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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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"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?"

Howard doesn't know how to interpret the way Aunamee speaks to him now, but he wonders if it's a doctor thing. Bedside manner, acting warm and encouraging when telling your patient bad news. And it works, it is encouraging, at least when Howard isn't thinking about the unspoken implication.

"Will it get worse? From walking on it, I mean? I feel like it's been about the same level of hurt for the last few days."

Howard's suddenly glad he didn't have his sleeping bag on his back when he ran into Aunamee. Between his hideouts with Sigma and Alpha, he has two cans of food left, two sleeping bags (although one was stabbed and ripped nearly to shreds when he killed Draco), his knife, clampons, some fishing line, a fifty-foot rope, and three people's worth of clothing. Not a bad haul. Plus Sigma and Alpha both have firestarting kits of their own, which have come in handy.

"Not too much. I have a knife and a sleeping bag back where I'm hiding." It's a lie - he has more than that, and the knife is in his pocket.

"No," he says. "But it won't get better."

He hears the lie, the chorus diverging. Oh, distrustful Howard. Liar who lets people freeze to death and fills other bodies with holes. He runs his tongue over his teeth and sits back on the heels of his feet.

"There are ways, of course, to recover your mobility. Exercises. Physical therapy. And there are ways to reduce the swelling."

"I been packing ice into my boot, trying to stop the swelling, but that just gets my foot wet and cold." He really has no idea how to handle himself in the snow - Aunamee should see that, see that Howard only ever saw it on TV until now.

"But the rest of that doesn't sound like anything that'll help me right now. It'll only help if I win, and that's probably not going to happen either." In a way, Howard prefers the arena. It's stressful and brutal, but it's easier to play desperate in front of the cameras than to pretend to be charming and happy in the Capitol. He's not interested in winning so much as postponing both death and the return to luxury.

He's going to tell Howard that he needs a barrier between his foot and the ice and that every inch of increased mobility could spare his life for another minute, but something else catches his mind, something he missed in the initial flurry of thoughts. Aunamee sees the deep black voice of death and then he sees -- more, he sees rebirth and crowds and more deaths and more rebirths, a cycle like a perennial flower. It startles him so much that his composure fails and he blinks furiously in attempt to regain himself, doubt gripping his shoulders like a great beast.

Is this boy delusional? Psychotic? Are his abilities failing him, flickering on and off like a fading light bulb, spewing false information like a dying machine?

"You okay?" Howard edges away from Aunamee, wondering if he's watching someone decide whether or not to kill him or watching someone have an aneurysm. He starts getting his foot back into his boot.

This is how the others died.

The chosen men and women before Aunamee, their abilities ebbed and flowed near the end. Their visions grew unreliable. They made mistakes not through carelessness, but by following information that was fundamentally false. It was as though the power they held started to reject them, to taunt them and draw them towards their deaths.

"I might have heard something," he says. He looks up without moving his head, wide eyes staring at the sky above. His breath is halved. "Up there."

Howard glances up and quickly finishes getting his boot back on. He gets to his feet and backs against the ice wall, looking upwards, although he keeps Aunamee in his range of vision. "There's no animals here but birds. And other people."

Which means that if they hear something, it's probably a threat.

"We should book it."

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