thecapitol | Their Souls Dangling Inside Out from Their Mouths [Open]

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Their Souls Dangling Inside Out from Their Mouths [Open]

Who| Punchy and Open
What| Punchvox is in da house.
Where| Training Center
When| Before gas leak.
Warnings| Avox, mentions of torture.

It took a while to break the new Avox in. There was the physical brutality, of course, but the psychological regimen had to be implemented, and that took a while. It's been several weeks since the poorly-formatted message took over all of the network devices and televisions. Punchy hasn't been seen since then.

The boy who shows up in the Training Center now seems smaller, divided by some imperceptible distance from the name he once held so proudly. The spiky red hair is cut short, clean and functional like the other Avoxes. His eyes are lowered, body no longer held with casual swagger but instead like furniture covering, existing only to hide and protect what blunt form is beneath. His hands shake slightly as he takes a sponge and a mop and starts to clean up the room where the weapons are, weapons he flinches at when he sees them. He avoids the glints of blades as if they're the eyes of angry accusers or worse, stern teachers.

His fingers drum for a few beats, just a slice of time, on the handle of his mop. Just for a second, something winks out. Then he's back to work.

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AndrAIa heads to the Training Center for her daily practice. She's gotten used to seeing the silent servants cleaning the place. She almost overlooks the one there now, but something about him seems familiar. She pauses and circles around so she can see his face and immediately breaks into a smile. "Punchy! You are back!"

But almost as soon her joy is gone, replaced with worry. There's something very different, very wrong about him; the closest she had ever seen before was Enzo, after the game they had lost. Punchy had the same defeated look to him, only... worse. She shudders in sympathy and reaches out a hand.

Punchy winces away from her hand. For the moment, it's the only indication he gives that he's even noticed her there at all. He managed to make it through two Arenas with his spirit intact, but now it appears to have been sucked out entirely.

AndrAIa is standing on a patch of floor that he needs to mop, but he can hardly ask her to move, so he just stands there and silently prays that she won't press the issue too hard. They tried to sever his connection with God, back there. Sometimes he think they might have succeeded.

All he can see with AndrAIa is the young woman's corpse that he tried to bury. That Tim forced him to leave alone, because he was bleeding too much to dig even a shallow grave.

Holiday sat and watched Punchy work for a long time. When she had first walked in, she almost ran to him with fear and worry, but she decided to give it a minute. He had changed, that was for certain. They had hurt him deeply and there was nothing that she could do to fix it. There was likely nothing that anyone could do.

She should have been there for him. She should have looked for him as soon as it happened.

Holiday doesn't say anything, she's not supposed to talk or interact with the Avoxes anyway, but she approaches him and stands close, waiting to see if he'll make some sort of move of acknowledgment.

He doesn't. He's not supposed to make eye contact, and he's not as accustomed as the other Avoxes yet to looking at someone without letting the gaze meet. He has to keep his head down entirely.

But he does stop when he realizes he's mopping her feet. A streak of water sloshes over her shoes, and he would apologize but there's no way he can. It's not just that his voice has been taken; it's that there are scars between the insides of his knuckles where they punished him for hand gestures, that there's a part of his mouth that doesn't move right because one of his trainers decided it was too expressive.

So he just watches the water drying on her shoe.

She doesn't pay attention to the water or her shoes. Holiday watches him closely, trying to pick out something that will tell her he's still okay.

She wants to apologize, in front of the people and cameras and everything, but it doesn't really come out since she fears that he won't be able to reply in turn.

Instead, Holiday takes a couple of steps forward and wraps him in a useless, but firm hug. What else could she do? Fix this?

He freezes. There's not much else he can do. He could push her off, theoretically, if he weren't scared to, if he actually wanted to - but the truth is he finds some comfort in her arms.

For a long time, Punchy took pride in how long he withstood the torture. Now he just regrets postponing it, and a more spiteful person might blame Holiday, or Joan, or Tim or Duke or Flora, for giving him some memories to anchor himself to for the days it took to crack him.

He subtly squeezes back.

Holiday wasn't thinking, honestly. She wasn't entirely sure if either of them would end up punished for this, but it didn't matter at all right now.

"I'm so sorry." It's all she can say or feels allowed to. She doesn't have any excuses and forgiveness seems stupid a thing to ask after. Sorry doesn't help, but it's the only thing she's really got.

He doesn't break away from her. He waits for her to make the move, because passivity has become his new code. Having been punished for doing things, he's been redirected into doing nothing.

But she's warm and he appreciates the gesture as he slightly, slightly relaxes into it.

She wants to tell him that she'll fix it and she almost does, but Holiday refuses to make promises that could fall through. One like that could fall through in the worst way.

She still makes the promise, though, just without telling him.

Holiday feels him relax just the tiniest fraction, so she stays where she is for a moment longer, closing her eyes and just being there.

He's not allowed to let go until she does. He wants to whisper into her ear, and he tries, he actually tries to push through the sudden wave of fresh, bloody memories the Capitol made to try and get him to never try to speak again.

All he can do is mouth words at her.

She shifts, realizing that he's trying to speak, and pulls slightly away from him but still holds him close.

"No, no. It's okay. Please. It's okay." She would love nothing more than to teach him sign language, but she can't right now. There would be very little other opportunity... actually, there may not be any, but she had to see him again at some point.

When she pulls away, he lets his grip on her go slack, like a doll waiting to be positioned. His arms circle her but don't hold her anymore.

He can't force himself to meet her eyes.

That's okay. She's shaking a little and her hand finds the side of his face gently, but-

"It'll be okay." She wants to promise him a whole hell of a lot, but not here. She'll fix this somehow. Maybe not completely--definitely not completely--but she'll fix this.

He wants to nod. He wants to be the brave, devil-may-care kid she met.

But he can't make himself, even for her, so he just goes back to mopping.

Joan doesn't spend much time in the training center. She refuses to kill anyone in the arena who's not directly threatening her or one of her friends, and even then she'd prefer to disable them instead of striking a fatal blow. That's what she's doing in the weapons room, seeing what they had for that purpose. She doesn't expect something so unusual as a single stick, but maybe there's a baton.

The avoxes creep Joan out, but considering how the civilians treat them, she goes out of her way to catch their eye, acknowledge their presence, treat them like people. When she passes the boy, she looks at him, begins to offer him a smile.

Then stops, the smile fleeing her face.

"Oh my god."

There's a new jumpiness in Punchy, something that reacts to the outside world even when they've drilled it so deeply into him to avoid doing so. Loud noises spring some nerve inside him, one that managed to stay undercover for the duration of two Arenas but is now raw and exposed.

A shudder runs through his shoulders as he glances up and sees Joan, as he forces his face blank. As he pushes recognition off his features.

He keeps mopping.

It's a subtle reaction, but Joan has been trained to notice subtle things, both as a surgeon and a detective. He seems to recognize her, so this isn't another case of doubles across the worlds, or someone who just bears a striking resemblance to her friend. The way he recognized her suggests he isn't just pretending. Something awful has happened.

She steps closer, but not too close, wanting to give him some space so he doesn't panic. She wants to ask him what happened, but if it is what she suspects, he won't answer. He won't be able to.

"Hey," she says, her voice very soft. "I need you to do something for me. If you understand what I'm saying, I need you to tap your fingers against the handle of the mop. Can you do that?"

He tries not to think about it as communicating. He tries to think about it as taking orders. As an Avox he's supposed to disappear - and that, he realizes, is the last thing he's ever wanted to do. He's never wanted to melt into crowds and walls and floors; he's wanted to stand out, to be celebrated, to be recognized.

Now there's nothing he craves more than to cease being entirely.

He taps his fingers, a beat that echoes some long forgotten diss rap, the last pieces of himself stained indelibly into his brain. They scrubbed the important parts; some of the quirks escaped intact.

He taps, and she tilts her head.

"Good."

Good. That's good. At the very least he can hear her and understand her.

"Okay, tap once for yes, twice for no. Do you remember your name?"

She wants to know how far they went in "reprogramming" him.

He taps once. He still remembers who he is. Punchy - Matthew O'Connor - Matty - just because he remembers that person doesn't mean he can reach it. It occurs to him that this new person he's become is another stage in his life, one without a name, because Avoxes aren't supposed to be individuals.

But he's still Punchy. He had that name emblazoned on his chest too many times to forget it. And he remembers bristling whenever anyone called him Matthew and rolling his eyes when Flora called him Matty. Those parts of him can't be taken away, even if they take his voice and his spirit.

"Good." That's a start, something they can build from. He remembers his name, hopefully he remembers things that are connected with it. Tendrils of his former life. She doesn't know enough about him to explore those, though. She'll have to find someone who does. For the moment, though, she'll work with what she does know.

"You recognize me. Do you remember my name?"

Edited 2013-09-30 03:34 (UTC)

Punchy nods. Part of him wishes he could explain, wishes he could tell her it's still him, he's just learned not to talk, to keep his head down, to avoid the Peacekeepers again-

-but when he thinks about how to tell her that, the memories of that awful office building return, of being injected with hallucinogens and having his tongue cut out.

He goes back to mopping.

Okay, good. If he knows enough to remember her, there's probably still a good deal of him intact mentally.

But physically? He's dressed like an Avox. But his silence could be psychological, right?

She moves closer, and reaches out to touch the back of his hand gently, watching to see how he reacts before she starts to delve into more painful things.

He winces slightly, but doesn't recoil from her. He keeps his eyes purposefully averted, demure in a way that doesn't fit his tall and muscular stature.

She debates briefly with herself, whether or not to ask. Because asking will doubtless be painful, and she doesn't want to cause him more pain. But she needs to know what they've done.

She leaves her hand where it is, gentle on the back of his.

"Did they do it? Did they make you an Avox?"

Because he's asked a direct question, and only because he's asked a direct question, he nods. And stares at the wall behind her shoulder.

Oh God.

The sadness on Joan's expression doesn't even begin to convey the anger and grief she feels for what they've done to him. If they were at home, she would track down the people who did this to him and make them pay. But those people are the "justice" here, and a profound sense of powerlessness overcomes her. She wants to tell him they'll pay, but she can't. She wants to tell him she won't let them hurt him again, but she can't.

"I'm sorry," she says, her voice quiet but tight. "I'm going to do whatever I can to help you whenever I can. If you ever need anything, you can always come to me."

She wishes those words didn't feel so terribly empty.

It's the fact that he can't say anything - not even that he's tongueless, but that there's this new specter of fear, that they'll take him back to the Peacekeeping Center, that they'll get her in trouble and do the same to her as they have to him - that makes up his mind.

Since she's not giving him a direct order, he goes back to mopping, and turns his back.

He turns away, and Joan takes a step back, looking at him with a sad wariness, fighting back a twist of hurt at the rejection. She's powerless here. She knows it. He knows it.

"Take care of yourself," she says softly, before turning as well and heading for the door.

R's starting to run out of spots to lurch and think in.

His Escort's learning. And he's avoiding the closet because he isn't prepared for what might happen if he goes back and Howard springs another kiss on him. Not yet.

Training Center it is. R wanders until he bumps into one of the doors, rights himself, and wobbles inside. His arms flop side to side like he's forgotten that left-right-left everyone else has mastered, not particularly alert because there's no point. His shoes, worn already from the shuffling, squeaks and skids across the newly mopped floor, ruining the Avox's hard work.

He doesn't realize he's not the only one here until he looks up and spots a red head. Fingers wrapped around a mop's handle that looks familiar because he almost stripped them to the bone awhile ago. At that close range, even R holds onto that memory. He can't remember his birthday or his parent's anniversary or even what was the last thing he said to them but he can remember that damn watering hole just fine. The rest of Punchy, though, is different enough that R pauses. He's quiet, for starters. No motor-mouth. There's a strange limp slouch in his shoulders that he swore wasn't there before. Maybe he better start things rolling if Punchy isn't going to.

R shambles up, already prepared to groan by the time he's close enough to make eye contact. "Hu-hi, Punchy...need...help?"

It's a big floor for one set of hands. R's pretty sure even he can help with mopping. It's repetitive and mindless.

Punchy smells R before he sees him. There's that distinctive scent of perfume laying over the smell of rot like a white shirt over a dark bra, feigning polite but ultimately futile.

Without his protective shield of ego, Punchy finds himself somehow scared of R in a way he wasn't back in the Arena. The hairs on his arms raise slightly, the ones on the back of his neck winking out from above the high grey-white collar of the Avox uniform. He feels a tightening in his gut, an uncertainty that sneaks up to his throat. His knuckles go white around the handle of the broom.

Punchy's not supposed to relay information, only follow orders. In that way, questions seem like a devious sort of catch-22, and Punchy quietly resents that R uses up the energy required to communicate on setting such a trap for him.

So he just shakes his head, the last refuge left to his voice a simple gesture in his neck. He doesn't need help. Needing help means he just needs to work harder here, to avoid notice.

What's going on? R reviews anything he did wrong, but he's sure he hadn't attacked Punchy in the Arena and he hadn't said anything obviously insulting. He would've remembered cracking his skull open and learning the secrets to what made Punchy Punchy, from his slang to how he felt about his red hair. Why isn't he running his mouth off like he did back there at the watering hole? R's stare wobbles but he's still fixed on the human's face all the same, a little puzzled frown working its way onto his face.

"...Quiet...?" R asks, punctuating it with a questioning grunt. "Not...you."

There's a missing word in there - he thinks he meant to interject "like" in there that got lost in translation - but he thinks the gist is still obvious.

This is the part where Punchy would shrug and loll back and brush it off. 'Breezy', he'd say. 'Still frosty, just flossing'. There's still some part of him entirely allergic to having people worry about him, and it makes the muscles around his stomach and throat constrict, a little lance of sour pain run up his hands.

The divide between the person inside and the person his fear is making him is wide, and filled with water, and he's too heavy to swim across.

Still me, he wants to say. But as he can't - as his tongue still isn't healed, is instead a bloody, ripped crater that still oozes in his mouth, as wet scabs form and slide down his throat - he just shakes his head, then gestures with a shaking hand at his mouth.

Still not talking. R catches the tremble to his hand, and he's almost sure Punchy's pointing at his mouth. There's something with his mouth? He's human, he can talk and R knows for a fact this human likes to talk just to hear himself speak. All this silence doesn't fit him. Or his clothes, for that matter. They're tailored, but something about them looks...weird. Makes Punchy seem to curl in on himself instead of feeling larger than life back at the desert.

R leans forward, his face gray and blank, getting close enough to almost tickle the human's nose with his muzzle.

Show me?. He can do anything about it, but he'd like to know, all the same. It was one of those pushy parts of R's personality that had the other corpses shuffling around in a wide circle around him when it wasn't feeding time.

The smell doesn't bother Punchy, but the invasion into his space does. After time, Avoxes get used to not having a personal bubble of their own, but for the moment it makes Punchy's skin raise in little bumps like a flock of birds up a cliff.

He doesn't want to respond to the question that hangs, asked but silent, between them, but he is bound to reply to questions, to answer them in the spirit they're meant. So he opens his mouth.

There's not even a stump, just a socket where the tongue was ripped out entirely, just some exposed, cauterized nerve. It makes his teeth look smaller, somehow, surrounded by the void in the pit of his jaw. The gums around the inside of his teeth are still bruised, blackish brown and with white pockmarks of infected pustules.

He waits for R to respond to close it.

R stands there wobbling, peering into the darkness. It takes him a moment to realize what he's looking at: no tongue, just a cavity where there should be a strip of muscle flexing and forming all those words. Arena? After? R stares instead for a little while longer, the seconds dragging, before he finally leans away. It's not totally rotten in there, but it does look bad, for a human - the gums in particular look like they're in the early days of zombification.

"Ugh," R moans, feeling sorry for Punchy. So he can't speak? R knows what it's like to be trapped without no outlet...and he still has his tongue. "How...?"

R's glazed by on what it means to be an Avox - he's only familiar with what his Escort babbles about and she takes them for granted. Treats them like part of the scenery because in her world, that's all they are. R's suddenly aware of his own tongue thick and swollen in his mouth. Should he stop speaking? Will that be easier? He could stand there next to Punchy and share space with him, if that helps. Help mop. Even R thinks he can manage mopping, after years of watching that one Dead janitor doing it over and over and over.

It takes a while for Punchy to remember that he can make gestures. They've wired it out of him so intensely that the normal enthusiasm he moves his hands and body with seems like a language he has to relearn. The motions come out strange, accented, something like a child speaking in their first Spanish class.

He holds one hand out flat, balancing the mop handle against his shoulder, and brings the other hand down on his palm in a decisive chopping motion. The little smack of flesh and flesh seems to echo in the room.

R stares at Punchy's hands, then back up at his face, as if he could see how the tongue had been separated filament by filament, the muscle tearing. The blood, so fresh it's red. Even he can figure out what the gesture means.

"Still...hurt...?" R asks. His groan is gentle, a few steps up above a whisper. No wonder Punchy's so subdued. The biggest thing about him had been taken away.

Because it's a direct question, because the communication is forced, Punchy nods his head slightly. It's not the physical pain, though there is that; it's the awareness of that. It's thinking of things he's going to tell people for three seconds then remembering he never will. It's opening his mouth to talk to himself and stopping at the lance of pain through the bottom of his jaw.

It's waking up, every single time.

He shrugs.

The nod's so small it almost looks invisible - the only reason R catches it is he's used to barely there reactions from the other corpses, the borderline invisible things that tell him he's not the only person trapped. There's other ghosts, too. You just have to know how to read them.

Or at least make an educated guess.

"Help...you? You had...nice voice," R says regretfully.

Punchy doesn't even bother to shake his head here. Why bother?

The compliment should have hit him like a Cupid's arrow, burrowing in his chest and filling him with light. He used to run on compliments, a machine of ego fueled and slicked by praise. But instead R's remorseful comment burrows into his skin slightly, warm for a few moments before it dies somewhere in his flesh, like a worm's corpse inside a rotting apple.

He goes back to mopping.

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Their Souls Dangling Inside Out from Their Mouths [Open]

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