Bluejay

Jessi was bleeding. Quite a bit, actually.

She wiped the blood from her hand with a wad of tissues, but it was only replaced by more. Red stained her fingers, palm, arm, drying in the tiny crevices of her skin, streaking over a tapestry of scars like spilt milk. She tore out some more tissues almost desperately, wincing when blood dripped onto the table, and pressed them against the wound.

It was an accident. She hadn't meant to smash the bottle; she hadn't even realised it was there until she knocked into the table, because of course she had to knock into the table. She was surprised she wasn't dead with how clumsy she could be at times.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

She just had to knock into the table. It just had to be Ivor's spare potion bottle. It just had to hit the wooden floor instead of the carpet.

And now she was getting blood everywhere because a large shard of glass just had to slide into her hand in her haste to clean up her mess. Stupid.

She was so stupid.

Maybe she had some money lying at the bottom of her bag. She could run down to the market and buy him a new one before he got back with Jesse and Harper and they'd be none the wiser; she'd already cleaned up the glass. Of course, there was the little droplets of blood on the carpet, but they weren't too big. She'd probably be able to scrub it out. Maybe she could find one of the hotel's cleaners and ask to use their supplies.

But what if they charged them extra for getting blood on the carpet? What if she couldn't get it out even with the supplies? What if she did and they charged them anyway? They could charge them just for her using their cleaning supplies.

Well, Jessi didn't actually know whether or not they would be charged extra, be it for her using the cleaning supplies or getting blood on the carpet. But she'd rather not risk it. Heck, they might not even let her use their cleaning supplies in the first place.

Grabbing some more tissues, Jessi wrapped them around her stinging hand and pressed. She was in the middle of pulling more tissues out of their box to clean up the splatters of blood she'd left on the carpet when she heard the click of their hotel room door opening.

"Jess, we're back!"

Her back straightened as though it had abruptly be replaced with a blaze rod, her heart leaping into her throat. Red began to seep through the tissues.

"Uh, he- hey!" she called, grimacing when her voice cracked, "I'm- I'm in the bathroom!"

The floorboards creaked as they made their way inside the room, the door closing behind them. There was a series of light, jumping thumps as her brother skipped over to the bathroom door and knocked.

"We got you something from the market!"

"Really?" said Jessi, although her mind was not on whatever they had gotten her; she was a bit busy throwing the bloody tissues into the toilet and grabbing clean ones to mop up the blood still pouring from her hand.

"Yeah! It was just outside- Harper's gonna go back down if you wanna check it out yourself."

"Aw- Awesome," Jessi stammered. She threw the last of the bloodied tissues into the toilet and used her elbow to flush it, her non-bleeding hand already occupied with keeping the clean tissues against the gash. She heard Jesse say something to Harper in the other room, and then Jessi abruptly realised she'd used all the tissues and she definitely didn't have enough money with her to replace both those and Ivor's bottle, if she even had any money to begin-