OPEN | prompt three | PAIN

[wrens]

prompt three | P A I N dressing-room style. start your own thread. tag others. wash, rinse, repeat. open to all.

 

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[nonimmune]

[ The tunnels are dark and deep. They are accosted just once, and escape mostly unharmed. (Mostly means there is a rip in his clothing stained red and copper, but the bleeding has stopped and the wound is purely surface.)

The man catches her movement in the corner of his eye, and pauses, his hands on the makeshift bedding. He pauses, and then he keeps working, moving aside only once the small patch of rags is done. He sits heavily, hands fumbling through his pockets before producing the needle. (It's been eleven days since the last.) His hands tremble as he presses it into his skin, but steady soon enough. (He doesn't know how much longer he'll last, but he knows enough of pain to last him a lifetime, although he doubts he has that much time left.)

Vaccine tucked away once more, he settles back, simply watching her. His meaning is writ in his features clearly enough.

You should sleep. ]

[immunisations]

[ If there's any satisfaction to be gleaned in watching the man take his medicine, the girl makes no indication of it. There's too much poison in his veins already, she can smell it on him the way certain animals can taste blood on the air, can smell rot at a long distance. It's almost as if he's already dead and all that keeps him upright and moving is his drive, his determination, to ensure that his charge is safe and will not meet a similar fate. Not that having her body eat away at itself was ever in the cards for her; but there are worse ways to die than under the crush of the Sickness. Both the guardian and the girl have seen glimpses of it in their travels north. Man's inhumanity to man. If they can even be called men, that is.

The bed of the tunnel is strewn with debris. Inorganic and organic, layered one on top of the other: bits of machinery, shards of metal, hidden beneath the bones of dead things — animals long scavenged and even longer dead — the occasional clump of moss straining against the dark to survive. It makes a shivering, scraping sound beneath the girl as she crawls on both her hands and knees towards him.

In many ways she as much an animal as she is a girl. Feral but tamed by his loyalty to her, she returns it in kind. His charge makes a soft noise in the back of her throat and then shakes her head again, her wild red hair shivering.

You first. ]

[nonimmune]

[ The man hesitates just a moment, as if to argue, but in the end, he lies down just a yard (give or take) from the girl, on his side so as to keep his eyes upon her. (It's how he always sleeps — if he sleeps at all — as though even in the arms of Morpheus he could keep her safe.)

For a long moment, he simply stares at her, the look on his face almost one of grief (not proper grief, but the numbness that comes afterwards). There are moments in which he wonders if this is simply a nightmare, if he will suddenly wake to a world in which there is no such thing as the Sickness and the lengths to which people will go to in order to survive still remain distant. (He'd already known of the price of life and death, yes, but he'd never seen it quite so close.) But he knows, he knows this is not a dream (nothing so horrible could be) and he knows he cannot afford to dwell upon things he cannot change.

The only matter in which he has any say is in the survival of the girl, and even that say seems to be dwindling.

A part of him wants to reach out, to take her hand, but that is a luxury, and they have no room for such things. So he simply watches her, his face made even more gaunt by the darkness and the shadows. ]