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Azalea came to screaming. That was never a good sign, her body heaving and shaking back to consciousness. She listened to the echo of her voice on the rafters, spread her fingers where they lay, feeling for the ground to push herself up. Instead, what she felt was a pool of warm and heavy liquid, which she could only presume was her own blood.
Fuck.
She cracked open her eyes then, slowly moving her arms behind her to try to push herself up. It was as she moved that she heard the voice from the other side of the room.
“I wouldn’t move if I were you.”
Fantastic. She had an audience for her blood-soaked pity party. Azalea squinted her eyes open, and immediately slammed them shut again as the halogens burned into her retinas.
“What brings you here, did you want to laugh at my failure again?”
The other woman didn’t respond, and Azalea stared at her own eyelids, trying to track the sound of heavy combat boots on the cement. Even so, she still jumped when that gravelly voice spoke again, this time just behind her ear.
“Ok, here’s the game plan. I’m going to touch your shoulders. I need you to roll yourself upward as slowly as you can until you can sit up. There’s a bit of a situation with your injury, I don’t want you to impale yourself.”
Azalea slowly squinted her eyes open to assess the situation herself just as firm hands pressed between her shoulder-blades and the concrete. She instantly regretted it, staring down at where her stomach and thighs seemed to be replaced almost in their entirety with a bloody pulp of flesh, glass, and steel.
The hands pushed down on her shoulders none too gently as her body jolted at the sight.
“What did I tell you, Azzy. I need you to move slowly. One vertebra at a time, if you must.”
Azalea huffed out a laugh even as she slowly, agonizingly, pushed herself off the ground.
“Are you quoting your fucking yoga teacher at me, Mila?”
She didn’t bother with a reply, her steady hands pushing up at her shoulders until she was in as close to a sitting position as she would get, hands hovering over her chest. She gaped, now, at the pool of blood she had been laying in, spreading as it was onto Mila’s boots and knees and hands. Mila tracked her eyes and retracted her hands, wiping them off on her pants.
“I’m going to pick you up now. I have a car right outside, can you stay awake until we can get there?”
Funny enough, it wasn’t until the moment Mila brought it up as an option that Azalea felt just how tired she was. The adrenaline she’d been running on seemed to have sapped from her body, and all she wanted to do was let her eyelids droop. She heard a deep heaving sigh from behind her, and she let her eyes slip closed as she felt strong arms lift her off the ground.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This time, Azalea came to in a small apartment, lying on a bed that had the distinct crinkle of protective plastic on the mattress. Gore protection, right. Mila was sitting at the very edge of the bed, pulling on a pair of blue gloves that made her think of a hospital, while the incense burning on the dresser and Polaroids pinned to the door very much disabused her of that notion.
Mila turned toward her when she felt the mattress move and pressed a hand back to Azalea’s shoulder almost instinctively.
“Stay still, Azzy. You’ll only make this harder for yourself if you keep moving.”
Azalea chose to ignore this in favor of trying to push herself up to better see the pictures pinned to the bedside table. As she tried to shift, a sharp pain coursed through her abdomen, flattening her back to the bed.
“What’d I tell you. I need to get this out of you before I can start stitching you up. Don’t move.”
“Christ, fine Mila. Just… please be gentle.”
Mila didn’t answer so much as she grunted, but Azalea still noticed that the tweezers pulling glass out of her move with as much care as could be granted in the situation. As she worked, Mila started chewing on her lip, a sign as long as Azalea had known her that she was about to ask something personal, or stupid, or both. Finally, she snapped at her with the hand that was white-knuckling the bed, as much to get it out as to distract herself from the constant pain.
“I can tell you’re thinking, and we know that’s bad for your health. Out with it.”
Mila didn’t look up, but her hand paused halfway through its motion, a wicked piece of steel dangling far too close to Azalea’s open wounds for comfort. She let out a gravely sigh that shook her frame and slowly moved the offending metal to the towel she was using to catch the detritus of the cleanup.
“Fine. Why the hell were you doing this heist alone?”
“Are we really going to rehash this whole thing now? I’ve told you a million times now, I am good at what I do, and I get what I need out of the situation every time.”
“What you need out of a situation? Was what you needed from that office to be bleeding out on the floor of a warehouse? Was it worth nearly having to transplant your whole internal organ system just for a job?”
She was yelling now, gesticulating with surgical instruments. Azalea lifted a hand as far as she could off of the bed (which, looking at it, was pitifully little), trying and failing to reach for Mila’s arm.
“Hey. Listen, please don’t wave the scalpel, or you’re going to finish the job that the bomb started.”
“Christ, and you have a sense of humor about it too? Who even are you?”
“You know, you used to find my sense of humor cute and charming.”
“Yeah, and then I had to re-set your shoulder about a baker’s dozen times and fight off half of the mob presence in this town because you were sticking your nose where it didn’t belong. That’s not the kind of thing that being hot and funny gets you out of.”
“Oh, so I am hot and funny.”
Mila snorted, almost despite herself, and picked the tweezers back up. “You and I both know that’s not what I meant, Azzy. I thought we were done having this fight when you left.”
Azalea pushed herself up on her elbows, ignoring the way her abdominal muscles screamed at her and the wet crinkle of the bed below her. She watched Mila’s capable hands stop from where they had been pulling the last near-microscopic shards of glass from her upper thigh, and the other woman slowly turn to look at her.
“Please lie back down, Azzy. I’d like to finish this so I can stitch you up and let you mope around until you can walk again.”
“No, okay. Are we actually going to talk about it? Because you keep beating around this,” she gestures vaguely with a hand between the two of them, every second sitting up reminding her that far more of her insides are currently facing the outside than she would ever feel comfortable with, “and all I can think about is why, after all our history, after our last fight, you actually rolled up to drag my bloody body out of a warehouse. What gives, Mila?”
Mila looked at her for a long time, then gently put down the tweezers and pushed Azalea back down to the mattress. She tried not to think about the last time she’d felt Mila’s hands on her shoulders like that, failed miserably, and couldn’t stop the crooked smile cracking across her face, even as her nerves sent pain signals shooting up her skin.
Out of her eyesight, she could hear Mila pick the tweezers back up, and a second later the feeling of her trying to pick out the last few glass shards. She thought for a moment that they simply were tabling the conversation, but after a few agonizing minutes, her gravely voice broke the silence.
“Azzy, I didn’t know anything was really wrong when you left. We’d fought plenty but at the end of the day, I was always your phone call to pick up your pieces. Do you know what that does to someone, building a life with someone who just decides to disappear? I spent weeks with one ear to the radio, because I swore to God, I was going to hear about some rookie cop shooting you dead after a job gone wrong.” She paused here, digging out another shard of glass. “It’s hard to move on having yoked myself to you for the last three years of my life. In the end, I just found myself patrolling the same three or four neighborhoods, either hoping or dreading that I’d see you blowing yourself up to steal something inconsequential.”
Azalea stared up at the ceiling as she heard a plastic cap being unscrewed, biting down on the inside of her cheeks until they bled as she felt Mila upturn what felt like an entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide over her stomach and legs. Finally, she couldn’t stand it anymore, and pushed herself back up into where Mila’s hands were pressing gauze to her wounds with a gentleness uncharacteristic of her bedside manner.
“Hey, well. I’m glad you were there. I’m sure I had my reasoning for leaving, but to be honest, I truly couldn’t tell you now. I don’t think that I can do this much longer, if the security is actual explosives now. I’ve just got to cash in this job and then… maybe we can get coffee? Start over?”
Mila stared at her, hands slack with shock making it easy for Mila to slowly push herself up to a seated position, reaching onto the gauze holding the metal and glass that had housed themselves in her body. She picked through the shards until she found her prize, pinching the data chip between gentle fingers.
“Alright, bingo. I’ll just tell them to pick this up tomorrow. Can hand in my two-weeks notice while I’m at it.”
Mila just stared at her, blank-faced for far too long.
“Azalea. My dearest Azalea, please think very carefully before you answer me. Did you store corporate espionage in YOUR GAPING WOUNDS?!”