thecapitol | Dog Bait, Small Veins [Closed]

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Dog Bait, Small Veins [Closed]

WHO| Temple and Peggy; Temple and Quintus
WHAT| Temple and Peggy have a horrible encounter; Temple sells out her fellow Mentors.
WHEN| After the mini-Arena.
WHERE| A bidder's house; the Peacekeeper Headquarters.
WARNINGS| Rape in the thread with Peggy. Graphic content, don't read if you're uncomfortable. Nothing yet in the thread with Quintus.

I. For Peggy

In any society but this one, Temple would be well within her rights to kick, scream, scratch or stab her way out of the situation - not only has she been bid on in retaliation for a stock deal gone wrong on Gowan's end, but she's part of a fetish package with her stronger, larger doppelganger, who also happens to be her murderer. But she is in this society, and acutely aware of it, and so any part of Temple that wants to put up a fight is submerged under pleasantries and rationalizations, until even Temple herself forgets that she ever had objections.

She plays along almost enthusiastically, giggling at all the jokes and cooing at their bidder's prowess with such conviction that any artifice would seem a projection on the part of the viewer. She doesn't cringe or whimper, even when the bidder runs his hand over that carved-heart scar on her thigh or when Peggy puts her hands around her neck only moments after the man did, at a command that Temple acted perfectly fine with. She doesn't even fake it because faking requires intent, but there's something off about the entire thing. She is like a carved eggshell, fragile and expensive and beautiful but hollow, aggressively hollow, as if to look at her is to be forced into acknowledging the serene emptiness of her expression, the humanity that doesn't exist behind her pale, pupil-heavy eyes.

She goes immediately to sleep after the 'rough and tumble', not because she's relaxed but because that is a foolproof way to shut out the waking world, and her ability to handle it is entirely expended. She rests so peacefully she looks dead.

When all's said and done, the bidder, who has paid for their services overnight, leaves them in the bed while he heads out to work as the head of some company that imports wheat from District Nine. He leaves in a three-piece suit, respectable, upstanding, a pillar of Capitol society, the image of a baron more than a robber. Temple gets up early, untwines herself from the bedsheets and takes some makeup from an Avox and sits in front of the boudoir, styling her hair and painting on a face.

She hums as she covers the bruises running over her neck, a spry little morning tune from far from the Capitol.

II. For Quintus.

Temple's never been discreet, per se, but she's always been careful to never leave any evidence that could be used against her. To be dragged in for questioning for a dalliance with a young man she's just met (not a Tribute, not a Staffer, not even a Districter) is embarrassing, but she already has firm beliefs in her ability to wriggle out of this situation without anything someone can send home to Gowan. He can't (won't) act on hunches, rumors, gossip, and Temple's ready to throw this young man under the bus if it means not having to spend the night in the sterile, boring Peacekeeper's offices.

And besides, there's no physical evidence of anything. Temple hasn't even given him a kiss yet.

"I'm Temple Stevens, Gowan Stevens' wife, you can't just hold me without telling me what I'm charged with." She tips her nose up (it would look comical on someone her height if she weren't in heels) and pouts and huffs until she's led to a seat in the lobby.

As usual, the waiting room is empty. The Peacekeepers have done an admirable job keeping the riffraff out of the Capitol city's borders, much less their own custody. Temple takes a seat and yelps as an officer handcuffs her to the chair.

"Excuse me!" she hisses, kicking her feet aimlessly out. "I have a kid to get home to. Make this fast."

"Mr. Falxvale wanted to have a word with you. He'll be here to take you to interrogation shortly."

"I demand cameras," Temple huffs. "I want everything he asks of me recorded."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Having sex with Temple Stevens is like having sex with with a corpse, except she would speak and have a smile painted on her face. It's almost an existential experience to be on top of her, hands on the woman's throat, looking at her empty eyes and doll smile. It feels like she's looking into her future, and for one hysterical moment, she was so afraid that she wanted to keep choking her until she died.

She didn't show it, though. She can't hide everything, but she can hide that. She always has the slightest edge with bidders, but they think of it as a sexy dominatrix persona and she won't tell them different. She makes herself at home in their house, makes them give her good food and wine, makes them ask nicely. Not everyone plays along, but no one recognizes it for what it is--the thrashing of a woman trying to gain some control over what's happening to her.

It's not the first time he's been in a threesome. Usually, it's married couples that want to spice up their sex life. She's never done this with Temple, though. She's worried that she'll get in the way of harvesting secrets from the bidder, but Temple goes right to sleep. That leaves Peggy to talk with the bidder and eke out secrets deep into the night.

She woke up early. She couldn't go to the gym like she normally would, so she just got on the floor and started doing sit ups and push ups. She doesn't bother covering the knotty scar tissue on her abdomen and back. Only Temple and the avoxes are there, and it isn't like either of them would be staring. She waits until Temple has woken up and gotten to to the boudoir, out of eye shot, before she collapses on the ground and breathes. Her body is screaming from all the internal injuries she racked up in the arena, and she's weak from the radiation treatment, but she's building back up her strength as fast as possible and it hurts.

She hears humming. She props herself up on her elbows, finally daring to talk to the woman she tried to kill and then shared a bed with less than a week later. "What song is that?"

Temple knows Peggy's exercising (knows Peggy's in pain and purging as much of it as she can through her pores), but she doesn't say anything about it. She lets Peggy keep at it, and some ugly, bitter part of Temple is glad that it hurts, that Peggy didn't get brought back from the Arena whole, that she's carrying a scar from the same Arena that cut a gash across Temple's crosshatched mind.

A gash that was pulled open further and then ritually sewn up again over the last night. Temple's good at sewing things.

"Oh, it's from home," Temple says lightly (she would only ever say that to another Mentor, and only now, with her Capitol deniability so forcibly ripped away by a night of violation), dabbing at her collarbone with a powder brush to blend in the cover for bruises. Blemishes show up so harsh on her pale skin, she thinks. It's a shame. "My brothers used to sing it while we were working. We each had a different task, you know. We had a spinning wheel and a loom and frame to stretch canvas on, and we almost made enough that I didn't have to work part-time at the factory."

In the mirror, she can catch sight of her bent pinkie, of the scar across the back of her hand from a sewing machine she'd been using when she was - six, maybe? Younger? It seems like it all happened to someone else, all of it, the work songs and the clicks of the machines and the sore fingers from embroidering ten, twelve hours a day, as if her memories are not her own but a recollection of some film she watched.

She starts to try and tame her unruly hair, talking to Peggy and yet trying to convince herself, as well, with considerably success given how deluding herself has become ritual. "That was alright last night, wasn't it? The dinner was nice, even. I think to myself that the dinners are what I look forward to with these."

A song from home. Temple always seems so desperate to shed her Districter origins, desperate in a way that Peggy's never been able to feign, and it's surprising that she is ready to acknowledge it now. Perhaps it shouldn't be--after all, how could either of them forget that they're still just Districters after nights like last night?

"What was your task when you all worked?" she asks carefully, probing into Temple's past in an attempt to find a way to see her as anything other than an object of terrible prophecy. She wonders absently if Temple ever talks to her son about this. If she ever sings Districter lullabies to him.

(Peggy's considered it before. She doesn't expect the Capitol to allow her to remain childless forever, so she's considered how much heritage she would ever be able to share with a child. She tries not to think about it too hard, though, because she's resolved that either war or her death will happen before she ever allows herself to bring a child into this world.)

She smooths her hand over the scar on her stomach before she draws her feet under her and hoists herself to sit on the edge of the bed, raking her fingers through her hair. Her eyes dart towards Temple, carefully covering her bruises while Peggy's are still bright and obvious on her skin, and a familiar chill creeps into her gut. "Is that what you think?" she asks carefully. "He's gone, you know." Temple can speak freely if she chooses. Even if they do have hidden cameras on them, the Capitol doesn't care about Mentors complaining to each other in dark, private corners.

"Needlework. Embroidering, stitching. They use machines in the factories, but for the really expensive clothing, Capitolites want it all handstitched. It feels more personal that way, with a little blood and sweat on it." In someone else's mouth, that might sound sardonic, a condemnation of the market that values pointless labor so much, but Temple states it with the same unassuming passivity as someone would observing the weather.

Bailey doesn't know Temple's from the Districts. He never would, if she had her way. The instant he learns that his mother is not a Capitolite but one of the bow-backed slave class, he'll realize that his mother has a story to her, something she's been keeping from him - and how is she supposed to tell her son about what happened to her? What she did can be justified. What she allowed to happen cannot.

Of course it's not what I think, some vicious, girlish voice in Temple's head says, one that's quashed quickly. She tells herself she should be grateful that last night went as well as it did, that on the spectrum between her worst debasement and her most intimate bliss this ranked on the low side of that wide and murky middle ground but in that middle ground nonetheless. Maybe it's less because the actions aren't so bad as because she's developed a way of making herself disappear. She's gotten good at being violated.

"Sure." She puts a pin in her hair, one in the shape of an oversized bow. She slips a bracelet onto her wrist and stands up, fluffing her skirt in the mirror. "He gave us dinner first. He let us sleep in instead of kicking us out first thing in the morning. He even gave us two days notice instead of just picking us up at the Center. Politeness goes a long way, you know. I can't stand a boor in bed."

Peggy stares at Temple's face through the mirror. The porcelain of makeup spreads like a cancer, removing any kind of character from her face. There's nothing there. I can't stand a boor in bed. She can't think that way. She can't. But maybe she does, after she says it enough times and convinces herself that it's true.

The world seems to lurch. Peggy digs her fingers into the sheets to steady herself. She wants to scream. She wants to tear apart this horrible twisted place where women exalt the politeness of their rapists and people can't tell the difference between lies and truth anymore. She wants to shake Temple until she shows feeling or she dies.

Instead, she chews the inside of her cheek. "You're a frightening woman, Temple." More frightening than anything. It's primal, what Peggy feels when she speaks to Temple. She looks at this woman and she sees what she could have been. What she might one day become, if the rebellion fails and the Capitol has its way.

No, never. She'll never let this happen to her. She will die in a shoot out with Peacekeepers before she does. She gathers herself and combs her fingers through her hair before standing up. "I'm going to take a shower."

She needs to go before she suffocates in Temple's doll-eyed denial.

Temple doesn't- can't allow herself to- understand what it is that makes her current state so frightening to Peggy. Because Temple is uninjured, she thinks, the little girl Temple Drake locked safe inside and away from trauma and pain so long as the grown woman Temple Stevens on the outside tells her sweet lies, so long as Temple Drake believes enough that she isn't hurting at all. It's the ideal solution. It's preferable to the alternative.

"You can't wash it off," Temple calls, loudly enough to be heard in the bathroom. "Believe me. I've tried."

She goes back to dressing up in the mirror, only now her eyes are clear, wiped clean by the tears she realizes she can't stop. She dabs at them, trying to salvage her mascara, but her hands begin to shake because the levee has broken, because Temple has looked too far inwards to avoid seeing the things she pretends are not always there. She feels herself trapped in flesh, no longer able to walk on out of it and out of time and into nothing like she usually can, but a victim to the hyperventilating and nausea and trembling and crying that ravage her mortal body. Her vulnerable, mortal body, which she can never protect and which anyone can do anything to.

There is no reason to feel this way, she tries to tell herself. I had a nice night. The wine was delicious. It didn't even hurt when-

She sprints to the bathroom, ignoring that Peggy's in the shower, shoves open the door and vomits into the sink. After a moment, still bow-backed over the counter, she speaks to Peggy again.

"I'm sorry. I should have used the bathroom down the hall."

Peggy tries to ignore it when Temple calls after her. She doesn't expect to be able to scrub it off. She remembers when she turned sixteen and she was bid on for the first time. A man thrice her age had her taken from her home in District 10 without warning when she was supposed to be celebrating her birthday and brought to the Capitol. When she was brought back to District 10 the next day, she spent all her time in her bathroom, scrubbing her skin until it was raw. She could never wash it away.

Her friends and family wanted to continue the celebrations. She lied. She said that she was just too partied out from the bash the Capitol threw and she didn't want to keep celebrating. She made everyone leave her alone. She scrubbed and cried on her own. She kept lying until the day everything fell apart.

The feeling of violation is a part of her now, and she knows she can't wash it away. The fact that she's taken some control of it and is using it to her advantage takes the edge off. She no longer feels like that vulnerable child crying in the shower, so that means she's able to turn on the water and wash as normal. She won't cry over the feeling of helplessness. She'll just wash and imagine the sweet sense of revenge when she can finally see all the men and women who did this to her dead.

The door slams open. Peggy jumps, needing to catch herself on a handlebar to keep from slipping, and opens the shower curtain in time to see Temple vomiting. (The water from the shower starts raining on the ground, but let the man deal with the water damage.)

Peggy is naked and suds are still rinsing out of her hair, but she swallows, watching the woman move and speak. "Think nothing of it."

She nods towards the toilet. "Put down the lid and sit. I'll get you something for the nausea." This, she can deal with. This, she can understand. It's better than the doll she just left.

"He doesn't even put the lid down!" Temple whines, as if that, of all the possible sins this man both has committed and could commit, marks him as classless and worthless. That he violated and abused two women in bed last night seems an afterthought compared to this peccadillo against hygiene and decor, in Temple's world, but she grabs onto this something she can allow herself to be upset over.

She dry-heaves over the sink one last time and then staggers in her bare feet to the toilet, crashing down the lid and collapsing onto it from legs made weak from breathlessness.

For a few moments, she just tries to catch her breath, her lungs spasming and kicking away inside her chest, refusing to fill properly. She jams her palms at her cheeks in an awkward and fruitless attempt to wipe away the tears.

"I had too much to drink last night. I must have." It's a lie; Temple was drunk last night, but the amounts of alcohol needed to actually give her tiny, veteran body a hangover exceed what even a Capitolite would drink in front of others. She clenches her fists in her hair, undoing all the work she put into it earlier. "Peggy, Peggy, I can't go home like this. I can't let my son see me like this."

She looks, wild-eyed, at the only Mentor in the room who seems to have her act somewhat together at the moment, forgetting entirely the exercises Peggy's been doing since before sunrise.

Peggy doesn't believe for a moment that this is a hangover, but she won't point it out. Let Temple have her lies and stories. It seems she needs them to survive. Peggy doesn't understand it, doesn't understand how anyone could willfully deceive themselves that way, but she accepts that she's just not going to understand the things some people do.

When Temple turns to look at Peggy, her eyes are like an animal's. An animal's that knows it's about to be slaughtered. "Your son won't see you like this, Temple," Peggy says, trying to give a note of soothing to her voice as she quickly rinses the suds out of her hair. "I can clean you up."

She can't make her well. She can make her clean and give her just enough strength to slip back into her denial again. Peggy turns off the shower and steps out, grabbing a towel to just pat herself dry before hanging it up again. She doesn't care about being naked in front of Temple after last night. "Tell me what you're feeling. I'm sure he has medicine to alleviate any symptoms, and what he doesn't have we can work out."

She can talk to her. She can paint her face again. She can style her hair. She can do what she needs to do for Temple to put herself back together.

"Thank you." Temple's voice - her real voice, not the one affected into a Capitolite's coo - is a broken, hoarse mewl. It sounds like it comes from someone dying of some interminable disease, someone whose body has become indistinguishable from their death bed. It doesn't sound Districter, not weathered and weary like Peggy's but small, sad, prepubescent. She takes a few more staggering gasps.

"I can barely breathe," she manages. "I-I can't feel my hands."

That isn't entirely true; she can feel them, but they are amorphous, a dull ache at the end of her wrists with no concept of knuckles or fingers. She cringes at Peggy's nudity, not from prudishness but because it's alike to hers in at least that most basic gynecological way, if strapped into muscles and scar tissue. It's like seeing a cage when one's in prison; there's an instinctive revolt.

"I need sedatives. Those always help. Is there more alcohol?"

It's easy to think that Temple has successfully purged the Districter from her. It's easy to look at her and just see an incomplete Capitolite, constantly masquerading as genuine when she's hollow, but Peggy can hear something else there. A child. A Districter child, like they all were once.

Once.

"We're going to count together." Peggy notices Temple's cringe. She misinterprets it. She thinks it's a reaction to her scar, big and horrible on her abdomen, and the slight unevenness of the muscle beneath it, where the artificially repaired muscle tones just a hair differently than the muscle that has always been whole. Normally, she'd become defensive, but she just grabs a towel, the tips of her ears flushing in shame as she wraps her body in it and then kneels before Temple.

"Give me your hands. I'll get feeling back into them, and then I'll check for medicine. Count with me now. One... two..." Counting. It's how Peggy would get breath back in her lungs when the panic got to her.

She counts. She follows along with the ease of obedience, of being directed.

Temple holds her hands out. They shake. They are older than she is, prematurely aged by her District in the ways signature to it, with the scars and the broken pinkie that she's never had surgically fixed because she needs her hands. She can have a tuck to part of her face and spend two weeks out of the limelight, but even someone as helpless as she is needs her hands, even if only to fidget, to tell herself that she can open a locked door with them.

"I need to lay down," she mumbles, finally catching her breath. Her head's spinning, images of her and Peggy and the man who brought them here, bought them here, and the long string of people before him like paper dolls chained at the wrist, stretching off into the horizon. Temple doesn't know how many times she's let this be done to her, and in her mind it's always her fault, always her who should have said something or done something but instead ran away to that glassy, quiet place in her head.

She sees a bruise on Peggy's wrist from last night.

"That bastard." She flicks her gaze up to Peggy, meeting her eyes, and there's something in Temple's face that becomes hard and vicious as the invective begins to bubble up out of her, inane and meaningless but actual hatred that she so rarely allowed herself to feel. "No wonder he had to buy us, no wonder he had to, no sane woman would ever let a dick that small and flaccid up in her. It was like trying to fuck an earthworm. And his breath, God, and the hair on him, no wonder he has to fling money around for dates when apparently it'd cost too much to turn him into anyone worth a second glance."

The ferocity surprises her. It feels like a sudden roll of an earthquake, the loud and furious protest of an abused land before it settles and becomes silent again. She holds eye contact, searching Temple's face, wondering if this is a crack to something deeper or just the thrashing of her dying soul.

"He'll die alone because no one will fuck him for free." It feels like poison seeping out of her skin, thick and sticky as sap. "He'll spend all his time getting more surgery and creative hairstyles, and it won't matter. Take away the flash and no one will ever find anything worth their time."

That's the worst curse she can think of. Be alone. Utterly alone. Fight eternally to alleviate it and never succeed.

Peggy reaches out with one hand, tucking a lock of Temple's hair behind her ear and offering an arm. It's strange to be tender with Temple Stevens. After this is over, things will be normal again, but right now it feels like they're sisters in bondage, and isn't that a frightening thought?

"Let's get you lying down. I'll find medicine for you."

She takes Peggy's arm, and she thinks that these muscles were the ones that slit her throat in the mini-Arena not long ago. There's a hesitation to her, then a resignation.

"He'll die," Temple says, with a flat, ugly finality. She doesn't care if it's alone or in bliss. She can ponder no greater punishment than oblivion, the one they're all heading towards eventually. She has never feared anything more.

She lies down, but the plush covers and smooth sheets of the bed smell like sex (like rape), and it makes her head spin. She takes a deep breath and it catches in her throat, flutters like a bird, and she lets it out. She supposes the stink of this is better than the taste of blood in her mouth as she died in the Arena.

"I'll just lie here. I'll be alright. I wouldn't say no to- to some alcohol, though."

"I'll get the most expensive alcohol in his cabinet."

And if they can't drink it all, they can pour some down the drain just to inconvenience him. But first, Peggy should get any medicine she can for Temple that won't react poorly with alcohol.

She keeps the towel hugged to her chest. It's become a shield. If her body is hidden, then she has control. She's taking care of a woman she murdered, a woman she would still murder if she had to. Yet that doesn't seem so strange to her anymore. She's used to the double faces of the Capitol, where she can be best friends in one situations and cold-blooded enemies in another.

Peggy searches the house. She lingers at cabinets, checking for things besides just medicine and alcohol, but she doesn't do her full search yet.

Eventually, she comes back to the bed, bearing a bottle of anti-nausea chews and rum.

"Just leave it on the table," Temple murmurs. She can hear Peggy moving around through the house, and the uncharitable part of Temple wonders what's taking her so long, why she can't just beeline towards the nearest bottle the way women of Temple's ilk can, hungry for heady darkness. What makes Peggy any better than she is, she wonders? Any more a worthy Victor when the virtues that win an Arena are actually faults?

While Peggy's gone searching, Temple pulls the covers up over her head and curls into the fetal position, arms wrapped about her knees, stomach folded over even though the nausea has faded along with the panic. She can still taste it when she inhales through her nose, so she breathes through her mouth. And then she tries to leave her body again, to shed it off like the dried husk of a snake.

When Peggy returns, it's the usual Temple Stevens that greets her, doll-eyed and vacant and numb below the waist as she takes the alcohol and the anti-nausea medication. "Thank you, dear."

In truth, he hadn't so much asked for this as had it thrust upon him--there'd been a bit of a jurisdictional brouhaha, what with one of the arresting officers wanting to pass the responsibility off on the Training Center Peacekeepers due to Temple's mentor status. One irritated phone call later, the thing had been brought to Quintus' attention, and he'd insisted that, no, it could be managed perfectly well here at HQ. Which then had somehow turned into him being asked to do the interrogation himself, because clearly, in light of his recent employment, he'd be the most well-equipped person for the job. Never mind that he happens to be working late because he actually has other work to do.

He could have gone ahead and refused, but if there's one unfortunate truth that he's learned over the years, it's that if he wants something done correctly the first time, he's better off doing it himself. So, grudgingly, he decides he might as well.

He looks somewhat tired and unimpressed as he walks up, carrying a clipboard-sized tablet under one arm and gesturing with his other hand for the officers to uncuff her from the chair.

"Ms. Stevens. Right this way, please." As though she has a choice in the matter.

The courtesy, superficial as it is, does calm her just a bit. She gets up, rubbing at her wrist as if the cuff actually hurt her skin and not just her dignity, and trots after him with her arms folded and her shoulders hunched.

She carries herself with all the indignation and harrumphing of a true Capitolite, instead of someone keenly ignoring that both she and Quintus were born in the Districts. They have the same lesser blood pumping through their veins.

"I hope that you're enjoying this, Falxvale. I haven't done anything wrong and it's not as if I'm just overwhelmed with free time. Do you want to just give me a ticket for littering? I assure you we'll pay it."

"Believe me, I'm enjoying it," he mutters under his breath, entirely deadpan, as he ushers her into an interrogation room and shuts the door. The lights flicker on automatically, reflecting off of the steel table and rendering the white brick walls uncomfortably bright.

Quintus doesn't bother cuffing her again, taking a seat and drawing a stylus from his pocket, the tablet screen coming to life as he taps it.

"Now. I can hazard a guess as to what you were doing with this man--Mr. Eliphas Deciford," he says, reading the name off the file, "but I'd rather hear it from you. What were you up to and how much do you know about him?"

"I hope you don't mean anything by that." Temple takes a seat and crosses her legs with a prim, snittish posture. If she were a cat, her tail would be twitching. She folds her hands into her lap and stares back at Quintus, pupils wide and guileless, not innocent so much as blank.

"I was trying to find out how deep his pockets went so I could get some support for my Tributes." Lying comes to Temple as easily as breathing. "Any bit counts, you know, and I don't want anyone thinking I'm just relying on Gowan's accounts."

"Sure." He manages to not sound skeptical. "Did Mr. Deciford tell you much about his finances? Where the money's coming in from?"

"No, of course not. That's not my business. I don't run personal audits on everyone I rub palms with."

A little wrinkle forms under her lower lip, the beginning of a pout.

"Well, let me enlighten you." He leans back in his chair. "We have evidence showing that Deciford's been selling supplies and information to insurrectionists out in the Districts. Which makes your relationship to him interesting to us."

He quirks a hint of a smile he doesn't mean. "Anything you know about his activities, his contacts, whatever, I want to know. 'Any bit counts.'"

"That's horrible," Temple says, and her surprise is honest. Temple's intentions were purely lecherous, and her loyalty is clear. She, of all the Victors, is easily the most enthusiastic about the current administration.

She feels a chill in her gut when she thinks that not only can she be painted into the same corner as a rebel, but also that by association her little boy has been made a target. Temple likes the Capitol, but she has no illusions as to how the secret webs of threats and vulnerabilities works.

"I don't know anything about that. I try to keep my hands clean, you know. Anything less would reflect badly on Gowan's company."

"I imagine it would," he agrees. "And I also imagine that someone with such an active social life as you must know something. Humor me, Ms. Stevens. I don't mind if you start with the boring details."

"I don't know anything," she says, rising into a sort of panic, not on her own behalf (because she has become well-accustomed to canceling herself out of any equation) but because her son, her son might be dragged into this. Her heart flutters in her throat and her gaze goes blank. "I'm not one of those Mentors, not one of them hoarding secrets and intel."

He perks up at that pronouncement, his chin inclining slightly.

"Those Mentors?" he echoes.

"You-you know what I mean. Everyone knows about Mentors like that." Temple looks as if she wants to swallow her own tongue, like she's taken a step off a ledge lower than she anticipated. The Mentors are not a united front but a sort of fraternity, bound together by nothing but the trauma only they can understand. There is only so far Temple can stray before she risks leaving the flock entirely. "I wouldn't even know anything about it but the same rumors you do."

"Maybe so. We do try to keep up on that sort of thing. But then again, maybe not."

He rests an arm against the tabletop. "And, well, you know how rumors travel. Who's to say that anything you tell me couldn't have come down the line from somebody else?"

"I mean, I'm never seen anything. I don't actually know anything. Mr. Falxvale, you're asking me to remember what happens on nights I'm bid on in a group, and, well, I usually lubricate myself with quite a lot of alcohol for that, you understand."

She lowers her voice, not because she's talking about treason but because she's talking about bidding, and to pretend it's anything other than high-society dating is taboo in the house of the Capitol.

"Yeah," he acknowledges, feeling a twinge in the pit of his stomach at the mention--for a moment, Emily's face flits to mind, her teeth worrying her lip and cheeks burning with self-disgust. He had never approved of bidding, disliked the inconsistency of what was allowed here versus what he'd helped enforce in the districts, and hearing someone he'd cared about speak of it had stirred his feelings into deep disgust.

But that isn't relevant here, so in the space of a breath, he brings himself back to the task at hand.

"But if you do remember something useful, then I might consider that valid reason to put this matter behind us," he says, gesturing to Deciford's file. "Which would make things much easier for you and your son, wouldn't it?"

Temple's eyes dilate, some kind of subconscious reflex to fear. Her hand tightens over her knee, and for a moment she gapes, fishlike, trying to swallow what she knows to be a threat in the calm, passive language of the Capitol.

"Why can't you put this matter behind us knowing I didn't do anything?" she whines, her breath rising in her throat.

"I'm trying to uphold national security here, for your sake and that of everybody else. I can't do that if myself and my men are kept out of the loop."

He sits up to bring his other arm to the table, placing the tablet in his lap as though to communicate that he won't put her on-record as a source--or that he's willing to step outside of the boundaries of protocol here. Whichever way her anxious mind wants to take it, really.

"Besides, if you won't tell me anything, what reason do I have to believe you?"

"I don't know anything," Temple says, working herself up with only a little goading from Quintus. When he places the tablet down all she can think of is that those unoccupied hands are going to turn to fists. She chews her lower lip, then brushes her teeth against the back of her hand in case she's gotten any makeup on them.

"You probably already know that there are Mentors that sleep around for secrets. Everyone knows that. Finnick Odair did and didn't even hide it. But I don't, I just take my pills and a drink and I don't try to remember anything the next day. I'm a good Districter. I know my place."

For all her fripperies, for the fact that she wouldn't make this case to a true Capitolite, she hopes that Quintus can see that she's sincere.

Quintus watches those agitated movements, nodding at her words. Were he less experienced at this, he might be inclined to escalate his threats, but he's got her running scared and he doesn't want to lose her entirely.

Instead, he gets up, walking around to her side of the table and rests a hand against her shoulder, bending so that he's more at her level than towering over her.

"I believe that you're good," he says, softly and carefully. "That you're one of the good Mentors. But like you said, there's some bad ones out there. And what they're doing not only puts our nation in danger, but by association, they're endangering you and your son. I can't protect you unless I can show that you're on our side. Help me protect you. Tell me who the traitors are."

Temple stiffens like a board under his hand. It isn't comforting to her. It just adds to her unease, to the way her heart is crawling up her throat and her guts are tightening and knotting. He may as well not be touching just her shoulder.

"Why can't you protect me otherwise?" she whines, dropping her head and squeezing her eyes shut. Her pulse is pounding in her ears. "P-Peggy Carter. The Butcher Queen. I saw her once..."

The admission makes an odd little thrill shoot down his spine--the sort of feeling a predator might have upon catching the scent of blood. The practical part of him is necessarily cautious, recognizing that Temple might be just producing the first name that comes to mind, but with the trajectory their conversation has taken, that caution stands in opposition to his gut.

"What did you see her doing?" he encourages, keeping his tone gentle.

Temple worries her lip and rests her hands in her lap. Her fingertips seem to vibrate slightly.

"Snooping around. There's a bidder who wanted us both, because - he says we look alike. And I was sick that morning, so I stayed in bed and she just...rooted through things." It's partially lie by omission, partially honest recollection; Peggy had gone looking, first for alcohol and anti-nausea medication for Temple but then for God knows what else. It shouldn't have taken her time to track down the medicine, she could have just asked an Avox, but Peggy went looking.

That on its own is suspicious.

She's not lying. It's not an assertion he can confirm here, but a strong instinct, drawn up between the details and the pacing of Temple's words. There's some kernel of truth in that story, something worth chasing.

"Did she say what she was looking for?"

"No. But she could have used an Avox. An Avox would have already known where everything was." Temple wrings her hands and exhales deeply. "That's all I know, Mr. Falxvale, I swear. Please let me go home to my baby."

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Dog Bait, Small Veins [Closed]

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