for r

[marcato]

In the days before the 7th arena, Aunamee pounded on blue foam dummies with gauze-wrapped hands. It reminded him of his childhood, in many ways. Before he awoke to spectacular powers, before the Insight, he had trained on rubber busts that swung from the ceiling like hanged men. Every rebound of those fake bodies had been unpredictable, every sway unaccounted for. Each blow had cracked across his own knuckles, spindling pain up to his elbows and shoulders. It had always made him angry then -- shouldn't the aggressor feel no pain? shouldn't he able to win entirely? completely? -- and it made him angry now.

With Aunamee's next punch, the dummy bounced off the wall behind it with a sickening thud.

Comments

[shambler]

R liked to visit the Training Room from time to time. A lot of his friends came here - Howard like to hide out here if he wasn't near his favorite dumpster, Julie when she wanted to practice archery because they didn't do guns here. R usually came to watch. Knots were totally out of his league and he was afraid to pick up a bow after he shot Karis with it.

Watching was safe. He knew how to watch.

To his surprise, Aunamee was the one in the Training Room - he hadn't seen his friend since that day in the hospital when he delivered the flowers. Now he was punching away for all he was worth.

"Heal...ed?" R groaned as he slouched up. He had to say, Aunamee looked a lot better than that pale body swamped by the stark white sheets back there.

[marcato]

Aunamee's spikes of anger were interrupted by the speech sounds, the little hee and leh and duh. He spun where he stood. As if on cue, his chest sang with the pain he had almost learned to ignore.

He swallowed his grimace. It tasted like sweat.

"It's important," he said, "for them to see me."

He gave the dummy one last tap on the shoulder, an unspoken thank you to the prop of his recovery.

"They need to know I heal quickly. After all, you know how they are."

It was intimate, that last sentence. You know how they are. Like only R and Aunamee knew how to hide their bleeding from the sharks.

"It's good to see you, my friend."

[shambler]

Them? It took R a long moment to put "them" and "Gamemakers" or "the fans who saw me pull through the hospital" together. Oh, them. R hadn't bothered with the appearance and publicity thing himself - too much to keep track of when speaking was already a full time job, but he'd overheard his Escort. Appearances here were everything. Guys like Aunamee had to be on top of their game.

"Glad...to see...okay," R grunted. He came closer, bumping up against the dummy and watching Aunamee with that same gray stare he always had. "Take...breaks?"

He shouldn't push himself, all the same. Humans are fragile. What if he injures himself again?

[marcato]

"Are you worried about me?"

He couldn't help but smile as he said it. Pity was one thing. Pity was cold and cramped like a closet, wet and dirty like a snow-covered highway. Worry was nice, and it felt nice on his lips as he acknowledged it. There were so few people in this place that could make him smile, but oh, R never failed him. Not once.

"I'll take breaks," he said, giving a small wink. "If you think it's best."

He approached the off-balance boy. He rubbed the excess energy out of his knuckles.

"Do you still get tired? In your current state."

[shambler]

Worried? R surprised himself realizing he was worried, that he'd held onto it instead of having it slide away on him. He jerked his head in a nod as he took that wink for another one of those friendly, we're-in-this-together gestures from Aunamee. It felt nice. He hadn't been winked at before. R liked a lot that Aunamee winked at him.

R thought about his question, his hand wobbling up to his forehead. "Here. Some...sometimes. We...ssstop. Then...go...again."

It wasn't sleep. R didn't (normally) dream. But there were times were he simply powered down like the other Dead and it was always a vague surprise to realize he was aware again. Some zombies took their breaks for days - weeks, sometimes - on end. R preferred being on his feet as much as possible. It wasn't living but at least it wasn't another step closer to being another dead boy on the floor.

[marcato]

"You stop."

He extended a hand wrapped in tape, pointing his finger inches from R's forehead.

"Right here."

Except R didn't say 'I,' he said 'we.' Aunamee tried to imagine it, scores of half-dead men and women winding down like broken clocks. It wasn't so difficult to see. He had witnessed slivers of that world when he crawled into R's mind in the last arena. He could see the grey skies, smell the death. It was enticing in the same way that Howard's world was enticing. It was the period of suffering after a long journey of other sufferings, and it was beautiful.

"There was a time," he said, his voice nearly a whisper in that great room, "when I never felt tired. Did you know that?"

[shambler]

Unlike a human, R didn't go cross-eyed trying to follow the finger pointing right at him. He didn't blink or pull back - he stared straight across, watching Aunamee's face with that same almost-vacant stare he'd had since they met. Yeah, right there. It wasn't sleep. It was just letting the body lie there and whoever was inside - if there was anyone inside - vanished for awhile.

At the question, R shook his head. He didn't. He couldn't imagine Aunamee as anything but that smiling man in the Training Center even though he knew, logically, that he had to have been a teenager, a kid, a baby at some point like the other Living.

"Need....rrest," R was unsure if that was the right thing to say. "Feel...better?"

sorry for the delay!

[marcato]

His words were soft, patient, even as the muscles in his lips pulled back into an almost scowl.

"Are you asking me if I feel better now that I need rest?"

They were foreign words on his tongue. Bitter, like poison. Rest was only shades away from death, and every time Aunamee closed his eyes to sleep (to die) he felt a small part of him grab the edge of his consciousness and beg for it stay, please stay. Maybe R missed the things that made him human, like sleep and diseases and cramped muscles. Maybe he didn't know any better.

[shambler]

Well...yeah. That was exactly what was he was asking, except without the groaning and the pauses, and in Aunamee's purr instead of his own shaky half-whisper.

R nodded. "Hope...so..."

The words sounded right on his tongue. Mushy, but right. A part of him remembered Get Well cards and visitation hours. Remembered sitting in the hard plastic lobby chairs but not for who or why. It could've been someone with a bad case of the flu or maybe he'd known someone who turned - didn't realize the signs of infection. Either way, R was glad to say Aunamee was improving instead of spiraling. The man belonged on his feet and not swallowed up by a hospital bed that smelled almost too clean.

[marcato]

"You might not have understood," he said in that same patient purr, soft and melodic like the start of a symphony. He willed the muscles in his face to calm, for his lips to even out and his brow to relax. "Before I arrived in this place, R, I wouldn't have needed the rest because I would've never been hurt. In my world, I never felt pain. I never felt tired."

How beautiful, that had been. How perfect. Few things were better than the look of fear and dread in his would-be killer's eyes when his body simply. wouldn't. fall.

"I know what it's like to be half-human." His eyes flashed, a manic contrast to his otherwise calm face. "Like you."

[shambler]

For a moment R thought this was figurative. That he just meant he was from a place that knew no pain, no walking corpses, no starvation. No diseases. Then Aunamee said they were on the same level and that was when he realized he misunderstood. He meant literally. Something that made him half-human - a kinder way, R thought, than saying "less than human".

He looked...Living. Smelled good enough to eat (R was thankful he could keep that to himself).

"Like...me?" R rasped. Clarification. He could use some clarification about now. "How?"

[marcato]

"It might be more appropriate," he said, "to call me your inverse."

Inverse was such a nice word. It implied rules, symmetry. This was how he'd think about R from now on, he told himself. A shadow to his light.

"You see," he continued, his voice gaining melody, strength. "I'm always alive and you're always dead."

[shambler]

R pulled up in surprise, his shoulders going from slouching to stiff. It threw him for a moment to realize he didn't like Aunamee's words - the actual words were chained together so smoothly they might as well be honey but what he actually said...

"Not...nice," R finally groaned. "Rubbing...it in."

Yeah, he was probably stuck like this forever, but still. He didn't understand why Aunamee would make a dig like that when they were friends.