thecapitol | I've wept for those who suffer long...

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I've wept for those who suffer long...

WHO| Wyatt and OTA
WHAT| Somebody needs a time-out.
WHERE| The Speakeasy
WHEN| A while after cleaning Aunamee's clock.
WARNINGS/NOTES| On top of the arena guilt he'd already been dragging around, he's now found out one of his friends is dead-dead, and tried to for realz kill man with his bare hands. Just... keep that in mind.

He'd tried to kill a man. Had wanted to.

He hadn't been aware of it at the time, the decision too quick, too hazy in the fog of red, but now, in the clarity of the aftermath, as the bitter anger burned away and left him once again to his own thoughts, that was the truth of it.

Had the peacekeepers not been there... he would have beat that man to death. Easily.

Far too easily.

But then... what was one more charge on his ever growing list of sins?

He sat with his back to the room, his left hand wrapped around a half-empty tumblr, the other hand covered in a blood-spotted napkin. He wasn't sure he even recognized the face anymore, that tired, worn thing, that stared back at him from the mirror across the bartop.

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With a new District 4 teammate, R eventually realized his Escort was too busy to keep tabs on him like usual, even at the slow rate he shuffled around.

R makes his getaway while he still can.

He goes back to the Speakeasy. It’s where he first met Howard, after all. R might be considered the resident weirdo by the other zombies back home, but he’s still one of them: he returns to what’s familiar. There’s good memories of this place and they’re his, actually his, not a question mark from another life he’ll never be sure about. It’s meeting one of his few friends and teething on steaks and music and even the awkwardness of watching his new buddy tear a fangirl a new one, all because Howard thought he was stepping up to the plate for a zombie. R thinks he likes this place.

R’s feet catch on the threshold as he shoulders his way into the Speakeasy, the zombie lurching forward a few feet before he stops and sniffs. Alcohol, food, smoke; all interlaced with different flavors of Living. Fairly fresh blood dotted in there with red threads. His brain isn’t riddled with holes from the piranhas anymore, his frontal lobe flaring at the scent. His mouth works behind the muzzle before R remembers oh, yeah, he’s here to look for friends. It’s called priorities. He’s trying it on for size.

It doesn’t take R long to find Howard sitting with Wyatt. The two humans are at the counter near the back, Wyatt nursing a tumbler that reeks almost as much as the bloody napkin in his fist. Howard looks as skinny as he did back on the ship, sharper angles and sunken skin that his padded clothes can’t always hide. Slowly peering from first one human to the other, head bobbing lazily, R’s startled to realize he almost looks more Alive than either one right now. Jesus.

“Is…this seat…taken?”

Edited (added a few things) 2013-05-10 17:54 (UTC)

Wyatt's mouth opened, another denial on his lips... but the new voice chimed in and the words died as he twisted on the stool to find R.

He'd never even known had happened to the dead boy. He'd watched the flyin' machines take Howard and Julie, but R had been nowhere to be found. Just the strange black blood and dragging steps through the dirt to tell him that he'd tried to leave... but had seemingly disappeared until the cannon had announced his fate.

"R." As with Howard, the boy's appearance had a red-hot knife of guilt slipping between his ribs. He may not have made R any promises, but he still felt like he'd let him down.

"R. No longer a pirate." Howard reaches a foot over and taps the top of the stool next to him, indicating he should take a seat. His shoes are a little too big for him - his stylists still haven't gotten his sizing right, and apparently shoes that fit him are hard to find in adult fashions even in Panem.

He folds his arms as if to tell Wyatt that he's not going anywhere, at least not for the time being. In one hand he's slipped his lucky rabbit's foot, battered and orange, out of his pocket. It hangs in his hands, the gold ball bearings of the key chain pressing slightly into his fingertips.

There's still a spackle of blood on it. They must have recovered it from the arena without cleaning it.

"Putting money on R not winning one of these anytime soon, either. No offense, man." He holds a hand to the side of his mouth and fake-whispers, "Wyatt's sulking."

Nope, R's no longer a pirate. Good thing he didn't quit his day job of regular zombie.

At least shambling's easier with two feet. R grunts at Howard, obediently going over to sit down next to him without having to be asked twice. He's easy like that. There's a little trouble with R navigating the stool with it being higher than the normal chair. Eventually he gets it down, the zombie leaning forward with his arms on the bar like that's the only thing keeping him up, his head shifting toward both Howard and Wyatt.

"Don't...care...about win...winning," R would shrug if he wasn't using the bar to prop himself up. At the fake-whisper, R starts the dangerous maneuver of trying to look around Howard at Wyatt, the stool wobbling. "How...are you...holding...up?"

It's a stupid question, even for a corpse, but the sad thing is R thinks Wyatt actually looked better in the middle of the Arena than he does right now in a bar with plenty of food. Suddenly he looks older, sharp lines in his face, the skin under his eyes sagging. Even the mustache looks like it's seen better days.

Wyatt's glass came down hard on the bartop, glass and wood smacking together, liquor sloshing, ice jumping.

"I just want ya all to be safe." He turned on his stool, stared at the both of them, blue eyes shifting between them, meeting one gaze, then the other. "That's what I care about. I can't sit back and watch them hurt the people I care about. I won't. I already-...."

He faltered, realizing just as the words were crossing his lips what he was about to say and was suddenly unable to get them out. He took a breath, his jaw stiff, lips thin and white as he pressed them together.

"...I just can't."

Edited (That was a terrible tag. D: Added some stuff, hopefully better now.) 2013-05-12 21:57 (UTC)

"I'm okay," Howard says, letting the question and answer roll over his like water over a stone. He doesn't want to talk about how he still has nightmares, how panic strikes him like an assault on his senses when he isn't watching out for it. He knows it'll just make the booze move down Wyatt's throat quicker. "And that makes two of us, R."

He holds a hand out for a high five.

He looks at Wyatt, catching the pause, knowing instinctively what the words were going to be because what other sentence starts like that, starts like that here?

"Newsflash, Wy. Death's cheap here. And safety isn't a thing that happens no more." He holds the rabbit foot out, moves it over to Wyatt's hand to silently give it.

The zombie stares back at Howard's hand, a good few seconds wandering by before he realizes he's supposed to do something. What was it again? R knows this one. Used to know this one. Ball's in his court. After a moment, R decides he better just copy Howard: his hand wobbles up, he misjudges his distance badly and they exchange the weakest high-five in history, R's hand barely glancing off Howard's.

With a relief he goes back to propping himself against the bar counter. Seriously, Howard needs to warn him before he springs stuff like that on him. R isn't in the mood for feeling like he's getting the Humanity Pop Quiz; not today.

"Howard's...right, Wyatt," R says. Considering how Wyatt slammed his tumbler down on the bar, R's going to go out on a limb and guess things are not okay in Wyattville. "We're all...here. You couldn't...predict. Not...your fault. What's important...is the...now."

R doesn't have it in him to lie to Wyatt, not with how he's looking at them with his jaw tensed like he's trying to keep himself in check, his blue eyes wide and too bright. He can't moan that they can stop the Capitol. R's only a zombie, Howard's a starving little kid, and Wyatt. R's not sure how to help Wyatt, aside from doing what every zombie does and exist, be there, be predictable.

He looked down at rabbit's foot, the strange orange fur brushing against his knuckles as Howard held it out. He didn't understand when folks had decided that carrying around the severed feet of rodents was lucky, but he understood the significance of it to Howard.

It had been there, in the arena. Like a worry stone the boy had turned to during the worst of times. Howard's token... as important to him as the metal star pin was to Wyatt.

Something shifted inside his chest. A pain, not unlike the one he'd felt while talking to the escort, stabbing somewhere near his heart, and the words rumbled up, as rough as gravel.

"Not everyone." His fingers twitched, unwinding from the glass and reaching toward the little furry bundle. He touched it only lightly, just the tips of his fingers feathering over it, as if might come alive and bite him.

As if Howard might change his mind and snatch it back.

He pulled back before either could happen, his hand trapped between his glass and the rabbit's foot.

"Not everyone came back."

Not Neeshka.

And, he was beginning to fear, not all of himself either.

Howard considers going for the bro-fist with R, but after that paltry high-five he decides better of it. R's hand is like a limp fish flopping against Howard's fingertips. He almost gives R a look, like 'really?', but decides better of it. He doesn't want to make R feel more self-conscious than the poor zombie already is.

His eyes shutter a bit as he watches Wyatt reach for the rabbit's foot and then pull back. It feels like a rejection. He knows it shouldn't, but it stings. Your offerings aren't good enough. He lets the rabbit's food continue to hang there. You trying to help never matters.

"Not everyone deserved to." He knows Wyatt and Draco were allies in the Arena before this one; he also knows Draco's deader than disco, thanks to Moody Blues slitting his jugular with a knife. If that's what Wyatt's kicking himself about, Howard can't sympathize; once, he felt bad for killing Draco, but after what Draco did to Eponine Howard feels nothing but vindication.

R starts to say that's a little harsh when he remembers the way that man with the spear was looking at his friends. Suddenly he thinks maybe Howard's onto something.

It's iffy, sinking into that spiral. R's sat there before in a cloud of it, thinking maybe it wouldn't be so bad to give it up and stop thinking, shuffle around all the time like a lot of the other zombies instead of trying to grab onto whatever he has left. It's not fun. Recognizing that funk, R tries to clumsily change the subject - it's ham-handed, so obvious you could see it coming in the dark from a mile away.

"Let's...do something...else. It's..." It's what? R trails off, not having the words to describe what he really thinks, unsure if he can relate to these two Living. For all he knows, he's only aping that he gets it. "...outside? Clear...er. Not...this."

As soon as he finishes moaning, R's starting to think this was a bad idea. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Wyatt’s not in a good way and suggesting they get some fresh air won’t make that magically disappear.

Edited 2013-05-15 09:00 (UTC)

Wyatt shifted on his stool at Howard's statement, head pulling back as if the boy had just hauled off and slapped him one.

Open hand, all palm.

His eyebrows veed, expression hardening.

"She was my friend. I'm real sorry if ya'll didn't along, but she saved my life and I ain't gonna sit here and listen to ill speak of her." He glanced over at R, jaw working. "I won't stop ya, but I would ask ya to take that outside."

Howard bites his lip. It's weird, after so many weeks avoiding doing that because the damage to his face made such tics painful and harmful. He looks over at R, thinking that while he agrees with R's suggestion for fresh air, he doesn't think Wyatt will.

He leans in, thoroughly accustomed to R's zombie scent, and whispers "I don't think we should leave him alone like this. I think he needs company." He hopes R understands, because R makes good company. He mostly sits there, and he listens, and he doesn't talk over people or waste time on idle chitchat. Can't afford to, Howard guesses.

Howard's about to elaborate to R how he knows not to try to move a drunk when Wyatt's head jerks back, and Howard startles and practically falls into R's lap. That's all it takes to set him off into high-alert, one sudden movement, and his breath is coming in and out as if he just sprinted the two-hundred meters. He picks himself up off R and makes a waving, tumbling motion with his hand as he calms himself down.

"Wait, she? I thought you meant Draco." Howard's voice gets dull and gritty with the awful realization that he may have tripped a landmine he didn't know existed.

R isn't prepared to get a scrawny black kid trying to use him as a chair; he freezes and goes Dead-still in surprise as Howard flinches into him.

He'd agree, only it sounds like they're not on the same level here, R lost all over again trying to follow along when the conversation twists and the tension in the air snaps into something else, crystallizes with edges so sharp that R imagines he could touch it. He's only a zombie and even he can tell that Howard's somehow said the wrong thing from the way Wyatt's face closes off.

Maybe outside's a bad idea. R doesn't feel right shuffling off to go lose himself in his head while Wyatt and Howard are trying to work all this out. Second time's the charm?

"Stay." Would it help if Wyatt talked about it? R's not on expert on the talking it out thing, but Julie seemed to like it. "Who...was she?"

Upset or no, Wyatt still reached out when Howard started, not realizing until the boy waved him off, until his hand was hovering just off his shoulder, useless, that he had been the cause. That Howard had been frightened by him. Had thought he....

The hand dropped away and returned to the bar, pointedly curling around his glass.

"Neeshka." He knocked back what was left of his drink, staring at his reflection in the mirror, unable to look at the two boys at his side. "Her name was Neeshka."

Howard's not much of a fan of sitting around talking about the dead; there's a reason he hasn't brought up Orc to anyone much. But he also recognizes that what helps him doesn't necessarily help Wyatt, and so he concedes that maybe R has a point here. After all, Howard doesn't like to drink away his pain, and that strategy seems to be a favorite of Wyatt's.

He sits on his stool and wraps his arms a bit around himself, although he keeps casting low glances at Wyatt as if worried that there may be sudden movements. His heart's still battering away inside his chest.

Then he reaches over and, with his fingertips only, nudges the ugly rabbit foot keychain in Wyatt's direction.

"We're listening." It's paltry, but he really doesn't know what else to say.

The name's familiar to R. He knows he met a Neeshka once, that she had a tail that wouldn't stay still and would drive any zombie into a hunting frenzy. Other than that, he doesn't know much about her. With Wyatt looking the way he does, R guesses they were close.

R continues to sit like the dead meat he is, rigid on the stool and slumped over, colorless eyes on the Living. There's no quiet judgement in his face - there's not much of anything, really - but he's ready to listen. It's the least he can do.

His eyes pored into his glass, as if carefully memorizing the size and shape of the ice cubes, but as Howard's rabbit's foot inched closer, gaudy fur rubbing against his fingertips, the words came.

He couldn't look at them, but worrying the chain of Howard's token like rosary beads, he could tell them.

Tell them about his second arena - his first real arena - and how they had met on the beach and the deal they had struck. How after she'd come to him with her jokes and her cleverness. How she'd constantly gotten herself in trouble, and him in turn... and how she'd never failed to make him laugh.

He told them about the forest. How she'd saved him from the attack he'd never seen coming. About how they'd worked together, keeping each other strong through the bloody sickness. About how, when the end came, she had kept him company while he died.

"...I never got to say goodbye," he finished quietly, the strange orange rabbit's foot having migrated into his fist.

Just like Dora. Just like Bat. Just like his brothers.

Howard doesn't watch Wyatt. He watches the keychain in Wyatt's hand instead, and he listens. Wyatt's voice is like the rough rocks under a new stream, edges breaking through the surface, grit clogging up the water. At one point, he looks to R, trying to figure out if R's getting bored - but as usual, it's pretty impossible to see boredom in that petrified face. R's polite enough, and Howard remembers why he originally liked him so much; he's a good listener, a good secret-keeper, and reliably predictable as death itself.

He looks back at the counter, letting his eyes trace their way over the knots in the wood surface, getting trapped in the eddies.

"I never got to say goodbye to my parents, either," Howard says quietly, and then, as if out of some compulsion to act like that doesn't bother him, he shrugs. Twice. He takes a drink of his ginger ale and looks back to R, thinking that of all of them, R may have the most reason to drink - but R at least got Julie back.

Neeshka, now why does that sound familiar? It takes R a long moment of struggling and trying to massage his memory into something half-way useful before he remembers he does know that name. The tiefling. The girl with the horns and tail. She hadn't been too bad, for someone Living. Listening to Wyatt's quiet, broken twang, R realizes that to him, Neeshka was more than "not too bad".

R strains to think of anything to add to the conversation that won't be more useless corpse advice. The problem is he doesn't remember sharp loss, doesn't remember if he ever said his goodbyes or what it feels like to wake up and have your family and everyone you care about gone the next day. The reactions from Wyatt and Howard are different, too; Wyatt withdrawn and pulling into himself, Howard quiet but jittery, more so than normal.

"Maybe...they, she...could return?" R tries to remain positive. He doesn't get how the Capitol does what it does. Maybe it doesn't matter the little nitty-gritty details how they kidnap who from where or revive people from the dead without having them zombie-out. "Doesn't...have to be...goodbyes?"

Wyatt's head bobbed, but it was more a reflex than anything. R's suggestion was possible, he supposed, but somehow it did nothing to stave off the hollow emptiness in his chest.

"Ya'll are the only family I've got left." He turned, blue eyes moving over Howard, then shifting over to R. "Iffen somethin' happens-" his bloodied hand twitched, "-I want ya both to know I think of ya as kin."

"Rob's got a point. People come back here. Ain't nothing permanent."

The word 'family' makes Howard's skin crawl. It's heavy and meaty and spoiled with disease. 'Family' means that crushing feeling in his chest when he realized his parents wouldn't come back. It means the blood ties no one holds themselves to. It's permanently charred in Howard's heart, a dark, ugly word that may have been beautiful once, but has spent the last two years disfigured.

But 'kin' isn't a word he grew up with. It's not a word for the parents that left him, the cousins that bullied him growing up. It's a Wyatt word, something from a time long past, something Howard never encountered except here, in the Arena and Panem.

So he doesn't know what to say. He takes another drink of his ginger ale until it's all gone, carbonation like a wire brush in the back of his throat, and twitches one side of his mouth as if to say something - and stops. He wonders what R thinks about it.

He wonders what he should think about it.

Well, there's was that and the fact that outside of the Arena, R hasn't seen any new Dead. People seem to come back fresh and whole instead of rotting shells with maybe someone still trapped inside after they die. It's a better deal than back home.

It's not...normal. If R was more self-aware, he'd even work up to thinking it feels unfair, too.

"Thank...you, Wyatt," R rattles it out, not sure how he feels to be adopted but he thinks he's touched. It's a strange sensation to suddenly be part of a family, no ifs ands or buts; the other zombies back home had never felt like "family", not even M who was the closest thing to a best friend R ever had. You didn't cry or feel much of anything at all when a corpse died or wandered off, even if you might've been related or married to each other before the apocalypse stomped all over everything. "Means…a lot….from you.”

He glances over at Howard, as if he needs to gauge what the other human’s thinking, like Howard’s a measuring stick for how to react.

They seemed hesitate, uncertain the way they glanced at each other - maybe they didn't care for the idea of being saddled with an ol' broken down lawman - but he it was too late to take it back now, even iffen he'd wanted to.

Which he didn't. It was true, and even when it was painful, there was no shame being honest.

"I wish this thing hadn't happened, but havin' the likes'a you two as friends as made it easier to bear." He nodded, and cleared his throat roughly. "I thank ya for that."

"I'm glad. It's easier with other people." He feels the silence like a blockade erecting itself between him and Wyatt. He scrambles to find a way to explain, to keep this one connection that's proven itself stronger than all those ones that have ripped themselves away from him. "I second Rob, Wyatt. I'm sorry, I just. I want to say thank you. Just."

He scratches the counter with a nail idly. Licks his lips. Breathes through his nose and hears his heartbeat fluttering in his eardrums like a moth trying to escape the hell of his brain.

"I got issues."

Serious understatement, but he hopes Wyatt understands.

"Want...to help," R latches onto that, peering unsteadily from Howard to Wyatt. They're his friends, real friends, not Dead people he bumps shoulders with one day and oops, the next week they're regular-dead. It...feels different. "Both...of you."

The problem is it's fine and all to say that but how's he actually planning to do it? R sits there, stumped. He's never really felt that urge rise up, not strong enough to actually try to hold onto it, not really, and now that he does, he wants to do something aside from groan and stare.

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the_marshal - 2013-06-04 12:21 (UTC) - Expand

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