Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
honey, we're home
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
. ✧ ・゜. +・o ✧
Seeing her older brother saw open El's leg was not an experience Alina ever expected—or wanted—to see. Then again, that could describe most of the situations she'd been in during the past few days, because, she had to admit, she was totally not having a good time here.
She knew she could easily look away, but she found that it felt like a betrayal to El and all of the pain she was in to do so, so instead she kept her eyes firmly locked on the wound and held her friend's hand as she screamed, the heated knife sinking into her flesh. The smell of blood and rot, which had been faint before, got stronger as Jonathan cut into her leg, causing pus and blood to squirt out of the wound, and Alina tried to breathe as little as she could as the skin on El's leg split. The only time she briefly looked away was to watch Erica, who, given that she was literally ten, should not have been witnessing this shit, but Alina found that the girl was actually leaning forward to witness this surgery, curiosity written all over her face.
"Oh, shit," Dustin swore as he watched, and Alina wondered if he, too, was going to throw up. What was it like for him, to reunite with his friends briefly only to have one of them collapse mere minutes later with some strange parasite writhing around in her leg? A parasite that, apparently, he hadn't even been dealing with?
The gaping hole in El's flesh was larger now, and Jonathan—who seemed to Alina moments away from passing out—heaved in a deep, horrified breath. And then he sank his gloved hand into the fissure he'd created, causing skin to split and spread, veins to bulge, and for El to let out another scream. Everyone else was letting out cries of disgust, and Alina was pretty sure she saw Gabe duck away to vomit again. She was seriously considering joining him, but kept her hand firmly intertwined with El's, even when the girl squeezed it so hard she lost the circulation in it. She tried, for a brief moment, to imagine the intense pain El must've been going through, multiplying what she'd gone through at the hospital by a dozen, and stared down at her friend incredulously. How in the world was she still conscious?
