thearena | And me without my coon skin cap.

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And me without my coon skin cap.

Who| Tim Drake and OPEN
What| Tim derps about, until someone finds him?
Where| The outskirts of Frontierland, where it meets the river
When| Week 3
Warnings/Notes| Previously existing wounds, zombie.

His stomach is starting to gnaw on his gallbladder, Tim's sure of it. He hasn't eaten since in thirty hours, and he wonders if he shouldn't have stayed in Tomorrowland, where there was food. But, aside from that, he doesn't think that he's in bad shape. Dehydration is his biggest fear; he can feel the headache coming on. Water would trick his stomach into feeling full, too, for awhile. Other than that, a couple of bruises, a few scrapes. Not bad for a death match. It's all from doing things that were borderline inadvisable - mainly climbing the rotting facades of New Orleans Square. The only actual cut he's gotten was from trying to break off a rusted pole early this morning. He had thought one of the feral cats was around, but the clanging protests of the metal must have scared it off. He wasn't hungry enough to eat a cat anyway. Not yet.

The cut's on the back of his hand, red and painful, even when he doesn't try to make a fist. He needs to clean it. Sitting on one of the few intact lengths of fence, Tim is looking towards where he knows the Rivers of America are. After Bruce's warning, he'd given the largest body of water a wide berth, but he needs to drink soon, before delusions set in. He'd rather not die of thirst. If he had more oranges, he wouldn't need to go near the river, but it's a trek back to where the trees are. There might not be any fruit left, anyway. He'll have to brave the water here eventually.

A silver parachute drifts down into his field of vision, and Tim instinctively reaches out to snag it. Dangling from its lines is a small flick-knife. He looks up to see where it might have come from, but sees only sky. This place just gets weirder. "Uh, thanks?"

Pulling the knife free from the parachute, he takes opens it up and inspects the blade. Short, but sharp. It may come in handy for all of the vermin running about. The chute, itself, too is a gift. He can cut it into strips to bandage his hand, once he cleans it. With a sigh and knife in hand, Tim gets up and starts heading toward the river.

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If Tim knew what Howard had lived through, there'd be no disgust towards Howard, but there would be for those in charge of his world. For Howard, he'd feel pity and sympathy. He may not have experienced that level of starvation, but he's already thinking about when Gotham City was thrown out of the U.S because they didn't want to deal with the earthquake cleanup. They were directing runaways and orphans stranded in the city to go live with Poison Ivy for heaven's sake, on her word that she'd feed them fruit and not kill them if they didn't walk on any plants.

It's not as bad as eating shoes, but, if the Capitol had the same kind of garden that she had, they'd already be dead.

"There's no point in killing anyone," Tim whispers. He doesn't really want to be overheard and hides his face with one last mouthful of water, "It makes you one of them."

Standing up, he's still looking longingly at the water, but he's had at least sixteen ounces at this point, in less than five minutes. He feels a little sloshy. "I'm Tim. Where'd you get the thermos?"

"I'm Howard." He drums his fingers on one hand, the unbandaged one, the one he carries a knife with, over the fabric and on the thermos in a jazzy sort of rhythm before he starts walking, doing his best not to limp in front of Tim. "Tomorrowland has gift shops. They mostly been run through already, but there's some useful stuff too."

He gestures to his clothes. "That's where I got the new clothes, too. You don't want to know what my old set looked like. The Capitol dressed me all in white, and, well."

He motions to his face again. "I looked like a giant tampon."

Not the most polite way of putting things, but Howard's only just out of the age where fart jokes are the height of comedy. Even before the FAYZ, he wasn't the most polite kid, but he's eschewed most social etiquette entirely in the last two years. "Look, I can show you where the piranhas are at and we can get you some Indiana Jones swag or something. You know Indy, right? Crystal Skull, Temple of Doom, all that?"

Gift shops. Okay, he knows that he likes this kid now. He's a survivor. "I've been to Tomorrowland. There was still some fruit there, when I left."

Wrapping whatever meat they scavenge in orange peels should conceal the foreign taste. Tim feels wasteful suddenly, having discarded the peel the other day. He won't do it again.

He doesn't mention it, but he's going to keep them from going into Space Mountain, already working out a story about an armed, bloody man going inside. He feels that he owes it to Punchy, somehow, to protect his location for not killing him on arrival.

Tim snorts at the giant tampon comment and looks down, trying to hide the faint blush that he can feel in his cheeks. He grabs onto another topic like a life preserver rather than try and tie together a joke about the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. "Great, piranhas. I love this new Disneyland. Can't wait to check out the Haunted Mansion. And yeah, I know who Indiana Jones is. I haven't had time to go to the movies in years, so I haven't seen the Crystal Skull. I call dibs on the hat."

"Oh, so you found it too." Howard doesn't look thrilled at the idea that many people will be going there - not just because it means sharing, but because it means that there will be more people to run into whenever he tries to get at the blackberries and tomatoes. Howard doesn't want to run into many more people than he has to.

That's part of the strategy of keeping Tim around, too. There's some safety in numbers, and hopefully if they run into any maniacs the bad guys will go after Tim instead. It's not much of a hope - Howard's obviously the wounded gazelle here - but he doesn't have many options.

"Crystal Skull was awful. Spoilers, there were aliens. Everything is aliens. In an Indiana Jones movie." There's a strange lightheartedness Howard uses when talking about pop culture. It stands at odds with his usual biting tone, with the mutilating wounds on his face. He could almost be any teenager at the mall, complaining about how he wants his ticket money back.

"I was consider shoring up in the Haunted Mansion, but then I was like, hell no. Knowing the Capitol there's probably real live ghosts crawling around it, maybe from all the people who've died already. That's a charming thought." He gestures to the shooting gallery and a 'saloon' in Frontierland. "I been using the big stuffed animals from the shooting gallery as bedding. There's no food left in the restaurant but there's stuff that can be used, utensils and tablecloths and the like. Anyway, in Adventureland there's some netting in the Indiana Jones ride, so we can use that to catch fishies."

"Yeah, I found it too," Tim says sullenly. They're competing for a food source, after all. It's the oldest way to cause two animals to fight. Overpopulate an area, and they'll be pushed to the brink of starvation. Some poor sap walks by with a banana, and nature takes its course. Sometimes, no one ends up with the banana. Tim assumes that he's probably going to starve to deah, in the end.

Safety in numbers is why Tim is keeping Howard around for now, as well. It's mid-day, and he thinks that even the tributes that tried to stay awake into the night would be up by now. It would be too risky to sleep the entire day; it's safer to sleep at night. The odds favored the others sticking with what they were accustomed to and sleeping at night. Besides, Howard would make too attractive a target on his own. Tim wouldn't be able to rationalize leaving him behind even if he wasn't being promised food.

"Okay, while I'm not going to say that aliens are never the right call, more often than not - it's not aliens. Maybe the screenwriter saw that tv show "Ancient Aliens" and thought that, if aliens built the Sphinx, they belong in an Indiana Jones film?" Tim pauses, considering this for a moment. He can't remember where he saw the show. He dimly recalls one of his crazier history teachers showing it in class. The one who had a collection of Hawaiian shirts and dreamcatchers.

That wasn't good supporting evidence for the validity of the show. "Or maybe they just assume that we're all stupid, which is true, by and large. More than 50% of Americans believe that dinosaurs and man walked the earth at the same time."

Tim glanced over at the shooting gallery. The structure looked like it would cave in if a fly landed on it, which made it pretty good cover. He would assume that no one would venture in something so obviously unsound. "Just be ready to move if you hear any creaking," he cautions.

The utensils in the saloon are most likely gone, he reminds himself, especially if they were metal. You're not going to beat anyone to death with a serving spoon, but it could serve as a cup and might even be useful deflecting knife attacks. He'll head back this way later, to check, but it's not tantalizing enough to turn them wround right this instant.

"You've seen that TV show? I love that TV show." There's a kind of energy to Howard now, as if just being able to connect with someone over pop culture excites him. It reminds him not just of home, but of a life before everything went crazy. The days when he could curl up on the couch with his PSP and some soda and let the History Channel or VH1 run, back when he and his parents would watch American Idol at the dinner table, back when he and his mom used to make deals in the car that they could listen to songs off one of his favorite CDs if he put up with the morning news on the way to school.

It's still there, hanging over him, like the shadow of who he once was. There was once a kid inhabiting this body who worried about getting acne, not about getting his face slashed open; there was once a kid in this body who refused to eat anything with pickles, rather than stuffing himself with rotten tomatoes from Tomorrowland.

He gives Tim a curious look. "You mean dinosaurs didn't? You mean We're Back lied to me?"

Seriously, though, he didn't realize that, and that bothers him. He doesn't like the idea that Tim's marking him up as uneducated. Uneducated is different than stupid - having your enemy think you're stupid is a benefit. Having them think you're uneducated is just insulting.

And the truth is Howard has a seventh grade education.

Howard's already ransacked parts of Frontierland - the prop guns from the shooting gallery, for example, have all been taken and destroyed. But as he limps into the gallery he starts to collect other things, kicking through sharp splinters on the floor to find a piece of wire, a cable here, the drawer from a cash register there. All things that can be used and repurposed. His eyes dart around as he imagines ways these things can be used.

Tim hates that show. It's a part of the sweeping misinformation of America, what happens when you show people of average intelligence something beautifully filmed and deftly edited in a clever little package with no real disclaimers about this all being theoretical. People tend to miss the more subtle verbal clues in the narration, because it's hard to appraise word choice when there's a well-rendered green alien on the screen.

The History Channel is one of the worst offenders. It's not quite the joke that The Learning Channel has become, but it still uses a belt sander to further erode the annals of history.

"Yeah, it did," Tim confirms. He doesn't even know what 'We're Back' is, but he knows that it lied. His father was an archeologist; he didn't have to rely on school to teach him about dinosaurs and other cool bits of ancient times. Even then, Tim's always been able to go to better schools, having spent time at a number of boarding schools.

It's not that he thinks Howard is completely uneducated. He acknowledges that dinosaurs are fascinating. That makes them one of the easier historical errors to fall into. People want to think that humans were using trained triceratops as cars. Tim thinks that public schooling needs to do a better job of stamping out this misinformation that pop culture spreads. A more informed person is more likely to view things critically, to take press releases with a grain of salt.

"They showed you what you wanted to see. It's not a bald-faced lie - the creators probably believe it themselves," he explains as he starts kicking at the counter. That cash register most likely had an ethernet cable, and Tim wants it for a makeshift rope. "But the truth is, over sixty million years separate dinosaurs and modern humans."

The counter has dry-rotted and caves in easily. Tim starts pulling free chunks of it and throwing it to the floor, looking for anything interesting.

"It's a cartoon. It's a cartoon about dinosaurs that take over New York and get sold to the circus, and then mean Dr. Screw-Eyes kidnaps their kid friends and makes them into circus monkeys with techno-magic, and I don't know, I watched it like, four hundred times when I was little."

There's a machine that stamps coins to look like flattened images of Thunder Mountain. Howard walks around it, presses his fingertips to the glass, blinks. Then he grabs a piece of metal from the ground and starts to unscrew it. There may be useful gears and the like in there. And if there's one thing Howard's good at, it's breaking things down and making something new out of them.

He doesn't really use the one hand that has a bandage on it. He's noticed in the last few days that he doesn't have feeling in two of his fingers, that while he can feel in two of the others he can't actually move them without the help of his other hand. Whatever impaling it did is serious, though he guesses he should have expected that for skewering his own palm.

"So you're like, some kind of nerd or something? I mean, all brainy and stuff." Howard could have been a nerd, but being small and awkward and unathletic and a minority in a white school, he decided at a young age not to try and attract any more negative attention from his peers. That meant slacking, and for many years it served him well.

He can think of at least five people who would love that TV show. He is not one of them. However, Tim doesn't want to go insulting the kid's taste and so responds with a small sound that has no syllables but yet indicates interest, albeit distracted interest.

Because Tim's found the cable that he was looking for. It's absolutely no good as a cable anymore. From the loose end that he's gotten his hands on, it looks as if it was chewed through, and it's missing the connector on this end. The good news is that the wires were coated in a plastic, rather than a rubber, which means that it isn't cracked or flaking and has an outside chance of holding some weight.

He starts tugging on it, pulling it free inch by precious inch. "Hm? Oh."

Kon and Bart would say he was a nerd, but, in non-subjective time, neither one of them was even ten years old yet. They'd hate him for pointing that out. Stephanie and Dick might call him that as well, but they also felt it was their right by the nature of their relationships to tease him. Bruce would say he was studious.

"Yeah, let's go with nerd," he says casually, without either shame or pride in it. He may not have a collection of action figures or card games, but, if a nerd can be defined as an intelligent person with an obsessive hobby, he fits the bill.

"That's cool, I guess. Being a nerd." Howard manages to get the coin machine open, and the front glass pane swings out. All those gears and metal rods and strange pieces are his for the taking. He looks over his trove of materials, pulling a battered, orange lucky rabbit's foot out of his jeans pocket and rubbing it between his fingers on his good hand. After a moment of deliberation, he reaches in and takes a metal piece that has a sharp enough part to be used as a shiv.

"I guess those sorts of classifications don't matter now, do they? I mean, nerds, jocks, geeks. It's all kind of in the past." In the FAYZ, kids still grouped with the friends they had before, but that was less about cliques and more about clinging to the last shreds of normalcy and familiarity they still had. "I mean, we're all in the murdergames together."

He picks up a few other pieces and tucks them into his lunchbox before limping his way over to Tim and the cable. "What you got there?"

"Those kinds of classifications never mattered, Howard. Labels like that only separate people and keep them from learning how to interact with anyone different with any real understanding," Tim says with some annoyance. This is a sore spot.

"Labels turn into cliques, which can degenerate into gangs, and then its murdergames, even back home. And it's a plastic cord," Tim says, yanking on it harder now. He's got about three feet of it, but he was hoping for more. He's not sure how much he wanted, but there's also no way of telling how much he's going to need. It might do for a rope. It would make a fair garrote, too, he notes. It's a wide, flat cable that wouldn't cut into the skin, the kind that would let you strangle someone to the point of oxygen deprivation - but would still let them recover. Eventually. More than enough time to run away.

Tim is suddenly seized with possessiveness, though, and alarmed by the attention that Howard is showing it. Which is ridiculous, it's just a scrap of cable, and Howard has offered to help him catch fish, something so much more practical. He could strangle someone with his hands if he needed too. He refuses to go along with that grasping, devolved selfishness. If Howard asks for it, he'll give him the cable after they eat.

"I thought it might come in handy. Tie the food to it and hang it high. Maybe the vermin won't get at it. It'll be hard to get a good knot in it though. Good wires are designed to prevent tight ones so that the filaments don't get damaged." Tim inspects the counter, to see if any more of it looks like it might come loose. The rest feels sturdy, and he doesn't want to break his hand or foot trying to get more. He pulls out his knife and cuts it free. "Did you get everything you wanted?"

Edited 2013-04-21 04:53 (UTC)

"Those classifications always mattered," Howard says sharply. "Maybe they don't matter for you because you're an average-sized white guy who can take care of himself, but I had to know which rules to play with to keep from getting my face busted in."

That's the way it is, in Howard's world. It's one thing to find the rules silly and stupid and even harmful, and another to be able to resist them. Playing 'against the rules' got him bullied in school, got kids like him lynched or publicly executed by Caine's kangaroo court in the FAYZ. Howard likes learning how to work within a confine. He makes the best of bad situations, but he doesn't make better situations.

He squints at the wire - he doesn't need it. He has both rope and twine back at Thunder Mountain. "Cut through the plastic around the part you want to make a knot from and you'll be able to tighten it more, I guess, but you know there's a place that has children's sneakers in Fantasyland, right? Shoelaces work better for a line, but some of them are moldy or frayed so I wouldn't use them to support more weight than that."

Spoken like someone who knows. Howard's secretly a regular MacGuyver, although he's seeing that Tim's not so shabby in that area either. He likes that, and at the same time it scares him, because Howard's resourcefulness is the one edge he has in this place. It's also a selling point to the Sponsors, his unique cleverness, and if Tim can do it better, well, Tim's probably a bit more photogenic at this point. What with not having his face mauled. What with not being (as evidently) a paranoid, antisocial basketcase.

"I may come back here for more from the coin machine, but I'm set for now."

Tim was going to let it go at first. Yes, he's not under-sized anymore. He's in the low range of average and still growing. Yes, he's white - it's the sad, pathetic truth that it probably still makes a difference in Howard's life. Tim wants to point out that not everyone is racist, that he too knows how it feels to get you're-not-welcome stares.

But then Howard suggests that Tim doesn't know what it's like to have rules to keep from getting his face busted in. He doesn't know if he should laugh, punch the kid in the jaw - no, he's younger and injured and personal fights are against the rules, somewhere. His parents' rules and Batman's rules, albeit for very different reasons. Nice kids don't pick fights, Timothy. Personal vendettas make you sloppy, Robin.

Okay, he's proven that last one wrong. Red Robin doesn't get careless when it turns personal, he gets more calculating.

Then, there's his own rules, different sets of them for Tim Drake, Tim Wayne, Robin, Red Robin, and now here, where he's got to be some blended persona of all four constantly. If he can't, he doesn't know what will happen, and the unknown is always the most dangerous factor. He doesn't know where violence fits, under this amalgam code.

The only set of rules that this doesn't go against is Bruce Wayne's, because, any time you can create chaos for the public face of your personal life, you take it.

"I don't know what you think my life was," Tim said angrily, "But, if you think that I'm some popular kid who flies through high school without anything ever touching me - buddy, you are so far off the mark. A freaking gang war broke out at my school, okay? I saw kids die - I saw one of my only friends at school die, and there wasn't anything that I could do about it. That wasn't even the first funeral I've been to."

Tim looks genuinely upset, but there's no sign of it in his voice. The cowl hides his face, usually, but his voice is always on show. "I've been to seven funerals in the past five years, and none of them were for my great-aunt Edna from Topeka who I've never met, understand? So I'm sorry that you had a hard life, but this is proving my point here. Don't judge a book by its cover, because you're going to regret it."

Howard doesn't know exactly when they got into this pissing contest, but he feels his pulse and he feels himself getting angry, like it's some foreign creature inside his chest. He escaped the FAYZ with nothing to show but nightmares and scars and panic attacks and an eating disorder and this one consolation, that he's a shoe-in in the Misery Olympics. And now Tim wants to take that from him.

"I'll play my tiny violin for you." Howard's voice is cold now, detached, as if he's reading from a textbook only he can see. Purposely affected, to keep from letting how upset he is leak through. He doesn't look at Tim, instead wandering back to the broken coin-stamper. "Where I'm from the mortality rate for kids under fifteen is thirty-five percent in a year."

Whatever. Maybe he shouldn't have made assumptions about Tim. He doesn't much care right now, as he limps back to the souvenir machine and traces the sample ovals with Mickey, with the castle, with Donald Duck on them. He feels as if there's pressure, right behind his eyes. Maybe he just wants to cry. Who knows?

Maybe once upon a time he'd have sympathy for Tim, because Howard's not a heartless person. He's capable of empathy for the people he knows, people he identifies with. But he tells himself he doesn't have time for this. This is the Games, and empathy is a trap here.

"So we don't really do funerals anymore." He picks up his thermos and pack. "I'll get back to my camp on my own."

Edited (edited to make the statement more sensical) 2013-04-28 07:37 (UTC)

Tim wants to backtrack when he hears the mortality rate, to apologize and try to diffuse the situation. Rather, his stomach does. He sympathizes with the kid; he really does, but Tim doesn't want this to turn into a pity party. He doesn't want to have to surrender more horrible memories to explain why he had reacted that way. It's not Howard's business, and it's certainly not for the cameras.

But there's no time to consider it further, Howard wants to go back to camp on his own. Fine, Tim will let him. He isn't going to beg for help fishing. Howard's already told him where to find the fish and the nets. He has what he needs, information-wise. Execution can be trial and error.

Tim starts wrapping the cable around his waist, weaving it around itself to secure it. "I'm going to Adventureland to get food. Come with me or follow me if you want, but don't sneak up on me. I'd rather not fight you."

Because Howard's got enough problems without breaking his nose or dislocating a shoulder. Tim makes his way out of the shooting gallery. "Try not to die," he offers as a farewell.

"Yeah, I'll try real hard at that one," he says as he goes, sneering at the distance and sending Tim a one-finger salute. He hobbles and limps his way off with his tote full of junk from the coin-stamp, trying to fixate on what a useful haul that will be rather than how irritated he is right now.

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And me without my coon skin cap.

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