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Who| Katurian and you.
What| A neurotic, antisocial government employee goes about his routine.
Where| Inside and near three locations: Noire, Peacekeeper Headquarters, the Art Museum.
When| Throughout week 4.
Warnings/Notes| Mentions of torture, depression, PTSD. Location is tagger's choice.

Katurian doesn't like the outdoors. He doesn't like crowded areas or loud noises, doesn't soak in the garish colors of his fellow Capitolians, doesn't laugh or dance or spread gossip through pursed lips. He is a ghost in the great city of the Capitol, a practical non-entity who slips between roads and alleyways with his face down, buried away from the people around him.

There are, however, good places in this city to be a ghost.

In Noire,

he hides away in the corner seats and tries to match his breathing with the people sitting next to him. This is where he lets himself cry, sometimes, but he is so good at it, such an expert that it barely makes a sound under the clatter of plates and silverware. He always orders a small meal of broth and bread. He pays a full tip.

Around the Peacekeeper Headquarters,

he does not hide in the darkness, but instead in plain sight. The people who work there know why he belongs, and the people who don't can only guess what he does once he's waved through security with his government badge. Fear acts as his shield. But even if it didn't, it doesn't matter. Katurian never learned to drive in District 10, and so he needs to walk this route every single day. There is no avoiding it.

In the art museum,

Katurian likes to believe that more people pay attention to the paintings than him. Noire is where he lets himself cry, but here is where he lets himself smile, the handiwork of all those dead artists embracing him like a warm blanket. He spins in the rooms when he think he's alone. He speaks to the paintings as though they're quiet, frightened animals. You are so beautiful. So sweet. Look at your brush-strokes. This is where he remembers why he's still alive.

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There had been a painting in Wesker's Tokyo quarters. Deep beneath the earth, in the cool, recycled air of the Shibuya facility it hung safe and unharmed as the world above had shuddered and twisted, burned and fell.

A Pollock - Jack the Dripper - all chaotic slashes, paint like arterial spray. It hung behind his desk, framing his shoulders in red and gold and black as he worked. Gave his employees something to fix their eyes on as they feigned calm and tried to deny the fear he could smell on them.

He'd liberated many such things in the days of the panic. While others had grabbed desperately at food and water, family and friends, he'd gathered his favorite pieces and scattered them across the globe. Statues and paintings and ancient bits of pottery and stone. All different, and yet all the same. Powerful, awe inspiring, and his.

But only one - that violent Pollock - was hanging in the Capitol's art museum.

He lingered before it, head slightly tipped, hands folded behind his back as he glanced over the little plaque that told its history, sharing the tale of how it had come to find itself at the museum. Untroubled.

The spark had already been struck.

The flames merely needed fanning.

Katurian entered from the western set of rooms, his hands in his pockets, his head held high.

And then he stopped.

"Albert Wesker," he said, his voice so quiet that it was nearly a whisper. The man stole his breath. His presence stole his breath. That impossibly blond hair, that looming figure, those untold muscles buried under the weight of his clothing. Underneath his skin and bones, Katurian imagined that he could see the monster sleeping inside of him, curled up with its teeth locked together. Wesker swallowed him in the same way the paintings swallowed him. Katurian's sickly, scrawny body was only a pebble on the crushing depths of the ocean floor.

Edited 2013-07-19 14:36 (UTC)

The head turned, the high lighting flashing off his pale hair, turning it to white gold. One of the shoulders too, a subtle shift of muscle, of weight so he might look back, the lenses of his glasses black pits.

As deep and unfathomable as Katurian's oceans.

His nose flared, just a twitch as he breathed. Knowing the man first by the scent of his soap - the one he'd scrubbed his body with, and the one he'd soaked his clothes in - and that of the sweat and blood that neither could quite mask.

"Yes."

He expected to be recognized - so it wasn't a question - but whether that pleased or annoyed him, was shuttered away behind the dark glass.

"Can I help you?"

Edited 2013-07-19 21:29 (UTC)

It was not intentional, him saying Wesker's name. It was pulled from his lips in the same way sap is pulled from a tree. Wesker's very presence was a metal spile, buried deep in his skin.

"No," he said, which was honest, his lips and brain fumbling for a followup. Wesker was intimidating, blinding, but not because he had killed people -- no, it was because of the wide-mouthed monster lurking inside of him, how it reminded Katurian of nightmares and dark corners. It was also because that wide-mouthed monster had killed him, or at least another version of him. This latter fact had nothing to do with revenge or fear and everything to do with morbid fascination. He was a moth crawling towards its flame.

Look at him, mixing metaphors.

"I mean yes," he said, trying to hide the tremble under his voice. "Yes, because I wanted to meet you, and it's very nice to meet you."

A blond eyebrow twitched above the rim of his glasses.

"I see."

The corner of his mouth curled and he shifted, turning to face the man with the painting at his back.

(Home sweet home.)

"And you are?"

His head tipped, just a fraction, serpentine eyes flicking up and down under the glass. He did not recognize him, he was sure the face was unfamiliar, but there was something...

In the eyes. Around the lines of the mouth.

In the hands.

When he wasn't in immediate danger, Katurian understood a little something about suspense. It's the key to any story, after all -- in every story -- and as an expert storyteller, he liked to believe he knew a little about using suspense in his own life, too. It was inevitable, he figured, that one day Wesker would learn his name and who he was (his ego was too inflated to consider anything less), so he decided he wanted to control that information. Let it slip in bits and pieces. Make him salivate.

"I'm a fellow art lover," he said, wearing the role of enigmatic stranger like a hat. He approached Wesker with his hands behind his back, his eyes flickering between the taller man and the painting. "I don't usually go for these abstract ones. I consider it cheating. Too easy, you know? But not this one. Not this one."

His hands still trembled. His heart still danced.

"He was an alcoholic, you know. Pollock. That's how he died."

Wesker exhaled, a long breath through his nose, impatience flickering around his mouth, the corner falling. Tightening.

He could almost feel Katurian's hands, groping at strings, trying to twitch him - the moment - to fit his pleasure.

Behind him, his fingers twitched, curled. Fingertips rubbing together.

"I'm sure he would be pleased that his tragic end makes his work tolerable to you," he drawled.

"It's not like that," he said, but it was like that in a way he couldn't quite explain (or didn't quite realize), and so his facade crumbled just slightly. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. He bit his lip.

"My name is Katurian," he said finally, giving into that inevitability. "And I'm a member of the Capitol's human resouces division."

It was such a gentle name for the things he did. Katurian liked to imagine that the emphasis was on division, bisecting, pulling apart. He extended his hand for a shake.

"It's a pleasure to meet you for the very first time, Mr. Wesker."

"Katurian." The blond head pulled back, the name a purr.

Surprise, and pleasure - a deep curl of satisfaction.

There was the similarity. Another double. Another funhouse mirror come to life. Wrapped, pulled askew, but still born of the same image.

He breathed again, that deep inhale, drawing in the scent of aged copper, soap and cologne. Filing the combination away in a mental file under Katurian as he unfolded his hands and took the offered one in his warm (too warm, feverish, the virus swimming just beneath the skin), strong grip.

"A pleasure indeed."

Katurian feels something solid inside of his chest when Wesker looks at him like that. Like a meal. When he takes his hand, it's like the completion of an electrical circuit, and he wonders if his own insides are burning, charred and sizzling like wood.

He releases him.

"You're so warm," he says. There is no strategy behind his words. He is only filling an empty space, only passing time until his courage surfaces.

He took his hand back, folded it once more behind his back, a pillar of black and red and gold, straight and strong.

"Do forgive me." He was more amused than offended. The reminder of his status - more - ever a pleasure. "A symptom of my condition."

Teeth flashed, there and gone.

"It isn't catching."

Not that easily.

"Your condition," he echoed. "What a mundane term for such a beautiful thing."

There was no sarcasm in his words. No mockery. He spoke to Wesker in the same way that he would speak to the paintings, now and again. He spoke with a burning awe. A twisting curiosity.

"How often do people cower from you?"

"The unknown is always feared," he mused, head tipping, the slitted eyes visible for just a moment as the lights played across his dark glasses. "Disdained."

Fought.

(Jeering up at him, pointing with fingers that had never touched the sky.)

He gestured to the painting, nodding gently. "But never fear, Mr. Katurian, unlike our dear Mr. Pollock, I will endure."

He would see the revolution. Would stoke the fire, and stand upon the ashes.

"I don't," he said, the words like honey on his chapped lips. "Fear, I mean."

Was this what he wanted to say? It seemed so wrong, so out of place, because fear was all that Katurian did. His skin was a puppet, and underneath it, fear worked the gears. Pulled the strings.

"I mean," he corrected, stepping forward, "I'm not afraid of dying, and so I'm not afraid of that monster of yours, buried in your throat." This was the lie he told himself at night. Death is not the enemy. Katurian liked to believe that he would accept death quietly, stoicly. "But so many people are afraid of you, and there's power in that. There's power."

A muscle moved in his throat, an unnatural roll beneath the skin.

He tipped his head, cracked his neck, and it settled, disappeared. The temptation to put this new Katurian's bravado - to see if he would break as easily - to the test fading.

"Power is relative, Mr. Katurian." Katurian to him, him to the Capitol. "...But it is a tool, one I'm not afraid of using."

Katurian watched the way the skin on Wesker's throat gave, expanded, twisted, imagining the horror bubbling just underneath. It made his own neck feel strange and unnatural by comparison, and then it made his own neck feel cold, the chill escaping down his spinal column and into his fingers.

He let the chill guide his fingers to his pockets.

He removed a small, off-white piece of paper. A business card.

"I'd like very much, Mr. Wesker, if I could see you again. Talk."

An lifted, the pale arch leaping up toward the equally wan hairline in a smooth expression of surprise.

How quaint.

"I'm not in the habit of hiding," he drawled, unfolding his hands long enough to reach out and pluck the card free between two of his fingers. "You know where to find me."

"Do you think they can hear you?" Momoko asked curiously, after watching the strange man appear to speak to the paintings. She knew people often spoke to inanimate objects, it was perfectly sane, but something about the man makes 'perfectly sane' seem...unlikely. "They're nice, but they can't, you know."

Katurian froze in front of a Manet (a woman was standing at a bar with a mirror behind her, but something about her reflection wasn't quite right--), his shoulders locked, his chest tight.

"No," he said with a half-laugh, turning on his heels, hugging his arms to his chest. "No, I, um. I get carried away, now and again." He lifted his shoulders and rolled his eyes as though to say, isn't this typical?

"Nowadays most art is rubbish."

He woke with a gasp in the Capitol, three days after he burned to death - it was like jerking out of bed from a nightmare, only sharp with the close memory of pain. Days later, he can still feel it. They fixed him up perfectly, of course, but he keeps expecting the sharp hitch of a broken rib when he breathes too deep; keeps waking up panting with the sheets tangled around his legs, sweating from a heat he only dreamed.

Invisibility has always been an enemy to Neffa. Renown has been, for so many years, the cornerstone on which he balances the pillars of his career - it is the real currency underlying every transaction he's ever performed, a magic cloak slung about his shoulders that turns his mere involvement into a ten percent interest rate, and it's as important here as it was in Ristopa. His weapons against invisibility are the only ones he's been permitted to keep, and he has not let them rest since he came. But since he came back from the arena - since they recorded him burning to death - other people's eyes have made him feel sick.

It will pass. (It has to pass.) But he comes to Noire because he's tired of being reminded what he looked like in his final moments by every stranger who was permitted to intrude upon it. He comes because other people's intentions are exhausting to read. He comes because for the first time in his life-- just for a few hours-- he doesn't want to be anything to anyone.

He orders... gods, he doesn't know. Something unremarkable. He sits, puts his back to the wall, and thinks, maybe, he is alone - alone enough to pretend, anyway, a sufficient distance from the quiet clink of silverware to believe that no one knows he is here. It is liberating. He dares to stretch his legs out under the table-- to flex his shoulders, to let his face relax and spread his arms--

--and connects with someone half an arm's length away.

Neffa snatches his hand back like he's touched a hot stove. "Ah! I-- Gods. Sorry." It's impossible to tell where exactly he should be pointing his voice, but the general direction is correct, at least. "I didn't--" I didn't see you. "--well." He lets a sheepish smile color his voice, and keeps his disappointment out of it. So much for being alone. "Sorry."

Edited 2013-07-21 22:46 (UTC)

Katurian is very sensitive to little sounds, to touches he doesn't expect. This makes Noire his enemy as much as his friend.

For Katurian, friends and enemies have always been very close together, like fear and pleasure. Love and hate.

At Neffa's touch, he doesn't yell, but he does jerk backwards in his booth, the metal buttons on his pants scraping against the fabric, his head connecting with the wall behind him with a sickening thump. He doesn't feel pain so much as panic, that familiar adrenaline coursing down his arms and dissipating in his hands, turning the tips of his fingers numb.

"I'm all right," he says. Normally he wouldn't say anything -- he would slink deeper into the shadows, he would close his eyes, he would hold his breath -- but now he is off balance and the words won't stop. "I'm all right, it's fine. I'm fine."

He sucks in a breath, unable to quite hold his passive-aggressive urge.

"I mean, you scared the absolute fucking shit out of me, but I'm all right."

Neffa realizes suddenly the curse of this place. He draws his breath in sharp when he hears the thump of the other's head(?) against the wall, but the stranger can't see his sympathetic wince. He hears the sharp retort, and can't decide if it's sarcastic or savage; nor can he turn it one way or another with a smooth gesture and an apologetic smile, and he is, for a few seconds, lost.

It's so important, isn't it, the seconds before and between casual touches. The little gestures, the small movements of the eyes and the tilt of the body toward one that communicate intent more surely than words, the motions whose lack turns a clumsy bump into an attack.

Neffa opens and closes his mouth, and digs for the right thing to say, and thinks that this is real fear of the dark, maybe. Not of unseen dangers, but of this uncertainty-- of a place where the only truth is what the other understands, and nothing to do with what he chooses to present.

He still has his voice-- he only has his voice. "I didn't hear you," he drops into the darkness between them. "Forgive me. I-- I must not have been paying attention." He falls back on honesty, because his.balance is gone. "...Your head's all right?"

"I said that I'm fine," he says, that quiet buzz of anger still resonating in his voice. When he feels unsafe, Katurian cowers, but when he is unprepared to feel unsafe, his back arches up like a cornered cat and his thin, sickly fingers become claws. Then again, he is also unprepared for how apologetic Neffa sounds, how his voice tightens and wavers. In the Capitol, an accidental touch is usually followed by tittering giggles, a quick glance, a return to conversation.

This is when he remembers that Neffa said gods, plural. This is when he thinks that maybe the man's anxious uncertainty is the genuine uncertainty of an off-world Tribute, and not the polite facade of a native.

His voice sounds familiar. Doesn't it?

"Anyway," he says, softening his voice, "I forgive you. The point is, I forgive you. This place can be a little disorienting."

This place. Noire. Panem.

The art museum doesn't have any screens, no televisions at all. Not inside anyways and that more than anything else is why Shion was here, and had been there every day that week. He had explained it away as a facination with art, and it was the truth. No. 6 had had no such things and the pieces in the museum were like nothing he had ever seen before.

This was his fifth or sixth visit and the smiling lady behind the desk had handed him a sketchpad and pencil and asked if he wished to draw anything. Shion had taken them out of politeness, having no idea of the cultural norms of such a place, but they were on his lap unused, he had no idea how to draw. Couldn't even imagine how to begin.

He was sat quietly in an empty room, mostly he wasn't recognised though there were sometimes whispers and fingers pointing at him. He still wasn't sure what the correct, sociably acceptable way to answer questions about his own death was so for the most part he just told them he couldn't remember much after being bitten by R.

A lie, but one that gave him peace. He looked up at the man spinning though, a capitol citizen he thought, he was starting to learn the behaviors of the tributes, the citizens, the old tributes and mentors of time gone by.

He smiled, glad that he was not the only one struck by the beauty of the pieces, and blushed when the pencil he had been given rolled to the floor, disturbing the peace.

The pencil wakes him from his reverie. In the quiet of the museum, the impact reminds him of a gunshot. Clink, clack. Bang. He turns his eyes to the figure on the bench, unable to stop that automatic, animalistic reflex to survey the scene, guard against threats. This is a quiet boy, he thinks, a gentle young man who is unlikely to have a knife stashed away in the inner pocket of his sleeves, who probably won't jab a knee into Katurian's stomach or attempt to shatter his skull. He should relax. Stay calm.

The pencil rolls towards him and he catches it with his foot, holding it steady like a soccer ball.

"Hey," he says needlessly, keeping his voice small. "You dropped this."

Shion blushed again, "Sorry, It fell." He stood up to go and retrieve it. "I didn't mean to disturb you." He had noticed the mans behavior and he wondered if he had maybe got him wrong, perhaps he was a mentor, he was jumpy enough to have been in an arena.

He bends over and takes the pencil between his fingers. How smooth. How perfectly formed for the human hand. It is a lovely tool.

"Are you an artist?" he asks, unable to quite keep himself from the question.

Shion shook his head, "No." He looked down, "Art is discouraged where I come from, but I find it beautiful, and the curator gave me the materials, she thought I might like to draw."

He smiled softly, "Are you an artist?"

Katurian knew the boy in front of him was a Tribute -- it was his job to know -- but there was still something comforting about him. He had such a gentle smile and such kind, sad eyes.

"In a way," he said. "I mean, not this kind of artist. I'm a writer."

He approached Shion, following that warm, comforting light.

"That's so awful," he said, his own lips slipping into a frown, "that they don't allow art where you come from."

"A writer? Really?" His eyes sparkled and he smiled, "Books were banned as well, but for a while I loved outside my city, with a friend who had a room full of books. What kind of stories do you write?" His voice was excited, he's never met a real writer before. Such arts had fallen with the world.

"I write all sorts of things," he said, although it was a lie. Katurian really only wrote about one sort of thing: pain, whether it was pain from a death or a maiming or a prophecy unfulfilled. There were no happy endings in the stories Katurian crafted. There was nothing in them that hadn't been touched by blood.

Katurian thought about blood right now, about how when he concentrated, he could feel little flakes of it underneath his fingernails. Gloves, he thought. He really couldn't afford to forget gloves.

He moved to sit down next to Shion, reconsidered, and then took the very end of the bench, his body half on the seat.

"There are --" He struggled for the words. " -- certain restrictions in Panem, yes, restrictions, but they'd never take it away from us. Art." He couldn't disguise the doubt in his voice, the way his eyes nervously glanced around the room. "It's too important."

Shion nodded, he understood restrictions and he had come across many of them in the capitol, had examined them, to see how far the stretched and how deep they went.

"They would find it hard, if they did." He waved his hand slightly, "Everything here is art, the buildings, the people. Even the arenas." The Games, which seemed like a huge part of culture, and the governments control was practically made of art, from the arenas crafted, to the costumes. It was a strange sort, a wrong sort of art, art used for bad. But Shion could see how it was still beautiful.

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Art Museum

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