You Should Have Never Trusted Disneyland

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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.

Comments

[downbeat]

Katurian isn't doing very well.

His face is bruised. His neck is bruised. His nose has been cracked and it rests crooked on his face, a steady stream of blood bubbling up from his nostrils. He cannot stand up straight, not really, and so he walks hunched with an arm curled around his wounded stomach. Now that Draco is dead, he has nowhere to go. He sleeps in holes, in overturned food carts, in dark corners where he needs to regularly fend off rats with his folding knife. It's so different from his first two weeks. Suddenly all he wants to do is sleep.

In Tomorrowland, Katurian is sleeping. He's curled up in a small ball not far away from the gardens, hidden under what once might have been a train car. His sponsors haven't been kind to him in the recent days. No food. No water. He came here for the former (and maybe the latter, god he's so thirsty) but it was a long walk and for whatever reason, lying down to take a quick break didn't sound like a bad idea. He holds apples in his arms as though they were teddy bears.

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Howard almost stumbles right into Katurian. He's spending so much time looking over his shoulders, looking for Grey or Aunamee or Karis or Draco, that he doesn't pay as much attention to what's in front of him as he should.

He only stops a few steps away when he realizes that Katurian's not a rock at the base of Thunder Mountain in the dim light. He walks with that little limp around Katurian, until he recognizes the face. His foot drags slightly; just because the spear wound has healed up some doesn't mean that the trip to and from Tomorrowland is easy on him.

Katurian. The guy who would kill people in their sleep, looking like maybe the victims woke up.

He taps Katurian with his foot and then takes a few quick steps backwards, letting the sack fall from around his shoulders to swing in front of him like some sort of protective shield. "Wake up. You can't sleep here."

The shrinking nature of his body language is gone. Howard still skulks, but it isn't the vulnerable, helpless gestures of a wounded creature that dress his muscles so much as the motivation and seriousness of a wildcat. The arena is, unfortunately, his home now. He can be all business here, because here the fear and paranoia is an asset instead of a liability. Here it keeps him alive.

And so it isn't with shaking hands or hunched shoulders that he faces the man beneath him. It's with the jaded, vigilant stance of a survivor.

[downbeat]

Katurian, meanwhile, isn't equipped for suffering. Before the arenas (and before the police), Katurian had never broken a bone or been in a fight. His parents had given him a life of guaranteed physical comfort. It was, after all, an essential element to their so-called 'experiment.' Raise one brother in the darkness. Raise one brother in the light.

How was he supposed to be the light child if he knew hardship?

His eyes open slowly at first, and then he's hit with a surge of energy, a white hot panic that explodes from his chest. His immediate instinct is to shove himself backwards, but when he does, the pain in his stomach stops him with a gasp. A grimace. It's only then, when he's paused in pain, that his eyes focus on the boy in front of him.

Howard.

Katurian isn't sure if this is good news.

From his place on the ground, the cuts and gashes on Howard's face almost look like shadows. That's what he thinks they are at first, jagged points of darkness, and then he realizes. Katurian still hasn't caught his breath, but the sympathy beats out the fear if just for one moment. "Jesus Christ."

It's a squeak.

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Howard reaches a hand up, suddenly self-conscious, and feels some of the cuts on his face, the ones that haven't gone all hot and leaky with infection yet. It's the hand without the knife, and it requires lowering the sack to the ground. Then he drops his arms again.

"It's okay, it looks worse than it...nah, actually, it feels pretty awful too."

The memories are the worst part, of course, but the physical pain doesn't have to be fun just because it's the lesser of the many evils here. "I look like something out of one of your crazy stories.

Maybe in some alternate world, he would have shown Katurian that he writes scary stories too. Maybe Katurian could look over them, give him tips, tell him that this is a good way to work out those demons, that this is better than binge-eating and shaking in the night and pacing until his feet blister and thinking about killing himself.

But maybe in some alternate universe they aren't all enemies on the same side, either.

"You're going to get found if you sleep here. I almost walked right into you. This is a shitty place for a dirt nap, that's all I'm saying." Howard eyes the apples in Katurian's hands, wondering if he can get one of them too. It's not greed, really, not for the sake of having things. Not entitlement. It's just plain old-fashioned want.

[downbeat]

But Katurian is starving, and his immediate reaction is to pull the apples closer to him in a protective embrace. These are his. These are going to keep him alive. Altruism emerges soon after, that flickering little voice in his head that sometimes sings to him like an angel.

(Once upon a time, there was a writer and he was a selfish fucking asshole to a boy with a mutilated face.)

He takes one of the apples and rolls it forward. His hands are trembling and the apple isn't exactly round, so it makes a brief circle in the dirt before stopping entirely. He gives it another nudge. Then another, more frustrated nudge. Finally, he picks it up and offers it forward with his shaking hand.

"It's a thank you gift," he slurs out. "Take it."

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

"Thanks for what?" Howard picks it up with the hand that was skewered by the shard of glass, the one with bandages and gauze wrapped between two of his knuckles. He rubs it on his new jeans and tucks it into his sweater pocket. And pulls a tomato from his and sets it in front of Katurian in exchange.

"Look, come on, I'll show you where to sleep." He doesn't reach a hand out to help Katurian. They're clearly occupied, and he doesn't feel comfortable enough with him to let him into his personal bubble like that. "You help me, I help you. Who did this to you?"

He gestures with his hands. He'll tell Katurian what happened to him in exchange for the same - that way they both know who to watch out for. It's the most morbid and depressing of currencies.

[downbeat]

You help me, I help you. An apple for a tomato. Katurian turned some of his cloak into a bag as well, although he's currently lying on top of it. He gets on his hands and knees, slips it out from underneath him, and takes the offering with ginger fingers. He moves the apples there as well. He was too tired to bother earlier. (Or maybe it just feels better when the food is pressed up against his chest, his beating heart.)

"You could've left me or you could've killed me," he says. "But you didn't." And then he hesitated a fraction of a second. "Not yet."

He tries to laugh like it's a joke, but he cringes instead. He gets to his feet, little by little. Muscle by muscle. Joint by joint.

"His name was Hyperion. He wore white, and I'd never seen him before now."

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Howard's upper lip curls a bit, making his disaster of a mouth look like one big gouge. The gash down his lip and chin gives a sibilant whisper to the end of each of his consonants. "Great, awesome. So he's my district. That's just what I need."

Because he's not afraid enough of Alpha. Howard gathers up his sack of things again and gestures with his head towards the ramshackle buildings along Frontierland. It's a stiff gesture; his lymph nodes are all swollen up from trying to fight off the infection in his neck and face, and it's made all his motions above the shoulder resemble stop-motion animation, slightly.

"Mine was Draco Malfoy. Your district. Looks like it's like the hologram card in a Pokémon trading card pack - every district gets one sparkly, shiny little psychopath."

[downbeat]

Katurian is about to say that Hyperion wasn’t really to blame — that he attacked him first, that even though he could have sliced his belly open a thousand times over, he let him off with only a couple of kicks and punches — but then Howard keeps talking.

A mistake. This is obviously a mistake.

“What?” he says, so fast that his lips trip over the syllable and it comes out more like a ‘wha’ or a ‘aah.’ Those wounds on Howard’s face, they’re horrible, hideous, merciless, and Howard was right, yes, he looks like something he would write about, but in Katurian’s stories, it’s not the boy who delights in sadism. It’s the cruel adult that has already been twisted by this fucked up world. It's the parent, the hermit, the teacher who never looks his students in the eyes.

It's not Draco.

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"Oh, what, did he pull the innocent schoolboy act with you?" There's a bit of a sneer to Howard's voice, not directed at Katurian but at Draco. Howard never would have been able to pull off the innocent schoolkid act - he doesn't have the 'breeding', as Malfoy might have said. He doesn't come from some aristocratic white rich background that makes people feel as if they own the world, and all the people within it.

Howard's voice gets quiet now, and he keeps walking. The new tone makes that little wet hiss at the end of each word sound all the more obvious. Despite the limp, he moves quickly, as if trying to put distance between himself and the memory, or between him and having to explain that to someone who might defend Draco. Maybe he chose wrong to make this exchange with Katurian.

"He tortured me. I think. He said words and pointed a carved stick at me and he tortured me. And he did something to Eponine, he made her do this to me."

Howard pauses and looks up. "She was crying, Kat. And she was biting my face right off."

[downbeat]

What Howard said sounded crazy (he waved a stick?), but too many things these days sound crazy. A man with an alien living inside his throat. A woman with impossibly large claws. A little girl cutting into a boy’s neck.

Katurian was fourteen when he learned that people who treated him with kindness and patience could turn around and become grinning monsters towards someone else. Katurian stays away from people because he’s eccentric and nervous and morbid, but he also stays away from people because his trust has been shattered, because behind every friendly word there might be knives.

(He should have followed his own advice. Hide and run and kill anyone who gets too close. Someone saved his life, so naturally he momentarily forgot about the overall shittiness of humanity. Great job.)

His exhale sounds more like an inhale, like a rattling gasp. He called him Kat. Like sweet Michal called him Kat.

“I can’t stand it in this place,” he says, voice unsteady like the chipped ground beneath them. His sinuses were not only wet with blood, but the beginning of tears. This place ruined Draco and Howard. It is ruining all of them. “This fucked up place.”

He never said these words before. He pleaded with the Peacekeepers, he vomitted in hallways, he screamed and he cried. But he behaved with resignation. He never complained.

“We deserve better.”

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"Do we?"

It's a response that surprises even Howard, but he realizes that he means the words in that morbid, laconic little question. He never used to believe that bad things only happened to bad people, but since he's been here...

He stabbed a man to death in his sleeping bag. He stabbed his ally in the neck. He took clothes from a boy in the freezing cold. And here's Katurian, all beaten up after a few days of trying to strangle people in their sleep, if he was following through on the plan he told Howard about at the beginning.

"Or, I guess, better question. Who gives a shit what we deserve?"

He pauses for just a moment to rest his leg. The hole in it is healing well enough, courtesy of the medicine from Aunamee and the Sponsors. It still oozes blood at times, but at least he can run, if he has to.

He wonders if he's losing Sponsors by saying these things. He wonders, right now, if it matters.