thearena | open;

Bucky hadn't begun with any friends here, and this place seemed to be rigged to pull people apart. But that was alright, he told himself. He'd been on his own before, he knew how to survive. He wasn't lonely. He wasn't.

Anyhow, the mutt he'd picked a fight with had gotten him worse than he let on to Punchy. His ribs were bruised, or something like it, and so he was sitting down, trying to give them a rest. He was hidden, sort of, but nothing keen eyes couldn't pick out, planted there like a clay bird you'd shoot at.

It was one thing wandering around an arena trying to survive - and entirely another actively seeking out one's friends. Usually Sherlock would avoid all signs of human contact (the likelihood of an individual wanting to kill him were much too high and not interesting enough to warrant the danger), but in this case he was actively seeking them out. The benefit of finding John or Danny again outweighed the risk.

So when he caught Bucky's trail, he followed it rather than avoid it, following it to a bush where he could just make out the shadowed outline of an individual...

He could hear the other man's footsteps— he made himself listen for those sorts of noises. Bucky weighed in his mind, the advantages of trying to stay put and stay hidden versus giving himself up. But the truth was, he liked to charge into things.

"Who's there?" he asked, not coming out of his hiding spot quite yet.

Sherlock came to a halt as he was noticed, silent for a long pause. Considering.

"I'm not sure what answer you expect for that question," He said eventually. "Considering we're in a death match."

He didn't sound particularly concerned about it, though his hand lay in his pocket, the folding knife secured in his palm.

"If I was gonna try and kill you, I'd've done it already." That was true, Bucky was used to sneaking up on people and slicing them in the dark. But those people were Nazis. So that was different.

It had to be different, right?

"But maybe if you came charging at me I'd at least know you were coming."

This guy didn't sound like a Nazi.

Punchy's megaphone has broken again; this time, the battery has finally died after Punchy's unsuccessfully tried rallying people to him for the last week. Unfortunately, most of the souvenirs in the park are being sold batteries not included, and as such Punchy's at a bit of a loss as to where he's going to get more double-A's.

He's dismantling a pillar when he sees someone from the corner of his one eye. He gets to his feet, but it isn't the smooth, athletic gesture it would have been a few weeks ago. Now it's stooped, slow, weighed down by dehydration and hunger. Punchy shades his eyes and brushes some dirt off his bare chest before he calls out to the figure he could swear he saw not far off.

Maybe it's the light and the exhaustion. Punchy's used to barely sleeping but this is insane.

"Yo, homie, if you be comin' round no need to front out here. I ain't looking for a scuffle or nothing."

Still looking for John, still looking for Danny, he was less wary than he otherwise might have been - even if the figure dismantling the pillar was definitely not either. But sometimes curiosity could not be checked, and Sherlock was never very good at not giving into impulses of the curious variety.

The voice, however, stopped him dead in his tracks, ten feet away with his hand in his pocket, clutching the folded knife out of sight in his palm.

However, for some reason, he could not find it in himself to be afraid.

Instead, he was disgusted.

"Was that meant to be English?"

Punchy holds out his hands when he sees the stranger approach, as if to assure Sherlock that he's unarmed. He realizes a second later that that probably looks a bit awkward when he has a piece of metal in his hand that he's been using to pry the pillar open, so he opens his hand to drop that on the ground with a little clink!.

And then Sherlock has to go on picking on the way he talks, when Punchy's had it just about up to here with people doing that (almost as much as he's had it up to here with people killing each other on his watch). His good eye narrows and his cheeks flush a bit under the sunburn and freckles.

"It's supposed to be American, bitch."

Sherlock raised an eyebrow, watching with vague amusement as the boy dropped the piece of metal and then blushed. And then swore. Well, at least there was absolutely no reason to fear this one. He removed his hand from his pocket, the knife left inside still safely folded out of sight. He wouldn't need it.

"No wonder it was nearly impossible to decipher," Sherlock said with a slight smirk in his impeccably crisp, posh, English accent. "Luckily, from what I could gather, you have no intention of starting a fight - and nor do I."

Punchy appreciates the lack of weapons, given that very recently he saw Topher gutted, saw Holiday's fragile body rent apart by a hook. He figures he could take Sherlock in a fist-fight, but he has no intent of doing so.

"Word, homie, I ain't looking to throw down. I just be cracking this shit here in the pillar, looking for some juice for my cone." He pats the pillar. "Tried bustin' one of these open earlier and got some kind of chip out."

Sherlock parted his lips to immediately start correcting Punchy's grammar, but by the time he had finished his piece, there were so many incorrect segments that it proved impossible to actually correct every single one.

Instead he looked mildly frustrated until, with the last sentence, his eyes lit up.

"A chip?" He said, proving a suspicion. "Do you still have it?"

"Fo shizzy, bizzy." Punchy reaches a hand around the pillar to grab the pieces of his megaphone. He's also got a small pink sack tied from the cloth that used to be his cape, which he keeps his other electronic parts in. He unties it and examines it with his one eye.

With an almost childish trust and naivete, as if the idea that Sherlock might hurt him or is his enemy has long since passed him, he holds it out to Sherlock. "Here. Microchip. Can't tell what it is without more shit to light it up, though."

Luckily, Punchy's trust in this case is entirely warranted, as the fact that they are in a death match at all has completely fled Sherlock's mind. He takes the microchip carefully, holding it up to the sunlight and squinting at it for a long while. Eventually he gives it back.

"Quite." He agrees, but in the meantime he's memorized it, filing it away in his mind to look at again later. "Unfortunately nothing from the arena will survive us - it would be useful to have equipment--" He cut himself off, tsking with annoyance, remembering that he didn't have any of his equipment here in the Capitol, even once he was out of this death pit. But he saw the other electronics.

"Are you starting a collection?"

Punchy furrows his tongue behind his lips as Sherlock examines it. The problem with a microchip, of course, is that without anything to read it with, it might as well be a piece of broken plastic. He shrugs and gestures to the grab-bag of broken speakers, stereo sets, cash registers and ticket machines.

"Trying to retrofit some of this jank-ass bullshit to read the chip, but most of this is real old-school, way earlier than how I know how to crack." The ticket machine is probably the only thing with a CPU, although there's a bracelet-reader that might be able to be turned into something. "I'm a software mofo, not a grease monkey."

"Way earlier." Sherlock's eyes snap to Punchy's face. While it's true that most of the electronics are hardly new or top-of-the-line for Sherlock's time, they were, at least, what he would expect in a place like this. His eyes light up as he studies Punchy.

"When are you from?" He asks, with particular and intense interest.

"All the skills in the world ain't gonna mean jack if shit's written in a different language, you know?" He gestures to the little chip. "I can't even tell what that's coded on."

He squints at Sherlock, as if the year should be obvious.

"2008, not two thousand and late." He flashes a gang sign he learned from a music video at Sherlock, then a two-something-five-three with his fingers.

Sherlock tsked under his breath, a theory lost. He raised an eyebrow to whatever bizarre symbols Punchy was trying to flash at him, and ultimately decided to simply ignore them as irrelevant noise.

"Behind me, then. Though close enough to not make a difference." He paused, frowning. "Finding anything still workable to read it is incredibly unlikely, in this--" He suddenly stopped, turning abruptly in the direction of the main street.

"Except. Except. No - no, likely analog, but-- possibly? If digital, it may just--"

"Whoa, dawg, is your flashbulb fazing? You got an i-dee?" Punchy looks energized, as if someone's plugged a live wire into his mind. He grins, the empty socket of his eye squishing into the shape of a comma, if bloody and rotten.

"You got something that works digital?"

"Possibly," He clarified, still looking back toward the main street. "Possibly. We found machines that had video playback, in one of the stores. Obviously the original designs would have been analog, but the films themselves were of the last arena, here, and as far as I'm aware almost all of the technology in the Capitol itself is digital."

He smirked, slightly. "An eighty percent chance that they are completely useless, but--"

Punchy doesn't let him finish.

"Lead the way, hatchback!" Punchy slaps his hands together and starts to gather the electronics into his arms. "Twenty percent's more aces'n I got."

He starts ahead of Sherlock.

Sherlock watches him, slightly amused, before clapping his hands together and immediately following. It only took a moment to catch up. He was infinitely pleased to be doing something that wasn't directly related to partaking in a ridiculous death match, and all too happy to find someone who was similarly disinterested. However, he felt he needed to cover some bases first.

"Keep your eye out for a shorter man with sandy coloured hair," He said, confident that the description covered both John and Danny. "Lost him during the fireworks."

"That some kind of homeboy of yours, like, not on the DL or shit but tight up ins?" Punchy holds up crossed fingers to indicate something like the American Sign Language for 'bromance'.

He pauses at a crossroads. "Okay, where's this shizz at? Can't bust it 'til I lock on it."

A lot of this is just talk, as if he's going to be the one to figure this all out when it was Sherlock who out the pieces together.

It was a dialect, he realised. It wasn't just terrible grammar (although it was that), it was an entire dialect onto its own. So if one wanted to communicate fully...

He cleared his throat.

"Homeboy and me are ride-or-die, yo," He explained in his crisp, posh British accent.

He raised an arm to point at the shop that he and John had broken into on their first day in the arena.

Punchy's face lights up like the Vegas Strip at 8:30pm in August. Someone speaks his language. Someone speaks his language with a truly ridiculous, stiff accent, but they're talking like someone Punchy could get to know.

He decides right then that Sherlock's his favorite not-yet-dead person in the Arena.

"Ah, so he's a down-ass motherfucker with a boss streak. Aces high on that one, dawg." He gives Sherlock a thumbs-up. "I'll holler if I keen on him."

John had been stumbling around for what he was sure had been at least two days, though they seemed to melt together in the haze of hunger, thirst and the accompanying weakness. The fireworks had been very carefully designed to separate him not only from his allies, but also from the supplies they'd gathered. He was kicking himself for it now, but in future he'd sleep with food rations secured physically to himself in case anything like this happened again. He was already planning for the next arena.

Without a map or any knowledge of Disneyland he'd managed to get himself quite magnificently lost- but it didn't seem to matter that much anyway. Sherlock would be looking for him too, he had no doubt of that. All he had to do was stay alive until the detective could track him.

He came upon an orange tree after some time, and nearly let out a few colourful words with relief. Staggering up the hill, he grabbed one of the low-hanging fruit, twisted it off the branch and sank dirty fingernails into the rind, peeling it off eagerly to get to the sweet, juicy flesh inside.

Karis was still restless. Kill, be killed, that was the whole point of this game and so far she'd done a damn good job of killing. The problem was that there weren't nearly that many people left, so finding targets was getting harder. She roamed across the park continuously, not bothering to stop. Just one foot in front of the other as she circled through the run-down buildings and decay. Then she found him - a man settled next to a fruit tree, desperately trying to get to the flesh inside.

Well. That was fine by her. It meant he was distracted.

She broke cover at a run and tried to cross the distance before he became aware of her, aiming for a full on body blow and tackle. Once he was down, she could see about incapacitating him a bit more permanently.

John was, unfortunately, completely distracted, his teeth sinking into the orange just as he heard her approach. With no time to adjust his position, she bowled him over completely, leaving him splayed on his back. Miraculously, he still had the orange in hand.

It was almost too late to struggle with any amount of effectiveness, but he tried anyway, grunting with the effort. Somehow, he didn't think he'd be able to talk his way out of this one.

She had him on the ground. Good. That was step one. She felt him start to struggle and she snarled something in a harsh, guttural language through her teeth at him as she grabbed his arm and wrenched it in a direction it wasn't meant to go, as hard as she could.

She sort of wanted to take her time with this one.

Pain shot through him like a lance. He cried out, sharp and short, his chest beginning to heave with equally sharp, short breaths, his eyes wide as he stared at his otherworldly attacker. This was it, then. This was how he was going to die. He sucked in a lungful of air and threw all his energy into a desperate and likely futile attempt to free himself.

She heard the crack of bone and that, that sent a thrill through her. This always did. She honestly didn't know whether it was the necromancy that animated her reinforcing her and making her want to or if she genuinely enjoyed killing. She didn't particularly care, either. She let out a harsh laugh as he tried to fight back and she stuck a clawed hand under his chin and forced his head back, as she jabbed her other fist into his side.

"Be quiet and stop fighting and maybe this'll be easier for you," she hissed.

He wet his lips, a nervous reaction, and tried to steady his breathing, hoping to stockpile a little more energy before attempting to break free again. His eyes focused on hers.

"I'm unarmed," he said, chest tight, pain throbbing through him, bright and impossible to ignore. "I'm a doctor. I don't know if that means-- if that means anything to you."

Karis cocked her head to one side and then slowly started to stand, acid-yellow eyes locked on his face.

As soon as she was on her feet, she jammed her foot against the side of his kneecap in a vicious kick, intended to jam it out of place. Her response came with an angry little snarl, "Do I look like I need a doctor?"

He cried out again, squeezing his eyes tightly shut and pressing his lips together as he tried to clamp down on the pain. His leg. Of course she'd gone for his leg.

"No, you-- you don't," he agreed, a little breathless.

"So give me another reason to let you live and I'll think about it," Karis rasped. She really had no intention to let him live, but she might as well give him a glimmer of (false) hope. She put her boot against his chest to pin him down while she tried to figure out what to do with him.

Maybe she ought to just gut him.

"You know... I don't think I've ever heard of anyone saying that and meaning it," he said through gritted teeth, already running through his probable death in his mind. He'd come back, wouldn't he? Most likely. The only real drawback, besides actually dying, would be how he'd be unable to help Sherlock.

He really, really didn't want to die. But if his attacker needed a reason not to kill him, he was dead already. He struggled uselessly against her weight on his chest.

"Yeah, you're probably right," Karis laughed harshly, "Too bad for you, huh?"

She lifted her leg and gives him a sharp boot in the ribs to knock the wind out of him. With his arm broken and kneecap battered, she doubted he'd be putting up much more of a fight, but better safe then sorry. She crouched and straddled his waist, one hand pressing his shoulder against the ground.

"Any last words?"

He coughed, sucking in air harshly as he tried to recover from the blow to his chest- a spike of panic shooting through him as she put weight on his shoulder. It was recovered now, had been for some time, but the experience of having been shot through it had never really left him.

He couldn't think of anything eloquent enough to qualify as last words, but it occurred to him as he looked up into her unearthly eyes that if this was it, if he didn't wake in the Capitol, that this would be the last thing Sherlock would see of him. "It wasn't your fault," he said, a slight wheeze to his voice as he let his head fall back onto the ground, his eyes closing. The cameras would carry his message, there was no need to ask his murderer to. "And I wouldn't have changed anything."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Karis muttered, her head cocked to one side curiously. Oh, well.

"Whatever," she shook her head and then slid her claws into the flesh of his belly and tore upward, "This might hurt a bit."

He screamed, gasping sharply, his chest shuddering with desperate breaths, eyes squeezed tightly shut. He'd thought being shot was the worst pain he'd ever experience, but this-- this was tearing and gaping and wet, and he could feel himself bleeding out rapidly. God, he wished he could lose consciousness, he knew he would soon enough, but the pain seemed to stretch out forever...

"Have fun," Karis hissed into his ear. She wrenched her claws sidewise, just to open him up a bit more, and then scrambled to her feet. She'd like to stick around, just to watch him bleed out - but she has places to be, people to kill. So she gives him a kick in the ribs and then turns to head back into the park. A kill is a kill.

It was at this precise moment that Sherlock crested the hill and saw the scene. He'd heard the piercing scream, would have avoided it entirely if he hadn't heard a familiar note within it, his stomach plummeting with a twisting fear that he did not recognize in himself nor understood. As he crested that hill, however, he did understand and a breathless 'No' left his lips as he broke into a run.

It was too late. He knew it was too late. Even from a distance he could see the damage, could see John's attacker fleeing into the park (though he memorized her back, yes, yes he did). He wanted to go after her. Right here. Right now, knife in hand. But he couldn't leave John like this, he couldn't.

"John!" He cried as he ran up to his torn and broken body.

Blood bubbled up in his mouth, flooding everything with the iron tang taste. Distantly, he thought he heard Sherlock's voice, but had no energy to force even a strangled sound past his lips beyond the wet gasps.
He coughed, convulsing in a violent spasm, his eyes rolling back in his head. Unconsciousness couldn't be far. He was floating, everything slowly turning grey...

He was running too fast to make any sort of graceful stop, half slamming into the ground at John's side.

He didn't need John's medical experience to know that John had maybe seconds to live. Sherlock's hands shook as he pulled John upright into his lap. It wasn't logical, to handle anyone this way, but Sherlock was past logic and John was past saving, but there had to be something he could do.

"John, tell me what to do. Quickly!" He bit out, almost angrily, as if to spur him into action and healing by the force of his will.

Logically, he knew that the percentage of tributes that survived and reawoke in the capitol was greater than those that disappeared, that in all likelihood the more quickly that John died, the more quickly he would be okay again. But the fact that there was any chance - the fact that John could die, just like this, and then be gone forever, and Sherlock wouldn't even be able to examine the body, that he wouldn't be able to look down at a cold slab and then calmly and purposely find his killer--

His knuckles were nearly white from how tightly he gripped John, the man's shoulders pulled up onto his knees while Sherlock was bent over him. Sherlock shook him again.

"Tell me what to do!" he hissed.

John was far beyond the point where he might have been able to speak. He forced his eyes open, but couldn't make them focus- the hazy knowledge of Sherlock's presence filtering through imperfect vision and muffled hearing. He coughed, spluttering blood, and reached deliriously for his hand.

Sherlock glanced quickly at John's hand - momentarily completely confused with what John was trying to do, or say, when he realised that he was reaching. Without a second thought he grabbed John's hand and held it tightly, his other hand moving to John's chest, hovering as he tried to decide where to place it. He knew he had to stop the bleeding, but how do you stop someone bleeding if they're bleeding from everywhere?

"Leave you alone for two minutes--" Sherlock said angrily, though there was a real trace of panic in his voice.

He heard that. A shaky, secret smile slipped onto his barely parted lips, unmoving once it settled into place- the kind of smile that crept onto his face when Sherlock cracked a joke at crime scenes, the kind that really wasn't appropriate to the situation. He smiled, and was gone- as silently as if he'd never been there at all.

Sherlock was, in a way, well accustomed to death.

He had seen more corpses than he could count. Had felt them, hand moved them, had traced their last moments, had uncovered their secrets. He had used them, in the dim labs of St Barts, he had discovered them, in various states of destroyed. He had stumbled upon them, had been brought to them, had them brought to him. He knew what death looked like.

But there was a detachment, in death, between the bodies of the victims he studied, and watching someone actually die. It had only happened twice to him, back home. The first time he'd felt almost a sort of Justice - watching the suicide serial killer bleed out under his foot. He hadn't killed him, of course, but he had been there, and he'd watched the light fade from his eyes, and he'd felt nothing. Why would anyone feel anything for a monster?

The second time, he'd watched a man blown to pieces, running out into a mine field. That had shocked him, down to the core, though he still felt nothing for the man himself - a murderer and a mad man, who had endangered not only himself, but his friends. So though it shook him, there was still Justice.

There was no justice here.

The cannon boomed, but Sherlock barely heard it, his hands beginning to shake violently. He had never had to watch someone he cared about die. And he did care about John (could even, in his better moments, admit that to other people). He didn't care about many people - could not find the well of empathy that most seemed to take for granted, and did not particularly want to - but he cared about John. Almost, if he had thought about it, more than he cared about himself.

He yelled at him. He didn't remember what, but it wouldn't have mattered. A vague, bitter note, demanding that he be in the capitol upon his own arrival. That he wouldn't settle for anything else and would be furious if he wasn't there.

He didn't move for a long time, until he could hear the muttations begin to close in on him - the snarls and the snaps of the strange creatures edging closer. He thought for a moment that he should just sit there and let them - but eventually with a curse he let go - John's hand had already stiffened around his own, just slightly, and he was forced to pry it off. Cursing again and again, under his breath, he backed away from the body, covered in John's blood, turned his back, and ran.

open;

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject