thearena | It's always the quiet ones

Entry tags:

It's always the quiet ones

Who | Bruce Banner and YOU
What | There are biographies of him. They must be destroyed.
Where | The Bookstore.
Where | First day of the arena, after the Cornucopia
Warnings | References to past attempted suicide and violence, probably.

At first, Bruce had just glanced through the books in hopes of finding something out about the Capitol. When he realized they were books about the Tributes, he found his own.

Some weren't very bad. Many of them had information he never wanted anyone else to see. Those had to go.

He piled all the painfully accurate books on him he could find--he would have to sweep through the store again after he had finished with this batch--and started to rip them apart. It wasn't the frenzied, messy tearing that one might expect. It was methodical. He tore out pages at a time, then ripped apart the pages until they were fluttering debris with unfinished sentences and sad little inklings of the truth he was hiding. It was quiet, measured, and his face didn't show hint of all the things he felt.

How dare the Capitol plaster their personal business everywhere like tabloids.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Fortunately, Natasha found the bookstore early on and happened to collect every copy that had her name on it. At least she hoped to have done so--there's no telling if they would be mad enough to restock them in the middle of an Arena. Actually no, she's willing to bet they will.

She'll have to swing by the bookstore more often.

Seems she's not the only one who is experiencing trouble when it comes to fictional stories. Maybe he picked up something a little too close to home? Sneaking up behind him, she plucks a book from over his shoulder just to see his reaction.

After having the Initiate stay in a safe hiding place, Homura went about her business She wasn't quite ready to go back to the Cornucopia - not yet, it was still quite vivid what happened - but she could find supplies to help out. Maybe other weapons, aside from the skate blades.

Or, in the case of the bookstore, kindling. Kindling worked, especially if the lights went out. Always a possibility. Keep warm, and especially, to warm up the Initiate. She'd managed to snatch up a few - and she was absolutely not tempted to read any of them, absolutely not, when she spotted the man ripping up the pages from the book.

Huh. Perhaps it was something embarrassing? A small piece of debris landed in the open palm of her injured, shaking hand. She didn't see who was ripping the books, save out of the corner of her eye, as she spoke.

"You're wasting paper, you know."

"Give it back." He turns in place to face her, still ripping the book in his hand. His eyes are on her, though, and his voice is stern, like a teacher's. Not angry or panicked or desperate, just stern.

And when he's facing her, it's clear that there's something wrong with his hands and arms. They're wrapped in bandages, giving off a mummy vibe, but whatever is wrong with them, it doesn't seem to keep him from tearing books apart.

Edited 2014-08-20 17:56 (UTC)

"They don't seem to have any recycling bins."

He didn't seem fazed by her voice, but he was paying attention, his eyes immediately darting towards the sound. His hands and arms were bandaged, so he'd be at a disadvantage if it came to a fight, but he could probably throw the average sized person long enough to run if he had to.

"Why are you destroying them?"

Clementine asks, from a small distance away. Enough distance that this stranger decide to turn and grab for her she can easily turn and flee back out of the store with a good lead on him if she has to.

Most people in the arena can be counted on not to harm children, not all of them though. In this situation it counts to play it safe.

The voice is too high. Too soft. His jaw clenches.

When he glances towards the sound, his suspicions are confirmed. He keeps the rage boiling in his gut from showing on his face. (He could rip apart the whole Capitol in this one moment. Child torturers and murderers. He wouldn't even feel bad.)

"Because they have a lot of personal details in them," he says softly. He's never liked lying to children, so he won't. "Details I would rather keep to myself until I choose to share them."

The remains of pages flutter down at his feet like inked snow.

"How old are you?"

That's a safe reaction to start with. It's the type of question people immediately ask on seeing her because they're upset at the sight of a child in this situation.

Clementine takes a few steps closer to him, glancing about the books. "They're about you?" she says. Books about a tribute... it must be something the Capitol has put into this arena to mess with them, meaning he's probably not the only one. "I'm eleven."

"I expect all the tributes have one. I found a few that belonged to people I don't know, but I didn't look for them."

He doesn't have a visible reaction to her age. His voice stays soft and his expression calm. He doesn't want to give her anything else to worry about when she's already in such an awful situation.

"Eleven? So you'd be... fifth or sixth grade?" He glances up at her from his book. She doesn't... feel eleven, if that makes sense. Her demeanor is very calm for such a young girl in such a horrible place. Had she been in previous arenas?

He wouldn't feel guilty for murdering the Gamemakers. That should scare him. It doesn't.

"You can come closer, if you like. I won't hurt you."

Clementine takes in that information with the idea that she needs to find hers if there is one, soon preferably. She's never been shy about telling people about her past, where she comes from but the Capitol likes to twist things. Also it's not the same if people read about it in a book as when she gets to tell them herself.

It's not hard to understand why he'd want to destroy them.

"I think so. I haven't been in school since first grade." she considers him for a moment and then nods, coming up to where he'd piled the books. "My name's Clementine."

"Clementine. It's very nice to meet you." He looks down at her, and the corners of his lips twitch into a rare smile. It's small and doesn't reach his eyes--it's clear from his face that he doesn't smile often--but it's sincere. "I'm Bruce."

She hadn't been in school since first grade. That would have been about three to four years out of school. She had an American accent, and it was illegal to deprive children of education so early in America. Maybe she was homeschooled? "What made you leave school so early?"

"You too." she gives Bruce a small smile in return.

He's probably not going to expect the answer he gets and Clementine takes a moment to think about how she's going to phrase it. "There aren't schools anymore where I come from, not since I was eight. Something bad happened then." she could leave it there but after another second decides to plunge onwards and explain fully. He'll probably ask anyway if she doesn't. "Dead people, we call them Walkers, they started getting up, started killing everyone. There's not many living people left."

He pauses in his tearing to frown down at her, his brow furrowing into ridges that have already been left by many frowns before it.

"You're telling me the zombie apocalypse actually happened?"

It sounds... cartoonish. But it is her reality, he can read it in her face. Maybe the calmness didn't come from the arena after all.

He chews the inside of his cheek, considering the implications. There's not many living people left. "You know, between the two of us, I bet we can destroy both our biographies pretty fast. If that's something you want."

He knows what it's like to have violence and sadness painting your history. He knows how to feels to want to make sure you are the one to reveal it, not anyone else.

"Everybody here keeps calling them that." Clementine says with a confused look. Until she'd come to this place she'd never encountered the word 'zombie' before in her entire life but without fail everyone she tells about Walkers brings up the word, yet all those people seemed to come from worlds where they didn't exist.

It was really strange.

"I'll see when I find it, how bad it is." Clementine decided. "I can help find if there's anymore of yours too, what's the cover like? I promise I won't look inside."

"Maybe you don't have that kind of thing in your world, but in mine, at least, there's a lot of media about the dead rising and ending the world. We call them zombies." And they're the most unrealistic horror movie fodder in the world, but considering she's apparently lived through one, he's going to refrain from saying that.

He gives her another small, rueful smile before closing the book, giving her a look at the cover.

"Personally, I think the cover could benefit from a redesign." He knows it'll probably pique her curiosity. He won't hold it against her if she asks questions.

"This is ridiculous." It's barely more than an amused mutter from behind the next shelf over, though Albert doesn't quite care of Bruce overhears. He'd come into the store when the other man was perusing the shelves and not in sight, only to find Bruce was there when he started to hear the tell-tale ripping of paper. Already having come in contact with the Capitol's brand of defamation, he leaves Bruce to his business in sympathy.

Of course he's morbidly curious about what they may have written for him and went in search. He wasn't disappointed. What he's uncovered is a travesty of hokey purple prose attempting to overshadow blatant pornographic content concerning himself and his fiance. If it wasn't so ridiculous (he may have been a cyborg, but a vibrate setting was never one of his functions) he might have been offended, but as it stands he can only laugh periodically at the printed trainwreck in his hands. He'll have to show this to Jet later.

He's got to wonder if anyone else appears in such caricature and so he moves a bit further up the aisle, looking for anything of note once he's stowed away a copy of the sleezy paperback. Bruce's name pops out at him when he gets near the end and while the doctor might be ripping apart volumes as Albert peruses, he has to conclude that if Bruce left the book, he must not care about this particular one.

Albert's quiet for a moment as he opens to a random page, and then...

"How many children?!"

Outwardly, Matt wouldn't seem to have much use for books. After all, he was blind, and without his glasses it was more obviously so. But he'd kept his heightened senses a closely guarded secret, one that he wasn't ready to reveal just yet. His acute hearing had let him overhear whispers from other Tributes, whispers which told him that the bookstore houses a library of biographies on each of the competitors. His first thoughts were not of using the books to his own advantage or of getting to know his enemies. No, no. Matt Murdock was a selfish man. Before anything else, he needed to find his own biography and rip it to shreds. His secrets were his own, damn it. He'd spent half of his adult life fighting to tuck his most personal life away again. He couldn't just be on display like that, not after everything he'd done back home to change things.

And so there he was, a blind man sorting through shelves of books, opening each one and running his fingers over the print to decipher the letters. It was time consuming, it was arduous. And every so often he'd paused to read whatever interesting passage he'd come across. But still, he'd yet to find the book he was looking for.

"I don't think anything like that existed in my world before it happened." But in every other world Walkers were fiction. "Where are they supposed to come from in your world?"

Clementine is perplexed, "It doesn't look like you." she tells him, squinting at the text. "You really did some bad things?"

Bruce immediately started laughing. Not chuckling, not snickering, but full-on belly laughs. He hasn't laughed that hard in years.

"You found that version?"

He leaves his tearing for a moment to move through the book shelves and face Albert, still smiling in amusement. He had heard Albert's grousing, but that tone meant he had found a certain book that had left Bruce rolling his eyes and putting it back on the shelf.

"It also says I'm an alien in a human suit."

Bruce took note of the blind man who walked in. He had frowned into his destruction of books, thinking about what kind of horrible people would put a blind person in a gladiator match. He didn't comment, though, since he doubted it was anything the man hadn't heard before, and just kept tearing.

Up until he realized that the man was looking for something. Probably his own secrets.

"If you tell me your name, I can just read through the spines and find your books," Bruce offered, still ripping as he did so. It might expedite the blind man's process a little bit. "I wouldn't read anything else."

"The origins change with the stories. Some say that necromancers did it. Others say it's a disease. Even others say it's science experiments gone wrong... Really, any theory you can think of to justify it."

His smile becomes a little sad. It's his eyes that change, falling into a familiar resigned melancholy. "Yes, I did. I work every day to make up for it, but sometimes you make mistakes and you can't fix them."

"Oh..." her face falls when he says that. It was silly of her really to expect that fictional stories from another world could give a solid answer on why it had happened to her own. Clementine didn't give much thought to why when she was back there, too busy surviving to question the nature of what had befallen her home but away from the Walkers it was easier to wonder just why it had to happen to them.

"It's okay." Clementine says quietly at his confirmation. She's thinking of Lee at Bruce's words, Lee who was one of the best people she'd ever known. Lee who had killed his wife and was on his way to prison when the Walkers happened and had been the one who kept her and a whole group of people safe and alive as long as he could.

He'd always tried to do the right thing, despite the mistakes he'd made. "Sometimes good people do bad things, it doesn't make you bad."

He wants to touch her. Maybe the back of her head or her shoulder. He never really wants to touch adults, only children. She looks like she might need it.

He keeps his hands to himself.

"I really hope that's the case with me." At a certain point, though, how many people can you accidentally kill before you can't make any claim to goodness?

"If you find any books with this cover, please give them to me."

He opens the book again and rips out another page, pausing before tearing it apart. "Do they have origami where you come from, Clementine?"

"You said you're trying to make up for what you've done, that's usually a good sign." It's the sadness she can see on his face that makes her want to offer out even what little assurance she can give. "I will."

Clementine has to consider that question for a moment, "I think I've heard the word before. What is it?"

Clementine is a good kid. Smart. Sweet. Too mature. It makes him hate the Capitol more.

"It's Japanese paper-folding. Someone I met taught me all about it. In Algeria, of all places. Let's see how much I remember."

He sits down next to her, gesturing for her to do the same before smoothing the free page on the cover of his book, beginning to fold the corners. "The idea is to take a piece of paper and make it into a sculpture. This friend of mine would always make fun of me because I'd make my origami unevenly."

He places a lopsided paper crane on the cover of the book, raising its bent head proudly. "Ah, you see? Maybe you can make a better one if I show you."

At the gesture for them to sit Clementine looks back to the door for a moment before deciding that it seems safe enough in here for now and doing as Bruce instructs. She lets her backpack slide off her shoulders and crosses her legs, leaning forward across them with her elbows resting on her thighs to observe the actions of his hands.

"Wow. That looks really neat!" Even if his crane is, as he said it would be, lopsided. Clementine is genuinely impressed at how he managed to turn a piece of paper into something like that. It shows clearly in her expression, "I'd like to try, please."

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 5

It's always the quiet ones

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject