thecapitol | (no subject)

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Who|| R and [Semi-Open] – PM me if you want to bump into him so I can write a prompt.
What|| R wakes up to realize he’s a zombie all over again and the Cure, in fact, wasn’t a cure after all. He’ll be in a funk. Mostly he’ll be blocking traffic (cue finding him in the District 4 shower, creepy-staring, or else where). Basically R needs cheering up, pep-talks, even the awkward ones telling him he’s better off as a zombie.
Where|| Around the Tribute Tower and Training Center. Also District 4’s suite.
When|| After reviving in the Capitol from Howard mercy-killing him and before the next Arena. Basically a catch-all.
Warnings| Zombie references, depressed zombies.

Prompts in the comments for each character. Heads up I may be slow posting, so a post per day or every other day (so backtag central?).

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In that moment, a memory rushes back, and Howard knows he's in his packed bedroom with R but feels like he's back at Disneyland, by the water, listening to R and Karis hunt for him. He doesn't respond like a normal person responds to a friend fighting, but like someone getting robbed at knifepoint. His hands come up not to fight or placate, but in some subconscious protest.

He gets small, crinkles like a leaf in the fire, rat nose wrinkling, shoulders jerking, body pressing back like he could slip between the molecules of the desk behind him. Like R's about to reach out and- and not bite him, but hit him. Out of anger, not out of hunger.

He likes to tell himself he'd never steal from a friend. Back in the FAYZ he often went hungry to make sure Orc got enough to eat, but if he's honest with himself (and he rarely is), he sometimes went hungry to make sure Orc had enough booze to stay compliant. Friendship, when couched only in terms of what is given, is simultaneously too simplified and too complicated to be categorized as good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, positive or negative.

He would never steal R's life, and yet he did. His mouth runs dry and blood slows down that R mistakes the actions for what they might well have been.

"R, you were in pain," he hisses, and the fear makes his defensiveness sound harsh and keening. "What was I supposed to do?"

It takes a long moment to realize Howard’s shrinking away and not just because he’s upset – he’s shrinking like he wants to be a smaller target, like he’s expecting to get grabbed. Or hit. R finally realizes he’s clenching his hands, the gray skin scratched over the knuckles tight enough to start forming minute cracks. It’s not the usual zombie position: it’s either limp hands or claws. He has to force himself to uncurl his firsts.

It’s difficult to explain. He used to wonder back in the airport what pain felt like in that dull, vague way a zombie usually wonders about his life or what haircuts used to feel like. Told himself he missed it. The reality is feeling pain again had been so much more than he anticipated, from the adrenaline spikes and the way his body reacted in a way a corpse’s simply didn’t, and “doing him a favor” had cut that short. R’s mouth flopped behind the muzzle as he tried to work out what he wanted to say, frustrated Howard could get it all out in sharp consonants and vowels and here he is, struggling along after.

“Let…die…” R shrugs helplessly. “Not…speed up and take…time.”

That isn’t even close to what he meant, R trailing off a frustrating croak as he hits Howard with that unblinking Dead-grey stare. If Howard could just – just nibble his frontal lobe, he’d know exactly how R feels. It’d be so much faster. It’s selfish, he knows. Howard did what he’s sure any Living person would’ve appreciated. An end to a miserable way to die, alone in a staircase and starving to death. But it’d been different knowing he had company and there’s a part of R, the zombie part that wants to grab onto things and never let go, that wanted Howard to stay there until the end played out, no matter how long it took.

It occurs to R that could’ve been days, literally. Maybe he expected too much of Howard. Zombies can be greedy like that.

"Rob..."

Howard still doesn't know how long he sat there, feeling R's broken living body with his hands, in the bottom of that stairwell. The last ten days of the Arena, the ones spent blind, roll and smush together into a dark blur of sound and pain and fear. He'll have to go back to watch the footage to understand which events were real and which were dreams, which were manifestations of his imagination allowed to run wild in the absence of light.

But he knows killing R was real, and he knew that even before R confronted him about it, even before he saw the kill money credit on his card when he got back. There are some horrors that cannot be imagined and can only be lived, and stabbing your best friend in the face out of love is one of them. Feeling bone jutting out, burned flesh, one of your few remaining strongholds of humanity in agony.

"I was helping you."

He breathes deep, backing up out of the range of R's hands, as if R could actually throw a punch. It means taking a wide step over some clutter on the ground.

"You wouldn't have died. You'd have lingered. Zombies die from head trauma, right? You would have dehydrated and starved and I- I can't be there while you starve, man. I couldn't. I couldn't."

Feeling angry is such a novel concept to R that he’s surprised when he hears that nickname from Howard and instead of letting it slide over him, it’s another thing to get upset about. Rob. No matter how many times he groaned Rrgh and Rrr to Howard and he still keeps calling him that.

R doesn’t lean forward or try to make himself look bigger. It’s not something that’s hardwired into him anymore, if it ever was, and he can only watch as Howard keeps on backing up and puts some of his hoard between him and the dead boy still trying to work out what feeling angry is like. In slow motion R’s eyebrows knit together, his mouth twisting into a deeper frown. He doesn’t know what his Escort thought would happen. That it’d smooth over, somehow?

“Was…alive,” R mumbles, wishing he could believe it. But Howard’s closer to the mark – he’d been killed twice back there, before Howard got to him, and he’d survived because it hadn’t been head trauma. But everything else had felt real enough that honestly, R would’ve settled for that partial Cure even now “Friends…be…there.”

It had hurt lying in that stairwell but there had been a point where things grayed out, seconds he lost listening to Howard’s ruined voice speaking and then, then dying hadn’t seemed so bad. There had to have been a point where his body would’ve…given out, right? Withered in on itself even if he was alive in there? Maybe he would’ve ended up a Boney, jagged claws and sunken eye sockets.

R wheezes out a wordless sound and drops his accusing stare, shuffling back a few feet through a pile of magazines.

"That's not living."

He can't believe it is. He doesn't truly feel that his life right now is worth holding onto, much less a dark, pain-riddled existence at the bottom of the stairwell. Something about that seems bullheaded, stupid, naive, and he can't help but feel like R's pinned him between two awful decisions.

Howard doesn't untense when R backs up. He stays trapped like a rat in a corner, although he lowers his gaze, fiddling with the edge of his sweater between his fingertips. His lower lip twitches as if in some tic or contraction, expressing nothing but the lack of control he feels right now.

"Don't be mad at me," he says, and it's a sad little whimper. It's pathetic, and he knows it's pitiful, as if he's standing outside himself and looking from R's perspective with scorn at the sniveling little wreck making excuses for himself. "Please don't be mad at me."

"Is living," R shoots back as best he could. He accidentally drips black drool onto a magazine at his feet, R too upset to even feel embarrassed. "Can't...not be, How-ward."

R's voice trails off into a whisper, croaking, ragged at the edges. Whatever tension he managed to inject into his corpse slides out, settles to the bottom of his feet like blood must’ve when he died next to the river. He’s angry at Howard and he can’t let it go, for some reason. It doesn’t slide off his shoulders, off the withered folds of his brain, like everything else did before the Capitol. R’s eyes drift down to his shoes as he stares at them, his face slack. For a moment it might look like he’s drifted off again when he looks up.

“Need…tell Julie. Back to…this,” R wishes he could leave her with the memory of that night giggling together in the sleeping bag. But she’s survived the zombie apocalypse – she’ll know how to deal with him being a dead boy again. “See…her?”

It’s almost exhausting to groan out so much at once, R getting annoyed all over again. He can’t make Howard take back what he did in the stairwell. He can’t leech away that feeling that’s curling across his bones and his guts, unfamiliar, stronger than the times he’d gotten into fights with M about stuff neither of them could remember. It hadn’t mattered, in the end.

This felt like it did.

"Julie..."

Howard sees it there like a door, like a flaming hoop that tamed lions jump through. He could slip the words in now and ruin R, wreck the dead boy from the inside out in a way stabbing him in the face couldn't compare to. He could say it and he could take the part of R that wants so badly to be human and lovable and loved and just squash it like an overripe fruit underfoot.

He softens the blow with a lie. He still throws the metaphorical punch, because he's angry and hurt, but he loves R enough that he doesn't drive the knife somewhere lethal. R may have the fight slipping out of him, but it's rising back up in Howard, this idea that after all of this, after everything Howard's done for R, Julie's the special one that R runs to.

"Julie left. She's not coming back. She left you like my parents left me." His affect is too flat to be vindictive, and in that way it's cruel in its simplicity. There's no intonation to hold on to, only the words dangling there in bold, sharp letters and simple sentences. They're hostile not only to R but to Howard, the way the syllables prick at that wound that's never quite closed.

"She went to District 12," he lies, and it's sad that lying comes so naturally, so easily that he doesn't miss a beat. "As a representative. And she said maybe she'll write, but not to look for her because it might mess up her plans. She thought it would be too complicated to say goodbye so she left."

And R, in all his rotting, stumbling naivety and desire to believe Howard wouldn’t lie to him, buys it with all his dead heart. His reaction isn’t immediate because it never is. It’s slow, not quite glacial, his normally slack expression changing to something else after a few seconds: his eyes widen a fraction, the muscles around his mouth relaxing in surprise. For a corpse, it’s actually bordering on immediate, knee-jerk instead of absent.

“No,” R blurts. “Not…gone.”

He doesn’t want to believe it. Somehow it’s harder to process the idea of Julie gone, even though she’s alive, even though that’s exactly what he thought would be best for her. Living with other Living. Not running these Arenas, hanging around a corpse who could still infect her if he got hungry enough. But the reality is he remembers those stolen moments, from the date with the flowers and the sleeping bag, tangling his hands with hers, sharing body warmth. Finding it in themselves to laugh. He hadn’t wanted her to go. The selfish, greedy part wanted her to stay.

Crushed, R rocks back a step as he absorbs the news from Howard.

“Plans..?” R finds himself asking for details, something that he’s sure no zombie has had the foresight or presence of mind to bother with. “She would…tell me. Perry…?”

He’s blundering around in the dark in front of Howard, torn between feeling angry at Howard and grateful he’d bothered to tell him anything at all – at the rate he finds out things in the Capitol, he wouldn’t have known Julie was gone for months. If even that. His grey face crumples. The idea that Howard could be lying just to get the last jab in doesn’t even occur to him as he looks across the junk, wondering why Julie told him first.

"Go ask someone." For all I care. Howard practically spits the words as if they're venom he's sucked from a wound. As if he's ameliorating his own hurt by turning it on a target that can't, won't fight back. The fear dissipates and is replaced by anger that R's only minimally responsible for. "She's gone. She left you because everyone leaves you, and everyone leaves me. That's all we're good for is getting left."

He reaches back and knocks over a pile of his things, sending papers and plastic cups and screws and bottlecaps spilling over the edge of the desk and onto the floor like misshapen confetti. He doesn't even really look at R at this moment, so focused on turning something outwards, on taking the parts inside his soul and vomiting them forth.

"But that doesn't matter to you, right? I'm the only one who sticks with you and that's not good enough, that's never good enough, I'm always doing it wrong."

He seems to deflate, now, watching as the sadness soaks into R, sluggish and saturating. And he feels guilt, there, as he watches the emotions move over R's face as slow-motion as a mood ring. Howard's own tension cuts like a rubber band being snapped. He sighs and sits down on the bed, shaking his head.

"I'm sorry. This isn't how I wanted to tell you." This isn't even the lie he wanted to tell R, but now that it's said there's no way to fix it. The damage is done unless Julie comes back, and Howard feels relatively certain that that isn't happening.

R’s still reeling from the news, so much that he’s having a hard time holding onto the reason he came in here in the first place as he tries to parse out individual trains of thought from that grey sludge. All he can seem to focus on is the word “Julie” and Howard’s face filling his field of vision, gaunt and ashen skinned. Unsure what to do, R shuffles to what looks like a chair underneath a pile of boxes and sits down. It’s more of a collapsing motion, R flopping like his strings have been cut as he stares at nothing in particular. Grey eyes go far away.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there trying to digest. He thought he wanted to feel: from pain to emotions that weren’t just ghosts of themselves. The reality is now that he has, he has no idea what to do with all it. He feels even more like a stumbling, stupid corpse, unable to process his friend – crush? – leaving, or the fact that Howard has a habit of vomiting out the truth like poison.

R’s chin has drooped to rest against his chest by the time he comes back to the present, lifting his eyes to stare mournfully at Howard.

“Know…now,” he says with a little slur, not sure if it’s better he found out now or later. “Looking…out for…me?”

He lurches to his feet all of a sudden, driven by a need to get air despite decomposed lungs. He can’t look at Howard without questions piling up, threatening to go tumbling down like that tower he’d knocked down. His shoes slip on plastic wrappers, crushed boxes of stale crackers.

"Don't- don't stand, you'll ruin it." Boxes and plastic and jangly things slide to the floor, less toppling than just oozing across any slanted surface, like a tent falling in on itself. Howard doesn't sound particularly convinced that that pile of his hoard was much worth saving.

He swallows and reaches over, taking a key-ring filled with gadgets and quietly fiddling with it, chewing on a piece of metal that's poking out until he accidentally punctures his lip enough to bleed. He wipes it away and looks at the zombie resting like an old, old man in the chair, surrounded by all this useless garbage.

It amazes Howard sometimes how R manages to look so very ancient and yet so young, like an infant. So helpless. After a moment Howard picks his way over the things and puts his hand on R's shoulder, then reaches over to start unstrapping his muzzle. A symbol of trust, the most important one there is.

"I'm always looking out for you."

And the sick thing is, Howard means it. And he doesn't believe he's ever mistepped in that regard.

Normally Howard reaching for the muzzle is something R looks forward to - apprehensively, holding his breath out of some outdated instinct - but today his reaction is entirely visceral. He spots Howard's hand coming toward the straps laced around his head, inevitable, feels his other hand burning with Living heat on his shoulder and he can't. He can't do this. Not today. Not after he had weeks worth to remember what it felt like to be alive and talking and hungry

R jerks his head away with an angry grunt, using his full height to his advantage and for once, he has perfect posture as a corpse. It adds several inches now that he's not stooped over.

"No," R says, wheezes, and tilts the muzzle out of Howard's reach. "Not...always. Leave me...alone...."

He turns and nearly breaks his neck as his shoe skids on a plastic lid, slick with something that could old butter or mold. R weaves, staggering back to a more-or-less upright position, and then makes for the door, brushing past Howard. His head feels like it's close to exploding from some internal pressure. Compared to his days as just another zombie, feeling an emptiness in his skull that howled, it's too much to deal with right now.

R wobbles out the door, the door swinging lazily on its hinges instead of slamming. So much for working things out between friends.

Howard's surprised. He freezes, as is his occasional wont when shocked. And even though he's fast enough that he could probably stop R going, he doesn't, instead doing an unwitting impersonation of a zombie with a slightly slack jaw and a hapless inability to act.

"Wait-" he says, but by then the door is already closing. By then, R's already gone. And he could run out after him but he simply doesn't, and he can't explain why.

Instead he just repeats "wait" even as he sits down on the bed, a sigh coming all the way from his stomach, and buries his face in his hands.

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