Tributes live and the way their natural eyes hunger for everything they touch. There are "people" living in Districts working and wanting and not having any of the things Cass does. But they might be happy, and that's all she wants. I'd gladly trade my lifestyle for their's, Cass stubbornly says to herself, although she could not know the pain and suffering that accompanied the supposed freedom she craved.

The moments now really and truly over, dead perhaps. Thats it. Gruffly, Cass removes a hand and reaches it up to touch his hair, a mid-step between restraint and her desire to feel his eyes under her fingertips, like red jewels. She's full of self-pity and loathing now, believing somehow that who she is is fundamentally wrong because Cass doesn't want what the world has offered her, and it seems rather clumsy to deny what has been thrusted at you. She should just gracefully accept that life is not what Cass wants, but that she could learn to love and live all the same. She would take drugs, go to lots of parties, have private moments with lots of guys, share her stories, retain her status, marry a nice man who treated her well with diamonds and freedom, have children to coddle and love her even when she hates herself. Have avoxes, lots of avoxes to wait on her and abuse when Cassedy feels the pressure of being perfect weighing down on her rail-thin shoulders. And doctors to prescribe pills, to administer "vaccinations" and do work on already developing "flaws" of her appearance and age. Her life would be a rambling sentence filled with endless words and secrets, rather than something that starts and stops when importance ceases, an restarts when a spark of knowledge and hope stirs her life back into being meaningful. But she can't think right now, Cass is making a vow to enjoy her moment in the sun and that she will.

"Tell me your name, tell me your story. I'm sick of mi - I'd really like to hear something different right now to make me feel better." Cass weakly flirts and bats her eyelashes, but with her make-up smudged off on a towel in a bathroom down the hall, her eye-lashes must look short and stubby, so she can't imagine the hints of seduction being picked up by her dancing partner. She hesitates and removes her hands from him, trying to rub away that spark of hope in her core that told her that she was a silly girl to give up on happiness so soon in her existence. Suddenly boredom grabs ahold of her and she twirls and sashays over to the bed, plopping down with hair spilling around her head as an angelic halo, and pain painted on the crease of her brow, while twisted, bitter anger drives her to more words although she knows they are rude and commanding, like a haughty owner to a slave. But it must be different between her and her acquaintance, because he's not anything to be commanded, he's just a person like her except that she's a bitch. Simple as pie.

Still the words burst out: "Just tell me something."

Cassedy is talking herself into a frenzy.

She can tell by the way her arms shake thinly, like lonely reeds on opposite sides of the world that are tired and cold, alone and forgotten. Her legs thrum a quick-beat-stamp-beat-quick pattern into the carpet. If her shoes weren't off and away in a room with a sink, she'd be carving holes into the carpet and dragging life-stains into the clean, white surface. This whole room lacks any color, she's going insane. Cass doesn't want the darkness of dancing black with splashes of neon trickling through the room to filter over sweaty bodies and gleaming, smiling, happy people-teeth, but she'd like some color.

Her life is half empty, no half full. There's an extreme that will lead her into a world of regrets and commitment to a home where Dru feels welcomed amongst the damned and derailed. But like the neon light spilling onto the quick-beat-stamp-beat dance floor of her life, hope too dwells in her life, passing in and out of her existence, weaving lies and patterns into her fragile heart to stitch it back up again so she doesn't fall apart [too soon].

Not that she feels a premonition coming on, but she does. Cassedy can see the future splayed before her very eyes, somewhere between the crook of the wall-meets-the-ceiling and a strange boy dancing, all in white. Bizarre, with his dark head and light, light, light everything else. Like that shock of black, Cassedy's eyes see a strange and unfamiliar sight pouring into her consciousness, something buried deep below the shallow rivers of self-insecurities and boy-crazed conniptions. Beneath the valley of the Capitol, there is the hope for a real life with actual people who have time to listen to Cassedy instead of hurry hurry hurrying nowhere to go eat nothing and take pills and throw up trash into rows of empty white bowls hiding behind closed doors where people don't have to look at the expenditure of a sad pathetic useless fabricated existence.

Her hands are shaking and itching to grasp at someone. Her eyes are closed to keep the demons away. Her legs still thrum away the beat of her life, because hearts can't be trusted. Her arms still shiver in the cold abandon and her chest heaves with heavy breaths, all together having nothing to do with a feeble constellation [of the body].

More so, Cassedy has finally begun to realize that not all of her issues can be shared with others. Boys don't comprehend the fragile network of lies and compliments girls feed each other and throw up in private during secret 3-way phone calls to discuss pay back and trash-gossip-intel. Happy people never understand why sad people like to cry and moan and harp to others [but Cassedy won't dwell on the man's sad eyes or cool/burning/hating radiation spilling through his hands into her reed-arms and leading her to consume a healthy dose of reality which is a full-blown shock to the system]. Certainly, nobody can understand the woes of ten angst flowing in and out of Cass like waves lapping away at the solid ground she stands on and suffocating her, under waves of grime and suicide-waters where real people jumped and died and rest.

The ocean scares Cassedy more than anything ever has, even the stray anxiety of a moment spent like this

I'M ANGRY

Therapeutic as it is to write your feelings and express what you really mean to say, Cass can't help but scribble a blurb of words onto the mirror before her hand drops a shining, silver tube of lipstain onto the vanity surface. She doesn't mean to do this, not to herself, not to him. But he feels like Oedy did when Cassedy was young and innocent. Even more so than any of Oedy's familiar companions who dance downstairs with girls dressed as rabbits and flowers, girls who stare at a white-washed room with boredom, and a fair young man with only brief interest ignited by the red eyes that tell Cass he is staring at her and willing her to know that she is ignorant to the world, more than any of the empty-headed dancers downstairs who breath in the taste of excitement and exhale joy into their date's lips without a second thought to catch in their brains and shake their bodies with fear.

Oedy, her older brother with the muscular disorder/disease/gift/power/key to unlocking the universe always stared at Cassedy like he wanted to preserve her as a specimen of the world he would have grown up in as a normal, healthy boy. But he was more than. Cass asked him questions when he left in helicopters for unknown lands of test-tubes and blood-drawing equipment, but he would only tell her about the stair-master they were testing his endurance on, or how much he bench-pressed that week, without even trying.

She was the girl who moaned to him about his old friends who hung around her, waiting to catch words they could spread to their friends so that other people would like them because they were the gift/power/key to unlocking the universe by association. They tried to rub up against Cassedy and catch her diseases, like they thought maybe being friends with the sister of the freak would make them an increment of a ways as special as him. People never seemed to understand that strangeness isn't something you catch, because Cassedy knows the visions dancing in her head and the shakes in her bones come from within. Why should you blame anyone for what you've become? Why would you ever say "it Was Jimmy Kardon who has made me so bitter."

Oh.

IM SORRY

I got a broken brain
The doctor's saying that I'm insane overpaid
I'm seeking someone to take the blame
Like that would solve anything

Cass is sitting in a white room with no windows while her friends are finally making their way upstairs after hours of getting to know their dates. Now it's finally time for them to dance together, and Cass finds her eyes gazing on stilt-shoes and her ears falling onto the sound of muffled giggles as soft thumps breeze right past them. She'd turned her face away with a sort of strange, strangled sound when Greg moved past her and reached for the lipstick her unsteady hands must have dropped again. She blushes because she feels her mouth formed words that are fundamentally wrong, based upon only hunches and silent divination. To be wrong about Greg seems like a betrayal, not only of herself (for Cassey is used to failing in one way or another and causing trouble for herself) but to Oedy.

Oedy had taught her better than to be one of those girls who takes and never gives. Of course, she'd started off the night harping about her own problems, issues with boys and self-image, but she'd ended it well enough: listening to another human beings expressions. She felt kind of tired though, and edgy, like there was something wrong with the picture or the colorful words smeared across a mirror. But my eyes have a penchance for deceiving me. I could be seeing this all wrong, he is just as I am. We're both just listening to each other and maybe more than a little bit hopeless at what we're designated to do with ourselves. But he seems like the kind of guy who'd be good at everything like Oedy is..

She distractedly side-glances at the white figure again, remarking to herself how Oedy was always more colorful than him. Her brother was the one with the bright lights trained on his figure always, and the secret shadows hiding behind him, where he kept his dark secrets and all the notations about the places he would go in a helicopter, and not just how many miles he walked on a stair-master that week. Things he never told Cass, but she'd adapted to picking up with her extra-Oedy senses. The ones I'm using not to decode his writing. It isn't very hard for Cass to understand now, she's no longer hysterical and muscle-memory serves her brain well so that she feels she recognizes the subtle gestures Greg is throwing her way.

But he's writing now, not turned towards her. Without red eyes gazing at and judging her with some expressions that make fear a constant presence in the back of her air-filled head, Cass is brave enough to stop standing still long enough for wobbly feet to pad quietly over to the door and shut it softly as to give them a degree's more privacy. She turns back to her guest - no, part with that, he's her host considering she rudely barged into the pristine white chamber of her own accord and nearly slammed into him while he was clearly not expecting any visitors (this wing of the house was far enough away from the party that he could have safely spent a few hours with his door open and not a partier or two would have dared enter).

Except that, for an odd reason unknown to Cass, he doesn't feel like her gracious host. Not even like the ugly, ferret boy hosting the party who liked to make eyes at all his girl-guests as though he were paying them to follow his every beck and call. He has a stranger's air about him, as though he is equally as uncomfortable with the situation they are in as she is. More so even, in that he is a guest to her walk of life. Maybe he's a performer, some singers spend all their time locked up in a room alone and won't speak for hours before a concert. Sometimes days... It would explain the unfamiliarity; his worldly qualities and older attitude's, taken right from the teachings of an aging chanteur who passes along his last lessons to the bright, young pupil with the shining, twinkling red eyes and a pale, ghostly stage presence. One who will succeed based on sheer will power and devotion to his trade, he won't even follow the rules of etiquette and introduce himself. You could take the leap yourself, Cassedy, nobodies forcing you to keep quiet you dumb-thing!

She turns to him again and ignores the pushing thoughts no, that's not it he is far too different and would have been a better dancer if he sings as a profession, every performer can do a coupling of things these days. Instead, her eyes drift over to him, but before her mind can split her tight lips and form words, she notices an unusual and wonderful thing. She isn't wrong, she isn't as wrong as she'd thought! Cass had earned herself the privilege of one name and a smile in half. He's looking at her now, instead of through her with that ghost-edge that made her young bones twitch.

"GREG" is a normal enough name, but it sounds wonderful in her mind because it goes along with everything Cass had feared and faced just then. She'd thought for a moment - she'd thought he was just another one like herself who lived on passion and addictions. To her stab-wounds ingrained deep in her inner-arm's skin, he would be the voiceless stage presence, and to her lustrous dancing was his possession of a snake charm of a voice (of this, she was sure) that was low and melodic, meant to entrap an audience just like the feel of her hips and arms when she winded them around a crooked boy with an elated smile when he realizes he's "caught" a willing partner, even though all along it's always been Cass with the power over her dancing partner and the bottle of pills she knows he has on his person, the one's she'll steal and swallow/choke/live on.

She'd feared he was a consumer like herself instead of a giver and protector like Oedy, one who can't help but involve themselves in an other, even when they don't have the pleasure of such understanding company (dare she call herself such?) as Cass.

CASS,
she writes and returns Greg's own smile with a smidgen more turn upward to show him she's happy, but concerned. Because although Cass is happy she was right about Greg's decency and torment, her rightness didn't change the state of the demons haunting his mind, the ones she sees clearly now. There's a ways of a battle if she's going to repay Greg for her temporary catharsis, the release from all that tight-winded anger she'd been stirring in with her bold colors and agonizing need to satiate the curiosity why am I different? The catharsis is important, it'll last a lifetime, but she calls it temporary now because Cass knows that just as "Greg" will face demons of her own, acknowledging her.. differentness, her pains - that doesn't mean she's through with her battle yet. Cass feels like she's facing an enemy now, but the enemy is in the mirror reflecting her image. It's inside of her, and it's something only she can dig out.

But there's hope. Both of them are crossing great distances through the land-mines of their minds, and through the barriers that had kept them distracted and separate before, before I trusted myself and let the red eyes see me for who I am. Now Cass feels a sort of kinship to Greg. She understands why he reminds her of her brother, because compared to the blood-ties between Cassey and Oedy, Greg and Cass share a mutual "something" lurking beneath their surfaces. It glints in Cassey's flickering aqua eyes, bordering on grey whenever she catches a glance from the corners of them, as though they are reverting to her natural, stormy color by their own will. It makes Cass wonder why Greg painted his eyes such a bright and bloody red - to reflect his colorful insides just like her, or to hide something darker, a secret paid in blood and concealed almost entirely from the world behind the pale white face mask Greg wears around the suggestive, blood-red eyes.

She looks at him, she turns her head a fraction to the side and down so that it hangs like a questioning puppy's. But then her tan cheek turns entirely away from him. She can't bear to look at him and not understand what she is seeing. When she looks at herself, she feels like she knows whats going on, now. But Greg only gives her half the story even when he lets himself smile and lets her eyes gaze upon it. She wants to dig up his secrets and make his tongue move, her burning curiosity is transfixed by his mysteriousness. But Cass made a promise to always respect her elders, and she feels a touch barrier being bricked like a wall between him and her. No more dancing, no more falling and sobbing into foreign arms and shaking hands touching warm skin. This is a part of Cass that must dwell in the past, if she is going to - to change. And Greg is change, he isn't something she can touch and feel and want with all her senses, he belongs in a category designated to brothers and respectable older people. But her lip still trembles under the half smile and Cass feels tears springing. She can't understand why even with someone her mind can grasp at and hold onto when her body trembles and her heart lies to her, why can't she be happy with "only" this?

Greg will understand, if she writes it. She has to know. She has to goddamned find out what the hell is still wrong with her head, he has to know. She's depended on him so far for answers, right? Distractedly, her hands pick up a pen, and then one drops to her side while the other carefully prints.

YOU MAKE ME FEEL BETTER DIFFERENT BETTER
BUT I AM STILL
UNHAPPY UNEASY - WHY?

Her lower lip slips down into a slight frown, but she looks at Greg and feels it raising up again with a silent energy backing up her happiness and tied to him, the answers to her questions, his answers.