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WHO| Aunamee and Howard
WHAT| A new tribute arrives.
WHEN| Third Week
WHERE| Ice fields.
WARNINGS/NOTES| None yet.

The strong will survive, and Aunamee is strong.

Ahead of him, the landscape is a perfect white (his favorite color, a blank slate) sprinkled with bursts of red and brown. Blood, but no bodies. Blood, but no bodies. He's noticed the trend and he prefers it, in a way. It makes the perfect white snow (the perfect blank slate) into an artist's palette with colors to be mixed and merged, except the paint belongs to someone's last moments and the palette is a killer by its own right, cold claws ready to snap up at any moment.

The strong will survive, and Aunamee is strong. He does not let himself fear.

Except he does. His heartbeat rolls up from his chest and into his throat, an all-together unfamiliar sensation that makes him feel like a prey animal. It's disgusting. Nauseating. Maddening.

It's almost enough to make him paint.

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"I have no interest in dying," he says over the wind, his hands still empty and exposed. "Or killing."

Without telepathy, Aunamee suspects that murder will be a hollow cusp of its former glory, all blood and no words, all screams and no feelings. He's dreading his first kill for that very reason. Won't it be like having a microwave dinner after feasting on steaks his entire life? Won't it be disappointing, unsatisfying, uninspiring?

"And I would never ask you to kill me," he says, knitting his brow. He softens his voice, the sweetness and sorrow brushing in just like the wind. "That would be cruel."

"Then that makes two of us." Howard looks as if he's still hesitant to approach; after all, he has the dead bird, and that's valuable currency in this place. He clutches it a little tighter.

"But if you're not planning on dying and you're not planning on killing, what are you going to do here?"

He could play it clever. He could lift his shoulders in a shrug, a nonchalant who knows, and leave it at that. He could turn the question back on this young, suspicious boy and ask him what he's planning to do about it. But there are ways of cultivating mystery and then there are ways of cultivating trust, and without shelter or weapons, Aunamee needs the latter more than anything.

"I'm doing the same thing all the sane ones are doing," he says. "Keeping those two goals from conflicting for as long as possible."

But he can't entirely resist.

"What about you?"

Howard could unveil his 'master plan' (outlast everyone) but he also knows better than to act like a threat to strangers here.

"Freeze to death instead of letting someone get their rocks off torturing me." He hasn't run yet. He takes a step closer. "You got any skills worth advertising?"

Aunamee mirrors the step, his hands raised high.

"My eyes," he says. "My hands, for catching your birds."

This boy asks questions. Aunamee prefers this to the more compliant ones, the ones who kick back but never kick. He appreciates the strength. The initiative. The challenge.

"I don't need that. I already catch my own birds." And has allies hunkered down elsewhere. Expanding that trust is opening it up to potential danger.

So instead he asks, "do you know first aid?"

"Yes, he responds simply, taking another step forward. He remembers cold hands cupped around his, guiding him through sutures and cold compresses and CPR. For when the world ends, there will be many injured, his teachers told him, and you will need to protect them. Aunamee has lost count of the number of people he stiched up since, casualities of his own manufactured disasters.

"I was not lying earlier, about the cold finishing me." He keeps his voice even, serious. "I have neither weapons nor supplies."

"My ankle's hurt." Howard doesn't want to go into detail yet, or imply that he can't run if he needs to. He's underfed, especially lately, and short, so he doesn't want to give the stranger more reason to believe he can be overtaken. "If you can help my ankle, I'll see about finding you a place to get out of the cold."

And he smiles. Sweet and relieved and grateful.

"I would gladly help you with your ankle, friend."

Friend. It slips out easily, like melted butter, tinted with his ever thankful smile. He closes the gap between them with graceful steps, moving ever so slowly, ever so carefully. He'd rather not startle. Not yet.

"My name is Aunamee."

"You're not my friend," Howard snaps. "Remember that."

After the last few incidents with friends - first being assaulted, then having Eponine go commit suicide on him - Howard isn't inclined to bestow that title on anyone new, certainly not someone he's met so recently.

He jerks his thumb in a direction and starts walking, trying to hide the limp. "And I'm Howard."

"Howard," he echoes. "Howard, who doesn't make friends." Something is broken in this boy. Something besides the ankle, which Aunamee notes and studies, staring at every bend, every slightly uneven step as he follows behind him. "That's probably a wise move."

He should have known. This boy's drive, his confidence must arise from suffering -- like all good things. What was the spark? Neglectful parents, lonely schooldays? No, he's sure there's something much more than that, perhaps an accident or a death or a betrayal. Was he bright and naive before the snow, before the death match? Or has a shadow loomed over him far longer than that? It's enthralling, intoxicating, this mystery wrapped in a human body. He wishes he can inhale all of his secrets, but he can't, not now, not anymore, and so he'll need to crack him open like an egg instead. Soon. When the time is right. Smash. Bam. Crackle.

Perhaps he can enjoy a mystery, now and again. Perhaps it's not so awful, missing his telepathy.

"How old are you, Howard?"

"Fifteen. Why? How old are you?" In a way it puts Howard on the defensive to be questioned about his age - he already knows he's at the cusp, almost too old to be sympathetic, but young enough to still have his age be a mark of vulnerability. And he really doesn't know how much life experience Aunamee might have, but the different between 45 and 35 seems to be less than the difference between 25 and 15, no matter what it is numerically.

He's leading Aunamee towards the crevices, where they can at least get out of the wind and Howard can continue to deliberate over whether or not to share the bird. He's a good catcher, so getting another bird won't be too much trouble, but it means traveling back to the glacier.

"Thirty-three."

It's not easy to walk on the ice. His muscles strain for balance, little pricks of effort that he knows will become ache in not too long.

"You conduct yourself beyond your years."

"I don't know what that means." He doesn't look comfortable with compliments, and in a way presumes that Aunamee's overselling his gratitude for the temporary alliance. They approach a crack and Howard crouches outside it. "Come on, get in there and we can warm up."

He doesn't want to go in first and maybe end up cornered.

Standing over the crevasse, Aunamee hesitates. Warmth at the price of uncertainty. The fear had dimmed down, so quiet that it was only a hiss or a whisper over the gears his mind, but now it flows back, his heart twitching and stuttering like a dying insect. He rolls his tongue in his mouth. How did his throat get so dry?

"You promise," he says slowly, "that you won't kill me with whatever you've got in your pocket and leave me down there."

"Promise. I was serious that I don't want to kill no one." But that doesn't mean he's handing over the knife to prove it.

He watches Aunamee, taking in the hesitation, not sure what to do with the fact that at this moment, he, Howard, is actually intimidating. He's being taken seriously as a threat. "Besides, you can't check out my ankle if you're dead."

"I can't," he says, forcing a smile. He crouches down to get a better look and determine where he should place his feet while trudging into the unknown. He breathes through his teeth. "Then again, I only need to check it once."

He casts a glance at Howard. The glasses black out his eyes, but his expression is plain enough. The worry. The doubt. They were emotions he needed to feign in the past, and while he likes to believe he's feigning them now, too, he isn't. Not entirely.

But he descends all the same.

One step down. Another step down. He is careful and precise, slow and even. When he's down far enough that his head is beneath the surface, he --

(such light so many birds and whispers and suns giving in to moons and moons giving into suns lives blossoming and withering and so many colors red green blue yellow pink orange white white white white white)

-- shudders and rests his forehead against the icy wall.

Edited 2013-02-04 23:01 (UTC)

"You okay, man?"

Howard comes behind Aunamee, moving a bit more slowly on the descent. He doesn't know that his mind's about to be peeled back like an onion, no, like a wart with the nerves tangled up in the flesh. The wounds have scabbed over on the surface, but the punctures are too deep to have healed over. They've only been ignored, pushed past.

He has no idea that Aunamee will see his childhood, one of a dozen black kids in a primarily white school, short, scrawny, unathletic, awkward. Shoved up against lockers and going to the school nurse with broken noses and fingers starting when he was eight. Falling in with a group of bullies and making not friends but allies, at least, in his war against the rest of his peers. Stealing, picking locks, vandalizing, cutting class. Trips to the principle's office and a few times to the sheriff.

And then, the FAYZ. The day the adults went away. He was thirteen and his science teacher vanished out of existence in the middle of class.

Through Howard's mind Aunamee will see society collapse in a microcosm. 400 odd kids, trapped in a bubble with mutant animals and superpowers for a year, tethered to a patch of hell 400 miles wide. They fought. They starved. They went crazy and killed each other and killed themselves and died of diseases better suited for a horror movie.

In his memory he's less than seventy pounds, drinking a bottle of shampoo to stave off the hunger. In his memory, he's cradling his bleeding nose at his best friend's hand. In his memory coyotes are feasting on toddlers, his best friend's face is being eaten alive by a worm as long as his wrist, he's making moonshine in a tub, he's watching a little boy vomit up bloody strips of his own vital organs. He's watching their self-appointed king execute a ten year-old by throwing her through a wall. He's being told one of his friends was cannibalized, he's being told that they have evidence the government did it, he's crying late at night because he wishes he knew why his parents left them all to this.

And then there was the arena, and then the Capitol, where all the good and running water in the world can't make him feel okay. He's eating until he vomits, then eating more even when everything tastes like stomach acid. He's walking through the Capitol at 3am because every time he closes his eyes, he's covered in insects eating his flesh. He's washing in the shower as the water runs cold because he can't get the grime off, can't stave away the germs. All the neuroses, all the nightmares, all the suicidal thoughts are there for Aunamee to peruse through like a library of puberty skewered by fear and pain.

Once they reach a small cove in the crevasse, Howard sits down in the snow and covers the bird in hunks of snow. He watches Aunamee, not revealing his injury just yet.

Edited 2013-02-04 23:45 (UTC)

It's beautiful. It's so much more beautiful than he could have imagined.

"Heights," he breathes, hiding his smile against the cold wall. He fails to suppress another shudder. "I don't like heights."

When Aunamee first developed his abilities -- when he was still named Ariel and wore different frowns like some people wear different hats -- he had thought of them like a warm blanket, almost, a soft and comforting embrace in the abscence of anything else. He feels that now, too, except this warm blanket is more like the skin he's been missing for the last several hours. And that skin sings. And that skin loves him.

Finally he moves on, his arms and legs trembling as he takes his last few steps to the cove. Fear, he thinks, can explain all of this, and now he can fake that with all the confidence in the world. Now he can place his attention on the things that matter.

Now he can know this boy.

"Let me see your ankle," he says, his voice somewhat raspy. He clears his throat, holding his palm across his mouth.

Edited 2013-02-05 04:58 (UTC)

"Big whoop. No one likes heights." Of course, acting nonchalant is all a cover for those fears that never leave him alone.

Howard chews his tongue, then decides to go with it and pulls his pant leg out of his boot. Removing the boot is difficult. His ankle and foot are both swollen, and have turned the sickly purple and yellow color of a bruise. He's been keeping it straight with a piece of an arrow and some bandages.

He keeps his hand in his pocket, around the knife, just in case Aunamee decides to do anything. Howard doesn't especially like him yet - he's acting like he wants something, and it wouldn't shock Howard if it were supplies or advice - but first aid is first aid.

"True," he says, "Very true. And falling is probably preferable to murder, yet the human mind is an irrational mystery. Isn't it?"

His mystery.

He sits down beside Howard and takes his foot in his hands, examining the bruises, the swelling. He gingerly palpates the outside of his ankle, ligament after ligament, listening for sounds of pain (the most beautiful sounds in the world) and feeling for bone. This is all very natural. Everything is so natural.

"How did this injury occur?" he asks, although he knows, oh, he knows. "Or if you'd rather not say," he continues, "you could do me a favor and tell me whether you saw it bend inwards or outwards."

Edited (somehow I lost a line in there!) 2013-02-05 22:34 (UTC)

"I don't know. I don't think people are all that hard to read."

Howard doesn't make any noises of pain, but he does wince when Aunamee presses on certain parts. His face furrows into an expression of sudden pain. He takes a deep breath when Aunamee retracts his hands.

"At the Cornucopia. I was pulling a bag from someone and they let go, so all my weight went on my foot. Outwards, I think." Trying to wrest supplies from the old man who is, ironically, Howard's ally now.

"Read perhaps," he says, a smile flickering across his lips. "But understand?"

He waves a hand at Howard's foot.

"I'd like to see you move it, if you don't mind." An outwards bend, if he remembers correctly, is one of the worst kinds; the ligament tears near so many important bones. It's enough to make Howard a liability. "You didn't hear any pops or cracks, did you?"

"You want me to get up? You already seen me walk." And while he can walk, it's not exactly comfortable. Howard rolls his ankle as much as he can without putting it in too much pain. "No cracks, but a little bit of popping. What's wrong with it?"

He doesn't know it's a bad sprain, and he's honestly worried it's a break.

It's lovely when the questions on the outside match the questions on the inside, like a full chorus chiming in all at once. Now that the future (and Howard's mind) is rolled out before him, his muscles are relaxed. His voice is calmer. He is soft and paternal. He is gentle and urging.

"It's a sprain," he says. "And quite a bad one at that."

He leaves the words unspoken, how he could easily overtake Howard in this position but doesn't. Aunamee is fond of him, how his pain rings and sings in his ears, how his brow furrows with suspicion and how he struggles to take command of every situation. There is no need to discard him so early. When his ankle fails him, he'll be easy to eliminate -- in mercy or otherwise.

He gestures at the bandages.

"What other supplies did you nab, twisting that ankle of yours? More of these?"

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