thecapitol | I Ran So Far I Could Hardly Breathe [Open]

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I Ran So Far I Could Hardly Breathe [Open]

WHO| Temple Drake-Stevens and anyone in or visiting D8!
WHAT| Temple gives the D8 Tributes a very Temple gift.
WHERE| D8 Suite
WHEN| Before the reaping for the mini-Arena.
WARNINGS| Underage alcohol use, classist idiocy, Temple's special brand of stupid. Sexual assault topics will be warned within the thread subject headers.

Temple Drake would have hidden under the covers at the Mentor highlight reel that went up about her last night after she got off work. She would have stayed there all day, chewing on her fingernails until the manicure came off between her teeth, snot-nosed with her knees together and her hair in a mat of red curls and dried tears, knowing that every person who sees her on the street tomorrow will be thinking of how she was there on the television, helpless and violated and pathetic and scared.

But Temple Stevens, Temple thinks, that woman that the girl emulates more than she actually is, isn't fazed by the violence of the Games or anything that happened in them, and she has a job to do, or at least to pretend to do in valiant Capitol fashion. And so Temple, the person she is and the person she wants so badly to be together, gets out of bed in the morning and dresses in something not even a Mentor could afford on their own dime. Pearls drip down the dress and the fur feels as if luxury itself is giving her an embrace. Her impossibly high shoes, which with six-inch heels bring her to a grand total five and a half feet, click as she walks from her car the valet has parked to the elevator, and her five year-old son, on a leash and tended to by an Avox nanny, keeps the pace. She politely grins and waves at the few people between the curb and her workplace who tell her they saw her on TV last night.

Temple Stevens isn't fazed at all. She is the protective armor, fortified by wealth and fashion and charm, that no past can break down, no matter how many times it's regurgitated for the media.

However, for the sake of having something else to talk about when she gets to District Eight, she's had a gift for her Tributes (some of whom she hasn't even met!) installed in the Suite living room: a fondue fountain that, split into tiers, provides a constant stream of cheese, chocolate and bourbon, with Temple's favorite being the last one. It's not enough to keep burly men fed, but hopefully it'll cheer them up a little.

Throughout the day, Temple can be found letting her kid (who mostly sleeps and plays in Temple's private Mentor suite) sample bourbon-soaked angel-bread from the fountain, dropping little nuggets of wisdom like "I noticed when you make an Avox get down on all fours they have the same number of legs as a table - don't you think that means they were made to serve?" on anyone who wanders in, and very occasionally trying to order Sponsor gifts for the next Arena in between testing new pairs of shoes and trying out different earrings in the communal bathroom.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"You're hardly up the stairs and you're telling me how to parent and doing it for me," Temple says, eyes narrowed, that dangerous warning tone in her voice that is the product of twinned wealth and poverty - Temple can be vicious with her words because she has the power of a very rich woman and the desperation of a beggar, and has so twisted the two around each other that when she attacks she doesn't know which informs her more. "That's kind of you to do, so unsolicited and at the cost of your health."

She folds her arms and watches as Bailey takes the gift and rips off the wrapping paper. Bailey is, to his mild credit, as delighted by a logic puzzle as he is by a shiny bauble, and within moments he's uttered a passing "thanks" to Linden and has dumped the pieces on the floor to organize, although in his current inebriated state he doesn't seem to be having much luck with anything but the most basic color coordination. Temple makes sure that he's set up on the floor before she gestures with her eyes that she and Linden should talk with the door between them and her son.

She lets her gaze linger on Bailey before she closes the door behind her, feeling for an instant the impending doom not of his eventual maturation but of the fact that someday he'll understand why his mother is so crazy.

She sighs and folds her arms again as she looks at Linden. "He wanted to know why I wouldn't let him watch television last night."

It is vicious, and Linden looks briefly taken aback before his eyes harden and he approaches the interaction from a more unflinching angle. He rationalizes that he owns up to his frailty, and therefore has no reason to be ashamed of it.

"I don't know about kind, but it certainly seems necessary."

Linden is kind, or at least not cruel, to refrain from saying that Bailey drinking bourbon unattended is just as bad as the drinking during pregnancy that Gowan alleged. The cutting barb occurs to him, though, which means that this entire situation is getting to him enough to make his spirit just as mean as Temple's. His eyes travel alongside hers to the child that is probably not her husband's delightedly openly his puzzle and beginning to sort the pieces... well, not like a brilliant prodigy kid, but at least with some consistency despite his drunkenness. He nods to acknowledge the thanks, but the boy doesn't see or answer it, and he silently lets Temple close the door and put that barrier and distance between two broken-flint Victors and an innocent child.

"What did you tell him?" He asks. "I imagine even drunker than a five year old should be, he still realizes when you're lying to him. He's a child, not an idiot."

Temple's not unused to her pain not serving as any sort of shield. Some women cry when they want someone to back off, but those are Capitolites born and bred. Districters, especially Victors, know the feebleness and futility of tears and so Temple doesn't even bother with them. Maybe a Capitolite would have treated her woundedness with, though not empathy, a sort of repulsed concern, but this is Linden, her vice and her victim and her friend, and he's going to insist on staying honest with her.

"Well, if you want to go in there and explain to him that I didn't want him to watch his mother getting raped with a damn corncob, you're welcome to. I won't stop you, it'll be a task off my plate." Her voice is hushed, but she knows as well as Linden does that it might well be recorded. Whispers are as incriminating as screams, after all. "I told him there was an important news report I needed to watch. If he knew I was lying I'm sure I would have heard about it between the rest of the tantrum."

She walks back over to the fountain and gets herself a glass, filling it with alcohol for herself and then filling one with slightly less for Linden, like she's already forgotten he was just in the hospital getting his liver replaced.

She is so clearly and obviously overwhelmed. Linden knows what it's like, having been on this circuit for even longer than she has; he even watched her Games live and remembers being the one to personally make the move to turn off the television at the viewing party he was attending. A couple of years later and he might not have been sober enough to realize what was going on, or on his way out via stretcher, and he's in the process of trying to remember what it is like to be able to cope without alcohol and pills. Lately, he's doing OK, not perfectly, but better than he has in almost a decade. Even if it came at a cost, that is some kind of victory for the man.

He glances at the closed door, listening to the childish and slightly slurred murmurings from the other side indicating that Bailey is both well and distracted. Linden looks like he is actually considering trying to find a way to explain it, but the ambition dies quickly and he averts his sunken eyes. This is an occasion where he will defer to Temple's judgment as a parent without challenge or question, because some things are too heavy and difficult and she has the luxury of protecting her child rather than traumatizing him. He nods in wordless acceptace as she drifts from his side, following her to the location he'd pried Bailey from just minutes before.

Linden is well aware that a sudden transition from desperate addict to teetotaler is one that many would resent, and that Temple's likely to be at the top of that list. They've always shared the desire to blot out pain, and the results of that desire, for better or worse. Whether it culminated in numbly shimmering sex or stabbing, anxious fear when someone was a little too difficult to awaken after nodding off, it was mutual and shared without disapproval or judgment. He doesn't deny that they both needed it on some toxic level, which is why it feels impossible to deny Temple as she turns toward him with a glass.

It's not as full. It's probably her idea of reasonable moderation, when no such option might exist for Linden anymore. He's worn out, spent, at the point where he is outliving his organs and extending his life unnaturally at the expense of others. He doesn't exactly push the glass away, but his hand goes over it, the knuckle of his smallest finger still swollen and bruised from where he intentionally crushed it the day he officially grieved for his mother.

"I know that some things aren't fair to ask you for," he says softly, just above a whisper. "We've both always understood that. But you're the hardest person for me to say no to, and if you're my friend, Temple... don't help me kill myself now that I actually want to live. Please."

It's a different way to need her, and Linden doesn't actually know or predict how she'll react. Maybe it's too different from the dynamic they're comfortable with, outside of that safe, soggy Eden they find so easily where anything goes and no one cares too much about consequences. Maybe Temple was relying on him tonight to get carried out by a team of paramedics with everyone staring gape-jawed, thoroughly distracted from Temple's own state of emotional disarray.

If Linden escapes his predetermined death, in some way it also means that he's leaving Temple behind. They both have to realize it in this tense moment balanced between acceptance and rejection of the poison between them.

For a moment she just stares back at him, confused to the point of uncomprehending, because it always came so naturally to them, the self-destruction, so easily that they never really had to consider it for what it was. She barely even realizes that the glass is in her hand and that that's what he's talking about, and for an instant she believes he's changed the conversation so quickly as to snap her neck with the whiplash.

Then it sinks in, the way he's withdrawing from her, the way he's forcibly untangling himself from the sick bitter roots she can't help but lay down, the trap that is Temple Drake. The cage laced with honey and sugar for the rats to come in. She feels her heart lurch in her chest, and tastes the bourbon at the back of her throat. She wonders, as she always does because she never believed she could fend for herself, not for an instant, what it is that she's going to do without her closest friend, with him condemning her to the lifestyle he now spurns.

"I'm not." She sets the glass of alcohol down on the edge of the fountain, but she does not throw it out. Her voice is a kind of stutter, as if it's cutting out of her mouth unformed and on the way to something else that it never reaches, abrupt and ejaculate. Her eyes dart down, and for a moment her size lends itself to making her look like a child, or worse, like a toy in beautiful garments to be lent to grubby hands. "I'm not."

She blinks (her eyes are glassy behind her thick falsies) and walks around the kitchen aisle, feet making clack-clack noises against the marble tiles. She's stunned, not because she couldn't see it coming but because she could and so she disbelieved even harder that he would separate himself from her like this.

"It was never about that," she says weakly.

Hurting her is the last thing he wants to do, and its inevitability doesn't make it any easier to watch her expression vacate and collapse. She almost seems more confused than hurt, and that makes it worse. There are so many challenging balancing acts here that Linden's social mannerisms aren't delicate enough to handle with the required finesse; rejection without judgment, denial without condescension, you can without I wouldn't. Comprehension dawns, and he realizes that he was wrong, and it actually is worse with her understanding and grasping the full meaning of what turning down the bourbon actually is for both of them.

The roots might make them both sick, but he's the one they're actually choking the life from now, even if she's the smaller and more fragile-looking at this uncomfortable moment. He's added yet another emotional shock to this already tumultuous day and left her reeling, all because he wouldn't share a drink with her as they traditionally have to for their lives to make sense.

He might be a good recovering addict today, but he's being a terrible friend, by their fucked-up standards.

"I know," he's quick to say, following as she moves away from him. "I'm not trying to accuse you, Temple, I swear it."

He means it, too, even if part of him thinks that maybe she'd rather he die belonging to her in their mired status quo rather than break free of their mutual vices and thrive.

"I've worked so hard. I've said no so many times. I've failed just as many. If I fail again, I don't want to blame anyone but myself." He touches her shoulder, wanting her to turn back toward him.

"Please look at me... I won't lie and say this changes nothing, but it doesn't have to be a bad change. I can't..." he shakes his head, forcing laughter, trying to appeal to a different emotion in a way he hopes isn't ill advised. "I can't bring Bailey presents if I'm in the ground, Temple."

Edited 2015-08-21 19:38 (UTC)

It doesn't matter that he isn't trying to accuse her. He is, and something in her kicks and thrashes against being held at the epicenter of an addiction Linden had years before they met. Because it places her in the same web, the lines fraying, and she can admit neither mortality nor responsibility. She's afraid of death and she's afraid of admitting what a disaster she is, the battleground for everyone else's fights, for a nation's bloody war taking place upon her body two or three times a week.

And what sort of mother is that? She can hear Bailey murmuring behind the door, and she's so scared of admitting how entirely ill-equipped she is to take care of him in a whole culture that's ill-equipped to care for children. She becomes vicious again, breaking out of the fragility into something as sharp as a broken piece of glass. When she meets Linden's eyes hers seem pale but it's only because her pupils have constricted into panicked points.

"And that's what I'm doing it, is it? I'm putting myself in the ground where I'm not going to be able to take care of him anymore. Well, you can throw a damn party, then, because at least he won't be around a mother you need to give parenting lessons to."

She takes the glass up from the counter and drinks it back out of spite, almost, but because it's nigh to radioactive to mutate the fear in her into anger and numbness. Her voice is shrill and wet when she speaks again and slams the glass down.

"What did you even come up here for, then?"

Of everyone in Panem, Victors recognize struggling the best. Linden has personally held a struggling body in a straining headlock while another boy killed it, and felt it go limp and heavy as the life seeped out of it. He's personally struggled, both against what his addiction prevents him from having and doing and against waning health that's reminding him every day that his Sun is starting to set, delayed by modern medicine but only for so long. His promises are more like prayers, things that he says hoping that he'll last long enough to see them through, and even if he's trying to mend the damage he's done, it's ultimately too little too late.

Everyone around him realizes it. Temple must realize it, he thinks, meeting her constricted eyes with his own dark dilated ones. He clenches his teeth but says nothing in response to her vitriolic statement, does nothing to stop he from throwing back the bourbon meant for him.

"Temple, I came to see how you were doing after the broadcast."

I'd hoped it would be better.

"I wanted to see if there was anything you needed, and any way I could help."

He doesn't say that he's essentially shooting the moon by attempting this without intending to drink or shoot venom into his veins while her child plays on the other side of a closed door.

"Even if I'm not qualified to give parenting lessons, maybe I could take Bailey out for a bit. There's some stage show about Trolls he'd like. You wouldn't have to worry about losing track of him, while you do what you need to."

"So this is what you consider help."

She knows, deep down, she knows he's doing right by not drinking, by disentangling himself from her alcohol-soaked embraces, and yet it's the combination, no, the culmination of this conversation and the twenty-four hours before it amassing into a thunderhead that could strike her dead now. For a moment she looks at Linden with a pure sort of misery, and then the mask returns; the woundedness turns to haughtiness, the anger to distaste. She becomes every bit the Capitolite woman she pretends to be addressing a Districter, rather than a kindred battered spirit in Mentoring.

"Fine. Take him. God knows you think you can do a better job with him than I can."

She waves her hand like she doesn't care and gets herself another glass of alcohol, acting like Linden's not even there, like he's one of the Avoxes. She fills the cup to the brim until bourbon runs over the rim and then walks over to the very corner of the living room and sits on a cushion of a floor, facing the wall only inches from her nose, taking sips and vanishing from herself. She goes somewhere else, anywhere else, nowhere else.

It might be unintended and unwilling, but the truth of the matter seems to be that Linden is the conduit for this thunderhead. Her misery almost gets a response from him, kneejerk and organic enough that even he doesn't know what it might have been, but then it freezes over. She's affecting the haughty, distant Capitolite she can only pose as like a doll weighed down by all her baubles and finery. She dismisses him, and even though they're not so different, Temple and Linden, the gulf split between them in those moments is every bit as stark and ugly as an open stab wound.

He turns his back on her small, sitting form, returning to the bathroom to kneel beside another. Bailey's still fussing with the puzzle pieces, too inebriated to have made much progress.

"Hey, Bailey. We're going to go see a play," he says, getting his attention and his unfocused eye contact. "Come on, up you get..."

He doesn't wait. He picks up Bailey, hugging him tight like there's any way his scrawny arms can protect him from the madness outside. Nudging open the door, he makes a beeline for the hallway, trying to decide how long he should ensure they're out, and wondering if Temple will even notice after a certain number of hours have passed.

Edited 2015-09-01 01:11 (UTC)

Bailey makes a fussy noise as Linden picks him up, and clings to Linden like a koala around a branch. For all Bailey's brattiness, for all his spoiled entitlement, he clutches onto affection with a surprising amount of desperation. Maybe it's the dead sister. Maybe it's because even at this age he can sense the tension between his mother and purported father. Maybe he's just very fond of his Uncle Linden.

"Is Mommy coming?" Bailey hiccups and clings. "Can I get souvenirs?"

Temple doesn't come with them, and she doesn't notice the hours that pass, only that at some point she's drinking from a glass that's been empty for long enough that the stickiness of the bourbon on her fingers has dissipated. When Linden returns, Temple's asleep in her room, or at least in enough of a stupor that she doesn't respond when someone enters the District Suite.

Linden's much more of a branch than any kind of solid, adult tree, but he's sturdy enough to support the child's clinging weight. He's desperate, too, and holds him right back in an attempt at reassurance.

"Your mother's not feeling very well," Linden explains gently. "Don't worry, she's OK, but she asked me to take you out to have some fun while she tries to feel better. And yes... I'll buy you whatever you like, OK?"

The hours pass in a daze, moreso than they ever have when Linden was drunk or high. His newfound and frequent clarity is its own sharp, intense buzz; he's remembering how blazing his intellect once was as his brain un-numbs itself, the way the world seems to move more slowly now that he's not weighing himself down with heavy stupors. His thoughts fly from synapse to synapse and he's less content than ever with his strange, sad status quo. The time he spends with Bailey is surreal as he struggles to be present and cheerful as the child sobers up, taking him through the carnival-esque parts of the Capitol and keeping his promises, purchasing and carrying what he wants and dutifully following from attraction to attraction. There's always water or juice in Bailey's hand, and then food once Linden's sure it'll stay down. Despite the distant sadness Linden feels for many reasons, he is determined that Bailey remember this one as a perfect day, and he returns with a sober and sleeping boy in his arms. He considers giving Bailey a much-needed bath, but he opts instead to entrust him to the Avoxes, looking on as they tuck him into bed and deal with Linden's various trinkets and gifts.

He doesn't want to leave. He's terrified that something bad might happen if he does. Some of the refreshments are still out, and he realizes that he hasn't eaten today, and he picks over what's left, bits of cheese and crackers palmed and nibbled at neurotically. The bourbon's still there, heady and potent and tempting, and he stares at the fountain for a long time before just going to the couch and eating a late, rushed and insubstantial dinner in a suite that's not his, while lives he has no role in slumber in the rooms over.

Eventually, Temple gets up. The combination of alcohol and downers she's taken has made her heady, the world foggy and slow, and that makes it all feel easier to process but doesn't actually help her analytical skills or recall any. She pulls herself out of the bed like it's a coffin and she's a ghost untangling herself from mortal flesh to watch her own funeral proceedings, and, barefoot and in a skimpy silk nightgown made of sheer lace, she emerges from her bedroom at half past six in the evening.

"Where is he?" Her eyes flash with alarm, her mouth pulling into a grimace of fright, as she realizes that her boy isn't out here with the Avox like she thought he was. To her credit, it's the first thing she latches onto, even before her anger at Linden or her own pain: the panicked, pure concern of a mother for her child cutting through and mingling with the disorientation of waking.

She realizes who it is she's looking at, and some memories of those moments before she banished herself from her own mind return. Right. Linden was taking are of Bailey today. He made a point of it. "Did you- did you put him to bed?"

He's stopped nibbling by the time she practically floats back into the world of the living, almost as white as the lace on her sheer nightgown. His unfinished cheese and crackers sit nearby looking like a mouse attacked them before keeling over from ingesting poison; one of the hardest parts about adjusting to life after ravaging himself with alcohol and drugs is remembering how to eat, not just the bare minimum to live (and even then only when he remembers), but also to feel satisfied and solid. He hates the way his bones stick out on his gaunt frame, but he hates the weight and sluggishness of a full stomach even more.

"He's in bed," he confirms, turning tired eyes toward the stricken and alarmed woman. He doesn't clarify who put him there or how, because really, isn't the end result what matters? "He needs a bath but he's exhausted. It won't hurt him any to wait until morning, he just won't wake up smelling like roses."

More like bourbon, he doesn't say, knowing when to pull back and avoid smearing salt in an already open and raw wound.

"Alright." She relaxes, and it seems to make her wilt a bit, like fear made her spiky and larger than she is while without that emotion to hang herself on she just seems small and bleary, less like a person than like an afterthought someone dumped the remnants of a soul into on the universal assembly line. She reaches up and wipes the corner of her mouth, then pads over to the kitchen and grabs a mug. She fills it half with cold coffee from the coffee pot and then with more alcohol, because to exist in this moment without some sort of analgesic is like exposing herself to a thousand needles that slip into her skin from between the molecules in the air.

She doesn't offer any to Linden. Instead she walks over and takes a seat on the couch next to him, close enough to be read as an apology or at the very least clinginess. She cradles the cold beverage in her hands, blowing at it even though it cooled long ago. Her eyes are dull, distracted - doll-like, and the move like they aren't attached to anything inside her head but are, at least, coordinated in their sluggish twin dance. Her lower lip is shaking. Her hands are too.

"He's going to find out someday. About the Arena. He doesn't even know I'm a Districter, Linden."

He watches her shoulders curl as she seems to shrink, hackles of a sporadically diligent mother lowering along with her misdirected ire. He listens to her movements more than watches them, preferring to find a way to fix his eyes on something inanimate and nonliving, like the coffee table or the couch's armrest. At least those are things that are supposed to look soulless. At least they don't have eyes that are empty and strange. His used to look that way, too, and it was something he and Temple shared in common once. That uncanny valley of the dolls, distant, thousand-yard stare, but without the drugs, a faint flicker of life has returned to Linden's eyes, lifting him out and away and ever further from Temple.

Intelligent, thoughtful, and awake, he doesn't know that she would appreciate seeing them any more than he wants to meet her glassy, anesthetized gaze for the moment.

Footsteps, fluid pouring, another shifting glance as she settles beside him. Their thighs aren't touching, but their hands could at this distance if a move was made. None is immediate.

"Yes," he agrees levelly. "He'll find out. He won't be a child forever. But the only shame he'll feel is the shame you show him, understand? Find some beauty in truth and pare it down to essentials, and Bailey will value it because it's the truth."

Edited 2015-09-11 03:24 (UTC)

Temple snorts. It's a harsh sound, one that doesn't match her dainty physique or usual delicate voice that hovers between glass and razor; glass when she speaks from that chameolonic voice, with every tone just the sound of the world blowing over a cavity; razor when she bites, as if anger constricts her throat down to a slit through which only sharp edges can emerge. She takes a drink of her coffee and alcohol.

"You've seen my Arena. You find some beauty in it. I can't."

Sometimes the truth pulls itself out of her, like blood seeping through a chink in the armor; and there it is, the fact that Temple Drake is not alright, that there are no flowers in the garbage, that the moments of relief she found in the Arena were merely reprieves from the ugliness; that she comforted herself at night with the fact that some of her torturers would mutter that they loved her, or that they would just use their body parts instead of foreign objects, or that they would let her go to sleep afterwards, because they didn't always, because sometimes she didn't even have those small indulgences; Temple Drake didn't find beauty but crafted it herself out of desperation, didn't find silver linings but instead sculpted something if not pleasing then at least not horrifying from the excrement of human cruelty; Temple Drake, debased and sad, walked out of her Arena with nothing, not even a victory, not really.

"Thank you for taking him today."

The snort is harsh enough to jolt him slightly, shake his placid, exhausted bearing for just a moment. He stiffens, jumps slightly like Victors tend to at sudden sounds, especially those base, primal, animalistic ones. It could be a creature in the bush, hundreds of pounds of lean muscle and sleek motion and powerful jaws. Even as the mind realizes that can't be true, the body reacts as though it's the only truth.

For one who loves truth, as Linden does, it's a difficult predicament to be in. Not that he's allowed to openly love it, trapped and mired as he is with all the other falsehoods staggering through the Capitol in a drunken reverie.

"There were bad people in your Arena..." he says quietly. "No matter what you might think, you weren't one of them. There's your beauty and your truth."

He shakes his head, as if denying that he did take Bailey. The lights and music and laughter seem so far away now. "It was a good day. I wish you could have shared it with us."

"I could have run. I could have fought back. I just...I was scared. And tired, by the end. I let it happen."

The guilt has had so many dark, warm places to grow in her. It's a festering culture, ravaging the wounds of the Arena that have been covered but not disinfected. It exists because some part of her needs to believe that she was responsible because that means she had some control, will have some control in the future, no matter how many times she's bid on or how many competitors for Gowan's market shares use her to send a message.

"He'll never have to live that life. Bailey won't, I mean. That's the one thing I can do for him." She wants to say that there are other good things that came of her Arena - a year of food for her District, meeting Linden and the other Mentors, living in the Capitol - but the sentiments all feel like ash settling at the base of her skull.

She starts talking, and automatically, his head begins to shake back and forth, sorrow and denial flickering behind the newly living man's eyes. "The things you could have done are infinite. You can't afford to dwell on any of them when the events are set," he insists in a low voice. "You'll get lost and hurt and the cycle of torture will repeat endlessly until you're dead or crazy. So many Victors go that way. Bailey needs you to go a better way, because yours is the example he'll be following."

He cradles his hollow cheek in his hand, too tired to hold it up.

"I'm jealous, you know. Of what you have to live for. You have a future, and I'm fighting for a kind place in a handful of a child's memories."

"You act like the past is behind us," Temple says, laughing without humor or even sadness into another sip of her drink. It rolls down her throat, not even burning anymore, not anything but something to try and fill that hollow space inside her. "Like it's not what makes us exactly what we are."

What, not who, because Temple has come to believe that people like her, that Districters, are less than human. It's such an insidious belief that she adopted it without even realizing it, and doesn't notice that's how she thinks now.

Her son cannot follow in her footsteps. The one joy in her life is that she can prevent that by his birthright. She can pretend that he will never suffer, never long for anything, especially a reprieve from life.

"There's nothing stopping you, Linden. If you're going to turn over a new leaf, you might as well go all the way."

Linden has always known that Temple thinks this way, that her values are as warped and broken as her fractured sense of self-worth. Somehow, it's only now that he recognizes it as something horrifying that is making her that glazed-eyed doll.

"The things that catch and snag on our ambitions aren't always what we expect," he says flatly. "You know that just as well as I do, because the logic goes both directions. There's nothing stopping you, either."

He reaches for one of his neglected crackers, only to work at crumbling it in his fingers.

"You hate Gowan. You hate yourself. That must get in the way of loving the sum of your parts. Don't you want something better than all this for Bailey?"

"Bailey's not the sum of our parts. What a crass way to describe a child." Bailey has to be something better than these two hated people, the man who forgives her for being a victim and the woman who blames herself for it. Besides, she almost says, he isn't even Gowan's. Not really.

Temple pulls a pack of traditional cigarettes out of her purse and lights one up. Supposedly, only vapors are allowed in the Tribute Center, but she doesn't care. No one in their right mind would try to stop her. She takes a drag.

She reaches over and takes Linden's wrist, tapping the lipstick-covered edge of her cigarette against his skin. "What better is there? The way we grew up? Me taking him out to a District and raising him as the salt of the earth? I could just- I should just give him to Gowan."

"I don't think it's crass," Linden says, staunch despite the soft, tired sigh his voice comes out as. "I think it's an elegant and simple way to describe something as violent and messy as a life."

Any life, he almost adds, not just fractured and fucked-up Victors. He watches the lit cigarette tapping the veins in his wrist that he's thought about slitting open on more than one occasion. Temple's scarlet lipstick calls it to mind in a way that's not quite comfortable, but is still distant and dead enough to keep from stinging too viscerally.

"Don't give him to Gowan. You really think he could do better?" Linden asks. "I like seeing him, you know. I like looking him in the eye, and I like him being the first to look away. He's fatter than me but I still feel like I could take him in a fight. Strangest thing."

He pauses.

"You like it, too. Don't you."

"I think it denies him the chance to be better than the two of us," Temple says, blurring the line between whether she's talking about her and Gowan or her and Linden.

"Like making him back down or like watching you do it?" No to the former, yes to the latter. It makes her sick to have that shot of momentary power, to make the spineless, pathetic bastard in front of her cower before her words and her absences, because the aftertaste is the knowledge that he could destroy her from the inside out by no factor other than his Citizenship. Any advantage she has is illusory when he holds the trump card.

And she sits at home as he holds it over her, forgiving her over and over for her victimizations, patting himself on the back the whole while for being the most understanding and saintly of husbands. An even trade, he once said, his forgiveness for hers over abandoning her in the Arena, and she said yes, it must be, but she was lying.

But she does love to watch Linden make him back down. It's as if for the moments she sees it she's stepping into an alternate life where she isn't in a marriage that feels like a noose, where the alternative isn't night after night of forced prostitution.

"I don't think people who don't know how to be happy can give Bailey a happy life."

I Ran So Far I Could Hardly Breathe [Open]

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