thecapitol | (no subject)

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Who| Penny and Katurian
What| Katurian is having nightmares.
Where| Penny's home.
When| The final week of the arena.
Warnings| Mentions of: torture, abuse, murder.

The dreams begin in earnest after the rebellion hacks the network. Katurian's brother, Michal, stands on the foggy plain between life and death, his eyes dull like faded quarters. Katurian stands opposite him on solid ground, on grass that seems too sharp, on dirt that seems too dirty, and when he reaches out to touch him, his fingers dissolve into clouds of liquid nitrogen.

"Kat!" Michal shouts. His old nickname, the one Howard had called him over the network. (It's not that unusual of a nickname. It's the obvious choice, isn't it?) "You're a traitor to the Districts, Kat!"

No, he tries to explain. It's not like that. He's doing this for both of them, don't you see? If the Capitol did not love him, then the Capitol would destroy him and, worse still, his stories. His words would not be carefully saved in boxes of evidence -- they would burn. He would burn.

"Stories, shmories," Michal says. Because he's young. Because he couldn't understand. "Don't you care about anything else?"

You, he wants to say. You.

"Liar," Michal says. "Liar like how you lied about killing and hurting being wrong and then doing it anyway. Lying hippo-crate."

Hypocrite, he corrects.

"Lying hypocrite," Michal says, and suddenly he is close, too close. Katurian is a speeding car and Michal is a concrete traffic barrier whispering up against his windows. "You've grown up just like Mom and Dad wanted you to grow up."

The dream always ends the same way, with bucking, with gasping, with a pillow clutched tightly between his fingers. With crying. With broken sobs that sound like nails clawing at a prison cell.

Penny doesn't smile enough to remind Katurian of his mother. Her words aren't lyrical enough to belong to his father. All the same, he arrives at her front door in the dead of night like a child hiding from his nightmares.

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Penny sleeps on satin sheets. Nothing disturbs her, not from the outside world and not from the dark recesses of her mind. The swamp at the bottom of her soul only bubbles with contentment; today was a good day at the office.

In contrast to the stillness of her home, Katurian's knocking is like the fist of God casting down thunder. She wakes with a scowl, wraps her robe around herself, and slides her feet into warm slippers. Before she goes downstairs to answer it, she runs a brush through her hair and ties it in a top-knot; whomever is at the door will wait for her. She's confident of that.

She wasn't expecting Katurian. She opens the door.

"There had better be a good reason for waking me at this hour, Katurian." As bitchy as the statement is, it isn't without a hint of satisfaction. The corners of her lips, pale and rosy from sleep instead of painted red, turn up slightly.

Her home is large and gives the effect of being made all of porcelain. It's cleaned once a day, while Penny's out, by doting Avoxes. A small bamboo fountain sits in the middle of the front lounge, between two leather couches wrapping around it like parentheses. She gestures for Katurian to come in.

"I'm making myself a drink."

Katurian prefers to keep his home simple. Small. Although the entrance is large, he intentionally keeps the inner rooms cluttered and tight like a series of coffins. He can curl up in the corner and pretend that the dark walls surrounding him are the edges of a suffocating blanket. In Penny's house, wide and exposed like the inside of a gigantic sink, he exhales uneasiness with thin breath.

This may have been a mistake.

But what is this? his mind asks him. Penny is the only person in the world that he can turn to, yes, but she is not a friend. She will not offer a comforting embrace, but the possessive hug of a boa constrictor. She cannot help him.

And yet.

He steps inside. He has dressed himself in his usual drab clothing, more in step with the Districts than the flashy garments of the Capitol. "I was thinking of you," he says softly, almost a plea. "I was thinking of you and I needed to see you."

Katurian's words are like a massage and a warm bath and an electric shock all at once. Penny takes them into her mind and tucks them away, hoarding them like a greedy dragon inside her lair.

"Sit down," she says. An Avox emerges from the shadows to brush off a seat on one of the sofas, and another goes to make the coffee, predicting Penny's requests without actually requiring she make them out loud. "I won't poison you with this coffee, I swear."

Of course she wouldn't. Where would she be without her fawning coworker?

"Talk to me." It is a command and carries the imperial tone of such.

Death doesn't frighten Katurian; erasure frightens Katurian. He cannot laugh at Penny's quip because he knows that if she were the one to take him down, she wouldn't leave anything behind. She'd swallow him whole like a snake.

So kill her first.

The thought is so sudden, so violent, that he needs to grip the edge of his sleeves to keep himself from shuddering all over. He sits down with tense muscles, sinking into the cushion like an anchor dropping to the ocean floor.

"Nightmares," he says, as though it explains everything. Penny knows that he rarely sleeps, that he needs no make-up to keep his skin sallow and his eyes dark and bruised. She does not know why. He swallows hard. "Is tea all right instead?"

Or alcohol, his mind adds, as clear and natural as its call to murder just moments before.

"My coffee isn't good enough for you?"

She lifts a hand and makes a snapping noise, and the Avox in the kitchen sets water to boil in a kettle, too. Penny watches Katurian's response like a cobra waiting for motion to indicate where to strike. She folds her hands in the billows of her nightgown and props her feet up, a picture of levity with edges much too defined.

"You're not high. You came to me before you went to your medicine." Katurian always makes the corners of her lips work. He gives her exercise with all the ways she makes little smirks, little frowns, not the ghoul masks she provides to her victims.

Lying is the obvious solution. He could tell her that his medicine, like coffee, is not to be taken late at night. But the hole in that lie is even more obvious: if Katurian were hoping to get to back to sleep, the last thing he'd do is get fully dressed and travel across town.

So he settles for one of his nervous, crooked smiles.

"Doesn't that make you feel nice?" His voice cracks on the final syllable, and he immediately regrets his choice of words. It was too obvious a ploy. Too blatant. He coughs into his fist, his eyes averted. "I depend on you."

"It does." Penny doesn't keep up too many pretenses around Katurian, and it doesn't bother her that he can read every profane word of her like a book. She flatters herself into thinking she can hide the ugliness that consumes her in public, but Katurian is addicted to it. He sees the rot inside her and feeds on it, a twin fungus. "You need me."

The Avox brings over a cup for each of them. Penny doesn't look at her, but at the scar along her mouth. An early, old Avox, back when Penny was still learning her craft of breaking and subduing the human spirit. Penny keeps this one around out of a sick sense of sentimentality. The scar stands as a testament to her inexperience, and to how far she's come.

That ambition, in someone else's hands, could be used for good, but Penny hoards it like a shiny in her nest.

"What were you dreaming about?"

Katurian doesn't look at the Avox either. Not at her eyes, not at her lips, not at her fingers as she lowers the cup into his waiting hands. He watches the floor with wide eyes, taking measured, deliberate blinks.

They disturb him. The Avoxes. When he is sober, they feel like wisps of nightmares that have escaped into the real world, staring down at him with eyes that see too much. He doesn't allow them in his own home. He never has.

"I can't remember," he lies without stuttering, his eyes still fixated on the ground. He cups one hand in the other. "I can only remember the feeling. Like being crushed."

Like how I need to crush you.

"Can we talk about something else?" he asks abruptly, his voice cracking once more, his fingers trembling around the tea cup. "Tell me about you. Tell me about your day."

The Avox slips away to a corner of the room, where she stands in the same mute stupor she's always in. Penny doesn't allow her servants to sit in her presence. Trophies, after all, keep their poses eternally.

And you wouldn't sit before a god.

Penny nearly snaps like a bear trap. She nearly takes the attempt to redirect the conversation as an insult, as a mutinous disruption of her total control of the situation. The only reason she doesn't is because Katurian thought ahead of that, thought to offer her a more tantalizing alternative - talking about herself.

Herself and her work.

"Long day. I've been working on a new serum. I want something slow onset, something that degeneratively destroys memories, but with a single dose. I'm considering something that targets implicit memory."

"Skills," he says, running his teeth over his lips, savoring the redirection with his saliva. "It targets skills."

When he was a boy, it was so difficult, learning how to use the typewriter. Sometimes he didn't press his fingers down hard enough. Sometimes he pressed down too hard and the keys stuck, giving him a once upon a timeeeeeee and forcing him to expel the ruined work. Learning the location of the keys was worst of all. He typed with his index finger, letter by letter, space by space. Now his fingers move like little dancers.

Implicit memory. How many plans could be foiled with disrupted implicit memory?

"That's very good," he says. "That's very clever."

"My only regret is that I won't be around to watch the results if it's put into practice against saboteurs."

The Capitol - she refuses to think of Cruentus as her superior, not when she could come up with a thousand poisons to reduce the bitch to a quivering, drooling heap of flesh - will take her work and give it to foot soldiers in little needle guns. Maybe they'll put it in the water. Maybe they'll sneak it to certain Tributes in their food. It'll spice up the Games.

Penny's loath to allow others to profit off a backbone of her work, but such is the curse of only holding power in one place at a time, of lacking omnipresence.

She points to her feet and her Avox comes from the corner and pulls the silk slippers off her feet. Penny's toes are dainty and painted the same baby pink they use to send little girl infants home. Like the rest of her, they radiate an artificial girlishness.

"My feet hurt," she says, giving Katurian a look as if daring him to expec the Avox to massage them instead of doing it himself.

He knows that look. He's seen it countless times before.

Katurian kneels down (bows down) like he always does and starts to massage her feet. Even though he knocked on Penny's door with murder guiding his muscles, now there is only complacency and sniveling cowardice. Without family, without Michal, he gives in so easily. There is nothing left to fight for but his stories, and this is how it's done. Hold the bottom of her foot with both hands. Start at the top at her foot, nice and steady, nice and firm, take care not to press too hard --

(and get the keys stuck, forcing him to expel the ruined work)

-- on the center, focus on the sides.

"Do you ever think about your time before the Capitol?"

The words come out before he can stop them.

Under Katurian's hands, under his thumbs on her soles, he'll be able to feel Penny flinch. Her hand on the armrest of the couch tightens even as her face remains mostly impassive, except for her lower lip drawing taut as a noose.

"No," she lies. Her breath tastes sour, and she reaches forward and drinks more of her coffee.

"I don't speak to my family. You know that."

"I know that," he agrees. He fights the building tension in his shoulders with quick little twitches, his hands still following the curves of Penny's feet. "I think about my old life all the time. Not because I miss it, but I -- I miss parts of it, certain little elements, and it's important to remember where you come from. It's important to remember where you come from."

Repetition again. Babbling quiets his nerves, the speaking drowning out the thinking. But there are disadvantages.

He inhales.

"They're sending the new Tributes to the Districts soon. I might like to go."

Edited 2014-01-12 21:02 (UTC)

Penny narrows her eyes at Katurian, watching his forehead, the sheen of light sweat in the line of his hair. Her eyes are like gouges in clay where some artist forgot to place marbles, black and cavernous to the lightless interior of her head.

"Are you asking for time off?"

An ugly thought starts to ferment in Penny's head. What if her District has forgotten her? What if they've tried to erase her?

"I was considering making a visit myself," she lies, as if the idea hasn't just occurred to her.

"Yes," he says. "Please."

Maybe that's what this narrative has been building up to. His nights and nightmares have brought him here, but not to kill his closest ally (and only friend), oh no. It brought him here so that he could finally gain the courage to revisit his home and put those nightmares to rest.

"And-- And I hear that District 7 is very beautiful this time of year." He moves to the other foot. Has he been holding his breath? "Because of the pines."

Edited 2014-01-12 22:59 (UTC)

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