thecapitol | My Hungry Ghost of Hopefulness [Closed]

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My Hungry Ghost of Hopefulness [Closed]

WHO| Howard and his interviewers (Rat, Eponine and possibly Roland), Howard and Orc, Howard and R, Howard and Wyatt
WHAT| Howard petitions out
WHEN| Before the latest Panem Nightly
WHERE| Tribute Suites
WARNINGS| None, but suicidal ideation may come up.

The paper in his hands is crumpled and grimy with sweat. He's been holding it in his hands for the last two days, picking it up over and over again to check times, check room numbers, make sure that he's ready to make his appointments. He doesn't sleep well, waking from nightmares where he misses his alarm, where he forgets what language is during his interview.

Despite his best efforts, he hasn't really been able to make himself look presentable. Typically he looks better after a few weeks in the Capitol to put some fat on his painfully skinny body, but the stress of waiting for his petition to process has done him no favors. He has dark circles under his eyes, which appear almost bulbous atop his hollow cheeks. His fingers on each hand are covered with scabs up to the first knuckle. His lips are covered with canker sores and he's developed a twitch in his right leg that ambushes him when he sits down.

He doesn't feel ready, and he doesn't feel like he'll feel any better once he's done with each interview. He gets to the doors over an hour in advance and paces outside them, lost, it seems, in his own shallow breathing and possible rejection. He knows, deep in his stomach, what he has to do if his petition is denied. He knows he can't handle another Arena. And yet while he isn't allowing himself to contemplate willfully, images of how he has to die start trickling into his mind and lurking in the shadows.

He knocks on the door at exactly the correct time for each interview.

-/-

After each one, there is no dissipation of tension. There's no feeling of relief, that he's done the hard part. The hard part is still the waiting, and that's still happening, like a car wreck he's going through in slow motion. He tries to sit by himself in his room but, to put it politely, he psychs himself out.

(The truth is that he finds himself unable to breathe, finds his legs unable to support his weight, starts shaking so hard he has to lie down and stare at the ceiling as if the white paint above him will swallow him up.)

He gets up and takes the elevator to District 4 and District 10. He goes and he finds his friends, no matter how they currently feel about him.

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That’s not a bad goal: R thinks he might not know anything about his own pre-death self, but he assumes he would’ve thought Howard was making the sane choice, regardless. Being killed and brought back by the Capitol isn’t a guarantee, after all. Everyone knows that. He can’t fault Howard for throwing in the towel.

It still feels…weird to think about. An absence, except Howard wouldn’t be dead. That’s usually how it would go in R’s world: friends usually got sniped, burnt to cinders or they ran into the business end of a shotgun if starvation didn’t take them first. This was a different kind of absence.

R doesn’t seem to know what to do with his arms, unlike Howard, who closes up his body language defensively as if it’s cold in here.

“Ghgh,” R says. When in doubt, groan. Stall for a little more time as his mind sputters to life again. After a pregnant pause, R stumbles the few feet over to the bed, standing there over Howard and silently looking down at the top of his head. His hair’s short. Shiny, probably from some product his Stylists rubbed in to imitate a healthy scalp, and he only needs to inhale slightly to taste that lavender-electric Life smell wafting off Howard. Telling him where his best parts are.

He presses his lips together, turns in that awkward about-shuffle, and plops down heavily next to Howard. They’re not quite touching.

“Here. Why? I’m…helping?” R doesn’t mean he won’t help – he will – but he’s not sure why Howard would come to him when there’s other, more qualified people out there. Namely people with pulses. Also they probably aren’t still pissed off at him about a mercy-killing.

"I figured we might..."

He doesn't want to say it. It's not because saying the words out loud might make them real, like they may summon fate, but because it feels like going over the same material yet again. Every time a new Arena starts, this possibility is there, that everyone he places his heart is in going to die and never come back.

It almost feels cheap. It should be heartwrenching every time but now it's just routine. Wake up, shower, brush teeth, contemplate the grief that feels less potential than inevitable. Finding it funny and tragic every time that he's pondering on the death of a dead boy.

"We might not see each other again and- and my parents-" He takes a deep breath, lower lip quivering slightly, a little saliva in each corner of his mouth as he tries to find words for it. "Last time I saw them, we were fighting about the shower. Then they left."

He stares at the wall, shaking slightly. His next words come out harsher, more certain. It doesn't matter that he still thinks he did the right thing. What matters is fixing things.

The piles and piles of broken things in his room attest to his need to repair what this world has broken. It's not an impulse he had as a child.

"So I'm sorry."

R has an inkling what that kind of loss might feel like: he doesn't remember his own parents, of course, but he does understand the concept of regret. Understands beating yourself up over the what-ifs. All those questions and scenarios and knowing they'll never be answered. He looks at Howard with more focus this time.

Every conversation with him, every interaction R snatches little bits and pieces of Howard Bassem's life: he now knows Howard never made peace with his folks and that he's (probably) stayed up at night, trying to remember what was so important about the shower.

He sits there next to Howard, almost close enough to touch but feeling those few inches as if they're miles. The apology surprises him. R's heard Howard apologize before but they've been frantic, scared, a stream of words he's seen on the Arena reruns. He thinks he remembers an apology in the closet, when Howard thought it was a good idea to laugh death in the face and kiss a zombie without a muzzle or rope. This "sorry" sounds different. R struggles to place his finger on it: something lightens in his chest. His shoulders don't slump quite as much. He doesn't feel better, exactly, but he believes Howard's sincere. He doesn't want what happened with his parents happen with his friends.

"Me...too." R gets that out there, his voice coming out in a raspy wheeze, like a corpse's final breath. "Closure."

It's one of those big words that would've made his Escort look at him sharply because between the rotting, vacant staring and groans, it's easy to forget he's not as stupid as he looks. R hesitates, then reaches out to touch Howard's hand for a moment. He withdraws it, leaving his hands resting in his lap as he searches for what else he wants to say. That one word doesn't really seem to do what he feels justice, actually, but he can't think of anything groan-efficient to replace it. Instead, he hunches his shoulders, head lolling toward Howard.

"Help you. Want...you happy."

And just like that, something lifts between them. There's an understanding again that this petty squabble - whether over life and death or not - doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Howard isn't sure what does matter, but it isn't that stairwell, it isn't crossed wires and people trying to do right by each other and failing.

People do wrong by each other enough that there's no need to penalize good intentions in either direction.

He reaches over, an arm behind R's waist that might look like a fairly trim young man if he weren't beside a living, breathing ad for multivitamins and protein bars. He pulls R close, into that realm people are only allowed into by discretion, until R's head flopping around on his gormless neck rests atop the crown of Howard's.

"I'm sorry they didn't bring you back alive." He had mixed feelings about R's struggle towards humanity; mostly he was proud and happy for him, and yet that little worm inside the apple of his stomach dug away, leaving a hollow trail of reminders that Howard would soon be obsolete, a clumsy tool for hands that had working fingers now.

"I thought...I thought they would." He doesn't know if he'd have done it if he didn't. He probably still would have, recalling the moans and the stink of that stairwell, but he knows better than to say that out loud.

R isn't sure how to describe it, but he does know it feels better, somehow, all of a sudden. There's less weight pressing in on his shoulders making them slump even more than usual. He doesn't pull away from Howard's arm sneaking around his waist. It's easier, too, to rest his head instead of holding it up on a neck that feels like a wilting flower stem half the time, waiting for those rotting tendons and muscles to finally give.

"Wanted...keep...up with...you," R mumbles. His eyes itch, although he can't tell if it's because they're drier than normal or his dusty tear ducts are wishing they could function. It's easy to mix the two up. "Thought...liked me...better."

There's a few missing words here and there, but he's overall just assumed there must be some point where Howard gets sick of his clumsy, stumbling friend who can't help but stink up the place. They're buddies, sure. But they're not on equal footing and never can be and it's a fact that R can feel like it's a living, breathing thing in the room.

R heaves his shoulders in a helpless kind of shrug. Sometimes he wonders about Howard's life choices, why he'll do something smart like petition out of the Arena and then hang out with a rotting maneater when he could do better. He thinks he understands Howard sometimes and then there's moments like this, where they're in a position that R recognizes is intimate between the Living, and then the questions coming swimming back up.

"I like you the way you are."

And it's true. He isn't oblivious to the fact that R takes so laboriously long with words, to the smell of rotting flesh, to the fact that everything has to be done and said both clearly and slowly to penetrate the fog of the zombie's mind. Not is he inured to it; sometimes it's all he can do not to reach over and try to physically shake the words from R's mouth, although he bets that he's rattle some teeth out if he did. And he knows how much it hurts R to be stuck in a state that Howard would probably have let himself shrivel up into a long time ago.

At the same time, there's something dependable about R's weaknesses, something attractive about shortcomings that aren't going away anytime soon. Howard has just enough self-awareness to realize that he's somewhat predatory about his friendships, and that R's no exception to that.

He moves a little, flops a little, when R shrugs, not content with but apathetic at the moment to the movement.

"You don't want to be the kind of person who can keep up with me anyway," Howard murmurs, sighing deep from his nose. He looks like hell. He feels like hell. If R's body were warmer, Howard wonders if he would lean towards warmth, but instead they just rest against each other.

R would beg to differ. "Want...that."

He gives up on trying to argue the point: Howard's faster than him with his words and just physically, overall, so it's a matter of picking your battles. He guesses. R's never really had to think like that before. Back home he'd mostly stuck to the same old usual: kill some people, feel bad, bump into M and share brains. Rinse. Repeat. Never did get used to the screaming, though, and all the un-life experience he had hadn't prepared him for moments like this, feeling a Living, breathing body resting against his.

"Ap...appreciate," R gets the word out (thank God), fighting the urge to smile. As much as he'd like to be alive like before, it does mean a lot that Howard likes him as he is, even if he's a shell. "Want...hgh..elp you. Petition."

R gently steers it back to why Howard came. No idea what a zombie could do that would make the Gamemakers listen, but he was open to ideas. R reaches out and pats Howard's bony knee, a little less bony than he remembers, and flops his hand up and down in this awkward limp motion.

"Just bear with me while it gets processed." Howard stares at the wall while he says that, murmurs it so R feels Howard's jaw moving with the syllables as much as he hears it. He exhales deep and swallows. "I already turned it in. Now I just...I wait."

He pulls back from R, then opens his body language, as if bringing himself for inspection. His hands are shaky. His lips are pocked and bloody, his eyes hollow, chin quaking slightly with exhaustion and nerves. This is what living looks like. Thriving, no, but living.

Why would R want to feel fear as keenly as a breathing human being does? Why does he want the lance of panic slicing through his brain, or the oppressive anxiety that wraps around him like steel wool? What is there to gain from any of that?

He meets R's eyes, the flat dirty pale gaze that Howard still finds life in. The eyes are the windows to the soul - R's windows are fogged, but they're still glass panes and a frame. "No, you really don't want to be alive. Not while you're a Tribute, man. Maybe we both- maybe we both should count our blessings."

Maybe it's just the grass being greener. Whatever.

That's the hardest part, R figures. Because Howard doesn't have the questionable benefit of being a zombie, he doesn't have the Dead's (mostly) endless patience. Waiting for days could feel like an eternity. Time doesn't blur together into a grey soup for Living people like Howard. Sometimes R wonders what it must feel like to be in his head, to see things out of those brown eyes that are so dark they're black sometimes and feel time racing and slowing and acutely aware of mortality. Trembling with the fear of it. The little taste he had of it back in the Arena can't possibly compared to what it's like to be Howard Bassem.

R catches himself staring at Howard's mouth, chapped, raw in places. He bets he'll ease on the lip picking and the chronic nail-biting once - not if - his petition goes through. Maybe he'll work out kissing.

"Guess...so..." R mumbles. He tries to look on the bright side, all the things that Howard can do without murder hanging over his head. "Make...list. Stuff...to do. Busy...here."

R lifts his hand and taps a limp finger against Howard's forehead. Keep that nice and busy and maybe he won't wake up screaming. His hand flops back to rest on his thigh, R's head lolling to face forward.

Some people would cringe away from a zombie's touch, and long ago Howard was one of them. Now he lets R into this tiny sphere, this sacred air he holds around him like the cloud of security, and he does so hungrily. He lets R tap him and then leans back in, finding comfort on R's bony shoulder. There's relief, and an added sense of peace now that they've repaired the damage between them.

It's the only kind of damage they can repair.

"I could clean your bedroom," Howard says, looking at the little piles of stashed treasure, then tries to laugh. It's a mouse of a giggle, but it's something. "I could clean my bedroom."

Though at this point that could be a several-person job. Howard used to have to chase the Avoxes away, lock them out. Now they stay away naturally, probably repelled by the smell.

"Can I stay here tonight?" He knows what a favor it is to ask, to say to a hungry zombie, muzzle or not, that he's willing to lie helpless in sleep here. He also hopes it's taken as it's meant.

R actually grunts out his version of a laugh, this croaky noise that sounds like a creaky floorboard.

He suspects he used to have clean freak tendencies when he was alive, given the vague sense of organization he had back at the airport compared to most of the other zombies, but he knows what Howard's hoard looks like. It makes even his stockpile at the 747 look small, insignificant despite the fact it had several years' headstart. A scrawny kid and a stumbling zombie trying to make a dent in that thing seems impossible, even to R. You think a zombie used to the inevitability of Death wouldn't be so quick to say it's a lost cause.

"Stay," R jerks his head in a nod, startled Howard's brave enough to ask. Then again, this is the kid who dared to remove his muzzle and, on top of that, kiss the mouth that had ripped off its share of faces. "Wake...you...up."

R has a shaky concept of time at best but he figures if Howard says something as simple as "when the sun comes up", he can get it. Probably get it. The main point is he won't murder Howard in his sleep and he's proud to say he's actually certain about that. This isn't the Arena. To show he means business, R stumbles to his feet and moves a few yards away to root through his pile that he's designated, in his mind, to mean clothes/blankets/etc that caught his eye. He fishes out a hideous quilt with alternating patches for each District, heavily idealized. Basically the Capitol citizen's idea of what life really like is in the Districts. The colors clash.

"Here." R holds it out.

It's cool. Things are cool between them. It's certain, now, and that little bit of relief filters on down through Howard's brain and, for a moment, tames the endless neuroses.

"I'll probably wake myself up, honestly." R's seen him waking up screaming, or crying, or hyperventilating. He really has nothing to hide, and that's a decent enough antidote to the shame he feels whenever it happens. It's been enough times. "But if I don't, just wake me up whenever your Escort comes to get you and spritz you with that awful potpourri shit. I'll try and talk her into good old-fashioned Febreze."

He gathers the quilt up in his arms and kicks his shoes off (he doesn't know R's sense of organization, but expects that as the sneakers are temporary guests, them sitting out of place won't be too much of an eyesore). He used to sleep sprawled out, but in the last few years he's started curling, fetal-style, as if protecting his precious innards, as if his spine was bending in the same direction as his stomach when it increased its concavity.

"Goodnight, Rob." He lays down, unsure if he's going to sleep when he closes his eyes or just lie there waiting for a blissful nothing that never seems to come. That R could eat him, could find a way out of his muzzle, maybe, occurs to him, but doesn't actually impact a single braincell. "See you in the morning."

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My Hungry Ghost of Hopefulness [Closed]

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/wrap ;_; also love the bit about the quilt