Survival Of The Fittest

Idiot.

The girl who'd shot her had taken the collar tracker. Rude, unnecessary. But she'd left the objectively deadlier haladie in Ash's bag, completely undisturbed. Stupid, unreasonable. Totally in keeping with expectations.

- Ashlyn -

When she'd woken up on the floor of the house, with long shadows heralding the arrival of late afternoon, she'd been mildly disappointed. Once again, her suffering was being prolonged. There hadn't been as much blood as she'd expected - the bullet hadn't gone straight through, which meant it was still in there somewhere. When she'd fallen on her back she'd kept the blood pooling inside her instead of giving it a place to drain out. Would've been kinda badass if she'd actually planned that. So she was still alive, plus she had a nice little souvenir to remember Mystery Girl by. She'd treasure it until her dying day - which was probably today. She'd patched it up as best she could - didn't do a great job, but it kept her blood from gushing out like a storm drain after a heavy rain.

Going for a walk after that probably wasn't the brightest plan, but she hadn't really felt like staying around the place waiting to die. It seemed anti-climactic. For all of Ash's ambivalence about life and death, sitting down and beckoning the Reaper to her side just felt like too much of a cop-out. Had a real loser mentality feel to it. So instead she'd chosen to just get up and walk for a while. Find someone to fight. Go out taking some other miserable soul with her, end their pain and her own simultaneously. Or just go out there and get slaughtered, gift somebody a haladie and a shot at the daily kill award. Either was good.

So now she was out here, navigating the cloud-dark evening with her dinky little flashlight. It was slow going. The old road wasn't exactly an easy climb at the best of times. She and Juanita had done it, even with the latter's bad leg slowing her down, but it felt longer, more arduous this time around. Blame the blizzard for that. And the dark. Even with the flashlight, it was hard to see, hard to know where to put her feet. Like someone had sneakily turned the treadmill up to the highest difficulty in the middle of a run. Yeah, fine. Dying of exhaustion, that'd work too. She could go out as she lived, working hard and pushing herself to the limit. Not a bad way to go out, all things considered. Cooldown after a workout always felt good. This one would feel euphoric, given the intensity it took to push herself this far. Did she want to give up right now? Nah. She'd keep going. Just a while longer.

Not two seconds after she'd made the resolution, Ash put a foot wrong, and fell into the fluffy white blanket that the ground had prepared for her. She groaned and raised herself onto her hands and knees. Felt a little bit of blood come leaking out. Shit. Flopped back down, on her back this time. Dropped the flashlight, let it point off into the skywhere like the world's most disappointing Bat-signal while she clamped her hands onto the wound. Had to keep the blood in her.

Felt her eyes closing again, involuntarily. Tired? Cold? Losing blood? All of the the above. Hard to see which of those things was gonna knock her out first. Guess it didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Snow settled on her eyelashes and cheeks.

Yeah, all right. Not the way she wanted to go out. Not even close. But this wasn't as bad as she thought it'd be.

Had to be grateful for that, at least.

((The weather had been worse than Katelyn was expecting.))

She had found herself wandering away from the research station, along the old road, and the snowfall had only grown more intense in the intervening time. Even with her flashlight, she could barely see ahead of her through the torrent of white. Wandering out here, away from Kai, had been a mistake. She didn't feel any better, and the only thing it had accomplished was making her nose and fingers numb from the cold. This had been a mistake.

At least, that was what she had been thinking, until she was able to make out a light in the distance, reflecting off of the flakes. Her first instinct had been to avoid it, as she didn't need even more unexplained blood on her hands when she came back, but she reconsidered once it was clear that the light wasn't moving. Her classmates would have to be insane to be camping out here in this weather, and if anyone was caught in it for too long, no doubt they would be dead. Curiosity may kill the cat, but she had a few lives left to spare, and the thought of another potential weapon was too tempting to pass up.

Once she got close, she was able to make out a body lying in the snow, half covered. Some idiot had wandered out and died of hypothermia, no doubt. She hoped that they'd have something worth stealing on them, or at least she did until she could finally see them in detail.

It was Ash.

"Ash?!" she exclaimed, abandoning all pretense and hoofing it over to her sister's side.

A quick check of her pulse yielded that Ash was still alive, if only barely. She was bleeding, a crimson red stain on both her jacket and the snow beside her. Her skin felt terribly cold, and her lips were turning blue. For a moment, Katelyn was overwhelmed by the same kind of fear that had struck her when Ren had laid dying. This was a catastrophe. As complicated as her feelings were towards Ash, she didn't want her last experience with her sister to be watching her die as her body was buried in snow.

Katelyn took a long, deep breath to steady herself. She couldn't afford to panic. As nasty as the wound looked, it was only one injury. If she got Ash somewhere safe, like back at the research station, then she could fix this. Moving her was likely dangerous, but Katelyn couldn't try to treat her out here. Not in these conditions, anyway.

She gulped, swallowing her fear. She had to try. For herself, as much as her sister. They were already lucky that Katelyn had found her in time. The worst that could happen was that she died anyway, without either of them getting any closure. And the best? Maybe they could finally talk out their problems, and Katelyn would have someone else to rely on besides Kai.

With as much care as she could manage, Katelyn stuffed her flashlight in her coat and pulled Ash out of the snow, hooking her sister under the arms and hoisting her onto her back. It was a struggle to hold her, Katelyn's legs and back already buckling under the strain, as Ash was nearly double her own weight. Still, she was used to hiking around with camping supplies, and she didn't have anything else besides the grenade launcher weighing her down right now.

"I've got you, Ash," she soothed, despite her sister being unconscious. "I've... I've g-got you."

She could do this, she told herself.

((And she kept telling herself that, one labored step at a time, as she dragged herself and Ash all the way back to the research station.))