[OPEN] The night won't compensate the blind

[futilecycle]

Who | Sigma Klim, Eponine Thenardier, and You!
What | Sigma and Eponine pass the time in their shelter, and later Sigma's last stand in the Arena.
When | Week 2-3
Where | In the jungle.
Warnings | Illness, drinking with a minor, death and mentions of gore in Homura's thread.



The whole of the week, Sigma had been drifting in and out of consciousness. While Eponine slowly recovered from the last of her flu and the wound on her leg, the Doctor was only growing progressively worse, as though her pain could seep into him. His whole chest ached when he took a breath and it was as though his lungs had been grated apart, filled with blood, flesh, the water from the air that suffocated him in every humid breath. Even in his sleep he coughed rattlingly.

But the girl's presence next to him kept him grounded, kept him from giving up in his battle against his own body. At the moment he laid near the entrance to their root alcove, conscious enough to watch the opening carefully, if in a daze. If anyone were to spot them he would leap on them and tear them apart like any badger or weasel, illness or no. If he had been doing this duty for minutes or days, he could not tell; any duration of consciousness slipped away from him without bias.

Comforted that there had not been an unexpected guest in some time, he turned to their stash of supplies hungrily. He wheezed with every breath, for his throat felt as though it were burning, and he could no longer endure going without water periodically.

"Eponine? Shall we eat and drink?"


*


After the girl had run away, leaving Sigma to awaken in a panic and search for her in a fog to no avail, the Doctor decided not to return to their shelter even if it meant leaving Eva behind. He could not face her motherly wrath over failing to supervise the girl, nor could he deal with his shame if he continued to travel with her - not to mention with his worsening cough he was extremely contagious. In the end, it was better for them to go their separate ways. Sigma gathered up only the canister of food a sponsor had graciously given him (he had a suspicion Eva would kill him for leaving with anything else) and set out for nowhere in particular.

Dr. Klim had found running water to refill his sponsor canister when it began: the freezing jungle rain, soaking, torrential, inescapable. The moment the water descended on his shoulders Sigma felt as though he were being picked apart by thousands of blades of ice - if the touch of another's skin on his had given him instant cool relief, this was like drowning a burn in an ice bath.

Shaking, now, and hacking as he went, Sigma rose from the bank and spun around, searching fruitlessly for a place to hide. But no matter how thick the overgrowth, the rain continued to pelt down on him and Sigma lifted his head to the sky helplessly. He was too weak to make it back to Eva's shelter in the roots, which was far behind him now - but if he stayed, he was dead. Fatigue overcoming him, Sigma curled into a pathetic ball beneath a tree and shut his eyes, coughing into his hands.

Comments

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

Howard looks almost equally pathetic as he scrambles through the mud and over branches, soaking wet and shivering. His skinny frame doesn't handle coolness well, and the water makes all his clothing stick to him and highlight his skeletal features. He bites his lip and looks for some sort of tree to hide himself under, something to curl up against until the cold storm is replaced by cloying humidity.

He finds Sigma at the base of one of the trees he's looking for, and for an instant thinks he's found Sigma's dead body. He feels twin impulses - to try and rouse the corpse of his comrade (friend? protector? father figure? acquaintance?) and to go through his pockets and see if there's anything useful there. Thankfully, a racking cough makes Sigma's shoulders jerk, and the fact that he's alive means Howard doesn't have to choose between his affection and his pragmatism.

He crouches down next to Sigma, next to the tree.

"Almost like your first Arena, right? Curling up for body heat?"

[futilecycle]

Face to the mud, which felt frozen as the water rose, Sigma was beginning to drift off, falling asleep even as his entire body was soaked and wracked with pain. His resolve had broken without Eponine: death had not been an option with the suicidal girl around, as it was his duty to set an example. Now how easy was it to forget that, to combat the cold not by strength but by refusing to fight it, to drift away and go to wherever Kyle and Diana were waiting for him...

But there had been another reason Sigma had decided to fight, and from the jungle it has wandered along and sat next to him. The Doctor had done his best to press on despite his illness, for the longer Sigma fought it, the further he could keep moving, the less likely the two of them would cross paths. Sigma's eye snapped open and he gave a trembling gasp, horrified that this had slipped his mind. Howard! His motivation reignites in him, seeps into him up from the earth where he'd fell, and his fingernails dig into the roots of the tree to wake himself up.

As he comes to his lungs remind him he needs to cough, and Sigma clenches his throat and chest so tightly to stop it he feels they might collapse. His cough comes out a wheeze, hopefully masked by the pelting rain. Palms to the grass he pushes himself upwards until he can at least sit, staring ahead, not answering Howard's question and going about as if he had not heard. Vision swimming, Sigma looks around for the easiest path away. It was not Howard's fault that he was in such a state, though undoubtedly the boy would blame himself if he knew... If he learned...

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

Howard was not expecting an embrace, or even much of a response. He was anticipating that he and Sigma would sit there, shuddering in the cold, sopping, side by side like two parts of a Russian nesting doll. But he wasn't expecting Sigma to pull away.

"Sigma...?" Sigma barely even looks at Howard, and Howard's seen that look in the faces of many FAYZ kids before, in his own eyes when he watched the tapes of the Games. Sigma's looking for an exit, and as Howard opens his mouth to question why the cough in Sigma's throat makes it painfully clear.

The pieces fall into place in Howard's mind and crash like tectonic plates. He did this. He got Sigma sick. And now Sigma wants nothing to do with him.

A normal person might not make those leaps in logic so quickly. A normal person might suspend judgment until they've asked a bit more. But Howard's not merely a normal person, but a walking compilation of neuroses, a Greatest Hits of abuse and abandonment. And his senses are keen enough to find even the most fleeting shadows of loss.

He's not stunned, as he stays seated in the rain, right where he is except for the shivering. You can't be stunned by something you've always expected, deep down. But he is stung by it, and so he just sits there, mouth slightly open and clogged with a hundred words he can't say, tears starting to mix with rain.

[futilecycle]

The Doctor wiped the rain from his brow with the mudless back of his hand, and dirt dripped from his fingers onto his cheek. Howard had called to him, there was no way he could ignore him forever. Finding his feet, he tried to decide how to deal with the boy, sluggishly starting ahead, like a man in slow-motion.

Even if remaining behind was an option, he had nothing to offer Howard. His lips had turned blue and he could not make conversation, after all, without wheezing - he turned around to face Howard a moment, trying to smile, though it came off as more of a grimace as the rain slammed down across his back.

Gathering all of his strength, he tried to be perfectly clear, to speak only once, the only words he could think to say. "I'm being pursued," he lied. "Do not follow me." His tone was sharp, like commanding a dog to stay.

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

And so he doesn't. He supposes he should be grateful enough that Sigma at least provided him an excuse.

He sits in the rain and mud as Sigma walks away. It takes a while, although the lapse of time if still truncated by the mist and water obscuring the view of the forest. In a few moments, Sigma is gone, swallowed up in the grey and green horizon.

"I'm sorry!" Howard calls, much too late, much too uncertain. And then, soaked down to the bone, he trudges into the jungle too, in the opposite direction.