thearena | Open to Arena 1

Entry tags:

Open to Arena 1

Who| Doc Holiday and anyone else in Arena 1
What| Just trying to survive for now. With one arm.
Where| Arena 1, near the mouth of Milkshake Lake
When| Around day 2 of the arena
Warnings| I think she's going a little crazy. Also, tl;dr as this doubles as a narrative on how she's survived this long.

This arena was hell. As much as she had talked about the arena's not mattering at all compared to everything happening in the Capitol, she has finally revised all of her opinions on that matter to surmise that the arena's were a very cruel annoyance. She should have kept her arm from the Cornucopia. At least then she'd have a meal.

... She didn't really just think that.

Holiday trudged along in this place with only her right arm at her disposal. The other sat where a bright pink bag once laid at the Cornucopia. Nothing from the start and that bitch, Calico, wasn't going to give her anything in this arena if sponsors even still wanted to help her now that she had been branded.

At least she wasn't dumb. She had completely destroyed the white robes of her costume to make a tourniquet and bandage (or maybe a mop) for her arm. She also refused to eat the treats scattered around the place. Did they think she was that stupid? Even if it really was real, she wasn't about to chance it on just their word. And then there were the tiny buildings she had come pass scattered around the land. Those screamed death traps, if not by Gamemakers, then by other tributes. It was like a blinking neon sign that said, "Oh please kill me." Then there was also watching her friends die without ever getting hurt. Wyatt, Punchy, a few other people just... collapsed. She didn't have time to stop and help them, not that she could do anything anyway. Besides, she thought she was going to be next... but the sudden, horrible death never came. Yet.

And if all of that wasn't enough, she just had to go and get mauled by some things straight from a Japanese pop show made for preteen girls. Whatever they were, they liked her stub of an arm and they had teeth. The things swarmed her in the night, as if they had come from all corners of the arena just for her blood. While one of them tried chewing her good arm away, she had slung the beast straight into... a rainbow... where it promptly caught fire. Then suddenly the hunters were now the hunted because Holiday had found her lunch.

The closer to the milkshake river she got, the fewer those things became as if they didn't like the area. Really, all that saved her during the night was that she just so happened to run (or hobble really) in this general direction. It was a good thing they had attacked her, otherwise she would have starved before bleeding out. Now she had three cooked Doki-Doki and two that were still raw since she had yet to find a rainbow to throw them into. Those last two had died due to broken necks.

She sat at the bank and began to partake in quite a lonesome meal as her mind wandered back to a time where a younger version of herself couldn't even think of something like this simply because of the immorality of it all. She chuckled through one of their red and white stripped arms.

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"Doc!" Chris had been searching all over for her.

"Shit," what else could he say seeing her. Splashing through the river to get to her he laughed a little. "And here I was worried you were like the others." He meant the ones that had been poisoned. Pulling off his pack he motioned next to her. "Mind if I join you for a bit?"

Holiday jerked and stiffened at hearing her title being called out. She didn't want to fight Chris. Really, she didn't want to fight anyone...

She took a breath as he started splashing through the, uh, water of the river. She would just do the same as last time. Help others and only fight if someone struck first. Even then, don't strike to kill unless they were endangering someone she cared for. That was her rules and she wasn't going to break them. She's too stubborn for that.

Holiday smiled when he reached the bank she was on. She knew she looked horrible. "Not at all. I have some," she looked down at the creatures, "... food, if you want any."

I lucked out," He added one of the pocky packs to her meal, and the parasol. "I'm not going to use it. At least it'll be some shelter from the sun for ya." He now felt bad that he hadn't found her sooner though. "I don't have pain meds though, wish I did."

"And looks like I'm not going to be leavin' you alone." He grimaced slightly. "That is if you want someone around to back you up."

She looked at the things on the ground. Holiday had a comment about not taking things from him on the tip of her tongue, but he went on before she could fully articulate it.

She looked to her stub of an arm. "Don't worry about that. It's fine." In all honesty, it hurt like hell. When she bumped or jarred it, the world would go white. Now that time had passed and her body recognized there wasn't anything there anymore, it hurt even worse. A full state of shock was likely not far around the corner, despite the pains she's gone through so far to stave off the worst of it. Without water, it would be before night...

Rebecca acted like it was better than that, though, but the weariness and sweat said it all.

"I'll be a liability to you, Chris, but it's appreciated. So are these," she looked down at the items he had given her, "but you're better off with them than me."

He shook his head. "Right now, I feel it's a calculated risk. You really think with our charm bracelets they're goin' to let things go back to normal out there? Longer you're in here less you'll have to deal with them." He set up the parasol to give her some shade.

"Saw Some too, not sure where he ran off to," he stretched a little. "And besides, I'm better a guardian so who knows we might last a while. Moment you want to split off I won't stop you, just ask you don't stab me in the back because of it." He nodded to the arm. "Should we see about dealing with that so you're not jarring it as much?"

She stayed quiet while he talked. Maybe he was right about the outside world, but it wasn't like she dealt much with them anyway aside from sponsor dates... which ~~thankfully~~ were likely to not be a thing anymore.

Holiday looked up at him with a frown when he mentioned the possibility of her killing him. Maybe he could stay with her. Just for a little while... At least just to get through the shock part that she knew was looming. She looked at the ground while he set up the parasol, thinking about it before he asked a question.

"I'm not sure what else to do with it," she answered, looking back to the arm. "I've stopped most of the blood flow and I keep alternating the makeshift bandages to try and prevent infection as long as possible." In a world of candy, that wasn't long. She had thought of a sort of splint, but had no materials to make such a thing just yet. "If you have ideas, I'm open to them."

"Not sure, I know first aide, but..." He knew shock, and how to treat it in theory.

"We'll try to keep it clean." He knew odds weren't good, but he wasn't going to abandon her. "If I find something you say's good we'll patch you up. For now, if you need rest tell me okay? I'll stay watch, would prefer a little more defensible, but maybe we can find that after we eat and you rest."

She knew what to do for a patient in shock, even out here. Maybe she should give him a rundown... Then again, this place wasn't going to offer a lot of help for her.

Holiday looked down to the food. "Let's eat, find shelter, then take turns resting. These things are attracted by the smell of blood," she looked to her kills, "but they don't seem to like singing or this lake."

Just one night, she told herself. Anymore than that and she really would be a hindrance for him. With this stuff and being unharmed, as far as she could see, he probably had a good enough chance of winning.

"Sounds like a plan, I'm good for a bit so we find shelter, I'll take first watch." He had taken note of her observations too.

"Tomorrow I'll see if I can make it a better shelter, I'm not going to let you get killed out here Doc, not unless there's no other way." He gave her a look that told her if she ordered, he'd take her out.

Holiday wasn't ready to be taken out yet. She wasn't going to fight, but she wasn't going to roll over and die either. She wanted to prove her strength, at least.

Still, she frowns. He knows that he doesn't have to do that, but... "Thank you."

He only offered because he knew Cal didn't care much about her, and he wasn't sure if Jack would be able to get meds for them this early. If things got too close he'd spare her the pain.

He nodded. "Hey, you'd do the same for me in this position. Don't worry we get things set up and should be good for a while."

Well, she couldn't deny that she wouldn't do the same. Still, she knew how out of the way it was for the ones here who wanted to win.

She just nods. "Thanks. Anything you want me to do?" Holiday knows she can't do much, but she can do something.

"You can help pick a spot out when we're looking." He grinned. "Sorry, force of habit, wounded friends get to rest as much as they need to. Just wish there was an evac chopper on the way ya know."

"You're not the only one that would love a chopper." If that was the prize, she probably would have killed for one already.

"I'll do whatever I can."

"It's all I'm going to ask you to do Doc." He grinned at her. "You'll do alright we just need to stay focused."

Though he was trying to stay positive he wasn't sure how well they'd be able to keep that wound of hers from going bad.

Howard smells cooking meat. Maybe it's just that aromatic, or maybe it's because he's so attentive to those sorts of things. He stays where he is for a while, behind a bluff of what seems to be rock candy, before he finally decides to chance it and see if he can trade. He could use hunting advice, although there's always the high chance that the other person will just kill him and take his stuff. He squirrels some of it away before approaching.

It takes him a while to get there. His balance is returning - the swelling in his head must be going down - but the headache hasn't, and he still feels brutally nauseated. The vision hasn't returned to his right eye, so he keeps Wyatt's eyepatch on. His speech is slightly slurred, and he can only remember the words for things when he sings them.

He's been doing a lot of singing lately, quietly. Mostly pop songs. The weird critters have a better sense of hearing than humans, so Howard doesn't feel too concerned about giving away his location.

He sees Holiday further down the bank and stops. A woman, and if he remembers right from the last Arena, one who tried to help that zombie guy. He clutches the pink ninja star in his hand.

"Trade you," he calls.

Holiday saw the kid first and watched him slowly walk closer and closer towards her. There was a movement in his steps that suggested he was injured, too, but she couldn't pick out what the cause was from the distance. She blinks at his words.

Was he trying to get her guard down to kill her? It wasn't like that mattered as this was the exact type of people had to help out around here. She glances to her little corpses before looking back up to him and nodding. "I have no weapons and one arm. You won't have problems with me. There's enough here for both of us."

... She didn't plan on getting up, though. The blood loss was talking to her.

"So would you say you're unarmed?"

He probably weighs less than her, even without the arm, but he can see from here that she's got serious blood loss. He creeps a bit closer and crouches down across the doki-dokis from her, using one hand against the ground to keep balanced.

"I got weapons." His voice is mushy; his tongue feels like it's moving in slow motion. "Trade you one animal for one blade. Looks like it might come in...handy."

He laughs at his own wit, then gestures to her stump. "You cauterized that?"

Edited 2013-06-27 00:18 (UTC)

Well, Holiday didn't think his jokes were very funny. She just gave him a tired blink. It wasn't like she could say anything, though. Humor like that reminded her too much of Rex.

"Deal." Holiday hands over one of the cooked ones, considering the raw ones still needed some work. She may hand those over, too. It wasn't like she was going to run out while they were basically stalking her.

"No, I haven't. No fire," she answered, glancing to her arm. "Some of these things attacked me in the night and I accidentally threw one at a rainbow. Caught on fire and burned to death. As much as I thought about it, I didn't think it would be safe to try the same with myself. Might catch more on fire than I'd like."

However, Holiday had now realized why his walk was a bit off. "Concussion," she pointed to his head with her good arm. "How long ago was it?"

"So they are violent." Howard grabs the cooked little animal and examines it. He lays it out on the ground and starts to gut it with the ninja star. The potential to eat something that isn't sugary is overwhelming enough that he'll spend time eating around a stranger. Even nauseated and dizzy. "I got fire, too, but it'll cost you another living Beanie Baby."

After a moment he reached into the brightly-colored waterproof bag and pulls out a pink, bladed star for her. He tosses it near her feet harmlessly.

"Cornucopia. I think. I don't, um." He blinks and rubs at the eyepatch and tries and fails to make the word 'remember' appear. "It happened but I don't know what happened during it."

"They smell blood," she quietly answers before listening to him some more.

Holiday nods, biting her lip a bit as she watches him. Finally she grabs the two uncooked things and shoves them over. "How about two Satan Beanie Babies and a free medical exam. I'm a doctor if you want someone to look at your head." If he trusted her that much, that is. She understood if he didn't, but she'd rather help the guy.

"Oh goody. Guess that's why they were following me. They hate singing." He figures one bit of survival advice begets another. Tit for tat, no one owes each other, everything's even. He takes the two doki-dokis and stuffs them in the bag and gives her a skeptical look.

"...Promise you won't stab me if I get close? One of the last people who said they could medic..." He takes a deep breath and winces.

Singing? She would remember that.

Holiday looked down at the little pink star, before pushing aside with her foot. "Now I have nothing to stab you with. I won't hurt you, promise. I don't have anything to gain from it."

"You'd have one less opponent." He gets close slowly, skittishly, like a sparrow approaching a feeder. He has a cut on his head, but that's clearly not where the damage is.

"I bled from my nose and ear, I can't see out my right eye and I've been throwing up a lot since. Sherlock said it might be internal bleeding."

Holiday didn't say anything as she carefully looked at the wound in question. With those kinds of symptoms, he more than definitely had internal bleeding. He needed modern medicine, but that wasn't an option out here. She racked her brain for a moment.

Time for a survey.

"How long ago did you last throw up? Are you still nauseous? And how long after the Cornucopia did you lose sight in your eye?"

"We had a doctor. He died." Howard sits very still as Holiday examines him. It's a lot of questions, and it feels disorienting. Things that should be simple seem to take planning almost. Words need to be carefully held onto before he forgets them.

"A few hours. A little bit, but not so much now that I'm not as dizzy. And, um, I don't...one second I was running towards the Cornucopia and the next I was far away from it and bleeding and half-blind."

He's tense - it's clear every instinct is screaming at him to run away. If Holiday weren't in such bad shape herself, or so disarming (haw haw), he probably would.

His dizziness and nausea was getting better and the swelling on this wound had probably gone down recently considering it should be a lot bigger. Those were good things. The memory loss wasn't.

"The best thing for you now is rest. Not sleep, though. It's too dangerous to sleep in your condition right now. Maybe you can in another day or two, but your body needs to relax and calm down for now." It would help more with the nausea, but she couldn't guarantee much else. Honestly, the best thing she could prescribe is to be beaten by another tribute. Winning in this condition would do him no favors and it seemed as if the Capitol healed all wounds after their deaths.

... She glanced at her arm. Well, Holiday hoped they healed all wounds.

She backs away from him again, realizing that her closeness isn't helping him to relax at all. "What happened to the doctor?"

Great. No sleep. Howard's already exhausted; he never sleeps well the nights before the Arena, even though he knows he should. He relaxes just a fraction when she backs away, then pulls matches from his pocket. That's the best thing about this outfit: pockets.

"Same thing that happened to Wyatt. Just keeled over and died. They didn't even come for the body."

He holds the match out to her. "I know how to cauterize from a book. Don't know if you trust me with that."

"I'm not sure I know either, considering your condition." She wasn't scared that he would try to kill her as much as she was scared he'd catch the rest of her cloths on fire by accident.

She looked at her stump and all the blood. "You feel like you can handle something like this? Not to mention losing a match or two."

He nods very delicately. He doesn't want to make his headache worse. "I'm real good with my hands."

He holds a pack of matches out, then displays another three of them in his pocket like a hand of cards.

"I prayed for matches to burn Wyatt's body and they came. It's enough to make you believe in God. Or that the Sponsors are God."

"They would like that." She was glad he got some good stuff, though. He needed it. "I'm surprised they didn't handle the bodies like they always do, but I'm sure they have some reason for it."

She would go back there with that information in mind, but it was likely to be swarming for tributes looking out for fresh blood straight from the Capitol. There was nothing she could do to help the dead... or so she's going to keep reminding herself.

"If you really want to, I wouldn't mind the help." Holiday starts to undo the make shift tourniquet, making her mind reel at the sudden dizzying feeling. Finally, she gets most of the cloth and hand made bandages away to expose the wound. What was left of her skin was stained red with the blood, but the clean cut shows clearly enough what happened to her. Everything below the where the tourniquet was had turned purple from her straining to keep blood away from it, but undoing the thing had given it a new, if smaller, flow.

Howard doesn't wince at the wound. Awful as it is, he's seen worse. Instead, he gets to work.

"Maybe this is the finale," he says glumly. He starts a small fire. The sugar burns fast and hot, which is ideal for getting the edge of the ninja star hot. Howard keeps his hands in his sleeves to keep from burning himself.

"This is totally unsterile and is probably going to hurt," he says. "Hold onto something with your other hand."

Busying himself is the best way to keep from thinking of how awful this all is - or the fact that he's cauterizing someone's severed stump with a pink star in Candyland.

She hums at the finale comment. Doubtful, unless they were all going to die permanently here... Which is always possible, of course.

"Thank you," she tells him before stuffing some of the cleaner fabric into her mouth to keep from biting her tongue off or breaking her teeth while she holds her leg with her hand.

Unsterile or not, this was better than nothing. It was just getting through it. Holiday took a few deep breaths.

"It's nothing."

Howard makes it quick. He's not a sadistic person, just an angry one. Holiday's flesh makes a sizzling sound as he presses the blade to it once, twice, three times, for short increments of time, working around the edges to the center. For the second time in too short a period, he smells burning flesh and sugar mixed together.

When it's done he tosses the star to the side and scoots away from her, letting her have her space.

Holiday really does try to keep still for him and she does a decent enough job of that. She grunts when he begins, but allows the pain to just black out her mind for a moment to ignore the rest of the world.

She doesn't notice that he's even done at first. What she first notices actually are the tears pricking at her eyes and that she really needs to breathe a bit. Holiday spits out the cloth and just sits there for a moment, breathing deeply. She swallows hard to keep her meal down.

Rebecca stays that way for a moment or two, just trying to gather herself, before nodding to him in a sign that she's both okay and still thankful.

"You okay?" Burning is one of the few pains he hasn't been excessively subjected to. He hates the smell of it, but that's because he ran a fire evacuation once, and the smoke makes him think of children choking to death.

And he rummages through his bag again and holds out a can with a plastic top. It's got water in it. "Only a sip, okay? More than that and I'm stealing all your dead animals."

She tries nodding again right before the can comes into her vision... and she gives a little chuckle. Without questioning the action, Holiday goes ahead and takes as small a sip as she could manage from it. It almost physically pained her to take so little, but she wouldn't have taken any more from him anyway.

Holiday hands it back over. "You've been good to me. Thank you."

He takes the water back and pops the top back on. "Don't remind me or I'll change my mind."

He goes and sits back over by his half-butchered doki-doki. "What's your name?"

She nods again and takes a few more deep breaths. She was starting to see colors and hues again that had been washed out from the pain. Getting better.

"Rebecca Holiday. District 8."

"Howard Bassem. District One. You know, the district full of psycho serial killers." He pulls the guts from the doki. "Promise I'm not, though."

Holiday smiles again. Conversation is a wonderful distraction out here. "The only history I know about the districts are from the reruns of earlier arenas. From what I saw, your district wasn't the only one."

Two and Four did pretty insane things, too.

"Still do insane shit. There's like, zero team spirit." He raises an eyebrow. "I think the same guy's killed us."

"I doubt there was a lot of team spirit to start with, as per the rules of the games." One victor. Why would anyone help out anyone unless they were crazy like her?

"Yeah, but District One's bad even for that. I've been sleeping in a hall closet so people don't leave creepy threats outside my door while I'm sleeping." Not that that helped much with Aunamee.

Holiday believed that Aunamee was beyond help anyway, but she raised her brows with that.

"I didn't think the tributes would be that different from each other, no matter what District we're in. Most of us come from the same background anyway."

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Open to Arena 1

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someone had to do it

omg why am i laughing

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