[OPEN] The night won't compensate the blind

[futilecycle]

Who | Sigma Klim, Eponine Thenardier, and You!
What | Sigma and Eponine pass the time in their shelter, and later Sigma's last stand in the Arena.
When | Week 2-3
Where | In the jungle.
Warnings | Illness, drinking with a minor, death and mentions of gore in Homura's thread.



The whole of the week, Sigma had been drifting in and out of consciousness. While Eponine slowly recovered from the last of her flu and the wound on her leg, the Doctor was only growing progressively worse, as though her pain could seep into him. His whole chest ached when he took a breath and it was as though his lungs had been grated apart, filled with blood, flesh, the water from the air that suffocated him in every humid breath. Even in his sleep he coughed rattlingly.

But the girl's presence next to him kept him grounded, kept him from giving up in his battle against his own body. At the moment he laid near the entrance to their root alcove, conscious enough to watch the opening carefully, if in a daze. If anyone were to spot them he would leap on them and tear them apart like any badger or weasel, illness or no. If he had been doing this duty for minutes or days, he could not tell; any duration of consciousness slipped away from him without bias.

Comforted that there had not been an unexpected guest in some time, he turned to their stash of supplies hungrily. He wheezed with every breath, for his throat felt as though it were burning, and he could no longer endure going without water periodically.

"Eponine? Shall we eat and drink?"


*


After the girl had run away, leaving Sigma to awaken in a panic and search for her in a fog to no avail, the Doctor decided not to return to their shelter even if it meant leaving Eva behind. He could not face her motherly wrath over failing to supervise the girl, nor could he deal with his shame if he continued to travel with her - not to mention with his worsening cough he was extremely contagious. In the end, it was better for them to go their separate ways. Sigma gathered up only the canister of food a sponsor had graciously given him (he had a suspicion Eva would kill him for leaving with anything else) and set out for nowhere in particular.

Dr. Klim had found running water to refill his sponsor canister when it began: the freezing jungle rain, soaking, torrential, inescapable. The moment the water descended on his shoulders Sigma felt as though he were being picked apart by thousands of blades of ice - if the touch of another's skin on his had given him instant cool relief, this was like drowning a burn in an ice bath.

Shaking, now, and hacking as he went, Sigma rose from the bank and spun around, searching fruitlessly for a place to hide. But no matter how thick the overgrowth, the rain continued to pelt down on him and Sigma lifted his head to the sky helplessly. He was too weak to make it back to Eva's shelter in the roots, which was far behind him now - but if he stayed, he was dead. Fatigue overcoming him, Sigma curled into a pathetic ball beneath a tree and shut his eyes, coughing into his hands.

Comments

[iflipmyhair]

She didn't hesitate. Quietly, she grabbed his arm, to pull him up. And then, after that...

...where could she go with him? In his state, he wouldn't last long to get very far at all. The Compound was out of the question, certainly. The Cornucopia was questionable at best. The fact the vines didn't seem to be attacking almost seemed a portent of its own. Perhaps a testament to the fact he would die painfully on his own anyhow, laying broken in a pool of his own bodily fluids--

The hand that grasped Sigma's metal arm tightened a little. Perhaps it was because of the weight of the old man; frail as he now was, the arms were still not normal arms.

"I can get you up. I've got a tent I can cover you with if we move out a little ways." Her voice betrays none of what she is truly thinking. "Can you hold on for a little longer, and stay awake for me?"

[futilecycle]

He took her arm, petite in his, gratefully, careful not to snap it between his metal fingers. It was just enough to help him scramble to his knees, then to his feet - he did not rise just yet, too weak, and squatted in the mud as he listened to her in a fog. His breath made his chest rattle.

Sigma blinks once, twice, until he can speak. "...Okay..." It's as though she is the adult and he has become the child, entirely dependent on what she decided to do next. Though his body is unwilling to listen to her advice to stay focused, he comes to a compromise: his sunken-in eye closes, but his metal one whirrs to action, rusting metal groaning in the rain: watching Homura gratefully.

[iflipmyhair]

Her, the adult. And her charge the child. She didn't question how she was all right with the control, with the unquestioning stance of this man. How she held his very fate, the fate of one who was otherwise a stranger - right in her hands. She'd long ago learned her answer.

Homura didn't waste time. She went about a dozen paces before she set to work, grabbing the items she knew she would need.

She had a plan. She knew what she needed to do.

The tent cloth came out with a flourish, though she had little intention of merely making a tent, which would have restricted the space for Sigma. He was hardly a small man, and if she went by the instructions the tent wouldn't fit over him. So she used the cloth to make a canopy top instead.

Using the pegs to fasten two ends on trees, and the metal rods, connected into long shafts, for the other two ends, which she tied on the shafts neatly with a single, right knot. She was done within minutes, and soon she was unrolling the sleeping bag on her for him.

After about ten minutes, it was finished. It was makeshift, of course, and quick, but it was sturdy and it would do. Quietly, she walked over to Sigma once more, carefully

"This will do, for a night or two," she spoke again at last, her voice hardly above a whisper compared to the driving rain. "I will fend off the vines, while you rest. Then, I think, we shall go from there."

[futilecycle]

Sigma had curled into a ball beneath a tree before she finished. Now that there was a chance he might survive, it seemed, the vines had begun to bother him again. He fought them off for a few minutes, moving from tree to tree as they chased him, but as the tenth minute approached he gave up, falling still, laid on his side with his knees to his chest.

Once Homura had erected the tent he gathered the last of his mechanical strength and broke from their grasp, though red welts had formed around his ankles (his wrists had no organic skin to devour). After she had explained her plan, Sigma did not wait to discuss her kindness: leaving the hell of the jungle behind him, Sigma ducked into the tent. Now that he was out of the rain he yelped in pain, not realizing how much the torrent had harmed him until it no longer beat against his back. His consciousness swimming as the veins in his head beat loudly and threatened to burst, he felt as if he radiated heat, and realized his condition would prove deadly if he didn't rest at once. His clothes were sopping wet and he removed his shirt with more concern for survival than privacy - the old man was well toned, making it darkly hilarious someone herculeanly large should be left helpless against an invisible foe. Should Homura care to look, there was a seam across his shoulder where tanned olive "new" skin on his arms met a sickly grey complexion, and then it was gone as Sigma removed his boots and burrowed into the sleeping bag.

He brought the blanket to his neck as he removed the rest of his wet clothes. The soft fabric felt so clean and warm after such long suffering that it was a blessing to the dying man. Between chattering teeth and words slurred from blue lips, Sigma attempted to express his overwhelming gratitude. As far as he was concerned in his agony, it was the most undeserved and charitable thing anyone had ever done for him. "Wh..y help me? H-How can I th-thank you, Homura?"

[iflipmyhair]

Homura was quiet as Sigma undressed and got into the sleeping bag. She didn't feel or look abashed at him undressing; indeed, she seemed nonplussed by it all, letting him take his time. He did not have much of it left; rushing him in his illness would have been stupid, cruel even. Especially seeing the physical effect of the illness.

She wasn't sure if Sigma believed he might survive the night, but she knew. He had been in the humidity and damp for too long. It was quite possible he had other infections, now, taking advantage of his condition. Whether or not he knew it, or was able to realize it.

At the question, Homura closed her eyes.

"Rest, for now, Dr. Klim. Save your strength. That will be thanks enough."

[futilecycle]

Even in the sleeping bag Sigma began to tremble, as if lowered into snow. His face bloomed with a bright red burn and he moaned without realizing he had done so at all. He watched his savior in disbelief - or at least, he tried. His cybernetic eye had cut out in his exhaustion and he could no longer keep his organic one open. His eyelid grew heavy and eventually eclipsed his pupil, though he fought to open it again. Within seconds, however, his eye was shut tight and his head fell limp against the blanket.

"Homu..r..."

Why go so far for a stranger?

He fell less into sleep and more into unconsciousness, still shaking. Had she let him go on this way for very long, he would eventually talk under his breath, repeating a woman's name, muttering for forgiveness in his fever dreams.

[iflipmyhair]

She quietly watched, until, at last, Sigma fell silent. If he wasn't asleep, then he had lapsed into a coma. In any case, he was not responding. And thus he was very unlikely to wake up for what was to come.

That's right, Dr. Klim. Don't worry about it right now.

Slowly, she stood up, and with two simple tugs, undid the tent straps tied around the trees. They began to flutter harmlessly towards the ground. She'd not merely made the tent into a canopy for comfort, after all.

It had been for expedience.

This isn't personal. No, I lie. In a way, it is. You and I...

The linen was heavy enough that, covering someone, it would be difficult for someone as sick as Sigma to breathe as it was. Grabbing the edge with one hand, Homura bent down to the dirt and covered Sigma's head, all the way to his crown, as tightly as possible. The rods bent, threatening to snap in response, down by Sigma's feet from this action.

...we have more in common than you realize.

Meanwhile, Homura's other hand grabbed the man's throat with a strength not generally found in a girl her age, or her size.

That's why...I'm doing you this favor.

Without a second thought, she squeezed as tightly as she could.

[futilecycle]

Dr. Klim was not conscious to appreciate what Homura did for him, his body had not the energy to startle him from his sleep. Deep within his fever dream Sigma tried to breathe. His nightmare blistering to life, a saw tore open the space between the glenoid of his shoulder and the humeral head of his upper arm while a spike bored a hole through his right eye. He falls and his chest feels crushed when he tries to draw breath, pain consumes him like a vise. He tries again and chokes on a scream instead. His body twitches under Homura erratically.

In the memory a slender, young woman rushes over to him, her figure blurred by fever and by the pain that feels too real to be in his imagination. Sigma knows it is Diana, but for the first time he cannot keep her face in focus. Her hands are on his face and neck, ice cold on top of hot blood, telling him to keep breathing, to stay alive...

Beside Homura, the cyborg's metal hands twitch and rise from the floor of the tent in reflex to clear his throat of the obstruction. But with Homura's weight and the canvas on top of him, they can only claw the ground where they lay, polymer fingernails scraping holes through his sleeping bag. There's a sickening sound of metal grinding together inside of his body from the strain, like an old machine that had worked too hard for too long.

Forty-five years on the moon while aging steadily made every part of his body not reinforced by titanium atrophy. After enough pressure, the brittle bones of his neck snap beneath Homura's petite fingers. Delicate thumbs crush his windpipe.

Even the colour seems to drain from his dream as he tries to look into Diana's eyes. Her image is sucked away like a cigarette burn through an old photograph, and he gives up trying to breathe for her. As easily as falling asleep, Sigma drifted into death - in his final unconscious thought he wonders why he had not let go earlier. His body slackened, his arms stopped twisting inside the blankets. Somewhere, a cannon blared.

[iflipmyhair]

She felt the snap far quicker than she'd expected. But she didn't let go until the arms stopped moving at last. Then she knew for certain he was done.

But she wasn't. Not yet. Gently the other ends were untied from the rods, fluttering gently into Homura's hands. Quietly she covered his feet up, then went back to the top to make sure he was covered all the way.

Expedience. The instrument of death now covered him as a shroud, though she knew she wouldn't have time to do anything more proper. Already, she could hear the hum of machines descending from the sky and the clanking of metal. They'd take his body, tent covering and all. She wasn't going to try and find out what they'd do if she tried to stop it for a few precious moments.

By the time the machines descended Homura was long gone, out of the jungle and into the grass.