thecapitol | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Who| Katurian and Penny (closed)
What| It's a torturers' night out.
Where| Detention building, then Lux 4.
When| Week 1
Warnings| Drug use, torture aftermath, sadism.

The drug is leaving his system. He can tell because on the way in, the gas smells like strawberries, but on the way out, it clings to his palate and makes him taste strawberries mixed with nail-polish remover, the harsh chemical scent burning his sinuses and making his eyes water. So long, old friend, he thinks. And then:

O dear, what can the matter be?
Dear, dear, what can the matter be?
O dear, what can the matter be?
Johnny's so long at the fair.

Hopped up after an interrogation, it's like Katurian can only think in nursery rhymes.

He paces with his arms wrapped tight around his chest, surveying the damage. The linoleum floor is covered with long stretches of fresh blood. It looks like someone took a paint brush and just went wild with it, painting a little here, a little there. The walls haven't fared much better, only these brush strokes are matted with pieces of hair. A tooth. It probably stinks in here, so Katurian is actually thankful the astringent chemical is overwhelming his senses.

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Penny is humming.

Normally, when Penny makes a mess, she has the Avoxes - the slaves - clean it up for her, but a post-torture session is always exempt. This is, for her, part of the process, and she takes pleasure in examining the last of the refuse as she tosses it away. She uses a small sponge to scrub at four lines of red, like crayon marks, on the arms of the metal chair in the center of the room. The foam from the soap comes up pink. She dips it in and out of a bucket of suds, where hair and a bloody piece of tongue float at the surface.

She puffs her cheeks out and blows a piece of fingernail away, interrupting her reverie.

When she finishes, she takes her apron and gloves off and hangs them up. The gory bits are gone. The Avoxes can deal with sterilization, and medical can patch up any evident injuries on the new one they've added to their number.

"I liked that one," she says to Katurian, touching him on the elbow. "The part about the teeth was really lovely."

The teeth.

In the story Katurian told today, there was a man who was mourning his daughter because she died from a serious ailment or some such thing, and so he decided that he would make a doll in her image as a sort of memorial. It starts all pure and innocent, like he gets doll hair at the shop and weaves it all together while watching his favorite television programs, but then the man gets obsessed and needs the doll to be exactly like his daughter, exactly, and so soon he's stealing hair and fingernail clippings from little children, and then he's luring them to his house and harvesting their body parts. He takes one boy for his nose. One girl for her hands. In the end, the thing he most cares about is finding a child who has her same smile.

The part about the teeth was really lovely.

He laughs at her touch -- less of a chuckle and more of a giggle, less of a man's laugh and more of a boy's. When he's sober, Penny has a face that touches down in his nightmares like tornado, but right now she is a friend with sharp teeth and she loves his stories. He brings his hand down to touch hers, feeling the fingers that brought such destruction.

Hot cross buns!
Hot cross buns!
One ha' Penny, two ha' Penny,
Hot cross buns!

"H-He had such a great face," he says, sniffling chemical strawberries, "when he realized what that meant for him."

"He doesn't have such a great face anymore."

Penny's giggle is the sound of ice cracking under your feet.

"You should write one about tongues next team. Teach them not to lie." Not that Penny really cares that people lie about their feelings on the Capitol - in fact, she prefers it. Let them resist her. She's more than up for the challenge.

She squeezes Katurian's elbow slightly, gently, not unlike a cat kneading its paws: it isn't injurious but it's not without a warning that the claws are there. Penny has all different sorts of touches. Once upon a time, before she perfected her art, she believed she only needed to be able to hurt, but after years on this job she's learned that the most painful touch is the caress that comes after a stabbing.

"Do you want to get dinner?" The fact that it's phrased as a question is only a disguise.

He laughs at Penny's not-quite joke, the sound high and uneven. His muscles tense under her grip.

"Yes," he says, not sure or yeah. He is used to treading lightly in Penny's presence, frosting his words with pleases and thank yous. "I'd love to get dinner."

Although Katurian has been in the Capitol for over two years, he still resembles a half-starved man from the Districts. Eating is difficult. Most of the time, guilt fills his stomach like a boulder, and he chokes on tastes that are too sweet or too bitter for his anxious throat. But it is always different after these sessions. It's like the violence empties him out.

It'll be another story later tonight. He'll have dreams.

"Of course," he says, "you're a famous face now. I mean, from the television." The execution. He pulls away from her with another breathless laugh, his legs carrying him towards the exit in small, uncertain steps. "It's funny because the people in here, the people in this detention center, they won't ever forget your face, but sometimes people on the outside need reminders, and I think you did a very good job with that, a very good job. Today, too. You have presence."

He pats his pocket to make sure that his inhaler is still there. Katurian has always loved words, but when he's sober (and less in control), it's more like the words love him. They tumble out of his lips like runaway train cars.

"You could be an actress."

Penny lets the flattery wash over her. She bathes in it. She wants it to soak into her pores so she can carry it with her forever and ever. "You think I'm pretty enough to be an actress?"

There's a glint of canines as she grins. His answer matters to her. Anyone's answer would matter to her, regarding this question, but Katurian's especially, because she's marked him in that catlike way, quietly kneaded the sweat of her palms into his labcoat. Mine.

This is all mine. It's the same feeling she gets when people on her table scream. Look at everything that is mine. She doesn't just hold fear in the palm of her hand; she folds her fingers over it, snatches it away, cradles it to her chest.

There are interns in the lounge, science specialists and cadets for the Peacekeepers. They cringe when she and Katurian enter, as much for him as for her. There's something sickly that radiates off of the two of them, as if the rot can be smelled. Penny looks over to the scrawniest one and winks, then nods to the session room. Let him fear what she might do. She likes it that way.

"Do you want to pick the restaurant?"

Does he think Penny is pretty? Maybe like a sunburn or the glint on the edge of a needle, but otherwise the word "pretty" doesn't come to mind. Harsh. Sadistic. Unrelenting. When they collaborate in their sessions, Katurian thinks she's beautiful like a plot twist or dramatic irony, but there is nothing physical there, only the tiniest tug inside his chest. She's the pen and he's the hand. (She's the monster and he's the monster, too.)

"You're gorgeous," he says. He has always been a good liar.

He slips his fingers into the recognition slot leading to the locker rooms, even though putting his fingers inside the jagged mold makes him feel like he's feeding himself to a lion. When the door clicks open, he holds it for Penny, his eyes flickering over to watch the fresh recruits in the lounge. He feels his heart flutter, a smile flash across his lips. The drug must still be working its magic -- which is good. He'll need it for his dinner with Penny.

Once inside the room, he strips off his lab coat. He folds it and places it inside his locker, slow and gentle so that the contents of its pockets don't clatter.

"That's such a kind offer," he says. "But I'm, um, I'm not really a food person. You know? Give it to me in a pill, you know, give it to me in a pill that can be taken straight away and fucking let me get back to work. Right?" He mediates his words with a weak laugh. "So you should, you know, get the honor of choosing the restaurant because I'll go anywhere. Anywhere."

Penny makes a delighted sound like water boiling over in a pot. Her sisters were always pretty, and she was always the odd one, stubbornly plain in spite of features nearly identical to theirs. It's as if all her life the ugly fever that burns inside her has wrapped invisible caution tape over her very flesh; people can see it, see hideousness, even when it's molded in the form of a pert little nose, of red lips and eyes swept with makeup like the wings of a shrike.

"You'll go anywhere with me." Penny worries each word like a dog with a bone, gnaws it, gets spit all over it. Her Katurian. She owns him, and that exhilarates her. He's less man than pet, less pet than mirror, less mirror than invert. She is the fist and he is the squishy, wrinkled palm.

"You work so hard. You're so devoted to this place." To her, she tells herself. "I think I'm feeling like noodles today. Maybe beef tongue. It's a tongue day, don't you think?"

Katurian is devoted to distractions. It has always been this way, at least to an extent. When he was four years old and first took up the pen, his parents would need to haul him off to bed, out to school, over to the dinner table, down to the farm. When he was seven years old and the nightmares first started, the need to suffocate the distractions grew even stronger, and after his parents died, it became a thick rock in the base of his stomach. He wrote because he feared the silence, the emptiness that promised all the horrors in the world beyond it. Katurian is not one for quiet lunches or lazy Sundays. Katurian writes until his fingers bleed, and then he takes to the stage.

The stage. What a way to put it.

Once upon a time, he was cutting out pig tongues, and now look at him.

He shudders slightly, his shoulders raising as though to hide his neck, his cheek curling up against his shoulder. He runs his hand along the edge of the locker before closing it. "Speaking of tongues," he says. "There's this thing, some genetic thing or whatever--" Katurian isn't great at specifics. "-- and anyway, this thing is that some people can fold their tongues, but other people can't, like, they just can't. It's physically impossible for them. So --"

So what? His mind catches on something. There is a half-formed idea in here. There is potential.

"Alginate," he says. They use it in old dental impressions, and it feels like guts in Katurian's palms. He gazes off where Penny cannot see, his index finger rubbing against his thumb as though he were a grooming fly. He could do something with this, if he had time tonight. Molded gums, jagged teeth, twisted tongues. He could make a brilliant story. Normally, of course, he would, but for as much as Katurian cancels plans, he never cancels plans with Penny.

He turns back to her. Smiles. His earlier discomfort has fled away, and again he stands tall. The performer in the green room.

"Surprise me."

Edited 2013-07-09 00:32 (UTC)

"Like this?" Penny sticks out her tongue, then rolls it at the corner to make a tube, then contracts it into a clover shape. She presents it like a child showing their teacher a fingerpainting, like it's the punchline to "do you like sea food?". This is the only connection she still bears to her family, a genetic one, and she likes it that way. No more trying to suck up to people who will never pay her the appropriate amount of attention; why beg when you could command?

And she loves to be special, to do what other people can't (or won't). It's as if her brain is smushed down on one side, letting the other side bulge and leak. The part of her mind that governs maturity is irreparably stunted to make way for the genius that blesses her with scientific prowess.

She decides to continue with the theme of tongues. Given the Avoxing earlier, it seems appropriate to her. She heads towards the garage an ushers Katurian into the passenger's seat of her car; she wouldn't dream of allowing anyone else to ever drive. It's a tacky vehicle, one that clearly places an exorbitant price tag as a higher priority to functionality; Penny never did quite learn how to flaunt her wealth, having grown up poor, but no one has ever had the heart (or balls) to point it out to her.

"Radio?" she asks, wetting her lips like a snake smelling its prey.

Edited 2013-07-13 08:32 (UTC)

Katurian cannot always stomach Penny's more childish side. It reminds him of his brother, that innocence mixed with malice, that desire to impress caked with something much darker.

(Michal. Oh, Michal. Katurian had failed him and so both of their worlds crumbled, and yet on the bright, big television screen, his counterpart had begged for him like he could still be saved.)

He coughs up misery and then swallows it, burying it in the back of his throat like all those stale, chemical strawberries.

"Yes," he says, smiling weakly. "That's right."

This isn't about showing weakness. After all, he shows weakness around Penny all the time -- he trembles and twitches and stutters. It's a matter of sentimentality. Penny has severed every bond with her family, but Katurian can never stop loving his brother. Even with him dead, Katurian cares about him more than anything in the world. More than Penny.

He knows, of course, how dangerous this is.

In the car, Katurian drums his hands on his knees and tries to think about alginate. "Radio," he repeats needlessly, breathlessly, managing another smile. "Most definitely."

Edited 2013-07-14 01:42 (UTC)

Penny strokes the steering wheel, eyes narrowing as she examines herself in the rearview. Gorgeous, Katurian said. Penny can't see gorgeous when she stares back at herself, but lacking the cognizance to understand that the human mind cannot help but recoil from malevolence, all she understands is ugliness.

It's as if the temperature in the car drops five degrees, and she slams her hand against the radio suddenly. The speakers spit music out that doesn't seem to match the scowl on her face, doesn't seem to match the way the air has become like a net of tightropes.

"You better eat every bite of these tongues," she says, lips curled into a snarl. She slams her foot down on the pedal and peels out of the parking garage.

This is something else about Penny that makes him uneasy. She is mercurial, unpredictable, the guiding hand of an angel in one moment and the fastening talons of a hawk in the next. He likes to believe he understands her on some fundamental level, that he can predict these things and take steps to avoid them, but in reality, he's just as helpless as anyone else. She can bend him like a tree in a hurricane.

He edges backwards against his seat, his head against the head rest as though gravity itself kept him there.

"I will," he says, unsure of what he could do other than bow. Give in. "I'll eat every one of them because I'm there with you."

His voice catches on those last words. As the minutes go by, his sobriety increases, carrying him towards fear like a dog's leash.

Edited 2013-07-24 00:08 (UTC)

She gets road rage, of course. Not today, but regularly. She doesn't like being stuck in traffic, because then it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter that she can bend the bravest souls like putty in her hand, it doesn't matter that she inflicts pain with the meticulousness of a butterfly collector - she's just another fool in traffic, sweating behind the wheel, watching the digital numbers on her clock ooze by.

Thankfully, as if the entire city is afraid of her, the traffic parts for them today, and soon enough they're at the restaurant. She's spent the drive there quietly listening to the radio, eyebrows scrunched up, massaging a dim ember of pain taking light in her temple.

"Table for two." Penny doesn't say please.

Katurian wonders if she'll order for him, if that spark of rage about the tongues was just that -- a spark -- or if it was something that will linger like a migraine, a toothache, pain. The latter possibility seems more appropriate from what he knows of Penny, and it also seems more appropriate from a narrative point of view. What a metaphor, Penny as pain, the punishing hand and the punishing tongue. This is what he thinks about on his way into the restaurant, his head bowed away from the other patrons, his fingers curling together like tangled ribbons.

"This is a good choice," he says needlessly. "This place. This is a nice restaurant."

When they reach the table, he makes sure to sit down second. Penny gets to choose her seat before he does. Of course.

"I never go out to eat unless it's with you."

Penny reaches over and her fingers are like nagging brambles, tugging at Katurian's hand even as she's at rest. It isn't a comforting hold; it is, as all things she does, a territorial claim. He pleases her when he says such things, and she's blinded by the desperate need for it to be true.

For him to be hers, to keep and to discard at her own whim.

"I always make good choices." A pulse flutters in her neck. "I'm never wrong."

Only when science fails her. Only during trial and error that she forces and molds through brute perseverance into the results she wants; or by changing her goals. But she never loses.

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