thearena | Turn Around, Bright Eyes [Open]

Entry tags:

Turn Around, Bright Eyes [Open]

WHO| Howard and open, Howard and Wyatt
WHAT| Howard stumbles around blindly through the basement, dies
WHEN| Week 6
WHERE| Parking lot
WARNINGS| Death, some description of injury.

[OPEN]

Howard doesn't stray away from the car, but to stretch his legs he walks in circles around it, limping and shuffling to avoid putting more pain on his injured feet. He feels over the metal with his good hand, walking in circles until he can feel warmth still soaked in from where he was moments ago. And he hums a little to himself, even though he knows it's dangerous, because being blind and in silence feel like being both blind and deaf. He can't be trapped with just the noises in his head - the pounding of his own blood, the sound of his breath, the imaginary foes that come up on him.

His eyes are covered in bandages that wrap all the way around his head. Skin flakes and peels off from the area around semi-healed burns on his neck and shoulders, the worst of which are covered in gel and tape and the rest are, unfortunately, exposed. He hardly looks human anymore, instead like some videogame monster, a limping, stooped, pustule-covered creature feeling his way around the same circle, over and over.

He stops when he hears noise. He freezes and stops humming "Total Eclipse of the Heart", standing still as a rod.

-/-

[For Wyatt]

The antibiotics from the medical kit run out. Whatever bacteria is festering in Howard's burns does not. Soon enough he's running a fever, and he seems weak and fatigued, more than he has been. He stops going for his walks around the car and sleeps more, and he talks to Wyatt less, needing to be prodded into talking. Sometimes he has to be asked a question multiple times before he seems aware he's expected to answer.

When he does sleep, with the chills he's so cold he needs to rest against Wyatt's side to feel warm. He rests there with his head against Wyatt's chest, bundled in their raggedy blanket. For a while he tried to blame Max for not sending them supplies, but he knows, deep down, how difficult it is to get medicine this late in the Game.

"You think there's much longer to this Arena?" he mumbles.

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He'll definitely hear a noise when Susannah arrives down in the basement--if only because she hasn't any choice but to take the elevators.

She ends up taking the one closest to Howard so she sees him there, standing still. Like a dear, she thinks, in the headlight of a car. She doesn't know who he is, but she can see how small he is.

"Hello," she calls as she wheels herself toward him. If there's anyone else down here that'll draw them out--and then she'll have something to fight that's not this poor kid.

Edited 2014-02-23 05:39 (UTC)

"Who's there?" Howard feels around for the car door, although he knows that clambering in is hardly any sort of safety. Furthermore, he's well aware that the bandages on his face give away how incredibly vulnerable he is, even by normal standards.

And yet he still manages to pick up that those aren't footsteps coming towards him, but a more continuous sound. It takes a moment to click, but - wheels.

"I'm not alone," he bluffs. "Wyatt'll be back any minute. You hurt me and he'll come after you."

"I don't intend to hurt you, sugar," Susannah replies, wheeling closer to the kid. "And I'm not going to kill you either--not unless you ask me to. I try to keep my murderin' to people a sight bigger than you. I'm Susannah Dean--who are you?" Because in the state he's in, the kid's unrecognizable.

"Lots of people say that." He turns his body as much as his head because the burns on his neck crack open and weep fluid if he stretches them too hard. The echoes of the parking lot mean he can't really hear where she's coming from. "I'm Howard. You're- you're the wheelchair lady."

"Well, I mean it," Susannah says. At least she, Susannah, means it. There's no accounting for Detta, but being with Bert's helped keep that bitch as a voice in the back of her mind, which is where she ought to be. "And yes. I am. And you're-- you're the Negro boy from Dee One."

She made note of him, of course. There weren't all that many people in the Tribute Tower who looked like her. There were probably more of those odd grey-skinned troll aliens than there were colored folk of her sort in the tributes and Susannah wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad thing.

She's still coming toward him. "It's nice to meet you, Howard."

"You just call me a Negro?"

If he had enough of a face left to express confusion, he would. It's not the rudest term he's ever been referred to as (Orc's dad supplied most of the creative ones he could remember, and occasionally his peers in school), but it's not one he expected, either, especially from another black person. And of course he knows she's black - he, too, has been noting the people who share his skin tone.

"I mean, not like you're not, but damn, that's old-fashioned." He holds out his hand not because he likes physical contact, but because if she shakes then he'll know where she is. "Nice to meet you too. Circumstances kinda blow, though."

"Agreed," she says, rolling right up so she can shake it. Alice Holmes raised her daughter to be polite. "Don't know if I'd express it quite that way-- but yeah, these are some damn unfortunate circumstances we've got here. I'm guessin' you're from my future? I'm told that the preferred term after my time is 'black' but that still seems so rude to me."

She moves back a little after she shakes his hand, to give him a little space.

He doesn't just shake. He uses his other hand, broken and injured as it is, to feel her wrist and over to her face.

"Sorry, I just- I can't see anything." Obviously. "I like 'black'. It's straightforward and doesn't sound like separate fountains or anything. I get called 'Negro' by the same guy who makes me empty my pockets whenever I leave his house because he thinks I'm stealing."

She lets him. "I guess some things never change," she says quietly. "Even if we all share the same drinking fountains. Mr Johnson signed a law that was gonna fix that, you know. The Civil Rights Act, I think it was called. He did that maybe a month before I left my world. I never did like him as much as Kennedy, but." She shrugs, even though he can't see it.

"That the one about desegregating schools?"

Howard's knowledge of the Civil Rights movement is spotty at best. He's never taken any great interest in history or in formal education, and never thought it mattered much how unequal things were before when they're still unequal now. He knows better than to say that to Susannah, though.

He feels around for the car again, lifting his feet gingerly to take pressure off them.

"Mmhm. And lunch counters and hotels--pretty much everythin' public. No more separate drinkin' fountains. No more Jim Crow cars. If-- do you know what those are? Since you're at least as much from the future as Eddie was--my late husband, not the mentor--and he didn't know, but he was white and, well... not all that well educated."

There was, after all, a reason Susannah had been privately educated instead of been entrusted to the whims of the New York public school system, besides her father's money.

He bristles slightly, not liking the idea that she's figuring him for uneducated, even though he is and it often shows.

"That's the train cars, right? We barely use trains in my day. Just regular cars." He shrugs too, his body language not muted at all just because he can't see it. "Now you just get shot at by the police and beat up by white kids. And everyone thinks you're a fucking thief or a drug dealer. We got a black president, though."

Yeah, sorry about that, Howard.

"Really?" Susannah might have said something else about how people aren't riding trains as much as they did when she was a little girl in the time she came from, except she's been distracted by something more important. "You're-- you're not funnin' me, are you? Eddie--my husband--used to do that, he'd claim the president when he came from was Ronald Reagan." It's clear from her voice how ridiculous she thinks that idea is. "Who is it? Is it Mr King?"

Edited 2014-03-02 21:11 (UTC)

Howard's face brightens up, as much as it can with its current state, for all of two seconds before the corners of his mouth take a downturn again.

"Nah, not Martin Luther King. He got assassinated a long time ago."

"Oh," Susannah says quietly. Right. She remembers the Howdy Doody puppet saying that Martin Luther King was dead, in that terrible memory-dream she'd had of the Oxford jail cell when Mia stolen her body. "Who is it, then? Anybody I might've heard of?"

"A guy from Chicago, Barack Obama. Young guy, all about change and hope and stuff, but he'd only been elected for a little bit before my world went like-"

Howard makes a gesture like he's crumpling something up in his hands. "Like pfft."

"Barack Obama? And he went by his full name and not, say, Barry?" Susannah raises her eyebrow. "That is a change." After a moment she adds. "I'm sorry about your world, Howard." And she is. She's not sure what pfft exactly entails, but it implies plenty.

"It's better here," he says quietly, and the sad thing is it's true. He wonders if not being able to handle Panem is a sign he can't handle life in general.

He starts to sit down, trying to take weight off his injured feet. "You do pretty good for a lady with no legs."

"I've had about six years to practice," Susannah replies. "And-- I've been through some pretty hairy things in the last year or two. So far the Capitol hasn't handed us an insane self-aware suicidal monorail train or tried to recreate the Wizard of Oz just outside a dead city that was once Topeka just to mess with our heads." She makes a rueful noise. "Yet. I've probably given them ideas."

"See, none of that even sounds out of the ordinary for me. Back home that's be like oh, something retarded and dangerous is happening, what else is new?" He picks absently at some of the scabs on his feet. "Nothing they do here is that bad."

She nods. "For a while," she says, "I wondered if this place was a new mask for an old enemy. But the longer I'm here the more I'm convinced they're entirely human and always have been."

"Humans can be pretty awful on their own." He pauses, dragging his hand across the asphalt as if feeling something under his fingertips can drive out the pain of his broken body. "Do you ever watch the footage from the past Arenas?"

"Only if I can't avoid it," she answers honestly. "I know how to kill already. I don't need to study how other people have done it. If there's someone I know and like still in there I'll watch it for them--and I made myself watch Eddie's once--the mentor, not my late husband, sorry, they have the same name so it's a bit confusin'--but I don't really have any interest in watching otherwise. I know what I'm gonna see. Why?"

Edited (icon argh) 2014-03-10 19:27 (UTC)

"I use it to see who to avoid." He reaches for the door of the car, feels for it. "But you'd get a feel for how bad people can really be. That's all I'm saying."

Susannah sighs. "I already know how bad people can be," she says. "I've-- dealt with some pretty nasty customers in my time." Oxford Town. Lud. Sombra Corporation. "But if you think I should, I can try."

"You probably should. Gives you kind of a- a long term sense of things, you know? People come in okay but after three, four Arenas they're all fucked up inside." And sometimes it doesn't even take that long. "Hey, can you do me a favor?"

"Oh, prob'ly," says Susannah. "What do you need?"

It takes Howard a moment, a good long moment to find the strength to be vulnerable, moreso than he is. To admit weakness.

"There's painkillers somewhere on the floor of the car. I need them. They're in a bottle, it rattles, I just need you to point me toward them."

"I can do that," Susannah says. "Do you need help gettin' the door open?"

Howard pauses again, considering this. Considering how much he hates to ask for help, how much more he hates to need it.

"Yes. Please."

"Okay," Susannah says. "Gimme a sec, I need to get down out of this chair."

She wheels back a little, then climbs down from the chair, and slowly swings her stumps like legs so she can "walk" back to the car and reach up for the handle. Even more slowly, she pulls the door open, moving backward with the same "walk."

"You sound weird walking," Howard says, laughing quietly. In an awful way, it's comforting to not be the only one with a fucked-up body here. He sits back down on the ground, squeezing his mangled feet with his hands.

"It's hardly walkin'," she replies. "More like-- stumpin'. An' there's a reason I'd rather crawl, given the chance. But I don't trust the ground here, not when there's cars with broken windows, an' at least my stumps are sorta protected by these dinoskin pants."

She'd got them from the giftshop, before the giftshop had closed due to volcano, and knotted up the bottom half so they didn't trail so badly.

"Dinoskin pants? You didn't get sick of dinosaurs last time? Or is this some kind of, I don't know, Freudian revenge thing?"

Oh yeah. He saw how you died last time, Susannah.

"I don't know if I'd call it Freudian," she says, as she feels her back press against the car. "But I s'pose you could say it was sorta revenge. There. Door's as wide as it's gonna get."

Howard starts to feel around, 'looking' for the bottle. "Can you point it out? Am I getting close?"

"Warmer," she says, once she can see into the car again. "Up and to the right a little more."

Howard's hand falls on the bottle and he pulls it close to his chest. After a moment, he gets the cap open and gingerly pulls out a single pill to dry swallow.

"You should probably go find your boyfriend now."

"Bert's not my boyfriend," Susannah says. "But I suppose I should check in with him. It's-- good to meet you, Howard."

"Sure he ain't." Howard grins in Susannah's general direction, and it's a horrifying expression made gruesome by his scarred, mutilated flesh. "Bye, Susannah."

And he crawls into the bottom of the car and pulls the door closed behind him.

She flinches, slightly, at his gruesome expression, but doesn't let any of that stray into her voice. "Bye, Howard," she replies, to the shut car door. "Maybe when we see each other in the Capitol I'll introduce you to my real boyfriend."

Fear was constant in the arena. There were no promises from one day, one hour, to the next that the ones you cared for would be safe. Monsters and tricks and the other tributes, the danger was always there... but it was still different, still so much worse, to watch it happen. Slow and steady right before your eyes, unable to do a damned thing about it.

Wyatt knew Howard was slipping away from him. He could see it, feel it, a little more every day. He held the boy closer, a little tighter; stretched their supplies further. Went without, in favor of staying.

He didn't have to be a doctor like Holiday or Hawkeye to know the boy was dying. To know he was failing, again.

"No," he murmured softly, a litany of promises, of prayers, echoing in the back of his mind. A silent urging for Howard to just hold on a little ways further. "There ain't many left now."

He shifted, rested his cheek on Howard's clammy forehead. The little tiger purring and rumbling against his chest with the movement.

"Jus' a little bit longer."

Howard would nod, but he feels so exhausted that even that little gesture seems like some sort of Herculean task. His neck is stiff, and Wyatt's chest is warm, and he can come up with a thousand reasons to justify his lethargy and yet none of them would mask the reality, that his body has started shutting down.

He even nearly refused food today. The panic that he carries about starving was only barely enough to overcome his lack of appetite, and even then Wyatt had to convince him. He figures he only did it for Wyatt, but that would be selfish then, to continue taking Wyatt's supplies when he has no chance of winning. He almost imagines dying would be doing Wyatt a favor.

He holds the stuffed tiger - Wyatt's said it's a tiger, Howard just knows it's soft and comforting and that he's beyond caring about looking weak and helpless now - a bit closer. "I think we'll make it."

"We will," Wyatt promised, even knowing deep down in the pit of his gut that it was hollow - unless the remaining went in a fell swoop, and soon.

He squeezed Howard's shoulder, pressed closer as if maybe if he willed hard enough, he could take on the boy's sickness - take it through his skin, through the heat against his cheek.

"You an' me, jus' like I said. Jus' need to stay strong a bit longer, son."

"I'm plenty strong," Howard says, trying to joke and finding that it just falls flat when he doesn't even have the energy to expel air from his lungs as laughter. "I'll be fine."

What he should have said is it's not your fault.

He doesn't even notice when he passes out. Time's been harder and harder to tell now, since he sleeps through most of the announcements, since he spends less and less of the day awake. Sleep is a refuge, a place that dulls the pain burrowing into his head and crawling in his skin. The nightmares that come from that place are hardly worse than the fears that can seep in while he stays awake, statue-like, guided through reality only by sound and discomfort at best.

He sleeps for a long time against Wyatt's chest, occasionally shivering slightly, otherwise unresponsive. Any attempts to wake him may as well be used on a stone. He doesn't dream, doesn't talk or whimper in his sleep like he sometimes does. Somehow, this time the shroud of impending death alleviates fear, rather than amplifying it. He's safe in Wyatt's arms. Nothing further can hurt him when his fate's already sealed.

His hand loosens on the stuffed animal, and it slides out of his loose grip and falls a few inches on the blanket. There's no death rattle, not really, just a slightly louder breath before he stops entirely, before the last of him leaves his tiny, broken body and locks the door behind him.

The next thing he knows is that in the Capitol, he sees daylight and it doesn't even hurt.

Wyatt felt him slipping. The warm breath against his collar going shallow and faint. The heart beating against his own slowing.

His fingers tightened on Howard's shoulder, his eyes squeezed shut. He held his breath -- and felt Howard leave him. The last whispering inhale giving way to a too heavy silence. Too sharp, too sudden.

Unbroken, but for the ragged pounding on a single heart, echoing in his ears.

His other arm came up, embracing what was left of Howard hard. Head turning to hide his face against the wall of the van, forehead on the window as his shoulders shook. The sound that crawled up from the depths of his chest strangled. Choked.

It might not have been his fault, but he felt it strongly enough. Howard had been counting on him, had needed him, and he'd failed him again. Hadn't seen him to the victory the boy so deserved.

It was hard to say how long he sat there, minutes or hours or maybe the rest of the day. The time meaning little in the arena, when life had already left him.

Max, Howard.... All he could hope now was that they'd find each other in the Capitol. Look out for each other after he - when he didn't....

Unless....

He hadn't given it much thought, nothing beyond those late, quiet talks with Howard, but there it was now. A small, dim spark in the dark.

Slowly, finally, he moved. Shifting to press a kiss to Howard's forehead and to lay him down gently, moving out from under the weight carefully. He slipped the little tiger back into the boy's arms and tucked the bag back around him, slipping it up over his face.

There wasn't much left, but he took what was. He checked the bundle of paper in his pocket, the card, folded into hard squares, and gave the van one last look before turning, and walking away.

He could see them again if he won.

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Turn Around, Bright Eyes [Open]

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and suze's language is a product of her time

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and cut?

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