11.18.2011

Art: 060/100 Themes - Rejection

"Envitalio." Rejection. - 060/100 Themes.

Three in a row where I'm just beating the crap out of Rivek. I'm a bad person.

 

Willow huddled with her stomach against the ground. She felt something soft grace her cheek. As the dust settled, she turned her head and saw barred, gray feathers. Gingerly, she lifted Rivek's wing off her shoulder and struggled to her knees. He collapsed on top of her, and she felt hot blood run down the front of her shirt. The ground crunched as she rolled him off and leaned his limp form against a broken pillar.

She looked at her chest, where she felt the blood. She was fine, just scrapes and bruises. She turned her attention to her newly hired bodyguard. From what she knew about his powers, maintaining his form halfway between man and bird was the most taxing ability he could use, and he had done it for her with no second thought. When he eyed the first fuse being lit, he brought her to the ground with superhuman speed and shielded her with his body, turning them into massive wings to increase his surface area. The avian limbs he'd protected her with shrank back into human flesh, scratched and bleeding from shards of glass and stone. His left sagged, and she could see the sundered collarbone peeking out from a wound by his neck.

He spoke softly, between short breaths, "Just. Doing. My job."  A thin, wood beam protruded from his chest. Black blood pooled around the opening, nibbling at the timber before running down his side. He muttered, "Fucking. Hurts."

She put her hand on his cheek and looked around as she ran it through his hair. She needed help. Her only experience with severe puncture wounds involved people who were already dead. The explosion had taken out much of the castle wall, flooding the room with rubble. People emerged from the dust, recovering from shock. An armored man threw a door off of himself so he could stand. A woman crawled out from under a table. She heard a moan.

"Will..."

Fenne lay a short distance away. His lower limbs had been crushed, trapped under a piece of ceiling. Blood slowly ran out from under the rock. He met her gaze, his eyes pleading and red dripped down his nose and into his mouth.

She turned to Rivek. He nodded in Fenne's direction. The wood moved up and down in time with his heaving chest as he muttered.

She met Fenne's gaze again, and her heart quickened. She could not attend to two fatal wounds at once. She looked around again in panic. A bevy of medical staff members, dressed in white and guarded by a squadron or soldier, ran into the room.

Rivek's skin had turned pale, and his lips were now blue, moving without sound. Willow hoped it was not some kind of final prayer. The color had gone from his eyes, from vibrant blue to lifeless gray. The group of nurses settled around Fenne, and he disappeared from view. No one else would do it. No one else could do it. When Rivek signed that contract, he became her responsibility alone and, if she helped anyone else, he would die.

She put his lips to his and breathed the threads of her magic into his collapsed lung. It seemed useless. She tried again, reaching deeper his time, past the trachea and into the tiny branches in the lungs. Her knees shook as the air rushed out of her body, pushing against the collapsed walls of the tissue. They moved. She gripped his torn clothes to steady herself as she exhaled once more into his body. The invading air in his chest cavity bubbled out through the wound, and the lung expanded to fill his ribcage again.

The wooden stake, finally burned through by the acid blood, clattered to the ground in two pieces. The now-open wound sputtered, the blood fighting and losing against the hastily forming tissue. As the hole closed up with a keloid scar, she felt him breath on his own again. She re-positioned his fractured clavicle and coaxed the shattered bone back together with a sewing motion. Cold sweat ran down her forehead. There would be more to attend to later, but the important part was taken care of. He swallowed the blood in his mouth, half a smile crawling onto his face. She ran her bloody fingers through his dark hair and rested her cheek against his neck. He would live.

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