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thearena2014-02-17 12:34 am
etcircenses) wrote in thearena2014-02-17 12:34 am
WEAPONS ROLL RUN
"The museum will be closing in half an hour. At that time, something very special will be distributed to the Tributes brave enough to risk their peers at the first floor elevators."
The storm is still raging outside, casting everything on the first floor in a dim light occasionally shattered by flashes of lightning. The thunder rolling in the background seems to set the tone, although some may find it a welcome distraction from silence.
Half an hour passes. Five minutes before it's done, the elevators cease functioning, leaving Tributes to use the stairwells.
Each elevator door opens to reveal a handful of weapons: firecrackers, revolvers, grenades. There are no threats to the Tributes who try to retrieve them - none but their fellow competitors.
[OOC note: party-style post. Everyone tag away.]
The storm is still raging outside, casting everything on the first floor in a dim light occasionally shattered by flashes of lightning. The thunder rolling in the background seems to set the tone, although some may find it a welcome distraction from silence.
Half an hour passes. Five minutes before it's done, the elevators cease functioning, leaving Tributes to use the stairwells.
Each elevator door opens to reveal a handful of weapons: firecrackers, revolvers, grenades. There are no threats to the Tributes who try to retrieve them - none but their fellow competitors.
[OOC note: party-style post. Everyone tag away.]
For John Watson
He didn't want to have to kill anyone and that meant something powerful would be good for scaring them off or having a little more control over how he injured them, and if he did have to kill someone, he wanted it to be fast. Maybe these would be better about that than a spear.
Of course, there was the crowd to contend with. This was Guy's first arena where he'd had to deal with it since he'd missed the Cornucopia run of his first arena. The seething mass of fighting people was just as intimidating this time than it had been several weeks before, in the basement, and just like before, Guy couldn't stop himself from looking at it and thinking: What is the point of all this?
And just like before, he jumped in anyway. Survival was survival and whatever these were, maybe they'd help him and the other people he'd come to care about survive. The longer they all lived the more time they had to convince the audience they should be revived.
So once more into the breach he went, spear in hand, mostly using it to block blows or try to trip people. Only right when he was near the elevator, an errant elbow to the back of his head sent him sprawling into someone else, his spear held in a way that might make it look like he was trying to kill them.
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Well. Hypotheticals had never been his strong suit. He'd work all that out once he had the cool security of the revolver in his hand.
Knife out, he darted through the tangle of tributes- until his path was suddenly blocked by one brandishing a spear. He slashed out in defense, heart pounding- god, but he didn't want to die. He didn't. It never got easier, not even a little bit...
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That made things start to get just a little bit messy.
"Would you just - drop it! Just let go and I'll let you -"
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It was thunder. Thunder and lightning. He heard it in his one good ear, loud enough that the sound actually hurt. For a moment, he was afraid he'd lost the hearing in that one, too, after Gabriel's moment of self-destruction had cost him the hearing in the other, but the universe stopped its ringing after only a moment as he staggered back away from John and the gun.
The thunder wasn't permanent but the lightning was. His last time in the arena, he'd been hurt plenty of times, including the time he'd died, after Orc had slammed him into a tree but he'd never felt anything like this. He'd never seen anything like this, like the hole in his arm that was starting to gush out blood.
Too much blood. Maybe not enough that he'd die instantly but enough to worry about it happening soon.
Thunder and lightning, right in your hand. Things that blew giant messy holes in people with the flick of a finger, with hardly a thought. And the noise, the thunder - he remembered that noise now, from the shared nightmare he'd seen, from Hawkeye's fever dream of mud and blood and people crying out for their mothers, the one that hadn't felt real because he had no context, because it wasn't like any reality he could imagine.
It felt real now.
"I don't - I don't want it," he said vaguely to John, with lips that had started to go pale, only just loud enough to be heard over the tumult. He was clearly in shock, not going for his spear, not trying to attack him. He'd left himself wide open to attack but his gaze was an attack all by itself, at least for anyone that actually had compassion.
Because right now he probably didn't look all that different from those boys John had patched up in Afghanistan, the ones that looked around after the IED went off as if looking hard enough might help them figure out exactly where their legs had gone.
"I don't want it anymore," he said, his voice strange and toneless.
He didn't want killing to be that thoughtless, that easy. He'd thought it was something else he was running for, he'd thought it was just another type of spear or knife or sling, but he'd been wrong. It was too much, too horrible a thing, something that just shouldn't exist, and he didn't want to hold it in his hand.
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Gunfire had a way of bringing everything into focus, John had found- and it was strange, the kind of things you could hear over it, immediately after it. What wasn't strange, and was actually oddly comforting, was that his instincts were the same they'd always been in response to a sound like that- to a look on a face like that.
He hadn't looked at his attacker's face before.
"Come on," he demanded gruffly, not pausing for response before swiftly securing his weapon and scooping Guy up to drag him out through the bloodbath. He'd get him just out around the corner and stop the bleeding- that was the least he could do. "You're fine, and we're getting out of here. You're fine, alright? Breathe."
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It was only the ones that enjoyed hurting people that he despised. The rest was just fear and he would've been lying if he said he wasn't just as afraid.
"I'm sorry," he said as John half-carried him off, stumbling as he tried to keep up. "Someone hit me in the head and then you cut me and then I got a little scared." And had tried to stab him back. "I usually try not to get like that, but you know how it is."
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"How about we do a deal," he murmured a little absently, his concentration clearly on assessing the damage. "We take it as read that neither of us wants to hurt the other, I see what I can do about this- it looks like you got lucky- and we'll go from there. Alright? I need to get a good look at your wounds. I'm a doctor."
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"I'm sorry. You're a doctor," he said, shaking his head.
He was definitely in shock though a huge part of it was psychological. It was horror over something like a gun existing. It was horror over what had just happened when he'd promised himself he'd only attack people trying to kill him - genuinely trying to kill him. Not ones he'd scared into thinking he was trying to kill them, accidental or not.
His decision to wander into that had put him in a position where he'd almost killed or had almost been killed by someone he might have normally gotten along with.
"I have friends who are doctors. Like Hawkeye and Julian and Joan. I almost hurt a doctor. I'm sorry..."
He liked the concept, people who just dedicated their lives to healing the sick. From hugging him when he needed a hug the most, to trying to save him and staying with him as he'd died, to keeping him from choking to death on his own vomit because of poison, the doctors here had turned out to be something he wished existed back home.
They had become something special in his eyes, still normal people, but normal people capable of a kind of wizardry he knew would take him a relative lifetime of education for him to master.
A literal lifetime, really, if you thought about it. Thirteen years of basic modern education he'd missed out on, four years of pre-med, four years of medical school, three to seven years of residency. Add that to his probably-twenty-two years of age and he would've been close to fifty before he finished. After which, he'd keel over and die because that was about as long as anyone lived where he was from because of the lack of medicine.
To Guy, what they did was a type of magic anyone could do that was still, despite that fact, magic. That was why the expression on his face was troubled, like that of a nine-year-old, Lisa Frank-loving, little girl that just realized she'd almost killed a unicorn.
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He paused, pulling out what was left of his medkit and beginning to tend to Guy's injuries. "Haven't hit anything vital here- just need to stop the bleeding. Hold still..."
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"I'm sorry," he said again, not sure where the sorries were all coming from. Vaguely, he realized that might be annoying. "I'm sorry I keep saying sorry."
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"I know. I know how it is. This place makes people - even good people -" What did it make them? "It makes them scared."
Scared people did stupid things.
"Is there anything you can do about the pain?"
It really, really hurt, especially now that the adrenaline was wearing off.
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"Sorry. I don't have any medication left- I had to treat two of my friends, and I didn't have much to begin with. I do- listen, if I get hold of some more, I will come find you, alright? I will. I'll- hang on, I'll give you a list of kinds of medicine that will help if you can find them and I'm already... gone."
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He couldn't read the labels himself but if John told him the names he'd remember them.