Slowing down makes Eliot aware of several points of pain, lighting up his body like a pinball game. His hands throb in time with his skittering heart, his eyes won’t stay open for more than a moment at a time, brief blurs of nothing but bright and dark, every single part of him feels scrubbed raw. He can feel a grinding ache in his knees, his shoulder. Everything strobes as he hauls himself on, feeling his way forward in inches.
He hears an answer to his question, small, strangled, but there. Someone here is alive. He thumps his way around a toppled dresser, an avalanche of shattered plates. It’s hard to place the sound. There’s an echoing roar in his ears that’s either the fire or his heartbeat making everything sound distant and small, even the gunshot-cracks of rafters snapping.
“Hey, keep talking. I – " his voice tightens up to a gasp, he waits it out, tucking chin to chest as he breathes, tries to get his bearings.
It strikes him that he doesn’t know which direction the door is anymore.
You are not a hero.
It’s not a revelation. Just an uneasy reckoning with something he’d always suspected but never stopped hoping he could fight.
“You gotta say something,” he says and it sounds like begging and maybe it is. He doesn’t want to think about that too hard. He feels tile under his palms, slippery with soot, then something soft. Someone. No. Body. This person is dead. Their arm rolls out of his hand, heavy, no resistance. He shakes them, tells himself he needs to stop, keep moving, there’s nothing he can do to help here, keeps shaking them.
He doesn’t want to open his eyes. This isn’t something he wants to see. But he has to know. He looks. They’re not the guy from the alley. He says sorry to this person, their wide, shocked eyes that his hands are trembling too hard to close. It feels stupid, something that people only do in movies, playing at being respectful. Asking for forgiveness from someone who can’t say no.
He knows he needs to move. There’s someone in this building he still has a fractional chance of being able to do something for.
"Please," he calls out, voice cracking and not quite managing to pull back together, "just tell me you're still there?"
CW: injuries, descriptions of a dead body in P7&8 here is a real party
He hears an answer to his question, small, strangled, but there. Someone here is alive. He thumps his way around a toppled dresser, an avalanche of shattered plates. It’s hard to place the sound. There’s an echoing roar in his ears that’s either the fire or his heartbeat making everything sound distant and small, even the gunshot-cracks of rafters snapping.
“Hey, keep talking. I – " his voice tightens up to a gasp, he waits it out, tucking chin to chest as he breathes, tries to get his bearings.
It strikes him that he doesn’t know which direction the door is anymore.
You are not a hero.
It’s not a revelation. Just an uneasy reckoning with something he’d always suspected but never stopped hoping he could fight.
“You gotta say something,” he says and it sounds like begging and maybe it is. He doesn’t want to think about that too hard. He feels tile under his palms, slippery with soot, then something soft. Someone. No. Body. This person is dead. Their arm rolls out of his hand, heavy, no resistance. He shakes them, tells himself he needs to stop, keep moving, there’s nothing he can do to help here, keeps shaking them.
He doesn’t want to open his eyes. This isn’t something he wants to see. But he has to know. He looks. They’re not the guy from the alley. He says sorry to this person, their wide, shocked eyes that his hands are trembling too hard to close. It feels stupid, something that people only do in movies, playing at being respectful. Asking for forgiveness from someone who can’t say no.
He knows he needs to move. There’s someone in this building he still has a fractional chance of being able to do something for.
"Please," he calls out, voice cracking and not quite managing to pull back together, "just tell me you're still there?"