thearena | You Should Have Never Trusted Disneyland

WHO| Howard and anyone
WHAT| Howard gets back on his feet
WHEN| Late third week
WHERE| Frontierland and Tomorrowland
WARNINGS| Howard's pretty damaged and I'll describe some of his injuries in detail during tags.

Wyatt did a good job with Howard, and the medicine from the Capitol is top-knotch. In addition, Howard's always been somewhat resilient. It takes him a few days, mostly spent sleeping in the scaffolding of Thunder Mountain under Wyatt's watchful eyes and eating the few rats he can get in traps, but soon enough he's moving about again.

Protein's all well and good, but he and Wyatt will need something else before long. He remembers there are orchards around Tomorrowland, so as soon as he can walk again on his injured leg he decides to set out that way, under the cover of night. The dark scares him, but no more than the day. At least at night he can blend in and not be a blaring target.

He's discarded his white district outfit and replaced it with some of the tattered, moth-eaten souvenir clothing from one of the shops - an oversized black t-shirt of Scar from The Lion King, a pair of jeans with the Mickey head sown into the back pockets, and a big grey sweatshirt with the castle emblazoned on the front. It all highlights how very small he is, as if his body hasn't even made the slightest effort to fill out the clothing. He's sheared the leg off the jeans up above his injury on his lower thigh - while he isn't happy to be displaying a weakness, he needs quick access to it to clean it whenever he finds fresh water.

The worst of the cuts along his torso are hidden by the clothing, but his face is still a horrible mess, with some of the bitemarks scabbing and oozing periodically. The hole in his cheek and split from his mouth to his chin makes it hard to eat, and has left him with a stiffness in his neck. His head cants to the left whenever he's not thoughtfully trying to keep it straight.

The new folding knife never leaves his hand. Never.

It feels all wrong to go through Disneyland like this. He doesn't walk like a tourist or a kid. Instead he darts from shadow to shadow, perpetually glancing over his shoulder and doubling back in case anyone's following him. It takes well over an hour to get to Tomorrowland.

If he were a religious kid he'd offer a prayer of thanks to whatever god when he finds a patch of blackberries and tomatoes. He starts to fill the pockets of his sweater, then a lunchbox he looted from a souvenir shop, and then he lays out flat the cape he got at the start, throwing all the fruits he can gather onto it regardless of ripeness. He gathers it all into a makeshift sack, slings it over his back and starts the arduous journey back to Thunder Mountain.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I like to chew things. It helps with hunger." He pauses, then quickly clarifies. "Not that I'm hungry now, but I been pretty starved before the Games. I'm way better fed here than I was before the Capitol kidnapped me."

He takes what he wants and backs away, to a safe distance of about ten feet. "In a way, this shithole's a blessing to me. It's be even better if people could keep from jabbing knives in me and chewing my face off."

He messes with his cape pack, taking a little longer to tie it than he really needs to like it's taking up a lot of his attention; what Howard's saying isn't really something that's foreign to him, but that doesn't mean it's any easier to hear. "That's saying something." After a second, to cover that up with a bit of humor, he tacks on a "If they start using that as a line about how much good they're doing for us, I'm blaming you."

"Those were human bites?" He said he got it looked at by a doctor, right...? Still, if-- when-- this thing worked, they'd have to do something about that to make sure it didn't get infected.

"Oh, they already do. It's just not propaganda for me." He shrugs. "If I weren't here I'd have died for real of starvation or the plague by now, or worse."

He nods slowly. "Yeah, human bites. Like I said, it's not personal that I'm scared of you."

He frowns slightly, trying to think back to what sort of conversation they had had-- wasn't he just from LA? Not precluding starvation, of course, but when he thought plague, he didn't think California. "Where exactly were you from again?"

An uncomfortable look passes over his face for a moment. "It's fine, I'm used to it. Let's get that food."

"Perdido Beach, a little north of San Diego. The, um." He shuffles his feet awkwardly. "The apocalypse happened when I was thirteen."

He gestures with his good hand. "This way. You like fish?"

"Huh. Glad I missed it." It's a weak joke, sure, but he's fully confident that it happened in some alternate universe somewhere; hell, if not for the location, it could have happened in his own universe.

He starts walking thataways. "Are we talking some breed of killer fish, or are these normal, nonmurderous kinds?"

"We're in an Arena. The fish here only don't eat me because I eat them first." He keeps chewing on that wire, wincing slightly when it gets caught in the gash down his lip. He limps his way forward.

"By the way, you got a map of this place? I got maps."

"Great." He thinks about making some sort of joke about the fish eating him anyway, but after an awkward pause he decides against it-- probably too soon.

"I can see Cinderella's castle, that counts, right?" And he's got a vague idea of where he can't go, but-- "Hey, uh, where is this food, anyway?"

Howard looks a bit guilty. It's taking so long to get anywhere because he's limping pretty badly now. "Adventureland. You remember Indiana Jones? The Jungle Cruise? That's where the fish are. But first we got to get you some net. There's some in that really long cattlestall line to the Jungle Cruise."

You Should Have Never Trusted Disneyland

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