Give Me Love

chapter nineteen

Warning: graphic depictions of injury
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It looked like fireworks. 

Flashes of light spotted your vision, tiny bits of shrapnel and bombshells flicking out like reverse-stars against the fiery backdrop of each explosion. There were many. They pounded into the dirt, rattling your teeth as you felt each of them land and release through the ground. Bits of sharpened metal sparkled as they shot into the sky, ripped cloth catching fire midair, ash raining down all around you.

It sounded like hell.

There were the screams of the newly injured among the previously injured. Clones crying out, mixed with other men and women, mixed with the deafening sounds of a fleet of enemy fighter ships hovering in the sky above you, mixed with the relentless onslaught of bombs. All of this, mixed with the ringing in your ears as you eventually lost the ability to hear altogether.

You weren't dead. That much was obvious— you had been dead once before, and this wasn't like that. You knew it because you couldn't remember being dead, while this... this you would remember.

Your neck turned on its axis, met with the smoking remains of your speeder bike. It had been hurled into the air and dropped right beside you, no doubt taking the impact of one of the strikes that had hit close to you. You pushed yourself onto your forearms, flexing each muscle and scanning your body to check for damage.

Miraculously, you felt fine.

But then when you turned your head the other way, toward the med camp, you were face-to-face with the burning remains of Malachi.

You screamed— or you might have, if you could hear— and scrambled backward into your smoking speeder. It jostled with another impact, and then the vibrations on the ground stopped. With one last explosion, the last transport ship had been blown up and the flying hunks of metal dug themselves into the dirt by your feet. You saw one particularly sharp piece propel itself into a perfect arch through the air, burying itself almost peacefully into the back of a fellow medic.

Peacefully, because you couldn't hear the sudden screaming and crying as she dropped to the ground and wailed around in the dirt. She had been trying to drag someone out from under the remains of the tent when she was hit, and now they were both bleeding out.

You pushed yourself to shaky feet, not even thinking twice as you stumbled over to the tent. Strong gusts of wind blew you back down to your knees as the enemy ships zipped away overhead, out of the atmosphere, but you got right back up, joints shaking and head pounding as you reached for the two by the tent.

You got to the medic first. She was facedown, and you pressed yourself to the ground so she could see you. She was screaming still but you could only hear the ringing in your ears, so you shook your head and pointed to your right ear. Then tried to say, "It's okay, I'm going to help you." She cried harder at this and pointed toward the tent.

There was a body half in and half out of the smoking remains of the med-tent. It was a clone who had been shot with a blaster in the side. He was patched up but bleeding from a wound on his chest, burns and shrapnel embedded in it from the explosions.

You dragged him out, his eyelashes fluttering, and laid him right next to the girl. She reached out and took his hand, and his eyes opened to land on her. He squeezed hers harder when he saw the metal in her back.

"Save her," you thought he was saying, but you couldn't tell.

You dropped to your knees beside her and began cutting away the material of her jumpsuit with your scissors. The wound now exposed, you could see through the firelight that the hunk of metal had gotten deep, but missed the spine by a hair. That was a good sign.