thecapitol | Pale and Deathly I Have Become [Closed]

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Pale and Deathly I Have Become [Closed]

WHO| Black Tom and Molotov
WHAT| Tom comes back from the dead.
WHERE| The castle for Tom's crowning
WHEN| After the D12 Breakout
WARNINGS| None.

Tom wakes up angry.

It's almost a foreign feeling to him since coming to Panem. In the last year he's woken up content, bored, energized and even, at times, fearful, but it's been a while since he's felt wrath writhing inside him, dark and tumorous as a cancer, from the moment he opens his eyes. But he wakes with it now, with hate in his throat and rage in his guts and every muscle bound tight and violent.

He throws a punch at one of the technicians in the lab taking his vitals. It's not because the technician did anything so much as because he was there, and Tom's looking to lash out. In lieu of Albert Heinrich, the nearest milquetoast target must due. When he's off the table and dressed, assured that he's as healthy as if he never died, Tom storms out and heralds a cab and certainly doesn't bother to pay after it drops him off near the castle he won in the Thirteenth Arena.

He doesn't tell Molotov he's been revived. He doesn't want to reach out to anyone at the moment, doesn't want to lay eyes on another human being whose very presence might remind him that he was beaten, beaten in fair combat by that wretch of a man, humiliated on the battlefield. His pride is gutted and deflated, and with that out of the way all he has is fury.

He goes to the garden and starts aggressively weeding, hoping that in time he'll calm.

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The first thing Molotov insisted on having put in the castle was comprehensive surveillance, so she's aware of Tom's arrival before he can even open the front door. Capitol liaisons brought her back a few days early, after the Panem Nightly News tragedy, though she's refused to go back on the air. They spent several moments informing her of Tom's death, then several hours mitigating her rage, promising her that he'd be safe and resurrected, that they appreciated her sacrifice and empathized with her feelings.

She drank a small amount of coffee that she was well aware had been laced with sedatives, then went home to the castle and slept in their empty bed for the better part of two days. When Tom comes back, she's just woken up, and she stands in front of the security monitors in a robe and bare feet, drinking a black Russian and watching him yank up weeds like they personally insulted him.

In the end, she gives him an hour. Leaves him in peace to get whatever it is he gets out of gardening. But she does, eventually, come to him. She still hasn't dressed, looks soft in the way that she only ever lets Tom see: makeup free, hair still bearing the muss of sleep, curls that she hasn't straightened out yet. She has two coffees now, both suitably spiked, and they slosh gently in their mugs as she pads between the neat rows of plants.

"Coffee," she murmurs simply, quietly, and sits down beside him, the soil slightly damp against the backs of her legs and the sheer parts of her robe under her ass. It's all she does, all she says, she doesn't even touch him. She gives him control for the moment, but she's there next to him, for him, with him.

Even in the fucking dirt.

He has the vague awareness that he should feel guilty for not coming to her first thing, but any remorse he has turns inwards and turns to anger, self-pity, a sense of injustice that seems to seep from his very pores. He should have suffocated Albert Heinrich to death in his own blood. He should have remained as invincible as the Capitol has made him since his victory, untouchable by virtue of the immense privilege granted to him.

The power he's had here is a high, and there's no respite from the crash when it's revealed to be as facile as the Capitol itself.

But weeding does get a little bit of it out. It's always been calming for him. By the time Molotov comes down, that indignant roar has turned into a simmer, and his fingernails are caked with dirt.

"Thank you." He isn't aware it's spiked, and he drinks a mouthful without regard for the heat. He looks at her, and it stings to see her look so tired, so demure. "Christ. What a disaster."

Molotov doesn't mind that he didn't come to her, honestly, if it means that they've avoided a huge and unnecessary blow-up. All that matters to her is that they're back together, and they're always stronger together.

She nods and takes a drink of her own, looking out at the plants. She's not tired so much as just quiet, because when it's just the two of them, she doesn't need war paint and bared teeth all the time; she can afford let herself be vulnerable, a predator asleep instead of on the prowl.

"Well, that's an understatement," she notes dryly, taking another sip. "But they're not any stronger than I thought. Just luckier."

"Much luckier. Or maybe they just don't have to work around the absolute incompetence of the Peacekeeper authority." He rips out another weed, chucking it aside as if to touch it is to be poisoned.

"How are you managing it?" Tom knows she didn't respect or even like her coworkers, but there's a certain part of them that Molotov felt she possessed. They were idiots, but her idiots. Tom can relate to that, to the loss and the transposed injury of feeling as if they have, unwillingly, become a part of of yourself, a raw nerve that cannot be removed.

"Probably a little of both. The Peacekeepers were never going to be ready for this." She watches him throw the weed, watches it land a solid foot and a half away from them. She can practically feel his anger still radiating, touching her like heat.

She shrugs. It's hard for her to explain, and she doesn't necessarily like that Helena and Julian had managed to come to mean something to her, but it's been difficult. Maybe more because she knows that the mouthy elf bitch had waited until she was gone, would never have dared had Molotov been in the studio. She can't stand cowardice like that, can't stand that she just knows the bitch is crowing about killing two completely innocent and stupid people like it's something to be proud of.

"I'm all right."

Edited 2015-12-22 04:30 (UTC)

"Of course not. The Peacekeepers are too busy deluding themselves into believing the status quo will hold to actually think ahead." Tom mutters and fumes as he tears up another weed, then gets the hand-rake to turn over some soil. He's soothing himself, but he's like hot coals right now, requiring time to simmer down in the absence of cold water.

The heroes in this situation had no honor, and that bothers Tom. It's not that ruthless, pragmatic amorality upsets him - he admires it in most - but he doesn't like the line between heroics and villainy to be blurred. There should be good and evil, and never the twain shall meet. It would have been so much easier to cage Theresa in a life of crime if the world could be so simply divided.

"Panem lost a good forehead and pair of shoulders in Julian." That's about all the compliments Tom can think of for the dead. He knows it's not their loss so much as the sense of having a home ransacked that's going to bother them.

Molotov watches him, silently sipping her coffee, and shrugs again. "Even if they were more serious, they have no real training. Nothing they could ever practice is like this, you know? Any troop that already knows war will be better off than ones being thrown into the fray for the first time."

The division of good and evil isn't something that Molotov thinks much of, as she lives somewhere between the two herself. But she can't stand people who are proud of accomplishing nothing, who think it means anything -- honestly, she's pretty sure a toy poodle could beat Helena and Julian in a fight. She could have respect for a Rebel coming after her, seeking out a challenge or at least a fair fight. But who brags about defeating the punching bag in the gym?

"Whatever. At least they got their bullshit out of the way before they died. I suppose that's all any of us can ask for." She lights a cigarette and exhales smoke, wrapping her arms around her knees. "And you?"

"You'd think they'd learn from watching their own damned Hunger Games that the ones who actually train and practice win more often than not. But half our Peacekeepers just sit on their arses all day anyway, gobbling up doughnuts and watching security footage for a flash of some Capitolites rolling in the hay..."

He sits back on his heels and takes another sip of coffee, then wipes his forehead with his gloved hand. He peels the gardening gloves off and tosses them aside so he can feel the heat of the beverage better.

He sighs. "I'm alright. Mad, but that's hardly surprising when someone got the jump on me. I've been in more scraps than I can- anyway, the last time I was shot it didn't end so tidily as this time."

She has no strong feelings about the Peacekeepers, although she supposes that's to be expected when her main exposure is having them block throngs of people from touching her at parties. Either way, she nods, shifts on the soil and thinks to herself that it'll stain, even when that doesn't matter because she can afford a thousand more robes even if she didn't get them free.

Her touch is gentle, instinctive and not premeditated, when she puts one hand on his knee, gazing out over the gardens. "It's only one battle," she murmurs. "We still have a whole war to make them pay. All of them." Anyone who dares cross them, draws their ire. Allegiances mean nothing, only theirs to each other holds any weight.

"We'll stay home today. I already cancelled everything through the end of the week, since no one could tell me what was happening."

Tom, by contrast, has to work with them, and through very little fault of their own they've come to inherit his disdain. Tom is a man of passions, of sorting people into categories where they either must ascend a pedestal, as Molotov has, or topple into a pit from which he can get a good vantage point for spitting on them.

He glances down to her hand, and then takes it and gently moves it up his thigh, not sexually but to right over where the pain is, always is, even when he's having good days. It's there, sometimes only as a reminder, sometimes more forcefully so. Today he's between the two.

"Aye, I can appreciate that. We'll stay home and drink ourselves blind and eat those nice chocolates I sent for."

He moves her hand and she runs her thumb back and forth along his leg, where she knows the scar is under his trousers because she's seen it so many times that it's ingrained in her head. Taking another sip, she nods again, then moves closer to him and puts her head on his shoulder.

"We can decorate the trees." The Christmas trees have been brought in, beautiful big ones shipped from Seven, but with both of them away, and then the subsequent events, nothing's been actually decorated yet. Fragrant wreaths and lengths of swag lie in the front hallway, waiting for them. "Blini and caviar for dinner, if I can get that Avox to understand that it isn't the same thing as a crepe."

She reaches out for his hand, to lace their fingers together and bring his knuckles to her lips. "I missed you, out there. I forgot what it was like to fight without you." She took their being assigned to different squadrons, different areas, a bit harder than she'd expected -- it has been, after all, more than a year since she went to battle without him. He'd fought without her, when he won his Arena, but even then, she'd noticed that he spent more time as a weeping willow than he did actually engaging in the Games.

"Good luck with that. I think when they program they they obliterate anything resembling civilization in their heads." He rests his head on hers, feels her scalp warm under his cheek, and for a moment feels not even just sated but better, to know that she sees him no less after he's been humiliated and beaten. He knows their love rests on something less fickle than victory and conquest.

He lets her kiss his knuckles (still flushed from the activity of weeding) and then rests his hand on her own knee, so that their arms are criss-crossed. "Aye. I can't imagine you'd have let me make the fool decisions I did, either. You'd have killed me yourself before you let me get myself shot to bits."

After a moment, he starts to get up, slow and seeming older than he is because his leg is hurting him.

"Still, you'd think that such a simple difference would be easy enough to get it to understand, when it knows how to make so many things already." She closes her eye for a moment, takes in just the two of them, sitting in the garden, whole again in a way they can't be individually. Not anymore, anyway. Continuing to stroke his leg, she snorts a little, can't fully suppress a smirk. "Well, I do hate it when you don't listen to me."

He gets up and she helps him, though in the kind of innocent-seeming way that suggests they're only using each other as support, that it's just easier to rise from the ground that way. Once standing, she takes his hand and squeezes it, kisses his cheek, then slowly leads him back into the house, as the living area of the castle really isn't much larger than any big, ostentatious house would be, separate from the bizarre, useless rooms from the Crowning, statues and paintings they didn't want or need. Only the throne has been moved, to where it currently sits in a room that Molotov calls "the chair room".

It doesn't match the living room furniture and so she won't allow it anywhere else.

(Tom spends an awful lot of time in "the chair room". He quite likes his throne. There may or may not have been a nude photoshoot on it.)

"I do too. They have one job, don't they? It's to listen and obey. So when they can't even manage that, then it's just an added insult."

He can tell what she's doing, but he appreciates it. His ego is bruised, more pained than any individual part of his body, battered by the way his expectations in other (not even in himself) were so thwarted. He really thought this war would be easier. The eventual winner doesn't matter to him, but he does care about getting out of it alive and with Molotov and Arya at his side. Maybe Sansa, too, although not because he has any fondness for the girl but just so Arya won't feel guilty or anything.

He really should focus on pitting Arya against her kin. He may have failed in doing so with Theresa, but today's a new day, and Arya's already more bloodthirsty than Terry ever was. And he has Molotov to aid him, his beautiful, deadly wife.

Sometimes he sits up at night and just mulls that word over his lips, 'wife'. It's only ever while she sleeping, and every time he says it he loves that wispy syllable more.

Edited 2016-01-09 01:30 (UTC)

(The things that Molotov puts up with... )

More than anything, she's just angry with the Capitol's failings, its inability to control or properly train its own people, the fact that a ragtag group of assholes is getting the better of them. Even the White pigs had to be completely decimated before they gave up the fight against the Bolsheviks, and Molotov had certainly thought better of the Capitol than that, at least until now.

Then again, the Whites were still Russian, she has to remind herself. And even the most pampered Russian is a hardened warrior compared to these people, by virtue of blood alone.

Arya, and Sansa by association, rank much lower down on Molotov's list of priorities than they do on Tom's -- all she wants is for the two of them to make it out with as much protection, wealth and power as they can manage. Her fondness for Arya pales in comparison to her survival instinct, and she's so much less inclined to attach herself to anyone than even Tom is.

"Come on," she murmurs, pulling him toward the bedroom. "I'm not letting you track dirt all over the place, you need to change. So do I, actually, sitting in that mess." Reaching back with her free hand, she dusts off the back of her robe before they cross through the doorway to their room, her ring catching the light.

When she thinks hard enough about it, it makes her uncomfortable, the idea of having a husband and being a wife. She spent so many years alone and independent, with absolutely no ties to anyone because it was dangerous and only a source of disappointment. She'd lost her father and then there was no one to care about, no one that didn't also bring hate and fear and pain, no one until Tom, and one year isn't much time to adjust to such a massive shift.

So she tries instead to only think of them as a singular being, because then she's not entangled permanently with someone else so much as just protecting all the extensions of herself. But it gets easier, a little bit, every day.

Molotov squeezes his hand again before she pushes him gently toward the bureau so he can get clean clothes out and so she can shed her now-ruined robe and switch it for another (white lace, trimmed in fur). "How long since you ate?"

"The Lord made dirt, and dirt doesn't hurt," Tom says, teasing and apathetic to tracking the earth into their ridiculous palace, even if it is tightened smaller than the bones of the building just for sheer convenience. Both he and Molotov spend aggressively, as if the end could come any day now and so there's no need to save - and with people like them, it very well could.

Tom's made his peace with that.

"Pass me that robe?"

Tom's always attached himself to people. Maybe it's because there's something inside him missing, a hollowness that people attribute to a lack of heart or of soul, and some animal instinct in him looks for a substitute to stuff up the void. He had Maeve from afar, and then Cain as a second pair of hands, and Theresa to raise.

But he's never subsumed himself to someone like he has to Molotov. Nor has he grown in their presence, built up parts of himself to make up for the fundamental elements in him that are missing. It doesn't matter what he's lacking now, because he only cares about what he has.

That's why he can take out his rage now by ripping up some weeds and not razing a school or running some nuclear weapons across a third world country's border.

"Probably an entire timeline ago. I'm famished."

"The Lord made poison ivy too," she teases gently, passing him the robe, then smugly adds on, "and me too. So it seems like the Lord enjoys making things that hurt, after all."

Molotov has no true regard for their actual furnishings, the rugs and drapes and furniture. Instead, it's just another thing she can control, feel secure in -- that these are her things and this is her space, that she has rule of this domain. And so she gets pleasure from governing every aspect of them, from exact placement to whether or not Tom can leave dirty footprints on the floor.

She waits for him to tie the robe before she goes to his side, wraps her arms around his waist. "We'll eat. Whatever you want, just tell me, I'll deal with the Avox." Her hair bunches on his shoulder where she leans her head, and he smells like soil mixed with the vaguely hospital-like scent of wherever he was revived. She wishes he smelled like he normally does, like cologne and what she thinks must be fire, somehow.

He's back now, and that's what matters, because Tom's rage is loud and showy, but hers tends to simmer, taking either time or a huge blast of heat to throw her into an angry, relentless wave of boiling water. Without him, she thinks more than she wants to, dwells on what she's lost in the past, what she never had, and it can be overwhelming, send her into that furious rush without needing any outside influence.

But he's back, and all she has to do is focus on him.

"Perhaps, but it wouldn't be the dirt to do us in."

He undresses and puts his robe on, feeling as uneasy in revival from death as if he'd been poured back into his own body. He's physically fine. He knows that. It doesn't stop him feeling as if he's only wearing his own flesh as some sort of misfitted casing.

He places his arms around her shoulders, bringing her close and holding her for a moment, to feel something he knows is solid and true. How strange to think of her this way, when she existed in their courtship like a flame, intangible and dangerous and mercurial. But that was just one dimension to her, like a beacon in a lantern, drawing him close through the dark.

"Order what you like. I don't care, so long as the Avox brings alcohol with it. Whiskey, naturally."

Their noses touch when he pulls her close, and Molotov kisses him gently, pressing her fingers into his back. No one who saw them now would ever think they just got home from a war zone, that they're going to go back when they're still fresh off a honeymoon, that their crosshairs are locked on one person in particular. They just look like a vaguely tired couple, using each other to try and recover.

"Okay," she says quietly, moving her hands to his cheeks and running them back through his hair. She delicately pulls away to summon the house Avox, though she never lets it in their bedroom while they're home -- she has no trust for even what is, essentially, a robot. She speaks through a crack in the door, demands whiskey and sandwiches, hot ones to counter the cold weather. Only then does she come back to tug him toward the bed.

He winces a bit, exhaling long and slow through his nose upon the termination of the kiss. He's barely moved when she returns to tug him to bed, but he shakes his head in a sort of placid refusal.

"My leg is killing me and I smell like I've been to hospital," he calls after her, grousing slightly at things beyond her control. "I'll be drawing a bath, if you're keen to join me."

Because he doesn't want to be away with her, but isn't ready to curl up in the sheets yet.

Her brow knits, and it's clear that she's concerned, that she won't be fine until he is. She squeezes his hand silently, looking at him with her head cocked, and they stand there for a moment, fingers entwined with their arms extended toward each other. The pause is only momentary though, and then she steps back to where she was, kissing him again before she moves toward the bathroom instead.

She flicks on the light and goes to turn on the taps, filling the kind of bathtub that only the extremely wealthy have, as it necessitates a bathroom larger than most peoples' living rooms, space enough for decorative accoutrements in addition to the freestanding basin under a chandelier, the separate shower, an entire wall for linens that are only meant to look pretty. She adds bath soak, something that was specially formulated for him with specific oils for soreness (not that Molotov believes in that panacea bullshit, but it smells nice so she doesn't throw it out), then comes back to him.

"Come on." Her voice is soft and she pulls him afterward. Honestly, she could use the bath herself, because the fact that she's basically slept for two days is pretty obvious.

Tom, naturally, believes in all of that panacea bullshit, although he'll insist that his fondness for natural remedies is about actual science and botany and not just "Hollywood nonsense". Molotov's certainly had to put up with at least one lecture about the benefits of homegrown echinacea.

"Right with you." He gets up and when he steps into their idiotic bathroom, shrugs the robe off, not resisting the urge to check himself out in the wall-to-wall mirror (vanity is a state of being). For as much as his leg hurts, for as old as death makes him feel, he still has the strong physique of a man a decade younger and then some.

With anyone else he would downplay the pain, but he knows that hiding the soreness won't sate Molotov, only actually eliminating it. She can read his too well. For someone as accustomed to lying as he is, he's remarkably bad at misleading the people who love him.

He takes a seat next to the tub as it fills (and it may take a while, given that it's large enough to fit a harem).

This is what most of their arguments are about, stupid shit like whether or not gingko biloba helps the memory.

Molotov doesn't look at either of them in the mirror, just sits behind him and runs her fingers through his hair, her nails on his scalp. She's quiet, the way she always is when she's assessing things, assigning solutions and making note of the answers she can come up with. Eventually, she wraps her arms around his neck from behind, pressing her cheek to the nape of his neck, and she sighs.

"I love you," she murmurs, running one hand down his back when she finally moves to turn off the water. The water is steaming but tolerable, the kind of hot that will take some time to cool down to lukewarm. She leaves her robe on a chair when she climbs in, after he does so that he can get as comfortable as possible.

He sighs back, but it's a warm sound, one that seems lighter than the dour mood the last mission put them in. It's almost as if it comes from a happier, more domestic world, one which people like them only catch in glimpses and as rewards for all their hard work. "I love you too. More than I knew any man was capable of, much less me."

He doesn't wince as he lowers himself into the water and takes to sitting on one of the many porcelain shelves inside the tub, making it more like a jacuzzi than just a huge and elaborate bath. He's used to heat. One could even say he's fond of it, as if finding all that warmth outside makes up for how cold-hearted he can be.

"Could you reach that rosewater oil, dear?"

Though she never outwardly reacts, Molotov looks more like she should be sending up steam, melting and evaporating in the heat of the water, her skin turning flush as a carnation in protest of the drastic temperature change. But she's been cold both inside and out for so long that she hardly notices these things anymore, even sometimes welcomes them; it feels appropriate now, cleansing and proper.

She's settled against him by the time he asks for the oil, her head on his shoulder and the bottom half of her hair floating in the water. Refusing to move, she stretches as far as she can, and succeeds only in knocking the bottle into the water. She watches it float for a second, then extends her leg and pushes it back toward them with her foot. It bobs into their space, gently bumping into her arm as she closes her eye.

"There."

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weh my FEELINGS

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finally i use the bathtub icon

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