The Gamemakers (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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thecapitol2013-08-24 12:39 am
gamemakers) wrote in thecapitol2013-08-24 12:39 am
Entry tags:
The Message Logs [Open]
[OOC: General catch-all for in-person reactions to this.
Warning: making out with zombies in a lower thread.]
Warning: making out with zombies in a lower thread.]
no subject
He starts when Howard's voice suddenly cuts through the fog. It's a delayed flinch, a shudder running down R's corpse as he comes back to the present and his head bobbles up in slow motion. The stare he levels at Howard is the haunted one a rabbit gets before it's smeared into roadkill, a vague "oh crap" plastered on his face that's too little, too late.
Look, he's not ready. Like at all. He was supposed to have more time to get his act together.
Suddenly he's grabbing at his words like a man without a parachute, R's mouth flopping behind the muzzle as he fumbles. What does he say? He should say something, something that torpedoes I'm sorry I bit you out of the water. Instead he gapes, shuffles awkwardly out of the way, bumping into the other side of the closet and knocking a broom over. It clatters to the floor. He staggers the other way only to kick Howard in the ankle. R's horrified: this is already off to a bad start and he didn't even say anything yet!
Clearly he needs to find a better closet to hide in.
He almost tramples Howard again out of nervousness. With how shrunken he looks, a second time around might smoosh the poor guy.
"Huh...How....Ho-ward," R stutters, at a loss. His voice comes out creaky from disuse, nowhere as bad as the Arena, but he's been avoiding his favorite activity - conversations - and it shows. Painfully. Are they still friends? Or has Howard figured out he's more dangerous than he's worth? What comes out is more of a whisper than anything else. “Fff…free….closet...?”
R finally decides to wedge himself shoulder-first into a corner where he’s least likely to trample the human to death. There. That works. It gives Howard enough room to squeeze in after, the closet smelling strongly of a mix of lemon cleaner and Evening Shore Glow. R hunches his shoulders, straining something trying to think fast on his feet. Howard doesn’t take up much space physically, but R thinks about the last time he saw him and suddenly the air hangs heavy enough to crush.
no subject
Howard takes a seat in the corner, pushing a bucket and a mop out of the way. The mop smells faintly of cleaning fluid over the perfume, not of mold like the ones in his middle school did, and it's dry. All that does is remind him of how R seemed to be put together of sandpaper and dust when they met last, when the zombie took a chunk out of Howard's neck. His hand moves up to his collarbone subconsciously.
"So."
The word hangs in the air, weightless for only a second before the rest of the sentence drags it down to shatter upon the floor.
"You bit me."
It's not an accusation so much as a statement of fact. There's no resentment in Howard's voice, no cutting edge; he's been expecting to get bit for a long time now, and is actually somewhat surprised it didn't happen back at Disneyland. He stretches his legs out, nudging his foot - intentionally - against R's knee, and leans his head on the mop bucket. He's shivering slightly from a bad combination of negative body fat and normal room temperature, and as such his body language is closed off, all hands tucked under arms and shoulders hunched.
"I don't remember anything that happened after that and I don't want to."
no subject
He can't read Howard. R's not the best at reading Living faces these days, but with the dim light filtering in through a seam between the wall and the door, and the matter-of-fact tone of his voice, he's struggling here. Are things already over? Is it too late to groan anything? Howard nudges him in the dark, R thinking too late maybe he should move his knee away because hey, zombie here, he can't be trusted. It's not like physical contact won't spread the infection but, but all the same, it doesn't feel right to be bumping shoulders or knees with a friend he killed, just like anyone else.
The grunt that comes out of R is unhappy. "Better...that way. Sss...sorr - "
R can't get it out. Even if he gets out those two syllables, it still doesn't feel enough for what he did to Howard. R drops his eyes from Howard's shadow. This reminds him too much of that cave back there - dark and cramped and Howard's body heat dragging him closer like a magnet, the smell of his particular brand of Life seeping into his corpse and tugging. Blinding him to his number one rule of Friends Don't Bite Friends.
Unable to get that one word out, R shrugs helplessly.
"I...think...a mistake. Us?"
no subject
There's more he could say about that. He could tell R about all the nights he sat up, curled in on himself, feeling the pangs in his stomach reverberating up to his neck. He could tell R about catching cockroaches to eat them, about digging up roots until his fingernails split, about mixing all-purpose flour with water and calling it a meal. He could tell R about the chills he felt run from his heels up his spindly calves when he stood on a scale and saw the needle not even hit the number seventy. He could tell R all about what it's like to die in slow motion.
But what would be the point in recounting an existence that R lives, if in a slightly different iteration? There's no series of words, no compilation of memories that quite captures the way hunger erodes you inside, the way it's impossible to place anything as a higher priority when your every thought is consumed by the nagging, pulsing voice of need and want.
Instead he just settles on "hunger fucks you up. I can't blame you for doing what you gotta go."
He wiggles a little into the corner of the closet, back against the wall as if that'll help him keep warm. Something about small places makes him feel less small, and he wonders, sometimes, if it's his size or if it's the way other people look at him. The other Tributes look at him like prey, or like a child to protect, and the citizens here look at him like a toy to dress up and throw in the world's most hellish dollhouse.
no subject
R’s chin has sunk to his collarbone in the meantime. He hears the human moving in the dark, getting himself comfortable or maybe making sure there’s a few more inches of space to work with. After the Arena, R feels like he needs to be the voice of reason here.
“But,” R starts, pauses, and blunders ahead at full-steam. There needs to be a but there. If Howard isn’t going to whip it out, then someone else has to. “…Should…be…better. Things not…cool.”
Finally running into that wall between what he thinks and what he can actually get past his stiff lips, R snaps his mouth shut.
It’s the closest thing R’s made to taking a stand in awhile, instead of going with the flow and hiding and avoiding what’s out there because for all he knows, he was this bad when he was a person, like Howard and Julie. R shifts where he’s wedged himself in the closet. Being a zombie has its perks; he doesn’t feel the need to fidget (it’s more to fill up time, to remind himself he’s not as far gone as the other Dead if he can still remember to fidget), and the more cramped he is in here, the more stable he feels. Less chance of tipping over.
It's okay to cheat when your sense of balance sucks.
no subject
Silence yawns between them like a ditch where bodies are buried. Normally Howard's so claustrophobic around other people, so scared to share the spare near his body with another soul, but when he feels R pull away in the dark it only makes him feel lonely. It's not as if he wants to cuddle - that's ew for a variety of reasons, most of which Howard doesn't care about enumerating - but he also doesn't like feeling repellant.
He doesn't like his acceptance for the unoffered apology rejected like this.
He kicks his feet up on the door, so that they're resting half a foot above the ground, his rubber soles finding purchase at that weird angle. The light from the doorframe looks like it could be a door to anywhere, and he wonders if he'd find Narnia if he opened it now - but knows, deep down, it's just a hallway where some escort will pounce on him and some fangirls will poke at him like a zoo animal. It's just more of his life on the other side.
"Sorry about setting you up with Diana at the date auction." He figures Diana probably deserved it, but he's not about to say that out loud, because that makes it sound like hanging out with R is a punishment. Howard knows it is for others, but the truth is he'll be sad if R keeps insisting there's a problem between them that Howard doesn't want to acknowledge.
no subject
R's lips press together behind the muzzle, the one he wouldn't need to have stuck on his face like some safety guarantee if things really were "better". Maybe he's not making himself clear. His groans aren't up to snuff. Communication errors. Something lost in translation from Dead to Living. He falls quiet trying to think of a better way to word this in a way Howard will have to get, no ifs ands or buts; he's still struggling along when the human suddenly changes the subject on him.
That's cheating! R wants to shout. The urge's intensity surprises him, coming at R with a jolt because he's never thought about yelling at Howard before. And because he's a zombie, R gets stuck; he waffles between going through with it, wheezes and gasps and all, and giving up because it's easier to go where Howard's leading. The urge to toss all the exclamation marks in the world at Howard rolls over and dies. Now he’s bogged down trying to remember faces and names. This probably would’ve been easier if he hadn’t staring at a wall for who knows how long. It’s not easy trying to think of his feet after slumping in a rut.
R's so distracted he starts listing over again, trying to remember any Dianas, rolling the name around in his head for Howard. His face goes slack behind the muzzle. It takes a few long, torturous minutes to massage his memory back to the last week.
Girl. Not-Julie. Ordered bigger than her eyes. That Diana.
“Why?” R’s genuinely curious despite himself. Things still aren’t cool between them because friends don’t chow down on friends but, at the same time, he doesn’t get why Howard did that. “Not…good dating...materi – stuff…here.”
Zombies aren't exactly a girl's first choice. Or second or third.
no subject
He wants it to be something other than a dead body bleeding out next to a deader body covered in beartraps like big metal piranhas.
"She's from my world." R probably noticed that she was underfed too, although not quite so bad as Howard. Beauty and pull got you privileges in the FAYZ, and while Diana may have been 'eating for two' with her pregnancy, Howard had an alcoholic lump of fucking rock to shovel the meager spoils of his work into. God knows Orc never scrounged up his own food.
"Figured she should make friends before someone takes advantage of her. We look out for our own, FAYZians. You know, out here." Inside the FAYZ it's a different story; he and Diana probably would have bitten each others' throats out for a handful of Spam. But out here in the Capitol, there's a certain solidarity in going from starved and despairing to pampered and idolized and dolled-up. It's the same kinship that drew Howard to Eponine and, he realizes, to R.
To be hated and forgotten, to be a face in the masses, only to become a star used to sell toothpaste and spears, neither through any choice of your own.
no subject
“Nice…of you...” R mutters, his groan so low it’s dangerously close to slurring his words together. He thought he knew where this conversation would be going. Zombie bites human, human get pissed and does the sane thing and breaks up with him. Friendship over. Even humans have to have their limits, right?
Howard isn’t behaving like a sane human with a healthy dose of self-preservation. Maybe he’s behaving like Howard. Maybe everything R knows about being human, everything he’s stolen over the years, isn’t enough. Back to the drawing table. R eventually decides he’s tired of hearing Howard’s voice coming at him from knee level while he stands there resisting the urge to lurch away from the wall. Trying to move carefully in the dark, R starts that long, awkward maneuver of sitting down. It’s not easy with his stiff joints even when he’s got all the space in the world. Doing it in a cramped closet and trying not to kick Howard’s teeth in by accident takes up all his concentration.
Eventually he gets there. That’s the zombie motto: eventually you get there. Or you don’t, because your legs snapped off. R gets there, sitting with his back against the wall, his head slumped forward.
“You see…others? Ju-lie? And…” R was about to ask about Wyatt and trails off, unable to mention his name. It gets caught in his throat like a bone going down sideways. There were other skeletons in the closet besides taking a chunk out of Howard. “…Yeah. Others.”
no subject
Howard shifts to the side a little bit to let R sit down. Hip to hip, the fact that R produces no body heat is almost as unnerving as the way Howard can feel his pelvic bone cutting through the side of his pants like a handhold. It makes the way Howard's shivering obvious, and he pulls his hood up over his head not to be antisocial but merely to keep his head warm. He's been eating everything in sight but it still takes time to bulk back up.
He's trying to put it away, he tells himself - he's grateful he doesn't remember a thing about the actual zombification, that it slid off him, water on a windshield. He collects too many memories; at some point, he started thinking of himself as some sort of experiential Katamari, rolling around picking up bad memories in an ever increasing ball of unhappiness. Let this one go by, he tells himself. Be glad that it did, that you dodged that bullet with your swiss cheese corpse.
"I saw Wyatt." He frowns, knowing that Julie will hover at the front of R's mind forever until he knows she's safe, and knowing that the fact that he doesn't say he's seen her speaks without words. "He told me he killed Aunamee."
Something tenses in Howard's spine just saying the name, some spike of anxiety that doesn't correlate at all to the absence of danger here in the closet. There's a brittle little creak in Howard's voice.
no subject
Anyway, is it cold in here? R doesn't think it's that cold; he's shuffled through winter cold, cold so deep you could feel your knees lock up and the moisture in your corpse freeze. It's probably only room temperature in here. It doesn't explain why R can feel Howard's shivers every now and then when their legs graze against each other. He catches himself leaning a little to the side to give Howard something to prop up against before he thinks about what he's doing.
Aunamee.
The name slices through R, piercing body parts that died a long time ago. He's surprised at the sensation. Maybe this is what hurt feels like. He liked Aunamee. They'd been friends. He assumed Aunamee was what it said on the tin - a good man willing to help others and look past all the iffy things like oh, say, a little decomposition reeking out or a Dead boy's thousand-yard stare. The kind of guy who didn't care what you looked like on the outside. Now R isn't sure. The hitch in Howard's voice seems to confirm what Wyatt told him at the Speakeasy.
R wheezes out a wordless sigh. They better touch base on this while they're sitting here. It's another one of those conversations he thought he had more time to prepare for.
"He...did. I saw...after," R glazes over his own involvement for now. He doesn't have the words to cover that plus everything else. R massages his tongue and brain. Time to form sentences and be economic. Everything feels more mushy and slippery than usual as he opens his mouth. "...Aun-mee...wasn't...your friend?"
R's head swivels toward Howard's voice in the dark. It's probably some leftover instinct, a primal need or whatever, to insist on looking him in the face even now. He hadn't put it to much use before with the other corpses. Everyone had the same expression you had, most of the time. With humans, though, it's so much more different. Body language jumps out and screams instead of whispering by. Expressions flit across, transform from one to the other. Variations and shades he could barely keep up with even on a good day.
no subject
Howard can't find words. Howard, so usually full of sentences fighting each other to get at the teat of fresh air first, doesn't know how to explain Aunamee.
He doesn't have words for the way he has lucid dreams where he's aware he's asleep and only dreaming, and yet he can feel Aunamee's foot on his back, and he can see the knife coming down even in the dark. He doesn't have words for the way the memory sneaks up on him, set off by such small things, certain colors of pink or the smell of urine or when he runs his tongue over his teeth in a certain way. He doesn't have words for being scared until he vomits, for phantom pains, for the face that refuses to leave his nightmares.
So he makes it plain.
"Aunamee said he was my friend. Then he pinned me down and tortured me until I died." Howard's words sound like they're coming from a different person, not from a teen boy but from a grown man, a shell-shocked veteran with bullets on the brain. "Wyatt tried to save me when he caught Aunamee stabbing me and grinning about it."
It was the beginning of a blood-soaked friendship between him and Wyatt, a sort of camaraderie that couldn't be born in deathlessness. Only mortality can sew people together as closely as it brought Howard and Wyatt, as quickly as it did.
Howard doesn't know what Aunamee would have done to R. Maybe he would have been kind. Maybe he would have taken R apart like a biology-class dissection just to see how many pieces he could remove before R stopped groaning. Could R just be a head and a spine and some lungs?
Howard groans slightly, suddenly nauseated.
no subject
R listens. He doesn’t want to, but he listens. He’s too good a listener for his own good and so he’s stuck sitting there, knees knocking against Howard’s, listening as Howard tells his side of the story in all its gory detail. That picture of Aunamee, shiny teeth and great attitude, starts to crack at the edges. Even a zombie starts to wonder, even if he's the last one to the finish line. What kind of man would do that? Look at Howard. He’s not even a hundred pounds of skinny, nervous human. He's squirrely but....good. In the end all the questions R has boil down to one word, one syllable:
Why?
The groan next to him reminds R he has a voice and he should use it. Say something to Howard.
“Didn’t…know,” R moans. "Sorry you...met...him. It's - it's..."
He falls silent. Somehow that doesn't seem enough, even if he had more words in his arsenal to groan. There's got to be something else. But it's happened and because Howard's human, his memories are fresh and alive and pulsing in a way R can only re-live when he chews on someone's brain. His face scrunches, his nose crinkling. His mind's still blank, cobwebs and rot. Nothing fitting blooms. R shifts toward Howard in the dark. Their legs bang into each other. A bucket skitters.
"Sorry," R says again, at a loss. "I'm...sorry."
His hand wobbles out toward where he thinks Howard's knee is. It doesn't occur to him that a sudden touch in the dark might set the human off. All R thinks is there needs to be contact because it's a fall back to brush and touch things. A reminder, in a way.
no subject
Human contact. It's something so basic, something that comforts little babies before they even know words to express what it is, before they even have the mouth muscles to smile. The sensation of touch links people together like an invisible array of telephone lines, chaining people across distances even as they pull away.
It's something's that's been soured and bloodied and mutilated for Howard, and it's only when R touches his knee that he realizes how incredibly tragic that is. It's only when he flinches, even though he knows there's nothing to be afraid of because he's already been killed by this guy and how much worse could it get? The entire human race has been poisoned, and that poison is a moat that he's too afraid to wade through most of the time.
He realizes that the vacancy in his muscles, that feeling of dead space and oxygen deprivation that chokes up every nerves and throttles his brain stem, is loneliness. That the stain of fear soaked in deep is isolation.
After a second he covers R's hand with his own, on his knee which feels like a damn baseball under his pants, a jutting edge.
After a second longer he manipulates R's hand into his own and gently squeezes.
no subject
Now that Howard's dropped the scenario in his lap, R turns it over in his hands - in his mind his hands don't twitch or drop things or go corpse-stiff; they work exactly like they're supposed to - and he's not sure what to make of it. There's the vague idea it would suck but since he doesn't feel pain, it's not the same. The hitches in his throat someone like Howard might get don’t exist for him. Not anymore. He tries to care about his own body. His self-preservation flutters weakly. What it felt like when Julie accidentally amputated his foot, way back in Disneyland. It didn't hurt the way it had when he learned what happened Hyperion did to his friends -
And that had been Aunamee, too. He'd made sure R knew about Hyperion killing them last Arena. Sat him down in front of that screen and watched with him, all the way. R assumed back then he was doing it as a friend.
That why kept spinning around. Why lie?
R grunts at the fingers threading through his, burning with Life he’s spilled out there in the Arena. It’s so much better pulsing away in Howard’s bony hands. It’s Howard’s, not his to rip out and steal. It’s always belonged there even if the hunger sniffs and whispers it wants more and more. R manages to shove it down, gulping silently behind his muzzle. It’s not much, but at least he didn’t get Howard’s brain – at least he kept that to himself, he didn’t get to leech his memories too while he was at it. It’s nice not to sit next to Howard in the dark and think “I know how you think and feel and what your favorite food is”.
He squeezes back after a few seconds of delay.
It feels like the right thing to do. Maybe he doesn’t need to go blundering around for words. Groans don’t solve everything. The silence seems a little less heavy than before, R almost feeling…content. Maybe.
no subject
He spends a little while entertaining himself with the question of how R clips his toenails, if he even remembers how. Maybe R just never takes his shoes off, and can't feel the broken enamel curling in and slicing up his feet inside his rotten socks. R's hand lays in his like a lump of dusty clay, warmed only by the blood nourishing Howard's own.
The safest Howard feels is with a zombie who bit his throat out not long ago. How fucked is that. He's struck with the urge to rest his head on R's shoulder, to take advantage of the closed closet space to tell himself there is nothing to be afraid of with other people, at least, not always. Not now.
"Hey, look, um, if I do something, you won't...tell anyone, right?"
He doesn't really give R a very long time to respond, because as soon as those words are out of his mouth he feels the impulse slipping away from him. And he wants to hold onto that impulse, because it feels like an answer to a question he hasn't been able to ask himself yet.
"Stupid question." He finds R's face in the dim light from under the door and kisses him, kisses over the muzzle and closer to R's nose than anything.
sorry typos
R opens his mouth to say he’s pretty sure whatever Howard’s secret is, it’s safe with him. He doesn’t get anything out before the little guy’s going for it before he’s ready to react. His mouth’s parted in a little o – the proto-gape – when Howard reaches out with one hand, groping around for his face and why’s he doing that? Next thing he knows, Howard’s leaning close and kisses him on the muzzle. The metal’s the only thing between them. It doesn’t stop R from feeling that little wave of Living heat pushing across the inch or less between them, his eyes locked on where he can see light glinting of Howard’s eyes. They’re still slick with moisture unlike his, a little oomf to show how alive he is, even dangerously underweight.
His mind goes blank. Not just corpse blank, but blank blank. He stops, he stares, he sits there like a lump of dead meat. He does what he does best.
R gets stuck in that proto-gape, too stunned to even remember whether he should groan or moan or do something. The zombie’s still sitting there when Howard leans back, imagining he can feel that kiss ghosting over his nose. The muzzle’s warm.
“…Wuggh?” R blurts before he thinks it through. It was supposed to come out as “what?”.
He doesn’t pull away or lean forward – he remains where he was propped up against the wall, as if he forgot how to move his corpse. All his attention’s focused on Howard, feeling his presence in the cramped closet like it's so much larger than those ninety pounds of sinew and muscle. What’s going on?
Re: sorry typos
"Please don't tell anyone..."
He reaches over and starts to undo R's muzzle, thinking, for the first time, that he wishes R wouldn't talk right now. That the zombie's practically a chatterbox compared to what Howard wants him to be right now, something warm and living and capable of fixing problems just by existing - all the things that R's not, and yet things he has to stand in place for.
He isn't fearless when he leans in now for R's bare mouth. He knows full well R could bite him, but, he rationalizes, there are worse things that could happen. After all, he's already been a zombie once and doesn't remember a thing about it. It might be like putting this version of him to sleep, viral euthanasia for the Howard that can't sleep at night because he's too scared of the world and hates himself just a little too much. Compared to how he feels now, how he feels every day since Aunamee, zombification sounds good, even if the idea of hunger, endless hunger, rots the insides of his bones. At least R doesn't remember who he was.
He wants to be repulsed, because that's what a normal teenage boy would feel about kissing another guy, much less a zombie, he thinks. He wants R to bite him, dammit, and make everything go away in a hell of forgetfulness and appetance. And at the same time he wants R to kiss back, because that will mean that he's worth kissing back at all. He pulls R's tongue into his mouth and R's dried, useless tastebuds are like little grains of sand against Howard's teeth.
The way he kisses R is different than the way he kissed Eponine; desperate, yes, but hesitant here where with Eponine he had something to prove to her and everyone watching. Here he's just trying to disprove a theory to himself.
That's all.
zombie kissing
The words falter before they get anywhere close to his mouth, R freezing up when he feels Howard's hands fishing around in the dark, reaching for the muzzle's restraints just like Eponine did a long time ago. There aren't any Escorts sweeping in at the last second. It's just Howard and him and he's too shocked to say uh, maybe he better leave that where it is, for his own good. The hunger perks up as the muzzle drops down to his lap. It lies there, forgotten.
He daydreams about being kissed. Experienced it from Perry's eyes; how over time it became a chore for him, another way Perry Kelvin had to pretend he wasn't drifting away and there was only so far Julie could hold him back. His kisses stiff. Robotic. R stole that memory while he was chewing on Perry's cold brain, piece by piece. But he's never been kissed personally. What he has are snapshots: hand holding, kisses on the cheek, lips brushing against each other (in R's mind, both pairs of lips are warm, soft, and he's already out of the running because he's still a zombie in the end). He wishes he could kiss Julie. Would she flinch? Would she have second thoughts?
The thing is he never, ever, thought about kissing Howard Bassem.
It isn't what he expected. R doesn't pull back. He doesn't push the other boy away. Howard's lips burn against his - something in his jaw ticks like he wants to lunge forward and rip his mouth clean off. Somehow R pushes it back down. He already ate, technically. Wandered in here full with undead-tofu. Instead he sits there leaning up against the closet's wall like moldy furniture as Howard runs with it. His mouth crushes against R's cold one, pushing forward while R doesn't react because he doesn't remember how. He isn't ready.
Howard even takes it a step further by doing something with his tongue.
R's too stunned to kiss back, copy what Howard's doing because it's polite. He's dizzy with the smell of Living flesh this close, stuck in his mouth like Howard's just asking to get bit, that smell washing over everything. If this keeps up, he might start drooling. He squeezes his eyes shut. Concentrate. Keep it together.
Kissing R is exactly what it says on the tin: cold, unresisting, and stiff.
what a sexy icon
But barring this temporary crack in the wall, Howard's always been very good at denial, so he manages to completely avoid the conclusion that he's in tears because of what finding this so much more intense than kissing Eponine ever was means. The logical chain hangs somewhere in his mind, but the links are weak, and it's stretched slackless into some foggy place his thoughts don't dare wander.
He sits back in his corner, and a mop behind him tips over and falls against the closet door with a crack that sounds loud as a gunshot in the tight space. Howard startles with an electric jolt of panic, certain they've been caught, feet jerking and accidentally kicking R in the ankle, smacking his own head against the handle of a vacuum. It'll leave a black eye.
"Sorry, sorry." He reaches back over and picks up the muzzle. "Sorry. Sorry..."
He doesn't know if he's apologizing for being jumpy or for the kiss. He fixes the muzzle back to R's face like wrapping the bow onto a gift, right before you set it aside and under the tree. Right before you complete the act of giving something that is not, and never was, your own.
"Don't tell no one. Please. Please."
lolo
There’s a lot to process. He’s not even sure how he feels about his first kiss. All he knows is he sits there obediently while Howard sticks the muzzle back on his face, knotting the restraints carefully as if presentation matters. Are his hands trembling? Did it sink in how close he could've come to getting his face snapped off? R goes through everything he knows about humans, whether from watching them or getting to know them the old-fashioned, bloody way. Intimacy down to a pulsing cellular level. Every middle man taken out back and eaten alive.
He didn't get that with Howard back in the Arena. R looks at him, feels his presence alive in the dark, and he has literally no idea what he's thinking right now.
Eventually he needs to say something because if he doesn't, Howard's going to keep babbling away at him. His mouth still feels warm from the kiss, fading fast. R doesn't even register running his tongue over his dry lips or the croak that claws its way out of his throat as he groans again. The racket Howard makes only gets a slight flinch, a kind of Dead's delayed reaction as R struggles to multi-task here. One thing at a time.
"I don't...get," R says before it occurs to him maybe he should be reassuring Howard instead of grilling him. It's too late; he's already groaning and he'll need a few minutes to come up with even more to toss in there. R's lips flutter behind the muzzle as he sags forward. His tongue's gone cold again. "Why...did you...kiss me?"
Re: lolo
If R was hoping to stop Howard from babbling, he's failed spectacularly. "I don't know, I don't-I don't know, I just thought, I wanted to, I wanted you to know it was okay, I don't know what's wrong with me, I just-" He sobs and hiccups, and snot runs down between his fingers. He tucks his head like he's in an airplane waiting for a collision.
Something about Panem makes a sort of sick sense to him. He understands anger, he understands people without any real power liking to watch the ones even more helpless than them suffer on the big screen. If he were a citizen here, he'd probably kick back in a big fluffy chair and watch skinny little kids get bled to death on the screen. He'd eat popcorn, and he'd toss the rest out when he was full.
But this? These emotions, and dating, and friendship, and all of this squishy, unquantifiable crap untouched by the laws of survival? He doesn't have a clue. He feels like he's being radiocontrolled by some awful gamer on the other side of the screen, fucking with their dating sim. He has impulses and ideas and fantasies that don't line up with anything he's supposed to want, and the things he's supposed to want terrify him almost as much as the things he craves.
He reaches up and grabs an old extra Avox outfit and pulls it down on top of him, as if hiding under the covers from the world.
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And...now he's hiding.
R can't keep up.
The zombie sits there as Howard trembles underneath the mound of clothes, clean and patched and still not good enough for an Avox who might be seen by public eyes. Now it's been tossed out where one skinny little human uses it for cover, his elbows peeking out. Even though R can't see his face, he can still hear Howard sobbing away for all he's worth. They're ugly, desperate sounds, almost animal. Heartbreak? R's heard what humans sound like when they lose someone they care about: he's eaten parents, their kids, their husbands and wives, and sometimes (he hated this), he'd heard the survivor's grief. It did strange things, cut across the lump of meat in his chest.
Sometimes he wondered if they were lucky when they, too, disappeared under all those grasping, hungry hands. They did stop crying.
After a few minutes, R decides he better do something. Check on Howard. Do anything but sit there and go dead silent, retreating into his skull. As far as he can tell, he's alive and breathing and technically he should be okay, all things considered.
R's head lifts off a few centimeters from where it'd drifted to rest on his shoulder. The muzzle tilts in the light from underneath the door, his mouth forming around the vowels and consonants before he slaps them together into words.
"...Howard?" he asks, moan tentative.
Re: lolo
But the hypothetical solution evades him, and the ugly sobs ripping their way out his throat are a paltry language.
He wonders if zombies are capable of crying. It flashes like a light on the highway through his mind, cutting through the dark, this idea that R's even more trapped than he is. That they're locked up in the same way, with a million things stitched in and only small, useless ways to try and relieve the pressure. They're like animated cysts begging to be drained, the two of them.
"Why do they have to keep bringing us back?" he asks R when the crying's subsided enough to let him speak. He pulls the Avox outfit off from over his head, although he clutches it close to him like a security blanket. "It's just...it's not worth it, to keep fighting for our lives. They should just do us a favor and let us go."
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"Ugh...Don’t…know, How-ward," R moans, trying to sound supportive. It's the least he can do.
Howard's voice has a rasp to it like he's run out of tears for now and he's going on fumes. Does Howard really want that? R thinks about final death and not his shuffling brand, and then he tries to picture a world without Howard Bassem, crossed out permanently with a single red stroke. His eyes itch, like they had back in the cave when he listened to Howard dying, then Julie, and then he’d stopped thinking at all. Probably phantom tears. Humans do that (look at Howard). Maybe once upon a time he could do that too.
“Stay,” R’s being selfish, but he’s a zombie – he takes and takes and never gives. R defaults to grabbing on and holding tight. “Want you…to…stay.”
Even if he doesn’t understand the kiss or how all the emotions swirl into a soup for Howard, he does know at least he wants the little guy to live. R shifts where he’s slouched up against the wall, bumping into buckets and bottles of cleaner and he nearly knocks that broom back into Howard’s face before he locates his knee.
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