I'll Make You Bleed

Where to Go from Here (Jean POV)

**written by: blueTshirts** 

12:51 AM 

This can't be happening. This can't. This must be some kind of shock, right? Like psychosis or something? Doesn't that happen to people in traumatic situations?

I stare down at Sasha, my friend, my sister, someone I'd easily jump in front of a bullet for, and that list has no more than a few names on it; she's falling apart. Images flash in my mind of the millions of zombie movies I've watched with my two closest friends and remember what people look like as they're transforming into the undead.

The blood, the sweat, the confusion, shortness of breath, twitching limbs and crying out for their loved ones. Sasha lays in front of me likes she's resorted to complete disarray. She's covered in her own blood and puke. Her eyes barely focus on Marco as he's trying to get her to look at him. Her amber irises flitter behind her eyelids or wander aimlessly around the dusty wooden walls of this hellhole. Her body moves on it's own as her knee continues to straighten and release on its own. Her shoulder tenses forwards and the corner of her mouth pulls down. Her fingers twitch in my grasp. I hold on as tight as I can so her seizing muscles won't take her hand away from me.

"What's happening?" Connie cries, his voice hitching in the back of his throat as he tries to fight back tears. He looks up at Marco, begging and pleading, hoping that the poor second year medical student can help. But I can tell that Marco doesn't know. He's terrified. I can see it in the way he continues to do the same things over and over again like something's finally going to work.

But it's not. Nothing will work. Just look at her.

"Marco!" Connie screams.

Marco shakes his head looking down at Sasha with the same hopeless dread that I feel. He looks at Connie. Something inside my gut flips and twists. Marco's given me that look before. Once. It was so long ago that my brain feels like it's stumbling amongst unwanted buried memories and the severe stress of this singular moment. At least it feels like it was a long time ago.

A little over two years ago. I was in the hospital. I'd cut myself so bad that the blood wouldn't stop. It wasn't like I busted an artery or anything, but I needed stitches and a psychiatrist to slap me in the face. It was the one semester I went to college. Worst time in my life besides Marco. He came to see me in the hospital. He hadn't known any of the things I was going through. I never told him. Sasha and Connie brought my new boyfriend to see me without asking me.

He looked at me with those eyes. Those pretty brown eyes that lost all signs of fight. He was so overwhelmed with shock, fear, pain, that he couldn't come up with a way to give me strength or hope. He was lost that day. The Marco that I'd started to fall in love with, the Marco that saw life as an opportunity to help people, that fought even when it was time to give up, that was willing to try harder and stretch farther just so that the people around him that couldn't would succeed, my Marco, had lost himself.

He looks at Connie now like he has nothing left to give, that there's nothing he can do, that there's no hope.

My brain short circuits. It stops working. The fear, the pain, the stress, it all stops. I watch Sasha give into her body's convulsions and fall into a full out seizure. Her eyes roll into the back of her head and her body vibrates with twitchy movements. Marco moves to roll Sasha on her side and hold her head in his lap. Sasha's hand slips out of my loose grip. My fingers are left hanging in the air unoccupied.

Sasha is dying. She's dying like the rest of us are doomed to. Marco was nearly killed. Ymir's dead. Historia's dead. The car's are dead. The phone lines are dead.

Our future is fate at this point.

I hear Connie yelling at Marco, at me, for Sasha.

Sasha's body stops moving. As quickly as it started it's stopped. Sasha's head is turned away from me. All I can see is her hair in a messy bunch with stray pieces of straw and leaves stuck in it. She's no longer moving. None of her. Not even the jerky twitching. She's completely still.