thearena | (no subject)

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He slammed into the ground with a roar, finally down the side of the cliff. He didn't pause, didn't wait - launching himself at Venus with a bodily fury, his broken arm ignore for the better one gripped around the hit of his blade, flashing in a deadly arc toward her.

Venus wastes time trying to remove the shank from Shepard's head. She doesn't realize that's what it amounts to until Maximus is almost on top of her, until she doesn't have that extra milisecond to find her katana or really yank enough to get the split arrow out of Shepard's skull. She drops back, avoiding the brunt of Maximus' attack. The blade rips through the air with an almost feminine swish, a noise too demure for the fact that it cuts off a braid and takes one of Venus' ears with it.

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.

But his blade isn't there to block - for instead of moving to strike again it streaks upward to protect his eyes. He staggers back with the force of her tackle but stays upright, his solid legs taking firm stance on the ground. The elbow of his broken arm lashes out, slamming towards her gut, even though he knows the impact will shoot screaming pain through his arm. It isn't important.

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.

Maximus' fist drives the air from her lungs like an exodus. Venus' body doubles like cloth folding over a point, and she's thrown back several yards across the sand. Something sticky - syrup, she thinks, from the candy side of this landscape - runs down her leg and pools at the fold of fabric at her knee. It's only after a second she realizes that it's her own blood, and that she's found the katana that went missing by landing on it with her hip.

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?"

He remembered her. It flashed through his mind in a moment, and he remembered her back in the training centre.

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.

"Come at me, boy-" she doesn't even really manage to finish her sentence before she has to throw herself to the side, catching herself on her shoulder and whipping her foot out to try and catch his ankle.

She catches it, and he stumbles, but catches his balance by slamming his foot down hard, his hand whipping out to grab her wherever is convenient.

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.

He doesn't hit her shoulder. She's too fast for that.

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.

His grip tight on her arm the blade flashed down again, sinking deep into her shoulder as he pulled, hard, on her arm. With a vicious roar and the gut-wrenching sound of flesh tearing, bone scraping on bone, her flesh gave way and suddenly came free - her torn and bloody arm suddenly unshackled from her shoulder as he waved it limply above her.

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?"

Edited 2013-10-17 23:43 (UTC)

Venus is used to coming apart. She's used to being ripped open like pulled pork, molecule by molecule, impulse by impulse, thought by thought. Constancy has never been a part of her method. Teleportation and mental illness have combined to make her erratic, temporary, spread across too many places and too many emotions. Some people are polar stars and Venus is a flare shot up from a gun, brilliant and momentary.

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.