The Bodies In the Streets

[acroodawakening]

Who| Closed to Guy, Mindy, and Hawkeye
What| Hawkeye and Mindy get Guy back to the Training Center and put a blanket over his cage to calm him down. Possible bonding may ensue.
Where| The City and then his room in the Training Center.
When| Shortly after Guy's revival and then freakout
Warnings/Notes| None so far

The two of them would happen on it the same time, the street where Guy was hiding in the bushes. There was that funny building shaped a bit like a glass mushroom, the shops, and the street corner he'd shown them with his communicator.

The bushes were in front of a restaurant and so thick that even though most of their leaves had fallen off, he was still pretty thoroughly hidden by the branches. The only things visible were his feet in their furry boots, peeking out from a gap at ground level. Right now, he was nervously wiggling his toes.

He didn't plan on coming out, not until one or both of them came right up and got him.

If he was going to make the walk through the unholy terror that was the Capitol back to the Training Center, he needed something to hide behind the whole time.

Comments

[hit_girl_mindy]

"You know, you are allowed to sleep ON the bed," Mindy said. "It'll probably be better for your back. Your world sounds like its in the tropics then. Guess that makes sense. It didn't help that the games weather was actually pretty ok too, nothing too frigid."

She could totally not do frigid right now. Cold was bad enough.

"Look...there's been, like, amazing advancements since your time. Now you can go into a room where you can actually turn on and off something that will pour water on you, hot or cold. And there's even soap, which cleans your skin. And shampoo, dude. Seriously."

[swill]

He snorts at Mindy's explanation. "That's an advancement from my time!" Damn the shower tent of the 4077th and damn the cold water. Damn the shortages and the heat waves and the days the water ran green. He didn't comment on Guy making a nest. He wouldn't know how.

But he was serious about following Mindy's suggestion and getting the boy something hot to drink. Wasn't it funny? Him following the suggestion of a little girl? Hah. He turns with a quick pat to Mindy's back and creeps the door to Guy's suite open. He only steps out long enough to ask an Avox for something that wouldn't upset the fella's stomach-- they had to know more about him than he did. And apart from booze, how would Hawkeye know what the strange people of the Capitol had to drink? It's a couple of minutes at most, and Hawkeye never really steps out of the room. He returns to the edge of the bed with something in his hands- gives it a sniff- and he lowers the cup to Guy.

Hawkeye then invites himself to take a seat on the edge of Guy's bed. He figured, since the boy wasn't using it himself, that it wouldn't matter. And he just observes, this time around, and his brows shoot up even if no one sees and he quickly removes the wig from his head and scratches his hair. He's silent company for that moment, mind reeling and wandering. Naturally, this couldn't last long. And he was at such a loss with what to do for Guy, that he found himself asking, "So where are you from?" Because he had the hunch he'd like to talk about it- to escape this place through story, if nothing else.

[acroodawakening]

The whole time Mindy was talking about showers, Guy had been mouthing 'blah blah blah blah' sarcastically. It was a sore spot for him, since Lestat had said all that stuff about him being dirty. He planned to clean up maybe a little more often than usual but in his humble opinion baths were highly overrated.

Guy sat up just enough to sip the drink - hot cider - and it meant the blanket over his eye briefly slipped off.

"Are you talking to me or -? Oh, you're talking to me." Not Mindy.

Guy put the drink down on the floor next to the nest and hunkered down again, pulling the blanket back over his eyes.

"I'm from Tomorrow. It's a place that doesn't have all these tall things and people crowded together. Everyone wanders and hunts and gathers food to get by and a few people live in caves but most people are nomads like me. We just wander the world our whole lives, seeing everything in it, and it's great because the world is so big and amazing."

He dredged up the words he'd heard in the arena.

"A guy I talked to in the arena said where I was from sounded liked the past where he was from. He had words for it: 'prehistoric' and 'paleolithic.'"

[hit_girl_mindy]

Mindy had tried explaining the bathing thing, although she did look a little surprised at the mocking.

"Hey, don't underestimate cleaning. Makes sure you're at least recognizable, and you don't smell like shit."

She could be nice and patient in explaining, or she could just be blunt. Guess which won out?

"Actually yeah, you sound like what people would call cavemen in my times. You're sorta depicted as these hairy, grunting lumbering guys that dragged your wife by the hair for some reason."

And were locked out by your dinosaur dog, apparently.

[swill]

The 'tall things' Hawkeye realized must be the skyscrapers, towering and streamlined and dwarfing any imagination from his own time. He still wants to be convinced that Guy is only from a very underdeveloped part of the world- the world he knows- but then the part about living in caves makes his attention snap to the possibility that-- that hey, he's talking to history. And his nose scrunches a little in thought, and his brows furrow lightly.

So how was it that everyone was speaking English?

And the power of everything he didn't understand was so great, he was sure he felt a headache coming on. The sensation burst through when Mindy did- and Hawkeye didn't let a single moment of silence go between the end of her words and his rushed repair- "Those are caricatures- cartoons- exaggerated in one extreme for all they're worth. There are actually studies, centers all over of people trying very hard to understand-"

and wasn't it weird? To think that those kinds of centers might exist in this world, trying to figure out the lives of the creatures, hardly human by these new standards, who had lived so long before? What the hell had become of Crabapple Cove?

He's not even sure he's going to help, and he prepares to state the obvious in the least problematic way he knows. "There's not a whole lot left of the prehistoric. Time moved on, and it doesn't care to preserve a lot of the things we'd like it to. Now, that was back in my time. That's 1953." Not that it'll mean anything to the fella wrapped in a blanket. "And this time's ahead of mine by a mile. Now- how we all ended up here, I dunno." It felt like a newsflash streaming over and over in his head: everyone you know is dead. But if they were fine here, displaced, the folk back home must be fine, left alone where they had been. Right? No? Christ almighty, what a headache. What a heartbreak. "It's new to all of us. Having us not know what's going on is part of the game."

[acroodawakening]

Guy pulled a face at Mindy's description even despite Hawkeye'es quick save. In fact, that expression was even more irked by what Hawkeye said, even if his eyes weren't visible.

"What? Why would I drag my -" Yes, he was incensed. "I love my mate. I'd never grab her by the hair."

There was a brief pause as he considered something.

"That said, she used to do that to me, but when I made it very clear she was being too rough, she stopped." He held up a finger. "She's very, very gentle now."

Which was a good thing because otherwise she'd break him in half.

"We don't hurt each other. What kind of sick people hurt the people they love? And also cavemen and nomads are different - they're two different peoples. All human, but different. My wife and her family are caveman, I'm a nomad - we're built differently. And what - what centers? What's a center? What do you mean they study us? How can they understand people that died that long ago? Sherlock said I'm like people that are at least 10,000 years older than people like all of you. What is there left to study?"

[hit_girl_mindy]

And here of course, Mindy's extended knowledge of cavemen ended. This was one of those times she wished that her dad had not home schooled her, but what could you do? She never thought her faint knowledge of cavemen woul come into question.

"There's a lot I don't know, sorry. But yeah, we have centers because humans want to know where they come from who they descended from. They trace the history, date bones of men from that time and..."

Wait. Hold on.

"Hey," she addressed Hawkeye. "Back up. You're from Nineteen Fifty THREE?! I could have...yeah, I guess that makes sense if Guy is here..."

She was half mumbling to herself now.

[swill]

Sitting on the bed like it was the one which belonged to him, he couldn't offer even a hand on his shoulder. He wants to swing his legs and offer condolences for a misinterpretation he never would have thought was wrong, but he stills and frowns at the mention of the so very casual abuse. Then he wants to rattle on about strange sex practices -'sick' depending on who you ask- but realizes a moment later that he shouldn't. What he focuses on again is 'built different', but his interest had never been in studying history. Next up is 'Sherlock' and the headache pulses and Hawkeye barks out a laugh, short and sharp and high and entirely irrelevant to the adventure thus far. And God, he hopes it's not misconstructed as being directed at Guy's woes.

He sobers in a blink, though he's bright-eyed and with an energy that hadn't been in him for long moments before. He supplements Mindy's explanations, and makes a note to try and understand the subject himself. He shrugs, though he doubts it'll even be seen. "We're curious buggers." But 10,000 years were astounding. What the hell kind of technology did the Capitol have? "And our bodies are more resilient when left alone in the end." As opposed to being blown to powder. "Dig deep enough, you'll find anything. Gold. Bones. Oil. Atlantis. China."

Now he swings his legs and even bounces once on the mattress. He takes the movement and lets himself lay down on his side, facing the other two. He ought to check Guy's temperature soon... but what the fuck was the normal temperature for a caveman? --sorry, nomad?

He turns to Mindy, mockingly affronted, the despair well hidden. What? Dear God, what? Was he 10,000 years from the past? "I'm sure as hell not from '29! I already did my time!" He shuffles around, makes himself comfortable. He addresses the room next, his voice like he was a professor at a lecture hall. "Somewhere alone the line, we started using numbers to refer to the time we were living in. Then some important guy was born and we switched the counting the other way- reversed it and starting counting forward instead of backward." Because he remembered Guy saying he was from Tomorrow, whatever that meant, and he wasn't going to talk more about his time, because it not being everybody else's was wrong. "Numbers are easier to remember than names."

[acroodawakening]

"Bones? Bones?" The blanket was already covering his eyes but Guy covered the rest of his face with both hands.

"Don't tell me people are digging us up."

The hands dropped and he abruptly sat upright.

"How can people - what, does that mean somewhere down the line someone's going to dig up a tar pit and find my -"

He broke off because he didn't want to drag the conversation down, even though it was getting pretty miserable for him. (Not Mindy or Hawkeye's fault, it was the culture shock, it was inevitable, and at least he was getting it from friendly faces. Could've been worse.)

Slumping back down on the blankets, he turned over and swept the whole blanket over his head, nestling down in it so that he was just a lump, only his mouth showing.

"All because of numbers. Enough numbers pass on by and it's magically not a grave anymore, it's something to prod at because they're curious. I mean, how would they feel if someone dug up their grandma's grave?"

[hit_girl_mindy]

"The idea is to find hints of the past," Mindy said, realizing exactly how fucked up all of this must be sounding to Guy. Personally, she doubt she would care if someone dug her up: she would be dead, after all. A body was pretty much a vessel until it wasn't, and then you went to whatever was next.

"Pretty much, people want to know as much about what they used to be, where they evolved from. It's been a long time past, and some just want to know. The more people know about their past, they figure, the more they can attempt to try and fix their future."

Or something like that. Hell, she wasn't an anthropologist.

"Sorry about that," she said to Hawkeye. "I missed getting a formal education. "Too busy getting doing other things."