thearena | (no subject)

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Who| R and Howard, then Howard and Wyatt [CLOSED]
What| R gets a good, healthy liquid nitrogen dousing by fire sprinkler during the volcano eruptions. He gets caught in that limbo where he’s too injured to go on but he’s taking forever dying. Howard does a friend a favor.
Where| Stairwell bottom
When| Beginning of Week 4
Warnings/Notes| Zombie-mercy killing, death, liquid nitrogen burns all around

R was caught on the second floor when the fire sprinklers go off, dousing him with liquid nitrogen while he’d been half-asleep. Long-term exposure. Didn’t bolt for cover fast enough because it’s not hardwired into him anymore.

It’s stupid, really. He’d hung around the second floor because he hadn’t been killed there (yet) and maybe he still had some zombie tendencies to stay where it’s familiar. Stick to a routine. He met good people on this floor between Howard and Ellie and he was still on the fence about Joel. He could pretend it’s safe here.

It takes hours before R manages to crawl to the stairwell, aware he’s gasping away from lips that feel like they’re on their way to sloughing off. The sounds he makes surprise him on a distant level because they’re almost Howard-like, higher-pitched. More of a whine instead of his old groans. He’d say it makes crawling easier but it doesn’t. It sounds loud in his ears. Maybe it’ll draw in someone to pick him off, like his garrotter. R can’t get himself to care. All he has space to think is stairs, that one word echoing in his skull like a heartbeat that’s struggling to push blood through veins. He stares at the floor as he inches across it.

It’s a miracle he makes it to the door. That’s probably zombie, too.

Somehow R manages to lever himself to feet that don’t feel like his anymore, his toes so numb he has to look down to make sure they’re still attached. His hands grope for the door knob. Even something he could manage as a corpse suddenly feels impossible.

When the door opens, R stumbles in. He doesn't remember actually going down the stairs - not all the way. His hand feels along the railing. His foot kicks up against a piece of rubble and he crumples, tipping over half way down. He thinks he falls, feels the sharp edges of the steps smash into his ribs, his shoulders. When he lands in a heap at the bottom, R lies there, stunned. He should get up. Get back on his feet. He tries; can't. The splinter of something white and red poking out of the gash in his pajamas surprises him in a dull way. Broken leg. Of course.

Howard uses this stairwell sometimes. R hangs onto that thought. Probably why he came here. Just – just wait for Howard and he’s smart, he’ll know what to do. So he waits. And exists.

He ends up waiting days.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Howard takes the better part of four hours to get out of the back of the minivan once he hears the moaning and decides to do something about it.

The latter part actually takes some time. First when he hears the moaning he expects it's another manufactured distraction from his subconscious, trying to break the monotony of darkness and the silence interrupted only by his own breathing and heartbeat. Then he assumes the moans are actually coming from him. It takes a long time for him to realize that it's not only from someone else and real, but that it's R.

But once he knows it's R, he can't help but follow. Even if it's suicidally stupid. Even if he'll never be able to find his way back to the car. Even if, even if. It calls him like pollen weaving a trail of scent back to the hive. It calls him like the squall of a newborn baby does to a sleeping mother. It isn't resistible, and he doesn't want to resist anyway.

He gets to his knees and feels around the car until he finds the door handles, then until he finds and undoes the lock, then spends quite a while blindly fondling at parts of the car trying to force the back door open.

He crawls on hands and knees because the bottoms of his feet are ripped off, raw, bleeding and skinless. Wyatt's brought socks back for him that help a little with the pain, but he still can't put weight on his feet without withering up in agony. Besides, having his hands in front of him allows him to feel his way over the asphalt.

"R?" He reaches forward and touches smooth metal - a door. Sitting up, he feels around for a handle, then opens it, and useless light floods from behind him to silhouette him in the door frame. It'll spare R from the worst, for a moment - the image of Howard with his eyes dripped out, with the sockets distorted and half-covered with melted skin, with pieces of liquified flesh dried into geographic patterns down his cheeks. The top of his face a swollen, bruised red where it isn't ripped away to reveal blood beneath the skin. The backs of his eye sockets not a comfortingly morbid black, but filled with the detritus of his ruined eyes, with crust and flotsam in varying shades of brown and violet and red.

The taste of old blood in his mouth jerks him back from a haze. It's his, not someone else's and there's a part of him disappointed by that. Must’ve bit something on the way down. It’s not anyone he knows (or doesn’t). Just him.

Probably should’ve been like this years ago. Waiting to die along and at least knowing he won’t rise up to spread the infection.

Time loses meaning, R waking up every now and then to wheeze quietly to himself and bask in waves of pain ebbing and flowing across his body the way the Dead hunger used to. The boils blistering across his skin have turned waxy, a shade of yellow and purples and blacks that almost remind him of the airport. He’s tried rubbing feeling back into his arms, afraid of the numbness that feels scarily familiar, and he’s not sure if it helped. Doesn’t seem like it. If anything, they alternate between numbness and getting stabbed by nails several tissue layers down. The good news is between the hunger, starvation and the cold burns over most of his body, there’s a point where it starts to cancel each other out. There’s hours he doesn’t remember. A void he used to shy away from when he was a zombie.

One eye swells shut. R has a general idea something’s…wrong with the side of his face that had been more exposed awhile ago. He tells himself he should care because it’d been his face, brand new, soft, and flush with pumping blood and he just. Can’t. So he lets out a whistling breath every now and then. Wonders if he still has lips. He liked having lips. They’d been fantastic for talking and kissing.

R sits propped up against the wall with one leg curled under him, the other extended out with a shard of bone jutting out. His face shifts toward the light, his good eye squinting. The rest of him seems like it’s as good as glued to where he is but that one eye seems like it’s chugging along and he gets the impression of a small body sitting up, so small it almost looks like a little kid. For a moment Howard’s just a shadow, a question mark. Then he shifts and R stares. It takes him a moment to recognize Howard without being able to smell it off him.

The poor kid’s a shell of himself, looking like someone tried to torch him and see how human fat melted when you barely had any. The eye sockets are Boney-empty, except instead of the shadows of the status quo, it’s whatever’s left of his optic system. Shreds of flesh, pus. Unidentifiable chunks of meat. All stuff he’d eaten at some point. The face is still somehow Howard Bassem despite the red blisters scarring his dark skin.

R’s head lolls toward Howard. His mouth – what’s left of it, lips hanging off, teeth poking through holes – flaps wordlessly for a few seconds. It might even be trying to smile.

“H…hughere…” R slurs, if only barely. He’d raise his hand if he could. R, ex-zombie; present. “Thought…you.. come.”

Edited 2014-02-12 18:32 (UTC)

"Hi, Rob."

Howard's voice is a dull croak, still torn up from the smoke earlier in the week, from the tearless sobbing he's done whenever Wyatt leaves. Without tear ducts, he's done more crying in the last few days than he has in a whole year before. In a way it's helpful, a way to pass the time when the alternative is lying in the dark. Crying and trying to sleep and dreaming while awake.

He scoots forward on his knees. His good hand - the other one is broken, splinted, a smushed splinter-riddled appendage Howard keeps tucked to his chest - feels around and finds R's feet. Works his way up R's shins, slowly and methodically. He'd rather be slow and have an accurate assessment of the situation than fast and not know where anything is.

His hands run over the jutting bone, dry now from so long spent outside the body. Howard folds it in his palm, mouth gaping slightly in understanding after he's felt it enough.

"You're hurt. What happened?"

He feels his way up R's thigh, purposefully avoiding the groin area, feeling rips in R's shirt. Feeling weeping plasma on the skin beneath. Finally, when he reaches R's face, when he realizes that R's burned all over, he tries to joke.

"So much for seeing you again, right?" He half smiles because a full grin rips at the stitches Hawkeye gave him to try and keep the sockets from getting too infected, but even the half smile squeezes the ugly holes into lopsided shapes that leak pus.

His ghost of a smile widens. Rob again. Howard’s falling to pieces almost as bad as any zombie and he’s still calling him that name. Wasting whatever breath he can manage on it. The thing is R’s aware it’s probably just a survival reflex at this point, anything to keep from screaming, but he appreciates it all the same. It makes him feel a little better.

Howard’s shadow moves closer, R watching with his working eye and feeling a vague sense of déjà vu. Howard’s voice sounds a lot like it had in that cave, creaky and shot, and the way he crawls looks disjointed. Something that might’ve been fear tries to resurface, finds it’s too much work, and withers. Even if Howard got infected, he wouldn’t have been able to do anything but let him eat him a second time around. Most of his legs have gone numb, thankfully. It’s when he touches his broken leg that R’s labored breathing takes on a different tone, his chest hitching as he hisses. Fresh pain shoots up and reminds him it’s still there.

R’s lip – what’s left of it – trembles. Even this bad off, he doesn’t want to die. What if he comes back a zombie?

He swallows, his back teeth grinding. “F…fell.” Obviously.

Howard continues to work his way up his ruined body: there’s the numb patches R can’t feel but he can see Howard’s burn victim-hands touching and then the…not-so-numb ones. He tries to keep his mouth shut for Howard’s benefit. There’s times were he can’t: his whistling breath turns into a little whine and he flinches out of instinct.

“Sorry,” R mumbles. It’s not you, it’s me. “Liked…your eyes.”

The stitches in Howard’s mouth mutate his smile into something else. He’s sure he’d have nightmares about that half human, half-Boney face staring back at him whenever he drifted off to sleep again. It’s weird looking at Howard and seeing those two weeping sockets where before there had been dark, beady eyes; constantly darting, studying, searching out escape routes and sizing up threats.

Edited 2014-02-13 04:22 (UTC)

"Now people will have to love me for my stunning personality." His laughter slithers out of his mouth and dies, hanging in the air like vapor, vanishing. Ephemeral, at best.

Of course R fell. Howard almost wants to laugh at that, too, except the situation is so dire and sensitive that he can't bring himself to do it. A tear of pus drips down Howard's cheek and from his jaw, landing on R's pants.

"How bad is it?" He can feel the wincing, he can hear the hisses between R's teeth, and if it weren't the only way he can tell what's going on, Howard would stop his fondling entirely. He moves his hand up to R's hair, feeling the grease and grit of weeks without a shower, and he ruffles it to make bedhead neither of them can see.

The joke is lost in the dark. Maybe the audience at home finds it funny. Who knows.

He tries not to think about how chatty R was before this - well, not chatty, but at the start of the Arena stringing words together was easier. He was positively gabby by R standards back in the gift shop, and now the words are drawn out by stuttering, by wheezing. Howard doesn't know if that's pain or regression or both.

R huffs out a wordless sound like that, genuinely amused. He would've laughed if he felt up to it.

He doesn't seem to mind Howard running his hands through his scalp - he does seem to notice when hair clumps start coming out in his hands, though, R shifting his head slightly away as he grimaces. Fresh blood starts to ooze out from the open patches, beading and starting to trickle through what hair Howard left him. At least what's left of his hair gets ruffled into a bird's nest that hides some of the worst sores. It actually makes him look a little bit more presentable for the cameras watching them even now.

"I think..." R pauses, not because he needs to remember the words like before, but because he's trying to spell it out delicately for Howard. "Not...so good."

He'd shrug if it didn't seem like a bad idea. So he doesn't.

R drops his eye from Howard's gaping sockets. Compared to what he looked like before, his face looks almost motionless at times and he only realizes now that it's because his eyes did so much of the talking. It looks like he got caught in the same thing, that weird spray that jetted out from the fire sprinklers days ago. R's hand twitches at his side. That one seems like it's no good, the fingers tips turning black at the ends in a way that looks familiar too. His other hand seems like it's working. Bracing himself to move, R gropes for a hand to hold. He really just wants that right now. A point of contact to tell him they're both still alive, not some limbo grey space like before.

His fingers brush against Howard's ruined arm.

Edited 2014-02-13 20:28 (UTC)

Howard's a smart kid. Sometimes he wishes he weren't.

This moment, letting R touch his bruised, blistered arm with that hand that's warm, that's warm and trembling and so painfully alive, is one of those moments. He takes a deep breath, and for a moment there's a silence that oozes into minutes.

He pulls his arm up, keeping in touch with R's fingertips as they roll over the bones of his wrist, ghost down the back of his hand, until he can give R that warm palm that R needs.

"Hey, I don't want to keep feeling you up like this. Wanna lay down?"

His voice is too small to echo in the stairwell, which is saying something given the way it picks up and amplifies sound. He feels his insides grow cold - colder than they have in the last few days, when they've instead but replaced by a furnace of fear and hurt.

And he feels a knife in his pocket, heavy, dragging cloth down with it in its gravity. Something Wyatt left him in case he needed to defend himself. Swing at anything that doesn't announce itself. As if a blind kid flailing in the dark ever really would be able to protect himself that way.

To his relief he can still feel Howard’s arm, exploring the new valleys and bumps from the blisters. He tries to be gentle, minding welts that have to hurt from the way they glisten in the dim light. His hand is so much bigger than Howard’s, less spidery but with longer fingers because Howard’s just that tiny. He squeezes. It’s not much of a squeeze. He’s managed stronger even when he’d been a corpse. Still, he hopes he got his point across. They’re both here and that’s the main thing. Everything else after that are…details.

When Howard asks him if he wants to lie down, R doesn’t reply immediately. Silence stretches. The truth is he doesn’t want to. Too much effort, for starters, and he’s not even sure he can move his body from where it seems to have slumped permanently against this chunk of wall. If he lies down, it’s not even a question of if he can get up: he won’t.

But because it’s Howard asking, R dips his chin in a slight nod.

“Okay.”

His breath whistling, R lets go of Howard’s hand and tries to lever himself down without crushing the kid on accident. He probably leaves some chunks of his skin where it got stuck to the wall, fresh pain burning a swathe across his exposed skin until they reached the dead zones. It takes a few long seconds of struggling and wondering how it got so hard before he lies down, looking up at Howard. That better? Normally he’d think it was easier to talk this way but it’s not like there’s an eye-contact issue anymore.

He braces himself to slur again. “Hand?” His own drifts up, extending toward Howard even though he knows he can’t see.

The silence between him and R was once comfortable, back when Howard could see. He can't now, and the quiet is suffocating, the only resistance he can put up the sound of his own breathing, of R's quiet wheezing.

But then R's lying down, and Howard can hear the rustle, can feel the movement beside him, can hear that strange, quiet squelch of skin pulling from flesh, of a hiss in R's breath. He finds it's not a welcome interruption to the darkness and uncertainty.

He reaches to reorient himself, finding R's hand again, but he doesn't hold it this time. Instead he sits back, scoots his legs out from under him so he's sitting in a yogi pose. With one hand, he pulls R's head into his lap - slowly, gently, as if they have all the time in the world. As if stalling is for both their benefits and not just his own.

"You see anything cool in the Arena?" He finds a patch of R's cheek that seems unmarred, at least to his fingertips, and strokes it. "I was going to go for a tour of the gem room but, you know. No luck. And now I think it'd be kind of wasted on me."

He's babbling a little, just filling the empty air with something besides blackness and burns. He doesn't know what to do. He should say something to keep R's mind off things, he should tell a story, he should do something, but the only thing that comes to mind is that fucking Elvis song.

He brings his hand up for R's cheek for just a moment to give his good luck charm a squeeze.

R opens his mouth to protest when Howard draws his hand back. When he'd groaned hand, he'd meant a little bit longer than a quick touch.

But then Howard's shifting around where he can't see and he feels - vaguely - his hands around his head, feeling where his ears are and gripping his skull. R manages to keep any new wheezes to himself as Howard pillows his head in his lap. The kid's lap is...not soft. It's full of knobby knees, hard. But it's also warm and R lets out a sigh as he relaxes against Howard, his good eye fluttering shut. Now this is what best friends do. Doesn't seem too bad on the floor now, actually. Amazing what good company will do.

"I went there," R says slowly. He wants to sound the most like himself if possible - the slurring he can't help with the state of his mouth being cold-burned to pieces, but he can at least work on the awkward pauses. "It was - it was beautiful. I liked it."

Almost tripped on that multi-syllable word there. R trails off, aware of Howard's legs shifting slightly under his head and the touch caressing across his cheek. It seems to stick to one little patch. R wonders if the rest of him is that bad off. If he looks anything like Howard, half-melted and terrifying.

Getting an idea, R reaches down and fishes around in his pocket. To his shock, the elbaite shard is still there despite dying, despite the people he's bitten. Despite everything. He hadn't thought of it until now. Too bad Howard can't see the way the color plays within the crystal. R brings up the elbaite and touches it gently to the hand stroking his cheek. Maybe he could at least feel it, the way the facets are smooth to the touch.

"Got this from..." He pauses to regain his breath. "From there. Want...you to have...it."

Edited (missing punctuation) 2014-02-15 00:05 (UTC)

Howard's hand closes over the gem, and as it's been hiding in R's pocket it lacks the warmth of R's clammy hands. It's cold and slick like a piece of glass, and Howard taps it to his lip so he can feel it there, with nerve endings usually saved for the kisses he doesn't hope for anymore.

"Thanks." He pulls the necklace from around his neck and places it on R's chest. "Can you attach it to the necklace? Can you tell me what it looks like?"

Howard knows what will happen when R's dead. The stairwell will fill with an emptiness that will overwhelm even his sightlessness. It'll be quiet, and the stink of pus and gore will be replaced by the staler, harsher stench of death. It'll be loneliness with a dead body.

He doesn't want to do it. He wants to stay here in this moment, before that silence drenches him like rain. Before it soaks through his clothing and into his skin and saturates every cell in him.

He wants R to keep talking, and if not talking, breathing.

R reaches up, touches the necklace with the tips of his fingers. He’s not sure it can attach, actually. No loop-holes or hooks. But he can at least describe it. “It’s…green and red. Smoky.”

He pauses to think more about it, his fingers tangling in the necklace as he wracks his brain. Having something tangible, something he knows Howard was carrying helps him to focus. Makes the thoughts seem to matter more. Feel more like himself than before.

“Like…” R would shrug if he could. It’s hard to put into words. He doesn’t want to say it’s the color of blood or its green is the color of the wild grass growing through the sidewalks in bunches. “Emerald. Sun and then…fire..?”

It’s not exact but that’s all R seems to have in him for now, speaking wise. For all the times he longed to speak and now he’s too tired to bother. What he wants to do is focus on breathing – in, out; his chest rising and falling – and Howard there stroking his face. Filling up space above him with his presence. It’s not that electricity he could sense as a corpse by inhaling; it’s a difference sense, something that must’ve died when you turned into a zombie. Now it’s there, R relaxing into it. As far as he’s concerned, they could last the whole Arena in this one stairwell, just the two of them.

R’s fingers clench around the necklace without realizing, so tight Howard might have to pry it out of his fingers. Or off his cold dead body.

"Green and red. Smokey." He thinks of things green and red, and he probably should be imagining mangoes or something, but all he thinks of is oil spills, is nausea, is pollution. The colors direct his swirl of thoughts somewhere else, not illuminating but tinting the images that exist without shape or form.

"Okay, well, I guess you can hold onto my necklace for now. Did I ever tell you how I got it? It's got a little rabbit charm on there from Wyatt, you know, since I gave him my lucky rabbit's foot, and a little star to represent him staying with me even when I'm scared, which is kind of nice."

Howard been clutching it in his palms many times throughout the last few days. He's been running his thumb over each side of the little star, trying to figure out which side is the front with U. S. Marshal carved in and which side is the back as a way to keep his mind occupied when there's nothing else.

As Howard's hand closes over not the star but the knife, he realizes that he doesn't want R to scream. It's selfish, because that means that he won't know when R's well and truly dead, but he can't stand the idea of those sounds echoing like a swarm of bats up the stairwell.

His broken hand moves over R's forehead and cheekbone, identifying the eye socket. The handle of the knife is hot in his hands, sticky with sweat that's been forming for not long at all. He keeps talking.

"It was a Christmas gift, you know? I fixed all his clothes. Remember Christmas? I'm kind of excited to get back to the Capitol and hijack your record player. I have a new Linda Ronstadt album you might like-"

The knife comes down like the blade in a slasher film, all point and whip of air over the edge and grunt of exertion. And it comes down again and again as Howard prays to hit and go through R's eye, to undo the brain and to pull R out of this bruised, burned, broken, living corpse.

That story about the necklace is new. There’s a lot Howard hasn’t told him, hasn’t had the time, and R wants him to keep talking until he runs out of things to say. His voice fills the air with stories, words laced together by consonants and vowels; all things he’d ached to hear when he was shuffling with his head down. Now that he’s on his back, he can picture them forming in the darkness. The curves and slashes of letters. In his mind, he understands them. The hand touching his cheek reminds him he’s still human, fingers running across an eyebrow that’s been long singed off by liquid nitrogen.

Howard talks and R listens, his ruined mouth slowly curving into a smile as he drifts off, as close to content as a dying man can be.

The knife in his face comes out of nowhere.

R jerks underneath Howard’s hand. An animal scream claws its way out of his throat, starts to fill the stairwell. It gets cut off with the next stab, reduced to a broken gurgle as the knife misses his eye socket to skid down his face, cutting a gash all the way to his jaw. His body surges in an attempt to get away. He doesn’t wonder if it’s Howard or someone else who’s found them. His mind retreats into some sort of lizard-brain reflex zombies don’t have. It reacts. Save yourself it screams, only he can’t. The fight-or-flight urge is still there even if he’s already doomed, still trying to get him away as R bucks weakly under Howard. His hands jitter across the concrete as he twitches in agony. Blood flows, coppery and Living-warm, across the floor, Howard’s knee, his fingers.

It takes two more stabs to finally get him through the eye. The blade hits home. Punches through bone and hits something softer. R suddenly goes limp underneath Howard’s hands, his convulsions fading. His last breath is quiet, almost a sigh that doesn’t seem to fit the last twitchy death throes.

He relaxes, as still as the rubble littering the stairs.

His fingers are locked even tighter around the necklace.

Edited (changing stuff) 2014-02-17 08:12 (UTC)

At some point, Howard loses the knife, slicked as it is with blood and sweat. It falls to the ground somewhere with a clatter that's lost in R's gurgling and Howard's panting. Howard's hand opens, and this time when it comes down to R's face it isn't to punch a point through his eye but to rest on R's cheek.

Howard doesn't have the capacity to cry anymore. Instead he makes small moaning noises, little choked sounds as he apologizes to R over and over. Snot runs from his nose, but his tear ducts are melted, leaving his nostrils and his burns to do all the weeping.

He cradles R's head in his lap, unable to see the face mutilated beyond recognition, grime and blood-covered like a newborn baby from the canal. He runs his hand over the greasy patches of hair even though the sticky blood pulls some of it off with him.

The body starts to cool. The blood soaking Howard's clothing becomes cold, the shirt cloying, the trails going from drops to drying, caked stains. He feels sick at how much more natural this feels; R dead, cold, his flesh the consistency of half-dried clay.

It strikes Howard for the umpteenth time how fucked up everything is.

He's still sitting there in the stairwell when Wyatt finds him.

Wyatt wouldn't leave Howard anymore if he didn't have to, but he does. They need food, they need supplies. Things to keep them going as the arena dragged on. Things to make it easier, if only by a fraction.

Today, he went for food - always for food - and for clothes. Remembering Holiday's talk of the shops with funny things to wear (she hadn't lied), but they were clean enough. Dry enough, compared to the clothes he and Howard bled through. Soaked with pus and fluid.

A new bag over his shoulder, stuffed to straining the seams, he made his way back down toward the garage.

About the time his footsteps were reaching Howard, the coppery scent of cooling blood and dead flesh hit Wyatt.

Howard barely hears the footsteps over his own struggle to breathe past his snot-filled, leaking nose, dripping trails of mucus on R's shirt in the dark. When he does, his good hand leaves R's head and he scrambles for the knife.

He can't find it. And with R half in his lap and being blinded, he can't quickly escape. He covers his mouth and nose with his hand and tries to lean back, bumping into a wall and biting down a yelp.

The pace of the steps suddenly picks up, a rapid rhythm pounding not unlike a wild heart. Like the heart that lurched up into Wyatt's throat as he skipped steps in his hurry to climb down.

How many times was he going to come back to this? How many before it was too much? Before he was too late?

He rounded the corner and saw the blood, smeared across the steps, the bodies so still.

"Howard!"

He didn't even recognize R at first. Howard was all that mattered.

Howard's muscles all tend simultaneously at the sound, reacting to the volume before he parses the voice. "Wyatt! I'm okay!"

And he feels guilt flood his body like a basement. He knows what Wyatt's mind is doing, knows what awful images are being conjured up.

He stops looking for the knife and returns to holding R's cold corpse. "Wyatt, I'm sorry, I had to check it out, it's R..."

He was already over the body, reaching for Howard even as he moved, as he spoke.

"Howard, are ya alright?" Rough hands cupped his face, turned in one way, then other, checking for wounds. Reached for the boy's hands. "What happened?"

The words were a clip faster than his usual, unhurried drawl. Fear roughening his speech, turning it to gravel, tumbling from his tongue.

If he heard R's name, if it meant anything to him, he didn't show it.

"I'm okay." Howard feels around in the dark, and R's head makes a sick thunking sound against the cement floor. Like a heavy bowl being dropped, wrapped in cloth. Like a fist to bone.

"I..." Howard gives out a strange moan as he tries to dredge up an explanation. He hiccups. He sniffs. "I heard him moaning. I came to find him. And he..."

Wyatt should be able to put it together fairly simply by himself. "He didn't stand a chance anymore."

Wyatt still looked him over, a careful, determined check over. The words weren't enough, he had to see for himself that Howard wasn't hurt.

He heard what Howard was saying, but the words held little meaning until he was satisfied that the wet, shining blood wasn't Howard's. That the trembling beneath his hands wasn't from pain. Not physical hurt, anyway.

Then, and only then, did he give way, shifting to address the wound torn inside. The newest scar laid in Howard's soul at the hands of the Capitol.

His hands rested on Howard's shoulders reassuringly, warm and steady. The grip unflinching as he put together what had happened.

"...It's alright, son," he told him, squeezing gently. "Ya did the right thing. Better he go quick, with a friend, then here alone, slow an' sufferin'."

"Is he dead?" Howard clutches onto Wyatt, unknowingly smearing blood onto Wyatt's already-disgusting clothing. He holds him in a way that isn't at all conducive to escaping, but is instead the product of blind desperation, of uncertainty woven into his muscles.

He's shaking, vibrating like a tuning fork. Please let him be dead. Howard should be certain from that final gurgle, from the cold body, from the way you can just tell when people are dead, and yet it's so hard to tell what's real or not that he can't banish the phantom sounds of R groaning. Of R asking why, why, why doesn't he just finish him off?

A glance and Wyatt was fairly certain of it. The boy's face slack, his eyes wide and staring, empty and dark.

But to be sure, he released Howard with one hand and reached over, carefully resting his palm on R's chest... then lifting it to touch his face, fingers hovering beneath his nose. Feeling for a heartbeat, thumping away in the chest, or for breath, warm against his skin.

Finding neither, he turned back, taking hold of Howard again. Trying to steady him, trying to ease him, though he knew it was impossible.

He knew, all to well, that nothing he could say or do would really take away what Howard suffering.

"He's gone," he murmured. "He's on his way back now."

"Are you sure? Because he's R, he's..."

Really, there needn't be anything else said. R's always occupied that strange space between living and dead where he couldn't be decidedly one or the other, and Howard's terrified now that if he's not totally dead he'll be trapped inside a wounded, agonized body, probably with brain damage, probably bleeding out the face, bleeding into the parts of his brain that control sight and nerves. Betrayed by his own hemorrhaging.

"Come back here in an hour, Wyatt, make sure he's still dead, please."

"Pretty sure, son," Wyatt insisted softly.

Even R, trapped his strange limbo between death and life, despite his habit of falling into quiet spells wouldn't lay there now - still and silent - as they discussed him.

"But I will," he added, willing to promise Howard whatever he needed. "First though, I want'a get ya out of here. Get ya somewhere safe an' get ya cleaned up."

His arms moved, slipping around Howard's shoulders and under his knees, lifting the boy's slight frame as he rose out of his crouch. It never failed to surprise him - to worry him - how very light he was.

"There's nothin' more ya can do for him now."

"I can walk." Light or not, Howard's aware by now of Wyatt's shoulder, of the injuries that were placed on the backburner to deal with Howard's own wounds. He doesn't want to add to that if he can help it. "It's my face fucked up, not my feet. I don't walk with my face if I can help it."

Isn't it asking - pushing, burdening, demanding - enough to need safety always, to be unable to provide anything to this duo? Wyatt would do better to leave and try to win on his own, and Howard's entertained many fears of that in the darkness, even though he knows Wyatt's too devoted to act on self-preserving logic.

Still, unwilling to writhe out of Wyatt's arms like some big, bony fish, and knowing deep down that his mangled feet are no easier to walk on, he wraps his arms around Wyatt's neck and rests his head against Wyatt's shoulder. The heartbeat inside is still fast, in the residual throes of panic from finding Howard covered in blood.

Edited 2014-02-21 16:24 (UTC)

His shoulder pulled, a twinge arching across his broad back, but other than a small tick in the back of his jaw, he didn't react to it.

"I got enough left in me for this," he drawled, slow and rough, shifting Howard lightly in his arms and turning push the door to the stairwell open with his hip. "An' this way... I ain't gunna be accidentally stirrin' ya into somethin'."

It wasn't a guarantee. Holding your loved one's in your arms didn't promise that nothing bad would happen, that they still wouldn't be taken from you, but Wyatt still preferred it.

Knowing, if only for a moment, that you still had them.

"I'll keep watch," Howard jokes, although he listens as the stairwell door closes behind them, focusing on any little sound echoing through the parking lot. The walk back to the van takes such a shorter time than it took Howard to crawl this far - such a short space that Howard realizes he must have only been a few yards away.

If anything was going to hammer home how helpless he is, that would do it. He tenses as he hears R moaning again - but it's just his imagination, made crystal-clear by the inability to distract himself with reality.

The van door opens, and Wyatt lets him down on the blanket made scummy nights of sweat and oozing blisters and tears. Howard immediately feels around to reorient himself with the back of the car.

Wyatt wished he could replace the sleeping bag, but of all the things he'd been able to hunt up in the gift shops, those weren't among them. The only one he'd seen had been the one Max had sent him, hang-dogged and stained now, bunched up in the back of the van.

He'd given serious thought to changing the car too. The thing reeking of sweat and blood and burned flesh. Smelling of sick and death. But he hadn't settled on one he liked, the van was still the biggest. Still held the best spot in the garage.

"I got some clean clothes for ya," he told Howard after setting him down, slipping the bag carefully from his shoulder. "On the plus, ya won't have to see what was left..."

"What do they say on them? Are they Sherlock sweatpants? Because I ban Sherlock sweatpants." Howard tries to laugh, but he feels like the charred remnants of a forest after a fire, like a throat after being vomited through. It's weak and airless.

He struggles out of his clothing, pulling it carefully to avoid hurting his broken hand and all the burns. Normally he wouldn't be comfortable with his near-naked body near anyone else, but he trusts Wyatt, including with the bones that stick out like wings across his chest, the spine like the fins of a dinosaur. Lint from his socks sticks to his open lesions on his foot.

He snorted, a rough push of air out through his nose, as he guided the damp, sticky shirt up over Howard's head. Balling it up, he dropped it on the cold, garage floor - he'd get rid of it later.

"Not him, unless he's grown horns since the last time I saw him," he drawled, unzipping the bag and digging out the gray shirt he'd liberated from the shop. One of the few stragglers left behind.

Black, with a pair of grey horns above a bold text that read: Suck my bulge!

It wouldn't have been his first choice, if he'd had one.

"...Here." His hands were rough with calluses, the skin ragged from the burns he'd suffered last week, but they were as gentle as could be as he threaded Howard's thin arms into the sleeves. Whatever he thought about Howard's skinny frame - the bitter, churning anger boiling low in his gut - he kept to himself. "Head down, son."

"Trolls? Or a dragon?" Howard's pretty sure those are the only people with horns as Tributes, but who knows what's happened since he lost his sight. He lets Wyatt help him get dressed, wriggling into a pair of sweatpants and pulling socks up. He lays down on his stomach to rest, feeling fresh in the new clothing even though the underwear is hella old. His back feels scaly, flakes of scabs over blisters itching against the new fabric.

"You're done with getting supplies for today, right?" Howard doesn't want to be needy, and yet there's a tone of desperation and hope to the question. He knows it means keeping Wyatt in the smelly, quiet, cramped van for longer, but he's never been as vulnerable as he is now, and the specter of R's murder looms in the background. Guilt given corporeal form, almost.

He wonders if R's struggle at the end was conscious, a intentional will to live that Howard cut and stabbed out, or simply a subconscious reaction to pain. He tries to believe it was the brief impulses of nerves firing, that he was doing right by his friend. He tries to believe this even as the alternative takes root like ivy along his soul.

"It's gray, if that mean's anythin' to ya," he offered bemusedly, sweeping up the rest of Howard's ruined clothes and dumping them with the shirt.

The dragon, he remembered, was red. Her scales shining like fresh blood under the twinkling lights of District One's winter wonderland.

"I'll go back, an' check on R for ya," he promised again. "An' I'll get rid of these clothes, but I ain't got any other plans." He shifted, resting one hip on the back of the car. "We got enough to get us through today."

"Troll," he says, settling in, resting comfortable in the knowledge that Wyatt will stay with him a while, that Wyatt will be able to confirm if the moans Howard hears are figments of his guilt and imagination or reality. He lays back and rests. If it weren't for the gore-filled craters in his face, he could look as if he were stargazing, looking for constellations on the roof of the van.

But he's not. He's replaying things he hasn't seen, couldn't see, and yet that doesn't seem to stop R's bloodied, burned face from filling up the canvas of his mind.

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