{se} karma for the rules I break

Jude

In my head I am hunting for myself
but I come up empty again

Jude had been swept up by the waves that had lurched inland like a tsunami when the meteor fell. Far enough inland to not be immediately killed, he'd clung to debris and the skeletons of buildings in the seemingly endless time it had taken for the water to devour everything in its path. Scrawny as he is, the only benefit he has is having grown up on these sands, where swimming is a necessity of life and not just a common past-time.

He clings for hours, waiting for dawn. Waiting for help. Manages to pull himself up by his arms alone into an awkward perch of cross-beams of a house that is still standing - sans a roof, but still. His leg lies limp toward the swollen water, broken from impact with debris that had been hiding in its depths during the waves. A compound fracture; blood soaks his shorts and trickles down his calf, but he'd managed a tourniquet with his father's training. Jude knows he has to count himself lucky despite it all. If anything had struck his head, he would have either been killed immediately or knocked unconscious, and drowning would have taken him soon thereafter.

He can't see any other survivors nearby. It's hard enough to see the bodies in the water around him, so instead he curls up in a ball, hiding his face in his good leg pulled up to his chest and arms blocking out the rest of the world. He cries - often, but intermittently. Prays more than he has in a long time. And he waits. Waits, and waits, and tries to manage the pain. He knows Torchline aid will begin immediately, and hopefully Stormbreak thereafter. The water has begun to retreat and it's shallow enough it would only be to his knees if he jumped down, but he's stuck. He just has to wait...

the night is a cavern
I am underneath it, inside it, anything but free of it

A machine where your heart once was
Slowly takes the place of you

Stormbreak, blessedly, was fine. Torchline, unfortunately, was not.

Liam had come as swiftly as he could, but it had been slow going with the Skyport destroyed. He was further slowed by a lack of knowledge about the terrain: he’d never spent much time in Torchline, and even when he’d managed to make it across the coastal region’s border, he wasn’t quite sure where he was or where he was going. He consulted the map he’d brought along often, eventually making his way deeper into Torchline territory, into a region called the Ahi Coast.

He supposed that, in happier times, the Coast was probably quite lovely. Now, though, it was covered in knee-deep water that had yet to recede, and debris was scattered everywhere Liam looked. He surveyed it all with a grim look. He remembered how long it had taken Stormbreak to recover after the Ascended attack. This was, somehow, even worse.

He’d been recruited for a search and rescue team, working through the area in a grid formation to look for survivors. For a long time, Liam didn’t find any. He found plenty of bodies, though. He tried to keep count for a while so that he could report to Hadama on the casualties; eventually, though, he gave up. There were just too many.

A sound caught his attention and Liam looked around, scanning the wreckage around him for the source. There, clinging to a piece of a building - a young man. A boy, really. He was dirty and bloody and exhausted, but he was alive, and Liam splashed through the shallows to haul himself up beside the young man. ”It’s okay,” he said. ”You’re going to be okay.”

Only hold the memories now
Of a love I thought I knew

Liam

Jude

In my head I am hunting for myself
but I come up empty again

Jude startles hard at the seemingly sudden appearance of a stranger, and the act of clinging to the beam he's on makes him moan something twisted from the agony it causes to flare up in his body. Blinking away black spots, he watches the man pull himself onto the same beam, dismayed when he doesn't recognize him. He feels twitchy, and he can't blame it on the cold of being soaked or the bloodloss - like a cornered rabbit. But he's being helped, right?

Jude realizes he hasn't spoken yet. Wonders - even more vaguely - if perhaps he's in shock.

"Dad," he croaks out. "My dad - I need my dad," he begs, still frozen in the same position and beginning to shiver hard. Oh yeah, that's definitely shock. He tries to pinch his thigh to clear his head for a moment. "Um. How - how can I get down? Where are we going?" Is there an infirmary set up yet? Jude knows the longer he wears his makeshift tourniquet, the more dangerous it will become, and he really doesn't want to lose a leg.

the night is a cavern
I am underneath it, inside it, anything but free of it

A machine where your heart once was
Slowly takes the place of you

Liam moved carefully and slowly towards the injured boy, as though trying not to startle an injured animal. He'd guess that the young man was around twenty, but there was something about him that made him seem younger than he was. Perhaps it was the way he asked immediately for his father - not that Liam could blame him. If he'd just been through hell and was stuck on a dilapidated piece of building in the aftermath of a moon falling out of the sky, he'd probably be longing for his parents, too.

"Okay," Liam said soothingly, blocking out the wave of pain that threatened as he thought of his own children, of what he wouldn't have given to find them - even in such a state - in the aftermath of the Ascended's attack on Stormbreak. How much he longed to hear them call out for him again. "We'll find your dad," he promised, voice surprisingly even.

When he noticed the young man's leg, he hissed in sympathy, even as his estimation of the boy rose as he realized that a tourniquet had been expertly applied. "My name is Liam," he said, slowly approaching and dropping into a crouch beside the stranger. "I'm here to help. We need to get you back to Haulani. There will be healers there." He cast his eyes around, trying to decide the best way to move the young man without causing him even more pain. "If we can get you down, I can carry you, but it's going to hurt," he said, his voice gentle and apologetic. "What's your name?"

Only hold the memories now
Of a love I thought I knew

Liam

Jude

In my head I am hunting for myself
but I come up empty again

There's no logic to Liam finding his dad given he isn't anywhere close to Torchline, but Jude isn't in a state to recognize that, subsiding fitfully under the calm tone and reassurances offered to him despite the lingering twitchiness. There's direction and transparency to Liam's words, but it's lost on Jude - he only clings to his offered name and the idea that soon, this might be over. What is pain, of all things, when measured against an end to this nightmare?

"Jude," he chatters out between trembling, clacking teeth. Definitely shock, he thinks dully, slightly hysterical with far-away humor. His eyes sway toward his leg only to skirt back again, sick with the sight of pale bone where it definitely shouldn't be visible. "Just get me out of here. Please, I don't care if it hurts." The swift way he breathes through his nose makes it clear he's clinging to his higher brain functions by a thread. Words feel like a grind of grit and stone through the dulled blades of his mind, spitting out pebbles and dust through his salt-scorched throat as he reaches his hands toward Liam like a much younger child might.

the night is a cavern
I am underneath it, inside it, anything but free of it