thearena | Now I've Stumbled Here [Closed]

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Now I've Stumbled Here [Closed]

WHO | Howard, Aunamee and eventually Wyatt
WHAT | Howard freaks out and dies.
WHEN | Week 5
WHERE | In the crevasse.
WARNINGS / NOTES | Violence, brutal death, mentions and discussion of suicide.

Howard doesn't cry when he sees Sigma's face in the sky. In fact, he doesn't do much of anything besides stare at the sky for a moment, blinking, then looking past the image and to the stars as if they're going to tell him what to do now. How is he supposed to mourn when he knew this was coming?

And after that, he goes back to the hideout he shared with Alpha and packs up his things, because in a way this is more comfortable anyway, being on his own. Comfortable in its familiarity.

He gets all his supplies together. There's only one can of food left, and another dead bird stuffed into Draco's watertight bag. He ties the rope around his waist and over his shoulder, gets the sleeping bags and firestarter kit on his back. He doesn't want to stay in this cave anymore, not with Alpha's blood still on the ground. Even without the corpse, which he rolled and dragged out for the Hovercrafts, the cave seems full of some kind of sick energy that tries to worm under his skin even worse than the cold.

But where should he go? When he stands, laden down with his resources, the shooting pain from his heel to his knee answers for him. He'll have to find the minister.

It takes well over an hour of walking with his things back to the crevasse to find the area he left Aunamee. He doesn't see him immediately, so instead he finds the crack in the crevasse that was deemed appropriate shelter earlier, and sets his things down, waiting for Aunamee to return from wherever he is. He leaves the can of food up by the top of the crack, like an offering and a signal that he's there.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The last time Howard saw Aunamee, he was pristine. Clear skin. Steady gait.

Now he's drenched with blood. A long, jagged gash runs from his forehead and down his cheek, the skin around it bruised, discolored, sickly. When he emerges from the shadows below, he carries himself with a limp. His eyes are hollow. Exhausted.

"Howard," he says.

He came. His boy came for him.

Howard rests a bit while he waits for Aunamee. It's more difficult now, without anyone to take watch, and as such his sleep is troubled and light. Every time the ice in the crevice around him cracks, he jolts back awake, and as such he's already alert when he hears off-rhythm footsteps coming his way.

He visibly startles when he sees Aunamee. "I thought you said you didn't want to do any killing," comes out of his mouth before he even thinks of the dangers of saying it.

"This is my blood," he says. The truth.

He braces himself against the icy wall of the crevice, finding a small ridge against which he can rest his foot. The cold doesn't bother him (not down here, not where his abilities thrive) and the pain feels dull and distant, the physiological warning signs bowing to irrelevance. In this claustrophobic haven, Aunamee is safe. If his supernatural gift is a parasite, than his body is its host.

This parasite does not let its host die.

"You're here for more than exercises, aren't you."

Edited 2013-02-11 02:26 (UTC)

"You look like that girl in that Stephen King movie. Carrie, or whatever." His cousins made him watch it during a sleepover when he was eight, because they thought it was funny to watch their squeamish younger relative have nightmares. He's never liked horror movies for that reason. "You're hurt."

He's been walking around with a busted ankle long enough to notice when someone else is limping.

"The person I was hiding out with died." Howard killed him in self-defense. "I thought we could still be mutually beneficial to each other. You help me out, because I brought stuff and there's more where that came from."

Which would be insurance against being killed, except that Howard's lying. Everything he has is here. It seems his campout with Sigma was buried under an avalanche.

"I brought food, even. Legit meat and crackers, not dead birds."

He inhales the lie, sour like lemonade, and then his mind fills with beautiful images of the next five minutes. Scratches. Stumbles. New blood, fresh blood staining the sleeves of his jacket. For the last few days, Aunamee's own future has been narrowing down to a pinprick. He's lost too much blood. His wounds will not close, will not heal, and it won't be long before infection sets in.

He can no longer afford to take things slowly. He can no longer indulge.

"I suspect," he says, "that many of us resemble Mr. King's characters."

It's an attempt at a joke, but he can't even manage a smile. Instead he makes a quiet sound, an exhale that sounds like pain. He braces his leg against the wall and curls his hand around a groove in the ice. It's time to get up.

"Thank you," he says. His voice catches on the last syllable.

"You're welcome." Howard's voice betrays that there's a catch - food's never given for free. It's a vital resource and one that Howard only parts with in close company or in exchange for something. He expects Aunamee will return the favor, at some point.

He gestures to the supplies he's brought, though his eyes never leave Aunamee, sizing up the injuries. Maybe between this arena and the next, he should get some first-aid knowledge. "I got rope, fishing wire, watertight bagging, two sleeping bags, four sets of clothes, shoelaces, clampons, a harpoon, some fire materials and a bird."

He takes his gloves off and pulls the bird out. "Probably should start eating this before it gets to rotting."

Yes, Aunamee thinks. You probably should.

He hoists himself out of the crevice. It's easy at first -- he feels no pain, no discomfort at all -- but as soon as his head crosses the surface, his mind goes black and the wound in his cheek comes to life, blistering, seething, burning. Electric pain crawls up from his impaled foot to his calf. But he is more accustomed to these things now. It does not blind himself, disable him as it did when he fought with Grey. He bites his lip and pulls himself onto the solid ground, this frozen wasteland that carves his senses like a jack'o'lantern.

But he does not need his senses. He knows how this is supposed to happen.

All he needs to do is go forward.

He breathes, pants, and curls his leg under himself. "That's good," he says, the easier thing to say while he regains his breath. "I can't-- I cannot remember the last time I've eaten. I thought I ran out of luck."

If Howard was hoping for a congratulations in bringing back such a haul and is disappointed not to get one, it doesn't show. In a way, he's glad Aunamee didn't say anything - many of these supplies could have been gotten by Sponsor gift, but others, like the extra clothing and the blood-splattered, mangled sleeping bag, were clearly looted from the corpses of others.

"That's my last one," he says, glancing up at the can of food. He gets his knife out and starts to butcher the bird, keeping it on the watertight back so the blood and feathers can be collected and used otherwise.

Aunamee looks soft, almost, squishy, he thinks. Fighting through pain he doesn't seem used to. He can see wince on Aunamee's face as he hauls himself up, and he considers asking how he got those injuries, but he can ask that later. For the moment his thoughts are preoccupied with plucking and eating the bird, taking just enough of it to get through the day while leaving enough to get through tomorrow if he can't catch anything else.

Aunamee runs his tongue along the back of his teeth and watches. The care. The rationing.

(In his memory he's less than seventy pounds, drinking a bottle of shampoo to stave off the hunger.)

Aunamee slides his gloved-hand across the ice until his fingers find the cold, hard metal lip of the can, and then he pulls it towards him, maintaining his choreographed grace even while his hands tremble and his body aches. He says nothing while he pries the thumb tab open and discards the razor sharp metal into the snow. He says nothing while he sticks a finger inside and pulls out a too-large bite -- and then another. And another. He eats like he's been starving and oh, he is, Howard, he is starving, and can't you understand what brings him to do the things he does?

Can't you have some sympathy?

Howard looks up from where he's carving up the foul-smelling sea bird to where Aunamee's eating. The smacking noises of chewing are too much for him to ignore.

Stupid. He should have realized Aunamee was an idiot, that no one who hasn't really lived through famine can understand how to treat food. He feels his guts twist up, feels the pulse in his own neck as he's compelled to speak up.

How much food did he and the other kids waste, 'pigging out' in the first few weeks of the FAYZ? Oreos for dinner, Doritos for breakfast, the vegetables rotting away in stores and pantries. How deeply did they regret it when it got dire later, when they were eating roaches and pieces of their own clothing and when their own bodies were killing them for want of any nutrition, any at all? When they weren't even surprised that kids were eating each other?

"We only have one of those. Don't waste it like that, we need to ration it." His tone is deadly serious, almost threat-like. He doesn't seem to realize the knife is in his hand. "You hear me?"

He hears. He hears everything as though it's already been said.

It's not too late to turn back. Howard is a good boy who brings him food, who keeps his word, who waits for him in the cold, cold snow when it would be far easier for him to run. Aunamee feels a pang in his chest, a quiet rolling motion from his heart to his breath that isn't like guilt exactly, but more like loneliness. When Howard's gone, Aunamee will sentenced to solitude. He will be on his own. Alone. One.

It's not too late to turn back, but he won't turn back.

He'll just need to make this one count.

His eyes slide down to the knife in Howard's hand. "Birds," he says. He sucks on his teeth, a nervous twitch he has long mastered. "There are birds."

Howard gets up, leaving the split bird there on the watertight bag.

"There's a bird, and the rest is luck. What if my ankle goes out tomorrow? You know how to catch one of these? You think half this bird can feed us both?" Howard's voice is creaking upwards, cracking and betraying both his youth and the borderline hysterical panic. "Just- oh man, how much have you eaten already? Put the rest down, I don't want to have to take it from you."

He doesn't want to fight, but this is important. This is their survival at stake. It's occurring to him that Aunamee was the wrong person to run to, that he should have found someone more practical, someone with the same values - and that makes him miss Eponine again, and he gets more upset. It's etched into the curves and muscles of his face, the panic and regret and desperation.

"Don't make me take it from you."

"Calm down," he croons. It's getting difficult to hide his anticipation, but sometimes excitement can look like fear, invigoration can look like anxiety. He tastes the perspiration on his lips. "There's no reason we cannot have a civil conversation."

He drags his fingers across the snow once more, but not towards the food. He's inching towards the rest of the supplies, the sleeping bags (one tattered and bloody, dancing with memories that he cannot see right now, muted gasps, gurgles, apologies) and the clothing. The shoelaces. The crampons.

The fishing line.

"You'll want to put down that knife," he says.

His fingers brush against the metal cord.

"We can't have a civil conversation! Can't you see where we are? We're not in civilization, we're in the middle of nowhere with no real shelter and no food and I'm the only one here who actually knows what to do!"

He hears but doesn't register the comment about the knife, because Aunamee has reacted for the supplies now. In Howard's hyperactive mind Aunamee's wasting those supplies too, and besides, Howard never said Aunamee could just have them. All he can think about is that he's accumulated this little patch of resources here, and Aunamee's going to take it and waste it and there won't be anything left unless Howard can make him listen.

"Stop right there!"

But he doesn't stop. His hand clasps the spool, solid and firm in his palm like an anchor.

His heart is ringing. His ears are singing.

"You're growing unstable," he murmurs, soft as a secret. "Howard who doesn't make friends."

"I'm not-I'm not unstable, I just need you to stop and listen to me, put my stuff down, just put it down and listen to me!"

He won't throw a blow - he's been the small kid for far too long to have an impulse to hit first - but he clenches the knife tighter in his fist and takes a step towards Aunamee. He'll rip whatever Aunamee has in his hands away if he has to.

It's like trying to see up out of a well; he knows this is an over-the-top reaction but he can't get back to where they were just minutes ago, before they were fighting, before some act of his mind or of Aunamee's eating destabilized the whole thing.

"I told you," Aunamee says, pulling the spool up against his chest as though it were an infant, "to put down the knife."

And that's the last warning.

He releases the spool and shifts his weight to the right all at once, his one arm bracing himself against the ground, his good leg kicking outwards, forwards towards Howard's knees. This is not a "minister" at work. This is a little boy who was taught to fight as though his life depended on it. This is a little boy grown into a man that now only gambles with the lives of others.

Behind his dark glasses, his eyes are bright with life.

It catches Howard by surprise. He didn't expect Aunamee to hit him - what happened to civil conversation? What happened to Aunamee wanting to help people? And while he never trusted the man, Howard wasn't going to hurt him, he wasn't even thinking about the knife.

He cries out as Aunamee's foot hits him in the top of his shin - the snowpants make for enough padding that it doesn't do permanent damage, but the kick is hard enough to knock him down, and in the course of it he tweaks his bad ankle again.

He doesn't let go of the knife, though. Some instinct reminds him that it's the only weapon he has, so even as he goes down he clutches it tight. He rolls over onto his stomach and tries to get his feet beneath him.

While Howard is falling down, Aunamee is recovering the fishing line and getting up with a practiced ease, stumbling only slightly as his foot buckles and gives under his weight. Once Howard rolls onto his stomach (yes, this is what he saw, this is how it goes) he presses his foot down into the small of his back.

He breathes hard. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

(How is he already out of breath?)

"I'm sorry," he says. He holds the spool in one hand while unwinding it with the other, the sharp metal digging a groove in his glove. "But I cannot feel safe with you anymore."

"No, no, no, please-!" Howard tries to squirm away, tries to push up on his hands, but Aunamee weighs significantly more with him, and the position of Aunamee's foot has disabled Howard's legs from providing any effective leverage. "Let me go, you can have the stuff, I'll leave you alone, please!"

His breaths come fast too, tearful, terrified hiccups and gasps. It all happened so fast. Less than a minute, between his saying something and Aunamee pinning him to the ground. He doesn't even know how to comprehend it; his instinct has spiked quickly into fighting for his life, but his orientation of the situation hasn't caught up.

He stops flailing for a fraction of a second to analyze what best to do, and the answer comes to him in the form of the weight in his hand. He twists as much of his back as he can, throwing his shoulder to the side and stabbing the knife, hopefully right into the side of Aunamee's knee.

He did not forget the knife. In his visions, he saw it swinging through the air, he saw himself kicking his leg away and dodging it, but there are disadvantages when working with visions that are several minutes old, there is an inability to judge precise timing, and before Aunamee realizes it, the cold metal is sinking into the muscles of his calf.

"Fuck," he snarls, jerking his leg up and then kicking it out, aiming for the back of Howard's head.

There is an energy inside of him that has been absent until now. It's a palpable rage, a demon that mars his facial features and pumps his veins full of gasoline.

Some distant thought in Howard's head finds it funny: he doesn't feel the kick so much as his front teeth sinking into the snow on the ground, so much as hot blood from where he bit off part of his tongue filling his mouth. His vision blurs. It feels like his brain is the passenger in a car that's hit the brakes too fast.

But there isn't time to worry about that. There isn't time for anything but trying to escape, that instinct to get away. Lizards shed their tails when they're trapped; snakes use their venom. Howard has neither, but with Aunamee's weight off his back he thrashes, flipping to his side and kicking and squirming to get away. He slides in the snow, and he can't seem to get his feet beneath him enough to stand, nor can his bare hands get enough traction to crawl.

In one quick, single motion, Aunamee tears the knife from his leg.

-- and his body is consumed with a series of shudders, powerful nausea rolling up in his stomach, an impossible tingling in his arms and legs, lightness darkness lightness darkness, agony that grips his organs from the inside and threatens to pull him down to the ground. He hisses through his teeth, his breath punctuated by gasps, his lungs tensing and relaxing in all the wrong ways.

"I was prepared," he breathes, "to be kind."

He shifts the spool to one hand and the knife to the other, holding the handle so tightly that his knuckles are white, and then he throws the knife downward at the boy struggling to stand.

Edited 2013-02-13 16:19 (UTC)

It feels as if it goes right through his body. The blade sinks down under his shoulderblade, and it must slice through a nerve of some sort, because that half of his body goes numb. In the shock of the pain, his arm on that side goes slack too, and he topples over into the snow onto his shoulder.

He stares up at Aunamee, lacking comprehension, with the same kind of fear a doomed rabbit has when looking at an oncoming car. He doesn't understand how or why this happened so fast, or the change in Aunamee from ally to this completely dissimilar being of wrath.

"Please," he tries to say, but the bitten piece of his tongue and a mouthful of blood turn it into nothing more than a grotesque 'pluh' dripping down his cheek.

He kneels down next to the boy.

In the past, this would have been a graceful movement, the practiced behavior of a parent comforting a child with a skinned knee. Now he grimaces, the muscles in his legs giving and spasming as he tries to find his balance on the way down. The first thing he does from the ground is wrench the hunting knife out of Howard's shoulder.

The second thing he does is drive it into his stomach.

Howard yells - screams, squeals - in bewilderment and pain, spraying a mouthful more blood on the snow. Blood starts to soak through the parka, through the double layers, pooling inside the waterproof outer layer and escaping through the gaps in the fibers and the slash in the fabric.

He tries to writhe away, not because he thinks he's going to be able to escape but because he just wants to get away from the pain. His muscles are reacting without intelligent thought, on nothing but the base impulse of 'this hurts, make it stop'. He rolls onto his back, still shrieking through gasping for breath.

And then he clasps his hand under Howard's chin.

"Shh," he says. "Shh."

His grip is firm, but not harsh. Guiding, but not cruel. He rests the fishing line next to them and removes his own glasses, and the cord catching on his frozen ears as he pulls them up and over his head. Aunamee's eyes are grey and wide and piercing, because while he could always disguise the excitement in his face, he could never quite hide those ambulance-chasing eyes. They skid up and down Howard's body. They make u-turns around the knife still stuck in Howard's stomach. They brake on his face.

"This is going to help," he says, his voice hushed so low than anger and sympathy sound the same. He curls his finger under Howard's glasses and pulls them off, gently setting them down into the snow. "I'm making the difficult decisions so you don't have to."

Howard's screaming subsides too, turned into sobs interspersed with coughs, hiccups and gags as the bleeding in his mouth tries to drain down his throat and windpipe. He stops thrashing, eyes locked on Aunamee, not with recognition but as if staring into the abyss, while falling.

No, he doesn't want to die. He's never wanted to die, not really, not like this. Right? Every time he's come close he's stopped, standing at the edge of the roof or with a razor between his fingertips, wishing someone else would decide for him, rather than stalling, stalling. That must mean something, something more than fear, something about life being worth living.

Isn't it? Isn't getting away from this, mutilated, bleeding, in agony, isn't it better than dying? Isn't there at least the hope that things will get better - and then he thinks of the Capitol, of how having everything he wanted again was not enough to make him okay.

"No, no, no..." It's a small mercy that the word is easy to say with half a tongue. He starts to wriggle away again, a worm on a hook.

Edited 2013-02-14 00:43 (UTC)

As Howard wriggles, Aunamee follows, his fingers ever tight around the boy's chin. He leans over until his face is practically brushing against Howard's forehead and then he whispers, pillow soft, sugar sweet.

"You'll never go hungry again," he says. "You'll never cry."

The rage has all but disappeared. Only the siren song remains, gentle remnants of the man who so recently helped Howard with his ankle. With someone lying below him, with someone at his mercy, Aunamee's own pain (and fear and hopelessness) means nothing. He drinks this in. He swallows every agonized sound.

He looks back at Aunamee and doesn't know if it's a lie or not. He might be escaping into the quiet, dark warmths of death, or he might just be revived and have to do this all again. Or death might not be quiet and dark and warm at all.

But it'll at least be an escape from pain. Unlike his energy, that isn't fading at all. The knife in his gut and the wound in his shoulder, the pain in his face and head are dizzying, blinding. Bright spots dance in front of his vision, shielding him from the worst of Aunamee's lull.

How can he die without ever knowing what happened to his parents? He can't die not knowing why they left.

He whimpers. It's a sick, mewling sound, a confused and weak noise gurgling up from the depths. With the last of his strength he tries to shove Aunamee off him.

"I wish we met under different circumstances," he says, a soft purr. "I wish I didn't need to go so far to protect you."

As Howard pushes against him, he takes his hand and runs his fingertips along the skin in comforting little strokes. He eases his thumb down to feel his wrist. His pulse.

"You're a good boy, Howard." He releases his chin and lowers his hand down to the knife embedded his stomach. He grips the handle. "I would have treasured you like a son."

He pulls the knife out before sinking it in once more. Between Howard's ribs.

And then he twists.

Howard shakes under Aunamee's hand, trembling not from the cold but from fear and that deeply-felt discomfort with physical contact. It's torture, to be caressed like this with a knife in his abdomen, while the cold, leaden weight of death starts to creep up from his hips to his chest. His arms fall away from trying to struggle.

He cries. Deep, wrenching sobs for his mother and father, for the fact that they once held him with the tenderness Aunamee is using now, for the fact that they might as well have condemned him to death the same way. For the fact that he can never stop looking for someone to fill the gap they punctured into his world when they left. Looking for people like Sigma, for people like Aunamee.

And he cries because he's in agony, and he has been for a long time, and doesn't know how to make it stop. Even dying doesn't make it stop, because he keeps being revived. Before Aunamee pulls the knife out, some base part of Howard's brain tells him to escape the cold rushing up his body towards his head by curling up towards the heat, like a piece of paper in the fire, and he nestles against Aunamee's breast.

And then the knife is out - its removal is as painful as its insertion - and back in again, twisting, the edge of the blade making a harsh scrape sound against bone, flesh tearing, muscle being pried apart, and he screams like he's never screamed before.

Wyatt had been on the move a lot since the ice collapse. All the faces in the sky afterward. All the groaning and creaking. The whispering shift of the ice.... It had him on edge. Had him choosing his bedding sites carefully. Had him snatching the briefest stretches of sleep.

He was searching again, chased out of his cave by an unsettling, sudden webbing of breaking ice, when he heard the screams, carried on the cold breeze.

He paused, spear in one hand, the other reaching for his knife. His head turned, trying in pinpoint where it was comin' from...

It came again. High and tortured. The agonized peal of a creature near death.

He started running, trusting his senses to lead the way. When he found them, when he realized that it was Howard. What he saw what had happened - it was all impulse. Instinct.

In a fluid movement, the knife flipped in his hand, the blade between his fingers and then it was flying. Turning through the air, heading straight for the stranger bent over Howard's body.

The knife catches him in the side, in his abdomen just below the ribcage. He tears it out as though it were an insect, unthinking, automatic, the blood quickly soaking the lining of his jacket. He shoves the fishing line in his pocket and pulls the knife from Howard's chest as he stands, bleeding and unbalanced, a crumbling statue in reverse.

He knew this perfect moment wouldn't last. In his visions, Howard's death was quicker, the fishing line cutting into the soft skin of his neck like butter, and the stranger arrived later -- but arrived nonetheless. This new man was doomed and tasted like desperation and determination when he licked his lips. Aunamee wanted to see him for himself, but he did not count on the knife.

This is not how it's supposed to go.

He raises his hands, a knife in each, as he steps back from Howard's fallen form. He resembles a butcher, his whole front drenched with blood, small sprinkles of deep red on his face. His bright grey eyes, now unhidden by his glasses, dance between rage and exhilaration.

Wyatt's eyes, blue and cold, flicked from the man's hands to the wet, black stains, and up to his face. The look there, that unholy glee, lifting the hair on the back of his neck.

His chin tipped, his jaw tight, and the spear shifted, coming up in a clear threat.

He may not have had much training with it - any training, if he were honest. But he figured so long as the sharp end was pointed in the right direction, he'd get there eventually.

Gaze steady on Aunamee's, he took a step. Then another. Measured. Calculating.

And then Aunamee takes a step back. Measured. Calculating.

His foot drags.

Without warning, he relaxes all the muscles in his right hand and lets Wyatt's knife fall. It lands uselessly at his feet, the wind around them swallowing the clatter. He raises his eyebrows at the other man, the slightest smile flickering on his lips. The slightest secret.

He wanted to look at Howard, wanted to believe that all that blood, that those screams, were nothin' but lies. But he didn't dare. Didn't dare look away from the man, from the knife he still held.

Unbidden, he remembered what it had felt like. Last arena with Grey's knife in his gut. The heat, then the cold, and the strange lack of pain as the darkness had closed in.

His heart pounded, his knuckles whitened on the spear - but he didn't retreat.

He was Wyatt Earp. And he did not run.

He wishes he could stay. He wishes he could watch him try to help the boy who cannot be helped.

But alas.

He steps backwards, again and again and again, only turning once the snow has swallowed everything but his grin.

For his part, Howard lies in the snow, oblivious to the nonverbal exchange happening above him, with unbidden sounds of pain pulling themselves from his throat. He exhales, and the vapor from his breath is pink. He inhales, and his breath has to pull itself past clots of blood, and it smells like urine because he's wet himself, either in fear or pain or just because he's dying, he doesn't know.

The snow around him looks like the cherry-flavor Icees his parents used to let him get at 7-Eleven, on long car trips up to the East Bay.

He manages to roll to his side and stays there, curled around the wounds in his front like a nautilus shell. He clenches his eyes shut, not sure how much longer this will last, not sure where the next tender place Aunamee's blade will find will be.

Wyatt remained in his stance, watching Howard's attacker fade into the snow and dark, listening for what he expects to be a sudden ambush...

But nothing happens. There's nothing but the whistling wind and Howard, the rushing gurgle of his breath.

Finally he broke, unable to stand it any longer, and rushed to the boy's side. Ice biting into his knees, the wet - the blood - seeping through the fabric of his pants as he crouched and reached out, his hands hovering, unsure where to start.

"Howard. Howard, can ya hear me, son?"

His palm found Howard's chest, the sticky, wet, heat, and rested there, feeling for the boy's heartbeat.

He can hear Wyatt, but he's anticipating Aunamee's knife again, and his first reaction is to try, feebly, to defend himself again. He shoves and claws at Wyatt with his bare hands, making a small noise of protest.

But it's pointless, and the knife doesn't come. He twists onto his back and is looking at Wyatt's face instead.

He tries to ask Wyatt's name, as if to confirm that it's really him (he always imagined if he'd be seeing visions of anyone, he'd be hallucinating his mother or at least Jimi Hendrix before he died, maybe Jesus if he'd spent his life wrong about religion). Not Wyatt Earp, even if Wyatt has been a force of mercy in his life. In his mutilated mouth, with a hiccup of blood following it out, it just sounds like another question entirely. "Wy'?"

The back of his coat sticks to his body, drenched in blood from the wound there. He feels cold, but not the sort of cold that's been the norm for the past few weeks. Cold that starts in his gut and travels along his veins rather than his bones. Cold that does nothing to cancel out how much it hurts.

He thinks, hopes, that if Wyatt's come to save him, then that means he still has a chance.

He lays his head back in the snow, staring at the white sky above as snowflakes catch in his eyelashes. His right hand presses on the wound in his own stomach in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding or dampen the pain; his left reaches along the ground for Wyatt.

"Easy, easy, son," Wyatt soothed as Howard fought, unresisting as the boy pushed at him, dug at him. "It's alright now. It's okay."

But it's not. He knows a bit about dressin' a wound, about how to hold a body together until a doctor could be found, but this... he can't even see the wounds for all the blood.

"You just hold on, Howard. You hear me?" His voice was tense, strangled, as he presses his palm against the boy's chest with one hand and let's him hold the other. "It's all gun be alright."

Howard nods, a small little gesture of trust. He turns his head to the side so a dollop of blood and saliva can escape; he doesn't have the strength to spit.

"Ba'. 'Eh. Thom'a." He tries to tell Wyatt where the injuries are, but he can barely talk, and his voice is a fragile whisper mostly lost to the wind. He feels as if it's probably unnecessary to mention how much it hurts.

This is a hard way to die. It's like the tide, ebbing and flowing, dragging him away from life. His vision blots out and then opens again, blots out, opens.

He tries to follow Wyatt's directions and hold on. He hopes Wyatt knows that he's trying, very hard, that in this mission to save his life it's not him that's letting them down. If it's anyone's fault, he wants it to not be his.

The battle only lasts about thirty seconds, but it feels like hours, and sometimes he thinks he's succeeding, but there are other times when he's sinking deep into it. And finally he sinks so deep into the cold that he can't find the surface again. The white in his vision isn't the overcast sky but the absence of everything. He struggles for a few more breaths, but they're shallow and insubstantial. The heartbeat under Wyatt's palm weakens and stops. He dies with one hand still clinging to Wyatt's, cold and chapped from the snow.

Edited 2013-02-17 16:42 (UTC)

Wyatt could feel him slipping, fallin' away, and there was nothing he could do.

He squeezed the boy's hand, hoping he could feel it, that it brought him some sort of comfort to know at least he wasn't alone, that somebody had tried.

He watched the light fade, Howard's gaze gone far away. Seein' things only the dead could and then the canon, cracking in the sky, bracing and terrible. And he sat, for how long he didn't know, and held the dead boy's hand, breathing shallow and hard, his eyes locked on Howard's gray face.

When the flying machine came, it's lights beating down on him, he finally let go, backed away and let them take him.

He watched it scoop the boy into it's great metal belly, tracked it against the sky until it was well and gone. Then he turned his eyes to the ground.

He found his knife, dug it from the snow, and set off along the trail of red and black.

He couldn't save Howard. But this - this he could do.

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