Everything you know is wrong

[beastlybeauty]

Who: Justine and Cyrus
Where: Cyrus's office.
What: Justine's the new girl in town, and she knows well enough that this won't be as easy as the people up in the Capitol like to make it seem. She's going to ask Cyrus for his notes.
When: The day of her introduction.
Warnings: None that I can think of beyond two manipulative people being put in a room together.

Justine was still dressed in an elegant white dress and little to no makeup. She found that a minimalist style suited her best--less stuff to get in her way. She smiled at everyone she passed on her way to Cyrus's office, taking note of how few people returned the smile.

Well, she had never expected this job to get off on an easy start.

She knocked on Cyrus's door, and in a lilting sing-song voice, "Oh, Cyrus! It's Justine." Of course, she put emphasis on his name. She always did.

Comments

[currupted]

Smiling at people in the halls was growing tiring. A month into his assignment, and people still hadn't started smiling back at Cyrus. He hadn't yet stopped doing it-- though he was starting to wonder if he hadn't kept it up half out of spite.

It was why he liked afternoons in his office. He liked being able to wait for people to come to him. To frown at his communicator as much as he wanted to. To pin the smile on only when someone knocked at the door. He had a stack of folders beside him that was beginning to tower over everything else on the desk, and a list of missed calls that took far too long to scroll down, but it was preferable to wandering the halls, fielding people's unfriendliness.

At the knock, he looked up, startled and not particularly happy about the interruption-- but his smile turned genuine when he heard the voice come after the knock. Not a Tribute, that was worth a smile on its own, and all the better that it was someone he knew. He stood and opened the door for her, stepping back to invite her in.

"Doctor Florbelle," he said, with friendly emphasis on the title. "How wonderful to see you-- but I'm still a minister during working hours, you know." His tone was falsely chiding - a correction made more out of duty than actual ire.

[beastlybeauty]

She gave him a dismissive wave of her hand as she swept in, eyes sparkling with humor.

"And you sound like a perfectly stuffy minister when you call me Doctor."

She leaned against his desk, propping herself on her hands and smiling at him. Intellectually, she can gather that this has probably been a difficult job for him. He had been sent in to smooth relations over with the Tributes, but she can already tell that that's completely shot. The Training Center seems to bleed resentment.

It's not going to make her job easier, either.

"I'm sure you're busy, but I was hoping to steal a moment of your time. I was hoping to learn a little bit about all the Tributes, but they haven't been particularly... forthcoming."

[currupted]

Of all the insults he'd had leveled at him in the days preceding, stuffy was among the mildest. ...And not one he could in good conscience deny, if he was honest. But it cheered him up, paradoxically - he'd take even a friendly insult, so long as it was friendly.

Cyrus had not been naive enough to expect his assignment to go smoothly. He simply hadn't expected quite the level of hostility he'd gotten. Tribute relations, he was finding, wouldn't respond to simple smoothing; in his opinion, they might do better with a good steamrolling.

He smiled at Justine, a wry quirk of his mouth. "Surprising." It wasn't remotely surprising. "Even to their physician?"

He gestured at a chair standing against the nearest wall (not far off - it was not a large office). An invitation to sit, if she wanted to. "Tell me about it. I imagine there's something I can do to help."