thearena | let's dig a hole in the sand, brother

let's dig a hole in the sand, brother

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.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Weeks in the Arena had taken their toll on Sabriel- even the advantage of being able to eat as much fruit and drink as much water as she could purify didn't offset the exhaustion of spending weeks looking over her shoulder, dealing with muttations.

She needed to sleep soon, but hadn't found a safe spot- and wasn't paying quite as much attention as she ought to as she stepped into the ruins of a building.

He had spotted her from afar, picking her way in to the crumbling ruins of a house. The frenzy for blood that seemed to have taken hold of his every thought and movement pushed him in to a staggering, stumbling run that closed the distance between them quickly.

He didn't announce his presence, nor did he give her any time to prepare herself. There was so little of Gannicus left - both bodily and mentally - that he barely had the thought to try and voice her name again with his broken, deformed mouth. With pale, unnatural eyes wide with madness he bodily threw himself at the girl, hands clawing and sharp as one went to drag her to him by the hair and the other moved to try to seize her throat.

He was dead.

He was gone.

It wasn't him, but....

He was dead.

Rosalind staggered vaguely through the Arena now, weakened with hunger and thirst, clinging to her makeshift nail bat as if it were the last thing holding her together. It was caked in blood. His blood. So were her clothes.

She spotted the creature and contemplated it for a beat, remaining in plain sight. It was going to notice her, and she knew that. She reeked of blood and looked so slight, so frail...easy pickings.

He was dead.

She hefted the nail bat, mustering up the energy for what she knew would be her last fight.

Edited 2014-07-13 01:42 (UTC)

He had somehow made it to the end once again; the arena eating itself and pulling itself apart as he did his best to finish setting one of the last trip wires to his bombs. It was a desperate situation and with how weak he was from starvation, he knew that he couldn't outrun even half of the tributes that were left.

Instead he was working a way around it, and hopefully he'd have half a fighting chance this time.

In a situation where it was so painfully clear that his opponent had given up hope then perhaps Gannicus might have stepped back and re-assessed. There was no glory in destroying those who had already destroyed themselves simply by believing so. A hopeless death was a miserable thing; Gannicus, in his prime, wanted his victims to face him with passion and strength and go out of this world kicking and screaming and cursing his name.

But Gannicus wasn't home. The creature he had turned in to relished blood, and hope had nothing to do with that. Blood was blood, regardless of the state of the miserable heart that pumped it.

The beast was weaponless but that didn't matter. The beast didn't care. The beast was beyond needing weapons now. The nail bat could have been a pillow for all he cared as Gannicus - or what was left of him - came at the woman in a low, inelegant run, fangs bared and all muscles coiled and tense as he lunged for her midsection in a savage tackle.

During his time in the arena Gannicus had come across more than his fair share of aliens. Monsters, he had thought them all, and he'd attacked them all with the same mixture of fear and disgust. Now - looking much worse than any alien creature with his wet, grey skin and corrupted teeth - Gannicus was in hardly any place to throw stones. Still, his shock and revulsion at coming across Garrus was clear, even with the ruin of his face and teeth.

Garrus could have been doing anything, really - the concept of bombs and wires and trips was so painfully beyond Gannicus's comprehension that Garrus could have spent a whole day patiently explaining what he was doing and Gannicus still wouldn't understand.

With the arena still falling in and on itself around them, Gannicus tried to approach as stealthily as he could. Crouched low and breathing raggedly around the savage teeth that eating the arena fruit had given him, he inched forward in the cover of a jagged outcrop of warped sidewalk in his attempt to sneak closer to the alien. One more death didn't seem too hard a task - with a bit of luck, the monster would die just as easily as any normal man.

The arena had already been handing Garrus the worst cards, but he was focused on his task. It was his last line of defence as everything was crumbling around him. He was not going to go out slow and painful like the last arena, if anything he was going to go instantly.

Even focused on his task, he was listening for things going on around him. Years of military training going to good use, there was something that was nagging him, and maybe it was a scuff of a foot on pavement but it had him looking up. Sharp eyes looked for anything out of place for a moment, before her went back to the bomb, setting the wire and arming it.

He held his breath as the man - the creature - looked up. The brief moment felt like an eternity as Gannicus crouched as still as stone in the deepest of shadows, and when Garrus resumed his work Gannicus let out a silent breath of relief. In one fluid move he bent down to retrieve a lump of rubble - a rock, crudely formed - and he hefted it loosely in one hand.

The Tribute before him was little more than the strange beasts that had been plaguing them all arena long, as far as Gannicus was concerned. Either way, he was going to have to be executed.

He steeled himself for a heartbeat, then moved. Gannicus fell silently from the shadows with his rock upraised in one hand, hoping to smash it across his enemy's head and knock him to the ground.

Ellie was not well. Everyone she loved was dead (again), and she could barely think beyond the unreasoning anger and hatred. She was covered in dried blood (half her own, half others) and she was a feral, wild thing, having long since succumbed to eating the arena's food. Everything around her were monsters, and she needed to survive. That was all she needed.

Endure and Survive, Endure and Survive, Endure and Survive.

She kept to the shadows and to the fog, the sweat rolling down her spine as she swatted at invisible flies. She was hungry - starving, really - and she was furious.

And then she saw him.

She didn't know him. Even if she had, she probably wouldn't have cared at this point. A brief thought flashed through her head. Food. Maybe he had food. She raised her knife - everything else long since abandoned - and crept towards him as quietly as she could manage.

The creature was coming towards him - running with careless gait, snarling and feral and much, much larger than her. She had fought many men much larger than her in the past. Her lean muscles shifted beneath her firm skin as she lifted the nail bat for a swing.

Alone.

He was gone.

The thought that echoed on repeat through her mind like a broken Voxophone stopped her up, and she didn't swing the bat down towards Gannicus until he was already lunging at her. She didn't dodge, didn't do anything else to resist the strike.

He was gone. She killed him.

He impacted with a grunt and a smash of flesh - bleeding and torn but solid as any rock - upon flesh as Gannicus tackled her to the ground. He took the swing of the bat in his stride, ignoring the sting and tear of nails through flesh as it embedded itself soundly in the crook of his shoulder and his neck. There was soft skin there - soft and sinewy and screaming at the bite of the nails through its delicate fabric - but Gannicus really didn't care. All the beast inside cared about is somehow satisfying the monstrous new appetite that seemed to have taken hold.

Whatever emotional agonies Rosalind was going through were completely lost on Gannicus; all he wanted to do is tear and rend, regardless of any annoying little moral complexities.

They fell to the ground as one, Rosalind below and Gannicus fiercely attached on top. His fingers curled in to claws as he tore at her throat and her eyes, anywhere soft and delicate. The nail bat had given him ideas, it seemed.

Shoulders sagging against the continual effort of having to deal with his injuries and his actual emotions, Gannicus could barely muster the energy to keep himself on guard. There was something resigned and fatalistic about the way that he slumped wearily as he traversed what was left of the arena as it descended in to hell.

A sound, a movement - he isn't sure what it is that suddenly has him pulling his gaze up and about sharply. Gannicus squints in to the rubble and the ruins around him; there was something - someone - out there. Maybe.

"Remove yourself," He blindly chanced as he called out, rasping around the misshapen remnants of the teeth that had been forced out of place by his monstrous transformation. Fingers curled wearily in to fists; bare knuckle was his favourite, he had to forcefully remind himself. "And perhaps I will stay fucking hand against untimely death."

He felt something was wrong, deeply wrong, and turning his head he caught the shadow a split second before the rock made contact with his head. Pain ricocheted from his fringe and down the side of his face. Based on sheer trained reflex, he rolled to the side and swiped out his leg, trying to catch the assailant off guard to knock him down.

For the first time he got a decent look at the person hiding in the shadows and Garrus knew there wasn't a chance in this hell that he could fight him off with the condition he was in. He didn't think twice, trying to get back around toward the tripwire he had set. He was not going to be beaten to death again.

How long had he been in this arena? It felt like months - a campaign, more than the kind of brief arena brawl that Gannicus was used to. He was tired - exhaustion chilled him to the very bone - but he didn't feel it until that very moment that Garrus swiped out his leg and knocked Gannicus to the ground. He fell heavily, and for the briefest of moments he nearly enjoyed the fact that he was lying flat out on the ground in the dust. It was more rest than he had allowed himself for weeks.

But he was a gladiator through and through. Rolling, he scrambled on to all fours and launched himself at his opponent even as the larger man - creature, still, now that Gannicus can look at him more closely - turned and tried to get away. Gannicus had no idea where it was Garrus was trying to get to, but he bodily threw himself at him anyway in a low tackle despite the ringing in his ears and the screaming tiredness in his muscles.

Garrus was not expecting the tackles and went down, grappling with Gannicus to get him off of him. It required more effort than Garrus wanted to admit, scrabbling around in the dirt, trying to dislodge the other man from him so he could reach the tripwire. They were so close that the blast would kill them both instantly, but the slim silver wire was just out of reach.

Twisting himself in the dirt, Garrus brought up sharp talons, sinking them into Gannicus' side to try to cause him enough pain to loosen his grip even for a moment.

The puncture of talons in the soft skin of his ribs draws a roar of pain and frustration from Gannicus. His grip falters as he attempts to shrink away from their sharp bite, twisting and rolling off of Garrus as exhaustion begins to set in and he loses his balance on top of the alien.

He has no idea what the alien is reaching for - a weapon, Gannicus assumes, but defeat isn't something that he is going to take lightly. It's all he can do simply to kick and punch at whatever spare bit of Garrus he can reach, but he finds himself flailing uselessly against dust and rock more than making any mark upon his target.

Garrus hadn't gone against such a fierce opponent in a long time. This was certainly challenging for him, twisting away from the blows and trying to get in a couple of his own on Gannicus to knock him back and keep him from doing any serious damage.

Seeing his opening in Gannicus' flinch away from his talons, Garrus scrambles and lunges, grabbing for the sleek wire. His fingers close around it as he casts a glance at Gannicus to see where he is. Garrus is damn sure he wants to take both of them in one move when he pulls the wire.

As they hit the ground, Rosalind lost her grip on the nail bat, leaving it buried in the creature's neck - but it didn't matter. She knew already that she was about to die, and she didn't care.

She killed him.

When nails tore through her flesh, however, the pain won out over her poise and apathy. She screamed and writhed beneath the bigger beast, shrieks rising in volume as his fingers reached in and dug out her eyesight. It hurt. It hurt so much, and she was about to die alone, without him -

He was gone.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

let's dig a hole in the sand, brother

II

sorry sabs :c

i.

IV

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

iii. sorry i'm so late sob

no subject

no subject

NEVER BE SORRY <3

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject