There's No Place for the Heart to Hang [Closed]

[pimpcanes]

WHO| Black Tom, Aang and Kristoff; Black Tom and Alex Murphy
WHAT| Tom makes three more kills.
WHEN| Last week, and week three.
WHERE| Various places in the mall.
WARNINGS| Death, violence, child death in particular.

For Alex

Thus far, Alex has failed to eliminate Molotov, Ampora and Milo, which has led Tom to become, dare he say it, bored with his cyborg henchman (and how else would he think of such a compliant ally?). While Alex had made short work of the American girl, since then it's been more of an inconvenience than anything else to hunt down the robot officer and feed lies to him.

Tom is always very certain of when he decides it's time to kill somebody, and this time it's as he's making his getaway from the food court he bombed earlier. He's very calculating in his murderous arithmetic. He considers his number of opponents, the effort it would take to really frame each of them, the inefficiency of relying on a minion he has to keep up a facade for. Normally when he had an attack dog to sic on someone, it was Cain, and no pretense was involved except for keeping from rolling his eyes too much at his partner's dim wit.

It astonishes him, sometimes, how much he misses the oaf. He sometimes finds himself explaining things in his head that he already knows, as if preparing to break down the logic for someone much less sharp than him. He's almost disappointed when he has no one to share it with, no one to appreciate the products his mind manufactures.

The question becomes, now, how to kill off a robotic police officer. Tom doesn't have a clue yet. When he approaches Alex this morning, looking over his shoulder and affecting that concerned-citizen persona, it's with the intent of ferreting out such an answer.

For Kristoff and Aang

By the time the last week of the Arena rolls around, Tom's doing fairly well for himself. Bored and restless, but fed, supplied with enough water to avoid the hallucinogens, and even well-rested. The ringing in his ears from the alarms a few weeks ago have finally faded.

He understands that idleness, however, won't endear him to the crowd. As he's already long lost any good will as either an underdog or as a lovable, harmless rogue, he may as well live up to his nature, and that means emerging from the cozy cove of the bookstore and going hunting.

The mall has mostly been emptied now, his competitors fallen, immortalized in harmless mannequin that steadily populate A Touch of Class. Even with the music piping in nonstop, everything feels quiet, and he suspects his footsteps may even be too loud, the slight unevenness from his limp all the more evident when the sound seems so stark. He holds Molotov's carbine in one hand, cocked and loaded. He has a knife in his belt.

After the morning yields nothing, he camps out at the food court, hunkering behind one of the trash cans and waiting to see if anyone comes for their meal.

Comments

[yourmove]

For all his upgrades and hardware, all the billions sunk into his chassis, Alex can't read the dishonesty Mr. Cassidy has continually fed him. When he makes his usual rounds and spots the man waving him over, looking concerned and agitated, he doesn't suspect anything but the usual - helpful tips, updates on his own emotional and physical health.

"What can I assist you with, Mr. Cassidy?" Alex marches over, coming to a stop. His good eye roves at the store behind Tom before it slides back to his face. No sign he's under immediate distress, as far as he can tell.

[pimpcanes]

"I was actually wondering if I could assist you." Immediate distress, no, but Tom does a very good job of affecting someone who's actually getting slowly run down by the stress of the Arena, the way someone who wasn't hardened through decades of superhero battles and close scrapes with the law and worse would. Playing possum, or some sort of equivalent, has been a necessary talent in his line of work.

"I need something to do aside from waiting in the cellular store for the next maniac to come in and attempt a murder. I was hoping you had a suggestion for a distraction. Any gap in your capabilities that I could help you fill." He sighs, then looks back over his shoulder again. "Please. I need to do something or I'll lose my mind in this awful place."

[trollroyalty]

Everything has been a blur the past few days, a blur that never seems to end and the hours drag on and on for Kristoff. It's ridiculous, he should feel some measure of happiness that Anna's out of the arena but all he can think of is her face on the mannequin and the knowledge that only those who had died had that happen. That meant Anna had died, and that he hadn't been there to... stop it, preferably, or at the very least be there for her when she passed. It's an echo of running across the fjords, using all his strength to try and reach her and watching her turn to ice right before his eyes. It's that same crushing emptiness and it consumes him.

It's really only his size that deters others from coming near him, because frankly he isn't in the right state at all for a fight. Thoughts are sluggish and he doesn't even think to check his surroundings when he enters the food court, blinking slowly instead as he looks around dully. He should eat, is the half formed thought, but there's no appetite there, nor is there any concern in his face when he coughs into his hand and sees the blood splatter against his fingers, Kristoff looking dully at the red before wiping his hand off and stepping further into the food court.

[yourmove]

That seems fair. It's also good that Mr. Cassidy understands he can undergo emotional distress and recognize there are ways to remedy that. It's a level of foresight that Alex finds lacking in this Arena.

"Of course. Here."

Alex holds out his hand, fingers uncurling one by one with soft clicks to show a small metal vial nestled in his palm. Just like that, he signs over his life to Tom.

"Glucose solution that I require for my nutritional intake. I can walk you through the steps to inject it into my chassis. I'm told it's...distracting." At least according to Clara. Alex motions for Mr. Cassidy to join him in the store, searching the racks and behind the counter for a chair or a stool he could stand on to get a better look at the back of his neck. Finding a beat up metal stool, Alex places it on the floor and indicates that Mr. Cassidy step on it. He turns his back, presenting his neck, the graphene plates scored from the impact with the Hummer days ago.

[pimpcanes]

Sometimes, Tom's had to fight and scramble for these little advantages, to search for handholds in a situation like a climber seeking crevices for their fingers. Often he's wriggled his way into an optimal position through tenacity or wit or charisma or creativity or experience, surviving and thriving despite odds stacked against him.

And sometimes things just come horribly easily. If he were a baby bird, the universe would be dropping the worm right into his mouth right now. There's no satisfaction in it, and yet Tom feels as if somehow he's earned this lately, through God knows what trials he considers himself to have suffered through.

He makes sure no one else is around them as he takes the vial and gets up on the stool. He doesn't particularly like balancing on these sorts of things, but it's a minor concern. He places a hand on Alex's metal shoulder as he gets up there.

"Alright, now what?"

[pimpcanes]

He's somewhat surprised to hear the coughing; he's aware of the toxic dust floating around on the third floor, and yet he didn't think anyone would be disoriented enough to stay there, what with the mall so unpopulated by this point. Then again, Tom has a master key, and that certainly opens up more safe places to him than most of the other Tributes have access to.

He waits, choosing between the knife and the gun. Kristoff's weakened, clearly, if the heavy footfall and coughing is any indication. Tom could save himself some ammunition through a more intimate approach. He pulls the knife from his belt, sets the carbine down, and, when Kristoff is close enough, lunges up from his hiding space with the blade swinging.

[yourmove]

"Unscrew the cap. Prime it by thumbing the green button," Alex repeats himself as if he's talking to Clara, right down to the inflection in his voice. It takes no strain on his systems at all to support the man's weight on his shoulder. "Turn the circular end toward the socket at the back of my neck. Align. Once it's aligned, all you need to do is hit the green button again."

He bends his head slightly forward so Mr. Cassidy can have optimal access to the port. When he does so, he reveals a small socket ringed with titanium, right where he said it would be. The motion also reveals a small chip against the back of his head, where the spine should meet the skull. The transmitter's red light winks almost lazily at Tom.

Alex closes his good eye, trusting Mr. Cassidy to follow the instructions. Even with his eye shut, he can still access his HUD. Or one side of it: Venus's hot oil attack damaged his other one, melting the wiring so badly it's inoperable.

[trollroyalty]

Toxic dust had never been something Kristoff had needed to worry about. Living in the mountains, the air was fresh, and even if it wasn't so, he hasn't had a house for a long time. Sure he had found his throat with a tickle, that had slowly become a cough but the two and two hadn't been added together.

Nor does he thinks to disguise his footsetps, something he can do. He walks on ice he knows how to carry his weight but the ground is solid under his feet and he just. Doesn't care. Can't find it in him to care in the slightest. He's out of it painfully so so that when Tom launches himself at him it takes him a second too many to react, Kristoff jerking back sluggishly, with a sharp, "What the hell?" followed by a hiss as the blade bites into the flesh of his palm and he yanks back again, eyes wide at the blood on his hand.

He doesn't think, doesn't let himself think before swinging his fist, all his weight behind the below in an attempt to clock Tom one, enough to disorientate him so Kristoff can leave.

[pimpcanes]

It's really a fantastic device, and though robotics are hardly Tom's specialty, he can't help but appreciate the technical expertise that went into designing the chassis. He wonders if he would have recovered better from his 'accident' with bionics, rather than with the experimental plant matter that eventually turned against his body, that led to years of medical battles and compromised sanity. Maybe his life, or at least the last ten years of it, would have turned out different, less lonesome, less 'dramatic'.

Or maybe he'd be dead.

He lines up the circular end, but he doesn't press the green button. Instead, he pauses, weighing a potential future where he isn't fast enough, where Alex turns around and breaks his neck. He weighs one where he just does as asked here, and Alex eventually finds out about the crimes Tom's committing, and he ends up with his neck broken anyway.

Really, it's not a difficult decision when everything's balanced and measured. He moves quickly. He brings a knife he had up his sleeve, carefully hidden whenever he visits Alex, out and in one deft motion, pries the transmitter up.

[yourmove]

The effect is immediate.

Alex doesn't convulse, he doesn't cry out or gurgle - he simply collapses in a graphene heap, but he doesn't go straight down neatly. He pitches backward, knocking Tom off perch. The stool goes skittering across the floor as he pins Tom under all that chassis, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling as his HUD blacks out. [INITIATING REBOOT IN 60] blinks in red.

For now, though, Tom has two billion dollars of cyborg helpless, provided he can squirm out from under Alex in time. Alex lies sprawled where he's fallen, looking almost corpse like with his glassy, unseeing eyes, and the way his skin looks almost plastic underneath the light.

[pimpcanes]

"Damn!"

Tom wasn't expecting Alex to drop like a sack of bricks, and the several hundred pounds of chassis trapping him are heavy enough that he worries that he's broken bones. His bad leg throbs with pain. He tries to wriggle out and finds that it's going to take longer than he previously imagined.

But he doesn't need to squirm all the way out yet to finish the job. He finishes prying the transmitter out and gets to the bloodier work. He doesn't know the precise mechanisms animating the remains of Alex's body, but he goes through a method that would seem suitable for the most brutal butcherings. He cuts Alex's throat. He drives the knife through both eyes. He cuts the glucose channel from Alex's neck and unscrews the HUD, which stops meting out a countdown. He cuts across the back of the neck, deep between vertebrae. More than sixty seconds pass. Alex doesn't rise.

It's not out of sadism but efficiency, and Tom finds little pleasure in this kill. He's more annoyed than anything else. This should have been a moment of perfect satisfaction and now it's just inconvenient. He starts to wiggle and shove his way out from under the metal corpse.

He finally crawls out from under Alex, feeling rather than seeing the bruises pooling in his hip and leg. A roomba bumps his leg and he shoves it aside. It whirls around and bumps Alex, who, despite his weight, doesn't seem immune to the coaxing from the little robot herd that's begun shoving him towards the escalator.

Tom doesn't stay to watch. He's going to need new clothes, clothes not drenched in someone else's blood.