LOS Drabbles

Wander

Garth's world was burning. A place that had been a battlefield not long ago reduced to rubble and shades of orange, red, and hazy black by the whim of an enemy ship. Everything was hauntingly silent save the crackle of flames and the ringing in his ears, and as Garth crawled to his knees, it got no better.

Bodies lay strewn over the dirt in front of Garth, some twitching, most not. Smoke blanketed the landscape, creeping into his lungs and stinging his eyes until he was coughing more than breathing and seeing the world in a blurry mess. Ash and blood clung to his suit and coated his tongue, a taste that persisted even after he spat it out.  As his ears stopped shrilling and he stumbled to his feet, something new dropped his stomach to his knees. Or rather, the new lack thereof. His comm.

The usual chatter from his ring, the warnings, the bets, and the yelling, was nonexistent. Garth's ring sat deafeningly silent on his hand, a frightening thing in the wake of such chaos.

"Lightning to-" He attempted to start a call, only to break off for the sake of a hacking fit, and tried again. "Lightning to any Legionnaires, come in." His voice scratched at his throat, soot acting like sandpaper in his airways. "Please, come in."
Staggering, almost blind, Garth started moving, searching for sound, movement, the subtle electric charge a beating heart gave off; in the unfuzzying state his mind was in, the only other thing he could do to avoid panic was catalogue.

He catalogued his injuries, counting up the places that burned and stung and grated with every step and made guesses on their severity for later.

He catalogued his surroundings, methodically searching one blurred mass after another for a scrap of bright fabric and marking them off in a slowly-growing mental map of the area.

He catalogued who had been on the mission and where he'd last seen them, along with whether their powers could've kept them unharmed or not. That list had been simultaneously reassuring and worrying: there were only five others to account for, but most of them weren't fireproof or overly durable, the mission had only meant to be recon with prep for a skirmish, not...this.

"Lightning to anyone that can hear me." He commed again as he crawled over what might've been a building corner. "Plea-se, please respond." Garth stifled another cough as he talked, only for it to come back with twice the vengeance when he stopped, and his crouched side-skitter over the wall debris turned into him keeled over on his elbows and knees.

Slowly, as his cough subsided, Garth rocked shakily back to his feet and continued searching like a man possessed, slogging around like a zombie for a sliver of familiar life. Most that he found were from the other side, immovable or already gone, and the ones that could do so little as hobble were shell-shocked. Garth wanted to hate them, but couldn't find anything in his hollow gut, and tried his best to help by guiding those that could to those that couldn't and hoping for at least one good thing to come out of it. Some didn't have enough time left for anybody else to come, and he stayed with them; he held their hands and listened to their last words, offering silent comfort until the charge in their skin faded, and then he would record their words and their names and stumble away again.

His gloves grew grimy with wiped tears and snot, collecting dirt from his digging and miasma from the air, and he still hadn't found a teammate. The blood on his suit began to fuse it to his skin, and still his teammates were missing. His voice had worn down to nothing from the smoke and the coughing and the pleading for a response —both commed and out loud— and not a single hair of his teammates had been seen by anyone since the blast.

Fear and sickening uncertainty began to boil in his gut the longer he went. With every ticking minute, he felt chances slivering away, felt vices on his chest and rebar in his arteries. He wanted to move faster, to canvas the area quicker and find anything other than stragglers and cooling bodies, but moving was like wading through knee-high water, and Garth was highly aware of how fast his heart was fluttering away at his rib cage. He knew what it meant, how light he was getting on blood. All he could do about it was curse and trudge on, though, breathe shallow through grit teeth and search for movement.

Garth lasted another hour on his own in that burning wasteland, breathing black smog and losing red blood, until his body couldn't take any more. His dragging feet tripped over a crumbled brick hidden in the dirt, he landed hard, and he stayed down. He stayed down in a curled pile of shaking limbs and filthy wounds, leaking the last of his tears into the unforgiving earth and...he gave up. Let the doubt and the fear and the survivors guilt consume him whole as he waited for death.