Chapter 1
John almost expects Erg to do something, to stop him from killing Turner−or maybe encourage him, after all Erg probably wants revenge for what the man did to his home and his people. But Erg just waits as John hesitates, the knife in his hand shaking more and more as his remaining energy fades.
Turner would be dead already if John hadn't been injured, weakened by pain and blood loss. A single punch should have felled him, yet after several he's still looking up at John, with no fear in his eyes.
“I'm ready to see my little girl,” he says. “Just do it, man.”
John falters, his arm giving out under him.
“Kill me!”
He nearly does it, right then, plunge the knife deep into Turner's chest where he knows it will kill him instantly. Not for revenge. Just to end this.
Except it won't end anything for John, will it? He'll still be here, alive, with the Clarice-shaped hole in his heart and another death to carry on his shoulders.
With a growl of pain, John drops the knife, away from either of them, and rolls off Turner's body. He lies there, beside the man who murdered Clarice and tortured him, and wishes for another kind of end. The one he came here looking for, today.
His thoughts stray toward Marcos, Lorna and the Struckers. He wonders if they managed to get Lauren and Andy back, if they stopped Reeva after all. He wonders if it should matter to him more than it does.
He feels numb. His whole body is on fire, yet the pain feels far away, disconnected.
“Thunderbird! John!” someone is calling. John blinks his eyes open sluggishly.
Erg is leaning over him, shaking his shoulder.
“Hm,” John mutters, struggling to get his body to obey him.
“We have to get away from here. The police will be here soon.”
John makes a weak attempt at sitting up, but almost falls right back down. Erg pulls on his arm and ducks under it to shift John's weight onto his shoulders.
“Come on, I'm strong, but not strong enough to carry you,” he says.
“Just gimme a sec,” John murmurs.
He's dizzy from pain and bloodloss, and the feeling of the bullets shifting inside him with every move is nauseating. He uses his left arm to pull himself up, but it gives out under him again.
“Just lean on me,” Erg says.
John gives in and lets Erg pull him upright, if upright is even a proper term for the hunched-over position that is the only one the wounds in his stomach will let him take. Thankfully Erg's mutation does seem to make him stronger than most people, and he's able to hold John up even when his left leg won't take his weight.
“We need to get down into the tunnels,” Erg says, guiding them back toward the end of the alley. “They won't find us there. There's an entrance a hundred yards away.”
John doesn't bother answering, keeping all his focus on not being a dead weight. With the adrenaline receding, his body is shutting down fast.
The most delicate part is going down the metal ladder inside the manhole. They can't go two abreast, and John is in no state to hold on to ladder rungs, let alone know how to place his hands and feet.
They somehow make it down without falling, mostly thanks to the fact that there isn't far to climb. The tunnel underneath is barely taller than Erg, its floor made of cracked concrete and foul mud. John stumbles through, still holding on to Erg's shoulders.
“The main room isn't far,” Erg encourages him. “We'll find medical supplies there.”
By the time they make it, John isn't putting any weight at all on his left leg and he's moaning with every step. Erg takes him to an overturned chair that he barely has time to put back upright before John drops onto it, spent.
“Stay here,” Erg says, and John wonders absently where he thinks he might go in this state.
He doesn't know how long he grits his teeth through the pain, focusing on staying mostly upright and not sliding down to the floor, before Erg comes back with his hands full of bandages and supplies.
“Will you let me have a look?” he waves at John's torso.
John nods, trying to uncurl as much as possible. One wound in his side makes it nearly impossible, and he groans.
“I'm going to cut off your clothes,” Erg says. “We can always find you new ones later.”
“'kay,” John murmurs. He doesn't have the energy to argue, or even to feel embarrassed at Erg seeing him like that. It's not like he even cares, anyway. There isn't a lot left he cares about.
There's Marcos and Lorna, and the Struckers, gone for hours now into danger. The kids, kidnapped and forced to do God knows what. And Clarice, her presence still at the edge of his consciousness. Stronger, down here.
Erg has a hard time removing the cloth stuck into his wounds, even after cutting his shirt and jeans into pieces. John does his best to breathe through the pain, but he can't keep a few groans from passing his lips. He nearly topples from the chair more than once.
Erg cleans the wounds with actual disinfectant, stingy as hell but better than the pure alcohol John has used too many times before. Some of the bullets still embedded in his skin are close enough to the surface for Erg to take out with a knife. He spends a while checking each wound, while John grits his teeth. He's losing too much blood.
“I can't get to most of the bullets,” Erg says, trying to remove the one in John's right arm, outside of his field of vision.
“Leave them in,” John says. “Just stop the bleeding.”
“They could get infected.”
“It wouldn't be the first time. And Lorna can get them out later, if−” John trails off.
“Alright,” Erg nods. “This one is really deep, it went far into the muscle,” he adds, pointing to John's leg.
“I'm not even sure that was just one bullet,” John says. “Some of those guys had automatic guns.”
“Hm. You won't want to walk on that too much.”
“I noticed,” John says dryly.
Bullets have pierced his skin in more places than he can count, but that one in his thigh is the most painful, beside the one low in his side that's seriously starting to worry him. It still pulses with blood, and John can hear a gurgling sound just at the edge of his perception. It can't have hit an artery or he'd be dead already, but John has learned just enough about anatomy to know that it can't be good.
The best Erg can do is pack his wounds with gauze and hope John doesn't bleed out before...before what? Getting out of here and into a safer place is not the end goal. There is no medical attention to be received, beyond Caitlin's limited knowledge, if she's even still alive. And then what?
“You're running a fever,” Erg notices.
“I know,” John answers. His teeth have been shattering for the last ten minutes at least. He's colder than he's been in years, he who never feels the temperature.
“Don't move,” Erg says.
He looks through several tents before he comes back with a blanket. He drapes it carefully over John's shoulders. John nods gratefully. It doesn't make much of a difference, but at least he feels a little less exposed.
“I'll try to find you some pants. Let's see, Mason was about the right size.” Erg pauses sadly at that.
“Thanks,” John says when he comes back with a pair of sweatpants. “I don't want to−”
“He won't need them any more. But you do. You're freezing.”
John's body has seized up, and he's shaking too much to do more than let Erg dress him. He should hate this, being vulnerable in front of a man he barely knows, a man he actively resented until today. But he has no strength left for that kind of feeling.
Even talking is getting harder. Thinking. The fog taking over his brain is one he knows intimately, made of pain and exhaustion. Everything feels far away, like the world around him is not real anymore.
“I need to clean the blood off your face,” Erg says. “Can I take off that ridiculous face paint too?”
“Says the guy...with the eye patch and the brand,” John articulates with difficulty.
Erg actually smiles. “Well, can I?”
“Sure. It's war paint. I'm not in any shape...to fight now.”
“You left him alive,” Erg states.
“Clarice...she wouldn't want his death...on my hands. Not like that.”
“No, you're right. She wasn't one for revenge.”
John looks up at him, this man who only knew Clarice for all of a few weeks, yet has so much pain in his voice talking about her.
“It's why she...joined the Underground, though,” he says. “Her foster parents were killed. She was...so angry.”
“I didn't know that,” Erg says, starting to wipe his face with a wet cloth.
“But she didn't stay...for revenge.”
“She stayed for you.”
John shakes his head, looking away.
“I could see it,” Erg insists. “I offered to her to come here from the first day, but I could see she was staying for you. She already knew the Underground was falling apart.”
“She left,” John murmurs.
“She couldn't take it anymore. She left to protect herself.”
“And she died.”
Erg sighs.
“I am sorry,” he says, his voice so low John wouldn't hear it without his enhanced hearing.
John doesn't answer. Even talking about Clarice doesn't hurt as much, like his emotions have faded away, left the edges of the hole, of the miss and the need to fly away, like his body already knows he's closer to joining her.
He hears her, suddenly. It's hasn't happened in hours, since he left the apartment, but she's here again. Of course, she lived here. Her trace remains.
She died here, too, John realized. He was in the alley when he saw her get shot through the portal, but this is where she died.
“Where−” he starts, but his body is taken by a sudden wracking cough.
Erg holds him up as he coughs, so he doesn't fall off the chair. John is nearly limp in his arms, except for the hiccups.
“Where was she?” John asks when it finally recedes, when he can open his mouth again without fear of throwing up.
“Clarice?” Erg asks. John notices he's stopped calling her Blink. He called her Clarice before, in the alley, too. John was too surprised to pay attention.
He nods.
“She made her portal by the wall,” Erg says slowly. “The Purifiers came from that side.”
John notices, too, for the first time, the area on the other side of the room where boxes and tents are overturned, reduced to pieces. The scene of the shootout. There are bodies still lying there.
He looks back up at Erg, who's followed his gaze.
“I'll have to do something for them,” Erg says. “Later.”
“They were...your friends,” John murmurs. “I'm...sorry too.”
“Thank you. Now let's get you lying down before you fall.”
He ducks under John's arm again and carries most of his weight, as John grits his teeth. The tent Erg leads him to is small, with a camp bed inside.
John can tell immediately who slept here. Her scent hasn't left, it assaults him so strongly that his reaction makes Erg stumble.
“Sorry,” he mutters. “It's just−”
“You can feel her,” Erg understands. “I'm sorry. I did not think about it that way. Do you want to go somewhere else?”
“No,” John says, removing his arm from Erg's shoulders and lowering himself as carefully as possible onto the bed. He doesn't have the strength to move anymore, and Clarice's scent is actually comforting.
Seeing her everywhere has been agony ever since her portal closed in front of him, but now it feels welcoming. It should worry him, John knows. It means his mind is giving up.
He catches Erg's wrist before the man can turn away.
“Marcos, Lorna...” he says. “Can you find them?”
“I'll try,” Erg answers.
John settles against the pillow and watches him move away, skirting around the tents and furniture with practiced ease. He soon disappears into a tunnel, and John is left alone in the large room.
He brings his hand slowly to his collar, finding first his traditional medicine bag. He squeezes it for a moment, then looks for his dog tags. He carries the trinkets, the memories everywhere with him: Pulse's dog tag against his heart, his family and tribe in the little pouch, the watch Dreamer got for him ages ago, and the slightly crooked beaded leather bracelet Clarice made him, when he taught her how to bead.
They're all gone, now.
The darkness, the abyss looming in front of John, as his eyes close by themselves and his body goes lax, don't scare him. Maybe his friends will be there when he wakes up.
And if he doesn't, maybe he'll finally get the rest he longs for.