thearena | The End of The Road For Someone. The Start of One For Someone Else.

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The End of The Road For Someone. The Start of One For Someone Else.

WHO | Howard and Tony
WHAT | How To Make Friends... Or Not
WHEN | After the earthquake.
WHERE | Somewhere in the woods
WARNING/NOTES| Death and possible sads.

He's stopped counting days, but Tony is fairly certain this is the longest he's lasted inside an arena. He'd feel better about that if he wasn't half-way certain he was dying. And not because he was afraid someone was about to bash in his brain with a radioactive brick, either. No, there was a sickness eating it's way through him. He knew what that felt like. It was a hauntingly uncomfortable familiar feeling, but this was it.

Sometimes, he hated being right about everything.

Still though, Tony's never been one to just lay down and take much of anything. So he sits by the stream and lets his water bottle fill. And waits. Tries to decide on his next move.

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"Right." He struggles back to his feet. It's clearly a difficult task, and he has to pause and breathe deep once he's done so to keep from retching up the handfuls of water he's managed to keep down today.

It's strange, he thinks. Two weeks in a deathmatch and no ones tried to kill him. Wyatt let him get away, and here this new stranger is playing the part of the reluctant nurse. It wasn't other people but the elements that did him in.

He takes uncoordinated steps back to the water, vision swimming with fever. Strange thoughts roll and lick through his head, overheated misfires about whether he could get a childproof cap open in this state, whether he remembered to lock the door back home, whether Tony's spent half as much time damning the reasons he's here as Howard has.

"What's your name?" It seems like the right question to ask.

Tony helps him back to the stream as best he can, without getting too close - hard not to be always on guard during a game where everyone is supposed to be trying to kill you - and then, down near the water. Then he lowers himself and takes off the bag he has strapped to his back. "Uh... Tony," he says, his head a thousand miles away from this place, running a thousand different scenarios in his head. Harder to do the math with the fever burning through him. "Stark," he clarifies, as though that would mean anything to the kid at all. Even though it probably wouldn't. For all Tony knew, the kid could be from Mars in another dimension.

Why was he life full of situations were even considering that to be an actual possibility...?

"You must be new here," he says, deadpan. Its a terrible, terrible joke. "Howard, right? Heard your announcement the other day. Not a great way to be welcomed to Panem, is it? Welcome: kill people or die. Things just keep getting better. At least they used to give a guy a bit of a warning."

"Tony Stark. Sounds like you'd own a steakhouse."

Howard catches maybe half of what Tony's saying, but something about it's comforting. Maybe because it's a break from that oppressive silence, listening with keen ears for any possible danger. Maybe it's just being able to talk to another human being and really not caring if he's about to be stabbed in the back - the benefit of knowing you're screwed is that it takes a bit of the pressure to be vigilant off.

God, he doesn't want to think about that, and he doesn't want to cry again, because it's such a paltry gesture compared to the enormity of dying. So he laughs at Tony's bad jokes instead. It's a dry, brittle sound. "Yeah. Or even kill people, die anyway. And they don't even give us gift baskets when we leave the party..."

He runs his hand under the water, shuddering. He gets back to his knees and supports himself on his other hand. "Sorry, I just need to..."

And then he collapses with a shudder and a small splash, unconscious, face half-submerged in the water.

"Something like that," Tony laughs as he digs through his bag in search of a few supplies; what was left of the medicine, and his sharp folding knife.

"No, it's more like -" and then Howard collapses and Tony isn't near enough to even try and catch him. "Shit."

He can't afford to lose either of them, so he sets them back down before he scrambles to pull Howard from the stream.

He's both freezing and burning up. Not good signs at all.

Howard's dimly aware that he's being lifted from a cold place to a slightly less cold place. He coughs a bit on the water as Tony pulls him to relative safety. The cold shock has done nothing to clear his mind, instead scrambling it further.

His mind melts into a pool of dreams. He's chasing a brightly-colored bird but when he catches it, it's not a bird at all, but live, writhing worms sewn together, and they wrap around his arms like sleeves. Then they disintegrate into spots of light that dance in the space between his eyeballs and his lids.

He gropes around blindly and finds Tony's wrist. He latches onto it - he's never believed in angels, but he believes he has a protector, at the moment, and that's something he wants to hold onto.

"Sorry, Dad. I know you had work today..." he murmurs. "I'll get my history test rescheduled for when I'm not sick."

It's not quite horror that washes across Tony's face, but shock is certainly there. There is an an initial reaction to try and wiggle away but this kid is scared and alone and dying and he's trying hang onto the fact that he can still be a good person, in the end. Because he has to believe that. Especially here.

"It's alright... uh... buddy," Tony hesitates and settles the kid as far from the stream as he could without dragging him across the rocks, "Why don't you get some rest and I will fix you up."

He shifts, reaching back for his bag of supplies, and slides them back in his direction.

Howard stays where Tony sets him, shoulders hunched but head laying in the dirt as if all the muscles in his neck had been cut. He shivers a little but other than than that and the slight jerk in his wrist when he lets go of Tony, doesn't move. He keeps his cut palm tilted up to the sun, as if on some instinctual level trying to keep the dirt away.

And then he remembers that none of that matters, because there will be no ER and no school nurse and no one to save him. That's some guy named Tony, not his father - his father left a year and a half ago, along with his mother. Tony, some guy who might have killed him if he hadn't been letting nature take its course, but some guy lending him vital, futile medicine all the same.

What's the point, out here? Why is Tony bothering? Howard thinks it would be easier to just walk away, if the positions were reversed, but then again he's been called heartless a few times, cold a few more. Maybe he'll never really understand it; it's not as if he has much time to learn now.

He can feel it moving like roots up through him. He wants to ignore it and deny that it's the feeling of shutting down. He wants to pretend that it's not the dreadful sense of irreparable things happening inside him. He exhales and his breath feels cold. He realizes a trail of froth is dripping from the corner of his mouth but he lacks the ability to remember how to lick it away.

"Thanks," he says, although he doesn't know if Tony hears him. His eyes are closed and the world around him is fragile, like wet tissue paper, so he can't tell how close.

Its an oddly difficult thing to resist; reaching over and just giving him the medicine.

But it was too late, and Tony knew it. It hadn't seemed so at first, but Tony's earlier estimation of a few days for the kid turned out to be vastly overestimated. To give this kid medicine would be just as equal to throwing it out altogether. It wouldn't save him. Wouldn't even help him. He was too far gone and the only things Tony could do for him now were either to sit here and not let this scared kid die completely alone, or just put him out of his misery.

And his folding knife was so close...

"Yeah, sure, whatever. Hey..." he moves as if to grab something. "Its gonna be ok, you know. It doesn't seem like it now. But it is."

"Forgot my latchkey..." He can't keep track of what's happening or where he is, nor can he keep from whimpering at the pain racking his body. At least pain and delirium is something better than fear - some part of him deep down knows to be terrified. He doesn't want to think about the fact that soon, it might all be over. All the hopes and dreams he had, all the ones he gave up in the last year, now gone for certain.

"That ok," Tony isn't even sure what the kid is talking about, really, but he's still debating on what he wants to do, and so he stays near by. Close enough to pat the kid on the shoulder. "It's not important right now. Just... try and relax."

He jerks his head a bit, as if he's trying to nod and isn't quite using the right muscles. His eyes open and he stares dully at the ground before closing them again. A groan of pain ekes out of his chest, but other than that he's mostly quiet. He register that Tony's patting him on the shoulder, and that that hurts too, but he doesn't resist it.

Try and relax. Try not to panic about how helpless he is right now, how anything could happen and he could be dead in a second, about how it doesn't actually matter because he'll be dead soon anyway. And he has no idea what comes after that. He doesn't have religion to cling to.

Maybe death is just being buried alive and helpless to stop it, like the zombie girl they kept in their basement. Maybe he'll wake up in the pitch black under feet of dirt and have to worm and claw his way to the surface. The image of her flashes in his mind, of the dirt stuck in her teeth and the blood around her cuticles.

The convulsions begin as if a physical response to thinking of that nightmarish memory. His eyes go wide and his body spasms, completely beyond his control. He makes a choking sound as the saliva on his cheek is joined by more froth.

"Ah... shit" Tony mumbles and scrambles away as the kid starts to twitch. He's pretty sure being near him is only going to make it worse.

And then the hacking comes and Tony knows it's only blinding pain for the kid from here on out.

Its pity that moves him; drives him back towards the dying young boy.

"Look. Um..." he scrambles around on the cold wet ground to get back a little closer. "You'll thank me for this later, I hope. But this is about to get real bad."

The knife is near and sharp and Tony is stronger and faster than most people give him credit for. And perhaps most importantly: Tony knows quite a good deal about the human heart. Where it is and it's vitality and just how very fragile it can be.

He wants it to be quick for him. Its the least he can do. For the kid. And for himself. They are the most interesting thing on television right now, and anyone keeping score back home knows as well as he does, this will be his first kill in this arena or any other before now.

This will be good for them both.

That's what he has to tell himself as he feels the hot red blood on his hands. "Hope to catch you on the flipside, kid," he says to the boy almost hopefully, and even almost smiles. "It's better there."

Had Tony not intervened, Howard may have lasted a little while longer. Not much longer, given the condition he's in, but maybe an hour, maybe a little less. Whatever time he may have gotten would have been agony, filled with seizures and choking. The human body will fight against death even when the mind prays for release.

But Tony knew what he was doing with the knife, so the death is fast instead. It takes ten seconds. Howard doesn't even truly understand what happened or how the sudden lancing pain in his chest relates to the sudden cessation in everything. It's as if the lights have been switched off. He spasms a few more times; his vision goes from red to black; he's beyond hearing words but suddenly, he's beyond even hearing syllables. The awareness of dying is replaced not by a poignant last thought, but by a scribble of unrelated images, like dregs of tea caught in a drain that's sucked in anything of value.

He doesn't even bleed that much. Without his heart pushing it around anymore, blood just leaks out from the force of gravity, onto Tony's hands and the rocks in the stream and down with the water.

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The End of The Road For Someone. The Start of One For Someone Else.

It happens! And your Tony is worth the wait

saligbosfiobsfiusou <3 !

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