empty hands and broad shoulders // { will vs kahinta | day 9

all those years of blood sweat and tears you cried
you've got less to show than you have to hide
well lady luck and all her charms i've never known
i'm just a man with empty hands and broad shoulders

He wakes up feeling like he's been pressed to death beneath giant stones. Quarry witch. He groans; his hands folded across his newly-mended breastbone rest like rocks. Wrapped around a knife, its handle metal instead of polished bone, they hardly feel like his own. More weight. Instead the stone hovers inches above him, catching his meditative breaths and reflecting them back into his face. Alive or undead, the difference is semantics and the Johnwayne has never really cared to split hairs like that.

Shutting his eyes again, Will wriggles into the stone, resituating himself for a nap. Shit. He could sleep for another twenty years and be perfectly content with that. It's not that he needs his beauty rest, or that he hasn't been sleeping well in the arena, or anything like that. Dying is exhausting, and even though he wasn't an active participant in the matter, coming back to life is hard work too. Nothing wrong with sneaking a few extra hours.

It's whatever calamity echoing through the stone cavern that finally rouses Will, grumpy, from his slumber. He scowls as he scooches out of the stone loculus, gracelessly dropping four feet to the ground. He hits the limestone and crumples, the twisted knife clattering with him. All things considered, it's hard to complain about feeling like one giant bruise. There are worse indignities in the world than clumsily pulling himself to his feet like a newborn fawn on ice, supporting himself on the wall as he reaches down for his dropped dagger.

Each step he takes away from the hole in the wall where he woke up is easier than the one before it. Either stretching his patched-together body is all he really needed — 'walk it off' is practical advice to alleviate everything from shinsplints to death, apparently — or he's plied with whatever has kept him going the whole previous week. Sure isn't interesting watching kids get stabbed once then keel over and die. He doesn't have to remind himself that there's an audience; hundreds of gemstone eyes glower at him in the dull torchlight.

The corridors wind and snake. Piles and stacks of sentimental garbage rest against the walls and sit displayed on podiums, as though Will is supposed to care about it. It's like walking through an exhibit-sized version of the box of junk that Bruce had given him for his birthday that one year. Calling it heirlooms or referencing legacy didn't stop trash from being trash. What sort of emotional reaction is he supposed to have towards decades-old notes and doodles, with someone's math homework, with letters to and from people he's never met? Putting something on a pedestal doesn't mean it's important.

Scowling, he aims an impetuous kick at the nearest artifact: a wooden wheel with twelve spoke and a rusted metal rim. It shudders under his foot, barely even serving its purpose as a wheel enough to budge. His toe throbs in penance for his tantrum, but nothing else interesting happens. Useless piece of junk, just like the rest of it. It's too unwieldy to bludgeon someone to death with and without its three brethren it's not rolling along anywhere.

He makes his way to the center of the catacombs, counting to four on his fingers. How many cannons yesterday? He'd been too dead to see the anthem. How many lived? Who was left? He sits on the spiral staircase to rest, then to lounge, his legs kicked up. It would be easier to do the math if he'd bothered to commit names and districts to memory, but he can work off of his own apathy just fine.

There's still blood under his fingernails. He doesn't know whose anymore. Might be his. Might be Lysander's. Might be Meredith's. Or Jem's, or the hounds', or might even be his father's. So many people have bled out beneath his knives, and while it's not that he takes pleasure in it — despite all the accusations to the contrary, he isn't a monster, it's just that he was born in District Two and his name is Johnwayne and he's got good aim — but it isn't like it bothers him either.

Whistling to himself, he digs at the crusted blood with the point of his knife. He did what he had to. Some people are dead because of him. Some people lived longer because of him. He has no idea who is which, all the information on dead and alive lagging by a day and Will's last update wholly missing. Jem might still be alive, though it's hard to say what with that last knife he'd buried in his chest. Terra and Lysander had been down here yesterday — easier to write them off as dead. Status unknown on JJ, and there's the possibility he's still kicking, but as much as Will wants to have faith in the boy from Seven, he can't imagine how long he'd make it on his own.

There were... what, twelve of them alive yesterday? Twenty-four minus how many faces had there been in the anthem? And how many cannons had he counted?

He's shitty with names but might just be worse with numbers. He stops whistling for a moment to run through it out loud again. "One, four, four, maybe five, maybe five, maybe six... wait." Will screws up his face, fending off the incoming headache from the focused counting. He tries in the negative: "One, two, three, six, ummm... Helle. One of the eights? Two of the eights? Fuck." And then everyone he can remember, in no particular order: "There's Mer, dead; JJ, don't know; Terra down here yesterday; Sherman, dead; Helle, dead; Jem, don't know; Lizzy, here yesterday too; Me, sorta alive I guess; uh... District Fours... District Tens..."

When he realizes he's not alone, he takes the opportunity to rope someone else into his counting rather than trying to size up the threat. "Hey," he calls out, still focused on digging the crusted blood out of his nails with the tip of his knife. "D'you have any idea who the hell's still alive?" Maybe in the scheme of things it doesn't matter. But who's to say that in the scheme of things, any of this matters at all? "Terra and Lysander were down here yesterday. That Jem boy must still be alive. Elsewise I got no idea." In another year, they'll all be reduced to some new set of mementos, more trinkets on pedestals stacked up in a dusty reliquary, handed down like heirlooms to another generation that has more important things to worry about than what befell Will Johnwayne. So why does he need to care about who's already been reduced to memory?