thecapitol | The Whole World in a Dark Hue [Closed]

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The Whole World in a Dark Hue [Closed]

WHO| Temple and Swann
WHAT| D8 Staffers Gonna Staff
WHERE| D8 Suite
WHEN| After the last D8 Tribute dies.
WARNINGS| Probably some capitolite awfulness and some wannabe-Capitolism.

For the most part, Temple and Swann have been ships passing in the night, both flitting in and out of the Suite for the last few weeks performing parallel and separate duties. There's been the exchange of gift baskets - neither of which were in person - and occasional post-it notes left on the kitchen counter, usually to the tune of "can you pull some strings with your father to get [Tribute from Eight] in a room with [producer Temple's buttered up]? thanks! -Temple" or "borrowed from budget to repair [something Tribute broke], thanks! -Temple". Temple rarely asks permission so much as just effusively thanks from afar, and unlike other Mentors, she seems hellbent on avoiding any of her responsibilities in combat training. Not a single Tribute has seen her at the gym, and she has yet to meet most of them anyway.

There are hints of her around the District Eight Suite, mostly in the fact that her five year-old and his possessions have made occasional visits and left the predictable kindergartener residue, discarded toys and terrible drawings and handprints on the hologram wall, that sort of thing. It, and the contracts she's been securing for the next Arena and noting in the budget, are enough to prove she exists and must be doing something with those odd hours she keeps. Maintaining a social network like Temple's requires diligence and an affinity for the night life, which is as much a ball and chain as it is a calling, she thinks.

But tonight, rather than going out and socializing and slipping her hand in the back pocket of anyone wearing an expensive enough watch, not fondling for a wallet but for a thrill and a connection, she's staying in to mourn yet another fallow season. Dressed as if she expected to go out, in a black and white dress and pearls and a birdcage veil, she takes a seat on the edge of the living room couch and turns off the ever-awake television.

An Avox brings her a bottle of gin. Temple tends to nurse the wound of District Eight's losses with getting shitfaced drunk. She probably would celebrate a victory by getting shitfaced drunk, too, but as she has yet to rear up a winner that's a bridge she has yet to cross. She's watching the Avox pour it, looking apathetically at the liquid, when Swann enters, and Temple's head seems to turn too far on her neck to see who entered. When she does, she gets to her feet, a broad, if tired, smile across her face.

"Swann Honeymead, in the flesh. And here I thought it was some industrious fairy keeping this place together." She holds a white-gloved hand out. "How are you holding up?"

Jolie had warned her that Swann took failures hard, that she'd been miserable after the last time Eight lost.

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This late in the game, no one goes home, not even the Staffers who live off-campus. If one's District still has even a single horse in the race, it's a 24-hour job until the end. Any smidgen of personal time the Escorts can get by smudging it as a "meeting" is well treasured, and Swann had been in the midst of hers, delivered dinner with Jason on the roof in a deep covered chair big enough for two.

Their phones had beeped at the same time, signaling another death, but the name RICK FORD - DISTRICT 8 flashed on the screen, and Swann blanched. She didn't cry -- she kissed Jason's cheek and murmured an excuse about being needed that was actually halfway true. Mostly she didn't want to be seen as a baby again, crying over these things.

Swann is also dressed as if she'd been going out, all cream and gold embroidery, her thin back exposed from the cut of the dress. This, however, is more or less casual for her, given that she has only her normal, impeccably styled ponytail and not something fancier. Even her hairpiece is limited to a small cream-colored silk fleur de lis at the side of her head.

Temple speaks and Swann blinks at her, looking distinctly lost for a moment, and then she seems to snap back into her own head, crushing all of her feelings down to plaster a pleasant look across her face and return the handshake.

"Temple, so glad to see you! I'm all right, just tired," she says, and it's a lie. "And you?"

Edited 2015-07-14 04:09 (UTC)

Temple knows that lost look, although it doesn't occur to her that's it's because District Eight lost because she's already so resigned to her District's drab and unheralded fate. It crossed Temple's face when she 'wanders', when something between her body and her spirit severs and she finds herself outside herself, looking at her body acting out motions that her brain has completely disconnected from. She's seen it in Games footage, in wedding photographs.

Her handshake is dainty and professional, not the same as how she shakes a man's hand with her lingering fingertips.

"Sober, which, at the moment, is a problem. I need to drown some District Eight shame." She takes her glass from the Avox and takes a seat on the couch, smoothing out the skirt of her dress, removing her glove to reveal blood-red nails the same color as her wound-like lipstick, and then taking a slug back of the gin and tonic. "Come, join me. We barely know each other at all and it's depressing drinking alone."

As Temple drinks, Swann's face falters for just a moment, and she can't bring herself to say that she'd prefer to just go to her room and fall face-first into the pillows.

"All right." The way she says it is more resigned than enthusiastic, and she has the Avox just pour her a glass of white wine that she takes before sitting in one of the chairs opposite the couch. She takes a small sip and sighs, rubbing her forehead with frustration, trying to think of a single positive.

"At least we made it to the final week."

"Yippee." Temple sighs and folds one leg over the other, then rests her head on her fingertips against the backrest of the couch. Her hands are one of the few parts of her that looks completely District, despite the nail polish, scarred from sewing machines and needles and with one pinkie that doesn't quite straighten all the way.

"Don't hold it against yourself, though. You didn't think you were going to turn this District's luck around in less than a year, did you? You did better work than any Escort District Eight's had so far, believe me." Temple's own hadn't even given enough of a damn to send her a single gift, something she has never forgiven him for, which has entitled her to his name and bank account in a marriage of guilt and resentment.

In true Capitolite fashion, Swann manages to note and mentally comment on every small detail of Temple's appearance, from her face (where Swann can practically read a history of minor tweaks and chemical peels) to her clothes (surely hiding stretch marks and surgically lifted tits from popping out babies). Her hands are obvious standouts, something Swann doesn't have to read, and she likes that they're honest, they can't hide under the veneer of a Districter playing dress-up.

"I thought I had a chance at it," she mutters, sipping her wine again. "It's not like our Tributes are weak. The fact that Joel keeps dying just kills me, that man should be able to survive a direct hit from an atomic bomb."

Swann hates Joel with a passion, but she has to give credit where it's due, and she knows his history.

Temple's face is kind - not incisive, not understanding, even, but fundamentally well-meaning, and that's the expression she gives Swann, as if she doesn't understand what Swann's invested and lost in her hopes here but respects it nonetheless.

"You're looking at proof positive that it's not competence that matters. It's just luck. That's all it's ever been." Temple frowns a bit and bites the corner of her mouth. "At least this time one of the kids might win. There's so many of them in the final week."

The farm boy, the tomboy from Ten, and that chilling and striking girl from Seven. Even some teenagers.

"I haven't met Joel yet. I hear he's trouble."

It's an expression that Swann has been seeing most of her life, because she has always been too delicate, too invested in things 'below' her. Animals, the handicapped, Districters. It's disappointingly familiar.

"It's not just luck. You outsmarted those other two in your Arena, I remember that. But that would be good. We haven't had a child Victor in a while, it'd be nice to get one of them out. I just wish we could win even once, though."

Swann has to take a deeper swig of wine to deal with thinking about Joel. "He's an asshole," she says, and she so rarely swears that she must mean it. "Makes threats, and he has to be forced to do anything. I can't even get a 'good morning' from him, it's always just go to hell or whatever pouty bullshit he's settled on that day."

Temple's eyes cut away, suddenly filled with old clouds. She doesn't argue Swann's point, doesn't go digging up the particulars of her Arena again. There's a reason she always tells her Tributes that she has no advice to offer in the Arenas.

"I do too."

It's strange, that she has so little invested in her District receiving the reward. She'd rather see a child win than one of her own. Maybe motherhood's made her sentimental.

"Charming. If there's anything I can't stand it's people who don't realize how good they have it here. They could be out in the Districts. They could be a classic Victor. They could be a Mentor. Instead they're permanently in the lap of luxury."

It's never occurred to Swann that Temple might object to even the mention of her own Arena. It's sort of her job to at least say things like lie to Tributes from other Districts. Swann also has that lovely Capitolite ignorance going for her, although hers is tempered with a kind of sweet innocence, unique to her.

"Believe me, I've told him that he could have it so much worse, but he won't hear it. In his head, he's the only person who's ever suffered, and it's the whole world against him."

"They have it easier than even you do. They weren't even born into this. They don't deserve it." Temple doesn't even seem to register the leap in her logic, doesn't seem to notice that Swann was no more meritorious to be born old money than anyone else, that it's luck and not divine birthright. She sounds as if she truly believes in the providence of innate wealth.

"But," she says, taking another drink of her gin and tonic, "that's probably the bitterness, me talking trash about our charges. Bad form of me, you won't see me do it again. Aside from my District's perennial disappointing performance, how's the job been treating you?"

Temple's reasons to picking Swann's brain are manifold. She truly does want to get to know her coworker, sees Swann as an ally in a District full of brute men who don't understand the complexities of Capitol life, but she also is observing, learning, always absorbing the details that make her better able to chameleon into the city she's taken as a home.

Temple's leap doesn't register with Swann either, who's spent thirty years hearing about how special she is and how important. Her brief flashes of realization that she hadn't really done anything to be special always fade out quickly enough.

"It's more intense than I thought it would be," she says honestly. "But I think that goes for anyone involved with the Games nowadays. My father hardly has time to sleep! But it's nice, in a behind-the-scenes sort of way. You learn the truth instead of just imagining the stories from TV and magazines."

Swann's brow knits and she looks down at her wine for a moment. "I do wish we had a little more time off. I mean, I love being here and working, but it can be... a lot sometimes."

"It's a shame Gowan went into vehicles instead of the Games. I'd love it if he worked himself so much I never had to see him." Temple sighs and brushes away a few stray locks of hair, which stubbornly refuse to stay in her fashionable updo. She resents them. They break the illusion of fitting right into the Capitol, those wild red curls that can only be tamed for a few hours at a time.

Temple takes a sip and nods, mulling the gin over her tongue as she considers what Swann's said. "It is sort of non-stop now. And there's just...more. More death. I used to just have to steady myself for two a year."

She's afraid she won't make it long, but in that case she can always ask for leave to go back to manning the homestead in District Six, hating her husband up close rather than from afar.

Swann looks slightly confused, a small knit in her brow and her head cocked like a puppy. Why would anyone want their husband to be away that much? It's one thing for Capitolites to stay in a bad marriage for appearances, but Temple's no Capitolite, so Swann can't see why Gowan would keep her around.

"It's hard, but in a different way, I think," she says slowly, thoughtfully. "They come back, so even when the deaths are horrible to watch, it doesn't sting as much. But then... sometimes they don't come back, and that's a lot harder to handle. Maybe because we don't know where the Gamemakers are sending them. Maybe because you always seem to lose your strongest."

Taking a sip of wine, Swann gazes out the window for a few seconds. "I understand why Jolie's gone on leave."

Temple doesn't elaborate on the toxic co-dependence of her marriage, on the guilt that led Gowan to marry her as if that could ever pay off the debt of leaving her to die in the Arena, on how Temple didn't realize that protection from bidders came with the shackles of a child and a bank account. It's too difficult to explain it; it's something Temple can't even put into words for herself, much less for others. In her head it isn't language but a series of moods, hypnic jerks of resentment and spite and misery.

Temple nods, chewing the corner of her lip and catching sight of her reflection in the glass she holds. "Do you think they're still out there? Does it help to believe they are?"

Some people believe in the afterlife. Temple believes in oblivion and it terrifies her. She'll run forever, even out of her own body, before she surrenders to the void.

Honestly, Swann doesn't think of it from Temple's side, but rather Gowan's, simply because he's the Capitolite and thus his opinions and desires are obviously the important ones in the relationship; it's not that she doesn't care for Temple in a friendly way, or that she thinks of Temple as inhuman, but... she's a Districter. Everyone knows that Districters, even Victors, they're simply less than Capitolites.

Different, in some small way, but lesser all the same.

"I don't know." There's a long pause before Swann says it, and she looks blankly out the window still, not willing to look over at Temple. "I don't know where they go. I hope they get to go home, because I know someone who says he did once, but... the Gamemakers say they don't have any way to send the Tributes back yet."

Glancing down at her glass, staring into the wine, she knows that it's more likely they're dead, just dead, couldn't be brought back for whatever reason. That they're probably hidden and covered up like every other secret in the Capitol.

That they'll never get their quiet. They'll never be diamonds.

"I hope they go home too."

Temple mulls it over, chews her tongue and then takes a sip of her alcohol that turns into more of a gulp, as she tries to chase away the misery of uncertainty with chemicals. She's never wished ill for her Tributes, no matter how she's pushed them away in the past - that's always been a sort of preemptive grief, an attempt to keep herself from losing again or worse, from feeling no loss at all when she knows she should, reifying her lack of humanity. If they aren't close to begin with, she's merely observing death as an outside, away from the blast zone.

Finally she tries to break into Swann's reverie with a friendliness that straddles maternal and sisterly.

"Come on, dear, you look so miserable. I made sure we got the Avoxes that know how to give massages, if you want one of those?"

Swann finishes her wine, one deep gulp that immediately makes her head spin just a tiny bit. She's never known how to separate herself from grief, how to keep people at a distance so she doesn't get hurt. She takes every loss personally, feels her heart crack just a little more, even as the old ones are still healing over. And she doesn't know how to stop it.

"What?" she asks, looking back over at Temple, taking a second to parse the question. "Oh, no, really I don't... I don't like any Avoxes except my personal one to touch me." It's mostly true, and a totally acceptable reason to duck out of such an offer. "But thank you. I think I'll just lie down for a while, I probably won't go back home until tomorrow morning. I can work from there and get things ready for Rick."

Things meaning gift baskets.

"Oh, of course." It's something that's generally more common among old money families, before not distinguishing between Avoxes at all became the norm. Temple is barely aware of what hair color her Avox of the day has most of the time.

"Get some rest. I'll probably head home shortly. There isn't anything to do here tonight." She sighs and gets to her feet, swaying ever so slightly with inebriation. "You did all you could, you know. Maybe if I'd had an Escort like you, my life would have been much different."

Watching Temple, Swann sets her wineglass aside and smiles a bit wryly, big brown eyes tinged with sadness as she looks up. "If you'd had an Escort like me, you'd have missed out on a lot of things," she says quietly, because everyone knows that Temple wants nothing more than to be the one thing she can't be, a Capitolite.

Even if she comes close, it's just not in her blood.

"You won, Temple. That's all that matters. You won and you're here, and we're going to work together to turn one of these men into a Victor."

"I probably wouldn't have a baby," she says, mulling that to herself quietly. Probably wouldn't have been able to dodge so many bidders by stapling herself to a prestigious name. And yet she thinks if given the choice, she would have preferred never to be abandoned in the first place, to not have been written off so harshly.

"We are. Get some rest, dear. Our next Arena will go better than this one has."

Far be it from Swann to give anyone advice on their emotional health, but she wants to tell Temple to let go the past because it's just making her rot inside, giving her the same nasty, slow-swelling blackness that Swann was born with and doesn't know how to get rid of.

Instead, she stands up too, more wobbly than Temple even though she's only had a single glass of wine, and wraps her arms around Temple's neck. "It will. You're just as much a Victor as Peggy, you know. You can be just as much of a Mentor, even if you think you can't."

Swann lets go and starts to toddle down the hall, holding her hand up in farewell. "You get some rest too. Good night, Temple."

Temple smiles wanly, hugging Swann back and then letting her go. Temple's hugs are always warm, maternal, somehow, even to her peers and betters. She watches Swann go and waves back.

"Sweet dreams."

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The Whole World in a Dark Hue [Closed]

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