Demons, live on

[molotov]

Who| Molotov and open, prompts for Clemmy-clem and Tom
What| Moping and trying to pull her shit back together
Where| The bar / D6 / D10
When| Between the Arena's end and the Crowning
Warnings/Notes| Nothing special?

I. She absolutely does not make it a habit to hang around the lobby bar. Molotov generally takes her drinks in privacy, in VIP rooms or in the Capitol's fanciest restaurants, where she can't be bothered by looky-loos and the paparazzi. And besides, she can only drink her own endorsed vodka in public, which can get a little boring when you have to always look happy drinking it.

But sometimes, a woman really just needs a giant glass of vodka on the rocks accompanied by the endless drone of the lobby and its activity.

She's drinking and chainsmoking and watching some insipid Capitol soap opera (since it's about three in the afternoon), but then one of Brock's beer commercials comes on and she turns her head away.


II. Molotov has always been shit at apologies. She doesn't give them, she rarely accepts them, and she hates the concept of them. But she hates guilt gnawing at her more, and while she doesn't take Arena kills very seriously, snapping Clementine's neck had managed to touch some small place inside of Molotov that she'd thought was long dead, withered by almost three decades of militaristic bloodshed.

It didn't take much to get an Avox to let her into Clementine's room during the day, while the girl was gone. It was easy to set up the gifts, to have everything laid out perfectly and beautifully. She sets the soft pink stuffed bunnies just so, as if they've been waiting for their friend to return. The handmade dress is fussed with until it hangs the way Molotov likes it on its dress form. A miniature china tea set already arranged for a tea party.

It's a precious little tableau, and Molotov leaves it that way, going to sit on the sofa in the common area and read a magazine. The only sign of who it's all from is a small notecard propped against the seat obviously meant for Clementine, as the other is occupied by the largest bunny.

The note bears a tiny, embossed version of Molotov's logo, the same one slapped on her endorsements and magazine spreads.

I'm sorry.

- Molotov


III. She's been staying with Tom more and more since coming back, since losing her fight against some kind of horrible snake beast man that she still hasn't identified, that still haunts her in nightmares that leave her soaked in sweat and waking in terror. She saw the Cornucopia trap for what it was, and was ripped to shreds for it, for trying to dodge until the others had torn each other apart enough for her to sweep in.

She can't spend time on Six, not with Clementine. Brock's failure to return haunts the rest of the Center, where she could tell time by his presence in the gym or at the bar with groupies, or when he left each week to go to the zoo, hoping she'd follow even when she never did.

It makes a knot in her stomach, that maybe they could have finally be friends and he was taken away before she could extend herself that far.

Only Tom's bed is a safe zone, at least when she's awake, and with so much focus on Tony, she's left free and she finds herself inclined to spend as much time as possible there, even when she has to stay alone.

He likes his holographic wall set to the beach, and she can't stand her preferred blizzard anymore, so in the evenings, she stretches out in the sheets and watches the same thunderstorm every night until she falls asleep.

Comments

[pimpcanes]

He knows that she misses Brock, that there's a ghost of negative space walking through the Tribute Center in her mind, and it stokes in him ugly hot coals of jealousy, made all the worse for competing against someone in absence. It's driven a bit of a wedge between them, the sort that neither of them really address because Tom cloaks his anger in passive-aggression and mild snippiness rather than outright derision or anger. During the day they have their petty squabbles - Brock, the fact that Tom still hasn't used certain words for Molotov, whether whiskey is better than vodka.

But at night there's no anger between them. At night, he wraps his arms around her and keeps her warm with the heat of his body, his mouth in her hair, his breath around her ear, feeling like she is a mermaid in his arms, lithe and willowy, when she stretches in their soft sheets. He strokes her head.

"Trouble sleeping?"

[molotov]

She doesn't like that they argue over Brock, over an attachment to someone who consumed more than half of her life and, futhermore, was a connection to her home world. It makes her worse, more angry, because she feels slighted that Tom wants to be possessive when he won't reciprocate her feelings out loud.

The whiskey versus vodka argument is a different matter entirely.

Molotov has gotten slimmer from lack of desire to eat, or really even do much of anything besides lie in this bed. She still runs, though she now opts to run through the city, down miles and miles of road until the buildings space out and there are more trees than concrete. She returns to the Center only to climb back in bed and dread Tom picking his little fights, then she repeats the whole cycle the next day.

He speaks and she glances over her shoulder, dark circles under her eyes. She settles back into the pillow and sighs before rolling in his arms. "Like always."

[pimpcanes]

"You know I worry for you."

Molotov has unearthed in Tom a certain tendency to fuss, to try and cover for their real friction by focusing on the symptoms. He won't relent on being peevish about Brock but he'll order her the finest dinner and massage her feet. He hovers over her as she sleeps like an owl at the sill. It's that fine line between caring and controlling, and he dangles his feet over both sides.

He gives her shoulder a squeeze and sits up in the bed, resting his back against the headboard and pulling her to his lap. "Come on, out with it. If I didn't know you better I'd think you were depressed."

[molotov]

She lets him move her, resting halfway in his lap with her cheek to his chest, and she shrugs a little. "Things just don't feel right since I got back. I don't know."

Molotov always pushes him away before he can get too controlling, before she feels like his lasso is narrowing around her neck so that he can stable her and break her in. But she's more pliant late at night when she's tired and drained and curled up with him.

"This Arena should have been mine, and then... I don't care that you don't like it, it hurts that... that he isn't here. That he didn't come back. He was part of my world, my real one back home, you understand that, don't you? It was sort of like having a link to everything I was taken away from, my father and my business, everything. And I wasn't even the one who got to kill him."

She sighs and closes her eye, frowning. "And I can't stop dreaming about that thing."

Her death this time had lacked the violent beauty of her previous ones, impaling herself or being decapitated. This time it had been gruesome and terrifying, at the hands and fangs and claws of a mutt that shrieked at her in Tom's voice, tore her apart and drenched itself in her blood and bits of her flesh.

Molotov doesn't have the experience with real monsters like that, abominations, that would let her cope with being killed by one. Sure, she'd had run-ins with ghosts and womanacondas and tiger men, but this was different.

[pimpcanes]

He sits back, absentmindedly stroking her hair as she talks, glad that she isn't looking up at him when she mentions Brock because he glowers when she does, his proud brow becoming a gargoyle-ish overhang, but he doesn't say anything or tense up.

He tries to imagine what it would be like to lose a connection to his world about whom he was ambivalent, but there are always people from his world here, the twelve year-old and the celebrity superheroine and the pink-haired teenager, reminding him that his place was not one of fiction. That whatever he accomplished was not something he only dreamed up, that if they were called to it, others could attest to his notoriety.

It makes it easier to swallow Brock's presence. And absence.

His deaths have, likewise, been cleaner. He hasn't been ripped to shreds, not here, always bleeding from a single knife-wound.

"I didn't expect you to be the kind of woman to let monsters into your head," he says softly, craning his neck forward and kissing the crown of her head. "Look, I don't - I don't like us quarreling. I don't like the squabbling. We could stop, you know."

[molotov]

She's quiet for a moment, because it's hard, to actually talk about her feelings and what's wrong, to get it off her chest instead of suffering through it until she can bury it down in the pit of her stomach and repurpose it as fury later on.

He kisses her head and she shrugs. "I don't think I would, except... it had your voice, you know. Because you were already dead. So the whole time, I could only hear you, and it hurt so much. Besides, I don't spend much time with things like that in my world. We have them, but that is super-science, usually I have nothing to do with it."

Molotov sighs and holds his arm where it's wrapped around her. "You are the one picking the fights," she says quietly, knowing that it's only partially true. She doesn't pick fights over him not having said it, but it makes her tense and curt and distant, which starts the arguments.

[pimpcanes]

Tom doesn't tell her that back in his world, there was an evil that wore his face, his body, that ripped up his best friend and broke a little boy's bones, that he can't abide being blamed for something he didn't do and yet he knows it's impossible to forgive because it's a wound that doesn't even have permission to exist in her own psyche.

He holds her a little tighter, instead. "It's all just fear, though. Fear just the same. You've just spent so long without honest-to-God fear that you don't remember how to handle it."

She'll put herself back together, day by day, reassuring herself of her insurmountability. That's how people like them do these things, when they're hurt. They patch themselves back together, alone, and then stride out as if they aren't still bleeding.

"We're both picking fights." Which is, again, only partially true. The truth lies in the middle between them.

[molotov]

Molotov doesn't answer that, can't admit out loud that she was afraid, that she still is. That the fear lurks in her subconscious and makes her wake up in a cold sweat at night with some monstrous version of Tom's voice shrieking in her ears.

She can only idly pluck at a string on his pajama pants, near the waistband, readjusting her face against his chest as he tightens his arms around her. It makes her sigh and relax just a little more, with all his warmth around her and one of her arms on his bicep.

"Well, it's your fault." It's mumbled petulantly, like a child refusing to admit guilt without directly lying.

[pimpcanes]

He knows she can't. They're too alike, the two of them. It's why they work well together but also stumble in supporting each other. But her cold sweats and jumpiness communicate to him where words can't.

"If you say so," he says, not like a child like her but like a teenager shutting down an argument by walking from it. It's not settled between them, he knows it's not, and for a few moments he just holds her and listens to her breathing and considers the tool he has, the atomic bomb that would shift their relationship towards a more peaceful future.

The hell with it. He deploys.

"I do love you, Molotov Cocktease."

[smarterthanthem]

Going into her room is an experience. There's so much pink that what's left of the young girl Clem once was is squeeing in delight. Everything from the decor to the stuffed animals, to the very pretty dress and even the tea party set leaves her in a state of wonder. Though Clementine at twelve would have been probably too old to play at tea parties even if the dead hadn't risen she's still so tempted, just for a moment, to pretend she's eight years old and without a care in the world all over again.

Taking it all in means she doesn't find the note for a little while but when she does... when she does she doesn't know what to think. Clementine angry about that still, of course she is and a whole bundle of presents isn't going to sooth that hurt completely.

Molotov, however well meaning, took her choice away. She made that choice for Clem, killed her regardless of what Clementine wanted because she thought it would be better for her. Because she though Clementine wasn't capable of surviving. Yet... Clementine hadn't expected this from Molotov at all, up until now Clementine had never thought of her as a woman who regretted anything. She always seemed so confident in what she did.

It's perplexing. It's both not good enough and at the same time out of the blue. Clementine shakes her head and heads back out into the common area with the little card in hand, walking and stopping in front of Molotov, holding onto her resolve as she did.

"Apologies work better when you say them in person, you know."

[molotov]

Molotov flicks through her magazine, doesn't look up or change her expression in any way. She's a woman who can barely handle emotions she's used to, let alone ones as foreign as guilt and regret. She's supposed to be a machine, efficient and cold, and yet Clementine snapped something inside of her that she hadn't really known was there.

She doesn't know how to apologize. She knows how to buy things, how to write the words down, how to express herself without being there. She doesn't know how to say things out loud.

"And if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride," she answers, eye scanning an article that she's not reading or absorbing. Her foot bounces and her voice is normal, almost indifferent, but it's too far out of her reach to look this child in the eye and explain herself. Particularly in this situation where one of them had to die, and Clementine was probably going to die just from having gone through the river.

Molotov pauses on an advertisement, a picture of herself, and fights the urge to crumple the page.

"Sometimes we have to take what we get."

[smarterthanthem]

"The stuff is nice." Clementine says next, because it's true. She appreciates all of it and the effort behind but at the same time she can't just let what happened pass. "Thank you, for it."

Her lips press together as she watches Molotov flick through her magazine. She doesn't know that the casual appearance is put on or not, she's not as good as a spy is at reading people. Clementine trusts her gut more often than not.

"If you're sorry then why did you do it?" this is what it comes down to. "You didn't have to."

[molotov]

"You're welcome. The dress is one of a kind, made by the designer who does my clothing line. I helped design it for you."

There's something delicate about the way she says that, as if it's meaningful to her, a kind of effort that she wouldn't put in for anyone else. She's still staring down at the magazine as if she's reading, but her eye isn't moving, isn't scanning words or even focussing on pictures.

"That's the game, isn't it? Only one person can win. Besides, you probably would have died of exposure. You were soaked to the bone and it was going to be night in only a few hours. You would have frozen to death."

Molotov sighs.

"I did it because I want to win as much as anyone else. I could have let the elements pick you off, or some beast, or someone else. But at the end of the day, I didn't want you to suffer, and... and I knew that I could save you from real pain, if you were going to die anyway."

[smarterthanthem]

"It's really pretty." she'll actually probably even wear it. Whatever feelings Clementine might harbour towards Molotov herself she doesn't want to waste something like that. This city's already full of too much waste.

It actually drives her and the other survivors a little crazy.

"Well yeah, that's hard to forget." It's actually a relief to hear Molotov tell her it was in the name of winning, not just out of some weird attempt at mercy which Clementine never asked for. "It wouldn't have been the first time I lived through falling in a river." She didn't even fall, or get washed downstream to wake up on the side of a bank this time. Living in a zombie apocalypse gives you weird standards like that.

"Doing it because you wanted to win... I get that. I know my chances are small next to people like you and that I probably won't win, but saying you did it for my benefit is... you did it without considering what I wanted."

[molotov]

She shrugs and finally looks up, though it's more toward the side than toward Clementine. Like there's something just over Clementine's shoulder that's fascinating.

"What you wanted doesn't really matter. I want to win, and that means that everyone else has to die, even people I care for. But I won't lie and say that I didn't want you to go quickly. Peacefully. If all I cared about was the crown, then I could have let you fight, could have stabbed you or slit your throat and left you to bleed out. I could have just paralyzed you and then thrown you back in the water to drown. But you don't deserve any of that. You deserved for it to just be over."

Being able to save a little girl that suffering, that meant something to her. Because even if the kill was done in the name of the game, she wasn't going to stoop to torturing a child.

[smarterthanthem]

"At least you're honest, I guess." Clementine's not going to forgive Molotov for it still. She notices how the woman doesn't look directly at her through the explanation.

She kept her arms folded and stayed standing, "Why do you want to win so bad that you'd do that? You know you still won't get out of here." winning was just an illusion of freedom, another level in the gilded cage the Capitol kept them in. Sure, you got to stop going through the arena's but being willing to do that at the cost of killing your friends... Clementine can't imagine that.

Seeing people she cares for die is her worst nightmare. Especially, as was so often the case, when they died protecting her.

[molotov]

"Why do you want to win?" Molotov counters, shrugging. "I play the game because it's good for me. Because I like winning. If I am to be stuck here, I want it to be with comfort, with the power to my name that I am used to."

She pulls out a cigarette and lights it, taking a long drag before exhaling and continuing.

"Look, this isn't anything new to me. Killing people for a living, I did that already, so you are never going to make me feel bad about it. But I don't go after kids. I just don't. That is the part of this that's new. And I told you, if you were going to die -- and you were -- I wanted to make it quick and painless. That's all.

[voiceinthephone]

Venus' words remained with Phil well after their initial Arena meeting, about Molotov's past experiences with killing children. He would not have given anyone his was no more evident when she killed Clementine, quick, painless but still brutal. Before, he merely knew her in passing but every claim and rumor was proven true in one swoop. That and Black Tom's reputation of being outright villainous, enough to sacrifice anyone for victory.

Gray did his best to keep his observing as discreet as possible, enjoying a glass of bourbon at the bar as he read his book. Was he biting more than he could handle? Probably but that reaction to the ad? That seemed sincere. Again, he wasn't a mind reader, and Molotov's reputation preceded her anyways.

[hope this is all right?]

[molotov]

Molotov had actually never killed a real child before Clementine. Dave and Eponine weren't children, they were adults carrying weapons that they were capable of using. And to anyone who had watched Molotov kill Clementine, it was obvious that it had deeply affected her, immediately and in the moment.

She knows it came across that way because the footage plays pretty much every time she or Clementine are mentioned. Close ups of Molotov washing a tiny corpse's face, smoothing out her hair, lying her delicately in the flowers. Holding her with a look of anguish.

Clementine would have frozen to death, anyway. She was soaking wet and it was getting dark.

Molotov glitters in the atmospheric lighting of the bar, dressed in a sharply tailored black pantsuit covered in black beading, the legs tight and sheer except for the designs that sparkle. She takes another deep drink from her glass before turning back to the television, one foot bouncing in a way she doesn't seem to notice.

She can tell she's being watched. The man she only really knows from passing in the Suite isn't much of a match for her twenty-five years of espionage-trained senses. But she doesn't care so much. Let him stare, for whatever reason he wants to. Maybe he's just wondering where she's been -- after all, she's been staying in Ten pretty much since the Arena ended.

[voiceinthephone]

As someone who knew what it was like to cradle a dead child, Phillip had to recognize just how painful it was to see Molotov carry Clementine, and care for that thankfully temporary death. How gutwrenching it was to see the spy's face...At least Clem wasn't in a dumpster, discarded like a broken toy, bruised and mangled. He would've thanked her for being so delicate with her had he not seen what happened before.

This put a lot of what Venus had told him in conflict: was she as merciful with other kids, or was this one a special case? Well, what better way to find out than going over there and meeting her off the Arena? Less chance of death. He put his book in his pocket and stood up to meet her, he'd never seen her for more than a few seconds before she disappeared in the elevator.

"Molotov Cocktease, I hope I'm saying it right," he greeted her, smile dimmed from what was going through his mind, but regardless welcoming to another D6 Tribute.

[molotov]

She's tossing back vodka like it's water, and it doesn't seem to be affecting her very severely. She feels slightly better, maybe, although she still looks as dour as ever while she lights a new cigarette. It's hard to be out in public right now, pretending like she isn't still mixed up over Clementine's death and Brock's disappearance, about the self-righteous assholes in the Center who call her "child murderer" under their breath without taking into account everything else.

Her own death had been gory and horrific and painful. She's glad to have spared Clementine that kind of pain, even if no one else can appreciate it.

The man from her Suite appears at her side, and she frowns at him, mostly because that's her natural reaction to most people.

"Mmn," she answers noncommittally, arching her eyebrow at him as the bartender appears to refill her drink. "You're... that guy. Something with an R, maybe?"

She's not being callous, she's just so unconcerned with him that she never bothered to learn his name.

[voiceinthephone]

Under better circumstances, Phil would be impressed: that is a lot of vodka if the bottle's slowly whittling contents are to be believed. Then again, she's probably Russian, and those constitutions put even a hardy American drunk to shame.

"Eh, it's Phil," he shrugged, pretty used to blending in rather than sticking out. And it helped that he was, outside the Arena, pretty harmless in the physical aspect. "I knew there was one more District Six tribute I hadn't met."

Whether Molotov managed to see the moment Venus relayed to Phil her kill list is unknown but he came here for a purpose: to ask why. Death Arena or not, why give Clem the virtue of a beautiful death while every other got slaughtered.

[molotov]

Molotov actually watches very little of the Games, unless she needs to study a particular person. She's studied Venus, but not since killing her, a fight she relishes dearly and holds like oxygen in her blood, wears like a medal around her neck, that she decimated that upstart bitch and everyone saw it. There's no more comparison between them -- Molotov won the war.

"I don't stay in the Suite very often," she says simply, which is true. Since her return, she's been practically living with Tom on the tenth floor, and even when she does stay in her own room, she's rarely there for more sleeping; she's busy, always has an interview or a photoshoot or a meeting, or else she trains downstairs for hours on end.

"Nice to meet you."

[voiceinthephone]

"Likewise." Molotov really didn't gain a fan when Phillip saw the two women fought it out, adding fuel to the reasons why he'd avoided Molotov's presence up until today. Venus ended up losing around the same time he kicked the bucket from two shots, but she went down fighting.

"You really...didn't plan on that happening, did you?" Gray stated outright as a quick preview of Clementine's run in the Arena flashed on the screen. Though he had yet to meet the little girl, something about the spy's absolutely destroyed reaction meant that she wasn't that desperate to win. Or maybe that part was an act for sponsors. No, that wasn't pretending.

[molotov]

They say there's two sides to every story for a reason -- Venus had been the one to start the war, when they were in space and she attacked Molotov with her powers for very little reason. In her mind, Molotov was just paying the bitch back, and since she's outlived Venus twice now (maybe three times; she never checked on the stats from her first Arena), it's obvious who's superior between them.

She wants a crown, but more than that, she wanted to destroy the twat that dared to damage her. She's done it in the way of better publicity, more endorsements, and most importantly, annihilating Venus on camera for everyone to see.

Glancing back at the television, Molotov shrugs and takes another sip of vodka. "Only one person can win," she tells him, watching the bartender flit around. "But no, I didn't go in planning to kill her. She just had to die, like everyone else."

It's not exactly true. It's maybe the truest essence of the kill, needing Clementine dead so that she and Tom could move forward, but that something inside of her that was cracked by murdering a child, that was just as real.