Dog Bait, Small Veins [Closed]

[clotting]

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."

Comments

[clotting]

"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.

[impaledqueen]

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.

[clotting]

"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?"

[impaledqueen]

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.

[clotting]

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."

[impaledqueen]

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."

[clotting]

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."

[impaledqueen]

"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.

[clotting]

"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."