and it's there I read on a hillside gravestone

[lessthanelementary]

Who| Neffa and Katurian
What| Neffa's luck runs out.
Where| Adventureland???
When| Early week 4
Warnings/Notes| Description of injury/death

The sponsors had given up on him. Neffa could hardly blame them. He'd played them most cruelly - given them cold, charming smiles and cheerful, violent promises, offered them infinite expectations and made good on exactly none of them. He'd run from every confrontation, begged for every scrap of help he'd bought, spent his time crouching in corners and muttering gibberish into the air, and ended up here, stretched out flat on the banks of the swamp half for concealment and half because his trembling legs wouldn't hold him in one place that long, pulling water to his mouth one shaking handful at a time and startling at every distant splash.

All in all, a terrible way to do business. He might have been the worst investment prospect in the arena, he mused - no good way to measure that, of course, but at the least he was a strong candidate. How embarrassing. He'd have asked for compensation for wasted time, were he them.

The water tasted foul, and it sat in his stomach about as well as the remains of the rat he'd cooked in the early hours of the morning. He wasn't sure if that was what had him feeling so feverish, or the cut on the back of his head that still throbbed and stung, or perhaps the chilly, sleepless nights - life had felt like a gift, when first he'd snatched it back from the mouth of the Cornucopia, but he saw now that what he'd begged off the gods was less life than slower, more miserable death. Stupid.

If nothing else, the water made walking seem a less daunting prospect. He staggered to his feet, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and turned to follow the edge of the swamp, moving slowly in the direction of the great pyramid looming in the near distance and thinking little of keeping under cover. Let anyone find him - he had nothing, and the only way to win something was to find someone willing to make him an offer. A calculated risk. Good business, yes? Gods, let someone be willing to negotiate.

Gods, my head hurts.

Comments

[downbeat]

Katurian was so exhausted that it looked like he was sporting two black eyes. His nose was a crooked mess of bruises. The veins, oh the veins, they were visible all up and down his arms, on his legs, at his temples. Hunger, thirst, and fear had all eaten at his body. He felt like a corpse, and when he caught himself reflected in the rusted metal around him, he thought he looked like one, too.

No wonder the sponsors had been silent. Oh, they were probably thinking. This is no good. Let's just let this one die.

It wasn't only his body that had taken a beating. Katurian's thoughts were dizzying and his moods were unpredictable. He woke up in the middle of the night screaming into his fist, biting off his own fingernails, clawing into the dirt. When he closed his eyes, he saw Draco's dead eyes and Howard's mangled face. He saw Michal hanging with a noose around his neck.

At first, he barely registered that someone was coming close to his shelter of the day, an overturned plastic balloon. In fact, Katurian even slipped out of it in plain sight, his brain crying for water so loudly that he only bothered to look one way. When he emerged and saw Neffa, he froze and looked at him with wide, panicked eyes. Katurian was like a rabbit. A battered, torn up, fucked up rabbit.