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Who| Maximus and OPEN
What| Wyatt is injured, Maximus decides he's done with this Arena, he meets up with Shepard, they agree to kill some people, and... well. Clusterfuck happens.
Where| Desert to Candy then back to Desert Again
When| Final Week
Warnings/Notes| Death, Gore, Violence, Beheading, Bromance and Bad-Assery
[ooc: planned out threads will get individual sub-headers, but feel free to throw your characters in here if you want to be taken out by Max / Shepard / Both.]
He was starting to see things.
Not horrible things, not even disconcerting things. Simply chilling things. His son, running into the sand, out of the corner of his eye. His wife, standing at the top of the Dune. He knew they weren't real. No one could see the dead, not even here, but it didn't keep the chill from his spine. He didn't mention them to Wyatt, there was no point.
He kept his ghosts to himself.
He didn't know where R was. They'd gotten separated when the worms crashed through the world, and Maximus hadn't seen him again. He wasn't exactly torn up about it, though he slept lighter, now. Waiting. He and Wyatt took shifts sleeping - the rhythms off as the nights and days lengthened and twisted the world around again.
It was dusk when he woke. An endless dusk. And he was alone.
What| Wyatt is injured, Maximus decides he's done with this Arena, he meets up with Shepard, they agree to kill some people, and... well. Clusterfuck happens.
Where| Desert to Candy then back to Desert Again
When| Final Week
Warnings/Notes| Death, Gore, Violence, Beheading, Bromance and Bad-Assery
[ooc: planned out threads will get individual sub-headers, but feel free to throw your characters in here if you want to be taken out by Max / Shepard / Both.]
He was starting to see things.
Not horrible things, not even disconcerting things. Simply chilling things. His son, running into the sand, out of the corner of his eye. His wife, standing at the top of the Dune. He knew they weren't real. No one could see the dead, not even here, but it didn't keep the chill from his spine. He didn't mention them to Wyatt, there was no point.
He kept his ghosts to himself.
He didn't know where R was. They'd gotten separated when the worms crashed through the world, and Maximus hadn't seen him again. He wasn't exactly torn up about it, though he slept lighter, now. Waiting. He and Wyatt took shifts sleeping - the rhythms off as the nights and days lengthened and twisted the world around again.
It was dusk when he woke. An endless dusk. And he was alone.
Re: for Shepard, Venus, Wyatt :: It's the Final Countdown
She dreams of her parents, of her team. She dreams of an audience pelting her with rocks. She dreams of Enjolras' dead face staring up at her, mouthing 'I thought you were better than that'. And eventually she doesn't dream at all, because she sees these things when she's awake.
She knows she's losing her mind. She knows it's showing on her face, that the charcoal she's been using like linebacker paint under her eyes is smudged and smeared on one side, is mixed with blood on the other side. The cut on the side of her face is angry. Ugly. Her cheekbones jut, made stark by the water loss. Her Catwoman hood is torn to ribbons, and the sleeves that she cut off expose not just muscle but bruises. Her bare feet are chapped and split, making it painful to walk. She still swaggers, but now it takes effort not to wince.
This isn't the way she wanted to go, and so, she refuses. She goes looking for trouble.
The doki-dokis have gone silent. Instead there's only the supernatural hum of the desert, the sound of cicadas and the occasional howl of the coyote mutts. She doesn't bother to keep her katana in her belt, instead carrying it. She shades her eyes and sees two figures in the distance, and while she doesn't like those odds, she also didn't come here to win.
"Hey! You!"
She came here to lose beautifully.
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Shepard's not in perfect shape herself; she's bruised and her velvet faux-armor is torn in more than one place, reduced to an unrecognizable, shapeless garment, grey bandages soaked brown-red and stiff.
But she wasn't dead yet, and she could count; it was just they last few in this, now. Herself, Maximus, his dying friend back there, and this bitch. Who was going to die.
"Was wondering when you'd show up," which was the truth. She hadn't known who else was left, but whoever it was, this was the only place they could have come, the only real end this could have come to. Her knives were in her hands.
"You're late."
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"Fashionably," Venus calls, and her lips curl into a smile. She's kept them red by biting them, and between that and the rest of her face it gives her the appearance of a faded picture of a model in a subway, covered in vandalism and graffiti. Her hand closes over the shiv and she runs at Shepard, eyes to the crack in the earth behind her, and the ghost of a plan forms. She can separate Max and Shepard with momentum.
And, well, if she lands badly, at least a leap off a cliff is dramatic. She bolts forward, using her higher ground to propel her faster and harder, and as she pulls her broken arrow from her belt and as her bare feet pummel the ground, she braces for impact.
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Shepard catches the charge well, braced hands, even weight, and it's as good as it could be expected, for the incline and angle— but the footing is bad. It's dust and loost rock and she slides, steps back for a better place and finds nothing but air.
"Shi—" and over they go, tumbling as much as falling, and the landing is with Shepard under her, all sharp stone and loose gravel. She won't let get for death or hell on earth, and the grapple pulls them over and up, rolling, sliding, down the loose, steep cliff-face until they hit another drop, and the weightlessness is momentary and gasping. Shepard lashes out with one foot, yelling defiance and rage, and catches stone rather than flesh, spinning them wildly.
CRACK!
It's sand, and it's soft enough, but not at that velocity. The surface might even be called even by ordinary standards, but she hit it badly. And with Venus' momentum throwing off Shepard's own, it's at least two ribs, broken, bent sharply inward. She inhales to scream and can't find the breath, struggles for several moments with spotted vision and the blind breathless panic that comes with choking. She's not lying on the ground, the sand is stars and cold vacuum and she's falling, twisting, breathing desperately after air that's thinner and colder every moment and she is going to die. She tastes blood and the deep stretched-skin blue of the desert sky, and knows that it's not the same. It's not real, this isn't there.
Move.
Move, damn you!
Don't just lie there and contemplate your collapsing lung, get up! Do you want to die here?! Breathing through the agony, she rolled over, struggled for purchase and found her knees. This was bad. This was very bad. Fucking Maximus, where was he when she needed him?
let me know if you want anything changed!
Her hands feel clunky and unresponsive, tingling with the shock, but when she gets to her knees she manages to fold her fingers into a fist and slam them into Shepard's nose. Her other hand searches wildly for her shiv, for the sword that got lost somewhere in the sand. When she can't find that, she grabs a rock.
She lurches forward on her knees, chest to chest with Shepard, and pushes herself up again. One hand holds the rock high.
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She wasn't sure where she'd heard that, the original inspiration lost somewhere among the dead, as likely in Nuclear Fire as Krogan fields. But this wasn't the fate of the galaxy, no necessary sacrifice, this was life and death and she'd practiced with Thane often enough to know what even an unamplified biotic could do.
Rage, she'd once been told, Is a hell of an anesthetic.
It was blind, unfocused, and weak, but the raw biotic burst turned what would have been a futile resistance into enough force to win her a few seconds. But only that; it left her with black-flecked vision and a bar of pain that snapped and spread. She imagined maybe that was what it felt like to be a husk, wondered briefly if it was this bad for Alenko.
God, that was a stupid decision. Sure, she'd gotten the bitch off her, but now it was all she could do to stay conscious, to keep breathing. Shepard tasted copper, moved helplessly and slow into unconciousness, like an animal scrabbling at a smooth slope, trying to win free, and failing. A few moments more of life, but helpless moments, dearly won, and wasted.
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She drops her shoulder, scooting her elbow out and slamming all her weight down on Shepard's throat. Her hand, smeared and dripping with saliva and blood now, reaches out and searches for the rock again - and finds the shank.
Better. She raises is high and brings it down as if she were staking a claim on Shepard's forehead, as if she were taking rights to the bone that yields in a crack under the point and the spasm that moves through Shepard's whole body. Blood spurts up; an eye bulges; Venus' motion is stopped only when her hand rebounds off the plane of Shepard's broken head.
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She hurls herself at his hips, looking for the part where his body bends to make him buckle. Her legs are strong, they propel her. Unarmed, she swings one hand up to try and rake his eyes out, the other grasping for his wrist to block the sword from another blow.
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Because somehow, he knows.
He knows that Venus is the last. That this is the end. That if he doesn't defeat her, she goes on to kill Wyatt and take the crown.
And that, he will never allow to happen.
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She swings it in a wide upwards arc, finding feet that can't hold her for long. She doesn't want to win this, and she knows she can't. She doesn't, however, want to be a little girl taken out in one blow.
"Come on, handsome." Her breath is hoarse like matted wire and hair. She runs fingertips over the edge of the blade, soft enough to not break skin, and then holds it as if it's a baseball bat. "Don't you want to put on a show?"
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She was not going to stop until he was dead. Or she was.
He flips his blade around in his hand to give himself a better grip, eyes steel and locked on hers.
"If you want a show," He growled, dark and low. More for the Capitol than for her, though at this moment it didn't matter. "I will give you one."
He launched himself forward, shoulder first, his blade swinging in a tight, deadly arc.
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He wants to laugh, her calling him boy, while twice her age, but he'd too preoccupied - stabbing out with the machete to try to pin her in the shoulder.
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Instead his blade plunges thorough the side of her breast, down through her back, and in the motion of her dodge the edge slices its way out of her, leaving a cleave two inches deep under her arm. It's a fatal wound. She's not stupid. It spurts blood like a fucking hose. She rolls flat on her stomach, trying to wrench her wrist from his hand, using her weight to try and get him down in the sand.
Because she can't stand, she realizes as she grabs for his face. But that doesn't mean she can't blind him.
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A streak of blood had hit his face, and his eyes, and with a growl he spit it out.
"Is this what you wanted?" He roars, half to her and half to the watching crowd, somewhere far away, as he flings her arm away. "Are you not entertained?"
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Now she comes apart again as blood, bereft of any old duty, gushes forth from her shoulder. It marches from her wound into the sand, making mud the color of pomegranates. Her head falls back, her face staring upwards as the sky blurs into a white mess.
It's beautiful. Tears streak her face like the track marks of a cheetah, like the adornments of Egyptian royalty. This is always how she wanted to die - glorious, dramatic. Memorable. People will talk about this, and she'll be forgotten in the mythos of the girl who lost her arm, a supporting actress in Max's story. She's happy with that.
Whenever she closes her eyes, she pictures places, but she can't see herself. She can never tell if her arms are lifted or lowered, if her hands are limp or in fists, without looking. 'Lack of object constancy', the Professor said. But she's always pictured places, and sometimes when she opens her eyes she's there. So she pictures Heaven, and she pictures Hell.
She wakes up in the Capitol.