Work Text:
Shin opens the small box to find the usual supplies inside it: painkillers, antibiotics, bandages, gauze. A few bags of candy.
“Is there anything else you need?” her voice rings with concern across the synch.
And he can think of something that’s missing. Something that’s far more important than candy. But he’s not sure how to ask her for –
-
Blood. He thought that he’d gotten used to it. That certainly he must have seen enough to be numb (to cuts, to gashes, to torn off limbs, to bullet holes, to organs spilling from - ) to the sight of it and to the smell of it. But this is different. It runs and it runs and it runs and it runs. Soaks through clothes, through towels, through sheets. Fills the air with an iron scent so thick that it chokes him. He realizes that he’d never known how much blood circulated through the human body. How much of it a person could lose and still be alive.
The girls are all crowded round. They keep calling for things – warm water, cold water, hot water, ice. Shin pretends that they know what they’re doing, because that’s easier than admitting that none of them knows what to do. One of the boys has given up on looking brave and is crying – choking out a litany of apologies “I’m sorry; I’m sorry; I’m so, so sorry” but the girl on the bed doesn’t hear any of them, Shin thinks. Her eyes are glazed, skin clammy with dripping sweat that sticks her hair to her face. She seizes violently and half of the girls say “Hold her down!” and half of the girls say “Don’t hold her down!” so the boys are all frozen. Silent, and useless.
At first, she’d only been dizzy -(no, he thinks; that isn’t right; that isn’t where this started; that symptom wasn’t really the first)
Shin hadn’t paid much attention to the rest of his squad – not to their gossip or their liaisons, at least – and so he doesn’t know now what the first symptom was. He remembers seeing her smile, seeing him lean in close and whisper something in her ear, to which she giggled. Something like that might have been the first thing. They weren’t shy about touching or kissing in front of the others; didn’t even bother sneaking to each other’s rooms – one simply following after the other in night after night after night.
“We’re being careful,” he’d say. He’d say, “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.”
A lie. Shin wonders if he’d believed himself when he’d said it, or if he’d been lying all the time. Wonders what lies he must have told her to get her to –
She stops seizing; she’s still. She’s still breathing, and to Shin every breath stretches out as far as the sea that he’s never seen – that he can only imagine as an eternity of water, wrapping around and around the earth forever. For some reason, he remembers his mother once telling him that people can’t picture eternity and he thinks she was wrong. Thinks eternity is the space between every inhale and exhale. Eternity is the time between now and death.
The vomiting had come next (and afterward, much afterward). Every morning nauseated her, like the sun itself was offensive. The girls were all worried, all concerned, and some of them said, “You shouldn’t have let him – ”
And she was scared, and she was desperate. Paralyzed in place. Too afraid to do anything, too afraid to do nothing until she almost passed out in her Juggernaut. In the middle of a battle, she almost closed her eyes; almost died. Instead the fear of doing nothing died. And then she was willing to try anything.
“Drink this,” he’d said. “It should help.”
Shin thinks of the honeybees. When they spot a hornet, they swarm – they ball themselves around it and vibrate their wings, building up heat until it’s so hot that the hornet dies. Some of the bees die too. Most don’t. Shin thinks maybe she thought it would be something like that, but he doesn’t know what she knew about bees.
And then she was dizzy. And then she was vomiting (again, like before – and not). And she said that she hurt, that her stomach hurt, so much, so the girls swept her to bed with a bucket and that was when –
All of the blood is a flat, dull, brownish red, and there’s so much of it that he thinks that it’s tinted his vision – that everything he sees is this color. That this might be the only color he sees for the rest of his life and he wishes that someone would order him out and he wishes that someone would give him something to do and he wishes that he was smart enough to leave on his own, but…
It takes him a minute to notice it when she stops breathing. There’s a girl checking her pulse, and a girl with her hand in front of her mouth, feeling for air, but – finally (and it is final, he thinks, so this must not have been eternity after all) – there’s no pulse and there’s no air. And the girls sigh, and the boys sigh, and the walls sigh, and he sighs – and they all tell themselves these are not sighs of relief.
He looks at her, and he sees her face, and her face is –
-
Mina’s. It’s Mikuri’s. It’s Lecca’s. It’s Kurena’s. It’s Anju’s. It belongs to none of them. It belongs to all of them, and it doesn’t matter how he asks; he’s not going to play silent witness again - not to another abortion gone wrong, so he just says it:
“Condoms,” he says. “Send condoms.”