2018-12-19: Nothing Above But The Blue Sky
- Log: Nothing Above But The Blue Sky
- Cast: Loren Voss, Lan Lilac
- Where: Photosphere
- Date: December 19th 2018
- Summary: After the events of The Powers That Be, Lan is faced with a daunting task.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
It's less of an awakening than a gradient. Darkness gives way to a twilight, gives way to ever lightening shades of grey. His blue eyes slowly open to render a sightless heavy-lidded stare unto the heavens.
Loren breathes, rapidly now. A body's compensation for what has been lost.
Around is a tumult of sounds. Shouts, speech -- it all passes around him, meaningless as the sky above where he lies.
It's blue.
For a first coherent thought, it may not be particularly elaborate. The sky is blue.
And he's so tired.
More shouting, close at hand. Why can't they be quiet? He's trying to...
To...
Why is he here? And why is he...
He turns his head, itself an endeavor that seems to take eons. Can see at last the body that lies along his own. Oh.
Listens, this time, to the sound and shouts around him. That's right.
Slowly he blinks too-heavy eyelids, feeling for the instant as if he's swimming through mud. Just a moment's rest.
That's all he needs. But there was some important thing...
His body feels like lead. Or ice. Or something shredded and cast to the winds. His body...
Oh. That's right.
He remembers now.
He's here because he's dying.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
t's right, open your eyes. Come on, Lo
chy to die from something like thi
There is an immense pressure threatening to cut the circulation to his right hand, which occasionally seems to shiver on its own. Someone is speaking at a volume just below 'yelling', and they're way too close to him.
"I said, wake up!"
The bright blue of the sky above his failing body is obscured by something deep tan and light yellow, edged in pastels and crimson and shouting at him. The shape fades into the form of Lan Lilac, drying blood dribbling down her side and soaking into the hip and thigh of her winter pants.
One of her hands is wrapped around his own, fingers numb and sticky with blood. Sweat drips off of her chin.
Lan leans her weight harder onto the heel of her other hand, pressing some kind of wadded-up cloth against his abdomen. "That's right. Wake up, look at me." Can he even hear her? His eyes don't look... right.
What should they look like if their owner has just been run through??
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He should... do something about that. Try to pull his body together. He's so tired. Maybe if he closes his eyes again for a moment. Just for a moment, and then he can...
He blinks again, slowly.
You're going into shock.
Even that thought rises and passes. Just another thing against the noise. Did someone just say his name?
...What's wrong with his right hand? It feels like--
A shape intrudes into his line of vision. He blinks once more, as if to attempt to resolve the figure hovering over him. Saying things. Noise. It's all just noise.
"<Who...? Wait, don't...>" he utters wetly, in Solarian. It tastes like metal. He tries to spit; it doesn't work.
Another blink. The figure above him comes into focus.
"Lan...?" For the moment, his gaze focuses on her, noting the blood caking the side of her face, her body.
With the armored glove peeled off, Lan has a better sense of how poorly things are going for the medic: pale, clammy fingers. A weak pulse.
He must suspect it too, since the next thing he says to her is: "...bad, isn't it..."
His gaze unfocuses, as if he were staring at some point beyond her. "I... think I'm..."
Panic cuts through the haze.
The mission was a failure. He can't--
"I-- I don't want--!" He spasms under her and coughs, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. "Don't... don't go..."
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
She doesn't know what to do. Not like he must. Loren's the medic, Leah's the commander, and Lan is just a shaman from some dirtfarming settlement too close to the ever-expanding edge of the Badlands to be worth putting on a map.
If only she were a real healer. If only she were better-trained. If only, if only.
But she isn't, and she's not, and wishing that she were won't make it so. Lan takes a deep breath and opens her awareness as much as she can to the ruin of his body. The main problem, at least, is obvious - there's a huge hole in his stomach from a spear. "It's me, all right. Yeah, it's bad," she murmurs, because Lan won't lie to him when he clearly knows better than she does.
"It's going to be okay though. Just... just help me out, okay? You're the only one of us that knows anything about medicine, okay, you have to --hey!" He's speaking that weird language again. His eyes aren't focused
She's running out of time. Loren is running out of time.
"Hold this," she tells him urgently, picking his hands up and putting them firmly on top of the cloth she's using to staunch his wound. It feels like part of a uniform. "Press-- no no no, hey, it's okay," she tries to quiet him, tilting his face towards hers. "I'm not going anywhere. I promise, okay
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
It's bad.
He already knew that. He knew that before Siegfried had grabbed him, before he'd used the Medium, before...
"...Where's... Leah?"
Gone, he already knows, somehow. Gone from here. Because of... him?
It's but a backdrop, all noise and violence, the language of Filgaia playing out just beyond them. The Demon of Elru has returned.
But, as he's realized, in that moment where he almost thrashes in primordial reflex, he is perhaps a little too far gone to worry much about that threat.
She tilts his face up, looks into his eyes.
She's just a Lamb, and yet. And yet, something is always better than nothing.
And yet, it would take a particularly determined man drowning to refuse the rope.
Lan doesn't know what to do. But what she does present him with is assurance.
He looks into her eyes. His breathing, still rapid, eases a degree in its intensity. "You... you promise... I don't want to... alone... My brother--"
He coughs, again. Gasps.
And focuses on her. "Help... you out..."
The cloth he's pressing against his own wound is growing damp at the margins. He's still bleeding.
Help her out.
Something to his gaze sharpens.
The answer is as simple as if he were to approach the same problem from an outside position.
What needs to be done is stop the bleed.
There's one good answer for that, and it isn't in whatever heavy piece of cloth she's pushing into his abdomen. What she's pushing his right hand into. Good idea, wrong tool, he thinks distantly, pressing into his wound with a limb that only dimly feels like his own. Everything's fading.
If rescue crews come, at this rate he could be in a bad position. Maybe worse than that.
If they don't come, he'll die. Even all the Ether he can muster can't resolve what's already happened to his gut, or put the blood he's shed onto the Photosphere back into his body.
"Find... find my pack. Should be... somewhere," he tells her, struggling now to stay afloat atop what feels like an endless ocean.
And all he wants to do is rest.
"In the center left... abdominal tourniquet... can walk you through it... easy."
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Ordinarily she would be trying to heal him just with what Rigdobrite has given her. Ordinarily she wouldn't be here. Ordinarily, she would be somewhere else, just a Lamb deservedly(?) suffering the harshness of the surface for the sins her people must have committed.
But because of him, and because of Gebler, and because of a conspiracy birthed before her mother's mother's mother, she's kneeling here, on her knees in a steadily-widening smear of his blood.
"I promise," she repeats, easy as breathing, and means it. The corners of her eyes wrinkle when he mentions that word. Brother. --Engil--. "I won't leave you here alone."
Her gaze sharpens when he finally gives her some instruction. "Okay. Okay, abdominal... I'll get it. I'm still here." Where, where... It can't be far. Lan pushes herself to her feet, swaying, and takes two wobbly steps before she forces a thread of steel back into her spine. It's going to be okay. He can walk her through it. Loren is smart. She just has to find---
His pack, wedged halfway beneath a piece of shrapnel and the outer hull of the Photosphere. She grabs the strap and pulls, grunting with the effort, until the whole thing comes loose. The chunk of metal it had been trapped beneath wobbles, and then tilts, and finally tumbles down the slope of the citadel's husk.
SHe's back at his side seconds later, frantically digging where he'd told her too. It's some kind of weird ... tire? ...With a pump. Lan blinks at it, and then at Loren, before frowning. This is going to be awkward, but even she can figure out that it's supposed to go around his middle. "...Do you have to sit up?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
She promises him she won't leave him alone.
It seems to give him some measure of peace. Even if he knows -- as he must -- that it would be easy to promise and then leave him here to die alongside a corpse. Nothing's stopping her.
But in this, he seems willing to trust. Perhaps to believe otherwise, even for him, would be a bridge too far for his psyche to even consider crossing.
He doesn't thank her. She may have to settle for the look of relief, for the nod he tenders, against her hand.
She rises, and for a moment, Loren is left alone. He exhales a breath into cold air, watching it plume and condense.
Am I going to...?
I'm still able to think. But...
I wonder how much blood I...
...I'm so tired.
She returns moments later, bag and device in hand.
"Loop it... around the waist," he instructs, visibly struggling against the tide that will eventually bring him under. But not yet, not just yet. "Needs to be tight -- no. I might... pass out," he explains haltingly. "Secure the... the white thing."
Would 'windlass' mean anything to her?
"...Then hold the pump. Wait for green on the gauge... and stop."
He can barely feel much of anything right now. Because of blood loss? An overloaded nervous system? His brain dumping chemicals into his organs and blood?
He should feel something, but he feels almost nothing. The awareness of a wound, the touch of pain.
Otherwise it feels like he's been sunk deep into a cottony haze. Like none of this is really happening anymore.
It's hard to focus.
"And then... after that... and then... there's... pull the device from the right exterior pocket. Enter code 7-8-6... and hit the red button."
A distress call... if there's anyone left to hear it.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Of anybody that Loren has ever worked with, was Lan ever in the running for 'most likely to abandon a dying person'?
If nothing else, he seems to feel a little better just from hearing her promise. She'll just have to hope that means he's going to be okay if she just keeps her word. If you wish for something hard enough, maybe it will come true. Right?
Lan works as fast as she can, despite her shaking hands. Silver keeps spilling into her veins, magic sympathetic to her wishes, but... if she uses that now, she has no idea what will happen to wounds like these. It's one thing to heal up bumps and bruises or scrapes. It's another entirely to try and stitch together the workings of the innards. She doesn't even know where some of the organs are!
She has to do some manhandling of him, rolling his body to one side with the most care she can to get the wrap around his waist. "Hold the pump," she repeats, nervous hands fumbling the device until she grabs it tight, like a mantra and a lifeboat. "Wait for green and then stop..."
The button sequence comes next. "Seven eight six. Red button." Beep beep beep, peeeeep. She stares at it for a moment, as if expecting it to do more than just make noise, before dropping it in the snow next to them. "Okay, that's-- Loren?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
It's unpleasant when she moves him. At a remove, he can even take it as a good sign.
In the moment, though, there are the groans and grunts. The twitches as the thing tightens about him. And the word he utters at one point which sounded like a particularly foul swearword of some stripe.
But he never urges her to stop or alter what she's doing. He'd known this could hurt -- the price of staunching the bleed.
But it doesn't make this any better.
He tenses against the rooftop against the glaze of pain, reaping the reward of possibly saving his own life.
It's into that configuration he holds that a cough introduces itself. A particularly wet cough.
He chokes on it.
Did I mess up--?
There's no response from the device Lan holds. No sign that anything at all has happened.
Below her, Loren tries to spit more blood. It works about as well as before.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
This has to be it. Now that these things are working, all she has to do is keep him alive until... until the abdominal whatchamacallit works. Until... someone has to be coming for them. She doesn't know where Leah is, and for some weird reason other Drifters seem to be really upset with Gebler right now? But the Tzadkiel is down. The Photosphere is failing. Mother is dead. People will show up.
They have to.
But first she's got to keep him alive. She stares down at him, concern growing with his labored breathing. What's-- is the belt too high? No, that's not it. His face is turning a really, really concerning shade of wan purple. "Loren? Loren, what's wrong?!"
Lan practically headbutts him in the chest with her ear, pressing her cheek against his sternum while she listens for breaths he can't draw. Lan does curse as she pushes herself back up onto hands and knees, pinches Loren's nose between her fingers, and seals her lips over his without a thought.
She's not doing CPR.
Wincing for him, she drives a knuckle into the middle of his solar plexus, just hard enough to force his body to cough. Come on! she thinks desperately, spitting a mouthful of blood to one side. "Fucking breathe!!"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Time. What they both need more of is time. Enough time to work out what needs to be done. Enough time to escape, from the Photosphere and the ascendant Demon of Elru both. Enough time to keep living. But it's in short supply wherever they might look.
He'd always heard that a tourniquet hurts.
He finally has the opportunity to confirm that for himself. If he were kinder, perhaps he might consider those he's applied a tourniquet to before and reconsider his irritation at their -- then, at least, he'd thought -- over-the-top discomfort. No such thought crosses his mind.
To be fair, he has other things that are more pressing than past failures to contend with at the moment.
Like the problem that's developed with his airway. He reaches a hand for his own throat, trying to cough, to clear--
It's into this that Lan interposes herself.
Then pinches his nose and presses her lips to his.
His mind goes blank. He doesn't think anything, and if she were in a position to see the expression on his face, doesn't emote much of anything either. Except for mute shock, reflected in his eyes.
He tries to push her away.
She jams part of her hand right into his solar plexus. He coughs, forcefully, hard.
She pulls away, spits blood. Tells him to breathe. His hand's still on her shoulder as he looks her right in the eyes, exhales a weak breath and wheezes, "Are you... trying to finish me off...?"
Even now his sense of humor is inappropriate.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Time is just one more thing they don't have nearly enough of. Loren might not have enough of it left to afford Lan any delicacy in her actions.
It's the crudest thing anybody has probably ever tried in the name of medicine, at least in front of Loren. Sealing her mouth over his own and creating suction to help pull the blood from his airway... it's pretty gross, but sometimes it works.
His hand's still on her shoulder. Lan stares down at him with wide eyes as, of all times, Loren chooses now to make a joke.
...At least she's pretty sure he's joking.
"I'm trying to save your life!" she retorts, an uncommon amount of heat in her voice. It's slightly ruined by the tears winding paths through the smeared red on her face. "Which side do I turn you toward so you don't choke again? There is one, right?!" She remembers, vaguely, someone doing that for her once when she was miserably drunk. "If you've got enough energy to make fun of me, you..." She doesn't know what else he can do. Not make trouble for her, maybe. "You can just be good, okay?!" she finishes lamely, at a loss for better words.
She wipes at her eyes with the corner of her sleeve before stacking her palms together on his chest, like she's going to do chest compressions in a very unwise spot. "Just be good and help me. I'm going to heal as much as I can but it won't be enough to fix everything - just stay awake until someone comes for us, okay?!"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
That's the way it always is, in the middle of battle. Combat medics are never known for their gentleness, for their only purpose is to keep soldiers alive.
Even if that means fixing them up just to send them back out to die.
The roles may be somewhat reversed now. Were he in better shape he'd worry more about the Commander. Worry more even about deVriese.
The only comfort he may be able to sieze now is that Leah isn't here. He can't see a fallen form that looks anything like hers. And she's not here.
Only Lan is.
Commiting to the sort of act that he will only really appreciate weeks from now -- if indeed he's around to appreciate it.
Instead he cracks a very gallows form of joke.
Lan had once wondered what Loren would look like if he actually smiled. He gets about halfway there, making a sound that might be a ghost of a laugh. Even in spite of it all -- exhaustion, agony -- he seizes a little bit of humor. To him, at least.
"--Don't turn me," he cautions, the semi-smile fading away like morning frost. "Don't move me. Unless this place is about to fall apart." His gaze turns past her now, off at the confrontation of sorts unfurling beyond.
Be 'good', huh...
"Don't worry," he sighs out, letting his head fall back against the snow-touched roof of the Photosphere. "I'm a medic. I'll... be good."
His chest is still rising and falling at speed under her hands. His heartbeat is fast -- a little too fast. He's tense. If it weren't for the blood, it would be a mirror of that moment on the beach, what seems like eons ago.
He places his hand next to her own. It still feels numb, mitt-like. "I'll... try. No promises," he cautions, cracking open his eyes to look up at her. "Can't... help it if I pass out... lost a lot of blood..."
And he's still tired.
Green light flares, angling out in fractal lines from where his hand rests against his chest. Can't fix a lot of it. Either because he can't, or because it would invite consequence for a future him if he made an error.
Right now, focus is hard to come by.
But he can mend some things. Reroute some things. It's better than continuing to wait here, in the cold.
"Let me... know if you see someone," he slurs, continuing to enforce his will upon his own flesh.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Lan should be helping the others too, she knows. But there's only one of her. Loren is right here.
She'd decided once that even doing a small kindness for someone else is better than trying and failing to help several. And... she's selfish, too. Because Loren is her friend.
Silver light pools beneath her hands, the power in her veins spilling over at long last. It's cool, calming, a little... refreshing, sort of, in a strange way. "Good. Just... be good," she nods, as if he needs one more reminder before she's willing to trust him to not be an ass.
She doesn't pray, despite her history of a few pretty words for her patron whenever calling on its power. She hasn't, not since Lan was made to meet Myyah Hawwa. It's just power, after all, right? It's just a gift from an elemental with delusions of grandeur.
"Don't use too much energy," she cautions Loren instead, despite knowing that he'll do more good here than she can. "Just try not to pass out. Do your best."
What can she do for someone so gravely wounded? Better to avoid the places she knows nothing about. "I wish I knew medicine," she sighs under her breath, and pours starlight into him instead.
It'll buy a few more minutes.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"Who do you... think I am..." he sighs out, some deeply-buried hint of amusement there in his voice as she asks again for him to be good.
It's strange.
The way she casts, that is.
He remembers a time on the moon when even a little trouble would have provoked her to prayer. But now there's nothing, not even in a situation where just about anyone would be justified in invoking a god or whatever, if they did believe. She does nothing except continue to draw upon the Medium's power she channels, as if it were a tool.
...Which is what they are, naturally, but that fact is beside the point.
So even that was changed in her. The thought is difficult to pursue.
He joins in with his own magic, trying to shore up what is effectively a sinking leaky ship. If he can buy time, though...
"As long as my heart beats... it's fine," he says, eyelids at halfmast as he stares up past her at a blue sky. "You're... worrying too much..."
It doesn't sound like him.
He's tired. It won't matter if he closes his eyes.
If he loses consciousness or not... he's done all he can. It won't matter anymore at this point. His eyelids begin to close; the green light begins to falter.
It's a little like drowning slowly.
He blinks then, raises his head all of a half-inch from where he's let it rest. Like he's watching for something, seeking something.
But nothing's there.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
"I think you're a big nerd that never makes any sense," she answers, maybe a little too honestly. "I think you'd complain if free cake fell from the sky and it wasn't a flavor you liked." Light leaks from underneath her palms, lapping against the lines of green in steady waves.
Behind her, thrown away in the snow and shrapnel, is the steadily-beeping 7-8-6 box. Below them is the ruined snowscape and further away still is the corpse of the Tzadkiel, spilling survivors and wreckage out onto the frozen surface. "I'm not a medic or anything, you know!" she exclaims loudly when he tells her she's worrying too much, voice pitching upwards with emotion. "I don't know how to fix you when you're hurt! And you keep getting hurt!"
Someone that you care about, that makes you worry all the time, that keeps doing things that don't make sense... Is this what it's like to have a child? No wonder Lan's mother drank. Lan lifts her head to stare after whatever he's looking at, but can't see anything. "Do you hear something...?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He pauses, as if wondering if he'd heard that right.
"Who... would eat a sky cake...?" Loren wonders aloud, against his rapid, shallow breaths. Her magic is calming, soothing -- touch different from his own -- but it can't do a thing against the reactions of a body suffering from a loss of blood.
Some people panic at death's door. It tends to be counterproductive, in his experience.
He doesn't want to die -- not here. But he should have more fear than this, shouldn't he? Beyond the sense that there are things he's left undone, the thought of his parents' reaction, the fact that he hasn't yet begun to make up for anything his brother did he...
It's peaceful, oddly peaceful.
It's because of the bloodloss, his rational side helpfully informs him.
She, on the other hand, is upset.
"...Keep getting hurt, huh... that's... a soldier's life..." He sounds distant again, like nothing she's saying is really registering with him here and now.
The green light of his magic breaks up and fades. His gaze is elsewhere now. He had thought he'd heard...
There's nothing above but the blue sky.
Nothing but the sensation of rattling away into the dark dizziness and distance.
Lan says something and it sounds like she's a million miles away.
Do you h
somethi
It might as well be static. It might as well be from above the surface of the sea.
Oh, runs the thought as he sinks back that fraction of an inch and the world blurs away.
Oh.
It may be some consolation to Lan that minutes after this happens, a small shuttle touches down gingerly atop the Photosphere.
Things may be a blur of action afterwards.