thearena | (no subject)

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Who| R and Julie Grigio [Closed]
What| R continues to do what he’s best at: he wanders, takes a breather against the Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse statue near the Cornucopia, and runs into a surprise Julie.
Where| The Cornucopia
When| Later in Week 4 after he's fed again
Warnings/Notes| R’s wandering around as a beat-up zombie, mentions of zombie corpse stuff.

R develops a new habit in the Arena, as crazy as that is – he keeps cupping his shattered eye socket with his hand, making sure the eye is still there. It’s dark in that side. For all he knows it’s there for looks. At least he hasn’t had crows pecking it out, part of the reason R’s been on the move so much. They tend to ignore moving targets. Knowing it’s still there, though, makes him feel better and not lop-sided like he hasn't been falling to pieces over the past couple of weeks. It’s been a few weeks, hasn’t it?

He hates he isn't sure. If he was alive, he’d know. He could read the calendar and point at a date and say that’s today.

R keeps shuffling on, doing his best to ignore his hunger. He snagged a rat awhile back, big and fat and pissed off, but rats are junk food and it’s more to keep his hands and mouth busy than because it makes a dent. The ankle’s probably gonna go soon. Concentrating on his foot barely hanging on there gives him something to do when he runs out of rat, R staggering along with his head drooping down and looking at his ankle. Yup. It’s totally snapping off today. He can be Peg Leg R after this. R rasps out a grunt at the idea and looks up to find he’s wandered back to the Cornucopia.

Why’d he come back here?

Maybe it’s a guilt thing over biting Air at this place. Maybe it’s because it’s shiny. Or maybe it’s the fact garden is pretty and he likes the colors.

Whatever it is, R decides he’s done with shuffling for now. He can pick it up later. Now he wants to go lie down somewhere, check his eyelids for holes because that’s a thing you need to do every now and then when you’re a zombie. Shake up his usual routine of shuffle - stagger - stare at a wall, maybe throw in a groan. Do the whole expanding his horizons thing. Is it possible for him to dream again? The last – first? – time he did, he woke up to find Julie booked it.

“Gghhh,” R moans to himself as he flops down to slouch against a statue he thinks he should recognize. He told himself he’d go back to Before Julie but it’s harder than he thought. It’s a work in progress, he guesses. The zombie’s good eye eventually drifts closed.

The next time the pedestals rise near the Cornucopia’s garden, R’s fallen asleep for the second time in his un-life, slumped like he died all over again. His other eye's frozen open, his shirt still covered with dried gore when he pigged out on that Tribute.

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Actually, she was hoping for a correction somehow. She wasn't entirely sure zombies could get brain damage (hah, hilarious), but. Weeks. She'd seen him a few hours ago, stuffing him in her room so Dad or anyone else saw him. She still didn't even know how he'd gotten into the stadium without getting shot. Alarm had never gone off, though. So he'd managed.

She nods, even if he can't see it. Guess she was spoiled with that whole balcony reunion; here she can't even muster up enough to feel anything beyond relief that he's here and moving. Not well, but it's something. Now she's focusing on what it takes to survive, now that she's not surrounded by an army and an overprotective dad. Hell, she didn't even have a knife to her name. Just a zombie.

Kind of helpful.

Julie snorts at his hand but takes it anyway, eager for the contact. You missed your zombie boyfriend? Nora, always getting under her skin. Especially with those rough edges of truth. Like stabbing someone with a broken butter knife.

"I've seen it," she answers, maybe holding his hand a little too hard and letting it linger once they're past the rocket. It's old and faded like everything else, broken and on the ground. She swears it should be standing up. The place is a wreck. The dome in front of them has high, pointed spires, but one of them is broken, jagged.

She doesn't add that when she saw it, it was filled to the brim with people. Just pictures -- god knows Colonel Grigio isn't a Disneyland kind of guy -- but the kind where kids were riding shoulders, laughing, lights ablaze all over the place. She remembers Perry, one time, finding a brochure for one of the Disney places, stuck in a drawer under some condoms. The condoms had been for the immediate distraction, but then she'd looked through the brochure afterwards.

It'd made her ache. So she threw it away.

"How did we get here, R?" Miles in a manner of hours. Or how long had she been asleep? Maybe she'd been out for days. Didn't feel like it, though. She was still stuffed with food from dinner. Christ, this didn't make any goddamn sense. "Did you get the big guys in white shoving you up here, too?"

R helps Julie across the rocket, not that she needs it, his corpse leeching body heat from her hand. He thinks she holds on a bit longer than she needs to even after she clears the debris easily. He also thinks he doesn’t mind. It feels good. A moment later and Julie pulls her hand away, leaving R to watch as she sizes up Tomorrowland.

Of course Julie wants to compare notes. R nods, one of those weirdly floppy yet stiff ones of his.

“Same…deal. Soldiers…?” R has to take a break, regroup, get his words back in order. In his opinion he’s hauling ass for a zombie. “They said…no Dead where they’re…from,” R throws that in because it seems like that’s important. “I asked.”

He has no idea where the Capitol is and even if he did, he can’t point it out on a map for Julie. His sense of geography is shot to pieces, but he knows where Julie’s from and that a place where the infection – or whatever – hasn’t reached is a Big Deal to someone like her. What he doesn’t get is why they’re taking other Living and using them as entertainment instead of banding together, though. Seems to him like it’s a big waste, but no one’s asking him to start groaning his opinion, so R keeps it to himself.

Anyway, he’s said his piece. R can only offer Julie a shrug and a lost look when she starts asking how they got here. It’s one of those questions he actually hasn’t thought of too much. It didn’t matter before. He’s gotten lazy with the whole thinking thing since he came clean to Julie and she took off. After that, everything stopped mattering. Now she’s back. Suddenly things are complicated and he feels like he better step up his game if he wants a second chance at being friends. At whatever this thing is – was? – between them. R has no idea. It’s weird.

The zombie starts to head deeper into Tomorrowland, his stump making a wet sounding thunk for every dragging footstep. They have to circle around the crashed monorail, whatever's left of the overhead tracks providing some shade. R squints with his good eye at whatever signs are still up. No dice. Giving up on trying to read, R tries to steal a page from Julie’s book and copy her, try out the whole paying attention thing. He looks, he listens, he sniffs. As far as he can tell, they’re the only ones out in the open. Looks clear to him.

Soldiers. Dammit. She should've been paying more attention, getting the feel on them. Should've been able to pick them out immediately if they were the military type. The whole matching uniform deal might've pointed to it, but she'd been too blinded by the white to look any harder. What kind of soldiers, then? Local militia? What, that just happened to have access to a working laundromat?

No Dead. Julie's attention snaps to R, staring at him. Can't be. Impossible. Hadn't the plague spread everywhere? She'd been traveling so long, moving so much, it felt like she'd just accepted it. Everywhere was trashed, everywhere was covered in the Dead. The U.S., Canada, Mexico. How could they be in Disneyland and not have any Dead?

Fucking impossible. Funny, to try to lie to someone who was already Dead. She shoved it to the side, a topic to be remembered but not picked at out in the open.

"This is completely fucked," she says, holding her arms out wide and then dropping them back to her hips. This. Everything. Dad was probably freaking the hell out and Nora was god knows where, and now she's stuck in a theme park with a zombie missing a foot. Which was squelching, by the way, and squelching was one of those words she'd figured didn't really apply well to anything.

"We gotta find you a boot or something." She tilts her head down, towards. That. Leaving spots of black zombie goo behind. Plus, seriously. The noise. She keeps thinking she should've brought the foot with her, just in case. In case what, she finds a staple gun? "You're leaving breadcrumbs."

That's one way of putting it. It’s very….Julie.

Don’t ask him what that means. All he knows it’s her, it has her personal color splashed all over it and he doesn’t have the words to explain. It doesn’t really need it, he thinks. R lets it go.

The zombie stares back, watching as Julie files away the info he threw at her and gets down to business.

“…It’ll…dry out. I think?” R isn’t sure where you would even get shoes around here. If she asks him, he did leave a boot back the way they came, even if it’s shredded to pieces from the piranha and his foot’s still rotting away in there. “Keep…moving, okay? No…biggie.”

Give him another day and he’ll probably forget he had a foot instead of a stump anyway. It’s not something that’s seared into his skull, like Perry and Julie. As far as he’s concerned it’s already gone. Out of sight, out of mind. R will wander around looking for a shoe if that’s what Julie wants, but personally he thinks they have better things to be doing with their time together. He’s still not sure if he wants to try taking her to Howard or not. Put all his friends in one place, hope they get along. R looks at the trail of black ooze leading back the way they came without registering it, grunts to himself, and looks toward what might’ve been Captain EO or something a long time ago. Space Mountain’s still in one piece, but it’s high, like Howard’s hideout and he thinks that might make it a spot where other Living want to hole up.

Normally that’d be a good thing for Julie. She’d be safe with others like her. Here, though, here’s different and R wants to hover protectively over Julie even though he knows she can take care of herself. That dream sends a shiver up his spine, R glancing at Julie as if he needs to make sure she’s still there and she is. Her head isn’t blown off by a shotgun. She’s still in one piece and Alive.

R brings up a hand to point at the auditorium. “There? We could…look.”

Dry out. Okay. Julie just stares at him, the same blank, careful stare she'd had when he'd first dragged her into that plane. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. Hah.

Again, she envies the Dead. The way they can just get over something as monumental as losing a foot, like it's something that happens every day. Like R's blood trail behind them won't freak someone the fuck out if they can figure that black goo is zombie blood. Or that he's leading someone right to them, whether Dead or Living. Some part of Julie's still waiting for the Dead. They'll smell R or something and come.

Eventually. If not now, then later.

Julie moves to his side like she's gonna catch him if he slips on the stump, following his hand. Like she knows what anything around here even is. But they gotta move -- or her body feels like that's what needs to happen, because sticking in one spot is always trouble -- and she's eager to get anywhere. Even if it's to find a stupid boot.

She loops her arm around R's to give him some balance. If they're gonna get going, she's gonna make sure he has good footing. So to speak.

"Let's go. It's good as anywhere else. You been there before?"

Hey, Julie should be okay so long as she doesn’t kick off his other foot. Then they might have a problem.

R starts to think losing his foot might be worth it when Julie comes over to help him walk, her arm looping through his so he doesn’t end up on the ground. Having her there makes R try twice as hard not to fall on his butt – being afraid he’d tip over and squash her is a pretty good incentive, actually. They shuffle down the ramp, concrete walls rising behind them. A line of doors starts along their right, R leading them around toward the last of them.

“No,” R shakes his head, a slow back and forth compared to a human. “But…out of the…open. You should…rest.”

He hurries on because he’s known Julie long enough to see that argument brewing all over her Living face like a storm cloud. Perry’s seen it too. It’s a lot more impressive in person, though. R’s in such a hurry that he’s slurring his words as he wheezes.

“You should be…hundred…percent, Julie. Big…day.”

R hopes she doesn’t get any funny ideas about striking off on her own like the last time he told her to stay put. Julie’s not so great at listening. Selective listening, maybe, or "stay here" isn't in her vocabulary to begin with. R doesn’t know if that’s a human thing or a Julie thing and maybe it doesn’t matter. All R knows is he needs time to scope things out. He needs to bother and care instead of shuffling from Point A to Point B, hoping for that next big meal.

Julie being here changes everything.

Weird to notice a zombie in a hurry. Towards something that's not dinner, yeah. It's slow as hell to her, but she's not trying to knock him. He's really trying.

"Rest? I haven't even been here that long." Though the whole tube thing was somewhat traumatizing, she's pretty sure she's had worse days. Actually, make that extremely sure. The storm is definitely brewing, just like R expected; last thing she needs is a damn zombie trying to protect her again. It'd gone badly enough last time. (And she might be still feeling a little guilty about ditching him. Twice.)

He's pushing. There's something out there, then, because Julie recognizes this urgency, like when he was trying to get her past the Dead the first time she ran. But he said no Dead. Well. Just two.

No Dead. It's still ringing in her ears. It can't be true. Literally can't be. Impossible in every single way. They could never purge them, not permanently. Not completely.

"What are you running from?"

This is the part where R could try to downplay it, try to dredge up the part of him that probably went through white lies without even thinking about it. He can't. There's nothing there, just another fuzzy hole in his memory. Now that Julie's known him longer, R knows he can't get away with the same routine as last time: if he says nothing, she'll be onto him. If he starts moaning "keep you safe", oh man. That'll probably just piss her off.

So R goes with the truth. It's easier in the long run. Besides, R has no idea how to handle the other Living Tributes here, not in these numbers. A hive of other Dead was easy in comparison. At least he spent years bumping shoulders and groaning with them.

"The...others. Living out...there," R tries to keep his voice down. The problem is moans tend to carry. "They'll...hunt you. It's...them or...you."

That was the easiest way to put it. The problem is R knows he can't stash her in this auditorium forever either. She needs food and it's not like the airport, where he knew where most of the stuff was probably left behind when the Dead took it over. Disneyland's new to him - or it is now - and he could be gone long enough for someone to wander in on Julie. There's Howard. Maybe he could help? R's still kicking around that idea as he glances sidelong at Julie with his one eye.

"Jesus, R," she snaps immediately, pushing the zombie to hobble a little faster. Her arm tightens around his, the skin lacking a pulse and heat both. "Why didn't you say that in the first place?"

She doesn't need an explanation past that. There's nothing about being Living that automatically makes them safe. She's had plenty of humans try to kill her. It's an every day occurrence on the run -- people who want the food, the supplies, or the women of people better off than them.

Dog eat dog. The door closes behind them and the auditorium stretches out, dilapidated chair after dilapidated chair. It seems empty, endlessly quiet, but the wet noise of R's stump echoes off the walls. She leans him against a chair and watches the door like she expects it to bust open. How many Living are here? If there's no Dead, then what are they all doing here?

"I'll take that rest." She's gonna have to take it while she can. She looks up at him, plopping down in a seat. A cloud of dust rises around her. "You still okay?"

R doesn't resist the herding - in fact, he seems totally fine with being propped up inside Captain Eo's auditorium like old creaky furniture, his head tilting to watch Julie sit down and keep an eye on the door.

"Sorry...didn't think...until now," R sighs.

He falls silent again, trying to think of how he could get Julie out of this, who he knows that can help her in Disneyland. That he didn't try to bite, because that's a terrible first impression and the sad thing is R lost count of how many people he even tried to make passes at the first place. R's lost in thought when Julie cashes in that raincheck, the zombie's eyes going to her. Julie's a splash of color in the dark with her princess dress even as the dust settles around her.

"Yes. I'll...keep watch. Wake you...up?" Sleep's not a problem for R. Him being able to move at anything more than a crawl, kind of a bigger deal. But he doesn't think anyone saw them slip in and he can wait as long as it takes for Julie to get rested up.

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