Chapter Text
Night is the worst time for these kinds of things to happen. In the dark, you can’t tell survivors from orphaned limbs, shadows from trip hazards, water from blood and gasoline.
Flame spreads over what is left and casts confusing geometries of light and shadow. Smoke turns the air acrid and unbearable and rich with the smell of burning hair and flesh. The rumble and rend of delayed collapse climbs over the noise of panicked humanity.
The explosion doesn’t kill everyone, and it doesn’t break everything. Maybe that’s the worst part–incompletion. Being among leftovers.
Knives wakes in the wreckage of July, immobilized under rubble. He’s on his side, in the shadow of a wall that’s partially at his back and partially splayed over him, crushing.
He tries to move, to shove a hunk of concrete off his chest, but he finds himself weak. The world shivers. He brings a hand towards his face and struggles to focus his eyes on the bone of his fingers as they drip.
Out of the smoke and sound, something resolves before him; shoes. Then knees, then hands, pulling rubble off him, brushing thick dust from his nose and mouth and turning his face to meet a pair of eyes.
The eyes flash in and out of contact with his—wide and alert and assessing; then tight; then gentle.
He recoils. He tries to speak, to curse the stranger for touching him, but the breath comes out wheezing and wet and more through his throat than his lips.
“Hey, it’s okay, don’t move,” the stranger says. “Don’t move. You’re okay right here.”
Their knees shift before him in the dark rock and gravel. Black liquid climbs the thread of their clothing. It’s his blood.
The hand on his face touches his cheek with a thumb; another hand slides into his slick palm.
Knives realizes his body is dying. The stranger is waiting for his body to die. As he struggles for physical awareness, it slips away. His throat is open, his chest sodden and ripping when he tries to move.
The stranger makes an odd noise when Knives twists. They try to recapture his attention. “Don’t. Don’t. Can you hear me?”
“Just wait it out. Rest.” The reassuring, gentle expression contorts, the voice breaks. “I’m so sorry I don’t have anything for the pain.”
Yeah, the pain. The pain is what makes everything so difficult.
This is stupid.
Knives screws his eyes shut and draws from the gate. He feels it—his chest starts to warm, to knit, then constricts around something and surges with pain again. This time, his voice works better, and he spits out the feeling, liquid and wordless noise.
Somebody starts. The hand around his tightens and releases.
“You-“
Knives remembers he’s with company.
The stranger’s face is blank, backlit with flame and cast with white light from Knives’s skin.
“You’re…” They trail off, eyes flicking across his body.
Knives jerks his hand away from them, trying to focus on the concept of blades and assemble them at his fingers. To strike the stranger down before they can call anyone else over, rat him out.
“…you might actually pull through this.”
The stranger leans back.
“Okay. Okay. We need to get you out of here right now, especially if you’re going to keep looking like that.”
They turn their back to Knives and begin to heave rubble off his legs, levering it sideways. “I’m going to have to lift you off that beam. I’m sorry.”
Yes—that’s what it is, in his chest. Metal and H-shaped and all the way through him.
He starts to push himself up by inches, to prop himself on his arms, but the left, untested, crumples. He slides back to the ground, sweat and wet agony.
When he opens his eyes, the stranger is over him like an animal. He sees the patterns on his skin reflected in the wet dark of their eyes. Knives swipes at their neck, but the blades are gone—or never came together at all—and his fingers rake blood uselessly across their throat. It drips back into his face.
Fingers slip again into his bloodied hand. Squeeze it. They’re warm, warmer than him. He feels the pulse of blood within them. The heat of life.
“Are you ready?”
Yes.
His hand is placed on the back of a neck. The animal leans over him, wraps limbs around him. It cradles him like an awful doll.
The movement is in his ribs, in his teeth. Too slowly, not smoothly enough, it pulls him forward and over. His vision slips like a red blanket. He’s clinging to the gate. To consciousness. To power. To the nape of someone’s neck with his fingernails.
At the height of agony, of demand; something shifts.
The gate cracks away from him. And there is only the raw horror and the helplessness of it left. Him, his body, the animal, the dust, his blood, someone else’s.
He loses his grip on awareness, like everything else.