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]

"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."

[molotov]

It's so unexpected that she doesn't react for a moment, that she needs a pause to even begin to parse the sentence in her head. When it does finally break through, crash like a wave over her mind, she twists to look up at him, her hand clenching tight around his arm.

"You do?"

The questioning note in her voice isn't for whether he means it, but rather sheer disbelief in whether he said it. She'd sort of accepted that he had won, gotten the leverage from her, and that she was never going to have that reciprocation.

[pimpcanes]

"Aye."

He meets her eyes with her own, and for a moment it's like they're speaking on some level untouchable by vulgar air, transmitting their thoughts to each other as if by radiowave. His face is set with seriousness, a sort of somberness that sees love as some sort of inevitable fate instead of a celebration, but it's a plush and comfortable coffin nonetheless.

"Forgive an old man for not wanting to fuck it up by jumping the gun."

[molotov]

There's another moment of that silent, psychic connection, and then she moves unexpectedly fast, long arms reaching to wind around his neck as she pulls herself up and kisses him hard. One hand holds the back of his head, her fingers curling in his hair, against his scalp, and she doesn't care that he's not exhilarated to be in love, because she feels the same way -- it's just a pleasant liability, a weakness to be exploited, and yet there's nothing to be done about it.

Nothing she would do about it.

"I forgive you," she murmurs against his mouth, her chest crushed to his, holding him tight. "Never do that shit to me again."

[pimpcanes]

It's because of that that he loves her, because both of them have insides as cold and harsh as the tundra from which she comes, because the fires lit in their dark landscapes to keep them alive are also at the risk of attracting predators. He nips at her lip a bit, holding her close, stroking a hand down her supple back.

"It's not like it was enjoyable for me either," he says when the kiss finally breaks, breath hot with the heat of her. "To be feuding like that, that is."

[molotov]

She kneels over him now, resting her weight in his lap, angled so that she can keep pecking at his mouth even as they talk. One of her hands runs along his shoulder, down his arm, then back up, idly, almost subconsciously.

She feels like a weight's been lifted off of her.

"You brought that on yourself." Her nose brushes against his, just barely. "Don't be touchy that you got what you deserved."

[pimpcanes]

"You like me when I'm touchy," he says, gentle brushing his fingertips over that place on the small of her back that gets her spine to arch whenever he touches it just so. Any power he holds over her is illusory, he knows - he feels like Apollo trying to hold onto a shapeshifting nymph sometimes, only he's lucky enough that his nymph doesn't want to escape. He's too old and experienced to believe his love could really tether her if she did.

"Do you want to walk outside for a bit? Would it help you sleep any?"

[molotov]

Her back curves, involuntarily, and she holds his face to kiss him again, more slowly. Tom may think of her as some untamable thing who's let him capture her, but she imagines him as gasoline on her fire, making her burn bigger and brighter and more dangerous to everyone else. Her other loves had been water, weak but present, dimming her flame.

"No, I don't want to walk. You're the only help I need."

[pimpcanes]

"Alright. I just wouldn't want that beautiful eye developing a dark circle under it," he says, cupping her face in both hands and kissing her as if drinking the elixir of life from a goblet, hungrily and reverently.

"Come on. Lay down and rest." He rolls her slightly so she's no longer atop him, instead nestled in blankets and against his side.

[molotov]

She holds his face too, runs her thumbs over his cheeks, and then he moves her. Molotov settles into the blankets, pulls them up a bit to more fully cocoon herself, and then she sighs, gazing at the fake thunderstorm, the one that repeats itself every few hours, every night.

Stretched out at his side, she drapes her arm backward, over his waist, and closes her eye.

[pimpcanes]

He doesn't sleep until she does, arms wrapped around her and her sleeve of blankets, breathing in the smell of her and hoping that his little confession will be a suitable Charon to ferry her to dreams. He kisses her head as she sleeps and then closes his own eyes before slipping to sleep himself.