Chapter Text
The world is red.
Red skies, red sand, red stone and fire and darkening blood soiling dirty bandages.
It’s the stench of sulphur irritating his sensitive nose, his throat, his eyes, even through the mask he can’t wear anymore because it hurts to move in it, to breathe in it. He feels wrong without it, too exposed.
It’s exhaustion, bone-deep and heavy, getting worse every single day he still manages to wake.
It’s sweltering heat, dry and inescapable on the outside, dangerous and deadly on the inside.
It’s pain, a pounding in his skull and agony in his cut-riddled limbs, eaten away by a spreading infection that surely will do him in.
But it’s also another person’s body — precious, too warm just like his, the eroded softness of yellow feathers barely cushioning the sharpness of hollow bones beneath. Another life, as fragile as the ragged breath against his collar. Her ragged breath, fever-burning, and the rabbit-quick heartbeat he can feel against his ribcage, mirroring his own.
The heat of two fevered bodies cradling one another is bad — the heat is dangerous, yet he refuses to let go of it. To let go of his last tether, of everything he has left. To let go of her. Her head tucked into his neck, his face buried in the softness of faded pink, feathery hair. She smells like sickness and blood, and a little like him — paper and old coffee. He knows he must smell the same, her own scent imprinted on him, like snow and freshwater and what he imagines northern lights smell like.
The entire universe is reduced to the smallest of subsets: him, her, and whatever time they have left before their bodies finally give out. He knows there’ll be no respawn for them — not this time.
It’s getting hard to tell when he’s awake and when he’s wrestling through fever dreams and nightmares, nightmares that leave him gasping and keening in the echoing dimness of the bunker. She has them too, he knows, because he can sometimes feel her shivering despite the heat, her features twisting in a different kind of pain.
Reality becomes a distant concept, the present hard to hold onto, as elusive as sand. Days and nights melt into greyish mush, equally as red and warm and scratchy sulphur that must’ve made its way into their very blood at this point.
Time crawls forward. She stops waking up at all. He stops being able to move.
So he drifts.
And sinks.
And sinks.
And sinks…