thecapitol | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

Their Souls Dangling Inside Out from Their Mouths [Open]

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