Like I Got the Devil at My Feet [Closed]

[pimpcanes]

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.

Comments

[needlebearer]

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.

[atouchofka]

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."

[pimpcanes]

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.

[atouchofka]

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.

[needlebearer]

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?"

[atouchofka]

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.

[pimpcanes]

"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."

[atouchofka]

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.

[needlebearer]

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.

[pimpcanes]

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.

[atouchofka]

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.

[needlebearer]

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.

[pimpcanes]

"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.

[needlebearer]

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."

/wrap

[pimpcanes]

"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."