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Sticky blood oozes down her face, clinging to her hair and stinging her teary eyes as she stumbles through the woods, staggering on progressively shakier legs. Her throat burns desperately, demanding water that she doesn’t have, and from the haze that slowly encroaches on her mind, she knows she’s not going to be conscious much longer. Rosita’s passed out enough times to know that much.
The whispers permeate the air around her, reverberating through the woods as if she were trapped in a tiny cavern. The voice is unmistakable, hissing demands for her capture over and over again. Exactly the voice she would have guessed for the risen dead.
Rosita slams into a tree that appears out of nowhere and her pounding headache only gets worse as her head strikes the trunk, her vision splitting double. Everything is twisting and spinning and whirling under her feet, and her depth perception is meaningless as objects loom over her like giants and then fade away into tiny specks.
She needs water. She needs water soon. She was dehydrated before the sprint for her life, and she’s losing liquids in the form of the blood seeping from the deep wound in her head, and without water, she’ll fall unconscious here in the woods, alone, at the mercy of the walkers, and that’ll doom Eugene as well.
She starts to keep going, staggering forward on legs like gelatin, and hits another tree in seconds. All sense of direction is gone - she could very well be running in circles. She takes another step, but that’s finally too much, and she plunges downward as if into a very deep hole, her brain clocking out into senseless blackness before she even reaches the ground.
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She comes to after God-only-knows-how-long, managing to prop herself against a tree in an effort to stop the blood loss. All she knows that the sun is sinking now, but still out and strong, and she feels like a pan in an oven under its merciless heat. Her lips are cracked and bleeding, her mouth is relentlessly dry, and her head is foggy and slow from blood loss and heat exhaustion.
Her stomach churns, and she knows she’s quickly in danger of heat stroke, which might kill her before the walkers do. Head lolling back against the rough bark, Rosita gropes desperately in her bag, searching for her water bottle despite knowing painfully well that it remains dry.
Her hand closes around a small metal cylinder, and she immediately curses herself for not thinking of it before. The flare will summon anyone from any community for miles around - as well as any walker, but that’s a risk she’ll have to take. At least it’ll be difficult for the dead to pinpoint the sight.
It arcs into the air with a high-pitched screeeeee , bursting in the sky like a firework, showering the rapidly graying sky with orange sparks. Rosita slumps back against the tree, digging her hand into the bark to keep herself awake. She can’t afford to pass out again - judging from the blood loss, the concussion she’s sure she’s incurred, and the symptoms of heat stroke intensifying by the second, she doubts she’ll wake a second time.
Rosita hovers on the precarious tightrope between life and death, wobbling back and forth between the two, insisting that she stay awake at any cost. The trees swim before her eyes, horribly dry from the heat. She vividly remembers the deserts of Texas - parched dry land, cracked from endless drought, lifeless except for the hardest of creatures, and oh so desperately thirsty. Her mouth feels the same way - disgustingly dry, her throat itching so powerfully she nearly retches from coughing, demanding water.
She loses track of time in minutes. Maybe seconds. All she knows is that she’s running out of daylight, and with it, life.
Maybe it would be easier to just give in. No, it definitely would be. Darkness creeps at the edges of her vision, and Rosita doesn’t blink it away quite so ferociously. It might not be so terrible. Simply fall asleep and never wake up again. And then this would be over, this desperate need for water, this horrible pounding headache that demands every speck of her attention not already snatched by the dehydration, this pervasive exhaustion with the world in which she lives.
The blackness edges in further, and Rosita’s hand goes limp against the bark. Her head doesn’t hurt quite so terribly now. Everything is less now, as if someone turned it all down like the volume on a television. She exhales deeply and lets her eyes fall closed, barely tethered to the earth.
“Ro?”
It’s the one voice in the world that could pull her back, and Rosita manages to lift her eyelids just a little, and none other than Tara herself swims before her, her face distorted and blurry, her voice reaching her from very far away.
Rosita is certain she’s hallucinating her. One small kindness from whatever supreme deity is about to summon her, one last glimpse of the one person left on this earth she loves before she’s gone. Then blurry, distant Tara murmurs “here, Ro, drink something,” and cups a hand behind her lolling head, bringing the mouth of a wonderfully cool, wet bottle to her lips.
And she is very much not hallucinating the water.
She practically inhales it, sucking down far more than she knows is wise, and would keep going, except Tara pulls it away. Rosita whines slightly in protest, reaching one limp hand for the bottle, but Tara shakes her head, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“Easy. You’re gonna choke, or make yourself sick. You can have some more in a minute.”
She’s right, as annoying as it is, and Rosita hums consent, her throat still too dry to speak despite the cool water restoring life to her cracked lips and dry mouth. Tara lets herself smile then, the most beautiful thing Rosita has ever seen, and cups her cheek gently, smoothing a thumb over her cheekbone. Rosita turns her head into the cool palm at once, savoring Tara’s grounding touch. Her face isn’t quite so blurry now, and her voice is much closer, much more real.
“You gave us quite a scare, you know.” Tara lovingly runs her other hand over Rosita’s muddy, blood-soaked braids, lightly touching the trail of dried blood. “Looks like you scared yourself a bit too.”
“Sorry,” Rosita coughs out, offering Tara a weak smile. For most people, her smiles are rare. Only Tara gets them so easily.
“Don’t be,” Tara murmurs, bringing the water bottle back to her lips. “Let’s get this into you, and then we’ll get you back home. Siddiq - Siddiq isn’t here right now, but I can stitch you up, and he can check you out when he gets back.”
Rosita hums assent, drinking thirstily from the water bottle until Tara pulls it away once more. “Just want you to know…’fore I pass out again...you’re everything to me, ‘kay? I love you…”
Tara huffs a laugh, leaning in to press a butterfly-soft kiss to Rosita’s forehead. “Maybe you should hit your head more often, Ro. I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Oh, shut up.”