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

II

[dead_black_eyes]

Linden can't help but stare at the way she simply hasn't changed. He fluctuates between being merely pale and appearing grey, merely thin and being gaunt, and merely drawn and looking nearly dead, but since marrying Gowan, Temple really does seem like she's suspended delicately over time, safely out of its ravaging reach. But Linden's noticed that that's the way of Victors; depending on their interest and their access to the surgeries and treatments the Capitol has to offer (or, alternatively, the devastating vices), they either age very well or extremely poorly.

He's torn. He wants to be happy to see her, as he would any old friend, but his dark eyes, alert and clear, recognize the trouble she could be bringing with her. Doesn't the lipstick hint at so much? The sign language books behind him spread over his desk seem so wholesome and chaste by comparison, an attempt to build and nurture rather than grind pain into dust with someone else who feels it the same way.

His shoulders probably feel a little more substantial in her grasp than he did the last time they held each other, when they were knobs of sinew and bone and the rise and fall of his chest was barely perceptible when he slept. He was in terrible health then, actually horrifying to look at, and it had been a miracle that he'd survived the overdose that had happened shortly after, stopping his stressed heart and landing him in rehab for months so he could scrape together something like vitality again. He'd given it the old college try then, but something else is motivating him now, something like what he had as a precocious child. Perhaps it is envy-worthy. Considering their relationship has always been based on pity and loneliness, perhaps Temple does have reason to be alarmed.

"I was awake," he says, sounding almost as surprised as she does about it (though much of it might actually be intentional affectation to put her more at ease.) "I understand it's been difficult, since..." he glances at the corner by the fireplace and the ashes that haven't been swept from the hearth yet. Clearing his throat, he continues as pragmatically as possible. "I sent a letter when I heard, and I don't know if it reached you or not, but I am truly sorry."

I.

[crabmunicator]

Children have never been Karkat's thing. Even in Sgrub, in the lab he stumbled into on one of the meteors of the veil, the grubs he made then were a process of slamming buttons and doing what time had foretold for him. He didn't like the process, and it was utterly bizarre observing all his team at an age before they'd even pupated, including his own bright, mutant self. But the thing is, they were trolls. Even the strange second set that he later learned were his team's ancestors were trolls.

Not one of them is some small, human child, motioning up at his horns in a bid for a chance to touch them.

"Look, no, you don't..." He's looking around, searching for whoever might look like this child belongs to them, because surely humans don't let their young run off alone, do they? They have their biological human parents to serve as custodians, a concept still weird to him, and weirder still now that he's in a position to have to deal with it.

He's in a bookstore, waylaid before he could get to the section he wanted by the insistent attentions of this kid who doesn't look more than 3 sweeps old, if that. He'd measure by years but age always comes in the Alternian system to his eyes.

"Does--Does anyone--? Who owns this kid?"

Is that how they even say it? God, human family is weird.

The worst of it is, he can't just tell the kid to fuck off and go on his way. He'd like to. He craves to. But when his early death has turned into frequent public appearances and humoring his fans, he can't run the risk of alienating Capitolites by making a 5-year-old cry.

I

[president_evil]

With the exception of tributes, children were typically beneath Wesker's notice. Particularly the especially young. Like animals they seemed to be able to sense the nature of things. Their instincts not yet overwritten by societal expectation and their own sense of self-importance.

So he paid no mind to the urchin scampering about the cafe terrace until, quite suddenly, there was a tug on his coat.

Looking up sharply from his communicator, then down, he found the boy at his hip, stare wide-enough for Wesker to see himself staring back.

"Ah, lunch at last," he said, just cool enough to make it uncertain whether or not he was serious.

[currupted]

Cyrus has finally, finally been here long enough that he's begun to register new faces, to follow the cycles of people in and out. It's still bizarre, that the most permanent residents of this place are the Tributes, and it's their staff who come and go like flocks of birds switching homes with the seasons; but he can tell, better than he used to, who belongs to a new crop of unhappy offworlders, and who's a seasonal Capitolite come home to roost.

He does the thing he always does when he meets someone he remembers best from television, when Temple waves at him - takes the necessary split-second to recontextualize her, to take her out of the screen in his mind and put her here, back in the real world where she belongs. He's seen her off the screens before, at social gatherings she wouldn't have been at if she hadn't married up; putting her in the cafe the staffers frequent, catching her eye as he moves past her table (glancing between the embroidery in her hands and her face), takes him a second to make real in his mind.

Funny, to think that if she were in the same position now as she'd been at the end of her Games, her marriage would be only dubiously legal. It's that, more than anything, that puts an ironic smile at the corners of Cyrus' mouth as he stops to greet her.

"Mrs. Stevens?" He knows her just well enough to address her, has taken her hand in greeting in other places just enough times that he can start the conversation. "I almost didn't recognize you." The use of her married name is a gentle, socially-appropriate joke, a nod to his recognition of her and a nod to the reason for his recognition of her.

[reallynow]

As with most important news, Jolie doesn't hear a single thing about Temple coming back until there are people moving things in the suites. If a Tribute died, she doesn't want to hear about it, honestly. She doesn't need bad luck, she just wants to surround herself with miracles and good karma and all sorts of Capitol self-help nonsense.

She steps out of the elevator with a suspicious look on her face, barely alleviated when Temple talks. Curiosity prompts her to glance over at the basket and she can't help but nod in silent approval at the booze before she waves a hand dismissively at it and strides over with her heels clicking like she means business.

"I'm surprised you didn't throw it at me." She scoffs, inviting herself to lean down and kiss the air around Temple's face in a manner that is both affectionate and respectful of freshly applied make up. "I didn't know you were coming back, girl. You look too good to be here."

I

[conifer]

"That's a beautiful wren." Of course it's the embroidery that's the first thing Emily notices, with both her immense knowledge of birds, having spent her childhood at the tops of trees, and her respect and admiration for anyone who works with their hands, whether it's to make something plain and functional or an opulent extravagance. Emily admired skill, and this sort of skill could only come from one District. "You're from Eight, right?"

[clotting]

"Trey!" Temple looks up and immediately perches forward on her seat, accepting the kiss and giving her coworker a quick squeeze. It's not the first time they've worked together, and the trappings of the Training Center tend to breed an affinity between people.

Besides, Jolie was one of the people who had cleaned up the dark shadows under her eyes and the cuts and scratches when Temple was pulled from the Arena and put in fresh, structured dresses that stood in stark juxtaposition of the messiness of Temple's Games. One of the people who had touched her bruised, dry skin with efficient gentleness when she had been treated with nothing but violence in the weeks prior. Just like there are some things that will never be forgiven, there are some kindnesses that will never be undermined.

"Don't think I won't in the future, I still have quite an arm."

She gets to her feet, not nearly as tall as Jolie is even when her heels can compete for height, and puckers her lower lip slightly as she looks past the makeup and falsies and decides if Jolie looks any better or worse than usual. It's been several years since Temple was last here, but she doesn't seem to have changed at all in looks, aside from a slightly different hairstyle.

"How have you been? You have to get me prepared for these new Games, I don't have any idea how you're managing so many Tributes, and all foreigners, too! We'll see if I last the week." She beams, aware that they both know Temple's tendency to play helpless is more coping mechanism than actual reality.

Re: I

[clotting]

"Oh!" Temple, sitting at the bench, looks up suddenly, almost instinctively tucking the handkerchief away until she realizes she's been complimented by a fellow Victor. Unlike the other Victors, Temple never really developed a sense of hypervigilance, but rather an ability to shut out the world as if there were an impenetrable wall between her and all input. She goes away in her skull, pulls the shutters over her eye sockets and nostrils and mouth and ear canals, and exists somewhere else. Being jarred from that isn't terrifying so much as just unexpected.

She lets the needle and fabric and hoop lay on her lap.

"Yes, although don't tell anyone, I usually just tell them I'm from downtown." She meets Emily's face with a friendly smile, extending her hand. "You're...Emily Finch, aren't you? District Seven? I'm sorry, I stopped watching the Games once my son was born, you understand. I needed all the sleep I could get."

Re: I

[clotting]

Bailey, with his dark eyes, his father's eyes, looks up at Wesker in decided uncertainty, hand half-extended to try and reach up for Wesker's glasses. He lowers his arm, eyes starting to well and mouth filling with a pathetic wail of fright.

"Bailey!" Temple's voice cuts through the air, surprisingly sharp and atonal given Temple's soft appearance. She walks up, tight in her dress and movements and not looking entirely unlike an origami crane, and ushers her child behind her. Bailey, certain of his mother's invincibility, ceases his cry and looks almost eager to see if Temple and Wesker will fight.

Temple does not fight, however. She shrinks slightly under Wesker's gaze, a frightened and deer-like creature. "I'm sorry, my boy didn't bother you, did he? He gets very excited when he sees...people from the Games."

Which is Temple's way of admitting that she doesn't know if Wesker's a Victor or a Tribute, because she hasn't been watching the Games for the last two years.

Re: II

[clotting]

Temple should know by now to brace herself when a conversation starts for that inevitable body blow, as if it's a toll she has to pay to reenter the world. Still, it catches her off-guard, the same way it always does when she assumes she can handle the grief and realizes it's slightly too heavy for her to manage, and she ducks her head for a moment and takes a deep breath before looking up at Linden again.

She holds his hand, runs hers over his wrist because for this moment she can't beak to break the human connection. His wristbones still jut out with defined shapes like kitchen equipment, even healthier, and in a way that encourages her.

"I received it. I'm sure you won't hold it against me that I didn't answer, I just thought, since I'd probably be seeing you when I came back here anyway, and with all the funeral arrangements to make..." She swallows and waves a hand about her hair, as if batting away some irritating fly instead of the complex and vampiric effluvium of mourning. She finally pulls away from him and reaches into her purse, pulling out a small, beautifully-wrapped box with his gift in it.

"Anyway. It's funny. Now that the funeral arrangements are all over and there's no infant to care for, I have more time to myself than I know what to do with. Which, I mean, that's rude, that makes it sound as if the only reason I made this for you is idleness." She places it in his palm, taking the chance to run her hand over his upper arm as she does, not handsy from lechery but from a neediness, as if she's sucking the support he so willingly offers her like a taproot guzzles water. "I appreciated the letter. Thank you."

[dead_black_eyes]

He regrets bringing it up almost immediately. Should he have danced around the subject, attempted to pretend that her child had never been? No, he's certain that it would have been worse that way. Like all wounds, this one will heal with time, and every prick, cut and burn at its site will ultimately make the scar tissue thicker and stronger. If she is returning to the land of the living, holding his hand and latching onto the support and familiarity of an old friend, telling of how she received a letter that wasn't thrown away by Gowan, he's happy to shepherd her back. This, at least, is harmless.

"Of course I don't hold it against you. I couldn't. I can only imagine how it must have been."

More anguish in a single household than he could have ever contributed, alone or with Temple. His eyes follow her as she draws away and his breath catches when she mentions a gift; if she's coming back into the land of the living, it stands to some kind of morbid reason that she brings death back with her, even in gifts, even meaning well. If they're drugs, he won't be able to accept or reject them gracefully, only to grieve his life's most reliable constant. His addiction, for all it's hurt him, is a part of him, and everything is uncertain and painful without its indulgence.

"You made it?" he asks, trying to relax a little; he needs to, because his fingers are trembling as he starts to open it. The silver string binding the ornate wrapping falls away, and moments later, he's lifting out a delicate and finely embroidered handkerchief embellished with linden flowers and an exotic red bird. A scarlet ibis, far from home in a strange land where it flew to die.

That's Mentors, right? Call me high off my ass, but we're going to die in a world we were never supposed to be a part of, probably alone, with people marveling at all the things we did in the moments it was hardest to be alive.

"I know it's not the only reason," he answers, turning it in his fingers and admiring it. "It's the best present I've ever been given. I can't believe you remember that."

[clotting]

Temple tucks away the embroidery and thread and hoop with the sort of ease and celerity that show that she was ready to hide them at any moment, depending on who walked into the room. Cyrus likely won't see more of it than that it exists at all.

"Oh, come on now, Minister. I haven't changed my hair that much." There's a way Temple looks at Capitolites, a certain brazenness that she learned subconsciously from them, as if it's unspoken that they're speaking as equals, as if she's refusing to acknowledge the reality of her subservience even as she lives it out without complaint. It's why, when most people think of the Stevens family, they think of Gowan's strangely pathetic nature before they remember that Temple is a Districter. She employs it even as she realizes that she's standing across from one of the few people who likely doesn't ever forget that she has scars from sewing machines on her hands.

Those same hands that, having stashed the embroidery, dig through her stylish little purse and pull out her wallet. She chatters, bird-like, always that strange amalgamation of impudent and obsequious, bold but skittish, as if she lived her life putting herself in the firing line just to have an excuse to bolt.

"What brings you to the café? Looking for Stephen? I haven't seen him all day, but I'm sure he's around. Look, you must let me buy you a drink, on Gowan's behalf if for no other reason. He sends his regards and thanks you for the card."

[clotting]

"Mind like a steel trap," she says, tilting her head to the side, shrugging a shoulder slightly, lowering her voice- "that's how I keep my indiscretions straight."

She remembers the two of them, soaked in rain, her naked except for a towel around her, her hair seeping into the bed, perched over a book that she read aloud because he liked to hear her voice when high, and because she liked to listen to him respond. She'd laughed, untangling mats of wet hair with her fingers.

You're wasted, Temple had said, not just high off your ass. You're wasted in this world. In her memory she can't remember if he heard her over the sound of the rain slamming down outside.

And now the tale of a child dying of a congenital defect keeps resurfacing in her brain, a plume of blood in those salt-filled and tumultuous waters. It was the inbreeding, the doctor said. That same heart problem claimed two of Gowan's cousins, one of his aunts. The Capitol gene pool is constricted and choked and even Temple's introduction to the family line couldn't dilute it enough. There was nothing she could have done.

You could have not had vodka when you were six months pregnant, Gowan had said, and she had stormed out of the doctor's office and left him to take a cab home. When he got back to the house she had packed her things and booked her ticket for the Capitol.

"I've been doing a lot of embroidery lately. I couldn't think of anyone more deserving of a little delicate beauty." And it says something that she'd be willing to give it to him, says that they are Mentors that she doesn't need to hide her skill with a needle from (her skill with any needle). "I'm so glad you like it."

She gives him another squeeze and kisses his cheek.

[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]

The child, dressed in a three-piece suit tailored for someone that small, stands up on his tip-toes in a feeble attempt to reach Karkat's horns. "Suck my bulge!" he says. "Karkat, say 'suck my bulge'!"

"Bailey!" Temple appears from behind an aisle, dressed impeccably and head tilted back not as if to compensate for her small stature but to meet the world full-faced. She snaps her fingers and an Avox follows her; he reaches forward and tugs Bailey away from Karkat. Bailey obeys, but not without some pouting.

"Go get him a hot cocoa, please?" Temple pulls a credit card out of her purse and hands it to the Avox before turning to Karkat. "I'm sorry, dear. He gets a little excited when he sees Tributes. He's at that age and the trolls are his favorite. It's such a shame I don't have any in my District."

[crabmunicator]

Oh kill him now. Where's the lightning when you need it? He wasn't made to deal with tiny human children spouting obscenities they clearly don't understand at him. Can he run? Is he allowed to run? He wants to run like he'll be swallowed up by the void if he doesn't, and the void is five and trying feebly to touch his horns.

Which means it's a pretty good thing that the kid's mother shows up first. Karkat heaves a sigh of relief so massive he sinks with it. He doesn't care who this woman is; she saved him from a fate worse than death.

"Please," he says, straightening carefully, "teach him not to say that. It's a vulgar thing that I'm not looking to explain, but suffice it to say a tiny human shouldn't be spouting it like a catchphrase."

He rubs a hand over his face then through his hair. Even at full height he can't be much taller than her, even less if she has heels to boost her. He's only 5'2", and the rest is the fluff of his hair.

His mind catches up more slowly with the rest, but once it does he blinks. "Your District? Are you staff for the games?"

[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.

[clotting]

"Ah. I'll be sure to disabuse him of that phrase, then. You know, it's printed on so much of your merchandise you can't really blame him for thinking it means something else." She sighs, twists her lower lip to the side and she thinks of how to apply discipline when the very idea of punishing her son in any meaningful way feels anathema. "I'm sorry for the inconvenience, anyway. Could I buy you a coffee? I don't want to just ask for an autograph but I don't think Bailey will forgive me if I don't."

Temple's words are kindly, but she has a sort of wary air to her, a skittishness that makes her seem like she could clam up at any moment, retract all that amiability as if it were a cat's claws.

"Yes, Staff for District Eight. I'm back from a long vacation and only now getting the bearings of the new system." She tips forward on her heels to glance over the bookshelf and see that the Avox is taking care of her child appropriately.

[president_evil]

Wesker held the boy's eyes for a beat longer, head tipping enough to find the child as he ducked around his mother's hip (I can still see you). Then, as if Bailey simply ceased to exist, the whole of his attention shifted to the woman behind which he cowered.

He judged her with a silent rise of a pale eyebrow, though he did award her a few begrudged points for her willingness to insert herself so readily.

"You may want to consider teaching him to ask before grabbing," Wesker advised her. "Not all victors are nearly as discerning as I as to when to bite."

[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.

[crabmunicator]

Karkat exhales, somewhere between relief and exasperation. "Of course they do," he says in tired agreement. "They need something to put on there, and unfortunately something short and snappy is easier to print on it than the stuff I put real effort into. And I didn't know they'd be marketing it to a kid that young. What's his human age?"

He thinks there's some shirts with the longer ones, though. If he ever wanted any of his own merchandise, that might be it. He takes pride in his lengthier rants.

He notes her district with a nod, mentally penning her down as Escort because he hasn't met Swann, knows Jolie is the Stylist, and she looks somehow too Capitol to meet his concept of a Mentor. His example is Linden, after all.

"But sure, I'll take a coffee. Is there something specific you want signed for him? Hell, we're in a book store--pick out a book, even, and I'll get it and sign it for him." He's got that credit card thing they gave him, after all, and he's on a mission of PR and self-loathing. It feels immensely weird that this is what his life's become.

[itscalledfashion]

He's doing a little browsing, himself. Jason had been quite adamant that dolphins jumping through forests of stars wasn't a District 7 thing, and so, Cassian was trying to find trendy things that involved trees. Unfortunately, trees weren't something that Capitolites spent a lot of time worrying over--Maybe that would change if District 7 could get a few wins, but in the meantime...Well, he'd figure something out.

His puzzlements over decor went out the window when he caught sight of a familiar face, who waved at him, and he put on his best smile for greeting someone like a long lost friend. "Templllllle~!" He trilled out, fluttering over like a brightly colored bird, scarves and bits of jewelry and lace trailing behind him. He didn't hug her, but he clasped her shoulders, looking her up and down with a fond, but appraising eye. "So it's true, they managed to drag you out of the backwaters! And look at you, still pretty as a peach!" He turned to look at the clothing in the window she was eyeing, inspecting it as well.

Temple was one of the people that Cassian would probably into the shallow section of his friends--The leagues of people that he knew well enough to be invited to their parties, and invite them as well, to gossip and natter, but nothing important, no inner circle business. He wasn't against Temple getting to that point, though--She and him had radically different pasts, but in the end, they had similar goals--An almost neurotic need to fit into the high society and wrestle their way up the social ladder, while acting like they were already where they wanted to be.

And Temple was a lovely person to talk trash with.

"You're looking for a new wardrobe, aren't you? Oh, do let me help. I'm sure you read all about how I've finally made it as a real stylist, it was in Celebrus and everything, I think my father is going to hang the article that mentioned me, honestly, it's so embarrassing." That was a lie, but his father had been quite approving, and showed it to the rest of his family, and that was about on the same level, to Cassian. "But now I'm a real fashion expert. I'm going to set so many trends, Temple."

[conifer]

"Oh, don't worry about that. You're lucky you're able to pass." She feels guilty admitting that, as though she's betraying her District for even considering it, but as much as she abhorred much of Capitol society and culture, she knew her life would be far easier if she were able to blend into it.

She feels relief that Temple hadn't seen her Games. It was refreshing to find someone who wasn't an offworlder who didn't have the image of her stabbing her only ally in the back in the back of their minds while looking at her. "That's okay. I tried to avoid as much as the footage as I could. You didn't miss much my year, anyway."

[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?

[clotting]

"Yes," she says, softly, noncommitally, like she doesn't entirely agree that it's luck or lucky but isn't certain enough of her position to argue it. Like Emily, she's equally grateful that her Games aren't public knowledge between the two of them. Maybe if no one remembers what happened to Temple Drake in the Arena, she'll cease to exist and Temple Stevens will eclipse her within their skin.

"Nor mine." She gives Emily's hand a polite and firm shake. "I hate having to watch it when I do, honestly. I only ever even bother so I can keep up with the gossip, and with some of the people around here, that doesn't even seem worth it."