Until Dawn

All Out in the Open

"Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!"

~Sons of the Desert, 1933

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One thing that Ratchet knew for certain was that he will never complain about the tiny cramped elevator in his complex again.

As far as he knew, he didn't leave any red smears on the floor or anything else in the dimly lit hallway that could possibly incriminate him. If he did, though, then he'll find out through a passive aggressive letter from his landlord that he had done a shitty job at hiding a murder or something along those lines.

He would bet his bolts that he would get that hypothetical letter tomorrow.

After nothing short of him half-dragging, half-carrying Alice out of the alley, along with getting a bunch of stares of random pedestrians and crimson stains on his favorite pilot suit, he all but collapsed by the opening to his home.

He really underestimated how heavy her dead weight could be.

The phrase "dead weight" didn't sound quite right, considering she was just unconscious, but he was too tired to try and remedy the wording.

Of course, the whole break-in was a less than ideal situation, but the entire time he was hauling their combined weight, he was hoping that the mess left behind would be easy to clean up and forget about.

Unfortunately, his wishes for a bloodless aftermath were dashed pretty quickly when he entered his apartment again.

If he wasn't currently holding his limp friend, he would have had to hold on to the crumbling doorframe to keep himself upright.

"Well this looks like a massacre and a half," he muttered under his breath as he walked in, making sure her limp head didn't hit the wall. And he wasn't completely wrong.

Pretty much all of his furniture either had shards of glass or wood sticking out of it, all of it covered with caked red splotches on them. The needles that were used earlier were crusty with both dirt and blood.

The sight made his stomach turn.

But despite the gruesome scene, he steeled himself and carefully avoided the wreckage. Some shards of glass somehow made it through his boots, cutting into his foot. But considering everything, the pain was fairly tolerable.

After all, he was barefoot for the first half of his life, so he had no room to complain.

He wouldn't be much help to his friend if he was also incapacitated, though, so he actually tried to be cautious around the broken glass.

Speaking of which, he finally built up the courage to look down at her beaten face, noting the way the stab wound on her face dripped down to her neck.

He could only imagine the pain of being struck on the cheek, and he couldn't recall hearing Alice screaming when she was hit.

Damn, how did she do that? Yes, it wasn't a good thing to hide pain like that, but even the strongest warriors had a breaking point.

By her current track record, that threshold would've been crossed a long time ago.

And yet, she was still standing. Well, not literally right now, but theoretically speaking.

The cut had started to scab over so it wasn't near as bloody as it was when she first got hit, but if he didn't intervene with some Nanotech soon, it was definitely going to scar.