thecapitol | How is This Living? [Closed]

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How is This Living? [Closed]

WHO| Temple and Linden
WHAT| Temple visits Linden after his surgery.
WHEN| After the crowning.
WHERE| A hospital in the city.
WARNINGS| Mentions of drug abuse, sexual assault, dead infants.

Temple hates hospitals. The first time she was ever in one - like many Districters, she was born at home, with the town doctor dabbing her fading mother’s head with a wet cloth and her brothers cleansing her newborn bloody body with dishtowels - was after the Arena, where they hooked an IV up to her arm to flood her shriveled veins with the fluids she didn’t get during the Games, where they stitched up the places she was torn between the legs, splinted her broken ankle. Since then she’s have the occasional cosmetic procedure and, of course, given birth to two children, but as much as possible has had her appointments at home. There’s only so much healing that can be done when the mind’s sutures are being tugged and yanked.

But for as much as she hates hospitals, she does care about Linden, and as such she visits him during her recovery with a bouquet of flowers nearly as big as she is. The Avox carrying it stands behind her, and from the certain angles it gives Temple the effect of a massive peacock’s plume. She’s maintained her aura of contentment, the one Linden knows is a facade, and the chatter around her always seems to be that time back in the city is doing her well, that the Districts must really take it out of a girl, as boring and dirty as they are.

She raps her knuckles on the doorframe of Linden’s room; naturally, Mentors are provided with fairly comfortable accoutrements. There’s a window, a table with more flowers and a stuffed Tribute, a tray of hospital food. It’s all so cheery in comparison to Linden, looking frail and, well, like he’s just had surgery. Temple looks healthier than ever and her best friend is nearly a ghost.

“Would it be crass to say that seeing you in this state makes me want a drink?”

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You won't feel a thing.

He's heard it so many times. It used to be a reassurance before trying something new and exciting that promised to kill his pain and his boredom. This latest time, before he'd slipped under the anesthetic, it had sounded disdainful, delivered from a contributing, sober member of society to one more messed up Victor as she turned his world to twilight with the steady plunge of a non-designer syringe.

Despite her disdain, she hadn't lied. Linden had stayed sleeping and stayed numb, and when he eventually opened his eyes, the numbness remained.

Damn it. I said no Morphling. Anything but Morphling, I said.

Not that it matters much what he wants as a Victor. He knows better than to be surprised, and when he hears the door, he's quick to lie still and quiet with his eyes closed until he hears Temple's voice. Thus reassured, he pushes the blanket away from his arm, where he's been diligently working at getting the IV drip out of his arm.

"Not crass at all," he responds as he slides the needle free and lets it drop beside the bed. "Feel free to indulge, if you'd like, I won't be offended."

"We'll see how long I can go without." She nods her head and that silent connection with the Avox seems to activate, this unspoken bond; Temple tells the Avox everything, uses her like a machine and also a diary, because it's not like they could even torture the truth out of a mute automaton of a person. The Avox begins to arrange the flowers by the window so that they'll receive light without blocking Linden's view.

She clicks her way over to Linden and rests a hand against his forehead, invading his space with the license only a close friend and sometimes not even though have, her face contorted into sympathy and concern and not an iota of frustration. She never held Linden's drinking or drug use against him - how could she? It's not like Gowan, from whom she exacts restitution in blood and money every day. If Linden were to leave her (abandon her) for an ethanol-soaked death, she wouldn't consider it an insult.

"How do you feel?" She brushes some of the hair away from his head, sweaty and crisp from the surgery and the hours he's spent lying here. "I didn't even know you were sick. Thankfully I have connection, everyone talks to me. Oh, Linden."

The Avox pulls up a chair and Temple sets down.

His answering laugh is wry and quavery; he, too, wonders how long he can manage without a drink to sustain him. That being said, the Morphling scares him, and even if it means being in a world of pain coming off the drip too soon after surgery, the thought of sinking back into the soggy grips of his worst addiction and vice would be infinitely worse.

I don't want to leave. Not now, with so much left to do, and the Rebellion...

Linden averts his eyes at Temple's touch. Years of being a mother have doubtless contributed to her skill in this capacity; truly, she's very good at sympathy. Her warm, dry fingers feel strange against his clammy forehead, but not unwelcome, even if it's largely in part because the Morphling is still singing through his veins and won't fade for a little while yet.

"I feel good," he answers honestly, though his tone carries a guarded edge; he knows that won't be the case for very long, even if he has some of the best care the Capitol has to offer and he can count on being on the mend quickly enough to return to the Tower within a couple more days at the most. He's trying to soldier through without heavy painkillers, though, and that will make the hours crawl by. "And a lot of people didn't know, at least not the details. It's as unglamorous and humiliating as it was inevitable."

He turns his head to watch her sit, the realization sinking in that it means she'll be here for awhile.

"You could have waited for me to go back to the Tower," he points out. "In a few days it'll be like I was never here, save for one more scar."

He pauses, fingers pressing against the bruised place in his arm that remains where a needle is newly absent.

"...or is it just that you like to seek me out at my worst, Temple?"

"Good. No one's saying anything too awful, you know, not anything worse than what people like us get out of the corners of their mouths most days." That's not entirely true - Temple's Capitol affectations and marital status have largely shielded her from being remembered as a Mentor - but it wouldn't do to split hairs right now, to remind Linden of how much better she is at disappearing.

She feels as if she could almost touch the morphling seeping from his pores, as if that numb glow is actually lighting him up from the inside, adding a painless color to his parchment pallor. It's just sweat, she tells herself. There's nothing holy or sublime about drugs (escape). To trick herself into thinking pleasure and release are anything other than chemical reactions and bodily functions would be to deny that they're all locked in this rotten meat.

She pulls her hand away from him, a cold snap coming over her face like the first indications of winter. "That's an ugly accusation."

It's not necessarily an untrue one, but it's certainly not one Temple will admit to, to Linden or to herself. She's already built an argument out of how much she hates hospitals, how this is friendship and friendship is sacrificing comfort for each other, nothing more. An addiction to commiserating is harder to diagnose than one to drugs, drink, or sex.

Linden doesn't believe it fully enough to accept it, but he appreciates the effort Temple's put into soothing his expectations. People are cruel, just as fascinated by weakness as they are by strength and cunning, and the years between a Victor's win and the eventual whimper or bang that ends him covers a fairly wide spectrum connecting the two extremes.

"I don't care what people say," he breathes, clinging to the painkillers while they linger in his system. It's easy to think that he'll be able to keep from reaching desperately for that IV again right now, for the same reason it's easy to think that a dose of designer heroin can definitely be the last after pushing off. Anything feels possible when reality and pain are distant, toothless concepts.

He regrets his unfiltered honesty the moment her hand withdraws and her features don a frosty shroud. "We can't all walk in beauty..." he says gracelessly. "It's been months since I've used, and the surgical grade stuff is a lot..."

That's not it. You felt somehing and you described it without painting a prettier picture, and now you're blaming it on the drugs, like so many other things.

"I'm sorry. I think I said that because I'm just happy I'm not alone."

"I don't walk in beauty either, Linden, so you don't have to act like I'm any better off than you are," she snaps, eyes narrowed and full of iris, lips thin, before it goes out of her.

She sighs from her nose, her mouth still set into an unhappy line, although the disappointment seems more existential than just in Linden for the moment. It's that unhappiness, that dim uncertainty of mental illness, the awareness that something is wrong without the ability to pin it down and thus cure it, with only clumsy and futile gestures in the direction of happiness with money and sex and drugs, that is so wound to both of them.

"Okay. Apology accepted. I'm just tender these days."

She reaches a hand under his blanket and rests her fingertips ever so gently against the inside of his thigh.

He knows he's said something wrong even before she reacts so bitterly, and though he's hearing it all as through a mist, his eyes lower toward his lap at her clear and cold ire. Morphling brings out the honesty in him, moreso than drink, and while they've shared blissfully unguarded and open moments because of it, lying pink and content beside each other as two children freshly-made and oblivious, the world of adults demands honesty with safety fences and regulations. So, incidentally, does existing in the Capitol.

It's safer to say nothing until she's broken the silence that follows her chiding words. He waits until her admission and the return of her honeyed gentleness before he glances up again to meet her eyes and feel the unhappiness that hangs between them despite their best efforts to grasp toward something better.

It lasts for all of a few seconds before his attention is being pulled a different direction. Temple was never one for subtlety, and if she was, it was long before the day she decided she wanted him and let him know in terms not even a gentleman could every misintepret. He'd laugh if he had it in him, but he can only stare initially. Then, his own hand reaches to press over it, unmoving, neither encouraging or pushing away her touch.

They are, the two of them, two fundamentally broken people, with cracks running through them in asymmetric but complementary angles, and their attempts to pretend otherwise are nothing more than dressing up. It's not that Temple's hurt because she's insulted, but because for a moment there, just a moment, Linden broke the illusion that she tries to cultivate that they'll both be alright - that they are alright.

Temple Drake is not a wildly creative person, and in the face of trouble she falls back on the old tricks and fixes that have patched her and kept her ramshackle and semi-functional until now. Here, it's sex. It usually is.

"I can be subtle," she whispers, "no one will know from the cameras. You just have to keep from making too much noise."

Linden and Temple both are revealed in that brief moment as bewildered children in too-big clothes that do not fit or suit them. Their affectations are clumsy mimicry and their words are memorization without full comprehension.

Neither of them are OK, and that's not going to change no matter how many jokes they make or smiles they force, or how surreptitiously they can reach for the warmth between the other's legs.

"You..." he winces; the Morphling he disconnected is fading from his system slowly, but every moment he notices it weakening and some of that post-surgical pain seeping back into his consciousness. "I'm sure you can, but..."

His fist clutches a handful of blanket. He's not as fast to respond to her touch as he usually is, but she's skilled in this area and experienced with him in particular, besides.

"OK, fine... please, do it, before the pain starts to get bad..."

"You won't feel any pain at all," she says, leaning forward and placing a kiss on her forehead that has a flick of tongue that no one will see, that may not even register for what it is, may forever be a question of whether it happened or not if not for the cool air on the small patch of saliva.

Her fingers toy under the blanket, touching more through proximity than actual contact, as if she's more interested in swirling the hot air trapped between his body and the sheets than in his actual body. It's expert. It's something Temple learned to do because it was the least objectionable way to get a bidder off, something she could do without looking, without even paying attention, while her mind spilled out and away and left her head barren.

Just like embroidery, all fingerwork, all delicacy and art made into a rote labor.

She uses the other hand to prick at his vein with the painkillers, not enough to reconnect it but letting drops into his bloodstream, stretching his senses out between pleasure and the pain of the needle.

It's not quite the point he was trying to make, shivering as her lips meet with a salty sheen of sweat. It's a result of the stress that's already starting to set in following his surgery and the results of actually attempting to reject painkillers after the fact. There are certainly rumors surrounding Temple's promiscuity and faithfulness to her husband, and some of them might involve Linden despite the care with which they've conducted their affair over the years, and though this doesn't look inherently incriminating, it's still a tender moment that borders on intimacy, even for Victors who have bonded over traumas during and since their respective Arenas.

Her touch is delicate to the point of being teasing; even in his current condition, she can pull this off, make it something he's got the constitution to desire rather than an exhausting and impossible demand. While she stirs and strokes responses out his mending, sore body, her deft fingers work at his vein.

They're both so good with needles. It's a virtue in her District, and something shameful in his, but here in the Capitol, it all blurs and melds into a skill that's useful for creating and destroying alike. There's a sharp intake of breath from Linden, and it's unclear whether it's a response to the comfort under the sheets or the drug that's finding a way back into his bloodstream after being dropped to the floor.

"I don't want..." he murmurs indistinctly, coherency escaping him as Temple manipulates him easily in her practiced hands and lets him feel the aching ecstasy he's been denying himself.

If he truly didn't want it, there would't be a problem.

"It's a little late for that now, honey. You might as well use in moderation while you recover." He's been drugged up for a few hours now. Any detoxification he's gone through has been set back, if not obliterated, long before she got here.

Her voice isn't the same as it was when she brought the flowers in moments ago. She's slipping into someone else, someone who is all comfort and hedonism and maternity and immediate pleasure, because if she's giving pleasure on her own terms someone else's pleasure won't be taken from her later. Slips into 'Boots' as easily as she does into 'Temple Stevens', as if she isn't actually a person but an essence that fills a persona as if it were a vessel, something liquid and insubstantial and undefined and malleable.

Her hand words deftly, teasing then holding and stroking, pulling, fondling.

"I'm so sorry you're here, Linden," she says, letting guilt and pity seep into this private, intimate, sexual moment, because those two emotions are always lurking somewhere not only in them and not only in sex but in the air that surrounds them, as if it's something contagious that attaches to anyone who breathes in the same oxygen too deeply.

She calls him honey; it's a generic, impersonal term of endearment, perhaps appropriate to apply to him as he's reduced to his body and aches and shivering responses to stimulus. The encouragement to use is actually, for once, advice that an actual medical professional would probably agree with, and he nods blearily in resigned acceptance as she kneads and strokes him to hardness more discreetly than should be possible.

On the cameras it's possible to see that something is going on; there's some squirming and restless leg movement under the blankets, and she has his heart rate visibly and audibly elevated via the monitor, but camera footage alone is not incriminating enough to get them in trouble as long as things don't start to look combative.

It's unfair of her to talk to him when he can't reach for the warmth between her legs in kind. She sounds calm, controlled and distant in the way she does when she slips into her Capitol-painted role, and Linden doubts that he can manage to maintain the even monotone he generally affects. Not like this, with her hand and the needle working together to put regret out of his mind.

"I'm sorry," he stammers, stomach muscles clenching as he tries to keep from pushing himself into her hand and giving away their improper conduct beyond a doubt. "I shouldn't have let it get this bad... it's my fault. I did this."

The last words come out in a sigh that carries a note of pride that is only comprehensible to broken people like them: I did this, and those bastards couldn't stop me.

"You did." She catches that pride and lets him have it, strokes it like she does his genitals now under the covers, with the same artful delicacy. It's a skill one gains as a Victor, or doesn't - it's demanded by bidders who want their egos stroked by beautiful victims and by interviewers without Caesar Flickerman's talent, the kind who want to needle for a scandal rather than a personality. You learn how to touch someone without hurting them, which seems so counter-intuitive for people who are fashioned into weapons.

She knows how to touch an audience's heart and a man's groin and these skills are small but they're enough to get her by where intelligence or kindness never would have protected her.

She almost says what else could you do? but Victors like the illusions of choice. They like to believe that they can direct their own destiny into the ditch, as if of all the things done to them there's still some core that cannot be wrenched away from them. Temple knows better, but she also knows how it is to want to believe.

And who's to say that this here is the Capitol's fault? Plenty of people Linden's age back home are just as drunk and high. Maybe he always would have ended up here.

"Easy, easy. Don't pop any stitches, I won't know how to fix them." And it would cut this session short.

Linden is not beautiful, and he tries not to be a victim, even if life mangles and locks him into that role just as often as the other ironically-named "Victors." To win is to prevail and triumph, as long as it isn't far and high enough to challenge Snow or his menacing status quo.

It's to value an illusion, knowing it to be an illusion, there being nothing else.

He doesn't pop any stitches, but Temple's skilled ministrations don't take much longer to drag his sore, mending body to the point of climax. He's never been loud when he comes, which is fortunate, considering their need for some discretion here. Even though he wonders (as he frequently does) if Temple might not want to get caught just a little bit. With a few short, shallow breaths, he stiffens and overflows into her dainty, manicured hand, closing his eyes to prevent the cameras from catching the way they roll back in at least a few moments of pleasure.

Temple continues to knead at him, but more softly now, to eke aftershocks from him, to leave him tended until there is no mistaking that this encounter has so ended. Under the covers, she wipes her hand against his thigh, the papery hospital blankets, the bedsheet.

She kisses his forehead again the way she does when she bids her son good night. She tells herself she is helping Linden to heal, if not his body or his mind then at least this fragile, ugly relationship they keep between them. Then she pulls away and meets his eyes.

"We're alright, aren't we?"

It's not the best orgasm of his life, but it might be one of the most welcome. It gives him a slight, distracting reprieve from pain, at least, and he pants and sighs as her hand gentles its strokes and eventually leaves his member. His forehead is salty with clammy sweat as she kisses it, but there's color in his cheeks until the inevitable fade. It's much like the way their former shared highs would illuminate their dark, sad lives temporarily, lush and vibrant while they lasted.

He opens his dark, unfocused eyes, fixing them on her the best he can when she asks her question.

"We're..."

She so seldom refers to a "we", not like that, where they're involved. It's not real if it's not voiced, probably not even if it is voiced.

"...what do you mean, 'alright?'" he asks, not accusing or ridiculing, but genuinely curious and concerned. Should he be concerned?

"Earlier you said..."

She pulls a small lemon-scented handwipe from her purse and rubs it, one finger at a time, over her hands. Then she folds it into a square and places it in the hand of her Avox, who seems to have spirited themselves from a shadowy corner just to present an upturned palm to her.

"I'm probably just being sensitive. I know that these things-" -hospitals, surgeries, a more eventful marker on the daily torture of basic survival that has gone from traumatizing to merely rote- "can sometimes make relationships a little shaky."

It's almost surreal. By the time a man is infirm and pitiful enough to need this kind of surgery, he's usually old. Married. With children, perhaps even grandchildren. Even under the morphling's hazy influence, he can't even feel ambivalent about the fact that he has none of those things, but he can at least reflect on the fact that Temple's here where those people would be if they did exist. The scent of lemon reaches his nostrils, mingling with her perfume and hospital odors that are both stuffy and sterile.

He thinks it must be true. Broken people draw Temple like a call. He's in the worst shape yet of his admittedly pretty eventful and unkind life and she's here, playing at the role of the widow already, speaking of "relationships" when it seems like a fancy and sentimental word for what they have. Linden thinks it might be uncharacteristic; he thinks that of the two of them, he would almost be the one more likely to slip up and use it that way first, since Temple has many and he only has her.

"Temple, you're my friend... you're always going to be my friend," he offers, eyes half-closed, slurred and gentle reassurance. "I'm going to live to call you that a little longer, looks like. Don't worry."

She turns her face to him again, her expression like an overcast sunrise over a field, dim but pleasant. Sated, the kind of full satisfaction of someone who's made a whole meal of the few words given her.

"Good. You probably know by now that I'm kind of fond of you," she says. She reaches over and tousles his greasy hair, days without a proper shower now from being in the hospital, the way she does Bailey's. She walks that strange line with Linden at times, somehow wife and mistress and mother all at once, as if by becoming everything she can locate herself within the archetypes.

The answering laughter is faint and tired. There's not much hearty about Linden even on the best of days; he tends not to laugh, rather than faking it, so chances are that it's genuine despite its insubstantial quality.

"I did have a feeling."

It's nice to pretend, anyway, for a little while. Even as an impostor and a parasite, Temple has never made him feel unwelcome in her life or her bed. In a world that simply tends to bury people like Linden, who have the potential to be imposing with the right support structure but gets swept away alone, Temple's been something to hold onto.

"Thanks for not giving up on me, anyway. In spite of the flowers, I haven't had many visitors."

"People like us rarely do." She brushes some of that dank hair from his forehead again. "I'll come back tomorrow if you want, if you're not released yet. I kind of go out of my skin when I'm alone."

She does it in two ways; sometimes she feels anxious, feels every nerve aching and bruised, her mind battered around with memories that she can't seem to exorcise. And sometimes she simply escapes. Time vanishes and she'll have stared at a wall for four hours. She doesn't know where she goes when that happens, but she knows that her body becomes nothing but flesh.

She gets up from her seat.

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How is This Living? [Closed]

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/wrapping