There's No Hate Couldn't Wait [Closed]

[fearisinthemind]

WHO| Penny, Orc and Katurian
WHAT| Orc gets punished for attacking Aunamee.
WHEN| Before Christmas.
WHERE| Peacekeeper HQ
WARNINGS| Torture.

To tell the truth, Penny has concerns about her job security, and they're festering into a sour brew in her stomach that fuels her spiteful outbursts on the job. Her employees are more cowed than ever, fearing to meet her eyes lest she put them up to some task that takes tedium to the point of torture. She keeps them working long hours and weekends, and any requests for time off are summarily denied.

The Capitol's been outsourcing more and more work that would be going to her to District Three, and that's concerning. More than concerning, it's insulting. Her work has always been impeccable, and yet they're giving it away to the scum of the Districts.

When they bring in a new 'problem Tribute' for her, the validation practically makes her squirm out of her skin with ecstatic electricity. She waits, as she always does, for the victim to be brought in. She sits at her desk in the big, wood-floored room that overlooks the Capitol, the one that smells like sterility. She looks over his file and positively vibrates with excitement. She pages Katurian and even adds an exclamation mark.

He's brought in, groggy, drugged, tied down to a metal gurney that an intern bolts to the floor. Penny stands up, lips pulls back to reveal a manic grin.

"Hello, Mr. Merriman."

Comments

[paidinbeer]

Mr. Merriman? No one had called him that in so long. It made him feel like he was in school again.

As his blurry eyes opened and dust and pebbles shifted from his stiff eyelids the vision settled onto Penny's smiling face.

"You...look familiar." He muttered in a scratchy dry voice.

The gurney was hard, even for him. He was used to stiffness but this was a new sort of solidness.

[fearisinthemind]

Penny's eyes widen slightly with delight. 'Familiar' implies omnipresence, implies power. She likes that. "I've been on television."

She reaches over and touches the gravel on his face, lets it scratch against her soft palm. "I've heard you've gotten yourself into trouble."

[paidinbeer]

Orc would have shuddered if his muscles weren't still waking up from a drug induced numbness. Actually the shudder probably would have been followed by arousal given his hormones. But for now he was able to focus on her words.

"Is he dead?" Seemed like the important question to ask.

[pillowmania]

Katurian tells himself that one day, he just won't show up.

Today is not that day.

He arrives with doubt in his mind and nervous energy in his fingers, but he arrives nonetheless, a small canister of his drug clipped onto his belt. He opens the door to Penny's office with the cautious silence of an intern. His bangs are stuck to his forehead, soaked with sweat.

He closes the door with his foot. When it refuses to close all the way, he kicks it, the sound like thunder in the otherwise quiet room.

He says nothing.

[fearisinthemind]

"He was taken to the hospital. You did quite a number on him. I really wish I'd been there to see..." She met Aunamee only once, but took great pleasure in asserting her reign. He was so easily riled up when she highlighted how inferior he was to her.

Her hand slides over and traces the contours of Orc's lips. "So unusual. So unique. We're going to have a really lovely time once Katurian arrives." She pushes his upper lip back. "We're probably going to need to inject through your gums, since your skin would break the needles."

That's when the door closes behind Penny - she's been so absorbed in taunting Orc she only just noticed him.

"You look like hell," she says.

[paidinbeer]

The words made him cringe as much as the drug in his system would allow.

"Are you going to kill me?" He wondered not sure who she was talking to just beyond his line of sight.

But as she said the bit about injecting his gums he felt them give a throb from where the needle had been so desperately stabbed by the peacekeepers before.

[pillowmania]

Katurian wishes he had a witty response, but he is awful with words that haven't already been written down. Instead he answers Penny with a laugh, high-pitched and brief like a chirping bird. He begins to pace around the room, sticking to the corners. The shadows.

Once he reaches the far end, he holds his translucent mask to his face and inhales.

Then he removes it.

"Are we going to kill him, Penny?" he asks. His voice carries a hint of sing-song, a mocking tone that suggests he already knows the answer. Dizziness hits him soon after, and he brings the mask up once more, closing his eyes as he breathes in.

[fearisinthemind]

"Oh, I hope not," she says back to Katurian in a matching sing-song voice. She circles the table, making the room feel filled with the spirits of children chanting Ring Around the Rosey - horrifying and childish all at once.. "Then again, we'll have to find out, won't we?"

When she's behind Orc - in that sweet spot directly behind someone's head where it's impossible to tell where the sound is really coming from - she continues. "Or maybe we'll just tell you stories. This is supposed to be punishment, but Katurian Katurian can be very generous with his art."

[paidinbeer]

"Stories?" This was...confusing. Even more then Orc was used to. He tried to roll his eyes up enough to see where she had moved to but he couldn't see past his craggy brow.

"What kind of stories?" Was she crazy? Was he crazy? Had he finally lost his mind after that last little display of fury and rage?

[pillowmania]

Katurian doesn't answer aloud, but his mind fills in the missing reply. Memorable ones. Yes, memorable ones. The kind of stories that stick with you, that visit you again and again in the dead of night. They wait for you under your covers. They whisper their remnants in the howling wind.

(it's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring)

He unhooks his mask and tucks it into his jacket, his body now shuddering with anticipation -- not nerves.

"Generosity," he says, "is earned. It isn't something we just fucking hand out to grotesqueries. You know?"

His tone of voice is sweet. Playful.

[fearisinthemind]

"Oh? And what would be the price of one of your stories for our little grotesquery here?" Penny moves her hand forward so she's stroking the underside of Orc's chin, feeling the scratchiness of the pebbles there. "I don't think he has very much to offer us."

That's when she gets a syringe out, one she's prepared before Orc was brought in. An inhibitor toxin. It strips away the mind's ability to defend itself from its own emotions, dampens the parts of the brain that rationalize and contextualize and forgive.

A perfect gift for a remorseful boy murderer. It will pull down the wall that says he is already being punished.

"Say aah," she says, wedging her fingers into Orc's mouth, avoiding the teeth.

[paidinbeer]

Between the big words and the general crazy that's coming from the woman's assistant, Orc is even more confused then when he woke up. Still he's not too keen to get any more needles jammed into his gums so he holds still hoping she'll be more delicate about it then the peacekeeper who stabbed at his mouth like it was about to devour him.

It hurt all the same. And if he was expecting a numbing solution he was sorely mistaken. He had no idea what was happening.

All he knew was it was scary, and he wanted his mommy.

"OW!"

[fearisinthemind]

The first cry of pain. It's like the first bite of cake, delicious and rich and promising more, more that she can glut herself on until she is sickened with it. Fireworks go off behind Penny's dark eyes.

Penny removes the syringe and pats at Orc's cheek. "Good boy." She passes the used needle to Katurian.

"You understand why you're being punished, don't you, Mr. Merriman?"

[paidinbeer]

The gums around where the needle had impaled were throbbing so he tried to focus on her words.

"Because I tried to kill Aunamee." He muttered feeling not an ounce of regret.

[fearisinthemind]

"Yes. You broke the face of one of the Capitol favorites." The word drips from Penny's lips like slime. "And you know, dear Mr. Merriman, if I had my way you wouldn't be here at all?"

She leans in and whispers in his ear. "I think you did us all a favor, doing what you're really good at like that."

[paidinbeer]

Well that was a bit of a comfort wasn't it? He relaxed a little hoping that meant she might go easy on him. He knew he couldn't have been the only one with a grudge against Aunamee.

"I had to protect Howard." He murmured still feeling an uneasy chill from Penny's breath on his ear.

[fearisinthemind]

"A bit late for that, don't you think?"

She nods to Katurian. Once the tears start, that can be the payment for the story, the water needed to make that sick flower bloom. That will mean Orc is good and ready to feel fear without the filter of knowing it's temporary.

[paidinbeer]

That hurt like a shot to the gut. He felt winded and weakly mumbled. "Yeah...but I could at least try and stop him from doing it ever again."

Except he tried and failed. And now he was going to die here and Aunamee would heal up and go after Howard, probably harder then ever.

Suddenly death seemed inviting once more. It had been a long few months since Orc had felt that way.

[fearisinthemind]

"Is what he did so very different than what you did before coming here?" Penny strokes his chin again, moves a hand down his neck, tickles his earlobe, all hidden safely from behind the top of his head.

[paidinbeer]

His stomach was twisting in knots and his head was swimming. He felt a chill unlike any he'd felt since becoming the creature he was now. It was like cold air was seeping through his cracks.

"He did it on purpose..." He weakly protested, his voice cracking "I...it was an accident."

[pillowmania]

It’s time.

Katurian knows this well. There’s a sort of give and take to the whole process, a sort of dance. With the drug thrumming steadily in his system, he can actually feel the change in the rhythm. He couldn’t feel it before — that was why he was unable to answer Penny, why he laughed and ducked away.

His nerves were gone. He was no longer Katurian Katurian, the poor reluctant writer who bowed to the Capitol because it was easier than pushing back.

He was Katurian Katurian, the Writer.

“What did he do, Penny? Can you tell me?”

He stepped closer, practically gliding across the floor. His eyes flashed with anticipation.

“Can he tell me?”

[paidinbeer]

He could. He didn't want to, but he could.

"I was drunk." He moaned feeling sick suddenly, like the first time he'd drank to much.

"I was supposed to keep people from using their powers." He felt the words falling from his mouth like vomit after a binge. "I hit her...I didn't even swing that hard. She's just a girl...she was just..."

Tears now, and snot from his stiff pebble of a nose.

[fearisinthemind]

"It sounds like one of your stories." Penny starts to circle the table like a shark. Orc's feet hang off the end, and Penny examines his toes. She wiggles each one, humming some atonal nursery rhyme as she does.

Then she wafts over to the cabinet and starts to pull out more materials. The bottom cabinet is refrigerated, and puffs vapor and chill into the air around her.

[paidinbeer]

Orc continued to sob on his back, trying to turn his head so he wasn't choking on the dribble coming out of his nose.

"I'm sorry I killed her. I'm sorry I killed that sick boy." He confessed, "But I'm not sorry about Aunamee. He needed to be stopped!"

[pillowmania]

"It does," he says, his voice soft. Reverent, even. It does sound like one of his stories. The boy is a tragic hero who has yet to pay his dues. He is torn up by guilt. Murderous instincts.

(No, not murderous instincts, innocent instincts like he doesn't know his own strength, like he doesn't understand things, like he's still just a child-- like Michal --)

Without his drugs, these thoughts would break Katurian down. But instead he stands tall. He laughs between his teeth.

"I like this," he says. "There's a lot to work with."

He drags his fingers up Orc's forehead like little spiders.

"Where did you hit her? And the boy."

[paidinbeer]

He writhed under the touch, thick neck straining like somehow he could pull himself off the table by tension alone.

"I-I hit her in the head with a bat...and I broke the kids spine I think...I don't know I was drunk." He moaned wishing he could curl up into a ball.

"Please. Kill me or let me go or...something. Anything."

[fearisinthemind]

In the background, Penny lets this tragic confessional play out. She arranges vials and syringes as if she's setting a table. She says nothing, but she rolls up her sleeves and ties her hair back tighter as she works, mixing something inside a vial.

[pillowmania]

"How could you call that an accident?" he asked. "Hitting someone with a baseball bat."

Although his voice was still soft, still sweet, he increased the pressure on Orc's forehead. His nails dug into the rock. It reminded him of his childhood, digging holes in the schoolyard. It reminded him of burying his parents.

(-- no, none of these things, remember he's a writer, think about texture, think about theme --)

"Breaking someone's spine. You wanted to kill them."

[paidinbeer]

"NO!" He burst with a booming panic. "NO I DIDN'T! I WAS JUST DRUNK!"

His body shook like an earthquake as he began to sob.

"I didn't mean to! I really didn't! And she seemed fine when she left just dizzy! But they said her brain got all swollen and...and...god. God why?!" Tears were lost in the cracks of rock on his face as he strained his muscles against the drugs and the straps of the bed.

[pillowmania]

The tears fascinated Katurian. They were like little rivers against the rocks.

(-- like the tale of the town on the river, like the little crippled boy, like a small box filled with toes, are you telling me you don't know that if you chop the toes off a little boy and put razors down the throat of a little girl, you don't know they're gonna die? --)

He shivered, the movement so sudden and overwhelming that for a moment he couldn't speak. This happened to him, now and again, when his memories fought against the drugs like the rough ocean fighting against a boat. Katurian was seldom violent, not like Penny, but it was times like this when it slipped out of him.

He shoved his fingers into Orc's mouth, staying above and away from his teeth. He dug his nails into his gums.

"I'd say," he said, the words slipping through his teeth as he dug, dug, dug, "you need a redemption story."