Pale and Deathly I Have Become [Closed]

[pimpcanes]

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.

Comments

[pimpcanes]

"Well, we'd eventually have to eat. Man cannot dine on love alone." He sighs too. Even he's starting to become exhausted from keeping up the pretense that all he wants is the attention and the prestige and luxury. Revenge is crackling along inside his veins, as if there were a layer of metal to conduct it between his muscle and his skin. He wants to make the Capitol pay for making him ask permission for things.

"They'd stop sending Avoxes in to feed us, and I'd have no choice but to sap your nutrients with a taproot."

[molotov]

She hides it, and well, but Molotov has never been able to suppress her hatred for what the Capitol's taken from her. It's been amplified by the war, by letting her remember what she loves, her work and the battlefield. Not a contest for entertainment, but an actual fight that she can sink her teeth into, a feeling she hasn't felt in ages. Even her language, they've taken.

And while she knows she owes gratitude for what they've given her in return, something as huge as letting her cross paths with a ridiculous plant-based supervillain from another world, the most perfect man to have ever existed... it doesn't take away the fury of the loss.

"How precious that you think I wouldn't sink to cannibalism before you." She chuckles and rests her hand on his chest, scratches gently. "I love you dearly, but I could eat your skin like potato chips. You'd probably taste like them."

[pimpcanes]

Tom doesn't even believe the Capitol was the one who brought them together. To him, their union was inevitable. If not Panem, it'd be some clash of interdimensional heavyweights, or an alien portal, or a mutant resetting the universe again. Panem takes no credit in his mind for this perfect bond.

And so he hates them without reservation or gratitude at all.

He chuckles back at the way she drags her nails over his skin. "Are you finally admitting that perhaps my people know more about potatoes than yours?"

[molotov]

To be fair, Molotov's world has a lot less of that stuff in general. The dimensions tend to stay separated, no one resets the universe, the aliens are all just annoying and stupid. So she has to credit the Capitol if only because she can't really conceive of those other possibilities. But she'll listen all night to Tom tell her stories of all the ways they would have met otherwise.

"God no," she says, nuzzling into the crook of his neck, sighing because she loves the way she fits there so perfectly. "It's like how some brands of potato chips are worse than others. Your skin would be the store brand kind, tolerable but you still wish you had a bag of nice, Russian Lay's."

[pimpcanes]

And tell her he will - probably for hours tonight, recounting everything he knows and plenty of things he's just wildly guessing at about his insane home universe for her amusement. He's never studied the stuff, only learned bits and pieces as he came across it, but he fully intends to present himself to her as an expert in interdimensional travel.

He chuckles. "I think that would say more of how good you are at roasting human flesh than it would the quality of my skin, dear."

[molotov]

And she loves him enough to never point out when he get basic facts about space wrong. She'd rather hear those stories than make him read her another book about perennials, the flowers get dull pretty quick, even in his voice.

"Good food comes from good ingredients," she says smugly, snuggling up closer to him. She searches out his hand to hold it, her legs sliding against his. "Are you feeling better?"

[pimpcanes]

Look, maybe those facts about space are totally legit in the 616. This is the universe that invented human black holes and then dressed them up as celebrities, after all.

He pats her shoulder, then finds her hand. "My leg is. My soul could use some more care, I think."

[molotov]

She sighs and squeezes his hand, kisses his shoulder before resting her head there and looking up at him. "And what kind of care is that?" she murmurs, one corner of her mouth curled into a smile. "Should I have the Avox make your soul a bowl of chicken noodle soup?"

[pimpcanes]

"Some quality time with the most beautiful woman in all the multiverse, of course." He rubs his thumb against her knuckles. "But chicken soup wouldn't go amiss. And whiskey."

[molotov]

"I can do all of that." Very slowly, she pulls away to stand up and get out of the tub, water dripping down her skin everywhere from her chin to her toes, and she reaches for a towel, fluffy and white and always warm like it came straight from the dryer. She dries off and pulls her robe on before smiling at him and leaving the room. She barks at the Avox through the door that they want soup now, snatches the whiskey from its hand and starts pouring glasses.

[pimpcanes]

He watches, cherishes, every drop of water that runs down her back as if rolling down her skin just to accentuate the perfection of her curves. Slowly, he hoists himself up out of the water, feeling not inadequate but just painfully old. The robe feels like armor around him.

He takes a drink and throws it back.

[molotov]

By the time he makes it into the bedroom, she's got the Avox gone entirely, her towel dropped to the floor as she takes her glass to the bed, crawling from the end to the pillows, waiting for him. "Come on," she says, taking a gulp of her own whiskey before setting it aside.

[pimpcanes]

He takes another drink as he crawls into bed with her, all but slithers up her nude back to spoon her. It's the only place he'd like to be right now, and the clink of his empty glass against the nightstand feels like the sound of being locked, willingly, in a box of treasures.

"You're the thing most worth coming back from death for."

[molotov]

She wraps her hands around his wrists, leans her head back on his shoulder, sighs loudly and happily. His robe is soft and warm, and he smells good again when she presses her nose to his jaw. Her nails glide over the backs of his hands, and she closes her eyes because she doesn't want to be emotional.

"I need you to come back. I'd have to kill myself if you didn't."

[pimpcanes]

"Don't do that, my dear," he says softly, truthfully. "I'd rather miss you a few years in Hell than be at fault for your demise."

He kisses the space right between her hair and the back of her ear, tenderly, as if he's afraid that the slightest ounce more pressure would shatter her.

[molotov]

She frowns and looks at him, and she looks wounded, broken-hearted. "You would want me to suffer alone?" she whispers, and it would truly be suffering, to have to live without him. She doesn't know that she could do it anymore, not live in a world that she knows he's no longer a part of. If Molotov cried more than once in a blue moon, she'd be tearing up now.

"I need you."

[pimpcanes]

He could tell her, of course, that he's watched the love of his youth die and managed to carry on, rebuild his life, find Molotov and excise that mourning as if it were a tumor under a hot scalpel - but he knows there's no point in bringing Maeve up unless he wants a fight no one will ever feel happy about. So he doesn't.

"You didn't need me before we met, dear."

[molotov]

It's an argument that would benefit no one, except for Molotov to again point out that he's blown his feelings for Maeve into hyperbole over the years, that a woman who never reciprocated his feelings is in no way equivalent to his wife. That he had a child to force him to carry on. That he can't understand what it's like for the love to be mutual and still something he can never have, the pain and misery of living with that fact.

She never wants that again. She would rather be dead.

"No. I needed another man, not even half as much as I need you now. And it was torture." Her pain is palpable, and one of her hands fists in his wrist of his robe. She stops looking at him. "I can't do that again. I won't."

[pimpcanes]

They'll never agree on it. They've never learned, no matter how deeply they adore each other, how to see eye to eye. Tom always holds Molotov up on some sort of pedestal, even in their fights, and so there's little time spent working on understanding each other - and a lot of just assuming that common ground exists.

That won't be a problem for tonight. He's too tired for all that.

"Then you can rest assured I don't plan on going anywhere."

[molotov]

Even when one or both of them know better, they tend to ignore that which could become a fight until it festers and explodes, until they can only express themselves in screams and throwing things. It's the only way Molotov has ever been able to express herself, using violence as a defense to protect herself from the exposure.

"Good." She doesn't know what else to say, how else to force more reassurances out of him to satisfy her own selfish neediness. She only holds tightly to him, rolls over to bury her face against the side of his neck.