Broken Hearts of Gold

[ViolentMedic]

He managed to get the scythe. If he hadn't, he would have gotten skewered by that first attack for sure. Joe held the scythe in front of him and tried to look scary enough so that the girl—she matched Marcus' description of Katarina with the hair—would leave, but that was difficult when she was completely in control of the fight. All Joe could do was attempt to block that rapier, because sure dying would be a relief but he couldn't do that yet—

He took a few steps back. Saw the other girl starting to get to her feet. No, don't do anything, stay out of it, run while you can—

With a noise that was half-scared-yelp and half-attempting-to-yell-in-a-menacing-and-distracting-way, Joe waved the scythe around wildly.

All he managed to do was bash the blade against the wall.

...fu—

[Rattlesnake]

Back and forth she stabbed, trying to score a solid hit. Once or twice she came near enough to shave Joe's arms, but the scythe made a frustratingly bulky shield when put to the task.

She darted back as with a hue and a cry he finally pushed back, but the shot was weak, misguided. Once again she nearly fled, but it was only the surprise of it after he'd sat and taken a dozen jabs without offering any in return. And maybe, she thought as the heavy point pierced the aging wall like butter, he wasn't even trying. Didn't have the guts.

She darted in, grabbing the edge of the scythe with one of the notches on the gorestained dagger. Maybe she couldn't outmuscle him, but the swordbreaker caught the blade so easily it seemed to have been designed just for the purpose. She had the leverage. The killer instinct. She pulled at the sharp metal, tried to force it to the side, but Joe was tugging back with the strength of fear.

With a grunt she gave a sudden yank and struck simultaneously at his side. It wasn't a killing blow, but a bloody gash along his arm gaped open as she reset her stance for another strike. She could solve that Gordian knot.

[Fiori]

((Ruby Forrester continued from Lucifer Fell))

Ruby had a lot to think about over the past 24 hours.

For one, despite her best efforts, she had failed again to figure out which direction Ami had headed off to. Which, after all she had gone through to find her in the first place and the state she had found Ami in, did nothing to relieve the amount of stress she was now under.

Not only that, as it turned out she had successfully managed to shoot Sharon after all. Hours after the fact, Ruby still wasn't entirely sure how to feel about that revelation. On the one hand, Sharon had been the aggressor, and technically all she did was defend herself. On the other hand, there was also the fact that she fucking killed someone. The fact that she only found out about it later didn't particularly help. Would she have felt differently had she seen Sharon died before her own eyes? Maybe, maybe not. It wasn't as if the new took her completely by surprise, seeing as she had fully anticipated the possibility that she had managed to hit Sharon during her counter-attack. Still, now that she knew for certain, she couldn't deny that the knowledge that she was now directly responsible for someone else's death was discomforting to say the least.

Then again, given the events of the past few days, it was arguably not the first time her actions had led to other people dying.

In any case, one of the only reasons why she agreed to split up was because she still wanted her own space. She appreciated Dee's company, as well as having someone to talk to, but a part of her didn't trust her as much as she trusted Ami. She wasn't sure why exactly, probably more out of paranoia than anything, although there was one time where she could have sworn Dee was looking in her bag.

Either way, by the time she heard Dee start screaming, she realised how bad a mistake she had made.

Shit, shit, shit, shit! Not again, not letting this happen again...

It took her a while to find Dee, given the twisting layout of the apartment complex, but eventually she found her. Alongside two armed strangers.

And what looked like a lot of blood...

Oh fuck...

"Get the fuck down, NOW!" she shouted, aiming her gun at the two assailants. She didn't open fire, not yet anyway, seeing as from the looks of things the two students - KK and Joe - appeared to be fighting one another. Maybe one was trying to defend Dee, maybe they were both fighting over who was going to finish Dee off. At this point in time, Ruby didn't know what the fuck was going on, but she was able to tell that at least one of the people in front of her was dangerous. And she would be damned if she was going to allow anyone else to get hurt.

Question though was whether or not she was too late...

[D/N]

She stumbled to her feet, wondered for a brief moment where she was again, them saw KK and realization hit. Not that Dee had anywhere to run of course, or indeed anything better to do right now. But she had her voice and her focus back, and that was a good thing.

"Hey," she wheezed. No one heard her.

Well, maybe not all the way back. Whatever.

Dee gripped the tire iron in both hands and threw it at KK. She aimed for the other girl's head, but really, that wasn't going to happen at this point. The iron feebly slipped out and arced downwards. Might be enough to trip her up or something.

[ViolentMedic]

Joe felt the rapier hit him, but it felt distant. Like he was watching a video of himself getting hurt. The adrenaline dulled it. It didn't feel real until the blood started to drip. He'd never seen himself bleed that much before. Stomach crawled, brain fuzzed up. He tugged the scythe backwards, free of that little dagger, and took a couple more steps back with it.

There was blood in his eyes—he was still stupidly waving the scythe handle and his bleeding arm along with it, and he'd managed to get splatters on his face—and he blinked and tried to understand what was happening, and a voice—a new voice—yelled 'get the fuck down.'

Joe dropped to the ground immediately, though wobbling as he did so. Tried to blink and bring things into focus—no, this isn't the time to get light-headed, hold off—and he saw a blur of blue, blue hair? Gun at him and Katarina, not at the bleeding girl—

"Get her away!" Joe yelled. Get the bleeding girl out, get the girl who might be Katarina away from anyone she can hurt, just do something, move someone away and the problem will be solved.

Joe saw Katarina's legs. The legs? The legs, yes, trip her, don't kill her, don't make a mistake, what if she isn't who you think she is—who cares, she stabbed someone—don't make a mistake you can't undo—

Joe swung the scythe with the blade pointing away from Katarina, directly at her legs, as hard as he could.

[Rattlesnake]

Too many things happened at once.

A shout rolled down the narrow hallway, and in the wake of that wall of sound a girl brandishing a gun. Immediately her attention transferred over to the newcomer, and the captor of her old, reliable scythe was but a mere distraction. You didn't screw around with guns. It was all or nothing. They missed, or they didn't shoot, and that was one side of it. Or the coin fell in their favor, and they had the luck or the skill to hit you just once and everything you'd done to that point was drowned in bloody irrelevancy.

Something flashed along the edge of her vision and caught her hip. For a second of insane panic she thought she'd been shot. It didn't make total sense, but maybe time really did slow down enough to see it coming. And adrenaline or confusion or whatever else to bury the pain. But no, it spun and clattered and the butt of the scythe swept suddenly towards her. She gasped a little as the thick stave caught the side of her calf. A moderate pain, nothing more, but her stance bowed and she expected the wicked blade to come flashing down at any second. She half-stumbled, half-dove to the side, but there was no followup. A dozen curses shouted amongst her thoughts. The hypocrisy, the cowardice. He'd been bailed out in reward for his unwillingness to even try to land a blow.

It hadn't been a bad idea. It would have worked, honestly. Let him be the Bella to Dee's Ami, because she knew precisely what to do with Bella now. The idle time she spent was full of various tweaks and improvements to such a contingency. But scalability was an issue. And so was the prospect of an unstable girl with your life clasped between her hands, a gunmetal die with failure and certain death stamped on its sides.

She spun, dropped to a knee, slammed the dagger into the wall and ripped herself forward with it. There would be time for them. Later, when she could reset the board and stack it back in her favor. For now, she was darting down the first branch off the main hallway she could find. Misgiving churned in her stomach, but she shook her head and twitched her brow and thought, no. If the girl hadn't intended to shoot her already, she could just join the back of the line.

((Katarina Konipaski continued in The Society of the Spectacle))

[D/N]

And just like that, Ruby was here and KK was taking off.

"I'm fine. I'm... hey Ruby, it's fine."

Dee lifted up her shirt and bent her neck to examine the damage. OK, not exactly fine, but could be worse. There were two cuts on her side, a couple inches apart, one shallow while the other was deeper and now that the action was done she could feel it a lot more so--

"Just, someone help bandage this for me. I don't have a first aid kit. Lost it like way back on the first day with the rest of my stuff, remember I told you that Ruby?"

God it felt like years.

"But I -- look I used to volunteer, I know first aid and stuff, as long as we stop the bleeding it'll be fine."

Fucking KK Konipaski. Dee always hated her.

[ViolentMedic]

He hit. He didn't kill her. And now she was gone. Albeit probably because of the gun pointed at her rather than anything that Joe had done. Still, that was... that was good, right? He could have killed her. But he didn't.

Wasn't she on his list? But the list didn't matter. The list hadn't done any good.

Yeah... this was... this was better. Nothing he couldn't undo.

Words made their way through the fuzzy dream-like quality everything had right now. First-aid. Someone needed first-aid. He had that. He had extra. He grabbed his bag with the arm that wasn't coated in blood—was that fatal? Where had he been hit? He'd worry about it later, it didn't hurt yet it was just tingly and shaky and slippery—unzipped it and retrieved the first-aid kit that had belonged to Benjamin Ward.

He shuffled over to the bleeding girl and the blue-haired girl and wordlessly held the first-aid kit out.

...The girl looked like she was bleeding a lot. Joe saw Jason for a moment. Then he blinked and he was gone.

[Fiori]

KK ran. Joe ducked for cover and asked Ruby to get Dee away. Didn't take a genius to figure out who was the aggressor in the situation.

Ruby was tempted by the idea of shooting KK in the back as she hobbled away. After all, KK had just shanked her only ally, and would probably go on try and stab more people if she did nothing. That said, after hearing about what happened to the last person she shot at, she wasn't terribly fond of the idea of gunning down another living being so soon. Especially one with their back turned and in full retreat.

Besides, the fact that Dee was now bleeding was a much bigger concern. She immediately knelt by her injured friend, unzipping her bag before noticing that Joe had beaten her to the punch.

Joe... It only just occurred to her that the name rang a bell. Hadn't he been mentioned during the announcements a couple of times now? Two, maybe three times? Definitely more than once, which meant he had killed more than one person. Were it not for the fact that he seemed to be trying to help, Ruby would still be demanding him to get the hell away. She still had her eye on him, but for now she had other things to be concerned about.

"Shit, how bad is it?" asked Ruby as she grabbed the first aid kit of Joe, taking out a roll of bandages. Stupid question, of course it was pretty bad. From the looks of things Dee had been stabbed not once, but twice. But given the situation, she wasn't sure what else to say.

"Here, let me help..."

[D/N]

"Yeah," was all Dee said when Ruby took the first aid kit from Joe. She pulled her shirt up higher with one hand, and removed the other from where it was pressed against her side to give access.

"Jesus."

Dee's hand was way more red than she'd expected.

The strength seemed to run out of her. She slid a couple inches down against the wall, blinked for a moment, and got her senses back. Just another tiny blackout-thing, nothing to worry much about as long as they got this fixed.

"No, no," she told Ruby when she saw the bandages. "Get uh, first aid was a long time ago, get the dressings. They're sterile, stop the bleeding. Get... fuck get all of them. Then wrap. Tight. It'll be fine as long as you stop the bleeding I can breathe and stuff."

Ruby wrapped and in between assurances Dee filled her in on what a bitch KK was and other recent events. Joe hung around and helped a bit and Dee occasionally eyeballed him to let him know she wasn't quite done with him yet.

When it was done, she sat there another minute and no one said anything. Maybe the three of them were waiting to see if she'd croak or not, and they all felt that saying something dumb would be even more awkward than silence.

At least Dee was thinking along those lines. At first. Then she had to figure out where the hell she would go from here.

Right. Silly Dee. Only one place to go. Wasn't like she was going to start making her own informed decisions on what to do next.

"Hey, Joe."

She reached into her pocket and grinned at the foresight she'd shown in making sure she got stabbed on the other side so it didn't get all bloody. Her lucky day, huh? Then she withdrew Kyran's heart necklace.

She could do one thing before she left this place, at least. Even if it was just as stupidly symbolic as Joe burying Kyran, but Dee felt like she could live with her hypocrisy this one time.

"Take it," she said. "It's... it's like what am I gonna do with it? I don't get anything out of it."

Joe hesitated. Dee could tell.

"Look, Kyran was probably hoping someone could take it home, have something to give to his mom. I'm... I get home that's good enough for me. Seriously. And it would be good enough for him. I know that. I've got nothing to bring back except me, nothing to give. I never did. I've got a fucking cigarette and a Freddy glove.

"So this is mine to give now, too. You took it in the first place, you take some, this is gonna be your fucking responsibility. You remember."

She bit her lip as Joe took the necklace, and she felt a weight off her shoulders. She felt lighter. Not that she needed it.

Dee touched her side, gingerly. Better.

"Help me up," she said to Ruby.

She left the tire iron on the floor. Too damn heavy to carry around anymore. It was another thing to give away.

"Either of you want that it's yours."

------

Ruby stayed with Dee as they moved slowly to the apartment building's entrance, and good thing, because Dee was weaving pretty hardcore those first few steps, like she'd totally forgotten how to walk. But she managed, and with each step she was feeling better and more confident that the bleeding would stop and although she still had no ideas for the future beyond her immediate destination, that wasn't what she'd done her whole fucking time on this island, and she was still alive.

So she had to be doing something right.

"Ruby, um, look. I''ve gotta go off for a bit. I'm heading to the school. I... hey, come by later and if I'm still there we can get back together then, OK?"

Ruby was not quite OK with that, she could tell. Dee wasn't surprised.

She smiled and briefly touched the other girl's face.

"Look, it's fine. The bleeding's stopping, I'm just gonna be walking real slow. I... look.

"Ami was, she was about to kill herself when I found her."

That last sentence sort of fell out of Dee's mouth. She hadn't planned on saying it.

"I thought it would be OK if she did, if she wanted to, I'm sorry. I told her I wouldn't judge her. Maybe I'm not sorry, I dunno. Maybe I did stop her, but I just made her angry at you when you came in instead. Thinking about it too much, I guess.

"You um... thanks for pushing me out of the way with Sharon back then, Ruby. Thanks."

She left Ruby behind to do her own thing. For however long that was. She headed east, slowly. She'd make her next decision whenever she got there.

(Deanna Hull continued underneath The Adolescent Sky)

[ViolentMedic]

Joe didn't really have to say anything during the patching. The bleeding girl seemed to know how to do it, and it sounded right to him. He knew a lot of doctor stuff in theory, but he'd never actually done any of it. He put in a couple of fuzzy words of trying to help. He wasn't very useful. Only one arm was properly working right now.

Hm. Maybe he should do something about that. The adrenaline was wearing off, and with it pain was slowly flooding in. He didn't look down at the injury yet. Not until bleeding girl was alright. He just moved the bad arm behind his back and pretended like it wasn't there.

She gave the pendant back.

Joe didn't know if he wanted it. Remembering was important. But how could he ever return it to the family? He didn't intend to make it that far, and even if by some freak accident he did... would they want to accept it from the guy who'd taken away their son?

He didn't think he could remember in the way he thought she was telling him to do. But this felt like the wrong time to protest. So he took it back with a nod.

There wasn't anything he could do for her at that stage. So he sat down and started fumbling with his own medical supplies. The other two left without him.

She'd be fine. The blue-haired girl was with her.

Joe should have asked for their names.

[ViolentMedic]

...He should have fixed himself sooner. Just bleeding carelessly was dumb. If his father was watching, he was probably embarrassed. He probably wasn't watching. Not after Jason, or Benjamin, or Kyran... and if he was, embarrassment over his son's shoddy medical skills was not the biggest priority.

Joe tried to move his arm into a better position. It spasmed pretty badly when he tried, and white-hot pain accompanied it. The wound was deep. Small—probably the only reason he was still going—but deep. Joe tried to stem the blow of blood. His fingers kept slipping. He was shaky. Shock? Was it shock?

He wondered if someone deep in shock would be together enough to know it was shock. Maybe it wasn't shock. Maybe it was.

Falling asleep would be dangerous right now.

Fall asleep.

He had work to do.

But everything around his arm was so slippery... his good hand was coated, his bad arm was coated... was this not lethal? It didn't... was it as much blood as Benjamin had spilled before he'd died? Joe hadn't been hit in the femoral artery. Had he been hit in the... the... what was it...

His hands kept slipping and shaking. But they shook slightly less as he tried to recall which artery he was thinking about.

Brachial. Brachial artery. His father had quizzed him about it once. The branchial artery is located in the upper arm... and the lower arm's main arteries...

"Radial and ulnar arteries in the lower arm," he muttered out loud. "Smaller arteries in the hands, including the palmar arteries..." He started rattling off bits of the medical information his father had made him review time and time again. As he did, and put his mind off everything that had happened and that was happening, his hands steadied enough. He still felt light-headed... but not as blurry as he had.

He wasn't an expert on first aid, but he knew enough not to make it any worse. It made him get dizzier if he looked at it too carefully, and if he was aiming to live for longer than a couple of days maybe he'd be worried.

But what mattered was that he could still move the bad arm. Not much. Each movement hurt like nothing he'd ever felt. He tried to swallow the noises whenever he accidentally moved it half an inch wrong. And if he overdid it, he would probably ruin his arm entirely. But it could move enough. Even if he didn't know how he'd hold that rifle properly any more.

He could keep looking for Travis. It'd work out. If he couldn't use his rifle... well, last he checked Travis had no gun. Maybe that had changed. But maybe he'd get lucky. And what did he lose if he didn't?

Joe had put the necklace aside while he worked. Now he looked at it for a moment before putting it in the pocket of his jeans. He tried not to think of how much that girl had been bleeding.

Time was running out. Travis needed to be found. He told himself he wasn't going to get involved in anything else. That included thinking about it.

((Joe Carrasco continued in Layabout.))

[Fiori]

Ruby stood there for a while as she watched Deanna limp away. She wasn't sure what to say really.

A part of her was still processing what Deanna had said about Ami. Had she really intended to kill herself back there, where she had found her on the boat? Admittedly, the thought had crossed her mind at the time, but she didn't think that Ami actually had any intention of doing such a thing.

Of course, now that she thought back, it made sense. After what happened with Sera, god knows what was going through Ami's head. And the way Ami reacted to her when she tried to comfort the poor girl. Christ, she couldn't believe how she hadn't realised it sooner.

Ruby looked down at the tire iron, briefly glancing up at Joe before looking back down at him. Whilst the thought of doing something about him briefly popped into her head, she quickly shook it away. She had enough on her mind already, and it wasn't as if Joe was actively posing a threat. Instead, she picked up the tire iron and slowly headed in Deanna's direction.

After all, she couldn't just leave her ally like that, could she?

---

It wasn't long however until Ruby found Deanna.

She wasn't sure what to think of this. After all, it wasn't as if she and Deanna had known each other that well, and they weren't exactly the closest of friends. But after all this, it was still quite a shock to see one of the few friendly faces left on this island lying dead on top of a makeshift grave.

She'd already suspected that Deanna's wound was fatal. She'd already suspected that the reason why Deanna walked off was so that she could die alone, with whoever this grave had belonged to apparently. It was part of the reason why she hadn't done much to stop Deanna.

But even so, seeing her lying there motionless, like so many other bodies she had come across over the last few days. It just reminded her yet again about how this was the fate that awaited nearly everyone on this island, bar one insanely lucky individual who would have the reward of being able to return home an emotionally scarred wreck. There wouldn't be any miracle rescues like the last time this happened. Any hope of that died along with Gavin and the other victims of that failed escape attempt. All they could do now was either wait to die, or kill in order to survive.

And it was about time that Ruby decided on which direction she was going to take.

((Ruby Forrester continued elsewhere...))