thearena | You Should Have Never Trusted Disneyland

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You Should Have Never Trusted Disneyland

WHO| Howard and anyone
WHAT| Howard gets back on his feet
WHEN| Late third week
WHERE| Frontierland and Tomorrowland
WARNINGS| Howard's pretty damaged and I'll describe some of his injuries in detail during tags.

Wyatt did a good job with Howard, and the medicine from the Capitol is top-knotch. In addition, Howard's always been somewhat resilient. It takes him a few days, mostly spent sleeping in the scaffolding of Thunder Mountain under Wyatt's watchful eyes and eating the few rats he can get in traps, but soon enough he's moving about again.

Protein's all well and good, but he and Wyatt will need something else before long. He remembers there are orchards around Tomorrowland, so as soon as he can walk again on his injured leg he decides to set out that way, under the cover of night. The dark scares him, but no more than the day. At least at night he can blend in and not be a blaring target.

He's discarded his white district outfit and replaced it with some of the tattered, moth-eaten souvenir clothing from one of the shops - an oversized black t-shirt of Scar from The Lion King, a pair of jeans with the Mickey head sown into the back pockets, and a big grey sweatshirt with the castle emblazoned on the front. It all highlights how very small he is, as if his body hasn't even made the slightest effort to fill out the clothing. He's sheared the leg off the jeans up above his injury on his lower thigh - while he isn't happy to be displaying a weakness, he needs quick access to it to clean it whenever he finds fresh water.

The worst of the cuts along his torso are hidden by the clothing, but his face is still a horrible mess, with some of the bitemarks scabbing and oozing periodically. The hole in his cheek and split from his mouth to his chin makes it hard to eat, and has left him with a stiffness in his neck. His head cants to the left whenever he's not thoughtfully trying to keep it straight.

The new folding knife never leaves his hand. Never.

It feels all wrong to go through Disneyland like this. He doesn't walk like a tourist or a kid. Instead he darts from shadow to shadow, perpetually glancing over his shoulder and doubling back in case anyone's following him. It takes well over an hour to get to Tomorrowland.

If he were a religious kid he'd offer a prayer of thanks to whatever god when he finds a patch of blackberries and tomatoes. He starts to fill the pockets of his sweater, then a lunchbox he looted from a souvenir shop, and then he lays out flat the cape he got at the start, throwing all the fruits he can gather onto it regardless of ripeness. He gathers it all into a makeshift sack, slings it over his back and starts the arduous journey back to Thunder Mountain.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's hard working on their project without being able to talk about what it is, but he and Tony have been working it out, and he thinks they're on the same page. He's got no idea if this will work, no way of knowing that there's not someone watching them and following along as well as they are-- Tony might think he's too smart for that, but Bruce isn't willing to put that much faith in that, not when they were able to solve the problem he'd been working on for years. Still, what's the worst that happens, they kill them? At least this way they've got something more productive to do than sit around and try to kill off a bunch of kids.

He can feel the boundary as soon as he passes it, but he's expecting it this time, walking around ready to feel the push surge back like a dam breaking, so when it comes he catches it like he always does. Still, he's not going to wander around here like a time bomb, not in these sort of conditions, so he backs up until it disappears again, gone as if nothing had happened. It's fascinating enough that he spends as much time feeling out the border as he does keeping an eye out for parts, and that's long enough to figure out where exactly it comes back. Someone had a sense of humor.

This time, though, he has a plan, and dying would disrupt it, so he lays low as best as he can. It's still not enough to make him want to fight-- the others would understand, and they still have Tony, after all-- so when he hears someone coming he carefully lays down his own cape full of little pieces and raises his hands smoothly and calmly to show just how empty they are far before he can see whoever he's come upon, silently thankful he wasn't just a few feet over inside the boundaries-- the other guy didn't really get the point of conscientious objection.

Howard doesn't want to lay down his knife or his lunchbox and sack of fruits. The knife is, to him, nearly inseparable from his hand. Parting with it feels almost as if stripping himself naked. So he just folds it, and holds it up between his palm and forefinger to show it's closed, and slings the sack and lunchbox down to the ground.

The blackberries and tomatoes have seeped and leaked through the fabric to stain it as if he's carrying a bleeding little body around. He figures that probably doesn't look very good either.

"It's me. I'm not looking for a fight." He twists his mouth to the side in an ugly smirk, one that has to work around all the extensive bloody damage to his face. "You could take me anyway, Big Guy."

His eyes widen as he actually takes in who he's looking at-- or more specifically, what's happened to him. "Jesus, kid, what happened?"

His first guess is that the stain on the cape is blood, and who can blame him for it; his own cape sling on the ground is bunched too unevenly to be something like fruit, and has nothing but rust and grime on it. He goes to pick it up, more to have something to do with his hands than because he feels he needs to. He smiles awkwardly, a little harder at the nickname. "I wouldn't be too sure about that. Is it a cliche to ask how the other guy looks?"

"The Games happened," Howard says, trying to brush it off. At least Bruce isn't getting too close, although Howard watches Bruce pick up the cape and whatever's within in with a keen, skeptical eye. "And the other person is dead. I didn't do it."

Howard doesn't look happy about this - about the death, not about that he was the one to commit the crime.

"What've you got there?"

He scratches the back of his head, the gesture more defined than he'd normally make it-- even if he doesn't think the kid would really think he was attacking, it was better to do things deliberately while in here. "Sorry," is all he can say at first, for the death itself, the injuries, and being stuck here in general, but unlike a lot of what he says, it doesn't sound (too) awkward, but rather like there's actual meaning behind it.

He shakes the bag slightly-- not too hard, nothing that would damage the parts further than they already are-- to make them clank together in demonstration. "Scavenging for parts. I've got a PhD, might as well try banging some screws together."

But he pauses, before offering tentatively. "I'm not that kind of doctor, but have you gotten any of that looked at? To whatever extent is really possible out here."

"Wyatt patched me up. And this other guy, uh, Dr. John Watson. He gave it a look too." That doesn't mean Howard's looking good, but he doesn't want to imagine the kind of mess he'd be if he hadn't had medicine and people there to put him back together. "I looked sort of like Humpty Dumpty when Wyatt got to me."

And he drums his fingers on the folding knife in the rhythm of 'all the king's horses and all the king's men...'

"Yeah? What are you making?" He doesn't expect to actually be told, and if Bruce actually says it out loud here in the Arena, with cameras and microphones everywhere, then Howard will know that doctorate didn't come with an attached vial of common sense. In a sense, he's asking to see how Bruce reacts more than because he thinks it's anything worth knowing.

He winces sympathetically. "That's, that's good. Not the Humpty Dumpty part, but at least you're checking for something." Though maybe it was worse, in a way, that this is what he looked like after fixing himself up.

He shrugs like it's no big deal, as if he's just stumbled upon some machinery and decided to mess around with it while waiting to starve to death. "The way these parts are looking? A rust museum."

"The Sponsors..." Howard's about to say that they've been generous, very generous with medicine. But he decides against it. He doesn't really know Bruce. He doesn't know that Bruce wouldn't overpower him and search his pockets for medicine if he knew he had it. "Anyway. I'm healing up okay."

It's a good thing they get made good as new when they die. Howard's not going to be winning any modeling contracts.

"Got anything worth trading?"

He gives him a look like he could easily say otherwise, but he's not really in the mood to push it, just briefly raising his eyebrows before shaking his head to himself and looking down again, considering his bag.

"Not unless you're interested in a couple of gears and wire bits." Both of which they could find more of, if they needed to, so there was no harm done there. The question was why Howard would want to.

"I might be." It might give him a chance to see what it is Bruce is working on, although he probably doesn't have the science savvy to put it together. "You guys all set for food?"

The other goal is to prove himself useful. You usually don't kill useful people until last.

"You've got enough food to be that interested?" He raises an eyebrow, immediately glancing down at Howard's bag, before quickly looking away away. Don't appear too interested, don't want to spook the kid. Maybe it was good, if he was that interested, the pure scientist in him wants to foster that... but here, he can't really afford to. He was one alien invasion battle away from not trusting the people he was already with as it was.

"No, I don't got it, but I know where to get it." His head jerks and tilts side to side, looking stiff, like a puppet's. His neck is all sore but the twitch is some sort of nervous compulsion he's picked up.

He winces slightly in solidarity, but there's not much he can do with that injury-- what does he say, yep, try not getting yourself ripped up next time?

But he pauses to consider it, then lets his curiosity take over. "What do you want?"

Howard considers this. He picks at the bandage on his hand. He looks at his fingernails. When he looks back up his eyes are hard and cold, calculating, business-like.

"I want immunity. I want, later in the Arena, if it comes down to it, for you to think 'I can't kill this kid because we had a deal'." He chews the corner of his tongue. "And failing that I just want to know what you're up to."

He laughs slightly to himself, though it's a little sad; no one can say the kid doesn't know what he's doing, but these games had to make him this way.

"You're vastly overestimating the chance that I would kill you anyway." Or anyone, for that matter, now that he knows where not to go. "But if we have a deal, I guess they're even lower."

He hesitates for the last part, before shaking his head. "You're a smart kid, you should know why I can't do that." He means it literally, though-- there's no point if he says it allowed.

"A lot of people say that to me, that they won't kill me, but I still end up murdered. That's pretty funny, right?" Howard gives a cynical laugh. "And okay, you can't tell me what you're up to. But if you're busting people out, I want in."

It's sad-- understandable, but still sad. But if this worked, and they got out of here... they wouldn't dream of leaving anyone behind. Still, he couldn't come out and say that, not when it was still too risky.

"Fine, fine," he says, trying to hold his eye contact, but immediately continuing to disguise it with an "If I go back on my word, you can kill me next time." But hopefully there won't be one.

"What am I going to do, arm-wrestle you to death?" Even though Bruce is an average-sized guy, Howard's small enough that he doesn't pose a threat to almost anyone here, even if he were in peak physical condition.

"And until then, I get to look at your stuff, figure out if I want any of it, then I'll point you to the tomatoes."

"You're creative. You'll think of something."

He shrugs and lays the cape bundle down on the ground, far enough from Howard that he's not directly vulnerable to him, and spreads the fabric open to show the collection he has. He looks it over for a second before setting two pieces aside-- they don't look that different from the rest, but those are the ones he can't part with.

"I'm keeping these, but the rest of them are up." It's mostly gears and wires-- they had been plucking the metal from closer to their home base for ease of carrying.

Howard approaches the pile as if he's holding his hand out to a snarling dog, or like a bird picking at a snake in the grass. He's clearly still scared of Bruce, assurances or not.

"I want these." He takes some of the wires and pops a short one in his mouth to chew. "Running out of shoelaces at my place. Need more things to tie with."

He can't make anything of the two set aside, and he doesn't ask.

He hangs back, hands searching for pockets before just awkwardly hanging at his side-- either way, they're still deliberately out of the way so he can't attack immediately even if he wanted to. It's not necessarily calming, but it's the best he can do to maybe stay nonthreatening.

He laughs, a quick snort to himself as he reaches forward and bundles up the rest of the bag. "Good to see you're feeling well enough to stick a wire from a centuries-old abandoned amusement park in your mouth."

"I like to chew things. It helps with hunger." He pauses, then quickly clarifies. "Not that I'm hungry now, but I been pretty starved before the Games. I'm way better fed here than I was before the Capitol kidnapped me."

He takes what he wants and backs away, to a safe distance of about ten feet. "In a way, this shithole's a blessing to me. It's be even better if people could keep from jabbing knives in me and chewing my face off."

He messes with his cape pack, taking a little longer to tie it than he really needs to like it's taking up a lot of his attention; what Howard's saying isn't really something that's foreign to him, but that doesn't mean it's any easier to hear. "That's saying something." After a second, to cover that up with a bit of humor, he tacks on a "If they start using that as a line about how much good they're doing for us, I'm blaming you."

"Those were human bites?" He said he got it looked at by a doctor, right...? Still, if-- when-- this thing worked, they'd have to do something about that to make sure it didn't get infected.

"Oh, they already do. It's just not propaganda for me." He shrugs. "If I weren't here I'd have died for real of starvation or the plague by now, or worse."

He nods slowly. "Yeah, human bites. Like I said, it's not personal that I'm scared of you."

He frowns slightly, trying to think back to what sort of conversation they had had-- wasn't he just from LA? Not precluding starvation, of course, but when he thought plague, he didn't think California. "Where exactly were you from again?"

An uncomfortable look passes over his face for a moment. "It's fine, I'm used to it. Let's get that food."

You Should Have Never Trusted Disneyland

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