thecapitol | You Blame Me and I'll Blame You and We're Both Right [Closed]

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You Blame Me and I'll Blame You and We're Both Right [Closed]

WHO| Howard and Wyatt
WHAT| Guilt is strong with these two.
WHERE| D10 Suite
WHEN| A few days after the date auction.
Notes/Warnings| None, but Howard will recollect on his gruesome death.

The Flinch is back.

That's what he calls it, The Flinch. Capital T, capital F. The way he jumps at loud sounds, the way as soon as anyone moves too quickly his eyes squeeze shut and his neck jerks back and little beams of electricity rush down his wrists. The Flinch, some preconscious reaction to everyone he meets, friend or foe, that once upon a time he had some control over, but has, for the last few days, won the battle. It follows him around like a personal raincloud that thunders and zaps him whenever his brain registers a threat, which is often, which is always.

The Flinch, as if it's its own entity and not a part of him at all.

It's not even just people; sometimes it's anything moving too fast, like the way the elevator door seems to snap open instead of yawn. After catching his breath, he edges one foot over the metal frame on the floor, until the doors threaten to close again, and then he sneaks into District 10's living suite. It's late, and everyone's either sleeping or out on the town, but there are people he doesn't mind rousing. At least, not enough to stop him. He moves quietly, feet dragging a centimeter above the ground like he's walking on air.

He stops when he realizes the fire's still burning with no Avox to tend it, and peeks around an armchair to see that it has an occupant, unrecognizable as a silhouette ringed with the dim glow of the flames. His eyes drop down to the legs of the chair and see the shadow of boots joining them.

The entirety of his insides seem to hollow out.

"Hey."

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Howard doesn't move into the light. His voice is quiet, a whisper dampened by fear. "Yeah."

He hasn't watched the recaps - hasn't had to, he assumed. After the date auction and all that stress he went back to his room (the suite now devoid of the serial killers who once plagued him) and can't seem to find any comfort there. Safety in his own District was bought at a price, such a high price.

He wonders if Wyatt saw the many ways a boy can lose his soul. Wonders if this is the end, if that last tether he had to being a good person has abandoned him.

"I know you been avoiding me."

He hesitated, swallowing thickly, staring down at his knuckles, at the blade gleaming red and orange in the firelight.

"I thought that might be best," he said, a low, rough rumble. "Until I could figure out what to say."

How to apologize.

"You don't have to say it, you can just..." Howard's voice cracks. He watches the light glint from the blade to the ceiling, and there's that cringe, The Flinch, and Wyatt doesn't even have to move. It just happens, like a nervous shock.

"Can you, at least...before you toss me out, can you put down the knife? I mean, just. Sorry."

He started to reply, to insist that yes, yes he certainly did need to, but it died in his throat as Howard went on, heart kicking like a horse in his chest.

"Howard," he turned, searching for a moment until his eyes adjusted to the shadows outside the range of the fire and found the boy tucked behind the chair. "I ain't angry, I don't blame ya for what happened. I - know it was my fault."

"It...I told you I would win." Howard's face contorts slightly in confusion. "You didn't make me promise that. What, is it your fault for dying?"

He expected Wyatt was angry at him, disappointed, maybe. Disgusted. He didn't expect apologetic.

Howard swallows hard and it feels like ash. "What are you talking about, Wy?"

"It's my fault you did." Wyatt stared at him, brow furrowing, a slow, worried vee forming between his eyebrows. "Ya don't remember, do ya?

Somehow that was better... and so much worse.

"It's no one's fault I did. I slept without securing my position. That's all." He shakes his head, slowly. "No, I don't...I don't know what you want me to..."

The bite. Oh, god, he died so fast he didn't realize that he'd been bitten. The blood rushes from his face to his toes, and he brings a shaking hand up to his mouth. The fire light in front of him seems to blot out his entire vision.

He doesn't want to know. He doesn't want to realize that he was hungry, that he was so desperately slavish to need again. He doesn't want to think that Wyatt saw him like that, that he was ever like that again.

"Oh, god. Oh my god, I'm going to be sick."

He was up instantly, dropping the knife and block into the chair, grabbing at the trash bin with one hand, reaching for Howard with the other, trying to guide him forward out of the shadows and into the vacated seat.

"Sit, Howard, breathe. Nice an' easy, one at a'time," he instructed, the words so hard to find for himself coming easily, as always, for Howard. "It's over, son. Yer back It's done."

Howard lets Wyatt lead him, tripping slightly over some imaginary nub in the carpet, focused on nothing but doing as Wyatt says. He drops into the seat as lifelessly as a discarded towel. His eyes are wide and the blood is pounding in his head, almost as loudly as Wyatt's words. Everything else is blotted out.

He upends his stomach into the wastebin, onto the refuse shavings of Wyatt's carving, and he tries his best and failing to make breathing come easy for the aftershocks, over gagging that won't seem to leave his throat for thirty seconds afterwards.

He wants to do as Wyatt says. The kid puking up into a trash can still wants to impress enough to make Wyatt stay.

He moans. "Please...please tell me I didn't eat no one."

He doesn't need it to be true. He just needs it to be aloud.

He rubbed a hand over Howard's back, trying to help coax the sick up and then trying to soothe away the knot it left behind between the boy's shoulders. That he'd been carving was strangely fortuitous, between the fresh cut shavings and the fragrant logs burning in the fireplace, the scent of the poison was nearly overwhelmed. The only evidence the wet at the bottom of the can and Howard's pale, peaky face.

"No," he murmured - promised. "No, I don't think so."

That Wyatt had no way of knowing how long Howard had been - under, and that he'd had tried, and had nearly succeeded but for the grace of the thick-hide on Wyatt's boots, Wyatt would take to his grave.

His entire body is shivering, despite the heat of the fire and Wyatt's hand on his starved back, reduced down to his FAYZ weight by resurrection. The nubs of his vertebrae stand out like beads on a necklace under his shirt. He leans into Wyatt, coughing and wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

"I don't want to know any of it. I don't. Please." He turns his head to look into Wyatt's eyes. The usually clear gaze looks dark and clouded in this lighting. "I thought you were angry at me. You're not, right?"

"No, son, of course not." He squeezed Howard's shoulder, thin and pointed beneath his fingers. "To tell the truth..." his mustache twitched, mouth twisting wryly as he swallowed, "I thought ya were mad at me."

And he might still be, someday, if and when he ever found out the truth. That knowledge twisted in his breast, knotting in on itself into a hard lump just under his ribs.

"I won't get into the particular's, but I just want ya to know that I do wish it hadn't happened that way."

"When I was little, I used to think there was nothing worse than death." Howard's gaze turns to the fire, so he can blur out everything he sees with floating neon spots. So he can pretend he's anywhere but here or home for a moment.

Maybe he could be a man of the Wild West, like Wyatt. Maybe he could be somewhere far, far away from everything that's been finding creative ways to hurt him. He just wouldn't want to do it alone.

"I got no reason to be mad at you."

Not yet.

He didn't say it, but he thought it. A soft whisper in his ears that he couldn't quite silence.

"All the same," he murmured, nodding, as the fire popped and threw sparks. "I still want ya to know it."

Howard draws closer to Wyatt, then closer to the fire. Part of being so emaciated again is the constant coldness, the chill that soaks deep in that defies room temperature.

"They gave me seven hundred assi," he says quietly. "Seven people's worth of kill credits."

He can count five. He doesn't know what happened to the other two, but he prays to a God he doesn't believe in that they died in his traps and not in his latter state.

"I just, I thought...people don't tend to say goodbye to me, you know? I thought you were mad at me for playing the game, and just didn't want anything to do with me no more."

He wants to say he'd be fine with that, that he respects Wyatt's autonomy, but that's a bald-faced lie.

Watching Howard lean and curl in on himself, Wyatt pushed the can aside with one hand, and curled the other one under the seat of the chair, pulling it across the plush carpet and closer to the fire.

"Howard..." He exhaled a long breath and shifted out of his crouch to sit on the floor, flames warm on his back. "Max an' I were together this arena, an' he didn't win by sittin' back an' waitin'... an' I didn't try to stop him."

He'd come back to their camp, wounded, and soaked in blood not his own, and all Wyatt had done was patch him up and thank God that he'd come back at all.

"I'm not Max," he says flatly, and after a moment he pushes himself up out of the chair to sit next to Wyatt on the carpet. "You don't like me for the same reasons you like Max."

If Wyatt likes him at all. For months Howard's been trying to piece together what Wyatt's getting out of this relationship, whether Wyatt's just one of those people who needs something to protect or if he's replacing a relationship from before the Games. For a while, Howard didn't really care what the reason was, so long as Wyatt stayed with him, but now it seems urgent to know why, so he can cement that bond. So he never has to worry again that Wyatt will disappear without a word.

He already lost Wyatt once. That was too many times.

Howard places a fist to his aching, concave stomach. It's still clenching and rolling as he tries to push the knowledge of what he became away. In spite of how cold he is, a few dots of sweat have appeared on his brow like a birdcage veil.

"It's okay if I don't win, Wy. Don't beat yourself up about it."

Edited 2013-08-24 06:16 (UTC)

"True enough, I 'spose," he murmured down at his hands, still callused, still worn, but whole again, unburned, uncracked by sun and wind. The little wounds from the cactus plants, the dirt and sand, all gone.

The Capitol again working its magic. The only scars left the ones he carried inside. The memories.

"But I can't begrudge yerself any more than I do him. Especially not when I told ya too." He looked up. "I remember what I said, an' it's as true now as it was then."

"I only want to get out of there because you want me out of there," he says quietly. He gestures to the fire, to the carpet, to the trash can with his half-digested dinner in it. Then to himself, to the ribs protruding through his shirt, to the way he's quaking. "This is all that's there for me out here."

He casts a glance down the hallway, to where Orc may be sleeping, but he says nothing.

Wyatt couldn't help but shake his head, Howard's words so like Max's - maybe they'd planned them out together. Some secret meeting where they'd plotted together to kick him in the chest.

"You an' Max both," he muttered, eyes steady even as Howard looked away. "Yer both so ready to keep throwin' yer lives away, thinkin' they don't matter." A muscle squeezed in his cheek, mouth working as he exhaled through his nose. "An' yer both so wrong, an' it kills me that ya can't see it."

"It's not that my life doesn't matter. It's that there's nothing worth staying alive for." He shrugs, watching the twitch in Wyatt's face, wondering who all that anger is directed at - the Capitol? The Games? The hell Howard lived through before coming here? "And you're probably not the best person to lecture me about throwing my life away."

Wyatt looks for his kind, those with little self-worth. Those running from actually feeling the wounds of their past. Howard's starting to put it together, here in the light of a puttering fire.

"Nothin'." Wyatt echoed lowly, his head tipping, brow furrowing. "Nothin' at all."

It wasn't worth living for himself, not to stick to the Capitol, not for his friends.

"'Spose that says it all, huh?" He nodded, leaned back against the warm stones of the hearth. "For what it's worth, I did what I did because I thought ya were worth it. You an' Max, you two were my reason."

And there it is again, as Wyatt leans back. The Flinch. If it weren't so extreme he could maybe pass it off as a chill, but by the time the idea occurs to him it's gone. He winces and curls around his pained guts.

"Don't...don't take it like that. That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you're not worth sticking around for."

He just doesn't know how to explain the heaviness in his head. The part that feels so alien in the safety of the Capitol that only the threat of death feels 'normal'. The fact that he's so used to surviving only for himself that the idea of living for anyone else again is an addition that slips his mind.

He wonders if Orc is sleeping on his side.

He was a silent a moment, waiting to see if Howard would elaborate, then exhaled again.

"I can't make ya want to be here. I can give ya reasons, try to make ya see what I do... but in the end only you can decide what's worth it."

And if their friendship wasn't among them....

He ignored the sinking in his chest and cleared his throat, carrying on.

"But it's not gonna change how I feel, an' I'll be here 'til the Capitol decides they've finally had enough."

"I stuck around for just one person before," Howard says, glancing again down the hallway. He reaches a hand up and rubs the bridge of his nose, the one the Capitol breaks every time he's resurrected to put it straight again. The one that got smashed in by a friend. "It didn't end well for me. I can't just...I can't."

It's not Wyatt's fault, and that makes it all the worse, because he knows Wyatt will only see it as evidence of his failures. It makes him angry, truly. Howard feels as if he's seen as so helpless that even his own mistakes can't be his to claim.

"Capitol seems to like me, though, so you're stuck with me for a while." He tries to grin. It's a weak expression.

And that, Wyatt supposed, would have to be enough.

"Alright, Howard," he nodded, murmuring tiredly. Giving in. "Alright."

He sat for another moment, then took another breath and stood, doing his best to ignore the way Howard jerked, like beat a dog expecting to be kicked again. He walked into the kitchen, drew a glass of water, and then came back, pausing long enough to drag the decorative blanket off the back of the couch.

He held the former out, and draped the latter over the boy, a hand digging - just for a moment - into the chair's cushion to pull free his knife and wood block.

"I reckon ya didn't really come to see me," he mused, pushing the wood into his pocket. Especially given the way Howard kept looking toward the hallway. The corridor that led to the tribute rooms. "Do ya want me want wake someone for ya?"

"I figured you were mad at me. Why would I look for someone who's mad at me?"

He takes the water with a mumbled but genuine thanks and pulls the blanket tight around his shoulders. No one told him when he was growing up that starving wasn't just being hungry; it's like the flu, but a hundred times worse, even without his penchant for stress on top of it. The Capitol likes to jack him full of antibiotics and vitamins whenever he wakes up, but he knows the truth; long term organ damage, permanently warped metabolism, blood pressure problems for the rest of his life.

He doesn't expect he'll live long enough to matter. Eventually the Capitol will get bored, even if he wins. Maybe especially if he wins.

He looks at the hall again. "No. I got someone from back home living in this District, but if he's sleeping it's probably best for everyone." He can't help but watch Wyatt's knife, wince as each cut against the wood lodges free the image of Aunamee above him.

"Maybe to find out whether er not I really was mad," he offered gently, tugging the edge of the blanket up over the back of Howard's neck.

But he let it slide away with his hand, glancing toward the hallway when Howard did.

"Which one?"

"That would only happen if I wasn't a coward." He reaches spindly fingers over the edge of the blanket on his shoulder and pulls it tighter.

"Big guy. Orc. Made of rocks. You can't really miss him if you see him." Howard rubs the bridge of his nose again, then a patch of forehead above his eyebrows until it flushes red from pressure.

One of Wyatt's eyebrows arched, "I've seen him about."

And heard him. Angry sort, he seemed to Wyatt, quick to lash out. Particularly after he'd been enjoying the many libations the suite had to offer - which was often.

"He's a friend'a yers?"

The way Howard had jerked and withdrew when Wyatt had tried to drown himself there after the last arena suddenly made more sense. Wyatt had never struck him, had never done anything to earn such fear,... but it wasn't really him Howard was reacting to.

More ghosts.

...Except maybe this one had been made real again.

"He's my best friend," Howard says, and there's a defensiveness in his voice that makes it sound as if he's used to having that statement questioned, having his wisdom doubted in making such an allegiance. There's a protectiveness too, something Wyatt's probably only heard regarding R or Eponine before. A preemptive shutter put up to spare his best friend from critique.

"I just came, you know. To make sure he's sleeping on his stomach instead of his back, because sometimes he drinks too much." Howard brings a knuckle near his mouth and starts to chew on it absentmindedly.

Wyatt was silent again, studying Howard's face with cool, measuring eyes for a long moment.

"Couldn't tell ya, son," he said finally, taking a step back, giving Howard to move past him if he wanted to. "I ain't in the habit of peekin' in on him."

He wasn't his place to say anything. Yet.

But he'd be keeping a closer eye on the strange fellow from here on out.

Whether Howard liked it or not.

Howard gets up, moving slowly, hesitantly, as if the poles of the magnet drawing him to Orc's room keep shifting. His feet fall quietly, and as he gets to the door he cracks it open, slightly, then closes it again and walks back, hands over his elbows.

"He always forgets to lock it," Howard says, looking annoyed, as if complaining that a family member always left the TV on.

"Ain't like he's got much reason to worry about it here."

District 10 was very decent lot, as far as Wyatt knew them, and even the troubling Needleteeth woman (whom he'd noticed hadn't returned from the arena) wasn't going to get away with trying to bring harm to a fellow tribute.

And it wasn't as if the Capitol would need for the key, if they wanted in.

He shifted, leaning a hip on the chair Howard had vacated.

"He's alright then?"

"It's the principle of it. He never locked it back home, either, and we got robbed like, four times."

Not that Howard blames the kids who broke in - they were desperate, to come into the house with the rock monster, and Howard broke into plenty of houses back in the FAYZ, going through trash cans and fridges and basements looking for anything, anything to eat or sell. He learned all the places people hide things - packs of cigarettes under mattresses, candy in jewelry boxes, granola bars inside bags of golf equipment.

He sits on the floor, glad to be near Wyatt, wanting just that calming presence near.

"He's fast asleep. Drooling a little."

He half expected Howard to leave, now that he'd checked in on his friend, but was relieved when the boy settled again. Warmed, as if the fire's glowing coals were in his chest rather than the hearth.

"Well, ya know, it is late, son, ya should probably start thinkin' about doin' a little droolin' yerself." He nodded down the hall. "Can't speak for yer friend there, but ya know yer always welcome to share my room iffen ya'd rather stay than go back down to one."

Howard opens his mouth to accept, then closes it, thinking for a second.

"I killed everyone I'm afraid of in District 1." He runs his tongue over his teeth, breathing deep. "And they didn't come back."

Which makes him a murderer, makes him what he feared just as much.

But, importantly, he hasn't said no.

He glanced down at the knife in his hands, reflection flashing up at him.

"I killed Aunamee."

R hated him for it, Doc had been pitying. Max had stared at him as if he'd never seen him before.

How would Howard react?

Edited 2013-08-26 22:20 (UTC)

"Good."

Howard's word is flat, dead. Like dirt trodden under someone's boot. Some kind of tension seems to leak out of him, as if his stiff spine is dissolving like sugar in water. He takes a deep breath and his lower lip shakes a little.

He looks at Wyatt and scoots a little closer.

"Fucker deserved it."

Wyatt didn't smile. Didn't find the comfort in Howard's support that he'd been hoping for.

Aunamee would have swung, under any fair system, he was certain of that, but that didn't mean it was Wyatt's right to take that assumption and run with it.

Did it?

(There was no justice here.)

"He won't hurt ya again. Er anyone else."

(And he didn't regret it.)

"Not while I'm awake, at least." It's still Aunamee's face he sees when he goes to bed, when he crawls into closets and under the bed and down alleyways to find somewhere, anywhere he feels safe. It's Aunamee's face, and Drake's voice, and Orc's hands, and Howard wonders how many more pieces of people he'll pick up throughout his life to assemble the perfect monster in his head.

He clutches the blanket tighter and closes his eyes. "Thanks."

Silence stretched, Wyatt chewing over his response, uncertain for a moment what he was supposed to say to that.

"That's what family's for, Howard," he finally murmured, the response his heart kept circling back to, but by then, Howard had drifted to sleep and Wyatt's words were heard only by the fire, popping and hissing in return.

Exhaling, he pushed off the chair and quietly cleaned up, emptying the trash bin and returning to the kitchen. Dampening the fire, sliding the chair back where it belonged.

Then, as gentle and careful as he could manage he plucked Howard up off the floor, and carried him down the hall. He tucked Howard into his bed, blanket and all, removing only his shoes, then drew an extra set of sheets from the closet and made himself a nest at the food of the bed.

He fell asleep to the gentle whisper of Howard's breathing, crickets chirping in the forest on his wall, and the vague worry that he hadn't remembered to lock the door.

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