thearena | welcome to the Jungle, we've got fun and games [closed to Joan]

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welcome to the Jungle, we've got fun and games [closed to Joan]

Who| Guy and Joan and then eventually Guy's killer
What| Teaming up and friendinating more while probably having sad feelings about humanity being all cruel to itself and junk
Where| In the jungle
When| Arena Week 6
Warnings/Notes| Probably gonna get Guy all dead up in here so murder time murder time blood blood blood

It was strange how much a few weeks could change a man. When Guy had been shoved into the arena, he'd been a panicked mess, but a well-fed, well-rested, able-bodied panicked mess with a good idea on how to survive. Now he'd gone far too long without food. He was feeling weak and losing muscle mass; it wasn't like he had much fat to burn. The poisoning and injuries certainly hadn't helped. A strange sort of apathy had settled over him. It wasn't the worst thing, because it meant he wasn't terrified absolutely all the time, but it was probably more lethargy from the hunger rather than any sort of zen calm.

Okay, maybe it was a little bit of zen calm. When you lived a life knowing every day might be your last and that every one you weren't dead was a blessing, death was still something to be afraid of, to be avoided, but its inevitability was something that could be accepted.

So inside, he really wasn't as much of a mess as he was on the outside.

Considering what a mess he was on the outside, though, that still wasn't saying much.

When Joan and him wandered into the same clearing, the sight that would greet her would be wildly different than the first time she'd met Guy. His skin was paler like he was - or had been - ill, and filthier because he'd often used mud to cool off and as camouflage. His hair was matted and even more unkempt. His nose and neck were bruised with nasty purpling bruises in various states of healing, and his body now sported countless small injuries. Cuts and scrapes, a nasty looking sore on his shoulder that wasn't quite infected but wasn't quite healing either...

One injury wasn't so small - the long gash up the right side of his face had left it a mess, covered in smeared, dried blood, and scabbed over. It had only narrowly missed his eye. Even his eyelid was cut slightly.

The moment he saw Joan's movement and heard the sound of the brush, he held his spear at the ready, a situation which begged an important question...

With the state he was in and the time that had passed, was he still the same, still as gentle, as when they'd met the first time? Or had he been pushed enough that pointless violence seemed a better way to respond to things in the arena?

"Joan," he said shakily.

He didn't lower the spear.

Maybe he had concerns about how desperate she'd gotten since he last saw her, too.

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Joan was keeping herself as together as she could. Sherlock was dead. John was dead. She could have given up. Given in to the grief. Let herself be sucked down into dispair. But she hadn't. And part of that was keeping her face washed, her hair neat in her ponytail. It seemed so unimportant, but it kept her together. Kept her moving.

She had a bag over her shoulder that contained the tent, the couple cans of food and bottles of water left, and the medical supplies. The food and water won't last long, so she's been rationing very strictly, so she's hungry and thirsty, but a hair away from famished and parched.

When she encountered Guy, she didn't recognize him at first. She just saw the spear, and took a couple steps back. Once she realized who he was, her expression went from fearful to wary. He may well kill her. But she doesn't have the energy nor motivation to run. She just stands, looking at the spear leveled at her.

"Guy."

Edited 2013-12-03 20:42 (UTC)

He carried himself like someone that could hurt her if she'd gotten more desperate, if she was willing to hurt him.

He also carried himself like someone that was even more willing to put his spear away if he could.

"So how did that whole thing with not letting them change you work out?" he asked and the way his face, initially cautious, softened to something more gentle, made it clear that he was hoping she was just as nonviolent as before - so he could be, too.

Edited 2013-12-04 03:12 (UTC)

She looked up from the tip of the spear to his face. She recognized the desire for peace there, and stayed still, not advancing and risking frightening him, but also not retreating. Trusting that his intentions were ultimately not to hurt her.

"Who I am is one of the only things I have left."

There were some who might not have trusted her and in the future trusting people like this was almost inevitably going to get him stabbed in the eye - but he was aware of that. He knew that sometimes that gut instinct telling you everything was alright was wrong.

The alternatives were unacceptable, though.

He smiled at her. A smile was something that looked like it didn't belong on a face that pale, filthy, and bloody, yet there it was.

He lowered the spear and sat down on a nearby rock, to rest for a moment since the sudden surge of adrenaline had burnt up much-needed energy.

"That's the spirit," he said. "If you need a breather, pull up a log. If anyone stumbles on us and wants to start trouble, I'll take care of them. All my weapons are poisoned."

She let out a breath of relief when he lowered the spear, and circled around to sit on a log across from him, setting the bag on the ground at her feet. It felt good to finally be off her feet and stationary for a bit. She had been driving herself to keep moving in fear that if she stopped, she'd never start again.

But she won't get stuck here.

Once she's sitting she takes a good look at him.

"How did you hurt your face?"

He sucked in a deep breath and let it out with a 'hoooooah' noise.

"It's a long story that started with a little girl asking me to mercy-kill her because she was dying in agony and ends with me ending the person responsible for it." He gestured with his hand. "With a little detour in the middle where the person who did it poisoned me and I nearly died."

He pushed that same wiggly hand through his hair. It was still shaking even now that he wasn't purposefully moving it.

"It's been a long few weeks." He sniffed, "I got her, though. She messed up my face but she won't be hurting anyone else. At least for now."

Her stomach turned at that. She had gotten more used to murder as a detective, but it was still something that made her uneasy. The fact that someone she knew was the murderer made it worse.

"Do you remember the woman's name?"

Guy raised an eyebrow. "We were a little too busy trying to kill each other to exchange the social niceties. She had long black hair, pale skin, gold eyes - well, eye at that point since she'd lost one before I ran into her. She wasn't scared like everyone else. She was enjoying herself."

Guy's expression changed to one of the deepest disgust as he reached into his vine bag and took out his bottle of water.

"She asked me how long the little girl lasted after she'd maimed her like she wanted to know how long she'd suffered."

He shook his head.

"She couldn't even give her a clean kill so she didn't stay in pain. She maimed her and left her to die like an animal -" Guy rolled his shoulders in a gesture that showed he was confused. "Not even like an animal. When I hunt I try not to let animals suffer too much - the times I've had to defend myself from people, I've tried to make it so it wasn't fatal or if it had to be, I've tried to make it fast. I don't even have a word for the kind of person that'd leave a little kid to suffer like that. We don't have words for that where I'm from."

He was getting passionate and ranty about it, so he took a moment to calm down and take a few sips of water.

Edited 2013-12-04 23:33 (UTC)

"There are people here who enjoy killing. If you could point her out back in the Capitol, I'll add her to my list."

She stretched out her legs, one by one. They were sore from being constantly on the move, but she hadn't really noticed until she stopped.

"Are those the only people you've killed here?"

Guy raised a finger and pointed it at her "Smart. Keeping a list. If I survive this, I'd appreciate it if you let me know who's on it."

Not so that he knew who to avoid but because then he'd know who not to avoid. He'd know who to hunt down, so they couldn't cripple and maim and kill children, innocents, and the ones who wouldn't fight back.

"As for who else I killed, there was one other one, but that - that was almost a mercy kill, too. He was maybe about my age, black hair." Guy's face curled into an expression that was equal parts pity and disgust and he held a hand at his stomach, as if to show something was hanging out of it. "His guts were handing out and his jaw was torn off. And he was still - somehow he was still moving. He came at me and I stabbed him twice - one time in the eye and it didn't do anything. But he wound up slipping and falling off a cliff, so it was half my fault for backing it up to it, half his for not looking."

His gaze went distant.

"I don't even know how he was still..." He cut himself off. "He must have been in so much pain."

Edited 2013-12-05 23:37 (UTC)

She paused for a long moment. She knew exactly who he was talking about, of course. She considered not telling him about the zombie, letting him continue to believe R was suffering and he put him out of his misery. But he would find out soon enough once he got to the Capitol, and it was in the interest of his safety that he knew that in the wrong conditions, R might be a threat to him.

"Actually, that was R. I don't know if you even have people like him where you came from. He's a zombie, which basically means he's...sort of already dead. I don't know if he can actually feel pain. Not the way we do, at least. He's a good person. But being a zombie means that there are times he gets hungry to eat people. It's a hard impulse to control."

Guy just sat for a moment listening and then opened his mouth into a little round shape.

"Oh."

Then he thought a little more about the idea of a living dead person, that may have wanted to eat him, shuddered, and added, "Nghgh."

"It's weird, I know. They're only stories in my world, so I was pretty shocked to see that they actually exist here. And where he's from. But he really is a good person. I'd recommend getting to know him once we're back in the Capitol."

Assuming all of them got back to the Capitol.

"Uh, yeaaah," Guy said slowly. "I'll - I'll try to. Do that."

Provided he could get over the fact that every instinct ever would be screaming at him to run away. He would try, though.

"But that's it. Those three were the only ones."

He paused and put the water bottle away in his vine bag.

"I - I think things might have been different if things had started here differently for me, if something had made me think everyone was out to get me. But I met people like Hawkeye, and Signless, and you, and - I can't. I can't justify worse than that. Not when so many don't want to be here and don't want to hurt anyone. I've decided the only times I plan to kill are if someone asks for it because they're dying and in pain, if someone is trying to kill me, or - or if I'm hunting the hunters. The people who enjoy it. The people who'd maim a little girl and leave her to die in the dirt. It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme but if we're all to die, it should be on our terms. If people want to live as long as possible, and don't intend to hurt anyone else, I can try to give that to them. Stop the ones who would try to keep them from doing it, who wouldn't even - who wouldn't even give them the death an animal deserves."

He went on, nodding his head slowly, "And I'll still treat them all like people. Make it fast. Give them funeral rites. That's what I did for Mindy and the dead guy. I would have done it for Azula, too, but she was too dangerous for me to stay near as she died. Everyone, even the killers, the ones who - who treat it like a game - they're all people. Everyone deserves to be treated like people."

"They do. The people in the Capitol, though, see it differently. We're people to them, but we're still only here for their entertainment. We have it better than the children they used to pit against each other in the Arenas. They didn't bring them back from the dead, either."

His expression was one of pure heartbreak.

"They put children through this?"

If there had ever been any chance at all of him thinking the people of the Capitol weren't inhuman monsters it had been dashed by that little factoid. He'd make his mental exceptions if he met the right people, but the look on his face of empathy and compassion melted to one of disgust and pure consuming hatred. Joan was the first to see it, the fire in his eyes, the desire to see them all burn. She wasn't going to be the last.

She recognized that look, having seen it on her Sherlock's face more than once, usually when the lives and safety of the powerless were at stake.

"As I've heard it, there was a rebellion. The districts against the Capitol. Taking two children per district every year to kill each other in this televised death match was a way to keep them under control. Of course, it was a stupid way. When they realized that, they started using us instead."

"I guess that's one good thing about us being here," Guy said slowly. "If It means they aren't killing children. Probably the only one."

For a moment, he was lost in his thoughts, and those thoughts went bigger and bigger places, as the full weight of their power - and their evil - sunk in.

"They can go anywhere. If they can go anywhere, there's no reason for them to control other people. If they can pull us from different worlds, bring us back from the dead, they could find some world that could have everything they ever wanted. They could find some place where the fruit practically rains from the trees, with a sky that has too many stars for anyone to count in a lifetime. They could have anything they want and for some reason they want this."

He looked up at her, his eyes wide as he tried to come to grips with it, with this level of madness.

"I don't understand. I - I - I -" He tried to find the words. "We don't have this where I come from. Bad things happen, people sometimes hurt and kill other people but it's not so purposeful, it's - it's fear. Hunger. Survival. It's not..."

He went on, "And children. The are such precious - such -" He shook his head. "They don't all survive, where I come from, so to bring a happy, healthy child into the world - that's a gift. That is the greatest gift. Even the ones that aren't yours." His voice cracked and dropped nearly to a whisper. "And they'd just throw that away..."

He was reeling.

"I think you were wrong earlier about them being human, about them being people. They may be mortal but they're something other, something sick and broken. And they need to die."

Edited 2013-12-08 03:34 (UTC)

"No!"

She leaned forward, her voice going low and sharp.

"No. Killing people is never the solution, but even if it was? Never say anything like that here. They can bring you back? But they don't have to. If they decide you're better off dead, they will leave you that way."

The sudden sharpness of her voice startled him enough to make him jump slightly where he sat. Not enough that he was going to back down but enough that he realized he should take more caution.

"Actually, killing people can be a solution to quite a few problems," said Guy, "but okay. Okay."

He tried to fill his voice with sincerity, looking around, wondering who was watching and wondering if they were the same ones that had watched before, as children died for nothing.

"I won't do - I won't do anything stupid. I'll stay in line and do what these people want. No rocking the turtle shell."

He was lying through his teeth, of course, but he understood her warning. Maybe this was the kind of place where lies were necessary to stay alive.

"I don't think you understand," she said, her voice still firm if not as sharp. "Out there are thousands of people, against your one. If you try to solve things by killing them, the only thing that will change is that they will kill you. It's been done before. There was a woman, before I came here, who tried to kill one of their leaders. They executed her. Publicly. And started keeping a closer watch on the rest of the Tributes. Killing these people is not the solution."

Joan would advocate other solutions, but not here, not now, with the entire Capitol watching and listening in.

Guy nodded solemnly, gathering from the context of the conversation what 'executed' meant, since the word was unfamiliar.

"Like I said, I'll stay in line," he repeated, making sure it was loud enough so that anyone listening in would hear it. "I won't do anything to upset them. I'll do whatever they want."

Publicly.

Privately? Well, that was a different story. Guy planned to misbehave. His fellow Tributes were possibly someday going to find themselves shocked at his capacity for getting into trouble.

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The next day...

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