thearena | Like I Got the Devil at My Feet [Closed]

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Like I Got the Devil at My Feet [Closed]

WHO| Black Tom, Clint and Sam; Black Tom, Alain and Arya
WHAT| Tom and Arya start thinning the competition.
WHEN| Week 5 and 6.
WHERE| The forest.
WARNINGS| Death.

Were Tom even slightly more self-aware, he might be embarrassed to spend so much time as a weeping willow, moping around wishing he had Molotov to talk to with his long trailing branches and vines drooping onto the ground. He's been doing his best to coddle Arya without stunting that independent streak of hers, to provide her with food and shelter in his lair of the forest, but for the most part he's lonely. Most of the Tributes have been heading towards the castle or the sea, and as such he can't even fritter away his time killing. His powers have made surviving in the Arena easy, but they've also made it boring.

Today he pulls together a new body for himself like twisting a piece of a wet towel upwards out of the mulchy floor of the forest, trailing still those willow vines, wreathed in ivy and even less humanoid than when he first appeared. The hair of moss has become more of a mane, traveling all down his body, giving him a mangy, furry appearance, almost. His eyes glow yellow within deep, dark sockets that seem gouged into the bark-like substance that makes up his skin, and sap drips from his mouth and nose in long, sticky ropes, leaving a sort of snail trail through the forest as he shambles around. The beacon above his head is bright enough to cast a horrorshow light on his already terrifying features, making his brow seem heavy and nose aquiline.

He slouches his way through the woods, muttering out of boredom to himself. He collects his morning star, although the time it'll take to get his body back to something human and that can leave the forest is going to be onerous. It'll take at least a few days to start approximating a person again instead of a beast made of trees with elongated arms and claws. Then again, he has nothing better to do.

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It would be unfair to say Alain is lost without his dinh. Though he's never dealt with a Roland-less life before now, he's led enough sorties and carried enough messages alone to know how to take care of himself without a tet. He doesn't lack for courage, or for skill, and he hasn't yet let himself sink into despair. He cut up the wolf that took Roland, dried its meat and packed it up, took Roland's knife and the remains of his shirt, and has been settled since, caring for the blisters on his hands and sleeping on the highest ground he can find.

No, he doesn't lack for skill. What he does lack, more than he cares to admit, is purpose. He still can't bring himself to intentionally kill innocents, not in the service of a power like the one watching them. He has no wish to win, beyond that he promised to try. His first priority in the Arena was to protect Roland, and he has failed in that. For the most part, since Roland's death, he has simply stayed out of sight, relying on his instinct and his Touch to warn him of anyone's approach. He has enough meat to last him two weeks or more - the wolf was big, if tough - and enough weapons and training to protect him from most of the Arena's horrors. If he can outlast it, he has decided by now, so much the better.

He is walking through the woods now, leaning heavily on his crutch, his other hand resting thoughtfully on the book in his vest pocket. Water, that's the important thing. Find a place with good, clean water, and he can last a week or more.

At first, the presence doesn't register to him. His Touch is weaker here, and Tom's mind has an odd, inhuman shape to it. It's only when the first sound reaches his keen ears (shuffling, muttering, too close...) that he turns his attention to it and reaches out, cautious of sparking the Arena's defences against powers, to focus on that oddly half-human mind. Alain's hand slides slowly towards the kitchen knife shoved in his belt, longing for his gun. Otherwise he stands stock-still, his head slightly cocked, like an animal that hears a twig crack.

"Show yourself," he says at last, his voice low but carrying. "Whatever you are."

Arya had learned long before she started participating in the Arenas to keep an eye on her surroundings, and in any other situation she wouldn't make such a rookie mistake as stepping on a twig, hearing the sharp crack like the crunch of bone echo through the forest. This was Tom's domain, and so long as she stayed within it she could pretty much just wait out the rest of the Arena, as dull as that would be.

As he calls out, she emerges through the trees, tired and pale, cuts bandaged over and still rather red and raw in places from the fire at the Cornucopia, but otherwise remarkably unscathed for this late on in the Arena.

"I'm not a whatever," she says a little argumentatively, though she knows that he must have seen Tom nearby, or sense his presence.

Alain's hand moves away from his knife again, and he leans on his crutch, looking her up and down. "Cry pardon," he says, his voice still rather guarded. Hers isn't the presence he felt. He knows that at once, because he can feel her now; fierce will and buried anger burning away in the edge of his senses. But for all that, she's only a girl. A young girl, at that. He'll be cautious, but even with his leg worsening by the day and his blistered hands growing infected, he thinks he can take on a girl half his size.

He certainly won't make the first move, though. He meant what he said to Roland; means it even now. He doesn't set out to kill women or children, not at the whim of some shadowy government whose plans seem more Crimson than White. He's not fallen that far yet. Far enough to disgrace himself, and to let his dinh die... but not far enough that he's entirely forgotten the face of his father.

"Cry pardon," he says again, clearing his throat. "I can see you're a who, not a what. But it wasn't you I meant." He looks away from her, though he keeps note of her from the corner of his eye as he scans the forest around them. "There's something else here. Watching."

Tom doesn't reveal himself immediately - though in a form more corporeal than the mere forest, he's difficult to see now, melting into the palisade of trees, yellow eyes glowing faintly enough to be mistaken for an errant drop of sunlight cutting through the branches and leaves below. Only the morning star, in his claw-like hands, looks unnatural, and it's cast in shadow and not immediately apparent.

He stays where he can see Arya and, more importantly, the stranger that might pose a threat to her. That does pose a threat to her by his mere existence, his life pushing away at her and his own chance at victory like another suckling piglet at its mother's teat.

While they talk, Tom stays perfectly still except for a single roots, creeping across the ground beneath Alain's feet and laying itself like a noose. Then, like a muscle tensing, the trap tightens, moving to constrict around Alain's feet and yank him to the ground.

Alain cries out, in pain as much as surprise; his leg has been worsening throughout the Arena, and when it's pulled that way, the pain is such that for all his training, darkness blooms at the edges of his vision for a moment. His crutch flies out of his hand, skittering across the loam, and his face smashes hard off the ground, his lip bursting bloodily.

But even injured, he's a gunslinger, and he has a gunslinger's quick reflexes; long before that agonised lightheadedness has passed, the kitchen knife is in his hand, and he's rolling onto his back, biting down on the pain as he hacks blindly at whatever has caught him. Wood. It's wood... but it's not wood, is it? he thinks, wonderingly, then, in Cort's voice, What does it matter what it is, maggot, when it has you so snared?

He grits his teeth, ignores for the moment that horrible sense that the root around his legs is of the same source as that oddly inhuman consciousness, and focuses on hacking at it, wishing dearly for a sharper knife. His mistake is forgetting, in the haze of panic and pain and dizziness, that Arya is even there.

In any other circumstance, Arya would have serious misgivings about this. She'd done her share of killing before ever setting foot in an Arena, but she has a very clear, black and white idea of who deserves it. Alain certainly did not deserve it, so far as Arya was concerned, but if she didn't start thinning out the competition soon, they'd come for her. She needed to win this time, she could feel victory just out of reach, taste it almost.

She moves toward him, swinging the mace at her side and gripping one of the daggers in her other hand, looking back at Tom for some sort of signal to proceed. "Which should I use?"

That reminds Alain sharply of her presence. Spitting blood onto the ground, he redoubles his efforts to hack himself free. "Don't make me fight you," he says, his voice thick from his swollen lip. "I don't want to kill you."

It isn't a threatening tone - there's no bravado in it, and very little hope. It's pleading, almost begging. She can't know it, but his pleading isn't for himself, either. He's in no fit state to fight - even when he cuts himself loose, with a desperate kind of strength, he can't get to his feet between the broken leg and the bang to his head - and if she comes for him, she'll kill him. But instinct will kick in first, and he just may kill her as well.

He doesn't want that. He would kill whatever it is that grabbed his legs - that consciousness is malign and bitterly inhuman. But she's a girl. A young girl. Alain struggles to one knee, almost fainting from that alone, and raises his knife in a hand that is nonetheless rock-steady. "Don't," he says again, and that is all.

"Use the knife," Tom says, and the beacon flares up above him, strong and bright. His voice sounds like a creek coursing its way over gravel, wet and earthy. He twists the vines to make Alain twist around, as if on display. "He won't be bleeding candy if you hit him with the mace."

There's a viciousness in Tom's voice that transcends even the strange affect of his mutation, an all-too-human vitriol. Nature is war, but humanity is torture. Tom is emblematic of the latter, and when Alain twists around to see his face Tom grins, his too-human teeth set inside his bark-covered face.

"He doesn't want to kill you, but he will, he says. He's standing in your way, Arya."

A shudder runs up Alain's spine, and he makes no attempt to disguise it. It isn't the sight of the tree-man, although that's horrible enough in itself. It's the fact that Tom's smile so perfectly fits the shape of his mind, all thorns and inhuman tangles bound together by the shreds of humanity. He looks, feels, like something from a nightmare, and Alain can't help the instinctive horror that runs right through him.

His own beacon flickers, dimming a little as he subconsciously pulls his Touch away from that mind. If I had fire... he thinks, struggling to regain some balance, if I had my gun, some kind of charge to lay, I could at least take the bastard with me.

And if dreams were dollars, I'd never have empty pockets. That last bit comes in Cort's voice, mocking and harsh. Alain grits his teeth, ignores the agony in his leg, and slashes at the vines with all his strength.

Arya's a little reluctant to step forward with Alain slashing at Tom's vines, knowing that if he did manage to snap free of them that she'd be the first target in his path, not Tom, and she'd be overpowered by someone attacking her at such close quarters. She grits her teeth, grips her knife a little tighter, rising up onto her toes to reach Alain properly, drawing the knife across his throat and watching as the blood sprays forth, splattering warm onto her face.

Tom makes spitting noises when some of his vines are cut, but more roots and branches emerge to hold Alain upside down in a spread-eagle, to immobilize him in a torture rack of wood and leaves and earth. The grass beneath Alain's head seems to grasp upwards hungrily for the blood that splatters and sprays across it. Tom laughs, a cruel, ugly sound.

"Well done, lass." He lowers a bough of soft leaves. "Wipe your face. You don't need to watch his death rattles, I'll make sure he won't go anywhere."

Another branch emerges to rest at the small of Arya's back in a gentle, guiding touch, urging her to turn her back on the man writhing and bound in the last throes of mortality.

For a moment, Alain doesn't register exactly what's happening, even though it's obvious. There's a scattered, chaotic moment after that initial sharp pain where all he's aware of is the distant sound of... rain? It takes him a little while to figure out that the sound is his own blood pulsing out onto the loam, bright and hot. The pain from his leg and throat isn't gone, but it's withdrawn somehow, pulled back into a distant sea of sound and light that's rapidly losing meaning. He isn't a stupid man, but for a moment, Alain doesn't register that he's dying.

He frowns, looking more put out than pained, and opens his mouth, blood bubbling out from between his lips. When he tries to speak, all that comes out is a hoarse croak - she nicked his windpipe, and the strength to push air out is rapidly fading anyway - but his lips say Not like this. Tom and Arya may be aware of him, scrabbling at the edge of their minds in a desperate, instinctive scramble for anything to hold onto. That sense of him, of a presence made up of stubborn desperation and a kind of guilt, lingers for several moments after his body has gone limp, lips still halfway through forming a semi-conscious cry pardon.

At last, as the gush of blood slows to spastic little spurts and the last of the colour fades out of his cheeks, even that little shadow of him is gone. The flame above his head, which has lit brightly since the Cornucopia, flickers out, and all is still.

The fact that Tom's guiding her to look away from Alain's dying throes just makes her even more determined to look, and she pushes back against him, keeping her eyes on the way he jerks and shudders and then suddenly is still. The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword, her father's voice echoes in her head - if she's going to kill someone, especially someone like this who'd done nothing to deserve it, the least she can do is watch.

"That was too easy," she complains a little sorely, when it's over.

"I know. It was a bit disappointing." Tom flicks the body away into the woods. A hovercraft will fine it sooner rather than later, and he feels no great urge to treat the corpse with dignity. Flesh is flesh. The soul exists elsewhere. Tom's believed that in earnest ever since he saw a loved one reduced to nothing more than a few splashes and shards of bone from a car bomb.

"You did well, though. That was a nice, quick incision. You didn't waste your energy or your blade's edge." He rustles the low-hanging bough again, urging her to clean up the blood. He doesn't like seeing it on her face. It would be too easy to imagine her eyes vacant and dead with a similar splatter across that pale skin.

She finally looks away as he hurls the body away through the trees. Killing in here was one thing, but it made her feel sick thinking of them being treated so thoughtlessly afterwards, knowing no one in here deserved that.

The blood on her own face doesn't bother her too much, making her feel more fierce, but she reluctantly wipes a sleeve over her face at Tom's urging, unable to stop herself smiling just a little with his praise. "There wasn't any reason to draw it out. He wasn't bad, just unlucky."

"He was in our way." Tom says that even though he doesn't believe murder really needs justification. Others can get tangled up in the moral rights and wrongs. Tom doesn't particularly care for them. "Come on. Let's follow his trail and see if he left any supplies for us."

The last time Clint ran amok in the forest, things hadn't really gone well for him. But the longer the Arena drags on, the harder it gets. Water's hard to come by, and food's dwindled down too in these past weeks. Sponsorship can only go so far. They've still got to try to survive though, even if only one of the people here will come through this game alive. So despite his injury, Clint's out and about, Sam at his side, as they check on some traps they'd set. It's not the first time, and given the lack of trouble, they've seen fit to go further and further, chasing any trail of potential food. Maybe it's not the best idea, but they're sort of armed, and hopefully working together they're enough to take on an attacker.

And if not, hopefully they've proved interesting enough to be brought back.

Whatever the case is, they're picking their way through the forest, careful and quick. There's something unnerving about the forest, and maybe that's just the ache in his missing limb speaking, but Clint's on edge, scanning the surroundings with a gaze as sharp as his namesake. He shifts, signs quickly, if clumsily, having lost half a measure of his meaning with his hand.

"Up ahead?"

Sam isn't a jailer or a babysitter, and his medical recommendations don't exactly mean much when they both know that not all of them are going to survive long enough for Clint to really heal up. Shit, odds are none of them are going to, and playing it safe will only get you so far in the arena.

As far as Sam's concerned, Clint's mental health is more important than his physical health at the moment, and if Clint wants to go out and check the traps they've got set up, then that's what they'll do. Sam's still got the wand he's had for most of the arena, and this far into the arena, with food this scarce, well. They pretty much have to take more chances.

Still, they're not being stupid about it. Both of them are on their guards, and it's not just Clint. The forest has Sam on edge as well, looking around uneasily as if he knows there's a threat out there, he just can't see it.

He frowns at Clint's question, getting the meaning even if he knows Clint's having to work harder to get it across. "Something's moving, can't see what.'

Tom's beacon lights up, but given his current state that may not make him much easier to see. It sits directly above him but with his barky flesh and leaves and moss covering him chin to waist like a heavy coat or a mane, he still is hard to recognize as a being, much less a human. Sam and Clint might see him, but it wouldn't speak to a lack of talent if they didn't.

It's not that he's attacking. His beacon is lit because he's feeling, now. The entire root system of his forest is like a decentralized web of his own nerves, and though he feels it dimly, he can tell someone's moving around out there the way someone feels the impulse to itch when an insect crosses their skin.

He brings a spiky hand up and wipes a string of sap from the gash in his face that makes up his toothy jack-o-lantern mouth. He turns his head to try and see who's out there, stepping on grass and moss and ever so slightly tripping Tom's impossible alarms. His eyes glow, blindly and unalerted, in Sam and Clint's general direction.

He nods at Sam's words, not surprised but not enjoying it either. His eyesight is sharper, so Clint shifts, focuses as he scans the space before them. Far as he can see, there's nobody there, no deer, or bird, or even a straggling horse. He's about to sign back nothing, when he catches sight of a beacon lighting in the corner of his eye. Clint goes stock still, careful and intent, but as far as he can tell there's nobody there. Behind the tree, maybe?

Sam must have seen the beacon, it's bright as anything in the gloom of the forest, but Clint still gestures. Just in case.

Which is right about when one of the trees he'd been eying moved, and something gleamed, dim like shuttered lamps, straight at them.

"What the hell?" He murmured, softly, bewildered.

Oh yeah, Sam definitely sees the beacon - he just can’t see what the hell it’s pointing at. It’s a Tribute, and a powered one, which hell, for all Sam knows could mean invisibility. That’d be just their luck.

He nods at Clint’s gesture, opening his mouth to reply, then cuts off when he also notices the tree moving.

Shit. Sam ran into something like this before, deeper in the forest. A giant tree with roots that grabbed anything that walked by, and he’s not looking forward to that again.

“Stay close,” Sam mutters, pulling his wand out.

The roots under Sam and Clint's feet suddenly lurch, ripping themselves out of the ground with a crack, not towards them but the way an animal might wrench itself away from someone's touch out of startle. It doesn't take them long to change their attitude, to go from scared wormlike wriggling roots to something more aggressive when Tom realizes it's feet his extended reach is touching.

Tom moves towards them, choosing not to dissemble his body and reappear somewhere else but instead to charge like he's slithering and flowing in slow motion across the forest floor at them. He isn't fast like this, but there's something inevitable, inexorable, about how he approaches, as if his arrival at his destination is already a certainty. Meanwhile, the roots shoot up and towards Clint and Sam's ankles, seeking to bind and drags them down.

Clint doesn't have the most stable of footing right now. What with his knee being what it is, and the lack of one arm still throwing him off. So the roots tearing away from under neath his feet sends him stumbling, grabbing at a nearby tree to keep from falling. This really just means he's more vulnerable when the roots suddenly wrap around his ankles.

He doesn't make a sound, simply aiming and firing, blasting apart roots and shaking the curling pieces away from his ankles. But Sam gets an acknowledging hum, and Clint does stay close, carefully providing backup.

Tom isn't fast, but there's something about a tree ripping itself up from the ground and coming after them that settles badly. Of course, it's not actually a tree but a Tribute, but right now Tom's more Ent-like than anything. Trust the LOTR jokes to come out in full force, because Clint would really prefer not to fight an Ent. Still, the roots are more than enough, one wrapping around his bum leg and yanking, dragging Clint down with a pained yelp.

Sam's on slightly better ground there. His balance is excellent, and he's already fought against roots like this, ones that tried to grab him and Bucky and pull them under, and he knows how to use the wand against them.

Not that that makes it any less unnerving when it's clear that the beacon is casting its light on a giant tree - a Tribute that's a tree, of course - and that it's heading right for them.

Right, Sam's new plan is to get the hell out of there. Or at least, it is until Clint goes down, and then Sam's focus snaps back to him. Sam lunges at Clint, but another root grabs him, stopping him up short. For the moment, Sam ignores it, focusing instead on firing his wand at the roots surrounding Clint, trying to give him enough time to get back on his feet.

"Well, well, well." There's a snapping sound in Tom's voice, like wood splitting but actually the dried sap in his throat cracking open so words can escape. He rises, taller, looking as if he's just growing in quick-motion from the ground. "What have we here? A couple fool enough to go wandering in the forest, perhaps?"

He can't help but taunt. It's in his blood, or what passes for it in this state; he is not only a villain but one from a generation where it meant something more than simply merging a proclivity for crime with superpowers. There's a certain panache that Tom loves to indulge in because it makes him feel alive, defined, as if here, in the heat of battle and cruelty, he exists in perfect detail.

Sam interrupts that by having the temerity to shoot him. Tom hisses and his roots jerk back from Clint's leg for a moment, like snakes pulling away as they rear up to strike. Tom lunges forward with claws long and probing, aiming for Sam's guts.

Clint goes crashing down, head cracking against the forest floor in a way doesn't sound promising. Considerin he's still a mere week away from a relatively bad concussion, this can't be good in any capacity. But his leg is an agonizing mess, and that overwhelms the rest of the pain. He's dazed for a moment, instinctively trying to get away from the danger, but his hearing is shot, ringing and snapping, until the light from Sam firing his wand at the roots grabbing at him snaps him out of it.

Then, and only then, does the world rush back in in a flurry. Clint shoves himself up, groaning, and nearly goes crashing back down as he snaps his own wand up as Tom lunges forward. Lightning laces across claws, as accurate as ever even if Clint is dazedly climbing back to his feet.

There's no way they're running out of here.

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Like I Got the Devil at My Feet [Closed]

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