all i ever asked is keep it 8 more than 92 with me

[Sunnybunny]

Thank goodness Darlene knew that guy! It made the prospect of being shot so much better, right? It wasn't even that Sakurako was fighting to live, so why did all this make her so angry? Maybe because the benefit of the doubt, decency... all these things had only been rewarded with more pain.

Tea on a kettle, whistle blowing.

They were talking, but all she could hear was that sound. All she could do was face it, and see the hatred in her take flight. It flew for her, to her, and though she screamed out what might have been a warning, it just sounded like scrambled noise. Static.

There would be no salvation in running, not for her. Her only solace was that she'd gotten whoever this fuck's attention was, and...

that was no real solace at all.

[Buko]

His zipper had been stuck.

It was a frustrating thing, wasn’t it? Minor inconveniences. Especially, when comparing them to the direness of this situation—of gunfights and terrorist death games and killing and dying and all the ugliness and vulnerability that came with those things. It was exceptionally frustrating to still find yourself entrenched in the small things that preoccupied your mind before the world became large. Common sense wasn't so common and people hardly ever saw the forest for the trees. Including the folks who kept those cliches up their sleeves. Mantra's and meditations--you know the score by now.

You could lose your job, you could lose your girlfriend, you could lose your home, you could lose your family, you could lose everything that you ever cared about or wanted—it still sucked when you stubbed your toe. You swore and screamed. Pain was pain and frustration was frustration. The big and the small preoccupied equal space—least for Ace. Beats had been on a hair trigger since going to the lake. Ace couldn’t trust anyone, including himself—mostly himself. But that was paranoia and insecurity, wasn’t it? He knew that. Was it paranoia if it was founded in truth? Was the truth some singular thing that you could just grab?

All this philosophizing and wondering is to get to one major point: when the explosion came? Ace was more preoccupied with his battle against the duffel bag zipper than anything else. He had wanted his gun. He needed his gun. He believed that everything would've been safer--if he had his hand on a gun. On this island there wasn't a single problem that couldn’t be solved with more bullets. He had really believed that, wasn’t that crazy? The explosion brought with it a crisis of faith. It didn’t matter, he ducked for cover and dove for his bag, burying his face in the canvas.

His heart trembled and his body shook. The only thing Beats could feel was his heart beating out of his chest. The only thing he could hear was ringing. The only thing he could smell was smoke.

[dmboogie]

In some fucked up way Abe mighta saved a life or two by ruining the beach party, ‘cause the three lucky bastards were now all spread out instead of huddled together, especially with Darlene off on a diplomatic mission, and he wasn’t really sure how to feel about that?

Like on the one hand, if everyone blew up he could lay low for a while then snatch up all their stuff and he would be fuckin’ set, like, he could vanish into the woods until endgame came knocking on his door without any stress. So many guns he couldn’t even carry them all unless he gave dual-wielding a shot. Twice the firepower, half the accuracy, but half of zero was still zero, so it was fine, really.

He was getting off track. Where was he? Oh yeah, on the other hand, Abe wasn’t carrying much of a grudge beyond generalized envy so it’s not like he wanted to see all the guts and blood and shit that’d be covering the beach in the aftermath of a triple kill. He’d had enough blood for a while thank you very much, so as long as none of the survivors decided they wanted to see his blood like an absolute psychopath, that’d be fine, too.

Honestly it was a win-win for him no matter who lived or died, and that was a pretty cozy position to be in. He was real comfortable sitting pretty in the bushes where his worst injury was getting a bit of sand in his eyes. Even if he didn’t have a chance in hell of hitting anything with his rifle, using its scope to stay the hell away from trouble was still a neat trick. In the future he just had to, y’know, avoid shooting around people for absolutely no reason.

He finally looked up, trying to see how lucky the others had been. Darlene had hit the deck, but it looked like it was in a ‘taking cover’ way and not a ‘corpse’ way. It was harder to tell about Ace and Sakurako - the explosion had kicked up a bunch of sand, and it was kinda smoky, besides.

“Any of you guys fucking dead over there?” He called out, which was maybe stupid because his ears were ringing a little bit and he hadn’t even been at ground zero, but like, if they were deaf or dead that wasn’t really his problem, was it?

Anyways he wasn’t gonna move an inch until he was sure the rogue grenadier wasn’t coming to mop up the kills, and having the others shout back at him like ‘nah bro I’m fine’ or ‘oh god my entire arm fell off’ was a perfect way to speed up that process.

[Grand Moff Hissa]

If Darlene had been screaming, she was pretty sure she'd stopped. Everything had stopped, more or less. It was like the world had just paused, leaving her hanging there in the darkness.

It was mostly pretty much alright. She couldn't hear anything beyond a ringing echo, and she couldn't see anything, and everything hurt quite a lot, but the first two were like being asleep kind of and the latter she was used to more or less. She was lying somewhere soft, which she could pretend was a bed or a couch or a nice pretty field with flowers and goats to eat them. If this was being dead, it could've been much worse. It beat several recent moments of being alive that Darlene could easily call to mind, like for instance seeing Jonah shot in front of her, and singing to Max as he died because that was the only thing she could do, and being clubbed in the side of the head with a nailbat.

Unfortunately, she knew she wasn't really dead. There was just too much taste.

Darlene coughed and spat, trying to clear her mouth of the grit and sand that had ended up coating her tongue because she'd had her mouth open right when everything went to pieces. It felt like there was a little chunk of gravel actually under her tongue, and she couldn't get it out, and it was way worse than her worst ever experience with peanut butter, but when she brought her hand up to poke around and help she just bumped her face with the gun. She was pretty sure she yelped, and blinked, and that made it even clearer she was still alive because her eyes hurt quite a lot.

Thank goodness for glasses! Normally Darlene was neutral or vaguely negative on the subject, because she'd worn them so long they were like part of her and she didn't think about them very much, but absolutely no pretty girl ever had worn big thick round glasses like Darlene had. But the shockwave of assorted crud launched by whatever had happened might've messed her day up a whole lot worse if she'd taken a faceful with eyes wide open and nothing to shield them.

She'd been trying to clear her eyes before that moment of stillness, and as soon as she realized the impetus to resume became irresistible. Left-handed, now (her right being too busy holding the revolver), she rubbed and rubbed, and the tears flowed freely. They were tears of pain and of her eyes trying to clear themselves, not of being sad. Darlene knew because she wasn't afraid to admit when she was sad, and also because she didn't know what to be sad about yet. They were maybe also tears of stress because she didn't know what was even going on, but as she rubbed and blinked and spat and heaved big gasping breaths, she freed her left eye enough to at least open it for a few seconds.

Her glasses were real dirty again, of course, and probably scratched forever now besides, but she wasn't soaked in blood and had all her fingers still, which was a promising start. She thought she must not have had the gun cocked, or else she'd squeezed off a shot while falling and not even noticed, but it seemed to be okay too, insofar as she could judge such things. She was lying in a patch of ground that was some dirt and some grass but mostly sand, explaining its relative comfort, and she was able to push herself up into the exact same inefficient kneel she'd held a minute ago.

Reality finally caught up enough for her to realize that things didn't just explode for no reason, and that someone had tried to kill her from ambush yet again, and that they were probably right there nearby getting ready to sweep up the pieces, if there even were pieces left besides Darlene and the boy she'd been heading towards who had probably done the smart thing and skedaddled by now.

"Guys?" Darlene called. She was yelling as loud as she could and could barely hear herself even in her own head. Her left hand had by now moved to the right eye and it was at least making progress in getting tears to just stream down her face, which seemed like the right direction. She could feel them rolling down her cheeks to join the trails of sandy drool where she hadn't quite spit hard enough to not just have spittle dribbling down her chin.

"Guys? Hello? Are you... is anyone okay?" Her hand was bumping her glasses up and down and when she looked where Ace and Sakurako were mostly there was a lot of dust and blurs as her glasses bump-bumped around, making everything like someone's phone recording they hadn't stabilized very well, after they'd touched the lens with greasy fingers.

"Don't," she shouted to the world around her now, to the unseen assailant, whoever it was, "don't, if you did that, you don't come out here. Don't you come out here or else."

Darlene felt more like she was begging than demanding. She didn't even remember for sure if there were bullets left in her gun.

[Sunnybunny]

In the end, she'd tried to escape anyway.

A fool's errand.

Shrapnel wove into her body like lace in a corset, defining her shape forever. Odd places, like the back of her left calf. Way too obvious places, like the piece that was lodged in her right cheek. Her torso felt, to put it simply, fucked up. Her only mirror was the agony, and when the bird catcher and Darlene each called out her only response was sobbing. Sakurako was lying in the fetal position, tempted to cradle the barrel of the pistol to her head but of course dying wasn't...

It just wasn't.

Her glasses were hanging off her face, a single stem doing all the work. Thank goodness she could still see, though it was dust for days. Lake water lapped at her bare feet, and it was a miracle to feel it. Everything had been disturbed, and she cried because she was kind of alone again. With her aching body, and right now there was nothing else. It seemed a bit much, to hurt so much with all the necessary chunks still there. Some had been moved around, was all. Misplaced pieces, like a child putting together sets that just Wouldn't Match.

She didn't want to talk. Talking led to thinking, and the thought of that would lead to uglier places than her body was bound to be.

Ace was probably either dead, gone, or leaving. Thomas never would have left her suffering and she had been happy to be with someone that was his opposite in that way. She hadn't wanted to be protected, but she hadn't been able to escape her desire to be kind to someone for a while. It would sting, no matter which outcome was the case. Even silence couldn't keep that out of her head. Then again, there was still a light ringing keeping things from being entirely quiet upstairs.

Practically, there were things she needed to do to keep her life going, but getting up just took more than she had to give anyone at the moment. Especially herself.

[Buko]

In football, if you were thinking—you were losing.

This had been a fact drilled into him by his coaches for a long time and it had guided him in his time on the island well enough. This idea wasn’t an attack on intellectualism but instead a championing of preparation. Humans only used like 10% of their brain to think or some bullshit. The other 90% was for other stuff. Intangible things. When you surrendered to that animal instinct—you could move faster, you could fight harder, you could run longer. If you prepared your mind then you wouldn’t need to think, you’d just do. Muscle memory.

Mind over matter and the only thing that mattered was you.

He worked his way up, the empty four-five strewn to the side. His bag at his feet. His body covered in sand and tiny scratches of blood. Ace stood like Bambi, his legs shaking and quivering. Darlene screamed and postured—she sounded like Charlie Brown’s parents. She didn't seem so mousey now, did she? Ace had underestimated her and this entire situation. Saku sobbed and bled on the shore. The world slowed down and it became wide screen. In football, if you were thinking—you were losing. Right now—Ace couldn’t stop his mind from running.

She had been his focus. All he had seen was her. She was a lovely distraction and he knew it—she did her job and she had done it well. For a few moments, he hadn’t been thinking about Ivy or Meilin or Myles or Parker or Dante or any death or any killing. For a few moments, he had been just a teenage boy. Copping feels and stealing French kisses. Then the gunfire came and then the explosion and then there she was. Lying on the floor. All he could see was her. His focus was on nothing else.

“I…”

Ace turned his head and then his body in a clumsy 360, he looked around desperate in a state of panicked delirium. Beats picked up his gun, he picked up his bag. He looked at Saku. All he could see was her. His focus was on nothing else. Visions came to him—of Meilin and Ivy, of bodies on top of eachother and then on the floor. Memories of lips and then memories of death. Every girl he had ever kissed had died right in front of him. He had watched them go. The same mistake…over and over…

He took a step towards Saku. Then another, inch by inch, moment by moment—one foot in front of the other.

“I…”

“You’ve been lucky.”

“I’ve been good!”

It was better to be lucky than good and Ace was neither.

“I can’t do this,” he sputtered, “I can’t fuckin’ do this again,” he gasped, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can't. Please. Fuck!”

Beats turned around and on shaky legs, sprinted towards the edge of the woods and away from the scene. All he saw was her. His focus was on nothing else.

Ace thought he had never run faster in his life. Mind over matter and the only thing that mattered was you.

[ Ace Ortega Continued In: The Fear Index ]

[dmboogie]

No one answered Abe, at least not directly, but with all the screaming and sobbing going on he got the gist. They weren’t dead, but maybe someone was dying? He’d better scope out the scene, with his trusty literal scope. The smoke was finally clearing up.

Darlene was doing her best to look ferocious, which was kind of cute, just look at the lil’ mouse with the big gun, but even though the thought of someone getting their head blown off by her was hilarious Abe wouldn’t be laughing if that happened to him, so, y’know, a little caution and respect was due.

Sakurako was curled up, bleeding, definitely the worst off outta all of them. Abe wasn’t a doctor and he didn’t really wanna stare at her crying face or the shrapnel lodged in her cheek, so he wasn’t gonna place any bets on her current life expectancy. Maybe she could be fine, maybe she’d bleed out in the next five minutes, sucked to be her, haha, wait where the hell was Ace going?

Wow, yep, he wasn’t even taking cover, he was just getting the hell outta dodge. What a piece of shit, right? Even Abe hadn’t just fuckin’ abandoned Forrest, and he’d already won one award for that and it wasn’t fucking ‘boyfriend of the year’, so what was Ace’s excuse? Chickenshit had somehow chosen the worst of all possible worlds.

'Cause, like, if Sakurako was gonna live, then he’d just abandoned someone he cared about for basically no reason. If she was gonna die, well, she was gonna die alone or surrounded by people she didn’t give a shit about, and it was probably gonna be pretty slow, too.

If Ace was so committed to leaving his girlfriend to die he shoulda been a real man and put her out of her misery himself, nice and quick and heartless, then he could run away from the grenades and also the consequences of his actions, easy.

He scanned the rest of their surroundings, but didn’t see anyone coming to get them. Hopefully Ace could be their canary if it came to that. Normally he would’ve seen this as the perfect time to skedaddle, but Sakurako was still lying out there, and that was kinda fucked up, wasn’t it?

Abe wasn’t sure why this whole deal was actually making him kinda pissed, but it was. Maybe he just wanted to feel like he was a better person than someone else for once, that’d be a nice change of pace, right?

“Hey, I’m gonna come out, don’t fucking shoot me alright,” he shouted, tucking his rifle back into his bag. Hopefully Darlene heard him and didn’t just panic and go ultra-instinct mode and cap him. He slowly walked towards the others, keeping an ear out for any incoming mortar shells or whatever the fuck, stopping far enough away from them that they couldn’t all be taken out at once. Sakurako didn’t look any better up close.

“You uh. Need any help?”

Abe could give her a bandage or a bullet to the head, it was really all the same to him.

[Grand Moff Hissa]

There was abrupt movement, but it wasn't an attack. Ace came barreling out of the thinning smoke and dust about as fast as Darlene had ever seen anybody move in her life, which was doubly impressive because it seemed like he was only barely staying upright. It was incredible, and Darlene tracked him with her eyes (and not with her gun! She had just a little self control left) as he sprinted along the beach past her and quickly vanished into the distance.

He'd been armed, and he'd torn off so fast, the only thing she could think of was that he'd seen whoever had done this and he was going to go get them back for it. It had to be that, right? Darlene hadn't seen anything, but she'd had dirt in her eyes, so she had literally not seen anything. An endless range of possibilities could've played out while her senses were on the fritz, and she would never know, and Ace had seemed a little bit skittish before but surely he was more steady and savvy under pressure than Darlene was. Granted, that was not a very high bar to clear.

Back where Ace had been, at the water's edge, Sakurako was a crumpled heap, and Darlene was pretty sure she saw blood. The image made her breath hitch, and all she could think was, not again. It kept happening. People who were better than Darlene got cut down in front of her and she was slower or off to the side or had tripped or something and lived because of it. And, okay, she didn't actually know or even necessarily think that Sakurako was better than her in some fundamental moral or qualitative way, but the girl was very definitely cooler and prettier, the sort of girl who hung out with cute boys in the lake in just her underwear kissing with her breasts out, which was like an entirely different universe to where Darlene lived, but now Sakurako was the bloody heap in the dirt and Darlene just had spit running down her chin and sand in her ears.

It would've been really nice to clean her glasses right now, Darlene thought, and in fact she even brought her left hand around to her mouth and got some saliva on her fingertips, but then she realized that doing anything with it would mean setting her gun down, and nope, no way, not right now, so she just wiped her fingers on her skirt and then her chin on her shoulder. As she did, she took a few steps closer to Sakurako, and gave a little start when she saw what looked like the rise and fall of continued breath. She'd sort of thought the girl had been killed on impact and that was behind Ace's single-minded charge, but maybe she was wrong. Or, or maybe he hadn't realized!

The boy Darlene who had vouched for, the boy whose name she somehow terribly still didn't remember, and who was absolutely definitely not somebody to worry about in light of what all had just gone down, was calling that he was coming out, and he was asking if they needed help, and Darlene could hear his words like he was whispering only but it was enough, and she finally lowered the gun to point at the dirt. She should check if it had bullets and put more in if she had to. She should answer his queries. She didn't know at all what to do.

"I think she's alive," Darlene yelled to the boy, who looked scruffier than she remembered but not that much because he'd been pretty scruffy to begin with, and who was also not half as messed up as more or less everyone else she'd seen for days. "We should, we have to, we should do something."

It would be safe to, wouldn't it? To try, if nothing else? She thought it would, as she walked down the beach towards the fallen girl, stumbling only a little. Everything was ringing and she felt like she was shouting but her voice just sounded weird and wrong. She blinked and blinked, tears still gushing out, and that was definitely blood staining the sand, but whoever it was who did it wouldn't be back. Ace was going to get them and make sure, right? He was so fast. He had to catch up.

Only, if that was the case, why didn't she hear any gunshots to signify it?

Maybe they were just inaudible over the perpetual ringing.

[Sunnybunny]

She might have held it together if Ace hadn't stopped to apologize. Paradoxical, right?

He knew well enough she wasn't going to beg him to stay.

Why had he done that? As if she were someone he'd failed? That wasn't it, couldn't have been. She'd just been someone he'd been using, and no one said sorry to an empty chip wrapper before they'd tossed it. Dead or alive, she'd served her purpose to him, but poking at the wound was just mean.

The point was acceptance had just been a prelude to rejection.

The sentiment on the shore clung to her face and was stained by her tears in turn. Offers for help, which she knew she needed, hurt. More emotionally taxing than if they'd just started shooting at her. She wanted to die, she didn't. She couldn't go on, she had to. Thomas had asked her to live for him, but he'd killed some essential part of Sakurako by asking. There wasn't enough mercy in her to go emotionally numb so-

The scraps of her left behind sat up robotically, not wanting to take someone's giving a damn for granted. Her hand would always reach back when someone reached out to her. No amount of islands or idiot boys seemed to be able to change that, as much as she would have liked to have a hard heart.

But it remained like her fragile body, easily penetrated by people's attempts.

"If you don't mind helping... I think my boobs might have saved my life, but they're pincushions and I need bandages and disinfectant. Like, a lot."

Breathing heavily hurt, but pain and her were going to be pretty close from now on. Like when she walked but all the time.

"I won't think less of you two if you dip out instead."


She refused to think of Ace at all.

[dmboogie]

Now they were both at the scene, Abe and Darlene, and the scene herself was still at the scene, simple and clean. Every couple seconds he nervously glanced back and forth across the shore, but didn’t see any blobs of movement. His glasses were fucking filthy and had been for days and maybe he should do something about that at some point, but it was the sorta thing you just got used to if you let it go for long enough, which was a metaphor for his life maybe?

In more important news, if Sakurako was making jokes about her tits she probably wasn’t gonna keel over dead. He wouldn’t call it a relief, since he wasn’t like, emotionally invested in the situation, but, y’know, in a vacuum it was nice.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got, uh, one second,” he said, briefly turning away from the group, he had to do some quick hoarder calculus.

“Me, Marco, Jonah, Andy, Forrest,” he counted on his fingers, not bothering to whisper considering he was pretty sure Darlene was like, deaf now, before nodding to himself. He turned back towards the others. “Yeah I’ve got about five medkit’s worth of shit in these bags, you’re honestly doing me a favor by taking it off my hands, don’t worry about it.”

He plopped both his bags on the ground and started digging through the one that didn’t have his rifle on it. One-handed, of course, he still had one hand on his SMG, he’d probably have one hand on it ‘til they confiscated it at the end. He was pretty sure they confiscated the guns at least. Maybe he’d ask if he could keep it so he could sell it on eBay.

At first glance it was kinda stupid to be giving up his supplies for someone he barely even knew, but there was more to it, right? When it came down to the last handful of murderers and survivalists, well, maybe some of them would hesitate to pull the trigger on someone who’d done them a solid, and that extra second would be all that Abe needed. This was the longest of long term planning, which was why he was gonna win, not that there was any doubt of that, but, y’know, never hurt to have a refresher course.

It was pretty fuckin’ easy to be a good person when it didn’t cost you anything, even more so when it could pay off later.

He plopped two kits on the ground in front of him, flipping them open to reveal a fraction of his hoard. “I’m gonna level with you I don’t have any fuckin’ idea how to use any of this but I can like, try if you want.”

[Grand Moff Hissa]

Sakurako was talking to them. She was more or less upright, which was a promising sign, but Darlene knew firsthand now that people could stay alive and talk for a while without it meaning that they were going to keep doing those things in the long run. She couldn't even keep her gaze consistently on the girl, couldn't stand to dwell on the shredded flesh on display.

But it was okay. By keeping her attention on her surroundings instead, Darlene was being vigilant. She was making sure that if whoever did this came roaring out of the woods she would be ready to point her gun at them and hope that she did indeed have some ammunition left. Because, because Ace might gotten confused and gone chasing off after the wrong thing, or nothing at all, what with all the smoke and sand. That was why there were no gunshots. Or maybe Darlene was being overly cautious, and Ace was just that good that he was going to subdue the attacker without shooting. Or else he'd lose the trail and come back all slow, energy spent and spirits low.

He'd be back though, wouldn't he? He had to come back! He'd left his shoes behind.

He was pretty good at losing clothing, wasn't he?

The boy who hadn't run off was mumbling something to himself Darlene didn't catch, but before she knew it he had all these supplies laid out, two whole entire boxes of assorted medical stuff, which was certainly more than Darlene had ever had but she wasn't going to worry right now, in fact she wasn't going to worry at all because she knew where it came from, because he'd stolen it when the horrible accident had happened at the start so it was fine and there was a reason he had it and he was redeeming himself by sharing it now when it was really needed, in fact she could spin it even like he'd known they'd need it later and had just been keeping it safe, and that was close enough to the truth with how it worked out that there wasn't any reason at all to examine the situation any more closely.

Too bad, then, he apparently was clueless what to do with it. That part Darlene did hear, mostly! Her eyes went very wide behind her glasses, even as she sank down to her knees for the third time in as many minutes and pawed uncertainly at one of the boxes with her left hand (the right was still otherwise engaged in case of surprise attack). She turned over little packets of bandages and some single-serve pills and a tiny pair of scissors, without knowing what she was hoping she'd find underneath. She might as well have gone lifting up dead logs in the forest.

She could just feel the attention on her. The boy wasn't sure how to proceed, and Sakurako was bleeding pretty bad, which Darlene could see more clearly now and she couldn't just keep turning away from, and so that meant there was supposed to be someone cool and collected and competent to fix this.

But Darlene wasn't any of those things! She had barely been able to patch up some deep scratches and a tear in her ear, and it hurt a whole a lot but probably wasn't the sort of thing you died from. What had happened to Sakurako was something else entirely, and what they really needed right now wasn't Darlene but Jonah. Jonah would know what to do. Max would know what to do. Arizona would even probably know what to do, just because of her proximity to Jonah.

Darlene let her head pivot around, making lingering, direct eye contact first with the boy and then with Sakurako. She could just tell her eyes were as big as they ever got.

"I don't know what to do," she said. "Someone tell me what to do."

[Sunnybunny]

Sakurako's leg was caught in a bear trap, and it hurt too much to think. They'd worked it out together.

That broken leg needed a splint, and while the steps were muddled, Sean followed instructions like a champ.

x

Abe was a hoarder, which was kind of impressive considering he hadn't been on the announcements too many times. All those kits were stories, but probably sad ones, and she had more than enough of those. Had about enough of a lot, in fact. Her somehow intact toes wriggled, in search of that feeling she'd had just how long was it ago? Ah well. Darlene kept an eye out, glasses and all, and something about it was super endearing. What she lacked in intimidation, she made up for in chutzpah.

In another life, her thanks would be hearty and sure.

"I can give you the basics on using most of the stuff in there, 's fine. Thank you guys."

In this one, Sakurako gave a slow thumbs up.

"Leave the stuff in, bleeding out's a guarantee if you don't... and it'll hurt your hands like a bitch besides cause it's hot now. Just clean what you can and wrap it kind of loose. I hope it's not all for nothing, but shame on me for hanging out here by myself and not paying attention."

Her tears hadn't stopped.

"They just let any old dummy in their death games now, huh?"

x

Turning her head, her eyes fell on an abandoned snapback and shoes. She bit her lip to keep from mentioning anything else about it, let herself wonder who exactly left decent gear behind. x

[dmboogie]

Ah, hell, Abe was gonna have to be the responsible one here wasn’t he. He never shoulda expected initiative out of Darlene in the first place, and while Sakurako was holding herself together pretty well (or were the bits of shrapnel holding her together, haha), who knew how long that was gonna last. This woulda been obvious if he stopped to think for a second, but it still sucked because he’d committed to actually having to try, now.

Like obviously on a fuckin’ technical level he didn’t have to, he could leave the two medkits there and walk away with slightly lighter bags, they probably wouldn’t fucking shoot him for that, theoretically. Thing was, it was way too late, ‘cause Sakurako had looked at him, at him specifically, and thanked him, and she was maybe dying, so he couldn’t ditch yet, and he’d say it was because even he had standards, but he really didn’t, he’d just feel bad on a weirdly visceral level if he ditched. It wasn’t that deep, honest.

Deep breaths. Didn’t matter if she lived or died, really, but he had to see this part through.

“Makes sense, like how you’re not supposed to pull arrows outta you. Just gotta stay away from big-ass magnets now, haha,” he white-noised all over the place as he dug through one of the kits. There was so much shit in there he only vaguely knew how to use, and if he was gonna fumble around with a surgical dummy it was better not to simultaneously be the dummy, right? If he had to patch himself up later he’d have a better idea of what to do. He was just getting benefit after benefit outta this, wasn't he.

“This is gonna sting like a bitch but you don’t need me to tell you that, right,” he said, grabbing something that he was pretty sure was disinfectant. There was a bottle and there were wipes and he wasn’t sure what the difference was or which you were supposed to use first? It’d probably be fine.

Disinfecting her chest was gonna be a bit awkward, maybe it’d be best if Darlene did that bit, but like, in the grand scheme of things who gave a shit, when you were having a blood party everyone involved was kinda beyond the point of modesty.

Whatever. They got to work.

((Despite how desperately he tried, he couldn’t stop wondering what coulda happened if he’d given Forrest a chance to pull through.))

[Grand Moff Hissa]

Okay. This was going to be okay.

Sakurako had some sort of vague idea what to do, and she was lucid enough to give directions, and what she was asking for was the easy option anyways, wasn't it? Don't pull anything out. Just leave it in there and cover it up and pretend nothing was wrong. Simple! And also don't touch it because it's hot, and that one gave Darlene pause for a few moments, really, because if it was too hot for her fingers then wasn't it absolutely definitely too hot to be embedded in the broken flesh of the girl in front of her?

But Darlene didn't know what she was doing. She wasn't an expert. She wasn't even an amateur, or a hobbyist, or even the sort of person who watched medical dramas on TV, so she would do what the others said and then if Sakurako died it wasn't her fault. This was a good thing she was doing, a thing Jonah and Max would've been proud of her for, maybe not how she was already lining up her excuses for why she was going to fail and they were going to have to sing Sakurako songs as they floated her limp form into the lake, but the part where she did what she could to avoid that ending.

It was just really upsetting and difficult on some level to grapple with the idea of chunks of metal being stuck in the girl until she died, especially if that was going to be more than an hour or two from now. It seemed wrong, especially when she'd been the sort of person who was so pretty she honestly made Darlene a little jealous (okay, maybe that had to do with the making out half-naked in the lake, because she hadn't had that strong a reaction to or impression of Sakurako back at school). It was just wrong for the girl to be mutilated, wrong for her to be way way more messed up than an ear torn in two and some cuts, and wrong for it to have been done by someone who didn't even have the decency to come into view and die for the crime.

Finally, unhappily, Darlene set down the gun and started putting her entire attention towards the delicate operation of trying to save a life. Her hands were not steady, but they were there, and that was something, right?

The boy had tried to joke. It was funny in its own cartoony way, like something she might've seen on TV as a kid, and it made Darlene smile. Laughing and smiling improved patients' odds, didn't they? She was pretty sure she'd read that somewhere.

"Y-yeah," she added, trying to smile and not think about all that metal working its way ever deeper into muscle, to stay there until the flesh rotted off the bones. "Yeah, you just, when you fly, um, at the airport, you're going to have trouble with TSA forever."

Darlene hadn't actually flown in a really long time. She hoped she wasn't making things up.

"For the whole rest of your life," she added.

She should've quit while she was ahead.

After that, Darlene didn't joke much more. She just paid as much attention as she could and tried her hardest and put any leftover energy into hoping, as much as she could, that she didn't screw up and make it worse and kill Sakurako herself. It wouldn't be her fault if she did, but she still really didn't want it to happen.

((Darlene Silva continued in Afterneath))

[Sunnybunny]

For a few seconds after they had jokes, Sakurako's body shook. It wasn't long before raucous laughter joined the party her tears had started. Yes, it ached like she never imagined laughing could, but they were funny and no selling it just wasn't in her skill set. Wiping her tears with one hand, she nodded at their sage wisdom.

Her outsides looked a bit more like who she was inside now, she imagined. Scarlet shrapnel right on her face, a warning... a lighthouse. There were nastier fuckers here than she would have imagined, and while whoever it was had dashed her right against the rocks, they were human just like she'd been before she shot one of her nearest and dearest in his face. If she lived, it would be wonderful for them to share in the pain she felt.

If.

Huh.

"I'll never be able to walk by a construction site again, alas. Or rock a bikini without being in danger from grabby ass crabs. It's going to be a major pain in the ass..."

One of her hands laced in the other, like when she'd arrived here.

"For the whole rest of my life."

They worked, she instructed, her body being the stage they were putting together. At some point, a hat mysteriously found its way cocked onto her head, her curtains. Now all she could do was wait on the reviews.

((Sakurako A. Jackson continued in One Show Fits All))