What a Mess I Leave to Follow [Open]

[clotting]

WHO| Temple Drake and open; Temple and Linden; Temple and the D8 Staff
WHAT| Temple's back in town and being rich and obnoxious about it
WHEN| Week 2
WHERE| D8 Suite, D6 Suite and about town
WARNINGS| Anything darker than daytime alcohol use and usual Hunger Games fare will be warned for in the thread.

I. Open

The Capitol changes more in a year than the Districts do in ten, Temple knows, and yet it always feels as if she's coming back to somewhere that is fundamentally the same as it was when she left. It may get new technology and in this case, a bunch of offworlders, but its character is immutable. It's hungry and diseased and it swallows up poverty and defecates out the riches upon which the people living within it feast.

She slips into it like sugar into hot water and dissolves herself into the opulent atmosphere. She buys some new dresses, something appropriate for the weather and for living back in the fashion center of Panem, at a boutique and puts it on Gowan's credit card. She sips a fine-pressed coffee at a café and leaves the empty porcelain cup on the table for someone else to bus. She shops and loses interest when the salespeople speak of warranties, because she doesn't care if anything lasts her twelve months when she's probably going to replace it out of boredom in ten.

Occasionally, when she thinks no one's looking, she'll pull out a needle and thread and a handkerchief she's working on and add a few details to the embroidering she's doing. Birds have become a recent motif for her, although she doesn't want to admit why; on all her handkerchiefs lately they stare out at her, beady-eyed, or take flight holding, she imagines, her daughter's name in their talons. They named her after a bird, although Temple has yet to put that particular species to thread and fabric.

Aside from that nimble-fingered hobby of hers (aside from the skill inherent to how quickly and precisely she does it, which reveals that it once was never a hobby but a living), she seems every bit a Capitolite, bidding her Avox carry things or pausing at a store to examine the magazine covers that tell her belatedly the fashion trends she's already adopted. Bailey, her five year-old son, runs up to any of the already-slain Tributes he can find and pesters them, and sometimes Temple has to apologize for that. Occasionally she sees an old acquaintance (a Mentor, Staffer, a Capitol elite she's rubbed elbows with) and waves at them.


II. Linden

Temple's leaving when Linden's door opens, her dainty heels clicking away at the hallway tile, the sleek mechanical lines of the District Six decor. When she turns, it's with a familiar smile, none of the hesitation Linden feels upon seeing her. Temple's vices are not ones that other people introduce to her, but something innate, something that lies below her waist and under her breast; if it weren't Linden she acted them out on like some strange debased ritual feverish prayer, it would be upon someone else.

The smile only tautens a little when she sees how good he looks, and she hates herself for that, because she should be happy that he looks so healthy. And yet she can't deny that her first impulse is dread, and that with every flush of good pallor to his cheeks he runs away from her.

Temple, unlike some of the other Victors, doesn't seem to age. Maybe it's because she's merely twenty-five and has seemed twenty-eight since she was eighteen, but despite giving birth to two babies and drinking harder than most of the men she knows, plus using old tobacco cigarettes habitually, she appears exactly as Linden last saw her, aside from a slightly different hairstyle and makeup in spring colors rather than fall. Maybe it's that in taking her as a wife, Gowan has frozen her in time, removed her from the ravages of reality with a wedding ring that could feed her entire District for a decade.

"Oh, I wasn't expecting you to get my note for another few hours." She comes back for Linden, falling forward in her high heels with each step as if he is his own pull of gravity, and takes him by the shoulders and kisses each cheek. "They've called me back to Mentor and it's killing me already. I don't know how you do it."


III. D8 Staff

Like Swann, Temple announces her appointment to the District Eight Staff with gift baskets. Unlike Swann, Temple's giftbaskets are of a decidedly more adult flair. They're packed with hard liquor and packs of designer cigarettes along with one almost token jar of instant cakemix. Unlike Swann's, they weren't lovingly assembled by hand so much as placed together by a harried Avox, but they're glutted with the same sense of excessive wealth.

There's one for each Staffmember - Swann, Jolie and Samuel - and Temple's toyed with the idea of getting them for the Tributes before her attention span flitted away like some common sparrow. Now she sits in the District Eight common area, having practically marked the area with her perfume, which is heady and feminine. Her dress is tight and makes her look less like a grown woman than a trophy or an award, and she takes off her gloves only to readjust her slash of bright lipstick in a hand-mirror with pearl inlay.

An Avox scuttles back and forth, placing some of Temple's belongings in one of the Mentor rooms - including belongings for a small child, toys and miniature furniture, a rocking horse from rosewood. Bailey won't be living here, of course, and Temple herself will only be sleeping in the Tribute Center when it becomes inconvenient to travel back to the expensive neighborhoods in the Capitol for the evening, but she's a recently bereaved mother. Will anyone really hold it against her for wanting to occasionally take her surviving child to work?

"Oh, hello. There's something for you on the table," she'll say even before she glances up from readjusting her makeup when the elevator dings.

Comments

[dead_black_eyes]

That actually startles a soft laugh out of Linden; Temple's one of the few people who can do this, give a somber moment that little spark of humor that carries him out of malaise and into a reason to be again, if only for a little while. That's how it had been when she'd read to him that day, her slight weight disrupting the precise and flawless lines of a bed seldom used as Linden had listened from the floor, laughing in the wrong places, sometimes just at an odd turn of phrase or change in Temple's cadence. Then another would startle him into serious silence again, her voice smearing his emotions around like a child with so much paint on her fingers.

Wasted, in the real world, this world, and the next.

"No one at all?" he asks; every angle he sees it from seems to reveal a new detail. It must have taken many hours. The word deserving twists something in his gut; so much of their justification for their trysts was that decent people just didn't win the Hunger Games, and if they deserved anything it was mutual ruin and not anything even close to delicate beauty.

His shoulders raise stiffly in a way they never have before at her touch and her kiss. "Have you finished moving in?" he asks, an effort to derail before the affection, need and heat grow too difficult to turn away from. How easy would it be to ask her inside to catch up, lock the door, and get reacquainted? Not terribly, with those books in full view reminding him of the reason he'd started studying sign language in the first place.

[clotting]

One person, perhaps, in need of delicate beauty, someone too innocent to have tarnished her worthiness, but that person is dead and in a beautiful mahogany box only two feet tall. Temple feels her heart constrict, wondering what other simple sentences her daughter can hide in.

"No one at all." It is, perhaps, that small way that she and Linden see small pleasures. For her, because the small indulgences don't matter in the long run, they're a safe and even deserved peccadillo, like living off sugar when one can never have meat. She can treat herself to the minor whims of Gowan's credit card because it's all ephemeral, the same way they can bask in a high. Or could, before Linden's body adjusted from enjoying to simply needing to function.

"Mostly. I'm still setting up my room in the Suite. I hope they don't mind that I'm bringing some things for Bailey, I just don't really want him to be with a nanny on weekends. I'd rather he be with me."

She nearly invites him to see it with her, but she can sense a hesitation in him. If she finds herself wanting to overcome it, she will, because Linden's willpower is not, she thinks, as strong as his affection for her (or rather, their mutual guilt and shame, which they dress up and parade about as companionship).

She peeks around his shoulder, dodging to the side like an owl. "What are you reading these days?" He's always doing a bit better when he's reading.

[dead_black_eyes]

Linden thinks he rememebers a box like that from the story they read that day. It had actually been one of the parts he'd laughed at, breathless and helpless and turned on his side. It wasn't so much the thought of a child dying that had put him in such a state; no small part of it was the drugs, of course, but there was also the concept of a child being shadowed by death seeming so novel and tragic in an otherwise beautiful world. Even without the Games, young death is not unusual in the outlying Districts. Linden had friends at the factory who climbed inside machines to clean them and were torn to shreds as a result of a foreman not doing his job properly, only to be hosed off later like grime from a windshield because there was nothing to bury.

You have to understand. These machines are many tons, designed to assemble other machines that weigh many tons. Forty-nine pounds of skin and bone splatters and snaps like a bundle of twigs. So inconvenient to stop the whole assembly line for a bundle of twigs.

Hell, there's a reason so many District 6 songs are sad, or else imbued with such morbid humor that other Districts blanch and look away when faced with it. A Disrict that paints their faces white with black teeth and eye sockets for three days bridging October and November, wearing the knuckle bones of departed relatives strung up with twine and beads, might seem barbaric or callous in the Capitol. But it comes down to the fact that when death is so prevalent, it has to be a part of life, or else swallow up everything in icy, black despair. Deathdays is also a heavy drinking holiday span, incidentally, but they worry about that on November 3.

Little coffins, so drink today, hear the voices from the other side and feel like there's more than sand and smoke around and awaiting you.

"They won't mind," is his instant response. "Young children are unusual in the Tower but that doesn't mean it's technically against the rules, and I can't imagine anyone would try to separate you from him now."

From anything familiar and comforting, really, and Linden has always been that to her. Is it fair to rip it away? Of course not... the timing is terrible for trying to change his life, and that is not her fault. The "affection" wins out, and as she cranes her neck around curiously to look at his increasingly dilapidated suite, he stands aside in unresisting retreat. If she wants to come inside, he won't stop her.

Only fair, to return the favor.

"Oh..." he glances back at the books. "I'm learning sign language. There's a Tribute I'm friends with who can't speak, so... I thought it would save her some time and trouble if she didn't have to write every time she wants to communicate with me."

If Temple has seen the latest issue of Celebrus, she knows the rumors surrounding Linden and Nill, and he knows that even with a close friend, he has to deny that there's any weight to them. Nill is, officially, his friend, and therefore one less obstacle to things going back to the way they were. It leaves an ugly gash on his soul to think about not even being allowed that excuse for salvation.

[clotting]

"I just hope that he doesn't learn too many offworld curses from the Tributes. Although maybe it's better he learns those than actual curses." As if the places the offworlders come from are artificial, paper lands lacking the depth of veracity of Panem.

Eight is not accustomed to sudden deaths like Six is; they face a different sort of reaper, one that invites itself into the home and breaks the body down from the inside, fossilizing bones into arthritis, choking the lungs with the particles of sandblasting denim, nursing cancers from the carcinogenic dyes that keep the colors saturated for the textiles they export. Their Horseman is not War but Pestilence, the sweatshop a hotbed of disease and heatstroke, with chemicals that ripped holes in the skin, fumes from lye and bleach, vermin and insects underfoot spreading malaria.

Temple was lucky. She only ever risked her hands with her embroidery, mostly from the safety of her home rather than working the finger-stealing looms or machines in the shops. She looks forward to joint issues, clubbed fingers, stiff, numb knuckles, but not to lung problems, not to heatstroke or losing her hands entirely in the machines. But she knows death, if by a different face than Linden's.

"She's not an Avox, is she?" Temple's face goes taut and narrow, not from jealousy - her trysts with Linden are with the mutual understanding that they are making no claim on each other, that they are both trapped enough already that they don't need encouragement - but from a sort of prejudiced concern. She doesn't want to see Linden getting dragged into something that could end with him Avoxed; she's well aware what already happened to his family.

Selfishly, the idea of Linden being Avoxed irritates her, offends her, not for his sake but because hasn't she lost enough lately? Must she lose a friend too?

[dead_black_eyes]

"It's not the words themselves that mean anything. The intent behind them is what's important," Linden says. He's said similar things to it recently concerning other vices: it's not the drugs, they're just a symptom for a deeper problem. Trauma, evil memories and desperate, primal fears drive a person to glass and syringes, which compound problems and then it's just a hopeless circle toward an inevitable drain. "The fact that you care says you're a good mother, though, and anyone can see that you're raising him well."

It's substantial for small talk. Any old friend would say as much, Linden thinks, and then his eyes widen when he asks if his new friend is an Avox.

"Of course not," he replies, suitably shocked by the notion. "That's..." he shudders, affected and uncomfortable. "No, definitely not. Just an offworlder with no voice." His expression evens out, relaxes, and the hand not holding the handkerchief shifts and re-forms dextrously into several shapes. "It's helpful, though. Cathartic, it gives me something to work on and think about, and... move toward constructively. Keeps my mind off of other things."

[clotting]

Temple doesn't respond to that, doesn't accept or even acknowledge his praise for her parenting, and instead just goes dead behind the eyes for a second, an unwitting and unwilling symptom of her guilt and disagreement. He's used to that expression by now, she's sure, the subtle shift where her gaze dims like a spotlight shut off, where she looks no warmer or livelier than a beautifully-painted mannequin. It's the face that won an Arena, that stared at the sky when she was violated time and again, that clicks into place when her mind wanders too far from her body in space and time.

If she hadn't married Gowan, she wouldn't have had a baby that would have died in the crib, or at least not this baby. It was his genes but it was her choice to bear the child, to marry him in the first place, not for love or even wealth or prestige but because it allowed her to write herself into a different story than a District Eight victim. They told her her daughter didn't suffer. She feels like that's too comforting to really believe.

"Ah. I don't know any of the offworlders yet," she says, visibly comforted by the clarification. "Bailey watches the Games all the time - he loves the trolls, they're his favorites, he's so disappointed that there are none from Eight - but I haven't really...I never really got into the habit."

Her eyes flick over to his hand as it goes through motions like a sorcerer in front of her, enchanting and esoteric. "From the looks of you, I'd say it's your new drug. You look good, Linden. Better than I've seen you in years."

[dead_black_eyes]

He's seen her look that way before, and it makes him uneasy. Though he was one of the people who looked away at viewing parties for her Arena and supported calls to turn it off when the demented whims of a brutal Career became too unbearable, the images were relentless and he couldn't blind himself to the full extent of her torture. It makes him want to reach for her and call her back... or to let her go somewhere better. He can never figure out which would benefit her most, and indecision subsequently paralyzes him.

He starts to gingerly raise a hand, then curls and lowers it.

"So Bailey loves Trolls? District 6 has one, this go-round. Karkat Vantas. His mouth isn't what I'd call child-friendly, but he's a good person." Linden averts his glance when she says she's not in the habit of watching the Games; who could blame her? Most Mentors don't like it. It's more grim obligation than recreation.

He seems encouraged when she says that he's looking good. "Do you really mean that?" he asks, sounding like he's not sure he can truly believe it. "Because I don't feel it. I'm constantly tired lately and I have been sleeping a lot, so... that's probably what you're seeing."

A shadow of worry slips over his features, then vanishes when he changes the subject.

"So... Gowan didn't accompany you to the Tower. Is he staying in the Capitol?"

[clotting]

She clicks back into place, like two lenses coming back into focus. Her face brightens again into that sort of blithe pleasantness, and for a moment it seems like the sun has come back from behind a cloud.

"If you don't mind me bringing him down to Six, I'm sure he'd love to meet him. Besides, he misses his Uncle Linden." Bailey's paternity is something that could be much speculated between them if they ever brought it up, but by some unspoken pact they never do. The boy has dark hair, wide eyes, but so do Temple's brothers, so did Gowan's father. His pale skin could be anyone's, including his mother's.

"You can tell when I'm lying, Linden. You look good. Your face looks...full. Like the moon." She absentmindedly fiddles with her wedding ring. "Gowan's staying in the District for a while for business. We've...well, neither of us are in the space to be good spouses right now. He blames me, you know. I can't say I'm not blaming him too."

[dead_black_eyes]

"Of course I don't mind," Linden's quick to reply. "Just... so long as I have a bit of a heads-up. I don't want him to see me drunk... I don't mind your surprise visits, but the last thing I'd want is to undo all the hard work you've put into raising him decently."

Linden would be lying if he claimed that he'd never wondered about Bailey, as more than a few have as the boy's aged from a typically ambiguous baby to a more specified portrait of a human being. Whether it's familial resemblance or evidence of a cuckold, though, Gowan would be blind not to notice and question and resent that his child looks more like one (or more) of Temple's illicit lovers than he does like the man who signed his birth certificate.

He still seems uncertain, and he raises a hand to experimentally pinch at one of his thin cheeks. Then his eyes follow her absentminded movements, watching the ring turn on her slender finger.

"If anything, it is his fault," he says, blatantly and unabashedly picking a side. "It was a congenital heart defect, wasn't it, on his side of the family? Nothing you done could have done would have prevented it."

And I'm not wicked or cruel enough to say this out loud, but if anything, that heart defect is proof that the daughter, at least, was his.

[clotting]

"Of course, of course. I know that." Temple will come upon Linden as a surprise, but she never brings Bailey without warning for exactly the reason Linden's suggested; she likes to present Linden to her child as some sort of curated and ideal version of himself, as if Linden were a bauble or toy she were giving to Bailey for a limited time to distract him from the poisonous brew of his domestic atmosphere.

And because every time Bailey throws a tantrum and tells Gowan he wishes Linden, or any other of his many 'uncles', were his father instead, Temple feels a surge of sick and proud satisfaction that burns its way through her like a shot of good whiskey.

"That's what I said. He says it's my drinking. Maybe he should try carrying a baby around for nine months in his body and see if he doesn't want a sour then, but of course, he says he never wants it anymore. The liar." She glances back up with that peppy attitude again, as if the light switch to sorrow has gone off and been replaced by the glow of a sudden idea. "On that note, we should have a drink. Just a little one, toasting to seeing old friends again."

[dead_black_eyes]

Linden nods jerkily in response, in a hurry to demonstrate that he didn't want to imply that he doubted Temple's judgment in any capacity. "Just a reminder," he murmurs. "I know you're fully aware of what is, and what always has been. Call it a reflex now that he's old enough to remember things and it's clear that you love him."

He gets along well with Bailey as that bauble or toy; he usually has a gift for the young man, which is another reason he wants to have a little bit of a warning before visits. He is looking forward for him to be old enough to learn chess, and it's a bittersweet thing to see a child who is permitted to be a child, and not put to work cleaning machines in District 6 or scooping up bobbins in District 8.

His eyes widen when she tells of Gowan's accusations, and then narrow as he allows it to sink in. "That's ridiculous," he says flatly. "No wonder you're wanting to be away from him, now... give him a chance to miss you and fret before you go back, the idiot. And yes, I'd like a drink," he's quick to agree, but he's stepping outside of his room and moving to close the door.

"I'm thinking at the bar, though, just... because my room's not really the happiest place right now. Kind of stale."

[clotting]

"I don't need you to keep reassuring me, Linden," she says, not as a rebuke but softly, because it's like caressing a bruise to hear him say that. He can't undo the grief and guilt that has soaked into her very bones, seeped from her heart on up into her brain with a tower of logic for why her remorse is valid. No matter how genuine he's being it will ring false to her, and it will ache deep in her ribs.

"I think if I were left in a room with him a day longer he'd have learned what it feels like to be a Victor." To be so intimately acquainted with violence - when Temple makes comments like that, it's as if her vocal cords belong to an entirely different person, one whose tone is deep and dark as a chasm.

Someone who isn't so good at blending in, chameleon-like, with the airy and vapid society of Capitolites might insist on drinking privately, but Temple's actually relieved at the idea of having to force some smiles and laughter until it becomes genuine again. It's not quite as comforting as falling in Linden's bed, but they probably shouldn't do that anywhere near the Training Center anyway. And so she snaps out of that threat as quickly as she dipped into it.

"Alright. It's on me, though. I'm getting a bit of a kick out of running up the bill."

[dead_black_eyes]

Linden mumbles something half-hearted about "need" being ill-defined and subjective, knowing that he can't convince her fully even if he gives it his all and fortifies his reasoning with ironclad logic. For all the torment Temple has survived, what she subjects herself to is almost worse, with spikes turned inward and burying themselves secret and unseen.

He laughs darkly at the hypothetical as he pulls his door closed and locks it, pocketing the ke along with the embroidered handkerchief. A symbol of intimacy and one of privacy side by side, as if challenging him to change his mind, unlock the door and invite Temple to get a little more comfortable and rub her rebellion in Gowan's face even further. But something stays his hand and his tongue, and he's offering a chaste smile between comrades as he's turning to lead on toward the elevators.

"If you insist," he allows, flattening his thumb against the glowing disc. "I'd be glad to make Gowan's eyes pop out of his head when he sees the bar tab. Making expensive liquor disappear is a talent of mine."

There's a joke in there about deep-throating, but maybe it's inappropriate at this particular moment.

/wrap with your tag?

[clotting]

Guilt is, perhaps, the fuel that keeps them all going, that keeps them a glutton for the punishment that life doles out to Victors day in and day out, that after each bidder and each stroke of panic and each death in the family lets her rationalize it from the act of a capricious god to a sort of karmic sensibility; Temple's been carrying guilt for seven years, since the moment she was reaped and left to ask what she had done wrong that no one would stand in for her, what crime she had committed against the people she had grown up with, and it's only grown heavier year upon year, with new ghosts latching into her shoulders like a heavy cloak or like barnacles on the sea-line.

Temple picks up the joke for him. "And I'm good at making other things disappear." She drapes her hand across his for a moment, as if a hand could wink and smirk. And she takes him by the wrist and leads him to the elevator, as if it'll take them to a merry and temporary hell with all the other sinners.

"Come on, I've needed this," she says, batting those large eyes so few people can resist.