thecapitol | Nothing wants to stay the same. [CLOSED]

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Nothing wants to stay the same. [CLOSED]

Who | Sigma and Howard
What | Sigma gives Howard medicine, bad advice, and Howard gives Sigma the flu.
Where | District 10 Suite, Sigma's room.
When | Before the Aliens plot.
Warnings/Notes | Flu stuff, unhappy cats, probably references to violence.

Sigma's apartment was, as usual, impeccably organized, not so much a living space as storage. It was almost certainly the antithesis of Howard's room: the Doctor's notebooks were sorted and stored, his clothes folded and put away, his bed made without the assistance of an Avox and without a wrinkle. The only evidence that the room was in use at all were the cat toys strewn across the floor, and a single framed headshot of Kyle Sigma kept on the nightstand: a memorial complete with an offering of a single vased flower, lest he let his failure as a parent go unrecognized.

A package of decongestant in hand, Sigma waited for Howard as calmly as he could. From behind the bathroom door Nye howled indignantly, furious to have been locked away from his master and guests - Sigma had easily decided he was more concerned with Nye catching the virus than Howard taking the cat's confinement the wrong way. There was also the matter of Howard's actions in the previous Arena: the boy had killed Neffa, one of the only adult Tributes Sigma had come to trust, and the magician had failed to return. Internally, Sigma was livid, and hoped to keep his temper down so that his anger would not slip through his lips and damage their relationship further. With a battle on the horizon and an illness to contend with, nothing could come of fighting over it now. Perhaps when Howard was better and the date of their next Arena was set, Sigma would consider scolding him.

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"I'll try now. I just..." He coughs again. "I don't sleep good."

When he's alone, he has to curl up in tight spots to feel secure. Having someone watching over him will help, he hopes, as long as he doesn't focus on how embarrassed he'll be when he wakes up crying and begging for mercy from invisible assailants in his sleep.

"That is fine. I will stay here," Sigma assures. He likes to think he understands what is it like to have a difficult sleep, with his exaggerated dreams of being torn to shred by blades and waking up to find the nightmare waiting for him. To give him some peace he does not watch the boy directly, but folds his hands on his lap and stares at the wall- mercifully, not the side with Kyle's photograph propped on the nightstand- keeping Howard in his peripheral vision. "Sleep well, Howard."

And for a while, he does, despite the cough and rattling, popping sound in his chest when he breathes deep, despite the chills that crawl into his muscles and make them tighten and cramp. It's a light but dreamless affair, interspersed only by occasional sniffs and twitches.

It's a few hours in when the fear that soaks his waking hours slithers back into the subconscious it came from and wreaks its havoc there. Howard kicks his feet, fights invisible hands around his wrists, moans and whimpers. Wordless syllables kick out of his mouth in little barks and yelps.

Sigma had only moved to turn out the light once Howard had fallen asleep, and was beginning to doze off himself, still seated upright on the bed after three hours. He was snapped back into focus by Howard's thrashing behind him. Concerned and alarmed, Sigma neared the boy carefully, avoiding his frantic attacks and taking him by the shoulder.

"Howard. Wake up," he pleaded, shaking him gently out of his dream. He hadn't expected it to be as bad as this.

For an instant, the shake doesn't register, and the man holding him down in his dream with a knife tickling his navel is just grasping him harder. Tears fall, teeth grit, and he lurches out of Sigma's hand - only to be snapped into reality by the sound of his name.

"Dad?"

The overhead light, which they've left on, burns radial halos into his eyes, and he blinks up at Sigma's face through two beads of sweat collected on his lashes. His chest heaves with each breath.

Sigma froze. For a moment he forgets that Howard was asking for someone else and his face twists with heartache. The realization hits him once he begins to wipe the sweat from Howard's brow with his sleeve and he takes a breath to calm himself, his cold mask returning in time for Howard's eyes to adjust.

"It's me," he says quietly. "It's Sigma. Relax. You're alright. You're in my room."

He could feel the heat radiate through his cuff and the Doctor realizes with a a start that he's never been in this position before. Howard's fever was running high, it wasn't time to take the next dose of medication, and Sigma didn't know what else to do about it.

The rest of the details sink into place like ink along a stamp well. His father vanished two years ago. He's here, in Panem, in a bed much bigger than anything they could ever fit in his bedroom in California. There are no plastic glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling with blue putty.

"Sorry," he whispers. He tries to relax, but when he closes his eyes the memory of Aunamee, from both dreams and reality, comes lunging back up out of the darkness. He focuses his eyes on Sigma's, instead - the metallic one, and the one ringed with wrinkles and lines. "I got confused."

He wet the bed once, when he was in his District room, a few nights after he woke up from the ice Arena. He was too ashamed to even let the Avox who came into his room see it and clean it up, although he wouldn't be surprised if the servant smelled it. For an instant he worries that that's happened again, but no, he's just sweating, the damp of his clothing and the sheet is only that.

His cough kicks in again, irritated by the heavy breathing, and he lays back into the pillow - not flopping like last time, but gingerly, as if every nerve is too sensitive in this state. "Please don't tell no one."

The Doctor sighs long and painfully. "No... There's nothing to apologize for," Sigma says gently, "and nothing to tell. It's alright, now."

He knows he cannot fix the problem, cannot chase Howard's nightmares away without replacing them with something benign. Nye slept on the bathroom rug and for a moment Sigma had half a mind to remove him, but instead Sigma raises the blankets to Howard's neck carefully, tucks them in at his shoulders, mimicking an ancient memory of his mother with hope it could help.

Finally Sigma slips his glove from his right hand and touches Howard's forehead as if to check his fever. He knew what temperature to expect already, but thought the soft touch of skin might calm him down. "It's alright," he repeats.

And then he's seized by a pang of guilt - he wishes he had turned Kyle's photo down or had put it away. This is not something he'd want those already betrayed eyes to see.

"Liar," Howard wheezes. But it doesn't matter that he doesn't actually believe that everything's alright, doesn't matter that hope and health are both so terribly far away - the fact that someone's willing to lie to him means more than a pleasant truth ever could.

There are parts of Howard that want nothing more than to be protected and cared for in a way he's been so deprived of for years, and those pieces of him bend to Sigma's touch like sunflowers to the light.

He burns under Sigma's palm, the area around his mouth made pale from sickness. "Last time I was this sick was my first Arena. I was the first one to get dropped midway through, you know?"

He forces his eyes away from Sigma's, then from Sigma's night table, up to the ceiling. "Tell me about your kid?"

"You will beat this before the next," Sigma assures. He isn't sure there's anything else to say and he doesn't like the image of the boy suffering alone in the Arena that's come into his head.

And then Howard's question blindsides him, strikes him before he can realize it's coming, and Sigma shudders. Despite Howard's fever, the room seems very cold, now.

"Kyle..?" he says weakly once he's recovered through unfocused eyes. It's less of a question than an excuse to say his name, for it's the first time he's openly admitted it. Deciding he would like, after all, to talk about him with someone, Sigma removes his hand from Howard's forehead and crosses his arms. Where to begin with that boy? His life was nothing at all like the one Howard had lived and it would be hard for him to relate.

Sigma's voice is almost a whisper when he begins, launching into his story without further invitation. "Kyle... Kyle and I lived alone on the moon. He was born there," and the way Sigma says it makes the potentially funny situation quite sober. "After the mass extinction, Earth had become a wasteland. Both the environment and the few survivors were potentially too savage to restore any semblance of normalcy. I needed a place where I could work in private, and there were many underground communities that survived peacefully on the moon."

He pauses to sigh. "...In fact, it would be wrong to say that Kyle was 'born' at all. He was my clone," he admits gravely, quickly adding "but I must stress that it changes nothing. He was my clone, and he was my son. Do not regard him any differently than you would anyone else." He fears, for an instant, that Howard would think of Kyle as inhuman. He knew Kyle was already quite difficult to like.

At first he worries that he's offended Sigma, that that stunned look on his face is just the preface to the decision to leave. He relaxes slightly when Sigma starts to talk instead, nodding a little at the name of Sigma's kid.

"My best friend's a rock monster and my girlfriend's a French prostitute," Howard says. His voice is more just a breath than a sentence. "I don't judge."

He curls up in the fetal position, listening to Sigma talk, shivering slightly. It sounds nice, living alone, away from all the threats and harshness of the destroyed world. To be alone, with one person. To know, simply because leaving wasn't an option, that their world had to orbit around you. He's so used to being second choice - even Eponine prefers another man - that the idea of having someone to himself, not sexually, not romantically, but simply having them to himself, sounds like paradise.

Sigma almost chuckles. Ah, Orc. He wasn't aware the two of them were friends. Duly noted...

Unfortunately the reality was far from the pleasant hypotheses of Howard's imagination. Satisfied Howard had accepted Kyle's background, Sigma continues. "I raised him on my own... with some difficulty. As we were on the moon, gravity was much less than it was on Earth and without certain measures in place Kyle would not have developed properly. He had to be completely encased in a metal suit to compensate for the weight reduction. I am sure you can imagine babies are already handfuls without being practically made out of iron..."

There were many fresh dents in the considerably tough walls and tables, and bright white bruises on Sigma's strong arms, for years to come. He remembered fondly the first time Kyle discovered removing his suit turned their entire home effectively into a trampoline. Though Sigma had scolded him harshly for this transgression, and had later installed a restraining system, it wasn't long before Kyle got around it and did it again in 'secret'.

"He grew to be quite expressionless as a result, as I am sure you have noticed. But he was a bright child nonetheless. Kyle enjoyed reading very much, playing games, making up his own stories..." The hours the boy had spent playing 'house' and having tea with his rabbit was not unknown to him. "He took after me as he got older. He wanted to get his PhD in Genetics and worked very hard towards it. I was so proud of him..." For perhaps the first time Sigma genuinely smiles, beaming with joy. Those years were as if they could have had a future together.

Though Sigma realizes he should perhaps stop to give Howard a word, he does not, continuing to share his memories selfishly. "Those stories filled him with strange ideas. I suspect after a few novels he believed the nuclear family was a sacred and unbreakable concept. He asked me if I would give him a mother as though I could make one appear out of the air. He was not satisfied with anything less... Well, I am sure you remember Akane. She was kind enough to volunteer, but not before he had already become an adult. I owe that woman more than I can afford."

There is a silence, long enough to invite comment, but Sigma cuts it short at the last moment. "...I had my task to complete, as you recall," the one that had involved planning the murder of several innocent people and required no repeating. "I was unable to look after him the way I should have and he did not think much of me as a result. He... He grew up with a very warped sense of morality. He could not discern right from wrong and could be quite violent when he wanted to. Akane has killed more than you would consider for her frailty and would not have set him straight from those ways even if she had thought to - and it was not her responsibility to begin with. The things he had done here... Please, do not blame him. He did not understand..." No doubt others had noted Kyle's plot to kill Don in his first Arena. But how could Kyle have known it was bad? He was only following the rules obediently as they had been explained to him, like a child would.

"He may have been 22, but he was still just a boy. He had never been outside. He had never lived in a functional society. He did not know what it was like to meet others his age and have friends. He did not know what was and what was not appropriate, that men his age did not play, could not comprehend personal romance, did not cope well with loss, did not know how to handle his temper or hurt feelings..." He is clearly rambling, now.

"I wanted... to show him..." Sigma cannot continue. His eyes have glossed over with tears and he dare not go on. Oh, how he loved his son. Oh, how he had failed, and now he might lose Howard and Eponine as well. His chest heaves a breath stuck in his throat and he suppresses a sob. "...It's all my fault," he says heavily at last, lost.

Howard listens patiently, finding that he thinks it's more important for Sigma to say these things than it is for Howard to really hear them. His fever pulls and tugs at the corners of his mind, dragging some of Sigma's words askance, warping the sounds and echoing them in strange hymns in Howard's ears.

But he hears enough, and when he feels the tension coming into Sigma's voice, the crack not completed because there's just a little too much control to make it show. Sounds going tight under the pressure of sorrow.

He's never lost like that, but he understands grief. And he understands burying it rather than tackling it head on. He knows, deep down, that he hides his under anger, under the betrayal of being left behind, and knows that other people drown theirs in guilt.

He's never felt closer to someone.

He snakes a hand out from under the blankets and rubs the back of Sigma's back gingerly. "It's okay, man. It's okay."

Sigma shakes his head, taking long breaths to collect himself. He cannot cry in front of Howard, but he allows the hand to remain on his back without jerking away.

"It isn't, Howard. I told you already," he says sharply, his anger misdirected. But instead of leaving Howard to wonder he looks to the ceiling, balancing tears that have not fallen yet in the white of his eye, and clarifies with a tremble to his voice. "I had to kill him. My ability would only work if I had witnessed death and Kyle was one of the people I was ordered to watch die," he gasps. "My own son! ...But if I could turn back time and alter the past, I could arrive in a time where Kyle would never have to go through that. At least, that was what I had believed." It was no secret to Howard that Sigma had failed.

"And then we came here. I thought if could ensure his victory, it would be no different than if I had succeeded earlier. Look at where that got us," he says finally.

Howard shrinks from Sigma's tone, although he keeps his hand where it is, and launches into a coughing fit that brings tears to his eyes. It stings, the misdirected hurt, Sigma splashing at around at himself and at Howard because there's too much to fit inside. This is the difference between here and the FAYZ, that he is forced, by circumstances or decisions he doesn't understand, to be vulnerable. To trust that sick, underweight, scared, miserable, helpless, he doesn't have to fear their potential blows.

Maybe if he weren't coughing, he'd change his mind and run our the door.

His throat is barely settled when Sigma explains. He breathes deep, his lungs full of nettles. He has to pee, but he's not going to abandon one of his only friends in the war on grief.

"Well, that's your problem. You hope too much." It's a sarcastic comment, but warm. The next one is sincere, unshielded, sad. "You tried. You did him better than some people do. Than my parents..."

He doesn't have to finish that sentence.

"He loved you. We talked a few times."

Howard's backhanded compliment gives Sigma pause. He had never belived he hoped more or less than anyone else and assumed it was a universal phenomenon. "Maybe I do," he admits softly, but it is not when it comes to things he can no longer change, for he immediately denies Howard's claim. "It's a nice thought, Howard," he says quietly, "but you do not need to lie for me." It is unclear if he is talking about the comparison to Howard's parents or Kyle's feelings.

Sigma wonders, briefly, if he's done Howard any good at all, either. Perhaps if he hasn't, it would not be too late to start.

"...I've kept you up," he announces, rubbing his eye with the back of his hand and clearing away any tears that remain. "You are not going to get any better if we stay up talking."

He rolls his eyes in the dark. "Oh, fuck off. Me and him talked a few times. I don't say mushy shit just to stroke your ego. I meant it."

He's been taken for a liar so many times that it doesn't really hurt not to be believed any more. He brushes it off - the real hurt comes from feeling as if he's being chased out of Sigma's room. He knows logically he should go back to his room and sleep there, but all that waits for him there is four walls filled with junk and a stuffed rabbit and a tribble. He doesn't want to need company, but he's loath to leave it.

"Fine, fine, I'm leaving." There's a sulking tone that's all too settled into his voice. He sits up in the bed, shoulders jerking as chills pluck at muscles. His body aches everywhere, and when he rubs his hand over his face he realizes just how high a temperature he's running. He stands up and sets off another bout of coughing, then sits back down.

He doesn't have it in him to ask for help, for someone to make sure he gets back to District 1 without passing out in the elevator, so instead he just drops his head into his hands and shivers.

Though it isn't the first time Howard has been curt with him, it is the first time he's been so sharp, and Sigma is taken aback at his language. Again he fears he has offended him by trying to do him good, and this terror comes to life as Howard gets up to leave. Sigma rises, ready to pursue. "Howard, wait-.."

The boy's exit is interrupted by the coughing fit and Sigma worriedly rushes over to him. He catches him as he takes his seat, a hand on his back supporting him upright in the bed, and reaches to pull the blankets around his shoulders. Howard's hands cover his face and so Sigma holds the sheets around him until the chill has passed.

Sigma sits steeped in regret for a moment before he speaks. "Please, calm down. I was not asking you to leave, I promise." Emotional exhaustion is apparent in his voice now, like an overtired parent who can not relax until their fussing child is at rest. "I only wanted you to fall back to sleep. This could be serious. I am concerned for you..."

It is difficult to even watch him as he shudders. His fingers tighten around Howard protectively as if he could shield him from his illness. Sigma has accepted that this suffering, miserable, shaking ball will be him in not too long, but it is better Howard has him now than never at all. His voice drops to almost a whisper. "...And, thank you. Forgive me for not believing you. It is hard, Howard. It is very, very hard." Sigma looked up from the child and his eyes met a once identical pair on Kyle's photograph. His heart clenches in his chest and he can do nothing but believe Howard was right in order to assuage it.

A low whimper sneaks out of Howard's lungs and he leans into Sigma.

In a moment he reaches his fingers out and finds the blanket around his shoulders, tugging at it and pulling it tighter around himself. He takes a deep breath that feels like it's being tugged over gravel. He's nauseated from the coughing, and he licks away a bit of drool that's threatening to drip over the edge of his lip. His nostrils flare as he tries to exhale the chills out.

And his insides are empty, bereft of any more spite to throw at Sigma. He lets the apology waft in. He lets the concern come in. True, honest to god concern - someone caring if he were to die in his sleep, or need to go to the hospital (it dimly occurs to him that that's a possibility in this place). And he sucks it in and hoards it, this feeling of being cared for when he's spent so many nights knowing not a person in the world would be bothered if he were gone. It's a panacea stronger than any drug.

After a few moments the chills subside a bit, the dizziness giving way to clarity, although his breath is still a shallow scrape and he still feels as if every joint is misplaced.

I know it's hard, he wants to say, believe me, I know. I don't hang out with people who don't got it hard.

Doesn't spend time with people who aren't like him, denying the love they're given out of fear it'll turn out false.

"Sorry. We should go downstairs." His voice is hoarse. "I need to use the bathroom and I don't want to get your cat sick. And I have some sleep medication up there."

Edited 2013-11-08 03:55 (UTC)

Sigma flinches, at first, when Howard leans into him - not out of disgust or discomfort but because mutual affection is not something he is used to. His reluctance slowly drains away and Sigma takes the opportunity while it lasts, leaning in as well, a gesture that would almost resemble a hug if the Doctor were brave enough to use his arms. He backs away as Howard begins to speak to give him air.

"It is no trouble, Howard. I can let Nye and his box out in the common room for one night, the other Tributes are used to him. Perhaps an Avox could watch him."

Still he offers a way out, if he is not comfortable, patting him on the shoulder reassuringly. "But if you would like, we can go. Sleeping pills might be good for you, now." A dreamless, restful drug-induced sleep was of dire need.

We can go. Howard clutches onto the pronoun there, and it's what drives him to agree, more so than the promise of a deeper sleep. He nods, rubbing one hand over his lymph nodes in his neck and wincing. He takes Sigma by the wrist and starts back to the elevators, feeling how cold Sigma's skin is against his palm.

He all but needs to be carried by the time they get to District One, which is, thankfully, devoid again of serial killers. Alpha and Hyperion's absence is like a pleasant musical note sounding out whenever Howard goes through the common room, but it's barely audible to Howard over the waves of lightheadedness and tremors and aches. His expression bleary when they reach his room, only half-conscious.

The room itself can be smelled slightly from the hallway, and more so once the door is open. Aside from a little cavity at the doorway carved out so that the door can be shut again, the floor is completely covered in hoarded things, in stacked boxes labeled 'flashlights' and 'batteries' and 'wires' and piles of magazines and folded clothing in a hodgepodge of sizes. One corner of the room has a desk covered in broken electronics, and the closet door won't close, jammed as it is by oversized jackets and spare curtain rods and, oddly enough, a toddler's bicycle. The clothing on the floor has stains on it, and there's something crusted and pungent over the side of the trash can, but the clearest source of the smell comes from a large green plastic storage box with 'TO SORT' written on the side in marker - the insides look like the contents of a dumpster.

There's a clear human-sized patch on the bed which Howard stumbles to, and he crawls underneath the sheets, pulling them up over his head. After a moment he gropes around under the bed and retrieves a tattered, disgusting stuffed rabbit he rescued from some Capitol garbage and his Tribble from Wyatt, and starts rummaging around in the nightstand (past Exacto knives and rolls of tape and flattened, smoothed candy wrappers and jewelry he never got around to giving to Eponine) for the pills to help him sleep.

He wants to ask Sigma if he'll stay until he's sleeping, but he can't muster the words, so he just looks at the old doctor, with a little too much uncertainty and vulnerability to be properly po-faced.

Sigma continues to gently push Howard towards his room, ready to carry him should he fall asleep where he stood. Though he, too, is exhausted, he does not drift off on their way as Howard does, long accustomed to years of sleepless nights. With cautious optimism he assumes the rotting smell that pervaded District 1's hall merely belonged to leftovers neglected by the Avoxes, or the day's trash left behind - and is wholly horrified when he discovers the source of the stench. Sigma is in a state of shock and disbelief as they pass through the door, but does his best to mask it as concern for the boy's condition. The state of Howard's room makes every hair on the back of the Doctor's neck stand on end, makes every fibre of his being scream for him to leave. How had anyone let it come to this?

When Howard digs beneath the bed, he wonders if he might pull out a midnight snack that had been salvaged from the dumpster weeks ago, and Sigma finally cringes. But as the stuffed rabbit slides past the threshold of the mattress and onto the bed, Sigma's heart tears like an open wound (and in the darkness, Sigma almost mistakes the Tribble for a kitten). He takes a deep breath in, releasing it slowly, resolving to concentrate only on Howard for now.

Battling against his acquired mysophobia tooth and nail, his fear of catching Howard's flu and dying a slow death, Sigma sits down on the remaining space on the bed. He does not need to hear Howard speak to understand what he needs. With one last hand on Howard's shoulder, Sigma tucks in a loose edge of the sheet under Howard's skin, and then places his hand gently on the rabbit as if to coax it to sleep as well. He thought it might help, for some reason.

"Goodnight."

A memory Howard thought he'd been able to bury comes to surface. Him, sick with the stomach flu, and his dad carrying him up the stairs and tucking him in. Promising to call in sick to work tomorrow so Howard wouldn't have to stay home from school all alone. Taking his temperature and reading from Watership Down to him. Saying goodnight to him and a different stuffed rabbit, one that was yellow instead of blue and had a round, fluffy body and face.

And another memory, from the FAYZ. Waking up from fainting on the back porch of the house he and Orc share, riddled with infections in his nose and ears and eyes. Not even having water to clean himself up, just smearing the germs and sweat around when he wipes his face on a towel, when he feels the cut on his forehead from falling down. Hearing Orc snoring and crawling onto the edge of the huge mattress that Orc takes up the majority of, balancing precariously on the side, shivering, not daring to wake his friend. In the morning, only some spots of dried blood from his head wound betray he was there.

He doesn't want to remember either of these things. He groans a little and finds a comfortable pose. The neck around the stuffed rabbit is worn and greyed by being clutched with sweaty palms every night since his second Arena. He shakes out four pills from the medication bottle - the proper dosage is half that - but makes it look like it's merely two with the sleight of hand that's served him well the last few years. He swallows them down dry, although he coughs a bit more.

"Goodnight," he mumbles, breathing deep through his nose. He shivers again, and his free hand closes over Sigma's atop the rabbit's head. His thumb rubs over the veins there, the knuckles. He stares up at the ceiling and almost expects glow-in-the-dark stars. "Thank you."

And he closes his eyes.

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Nothing wants to stay the same. [CLOSED]

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