thearena | (no subject)

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Who| Aunamee, Wesker, Punchy
What| Death
Where| Tomorrowland
When| Early Week 6
Warnings/Notes| Blood, gore, death.

This all feels so familiar.

Aunamee's arm is so mangled that he doesn't even want to look at it, but he forces himself anyway. The axe had made a clean slice through the skin and muscle and maybe a little bone -- clean because it happened so quickly, because it seemed so straight-forward in the moment, like his body was made from paper, but the wound itself is biological chaos, unhinged flaps of skin, chips of bone, bleeding that won't stop. He has no water to clean it with. His rations are dry, and even if he could lift himself from the toppled pavillon in Tomorrowland where he retreated after his fight with Maximus, most of the water in the park is filled with dirt and grime and disease. What he really needs is Fantasyland, sweet Fantasyland that will love and protect him, but something snapped within his already broken ankle, something he couldn't ignore. Crawling brings on furious agony, but more importantly, crawling makes him look like what he is. What he's become.

Weak.

This all feels so familiar because Aunamee knows what it's like to lose this kind of blood. What is less familiar is the helplessness.

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Punchy's starting to not do very well. It seems the rotting hole that is his eye has finally taken badly to the dehydration and low nutrition - it's swollen shut, puffy and red. He's tired, too, and dizzy a lot. He's taken to wandering around Tomorrowland looking for pieces for his megaphone, although he hasn't found anything lately and is starting to realize he doesn't know what he's going to do if he fixes it. His plans at alliances have all fallen through - he may have faith in people, but it's finally sinking in (along with the blood and nightmares) that faith isn't enough without strategy.

He's still wandering around shirtless, his puppet tucked into his waistband, with a handful of wires he scavenged from a ticket machine in his hand when he sees blood on the ground. It's not much, just trickles on the grass. He bends over and touches it with his fingertips. It's still wet, and when he wipes it off on the rest of the grass it seems to just spread and get lost in the lines of his fingerprints. The dazed expression on his face hardens into something of a steely, determined glare, not at anyone in particular but aimed at this entire hellish scenario.

Topher died on this same grass. Holiday did too. Punchy held each of them in his arms as they went from civilians to protect to corpses for whom he could only close their glassy, unseeing eyes. For whom he could only pray.

He follows the trail of blood and stops when he sees a man crawling. He rushes over and kneels next to Aunamee. "Yo, dawg, take it easy, I'll carry..."

His words die in his throat when he sees Aunamee's face.

"Well, well, isn't this a pleasant surprise?"

The voice comes from a distance, drifting to Aunamee on silken threads as Wesker strolled closer, circling lazily around him like a wolf. A shark - gilding with a sure, measured grace.

He'd followed the blood at first, tracking the shining wet smears across the border and deeper into Tomorrowland. Then the scent, the heated copper of gore, the bitter stench of fear. Then, the sound - that desperate struggle of a broken body dragging across the ground, the panting rush of breath, the pounding heart.

He paused just out of reach, head cocking. He didn't smile. Didn't grin.

He didn't have to.

His amusement radiated off him in waves.

How the tables had turned.... Just as he'd known they would.

"I'll be honest, I was beginning to think you'd forgotten your promise."

He laughs.

Even with his numerous injuries -- the lacerations, the penetrating bruises, the broken bones, the useless arm -- the sound comes out as clear as ever, rolling smoothly out of his throat like the waves of the ocean. Blood is covering his front, but blood is also matted in his hair because he's been pulling out chunks of it with his bare hands. It is a task made easy by his malnourishment and by those little moments where he blacks out from the real world. When Aunamee is surrounded by people, he's an actor. When Aunamee is inside his own head, he's a spitting, writhing monster.

"Oh," he says through the laugh, the little chuckles, the musical breaths. His pupils are dilated. "How appropriate."

"You," Punchy says. He doesn't even need to say more. There is so much conveyed in that single word, though three letters, that sole syllable, that he needed clarify.

You. You killed an innocent person in front of me. You. You are in such pain because of me. You. You are making me question God.

You.

Punchy doesn't see the blood or the balding, mauled pieces of scalp or the jerky way Aunamee moves. He doesn't see the bruises and the grime. What he sees is something far deeper inside Aunamee: he sees a decision he has to make. He could walk away and let the guy - the creature - die. He could pretend he has nothing to do with this.

And perhaps, if there weren't cameras, he would.

But instead he braces himself and burrows his arms under Aunamee and lifts him up over his shoulder. "I'll get your wack ass to water."

The sound he makes is more of a choke than a greeting. With pain like this, it's easy to ignore the little sounds around him, the tell-tale crunching of boots on gravel, the rustle of clothing. His eyes reflect his surprise, his bewilderment, his fury, because look at this man strolling up to him and pretending he is that much stronger than him.

He uses what remains of his spear to hoist himself off the ground, working the splittered wood like a crutch. He does this quickly, like a choreographed dancer, except quickly is too quick for his battered bones and he gasps, winces, and only makes it to his knees before slumping forward and catching himself with the wood.

He looks down at the ground to hide his wild eyes.

"I never forget," he says, and he wraps his fingers around a clump of grass, his knuckles white. He smiles at Wesker with bloody teeth. "And I'm never wrong."

But even as he says it, his fingers tremble.

Behind the dark lenses, the serpentine eyes moved up and down, watching Aunamee struggle upright dispassionately. (He could hear the ankle bone grinding unnaturally, could smell the raw bloody muscle through the tear in his shoulder.)

"Is that so?" he drawled, pale eyebrows twitching in amusement.

He shifted, folding his hands neatly behind his back. "Then by all means, carry on." His mouth curved. "I'm ready."

Edited 2013-04-29 13:06 (UTC)

Aunamee is a butterfly with his wings cut off, floundering prey that only needs to wait for someone to claim his death. Not even Grey was afraid in a moment like this, but Aunamee cannot help himself. Aunamee is a trembling ball, and when Punchy approaches to lift him up, he allows his laugh to turn into a whine. No. Please. No. Not this.

But the death blow doesn't come.

His arms are draped down the boy's back and he's too weak and too stunned to move them. He hears the words, but they don't quite register. They don't make sense.

"What are you doing?"

He can't disguise the panic, the way it ducks in and out of his words.

Edited 2013-04-30 22:16 (UTC)

An invitation.

Aunamee's smile flickered on and off like a light switch, but his teeth never unclenched. They remained frozen like that, tight in a grin and then tight in a snarl, tight in a grin and then tight in a snarl. The blood stained his teeth red, but some of it was dry and brown like coffee. He tasted flecks of copper on the tip of his tongue.

An invitation.

(Aunamee had stood like the other man so many times before. His back straight. His hands behind his back.)

He surges forward before he even realizes it, his foot dragging behind him, his good arm swinging the spear with all the force he had left.

"Stay breezy, dawg. Stay breezy." He outright pats Aunamee on the back, trying to pretend this is just any person he's carrying to safety and not a bloody, wheezing sack of murdering flesh. Telling himself he's still carrying a human being.

But all that hate, no, all that hurt comes through in his face. His expression is outright tortured. This is the kind of person who murdered his sister.

"I'm savin' your psychotic fuckin' ass."

The puppet he dresses up like her feels flat against his side. He arrives at what used to be a fountain and lays Aunamee down next to it. He scoops water up in his hands and holds it to Aunamee's lips.

Precognition may not have been among the many gifts the virus had given Wesker, but with his training, with his speed and strength, he didn't need it.

The spear swung at him, head winking light with deadly intent, and he simply moved, his own hands striking like snakes, grabbing the shaft and stopping the momentum dead. With only a fraction of his energy, a mere portion of his potential, he held the weapon still and met Aunamee's snarl across the scant distant between them with a cool smirk.

Then one of his hands moved, slipping down the shaft to wrap over Aunamee's, fingers squeezing. Hard. The pressure increasing the longer Aunamee fought him.

Drop it.

The loss of forward momentum was enough to make his legs crumple underneath him. His knees hit the ground. His fingers lost their grip. His ankle twisted, crunched, and his vision exploded into a thousand white flurries, agony washing over him like the waves of the ocean. He was vaguely aware that he was sweating. The salt water stung his wounds, caught in his eyebrows. He gasped, searching for his breath.

His muscles moved in rolling shudders. It was the pain, but it was also the anger. It writhed inside of him like a snake. Now it was worse than ever.

He makes a small sound at that word, psychotic, a protesting groan that rattles in the back of his dry throat. As soon as Punchy is laying him down, Aunamee is trying to get up again, supporting most of weight with his good arm. His other arm, his bad arm, barely responds to his commands now. The fingers twitch. The wrist jerks.

"Why?"

It's a gasp more than a word. He sees the water, and oh, how wonderful it would feel his in throat, how he needs it, but the image of him licking water out of this boy's hand is nauseating. Aunamee needs other people to survive (he thrives on other people), but right now, all he wants is a measure of control. He needs it.

And so he does what he does best. He directs the conversation away from himself. He hones in on weaknesses.

"What's wrong?" he asks against Punchy's hand. He ignores the water, but some of it wets his lips. He fights the urge to hungrily lap it up. He tries to raise his bad arm. Tries to touch it to Punchy's face. "You look so miserable."

Wesker stared down at Aunamee, the spear standing now at his side, basking in the man's fury. Tickled by it.

This sanctimonious fool. He'd actually believed he ever stood a chance.

He clucked his tongue, a gentle tsk, tsk, and cooed - a patronizing drawl, "There, there, I'm sure you gave it your best effort."

Edited (spacing oop) 2013-05-02 11:44 (UTC)

"Because I don't leave motherfuckers out to get tits-upped into fuckin' fender meat, okay? Don't pop me no Q's." Punchy grimaces and pulls back from Aunamee's hand; he lets the water cupped in his palms fall and splatter on Aunamee's chest. "Fuck, I'll get that..."

He bends over the water again, glaring at no one in particular, and rinses his eye socket with water. He feels as if he wants to wipe off all the places Aunamee's body touched his, but he doesn't have time for that, or enough water.

"Nothing's wrong," he says to the puppet tucked on his person. "Shit's just fucking breezy. Just breezy, yo. Just cleaning up the homicidal jackwagon who kevorked my homeboy. Just breezy."

He normally doesn't swear this much.

So after a moment of glaring at his reflection in the water, he gathers more water in his hands and holds it out to Aunamee again. "Knock it back, mofo. You're dehydrated as shit."

Edited 2013-05-03 01:28 (UTC)

"I could ruin you."

He hissed the words between his teeth, the sound even harsher with his dehydrated throat. It was like an animal. A monster. Pain still clouded his vision with impossible grey spots. His ears sang like a saw mill.

"I could crush you under my boot and have you begging for your death."

Wesker was a giant. A pillar of stone and steel, standing straight and tall, unmoved by the antics of the insect at his feet.

"Whoever you were," he said softly, that cool silken purr, Aunamee's hissing of no more concern to him than the low whistling of the wind (he would bow to neither), "wherever it was that you came from, is gone. There's a brand new food chain, and it's time you realized your place in it."

The water on his chest feels unusually cold, like someone has claimed his body with a steel flag pole. He cringes when the hand comes up a second time, and with that cringe, the entire world jerks and twitches in the corner of his eyes. He dry heaves. His stomach cramps desperately, endlessly, and every time it does, he can feel his rib digging into his guts.

"Dr. Kevorkian," he says in rasps and rattles, "killed people who were going to die anyway."

Again, he reaches out to touch Punchy. To grab his sleeve.

"You poor boy," he says. "You don't know how any of this works."

He knew this. He knew it since the very first arena when he looked down and saw that his hands (once so perfect) were red and swollen with the beginnings of frost bite. It was before he met Howard, before he even left the Cornucopia. Something had felt strange inside his body, overly hot and overly cold all at once, and so he removed his gloves to get a better look at himself. He removed his gloves and saw that he was human. Mortal. Crumbling.

He knew this, but he had never heard it spoken aloud.

His body went rigid again, consumed by the shudders, and his immediate response was to lash out, scratch, punch, bite. He couldn't stand up, but that didn't matter. He clawed at everything within reach. He wasn't himself anymore. The veil had fallen, and this was what was left.

"Hey, hey, take it easy..." Punchy releases the water onto the ground. Maybe that's not a good idea now. He watches as Aunamee retches, not sure if he should look away, feeling as if he probably should reach forward and pat the guy's back but finding that the very idea turns his stomach infinitely more than the sound of heaving and gasping.

No one warned him being a hero would be complicated. It never is in his comic books. Maybe he should have paid attention in his Ethics class, but even that never covered what you should do with a helpless guy who you know is a ghoul deep down.

"I ain't some boy. And I ain't Dr...whatever. We're all gonna bite it soon but that doesn't mean I got to hit the pedal on it." He runs his hand over his hair, wiping away sweat and dirt with it.

He pulls the puppet out and fondles it in one hand, as if it brings some kind of comfort. And he makes a sign of a cross and stares up at the sky as if someone's going to explain it to him.

But the only one who can is reaching for him, and Punchy jerks away. "Don't touch me, motherfucker. Hands off. You shanked a good homie back there and you ain't even said why."

He sucks in a breath, trying to recover the air and energy he wasted reaching for Punchy. His hand drops bonelessly. His fingers curl into a not-quite fist.

And then he starts laughing again.

It comes out of nowhere. One minute, his voice is soaked in feigned pity, and in the next, something has cracked, snapped, snip snip snip. Aunamee thinks about what he must look like right now, balding and broken, so weak that he can't even refuse water without his body rebelling, so weak that he can't even ground himself with someone else's skin, and his stomach seizes once more and he rolls over off of the fountain with a light thud and then he's aware that his thoughts are moving too quickly and there's dirt in his mouth --

"I hit the pedal," he says. Chokes. He cranes his head so that he can look Punchy in the eye, the corners of his mouth twitching. "I hit the pedal, and your friend is lucky that's all I did."

Aunamee's fingers scrabbled over his boots, digging at the leather. Fists swung as his calves, the blows pounding dully.

He endured the tantrum stoically. Waiting expressionlessly for Aunamee to wear himself out, for the anger to burn away and reveal the husk. The withered, mewling creature beneath the smooth, careful mask.

"Pathetic."

Punchy can feel his face turning red. It twists something deep inside him, down in his guts, to watch this man rebuff his attempts at kindness again and again, to treat trust and openness with such disdain. To disrespect him, especially when he's swallowing so much disgust to do his job and overlook this man's depravity.

"What's so funny, bitch? What's so fucking funny?" He reaches over and grabs Aunamee's shoulders, props him back up, pushes Aunamee's back against the fountain a little too hard. Punchy's not violent, but this man... "What would you have done to him, innocent homeboy like that?"

Topher's pale face, Holiday's blank eyes, they burble up in his mind again and again. Because of people like this. Villains who are every bit the cackling mad men of stories but are so much more terrifying in that they do win, in the end.

God, they're both going to die here.

This was when Aunamee knew he needed to destroy the Capitol.

It was the only clear thought in his tangled head. It was the piercing scream that lifted above all the other piercing screams. He needed to crush Wesker, yes, but he also needed to crush the people who clipped his wings, the people who dragged him (the Chosen One) down below the level of this egotistical abomination --

It didn't take him long to run out of energy. He bowed his head and breathed. Gasped.

Pathetic. That was what Hyperion had said to Grey before he died.

Edited (hand.... really, self?) 2013-05-08 01:38 (UTC)

But the deathblow didn't come.

The spear clattered to the ground, the sound like a gunshot over Aunamee's soft panting. Tossed aside as Wesker's nose wrinkled at the back of the man's head.

He took a step back, a second, then turned on his heel, striding away with the same unhurried elegance as he approached.

Unconcerned. Untroubled. Forgetting Aunamee the moment his back was turned.

A non-element, so low in Wesker's eyes he wasn't even worth the trouble of killing.

But he doesn't answer. That image is still in his head, that image of himself fallen and imperfect, and he needs to laugh at it because if he doesn't laugh, he'll cry. He can't remember the last time he's cried. Growing up, he was a quiet boy who was more likely to tear apart a book than sniffle, more likely to hiss than wince, more likely to stare than bow his head in shame. It's not fair that this should happen to him. It's not Right.

He winces (and doesn't hiss) when Punchy knocks him back against the fountain. His rib digs under his skin, clawing at him from the inside like some great beast. When he opens his mouth, the only thing that comes out are gasps and more laughs.

So instead, he reaches forward to touch Punchy again. To grab his head.

"I asked what you would have done to him, you-" But Punchy sees the hand coming from his head and jerks back. The bloody fingers graze the tip of his nose, smear fingerprints on his cheek, as Punchy blocks the perceived attack by shoving Aunamee's shoulder back again. "Don't-"

And he hears something, a crack, like chewing down on the drumstick of a chicken. It sounds like it comes from within his own head but he knows it's come from Aunamee.

His mouth doesn't close. Instead it hand, his chin at half-mast, in confusion and horror.

There's a split second between the crack and the pain when Aunamee's scrambled thoughts all come together and form a single word:

Good.

But then there's a high-impact collision, less like a punch and more like an elevator plunging twenty stories and crumbling in on itself. It's his ribcage or his stomach or something, he doesn't know. All he knows is that there's a fire building in his gut and now that fire is flickering and flaring down his left arm. The laughter is gone, dead on his lips. Now there's something like a dry cough, harsh and incomplete and breathless. (His lungs, he thinks. Oh, his lungs.) With the all-consuming pain comes the all-consuming fear.

"No," he says, but not really. It comes out more like a 'nuh,' a shallow groan that whistles with his breath. (Is he ready for this? Is this really what he wants?) He paws for Punchy's hands because he tells himself that he's keeping up the act, that he's supposed to be good inside and that good people seek out other good people when they're bleeding out from the inside, but unlike his other reaches, there is nothing strategic buzzing behind his muscles. There is only desperation. Pleading.

A fear of dying alone.

"No, no no no, no, shit, oh shit..." Punchy doesn't know what to do, doesn't know what to do with that impulse to wrench his hand away from Aunamee's, so he takes Aunamee by the shoulder and gingerly lays him on his side on the ground, tucks the killer's legs at an angle. Rescue position.

"Oh god, I'm sorry, shit, I didn't, oh my God." The sounds of dying are harsher from Aunamee than they were from Topher or from Holiday. These are the sounds of a building collapsing after a blasting, the groans and creaks of infrastructure being flooded and broken. Muted by the flesh that blankets them.

"Hold on, homie, I got-" Punchy has the cape he's been using as a bag for his electronics. He unties it, shakes the items to the ground, throws it over Aunamee's shoulders like a blanket. "I ain't gonna let you die, oh god. God."

He doesn't even realize that the guilt has transformed Aunamee from 'motherfucker' to 'homie'.

Maybe a part of him knew, subconsciously, that reaching for Punchy would create this beautiful moment. Maybe he knew that killing Topher would give him the right injuries, that fighting Maximus would follow things through. Maybe this was part of a great plan, an elegant collection of ink strokes forging the painting that he always wanted in the end.

In these last (or not last) moments, these thoughts are the only things keeping Aunamee sane. The comforting embrace of Punchy's blanket is something he wanted. He asked for this. This is his.

His breathing is shallow, uncertain rattles, little swallows of air that remind him of trying to sip peanut butter through a straw. Tell him, he thought. Tell him what you did to his friend was a blessing.

"I w-w-w--"

But there's not enough air for it, and his body explodes into shudders. He doesn't notice that he's coughing, but he does notice the wet blood filling his throat and warming his dry, blueing lips.

"Shit!" Punchy jerks back at the weak spray of blood from Aunamee's mouth spills onto the ground, then dives back in and pats Aunamee on the back weakly. "It's okay, dawg, get it up, it's just..."

But no. It's blood. It's blood and Punchy's watching a man under his watch suffocate on it. As if in sympathy, Punchy's own face goes pale as a receipt, veins in his neck tinting through purple and blue. "No, man, come on, stay with me..."

This isn't happening, he tells himself. This is a nightmare. This is some Gwen Stacy bullshit, he thinks hysterically.

And part of him, some ugly, dark, cancerous part originating in his stomach, is relieved when that rattling noise in Aunamee's chest stops. Is glad when Aunamee's pulse begins to slow, when this homicidal motherfucking maniac's eyes start to roll back, revealing a bloodshot slip of sclera underneath.

But that part is buried under the part of Punchy that bursts into tears and sobs into his wet, blood-covered hands.

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