thearena | How Did You Expect Your Soul... [Closed]

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How Did You Expect Your Soul... [Closed]

WHO| Venus and Guy, Venus and Nasir, then Venus, Enjolras, Jet and Albert
WHAT| Death! Traumatic memories! Chain whips and bad food!
WHEN| Week 5 during the Hellrena, thread with Guy during week 4
WHERE| Throughout the Arena and then near the abyss.
WARNINGS| Bugs, death, some body horror, mentions of child-abuse, two gladiators slugging it out.

She goes looking for water before the Arena descends into Hell. The lake seems to have vanished somewhere into the fog, somewhere that she and Enjolras can't seem to locate despite their best attempts to retrace their paths. Eventually, it only makes sense to split up. They'll stay on the asphalt of the town road and hope that if they both keep moving in opposite directions, finding their way back to the meeting place in the middle will be simple enough.

She takes her chain and her boxcutter. She swings the former while she walks, and it cuts little trails of negative space into the cloud around her. She clicks her tongue as she walks, trying not to let dehydration or exhaustion look too evident on her frame in front of the cameras. Her head's pounding. Her throat is dry and crawling up the back of her mouth.

She stops when she hears something.

-/-

She finds Enjolras again when she's in less than ideal shape. Her fight with Nasir left her bloody, left her with broken bones and, she suspects, internal hemorrhaging. The Arena's already over for her, which would bother her if she ever intended to actually win one of these things. What actually does upset her is the fact that she's crawling back to someone else to slowly die, just like she did last time.

She's selfish. So sue her. She doesn't want to get lost in the fog and let the animals feast on her while she's alone.

There's a strange rage that pulses just beneath her skin, a hunger that creeps along between her bone and muscle that she can't explain. She itches at her flesh and some of it comes off, and her teeth hurt. She tries to not pick at herself, because she doesn't need to be opening new ones when the ones she got an hour ago are still oozing blood down her clothing to mingle with sweat.

The benefit of this strange setting change is that she has her powers back. She teleports back to the meeting place she and Enjolras had, landing with a bit of a squawk of pain as she puts weight on what is, in all likelihood, a broken ankle. She holds one arm close to her body, and the corner of her mouth has been sliced down to the side of her neck.

"Don't look now, but I'm a bit of a mess."

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Agron was dead and since then Nasir had operated without any feeling but rage. He retained reason but only to a certain extent. He had received a first aid kit after being knocked out by Gannicus and his used it to patch up his arm and tend to his other wounds. The bindings showed that he was wounded but the look in his eyes would give most pause. It seemed there was nothing human left, no compassion, thought for strategy, or desire to live. Nothing but a hate that filled him and could not find release.

Afftected by the food, he's almost unrecognizable. Skin pale and slimy like some underwater creature, hair almost entirely gone. Crowbar clutched in hand, he said nothing to Venus as he charged her. There were no taunts or expression of his respect for her for their last fight because he felt nothing.

Edited 2014-06-26 22:56 (UTC)

If she weren't a trained mercenary, she might have taken the crowbar to the brain, become nothing more than a pinkish-red splatter on the ground and a corpse with a hole in its skull. As it stands she hears him coming just in time, and throws herself to the side.

If she weren't dehydrated and lethargic, she might have spared herself entirely. Instead she only just avoids his body weight and throws her weight at his ankles, trying to bring them both to the ground.

"Nahs-" She almost gasps his name, but the truth is he looks more like Gollum than the gladiator she knew of. The other factor blocking her words is the crowbar hook catching the inside of her mouth and tearing. She feels her cheek split from her gum, from the base of her teeth. She feels hot blood spilling down her chin and neck. She's lands on her hands, grunting as a lance of pain shoots up her wrist.

Nasir didn't waste time. He kicked at her, trying to keep her still on the ground. There was no response to his half formed name. He didn't feel like Nasir anymore. He didn't feel like Tiberius either or a gladiator. He was this thing-- transformed and ugly and he didn't even care any longer.

While he kicked, he brought his crowbar down over her head, planning to knock her out for good so he could finish her off.

She avoids it this time, using her skill on the ground to slip her leg between his ankles and jerk enough to bring him down beside her. She throws her weight into the punch she swings at his pelvis.

Nasir lost his breath and he couldn't roll away from the punch. Instead he had to endure it. The crowbar had fallen out of his grip as he fell but he reached for it and whipped it through the air. If he could strike her again that would give him a chance to recover and press the attack once more-- without being on the defensive.

"No!" She can barely form the word, such a simple word, with the damage done to her mouth. Her tongue feels like it's flopping in a careless free-fall. She throws her arm back to grab the crowbar, catching it on her forearm and feeling the bone splinter inside her.

Better her arm than her head.

She throws another punch, now effectively one-handed, this one aimed straight at his nose. She follows it up with a grab for the wrist with the crowbar, looking to repay the broken arm with a like favor.

Nasir let out a sharp, cut off cry as the fist impacted his nose. He heard a crunch of bone and cartilage and the blood came trickling down his nostrils, spilling onto his lips so he tasted copper.

He turned his wrist, trying to twist it out of Venus's grip. His hand flew up, palm facing out, to strike her nose and, if not break her nose as well, send fragments of bone flying up into her brain cavity.

"I will tear you apart for this." He rasped.

He breaks her nose, although it doesn't have the lethal effect he was hoping for. It stuns her, but she's already partway into a kick towards his midsection. She follows through too hard and falls, blood spraying onto the ground, mingling with the mist.

Tear her apart?

"Maximush did it awready. And be'ter." She flips back to her feet.

Nasir had tried to roll aside so she kicked his back instead of his vulnerable stomach but he was only halfway into it when her foot connected with his body. He groaned but pushed himself up with one arm, even if he was a little shaky.

He readjusted his grip on the crowbar but didn't lunge yet. Steadying himself, he looked at his enemy. Weak. He could kill her so easily if he had a spear, if he weren't injured, if he didn't have a blinding rage blocking any thoughts of how to go about this.

With a grunt, he threw himself at her again.

She knows when she's lost. The fact is, she believes she could still kill Nasir, if she can hold onto her consciousness in spite of the blinding pain in her arm and face - but she has no doubts that she would die too.

She's not rushing to that like she once was.

She flops back to the ground, a death drop that's surprising in its flexibility and riskiness. It brings her under him enough to avoid his blow, and she rolls forward and springs to her feet. She takes off at a run.

Nasir ran after her despite the sharp ache in his ribs, the pain in his wrists, and the blood that still flowed from his nose. But there was something in him that was more animal than human. He was not a predator but he was out to kill and the anger at having been denied that thrill drove him on.

He yelled her name or rather, something like her name. It was hard to make out through the growl and altered sound of his voice because of his shattered nose.

Footsteps, light, nearly silent. Whoever it was knew how to move quietly, how to be patient. There was a light scrabbling sound in the nearby alley but the wall was made of brick, with nice, big gaps in between them for him to stick his fingers in.

He managed near silence as he scrambled up to the roof, but to bring his spear with him, he had to fasten it to the sheathe he'd made at his back and very briefly the shaft of it scraped against the wall as he went over the edge up top.

Edited 2014-07-23 03:53 (UTC)

She can't see anything around her. Things appear out of the fog in front of her as if they were teleporting there, buildings and trees and now a brick wall. It would be comedic if she weren't so tired.

Even her sense of hearing is dampened by how slowly sound travels through the wet air. She wraps the chain around her waist and frowns, wondering if she's imagining or actually vigilant.

She extends the box cutter, ready to slice.

Above her, Guy was holding his spear at the ready, just in case he had to get violent to keep whoever it was creeping up on him his tail. He could hear them there in the fog, very very quiet footsteps, the clinking of a chain.

His hearing was hardly preternatural but it was on the high end for a normal human.

But then he got a better glimpse of her through the fog and breathed out a sigh of relief.

"Hey, Venus, it's me," he called down to her, just loud enough that she could hear whose voice it was, but no louder than that, in case anyone else was around. "I'm gonna come down, don't stab me in the face or anything, okay?"

She lowers her box cutter, a sigh of relief big enough to push the fog away from her lips rolling out of her. "Guy! Thank God."

Not that she doesn't have to fight, but that he's alright. She slips the box cutter away and puts a hand to her lower back, which is gently oozing blood and plasma again.

"No face-stabbing. Got it. I think I'll be able to contain myself."

"You'd better. If I'm going to die, I want to die nice and handsome," he said, as he climbed down, jamming his fingers in the cracks between bricks to do it.

He adjusted his pack and his spear in its holster as he landed on his feet.

"You're looking, uh...alive?"

She looked not really good, but not-dead was still a good thing, right? Meanwhile, one advantage to his perpetually mussy hair and unkempt appearance was that unless he was in really dire shape, he looked mostly fine.

"Are you hungry? My sponsors went crazy this arena."

Edited 2014-07-27 03:09 (UTC)

"Look at you, being all vain. Someone has time for luxury this Arena."

She laughs, and it cuts through the stifling humidity in the strangest way. If the theme of the last Arena was betrayal, then the theme of this one is not being able to trust your senses, the most intimate sort of treachery.

"I wouldn't say no to something that wasn't probably poisoning me." She sits down next to the brick wall, leaning against it.

He chuckled at the joke about his vanity as he settled into a comfortable crouch, looking restful but clearly trying to be ready to jump up if he needed to.

"This has been a pretty easy one for me so far. Not that it'll stay that way, of course. But scary fast-moving monsters and bugs with sharp teeth and stingers and venom? Ooooh." He wiggled his fingers. "So scary. Been running from this kind of stuff since I could run."

They were threatening, certainly, but not terror-inducing. Just another animal trying to eat him.

"And I've already dealt with the whole lava, flaming death, fire-scary thing."

The End had been pretty terrifying, but the hellrena had been nothing like The End. The ground had still been ground. Sure the hellrena had been creepy but still not something that shifted him out of his comfort zone.

He reached into his pack and handed her some canned meat and a bottle of water.

"It's nice not having the ground crumble into lava pits this time." He paused. "You know, for now." He took in a deep breath. "The only thing that really freaked me out was the fake Eep but I could tell it wasn't really her from the start."

It had mostly been instinct, because his were a little stronger than some and he'd spent a whole life listening to them. Wrong body language, looked wrong, wrong smell. A hurt and traumatized Eep would not have been silent and even if she had been she'd have still carried herself differently. They couldn't fake two years of observed body language. He knew what an Eep scared and disturbed into silence would've looked like, he knew what Eep smelled like. That wasn't Eep and he thought that not with the surety of someone in denial but the surety of someone who was actually sure.

His senses were only mildly better than some of the other humans in the arena, but his brain was incredibly sensitive when it came to unconsciously picking up on all the little signs that something was off.

Edited 2014-07-31 05:52 (UTC)

"Ugh, don't talk to me about bugs." Venus waves her hand, but she has a very real tinge of nervousness to her voice. She's been lucky enough to be getting bugspray so far into the Arena, but she doesn't know that that will last.

She takes the can of food and pries it open, splitting it with her fingernail so they can eat together. She doesn't know if sharing food means the same thing to Guy as it does to some of the people in this Arena - the ones who come from starved backgrounds, ones like Ellie - but she wants it to count for him. Always. She picks a piece of the meat and chews on it.

Venus raises her eyebrows, pausing. "Fake Eep?"

Like the zombie they'd seen of Grantaire?

Guy took his half, smiling. It did have the same meaning for him, not just in the individual gesture but because of it unconsciously echoing culture from home. Sharing was caring, after all.

He gnawed on his half and his smile faded.

"It was one of the monsters. They made it look like her but like something bad had happened, so bad that she wouldn't talk. She followed me around." He shook his head. "That might have fooled some people but she didn't look right, smell right, move right. I've got a better eye - and nose - for those things than some people - movement's part of how we talk back home and I think my sense of smell's better than some of the people here."

Hence Guy using so much in terms of physical gestures when he communicated and sniffing in uncertain situations.

"If Eep had really been there and been too sad or hurt to talk, she would've looked, smelled, and especially moved differently. So I pretended to sleep and when it thought I was out, I was ready for it when it attacked me."

Venus nods. It's not the first time she's been here where the Capitol's used people's likenesses to try and psychologically get at the Tributes.

"Aside from all that..." She looks up at Guy, then frowns, trying to find a way to phrase it that won't ask him to bare any weaknesses from the camera. "You were ready for her when she attacked you, and that's it? Nothing else?"

No nightmares, no grief for the doppelganger of the woman he loves?

He shook his head, shrugging slightly.

"It didn't even sound human when it screamed." He hadn't lost any sleep over it. "It wasn't her. The nose knows." He tapped it. "And the ears."

The cruelty of their captors and their extreme punishments aside, he'd had to move on from traumas and terrifying situations his entire life. Sometimes with peace, sometimes with resignation, but the moving on had always happened.

The image of stabbing Eep was a powerful and painful one but the screeching, the fact it had attacked him had made it lodge firmly in his mind as just another thing with teeth and claws. It was another monster he killed, another life or death situation he'd walked away from.

"One thing no one here has ever understood about me, not even after watching that ridiculous thing about my life, is that the life or death stuff? That's always been my whole life. Walking away from that is how you live. That's in all of you, though, what I am. The old ways of thinking. You all came from where I come from. Even that snotty green guy, a long time ago, his people had to figure out how to bang a rock against a clam to get the meat out, and were probably running from something with bigger teeth."

He went on, "Monsters are easy. Everyone has that in them, to survive all that, and let it go. You have what's left of the people in the past that could do that in your instincts. That's why the worst parts of this place aren't the monsters, they're the people that act like monsters."

He made an 'eh' face. "Monsters that act like people? Different thing."

He found a better way to say what he was thinking, and smiled that little smile he did when he found the words, since it wasn't always easy for him, after so many years of talking to a sloth. Talking was easy, saying what he was thinking and saying it right was hard.

"Ooh ooh, I figured out how to say what I wanted to say! Accepting something bad and letting it go to focus on now and what you want to do now and what you want to be is living. Anything else is just surviving. It wasn't Eep and now it's dead and I'm sharing food with my friend. If I was still upset about it how could I be happy sitting here with you?"

The Zen of Guy.

Edited 2014-08-01 03:12 (UTC)

He has a point, she knows. It's part of why this place hasn't managed to break her either; she's always had her own horrors to wade through, her own private swamp of demons inside her head and surrounding her. At first, it was a wall between her and empathizing for other people, wondering on some sublogical level why everything was bothering them so much. Now it's a tool of survival.

"I try to believe that even people who act like monsters these days aren't, you know. I don't know." She frowns and chews on her piece of meat, trying to decide who the person she used to be was. It didn't take her long to acknowledge that the term 'superhero' was really lip service to an idea she didn't live up to, but there's a difference between deciding you weren't an angel and condemning your old self as a devil.

"Anyway. I like your life philosophies." And she likes to not only feel as if she's a friend, but like he's made a measured decision to consider her such. That she hasn't hoodwinked him with her flash and toothpaste-ad smile.

Then the smile is gone and she's on her feet in an instant. The box cutter comes out. The moment of peace vanishes much more quickly than it arrived. "I hear footsteps."

The way he moved was quick but graceful. Backpack on, but loose in case he needed to drop it to be more agile during a fight, spear in hand.

Heart racing, he stood there and listened, trying to figure out where the steps were coming from. It was always difficult to tell in the fog.

A figure appears, emerging like a slow-motion shark from the water. It comes at them at an easy but not a tentative or lumbering pace.

"Jamal?" Venus' head tilts, her eyes narrowed not in anger, but in confusion. "That's my cousin, Guy, you saw him in the..."

She feels a chill over her that she can't explain. "In the exposé. I don't know why he'd be here, though."

She feels like they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for her family members if they're bringing back the cousin she wasn't especially close to.

"Unknown things are usually baaaad things," he said slowly, moving closer to her and putting out his arm to move her back away from "Jamal" so that they stayed side by side. His eyes darted around to make sure they weren't backing out of the alley right into a Tribute but it seemed that it was just them and...it.

"They do everything with a reason. You know that."

He'd gotten pretty genre-savvy over the arenas for someone who'd existed before genres had.

Edited 2014-08-06 05:28 (UTC)

"I don't know why they showed that footage of us." It didn't even make a terrible lot of sense narratively, for the exposé, and yet it somehow wormed under her skin. Appeared over and over in her nightmares, though she can never remember what happens after she leaves the bedroom.

Her eyes dart around, not side to side but as if searching the inside of her head, little jerky motions. She keeps coming up with nothing, not- not anything that can explain the way her chest tightens, the way a chill and goosebumps rise along her legs like a flock of birds from the edge of a cliff.

"Do you want me to just kill it?" Guy asked her. "I can just kill it. Or we can run. Up to you."

It was her creepy, not-real zombie family member. If it lunged, he was going to take it out, but if not, Venus had a choice in how they dealt with this. She could kill it, he could kill it, or they could just run. It depended on what she found least disturbing.

"I'd be perfectly fine with killing it. I am very, very comfortable with killing creepy stuff."

Edited 2014-08-08 09:22 (UTC)

"I don't-" It's not as if she even mourned her cousin terribly at his funeral. He was an older cousin she saw on holidays. Kind of a jerk. She remembers her mother having a fight with Jamal's father over whether the children should all sleep in the same bed. She remembers Jamal taking the candy out of her stocking and putting it in his, remembers their grandmother yelling at him over it.

She remembers the flickers of a different voice when she and Enjolras were having sex, nothing out loud but something in her head, murmuring under her internal monologue, telling her to be scared. A language in her muscle rather than her brain, in the way she cringed and tightened when she didn't need to.

Why does it feel as if the waves are breaking over the shores of her mind, erasing the resolve and confidence she spent years crafting as an adult? Why does she feel like a little girl again? Why does she feel like she can't stand?

"Guy, Guy, let's go-" she takes his wrist. "Let's get out of here."

The fear was noticeable, especially to someone who knew and understood it so intimately.

"Okay. Okay," he said breathlessly. He started start to run with her in a sort of loping, sideways trot so he could keep an eye on it. "I'll keep an eye on it, just keep moving."

If she wanted to run instead of him killing it, they'd run.

This was her demon, for whatever reason it was her demon, not his. He only had a few things that could truly terrify him and most of them were not the kinds of things they'd put in the arenas.

So they'd run, and if they couldn't escape it, he planned on being the barrier between her and it.

A barrier with a very, very pointy spear.

Edited 2014-08-11 06:50 (UTC)

She can't run far. Her breath leaves her, her peripheral vision blurring. She stumbles and grabs Guy's wrist.

"Don't let him touch me. I don't want him to touch me." She can't even tell what she's saying, just that she's muttering.

It feels like it did when she was a teenager, when her throat and chest would seize up, her body allying with fear to rebel against her conscious mind. It feels uncontrollable, unnamed, and the horrible part is that she knows why but she can't remember it. She can deduce what must have happened but her head is a black hole.

Her reaction terrified him, especially since she seemed so confused by it. He wasn't sure if the existence of that thing was putting out something that was hurting her mind or if it was calling on some old instinct buried deep, but her fear was enough to get him moving.

He moved away from her, towards it, not trying to wrench his wrist out of her grasp, but tugging in a gentle way that showed he wasn't trying to run away, that he needed his hand free so he could stay.

"He's not going to hurt you. I won't let him hurt you," he promised her gently. He turned to look at her, tilting his head so he could still see the lurching thing out of his peripheral vision, but also turned enough to look her in the eyes - so she could see the promise in his. She got a full and open view of the gentleness and love there. "I'm good at making monsters go away."

As long as he was alive, he would do that for everyone he loved. His family, if he ever saw them again, his friends here, the people he'd come to see as the tribe he'd always wanted to have.

And if he ever died, he would die with them all knowing that he cared about them enough to do that.

Edited 2014-08-18 05:55 (UTC)

She wants to say that all the thing coming towards them is is a monster. She wants to say that it's the physical thing coming towards her that scares her, but it isn't. The monster is inside her mind. The monster already happened.

"I ain't even thought of him since the exposé, I don't understand why they brought him here except-"

She searches Guy's eyes, seeing only her own reflection in them. Flashes of something lurks around her corners, inside her mind, right out of her reach, like the rustling of mice in brush that reveal no prey. Motion with no object.

"I feel so small," she whispers. She wraps her hands around herself, feeling the prick of invisible insects on her. "When I was a kid- when I-"

This thing had taken on the form of someone who had hurt her. That was his takeaway. In some way he didn't understand, the real person whose face the monster word had hurt her.

The how didn't matter, all that mattered was that she was afraid and he wasn't, and that was all he needed to decide that he was going to fix it.

He ran towards the monster, spear in hand. Attacking it this time wasn't as easy as when he killed the Eep monster. He'd tricked the monster that had been sent for him by pretending to sleep and attacking it right before it attacked him. This one saw him coming.

He managed to stab it in the chest but it grabbed onto the spear with one hand so he couldn't withdraw it for another blow, trying to scratch him with its free hand. So holding onto the spear with one hand so it couldn't wrench it away from him, he used his other to reach for the rusty knife at his belt, using it to hack at the zombies arm until it was a mangled mess. Then he aimed for its neck.

Once provoked, the creature shifts from meandering and lonely to violent. One hand holds the spear, but the other lashes out at Guy with striking force, in spite of the knife its neck. Brownish blood splatters over Guy's arm and onto his shins. The revenant of Jamal doesn't want to be consigned again to the annals of memory.

(In the background, Venus whimpers and sucks air through her teeth.)

It struggles and throws itself forward, trying to use its superior size to bring Guy down. When Jamal bares its teeth, they're needle-like fangs, and it seeks to take a chunk from Guy's shoulder.

(Venus picks up a plank of wood and holds it like a baseball bat.)

He only barely managed to hold it back with the spear, claws and teeth nearly hitting the mark.

"Venus, run! You need to run!"

This one was too strong, and he was starting to realize that he might not be able to take it head on. But that was okay. That was something he was always ready to deal with in these arenas and some things were just worth it.

What was important was that his friend got away from whatever nightmare this monster represented. Something about this person had hurt her once and he wasn't going to let it happen again.

He kicked it in the knee, cracking it but because it felt no pain, that only meant it bowed slightly.

Guy let out a pained yell through his teeth as its claws raked across his cheek.

Venus has so infrequently known anger to fuel her combat. The feeling is only dimly familiar now, made even more obscure by the way it isn't quite anger that floods her muscles with blood, her mind with perfect, painful clarity.

It doesn't, she realizes, matter that she can't remember in detail what Jamal did to her. It doesn't. All that matters is that at this moment, someone is willing to try and protect her from it happening again, and she's someone who deserves that protection.

And in this case, someone who won't let her guardian angel be laid low.

"Get away from it, Guy! I'll take his block off!"

The movement was so quick that it was clear that he was primed to trust her. All it took was a word, the ferocity in her voice, he rolled backwards, once, twice until she was already past him, running forward towards it.

Her opening was there to take, and then the moment she drew away to give him one - provided it still wasn't down - that would be his opening again, too.

Until they'd worked together to hunt this thing down.

Venus hits this thing harder than she's hit anything else in her life. For once, she marries anger and action, marries them willingly, and brings the plank sideways and down. Turned so that the corner and the skinny edge hit first, it's like a scythe or guillotine, and the ghost of Jamal has no chance to react before the wet thwock! slices through its head and brains. Jamal wobbles, one hand reaching forward to either grab her or Guy or steady himself, but ultimately falls backwards as his knees go out, one by one, little pistons.

With it dead and a splatter of its brain on her arm, Venus drops to her knees, to her butt, and scrambles away, kicking the plank back.

He didn't have a chance to move back in to hurt the thing. Her evisceration of it was so complete he didn't even room to take a swing.

It was very thoroughly dead in a way that he totally understand a dead thing could be. There were a few times that terror'd had him reducing a predator to paste or parts. That was how fear worked.

And it was fear. A different kind of fear than just facing something trying to eat you. That was why as he came over and sat next to Venus, he didn't move too close or try to touch her at first.

If she wanted a hug, it was there, but he needed to make sure she was okay first.

"Venus, I don't know what's going in here but what do you need me to do?"

That seemed the safest way to go about it.

"I can get rid of the body for you."

Get it out of her sight.

She makes a stuttering sound, as if testing out her voice rather than trying to produce words. She's shaking, staring at this horror that has visited upon her, staring at it dead. Knowing that whatever it's woken in her mind won't sleep.

And yet it's just a body. It's locked in the cage of memory, barred by time's steel restraints and cuffs, a past tense beast. She can run into the future, into the rest of her life, and it can't follow her.

Some things can't help but be left in the past, and thank God for that.

She reaches over and takes Guy's hand.

"I think- I think we should bury it. It deserves to be buried." Not because it's good or should be treated like a human, but because it should be returned to the worms and damp soil that are its kin.

He squeezed her hand.

"Okay. Let me just find something to dig with. Yell if you need me."

With that he ran off to a nearby house he'd rummaged through. There had been some useful tools in it, including some that had looked like they were for digging.

Before long, he was back with two shovels and handed one to her. Then, wordlessly, he started to dig in a nearby patch of soft-looking earth.

Edited 2014-09-27 05:00 (UTC)

She doesn't yell. Almost unconsciously she grasps hunks of mulchy leaves in her hands as she waits, tossing them over the body as a cat may kick back litter, but it's not a conscious, thought-out decision. It's just a deep impulse to cover things, to remove them from her world.

When he comes back, she silently takes the shovel from him, starting on the wet earth, side by side.

"Thank you," she whispers.

"You don't have to thank me."

It was very matter of fact.

"Running from stuff -" He grunted as he dug, following her lead on how to use the tool. "Fighting hungry predators together. That's what you do with your tribe."

And he had one here, filled with people that cared about him as much as his family back home, that he cared about in turn.

Edited 2014-09-28 04:52 (UTC)

"I do have to thank you. You're my friend and I'm grateful," she says, almost snippy in her stubbornness. She almost wants to believe he can't understand what he's helped her with - and yet she knows he does. That there are monsters in everyone's childhood, some more real than others, that people have to face.

The shovel makes scraping sounds as it goes past stone and roots, as they make a grave for the things that have been done to her. For a while they dig in silence, and then she stops for a moment, and looks him in the eyes.

"No one was ever there for me as a kid." And so she didn't expect anyone to be there for her now, and yet here he is. Not only was, but is still, in the messy, sweaty cleanup.

"I know how that feels," he said gently, his voice soft.

To an extreeeme degree.

"I'm glad I can give you that now." He paused his speech but kept digging. "I don't think I'd have been the same person if I'd grown up in your world. I don't think the kind of person I am can be...can even come to be in a lot of worlds."

They all seemed so different, so alien, and so much of what he was had come of walking across sun-baked mudlands, and watching countless stars at night, and learning not to lose himself to the fear of the scraping claws at the opening of the caves he'd hidden in.

"But I like to think that if some very different version of me had been there, near you, that that part of me would've been the same. I wish I could have been there for you."

"I wish you could have too."

And it goes without saying - it's practically written in the air, invisible, some language they can both intuit without anything between them - that she wishes the same for him.

The hole becomes deep enough that they can drag the body in. They do, and she imagines burning it, but everything is too damp here. The earth will have to break it down the hard way.

"Guy, I know you're worried about if-" If the Capitol gets to his world, gets his mate and child and family. She doesn't say any of that out loud, not wanting to put the idea out there. "I know you're worried. I just want you to know that your priorities are my priorities. Your most important priorities. No matter what happens."

Now seemed the appropriate time to hug her, now that they were saying all these nice things, now that she was calmed down and seemed less anxious about being touched.

So he did. With the arm that wasn't holding the shovel, he hugged her gently in a one-armed hug, pressing his forehead to hers with the tiniest brush of his nose against her nose.

By now she probably knew what that meant. It was a familial hug. A "you are my tribe" nose rub.

It said more without words than most could say with a whole paragraph.

And she holds him back, squeezing him as tight as both their tired bodies will allow. They are, the both of them, uncountable measurements away from their homes. He's separated by eons from his family, her by the barriers of life and death.

Yet they've found family here. Imperfect, desperate family, willing to protect and defend and comfort and love.

It's more than could ever be quashed by this government.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

How Did You Expect Your Soul... [Closed]

Nasir and Venus, round two

Re: Nasir and Venus, round two

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/wrap?