R / "Ryan" (human) || WARM BODIES (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alonelyboy) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thearena2014-02-11 11:05 am
alonelyboy) wrote in thearena2014-02-11 11:05 am
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(no subject)
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.
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.
no subject
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.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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..."
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"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.
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"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."
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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'."
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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?
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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."
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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."
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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."
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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..."
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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.
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"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."
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"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.
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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."
/end
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.