thearena | Forget Your Running, I Will Find You [Closed]

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Forget Your Running, I Will Find You [Closed]

WHO| Howard, Draco, Eponine and Lindsay
WHAT| Howard and Draco run into each other, Eponine dies.
WHEN| Week 2
WHERE| Fantasyland
WARNINGS/NOTES: Death, mind control.

Having escaped both Grey and Aunamee, Howard takes a little while to compose himself. If he thought near-death experiences would eventually desensitize him, he hasn't been proven right yet. He's shaky and bleeding in a few places, and the unusual calmness he felt when he entered Fantasyland has entirely left him. He clutches his knife so hard that his fist is a whole shade lighter than the rest of his body.

It's starting to get dark, but he doesn't dare call Eponine's name. He climbs through a shop window and looks around, realizing rather suddenly that he's not alone in the cramped, dilapidated building. There's someone else breathing, someone nearby who's probably just heard him enter. Someone probably reaching for a knife of their own right now.

Hoping it's Eponine, Howard grabs the lighter in his pocket from the Sponsor and flicks it on, taking a step back. It reflects off a pale face and light hair that have featured in plenty of his nightmares lately.

"Oh, great. You."

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There really was no god.

Inside, Eponine was crying, sobbing - really sobbing, as she did over Marius back in Paris. She was trying so hard to curl her hands into fists - but every time she thought it, Draco's voice hissed in her mind, told her to claw deeper, harder, to find the point that'd make blood spurt. Already, buts of skin were wedged in her nails, and they were painted with blood from the scratches at Howard's neck. His kick to her hips did nothing either - Draco's voice ordered her to balance, to keep on top and so she did, sprawling over him, still biting down on his face.

Her face showed no pity - no emotion as she bit down again and again on his face, taking a hand to trace over his heart - to start to claw through the clothes at his heart.

"Aaaugh!" He kicks again against her, this time harder, grabbing her wrist and trying to break her hold on his neck. Hot blood is dribbling down his neck, down his face, mingling with her saliva and his tears. He shrieks and squirms and feels her claws digging into his skinny chest. "Stop, stop! Eponine, it's me, I'm your friend, Eponine...!"

This has to be a nightmare. He's going to wake up soon, tangled in his bedsheets, covered in sweat and not blood, and he'll go downstairs to where Eponine's taken over his District 1 room, and she'll have her normal fingernails that the stylists have painted pink-

He twists around and gets out from under her. They're side by side. Her arms are still pulling at him, her mouth still biting. There's a flap like a wet piece of paper against his jaw; she has a strip of skin from his cheek stuck in her teeth, he realizes, even though he can't see it in the dark. His stomach turns. He kicks and shoves again, dragging her with him as he gets up and staggers to the window, slamming his elbow against it to smash the glass in.

Draco could hear his own heart in his throat, his own breathing loud in his ears as he stepped back again, lifting his wand a little bit, muttering a soft Lumos under his breath. The light that emitted wavered for a moment, then held fast, a gentle glow that let him just see enough to suggest that now was probably the time to get out of there. He cracked another maniacal smirk to himself, wondering what sort of reaction the Capitol was having to all of this. Maybe he'd get a Sponsor out of the deal.

(Maybe Effie and Cinna would be horrified. Maybe Momoko would be sick at what he'd done.)

"That's right, mademoiselle. Tear him to pieces," Draco murmured, glancing back over his shoulder as he looked around for the door. Once Eponine's job was done, he didn't care what she did. She could run around sobbing over the mess; she could mourn until the day she too was taken out. But he was going to get out of there.

Eponine groaned as she was flung to the floor and then dragged over to the window by Howard, though not a sound actually escaped her lips. Inside, she panicked that Howard was going to hurt her, and it was almost a relief when she heard Draco's voice hissing in her mind for her to cry. Tears began to slip down from her blank eyes.

"Monsieur, please do not hurt me. Don't kill me, Monsieur." She parroted Draco's impression of her, her voice rising slightly higher than normal, gaining a slight twang of well-formed words instead of missing the odd letter from a word as she usually did.

But still, even amidst the shattering glass, she reached for Howard, raking her nails as hard as she could down him, tearing his clothes as she did so. His blood covered her face, especially round her mouth and her yellow eyes bulged as her swipes became more and more frantic.

Howard yells again as Eponine rends the shirt from his back, as broken glass digs into his arm when he breaks open the window. He gets a hand up on the sill, feeling glass stab through his palm, but he can't pull himself up and out with Eponine hanging onto him.

"Get off, get off, please!" Somewhere he realizes how silly it is to politely ask for anything in a situation like this. Eponine is erratic, rabid, tearing at him with claws and teeth and gazing at him with yellow eyes that glow in start contrast to the red on her face, the flush and the blood. He doesn't want to hurt her. He doesn't know if he can. He can only keep trying to shove her away, no longer thinking of saving her from Draco, only of getting away.

He slips back down from the window, back against the wall, leaving himself to Eponine's mercy.

"Someone help me!" he cries.

Drawn out by the sounds of struggling and desperate cries, Lindsey ventured closer to the source of noise with the intention of just watching. Since he wasn't sure what was going on, he had approached carefully, keeping to hiding in shadows or covered areas until he found himself observing a three people, one of whom was trying to leave the scene.

Draco, he recognized the young blond man to be, but couldn't seem to recognize the other two locked in battle. Whatever was happening though, it would seem like that it was left to the girl and the black guy, and the girl had the advantage.

She was also intently distracted by the guy she was trying to kill.

Seeing all this as an open opportunity, Lindsey carefully moved closer, still keeping to the backdrop until he was nearly within striking distance. Suddenly without warning, he leaped out of his hiding place swinging a large metal bar at the back of her head. It was a practiced move where he used to decapitate demons with a broadsword, so he had every confident it was enough to brain her if he hit.

Eponine's tears stopped as Draco's voice in her head focused her on Howard again, and she reached for his neck. She was unable to look around, or even move as Lindsey came closer.

Lindsey's bar hit Eponine's head with an awful crunch, and Eponine immediately blacked out, slumping forward on top of Howard. Her body was completely limp - and she was once more dying, this time of a serious head injury.

Howard shrieks as Eponine's head flops in his lap, as a spray of blood from her scalp covers his face and neck. She lands with her face to the side, showing him her eyes aren't closed, that the blood vessels in the one facing upwards have popped and left her eyes a demonic red. Her mouth is slightly open, as if to say, 'oh...'.

It takes a second for him to tear his eyes away from her to look at what actually hit her. It's a man he doesn't know, someone with a metal rod. "Please don't kill me! Please!"

Howard grabs Eponine's wrist, bolts up, drags her about five inches and then drops her. She was trying to kill him, he thinks. She's not his friend. She's already dead. What's he going to do with a dead body? But he's so loath to leave her. He falls back, a little out of Lindsey's hitting range.

There's something to be said for the sudden inclusion of someone else. Of course, it didn't take out Howard, but it looked as though he was severely injured. And Eponine was dead or dying, and Draco still felt a good amount of self-satisfaction that he had helped bring both of them down to this, and still get away relatively unscathed. Entirely unscathed, perhaps.

He hesitated another moment, then smirked to himself and ducked back out of the building, leaving the three - two - of them to their devices. Maybe he'd hear a bit more cannon fire that night.

Out of sight, Lindsey assumed the other boy had gone off, leaving him with the dark guy and the dying —dead— girl. It was cute how the guy tried to drag the girl's corpse with him, although not understanding the relationship between them, Lindsey could only smirk at the foolishness.

"Sorry for taking your revenge from you," he said as he now pointed the tip of his large metal bar at the remaining survivor. No more element of surprise, but one on one, he could take him.

"But hey, think on the bright side, I'll send you out too. Sorry, buddy, it's the rule of the game."

"Revenge?" Howard gets his feet under him and tries to ignore the way those words send a chill up his spine. Maybe it's just the way all that blood is cooling on him. He glances back down at Eponine, at the strands of black hair matting into the head wound. She's dead, she's definitely dead. Her skin looks the color of dried bone is the dim light. A lock of hair near her mouth is perfectly still, creepily so, like a photograph, whereas if she were alive it would be rustling back and forth with her breathing.

"Make it...make it fast..."

But Howard doesn't intend to stick around and see if Lindsey follows his request. He jolts upwards, straightening his legs despite the screaming in his thigh, and slams his hand down on the windowsill. An impaling shard of glass erupts all the way from his palm through between his second and third knuckle. He swings his legs over the sill and starts to stumble and run out of the building, away from Lindsey, hoping he's not being followed.

Lindsey would've gladly made it fast, how does getting brained in one hit sound? Except the guy would rather stab himself in the hand than to stand still, and how could Lindsey blame him?

If he was feeling adventurous, Lindsey would follow the obvious blood trail left behind, but he wasn't here to hunt. He had walked in and killed the girl because it was an opportunity kill, but now that the guy had ran off, it would be too troublesome to chase after him.

Shaking his head, Lindsey checked to see if there was anything useful on the dead girl before heading off to the other direction. He didn't even know their names, oops.

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Forget Your Running, I Will Find You [Closed]

no subject

no subject

do we want to get Lindsey in here soon?

Re: do we want to get Lindsey in here soon?

Re: do we want to get Lindsey in here soon?

And here Lindsey comes

Re: And here Lindsey comes

no subject

no subject

no subject

and now it's just the two of them

And then there's one