ataraxionlogs | Arriba, abajo;

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Arriba, abajo;

CHARACTERS: Mordecai, OPEN!
LOCATION: Space Babylon
WARNINGS: None
SUMMARY: Mordecai found the bar. Good luck getting him to leave, ever.
NOTES: Prose or action is fine, take your pick. Oh, and feel free to join existing threads or start a new one.

It was amazing how quickly time could pass. Already, Mordecai had been stuck on this damn ship for a week - a week too long, in his opinion, but there wasn't much to do about that. Most of his and Lilith's thoughts on how they might get out of here already had proven futile. Having spent as much time reading the comms as he had, though, that didn't really surprise him. There wasn't much that they'd thought of that hadn't already been tried.

He wasn't about to give up on at least finding out more about the workings of the place, though. There was a lot of information out there that the ship's other residents knew that wasn't written down in any obvious place - he'd learned that much already from Jaye and her descriptions of the ship's interior. He doubted those he really wanted information from - namely, the ship's Captain and Commander - would ever visit the bar and talk openly with the passengers while inebriated. That would be too good to be true. But getting to know a few more people could yield surprising results.

Well, that, and really, he just wanted a drink, so justifying it to himself didn't actually matter. Besides, he was curious about the place. He sent a quick text to Lilith, who he'd never known to turn down a night of social drinking, then headed on in to see who was there, and most importantly, what the regulars recommended he try.

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"Nope," Haymitch drawled. "But it's stronger than white liquor, so it's got that going for it." He was never going to get used to calling it vodka, despite what Russia insisted. Never mind that the stuff Ripper made was a bit stronger than standard vodka and tasted less like lighter fluid.

"You just arrive?" Small talk was the bane of Haymitch's existence, but he was getting to that point in drunkenness where he talked to fill space and kept from throwing up and passing out on the floor. One of these options was better than the other.

White liquor could be the name of just about anything. Didn't matter what it was stronger than, though, just that it was strong. "Yeah, this last jump. How long've you been here?"

Haymitch rolled down the sleeve of his jumpsuit to check the number on it- after awhile, you stopped caring so much and then forgot about it. 005. "About six jumps now. Haven't really been paying much attention. One jump's the same as the next. Still stuck here, still trying to get by."

He flagged down the bartender and managed to get himself a beer, then had a drink. "'Bout half a year, then, huh? Damn. I was hoping I'd be gone before I had to be here that long, but from what I've been hearing, guess that'll be a little too much to ask for."

"People come and go all the time, but it's probably not the way you want to leave and sometimes the ship puts you right back here." He sucked the last dregs out of his glass and waved a finger for another. "I went home for a few months, came back here, and it was like I'd never left." As soon as the bartender gave him his drink, he raised it sardonically. "So welcome back, Haymitch. Here's to another six months of listening to other people try to get themselves killed."

"Heh. Yeah, that's shit, gettin' pulled back in here like that. When you were back at home, did you remember bein' here at all? I hear some people have weird memory stuff happen when they go back an' forth."

"Not a thing," Haymitch shrugged, downing half the glass. He cracked his neck a bit to work a kink out that had settled since he'd been hunched over the bar for a good hour now and before that he'd fallen asleep on a couch in the 005 common room. Again.

"Just went back to my life as usual. Sort of makes you wonder."

"Sure does. This stuff could be goin' on all the time to a hell of a lotta people, and nobody'd even know." There had to be some kind of reason for it. Random chance was a powerful thing, but this was a little too complex for him to just shrug it off without looking for an answer somewhere.

"And there'd be no point to any of it." Which was the part that worried him. All of this madness, this terror, this stupidity, and for what? For them all to go home and forget it all.

"We're just here for someone's entertainment and then we get the mercy of forgetting about it. Good for them." In a way, it's almost more cruel than the Capitol. Not having to live with the agony is one thing, but realizing that all these people you're getting to know will mean nothing to you when you leave forever is almost painful. And damn it all, he was starting to get attached to some of them.

"I dunno, I'm thinkin' it's gotta be more than just entertainment. Most'a the time everyone here just sits around, doin' nothing. That's not real fun to watch. With stuff like that list, and the way people come an' go, it's like something's filtering us. Trying to find just who it wants for whatever its purpose is, and gettin' rid of everyone who doesn't work out."

"You think so?" Haymitch had heard that through the grapevine. He kept his ear to the ground. He listened. He watched. Most of the theories that weren't heavily filtered, he heard about. And with Ros gone, he didn't get as much word of mouth, save what he caught when he came in here.

"Can't imagine what they've wanted with an old drunk like me for this long, then."

"I guess there's no tellin' until we figure out who's responsible. I thought Resnik, originally, but unless she's real good at keepin' it secret from us, it sounds like she doesn't know anything more about it than we do. Guess I'm still suspicious, but I'm more open to the idea that there's somethin' even she doesn't understand about how the jumps work."

He, of course, was still working a lot of this out, through reading back in the comms, and, of course, talking to the people who'd been here longer - which was most of them. The bar was definitely a good spot for that. People got to talking a little easier with something to drink in them. And, of course, so did he.

Haymitch burst into a fit of barely contained snickers. "And you've talked to her, have you? 'Don't believe everything they tell you.'" It was something he'd never forget- one of Smiley's earliest messages, only confirming his sense of wariness about Resnik and Ward.

"I don't gamble, but if I did, I'd stake everything on Ward and Resnik knowing a lot more than they're saying."

"Oh, I don't doubt they know more'n they're saying. But I get the feeling they don't have all the answers we probably wish they had. Still, I haven't talked to either of them in person. Gotta get around to that someday." It just wasn't his thing, interrogation. He much preferred to watch and wait and accumulate information while other people did the talking. But he'd quickly found that wouldn't work well here - or, well, it did to some extent, but there were so many people with so many uninformed opinions about things that getting at the truth sometimes took more direct action than he was used to.

"Maybe, but two people don't survive to be the last ones standing just by luck." Katniss and Peeta aside. "The ship might well be more than what we think and they're thrown into it with us, but the way things stand between them and whatever happened to the people who were here before us... Seems odd to me."

But that didn't mean they were evil and Haymitch wouldn't kid himself about that. They were victors. What he wanted to know was if there was a Game or if they just decided there was.

"Yeah, I get that for sure. Especially with how many people used to be here, if this's supposed to be a colony ship. That many people don't just vanish overnight." Then again, they'd all just appeared on the ship, so maybe people could just disappear, but that didn't come any closer to explaining why or how.

"How 'bout you, have you talked to Ward or Resnik yourself?"

"More than likely, they're dead." There was only moderate proof about that, but it was enough to make it Haymitch's pet theory and he was sticking by it.

"Oh no, I don't get involved in their affairs. I leave that to the rest of the damn ship. Everyone's got a bone to pick with those two and I leave them to it."

But he stalked the network like crazy when they showed up on it. Most of the interesting information was probably filtered, but he worked with what he had. He didn't have Beetee here to hack the signal.

"So you just let 'em do whatever they do, and sit here an' drink and don't do a damn thing about it, huh?" He understood why people had that mindset sometimes, sure, but that didn't mean he agreed with it. It seemed that the majority of the ship's residents thought that way, though - their situation was a problem, the captain was incompetent at best, or a dangerous liar at worst, and all they did was get by.

And plot mutiny with a select few individuals, but if that was the impression Haymitch gave off, then he was doing his job right. "Exactly," he mused, taking a long swig of his drink. "Never hurt me in the past any."

Everyone else, maybe, but not him.

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Arriba, abajo;

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