ribs.— [tbc vs prj]

An animation

How long has he been staring?

Oz's eyes feel dry. The dampness beneath his eyes glisten faintly in the mechs' head-lights.

He shivers at Frog-legs' feet. The vinyl jacket does nothing for him, and he hardly notices it. The cold is in his bones, his blood. It has seeped into his heart as poisons do. He feels as though he'd have to rip himself open if he wanted to get it out of him.

He stares at the blood caked across his fingertip. Flaking. Only a little bit left before it's all peeled away, and she'll be gone forever.

Funny, how quickly you can convince yourself you love someone. It's the desperation that does it. The need, desire to be recognized as a human being and to find that quality within another. He loved Celeste. He loved Esther. He loves Orville, Peter, Ellis. He can't deny it anymore. The knowledge of the why beneath that love is written in the blood on his fingertip and he reads it too well.

Motion, rising over the fingertip. Fingertip becomes a blur as his eyes lift, and Ellis comes into focus. Oz blinks, now. Their eyes meet and their gazes go through the eyes, into something deeper. There's a connection that's instant and magnetic. They know. They see. And even though it's Ellis that approaches Oz, Oz feels pulled into him.

“Hey kid,” Ellis says as he sits beside him, “you got any family?”

Oz's eyelids flicker. A shift in the eyes – a clarity, for a moment. “Just my mom.” Abruptly, he adds: “Dad walked out.”

He doesn't know why he mentions the father. Doesn't think to even ponder it. He only does it.

It's his mom he thinks about. The warmth and softness of her arms as she squeezed him to her breast at the Justice Building. The tears that anointed his head. Is she still crying?

Dude, your mom fucking heard you say “butt-f*cked” on national TV.
Shit.

“My mom too.”

Oz peeks at Ellis. Only now realizing what had passed between them, feeling the realization like an electric spark. His eyes fall. “Sorry,” he whispers. Mind still on a mother's tears. Wondering how many mothers cry every year-- if Esther's and Celeste's were crying now.

“So why'd you stay in anyway?” The question's too sudden, too vague. Oz raises his eyes in confusion. “Why didn't you volunteer someone?”

Oh.

His lips tremble. He no longer sees Ellis. He sees the possibilities.

Snuff, crushed under the wheels of a ship--
Snuff, body splitting open on a spike of scrap metal--
Snuff, raising his cannon to kill a little girl--
Snuff, pierced in the neck by a muttation's horn--
Snuff

“I...” Oz falters. “I had this friend...he wanted me to voluntell him if I got reaped.”

Blood pact--
“I told you he doesn't even care.”

“But I...I really didn't want to do that...you know?”

“They'll crush you, man!”

“He thinks I'm gonna die.”

His lower lip falls open.

“Selfless kid,” Ellis remarks.

Oz stiffens. His mouth wrenches open to protest but he doesn't make a sound. It feels wrong to accept a compliment, he doesn't know why. At the Capitol, he took their applause and laurels with a slight, wry grin on his face, just happy to be recognized for a change.

Not now. Not anymore.

He doesn't know why, but the idea sickens him. Like tying a balloon to roadkill.

“Is he mad at you for it?”

Oz blinks.

“THEY'LL CRUSH YOU, MAN!”

“I don't know...,” Oz mumbles.

“They'll crush you, man!” The curl of the lips, the eyes--

“I...”

“They'll crush you, man!” The wide pleading eyes set in a pale face--

“I think he was crying...” His eyes bulge.

“Why?” the broken whisper, fading--

“I'm glad he's not here,” Oz gasps, hugging his knees tightly, fiercely to his chest, as though in defense.

“Yeah...,” Ellis intones.

Oz stares out into the darkness, the spasms of mindless revelation in his eyes, his breathing.

His lips curl to whisper a single name, but the motion of speech dies on his tongue and only breath flutters past.

The anthem with its screeching choir blares. The threat of light hazing, at first, and then twitching, warped--

Clenching himself into a tight ball, Oz seizes his jacket and flings it over his head. So that all he knows is the screaming of the Capitol's death-angels. And Ellis' warmth.

Without thinking, he reaches for the life within that warmth. Does not realize what he has done until he feels the soft, sturdy skin of Ellis' arm beneath his hand.

a drawing

The black wave mounts high over the junk wall, reaching to scrape the sky with its arched spine, casting the dull-white world with its thick lines in a sooty shade that swarms and swallows everything.

“Ellis?” he whispered afterwards.

The shade is prelude.

“Who started the fight?”

The mass of water leans its bulk against the walls, spurting through its seams like blood through new wounds.

An animation

They marched like a small army, Oz trailing behind, Peter at the front. The distance between himself and the other boys is intentional. He needs the space to breathe. After his and Ellis' discussion and Peter's apologizing (Just admit you have shit taste in men, dude), he needs that comforting, bedroom-styled sense of isolation.

The explosions stopped him. The screeching of fireworks before they alighted, flowering in the sky. The warped, old-sounding jingle – Nowles' fucking voice cackling over the intercoms.

“You can't put a bounty on everyone you hate, Nowles,” he whines in that sharp, abrasive way of an embarrassed younger brother. But he's glad she hasn't changed. Wonders how she did it.

He considers catching up to the others when he sees the head sticking out the ground. The barrel of the gun flashing red as another rocket flares into the sky.

“Speak now, or hold whatever peace you got left.”

Instinctively, Oz flinches his own cannon at the face in the dirt, staring hard at it. Red and amber and deep green flare across the lines of the face, giving it dimension, form. As city-lights once had.

“...Bowie?” Oz gasps.

“Yeah kid, it's me.” Bowie's harsh breath crackle through the comm. “I should shoot ya.”

Animalistic panic floods Oz. He cringes back. That instinct to beg for his life comes too quickly to his lips: "You don't have to--"

It manifests itself in some vague attempt to appeal to that "fraternity of man" Mrs. Priscilla used to spout on about. But then he remembers how well that went the last time. "Mankind," as she taught him, doesn't exist here. Only lizards that kill little girls.

"I mean -- you shouldn't," he tries, desperately, to flatten his voice, in that cool taunting way of that girl from Twelve. Yet his voice hitches and breaks, too fragile to be convincing. "My friends'll shoot you if you do."

A glob of spit arcs from Bowie's mouth, red already and catching the amber lights of the fireworks, so that it flashes like a spark. “Yeah? And then my allies come out and shoot your allies, and they shoot back. And then we're all dead.” Oz should flinch. He doesn't. Bowie has cemented him and he is too heavy to flinch. All attempt at bravado is gone. An image in his head freezes his heart so he can't remember to panic: an image of some bloody reptile, sucking blood from the tail it tries to eat. “So what're we gonna do here, Oz?”

The dread speaks for him. "It happens again. The dying," he croaks, his voice not a boy's for a moment. More like a rusty gate. Yet there's something in him still that rouses him, that makes him squeak out in a small child's whisper: "Does it have to?"

“Aye,” the answer strikes Oz cold. Yet it's not spoken that way – the resignation is soft in its understanding, harsh in its honesty. “It does, Oswald. Just, maybe not right now.” The deep, rumbling breath again. Crackling like logs in a glowing firplace.

When Oz and Bowie met, Oz thought him the most honest person he'd ever met. Not "honest" in the way the people who killed Esther had been. They seemed to have hidden behind this sense of brutality, of relishing in it. Rubbing it in Oz's face how much everyone involved had fucked up. As though it were all a joke, and they were removed from all the carnage, the pain, the desperation. But that wasn't true. They were the cause of it -- in part...And surely, they had to have felt the anguish, too. But Bowie doesn't hide behind that veil of godlike superiority. Like Orville, he sees -- but in a human way. A being that takes the pain and swallows it, and admits to it too.

Maybe Mrs. Priscilla was right. There can be a fraternity of man. Sometimes -- when it counts, if it ever does.

There's a sense of awe in the little boy's heart as he lowers his gun. It shines like dew in his eyes, shivers in his hands with a quiet, sinking ecstasy. "Thank you, Bowie."

“Don’t thank me.” Oz stiffens, the motion of his spine like a rabbit rising onto hindquarters, listening. “I can't have ya thank me yet, Tove.” The fireplace-voice pops, crackles – and then hisses. Like fire rising, dancing in the air. Fear needles Oz's heart – but there's assurance, too. “Ya gotta get outta here, son. In a minute, my allies are gonna come up from this hole. And if we see y’all…”

For all of Bowie's hissing, Oz knows he won't strike. No matter how deep the child puts his hand into the viper's den.

“Go. Run.”

He nods, up/down, up/down, obedient to the very essence of this man.

“Okay, Bowie, I'm going.”

sequential art

He tries.

Blaring lights flicker, and change the shape of things. Leaves become shadow. Shadow becomes a human hand reaching for his throat. Warped tree trunks becomes Ellis' body. The waving, shivering branch, Peter's waving, shivering arm.

But it never is.

Vines slither of their own accord, and he never sees them, only the conclusion of their slithering. The trees fan out their branches one moment, when it is convenient, like huge hands pushing forward to say “STOP!”

Somewhere, a Gamemaker grins over her control panel.

He calls out his friends' names, and hears nothing.

But he sees the blasting light of gunfire. It beckons to him. He runs to it.

And suddenly, there is Peter, gun at the ready, a bruise on his head.

And three other tributes.

Bowie.

The sunken eyes of a disappointed man.

And Oz knows he failed. He feels it like a wound.

“I'm sorry.”

It's his fault, now.

animation

A girl's scream shatters in his ears. High-pitched, wrought and strained with pain, muffled slightly by the cockpit, echoed and warped and crackled into something only vaguely human by the comm.

Yet Oz feels it so clearly. He doesn't hear it, it shoots into his bloodstream, races up and down his spine and he convulses as though in electric shocks, pressing the sweat of his palms into the dash, chest lurching forward as the rest of his body tries to disconnect backwards.

He waits the world to bounce up and slump back down and for the sound of metal and bones being churned and blended into one throbbing mass.

"papa."
"get peter."

sequential art

There are two little girls playing in front of the wall.

One has a hollow stomach, so the other wraps it up with bandages. The hollow one laughs, and the other one smiles gently. Both look very warm, somehow -- if a person can look warm, without being red-faced and sweaty. It's their smiles that do it. The look of laughter, the look of kindness.

They notice you watching them.

They wave as the wall breaks behind them, and the tidal wave surges for the three of you.

Your hand reaches for them, and they wave at you.

They're gray blobs shifting and reassembling in the dark water.

The water closes around your wrist.

Two monsters in the water, one with wide eyes, the other with big claws--

animation

Another rocket screams as it jettisons into the dark void, a trail of silver smoke glinting ghost-like. A flash as it splits apart, blossoming into sparkling patterns of orange and blue that flicker like intense stars, popping and hissing as it threatens briefly to shower the dark world with its heavy-looking sparks, only for the sparks to disappear and another screaming rocket to take its place.

Oswald's body remembers that it can't be one of his, and he eases, settling back into himself. It's one of Bowie's. Bowie brought a girl with him.

But, really, what's the difference. It happens again. Over and over and over and over. There will always be another Esther, another Celeste. They were never going to let him escape it, forget it.

He feels like something is coming into his body and possessing it. It's in his heart, in the spasms of his hands. A poison. It wriggles into the deepest crevices of his being and writhes like a worm.

Get it over with, make it painless, make it fast.

It's the most he can do. He owes all of them that much -- and more.

His thumb shoves down onto the firing mechanism.

Nothing.

He presses frantically, teeth bared. Clickclickclickclickclick!

The gun idles in its turret, pointing now at nothing, a worthless stick of metal that looks cold in the warm flaring light of the pyrotechnics. The way its nestled in its turret, it looks like a middle finger jutting up at Oz as he glares at it round-eyed. The audacity of such sabotage squeezes down Oz's throat, drops limply and heavily into his stomach. "Fuck!" he practically vomits the word out, it slides so oily out his mouth, and he dry-heaves a few more: "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

They weren't even going to let it be quick. They will do anything they can to worm their dirty little fingers deeper into the child-soldiers' wounds.

His fists fly up over his head, swung up with the anger of a god in the throes of judgment, seeing the fleshy holes of a necrotic world that must be damned -- they tense with the rigidness of happy destruction, with the hope to shatter, to set a holocaust ablaze--

Something pulls him back. A human hand clothed in gentle flesh. The mech reels back, blindly following the force, and Oz lets it, eyes wide, fists still raised over his head though they sway and the tension in his arms loosen and now suddenly they slump down into his lap.

He looks, and there is Peter, Frog-legs' arm in his hand as he gets in front of Oz.

"Ga--" They both catch the little mistake, as short and soft as it is. "Get behind me, Oz!"

Oz stares, yielding entirely, for one spare moment.

As the wailing fireworks shed white light across Peter's face, across his golden hair and shining eyes, as the pearls of sweat speckling his bruised face glisten as an aureole from temple to cheekbone.

"Let me level with you."

As the bullets beat into Peter's suit, denting, rupturing, the screech of metal, the sense of pain in a man's face even as he turns to face that pain, the golden light that robes Peter's body in light as he shoots back.

"I have siblings around your age."

As the Le Roux boy bares down. As a roar pierces through the comms, a throaty trumpeting noise so loud, so guttural Oz can hear the huge white fangs -- a sound that shouldn't be human.

Yet Peter looks into Le Roux's eyes as he fights back.

Brotherhood. In his outrage, both at himself and at the Gamemakers, Oz had forgotten it.

He doesn't know what it must be like for Peter, to have a brother. But he looks at Peter and realizes it's etched into his very being. The very way he moves.

Love.

Oz doesn't know it.

But he knew -- Snuff. In a quiet way, Oz felt that Snuff was a brother. But there's something different and special in finding a brother in a friend. In proper brotherhood, there is hierarchy and obligation -- the usual dictates of bloodline, and there is a beauty in it. Yet in the brotherhood of friendship, the only thing that roots it is integrity -- the notion of the pact -- the quiet glances and motions to one another, "I am you, you are I, we are the same, our bodies just don't know it yet."

That is what Oz knows.

And Peter already knows that Oz isn't the sort of kid to listen.

"No," he murmurs. The mech's heavy blade detaches from its sheath.

Oz is motion. He is an arch shooting around Peter. He is the flash of a blade as amber light sparks across it, across the earth, across his body and the bodies around him.

He looks into the lion's mouth.

It is what he owes.