{ wicked campaign | ravi + perch // @kay }

i've still got some opinions that i'm willing to claim
i'm gonna carry them around like they're some wicked campaign

Old habits die hard, and Ravi can't help himself from casing the mayor's residence. If moving into the current Perch residence was compulsory, Ravi would see to it that keeping the furniture was not. There was nothing wrong with it, per se, but Mr. La Torre was a man of specific tastes — and there was no arrangement of furnishings that couldn't be

"Coffee," Ravi agrees, not without manners. "Thank you."

He relaxed into the seat on the other side of Fabian's desk while the current mayor set up the hoops he had for Ravi to jump through. An endorsement is earned, not offered. Life had offered La Torre little but opportunity; it was what Ravi had taken that got him to where he is today.

"Your children?" Caught off guard by the demand, Ravi La Torre is too slow to suppress his scoff. He bites back the truth — that for all his efforts, for all his safeguards, he couldn't keep his own daughter out of danger. That from when she was old enough to hold a pair of pliers, he'd armed her with the tools of her own destruction.

He dismisses the concern with a furrowed brow, stares at the Perch family faces placed in front of him.

"Mr. Perch, I have plans. By this time next year, everyone will have forgotten your name, much less theirs." The shipping magnate has no reputation for patience, has too much respect for his own time — and, for that matter, Mayor Perch's — to sidestep truths.

He eyes the family portrait, offers a polite smile and small nod. "Cute kids," he concedes. Right hand reach, he plucks a photograph from the inside of his suit. It does not live there year-round, but Ravi does his research, knows that Fabian Perch is every bit the family man no one would dare accuse La Torre of being.

The foreground features the billiards table in the La Torre basement piled high with cash — half in a scattered mountain; half in neat stacks. His daughter, seven years old, grins — both front teeth missing — at the bills in her fists. In the background, a mustache-clad and million-years-younger Ravi La Torre leans over her work to double check the count.

The picture is blurry, underexposed, off-center — taken by a shaky handed snitch hoping to sell La Torre and his fortune down the river for a bribe. Ravi had personally peeled the skin off of the traitor's fingers, burned the more damning prints and the negatives alike — he remembers the stench of the acrid smoke so clearly. Few other family photographs exist; certainly none this candid. And implications notwithstanding, there are none that Ravi likes better.

"That's my Little Gun," he mumbles, passing the picture to Perch.

Ravi clears the feelings from his throat, returning the photograph to his pocket and the conversation to the matter at hand. "You know as well as I do that Leon Krigel is not the only District Four success story." He grits his teeth, swallows the biting criticisms forming on his tongue. His opinions go down like acid. Fabian Perch is not the audience to hear arguments against excluding the Krigel boy from that category altogether.

His voice is smooth, his words, harsh: "The children vying for your office struggle to recognize that a larger world exists outside of the Hunger Games. You want your children safe from poverty? From crime? From the hazards of the sea?" He sips his coffee, shakes his head. "You won't get that from them."