thecapitol | I'll Make You Lick My Injuries [Closed]

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I'll Make You Lick My Injuries [Closed]

WHO| Penny and Guy, Penny and Bunnymund
WHAT| Penny gets her creep on.
WHEN| After Guy's exposé.
WHERE| Peacekeeper HQ.
WARNINGS| Torture, mentions of bidding.

Penny makes them wait. In a way, it's like a kindergarten teacher giving a lesson: I want you to sit in that lobby and think about what you've done. The Peacekeepers keep Bunnymund too sedated to fight back, but conscious. Penny can't do anything with someone who's asleep.

She takes them one at a time. First Guy, then Bunny. She has a holographic television sitting on her desk, and she watches it as they're brought in. She pops little candies into her mouth and smiles at whatever it is she's seeing - it's only visible from the one side. She spreads her arms over her comfy chair in front of the desk and appears for a moment like a great spider, the lines in the hardwood floor of her office like a geometric, radiating web.

It's a normal office, large, with one wall taken up by windows. There are metal cabinets on another wall, and an area curtained off with cheerful blue fabric on a hanger. There's a pleasant view of the city skyline.

It's several long minutes before she says anything, during which they're allowed to say whatever they wish. This is one of her favorite parts, really. For so many people, it's the most horrifying time of their life, yet for her it's just another day. She's too important to bother with being punctual for them.

Finally she gets up. Her voice is too smooth, sterile, like a medical instrument polished to perfection. "Well, now you know who I am, don't you?"

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He was going to die. He was going to die or wish he was dead. That was how these people worked. It's nothing like back home where death was the worst that could happen to you. They had made misery into an art form (perhaps to compensate for the fact that their art was not actually an art form, as his trip to the museum the other day had proven).

The people of Panem weren't good at very much but they were good at this: intimidation and cruelty.

He just didn't understand how such a small thing could've lead to this. Correcting her on calling him 'boy.' It was such an innocent thing - at first he thought she might have just made a mistake and thought he was the wrong age and then she'd gotten smart with him and he'd reflexively been sarcastic back.

It was such a small thing, it really was.

"I - I would've spoken to you differently if I'd have known, I swear," he said. "I can't read, so I can't just look these things up to see who's who. I thought - I thought you were an escort or someone - I mean, if there are important people like you, and the escorts are acting important, it doesn't seem right to treat them like we should be treating someone like you if they're trying to make themselves seem more important than you are."

It was a feeble effort, he knew, but maybe if he could convince her that he'd made a simple mistake of not knowing the right people to treat as important, plucking a few strings of her ego might make her let it go.

These people liked to see people beg and crawl.

Edited 2014-05-13 07:48 (UTC)

They hadn't killed him yet, and that had given him time to wrangle his base instincts back under control.

All right, and they'd sedated him a lot, which had helped quiet the instincts that put him on edge in the face of capture. But he'd furthered the effect in the most passively defiant way he could, concentrating as best he could while sedated on meditation techniques to make the calm his own, at least in part.

"Not in the slightest," Bunny said, letting the effect of the sedation exaggerate his drawl. "You may not have noticed, but I'm a bit new 'round these parts."

He'd never been tortured before. No one had ever been able to keep him in one place long enough to do it. But he'd seen the ways in which humans were creative about hurting each other, and he was choosing his thoughts very carefully as a consequence.

They were positive thoughts that he was choosing, as positive as thoughts could get when they involved a certainty that he was going to hurt. They'd believe him cowed more if they got a chance to hurt him early, and he could turn that into cover. This could still become part of a strategy, even if it was a strategy that required him to suffer a bit. It wasn't as though he hadn't known suffering before.

Edited 2014-05-12 03:52 (UTC)

"You're a terrible liar."

She doesn't want to see him beg and crawl. She wants him to whimper. She wants to see him squirm as she prods fingers into wounds he doesn't even remember he has. She wants him to shudder under her touch like a tuning fork.

She looks up and stands. The train of her dress sweeps the floor behind her as she rounds the desk, tapping some of those magnetic balls that stand in a little cradle on her desk. They clack away in the background.

"Did you know that I have sisters? Had sisters. I can't use the present tense for the dead."

In a way, Penny likes it when they put up a fight. She likes to open up people as if it's a delicate surgery, picking bones from them like from a fish. She likes the struggle.

"You get arrested and you're brought to me. Who do you think I am?" She reaches over and strokes his head, the fur between his eyes and ears. "Come on. You're a smart creature, aren't you?"

She moves her hand up his ear and pinches the delicate skin there, looks at the blood vessels and the veins running through his body like roots.

"No."

He sat, fiddling with his hands, hoping she was fine with one word answers. It seemed safest to keep his answers simple.

He didn't know because he still had barely any idea who she was. Someone important, someone who tortured people for the Capitol, someone who killed the people they wanted dead, but other than that he had no idea who she was or where she came from.

"Of course you didn't." She slides her hand over his shoulder as she walks past him, owning him by the way she doesn't respect his personal space. "No one knows about my history, but they know all about yours now, don't they?"

She leans in and whispers in his ear, hot and close and full of saliva. "You're welcome for that."

Ew, creepy. Creepy creepy creepy.

He resisted the urge to squirm in his seat - or to hide under his chair - and though he was terrified, he tried his best to not show it on his face, lifting his chin slightly.

"That wasn't my history. That was one you made up."

What was her game and how was the expose supposed to tie into it?

Ironically, it's the touch to his forehead that unnerves him more than her pinching his ear. Pain he expects, pain he's prepared to deal with, but that's an intimate touch, a friends-and-family touch, and he hasn't had family or even friends that intimate in hundreds of years. He sucks in a breath of air, muscles stiff and frozen, pupils contracted involuntarily for a flash of a second, an animal response to the unwanted touch.

He tries to blend it into his noises of protest at the pain as he collects himself again. "How should I bloody well know? Do I look like I get arrested a lot?"

He exaggerates his grimace at the pain. The truth is, there's a lot he could endure, but he's not too proud to give her squirming and whining if that's her goal. He played the trickster back when he was mortal, and here, mortal again, it suits him better than the hero. For now.

"It was close enough to accurate. I even saw fit to have them put your imbecile family in there. I could have just erased them from it." She runs her hand through his hair, stepping back. "No one would have been the wiser if we'd said you'd made them up."

She paces around the back of his chair, where he can't turn his head to see her. He'll only be able to hear her slippered feet hushing their way across the hardwood floor.

"In fact, if it's easier on you, I could erase them from your mind, too. Out of mercy."

He tried his best not to shake as she ran her hand through his hair, knowing that even though she seemed quite content with his stiff-lipped inaction, that what she wanted more was a reaction.

As she slipped around the chair, he tried to keep his breathing under control, tried to ignore the hairs raising on the back of his neck.

His instinct for when predators were around was very, very strong.

But then she said what she did about memory and his blood ran as cold as the streams at the top of a mountain.

"You can't. That's not possible."

Edited 2014-05-21 06:04 (UTC)

She leans in and breathes into his ear, raising her voice slightly as she wonders if his keen sense of hearing will twinge at it.

"One doesn't have to be arrested to have a basic idea of how power works around here. Now, let me remind you, you're a Tribute, and I am the head of the Peacekeepers. Does that make it clear for your little lapine mind?"

She taps his nose and starts to walk around him.

Her voice is a purr, the burble of the tide over sea stones, something quiet belonging to something worthy of awe and caution. She looks into his eyes, her own dark and black and as pitiless as if they'd been gouged into a face of marble.

"As impossible as machines that fly? As impossible as you, dying over and over and being brought back to life? As impossible as the culture you see around you?"

She rests her fingertip on his nose, as if she's shushing his entire body. "I don't believe you're the one who tells me what's impossible, Mr. Crood."

He'd met a few people on his travels growing up but for most of it, it had been him and Belt. If she took memories of his family away, of Eep and his daughter, of Belt, he'd have nothing left.

Nothing. Just an endless expanse of hills and plains and desert, years and years of unending loneliness.

If he lost them, if he didn't at least keep his memories of Belt, what would he even be? Something broken and miserable, probably even a little crazy. His whole life would be that time he'd been alone stretched out over twenty years.

His eyes glassy, he asked, his voice pleading "What do you want from me? I said I'm sorry. I know - I know my place here, I know I'm not supposed to cause trouble. I didn't know who you were. I still can't read, I can't read to look things up to see who people are."

Oh, it does. To the sound, and her moist breath in his ear. She's certainly got a handle on getting far too into his personal space.

"Oh I get how power works around here. You do what you want, we don't, isn't that right?" He snorts anyway. "Thought you people went in for senseless brutality. What, that little dust-up with the Peacekeepers not entertaining enough for ya?"

"I do. It's the reward for brilliance here." She snaps her fingers - again, right next to his ear - and an Avox comes to wheel Bunny towards the curtains in the back, the flat table where she'll begin her work. She continues talking with all the drama of an actor.

"But little dust-ups are what I'm supposed to prevent, and as such, our paths have crossed. For your sake, I'd hope they don't cross again. For mine..."

She cackles. She's cartoonish in her glee.

"Stop making excuses." She reaches forward and smacks him, hard, right across the cheek, not in a way that will bruise but in a way that will sting. He'll walk away from here with no injuries on the outside.

She'll just raze his soul to the ground.

"You'll play along. I've put your name out among some of my acquaintances who will be happy to fill the void of your loneliness. You won't complain. You'll tell other Tributes that I was kind enough to let you off with only this. And you will show us respect."

She smirks. "You will show me respect. That's all I want."

Finally, he thinks. Frankly, if she wanted to really torture him, she could make him sit around and listen to her think so highly of her loony self a little longer.

For a brief moment while Penny isn't looking, he catches the Avox's eye, and lifts his eyebrows ever-so-slightly, rolling his eyes in Penny's direction. Get a load a' this gallah, ay mate?

The Avox may be too terrified to dismiss her, but it takes more than a mortal sociopath to unsettle him. She could take his tongue, but he's gone years without talking to anyone at a time. She could break his bones and re-set them in ways she finds interesting, but once he finds his way out of this mortality, his body will re-set - and if it doesn't, there's always magic to fall back on.

It won't take long. Even if it takes a hundred years - to him, that still won't be long.

He has to work to twist his face into a grimace of fear as she comes back into view again.

Guy recoiled from the slap, fighting back instincts to attack her back or run out of the room. That was what was so difficult about this place, having those instincts be strong but fighting back leading to more suffering and having nowhere to run to.

Then she said those words and his mind went back to that conversation he'd had with Azula during his first panicked day in the city.

"They took me away from home! They took me from my family! I already killed so they could watch - and I already died for them! What more could they want?!"

"Everything else."

"What do mean? What do you mean about your acquaintances?" he asked, voice trembling with rising terror.

Penny hasn't gotten to where she is by being easily fooled by feigned pain and fear. She knows what the two look like when they're honest, when they're not being performed but being existed in.

She isn't impressed as she gets a syringe and starts to unload it into a vein in his knee. It will start making his muscles slacker, his mind sharp but his body sluggish in a way that will feel like suffocating.

"Tell me about yourself, Rabbit."

"There are people who, I can't imagine why, are interested in getting to know you." She leans in, breathing over the back of his neck, the hair rising there despite the warmth of the room. "Intimately."

And then she giggles, that noise like a bird swallowing a worm too big for it, and gestures that the Avoxes should start taking him out. She goes and sits behind her desk, ignoring him for now for the sake of the papers in front of her.

"I'm a couple thousand years old, Sheila. You don't have the time."

He winces at the injection, then enjoys what is clearly going to be his last deep breath for a while, making a show of it. Let her dig in deep, give her a long way to drag him down. The deeper her satisfaction, the more of a cover he'll have after this.

"Besides, only my enemies call me Rabbit. And I don't have conversations with them."

"I don't appreciate being rebuffed, Rabbit." She pulls the needle out, wiggling it against his veins as she withdraws it. "When I tell you to do something, you'll do it. And if you don't, you'll spend time with me until you do."

An Avox carries in a little plastic electronic box.

Guy cringed as she breathed against his neck and then just stared ahead in incomprehension. What could she mean by that, what could she -

No. No.

The avoxes came in but he refused to let himself be ushered away.

"No. No. I - I have a mate. I have a daughter. I won't do it, you can't make me do it."

She turns, her dress sweeping across the floor like the drag net of a boat. "I can do whatever I want. That's the benefit of being me. And that includes making people behave as I see fit."

She nods to Avox. "I'm done here. Get him out."

"And I don't appreciate being tortured. Looks like nobody's getting what they want today," he drawls, slurring as the drugs take effect.

He really isn't happy about this, he has to admit. But admitting that is the first step to giving her what she wants.

"Well, except for you. You get to hurt me until I can't laugh about it anymore, right Sheila?"

Still, he grins.

"I hope you got a good night's sleep. This is going to take you a while."

Get her riled up. Get it over with.

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I'll Make You Lick My Injuries [Closed]

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