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Who| Aunamee and R.
What| A reunion.
Where| The jungle (far away from buildings)
When| Evening after Cornucopia.
Warnings/Notes| Some self harm. Will be added as necessary.
In the middle of the night, Aunamee makes shelter by digging a hole in the soft ground of the jungle and crawling inside. He covers himself with giant leaves, guaranteeing that his sleeping nest remains pitch black. Claustrophobic. When he blinks, dirt catches in his eyelashes.
He shudders.
Something inside his body is cold and black like the walls around him, and he's not sure what it is.
He shudders again.
This is what it feels like to be an animal, his mind offers, but he silences it by making his hands into tight fists, digging nails into his stupid, bleeding palms.
What| A reunion.
Where| The jungle (far away from buildings)
When| Evening after Cornucopia.
Warnings/Notes| Some self harm. Will be added as necessary.
In the middle of the night, Aunamee makes shelter by digging a hole in the soft ground of the jungle and crawling inside. He covers himself with giant leaves, guaranteeing that his sleeping nest remains pitch black. Claustrophobic. When he blinks, dirt catches in his eyelashes.
He shudders.
Something inside his body is cold and black like the walls around him, and he's not sure what it is.
He shudders again.
This is what it feels like to be an animal, his mind offers, but he silences it by making his hands into tight fists, digging nails into his stupid, bleeding palms.
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His voice is an echo, dropping off into silence before the final letter. Howar. The name says it all. R had been cautioned, warned against Aunamee.
Just as he expected.
"He's a good boy," he says, his voice recovering its usual volume, his fingers dancing along the handle of his knife. "Just as you're a good boy." Just as the dead are good, polite and motionless with their arms all folded up, obedient, giving. "I wanted to help him, you know. Him and Mr. Earp. But they don't understand."
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"How...help?" R has to know. He's been dead for God knows how long, but unless things changed drastically since he kicked the bucket, he's (fairly) sure "help" doesn't involve torturing someone to death.
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In the distance, he hears a crunch. Crackle. It could be the wind, but who knows?
(Mercy is lying down in the middle of the grass -- no hole, no leaves, no nothing -- and waiting for the monsters that crunch and crackle to take you. Aunamee can't think of anything more boring. More disgraceful.)
"Many people in this arena," he continues, "are doomed to suffer slow deaths over the course of days. Weeks. My touch is kinder."
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Maybe that's why Perry put himself in a situation where he knew he'd get eaten. For all he knows, it was worse somehow to live day to day compared to those brief, agony filled seconds as R ripped into him.
Fresh guilt wells up.
"But...not...their choice," R tries to figure out what's where. He wants to say it's different with Perry. "Wyatt...said..." What'd he say? R has to fight to concentrate between the wet dirt - really, it's almost mud at this point - sometimes dribbling into his face whenever Aunamee shifts his feet. "T...torture..?"
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"I told you that he doesn't understand," he says, tension rolling up in his throat. In the pitch blackness of the night, Aunamee allows his lips to slip into a snarl. "Do you listen to me, R?"
'Temper, temper,' his mother had told him when he was a child, her voice growing softer (weaker) as the years went on.
"Do you think I'm a liar?"
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"I...don't...know," R admits reluctantly, his groan quiet from where he's still stranded in Aunamee's pit. Where is this conversation going? Will he get an explanation that could satisfy the fear in Howard, the way Wyatt turned almost into another man entirely when the subject came up? "Want...truth. To...digest."
He has a feeling that's not exactly the word choice he was going for but whatever, it'll have to do for now.
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And then the anger is complete, it's here, it belongs and his toes curl up as he imagines stomping down on the boy's face, again and again, first with all of his strength, then softer so that R's brain could register every blow, every last blow, every fucking --
He steps backward, allowing his shoe to graze R's hand one last time as it went. Like a goodbye.
"I had been so happy to see you," he says, his voice somewhere between a hiss and a whisper.
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"Wanted...friends. You," R's suddenly on the defensive. Was it too much to hope to be friends? Has he been dead too long to understand the intricacies between the Living? "But...they're...friends...too."
His hands come up to claw again at the fresh dirt, ground into mud by Aunamee's boots. If R has enough time, he might even figure out a way to heave his corpse out of there.
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But he doesn't. Aunamee's anger is petulant like a child's. It pulls him backwards, step by step, until the boy's groans are nearly indistinguishable from the wind. It is an act that has nothing to do with manipulation, nothing to do with strategy. It is pettiness, plain and simple. It is the ugly structure beneath the mask.
Digest thoughts, he thinks again and again, like a broken record. Digest thoughts like you digested me.
He does not even say goodbye.