lucetilogs | EVENT LOG: FEATHERLY HAVEN RESORT & SPA

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EVENT LOG: FEATHERLY HAVEN RESORT & SPA

Who: All the lovebirds!
What: A bit of pampering and hijinks. Original event post here.
When: Feb 17th
Where: The Featherly Haven Resort & Spa (aka the hot springs)
Rating: If you feel your thread is heading for something steamier, please either fade to black or take it to an appointments post.

Also -- don't forget to add in your own character tags!

On the 17th, all characters will find an embossed invitation tucked inside the front cover of their journals, asking them to gather up by the hot springs for a marvelous party at the Featherly Haven Resort & Spa. Upon arriving, they’ll find that the area has been temporarily transformed into a luxurious vacation retreat. Although the weather is just as chilly as it should be in mid-February, the hot springs are compellingly warm and once the sun sets, the area is lit by grand torches. The usual hot springs buildings are somewhat incredibly replaced with what looks like a swanky resort -- though the building itself will disappear soon after the Shift’s end. There is a sizeable lobby, complete with plump couches and a droid-staffed bar. Each and every one of the hotel’s rooms is a honeymoon suite, stocked with champagne and fondue and yet more platters of fresh fruit. Courteous (albeit stoic) droids tend massage chairs and manicure stations on the resort's first floor, shaded by billowing, cream-coloured curtains. Others will be passing around festively coloured drinks, platters of fresh fruit, and -- of course -- huge complimentary towels to wrap up in once your soaking is complete: the whitest and fluffiest and most spa-like towels you ever did see.

Available both in the rooms, outside by the hotsprings, and in heaps inside the lobby, are little foil-wrapped and bite-sized chocolates. As with other items in previous years, each of these chocolates comes with a dizzying side-effect upon consumption:

White Chocolate will overwhelm its consumer with the desire to talk and -- more specifically -- the desire to share. Upon eating this treat, characters will want to chat the ear off of anyone near them, perhaps spilling some personal details in the process. But being chatty is a two way street, and so they will also press upon their conversation partners for details of their own lives. It’s a lethal combination: a nosy over-sharer.

Milk Chocolate will flush its consumer with the desire to be warm and affectionate with those around them. Hugs and kisses on the cheek will abound. Upon eating this treat, characters will want to throw their arm around those near them -- clasping close friends and associates alike. Personal space is no longer an issue.

Dark Chocolate will inspire quite another flavour of affection in its consumer. Upon eating this treat, a character’s libido takes over the driving seat. Many people around them become terribly terribly attractive and, as lust courses through the character’s system, they’ll hope to convince someone back to their suite for a little hanky panky.

Chocolate Coated Marzipan -- smooth and silky on the tongue -- evokes a spontaneous sense of...marital bliss. Those who chow down on this treat will find themselves tracking down someone they know they simply don’t want to live without. Whether this is someone they were previously attracted to in the week or a total stranger, your character will find themselves proposing marriage. And, (in)conveniently for them, all marriages may take place in the resort’s own Vegas-style wedding chapel! All ceremonies will be performed by a droid-officiant who looks disturbingly like Elvis Presley. Witnesses are optional but encouraged.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"...She risked scandal and ruination to live with me, back in England. Her society turned on her. Her own brother said he'd pay her to leave me. Lady Grace Hale, daughter of the Earl of Selby, living with a common soldier? They said she was mad. They said she was foolish. They said worse, but I won't repeat those words now.

But she stayed. So -- aye -- I reckon she loved me. She encouraged me to great things, lass. And she listened to my stories and she wanted to make such a difference."

But they'd never had enough time. God, nine short months and she was taken from him. And then her lawyers had bled him dry in the wake. Yes, she'd loved him. That tall, sad woman whom he'd held in the moments after she'd shot a pistol ball straight through her husband's skull. She'd loved him and -- by god -- he'd loved her.

The lady's story sounded so very similar to that of her own mother's. Choosing a man from the Seam over another of the merchant class. Never getting the opportunity to inherit the small pharmacy Katniss' grandfather had run. Considered undeserving all because she opted to marry a coal miner, to move with him to the Seam.

In loosing him, Katniss' mother had broken down. Became depressed and catatonic and forced Katniss to become the provider of a family at much too young an age. She can't help but look a little skeptical by all of this. And still curious.

"What happened to her?"

"She died." And these were words he spoken in years except in hushed conversations with Teresa, where she was only ever supportive of his grief for this earlier lover. For all his brusque nature, this was enough to threaten tears in his eyes. But they only managed to moisten; he didn't actually cry.

"Childbirth. A fever got her. The boy, too."

She moved closer to him at that, leaning her head against his shoulder. Though she had never known anyone to die from childbirth, her mother had tended to women in the Seam during difficult birthings. She had done her best to keep from losing both child and babe. But Katniss knew that her mother hadn't always been successful.

A reminder yet again why she never wanted children of her own. The risk was just too great.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, the words seeming hollow. "I'm really sorry."

He wrapped one great arm around her shoulders, glad for her company and commiseration. Dredging up the memories made his heart sour just a little. After all, insult had been added to injury when the lawyers in the family's employ had insisted that the child hadn't been his but had instead been conceived before Lord William's death and by the Lord himself. And as the child died after his mother, he was still -- albeit briefly -- heir to the small estate he had established with the woman he hadn't even had the chance to marry. All the profit from the Tippoo Sultan's jewels was sunk into that estate, and Grace's family stripped it bare. Left him with nothing but brief memories and an army commission he couldn't sell.

"It were years ago, love. Tragic, certainly. But years ago. I hope she had nine months of peace after her husband's fortunate accident."

Peace. How relative such a term was. He and Grace had been happy, but society had still whispered behind her back whenever they went out together. Once, she'd cajoled him into attending theatre in London and the whispers had been loud enough to be overheard. Grace had wept, that night.

"I killed myself."

The words leave her suddenly and unexpectedly. She doesn't mean to share them, doesn't mean to divulge a secret she's kept so very, very close to her heart. No one's supposed to know. No one aside from Clove.

Her death here hadn't been an accident.

"That day we met in the woods, I was finally coming back. After waking up here again, no longer dead." She swallows hard and then bites her lip, fighting back the tears. "After Peeta left, I... I... din't want to be here anymore. Picked a fight with Clove. Let her kill me.

"It didn't work," she continues a couple of seconds later, clinging tighter to his hand. "I didn't stay dead. I didn't get sent home. I came back here and-- I don't want to love again. I don't want to be in that much pain."

...His emotions ran the gamut. A quiet oath -- darker and less polite than any he'd uttered before -- slipped past his lips. Sharpe was no stranger to the concept of taking one's life. He'd once handed a man a pistol while suggesting rather forcefully that the bastard ought to shoot himself. He'd marched into battle at peace with the notion of his own death. He attended Lord Kiely's funeral services as they buried him in a plot adjacent to the sacred churchyard ground. And he'd known prostitutes and gin-pots who'd simply not been able to cope with life in the Rookery.

Sharpe drew her nearer, suppressing a ghastly rage when Katniss implied that Clove had done the deed. The rifleman quite liked the other girl from Panem, and their discussions of academies and military tactics had always been interesting, if never personal. But he found himself altogether too willing to hate the young woman simply for this one action.

And he remembered that day in the woods, and a girl who'd looked lost but turned out to not be lost at all. Only now, he learned, she must have been. Poor, sweet Katniss.

"...It's called a second chance, darling."

She let him pull her close, unable to look at him in fear that there might be disapproval in his face. It's silly, really, given the way he just holds her tighter. The swears that come from his lips are not those of a man necessarily angry with her. But she doesn't want to face rejection. Not anymore. Not from someone she's grown to care about and respect.

It's not until he speaks that the tension in her body relaxes. At least a little. There's still so much confusion in her, still so much sorrow. "I don't know what to do with a second chance.

"Don't be angry with Clove," she adds in as an afterthought. "It was my idea."

"She should've known better."

Sharpe was asking a lot from a the girl-child. He was demanding that Clove should have had the finesse to know when your enemy was bloody well asking for it and when to just walk away. He was demanding that she have sensibilities he wasn't certain he himself possessed. Mostly, he was just angry. Because the thought of Katniss dead drove chills into his spine.

She shook her head. Clove did what Katniss expected her to do: kill. It was what a Career did. Why the odds were always in the favor of those Tributes from Districts 1, 2, and 4. Training outside of the Games had technically been illegal. But there had been ways around it. A number of ways.

"No. She wouldn't," she said quietly. "It's how she had been raised. The only way you'd survive in the arena. And I took full advantage of that. I told you, Richard, I'm not a good person."

"Bloody hell, love..."

He tucked a finger under her chin, raising his face so he could look her in the eye. "You ain't the first creature to throw her life at someone else's feet. You won't be the last. That don't make you good nor bad. It makes you bloody human."

Was he disappointed? Disheartened, even, to learn that someone so dear to him had felt so forlorn? Aye. Certainly. But he remembered how lost he felt after Grace's death and how wrecked he'd felt after Teresa's. He'd nearly thrown everything away...

Even as he raises her head so she had no choice but to meet his eyes, she tries her best to avoid his gaze. Grey eyes look at every other inch of his face, the corners of the spa she can see as she searches for something else to rest her gaze on.

Whether that makes her human or not, it doesn't make her feel much better. She still doesn't know what to do with this second chance. Still doesn't know how to let go.

"Sometimes I'd still rather be dead."

And his eyes -- pale green and showing age and adorned not-too-far-off with a wicked scar -- allowed hers to wander. He wouldn't be forceful. Forceful wasn't his way.

"Well, I'm damned glad you're not." Gruff and bubbling with emotion. Then, softer: "What did they take from you, darling? They must've taken something..."

He knew that much about this place.

That's almost an easier topic in it's way. Talking about what she lost, as much as she hates remembering that, is easier than talking about dying. And it's easier than talking about Peeta. Remembering him in any way.

"My song," she says quietly, still not meeting his gaze. "I used to be able to sing."

He smiled just the slightest smile. Katniss? Singing? It hadn't occurred to him that she might possess a talent so sweet and gentle, but the moment the surprise arrived he knew he was foolish not to expect it. Hagman, after all, could sing like a bird and shoot like a bastard.

"You," he hazarded. "A singer?" His head tilted; Sharpe was charmed. He gave her cheek a gentle pat. "It'll come back, eh? You can get it back. I'll bloody well go with you to get it back, if you want. Because I would love to hear you sing."

She nods, feeling a lump form in her throat again. How had Peeta described her voice?

"He said I was like my father in that. Peeta, that is. He said when I'd sing, the birds would fall silent. That that was the first reason he noticed me. When I volunteered to sing that first day of school." She shakes her head, using the back of her hand to wipe at the new tears in her eyes. How had Richard talked about Grace without crying? It wasn't fair. "He said he loved me since. Since we were five."

He shooed away her hand and instead chased away her tears with the black cloth he normally knotted around his neck like a kerchief. It had only taken a moment to undo its knot and another moment to dab gently -- so surprisingly gently -- at her cheek.

"You'd known him for that long, eh?" His heart cracked. For as much as he's loved the woman who've come and gone, he's rarely had more than a year at most with many of them.

She shrugged. It would be easy to say yes. But her history with Peeta had always been more complicated than that. Would it never stop being complicated?

Why couldn't it just be simple?

"I knew of him. I didn't really have any friends in school. Not aside from Madge, the Mayor's daughter. But Peeta said he noticed me then. He noticed me every day after."

And then, then they turned eleven. And he saved her life for the very first time.

"I didn't really notice him until we were eleven. And my father died in a mining accident." She swallowed hard, fighting back the dull, hard arch that came with talking about her father. She should stop talking. She wants to. But Katniss just can't seem to bring herself to do so. "My mother had shut down. So it was me. I had to take care of them both.

"I was trying to sell some of Prim's old baby clothing to get money to buy us food. No one was willing. Peeta... risked his mother's wrath that day to purposely burn some bread and throw it out in the street for me. I wanted to thank him the next day in school and I couldn't. But I saw him watching me anyway. And when I looked away, I saw a dandelion just coming out for the spring. Something I could harvest and make into soup and--"

She looked down again, quiet and thoughtful. It had been because of his help eight years ago that she had been so reluctant to kill him when they first entered the arena. That she had been so angry when Peeta Mellark's name had been called.

"He saved my life that day with the bread. My life and that of my family's. I owed him so, so much. I'm never going to stop owing him."

He listened -- patient and quiet. Sharpe was good at all kinds of listening. There was the kind where a man merely stood stone-faced before superior officers, yes-sirring them as necessary while reading between the lines of their orders. But there was also the other kind of listening, where a man was calm and attentive. And he resisted the urge to dig through the girl's subtext in order to draw out anything she wasn't already willing to tell him.

And he felt deflated after she mentioned the death of her father. But alternately elated at the bravery Katniss pinned upon Peeta. Sharpe found it hard to imagine disliking an individual so warmly recieved by the girl herself, even if he was certain the boy was nothing like those he encountered daily in the army's gutters.

"A lad like that," Sharpe whispered his conclusion in a rough hush, "must be bloody awfully patient to wait so long."

"Or stupid," she offered with every bit the same conviction as she had used in describing Peeta's bravery.

Because for all Peeta Mellark was patient, was kind and loving and just purely good, he was an idiot, too. For choosing to love her. For constantly putting himself in harm's way for her. He deserved so much better than someone like her. But no matter how hard she tried, she could never convince Peeta otherwise.

"He could have had any girl he wanted."

Before the Hunger Games anyway. After, neither of them had a choice anymore in who they loved. Snow had stolen that option from them. She wonders, for a moment, if she would have fallen in love with Peeta anyway? If there hand't been any uprising, if Peeta had never been hijacked.

"But he wanted you. Wants you. If you think he's such a grand young man, then you have to trust his judgment in that regard as well."

She rolls her eyes at that response, unable to keep the doubt completely out of her face. She trusts Peeta's judgement. Probably trusts him more than any other individual left alive in Panem. But when it comes to his opinion of her, she can't help but question. Can't help but find every excuse to prove him wrong.

"I don't," she admits aloud, scowling a little as she slinks down in the chair. "I don't understand it at all. I'm not nice. I'm not all that pretty. I kill things to survive. And that includes people. I'm not what any boy should want."

"A woman what can look after herself is an attractive woman indeed. My wife, Katniss?" His voice stammered as he explained the raw allure in a creature such as Teresa Moreno. "We would spend months and months apart. And every time I saw her again, she would ask me the same question. How many French have I killed? And I would tell her. Teresa, I would then say, how many Frenchmen have you killed?

'Not enough, Richard'. Never enough. That was always her answer."

He rubbed a hand across his face. "She wasn't particularly nice to anyone but me. And even then, it were a stretch. Hell, girl! I'm not particularly nice. But me and her still wanted each other. And your lad wants you. You want him. Why must you question what's fit to make you happy, eh?"

The answer that came to her was surprisingly simple. It didn't take much thought at all, even after hearing the way his voice choked on mention of his wife. Another wife. Someone other than Grace. He had moved on somehow. Had found someone new to love.

She shook her head and looked down. The answer really was simple. "I don't deserve to be happy."

Sharpe knew he was a thug. A murderer. A thief. A rogue. But he couldn't wrap his head around Katniss's hatred for her own self. Certainly, he understood the concept of being unworthy. Of a woman, of a rank, of a uniform. But never could he imagine being unworthy of happiness. Not when he'd grown up among sweeps and prostitutes who found the time and courage to be happy.

So when Sharpe heard I don't deserve to be happy, he understood it as I don't want to be happy. And that broke his heart.

"Is there nothing an old soldier could ever say to teach you that happiness ain't a thing you deserve or not? It's just a thing you get to be. Not every damn day. Maybe not every damn month. But happiness ain't got nothing to do with meriting it. If it did, there would be no marching songs. No jokes in the darkest corners of the worst pubs in the worst cities. No soldier would marry. Leave happiness only to the deserving and happiness would be as rare as...well, Christ, a bloody rare thing."

EVENT LOG: FEATHERLY HAVEN RESORT & SPA

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