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 Posted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 1:41 pm
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He
xxxxxxxremembered
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxway
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthat
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxall
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxworld
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxdropped
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxdead,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxwhen
xxxxxxxxxxxxxhe
xxxxxxxxxxxxclosed
xxxxxxxxxhis
xxxxxxxblackmarked
xxxxxeyes
xxxand
xxdared
xto
xxxbreathe
xxxxxa
xxxxxxxxxblackmarked
xxxxxxxxxxxxxbreath.
The ground shrugged him in a why. When his body throbbed in the way it never did, when his breathing rent in-rasp-out-rasp in that bubble-born way it never did, Faustite learned to panic.
And he panicked well -- nerves fire-lit and smoked, his lungs muttering water-breaths the way that doves did when they were drowning. But his back was drowning this time, drowning in black, and while his eyes looked forward, his mind wound back to bone hair and branch boots and bonesnaps under overbearing hands. Latin spoken like a death sentence. A cluttered calm that wasn't calm at all.
The warehouse shift-shaft stutter-stepped into existence, the floor a mocking jeer while Faustite slipped and stumbled and black smothered him in more black. Breath and cloth and bone struck the floor tympan-even.
xxxxxxxUntil
xxxxxxxhe
xxxxchurned
xxhimself
xxxback
xxxxxxxto
xxxxxxxxxxxlife,
never dead and ever ready. Off and on and off and on he went, his eyes never finding the prize. There was a med kit around here somewhere, a sanctum safe from Stroud and her satan touch, her salacious grins and her saccharine singsong that soured his too-black blood. But the pity-poor captain couldn't find it through all the ways he dropped dead, so off and on and off and on he went.
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Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2018 2:42 pm
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Some nights were more difficult than others, and still wallowing with a broken heart, sleep eluded Yuuri. The warehouse wasn’t cold but it wasn’t hot either, which meant Yuuri still shivered under the robe he’d tugged on over his pajamas.
The intention of poking around the kitchen for a late night snack was abruptly withdrawn when unfamiliar sounds met him. Labored breath? Someone in pain? The movements were of someone too small to be Lauri. An intruder?
But instead of immediately calling for his packmate, Yuuri peered around the corner, only to see Faustite looking like death.
"Lauri!" he called, voice cracking under the stress of not just seeing Faustite there and in the state he was in, but knowing that it was most likely his own doing that allowed Faustite access to the warehouse in the first place. He’d seen it, so therefore was able to teleport.
Yuuri felt the color drain from his face at the thought, and because the aura of a part youma Captain could make the warehouse a target.
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Posted: Tue May 08, 2018 9:12 pm
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Ensconced within soundproofed walls, he would have known nothing of Faustite's agonies save the spatters on the floor and the mangle left in the morning had the door not been left carelessly open.
As it were, the strange sounds and strained cry of his house-mouse reached through the veil of sleep and drew him up to consciousness. "Mitä helvettiä--" Lauri groused, shoving back the coverlet and rolling out of bed to head downstairs; whatever the ******** commotion was it could die in a fire.
Noisy. ******** Noisy. But worse than that, there was an aura that shouldn't be -- Tiberius huffed angrily at being slammed awake by a ******** youma aura when he was trying to sleep off a hangover before returning home to Stroud.
"I can't ******** handle thi--blearjaghghghgh--" Everything that had been in Tiberius' stomach came forth in a rather spectacular froth of partially digested foulness like a ******** high-pressure vomit fountain in cat form. Then, and only then, did he manage to engage his aura dampening abilities before stumbling over to the cat corner to find some water to re-hydrate his aching brain before it exploded.
Lemons ******** owes me so hard-hnnnggg.....
"Yuuri--" Lauri had no idea the s**t that Tiberius had gotten up to, having just made it to his packmate and the mangled mess masquerading as Faustite, "Perkele--" I'm not awake enough for this s**t-
"First-aid kit. And my silver box from upstairs. I'm taking him to workshop." Lauri was pretty sure that moving Faustite was a bad idea, but he needed him up higher and in a place with good lighting - his workspace fit the bill. Even the kitchen island wasn't well lit enough. "Try not to die on my floor." There was no good way to pick the half-youma up, but an awkward-as-hell bridal carry was what the Finn settled on to get his new patient moved. "Did you stick your hands in woodchipper?"
No. Really. Those angles weren't concerning. at all.
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Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2018 9:41 am
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Yuuri felt as though he was going to be sick, and it had nothing to do with the sudden retching sounds coming from the cat he didn’t even realize had been there. Tiberius’s presence and therefore his ability to hide auras wasn’t enough for Yuuri to let out a sigh of relief. Not when Faustite looked as he did.
Hands pressed against his own chest to try and calm his pounding heart, eyes wide and wet with fear as Lauri appeared by his side and gave him instructions for what was needed. The words reached his ears in a muffled sort of way, his attention flickering back to Faustite for just a moment before he forced his otherwise numb legs to make the motions of turning to climb the stairs.
He stumbled a couple times as his feet moved on autopilot, first retrieving the silver box and then stopping to pull out the large and well supplied first-aid kit. It was a miracle that he didn’t fall down the stairs on unsteady legs as he followed the trail of inky black to Lauri’s workshop.
Yuuri didn’t dare ask if Faustite would be okay. He didn’t dare do anything that he knew might break Lauri’s concentration, because he would need every bit of it. Instead, he set the kit and the box down within reach for Lauri, and tried to focus himself on opening the kit, carefully and quickly pulling out and placing the supplies along the counter for easy access.
That, and he wasn't sure he wouldn't actually be sick if he looked at Faustite's mangled body. The smell and sounds of dripping oil and labored breath was bad enough.
He gripped at the counter to steady himself and await instruction, eyes catching a glimpse of the inky black foot prints from his slippers where he'd tread in the fluids Faustite leaked.
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Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 12:10 pm
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Lifting Faustite was its own nightmare beyond just the logistics of moving someone that was injured and made unwieldy by both unseen injuries and metal pipes poking from their back. Lauri felt ichor spill over blunt fingers as they slipped past what should have been solid flesh to touch fragments of bone.
Bile rose swift and burning, chasing the taste of sleep from the back of his throat. He choked it back and set his jaw. Faustite did not need vomit added to the wreckage of his body, nor did the Finn wish to add anything to the swaths of ink across the floor.
'Senshi. Blonde. White. Face scar.' If he had heard nothing else, Aue would have known of the Garden senshi with the severe eyebrows and flame-coloured eyes. He with the practical speech and wary words for those idiotic royals as they postured at one another. Thraen. Everything he had observed of the senshi had cried danger.
Now in his arms, broken and spewing black, lies proof.
"Did you have starseed already?" Faustite lain out carefully on his workbench under fluorescent lights was a horrorshow of black and white, bone and ink. "He will need another, two." A speculative look cast down at the shattered mess on his workstation, "More, perhaps. Tiberius! I know you have some." Without bothering to see that his orders were followed, Lauri grabbed scissors to cut fabric away from streaked skin and bared bone, a low hissing stream of Finnish expletive flowing from his mouth at the damage exposed.
Tiberius, despite having been violently ill recently, was capable of providing two glittering starseeds for use in assisting with keeping Faustite from joining fan favorites like Apatite, Marthozite, or Tanzanite. The Finn wasted no time in dropping one into Faustite's mouth to be ground into souldust for healing- there was no point in ruining a perfectly good officer without cause, and he had no doubts but that she would take the cost of Faustite's loss out of his hide quite literally. "We see how far it goes before second."
Inspecting the mangled wrists was slightly better than watching Faustite's ribs crunch and knit in a grotesque sort of rewind. He reached for the silver box- decidedly not part of any store-bought first-aid kit- and withdrew a small glass ampoule from a box labeled Morphine Sulfate Inj USP 10mg/1ml. Such things were not easily obtained, but were useful to have on hand for cases like this one. Lauri took a syringe from the box as well, unsealing the single-serving opioid and piercing the sterile rubber and glass to draw the fluid into the syringe for injection.
He needs a doctor- he must settle for engineer and starseeds.
Barking orders for water, towels, arc welder and anything else, Lauri set to work.
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Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 4:53 pm
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White-flashed pain, sharp as a word of warning, but through his where and his why and his how. Fingers pressed like matters into his support. They dug and pried and backed away when they found secrets they didn't want, didn't like. So many lay in the complex secrecy of a half-youma's body — in the knit of bone and youma and steel alike. Bitten and affronted they always were when they found a nest of snakes, coiled and waiting like the first breaths of reality. His head churned, rocking, rocking, lulling about like a listless ship.
Lauri's questions received only the barest responses — 'no' a breath on the air to inquiry of starseeds. That his were poached off of him like so much contraband was left out, too expensive and too irrelevant to his life right now. Lurid sprays of color desaturated under blood and loss. He blinked wearily, slowly. Pain ebbed with an ocean of black.
Like so many sinusoidal waves.
A weight touched his tongue. He rolled it between teeth with drilled obedience, spent no time on the flavor, no time on its implications. He bit with half an expectation for feline bile. None came but a brilliance that chased back a measure of dark. The tide never rolled in to replace its dried gulfs.
What came of starseed was road rash's slow retreat. Pockmarked black evaporated from his face like so much smoke. Set was his nose, though not healed, and the dusts of bruising along his body smoothed to alabaster. But his back still bled a gruesome sight and his wrists still throbbed with bone splinters, restless and limp, tools meant for a better devil. He needed another, and another he would receive by the cat's concession. Bleary, cobwebbed thoughts wandered to favors and the half-formed thought departed at once.
With the second came the slow, methodical march of ivory into position. Skin melted over breaks where bone retreated. His breath hitched, half-pained and half-relieved, as his back braced him upward again. His left wrist's open fracture righted lightly. And somewhere in that swath of pain, clarity ebbed all the more.
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Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2018 9:22 pm
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It took nearly everything Yuuri had not to cry. To see Faustite mangled like he was, to hear the stress in Lauri’s voice as he barked his orders. Yuuri did his best to retrieve each item needed, purposefully grabbing more things that might be useful. Extra towels, extra water, water for Lauri to drink as he worked on the steaming, mangled mess that was Faustite.
This was done while also trying not to take it personally that he was being ordered around more harshly than he was used to by Lauri. He knew the situation was an extremely serious one, and the least he could do was shut up and do as he was told. He was more useful for grabbing things than Tiberius was, anyway.
Used towels were snatched out of the way and replaced with clean ones, tools that Lauri seemed to be using more often grabbed for and quickly wiped down so that it wouldn’t slip from his grasp the next time he needed it.
He had no idea if what he was doing was helping or if he was managing to get in the way, but he certainly didn’t want to see Faustite die.
“Lauri…” Yuuri choked in distress, blackened hands lifting to cover his mouth and lower half of his face as he watched Faustite go limp on the work table. Yuuri’s heart stopped for several moments before he realized that Faustite was still alive, just… he must have passed out from the pain. He couldn’t blame him.
Yuuri quickly shook his head to waive off any attention he might have called to himself in his momentary panic. Lauri needed to focus on making sure Faustite was being put back together, and so Yuuri stood by, oil staining his pajama shirt as he clung to the front of it, as he waited for more orders from Lauri.
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Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 6:24 pm
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On the Finn's no-longer pristine workbench, Faustite remained human wreckage clothed in swaths of ink even after two starseeds administered, it spoke volumes on just how badly damaged he'd been. The spine and wrists were most concerning - and also things he could possibly help, in an engineering sense. Wetwork was nothing he had much experience in beyond basic butchery - cut and stitch, field style - but hardware Lauri could handle.
So long as Faustite could survive it.
The half-youma fainted on the table, going limp and still so that Lauri had a moment of stress in identifying there was still a pulse in the broken creature laying before him. Faustite's pulse was thready, erratic, but it was there. Would straight up energy supplement the starseeds in keeping Faustite alive? Full youma fed on it, so in theory that could only improve the captain's chances at survival. Yuuri was the obvious choice to take care of these things while he was working with metal, bone, meat, and ichor.
"Give the cat your reserve starseed, just in case." Lauri did not want to fully transform Schörl's pet into a youma, but neither did he wish for Faustite to die - he had a sneaking suspicion that she would exact payment from him personally for doing so.
A great deal was being asked of Yuuri, with his delicate constitution and nerves, but there was nothing that could be done about that - a great deal was being asked of each of them. For Faustite to survive, for Lauri to fix, for Yuuri to help. In fact, the only being not being asked to go above and beyond was Tiberius, who bitched drunkenly about having to block another aura (but shut up quickly as he got another whiff of Eau de Borkstack.)
Titanium will work, it's what we have...I'll have to drill support through whatever bone manages. ********, he needs X-ray-- If he had time, it could be built, home-brew. It wasn't hard to make something functional - they didn't need hospital crisp images, just something legible. But there wasn't time and they'd be ******** lucky bastards if Faustite's bones healed straight from this. "A proper frame could alleviate shift..." The Finn was muttering, moving to pull pieces of metal from various bins and eyeballing the sizes critically before selecting two rods, one half as large as the first. "The area is small, a bridge fixator, not a halo."
Faustite was small. And yet. Both, maybe. He pulled small flats of metal to go with the rods, and a spool of fine metal wire that glinted hungrily in the bright overheads. Setting his kit down, the Finn put his hair up into a quick, messy bun using a stray hair tie to hold it in place. Delightful. A horrific mess.
Prepared as he would ever be, with Faustite as deadened to what was happening, there was only the engineering problem before the Finn: organics be damned, the body was a structure, he'd make it happen.
Internal support fixation came from shaped and smoothed metal plates and the fine metal wire. External support built on a stainless steel hollow tube in a square shape, with two smaller struts going into Faustite's index metacarpal as one series of anchors to the rod, and another series sinking into the radius to anchor the rod. It was crude as hell and offered nothing in terms of movement, but for a rush job, it was the best he could offer. Given a few more hours of sleep and a few hours of research, Lauri could have come up with something more like what was actually used in the medical field in terms of actual usefulness...but on the fly?
Functional was what one got.
Each garbage wrist was given the same treatment, with the Finn doing his best estimation of where things should be based on how well the starseeds had healed the captain and what he knew of anatomy. The back...well, without X-ray, that he could not help so well beyond cleaning and wrapping for the moment.
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Posted: Sun Nov 25, 2018 10:06 am
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He did as he was told, since that was really all he could do. Yuuri did his best to remember to breathe, to focus on keeping Faustite alive and not letting himself succumb to his fears. It would be no help to Faustite or Lauri if he had a panic attack now. After was another story, but now? He did what he could.
He powered up briefly to retrieve the starseed that was requested, then powered back down so he could help. Staying out of Lauri’s way was, of course, the most important thing he could do, but he also quickly cleaned up any oily blood that spilled onto the floor and replaced instruments with clean ones when the tools Lauri was using turned black and slick.
Trying to make Faustite more comfortable as he was unconscious was a task as well. He went through a couple cold packs and thawed out two bags of vegetables on Faustite’s forehead before he gave up and decided to just keep the sweat and oil from getting in Lauri’s workspace.
And breathe, he reminded himself as he took a deep breath, not realizing until that moment that he was feeling light headed from inadvertently holding it for too long.
Yuuri kept as silent as he could throughout the process, knowing that his flitting around was probably just as much of a distraction for Lauri as someone talking would have been. But it was better than slipping or dropping a tool into Faustite’s… new hardware.
By the time it seemed as though Lauri was done, Yuuri was a trembling mess of nerves. Tears were stubbornly held back, even if they blurred his vision from time to time, and he shakily held out a glass of water in one hand, and a beer from the refrigerator in the other.
“Is he going to be okay?” Yuuri quietly asked after swallowing back the emotion that tightened his throat. Faustite sure didn’t look like he would be okay, but with Lauri’s engineering and a starseed or two… maybe...
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