thearena | welcome to the Jungle, we've got fun and games [closed to Joan]

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welcome to the Jungle, we've got fun and games [closed to Joan]

Who| Guy and Joan and then eventually Guy's killer
What| Teaming up and friendinating more while probably having sad feelings about humanity being all cruel to itself and junk
Where| In the jungle
When| Arena Week 6
Warnings/Notes| Probably gonna get Guy all dead up in here so murder time murder time blood blood blood

It was strange how much a few weeks could change a man. When Guy had been shoved into the arena, he'd been a panicked mess, but a well-fed, well-rested, able-bodied panicked mess with a good idea on how to survive. Now he'd gone far too long without food. He was feeling weak and losing muscle mass; it wasn't like he had much fat to burn. The poisoning and injuries certainly hadn't helped. A strange sort of apathy had settled over him. It wasn't the worst thing, because it meant he wasn't terrified absolutely all the time, but it was probably more lethargy from the hunger rather than any sort of zen calm.

Okay, maybe it was a little bit of zen calm. When you lived a life knowing every day might be your last and that every one you weren't dead was a blessing, death was still something to be afraid of, to be avoided, but its inevitability was something that could be accepted.

So inside, he really wasn't as much of a mess as he was on the outside.

Considering what a mess he was on the outside, though, that still wasn't saying much.

When Joan and him wandered into the same clearing, the sight that would greet her would be wildly different than the first time she'd met Guy. His skin was paler like he was - or had been - ill, and filthier because he'd often used mud to cool off and as camouflage. His hair was matted and even more unkempt. His nose and neck were bruised with nasty purpling bruises in various states of healing, and his body now sported countless small injuries. Cuts and scrapes, a nasty looking sore on his shoulder that wasn't quite infected but wasn't quite healing either...

One injury wasn't so small - the long gash up the right side of his face had left it a mess, covered in smeared, dried blood, and scabbed over. It had only narrowly missed his eye. Even his eyelid was cut slightly.

The moment he saw Joan's movement and heard the sound of the brush, he held his spear at the ready, a situation which begged an important question...

With the state he was in and the time that had passed, was he still the same, still as gentle, as when they'd met the first time? Or had he been pushed enough that pointless violence seemed a better way to respond to things in the arena?

"Joan," he said shakily.

He didn't lower the spear.

Maybe he had concerns about how desperate she'd gotten since he last saw her, too.

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"Go for it. It won't run out anytime soon. All the rain means you just have to dig a little bit down and there it is."

He reached down and took a few handfuls of water so that he didn't empty his bottle again.

"I've been fine on water. It's warm where I'm from, mostly forests like this, but a lot of desert, too, so there are some places where water's hard to come by. I know lots of little tricks."

He shrugged. "It's the food part I've had the most trouble with. Nothing in this place is edible. Nothing. I really have no idea what's so entertaining about watching people starve to death."

"Sherlock noticed that right from the beginning," she said as she filled her bottle. "The fewer resources there are, the hungrier people are, the more likely they'll fight and kill to survive."

She takes a long drink of water. It was so good. She had been rationing for so long that drinking her fill felt like a miracle.

She finally lowered the bottle, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

"I have some food. It's not much. We'll want to ration carefully. But it's better than nothing."

Guy nodded appreciatively at the offer of food.

"This way," he said, leading her along. "I've got a hammock up a tree that I made out of vines. It'll be a little cramped with the two of us, but it should hold and there should be enough room for us to sleep comfortably."

He peered over his shoulder at her. "It's why I made it. I figured a night or two of actually decent sleep wouldn't hurt."

A hammock. That was an incredible idea. A great way to be tucked away safely, able to actually sleep without keeping an eye half-open for people or dinosaurs.

"I haven't had decent sleep since this thing started."

"I don't think we can get more than another night or two out of it before it's not sturdy enough to support our weight - everything rots quickly in this place. But a night's a night."

He stopped in front of a large tree and pointed up.

Nothing was visible up there. The foliage hid it from view and so did the additional camouflage he'd made, just in case.

"Let me go up first and get my spear and knife tucked away. If I were to fall and nick you or if you fell on me..."

The knife was in a sheathe he'd carved out of wood but the spear went into a holster of sorts that he'd made at his back and he didn't have any cover for the point. He was right that it could be disastrous if he or she fell, because even if they survived the drop, that was an accident waiting to happen.

It was a difficult climb, too. Guy had picked a good tree to mount a defense from, that was clear, but with him so exhausted and hungry, it wasn't the easiest of climbs. Fortunately, he was more adapted to climbing than some. There were a few places that Joan would see him just dig his fingers into the bark and hoist himself up rather than using a branch. Under more ideal circumstances, she might have been able to see him climbing up the thing in just a matter of a minute or two but this time, he had to take care because of his exhaustion and it slowed him down.

She watched him climbing, frowning. It looked really hard. She was athletic than most people, but she was also hungry and sleep deprived and generally worn down. She had no specific experience with climbing, and although she had been able to climb a couple trees in this arena, she was concerned this would be outside of her abilities.

And hauling the canned food up there was probably impossible. She started looking around for somewhere to stash the bag.

"Don't do that, someone might get it," he called down from above, looking down at what she was doing and figuring out what she was thinking.

He tucked his spear in a safe steady place in the branches and unloaded his own vine back and hung that from a branch as well so he no longer had to carry it on his back.

"Leave it for a second. I'll come down and help you up, then hoist it up."

He cut a vine and pulled it free from the trees, tying one end to a branche, then started to climb back down, carrying the other end with him. When he was not far above her head, he dropped it down to her.

"Tie it to your bag, make sure it's tight. Then leave it and start climbing. I'll help you past any parts you have trouble with, then I'll hoist it up with us from the other end."

She took the vine and started tying it to the bag. Sherlock...her Sherlock...had taught her some strong knots, and she had taught herself some others. She used two on the vine, tugged on it to make sure it was secure. Then she stood, wiped her hands on her shorts, and went up to the tree. She sighed, shifted from foot to foot, assessing the climb. Then she went up the tree, pulling herself up carefully, branch by branch. She reached for one of those spots in the bark, tried digging her fingers in.

Her hand slipped.

Guy caught her hand.

"I've got you," he said gently. How he was managing to not only climb but help her climb when he'd hardly eaten at all these past few weeks was a mystery even to him. But muscles and sheer force of will went a long way and he had more of each than some.

He wrapped his legs around the branch he was perched on for leverage, wrapped his other arm around her body and hoisted her up, so that she could reach another nearby branch. Once she was past this part, she'd find things a little easier. The branches were grouped together more closely here. He climbed on the branches around her, making sure he was always within arm's reach in case she slipped.

"It'll be easier to climb down from in the morning. I can just lower you down on a vine. After that, I doubt we'll have the energy to do this anymore but a good night's sleep is worth it at least once."

Climbing wasn't the best for their bodies right now but their brains needed a break.

Edited 2013-12-12 06:06 (UTC)

She was small and light, but still, she was impressed at his strength. Once he had lifted her near the next branch she grabbed onto it and pulled herself up, making her way upwards.

"God, definitely worth it."

He was right. This was probably the last time either of them would have enough energy.

They finally reached a space near the top of the tree, and sure enough there was a hammock up there, in a spot where the tree branched out into several smaller trunks. He'd tied together the boughs of some of the branches below to help hide it a little better and tied the boughs above in a way that was meant help deflect the ever-present off-and-on rain some. It was a good spot to have a little hideaway since it meant they were cradled by the splitting of the tree trunk below, as if it was a little cage. If the hammock happened to break, or the game-makers decided to try to knock them out of the tree somehow, they'd at least have a chance of just hitting the branches a foot or two below and grabbing on.

The hammock creaked a little when they both climbed onto it but it held. It'd helped that he'd braided the vines together to give them a little extra strength.

Guy flopped gracelessly on one side of the it, taking a moment to catch his breath and try to get some energy back into his limp limbs before he pulled Joan's pack up.

"Took me a whole day," he breathed out heavily. "The climbing was the hard part though. I've been making these since I was little. Your hands just get used to doing it fast after a while."

He wiggled his fingers at her.

"And that's the view I was talking about," he said, pointing to one side where the leaves opened up just a bit. There was a natural dip in the forest below so that the tops of the other trees were visible, now shrouded in mist. As the sun set, the stars were peeking out in the gaps between the clouds, sharp and bright.

"Do you think they're real?" Guy asked, dragging himself up to go over and pull up her pack before anything happened to it. "The stars, I mean. I can't tell with this place, what's real."

She climbed on carefully and sat cross-legged, looking out at the view. "It is beautiful," she said softly. "Almost hard to believe it's all deadly."

She laid back, one arm up and under her head, the other over her stomach, as she looked up at the stars.

"I don't think any of this is real. Still. Beautiful."

Guy untied the vine from the branch and pulled it over the branch for leverage, hoisting Joan's bag up, hand over hand.

"The only thing I don't like about it," he said breathlessly as he hauled her pack up, "is you can see them doing the night's dead, but I just close my eyes."

He finally got Joan's pack up and hooked the straps over several branches so it was within reach but not at risk of snapping a branch and falling.

"Does the sky - does the sky look the same as here where you're from?" he asked curiously. "It does where I'm from and I keep imagining other places look like mine but then I remember they could be entirely different. Maybe - maybe the sky is yellow. Or - or the grass only comes in one color."

He pulled his shirt - the overshirt they'd been given since his t-shirt had been shredded for bandages and used as a cloth to gather dew - from a hollow in one of the branches, and then wiggled next to Joan. He tried to give her a little space, knowing she might be made uncomfortable by a stranger getting too close, but there wasn't a whole lot of room, so his shoulder was pressed lightly against hers. He tossed as much of the shirt over her that he could manage.

Edited 2013-12-13 06:44 (UTC)

"The sky is the same color where I come from. Although most of the grass I've seen just comes in different shades of green."

It was weird and uncomfortable, having someone she only barely knew laying there so close, shoulder to shoulder. But the benefits, a safe, comfortable night of sleep, outweighed the drawbacks. She thought of Sherlock, her Sherlock, teasing her about being so Victorian about such things.

Then counseling her to have sex with her host. Maybe a good thing he wasn't around after all.

Guy spread his shirt over her, and she frowned.

"Hey. Aren't you going to be cold?"

Edited (Some clarification!) 2013-12-13 23:10 (UTC)

Oh, would he have laughed if Sherlock had been there to offer that little bit of counseling. Sorry, Joan, you are a lovely lady, but you lack biceps the size of grapefruits, the shoulders of a linebacker, and your name doesn't rhyme with "meep."

"I'm fine."

He didn't usually wear much above the waist and that meant his skin had gotten desensitized to temperature variation. It hadn't been dipping cold enough here for him to really notice much difference.

"Just green?" he went on, stuck on that. "It comes in bunch of colors where I'm from. Green, yes, but blue in some places - the same color as water, and brown, and gold like the sky in the morning. One time we went through this little valley and it was red there. It was this fiery orangeish-red, almost the same color as my mate's hair."

He smiled a dopey smile as he looked up at the leaves above and added, "Which is a really pretty color. And it's sort of - it's stick-uppy." He made an amused humming noise. "She looks like a little poppu flower."

Edited 2013-12-14 04:52 (UTC)

Even if he hadn't already had a mate, Joan would have had no interest in anything remotely sexual. And even if she had, getting romantically or physically involved with anyone here was a terrible idea. It was handing the Capitol leverage on a silver platter.

Besides. Her allegiance was to Sherlock and John, even if she would always be the outsider to their bond.

She smiled as he spoke of his mate.

"She sounds great."

Unfortunately for Joan, he was one of those people. Get him on the subject of Eep or his daughter - something he meandered to often without prompting - and he had trouble shutting up. In the modern day, he'd have been one of those people that kept folding pictures of them in his wallet as long as his arm.

He lifted up his hand to show Joan the smooth bone bracelet around his wrist, carved with its little design of a warthog and a tiger, chasing each other's tails, a ring with more rings attached to it.

"We carved these for each other. She has one just like it, only hers doesn't have the rattle since I spend a little more time with the baby. People might stay with someone their whole lives, but sometimes their feelings change. Sometimes they find someone else or want to be alone again. We wanted to make it a promise, that we'd always love each other through everything. That we'd face whatever came our way hand in hand. We felt like there should be some kind of special promise."

He lowered his hand, still looking up at the leaves, nodding slightly, perhaps lost in one of the last conversations he'd had with her.

"We were still working on a word for it. I'm thinking of calling it 'marriage.'" That's how the word he chose translated to Joan, at least. "I still need to see what she thinks of it."

She smiled at that, if a little sadly. Joan wasn't the cynic that Sherlock was about marriage, she just hadn't had the best of personal experiences with it. Her own father had cheated on her mother, and although she took him back, their marriage was pretty much hollow. Joan herself had never been married. Had never really gotten into a relationship that managed to be something that was stable enough to last. The closest she might have come was Liam, and that was before the drugs. Before he chose heroine over her.

If she were being honest, there was only ever one person she could possibly see spending the rest of her life with, and Sherlock wasn't even close to a romantic partner.

Still, she had seen her friends in happy marriages, seen marriages in trouble where the parties were sincerely working to stay together, because they sincerely loved each other. She had deep respect for it, even if it might never be for her.

"I think marriage is a good word for it."

He lowered his hand slowly, his gaze rolling over the designs carved into it.

"Do you have family back home?" he asked. "Unless you don't want to talk about it. I'd definitely understand why."

For some people, talking about what was missing kept it alive in their minds and made it feel close. For others, it made them miss things ever more.

"No, it's okay." She sighed, narrowing her eyes briefly as she looked up at the sky. "I've got my mom and dad, and my brother Orin. I don't see a lot of them, though. Definitely not as much as my mother would like," she said wryly. Joan's relationship with her mother was, at best, complicated. "I'm closer to my friends. And I spend most of my time with my partner. Business partner, not romantic. Sherlock." She smiled a little, gestured with her hand. "Not the same Sherlock. It's...a long story."

"I'm just trying to wrap my head around the idea of two of them," Guy said with the tiniest hint of a chuckle. "He's, ah, he's a man with a great deal of...presence."

His tone wasn't mocking, though. He'd meant it when he told her that she hoped he'd come back.

"So what's your Sherlock like?"

"Well," she answered. "They both have a great deal of presence. They're very similar in a lot of ways...both brilliant in some ways, and utterly clueless in others. They can both be very abrasive. I think my Sherlock is better with people in general, though. More understanding. He's also a lot louder. More brash. Likes to bounce around."

The tone of her voice was deeply fond and clearly sad. She missed her friend, very much. Joan would never wish for Sherlock to be brought there and have to die over and over like that. But that didn't mean she didn't wish she was with him.

He didn't like the sadness in her voice but then he didn't like the sadness in himself.

"I'm not going to lie and say that you'll see him again. That's not really reassuring when none of us know really, if we're..."

He trailed off. Part of that was sleepiness. It seemed he was finally starting to drift off a little, the day's agitation finally winding down and giving way to exhaustion. Part of it was that the words 'if we're going to die' didn't need to be said when that was their ever-present reality.

"But don't ever forget it's not impossible, either."

He sounded tired. It made sense, with what they had been through. And this could be the last place and time they would be able to give in to the weariness. She moved a hand to take his and squeeze it gently.

"I won't forget. Thank you."

Edited 2014-01-04 08:00 (UTC)

His hand squeezed hers back and there was a ghost of a smile but then he fell asleep in the way people did when conditions for sleeping sometimes weren't exactly ideal.

In sleep, he still loosely held her hand.

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formersurgeon - 2014-01-04 08:13 (UTC) - Expand

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