mine own king [open]

[cameron]

duke friendly

He’d spent years wandering the woods, between the same trees, crunching the same scattered pine cones in the same worn-down boots. His legs grew tired as his hair grew long. His performances had altogether stopped.

He kept to himself.

Sometimes he flipped through scripts, reliving the tales he’d loved from his mother’s lap, but the hope to bring them alive had no wick left to burn. Before they’d called him to stage (or to bartop), the chorus of the greats’ best works chanting his refrain, but their voices now were absent, lips sewn shut like that one tribute, the girl from - oh, shit, he didn’t know, ten games past? Eleven? Years were muddled like the dirt both under his feet and smeared across his skin. Time was more and more elusive as the bright, just-out-of-reach future slipped further and further away, as its flame dissipated to nothing, to dark, to empty. Too empty. He shoved most scripts back into his satchel before ever reading the first line.

The last attempt at showcasing his passion was... ill-received. “None ‘a that shit,” he’d barely heard over “what fire is in mine ears? Can this be true? Stand I condemn'd for pride and scorn so much,” accompanied by a quick shove. Duke fell off the bartop, left boot sticking in leftover gin, twisting as he fell into the table of a particularly burly bargoer and her various suitors who all took to swinging, and fists were flying overhead as he crawled out the back door and out of the edges of district nine.

It took weeks to walk off that twisted ankle, and in that time, he sank into the mud, into himself.

Months passed, and he kept walking. Kept sinking. Kept to himself.

The routine was monotonous and drawn-out. He was free, and in his freedom he chose to wither.

And Duke Friendly died.

---

He was reborn one day late autumn, when his worn-down boots crunched different pine cones past different trees, and for what felt like the first time in ages he saw something new. Something exciting. His tired legs stopped and he pushed his long, disheveled hair behind one ear.

Great stone steps overgrown with grasses and dandelions and wildflowers in a full semicircle led down to a clearing, and his mouth slipped into an unfamiliar grin. He blinked, twice, checking his vision and his mental state, before dropping his bag at the top and lunging down steps two at a time till he reached the stage of this forgotten amphitheater.

He would perform again, he decided. Right then. Right there.

Words filled his head, hundreds he hadn’t used in forever, but they were all still there, had merely been sleeping, dormant in the darkness, and the wind seemed to pick up around him. The sun shone directly on him, in the light of early afternoon, but he didn’t care if he was caught by whitecoats when his life had just begun again. Duke spun, his hair falling from behind his ear and his arms outstretched. Warmth mingled with the words.

He planted his feet and parted his lips. “All the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him by inch-meal a disease!” Eyes were wide, staring off into the sky. “His spirits hear me and yet I needs must curse. But they'll nor pinch, fright me with urchin—shows, pitch me i' the mire, nor lead me, like a firebrand, in the dark out of my way, unless he bid 'em.” He crossed stage left, the warmth finally filling his core, staying lit wickless. This was what he needed. This was what he needed to stay alive. “But for every trifle are they set upon me; sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me,” he was alive, “and after bite me, then like hedgehogs which lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount their pricks at my footfall,” he was alive, “sometime am I all wound with adders who with cloven tongues do hiss me into madness.” He was alive.

And he wouldn’t go back to the meaningless meandering he’d festered in, he swore it. There could be nothing worse.

Sound shocked him, coming from the top of the stone steps, what could be either cheering or alerting others of his presence. But his heart was still full and his mind still teeming with words. This island’s mine.

“Who the fuck are you?” were the words he so carefully chose. He was a performer, not a playwright, for good reason.




ooc: title and quotes from shakespeare's the tempest and much ado about nothing

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

Sampson Izar

Twenty years have come and gone, brother.

You would’ve told me it was foolish to leave at the end of summer, with the cold threatening to slip through and settle into my bones. I wouldn’t have listened to you anyway, and you know that. But I would’ve taken it to heart, some, that you’d tried.

I spent the last few months trekking along the rocks and through the woods. Made a little lean-to near a river, started a fire each night like Rum Tum had taught me, all those years ago. Boiled up water in a little metal pot, to make sure my stomach didn’t rot. I did my best to get up with sunrise, a feat that wasn’t so hard to do when your whole life was spent rousing for the fields. Have to beat the heat, after all, and get most of what needed doing done before the sun got too high. Not that they gave much a break for the afternoons, when you’d sweat right through your shirt.

I had worried I’d miss the fields. The little songs the older men would sing to themselves, or the jokes my friends would cackle about. I thought of them when I climbed up one of the taller trees, how they’d be out in the brambles, clearing field and harvesting. How they should’ve had the chance to climb up with me, and look out on the world, as far as the eye could see. The world feels different so high up, looking out toward mountains, and seeing how the trees break for sky in the distance. There’s freedom, lonely as that is, with a world that’s limitless.

I try not to think about what I’ve left behind. I don’t think I left much. Not anyone that would’ve cried for me. No one that would’ve thought I hadn’t got what I deserved after all these years. They’re not like you, Benat. They don’t take the time to see me, see that my thoughts weren’t so wrong. Wanting to be free, wanting us to be equals. They don’t want that, even as much as they say they did. They want the world to be the same as it is now, just without a capitol bearing down on them. “Free” – with folks on top, and the rest of us at the bottom.

No one’s weeping for me. No one’s asking if I was thrown in a ditch and buried in secret, or hauled off to one of the prisons to be ripped limb from limb. They’re probably praying I never come back. That way they never have to come face to face with the truth: I’d done it all on purpose, blown things wide apart because I wanted to. That the world wasn’t safe, no matter who they were. That I didn’t have to be mayor to be powerful.

I could kill just the same. Wake them up from the world they wanted to live in.

I had to abandon my spot by the river when the rains came. After the second day, the river had swelled, swallowing up the bank and threatening the low lands where I’d bothered to put together a lean-to. The branches I used hadn’t been sturdy enough, either. Second night in they sprung a leak, and a hard gust of wind had collapsed the half down by my legs, waking me up and covering me in mud.

Rum Tum had taught me to keep moving, no matter how much I loved a spot. He said there was too much world to settle down in any one place. That’s how you stayed stuck. If you kept moving, you never got too attached to anything. Kept you from building a false sense of security, or opening yourself up to any unwanted attention. He’d say it was because of all that there was to discover, but I knew it was so that we could stay one step ahead of whoever might’ve been behind us.

So I walked, boots heavy through the mud, over rocks and through gullies, across hills and for a spell, in a cave. Never once thinking about looking back because I had nothing to look back for, which is a freedom all its own.

I’d been walking since before sunrise that morning when I came across the weird clearing. The circular outcropping of rocks, the stairs that led down toward a circular pit. And the boy – raving, speaking a combination of words that make sense but are senseless all the same – steps back and forth across the patch of earth below. He’s not bad, or bad looking. Then again, it’s been a few months since I’ve seen anyone.

I wonder if being out here meant that he was a wanderer, or if he had something he was running from to. Or if he had anything worth taking. Should I slit his throat then, or wait until later?

‘Who the fuck are you?’

Well – maybe later.

“Is that any way to treat an audience?” I crossed my arms across my chest and smirked. “And here I was going to clap for whatever the hell that was.”

“You can call me Sam – ” For a second, I almost finish with my full name. But I can be whoever I want to be out here. And it was probably better I didn’t go running around telling folks who I really was. “Who the fuck are you?”

[cameron]

As soon as the words left his lips, Duke instinctively shoved his hand toward the satchel hanging from his right shoulder, fingertips swimming for the cold handle of his knife before realizing there was no bag. He’d dropped all his things at the top of the amphitheater, mistaking a moment of passion as more pertinent than longevity. The familiar ghost of his satchel taunted him while the real one lay by the feet of the stranger above. His fingers tightened, nails tearing into skin. A whitecoat he could handle, had handled a few times already. This was different. The free played by their own rules.

Eyes hung on the limp satchel, useless from afar, as the stranger spoke. “Is that any way to treat an audience?” Unaware, he held his breath, waiting. Waiting for something to indicate if he should ditch his shit and haul tail. His gaze climbed from the satchel up, up planted legs and crossed arms, signs of power and strength, signs sounding alarms in his head, and when the man’s lips curled Duke’s eyes widened. He hadn’t yet looked at him, not really, and he was surprised by his kind features, his full lips spreading across his face, dimples around the corners. His boyish charm. Arousal mixed with fear and beads of sweat fell from Duke's temple. The first person he’d seen in weeks, maybe months, and he was actually cute. A little dirty and disheveled, but who wasn’t.

“And here I was going to clap for whatever the hell that was.” Duke exhaled, sharp, a tinge of relief sweet on his breath. The stranger was cute and not going to slit his throat. A winning combination if he’d ever known one. (He’d never known one. Every couple he’d ever met were overwhelmed, or incompatible, or repeating the cycles of abuse ingrained in them by their ancestors, or all three.) He dropped his gaze back to the satchel, if only for an excuse to size the other up once more.

The last time he’d met someone attractive in the woods, he’d been jaded. Awe-struck. The man had trees for arms and legs, massive round things hard as bark. He never smiled. Not when he robbed other wanderers while they slept. Not when he planted his roots in Duke’s soft earth. Not when he held a knife to his throat and spit on his face, taking his share of riches. This was different. The free played by their own rules.

A warmth he forgot he was missing returned to his cheeks, the chill of longing the longstanding default. His previous group efforts hardened him, but beat him down all the same, now too paranoid, too anxious for anything outside his own company. Duke since instated a strict Trust No Bitch policy, because no one out there was out there for anyone but themself. The creature comfort of companionship crumbled, leaving a man who told himself every day he was enough. Told himself every day he was enough, when he knew he wasn't.

“You can call me Sam." Sam. Cute boy who wouldn't kill him. Someone who smiled and laughed and wouldn't kill him. Duke broke his own policy partly because of all these reasons, but most of all, he was tired of being alone. "Who the fuck are you?”

He laughed till his stomach hurt, pressing dirty hands into his sides, staring ahead through watering eyes. Roses bloomed on his cheeks and he sighed, relief still sweet. "I'm Duke." He paused, before taking the risk of faith and jogging up the steps toward Sam. "Well, actually, I'm Caliban Friendly. But I prefer Duke now," he motioned around them, arms wide and looping, "out here." Eyes dropped to the satchel, the gleam of knife shining through its open mouth. Any other encounter he'd make the dive, but this was different.

He played by his own rules.

"And whatever the hell that was was art, thank you very much." Duke mimicked Sam's earlier stance, arms crossed and smirking. "I recommend better seating for the encore."