thearena | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Who: Emily Prentiss, OPEN
When: A few days after the cornucopia.
Where: Around E-12, top of the waterfall

She was far from an optimist - she fully expected that she wasn't going to make it out of here alive. If anything, she was an existentialist and this was a situation so existential it couldn't have been written better by Sartre himself. She was in her element, in that for once, her fate had never seemed so completely in her hands. It didn't make her happy, per se, but she looked for the silver lining.

She hadn't seen hide nor hair of anyone else in days. Maybe it was time to make herself a little more accessable; still not seeking the others out, but even she was starting to get bored. So bored, in fact that she'd had to take up a hobby. The hours in her day were mostly spent finding what edible plants she could - she wanted to make her Cornucopia scroungings last as long as possible - even if she hadn't seen enough wildlife to make hunting seem worthwhile. The rest she divided up between cleaning herself at the lakeside and finding a new shelter for the night. It left a lot of hours to be filled.

When she would spend time with her grandfather on the mountain, he'd been very skilled at whittling. She'd tried to learn, but she had never been quite as good as he was. He always liked to carve lions because he said the spirit of a lion lived inside her.

Seeing as she had a knife, a lot of time, and easy access to drift wood, she thought she'd try her hand at it again. Maybe some of the viewers were fans of crappy art.

But it only abated the feeling of restlessness for so long. She didn't want to move too far up the mountain for she still felt her initial reasoning held true. But she needed to move. She wanted to reach the top of the waterfall before nightfall - the quieter waters might attract more wildlife which would make her feel a lot better about food, at least.

The climb was rather perilous, full of skree and slippery rocks; and, as it turns out, ant hills. She nearly fell down the incline when she first realized she'd set her hand smack dab in the middle of a hill full of really pissed off ants. But she was a federal agent, she'd spent many years training not to react to pain in dangerous situations. So she just gritted her teeth and kept on climbing until she had a sure footing to shake them off and squeal like a little girl.

She stripped off her clothes and dove into the river to relieve the poison's effects...and then she reflected on whether that was a smart idea. Sure, if someone came upon her, she'd be forced to fight or flee, naked as a jaybird. But then again, if she was going to die anyway, at least she'd have a little shock value in it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Emily cocked her head to the side slightly to better pick up the scream. Yet another one. It wasn't exactly close, but not far either...though the bowl effect of the mountains made it hard to tell exactly as it funneled sound towards her.

The screaming didn't stop at just one, as most did - one scream, then a cannon. There came another and another, echoing around the basin, making its origin hard to discern.

She stood, shielding her eyes against the sun, watching for movement, dust clouds from a rock slide, some indication from whence the noise came.

Though, to be fair, she had no idea what her next move would be when she figured it out. She just found it a good idea to act with an abundance of caution.

There -- a rockslide, indeed. Amy had tumbled down a steep incline, landed hard on the rock below, and the bear was in pursuit.

Likely Emily wouldn't get there in time.

Emily frowned - what appeared to be a large hairy rock was making its way down the mountain-side, a couple yards behind a girl. She shook her head, that couldn't be right...a big hairy rock?

"Oh, shit!" she cursed, a little louder than was wise, before she was aware she'd spoken.

Despite knowing that she was competing against the girl, Emily just couldn't bring herself to let her be mauled by a fricking BEAR. There were a lot of cruel ways to die, but being ripped to shreds and then eaten was probably the worst.

She couldn't breathe. The fall had hit on her ribs, and something had cracked, and now every breath was agony from hip to shoulder.

The bear was a lot faster than her, and she closed her eyes and wished, prayed that some of her natural speed and strength, whatever it was that they took from her, would come back. But it didn't.

She could run parallel to the mountain and let the bear catch up with her and kill her.

Or she could go up and let it happen a lot faster.

Or she could jump, over the edge of the steep cliff and let herself fall down to the waterfall's height. It was her only chance, and she redoubled her limping effort, trying to make it there.

Emily shut her eyes tightly and tried to remember what her grandfather had taught her about bears. This was a grizzly, she could tell that much.

"PLAY DEAD!" she shouted, not sure if the girl would hear her, but nonetheless hoped that she would. "Curl into a ball and protect your neck!"

Play dead? Like that would work now.

Like she even wanted it to work.

-- And that thought gave her pause. Did she want to survive? Did she really? When it meant that someone else lost their chance?

What would her dad do?

She pulled one of the last of the arrows from her quiver. Gripped it in her hand. And she -- detached.

The fight was over in a few seconds. She didn't remember much of it, beyond flailing, a muted, strange feeling as the claws ripped into her belly, as its teeth sunk into her arm, and then -- then it was over, and the bear had an arrow driven up through the roof of its mouth into its skull, and Amy was bleeding more blood than she had ever seen in her life.

That was when the pain caught up to her.

"Goddammit," she hissed, sprinting up the hill, her thighs burning from the extertion. She forgot about the part where she wasn't supposed to think of these people as human.

"Okay, just...okay," she stammered dumbly, flopping to her knees beside the girl, "You'll be fine. Probably. Just relax." Her fingers were already slippery as she attempted to find the ends of her abdominal aorta in the mess of guts spilling out of her so that she could pinch them off to stop the bleeding and...

And then what?

She tried to lift a hand, but only her fingers twitched; she tried to say it's okay, my fault, really, but what came out was "Miff'd." Funny, though: all she could think about was that stupid little camera ball. Had she dropped it? That sucked. She'd stolen it away from its purpose and shamelessly used it for sponsors and now it was trampled into the mud by a bear, or dropped over the waterfall edge, or something. Jeeves. Poor Jeeves.

Her fingers grasped on the dirt again, and she inhaled, but the air burned in half her chest and it didn't feel like it stayed.

"S'oak." It's okay. That one came out a little clearer. "My ... fault."

She really was taking a very long time to die. Didn't this happen fast, in the movies?

Her fingers slipped and she'd lost the artery again. She turned her palms upwards, staring at her blood-slicked hands. "Out, out damn spot," she whispered, feeling very Lady MacBeth.

The girl was practically swimming in a pool of blood. What was it Reid had said? Someone could lose up to 40% of their blood volume and still survive?

She shook her head. Facts didn't help her now. She had a feeling nothing was going to help at this point. At this point, all she could do was sit there with her through the long and probably painful hours until her heart stopped...and hope the smell didn't attract more bears.

Or...

"I...I can make it stop," she breathed softly, "...if you want."

She wanted to cough, but it came out as just a spasm. Halfway between a cough and a retch.

"I stabbed a bear," she said, wondering. "Thisw." Would make a great story. If she could ever tell that story. If she could live to tell that story. But she wasn't going to live, was she? Her head was swimming, must be blood draining from the brain. Is this how vampire victims feel?

Jesus Christ. No wonder her father's fucked up.

"Good idea," she murmured. She managed to reach, to slide blood-slick fingers over Emily's hand. Too clumsy to do anything more precise. "Very good idea." Grabbed for Emily's hand, slipped. "Thank you."

She bit her lip, realizing that this must be how Morgan felt that night when he held her hand and begged her not to go. She wasn't going to cry - she was NOT going to cry.

She laced her fingers with the girl's and squeezed lightly. "I promise you won't feel anything...I'm going to-" she choked a little on the words, it sounded so heartless, "-to cut your spinal cord. It'll happen fast. Okay?"

"You," Amy said, "are handy. I bet you win."

Her voice was more coherent, but it also seemed farther away. Like there was a little set of vocal cords and lungs just talking on their own, and the thought made her snort, almost laugh. No time to explain the joke.

"Jeeves," she murmured, nonsensically.

"Shh," she soothed, at a lack for further comforting words.

Gently tilting the girl's head up, counting the bones in her neck with her fingers, Emily inhaled slowly through her nose, fighting off the urge to be sick. She held the edge of the knife to what she approximated to be the right spot.

"Okay, count to three..."

Three. Counting to three.

Way too complicated, right now.

Amy inhaled.

"Just do it."

She had to close her eyes. She couldn't watch the girl's face as she did this.

"I'm sorry," she whispered as she felt a slight resistance, then the gush of warm blood as the knife sunk in. It was kind of like cutting through a really tough steak...the mental image made her retch a little.

The girl's fingers went limp in her hand and Emily knew the nerves had been severed. It would happen quick now, she'd stop breathing as she lost control of her diaphragm.

It wasn't painless.

There was a spark, a bright-sharp pain unlike anything she'd ever felt before. Too bright to endure.

But then she was gone, and it was over, and she greeted that thought with a kind of relief as she breathed her last.

She waited a long moment, then leaned in slightly, listening for breath. When she couldn't hear any, she pressed two bloody fingers to her neck to feel for a pulse. Her fingers slipped, but it didn't matter, she was gone.

The knowledge overwhelmed her then and she quickly had to stumble aside as she emptied the contents of her stomach on the ground nearby. All she could think was how weak she must look to those watching...tossing her cookies over a girl she didn't even know.

When the shaking stopped and she once again trusted her legs to support her, she rose and evaluated the bear carcass. She remembered that bear meat was very fatty and that would be very helpful in the coming days of near-starvation.

She used some moss to clean the blood off her knife, then attempted to cut off a large hunk of meat to take with her for future meals. She wanted to get away from the scene as quickly as possible knowing that they would want to collect the body. But she didn't want to risk any of her competitors stumbling across this meal ripe for the taking, so she took the nearest questionable looking berry and smeared it over the carcass where she'd skinned it and hoped it would be toxic to anyone that might stumble upon it with an empty belly.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

(no subject)

no subject

I am so sorry for disappearing.

Re: I am so sorry for disappearing.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject