Chapter Text
The forest is green all over. Bright, leafy greens melt into darker, earthier ones, blurring together in my vision. Rays of golden afternoon light sift through the trees, scattering in intricately dappled patterns across the ground. Above me, I can hear the chirping and chattering of various birds. Below me, the dirt is soft and slightly moist, pillowing under my head. The scene would be downright peaceful if not for the molten, smoldering wreckage of the Yellow Dragon 2.0.
My first coherent thought while lying here is: Not this again. We can’t be doing this again.
The last thing I remember before this is escaping the Heavenly Court and entering the atmosphere above Huaxia in a rain of fire. Then… then what? We must have crashed; that much is clear. But where? And—
I snap up, my body jolting like I’ve been shocked. The others! What happened to them? I try desperately to regain my balance but succeed only in tripping over myself and crash landing back into the dirt. Agony tears through me, leaving me doubled over. I think I’ve torn the wound in my side open again. I try my best to just glance around me, and to my immense relief, I spot them. But the feeling doesn’t last long.
Qin Zheng lays limp across the remnants of the cockpit, mouth slightly parted, long hair spilling from his usually neat topknot into long, painful looking snarls. But his armor is intact, and he looks like he’ll be okay when he wakes.
Zhenyue and Rui are curled around each other protectively, their qipaos torn, revealing small burns and abrasions all over their skin. Rui’s weapons are scattered around them, glowing gently with stored qi. I wince at their injuries, but see that their chests are rising and falling relatively regularly, so I move on with my survey.
Yizhi… Oh fuck. Oh shit.
From his face, you wouldn’t necessarily know it. He’s lying supine, features relaxed with unconsciousness, as if just asleep like the others. But when I catch sight of his legs, that’s when I realize. He’s trapped. A large chunk of metal debris from the new Dragon is pinning him to the earth. Thank all the skies, his legs don’t look crushed, but they’re injured for certain, and I can’t get that thing off of him without help. Tamping down my panic, I scan around for my last companion.
To my surprise and immense good fortune, said companion is awake. Feeling my gaze, Shimin turns to me. His eyes widen when he realizes I’m also awake, and he crawls his way over to me, carefully avoiding the others. When he gets to me, he relaxes, heaving slightly. Of all of us, he appears the least affected by the crash— I can see some minor burns here and there where his armor melted a little, but by some divine luck, he looks mostly unscathed. And he’s not moving like he’s in a lot of pain.
“You’re alright,” he murmurs when he catches his breath.
“More or less.” I automatically clamp a hand to my side. The motion draws his attention to my wound, and he sucks in a breath.
“Did that reopen again?”
“I think so.” I grimace. “But I’m not the real problem here.” With my free hand, I point to Yizhi. “We need to get that off of him.” His face pales.
“Uh oh.” He holds out a hand to me. “Can you stand?”
“With some effort,” I grit out. I grab onto him and he pulls me upright, circling an arm around the small of my back to support my weight. Once I think I’ve got it, he lets go.
“Okay, you grab one side and I’ll grab the other. On my count of three, we’ll both lift that stuff off.” I nod and limp my way to the closer edge of the debris, hunched over to protect my side from bleeding out. Carefully, I crouch onto the balls of my feet and position my hands under the metal. On the other side, Shimin does the same.
“Ready,” I say.
“Alright. One, two, three.” We both heave with all of the little strength we have in reserve. For a long moment, the debris doesn’t even budge, leaving us straining against it arbitrarily. Then, centimeter by centimeter, it begins to rise, until it’s high enough that we can sort of shove-fling it away from Yizhi’s body. It lands in the dirt with a thud loud enough to wake Yizhi up, eyelashes fluttering open in momentary panic. He jolts straight up much like I did, then gasps sharply and collapses back down (much like I did).
“Yizhi!” Shimin exclaims, at once hovering over him with concern. Yizhi’s eyes flick to Shimin’s face, and a dopey smile tugs at his lips.
“You’re here,” he slurs. His gaze focuses on me next. “And you!”
And curse me, but the first words out of my mouth are, “Skies Yizhi, you sound positively drunk!” He frowns at that.
“Drunk?? Pshh! You’ve neverrr met someone soo… so… sober! in your entire lifeee!” Shimin and I look at each other in horror. Forget drunk. He sounds completely addled. I give him another once-over, and… yeah. Okay. That’s why.
On second look, his legs are in way worse condition than I thought. They’re covered in lacerations from shin to thigh, and some of them look deep. Many are leaking blood continuously, explaining the slurring. A wave of nausea rolls over me, and I have to fight the urge to vomit all over myself at the iron tang filling the air. I press a fist to my mouth, hoping to quell the sensation. It only sort of works.
“Yizhi.” Shimin’s voice is laced with worry. “Stay awake.”
Uh oh.
“Tired…”
“I know. But you can’t fall asleep on me right now, okay?”
“Okay…” Shimin’s gentle speech goes in one ear and out the other, gradually getting replaced by white noise. This can’t be happening. Yizhi can’t be dying.
Focus, I tell myself, slapping my cheeks. We need to treat this. But what’s the first step? I chew on my bottom lip. First things first, I need to staunch all of that blood. But I don’t see any gauze, and I have a sinking feeling that any medical supplies we had on board were destroyed in the crash if they hadn’t already been incinerated in the atmosphere. My gaze travels over the area again. Aside from the five of us, there were fifty other women on board, servants who had been offered as tribute to the gods and had seen this as their opportunity to escape. I can tell at a glance that most of them are dead.
This time, I can’t push the feeling down. I kneel and retch into the grass, bile burning my throat on its way up. Then I wipe my mouth and begin tearing at the nearest dead girl’s clothes. I want to feel bad for using her this way. But she’s not going to need them anymore, and right now, I just don’t have any other options. Shimin sees what I’m doing and begins to help, using his armor to carefully slice the last connecting threads until we have about a meter of usable fabric.
“I can take care of this,” Shimin says, reaching for it. “I know how to make tourniquets.”
“Then what do I do?”
“Help me prop Yizhi’s body so that I can tie these properly.” I do as he asks, and after about fifteen minutes, we have them all tied and the bleeding has mostly stopped. We watch in nervous anticipation as the color slowly returns to Yizhi’s face. His eyes, which had fallen shut despite Shimin’s best efforts not to let him succumb to shock, finally open again, and we both breathe a sigh of relief.
“Don’t scare us like that.” The words come out much harsher than I intend them to, but he gives me a weak smile.
“I’ll… try my besstt.”
“Yeah, well… good.” I turn to Shimin. “Watch him.”
“What will you do in the meantime?”
“We need to get our shit together. That means cataloging who lived, what supplies we have, and where we are so that we can figure out what our best options are from here.” He nods at that.
“Don’t worry about Yizhi. I’ve got him.” I give him a grateful smile.
But before I can do anything at all, I hear the sound of someone waking up.