let's dig a hole in the sand, brother

[gladiayyygirl]

Who | Gannicus & Rosalind, Sabriel, Ellie and Garrus (in that order)
What | Hellrena is gross and horrible and Gannicus wants to go back to 71 BC now thanks
Where | Around the Arena
When | Various points in the final and penultimate weeks of Arena 10
Warnings | Death, body horror, gore, Gannicus losing all his lovely hair


i. closed to Rosalind. ( penultimate week )

Gannicus had lost his knife but he couldn't remember when or where that had happened. Had he actually been capable of higher thought processes then maybe he might have cared, but Gannicus's present state of mind didn't quite allow for that. Lake water and orchard fruit had done him in, mentally speaking. Physically, too - rabid, greying and blackened, and nothing more than a brutish corpse compared to the lean, tanned gladiator that he had been before the arena had literally turned to hell.

There's heat in the air but the temperature is nothing compared to the fire in his blood. Gannicus - or the creature formerly known as Gannicus - had worked himself in to a frenzy as he stalked the paltry remains of the Tribute pack, all sloughing skin and sharp needling teeth. There was no compassion in his eyes - nothing nearly as human as mercy - and the limited part of his mind that remained was only fixed on one thing: to attack, to kill, to rip and rend flesh and somehow satisfy that all-consuming craving for blood.

ii. closed to Sabriel. ( penultimate week )

He had blood on his hands - blood under his nails, blood in his teeth. There was no finesse left to Gannicus, nothing of the talent and skill behind his movements. It was just pure violence and unsatisfiable blood lust that drove him forwards now, forward to finding his next victim, whoever they may be.

Sabriel was in the wrong place and the wrong time. There was nobody left within Gannicus to remember the promise he had made her - to protect, to watch her back, to keep an eye on the rest of her journey throughout the arena. His word was trampled down in to some small, forgotten place as the ghoulish beast that Gannicus had turned in to took control of his every thought and movement. With grey, hairless skin stretched tight and a smile too sharp to be real he bared his teeth and recalled the name of the young woman that he now stalked.

"Sabriel..."

iii. closed to Ellie. ( final week )

After Sabriel's purge and with his mind returned to him, Gannicus could finally think - and, worst of all, he could feel.

Guilt reigned, black and heavy and darkly crowing you are a man who thinks only for himself from somewhere nasty in the depths of his mind. He had killed Sabriel - he had killed Nasir - and although Gannicus has never shied away from the idea of killing those he loved he is overwhelmingly certain that neither of them received the glorious death they deserved. It had been vicious and ignoble, committed at the hands of a monster, devoid of any honour. Both had deserved better. Better deaths, and a far better friend.

Feeling was not something that Gannicus was particularly fond of - emotions were better dealt with through the dim haze of wine and absinthe, where they would feel far less potent and were much more easily ignored. As a monster he had been happily stripped of all conscience and all thought - his actions hadn't been his own, they had ultimately been those of his new masters. The Gamemakers were to blame, not him. Not Gannicus. There had been nothing of Gannicus in the man that slaughtered his friends and stripped them of any chance of a glorious death.

Or so he reasoned. Bleakly, he resigned himself to dim hope that maybe if he thought it through hard enough he might eventually believe it in time.

With the Arena literally going to hell around him it wasn't a particularly good time for Gannicus to wrestle with the intricacies of a slave's culpability at the whims of his master; the way that the arena was shifting and falling apart around him seemed a fitting - if terrifying - backdrop to the hell of having to deal with his guilt. He had no weapon and he had no more allies - all had been lost to the arena, leaving Gannicus with very little more to lose.

iv. closed to Garrus ( final week )

The arena splitting itself open at the seams, billowing odd fires that seemed to rage in the most oddly restrained way that Gannicus had ever seen. Contained but somehow lethal, they illuminated every jagged crack and abyss that seemed to open up even beneath Gannicus's very feet as he stalked the gross mockery that the dead little town had turned in to. Still weaponless, still battered and bleeding and somehow alive against all odds, Gannicus new that there could now only be a small handful of Tributes left. The end was near - so very painfully near - and he was determined to see this through to the very end.

The Tributes that remained had other plans, of course.