aviary | OPEN | prompt one

[ She leaves him in the remains of a silo located at the very edge of where the settlement gives way to barren dirt fields and an obliterated stretch of concrete that, once upon a time, was a road. It wouldn't do to bring him into town with her; his insides were hardly being kept in, even with the stitch job she'd done, and even neutral towns like Carthage had their fair share of sharks. A limping wounded animal meant opportunity, maybe even a free meal. Judith knows this because she's a shark herself. (Is, was. The line isn't clear anymore.)

When she finally returns, the rains have moved in and there's water leaking down in through the splayed bits of roof overhead. It runs and dribbles down the corrugated metal walls with a wet, pattering noise and turns what had been dry, dusty earth into mud and more mud, the color of tar. Her clothes are soaked through to the bone as she kneels down beside him, her hair hanging around her face in wet strands. The very tips of it drip down onto Darren's face (plip plip plip); its enough to loosen some of the blood that's still dried there in wide ruddy streaks. Judith wipes at with one hand while with the other she presses two fingers to the inside of his wrist and then to this throat.

Then she's turning away again, digging through her bag to pull out this thing and that, setting each aside. A new needle, better thread. A jar of thick amber liquid with what appears to be twigs floating in it. Her knife. ]

Did you sleep?

Edited 2012-01-14 04:00 (UTC)

[The pain makes it hard to think straight. To even see straight. She leaves him in some shelter (and he can't quite figure out what it is, just snatches, corrugated metal, the sound of rain) and he has no idea how much time passes before she's back again. How long she's been back. She's taking things out of a bag, and he turns his head, tries to make out what they are, but associating the shapes of them with memories in his head doesn't seem to quite work. Did he sleep? He frowns at her, lifts a hand - she's touching him - only for it to land back in the mud.]

No. [He pushes his fingers into the mud. Remembers that it's raining, realises that's what the sound on the metal above them is (again).] Where is this?

[ More things come out of the bag. A tin that rattles, an unlabeled can (dented at one end), another jar (smaller this time and made of dark green glass), a coil of torn cloth like dressings. Her hands are surprisingly clean, having been washed thoroughly in the drain off from one of the silo's spouts. Judith affords the hand that Darren raises the most perfunctory of glances, more than ready to put it down for him if he doesn't do it himself. When it drops back down to his side, she resumes what she's doing, her fingers dirtying themselves in peeling back layers of blood soaked cloth from where they stick to the skin of his abdomen. Her touch doesn't know what it is to be gentle, though it can be yielding and considerate from time to time. Right now it's matter-of-fact but feather light, mindful of how the ragged wound across his gut puckers and weeps as the cold air hits it. ]

Carthage. I've taken you east. [ She pauses just long enough to pull his shirt up to about midway. Tilting her head to one side, Judith assesses the damage and then begins to feel the sides of his belly, as if trying to test the strength of the stitches. ] You'll be safe for the night. We can afford to stop. [ She looks at him now waving a finger from side to side in his line of view to see how and if his eyes follow it. ] No one will think to look for us here.

[ She should have killed the raiders that did this to him. But killing was what had put her in this predicament in the first place; so instead, she took him and ran. ]

Safe.

[Hope lingers in the wake of the word for a moment, lingers longer than perhaps it normally would, but his head is muggy and that dulls the edges of the caution he's tried to breed in himself. She waves a finger in front of him, and he almost follows it, but then that little voice finally comes to life and he gives a laugh. It's short, uses too many muscles, disturbs his stomach and the wound there, and pain makes him gasp. Makes him realise how dry his throat is, makes him cough. He struggles to make it stop.]

Fuck.

[ When he laughs, her hand moves instinctively to cover the sown seam stretched across his belly, her fingertips pressing much more firmly than they did before, as if concerned that he may just up and burst any moment if he doesn't decide to be more careful. When the muscles spasm and harden beneath her palm she frowns, twisting to grab from the jar and its murky contents from where she's placed it only a few feet away; her hand remains where it is the entire time, the wound growing wet and slippery as she tries her best to open the jar one-handed, only to fail twice before finally succeeding. ]

Here, [ she says, urging the jar into his hand. The liquid inside sloshes slowly and upon closer inspection what's floating inside seems to be bits of plant matter; it seems rather strongly of menthol or ethyl — peppermint mixed with vodka topped off with lighter fluid. ]

You can either drink it, or can I put it on the wound. These stitches won't hold. I'll have to do more.

[He finds himself scrabbling at the mud around them, trying to find something to hold onto against the coughing and the pain. There might be blood in his mouth, he's not sure - everything tastes metallic, like it's in the air. He grabs at her arm at one point, and for a moment the strangeness of touching someone else (holding on, looking for steadiness) pierces through the pain. He takes the jar, doesn't even look at it or smell it before he lifts it to drink, but the foul taste just has him coughing weakly again. He pushes it back at her, some spilling over the edge.]

The wound, jesus christ.

[He takes a few gasping breaths, but the coughing's stopped, and there's something a little more like clarity in his eyes when he looks at her. Just another survivor wandering the wasteland, smeared with dirt, hair wet from the rain, hands bloody - his blood. A wound that needs stitches, that already has stitches, and she must have put them there, got him here somehow, went to get supplies for further treatment.]

Who are you? Why are you doing this?

[None of it makes sense.]

[ She takes the jar from him, it's contents going from sloshing to still in the wake of her much steadier hands. There's one of those brand new needles (oddly shiny and well-kept for what could only be assumed is salvage) pinched between her lips, the eye of it threaded with some of that black thread that — upon closer inspection — is slightly stiffened at the ends and closer to wire than the usual floss used for these sorts of operations. It wasn't ideal, but it was better than what she'd had previous, and whatever discomfort it would bring Darren in the meantime would be price enough to keep the blood in and the infection out.

Removing the needle to speak, she says: ] They were going to kill you. I made sure they didn't.

[ It isn't so much a why, but in a way it serves. She had gone to the trouble of saving him, she couldn't very well just leave him to die from his wounds. Judith isn't sure it would negate her efforts in the end (a tally removed was a tally removed) but she's never been a fan of doing needless things.

Some of the concoction in question is poured onto Darren's wound and it's equal parts cooling and stinging wherever it touches raw flesh. Judith splays one hand flat against his chest, steadying him, trying to force him still as she brandishes the needle in his face, warning him that she's about to start. ] I'm Judith. Now, hold still.

[It wasn't a why, wasn't near good enough to settle that niggling voice in Darren's head, and with that needle coming closer to his skin it only increases in urgency (it didn't matter if she'd obviously stitched him up already, she was about to stab a piece of metal through his skin and he had no fucking idea what she was doing it for).]

That's no answer. [There are the edges of something shrill in his voice. It's not a matter of anger, not right now, he doesn't have the energy for it. There's too much pain clouding his mind and his responses, and pain goes to fear all too easily. It's in his eyes, too, wide and shining at she brings the needle close to his face. He grabs her arm, grip slippery with mud, keeping it away from his face, keeping her from starting on the wound across his belly.]

Nobody just helps people like that.

[Maybe they had, once, but Darren had lived too close to the bottom of the pile to ever see anything resembling altruism. And then the Event had killed off the last of it anyway.]

[ He fights her and she fights back, attempting to wrench her forearm free from his uncertain grasp. Like this, he's managed to hold her and her needle away from his body, but he's also kept her from pulling away completely as well (not that she wants to; this is about forward, not back). ] Don't be stupid, [ she hisses, an edge showing in her eyes and in all likelihood that does nothing to help her case. She's killed plenty of men in her day and with little more than her bare hands most of the time. He has every reason to fear her, besides the most obvious (obvious to Judith, at least): ]

I've had enough people die around me. [ Because of me. Her voice pinches and doesn't go shrill, instead dropping low into her throat with a determined growl. ] I'm tired of it, aren't you? I saw that they were following you. I couldn't let it go.

[ In truth, he's not the only one that will walk away from the encounter with scars. There's a nasty gash across the ridge of one of Judith's shoulder blades which she'd only managed to dress, not being able to reach it to stitch. The wound screams as she meets the resistance of Darren's hand, and her eyes grow wet, but she doesn't relent. ]

Now let me start, before the stitches split.

I don't believe you.

[It's his slipping lucidity that has him saying it aloud. Everyone lies, but no one likes to be a liar, to be confronted over it. Even in the mud, scrabbling over every scrap of whatever they can get, there's some tiny part that knows every bad deed and selfish intention. Darren doesn't believe anyone, and he knows not to call any of them out on it. Anger and violence were the most common defence, the quickest way to silence a voice.

He doesn't believe Judith, and his mind conjures up loose images of what her real intentions could be, hazy with pain, outlandish and unbelievable - and yet, in some ways, more comforting to him than the idea she would rescue and nurse him out of the goodness of her heart. He could rely on people being starving dogs, fighting over the last bone. Judith, crouched over him with a needle in one hand and wet eyes (was she crying? Was it the rain?) is not only unreliable, she breaks the vision of the rest, making cracks for hope to grow through.

His hand slips from her arm, and whether it's an intentional thing or simply the fact he cannot keep a grip doesn't matter. If he's going to die here, there's not a damn thing he can do about it right now. Let her stitch him up or stab his eyes out; either will lead to some sort of rest, finally.]

[ She doesn't mean to give him hope, really. Perhaps if she knew that hope was what this was all about, she would abandon her needle and her thread and her insistance and simply leave Darren there with his opened up belly for the raiders or the animals or — worst of all — the insects to find. Judith understands how hope can be a poison in a place like this, how it can fill a person up only to let that person down, hard and fast. Not gentle like air being let out of a balloon but sharp and unforgiving, like a rock off a cliff. What's left of the world isn't meant for things like hope, or for expectations or for goodness or promises. And yet here Judith was, with her own promise hung round her neck.

(One life saved for every life you've taken, she'd sworn to herself. Only then are you allowed to die. And so her noose was set at the end of a very long and unrelenting rope.)

Judith startles when Darren finally gives lets go, having expected him to fight her tooth and nail til the last stitch was set. At first she wonders if maybe he's about to swoon and loose consciousness but then she sees his eyes and the way his head lolls slightly and she knows that it's not a fainting spell, it's resignation.

With a hand she presses down on his chest again, finding leverage for if the pain makes him squirm. Before pressing the needle to his skin, Judith leans down over him and says in a low whisper: ]

I will not let you die.

OPEN | prompt one | RAIN

judith | THE WASTELAND | post-Event

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