Focus Your Chi [Finished!]

[Bee]

Bill fah-hlaw fssh ah fah ah wehh cnnth. No more difficult than puzzling out a lisping child, really. A mildly retarded lisping child, granted, but he thought follow this might have been in there somewhere. Keep truckin', basically. Jin was okay with that. The exploration was doing more or less pleasant things to his mood, as seeing new things was taking his mind off their current predicament and didn't give him a lot of time to stew on babies in graveyards.

Things started looking more and more decrepit as they pushed forward. Tilted wood, broken carts, the occasional rat scurrying about.

There was a creak. Jin stopped. A rumble.

Their movement had apparently been enough to shake something loose, and Jin got halfway through turning and saying "run" when the supports around them gave way and the ceiling collapsed in a hail of rock.

[Dark]

Haydn was finding the act of exploration to be rather monotonous--maybe if there was something to see besides withered wood and broken carts and rock--and while the path they were on hadn’t branched off, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere, either. Still, it was better than waiting around for dehydration or hypothermia to come knocking.

He wasn’t paying much attention to their surroundings when he sensed Jin stop behind him, and was turning around to ask him the reason when he finally keyed in to what his ears had been telling him. Wood splintered, and rock groaned, and Hadyn had enough time to look up and see that they weren’t going to make it--gods, fuck, not like this--before he was lunging forward, barreling into Jin and using his momentum to shove them both as far as he could.

He didn’t quite make it though, and something crashed into his back, pulling him down, and he had one brief, dizzying moment of panic before he hit his head and everything went dark.

[Bee]

The sudden shove propelled him backwards in a flurry of clumsily twisting limbs as he tried to stay upright, but a fraction of a second into the effort he tripped over his own tail and went spiraling into the dirt, torch flying out of his mouth and rolling away. Which was just as well, because a moment later he was showered by a fall of debris and bruising little rocks and sharp splinters of wood.

For a moment he just stared dazedly at the roof of the cave, coughing on the cloud of dust and dirt that had risen, before he realized that he was the only one making any noise. He ignored the pain and got to his feet.

He had only just avoided the slide. There was a very tall wall of rocks where there had one been an open passage. There was no brightly-colored cat. He put two and two together, and his stomach turned over a little. No matter how much of a fuckface someone was, no one deserved to get crushed to death by an avalanche of rock. The fact that he had pushed Jin out of the way made it a little bit worse. Why did people always have to do non-asshole things right before they died? Why couldn't they all just be little pricks right up till the end, so it would be easier to keep hating them?

"Oh, you and your heroic fucking sacrifice," he said sourly, though trying to make himself feel annoyed was mostly just a measure against feeling any more ill. He stared at the pile of rubble. There had to be someone who would want the body, right?

He began pawing through the rocks.

[Dark]

It would have been much better if he had stayed unconscious; it would have been much better if he had just been dead to begin with. Hadyn focused on breathing. Shallow breathes that didn’t stir his chest at all as his lungs rattled, wheezed, on the dust choked air that he struggled to inhale. Anything to keep his mind off the pain--not as bad as he thought it should be, and he couldn’t help but wonder if he might be in shock--and a slow, suffocating death. He had, after all, been buried alive.

He choked down a hysterical sob, groping for something happier, something that didn’t involve obsessing over how long he had until the rubble settled on his chest crushed the last of the air from his lungs. Seconds dragged, and the world narrowed to a miniscule speck as the darkness pressed closer, smothering. He wanted to wail, scream, anything to break the stifling silence.

Rock shifted, and the world went white--hot--pain. He screamed.

[Bee]

The shrill scream blaring in his ears was, all things considered, both a good and a bad thing. Bad, because it was a shrill scream blaring in his ears. Good, because if Hadyn was screaming, and he could hear it so clearly, the little fucker was both alive and close to being uncovered.

He muttered out a litany of reassuring things: "I'm here, I'm here," interspersed with vaguely encouraging things: "It'll be fine, it'll be fine." Though he had a slightly queasy feeling, when he finally saw bright Morganberry fur, that the encouraging words were not grounded in reality.

The fur was bloodied in places. To be expected. What got his attention was the arm: bent, twisted, with poking bits of bone shard. That little fucker had been crushed. Jin grimaced and bit back a small welling of bile.

"Right," he said. "I've about got you."

He carefully extricated the last of the rubble. Hadyn looked like he was nesting in a cozy rock home. There was no way to move Hadyn himself without causing, probably, a significant amount of pain. But it would have to be done. Hopefully Hadyn would be able to contribute at least a little to the effort. The man was a prick but not, Jin suspected, an utter pussy. Even in the face of a wrecked limb. He hoped.

[Dark]

Hadyn cursed through clenched teeth, a steady litany of profanity punctuated by breathy whines whenever something shifted. He refused to look at his arm. Jin looked often, gaze sliding sideways almost without volition, transfixed by the sight of blood and bone and torn flesh. Hadyn stared at the ceiling he couldn’t see and clung to denial. Just a couple scratches, it would be fine; wasn’t that what Jin kept saying?

‘I should be dead.,’ he wasn’t sure if he’d said it out loud; he wasn’t sure of much of anything besides the steady throb of his heart, forcing blood through wrecked limbs and leaving streaks of pain behind. He couldn’t think; everything was bleeding out. He had to focus, but why? He wasn’t dead yet, but he would be, soon enough.

And he deserved it, didn’t he. He was a selfish prick; a fuck-up; the classic story of the stupid bitch who gets himself knocked up at fifteen and can’t deal with the consequences. The world would be a better place without him.

[Bee]

Hadyn looked to be engrossed in his own little world of mumbled profanity. Damn it, he was going to have to do something to that arm. What Jin knew about medicine could fill a thimble, but he had seen enough to know what shock was, and that it could kill. He glanced around for something to stop the bleeding. There was a little bit of frayed, half-rotting rope among the general mining wreckage.

It would have to do.

He retrieved it. He would kill for hands about now. As it stood, he wrapped the rope awkwardly around the upper part of Hadyn's arm and (after giving fair warning: "So this is gonna hurt like a motherfucker, try to grin and bear it.") pulled as tightly as he could. That would be enough to quell some of the mess. Hopefully for long enough to get Hadyn...somewhere. Fuck. Hard to travel in a snowstorm. It was probably still raging outside, likely to kill the both of them.

But the stupid cat was probably going to die if they stayed here. For a moment Jin entertained the idea of just letting the damn man die and staying put until the storm cleared and he could alert someone about the body, but something gross and altruistic had a slimy grip on his brain.

He sighed. "We need to get moving. I'm gonna help you up."

[Dark]

Hadyn thought he might pass out when Jin tied the rope around his arm--rather clever of him, but Hadyn doubted it would do much good at this point, all things considered; he rather thought he was close to bleeding out, and wouldn‘t that be a blessing--but his body clung stubbornly to consciousness, refusing to give him a respite. He clenched his jaw.

It didn‘t make sense that Jin was helping him--Jin was supposed to hate him, wasn‘t he--and Hadyn wanted to ask, but the question stuck in his throat. Instead, he made himself nod, and he thought he might have murmured an affirmative, but he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t focus--when he tried, the thoughts slipped away, like slippery things were apt to do--so he said it again, to be certain:

“A-alright.”

The world spun and he fought the sudden swell of nausea as Jin awkwardly helped him up; he managed to turn his head before he wretched on the meager contents of his stomach. He didn’t feel better after.

[Bee]

Jin was fine until the little fucker puked. The vague but entirely ignorable stomach-rocking he'd felt upon seeing blood and bone twisted and tossed itself into a maelstrom of noxious illness, and he couldn't even attempt to swallow down the violent upwelling of bile before he was turning sideways and vomiting even worse than Hadyn had, shaking with a cold, clammy sweat.

He felt disgusting, and suddenly needed to bathe.

"You son of a bitch," he choked out, trudging forward a bit and (as gently as possible) tugging Hadyn with him. Hadyn really couldn't possibly have known, but it felt better to blame him and act as though he'd done it on purpose. Jin was half-convinced he had anyway; perhaps it was the intense nausea talking, but he wouldn't put it past the feline to push through a haze of pain for the sole purpose of fucking Jin up. "You puke again and I'll finish you off myself."

[Dark]

Hadyn chocked on a laugh, tasting bile and blood, “Fucker.” It shouldn’t be funny, but discovering that Jin suffered from sympathy sickness was the highlight of a seriously fucked up turn of events, made all the more entertaining by the knot on his skull. The hysteria was quick to pass, though. It hurt, every step hurt, and only being able to use three legs when he was used to using four was a real pain in the ass, and Jin kept him mostly upright, but it still hurt.

He didn’t know where they were going, and didn’t pay much attention besides to keep his legs moving--a task that was becoming increasingly difficult as time passed--but he thought maybe the temperature was dropping; he couldn’t stop shaking. Or maybe that was just what dieing felt like.

The gloom lightened, almost imperceptibly, and Hadyn felt his heart flutter with something dimly resembling hope; they turned the corner.

They’d found the fucking exit.