Chapter Text
Cold.
Freezing cold.
He shivers. He’s underneath four feet of snow, maybe. It’s heavy and its temperature has already chilled him to the bone. His body is starting to show signs of frostbite but Tiger can’t move.
Something has immobilized him. It isn’t the freezing cold. Tiger vaguely remembers a solid piece of ice hitting his back before his head was hit too and everything blacked out.
Now his whole body is shaking and painfully numb. How long has it been since he’s buried here? He tries to make an estimation as he finds control over his arms. He can move them but they’re about as numb as the rest of his body that it almost makes no difference.
Tiger squirms in the ice while he claws his way out. He can’t breathe properly. The air under here is too cold and even his lungs feel like they’re freezing from the intake.
Get out.
He has to get out. He’s got to get out and…
Grayson.
That bastard did this.
Tiger remembers Grayson turning away to get to Dr. Daedalus’ snowy German castle just as he’s shouting a lethal promise to the dick. And by god will he keep that promise.
Grayson’s insufferable and naïve ideologies will most likely be his own death, but Tiger wants to be next on queue before anybody else gets the chance to give him a second passing.
Just imagining pounding that idiot’s face in is enough to fuel Tiger to dig his way out. Despite his unsteady hands and his numbed face, Tiger digs and digs. His feet are unresponsive to his brain’s commands, but Tiger puts that out of his mind for now. Probably numb from the cold.
His reasoning proves wrong an unsettling while later.
Before he has enough time to register what his new problem is and panic about it, he steels himself and thinks, one problem at a time. He can grieve and swear vengeance on his newfound lameness later when he’s sure that that’s what it is. Right now, he’s focusing all his energy on getting out of this icy grave.
Blood rushes through his arms and they start to burn after a while. His airways and lungs are burning too when he finally finds an opening but the burn is different, caused by biting cold rather than by strenuous work.
Tiger pulls himself out but halfway is all he manages to do because a horrendous amount of pain overtakes his body and it gives out. He groans loudly in agony, aware of the stinging sensation that’s coursing through his legs, up and down them.
And that’s good because that means he hasn’t totally lost them. He can still feel them in some way.
Outside is dark. Tiger can’t see anything but the stars in the sky and the silhouette of the castle in the distance. Not much time has passed. He’d say two hours tops. That means that help was unlikely to come, especially if that castle in the distance hasn’t gone up in flames or blown up yet. It means Checkmate is still battling with Grayson. People would have been sent to look for Tiger, surely. He is the Knight in the operation and they’d use him to the most of their advantage if possible. There is no rule against bringing back a benched player. Not in this game.
Now that he’s mostly out of the snow, the adrenaline rush leaves Tiger and he feels tired again. It’s still cold, but now the ice is replaced with biting wind and somehow that isn’t much better. His hands never stopped shaking, as did his body. Tiger lays down to wait for the pain to subside though his mind is already making plans to make his rescue faster.
After the hurting has gone down to a manageable amount, Tiger grits his teeth and continues pulling his body out of the ground. Pain attacks his body again. Something is throbbing inside him other than his racing heart, his veins feel like they’re on fire. His legs hurt every time he tries to move them. The effort Tiger exerts just to get out of his supposed grave summons forth tiny bits of sweat on his skin that dry up as quickly as possible despite the warm skin beneath.
Tiger stops, looks back and sees that he’s crawled some distance away from the hole he dug himself out of, but it’s easily only a short walk’s distance. Some ten meters.
He’s panting and sweating when he tries to lift his shivering body from the snow to at least a sitting position. It only makes him hurt worse, bad enough to encourage another groan of pain from his scratchy throat. The action leaves him powerless behind the agony and he falls back on his face.
He stops and decides to reach the Black King, but his ear piece is missing. Tiger taps the rest of the pockets of his vest for the emergency signal emitter to find it is gone. He curses, panic overwhelming him.
His breathing is shallower now and his heart is slowing down and Tiger recognizes that this is very bad. For the first time in a long time he feels helpless, but he masks that by emptying all his pockets, throwing every blade, bomb, glow stick, gun, magazine onto the snow next to him.
He snaps the glow stick to light it up and then catalogs his other items. He reaches for the pocket in his pants, which wasn’t an easy feat, and finds his emitter there. It turns out that the thing is broken once he has it held up closer in the light.
Dread is starting to take hold of Tiger, but he refuses to give up. Somehow today he will get out and when he does, he’ll recover. He will recover and he will hunt Grayson down. And he’ll make good of his word and kill that goddamned idiot.
That’s the plan Tiger puts together in his mind as he puts everything back on him haphazardly. He starts crawling towards the castle. It’s the closest place that offered shelter and warmth. All he had to do is follow Grayson’s footprints.
The problem is that Tiger is tired and in pain and still shivering like there’s no tomorrow. He reminds himself of the prize awaiting behind those doors and his willpower increases, if only a little bit. It’s enough to get him to higher ground, but he’s spent too long in the cold and his body can only take so much.
He stops to take a breath. The burn in his muscles don’t dissipate despite the snow beneath them. His eyes begin to drop.
“Tony!”
That idiot did call him that, didn’t he? One more endearing reason to kill him. The nickname is ringing in Tiger’s ear and he closes his eyes, feeling drowsy now. He knows he shouldn’t sleep. Sleep is bad. It’s a fatal mistake… But… just two minutes… Two minutes is all he needs and then he could go back to his scheming. He only needs two minutes…
He closes his eyes.
“Tiger!”
Tiger’s eyes fly open. He lifts his head and weakly pushes himself on his elbows. He looks into the distance, to the castle that’s still looming, to the snow plains everywhere else. Nothing there but dark shadows and snow.
It then dawns upon him what he’d been about to do and Tiger is gripped by horror. He was going to sleep… and most likely he’d never have woken up. What was wrong with him!?
Tiger’s heart is beating faster at the realization and he feels slightly more awake now. He swallows thickly then forces his body to a sitting position, no matter how badly it hurt. He contemplates it’s better to be in pain and live than comfortable and dead.
“Tiger!” The wind calls again and Tiger looks towards the sound. Still he sees nothing, but he waits. He waits for a shadow to move, or for another call. When nothing came, he huffs. He’s starting to lose it. His freezing, muddled brain is slowly turning into slush, isn’t it?
“Fuckin’ Gray…son,” he catches himself mumbling as he hangs his head in defeat. He feels sleepy again. This time he grips onto his leg and lets the pain keep him awake.
He has to find a way out of here. He could wave his glow stick around even when he’s unsure that anybody is around to see. Someone’s bound to look at the moving light, someone’s bound to come. He’s only got one unused left. The other would last for another eleven hours—more than enough time till daylight arrives.
He wonders if he’d make it until then. The weather isn’t extreme, but Tiger is injured and the nearest—
“Tiger!”
He decides it isn’t the wind. Tiger snaps the other glow stick on before he could think about what he’s doing, then holds one in each hand and starts waving. He prays he could be seen from wherever that call is coming from so he could be promptly rescued.
His arms are burning and shivering from the cold at the same time but he doesn’t care. The numbing pain in them has stopped, instead replaced by jelly it seemed. Nevertheless he forces them up.
It takes a while before he sees someone jumping down the slope from where Dr. Daedalus’ castle stood. Tiger screams for help—or tries to. His voice comes out weak and soft and broken. He tries again and this time, he hopes his yell is enough to catch the man’s attention.
He watches in defeat as the shadow runs around the large building and disappears behind it. His arms fall to his sides. He tries screaming again, but a broken sound comes out instead.
He waits. Surely, someone else would come out…
Tiger lets his body fall forward. He has to crawl closer, maybe. Maybe this isn’t high enough to be seen. There’s a hill higher still and maybe that’s where he needs to be to be seen.
Halfway up, Tiger’s body screams at him in protest. It’s numb but he somehow feels enough of the pain to fall loosely on his face again. He pants, waits the pain out. He tries wiggling his toes and he feels nothing.
He doesn’t want to think of the worst case scenario but somehow his mind gives him the picture of blue, dead toes with black, dead nails—all ten of them—and he just falters enough to start thinking of giving up. Thankfully, before he could start imagining anything worse, something nudges at his mind.
It isn’t… thought.
It’s nothing he could ever hope to describe—the feeling of sudden loss. Tiger can’t place it, but he feels like he’s suddenly missing something. Something important. It's like waking up from a hit to the head, but not, and not because he'd just woken up, or that he'd gotten hit on the head just now, but... Tiger doesn't know how to feel about it, what to think of it.
It was only a momentary nudge though. After a violent bodily shudder, Tiger’s mind is taken off of that bothersome feeling of missing something and he instead focuses on repressing the pain.
He knows that at this rate, he’ll freeze to death if he doesn’t do anything. Hoping for someone to see him then rescue him is a long shot, especially with everything happening. Tiger can’t afford to bet his life on hope. Hopefulness and optimism had never been very reliable assurances for him.
Nevertheless, Tiger closes his eyes and prays.
He doesn’t realize that while he’s in prayer, he falls into a light blanket of unconsciousness.