thearena | [closed] And when it's time for you to die I'll let you know

Entry tags:

[closed] And when it's time for you to die I'll let you know

Who| Brock Samson and Molotov Cocktease
What| Hunting season
Where| Arena 13: Birch Forest and Meadow
When| Some day during Week 1, morning

In the Northeast section of the Arena, between meadows that were once filled with scrub grass and winter flowers but are now craggy with churned ice and snow over permafrost, there is a forest of white-barked birch trees. There are animals there, deer and elk and things like that. Smaller ones too, but they're not as useful -- Brock's planning on catching one of the big ones and then opening it up all Tauntaun-style.

He has some traps and weapons halfway constructed for this purpose. For twine he needs for traps, he's skinned the boots he came in with, having swapped them out for more suitable ones from the bag he snagged at the Cornucopia. The gifts from Swann completed the set, and he has the windbreaker bundled up with the rest of his supplies, near the broken-down camp. He's trying to make it without a tent, camping in the shelter of the trees instead -- it's equal parts stubbornness and paranoia, since staying in a tent seemed dangerous and claustrophobic without somebody to keep watch. (It was moot anyway, though; he'd been gifted with a great many things -- water, food, booze, a really great knife -- but not a tent.)

His camp is halfway broken down as he prepares to pack up and move on to find game. But, you know, nature doesn't wait for any man, so with his breath visible in the air, Brock retreats a little ways away from his camp to relieve himself. It'll take all of a few seconds, so he's not too worried.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Molotov is far better equipped for this Arena than most, and really, she's just sort of playing around right now, having found Tom and getting her supplies. Those are safely hidden, somewhere that only she can find them, but she refuses to use the six days' worth of food she's received while the hunting is still plentiful.

That's what she's doing now, humming quietly as she goes from tree to tree, keeping an eye on the distance for game, something substantial but not too big to be hauled back to her shared camp.

Instead, she sees bits and pieces of someone else's camp, and it shuts her up, taking her from leisurely hopping between branches to a rapid prowl, bringing her quickly to the campsite. There's no one around, but the backpack is obviously full, and Molotov's focus narrows onto it, the blinders setting in so that she can have a singular goal.

Her world seems to move in slow motion, but it is hardly half a minute before she has leapt to the ground, snapped up the knapsack and scaled back up the tree, taking off toward the sunnier parts of the Arena, the meadows where her campsite and Tom are. Whatever's in the backpack, it's better than nothing.

It's not that Brock is unaware of his surroundings in a general sense. In fact, since his arrival to this world, he has been on an almost constant high alert, paranoia and adrenaline feeding his reflexes and his thoughts. It's worse in the Arenas, when it's literally life-or-death instead of just a steady baseline level of fear and second-guessing. Being a spy means that he knows how to operate at this elevated level for longer than most people without having a straight-up nervous breakdown, but still. It's been months and he is starting to run on fumes.

It's maybe because of this that he got a little sloppy. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Either that, or he just figured that, you know, taking a morning leak is a sacred activity. He didn't even think he'd be attacked by cougars or whatever when he lumbered off to take a piss.

He sees something flicker in his peripheral vision and he whips his head around just in time to see some dark shape fleeing into the birch trees. A second quick glance at his camp tells him all he needs to know before he's swearing and charging after the thief, awkwardly tucking himself in as he goes.

Pulling the pack's straps over her arms gives Molotov a better range of motion and frees her hands up, allowing her to move faster, grab onto branches for traction, even use them to swing between trees when the gap is just a little too wide. Her breath comes in little white clouds as she goes, not even bothering to look back.

She is vaguely aware of someone chasing. It doesn't matter to her, because she is so singularly focused on putting distance between them as quickly as possible. Her hair is tucked into her winter cap, made of black fur, leaving only her bangs and a few short tendrils in the front out, saving her from the danger of branches catching in her hair. Her gloves are dark on the tree bark as she braces herself on jumps.

Her boots, she feels, are clunky, and she nearly wishes she was in bare feet for this run.

It's not the worst thing that could happen. At least he didn't get his throat slit and his shit stolen. There is a bright side.

But his weapons are in the pack. The pocket knife, the strips of hide, the hunting knife -- he could do without the food in his pack, but without weapons he couldn't hunt for more. Plus having a knife stolen from him like that is emasculating in the worst way. You don't do that to a man and his knife! But at least he's wearing his clothes, mostly because he sleeps with his boots laced up just in case. The gloves are in the pack, though, but he barely feels the wind biting at his bare hands for all his anger.

The birch trees are too small for him to climb, so he's stuck following on the ground, where the meltwater has turned everything into a muddy, sloppy mess. He slips a few times in his pursuit but manages not to fall on his face, just catches himself on clusters of trees and then continues. Fury is starting to blur the edges of his vision, and he growls wordlessly as he lowers his head and sprints to try and catch up. If the thief wasn't aware they were being followed by then, they should now. Brock's already imagining the feel of bones crunching in his bare hands.

She can tell she's being followed, but it doesn't matter. She only needs to keep running, because eventually the pursuer will either give up or lose her trail, particularly as she keeps changing course, almost like she's serpentining between the trees.

There is a brief moment where she glances over her shoulder as she lands on a tree, only long enough to catch a glimpse of the body coming after her, but she is smiling behind her puff of breath in the air, entertained by this game. She feels so safe in this environment, untouchable and regal as she lands solidly on branch after branch.

The thief turns to look around at Brock and his blood boils. The audacity. This little chickenshit motherfucker. Brock is going to pull their lungs out through their neck. Cut their fingers off and jam them in their own eyes.

If he weren't so busy fantasizing about grisly murder, he probably would have easily placed who it is that he's chasing. Not because of her face, because he couldn't see it. But rather, because of the way the thief is moving in the trees, like liquid mercury sliding around obstacles like they're nothing, as effortless as anything. It's a gymnast's flight, the way the body coils around and ripples with grace and power, visible even under the parka.

The thief is in their element, and Brock is not. He has devolved into a locomotive of rage, clumsily half-slipping, half-sprinting in pursuit.

But through the haze (from his anger) and the fog (from the weather), he can see a fallen birch tree coming up. He grins frenziedly, veers slightly to the left, and then hops up on it without breaking stride. Now that he's out of the mud, running along the downed tree instead, he's going faster, unimpeded by bullshit. It's not a tall enough tree to take him all the way to the thief, but when he jumps back down to the muddy ground, he's closed a considerable amount of the gap.

Edited 2015-02-03 05:43 (UTC)

She still has the height advantage.

Molotov veers from tree to tree, sometimes changing direction suddenly, leaping to the left or right when she could be going forward. Navigating woods like this is second nature, something she did as a child for firewood and mushroom picking, and again when she was an adult and left in the wilderness to either die or find her way out. She has no worries about getting back to her camp, even when the trees are flying by so fast that she's lost her exact location in the blur.

There's a moment where an idea flashes in her head, and she reaches into the backpack, still moving, only to throw a flashlight out behind her, hard and at her victim, though he still has time to dodge it. But it both lightens the load and acts as a potential weapon, and anyway, she doesn't really need a flashlight.

It happens so fast that Brock barely registers that the thief is grabbing something out of the pack before he gets whanged in the head by it. It's not that his reactions are slow -- he grabs it midair before it falls to the ground, despite the throbbing pain over his eye now -- but he's just very angry. Angry enough not to even stumble as he gets hit, catches the flashlight, and continue charging through the trees.

It's ridiculous. If the thief keeps throwing his shit, neither of them is going to benefit, and he doesn't really want to see the last of his cheese strewn about the floor with scraps of Ugg boots.

Growling with frustration, he swings his arm back and then just chucks the flashlight at the thief's back, aiming for the head. It's been a long time since college football, but Brock's aim has always been good.

The flashlight misses her by inches, only because she had to sidestep a tree trunk, and flashlights don't really have that sort of foresight available to them.

She glances back again, for only a second, then misses a step and slips.

Molotov doesn't fall, though. She grabs the branch as she goes and swings herself on it like an uneven bar or a trapeze, trying to catch the next branch over as she dangles in mid-air.

Dammit. He is going to have to pick that up later and pray it still works.

The thief loses their footing and slips, dangling from a branch. Brock's frenzied grin returns, because this is his chance, and he lowers his head, expending the last bit of his energy to sprint again. The cold air is burning his throat and hw knows that as soon as he stops, his legs will be completely rubberized, but it's a point of pride. He's already fantasizing about massacring the thief, slicing off fingers for stealing and whittling away at the feet for running, but the moment before impact, he notices that from this angle, that's definitely a woman.

Brock's throw of the flashlight had been stupid and useless, but football has other skills that are applicable in these sorts of situations. With momentum on his side, he leaps forward to tackle the thief out of the low-hanging birch branches.

Her breath is knocked out of her when he catches her from behind.

They fall to the ground together, and she wastes no time twisting so that he's on the bottom, so that his weight can't crush her, and she contorts to be able to better defend herself, to already start throwing blows before they even land in the mud and muck.

It's a move he hadn't been anticipating, some catlike twisting in midair before they even hit the ground. Brock is too big, too heavy, to flip them back around before they land, gravity pulling him to the ground and momentum sending him sliding in the mud on his back. He goes a few feet with her on top like a toboggan before stopping in a cluster of birch trees. Before they glide to a stop, though, he's already throwing punches. The time from the point of impact to when they've slid to a stop takes all of a few seconds, but his reaction is immediate; he's trying to clock the thief -- her -- in the face so he can take control and roll them over.

Edited (incomprehensible phone tags) 2015-02-11 19:02 (UTC)

Her blows only slow as she attempts to escape his grasp -- they never quite end. She's grinding her heels into his legs to try and get traction to spring up and away, hopefully hard enough for it to hurt, and she keeps throwing her elbows back toward his face. Her mind is singular right now: escape.

It's difficult to fight somebody whose back is to you, Brock is finding, and he snarls in wordless fury as this woman keeps struggling. Maybe she shouldn't steal his shit, how 'bout that! Learn your lesson, mystery lady.

He waits until she jabs him in the face, then loops his elbow around her upper arm to keep her from doing it again. This takes one of his hands out of the game, but at least she's in the same boat, if he succeeds. Regardless, he sticks his other hand on her face now, trying to do... something. Blind her? Something. It seems like a good idea.

She squawks indignantly when he grabs her face, and bites at his palm, using her free hand to grab his hand and try to wrench it off, kicking wildly at his leg. What the fuck, that is such a childish move, grabbing her face like that! The backpack is probably pressing uncomfortably into his torso as she bucks, squirming the arm he has a hold on, too.

Yeah, there is a cheese tin digging into his gut right now; he could do without that. Also all her wiggling around is getting annoying -- he has one of her arms immobile, so at least there's that, but she still has three other limbs. And teeth, apparently, to which Brock grunts angrily at the biting and tries to cuff her across the face, which is awkward from this position.

He's getting tired of this and there's not much he can do from down here, so he tries to grab for her other arm. Unless she's a moron, he won't be able to pull the same move twice, so he's trying to rely on pure brute strength for the second one. It's still difficult, because he can't exactly see what he's doing. Simultaneously, he uses the cluster of birch trees he'd slid to a halt against, bending his neck against it and then using the sheer strength of his core to start pushing himself up to stand with a tree as a brace. The way she's squirming might make this difficult, though, but if he gets on his feet, then he can just throw her? That is his current plan, he will throw her.

Edited (phone tags the harsh mistress ) 2015-02-14 14:23 (UTC)

She never stops writhing and kicking, even when he hits her face awkwardly, even when he's trying to grab her other arm, which she fights like a wild cat, even when they're suddenly (if slowly) rising upright.

If anything, this change makes her more violent, ramming her heels into his knees repeatedly, slamming her elbow backward into his gut. Her noises of rage are incoherent and vague, and yet she's still stuck where she is, refusing to dislocate her arm to get it out of his grasp. It's an option, but she's not going for it.

Edited 2015-02-17 01:20 (UTC)

This woman is honestly lucky that Brock makes it a point not to kill those of her gender. Because for serious. This shit is annoying. He is strongly considering just breaking her arm to make it easier on him; that's not strictly killing, and therefore it is safe to do without the voice of Hunter Gathers screaming at him in his head for not playing by the rules.

There are times when Brock considers that he has been conditioned and indoctrinated to adhere by this set of rules, and that sparing someone based on their brain chemistry or whatever isn't actually morally upright. It's just arbitrary. But that's what makes someone a good soldier: adhering to an arbitrary set of rules for no other reason than because they are rules. He tries not to think about it whenever he can.

Brock tenses his abdominals against her onslaught, but there's not much he can do about her feet. He is going to be bruised to hell, which will make survival in this landscape difficult -- but at least he'll have his shit back. That's the important part.

Eventually, he manages to rise up against the tree to where he's just sort of leaning his upper back against it, sagging a little, his aching knees bent. With a grunt of rage, he lets go of her -- or more like pushes her in the back -- trying to slip the pack off her shoulders in the process.

When he sort of throws her away, Molotov grabs one strap of the pack, even as her other arm slips from the other. It makes her turn toward him as she lands, the pack between them like a rope in a game of tug of war.

There's a moment where she's just reaching to pull back on the pack, yanking at it, and then she looks up to growl, "It's mine now, asshole!"

And then she sees that it's Brock, and she groans loudly, still not letting go of the knapsack.

Brock is still holding onto the strap, but he freezes when he sees it's her, the gears in his head almost visible on the dumbfounded look on his face. He feels a little stupid for not recognizing her earlier, and just lets the pack hang there suspended between them for a moment, just like the silence.

Then: "What the fuck, Molotov!"

"It's a fucking Arena!" she yells back, tugging on the backpack. "You leave your shit lying around, it's fair game!"

She's not sure how this has passed over his head, because she thinks it's pretty obvious how all this crap works. She saw supplies, she took them, end of story.

"I was taking a leak!" he shouts, giving the backpack one hard tug to try and trip up her balance and pull her back toward him so he can grapple with her that way. Is nothing sacred where a man can't take a piss! Honestly.

"It's a backpack, why did you even take it off!"

They're yelling back and forth like children, playing tug-of-war with a knapsack. She doesn't trip but she is yanked forward a bit through the mud, and she growls angrily about it.

"Because I'm not going to sleep with a --"

He cuts himself off, looking up sharply beyond her, eyes focusing on something in the distance. He thought he heard something: a twig snap, mud squelching underfoot, whatever. Even through their babyish screaming, he was still on the highest alert possible. But on the other hand, he probably would have heard it a lot sooner if he hadn't been busy acting like a six-year-old.

"Shut up," he hisses at her, eyes darting around. When he hears another telltale sign of movement somewhere in the trees, he sees no other option -- he yanks hard on the pack and swings his balance to the side, trying to send her into a tree. If it works, he's going to pin her there against it and shield her from view. Birch bark is white, but Brock's parka is covered with mud all along the back, and if he keeps still it should passably work as mud-splattered tree, as long as nobody looks too close.

If it doesn't work and she still digs her heels in, then he's just going let go and hope she falls from lack of tension. She'd be better hidden on the ground.

Molotov doesn't yell back, because she sees him perk like an animal, knows that face instinctively, and her own hearing focuses away from him and outward, listening for all the same things he is, although she squints indignantly when he tells her to shut up because she hadn't even been talking.

She's ready to climb when she hears that second noise, ready to dart back up into the trees and away, but he pulls her before she can even let go of the pack and scurry up into the branches, and she is suddenly blind as he presses her back to the tree, his chest blocking out her field of vision. The smell of him wraps around her, lacking the tobacco smoke element but everything else is there, and it gives her a sense of comfortable familiarity that lets her sharpen her senses and her guard, listening as intently as she can, given her visual blindness to what is happening around them.

Brock has to bow his head to hide his hair, keeping his shoulders tensed to help. Molotov is closer to her actual height like this, since they didn't supply anyone with stiletto winter boots (as far as he could tell, anyway), and it makes it easier for him to hide her, giant as he is. He can smell her hair from the way his face is angled down, and his fingers curl a little against the birch tree -- one hand still holding the strap, the backpack sandwiched between them.

He keeps his eyes open, staring at the top of her head as the footsteps draw closer, twigs snapping. There's a slim chance it's just a very heavy, very clumsy animal, but Brock's chased enough people through the woods to know with almost absolute certainty that it's not an animal.

He's standing still because he has to, the nervous energy building inside his body from the chase, the revelation of the thief's identity, the person coming slowly their way. He's going to have to hit something in a minute. The yelling helped, but if this situation was any indicator, this is probably not the right place for that.

She shifts only slightly, looking up toward where he's tilted down, communicating with her expression, the way they've always been able to, the way that comes from knowing each other too well, being too similar.

Her brow knits and her eye narrows. What's happening?, she asks silently, hearing the steps but too in-the-dark to be able to suss out much about them. Brock has the advantage here, able to glance up if necessary.

Molotov places her hand on his chest, able to tell as much from his heartbeat as she can from his face.

Hopefully Molotov will know well enough to take his pulse with a grain of salt, because his heart beats hard against her hand when she touches his chest, even through the metal plate. When Brock was first outfitted with the plate, he'd been surprised that his heartbeat could still be heard through it -- he assumed that it would muffle everything like lead against X-rays. But it just dulled it a little more than normal, steel for bone and skin and tissue. His face contorts for a second, brow knitting severely, until he gets himself under enough control where he can make his heart fucking stop. She is just a woman. It doesn't matter anymore.

He watches Molotov's face for a moment, his own expression carefully blank, and then he slowly, imperceptibly starts to turn his head to look over his shoulder. Molotov could very easily just peek around him to get a look herself, but he doesn't want to risk it. Her black hat is too stark against the white skin of the trees.

Turning his head just enough where he can see out his peripherals, he looks just long enough to see that it's a person. He's unwilling to spend the time on sussing out exactly who it is, and it doesn't really matter anyway; it's not a chance he's willing to take, not right now. It's stupid because logically they'd both be able to kick the ass of anyone dumb enough to be stomping around in the woods, and when he thinks about it, he doesn't quite know why his instinct had been to protect her like this.

Slowly, he turns his head back to look at her again, then shakes it in that same nearly inperceptible way. Not yet. The crunching gets louder and then, after a few more seconds, starts to recede.

Edited (how did that even happen) 2015-03-06 05:33 (UTC)

She lowers her hand, watches him look behind himself, then nods at him in that same, barely-there way. His body is muffling the noise, and she's not fully sure if she's imagining the steps moving away or if it's just his bulk softening the footfalls to her ears, where the blood is pounding away anyway.

All she can do is wait. Molotov knows him well enough to trust this situation, knows he doesn't want to take her out this way, won't keep her against the tree any longer than necessary because it's torture for them both, and there's no honor in holding her there to try and disable her.

He wants to fight in open air, if they're going to. She knows that because she wants that too.

Brock is still quiet, half his focus on the mysterious person in the birch trees with him, and the rest of his attention split between paying attention to Molotov while simultaneously trying not to think about her too much. Which is hard when she's looking up at him like that, and he just keeps his eyes on her face, tracking the fine lines at the corners of her mouth and her eye, any traces of windburn on her face, the structure of her bones. He's barely seen her the whole time they've been in this world, and certainly not this close (not when she wasn't insane from infection, anyway). It's not that remarkable, since they've gone years without seeing each other before, but the close proximity after everything doesn't really help.

He keeps his expression carefully placid, trying very hard not to telegraph anything to her but wait and maybe some vague assurance that he knows what he's doing. Wordless communication has always come easy to them, even when there isn't anything to say. He just studies her face for as long as he can, until he can't hear anything anymore and even the blood in his ears has faded away.

Quirking his eyebrow at her, he turns his head around again to look, cautiously scanning the area before he's willing to back away from the tree and resume what they were doing, if they're going to resume at all. As much as keeping her pinned against the tree and beating her up is unappealing to him, there is a primal part of him that wants her pinned up for other purposes, and looking at her face for so long didn't really do much to help that, so he doesn't exactly move away with any kind of swiftness.

"I think we're okay," he says quietly in something nearing a whisper, looking back down at her again.

She watches him but with a sense of looking past him, focusing on what she can and can't hear, and it keeps her from thinking too much about how close they are, and how long it's been since they were like this.

He whispers and she nods, glancing over his shoulder again, then tightens her fingers around his backpack, the strap she still has.

"Give me your weapons and I'll leave."

Brock makes a noise that is part bafflement and part amusement, because that is quite a request. He shakes his head, his fingers curling around the backpack strap as well.

"Not on your life, Cocktease," he says, voice low, still not moving. "I have some food. We can share that."

"I don't need food, I have plenty of it. I want your weapons."

She's pretty sure they're heading toward a ridiculous game of tug-of-war, which is perhaps appropriate after that chase and then a weird round of hide-and-seek. But she's not letting go of the backpack, even though she knows she doesn't need more supplies, that she's doing this to be petty and reduce her competition.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[closed] And when it's time for you to die I'll let you know

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

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject