Temple Stevens (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
clotting) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thecapitol2015-06-06 09:31 pm
clotting) wrote in thecapitol2015-06-06 09:31 pm
What a Mess I Leave to Follow [Open]
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.
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.
no subject
He hasn't noticed her scar. He's not looking, gaze set in the mid-distance of his own thoughts. When he does look again, it's to glance over the book she's selected, and then the lurid flash of her lip.
It's another question he doesn't want to answer, but one he can't afford not to.
"Yeah," he says, not really meaning it in any way so simple, but passably enough. "Humans here don't care, not the same way. It's a quirk or a point of interest for my fans or something like eye or hair color to you--just a genetic fluke. And that's when people question it at all, because red's the default for you all. No one wants me dead for it here. It can't not be better."
And honestly, he is glad in a removed way that it's such a nothing issue. He had it on the meteor too in the end, when his team was almost all that was left of troll society and no one gave a shit anymore. But an actual planet where he can get a cut or a scrape and not have to worry about covering, hiding, bandaging, not daring to let anyone see the ruddy hue of the scab as it heals--that's something he never could have dreamed of on Alternia, not seriously.
It's just the way that none of them really get it that grates.
"Come on, let's get that book checked out and I'll sign it. You'll have to tell me how to spell your kid's name; I'm no good at human ones."
no subject
Temple may get it more than she lets on, and it's for that reason that she doesn't proffer evidence of her own secrets, why she doesn't say that she, too, hides what she is for fear of people seeing; why she cloaks her District breeding in a wealthy surname and beautiful clothing and a Capitol Citizen for a child, as if piling enough of the Capitol onto her outsides would make them heavier than the poverty and deprivation of her upbringing.
"Bailey. Bee ay eye elle ee why." There was a time Temple couldn't spell it either, especially not the longer and more complicated Capitol name that shortens to that diminutive. Now the letters roll off her tongue with practiced ease. Bilanxus, for balance. Bailey, because their son being named after a famous alcohol is Temple's passive-aggressive way to rub Gowan's mistakes in his face. She holds the book out to Karkat, eyes impassive, as if they care very little for his comfort with the entire ordeal.
"Please let me thank you, at least, with a gift card or something."
no subject
He shakes his head out of his thoughts once Temple starts to spell Bailey's name. "Okay," he says, and takes the book as his other hand fetches a silver marker from his pocket. He's taken to carrying a couple around with him lately so he always has something handy, with the extras as backup in case one runs out of ink.
Inside the cover he writes,
Bailey -
Try not to use my catchphrases. They're meant for older trolls, not human kids, okay?
Your human mom and I picked this book out special for you. I hope you enjoy it.
- Karkat Vantas ♋
It's all in sharp caps, and he holds it back open for her to look over and judge. All mild, no swears, and not one ounce of the disdain he feels for the Capitol presentation of his species: in short, he hopes it's acceptable for a human child.
Afterward he adds, "I'll take a gift card, sure. Thanks."
no subject
"I appreciate it." Temple gives some instructions to her Avox, who returns shortly with a gift certificate for a truly opulent amount of money, enough to feed a family of four in one of the Districts for months. "Thank you. I'll try to keep him on a tighter leash."
And so she leaves, little heels clicking against the floor, Avox silently trailing her before departing to retrieve her child.