thearena | I'm a Ruin, I'll Ruin You [Closed]

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I'm a Ruin, I'll Ruin You [Closed]

WHO| Black Tom, Molotov and Clementine; Black Tom and Beth
WHAT| The power couple kills a kid, then Tom gets shanked by a teenage girl.
WHEN| Week 6
WHERE| Near the river.
WARNINGS| Child death. Evil bastard death.

I. Molotov and Clementine

Tom's expertise is in fires and plant life. When the meteor shower moves from a brilliant display to an actual threat, he spends a few moments on a rocky outcropping of the mountain, peering over the skyline and the pattern of trees with a keen eye, looking like some sort of figurehead planted upon the stone. He licks a finger and puts it in the air, testing the wind. After a few moments, he turns to Molotov with a wicked gleam in his eye.

"If we head to that part of the river-" he gestures with his hand to a crook, the narrowest part of the watery snake that traces its way through the trees- "we'll be able to pick off anyone trying to escape from the fire when it inevitably flares up over there."

And with that, they both head down, murder on their minds, until they're settled casually at the edge of the river, waiting for people to wade across.

II. Beth

He and Molotov split up after two encounters at the river, both looking to see if any stragglers escaped across a bridge of trees or somehow swam the more dangerous currents. That's when Tom, wet to the knee and splattered with blood, holding a knife, comes across Beth and her smoke-stinking clothes. And no allies in sight.

"Look at who it is. The little lass herself." He calls to her, walks purposefully in her direction.

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While Tom handles plants and fires, Molotov takes care of terrain and lookout duties (she can climb so much higher and faster than he can). She's the one who brought them up here, finding a place to keep them safe while hell is breaking loose in the Arena, where they can hold out until it's time to bring their wrath down on anyone who survives to that point.

She stands a few feet behind him, arms crossed as she watches his back. He turns to her, and the way his eyes sparkle like that makes her grin and she presses her mouth against his, hard, before beginning to almost skip down the mountain, filled with a sort of vicious glee.

"Keep up, Thomas!"

At the edge of the river, she leans against a tree and waits, dark in the shadows with her black hat covering all her red hair.

Fire again.

Clementine didn't voice it but she was of the high opinion that the Gamemaker's had officially started to run out of ideas. Even if this time the fire came from a shower of meteors rather than a lightning strike (she thought that was how the last one started, anyway).

She's wasted no time legging it out of the forest, automatically making for the safety that the river would provide. By this stage of the game she's much more familiar with the layout of the arena and knows where she's going, making her feel more confident about escaping the flames even if she's alone. She really wishes she wasn't alone though...

Clem makes it to the river and wastes no time splashing into it, clenching her teeth at the cold as she starts to wade across. It's no small feat for her, given how short she is the water will come up much higher on her than it would anyone else and makes resisting the pull of the current that much harder.

Tom does his best to keep pace with Molotov, but he's long accepted that even on his best day he would be satisfied with going half her speed through the trees. She moves with insane grace, more like a bird's shadow flitting through the branches and leaves than a human being. He keeps to the ground, kicking through slush and mud until he finds the edge of the river.

"I see someone!" he calls to Molotov, although he's sure that Molotov's already seen the small figure pressing through the freezing water. His heart tightens a little bit to see how young she is, but he recalls the pain of that freezing water and imagines they'll be doing her brutal mercy. No child should be subjected to this. Even little Arya is probably better off on the other side.

She's motionless in her tree, watching the child like a hawk watches a rabbit.

But it's not all predatory. Some part of her wants to let the girl go, and another part reasons that at least the two of them can put her down. They can save her a lot of pain, a long death from exposure -- even if she makes it through the river, she'll probably freeze to death. Shouldn't they spare her?

"What do you want to do?" she calls back, leaving the final decision to him.

For a moment, he's still, gargoyle-ish in the shadows of the tree, knuckle to his chin as he ponders it. He isn't bloodthirsty for children, no matter what the other Tributes think. He's merely a realist. Children win less often than any other demographic since the Never-Ending Quell started.

That doesn't mean that it doesn't roll his guts a little, to take down a girl who bears no resemblance to Theresa except that his little girl was once that age too.

"She isn't going to win," he calls to Molotov, like a bird call. "There are too many Tributes left."

And so he gives them both permission to dip into the darker parts of violence, the necessary evil of the Arenas, and he feels a swell of righteous indignation, even, for being one of the few people in the Arena with the stones to commit these crimes rather than letting mutts and weather do it for them.

Molotov immediately begins to sail through the branches again, getting closer and closer to the girl.

She knows that this won't be easy. She's killed many people throughout her life, more than she can even remember, but she's never killed a young child, let alone murdered one.

She knows she'll apologize, feel sick over what she's done. She might be a mercenary, but she can feel guilt and she doesn't want to murder a little a girl. But Molotov can give this girl an instant, painless death that will never come from freezing or beasts or people who are keen to kill children. She can make those last breaths easy instead of torture.

At the tree closest to where the girl will come out of the river, assuming she does, Molotov stops and waits.

Clementine is still pushing through the water, with the grim dogged determination that had kept her alive year after year, past the time that most children had survived in her own world. The need to survive, to keep pushing even when it seemed terrible hopeless was wired into the core of her, spurred by the memory of all those who had died in her stead. If she died then she'd let them down and their deaths would have become meaningless.

It's not quite the same here, where death was more of a brief horrible inconvenience than a final end but she digs into that stubborn urge to keep going all the same. So long as she's still breathing she had to keep fighting.

There's a bow on her back, pink because that was what the Gamemaker's thought was appropriate, with a good supply of arrows still left in her quiver. She's tired and cold though, slowed down by those fact as the water finally starts to turn more shallow and Clementine stumbles up onto the bank, shivering hard but managing to stay on her feet.

Warily she starts to look round while she gets her breath back, searching for any threat whether it's human or mutt. Her teeth are chattering so hard she's sure everyone can hear them for miles around.

Tom should feel more guilty, he thinks, about letting Molotov actually shed the blood on this one while he makes the call. But instead he feels as if it's even, in a strange sort of way. He's made the decision and she can execute the act and they can split the burden between their two souls.

He circles around, prepared to bludgeon Clementine down if she tries to run but knowing that her chances of escaping Molotov are pitiful at best. Molotov is a trained assassin, silent, lethal, practiced, professional, while Clementine's skill is made of scrapped-together survival instincts pounded into shape by the elements. It's different.

He crouches down in the undergrowth, watching, getting mud on the knees of his pants.

Her stomach drops a little more upon realizing that it's Clementine, that this girl lives down the hall from her. That she's going to kill someone she has to see daily, and how that guilt will etch in a little deeper each time their eyes meet.

But if Molotov believed in souls, she'd know that hers is damned anyway, and that it's a greater thing to give Clementine a quick out now.

When Clementine looks the other way, Molotov comes flying down, jumping from the tree rather than climbing down. She bounces from branch to branch until she's on the ground, landing quietly, and she runs to catch the girl from behind, to cover her mouth with one hand if possible, and immobilize.

She's careful, though. Gentle. Refuses to hurt her.

It all seems quiet, empty, up until the moment a hand clamps down across her mouth and an arm wraps around her torso.

Clementine's immediate reaction is to fight, struggling against the hold pinning her arms to her sides with muffled outrage, kicking her legs out. She can't see anything of her attack, the only thing she can guess at is that it's a woman, maybe and so fast, so quiet she didn't even hear them approach! Panic fills her, even as she tries to fight her way free and stay calm.

In a desperate move Clem opens her mouth to use a move that has helped her before and sinks her teeth down on the offending hand in front of her face.

"Ow, fuck, you little -- "

It comes out before Molotov can stop herself, but she's wearing gloves, and the bite is nowhere as bad or painful as it could be. She keeps hold on Clementine, spreads her hand a bit to dig her fingers into the girl's cheeks to tighten her grip.

"Clementine, it's Molotov, stop."

They don't spend much time together, but two people can only spend so long living in the same quarters without having an awareness of each other. Molotov has certainly never been hostile toward her littlest roommate.

With a quick twist of her knee, she brings them both down to the ground, forcing Clementine, until they're in the mud and the girl is practically in her lap to hold her in place.

A few strands of hair have escaped Molotov's hat, and she's visibly distressed, but she leans close to Clementine, and speaks as softly as she can, as soothingly as she can.

"I'm sorry for this. But it's better than what other people will do to you. It's better than the Gamemakers will be, better than exposure. I'm so sorry, Clementine."

And she really is, her voice thick and even pained, but it doesn't stop her from readjusting her grip on Clementine's head and giving it a fast twist, a snap that she spent years learning how to execute properly. An instant, painless death, no time to think or fear or feel. From light to dark in a blink.

Molotov doesn't cry, but she does hold that limp little body in her lap, head bent forward over a small shoulder that doesn't move with inhales and exhales anymore. She's never killed a child before, never thought she would. Never bothered to apologize to a corpse before.

"When I get back, I'll make it up to you somehow."

Clementine fights. She fights even when Molotov identifies herself, complete with an indignant and muffled yell, she fights as she's pushed down onto the ground and in Molotov's lap. She fights, panicked and angry, right up until the moment that Molotov snaps her neck.

Then she doesn't fight anymore.

Maybe she could see the logic but that didn't make any difference to the child in the end, who didn't want to die yet another time, who would argue that she could fight and survive still to the end if they just let her go. She'd never go down easy or quick if she could help it, with the promises and expectations of so many combined with her own burning need to keep going. In the end though she just wasn't strong or skilled enough against an opponent of Molotov's calibre.

This is the point where whether Molotov and Tom have been paying attention could make a difference. Right Clementine is a limp, still little body in the Molotov's lap but a broken neck isn't a head wound and if they don't act that might change soon. The infection she carried along with others from her world was never predictable in how long it would take to bring someone back from the dead, eager to sink their teeth into living flesh.

Tom emerges from the undergrowth, solemn, funereal. He walks over to Molotov and rests a hand on her shoulder, the three of them in some perverse tableau of parents with child.

"She couldn't have asked for a quicker death, given what we have at our disposal," he says. Even that heavy accent fails to liven up the flatness of his tone. He crouches next to Molotov and though he doesn't grieve, he does feel the gravity of the occasion. He doesn't feel uncertainty about what they've done, but sometimes the weight of villainy seems to press down more heavily than others. Killing children that they know is one of those times.

He rankles even harder now at the 'child killer' names that have been attached to him and Molotov, as if he and she enjoyed it. He looks into Clementine's glassy eyes and something in his face goes loose and sorrowful.

There's a long moment where Molotov doesn't speak at all, just holds Clementine and looks at her, and then she stands and goes to the edge of the water, taking the body with her. She kneels in the mud and scoops one hand in the water, letting it run down over Clementine's cheeks as she gently wipes away the grime from that smooth, soft skin.

It takes her a moment to clean the girl up, to stroke her hair down and comb it out with gloved fingers. When she's done, Molotov takes the body away from the river to where scraggly flowers are trying to grow in the dirt, tiny and yellow and delicate. She takes Clementine's supplies, because she can hear the body collectors coming, the whirring overhead, and then passes off the pink bow and arrows to Tom.

She kisses his cheek before sprinting and disappearing up a tree, heading away to deal with it, and she doesn't think she needs to tell Tom that she'll be back shortly.

High in a tree, a few hundred yards into the woods, she faces the trunk and presses her face to her knees so that no camera can see the tightness escaping her body, the rawness of whatever bit of her heart or soul was still tender enough to hurt so much from this.

Tom waits with Clementine's body until the machine takes it away. He sits there at the base of the tree, finding Molotov's solemnity contagious, in a way, but he never properly got to mourn Sandy when he killed her, and Dave was old enough that there was some divisive calculus that spared Tom from remorse. But he feels it here.

He can't help but imagine that Clementine is his own little girl, whom he hasn't seen in years now, who won't speak to him anymore specifically because of actions like this.

Back home, or back in the Capitol, at least, they're likely thinking this is all some sort of ruse to rehabilitate their reputation. But the truth is that for a moment Tom honestly can't breathe without his throat tightening, without it hurting on the way in and passive back out like a sigh.

He doesn't rush Molotov. He just waits.

It takes her a while, nearly half an hour, before she can come back down the tree. There are few enough Tributes left that Tom can keep watch on his own, keep them safe, but it's unnecessary because they're all spread out at this point anyway. When she finally comes down, she sits down next to him without a word and puts her head on his shoulder.

Her face is dry, but tight, like maybe she shed some tears into the knees of her leggings.

"Do we have any vodka left?" she asks quietly, letting her eye close as she reaches for his hand.

He wraps his arm around her and quietly nudges a stray lock of hair from her face, one that's caught a bit on her eyelash, sealed there by a tear.

"We do." He takes her hand, the only part of her that's even a little rough and worn from climbing the trees and cutting up deer hides, and rubs his thumb over the back of it. He wants to apologize for making that call, but he truly believes it was the right one, and besides - anything he says will seem empty and self-serving. So he doesn't.

After a while he gets up, arm still around her. "Let's go drink it. There should be enough to go blind for a short while."

She clings to him, stays quiet until he stands the two of them up together. She nods a little, because she wants to be blind right now, is willing to accept drunken vulnerability for just a bit of that peace in her head.

"Okay."

There is nothing in the world that could turn the deaths of people she loved into a casual event. It doesn't matter if it happens once, or sixty times in a row, because Beth's sure that it will always feel like a knife twisting its way into her chest. She knows people come back, but she knows they don't always come back the same. She didn't. And at this point, she's tired, more than anything else.

Tired, and entirely not in the mood to entertain an attack of any sort. She knows him. She knows that he's already tried to kill her, and he's walking towards her in a way that makes it clear he's about to try again.

Well, she's got a knife in her hand before he can get halfway there. And there's something harder in her gaze, something borne out of pain and frustration and the kind of exhaustion that grinds straight to the bone.

"If you come any closer, I'll kill you," she tells him, flat and matter-of-fact. She doesn't want to fight him. But she will, if she has to.

"With what? That little piece of steel? I suppose you're going to carve me up like a turkey?" Where Beth's voice is cold and flat, Tom's is nearly cartoonish, gleeful and mocking, made elastic by his taunting. "I think there's only one bird getting cut up here today."

He bares his own life, then pats the

"Now tell me, do you prefer it quickly or slowly? Because if none of your wee friends are going to interrupt, I don't see why I can't oblige by your decisions."

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I'm a Ruin, I'll Ruin You [Closed]

I i am molotov look at that

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