#yeah moss stuck his arm in the flesh hole

[bosspigeon]

bRUH HELP

[pixla]

hi hon! i adore your writing and i have a request for tommy: so you know that scene in the caves when alice breaks her leg and cindy has to like put the bone back into place? could that be with tommy x gn! reader instead? and both of them have a really really cute moment where the reader confesses how they never felt alive until they met and started dating tommy? they both survive and flashforward with fluffy smut pls?

Special thanks to the j-st-patricks-day and all my friends who helped with the process of writing this fic <3

broken bones and beating hearts

Tommy slater x nb!reader

Warnings: swearing, graphic descriptions of murder, graphic descriptions of injury (eg. Broken bones and stabbings/cuts), Possessed!Cindy, alice dies, Arnie dies, vomiting, fluff, pet-names, knocking out teeth, sex, unprotected sex, this au doesn’t fit with any of the other films (feel free to tell me if there’s any others)

Word count: 3.2k

POVC= point of view change

Tommy gripped your wrists pulling you out through the narrow cavern as it collapsed only seconds later. “Fuck!” You tucked your legs close to your body, trying to shake the feeling of Cindy's grip around your ankles. “What the fuck is happening?” You looked up as Tommy still held you close, you both too scared to move from the previous near death experience.

Everything was normal. You had all just ran out into the woods, you and Alice teasing Cindy about some stupid witchcraft book she had found in nurse lane’s office. But then Cindy decided to slash Alice and Arnie’s guts open with a machete.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck fuck!” You cried, bawling your hands into fists, wandering down what felt like endless hallways. You both soon realised that you had been going in a circle. It didn’t make any sense, it felt like another dimension or a mirror maze, where everything looked the same, maybe even was the same. “Y/N.” You turned your head to face tommy. “What?” He looked at you confused. “I didn’t say anything.”

You were going to shake it off as you just imagining it, but then you heard it again. “Y/N!” This time you knew it wasn’t Tommy, it was a woman. “Hello?!” You yelled out, hoping that someone had finally come to your rescue, but Tommy just continued to look at you like you were crazy.

You strayed from Tommy’s side following as the voice repeated your name. “Where are you going?” Tommy yelled after you as you wandered, not bothering to pay any attention to his questions.

You followed the voice, bending through the same corridors and hallways, not knowing where you’d end up. It was when you twisted round one corner you halted in your steps. It was a huge room, far larger than any of the ones you had previously found. But the greatest way it stood out was the mass in the centre of the room.

It was dark and fleshy, like clumps of meat thrown into a pile. You gasped as you stood closer gaining a better look at the thing. It was alive. It rose up and down almost like it was breathing and it thumped like a beating heart. With each whisper of your name you grew closer, drawn to it. You reached your hand out transfixed, but when your hand melted into its flesh, you froze.

It all flashed through your brain so fast. Cyrus Miller, ruby lane, billy baker…Cindy Berman. It was every single one of those shadyside phycos, even Cindy. It was all of the pain, all of the suffering and all of the evil. You lifted your hand, a thick slime dragging with. You backed up slowly, expecting to hit a wall. You were soon proved wrong when you felt your body fly backwards.

You cried out as you landed with a thud, Tommy finally catching up to you, peering over to find you clutching your leg in pain. “Shit, are you okay?!”

He had jumped down helping to lift you from the pit. You sobbed, tears running down your cheeks like a broken faucet, your hands clutching at His shirt. Tommy held you running his finger gently through your hair, shushing you softly as you buried yourself into his warmth.

Tommy gently slipped from your hold, leaning down to examine the damage. It was bad. So bad, you could practically see the bone protruding from the skin. You felt your gut wrench at the sight causing you to lean over beside you, regurgitating your dinner onto the cold cave floor. “Don’t look, okay? Just look at me.” Tommy leant over wiping your mouth with his jacket. You nodded slowly, trying your best to keep your eyes locked with Tommy’s despite how hard your morbid curiosity urged you to look down. Ripping his plaid jacket into strips he looked up at you. “We’re gonna get out of here. You’re gonna get out of here. No matter what I do, I’m gonna make sure I protect you, just like I always have.”

“I love you so much Tommy. I’ve never and never will love someone the way I do you.” You lean into him pressing your foreheads together. “I can’t lose you, okay?” He nods sympathetically, pressing a light kiss to the slope of your nose.

“Do you remember those dates we’d go on, out to the forest at night, and we’d just lay there, staring up through the cracks in the trees?” You nod. “I want you to think about that, okay? I want you to think about how many more we’ll go on once we get out of here.”

You hold a tight grip on his arm as he wipes away at the area. “I’m gonna have to put it back into place now.”

You pleaded with him, as the tears started again. “Please, no. Please just leave me here. Just go and find help okay? I can’t do it Tommy, I can’t do it”

“Hey, hey, hey. C’mon, look at me.” He places his hand on your cheek, tilting your head to look him in the eye. “You're gonna be fine, okay? You just gotta focus right now.” You nod timidly, the tears starting to slow.

He holds the bottom of your calf with one hand and your heel with the other. “Just count to three and I’m gonna do it, okay baby?” He looks up at you, his soft words lulling your anxiety. You bite your knuckle nervously, unsure as to how you should answer, but the look of trust in his eyes persuades you easily. “Okay.”

You breathe in. “One, two-” You let out a blood curdling scream as a large crack rung out, bouncing against the walls of the cave. Your fist gripped Tommy’s forearm tightly as you cried out a series of various curses. “You fucking asshole.” You whine out in pain, letting out an airy laugh trying to brighten your rather dull circumstances.

“You're okay baby.” You wince as he wraps the piece of fabric he had ripped from his jacket around your leg, tying it tight enough to hold you together for the moment. You grabbed Tommy’s shoulder as he wrapped his arm around your waist lifting you from the ground. You hiss as you feel your leg throb from the sudden movement. “Do you think you’re able to stand?” Tommy watches as you wobble trying to stay grounded. You nod. “Yeah.” You had no choice and you both knew it, if you wanted to live, you’d have to.

You both started your journey, finally entering a new environment as you trudged deeper into the earth of Shadyside. Why did these tunnels even exist? The intricate details of the maze made it easy to come to the conclusion that they were man made, but by who? Not once had you ever heard of these tunnels, and by the looks of it, nobody else had either, despite nurse Lane of course.

“Be careful.” Tommy tightened his grip around you. “You might slip.”

“Okay.” You mumble, too exhausted to form a real answer. You looked around at the walls, floor and ceiling. The further the two of you walked, the denser this moss became. You felt a wave of familiarity but you couldn’t quite place it. Red moss…red moss! It hit you, Cindy! Her red stained shirt, she said it was from the moss in the outhouses. “Tommy! It’s the fucking outhouses! We fucking made it!” You would probably be jumping up and down with joy right now if it wasn’t for your broken leg.

You look up, spotting the out house toilet openings. Wow, real nice, you’re both sitting in Sunnyvale shit and piss right now. “Yeah, but how are we supposed to get out?” Tommy sighs looking up at the roughly 15 foot climb. “You can’t climb that.”

You look at him. “Yeah, but you might.”

“No. I’m sorry but no, I’m not leaving you down here, especially when there’s Cindy running around up there trying to kill us. C’mon let’s go, if we’re at the outhouses, we must be near to camp.” He directs you along but before you can both carry on your interrupted. “Did you hear that?!”

“No I-“

“Shush.” You both stayed quiet listening as to what caught your attention. It’s screaming. Someone is screaming from the outhouses. “Hey! Help! Please, we’re stuck down here!” You yell trying to get the attention of the voices.

The space grows quiet as the screaming halts, the both of you waiting nervously for any indication of life when a head pops out from one of the seat holes. “What the fuck are you guys doing in the toilets?!”

It was ziggy, Cindy's sister. “Ziggy..” you wonder if it’s right to tell her what’s happened to her sister but you decide against it, not wanting to put the girl in such an emotionally vulnerable state whilst she’s already physically. “Gary’s up here too!” She yells down as Gary’s head pops out another toilet hole. “Hey!” He yells, surprisingly light heartedly considering there’s a murderer running around camp butchering little kids with a fucking machete. “Can you get us out of this fucking toilet or not?!”

Gary had managed to make some sort of bucket contraption with some rope. “It’s just like You’re Gothel climbing up Rapunzel's hair, okay?!” He yelled down, lowering it down to you.

You're about to slip onto the contraption when you hear Ziggy's unfortunately very familiar screams, and before you know it Gary’s decapitated body lies beside you on the floor. You and Tommy let out an in sync gasp, him pulling you away into his chest, as to protect you from the image. “We’re gonna have to find another way out.”

You think to yourself. Alice…she had shown you something whilst you were robbing nurse lanes office with Arnie. “I know how.” You pull out the book that started this whole thing.

“Baby, I don’t get how that book is gonna help us, let’s be honest it’s some random witches and wizards bullshit written how many hundreds of years ago?”

“No, tommy.” You turn the book to him parting the pages. “It’s a map.” You rest the book on the floor, the two of you leaning over it. “It's a map of camp, you see over here, these x’s are the graves we found. And over here, that’s where we entered.” You point your finger on the page. “Here, there’s another exit. Mess hall.”

His eyes lighten. “Jesus, fuck! You’re so smart!” He pulls you in for a kiss.

—-

You sat, your back arched over as you watched Tommy laid on his back kicking open the vent that led to the mess hall when another scream rang out. You instantly knew that it was ziggy, far too acquainted with the tone of her screams.

“Tommy!” With one final kick the vent flew open, Tommy hauling himself through in a split second. “Don’t move, stay here! I’m gonna go help Ziggy.”

Tommy always cared so much for the kids at camp, you honestly weren’t surprised that he was willing to risk his life for one of them.

—povc—

Tommy barged through the doors of the mess hall, an all too familiar song ringing through the speakers, the noise made his head thump as it blared.

Tommy followed the screams, grabbing a mallet that lied on a nearby counter. Cindy stood beating at a supply closet door as ziggy screamed from within. Tommy pulled cindy's shoulder for her to face him as he swung the mallet into her jaw. Cindy tumbled to the ground as she spat a mouthful of blood and teeth onto the floor. Tommy hesitated holding the mallet in his hand, ready to strike Cindy. But before he could come to any decision Cindy grabbed her machete from the ground slicing at Tommy’s thigh.

Tommy dropped to the floor, his mallet sliding across the freshly mopped floor tiles, Cindy rising to her feet, towering over Tommy. Overpowered, he crawled backwards digging the heels of his hands into the cold tile floor. He was braced for impact when Cindy stopped turning around.

—povc—

You lunged at her digging the knife you found into her back, pulling it out as she turned to face you, plunging it into her chest over and over until she hit the floor unresponsive. You fell. You had finally reached your limit. Your leg was broken for fucks sake and you just murdered Cindy. Pure-hearted, hard working Cindy Berman. You plunged your knife deep into her chest until you split it down the middle. You dragged your body over to Tommy’s wrapping your arms around him, wetting his shirt as you became inconsolable. He held his hand at the back of your neck placing soft kisses onto the top of your head. “It’s okay baby, it’s okay. She’s dead now, we’re gonna be okay.”

You heard as ziggy opened the closet door, dropping to her knees at the sight of her sister dead on the floor. The red headed girl pulled her sister's body over to face her, wrapping her arms around Cindy crying into her cold lifeless body. You crawled over to the girl pulling her away from her sister's touch into yours. “I’m sorry.” You whispered.

The three of you struggled as you heard the last bell ring signalling that the bus would be leaving. Ziggy yelled out as the bus doors began to close. The wheels began to roll forwards but before it could depart a boy budged the doors open, calling out to her. “Ziggy!” You released your grip from the girl's side as she ran to him, embracing him. You rested your head on Tommy’s shoulder at the sight of the two. “I hope she’ll be okay.”

The two of you had found a place on the bus as Ziggy sat with you fellow councillor Nick goode. Finally being able to breathe, you rest your head on Tommy’s shoulder. “I’m so glad you're okay.” You look up at him smiling at his words. “Maybe you're the one who really needs protecting, without me you’d be dead meat.” You press your lips together, smiling softly into the kiss. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I had lost you.”

Your eyes wandered to the window watching as the camp nightwing sign slowly floated away out of sight. Finally it was over.

———

After the accident medics treated and hospitalised many of the camp nightwing campers and counselors such as you and Tommy. Your leg was thankfully saved. They said if not for Tommy it probably would have had to be amputated due to infection.

It was two months since that night, you still had to use crutches but besides that, you made a speedy recovery alongside tommy. Although he was in a much less critical condition than you and was discharged within a few days, he still spent every night in the hospital with you.

You laid beside Tommy his leg slotted between yours as the velvet underground played softly in the background. You run your fingers through his hair slowly as he whines quietly into your chest. It finally felt like the first time since that day that you both could finally relax.

You pulled away from his touch leaning over him, kissing his lips softly. “You look so pretty.” You hum. He smiles into the kiss. “Not as much as you, baby.”

You lifted yourself straddling Tommy’s hips, deepening the kiss as your hands ran down playing with the hem of his shirt, travelling underneath. He pulls away, his hand rubbing your thigh. “Are you sure? I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

“I’m okay.” You reassure him, pressing soft kisses along his collarbone. You removed your shirt as Tommy’s hands floated up to your waist.

“God, you're so beautiful.” He mumbles, kissing up your chest slowly as you take off your pyjama shorts, throwing them to the floor.

You lean down unbuttoning Tommy’s jeans, taking him in your hand. Tommy twitches at the contact as you align himself to you. You lower yourself onto him slowly as his hands hold a firm grip on your lower back. Tommy lays his head back, his hips thrusting up into you.

You shiver as you lift yourself up and down, your thighs shaking from the stimulation. His thrusts hardened, your soft whimpers of his name encouraging him. “You look so fucking good right now.” He gripped your waist helping you keep a steady pace.

You steadied yourself, leaning your arms out pressing your hands against his chest as you felt yourself near your climax. “Shit, Tommy I’m gonna come.” You whined under your breath.

“Don’t worry baby, me too.” He runs his hands down your back lovingly.

You threw your head back as you felt Tommy’s hand wander down edging you on further, your breath quivering at the touch. You felt his hips buckle beneath you as he reached his peak, yours following soon after.

You sighed your body collapsing onto his chest. “I love yours so much.” You mumble into his skin as he presses a soft kiss against your forehead.

—-

It was the 16th anniversary since that day at nightwing, the two of you still happily together. Despite the permanent scar that night had left on the both of you mentally and physically, you both managed to stay strong, the event probably making the two of you even closer than you already were before.

Every year instead of hiding from the memories of that night, you both embrace it. Tommy’s favourite way to do this was to ‘reenact your youths’ in his words by driving the two of you out to the forest, where you would’ve spent so many nights together when you were younger.

You would open the sunroof and lay out the seats creating a little bed for the two of you. Probably not the safest thing the two of you could do, but most definitely the sweetest.

The two of you laid there staring up at the trees, resting your head on Tommy’s chest, your arm draped across his abdomen. Looking up at him you pressed a small kiss to the slope of his nose, pressing your heads together. The moonlight glazed over his cheeks, giving him a paler look. “You look so beautiful.”

—-

The car ride home was quiet but the atmosphere felt soft and comforting as Tommy rested his hand on your inner thigh. The velvet underground played softly on the radio as your eyes gazed out at the passing scenery.

[wavesmp3]

[ksw] clouds

sunwoo x reader

wc. 5k warnings: medical inaccuracies, death, illness, hospitals, overall just a pretty heavy piece genre can only be described as an absolute mess inspired mainly by san junipero but also slightly by charlie kaufman and wong kar wai

a/n: this is supposed to be told nonlinearly but like the creation of it was very messy so i have no clue if it actually worked, so good luck trying to make this piece make sense of this :) 

act iii. scene iii.

Sunwoo sits and watches the sun shift from pink and blue to an impossible shade of green. And it’s then he knows that without a doubt Clara has ruined the color green for him. Because instead of marveling at the color of the sky, Sunwoo is reminded of the doors in her apartment building.

“Thought I might find you here.” The voice of a stranger who Sunwoo loved once upon a time says behind him. He tries like hell not to turn around. Not to lean back towards the voice and wait for your hand on his shoulder or your shin knocking familiarly against his back. He focuses on the waves crashing below instead. The roar of the water beneath him is deafening, but only if you let it be. He does, and he almost forgets that you’re behind him.

“Where’d you go?” You ask, now sitting next to him, tugging at the long grass. 

“I’m right here.”

“And what about in there?” You bring a finger up and poke at the side of his forehead. 

He turns to you, facing you in full. He takes in your features like it’s the first time all over again. And, oh, he wishes he knew before how many firsts you already had together. This is just another. This is just the first time he’s seen you in the past six months and remembered the thousands of times he’s seen your face before. 

He studied your cheeks. The one he now recalls running the back of his palm over after you left for the Cloud. 

He memorizes, for the millionth time, your eyes. He used to swear they were darker than they are, but then he saw them in the sun. He was dying back then; then he saw your eyes and you saved him. Just like that. 

Mr. Choi was right of course. As he always must be. You and him are like an old married couple. Not like. You are. Almost were. 

“I had lunch with Mr. Choi today.” He tells you. 

You squint at him. “I know. It’s Thursday.” You pull out a piece of the grass. “What’d he make?”

“Ramen.”

“Was it good?”

“It was okay.”

“Too spicy?”

Suwnoo answers with a sigh, looking away from you and back towards the water. The deafening waves crash against the cliffside. “I know you looked at your file.” He finally says. You stop pulling at the grass. You still. “Mr. Choi told me.”

After he says it, there’s a silence that isn’t actually silent at all. The waves rage below his feet. The seagulls are there too, beneath, above, somewhere, everywhere. And then, of course, there’s you and Sunwoo, trying to be silent over the static in your heads and the machines you’re hooked up to in a universe far far away. 

“Did he tell you about my file?”

He looks at you again. “No.”

“Oh.” You look away, brows furrowed, lick your lips, and then turn back to him. “So why are you upset?”

“After he told me, I went and I…”

“You didn’t.”

“I looked at mine.”

There’s another silence, except that this time it really is quiet. Sunwoo read once whilst in a rabbit hole of medical research that true silence only happens in a vacuum, where there is no medium for sound waves to travel through. This must be that. This place, the files, Mr. Choi and Mr. Chan, Clara and her apartment building full of green doors--it’s a vacuum. And they stick people in it then call it the Cloud. They call it extra time. But it isn’t. It’s nothing and he’s stuck in the middle of it. So Sunwo stares at you, straight through the vacuum of time and space you’re both lost in, waits for you to say something, and then waits for himself to hear it. 

“You looked?” You finally say, voice folding in on itself. 

“Yes.” Sunwoo’s own voice is barely there. You must be reading his lips which you’ve always been good at anyways. 

“So you know now?” 

“I always knew, and now, I remember.”

act i. scene iv.

There’s been an accident. 

That’s what they say when the sun falls out of the sky and the world starts spinning in the wrong direction. It’s how they show up at Sunwoo’s door painted in shades of blue and red, with authority in their arms and hands on their hips. How they prepare him for the looming moment where they rip past his skin, blood, bone to shoot a gun straight at his heart. I’m so sorry for your loss, they say leaving him with a bullet lodged somewhere between his left and right atrium. 

And those are the four words that play over and over and over in Sunwoo’s head as he gets to the hospital. Those are the words that crawl inside his open chest and turn him blue and black with infection. There’s been an accident, he remembers, staring at the extraordinary measures taken to keep your heart beating and lungs beating. This is it. Except that the accident isn’t that you’re dying, but that you’re dying. It’s always supposed to have been him. He’s supposed to be the one stuffed with tubes and hooked up to monitors, the one whose life is hanging on by a thread, and you’re supposed to be the one that saves him. It all feels like a play that’s gone horribly wrong because everyone switched parts after intermission without telling him. At what point did you steal the role of dying protagonist from him? 

We did everything we could, a stranger in a white coat says. Except that it’s not some stranger, it’s your colleague and co-worker because this is the hospital you work at and the hospital Sunwoo met you in. There was too much damage to the brain, they explain as the image of their tear-stricken face goes from your friend during intern year to the doctor who operated on you as your brain went dead. 

“We have two options, right?” Sunwoo is far too familiar with surgery and all this. He knows from his hospital days what’s supposed to happen next. But apparently, things have changed since then. 

“Actually, there’s a third option.”

Sunwoo doesn’t waste a second. He jumps out of the chair stained red from his bleeding heart and asks: “What is it?”

“We can upload them.”

act iii. scene ii.

In fifty days of living in the cloud, Sunwoo has learned all about the people that he shares a building with. There’s Mr. Chan who lives behind a vomit green on the same floor as him and who hasn’t left his room since last January. There’s also Mr. Choi, who lives behind the emerald door and invites Suwoo over for lunch every Thursday. Clara lives upstairs, where the walls are painted in various shades of green--olive, seaweed, moss, hunter, shamrock, sage, and others that Sunwoo tries not to think too deeply about. He’s only met Clara once in the past fifty days and has no particular wish to see her again. He hadn’t expected her to be a kid. Cancer, you told him after their introduction in the lobby, poor girl was only seven. As said before, Sunwoo tries not to think about it. 

And then of course there’s you behind the forest green door who has been slowly showing him all the good places. There’s the beach where you spent the day making seashell necklaces. The  cafe which serves its tea too sweet for him, but sweet enough to be considered your favorite. Sunwoo just gets the chocolate bread. You took him downtown. To a club. The tallest building. And to midtown where the amusement park is. 

But his favorite place you’ve taken him so far is the cliffside above the beach, where the waves crash against the rocks in a way that can only be described as violent. That day you and him laid in the grass and stared at the clouds with your heads dangling just over the edge and water spraying the backs of your necks. That day you turned to him and told him you’re sorry. For what, he asked. I’m so sorry you’re sick, you said, but it’s nice to have you around here. I think in a sense, we’ve both been waiting for this. Then, you smiled and stole all of the blood from his body. So yeah, that day, that place--it’s his favorite. 

Today, you take him on a hike up a mountain. 

“Do you believe in an afterlife?” You ask him after having spent thirty minutes silently staring at the view from the best peak. 

“One after this?”

“Yeah. I guess. Although, I’m not so convinced this counts.”

“I don’t know.” Sunwoo shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Do you think we’d be able to be with our loved ones in it?”

His chest lurches. “If there is one, yes.”

“Do you think it’ll be different than this?”

Sunwoo turns to you finally. “Why are you asking about this?”

You shake your head. “Nevermind. It’s a stupid question.”

He turns back towards the view. From here, he can make out Clara’s building. He thinks about her, about Mr. Choi and Mr. Chan, who he recently found out were once married but who haven’t spoken since Mr. Chan read his file in January, and he thinks about you and about him. 

“I think,” Sunwoo says, loud enough so that you can hear after wandering a little bit away from him, “that whatever the afterlife is, if it does exist, it’ll be worth it.”

You turn to him, but don’t make any move to come near him again. “And if it doesn’t exist?”

“Then life will have been worth it.”

The corner of your lip lifts. “I like that.”

Sunwoo only nods at the sentiment, and after a long while, he builds enough courage to ask, “you’ve been here a really long time, haven’t you?”

“Time doesn't work as linearly in the cloud as it does in the real world. Sometimes it feels like I got here and then you arrived the very next day.” You turn back towards the view and exhale heavily. 

“But yes. I’ve been here for an eternity.”

act ii. scene i.

Before he actually sees you, Sunwoo feels you. Not you, in particular, but something in the distance, a presence in the corner of the room and a pair of eyes watching him from somewhere far away. 

The scariest part is how much the feeling doesn’t actually scare him. 

--

Two days after that, he starts to see you in the flesh. He tells himself that his mind is playing tricks on him, that the person he saw in the produce aisle wasn’t actually you at all and was just a stranger with the same hair. 

He doesn’t go straight home from the store that day. Instead, he stops by the hospital and checks in on you, but even that doesn’t do anything about the fact that he sees a shadow of you behind the bed.

--

The day after that, you speak to him. Standing in the middle of his kitchen in broad daylight, you speak, you say hello, and the first thing Sunwoo thinks is that he’s dead. 

You aren’t, you reply. You’re a zombie, he reasons, here for my brain. I’m not. A ghost. No. Are you, here Sunwoo falters, fear flooding out of his body to make room for the briefest blotch of hope that’s crushed almost immediately by you saying: I’m not alive, Sunwoo. You saw me in the hospital yesterday. 

“So then,” he swallows, “what are you?”

I’m here. You look at him, stare at his face and without a sliver of doubt say, I’m here for you. 

Sunwoo knows it’s impossible. You can’t be here. You can’t. And yet, you are. 

Three years ago Sunwoo was told he had three months left to live, and he still remembers how impossibly you saved him from the brink of death. He remembers how impossible things happen all the time, and how impossibly possible it is that this is one of them. He steps towards you, touches your face, and feels the real, impossible thing against his hand. 

“You’re here.”

--

On the fifth day of your haunting, Sunwoo finally has the sense to ask why. 

Why what?

“Why are you here?”

I’m here for you.

“Stop saying that.”

But I am, you tell him. You asked, and that’s the answer. I’m a doctor, Sunwoo. I’m here for you. 

Then, finally, he hears what you’ve been saying for the past five days. You’re here for him. 

And the thing about doctors is that they’re there for you when you need them. 

“I’m sick.” 

Yes, you answer quietly, although it wasn’t a question. 

“Again.” 

I’m so sorry. 

“You’re a hallucination, aren’t you?” Sunwoo’s shocked by how sad that makes him, how disappointing it is. “I’ve been hallucinating.”

Find me in the Cloud, Sunwoo. There’s something I want to say. 

You’re gone by the time he gets to the hospital. 

act iii. scene i.

Sunwoo stares at the hall of green doors, eyes darting from door to door in an attempt to stare down the shades until they confess which one of them is tea green.

“Clara, the landlord, likes colors.” A voice says from behind him. “Every couple of months she repaints all of the doors in different shades of the same one. Before the green, it was yellow.” 

Sunwoo turns around to face you. When your eyes find him, they go blank for the smallest of moments. You give him a look that goes right through him, turning him inside out like you’ve seen the underside of his skin. It irks him. 

“I’m Sunwoo. I’m new.”

You gulp. “You’re here.” He doesn’t know what to make of the statement. Do all people in the cloud act like this? “Why?”

Sunwoo nods, maybe you’re not so weird as much as you just have a weird way of posing questions. “I was told I’m sick.”

“I’m sorry.” You say, frowning like you actually might feel back for him. 

“Have you been here a while then?” You nod. “Can I ask how long?” You shake your head. Sunwoo doesn’t think too much about it. Instead, he returns your earlier question “Why are you here?”

“Brain dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

You ignore it and point to a door down the hall. “I’m forest green. You?”

“Tea green. But I can’t find-” 

You tap the door in front of him. “This one, genius.”

“Oh.” He laughs awkwardly. “Thanks.”

Your mouth parts as if to say something, and your face goes blank again. He feels his skin turning itself inside out because of it. “Have you read your file yet?”

He shakes his head. “I just got here.”

You inhale, softening, and mutter an ‘okay’. You continue down the hall towards your door. Sunwoo is stuck in place. “I can show you around here, if you like. Take you to all the cool places.”

Sunwoo takes you up on it.

A forest green door slams shut down the hallway. 

act i. scene ii.

“Thank you for taking me out of the hospital.” Sunwoo says, exhaling. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to a park like this.” 

And it’s true, he really can’t. He’s been sick for so long now, and has been through a multitude of treatment plans and too many surgeries. When you’re sick and have 9 surgeons turn you down after asking them to save your life, you forget the joy of being outside and feeling the sun on your skin. You were the first doctor to agree to the surgery. You’re the only doctor to have ever treated Sunwoo like he wasn’t dying, like he was actually going to live.

“You don’t have to thank me. This is good for me too.” You say, head resting against the park bench and eyes closed. 

Sunwoo inhales, taking in the park with all his senses. A visceral sort of thing you learn to do as often as possible when you’ve been as close to death as frequently as he has. He feels the wood beneath his body and the grass beneath his feet. He feels the light on his skin and the wind pushing against his arms and nose. He listens to the kids screaming at the playground at the bottom of the hill and to the dogs barking within the dog park beside it. He takes all this in, relishes in it for the last time as a dying person. 

You sigh. “One more surgery.” 

“And then I’ll be done with this sickness.” 

You smile. He pretends not to see. “And then you’ll be done.” 

“Thank you for saving my life.”

“Don’t do that.”

“No. Seriously.” 

You smile again, this time at him. Sunwoo doesn’t have to pretend not to see. “I haven’t finished saving it yet.”

He leans back against the bench and closes his eyes. “But you will.” 

You tap on your coffee cup. “Honestly though, you did more work than me.” Sunwoo frowns while you take a sip. “The other nine doctors you called are good doctors, and they made the same judgement call I would have made for any other patient. No sane doctor would have agreed to treat you. But you were the reason I said yes. You had such faith that you were going to live and so much faith that I could do it that I believed you. I might be the one doing the technical saving, but you, Sunwoo, you’re the one who convinced me to do it. You saved yourself.”

He stares at you. The light hits your eyes like it’s finding a way to break through them. In truth, before Sunwoo got sick, he didn’t think he was scared of death, but he is. He’s terrified of it. Sunwoo realized it two weeks after his diagnosis and the day after he was wrongly told he only had three more months left to live. But now, for the first time since he was diagnosed, he doesn't feel so afraid of it. Despite how far he’s come and how close he is to beating this fucking illness, while staring at the light woven through your eyes, Sunwoo thinks he could live with himself if he dropped dead tonight. 

That thought alone, is almost as terrifying as death used to be. 

act iii. scene v.

“I saw your ghost, you know.” It’s the first thing Sunwoo has said to you in over two weeks. “It wasn’t actually you though, was it?” You don’t even bother looking up from your cup of tea. Through the silence, Sunwoo orders a coffee. 

“I didn’t know that.” The coffee turns lukewarm. “It wasn’t me.” You push an uneaten half of chocolate bread towards him. “It’s in your brain this time. Symptoms can include hallucinations.”

“Think you can still save me?” You can’t. If you know that much, you know he’s out of medical miracles, and that this time, he really won’t survive it. But it’s a joke. And you laugh at it.

“Definitely not. I never really liked neurosurgery.”

And all at once, he’s painfully aware of your friend somewhere in the real world that does like it but watched anyways as your brain died before her, split wide open. 

“Anyways, how do you know all of this?” But what Sunwoo really wants to say is brains are killer. Literally. Figuratively. 

“I’ve known since we...“ you hesitate, mouth stuck halfway through a word he can’t place. “After last time, I read your chart and looked at your scans.” Sunwoo nods. He expected as much. He doesn’t ask how you got them. “I’m sorry you're sick again.” You say to him quietly. “I’m sorry you’re dying.”

“I’m sorry you’re dead.” As soon as the words have left his mouth, he regrets them. Because you aren’t. And he knows you too well to think you’d look past the technicality. 

You scoff, shake your head slightly, and with a spiteful smile say, “Can I say it?”

Sunwoo only sighs. “Let’s start over instead.” 

You nod. He pushes the chocolate bread back. 

act iii. scene iv.

Mr. Choi was the one to recommend that Sunwoo give you and himself space. It’s been a month since you and him last spoke, since that moment hovering above the waves after he read his file and after he found out you read yours. He misses you, and has been for so long now. Mr. Choi was wrong. Sunwoo’s standing outside your forest green door to prove it. 

You open the door before he can knock. There’s no shock in your voice when you say his name, like you’ve been waiting for this day, expecting it. 

He looks behind you, at your apartment in Clara’s building that looks just like your apartment in the real world. The same one he cleaned out after you died, still filled with things he gave to your family or donated or took back to his place. He wants to crumble just looking at it again. “Can I come in?”

“It’s only been a month.”

And he knows what you mean by it. Three months is the recommended time off after reading one’s file. To reacclimate, they say, to process. But the insinuation that Sunwoo was supposed to go three months without seeing you makes him feel sick. The insinuation that after a year of being without you in the real world he was supposed to be without you here too, enrages him. Then he remembers how long you’ve been here, and how long you’ve been doing this and feels slightly murderous.

All he says is: “It’s been a lot longer than that for you.”

Your lip twitches. You lock and unlock the open forest green door five times before saying, “Are you sure?”

He nods. You let him in. 

Sunwoo used to imagine what it would be like to meet you again in the Cloud one day. He imagined tears and hugs and kisses. He imagined i love you’s and i hate you’s and i miss you. He imagined the scenario more times than can possibly be considered healthy. But he imagined something. He was waiting for the day. Waiting for this day. But this moment, sitting at your round wood table while you boil water for tea, is nothing like the million different ways he imagined seeing you again. 

And as you set down two mismatched mugs and take the seat across from him, he doesn’t even try to create one of them. “How long has it been since you read your file?”

You watch the steam rise from your tea for a long moment, then stand, grab the sugar and pour a spoonful of it into your tea. You take another spoonful and look at him expectantly. “Want some?” He nods, and you pour the sugar into his. You stir the tea then taste, then cringe, then add more sugar and then ask if he wants it. He refuses. You stir again. Sunwoo watches the whirlpool and waits the eternity it takes you to say: “I read it on my first day.”  

You put the sugar away, satisfied with the tea’s sweetness while Sunwoo marvels at how long you’ve known and how silently you’ve been carrying the knowledge of you and him since he came. And that knowledge is what makes him finally remember one of the reasons he came. “Is there something you want to tell me?” You look up at him when he asks it, exhaling like you’ve been wanting to bring it up for so long now, which Sunwoo guesses isn’t as much of a simile as he thinks it is. 

“Yes, actually. I…” you hesitate, flicking the mug as if the right words will come hopping out of the tea. Sunwoo watches for it. “I’ve just been here for a long time now, Sunwoo.”

“Two years isn’t that long.”

“Time doesn’t work the same here as it does down there.” You tell him tiredly. “It’s been decades.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“In the beginning, I didn’t mind the waiting. I knew you were on your way, but I just,” you hesitate, “I didn’t think it’d take so long for you to come back to me.” 

Sunwoo covers your hand with his. “I’m sorry.” You twist your palm into it, squeeze, then pull your hand away. Sunwoo swallows. “I came as fast as I could.”

“I know. I waited.”

“Do you regret it?” Sunwoo’s terrified of what the answer might be.

You don’t give it. “That’s not what I meant.” 

“Then?”

“I’ve been here for so long, and,” your head drops, voice breaking under the weight it carries, “it’s been so lonely.”

“But I’m here now.” Sunwoo says, leaning forward against the table. “You aren’t alone anymore.”

“I know you’re here. I know, and I thought that would fix it, but it didn’t. Seeing you in the hall that day was so bittersweet, because you were here but that also meant you were somewhere else dying. Because you were here and I still felt lonely.” You stop, chugg the remaining bits of your tea, and then wipe your cheeks. “Do you get what I’m saying?”

“No.” But it’s a lie. He does get it. He knows all about loneliness and the way it creeps inside, so slyly. The way it starts small and then grows, feeding on negligence, until it's too big for your body. He knows how it sits inside you, for all its enormity, and spills into everything. He knows how it lingers. How it has nothing to do with people or lack of them and everything to do with grief. Sunwoo knows all about loneliness. The day he read his file he felt a dam of it burst open within him. 

“I’m saying that in the real world I saved you, and now it’s your turn to save me.” You gulp. “I’m saying that I want you to unplug me.”

It takes a moment for Sunwoo to even register what you’ve said, but when he does remember the life support that’s keeping your body alive somewhere in a universe far away, he doesn’t say anything. He just stands and walks out of your apartment. 

act i. scene iii.

“Doctor, please present.” The attending announces, stepping into Sunwoo’s room for rounds. 

“Mr. Kim,” a resident starts, flipping open his chart, “was diagnosed 14 months ago and has gone through several different treatment plans. When he came to us, the illness had spread and was deemed inoperable and untreatable by several other physicians. Our treatment plan was aggressive and grueling but ultimately, effective. Sunwoo is 20 days post op from his third and final surgery. The surgery went extremely well with no complications and his vitals were excellent. He has been a model patient all throughout recovery, and according to our latest scans, he is also now illness free…”

Sunwoo doesn’t even bother listening to the rest. 

--

“So, now that I’m no longer a patient, if I ask you out on a date, will you actually say yes?” 

“Well,” you say, signing his discharge papers, “only one way to know.”

“What is it?”

You look up at him, smiling. “Ask me again.”

He does. 

You say yes. 

act iii. scene v. take ii. 

“I saw your ghost.” The first thing Sunwoo says after the last failed attempt.

You look up from your tea. “It wasn’t me.” 

“I know.” Sunwoo orders another coffee. “But the hallucination was how I knew I was sick again. It made me feel like you were trying to warn me, like you were up here somewhere caring from a distance. Right after I pieced it all together you told me to find you here and that there was something you wanted to say.” The coffee turns lukewarm again. Sunwoo can’t bring himself to say it. You sigh and push the same piece of chocolate bread back towards him. This time, he takes a bite from it. And with a mouthful of chocolate bread, he cries, “I just got you back, and now you want to leave all over again.”

You frown. “I didn’t want to leave the first time, and it’s different now.”

“How?”

“I want to go. Isn’t that worth something?”

“And what about what I want?”

“Oh, Sunwoo,” you say, “I’m sorry you’re sick. The hallucination was you and your head, but for what it’s worth, I have been up here caring from a distance. I still…” you don’t need to say the words. He knows. He never had to doubt it. “I never stopped.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you asked of me.” Sunwoo tells you. He made the decision last week but today, right now, with your confession still falling through the air, is the first time he’s had the stomach to swallow it. “And I’ll do it. I will. I just need some time. You’ve had so long and in comparison I’ve had nothing.”

“Okay.” You say simply.

“How long can you give me?”

You smile. “You know I’d give you an eternity if you asked for it.”

“I’m scared.” Sunwoo confesses then. “I know it’s what you want, but selfishly, I don’t want to let you again. I don’t know if I’m a big enough person to do it.”

“I do.” You say to him, leaning forward against the table and looking straight through him. “I know because I was your doctor. I have cut inside your body, seen all your organs, and during surgery two, I held your heart in my hands. I felt it beating. So I know exactly how big it is, and I know it’s big enough for this”

Sunwoo feels the heart you worked so hard to repair bursting inside of him. 

“God. Why’d you have to read your file so soon?”

You laugh. “I missed you. I couldn’t help it.”

And just like that, you’ve stolen the entire concept of fear from him. 

“I’m ready.”

“What?”

He looks at you and feels the loneliness slither away.

“Ask me again.”

[gkingoffez]

The Malfunction

Fandom: Red vs Blue

Words: 2,850

Summary: Simmons never meant for anyone to get hurt. Running away was supposed to avoid that.

Warnings: violence, guilt, non-graphic description of robotic body parts

Thanks @goodluckdetective for the prompt!

Of all the ways Simmons would have expected to spend his afternoon, running around in the cave systems beneath Blood Gulch, tired, wet and hopelessly lost would have been very low on the list.

“Where the fuck is the exit to this place,” he moaned to himself in frustration, wiping at the moisture on his forehead, “I swear it’s so much easier getting in to this fucking canyon then it is to get out. It’s a hell-hole in the middle of fucking nowhere, not the goddamn underworld, what the fuck!”

He half-glanced at his right arm- he’d managed to lock the mechanics at the elbow and shoulder joints so it stuck out of his body at a rigid, if awkward right angle. It had still been letting off an occasional electronic spark since he’d entered the tunnel, and he was still terrified, even half an hour after the incident, to let it touch the rest of his body.

What happens if it hurts me like it hurt Gr-

“Fuck, fuck shit fuck, don’t think about that, Simmons, don’t think about it. Just need to get out of here, and try to fix this. Why won’t you let me out!” he yelled to the tunnelway ahead of him, as if it was its fault he’d gotten lost. His own echoing voice was the only answer.

Simmons let out an angry groan and stopped for a break to ease his sore muscles.

He fell back against the rocky surface of the tunnel wall and took a few deep breaths in an attempt to remain calm, then abruptly choked back a sob.

He wiped impatiently at his face again- crying was the last thing he needed to do, he was already enough of a hot mess as it was, and there was no point in adding ‘crying like a little girl’ to the list. God.

Some idiot he must have looked like before, running out of red base, flailing his arms about, wearing only the bottom half of his armour and screaming at everyone around to get out of the way. The quick escape had been necessary, but he’d already cursed the fact that he’d had to leave both his helmet and gun behind.

The military standard boots had kept out the stagnant cave water, but hadn’t helped at all when he’d tripped over in a particularly wet alcove a while back. The thin maroon tank top he wore was muddy and drenched, and the bits of him that were human flesh were covered in goose-bumps from the chill in the stagnant cave air.

He looked fearfully at his arm again, the one Sarge had replaced with a robot arm all those years back. It looked suspiciously normal- all the beaten panels were exactly as they’d been yesterday, all the seemingly shoddy wirework exactly where it was meant to be. Even the scraped and peeling maroon paintjob Donut had helped him do was there. It was, undoubtedly, his arm, but to Simmons it had never felt more alien or threatening.

He still wasn’t sure how it had malfunctioned- maybe he’d fucked with something he shouldn’t have last maintenance session- but it had, and far, far worse than the usual malfunctions (he’d gotten used to occasionally shooting himself in the foot ages ago, that was nothing new).

It must have been something he’d missed, a crossed or broken wire in one of the circuits. He hadn’t meant for anyone to get hurt because of it.

“Fuck, Grif,” Simmons whispered to himself, clenching his flesh hand into a fist. He couldn’t shake the image of Grif being thrown across the base’s kitchen. Simmons had only stuck around long enough the make sure the fat idiot had still been breathing before he’d run off (and gotten himself lost) but anything could have happened in the intervening time.

What if he’s dead? What if I killed him?

Simmons banged his fist against the cave wall, dislodging a smattering of dirt. He pushed off and hurried onward.

No use standing around freaking out, gotta find that exit.

He just needed to get out of the canyon and away from his friends for a few hours, it was easier that way. He’d find somewhere quiet where he could safely look at his arm with the small toolkit he kept in his right boot. Hopefully that would be enough.

It wasn’t a forever thing by any means; he’d have to go back to base eventually. By any luck they’d all be laughing about it by dinner tomorrow, him and his team- Sarge, Donut, Lopez, Grif. They’d all forget about it eventually and move on. Maybe he’d even be able to wheedle a brand new arm out of it. Simmons just had to make it to that point without having a mental breakdown, which was probably a harder feat than it sounded. He wasn’t the most relaxed dude in the canyon in the first place.

“Simmons!” echoed a familiar voice behind him in the tunnel. “Simmons, where are you, dude?”

Fear seized at his heart and his eyes went wide. He staggered to a halt. Tucker?

“Simmons? Simmons, are you in here? Answer me!” came Sarge’s voice as well, reverberating off the wet tunnel floors.

The need to keep quiet and hidden was pitted against his inherent desire to follow a superior officer’s orders.

“Yeah!” he called back, immediately cursing himself for it. “Bu-but don’t follow me, I don’t think I’m safe!”

“Private Simmons, you best turn your robot hiney around and march right back here before I court-marshal you for desertion!”

Simmons blanched and squeaked in fear. He heard two sets of hurried footsteps splashing towards him, getting closer by the second. He looked to his arm, sticking out straight from his body and sparking slightly, then back down the corridor. He made a snap decision.

“No no no no, just stay away, alright? I’ll-I’ll fix this, just leave me alone!” he yelled, his heart in his throat as he took off in the opposite direction.

“Simmons, wait!” Tucker and Sarge cried, but he ignored it.

The tunnel soon opened up into a wider cavern so filled with stalactites and stalagmites it looked like a gigantic leering mouth. Water dripping from the roof created an empty and creepy soundscape that immediately put a shiver up Simmons’ spine. Worst of all, the place wasn’t familiar to him at all and the air smelled as stale as ever.

“Fuck, how big is this fucking place? And how the fuck did we never find it before, we’ve been in this canyon for five goddamn years now!”

He anxiously scanned the room for a way out, and spied a similar tunnel than his on the opposite wall. He ran for it, hoping it would miraculously lead him out, but was forced to stop several feet in. A cave in had blocked the way- a long while ago, by the looks of it, as a lot of the rocks had a layer of moss growing on them.

“Fuck fuck, what the fuck-” he cried.

“Simmons!” Sarge’s voice called, closer than ever.

Simmons whipped around and saw a flickering of torchlight almost at the mouth of the tunnel he’d come through. He squeaked, then covered his mouth to muffle the noise.

Out of time, out of time! Can’t let them find me, can’t let the touch me, oh god oh god oh god oh-

In a fit of panic, Simmons ran and threw himself behind a large stalagmite, trying to quell his heaving breaths.

“Simmons? Dude, are you in here?” he heard Tucker call. The echoing sounded different in the wider, more open cavern compared to the more confined tunnel.

Simmons crouched lower behind his cover and bit back a sob that was threatening to escape past his fingers. The footsteps of his friends slowed down, and he listened to them intently.

“My scanners are still fucked up but I think they’re saying he’s still in here,” came Tucker’s voice from what sounded like the middle of the cavern. “I’ll go check out that tunnel just in case- Sarge, you spread out and see if he’s hiding behind a rock.”

“Got it, Blue.”

Simmons fearfully pressed himself back against the stalagmite, edging around to avoid Tucker’s plodding footsteps that made a beeline for the blocked off tunnel. After a moment, he peered out cautiously- Sarge in his armour sans his helmet (which looked to be tucked under his arm) had his back to Simmons and was scanning the other side of the cavern with a flashlight.

“Simmons?” the gruff old man said. Simmons gritted his teeth together to keep his mouth closed.

He instead looked to the tunnel they’d come in, which was clear and probably his only way of escaped. Simmons reasoned that if he was quick and quiet, he could sneak out before he was found.

He took a steadying breath, and with a glance at Sarge to make sure he was still looking the other way, dashed to the cover of the next stalagmite. It was taking everything he had to keep quiet.

“Tunnel’s blocked off, he didn’t get out this way at least,” came Tucker’s echoing voice.

Simmons pressed himself further into the rock.

“Simmons? Come out, Simmons, we haven’t got all day,” said Sarge. “Here I am, taking orders from a dirty blue and you’re just gonna leave me hanging like this? Come on, soldier, I thought I taught you better than that.”

Simmons paused.

No, focus. Don’t let them find you, you’re not safe.

“We’re here to help you, Simmons. Whatever happened, we’ll find a way to fix it together, but running away won’t help anyone,” chimed in Tucker.

Simmons poked his head around, eyeing up his next stalagmite. The sweeping glow of a flashlight arced his way and he saw a flash of teal armour, and ducked back just in the nick of time. Tucker’s footsteps stomped right past him.

When he thought the coast was clear again, Simmons dashed to the next rock, hopping lightly over a shallow puddle. Two more to go and he would be at the tunnel, and hopefully home free. Well, probably still hopelessly lost in a wet and surprisingly extensive cave system, but at least he could lose his pursuers easier in the winding tunnels.

He looked around to check his path again and almost choked- Tucker was now standing at the mouth of the tunnel, leaning casually against the wall, obviously having caught on to Simmons’ plan.

Cursing internally, he ducked back and weighed up his options. With Tucker guarding the way out and Sarge still scanning between the rocks, it was only a matter of time until he was found. What then? Would they drag him back to base? Would his arm do that thing again, would someone else get hurt?

“Look guys, thanks for the concern and all, but you don’t need to worry about me,” Simmons said as nonchalantly as he could, hoping that the echoing cave would mask where his voice was coming from.

“Concern is a word for it alright. Simmons, you just ran off-”

“It wasn’t going to be forever, I swear!” insisted Simmons. “I just needed some space away from the canyon to sort this out. I don’t know what’s happening, and I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt while I checked it out!”

He looked again at the offending arm, still stretched straight and barely hidden behind the bulk of the rock. It sparked a little, as though sensing his gaze.

“Is Grif alright? Did I hurt him really bad?” he asked desperately, half-wanting not to hear the answer.

“He’s fine, we think. Donut’s staying with him and Doc was there when we left. He didn’t think there would be permanent damage, but then again, you know how Doc can be,” replied Tucker.

Simmons let out a tension riddled breath he hadn’t known he was holding and slid to the ground, his back becoming slick with the cold gunky moss from the rock. He didn’t care, Grif was still alive.

“That’s good, fuck, I don’t know what I would have done if-” He swallowed heavily and closed his eyes.

“Look, Simmons,” Sarge said from somewhere that sounded quite close to Simmons’ hiding spot. “Disappointing as it is that Grif survived, it means that everything’s fine and you can stop tryin’ to run away from us. Whatever mechanical oopsies happening with your robot bits, I’m sure we can fix it if you just come back to base with us. Lopez an’ I will have a look and we can have this all sorted out by Donut’s wine and cheese hour.”

Simmons looked down at his arm again, contemplating it. Maybe Sarge had a point- if he was honest with himself, he was cold, wet and exhausted, and he hadn’t been looking forward to trying to fix it, especially with his non-dominant left hand.

The set of footsteps stopped right next to him, and Simmons looked up to see Sarge standing above him, helmetless and smiling. “What do you say, son?”

He extended his gloved red hand, and Simmons hesitated for a moment before accepting it with his flesh arm.

He let Sarge pull him to his feet and awkwardly returned the grin.

“Got ‘im, Tucker,” Sarge yelled over his shoulder.

“Oh thank fuck, can we go now?” Tucker replied.

“You alright there, Simmons?” asked Sarge. “You look like a dog tried to fight a puddle and lost.”

“I’m fine, sir,” Simmons said with a relieved sigh.

Sarge nodded.

“Now let’s get out of here, this place gives me the heebie jeebies, and not the good kind.”

Sarge went to clap Simmons on the shoulder, a friendly, comforting gesture he’d had done many times before. Simmons widened his eyes.

“Sarge, no, wait!”

But it was too late. As soon as Sarge’s hand touched his robot arm, there was a great cracking sound and a wave of energy seemed to pass out from the metal. Just like Grif had, Sarge was thrown back by the sheer force of it, and fell limply to floor of the cavern. The loose helmet rolled from his grip and came to stop several feet away.

“Fuck fuck fuck, Sarge are you alright? Sarge? Answer me Sarge!”

But there was no reply.

Tucker bounded into view, his sword out and lit.

“What the fuck happened?” said Tucker, immediately stowing his weapon and crouching at Sarge’s side. He put a hand to his helmet, scanning Sarge’s limp body, before turning to Simmons. “What the hell did you do?”

Simmons was back on the verge of panicking, his breaths coming quick and short.

“I- I-I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to!” he cried. He looked at his metal arm, which was smoking slightly. “Fuck, what’s wrong with me, why does this keep happening?”

He looked desperately at Tucker to see that the Blue had pulled off his glove to dig his fingers into the pulse point at Sarge’s neck.

Simmons’ blood ran cold.

No no no, not Sarge, please not Sarge.

“You didn’t kill him, but he needs help now,” Tucker said, serious and in control, far removed from the womanising idiot now. He pressed a finger to the radio link on his helmet. “Church, do you read me? Come in, this is an emergency.”

Simmons couldn’t hear if Church replied, once again cursing that he’d left his helmet begind. He stared at his arm as though it tainted, half-expecting to see blood dripping from the wires and metal panels. One time might have been a fluke, but two times made him a weapon.

It was more important than ever- he had to leave before anyone else got hurt because of him.

“Yeah, found Simmons, but that thing happened again and Sarge is down. I’m gonna need backup, send Caboose and Donut if you can.” Tucker paused. “What’s that dude? Reception’s shitty down here.

Simmons stumbled backwards around the stalagmite, and caught sight of the way out again. He started for it, almost sprinting.

“Whoa, Simmons, wait!” Tucker called after him. He drew up just short of the tunnel, but didn’t turn back.

“Stay with Sarge,” he pushed out between shallow breaths. “I gotta go fix this before anyone else gets hurt, don’t follow me.”

“And what if you can’t fix it? Dude, Sarge was right, it’ll be faster and safer if we do it together.”

Simmons shook his head. “No, no, fuck. Just… tell him- tell them, I’m sorry, okay. I’ll come back when I can.”

Tucker sighed, the sound reverberating until it filled the whole room.

“Okay, I’ll look after them,” Tucker said, and Simmons felt a wave of gratitude. “Just make sure you come back, man, your team needs you. You should’ve seen how worried they were about you when you ran off.”

Simmons nodded, his throat closing up too much for a reply. With one last frightened glance at his sparking arm, he ran off back down the tunnel in search of the way out.

Second and final angst war entry! I did Simmons/red team angst bc, blue team to my core as I am, I’m a lil over just doing blues/tuckington stuff. Just wanted some variety.

The way I see it, this story has three possible endings

1.      Good Ending- Simmons manages to fix his arm enough that he feels safe enough to come back to base. Grif and Sarge make a full recovery. Lopez helps with the rest of the repairs. Maybe Sarge makes him a new arm entirely to ease everyone’s mind. They all laugh about it and the whole thing gets put behind them.

2.      (Relatively) Good Bad Ending- Simmons just… never comes back. He can’t find a way to fix it, so he just runs away entirely and starts a new life as a hermit. He sends a short message back to Blood Gulch just to say he’s alive, but otherwise there’s nothing. The reds and blues try and fail on an adventure to bring him back. Sarge doesn’t have the heart to tell the UNSC/PFL that Simmons deserted, and they all pretend he’s still there to keep Simmons from being dragged back for a court martial (after all, he only ran away in the first place to keep them all safe.) Everyone is sad.

3.      Bad Ending- Simmons hurts himself with the arm trying to fix it, knocks himself out and without proper medical attention, dies. A search party finds his body, and someone else still gets hurt when they touch the arm. Tucker has to cut it off entirely so they can drag Simmons back for a proper funeral. Everyone is sad, Grif especially, and everything hurts.

I’ll probably give this another good round of editing before putting it up on other sites, I kinda rushed to finish.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Can’t wait for the next war!

[clan-fuildarach]

birb story chapter 1

this is by no means required reading, it has nothing to do with my lore right now. it’s just my nanowrimo story from 2014 and one of the few stories i’ve actually finished writing. people seemed interested last night so i thought i’d post it!

i did all 50k words in 5 days which should account for the uh, issues 

disclaimer i know nothing about archaeology i bullshitted 90% of this and the other 10% is badly misremembered facts from when i actually visited this place

~

 The thing about bogs was that once you saw one, you’d seen them all. A featureless plain of rippling, purple-tipped deer grass and yellowish sphagnum moss. More often than not, it was soaking wet, and the final day of assisted excavation was no exception.

 Wind whipped over the hillside, snatching Nuala’s hood back. For a brief moment she was bare to the rain, her hair soaking through in seconds. With numb fingers she tugged the hood up again, hunching her shoulders against another gust.

 Repelled by the terrible weather, the news teams that had promised to be with them for the supposedly “historic” moment had vanished. As the grey sky pummelled the ground with freezing rain, the woman behind the digger controls reached out to wipe condensation from the interior of the vehicle.

 “Now, see,” David Kilrush was saying—shouting, really—over the wind. He pointed out a spot on his laminated map, holding it out for Nuala to see. “We’ll be digging in front of the structure, so we don’t damage it  - wouldn’t want to be doing that, of course. The probe team has the tomb here, stretching on to the cliff.” He nodded away, to the line of slim white rods sticking out of the bog surface. The simplest tool available for mapping the neolithic structures under the bog, the probes stood up higher where there was something beneath them, elevated by ancient rock walls or buildings.

 David’s calm, explanatory tone made Nuala roll her eyes. Of course she knew about excavations. She’d studied every single bog dig site she’d been able to find journals about. She’d been up and down the Cnoc Mór bog more times than David had, anyway. But since he was technically her professor, she couldn’t exactly say so.

 With an enormous kwoosh a spout of seawater climbed above the edge of the cliff nearby, splattering the team. Nuala was already soaked, so she barely noticed. Her eyes were fixed on the bare sides of the bog. The digger’s claws had cut through a metre of thick black flesh, but its usefulness was quickly running out. As the hillsite got wetter and wetter, the caterpillar tracks of the vehicle had begun to sink into the surface of the bog. Thick, black water discharged from the open bog hole had already covered the plywood sheets the digger had parked on.

 “Now, we’re going all the way down,” David said, checking his map. “Two metres, we’ll say. That’s roughly five thousand years. There haven’t been any major neolithic finds in this area since the Céide fields in the sixties, so we could be looking at something quite significant here.”

 Despite David’s continual stating-of-the-obvious, Nuala nodded eagerly. The wind and rain faded into the distance. Her black eyes fixed on the gaping wound the digger had cut into the bog. Suddenly, the north Mayo blanket bogs were actually really exciting.

 It was a tomb—it had to be, there was no other explanation. Other structures simply fell apart under the weight of the bog, so the archaeologists in charge of the excavation had reasoned that this one was made of large slabs of rock rather than small stones put together to build a wall. And who would go through the effort of putting together huge slabs of rock if it wasn’t a tomb? The structure, marked out by the probes, was too small to be anything else.

 Nuala’s heart skipped a beat as the digger’s claw pulled back more bog. Amidst the black mess of decayed plant-life was a flash of white. Sandstone, then. The acid nature of the bog stripped all colour off the normally brownish rock, leaving it ghostly white.

 The woman in the digger’s cabin pulled back on her controls sharply. She shut off the engine, leaving the lights on to illuminated the dim hillside, and climbed out.

 “Ah, Jesus,” she said, approaching David, “I didn’t know it was that close. You think I hit it?”

 “Should be fine,” he said. “Not to worry, Riona. Take a spade from the back of the van—you too, Nuala.”

 Nodding, Riona slogged away through the damp bog, to the van parked a few metres away. She took out a trio of spades and trudged back up to Nuala and David.

 “Try to keep yeer distance,” David said firmly. “Uncover the tomb, don’t damage it.”

 Nuala took the pitted handle of the spade and got stuck in, before Riona had a chance. Whatever it was that lay in the tomb, Nuala was going to see it first. She’d come all the way across the country for it.

 She jumped down into the trench, resting the spade against the walls momentarily while David and another dig-site helper passed down more plywood sheets to stand on. Already, the bog was sucking at her boots, bleeding dark, brackish water out of its cut sides. Once she was standing safely on the plywood, she started digging.

 One day, she told herself, she was going to have to recall this moment in detail. For a news interview, maybe, when she was a famous archaeologist. Or in her thesis. Her lip curled as she pulled away the black plant-matter clinging to the front of the buried structure. The other messers in her archaeology course would sorely regret declining David’s invitation to work on the dig-site.

 “Maybe we’ll find a body,” Riona said through gritted teeth, cutting a shallow foot-long trench in the earth at the edge of the excavation site. She’d come down with an armful of metal scaffolding poles, and as Nuala uncovered the bleached rocks Riona began reinforcing the walls of the excavation.

 “David doesn’t think we will,” Nuala said, “but sure, what else could be in there?”

 “He’s leaning towards grain storage, I think,” Riona said. “There haven’t been human remains found here in a long, long time. Not even up at the Céide fields.”

 David lowered a ladder into the trench and clipped it to the new scaffolding supports. “My god,” he said, as he climbed down, “this weather is desperate. Ladies, we might stop now for the night, I’m afraid if we carry on there’ll be a bogslide.”

 Nuala’s teeth bared in a snarl of protest. They were so close - the front of the tomb was almost clear of debris, the white walls glowing eerily through the driving rain. The very thought of there being neolithic human remains in the tomb was tantalising beyond belief. And, anyway, it rained on the bog every day practically, who was to say that the weather would be any better the next day?

 “If we come back tomorrow,” Riona said in a measured tone, “we’ll be coming back to a swimming pool, not an excavation.”

 David chewed his lip, rain dripping from the tip of his nose. “That’s true, and it’ll take a good hour’s drive to get to Westport in this weather, to get some tarpaulin…”

 “So we’ll keep going?” Nuala said. The rain had made it through her coat and waterproof trousers, somehow, and her entire being was soaked to the skin. Shivers wracked her frame, but given the choice between opening the tomb and going back to a warm, dry hotel room, she’d have chosen the tomb without hesitation. Obviously. What absolute fool would choose a boring uneventful evening over this?

 Her hands tightened on the spade, her numb fingers almost as white as the bleached sandstone.

 “Tommo!” David shouted, knocking against the ladder. An assistant appeared at the top of the trench, leaning over.

 “Yeah?”

 “Bring us the crowbar,” David said.

 Nuala stood aside as the crowbar descended into the tomb. David wrapped his hands around it and approached the front of the tomb. They’d already probed the area all around, and if other neolithic tombs were anything to go by, this was the front, the entrance. All they had to do was pull back the slab closing it all in. Of course there were dangers, but how else were they to get into the tomb?

 Riona grabbed Nuala’s arm and pulled her back, as far away from the entrance as possible. “You don’t want to get caught under that,” she said firmly.

 Nuala pulled her arm out of Riona’s grip, eyes fixed on David’s back.

 “This is your first excavation, isn’t it?” Riona said, her voice slightly gentler. “You’re very keen.”

 Nuala nodded. “Well, I didn’t choose to be an archaeology student for nothing.”

 Riona smiled, pushing her dripping hair from her eyes. “You’re a second year, right? Why’d you go all the way to Dublin to go to college?”

 Nuala had never mentioned that she’d moved to Dublin to go to college, but she guessed it was fairly obvious. David was the professor of her course, and he was from Dublin, but Nuala’s accent was pure Galway. And there were definitely archaeology courses available in Galway.

 “I just wanted to get away,” Nuala said, which wasn’t strictly false.

 “I’ve been excavating up in Céide for years,” Riona said. “Is that what you want to work at? Or are you planning on going abroad?”

 David slotted the hooked tip of the crowbar into the crack between the door slab and the rest of the tomb. He started carefully pulling back, his grip firm despite the rain.

 “I don’t know,” Nuala said.

 Riona smiled, her weathered cheeks dripping. “If you ever have to do work experience, sure you can come up to the Céide visitor centre and apply there. We’d be happy to have you.”

 “Riona, over here,” David said loudly, over the battering wind. It was really getting bad, the sky fading from wool-grey to inky black. Riona took the crowbar, holding it in place while David started slinging thick nylon straps around the rock. He threw the ends up out of the trench, for the assistants to attach to the front of the van. Once he was satisfied that the rock was secure, he gripped the crowbar beside Riona.

 Together, they wrenched the door off the tomb. The straps snapped tight, keeping the rock from slamming into the two fragile humans. David held it by one side and shouted something that the wind swallowed, but the assistants apparently heard. The van engine roared into life.

 Slowly, inch by inch, the rock slab rose into the air and out of the trench. Nuala leant to the side, impatiently trying to catch a glimpse of the interior of the tomb. It was too dark, though, and she couldn’t see a thing. A handful of dry leaves were swept into the air, tugged from the interior of the tomb by the grasping wind. More than a few hit Nuala in the face.

 What kind of neolithic tomb contained dry leaves? She snatched at one and held it out, squinting. It was long, as long as her thumb, black and oddly fluffy. She stared, uncomprehending, for several moments before finally realising what it was that she held. It was a feather.

 Instantly, her heart sank. There wouldn’t be any non-decomposed feathers in a tomb that wasn’t open to the air somewhere. And if the tomb was open to air, that meant the bog hadn’t been able to fill it, to work its natural preservation on the interior. They wouldn’t be finding any bog bodies in there. A human skeleton, maybe, if they were lucky.

 A few more downy feathers drifted from the tomb. The slab was out of the trench now, being pulled away by the van. David and Riona stood in front of the entrance, blocking it. Nuala strode forwards, feather in hand.

 “Look,” she said, “this came out.”

 She held up the feather.

 Both David and Riona understood the implications instantly. David’s smile fell slightly, but reappeared almost a second later.

 “Maybe there’s another entrance,” he said. “The only place we didn’t look was the cliffside itself, maybe there’s a tunnel…” He paused, thoughtful, and faced the interior of the tomb. He pulled a torch from his belt and held it up.

 The beam of torchlight cut through the shadows in the tomb, followed by the flashes of Riona’s waterproof camera. Nuala stood on the tips of her toes, struggling to see over David’s shoulder. Bird contamination or not, she was determined to memorise every last detail, just in case she needed to repeat it all to a fawning news reporter later.

 She saw the steps leading down into a dim cavern, rock slabs boxing in the floor, walls, and ceiling. She saw the vases and pottery cups lining the walls, half-eroded from the constant drip of acidic water from the roof. She saw dark lines on the walls and floor, painted onto the rock but somehow untouched by the bog’s acidity. The lines were too straight to have been put there by accident, running diagonally across several flagstones. They came together in the very centre of the tomb, linking like the centre of a many-pointed star. Around the nexus of lines was a careful, hand-painted circle.

 Nuala mentally thumbed through her textbooks, the reference material she’d brought with her to Mayo. She pictured the photographs of different excavations, the tombs from all around the country from roughly the same time period. And although the general structure of this tomb was identical to several others she’d studied, everything else about it was completely alien. More feathers lay around, all dusty black, but there was nothing to indicate where they’d come from.

 Unthinking, she followed the lines down to their convergence point again. She couldn’t look away, her heart pounding in her throat.

 Riona took another photo. Behind them, assistants were climbing into the trench for a look into the tomb, exclaiming amongst themselves.

 “I’ve never seen that,” Riona said slowly. “The lines - it looks like ochre, maybe, but where around here would you get ochre…”

 Nuala glanced up at David, waiting for an explanation. But he looked just as lost as Riona, his bushy silver eyebrows raised as he moved the torch-beam around the tomb. “I think,” he said slowly, eyeing the circle on the tomb floor, “that might be the capstone.”

 “Can I…?” Nuala indicated the interior hopefully, her heart pounding. David shook his head and she almost scowled at him. Riona entered the tomb first, descending the steps with a careful stillness. She stepped over one of the lines, bending over to take a look at a pile of eroded pottery.

 “I’ve never seen this design before!” she called. “It’s not geometric, it’s actually illustrated with figures…” Her camera flashed as she took a picture.

 Feathers drifted over the floor, gathering around Riona’s feet. She turned, snapping pictures of the lines tracking down the walls, and finally faced the capstone. David was right - it was slightly elevated above the rest of the floor, a long, rectangular stone that someone had cut very carefully to fit the surrounding flagstones. The circle was painted on the centre.

 “Could fit two bodies,” Riona said, taking a picture. “I’d say it’s nine feet long. Too big for just one person - unless they were buried with someone else, or some kind of treasure or religious artifact…”

 David took up the crowbar again and stepped into the tomb, this time beckoning with a tilt of the head for Nuala to follow him. She descended the slick steps, arms out for balance. David avoided stepping on the lines, as did she. That was important.

 But David set the crowbar down and removed a sample bag from his coat pocket. He pulled out a knife.

 “What are you doing?” Nuala said warily as he approached one of the walls.

“We’ll need to send this in for dating,” David said. “Just to make sure it’s as old as we think.”

 He set his knife to one of the lines. Nuala’s eyes widened, and she almost shouted at him to stop. She clamped her mouth shut, her cheeks burning with a faint embarrassment. Acting like a superstitious fool about a bunch of lines was something she expected from other people.

 Carefully, David scratched the maroon paint off the rock and into the bag. He sealed the bag and left it on the floor, by the entrance.

 “Now. Let’s open this up.” He grabbed the crowbar and approached the capstone.

 Disturbing one line was bad enough, but opening the tomb would disconnect all of them. Nuala forced down her instinctual fear, disgusted at herself. Opening the tomb was more important than anything, if it meant a successful first excavation.

 Together, Riona and David prised up the capstone. The sheet of rock was nine feet long but only about three across, and it was thin enough for both of them to lift. They levered it up and to the side in one practised movement, uncovering the grave cut into the floor and breaking the continuity of the lines.

 David’s torch beamed into the dark, rectangular hole. His shoulders sagged. “It’s a hoax,” he said quietly. “We’ve been had.”

 Feathers drifted into the air.

 Nuala approached the grave, stepping over the lines, and peered down into it.

 The creature lying dead in the grave would have satisfied a cryptozoologist’s wildest dreams. Slightly over seven feet tall, it was roughly humanoid, clad all over in dusty black feathers. Its face was bare of feathers, the speckled skin blue-grey, the expression peaceful and still. Two pale horns rose an extra foot into the air above its head, cracked and splintered at the tips. Its ears were greyish and sheeplike, poking from the downy feathers around its head. Its body was vaguely humanoid, though the chest was keeled in the centre, and the hands were long and clawed. Its legs were thin and birdlike, bare of feathers below the ankle. Dusty black scales covered its digitigrade feet. Its talons just about touched the lower edges of the grave, gleaming dimly in the torchlight. Above the creature’s head, in the foot of space remaining, a wreath of dried flowers sat like a halo.

 “Oh well,” Riona said. “You have to give them credit, that thing looks real.”

 If the creature was a model, then how old was it? How long ago had it been planted in the tomb? And who in their right mind would spend money on the creation of such a lifelike monster only to abandon it in a bog that hadn’t even been probed until a month ago?

 Riona took a picture, sighing faintly.

 Nuala reached into her pocket, unable to take her eyes off the creature. Without really knowing why, she’d pocketed the feather from earlier. Now, she pulled it out and held it up. It was definitely a real feather, the shaft cracked and dusty. But it wasn’t a flight feather but a down feather, and as far as she was aware those were generally not larger than a couple of centimetres. Maybe it was from an ostrich.

 A faint sigh echoed around the tomb. She lowered the feather, forgetting it instantly. Riona was texting, David was examining one of the vases. Neither of them had heard it. Nuala stared down, into the grave, just in time to see the creature’s chest move.

 She hardly dared to move. Slowly, the creature breathed again, as gently and gradually as if it was asleep. Her hand moved forwards of its own accord and found the creature’s wrist. She felt the steady pulse of blood under the soft feathers and sinewy flesh.

 “David,” Nuala said faintly, “it’s breathing.”

 That drew the two adult archaeologists over. David crouched by the tomb, watching as the sleeping creature took another steady breath. Riona shoved her phone into her pocket.

 Then, with a scowl, David reached into the tomb. He touched the creature’s shoulder, hesitantly at first. When it didn’t react, he grew bolder and actually dared to shake the creature, trying to get it to wake.

 “Here, now,” David said sharply, “this has gone on long enough. You’ve had your fun.”

 So he thought it was a person in costume. But Nuala knew what she could feel, and the feathers were firmly rooted in the skin. A faint shred of protectiveness stole over her, and she almost shoved David away.

 “Call the gardaí,” David said, glancing back at Riona. “That’ll wake this fella up.”

 Riona pulled out her phone.

 “Phone back to base, Nuala,” David said. “Tell them what happened. We’ll be coming back to Cnoc Mór for the night.”

 Nuala didn’t dream of taking her hand off the creature’s wrist. She reached into her pocket with her free hand and pulled out her phone. With numb, clumsy fingers she navigated to her contact list.

 A clatter to the right caught her attention, and she quickly turned. Riona’s mobile phone lay on the ground, the screen cracked. Riona herself stood nearby, breathing hard, leaning against the wall.

 “Riona?” Nuala said.

 On her other side, David braced a hand on the tomb floor, as if to keep himself upright. Something dark was dripping from his nose.

 Riona started to cough violently, doubled over with only her trembling hand on the wall keeping her upright.

 Nuala sprang to her feet, breathing hard. If the creature was real - and she had no doubt that it was - why had it been buried? What if it carried some ancient, infectious disease? She ran to the mouth of the tomb. The assistants were still there, but some of them had started to cough.

 “Call an ambulance!” Nuala shouted at them.

 Back inside the tomb, David appeared to have passed out, his glasses broken on the ground beside him. Riona was just about upright, her head hanging.

 Nuala waited for the weakness to come, the shortness of breath or the sudden urge to cough. She reached up and checked her nose, but it was clear of blood. Her heart pounding, she fell to her knees and grabbed at the creature’s hand again, trying to shake it awake, in the feeble hope that it would be able to speak and offer some explanation or warning.

 Suddenly, the tomb filled with light. Nuala couldn’t see, it was too bright, and her eyes were searing. She fell back, hands over her face, but that didn’t block out the light. In fact, she couldn’t see her hands at all. She couldn’t close her eyes, or look down. She could only stare straight ahead.

 The tomb was bright and airy, the pottery whole and unbroken. An individual in a muddy grey outfit crouched in front of the grave, carefully painting lines onto the rock. Slowly, the person turned, and covering their face was a pointed animal’s skull, like the skull of a dog or wolf. Eyes glittered from beyond the empty sockets. Three muddy wolf tails hung from their belt. Slowly, they dipped an oversized paintbrush into a pot of dark red sludge and started painting their skull mask with it. The red stuff, which was probably blood, dripped from the wolf teeth, spattering the ground.

Nuala woke up with a gasp, her back arching in shock. Her eyes flew open. All she saw was a blurry room, hidden behind a canopy of translucent plastic. To the side, she saw another bed, another plastic canopy.

 She sat bolt upright, panting. Hadn’t she been in the tomb? She must have fallen sick, and now she was in hospital, in quarantine. That was what all the plastic meant, no doubt. But the room beyond the canopy didn’t look like a hospital, in fact it looked a lot like the Cnoc Mór community centre. Their dig team headquarters.

 A person approached the canopy. They wore a big yellow suit, like a biohazard suit. With heavily gloved hands they unzipped the canopy just enough to step through.

 “Nuala Riagán?” a muffled voice said in a northern accent.

 “Yeah,” Nuala said shakily.

 “It’s okay,” the doctor said. “You’re in quarantine, but we think you’re not infected. You’re the only one who’s not, so you’ll have to stay here in case you’re a carrier.”

 “What?” Nuala said faintly. “What about - what about David, and Riona-” “David Kilrush and Riona Finch-Sinnott?” the doctor said. “They are extremely sick. I need to talk to you, Nuala - I need to ask you some questions, and take your blood. Is that okay?”

 “Okay,” Nuala said.

 The doctor started putting together a blood collection kit. Pushing up Nuala’s sleeve, they wrapped a tourniquet around her upper arm. “There were fourteen people there at the dig-site,” the doctor said, preparing a rack of tiny, brightly coloured collection bottles. “Six of them are seriously ill. Seven are already dead. One is completely unaffected. That’s you. Can you tell us exactly what happened? You’re the only one who can still talk.”

 Nuala nodded, a dull ache gathered under her skin below the tourniquet. “Yeah, um. We opened the tomb, and the grave, and uh… the monster…”

 “The feathered creature,” the doctor said. “It was awake?”

 “No,” Nuala said, “no, it was asleep. But no one got sick until the grave opened up. Actually… no one got sick until David touched it. Wh-what did you do with it?”

 “Don’t worry,” the doctor said, “we have it under quarantine, too. It’s still asleep. Are you sure it was when David touched it that he got sick?”

 “No,” Nuala said, “I think, uh, Riona got sick first. Yeah.” She glanced around, struggling to make out the person lying in the next bed along. She saw a neon blue rain coat and a pair of large brown boots. David. As she watched, he twitched and tried to turn over, but seemed too weak to be able to do it.

 “Did Riona touch the creature?” the doctor said.

 “No,” Nuala said. “Only David and I did?”

 “You did? Look away, sweetheart,” the doctor said, pushing the needle of a catheter into the aching skin of her elbow. Nuala didn’t look away. She wasn’t scared of needles.

 “Yes, I was the first to touch it.”

 “Where did you touch it?”

 “It’s left wrist. David touched its shoulder.”

 The doctor nodded, carefully filling the colourful tubes with Nuala’s blood. Nuala watched carefully, her eyes narrowed.

 “All right. Thank you, that’s useful information.”

 “And,” Nuala said, “what about me? Do I have to stay?”

 “Yes,” the doctor said firmly. “We’re operating under the assumption that the tomb and the creature are infectious. The town of Cnoc Mór has been evacuated, we’re the only ones here.”

 “Oh,” Nuala said. “But I have lectures next Monday, in Dublin.”

 “I’m sorry,” the doctor said, “but you have to stay. There’s no telling what you’re carrying right now, and we can’t allow the illness to spread to somewhere like Dublin. We could be looking at an epidemic here.” They pulled the tube from the end of the catheter, but left the catheter itself in Nuala’s skin. Wrapping a bandage around it, they straightened up and turned to go.

 “I’m Emily O’Rourke,” the doctor said, just before unzipping the plastic canopy. “They called me in from Belfast, I’m an expert on this sort of thing. Please call using the button if you need any help, or if you think you’re starting to fall ill. Someone’ll be round later with your dinner.”

 Nuala sat back, scowling, as the doctor left her behind. Would it have killed Emily O’Rourke to give a little more information about Nuala’s situation? As long as there were still people getting sick, Nuala would have to stay here, trapped, under observation. And her lack of attendance at next Tuesday’s practical class would damage her overall grade. If she didn’t get back to college soon, the extra credits she’d earnt for agreeing to go on the trip to Mayo would be worthless.

 So she had to lie there, in the bed, for a further three hours. All she could do was think; everything had been taken from her pockets, including her mobile phone and wallet. She considered her situation, trying to find a silver lining.

 There had been fourteen people at the digsite, and all but her had fallen sick. Many were dead. But the doctor hadn’t made any mention of other victims. So what if it wasn’t contagious between humans, but only between humans and the creature? If that was the case, then Nuala could potentially be free to go soon enough.

 Feeling slightly better, she settled back and closed her eyes.