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 Posted: Mon Feb 29, 2016 6:17 pm
After what felt like an eternity, he finally glimpsed Taijana in the darkness -- he spotted the glow of her eyes first, moving and struggling as she gasped for breath. This made him pull with more urgency, even though his arms were starting to burn from the strain. He couldn’t stop now. Pausing might kill her! The rope could break, or her grip on it might slip. He bit down on his lip, hard enough to bleed, and took sharp, quick breaths to dull the pain.
And then she was finally climbing onto the rock beside him, both of them wet and cold and exhausted. He pulled her close and held on although she was out of immediate danger, squeezing his eyes shut and listening their ragged breathing.
“I’m fine.” He finally breathed after she had spoken. It was a thin lie -- he was hurting, his lungs were sore from ingesting water, and they were still trapped deep in this underwater chasm, surrounded on all sides by rushing water. But he was alive, and she was alive, and that seemed good enough for the time-being. “You saved us, getting the rope looped around this rock like that. The gods only know how far and deep that stream goes, and…”
He trailed off, eventually, like she had, and for a while they clung to each other in dark silence, until their breathing steadied and his muscles stopped burning.
“Are you hurt? Did you fall hard? I was already near the water when the rope began to slip…”
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Posted: Mon Feb 29, 2016 7:21 pm
She held onto him as if he might disappear at any given moment. Taijana's breathing was labored, as if she were on the edge of hyperventilating despite the frigid water sloshing about in her lungs. I can't pass out here, not here, I can't... It was one thing to have an 'episode' on dry land, but down here she would be condemning herself to an early death.
"I didn't save us." She sobbed, pressing her face into his shoulder. "I doomed us both. The knot came undone and I didn't...I didn't see..." Thousands of 'what if' scenarios fluttered through her brain, but she couldn't grasp a single one. She had only succeeded in buying them time before their inevitable demise. Saying 'sorry' at this point felt like pissing in an open wound.
Taijana clung to him until her breathing started to even out enough for the sobbing to subside. She was no longer unsure if the roaring in her ears was caused by pre-faint symptoms or the current; this was definitely the echo of a furious stream, the very same one that threatened to swallow them whole.
"I don't remember the fall, but my arm..." Taijana leaned back to look at her left arm. It hung at her side, the rope still wrapped somewhat about her flesh. "When I got the cord around the stone it pulled my arm until something popped." She'd never had a broken bone in her life, and wasn't entirely sure if the pain in her shoulder was that or something else.
"...what do we do? No one will hear us if we call for help, and mother...she won't come to look for me until it's dark." By that point anything could have happened to them.
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Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 5:01 pm
“Shh, don’t worry about it.” He murmured, not sure how else to comfort the girl. Comfort and reassurance wasn’t exactly something that people had ever come to him for -- more often than not he had the opposite effect on people, unnerving them with his strange mannerisms and long, drawn-out silences. But here, at least with the roar of the water blocking out much of the awkward silences, he didn’t feel quite so unnerved himself. He let the girl sob into his shoulder, both of them waiting to recover.
When they pulled away, he squinted at her arm, noticing again that it hung quite limply. From her describtion of it, it wasn’t broken -- just popped loose, as she had said.
“We can pop that back in.” He ventured, resting water-wrinkled fingers on her shoulder. “It’ll hurt a bit, but… I’m not sure if you can get out without it. Not unless you want to chance… well, swimming downstream.”
The water that rushed quickly away from them, into deep and uncertain darkness, did not give him much confidence. He squinted upwards instead, and around them on either side, studying the places where the cave-walls came the closest. One of them was surely not beyond the stretch of a good jump. And from there he could see many a jagged rock leading the way up to open air -- the same rocks that had made getting water from this crevasse just that difficult. He noted then that Taijana still had the rope -- and pulled it loose from her arm to wrap it into a coil. It had left ugly red marks on her skin, but he decided not to mention them for now. Best to stay focused.
“I can climb up. I’ll play down the rope and pull you out. It isn’t torn, it only slipped. But you’ll need that arm to hold on.”
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Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2016 6:51 pm
"We...we can?" Taijana was surprised, though rightfully skeptical. She had never heard of such a thing happening. Neither she nor her siblings had ever been particularly daring so the worst any of them had received as far as injuries was concerned was a scraped knee.
"No! No more swimming." Shaking her head fervently, the young woman decided that any plan of his was better than trying to best the river again. "I can handle the pain; I'm tougher than I look." Which, frankly, wasn't very tough at all. Petite, sopping wet from both tears and water...Oh yes, Taijana was a force to be reckoned with.
She remained still as he removed the rope from around her arm, aware of a burning sensation across her skin, but too busy looking up to the cavern walls to pay it much mind. Would she be able to make that jump? Her mother's voice was strong within her mind, spewing venomous ichor to tear down her self-esteem, but her father's words were just as strong. If she wanted to she could make it, and Taijana wanted to; if only to make sure the wild man survived.
"Okay, let's do this. Just...just don't tell me when you're going to do it, or I'll fret over it." Which was more than likely going to lead in her hyperventilating and fainting.
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Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2016 5:22 pm
Painted Moose technically done, but maybe 1 more post each to wrap up the super-exciting plot? o w o
He had a sense of the truth in her words about not warning her (she seemed like a flighty sort, and he didn’t want to make it any worse). So, with no warning, he moved the hand that was already resting (in his attempt to reassure her) on her arm -- and, leaning forward to brace the rest of her against his torso, he pushed it firmly up and back into its socket. It made a rather spine-chilling sound, but… when the pain wore off, it seemed to do the trick.
“I’ll climb up and throw down the rope. If you can’t climb it, tie it to your waist and give it a sharp tug. I’ll pull you up. Ok?”
With that settled, he stood to gather the rope and tied it around his waist -- then leapt across to the wall in one leap. He stumbled a little at the end, slipping on wet rock, but caught himself and began his climb.
Upwards always came easier than down. The light from above outlined the edges of the rock, giving him obvious places to grip onto. He clambered up with relative ease, and soon enough found himself in the sunlight of the clearing. Taijana, he knew, would not be able to hear him… so he could only hope that she was still ok. He tied the rope to the same tree she had used before, tied a rock to the other end, and then threw it down. This time, he kept a careful hand on the rope, hoping that he would be able to feel either the tension of Taijana climbing, or the tug that suggested he should pull.
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Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2016 6:44 am
Taijana tried to prep herself as best she could, but the suddenness of it all brought a yelp from the girl. For that one moment the pain was worse than anything she had ever experienced in her life, enough to bring fresh tears to her face, but it was quickly beginning to ebb away. Her shoulder ached, though it was no where near the awkward, pulling limpness of earlier moments.
"O-okay, just be careful." I can do this. Popping her shoulder into place wasn't a big deal, and neither was climbing back out of the abyss. She wouldn't slip, and she certainly wouldn't drag them both back down to their untimely deaths. We're doomed.
Craning her neck, Taijana could watch Match scuttle up the rock face with relative ease. He made it look so effortless, so graceful...as if he had been born to do it. Once he was out of sight, however, a momentary panic hit her, but she fought through it. If he could do it then so could she!
So it came to be that when the rope descended to her Taijana wrapped it about her waist (for just in case purposes), puffed herself up, and jumped over onto the ledge. The jump came surprisingly easy, but the landing did not. She slid, nearly landing on her rump before falling back into the water. Bruised or not, she rose to begin her own ascension. Hers went much slower, and many a time she almost lost her grip on the wet stone due to sweaty palms.
When she saw the very edge she had fallen over Taijana felt like crying. Again.
She reached a hand up, and drug herself onto good, solid, safe ground. For a moment all she could do was lay on her stomach in an attempt to remember how to breath properly. Taijana peeped up through her bangs, laughing a little through puffs of air. Her hands moved at her sides, pressing upwards so that she could move into a sitting position before finally moving to rise up.
If her fingers could manage to stop shaking from the overflow of adrenaline in her blood then maybe she could undo the knotted rope about her waste. Although, a sudden, nagging thought hit her hard enough to cause her to groan.
"The water. Mother is going to kill me."
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Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2016 4:18 pm
Painted Moose yey! thanks for the rp. <3
“Are you alright?” He asked (again) when she, all of a sudden, groaned. Was she injured?
But it seemed that she was more concerned about the water, and her mother. Matchitemin shrugged faintly (a mother’s temper was not something he had any experience dealing with). Still, she shouldn’t be worried. It was he who had had the foolhardy idea of climbing in to begin with.
“It’s my fault.” He explained to her, reaching out to pat her arm. “You can tell her that. Tell her some stranger insisted on getting himself water and lost your pail in the stream. Then tell her, maybe… tell her that you shouted and threw rocks at me until I ran away.”
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