(no subject)

[paidinbeer]

WHO| Orc, beer from the heavens and YOU
WHAT| Orc has been blessed with three cases of beer. Anyone dare try to take them from him?
WHEN| Week 4
WHERE| Near the labs
WARNINGS| Alcoholic 15 year old. Possibility for violence, homosexual slurs and homophobic talk


Orc had stepped out of the labs for a moment. He had told Howard it was because he had to take a leak.

But the truth of it was, all those empty cages and messed up equipment creeped him out. It felt stupid to get the willies from stuff like that after all he had seen and done and experienced...

...but memory was a powerful thing. And all he saw when he saw those cages was the zombie movie he'd stayed up too late to watch one night where the taxidermy animals came to life and were falling apart as they attacked.

And so he was trudging about the outside of the lab with his spear. The rest of his supplies were in with Howard. If there was one thing he trusted Howard could do, it was keep track of useful things.

That's how he found Orc after all.

Squinting against the light something caught Orc's eye. He ran his grey sludgy tongue over pebble coated lips and watched as a parachute with a shiny orb attached to it drifted down from the sky.

He was all set to go after it and see if he could find who it belonged to...but it seemed to be getting closer.

...it was for him!?

Let it land and approached slowly. He remembered finding something like this in the last arena too. There had to be something good inside...

His mouth fell open as he lay eyes upon a bounty of beer. Three cases worth! Back home that would be just enough to put him to sleep with a few cans left over to wake up to. But Capitol beer was something else! Something strong. A whole case would be more then enough to make him comfortably numb.

Without waiting, without moving to a safer place Orc promptly put his spear in the ground next to him, sat down and opened the first can with a satisfying and familiar "Pssssst!" Like the can wanted to share a secret with him.

He lifted the beer up slightly "Thank you." He grumbled to whoever out there had decided to take pity on him. And with that he set to drinking.

Comments

[marcato]

Hunger had wrecked Aunamee.

Wrecked. No, not an understatement at all. It had happened every arena. There came a time when the simple act of being human proved too much for him, when sleep deprivation bruised his eyelids and thirst scraped his throat raw. There came a time when his thoughts dimmed and then were set alight, fire so strong, so brilliant, look at it go, look at the power that still rushes through his fingertips, even now, even like this, look at it go -- and then dimmed again. He was no longer the mechanism running his body -- he was his body. This was what he dreaded. This was why he lay awake at night.

This was why there was blood underneath his fingernails and shallow gashes in his palms. Haphazard stigmata.

It hadn’t taken him very long this arena, but then again, it didn’t take him very long the last time either. In the desert, his mind had fractured the moment he felt the Capitol’s poison in his system, and when he attacked Wyatt with his switchblade, he had not been himself, but a madman dressed in his skin. Of course, in his own head, Aunamee edited this picture considerably, because he was never mad, he was never irrational. Not even when he was.

(‘You miserable, broken man,' Aunamee had told Grey, and Grey had responded ‘I'm sure we'll see which of us that description truly fits.’)

It was his rationality (of course) that drew him to the labs. Food was necessary, and when he sampled the local flora and fauna, his lips had ballooned into grotesqueries. He would need to kill. Take. He could no longer afford to hide inside dirt and shadows.

-- But he was wrecked, remember, and his thoughts were dimmer than usual. Orc seemed to come out of nowhere. In one moment, Aunamee was alone in the jungle, and in the next, he was stumbling into a clearing with a monster. A boy.

(A friend of a friend.)

He raised his arms in a silent surrender.

[paidinbeer]

Orc sipped his second beer in as many minutes and the cool refreshingly heavy liquid hitting his empty stomach was soothing like a hug from a can.

So when a figure stumbled out of the forest with his hands up, the most it got out of Orc was an eyebrow raise. Who was this guy?

He looked him up and down slowly. The guy looked pathetic. Like a strong breeze would knock him over. The arena had not been kind to him that was for sure.

Hair...something about his hair caught Orc's attention. A nagging thought that was muffled by the beer already taking it's effect. He tried to focus.

"You looking for a mercy kill?" Orc managed to grumble while still trying to remember why his hair was important.

[gardienne]

Eponine had been prowling. Or no, perhaps not prowling. HOBBLING is a better description. Anyway, she had been hobbling after Aunamee, eager not to be left by herself again. But Eponine was slow, what with her legs being injured. And so it was quite some time after Aunamee had passed by that Eponine arrived. She saw Orc and she saw the beer, and she sighed. She would like beer. Any liquid. How long had it been since she had had a drink? A day? Two?

She needed a beer. Well, if she was choosing, she would have liked brandy. But that did not seem to be an option, unfortunately. She had asked... but nobody had sent her anything at all that arena.

Well, she'd just have to get some for herself, then. Slowly, she backed away, and circled the building, so she approached Orc from behind. Her progress was slow, but steady, and not particularly quiet, what with her crutches. But hopefully Orc was too drunk to notice her by now.

She crept closer and closer, so close she could touch the can - grab the can. She went for it.

[paidinbeer]

Unfortunately for Eponine, Orc was a fast drinker and had finished his current can.

His massive stone hand had been reaching for the next one and settled onto the very same can she grabbed. His hand was over hers and when he detected something was wrong he looked over his shoulder at her confused.

"Huh?"

[gardienne]

Eponine looked guiltily back at Orc, her hand crushed beneath his. She fought to pull away, to run as fast as she could, but she coildn't extract her hand from beneath his.

"Let me GO, Monsieur. Let me go!"

She remembered Orc from the auction, when she had been cuffed to the chair. He had been nice then, bringing her food and chatting with her. He had called her pretty. But would that mean anything here? Would he kill her?

"Or, Monsieur, will you make it quick?" Her voice was hoarse, croaking from lack of hydration.

[paidinbeer]

Make it quick? When Orc realized what she wanted he felt the beer in his empty stomach churn and felt sick.

"Do you want a beer?" He asked and lifted his hand off hers gently. He wasn't normally one for sharing...but he also knew he had a problem.

Maybe he wouldn't be such a drunk if he shared.

[gardienne]

"A beer?" Eponine nodded even as she asked.

"Oh, please, Monsieur. Please might I have one?"
She took the can quickly, afraid that Orc would change his mind, and retreated a few steps away before she cracked it open and began to gulp it down quickly.

[paidinbeer]

Orc nodded and turned around so he was sitting, facing her now picking up another can of his own.

"Thirsty huh?" A weak joke. They were all hungry and thirsty. He knew that.

"I didn't hurt your hand did I?"

[gardienne]

"Two day, maybe three, since I have had a drink, Sir." She paused in her drinking, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, before licking any remnants of beer from it.

She shook her head to his question. "No. I am fine, Sir. Always, I am fine. But I have nothing to repay you with. I have not had a sponsor this time."

[paidinbeer]

Orc shook his head and picked up another full can holding it out to her.

"You don't have to repay me. It's not like I earned this stuff." He gestured to the small stack of beer cases, they had just about gotten halfway through the first.

[gardienne]

So he was not going to kill her. Or, at least if he was, she was going to be so drunk that it would be unlikely that she noticed. She came closer at once, and took the can, and eased herself down onto the floor, holding onto her crutches until she was sat down.

"Well, you're lucky, Sir. Somebody must like you."

[paidinbeer]

That made Orc laugh, a sad bitter laugh.

"I have no idea why. the only person who likes me is Howard. And he had to like me back home. I was his only friend."

Even as he said it Orc had no idea how sad that statement really was

[gardienne]

"That boy deserves no friends." It was out of Eponine's mouth before she could stop it, and she gulped her open beer quickly. But she still stared at Orc, daring him to challenge her.

"You are a kind man. You deserve a good friend. Not someone like him. He is not a nice boy at all."

[marcato]

The insinuation was enough to make him grimace. His eyes grew dark. His forehead wrinkled. The edges of his lips tensed and twitched.

-- And then he relaxed, although a certain bitterness still lingered in his face, the dirty aftertaste of fear and anger. It wasn't so easy, feigning sweetness. Not like this.

"I'm friendly," he said, gesturing to his lifted arms with his neck. He finally managed a weary smile. "I know Howard."

[paidinbeer]

Orc blinked, surprised by her venom. Sure Howard was kind of a twerp, and people didn't like him much at all but that sounded down right vicious.

"I thought you liked Howard." Orc wondered out loud almost forgetting about his own beer...almost. He sipped it carefully.

[paidinbeer]

"Oh." Well that was usually good news...usually. "You look like hell." He stated as blunt as the stone he was covered in. "Are you wounded?"

He didn't get up though. Nor did he stop sipping his beer.

[gardienne]

Eponine drank steadily from her can for a minute, until it emptied. She was quite used to beer and alcohol; it freed her tongue, though.

"He is a bastard. He wants people to laugh at me. He is the most horrible child in the whole of the Capitol. He should die painfully here, I think."

She opened her next can and began to sip the fizzy liquid. It was not a nice taste, but it numbed her feelings a little. Soon, she would drift off without thought of Howard, without longing for his skinny arm about her, or his body heat next to her.

[paidinbeer]

Orc shook his head.

"He's a jerk. But he doesn't deserve to die painfully. Just a nice quite death so he can go back to where it's safe." A pause as he took a gulp of his drink.

"Mostly safe." He wiped some foam from his lip with the back of his hand.

"What did he do?"

warning for homophobic slurs

[gardienne]

"He is a bastard, Sir." Eponine raised her can again, though she snorted at Orc's words, waving her left arm, with the tight Capitol cuff still firmly attached to it, at him.

"He made me fall in love with him. He made me - and then he said he would rather have a boy than I. He is dirty and he is disgusting. A boy indeed! It is not right. HE is a boy. He is a bastard to do what he has done to me - now the whole Capitol laughs at me. They say, 'oh, there is Eponine, the jumped up whore, in love with a gentleman who loathes her and falls in love with the beautiful mademoiselle, and she is in love too, with a boy who is so disgusted by her dirty ways that he would rather have another man than touch dirty, stinking Eponine.' I HATE him for doing this to me. I hate him."

Re: warning for homophobic slurs

[paidinbeer]

Orc spat out his beer and started hacking and coughing. Sputtering on foam as her rant continued. He slugged himself in the chest a few times to try and get the foam out of his lungs.

"I...and...what? A boy?!" Orc must have misunderstood. Orc always misunderstands.

But there was a weird feeling that this time...he hadn't.

Re: warning for homophobic slurs

[gardienne]

As Orc began to splutter and question and perhaps understand what Eponine had said, she began to laugh. Not a happy laugh, or a friendly laugh, but a laugh of sadness, of desperation, of malice and humiliation and bitterness and disappointment, and as she laughed, tears began to roll freely down her cheeks until the cackles dissolved into sobs, and Eponine put her head in her arms and hid her face.

"I told him everything and he hated me for it. What man will ever love me, if I cannot even keep hold of Howard? He is just as bad as me, you know? And to like a boy better - I am truly, truly horrible. He is a bastard. A fool. A- a - "

But she couldn't think of a worse insult, and so she began to sob in earnest again. It wasn't fair. And even in her description of what Howard had done to her, how he made people laugh at her, Orc was concerned, not with her reputation, but with Howard. Howard and his dirty boys.

Why was nobody ever interested only in her?

Re: warning for homophobic slurs

[paidinbeer]

Orc was...to say the least...ready to panic.

All that talk about Howard aside, there was a crying girl in front of him. He fumbled his half finished beer and rose up onto his knees, to crawl over to her. What should he do to help!? What could he do? He tried to think back to when he'd seen his mother cry. What helped?

Gingerly, as gently as he could he put a hand on her back. It was rough and bumpy as the gravel touched her but it was soft.

"Calm down. It's OK." He mumbled in what he hoped was a soothing voice. He was so embarrassed by what he was sure was a stupid attempt to help, expecting her to scream at him. Anything but crying would be better. It was making him so anxious his beer buzz was gone.

He was glad she couldn't see how red he felt his cheeks were under the gravel that made up his face.

Re: warning for homophobic slurs

[gardienne]

Eponine actually stopped crying in sheer amazement when she felt Orc's hand on her back - and not because his hand was made of gravel, but purely because of the contact with him.

It took her a few moments to get herself under control, to stop the tears and her voice from wobbling, and she drank the rest of her open beer in one go.

But eventually, she could speak a little.

"I'm sorry to cry at you, Monsieur. I am so sorry - but you see what he does to me? Whilst he is happy, he has left me to cry to men who do not care. I am sorry, Sir."

[paidinbeer]

Orc shook his head gently.

"Howard isn't happy." he started slowly, speaking carefully as he chose his words and how he wanted them to come out.

"Howard was never happy back home. And he's not happy here. The only time he ever seemed happy was when he was telling me about you."

He picked up his half empty beer and gave it to her.

"I dunno what happened...I dunno what he did. But if he hurt you he didn't mean it. Howard is a wimp, so he only knows how to hurt with words. And he's not as smart as he thinks he is either. So if he hurt you I don't think he meant it."

Orc didn't take his hand off her back.

"And you're not that smart either. If I didn't care I wouldn't be sharing my beer. Or trying to make you feel better."

[gardienne]

Eponine snorted. "Well, he is a good actor to have you fooled, Monsieur. He had me fooled as well. He made me feel beautiful - but he said he had been lying. He called me for what I am. But it is not nice - they are words, yes. But insults - they are insults my - well, he is not truly my husband, but we are close - they are what the Gang call me, what men say to me."

She shook her head, leaning into Orc. He had been so steady, so friendly, in Eponine's recent predicaments, she instinctively trusted him. Or perhaps it was two and a half cans of beer downed quickly that made her relax.

But she laughed at his last comment. "It is not nice to say I am not smart. I can read, you know? And pull teeth, and get the gold out of 'em without scratching them up. And all sorts. But I say you do not care - that is wrong. Perhaps I should say you should not care, for what am I to you? The girl your friend dumped for a boy, the girl you fed because she was tied to a chair at a party. Sir, we have met in some bad places."