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Five minutes, all told, wasn't that long: not even for a broken FEAR shield, not even for a gunshot wound. But it was enough to produce a truly horrific amount of blood, and the blood concatenated with the enormity of the pain and his generally frail state and the sudden closeness of his death and the overarching, alien terror of the emptiness of his head without Fionnghal there meant that five minutes had been enough.

He barely reacted to Mark, didn't acknowledge the bandages, didn't acknowledge when the door opened and there were suddenly people again. The shock of the shield returning, in the classroom, had jolted a hard and shuddering and violent breath out of him, but that was the closest he'd come to actual noise. He was wrapping his thoughts around Fiona's like he was closing his fist around her solid wrist: possessive and desperate and terrified. She was, in turn, half-soothing and half-panicked, and entirely in a state of majestic rage at his stupidity.

"Four out of every five gunshot wounds are non-fatal," Taym said from somewhere far away, not really moving, not really, even, directly to Kostya. He said it like he was reading it off a slide. "This statistic includes gunshots to the head and the myocardium, which carry the lowest survivability rate."

He wasn't arguing with him, exactly (and the mangled mess of his arm would have made such an argument superfluous anyway): he was stating an interesting tidbit, unrelated, almost, to the situation at hand.

"I'm going to stand up," he informed him, matter-of-factly but very quietly, and then he proceeded to do so, his good arm clawing at Kostya as soon as he managed to attain his feet, before he buckled and Kostya was for a brief instant a crutch. "Five minutes is a long time," he said, faintly hysterical.

He managed a surprisingly long while: there was, beyond the odd expressionless of his face, his lack of reaction at Kostya's arms, a sort of jaw-set stubbornness that by now was probably intimately familiar to all of his acquaintances. He said nothing and protested nothing and stared sightlessly into the middle distance breathing hard through his nose because opening his mouth would betray how much pain he was in. Distractedly, twice, he reached up to touch the blood-soaked shoulder of his coat.

Some minute or so after it became obvious that he was going to collapse any second now it finally happened: more from pain, from stress, from the fact that he'd slept a mere hour or two and didn't have the bodily reserves to fight it like a healthy Hunter would have, than from actual damage. Fiona was working on the latter, but there was only so much she could do about the rest.

"Just a minute," he said. "Give me a minute."

And protests there were: immediate, noisy, bordering almost on violent, with childish, petulant, shout-accompanied attempts to get his feet on the ground stilled suddenly with an even-whiter face and a mute gasping breath when pain wrenched through his shoulder. Taym was weak on a good day, and whatever he might have had in him to wrangle Kostya into submitting to his need to save face he'd bled out in copious quantities onto the floor of Caelius's classroom.

The feeble, useless attempts to free himself and exercise some masculine dignity were abandoned rapidly, leaving him even more drained and withdrawn than before, and he settled instead for silently staring at all the blood (so much blood, he thought; his coat had been wet to the touch, his fingers had come away red) he was leaving on Kostya's shoulder. He said only one more thing, distractedly, wearily, seconds before they reached the infirmary doors: "******** doctors," he whispered, without any venom in it at all.

Obadiah's reactions were to be expected, given his personality. Kostya took them in stride, even if the Quartermaster was going to be very upset that he needed a new coat so soon.

"In no state for sexual intercourse," he idly replied, and let the waiting nurses open the door for him.

America's distress was palpable: he could hear her from afar. When she was close enough, and after she'd been hushed, Kostya quietly explained that "he shoot him aftervard."

There was no question as to who Kostya was referring to.

Stephen issued instructions, and without thinking, the Russian obeyed. He rolled up his sleeves, and produced a pocket knife from one of his many pockets. With a swift, efficient movement, Kostya slid it up the middle of Taym's shirt, pulling it aside. He cut the sleeves next, so that the garment could be entirely removed from the broken arm without jostling it further.

He had never seen a bullet wound up close, and of all Obadiah's wounds, it looked the most innocuous. Such a small thing, causing so much damage. It took a great deal of self restraint to resist the urge to dig his fingers into it, to widen it until he could grasp the bullet itself and pull it free from the grasp of muscle and tissue.

Kostya stepped back, regarding Taym's body with a cool curiosity. Strange: he'd never been intrigued by gore before, or the wreckage of it, but ever since his promotion, it lingered in every corner of his mind. He thought of the way the ones he'd saved at fallen to pieces, blown apart by a force so much stronger than they could ever dream of being.

With a red hand, he reached out to America, assuming that she might need a physical object to latch on to. She was often needy, in that respect.

Obadiah's hands were like icy claws, digging into his arm. Desperate, feeble, single-minded. It was good that Stephen's words assuaged him.

Despite Taym's insistent dismissal, Kostya made no move to leave. Taym had long ago lost the ability to force Kostya into action when demanded: betas did not take orders from omegas. Instead, he looked to Stephen for a cue.

If he could be of further use, he would stay.

And pass out he did, fingers scrabbling weakly as a mouse's paws clawing a sprung trap, and leveling out a few choice curses with his last conscious breaths.

When the world returned it returned in the form of pain: not just pain, but Pain, pain, capitalized and italicized, underlined in his awareness. Wrapped around it, tangled in it, was Fiona: disapproving and cautious and angry and soothing.

I know you know that that was stupid, sir, but I don't think you realize how stupid.

The pain was too large to allow for thought and that, at least, was a blessing. It swallowed up any motivation and impulse unrelated to itself, and left this: he could not show anyone. It was half wounded-animal instinct (look strong, look vital, do not let yourself be perceived as prey) and half a distant, hysterical fear of what they might try to do to shut him up, file or no file ("something of a history" he'd said in front of America and in front of Kostya and Taym hated him more for that than for how rough he'd been forcing his shoulder back into a place where it made some kind of sense). It had been a long time since he had experienced the sensation of simultaneously desperately wanting and desperately dreading. It was familiar, and he held it while he gingerly reached up, without opening his eyes and steeling himself to avoid flinching, to assess the damage.

The girl frowned but eventually nodded. Konstantin's ultimate reflex was in the practical, not the heroic. It made the times he slipped out of it more surprising and

running through the rain, coming to a stumbling, chaotic halt before her

strangely sweet in a way that she treasured. But that didn't change his nature, and while, in this instance, his reasoning gave her a sad sort of dissatisfaction, America could accept it.

She held tight to his hand in that hallway, regularly peeking into the room, unwilling to blindly trust the infirmary staff again. She didn't let go once Taym

unconscious, small, pale, fragile

was wheeled to a private room to rest and recover. Her hand gripped around his and became a comforting sort of leash. He had been in that room too. He was in Death division now. And while Kostya was not Taym, did not have that

destructive self-loathing whittling his body down carving caustic edges around every word every broken bend of his back cutting in small vicious jabs and he was always always flinching

particular nature, how long until existing in that same environment turned on this one as well?

Settling into a bedside chair, watching the IV get hooked up with a small, bitter feeling of relief, she asked, "So what are you gonna draw on his cast?"