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]

"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.