thecapitol | Treat Me Like a Don, Motherfucker [Semi-Open]

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Treat Me Like a Don, Motherfucker [Semi-Open]

WHO: Black Tom and anyone with reason to be in the Peacekeeper's break room.
WHAT: Peacekeeper CR building post, also Tom bitches that the HQ isn't a castle.
WHERE: Peacekeeper HQ
WHEN: During the first week of the Arena.
WARNINGS: None, just dumb supervillain behavior.

To say that the Peacekeeper Headquarters don’t match Tom’s sense of decor is an understatement. Everything about the building, aside from the office for the Head, is excessively corporate, with little cubicles and bright fluorescent lights and fax machines and scanners posted around each wall like a depressing and sanitized crew of ersatz sentries. The carpet is a dull beige-grey that shies away from making any sort of statement, and the desks are allotted two personal decorations each of a certain size, no more (Tom has, of course, chosen a photo of him and Molotov and Arya and his Victor’s crown). The break room is dim and populated by a refrigerator and a microwave that they have to clean out themselves, due to the lack of Avoxes.

It shows that most Peacekeepers are District-born.

Tom arrives at the break room for lunch and opens up a package he had made back at the Tribute Center, where Avoxes were all too eager to select caviar and honey-glazed swordfish for him. It’s held up as well as seafood can over several hours in the fridge. He takes a seat, setting his cane aside, and sketches on a napkin with a pen all the ways he would renovate this building if he were in charge. He doesn’t see why they don’t all just move to his spare castle. That’s the sort of building that inspires respect, instead of just a dull tedium, in his opinion.

He’s doing that still when his co-workers come in, now fully dedicated to the idea of rehauling this terrible setting and turning it into something worthy of a fascist police force. If it’s a little unsubtle with the influence from villainous lairs, so be it; Tom’s never seen something garish, tacky or absurd that he didn’t have some fondness for when it came to aesthetics.

“Do you think the floor here would be better as a crimson spread, or just as cold stone? I’m of two minds about it, and the latter allows for trap doors.” He glances up. “Oh, Wesker, what are the dimensions for your dragon’s head throne?”

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Wesker didn't eat often outside of the Tower, preferring privacy where it came to his meals, but just occasionally there was a dish - tastefully covered, labeled plainly with his initials and the date. It was good to remind them, every so often, just who and what he was.

The back of his throat itching, he prowled into the break room, fetching it without pause even as Tom addressed him.

"34' by 22', at it's widest point," he replied simply, ducking into the refrigerator and slipping out again. "Considering one for yourself, are you?"

"Hardly. I wouldn't want to be derivative." Tom pulls his pen back from where he's drawing his dream-headquarters with a little flourish of his pen. "I was just thinking, if we were to actually treat this as the workplace of two of the most illustrious Victors in the Capitol, we should move our thrones in. And I'd hate to put you behind a desk that you couldn't walk around with the throne."

He picks with a fork at the swordfish. "Ah. It just isn't the same when it's been reheated. I imagine you feel the same way."

He pushed the dish into the microwave and watched it spin, light winking off the faux metal. Warm, cold, reheated....

"It never tastes like the real thing," he muttered. Namely because it wasn't. (And just how the Capitol had managed it still prickled.) He looked back over his shoulder. "If we're redecorating, make the offices bigger. My desk at the Tower fits fine with the throne."

And his credits had been cut off. Commissioning a second would be as strenuous - for him - as blinking.

"Naturally. These shoeboxes aren't fit for a chimneysweep, much less officers of the law such as ourselves." Tom smirks and laughs slightly to himself, having never expected him to take up any such mantle of law and order. It's anathema to who he's been for decades, but then again, the world of Panem is such a perversion of natural society that of course he'd find himself a new role in such a topsy-turvy place.

"Do you ever wonder how they'd decorate for your Crowning now, since they've increased the budget so?"

"I can imagine." One side of his nose lifted, a jagged wrinkle creasing the bridge, and his mouth thinned, lips firming together. "And given the new fad of reaching across to bring back items of interest, it was fortuitous that I succeeded when I did."

The microwave beeped cheerily and went dark. Wesker popped the door and drew out his dish, a soft crackling audible enough through the cover. Fat and grease.

"One bite, one scratch, and I might as well be back on my Earth." From the inside pocket of his coat he drew out a slim, elegant case - like a penbox, but this one held personal silverware. (His saliva, in its normal state wasn't especially infectious, but neither did he enjoy the thought of getting anyone else's. Who knew how often utensils were cleaned here - if the crusted coffeepot was any indication.) "The typical infected shouldn't be trusted to show my restraint."

"Do you think they would have brought back that disease from your world? Just for a stunt?" Tom glances over at the personal silverware with a vague curiosity, likening it to the flask he carries on his own person. Peacekeeper rules apparently don't extend to drinking on the job for the obscenely rich or the powerful. It's just a Capitol thing, indulging when there's no need for it and not bothering to be inconspicuous about it.

"You've quite a dim view of our lords and keepers. I can only imagine it's because you've spent so much time with them."

"They have," Wesker replied, and though his voice was ever as smooth, there was an edge to it. A bite at the end, the words seeming to just scrape by his teeth. "Several Umbrella designs are stalking the arena as we speak."

And he was already making plans.

"As the saying goes, if one doesn't learn from their history, one is doomed to repeat it."

"Sure, but that's in the Arena." Tom raises an eyebrow. "You don't think they've made the barriers between the two airtight, after Thor's little...?"

He makes a gesture with his hands, like sparklers.

"We'll see, won't we," Wesker said, the reply ominous in its simplicity. Fact, nothing more, nothing less. "All it takes is one."

Pulling a knife and fork free from his case, Wesker lifted the lid of his dish, exposing the lump of slightly grayed flesh beneath.

"It burned through the world in months, shifting from liquid to airborne to blood transmission. Hopping the species barrier with ease, and mutating with each new skin it shed. And we knew what it was capable of."

The Capitol, he knew didn't share the same respect, however much poking into the dark corners of his past they'd done.

Tom's seen some pretty unappetizing meals in his time - anyone who does too long as a mercenary in war-torn countries will learn to tighten their belt hard and fast - but he still turns his lip at Wesker's meat.

"Perhaps there's more you ought to impart with them about security protocols. It's a wonder they have a man of your acumen just watching tapes and doing the most basic duties when you should be helping them streamline the entire system so such an idea of epidemic is just a fancy."

Tom might be stirring shit, just a little. Trying to pluck at strings he's got no business tuning.

It was a natural reaction. Wesker himself didn't look particularly enthused as he began to cut into the meat, slicing himself off a neat cube.

"If they insist on continued flirtations after two previous outbreaks, I don't imagine there's much I can do."

Willful stupidity was a chronic and often fatal affliction.

"How fatalistic." Tom's practically smirking now, imagining himself some sort of mischievous god of trickery sowing discord and paranoia, overblown on his own ego. "If the virus so beyond even your capacity to contain? Even with your oversight, they'd manage to bollocks it up?"

"Stupidity is as it does," Wesker said with a little curl one his nose, the pale bridge wrinkling as he lifted the small meat square to his lips. "And I am but one man."

Capable of a great many things, and seemingly everywhere at once, seeing and knowing all - but truthfully not. He just merely devoted a great deal of time to his network of information feeds.

"After the virus escaped and reduced the world to pus and ash, three safe-zone facilities were lost to stupidity. A torn suit, a power fluctuation, and shoddy math."

"Our timelines aren't terribly different, are they? You still know of the Chernobyl disaster and Fukushima, or are those after your time? Or aside from your time?"

Tom knows all about having to have contingency plans, and unfortunately, it tends to be his undoing in the world of heroes and villains. He gets sloppy, underestimating his opponents or, more typically, overestimating himself.

After the last time that happened, he swore it never would again.

Wesker chewed, a cheek bulging and smoothing, the muscles of his throat rolling sinuously beneath his skin.

"Chernobyl," he echoed the emphasis slightly off from Tom's in Wesker's soft, oddly unplaceable accent. "Was still a hot zone at the time of the Raccoon incident, still is - though getting far enough into it and living long enough to die of radiation is unlikely for most."

He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a linen napkin, wiping away a dot of bloody grease.

"Fukushima - the BWR nuclear power plant in Japan, yes? In the Futaba District." The napkin lowered to the table, his fingers rubbing lightly at it as his head tipped. "What happened?"

"Exactly what you were describing. Containment measures didn't come up to snuff. They prepared for every accident except the one they had." He drums his fingers along the head of his cane, poking at his swordfish with disdain. It's really not worth it to eat it reheated.

"It's the nature of humanity, really. It sounds as if you'd rather abdicate from it entirely."

A breath pushed through Wesker's nose, blade slicing through the meat with a little extra vigor.

"Humanity is tiring. Do you have any idea how exhausting it is to watch it fail again and again? Fearful and impatient and greedy... It's the same plied song and it will lead this world to the same place."

"And you would know, would you? You don't look a day older than forty." Tom smiles, that snake's grin that all but comes with a flick of the tongue. "But of course, appearances are deceiving."

"There were early marketing ideas for T as an agent in anti-aging products," Wesker said, with to little inflection change to tell if he was serious or not. "We were still working on the dosing."

Tom cackles. It's a spontaneous but practiced noise, one he's doubtlessly performed in front of a mirror a thousand times.

"Aye. That'll be how this world ends. The people in this city here will release your T-virus while trying to find the cure for crow's feet."

"Just in time for Halloween," Wesker replied dryly, cutting away with the precision of a surgeon. "Supple, youthful skin that helpfully sloughs off on its own to make one the belle of the infected ball."

Tom's laugh is loud and hearty, and entirely earnest. He could come to like Wesker yet, instead of just wanting to use him.

"Maybe they'd be doing this entire world a favor, to rid us all of the vain and coddled." There's a certain insolence and impunity that Tom has, now that he has a Peacekeeper's position.

"There are easier ways of culling the chaff from the wheat," Wesker said simply after he'd chewed and swallowed. Utensils paused, hovering over his plate, he looked across at Tom - in surprising amounts of agreement. (He'd known they were similar, in the way one beast knows another. But Tom might actually be tolerable, as well as useful.) "The Capitol, helpfully, has one already in place."

One need only get rid of whatever effort they currently went through to revive the tributes.

"Though simple gunpowder and lead remains infinitely cheaper."

"Would that we had a chance to use any of it. My fingers get itchy behind one of these desks. There's only so much security footage a man can stand." Tom makes a foppish gesture with one hand. He's bored. He misses the Arena, even, the illusion of freedom that comes with having only the schedule you make and the reaction to the elements and your foes.

He raises an eyebrow at Wesker. "Do you prefer it, here on the outside?"

"It is familiar," Wesker said, but his silverware paused, the tines of his fork resting on the edge of his plate. "...But there was something to be said for the challenge."

He was used to being the man watching, but his control here was no less an illusion than it had been within the arena. And there had been an immediate, visceral satisfaction in outmaneuvering the Gamemakers on the inside.

In the Capitol it was all so much slower, quieter.

Soon, he reminded himself.

"They can tout their training center all they like, but there's no test of skill like the arena."

"Aye." Tom sounds almost sad at that, as if he's watching the last years of his life where he'll be keen and fit slip away as he sits at a desk, waiting for a war that can't come quickly enough.

"Certainly not. And even the Arena...well, if it were merely a test of skill I imagine the Victors would be quite a different lot." By which Tom means he totally believes it would be him, Molotov, Arya and then a few other people whose lights would pale in comparison.

Contrary to popular belief, Wesker was capable of laughing. A low, soft purr like the slither of a snake over dried bones.

It came with a flash of teeth then.

"They complain now," he said, meaning their former fellow tributes, light playing off the blade of his knife as he returned it to his meat. "But they really have no comprehension of how much worse it could be."

Tom nods and chuckles appreciatively. He flips the knife he's using to cut up his food in the air, catching it idly, showing off when there's absolutely no need for it.

"You'd think they were kept in dungeons during their holiday, instead of a fancy training center with all the accoutrements."

The knife reflected in Wesker's glazes, a slash of light sliding up and down, like strange bright eyes - even stranger than those he already had.

"They'll tire of it eventually, or the Capitol will, and then it will be worse," he said.

Did he sound pleased by the prospect? It was hard to say, as he casually cut the last piece of his meal into neat squares and separated them for spearing on his fork with the side of his knife.

"They'd best hope they tire first." Tom winks, as if he and Wesker are in on some joke, the punchline to which is that everyone else gets rounded up and shot. He jabs at the swordfish again, lifting his upper lip slightly that the texture's off from the reheating.

"Alright, one more bite of this and I may as well pretend to work again."

Wesker wondered why he bothered - unless the complaining about was part of the appeal (it wasn't as if he were at risk of degenerating and tearing out the jugular of the secretary with his own teeth, so far as Wesker knew) - but offered only a mild dip of his chin.

"Duty calls."

Tapping his mouth with his napkin, he gathered up his dish and silverware and rose gracefully from his chair. He started to turn, the looked back.

"No stone," he said, suddenly turning the conversation back around where it began. The question still lingering in the back of his mind, idly picked at even as they'd talked. "Material sets into the grooves and imperfections, and festers."

"Aye." The complaining is the best part, the nectar of the peach, the cherry inside the chocolate. Tom loves complaining because it rotates the universe to spin around him.

"That's cryptic. Maybe you ought to send out the next message to the Citizens. Watch as they lose their marbles trying to figure out what it is you're saying." Tom throws the rest of his food away and heads out the opposite door from Wesker. "Have a good afternoon."

Quintus gives a snort of amusement as he overhears that remark, leaning over to fish his own lunch out of the fridge--the remnants of a stir-fry he'd cooked at home a few days ago. He's never been a very adventurous chef, having gotten used to things that could be boiled over a hot plate or roasted over a fire, and his experiences with Capitol cuisine haven't managed to alter his preferences all that much.

"I didn't know we were remodeling," he quips, popping his bowl in the microwave. "What would be the point of a trap door? So we can sneak up on people that don't clean up after themselves?"

"I was thinking of capturing and torturing whichever janitor keeps forgetting to get behind the pen holders." Is Tom kidding? Probably? It's really hard to tell with him, given that this is exactly the sort of thing he'd do in earnest too.

"Anyway, we aren't to be remodeling, which is only the third on my voluminous list of complaints about this place." Tom settles back into the uncomfortable folding chair and folds his arms.

"Oh, don't do that. That's a lot of paperwork I don't need."

He turns to face him, leaning against the counter. "Voluminous list, huh?"

"Aye. First one being that you aren't letting me capture and torture the janitor."

But pleasantries and jokes aside, Tom's serious, and he strokes his chin. "My first complaint is that when I petitioned out, I imagined myself having more of an influence over tactics and strategy. And yet so far as I can see, our strategy so far has been to wait for fires and then put them out, rather than stop them being started in the first place. You're a smart lad, Falxvale. You must have some sort of plan. I'd like to know what it is."

Quintus smiles to conceal his inward irritation. He's never been altogether comfortable with offworlders gaining more than low-level jobs here in the first place, much less ones related to security. Native victors have been troublesome enough, and those who haven't grown up with the Games, who have been pulled from their own worlds into sudden combat--how the higher-ups expect more than a shallow loyalty from them, he doesn't know.

"Our political situation right now is complicated," he says. "And I'm legally beholden to the President and his cabinet. So if you're looking for some grand, overarching plan, you might be better off asking them than me."

"I'm not a simpleton. I can understand a complicated situation. Try me."

He returns to his swordfish and coffee, retrieving his gaze from Quintus' not out of deference but from a sort of emphasized boredom.

"Are you telling me they're truly wasting a smart lad like yourself carrying out orders?"

"Sounds like you haven't spent a lot of time in the military." The microwave beeps, and he gives his food a stir before putting it back in for another minute. "Everything goes down through the chain of command. Responding to problems and starting whole new campaigns are two very different things."

"Honestly, I've spent more time in military custody than anything. Guns for hire don't tend to do well with that much structure." Tom pulls out his pipe, totally ignoring - or purposefully flaunting - that he's at the rec room at work and probably shouldn't be smoking indoors.

"It's a shame. Keeping you a hall monitor, and you being happy with it."

"Do you still think of yourself as a gun for hire?" Quintus asks. His eyes drop to the pipe, but he doesn't take the bait--not when that remark has him a tad curious.

"I wouldn't say I'm happy. It's been a rough transition, taking on this much responsibility. But that's true of any kind of big organization--the higher up you get, the more dysfunction you've got to deal with."

"Aye, I do. I've never made it a secret that you can only keep me so long as you keep me paid better than the opposition would. Since it doesn't seem the Rebels have much at their disposal, you've nothing to worry about."

He takes a puff. "Do you miss the field, then?"

"That's comforting. Always nice to know who's apt to turn around and shoot me once the going gets tough."

He shakes his head. "Not really. I had some good times out in the Districts but I got sick of the routine after a while. Not that I could go back now even if I wanted to."

He rests a hand against the left side of his ribcage. "Couldn't pass the physical with a reconstructed lung."

"Would you rather I lie to you? Because I haven't any moral compunctions about doing that either."

He pats his own knee.

"I probably couldn't pass with my leg in the condition it's in. Would you believe that there isn't even any adventure to go with the story of how I got it? Just a rotter of a cousin. Surely there's something more interesting about your lung."

He hasn't snooped on Quintus' file yet.

"I guess not, given the choice."

A hint of a resigned smile crosses his features--he'd known that question had been coming. "About five years ago I was stationed in Seven and got sent out to negotiate with some woodsmen who'd gone on strike. Turns out the whole thing was a setup. I got struck with an axe here and here."

He gestures to the scar crossing his cheek and to his side. "If his aim had been a little better I would've been killed on the spot. Luckily we did manage to round up the ringleaders of the attack afterward and had them avoxed."

Tom snorts. "At least there's a story behind that one. I got me bum leg in a family feud, falling backwards into an open grave. That was the extent of the drama."

Well, that and the fact that Tom's been nursing a grudge about it for thirty goddamn years, including kidnapping a kid and raising her to be evil just to get back at his cousin. But really, no drama there.

"You'd think swinging axes all day, they'd be better at turning them on a man. I suppose not."

Quintus shrugs a shoulder. "Well, that's...probably only the second time I've heard of someone getting injured at a funeral. Assuming it was a funeral and you didn't have some crazier reason to be standing at a grave."

"The guy was probably mad enough to get sloppy, fortunately for me. Some of my comrades weren't quite as lucky."

"It wasn't even a funeral. I was just paying respects, and I wound up in some grave they were going to use on the morrow." Tom shrugs.

"Do you think of them? I've always imagined that's the way a man knows he's really made for combat, if he can just shrug off the deaths of the people around him. I've seen too many people go weak in the knees over some blood and gore."

"I've never really been bothered by the gore," he remarks, retrieving his food from the microwave and blowing on a bite to cool it. "And of course in the moment you do what you need to do, but I still think of them sometimes. I was in Seven long enough that we'd gotten to know each other, developed some camaraderie. The whole thing was just a real shame."

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