thearena | and it's there I read on a hillside gravestone

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and it's there I read on a hillside gravestone

Who| Neffa and Katurian
What| Neffa's luck runs out.
Where| Adventureland???
When| Early week 4
Warnings/Notes| Description of injury/death

The sponsors had given up on him. Neffa could hardly blame them. He'd played them most cruelly - given them cold, charming smiles and cheerful, violent promises, offered them infinite expectations and made good on exactly none of them. He'd run from every confrontation, begged for every scrap of help he'd bought, spent his time crouching in corners and muttering gibberish into the air, and ended up here, stretched out flat on the banks of the swamp half for concealment and half because his trembling legs wouldn't hold him in one place that long, pulling water to his mouth one shaking handful at a time and startling at every distant splash.

All in all, a terrible way to do business. He might have been the worst investment prospect in the arena, he mused - no good way to measure that, of course, but at the least he was a strong candidate. How embarrassing. He'd have asked for compensation for wasted time, were he them.

The water tasted foul, and it sat in his stomach about as well as the remains of the rat he'd cooked in the early hours of the morning. He wasn't sure if that was what had him feeling so feverish, or the cut on the back of his head that still throbbed and stung, or perhaps the chilly, sleepless nights - life had felt like a gift, when first he'd snatched it back from the mouth of the Cornucopia, but he saw now that what he'd begged off the gods was less life than slower, more miserable death. Stupid.

If nothing else, the water made walking seem a less daunting prospect. He staggered to his feet, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and turned to follow the edge of the swamp, moving slowly in the direction of the great pyramid looming in the near distance and thinking little of keeping under cover. Let anyone find him - he had nothing, and the only way to win something was to find someone willing to make him an offer. A calculated risk. Good business, yes? Gods, let someone be willing to negotiate.

Gods, my head hurts.

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Katurian was so exhausted that it looked like he was sporting two black eyes. His nose was a crooked mess of bruises. The veins, oh the veins, they were visible all up and down his arms, on his legs, at his temples. Hunger, thirst, and fear had all eaten at his body. He felt like a corpse, and when he caught himself reflected in the rusted metal around him, he thought he looked like one, too.

No wonder the sponsors had been silent. Oh, they were probably thinking. This is no good. Let's just let this one die.

It wasn't only his body that had taken a beating. Katurian's thoughts were dizzying and his moods were unpredictable. He woke up in the middle of the night screaming into his fist, biting off his own fingernails, clawing into the dirt. When he closed his eyes, he saw Draco's dead eyes and Howard's mangled face. He saw Michal hanging with a noose around his neck.

At first, he barely registered that someone was coming close to his shelter of the day, an overturned plastic balloon. In fact, Katurian even slipped out of it in plain sight, his brain crying for water so loudly that he only bothered to look one way. When he emerged and saw Neffa, he froze and looked at him with wide, panicked eyes. Katurian was like a rabbit. A battered, torn up, fucked up rabbit.

It took too long for Neffa to realize he wasn't alone. He'd spent so long alert to every movement around him, so many days and nights flinching at every tremor in the air, that something in him had simply given up, it seemed - it was not Katurian's movement that registered in the corner of his vision (his eyes were fixed with dull concentration on the broken ground directly under his feet), but the halting of movement. That meant-- something hiding, something trying to hide, yes? Look up. Look up.

His gaze swung between Katurian and the overturned balloon a few times before he came to a stumbling halt-- wary, but well within earshot. Who did he want to be here, now? He's got a hiding place. He'll have supplies, maybe. What did he want from him? Anything. He's afraid. Use that.

"I'm not--" The water hadn't done much for his voice. He coughed into his sleeve, put out a hand and stepped closer - he thought suddenly of stray cats he'd known, backed into sun-baked alley corners back in Ristopa, and it took a dazed moment to bring his thoughts back. "I'm-- Help me. Help me, and I won't hurt you."

In the beginning, back when he first arrived in Panem, he might have trusted this man. He might have heard his plea for help and given him a warm place to stay, some apples. Katurian had always been a creature of cynicism, but he had also been a creature of hope (or maybe denial?), clawing and grasping for the soft and caring humanity he always wanted to find in other people — but so rarely did.

“You won’t hurt me,” he repeated with a gasping laugh. Anxiety and skepticism and weariness. It was the fourth week. This stranger would peal him like a carrot if it meant he would live a little longer. “Are you serious?”

Katurian held his knife like some people might hold their car keys. The handle was soft against his palm, and the blade was opened and tucked gently between his index and middle fingers. It wasn’t so easy to see, half-hidden by his hand, cloaked in the darkness of his glove.

He stepped backwards.

“L-Listen, I don’t — I don’t have anything for you, I’ve got nothing that’s going to help you. I can’t help.”

"Just-- shelter. Water. Anything." He took a step closer and then another, narrowing the distance between them, glancing over the other's shoulder at the overturned balloon behind him.

"You have to." Or I'll die. He didn't know if he could make it to the pyramid. Not without sleep, not without something to eat, not without just a few minutes of conversation with another human being. It was a plea for help couched in a demand, and it said something for how badly he wanted it that he didn't think about how that might sound.

After that first step backwards, Katurian didn't move. It was difficult to explain why, exactly. It felt like something rigid was inside of his legs, something far less giving than bones. He was half-statue, half-man. When he saw the weakness in Neffa's eyes (his face, his stance, his hands) Katurian imagined the weakness in his own body, the dark stain that forced all of his sponsors to flee.

"All right," he said. He didn't remember making the sound. Suddenly his mouth was open and then suddenly it was closed again, his throat dry and raspy. I'll help. Now he stepped backwards, slowly leading Neffa towards the shelter without removing his gaze. "There's food."

It was all he could say. No caveats. No conditions. His mechanical feet draw him backwards towards the balloon and forwards towards what he knew he needed to do next.

Relief flooded Neffa, set his hands trembling with a sudden release of tension he'd barely noticed, stacked as it was on top of the fear that had been digging claws into him for weeks. A smile broke over his face. Easy.

He followed, eager to close the distance between himself and life, clutching the bundled-up cape to him to hide the trembling in his hands. "I don't need much." The words fell out of him, borne on a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "Just-- anything you can spare. I'll-- I'll tell no one where you are, I swear it." He'd never wanted it to be a bargain without conditions, but this was not some sale at morning market, and he was not letting go of life now that he had it all but clasped in both hands. "I-- I'm in your debt. I'll make good any way I can. I swear."

He couldn't stand hearing it, the gratitude in this man's voice. His entire body went rigid. His shoulders lifted. His teeth clenched.

"Don't --"

He swallowed the rest of his words with a cough, bringing his unoccupied hand to pinch the bridge of his nose ... and then wincing when he remembered it had been broken. He inhaled. Exhaled. The ground was spinning underneath him, and his stomach felt like it was no longer connected with the rest of his body.

"You don't owe me anything," he finished, although he couldn't make the wince disappear. His forehead was knotted with wrinkles. His eyes blinked too fast. "Not a thing."

And then he was throwing a punch at Neffa, the sharp blade of the pocket knife nestled between his knuckles.

He saw it coming. He did not register that it was happening.

Too many impossibilities all at once, maybe-- a cruel new world, a tournament of murderers, the disappearance of magic, those he could reconcile. But add the split-second knowledge of his own impending death and something in him said no, as though by not reacting he could make it not real--

The sound he made when the punch hit was hollow, surprised, almost indignant. The knife went into his chest, deep, and it was strange and horrible to feel pain in places that should have been untouchable - it was not just pain but intrusion, and his hand went to pull it out, to tug Katurian's hand away (get it out) but his grip was so weak it was almost questioning-- he even met his eyes while he did it, briefly, like they were sealing some hideous parody of a business deal. Take this knife out of my chest and I'll--

(You'll bleed, you fool.)

Katurian needs to fight the urge to apologize, even with his knife lodged in this man's chest. Something tells him to twist it, that will make it better (that will make it worse), and so he does, turning the wooden handle in his sweaty hands. When he pulls the knife out, he stumbles backwards. This has nothing to do with the required force and everything to do with the way his bones are chilled now. The way Neffa's voice rings in his head.

(Show. Put on a show.)

He raises his knife and licks the blood from its edge. It is a rigid, uncertain motion like how all of this is rigid and uncertain, but he has a role he needs to play if he wants to get out of this place alive, and this is it. This is it.

He swings the knife again, this time aiming for his neck.

This time, he screams. He finds his tongue first when the knife twists, wrings out of him something hoarse and horrified; the sound doesn't stop when the knife leaves him but weaves its way into his breath, ragged and unceasing.

He should run. He wants very much to run. But fear is tangled up in his legs and swimming in front of his eyes, and when the knife is wrenched away he manages only a single, stumbling step back, like he wants to run but is still unsure about the idea, and by the time he has taken the time to look down and make sense of the blood coming out of him, there is no more time.

The second blow silences him. He puts up a hand, vaguely, like he means to stop the knife that way, but he's finding himself harder to locate in space, and the knife goes by without trouble, goes into his neck without trouble, and quite suddenly breathing is a great deal of trouble.

He notices, in a distant way, that he has fallen to his knees. He cannot tell if the knife is still in him or not. He thinks soon his breath will go the way of his legs, will fall out from under him, and the panic is like a second knife, right in the center of his chest.

He's no longer looking at Katurian. He's curling into himself, like he can hold the blood in that way-- he falls forward, catches himself one-handed on Katurian's leg, and he's not sure whether his grip says Please, please save me or Please, please let me die.

It takes so long for a person to die. Katurian knows this -- intellectually and through previous experience -- but it still puts a lump in his throat like a solid object. He gasps, pants, as though he were the one with the knife in his neck. This poor man, crumbling to the ground because of something he did. This poor man, dying in degrees instead of all at once. Like they all do.

The hand on his leg is cold like shivers. He takes it in his own hand reflexively and holds it tightly, comfortingly, like a parent guiding a child across the street.

"I'm sorry," he says, because he can't stop the urge anymore. He can't stay silent. He lets go of the hand to take Neffa's head, to pull it back and expose his neck. "I'm so sorry."

And then he slices one last time.

They say in Ristopa that dying is the most private thing a person can do. To step into an empty room and lock the door, to stand on a mountaintop alone, to lie in the dark and hear nothing but one's own heartbeat, is simple loneliness; to step out of the world and find the way back closed, to remove one's heartbeat from the infinite murmur of all things living, to vacate the anchoring elemental body, is a solitude that defies human nature, and cannot be undertaken in company.

They say in Ristopa that a dead soul belongs to the Mother, whose provision is fire. They say that when the body has released it, it comes to know its true nature, and becomes a thing of heat and light. The dying, though, belong to the Faceless Lady, who stands on the borders between invisible things, and who hears only the prayers spoken in solitude; hers is the perfect loneliness of the transforming soul.

Neffa's belief in the gods has always been tenuous at best. But when the warm hand in his disappears, when the knife flashes before his eyes and vanishes from his sight, he thinks of the Lady, in that instant. All his time spent crouching in the shadows before a makeshift circle failed to summon her, but maybe this will bring her out of the woodwork, he thinks - maybe she will wait for him in the in-between and he will have an instant in which to demand an explanation. He is formulating the question in his mind (blank-eyed, staring at the sky, his breath a ragged whine) when Katurian cuts his throat.

No one comes. Breathing is cumbersome, and it hurts, and so he stops.

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and it's there I read on a hillside gravestone

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sorry for the delay!

no problem at all! THANKS FOR AN EXCELLENT MURDER