thearena | Stranded in This Spooky Town [Closed]

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Stranded in This Spooky Town [Closed]

WHO| Howard, Wyatt, Aunamee and Grey
WHAT| Howard gets a message and goes to save his Pony Girl.
WHEN| Week 2
WHERE| Frontierland/Fantasyland
WARNINGS/NOTES| Death of a cat, plus the resident psychopaths are probably going to get messy later in the threads.

There is comfort in having an ally, and over the week Howard seems to be a little bit less of a mess for having Wyatt around. He still sleeps lightly, interrupted by strange visions and the creaking of the tracks outside, but he doesn't startle so hard at every sound, doesn't pace around the little hideout endlessly before resting. He catches rats and, during the day, continues to rig various booby traps throughout Thunder Mountain. The length of rope has made the latter much easier.

But he worried last night when he couldn't find any rats to share with Wyatt, and even though Wyatt was perfectly understanding Howard's more than a little relieved to catch a tabby cat the next morning. It's injured before he gets to it, which makes catching it easier, and while it scratches up his neck and arms he manages to snap its neck without much struggle. It makes a loud squall, though, and Howard freezes where he is in the shooting gallery, hoping no one heard him. He absentmindedly strokes the dead cat's neck as he listens, looking for all the world like a kid holding a plush animal and not a combatant with his next meal.

It's then that he notices that there's a long strip of fabric wrapped up in the cat's Minnie Mouse collar. He lays the cat down on the ground and silently crouches down, pulling the fabric out. It's a torn piece of a baby's t-shirt from the gift shop, moth-eaten and faded pink, with the image of Tinkerbell's feet faintly visible. There's a note written on it in pencil, smudged by the effort of writing on cloth. Howard reads it, licking his dry lips.

He gets up, grabs the cat, and races up the rigged track to the hideout in Thunder Mountain to Wyatt, cloth clenched tight in his fist.

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Knowing he's walking into a trap fills Howard with a strange sense of zen. Maybe it's because he has a goal in mind. Maybe it's because there's only so much fear a human body can feel before it burns out, sizzles out like a lightbulb. Either way, as Howard ventures to Fantasyland, he isn't shaking, and he isn't breathing any harder than the trek should make him.

He stops at the Tea Cups, all scattered and broken, and tries to orient himself. His cousins once made him ride the Tea Cups until he was sick. Looking at them now, it surprises him that he doesn't feel the usual disgust he did at subsequent trips to Disneyland. Maybe it's just that this place is too far removed, or that the memory seems too petty.

He hears a creak behind him and whirls around, scanning all the awful, broken and gaudy scenery for a sign of a threat.

"Hello? Is anyone there?" He unfolds his knife, clenches it tight.

Hanging back as far as he has to avoid being detected, he's unaware of the note that drew Howard in this direction. Perhaps, if he'd known of it, he'd have thought twice about following the boy any further. But it's too late now as he steps from among the rubble, his bag stashed somewhere to leave him with only the spear clutched in his left hand. He stops just within view, canting his head slightly to the right as if to examine Howard from another angle.

"Howard, wasn't it?" He asks, grinning as he rightens. "...What could Aunamee possibly want with something like you?" The teen looks as unimpressive and insignificant as any other to him. But there had to be something about him. He starts to approach Howard, his pace unhurried.

Any confidence Howard might have seems to be suctioned away by the mere mention of Aunamee's name. Or maybe it's the spear. Either way, it's as if he suddenly shrinks, smaller in the face of danger, frightened. His knuckles go white on the handle of the folding knife.

"What do you mean? What does Aunamee want with me?" It does occur to Howard that Grey might be here to kill him, but the slightly stronger fear is that Aunamee sent this guy to retrieve him. Neither is a possibility Howard wants to entertain.

He tries to keep his voice from betraying how scared he suddenly is. "Don't get close to me. Don't - just stay away. I have to be somewhere." He takes a step backwards.

"That's what I'm wondering." Grey replies. What Howard says next actually does get Grey to pause, blinking. He suddenly starts to laugh. "I've heard a lot of things one might say to someone to convince them to spare their life, but 'I have somewhere to be' isn't one of them." His amusement tapers off oddly quick to an icy coldness. "Unfortunately for you, I don't care." And with that, he's moving to quickly close the gap between them.

The laugh is like icewater down Howard's back. He feels every skin cell writhing to get away from Grey. At Grey's next step forward, Howard bolts.

He's a fast kid, and agile. He darts around a teacup and sprints around the fence at the edge, trying to figure out how to get past Grey and back to Frontierland, where he hopes Wyatt or the traps around Thunder Mountain might protect him. He trips over an exposed cable from one of the rides and scrambles back up, even as blood begins to soak his pant legs at the knees, and looks over his shoulder to see if Grey's following.

Grey is prepared for Howard to flee, for the natural dance of prey and predator to begin, and he laughs as he darts after the teen, tearing around the teacup and the fence in hot pursuit. He grins unpleasantly at Howard when the boy looks back. Keep running, keep running. He's gaining on you.

Maybe he'll pin Howard like an insect specimen to something iconic here in Fantasyland as a message to Aunamee.

His breath is harsh and ragged in his throat. He glances behind him again, but it's useless; he's only confirming the terrifying truth. Grey behind him, spear hoisted, excitement in his eyes. A foot closer and Grey can grab him. Even now Grey could impale him, and somehow Howard knows he's being played with.

But he's not without a few tricks.

He passes a light post, lungs straining for breath, face flushed, terror soaked into his body language, and he grabs the post. He swings around, not away from Grey but at him, head ducked to get under the spear, and slashes at Grey's knee with the folding knife.

The move is unexpected and while Grey manages to dodge the brunt of the attack by throwing himself sideways, the knife still catches, slicing through fabric and flesh. He stumbles and catches himself on the opposite knee and hand against the ground.

There's no time to check the injury but he can feel it, he's fairly certain. A minor injury. Hardly enough to slow him down. The scientist lunges to his feet, eyes wild and grin stretched too wide as he makes a stab for Howard with his own weapon.

"Aah!" Like Grey's, Howard's injury isn't a fatal wound, but the spear head does slip through and stick into Howard's thigh. He goes down, landing on his knees again, giving Grey the precious seconds necessary to reach him as he struggles to get back up against the pain in his leg and the screaming of his lungs. He's panting too hard to even beg for mercy.

Laughing, he pulls the spear free of the boy's thigh. "Well, he certainly doesn't want you for your abilities in the arena!" Still snickering, he thrusts the spear forward again, this time for Howard's gut. There's a nagging sensation beginning in the back of his mind. Or maybe it was there from the start and it's just now grown strong enough to be noticeable. Suspicion. There's nothing special about Howard. Nothing he can discern that Aunamee would possibly want with the boy. ...So then why.

And then there is Aunamee.

He stands on the pathway some meters away, his back straight, his eyes sharp. He holds a baseball-sized rock in his hands. When did he arrive? It's hard to say. He moves like a spectre, his feet gliding quietly across the concrete. When he breathes, it barely makes a sound.

"Grey," he says. (Alastor Grey, twenty-seven years old, with thoughts like broken glass and charred plastic. With memories that taste like copper.) "Let the boy go."

Before he squeezes his eyes shut, Howard sees the spears, slicked already with his blood, coming back for his abdomen. His muscles move without any conscious bidding - he falls to the side, curled up like the tendril of a budding plant, trying to protect the soft flesh of his guts.

But the pain he's anticipating doesn't come. Instead a fresh wave of terror does, when he recognizes Aunamee's voice even with a word he hasn't heard his monster say before, even with a single word.

His eyes snap open and he scrambles backwards, away from Grey, putting a good fifteen feet between them. He rakes air into his lungs and spies his strange and horrifying savior.

He whimpers.

His head snaps up at his name, the spear halting it's forward movement. Aunamee. Of course. Smiling, he straightens. "Nice of you to join us." He says, grinning as his eyes find the rock in the other man's hands. If that was Aunamee's only weapon, he had little to worry about. But there was something about the man, something nearly imperceptible but there. It was unnerving. It cried d a n g e r. He couldn't place it.

"Aunamee." His smile is cold. "...What will you do if I don't?"

It might be the confidence. The way Aunamee moves, the smooth way his eyes track Grey (and flicker, just briefly, on Howard), suggests a level of control usually absent in the arena. He is not afraid. He is an actor following cues.

“Follow your instincts, Grey,” he says, soft words answering a question that hasn’t even been asked. “Follow your fear.”

He smiles without mirth. It dies a second later.

“Don’t make me ask again.”

Howard looks back and forth between the devil he knows, and...well, no, this is basically both the devils he doesn't know. But at least he's figured that all Grey wants to do is skewer him like a piece of pork. Aunamee is still a terrifying unknown factor.

He gets to his feet, feeling weakness in his injured leg, wondering if he should just run for it now. He can't get anywhere too fast. His eyes keep going back to the blood-tipped spear in Grey's hand.

"You're talking nonsense." He hisses, one eye on Howard lest he slip away. To think he might be afraid. To imply that he was fearful. The scientist laughs out loud, as if someone's shared a private joke with him. Of what?

Turning back to Howard he raises the spear again, eyes full of anger and instability. This time he aims for the boy's chest. The time for games is over.

Except Aunamee knows.

He knows what Grey is going to say. He knows his doubt, his derision as well as sheet music, a cello solo in a minor key. He knows when he's going to look away (towards Howard, dear Howard, with suffering that rolls out of his thoughts like a red carpet) and he knows when he's going to lunge forward. He knows everything now, because this arena has blessed him with what rightfully belongs to him in the first place. His sight.

(Oh, thank you, Mr. Disney. You really shouldn't have.)

Aunamee has never been one for distance weapons (there's no intimacy, no touch), but he's practiced with them all the same. In an instant, he's throwing the rock straight for Grey's head. He knows, after all, exactly where Grey's temple will be in the split seconds between the throw and the moment it reaches him. He knows what it'll sound like when it cracks into his skull.

Howard sees Grey move forward. He doesn't see it in the time it would take to dodge. He couldn't, anyway, as frozen as he is by fright.

All he can do is shut his eyes again, like he did when he was a little kid trying to fall asleep, telling himself that the monsters under the bed weren't real. Mom and Dad said they weren't real. Mom and Dad are tired of their seven year-old waking them up all the time, so they tell him that awful things never happen when your eyes are closed and hope that keeps him asleep, and when he has to use the bathroom at night he feels blindly along the wall until he finds his destination...

He hears a crack and opens his eyes again.

The rock hits it's mark cleanly, causing Grey to stumble side-ways, the spear slipping from numbed fingers, before he goes down. There are black splotches in his vision as he blinks at the pavement he's suddenly lying against, momentarily lost as to what exactly just happened.

The rock. Aunamee couldn't have thrown it in time. Still trying to blink away the disorientation, he starts to lift himself from the ground, wincing when it sends waves of pain through his skull. The hair on the side the rock hit is dark with blood that's begun to trickle down the side of his face.

It is so very beautiful, when a mind goes silent. It is not unlike watching a firecracker shoot up towards the sky in a quiet, bright arch and then explode into a million shimmers and sparkles. It is a crescendo, marcato, caesura.

It is like life -- and then it is nothing like life at all.

He approaches with large, wide steps, closing the distance all at once. He stomps one foot down onto Grey's back and kicks away the spear with the other.

"I promised that I would no longer hurt you, Howard," he says. He digs into his pocket and reveals a small, silver box. Medicine. For his leg. "I am a man of my word."

He releases it from his hand, and lets it roll forward. That tiny peace offering. That sliver of compassion.

"Now run."

Edited 2013-03-30 03:24 (UTC)

Fear is not enough to stop Howard from taking a gift when it's given. He reaches forward and grabs the canister of medicine.

And then he gets up and, as fast as his injured leg can take him, runs. He doesn't know what to make of what transpired here, but whatever Aunamee's going to do to Grey is something he doesn't want to witness. The crack of the rock against Grey's head still echoes in his ears.

His world is upside down. More upside down than it has been since he arrived here. As upside down as the realization that his parents were gone for good. Some fact he took as solid, that his parents loved him or that Aunamee was evil, is shaken and ripped away. It's like trying to bicycle in a hard win, trying to stay the course even when everything that happens pushes you off it.

Find Eponine. He decides to stick to a goal. It's all that matters, and it's less messy than the scene behind him. Less messy than the screaming in his head.

It isn't hard to send him flat again, still very much wracked by disorientation and pain that seems to encompass his entire skull, radiating out from where the rock impacted his head. Sluggish, he grabs for the spear several seconds too late, snarling at Aunamee when it's out of his reach. Howard is long forgotten.

"Get off of me." He hisses. Attempting to lift himself from the ground again. He's vaguely aware of the ringing in his ears. The way his vision seems blurred. He's very aware of the way his stomach churns and his head spins.

But the moment Grey is lifiting himself up -- the moment before, even -- Aunamee is increasing his weight, shifting himself forward onto his back. Digging in.

"Do you know why he loathes me so very much?" he asks, his tone directed upwards towards unseen cameras. It's time for a speech. A lesson. "Because when I first met him, he was trying to force bleach down a twelve-year-old's throat and I stopped him. Hardly seems worth the hate, does it?"

Without warning, he releases his foot from Grey's back and stomps down on his hand.

Edited 2013-03-30 22:39 (UTC)

Grey hasn't even a chance to begin lifting himself before Aunamee's further shifted his weight, and he grunts when the other man digs his foot into his back. He's in denial about the subtle suggestions that the Arena has granted Aunamee his abilities. And left him without. Why would it? How could it? It was a lucky shot. He could still win.

"I said get off." He snarls, as Aunamee paints his character for the audience, and he's about to make another attempt to move when the man's foot comes down on his hand.

He yells out, the second and third metacarpal bone of his hand snapping under Aunamee's boot, and tries to pull his hand out from beneath it, to reach the spear that Aunamee's kicked away from him.

"This isn't just a lucky shot," he says, the smile rolling in his voice. It is too easy, getting excited in a situation like this. He can't help himself. "And you could never win."

He grinds Grey's hand into the ground, back and forth, back and forth. He is in no rush to grab the spear for himself. He has all the time in the world. He has all the control in the world.

"No one feels sorry for you," he says, low and easy. "This is your comeuppance."

Grey stops struggling for a moment, his eyes widening as Aunamee calmly confirms his worst fears. Aunamee is somewhere he could never possibly belong. In his head. Another shout of pain is torn from him when the other man begins to grind his hand into the pavement, and he tries to bring himself around enough to kick frantically at Aunamee, shrieking at him, more concerned about getting away than he is about his hand.

His head is spinning to the point that it's getting difficult to tell up from down, nausea surging in his gut. "Get off, get off!" The panic is there in his voice. "Get out!"

He can feel it. Sweet panic. Beautiful panic.

With one foot planted on Grey's mangled hand and the other steady on his back, Aunamee kneels forward, grabs the back of Grey's hair (the thrashes are so easy, so predictable, and he catches it like a slow moving insect) and slams his head down into the concrete.

He goes utterly still as his head bounces off of the pavement, nothing but blackness in his vision, blackness in his mind. Several more bones have snapped in his hand, mainly fingers, and fresh blood trickles from his forehead where it impacted the hard concrete pavement of the amusement park.

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Stranded in This Spooky Town [Closed]

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