[1-3] The Nose

[Gildarts]

Hands were on her, throwing her into the seat closest to them as they continued down the isle. Her hand reached out too, but while she attempted to grasp Abner, who had been right there, there was nothing but wind. He'd been swept away. A quick turn of her head confirmed that after flinging her to safety, his feet had lost their battle with gravity and he was no more. Christa’s hands were a flurry of movement, but they just weren’t quick enough.

There was a jolt. Her head sprung forward as though it were a lion, leaping with unyielding vehemence on its prey. And... Whap! Christa’s forehead collided with the front of the retractable desk that someone had been using to sip a coke and rum. Everything went dark, and the sky went sunless, until the scent of iron pulled her from the void of her nightmares.

Before she could see, there was a tug at her stomach, and the nausea came crashing down. Heavy eyelids lifted, stomach bile swirled, and her eyes swept the scene but wouldn’t let her focus. There was a whole lot of indistinct green, before of course, she saw the oceans of red below her.

Grating her teeth, before she could fathom what had happened, her hands moved to her thigh, where pain was striking loud like thunder in her ears, but with the violent force of lightning. Streaks of crimson blood could be caught in the corners of her eyes, which sparkled with the hazy contour of stars. “Tch,” she heard her lungs force out, while her breathing began to climb deep into her abdomen. Her hands wrapped around the uppermost of her thigh, and she identified shrapnel’s jagged shape with her fingertips. With a weak whimper, she murmured, while looking for his face, “Hello? Abner?” before she settled, for a much more familiar taste on her tongue, “Fuck.”

After a few more blinks, the flurry of color settled into stern shapes of trees, a slanted ground below her, and her own abdomen, buckled to her seat, which was just there, in the middle of the tropical woods. Below the belt, both sides of her legs were stained with blood, the better part, perhaps, was that she didn’t know if all of it was hers. Her thigh had swelled, but from feeling it, Christa determined the fragment wasn’t in deep. Her eyes shifted around while her hands released the buckle. With the flick of her knife, and the tie of a single knot, she isolated the wound.

Next, she tried to summon gauze, and something to sterilize her wound. But the shit didn’t come. No matter how much effort she put into thinking something to life, no white orb of light appeared at the palm of her hand. “Fuck.”

Before giving up, she saw the shimmer of broken glass. And by craning her neck, she identified a single bottle, less than an ounce, of white alcohol. Perhaps someone had been stirring their drink before... With a shake of her head, she set her eyes on the bottle, randomly laying on the forest floor, just ten feet away. For someone who couldn’t walk, it could’ve been a hundred. Tooth, claw, and a little tenacity took the Prime there, she had raised the thigh with the shrapnel so that it wouldn’t drag against the ground at all, then, she began to use her arms to heave her body forward. Her elbows dug into the soil below her, and uprooted a lively smell of green, that helped distract her from the pain shooting through her with every not-so-gentle yank bringing her body forward. Blue eyes set on her prize, now less than a foot away, she reached for it, and grasped the tiny cold bottle in her hand. Without hesitation, she twisted it open and then drizzled a few stinging drops on the wound. Next came her shirt and jacket, she didn’t know how clean they were, but it’d have to do.

One... Two... “GRRR-” Before reaching three, her hands yanked out the metal, and was met with an outpouring of blood. Had Christa not endured torture, she was sure she’d have passed out from the pain, but now, there wasn’t much left that the sniper couldn’t take. Pools of blood poured from the gash, and she met them by cleaning out the wound with the last drops in her bottle, then she met the injury with force. “Shit.” She saw the state of her leg, and looked around helplessly at the edges of the emerald leaves, which filled every part of her vision. What had she said last to Abner? ”Airplane mode be damned?” Gloat all you want, I just hope I’ll see you again. Then it daunted on her, delivering more terror than the agony in her leg and the current state of her helpless situation. If Christa couldn’t use Omnillium here, there was a chance, that if Abner had died, what if he didn’t come back?

There were worse things than being lost, worse things than digging a piece of metal out of your leg, and worse things still, than losing your sister and your friend. Not by much, surely, but in the many years Christa had lived, she’d found that life was a tangle of good and bad news. Her blue eyes fell down on her immobilized leg and then drew upward on the empty forest, full of eerie birdsong. This was, obviously, bad news.