thearena | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Who: Atticus and Open!
What: Brand new tribute dropping in
Where: near the cornucopia
When: Saturday
Warnings/Notes: None so far

Atticus is pretty used to cold winters, but mostly he associates them with mittens and hot cocoa. This is nothing like that, and it is...well, really fucking cold.

Which is kind of weird because he hasn't been cold since he turned. If anything, he's been too hot. So the cold thing...that's just weird. He can worry about that later, though. Right now, he's pretty sure he needs to find shelter and maybe something he can eat or...he's not even sure. Build a fire? He was a boy scout when he was little, but there isn't exactly a badge for death matches.

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Atticus scrambles backward as R moves forward. He's about to say something, anything, to calm the guy down. Maybe say he doesn't mind that R is dead, won't hold it against him or anything. It's not like he has any room to talk, after all.

But before he can get any words out, he feels his skin heating up, a fire building in his belly and spreading out to all his limbs. His amber eyes start to get brighter and brighter until it looks like they're glowing. His bones start to contort, fur sprouting over his body. In moments, there's a black wolf standing in a pool of Atticus' clothes, eyes flashing bright in the dim light of the crevasse, snarling at the corpse moving toward him.

Atticus pulling a wolf out of his pocket is new. So new, in fact, that R's face twists into a confused cross between a snarl and a gape like he can't make up his mind which one to go with. It's almost enough to make him stop the attack, if his body wasn't going on auto-pilot and he's riding shotgun.

There's no battle cry, nothing to pump him up like a human does. R doesn't yell. The only thing that comes out is a groan dragging itself up out of his ribcage, a sound that normally would draw in other zombies. No other Dead come. It's just him flying solo.

R doesn't let that stop him. He kicks up snow as he suddenly pushes himself forward and grabs for the wolf's black head.

Atticus is just as surprised as R is. He's never changed like this before. He's never actually changed outside of a full moon. It hardly matters though. At this point, instinct takes over entirely.

He twists away from the grasping hand a moment and then lunges at his attacker, snapping jaws aiming for the arm in question, meaning to incapacitate the grabbing abilities.

A normal person with any shred of self-preservation would've shied away, tried to bring up their other arm to block the jaws from closing in because Jesus Christ it's a wolf. Funny thing about being Dead: you lose that instinctive oh-shit reaction. It's easy for Atticus's fangs to close in on R's arm above the crook of his elbow, even easier to puncture through the parka's down and start tearing into dead skin and muscle because R isn't trying to fight him off. The zombie doesn't help things by trying to twist toward the wolf, letting Atticus get a better hold on his arm.

He reaches with his other hand, grabs a handful of black fur and starts pulling himself even closer, ignoring the arm.

R tells himself that he's never had a wolf/man/thing before. For all he knows, this won't just end up with him coughing up hairballs and feeling hungry all over again. He might even get some interesting memories from Atticus.

The zombie continues to try to drag himself closer, his mouth wide, as the arm in Atticus's jaws begins to tear off and hangs by shreds of ligaments and mangled parka, only seconds away from coming off completely.

Edited 2013-02-11 06:25 (UTC)

Atticus was rather expecting an oh-shit reaction. Not that he'd done this much, but instincts told him that he should get a fight. And apparently it isn't even enough to get this guy to stop with the trying to get a hold of him thing. Still, Atticus tells himself if he can get that arm the rest of the way off, this dead thing will leave him alone. He gives a mighty shake of his head and manages to tear the arm off, parka and all.

And then he twists his whole body to get out of the grip of the other arm.

The arm rips off with a disgusting squish, black oozing up out of the puncture wounds, and goes spiraling off into the back of the crevasse. It thuds against the wall. R jolts forward as his balance is thrown off, the zombie sliding even closer than he was before. He hangs onto the wolf like it’s going out of style. The stump where his arm used to be flails around like he’s still trying to use it to grab onto Atticus, which, in his mind, he is. Now R has a big fist of black fur, enough to drag himself close and bury his face into the other Tribute.

Okay. Yeah. So biting into a wolf isn’t working like R thought it would. All he gets is a mouthful of fur and R’s even trying to gnaw away for all he’s worth, too. Doing it with a horde would be easy, but with Atticus squirming and snarling in his arms like a wild thing, R finds out holding on at all is harder than it looks. It feels like he’s freshly dead all over again, trying to learn the ropes. It’s when he struggles to push the wolf down to the ground that R’s hold slips…

As soon as R's hold slips, Atticus is squirming out of it. Part of him wants to stay and tear this creature to shreds, but there is still a small, rational area of his brain that tells him he should run, that whatever this thing is is not something he wants to fight. (Possibly, this is holdover from his extensive knowledge of zombie-related games/literature from his human life telling him he has no way to take off this guy's head, really.)

He snarls and snaps at R just a moment before he is taking off at a run, thoughtlessly leaving his clothes behind.

Oh, wait, R has this aftera - wait, no, no he doesn't. His fingers slip, he's left with fur all over his tongue and stuck between his teeth, and as if to get a parting shot in, Atticus gets one more bite in before he wriggles free. R falls forward into the snow, his hand still clawing for the other Tribute. When he looks up, he catches a glimpse of a black tail and then Atticus is gone.

That could've gone a lot better.

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