Prompt #68 Nurse: #68 - Nurse

Challenge #68 - Nurse

Where Evan appeared from the portal, time seemed to shift and snap with a painful physicality: the slow fraying insanity that leaked out from the home-side all of a sudden congealed again into up and down, in and out, light and darkness.

From Jo's point of view, a tear ripped into the center of the ruins, right where she'd been spat out several months ago.  By this point, enough of the little fuckers that had tried to rip her apart had tried to spill through the portal that there was now a permanent dark patch beneath it. Loops and coils of something purple and red and bilious had managed to gain traction directly beneath the sometimes flickering portal, but the rest was charred. It was charred because of her: when she came back to these particular ruins, she combed the place and burned whatever she could find that had managed to make it over. She was glad that this portal, at least, wasn't stable, and that it only connected to home (or what was left of it) intermittently.

She was expecting the wax hand things. Awful little twisted body parts often coughed themselves into existence here. Sometimes, Evan-sized and shaped things would arrive, too. But Evan's screaming was still human enough that Jo stayed her finger on the trigger of her rifle. She shifted her aim at the last moment, firing a round into a hand that was melting and skittering towards her.

Too many of them for her to use a conventional weapon against, and besides, half of them were on this stranger. She changed her focus from eradication to triage, and surged forward to help. Cursing all the while, she spoke the words she'd learned to curl heat into her hands, though it singed her, too. It helped her *see* the little fuckers, to grab the wax hands off of Evan and throw them back from whence they came, and then when the portal closed again, to snarl the word of power that would burn them down to char.

She was in the middle of all this when Evan hit the ground, for hte portal had ejected him like a man-canon, and a cloud of dust coughed up behind him as he came to a halt. She didn't yet recognize him. Evan had not been a particularly close friend even before things had gone terribly weird at home; with his face the way it had become... well.

Jo hurried over to him and put a steadying hand on his shoulder, trying to assess his damage. God, what a thing to even begin to fathom. Her hand was still hot, and her eyes blazed. All of them. "*Are you okay?*" Her voice gave a sussurus, like insect legs vibrating on their own wings. She didn't notice it.

"Aaaaaaa!" He almost flailed her off, one big jerk of his shoulder, but stilled. He could hear himself screaming now, in a slow and then all-at-once recovery of self-awareness and lucidity, and just like that, the scream died down. Not because he didn't think screaming was warranted, exactly. Screaming just wasn't something he did, or thought of himself as doing, generally speaking. Even if his heart felt like it was going to beat itself to death. Even if his whole body was one big pain. Holy shit. Holy shit.

There was wax all over him, overtop of the shrapnel wounds that still bled. Had those been hands?! He whipped to stare at the figure who seemed human, not sure if she sounded strange or something was still off with his senses, his eyes wide. No, his eye wide -- one was covered in wax that streaked over it and up into his hair, glued shut. Fuck. Burned shut? Melted shut?

"What," he tried, hyperventilating, "who," and then, "wait," and then, "Jolene?"

"Who wants to know?" she asked, all at once put off enough that the fire went out of her. The sight did, too; for just a moment she felt like she could see every pore and vein and know without a doubt that whoever this was, they were comprised entirely of pain and fear. Now, blinking back the disorienting lapse that using her elemental abilities seemed to cause, Jo saw only a bloodied and mangled nerd.

"Shit," she said, eloquent as ever. "Evan?!" She dropped to her knees and tried to look him over more carefully, see where the bleeding was coming from, see if she could staunch it. She figured everyone she'd ever known had been _dead_. Well, save for Ryan, but when he hadn't come through the portal with her, it had made for a pretty grim last few months.

This at once gave her the hope and the horror that she _wasn't_ the only person to have survived. This meant terrible things.

Her mind churned, but her hands knew what to do. She grumbled at him, offering support to haul him to his feet. "We can't stay here. You need help. Come on, can you stand?"

He didn't take the proferred help. Her fire-helped sight hadn't lied: Evan was lucid again, but all that meant was that he was having a panic attack and aware of it, rather than having a panic attack while also out of his mind. He was panting, hands twisting and running over themselves.

"What was that,"  he didn't quite ask, "what the fuck was that, what was that," and, trying to peel strips of wax off of himself, he winced and made a horrid little noise; they came off of his clothing okay, but left welts where they'd run over the skin of his hands. He stopped, flexing his fingers, pupil blown out, body shaking. 

But he did snap focus back to Jo then, "was that you, did you get me out of there? What did you do? What was that?"

She blinked at him, changing her gesture of help to both hands raised, fending off the slew of questions. "You fucking want _me_ to educate _you_? I don't know, I never _did_ know; I know even less now that you're here than I did a second ago." She huffed in exasperation, pushing dark hair out of her face. "Look, don't think about it right now. Evan." She put her hands firmly on both of his shoulders. She wasn't dumb enough to shake him, at least. He looked concussed. "Hey, buddy. Look at me. We have to move. Get up." and so, with multiple short, stupidly easy little cajoling verbal kicks, she tried to rouse him to action.

"Don't make me carry you, because I will, and you're _never_ going to live it down."

"Don't," he said immediately. She hadn't shaken him but he'd tensed up when touched, and several things had begun to yell at him when he had. So, rather redundantly considering all the visible blood, he said, "I think I'm hurt."

He held up a hand against any aid from her, and instead gingerly, very gingerly, began to work himself to his feet. He was shaking terribly -- where he'd fell and slid, his back and hip were screaming protest, but at least he'd been covered and wasn't raw. His whole front was a hundred small hurts, but thankfully everything moved. 

He was trying not to think of his eye. It hurt. He couldn't think about it.

Finally he was vertical -- shaky, but vertical -- and could look around. He shuddered: everything was concrete, at least, but this was not a kind landscape, this was not a canny landscape. He had passed through something to get here, and he had no concept of what or how, or what it meant. What could it mean? His eye hurt.

He shuddered, mind skipping and shorting out, and in a desperation looked at the one point of familiarity, here. "Where?"

"Not home," was all that she planned to say, then, feeling brittle about the arrival of a friend, "not on Kansas, not on the same fucking _planet_." But she wasn't going to speculate too far, at least not right away. She settled her pack and raised her arms, goading him to move. "I know somewhere safe. Come on, it's not too far from here... but you have to move. And we can't stay here. More of those things could get spit out any minute, and they're not all that wimpy."

When she finally had him walking, it was evident that whatever ruins he'd landed in were not wide-spread. Not here, at least. Broken down concrete and asphalt gave way to a long, sharp drop, and beyond it, the sky was clear and the fields of golden grasses stretched long and far, save for little hillocks of trees, and villages that were toy-sized for their distance. There were stranger things, too, though from here none of them nearly so strange as what he'd just experienced. Jo led Evan close enough to the cliff's edge for him to sight-see without fear of going over, and she kept close enough to grab him, should he lose balance.

"What was the last thing you remember, before... that?"

He got close enough to look, and stopped, feeling too dazed and dizzy to think much of a dazing and dizzying view like that. Her question was just as disorienting.

"The front was coming," he said, brow furrowing. "I was waiting for it. Then the house... exploded? The wax was my fault," he realized, and shuddered. "And then the cards... oh. Fuck."

He patted his pockets, front and back. The cards were not, in fact, in his pocket. He whipped around -- wobbled badly, hands out, still tried to look for the little box. Had it even been real? He'd dropped them, but he'd still had them. One of them. "The cards. Jesus. There."

Back closer to the portal, though farther than Evan had been thrown, was a little nondescript wooden box a little larger than a deck of cards. It sat in a puddle of melted wax. Evan started back towards them.

"What..." Jo started to call out, then realized the futility of it. "Hey, wait!" She didn't need long to catch up to him, strained as he was. Suddenly, she had more questions, or rather maybe it was safer to say that the dam had burst, and the questions she'd been furiously stamping down threatened to overwhelm her. But if Evan went anywhere near the portal, she wasn't sure what would happen. When she'd first arrived, things had gone terribly. She didn't want a repeat of it.

Unfortunately for them both, the portal had not fully closed. It was a fickle thing, and though it wasn't visible to the eye, there was something cracking and dripping from nowhere. Once they passed back within the local bounds of the ruins, the temperature dropped. Sharply.

Something had reacted to the overthrown candles, and to Jo's propensity to use firepower. And Evan, bent on his cards, maybe didn't see it for what it was. The slick purple, black-red and off-white mound of gore beneath the protal was iced over, and hoarfrost crackled out in skittering vines that made for the little wooden box like it was treasure to be claimed.

With it came a singing sound, eerie and not at all friendly, or human. As Evan grew close enough to pick up his cards, something else reached out and seized them at the same time. Something still connected to the portal, something that brought with it the vertigo of the other side.

That insane uncanniness was still so close, so recent, but he didn't -- maybe couldn't -- maybe didn't think to turn away. 

"No!" He made a grab for the cards himself, feeling the tendrils in his own mind branch out again, the non-comprehending of patterns that he couldn't quite see in that something-else. In rejection to the cold, or in response, the wax on his face had begun to run, to melt out of his hair and down his face and into the eye that was still sealed shut. The tear duct drank it in obscenely.

Evan, touched and out of his senses again, clung to the card box in a chaos and fell over.

It wasn't sensical, and it had been long enough that Jo had been out of the hell that was home to fully comprehend what was happening, but she could see that something was creeping over Evan, and she wasn't going to let it take him away. Not when she'd only just discovered him. Not when he was the only link to her past that remained besides these horrible monsters.

She flexed her hands, looking-- really _looking_-- for trouble. Where Evan fell, frost began to bead over his clothing, and in rivulets that ran both ice and water, veins that traced back into the mess where the portal sometimes lay. She snarled, then, feeling an insane kind of anger surge through her, and she interposed herself between the portal and the man, stomping down on the vein of ice like it would do anything at all.

In point of fact it fucking _did_. She felt an electric jolt of pain up her heel and leg, but that strange inhuman singing pitched up in a scream that grew more desperate as Jo pushed fiery heat into the ground where the thing writhed and offgassed thick, white steam.

Where Evan had been struggling, the grip opposing him jerked and went feeble, the cold more humid and sickly in a way that felt awfully internal, even as he could interpose a sense of self beyond it.

The world was a nonsense again, briefly, and for a moment Jo scared him as badly as the sense of a creature in the ice, in the water. He'd latched both hands around the cards and the moment the grip of the other loosened, he yanked: freed, he rolled away desperately, limbs feeling too loose and out of control to push himself to the feet without falling again. That singing had gotten into his head, scrambled it, and the wax didn't bear thinking about. 

He finally found his hands and knees, shoved the box down his shirt -- cried out as he jarred a couple of slivers of house still embedded in his skin -- and crawled desperately back the direction Jo had been taking him.

While Evan retreated, Jo found herself gripped in a battle of... of _some_ kind. She wasn't thinking anything out, only knew that she had a grip on something really awful, and she wasn't going to let it go until it was dead. Steam billowed up so heavily that if Evan looked behind him, he'd see nothing, and the very human yelling that came with it fragmented and buzzed apart for a few seconds, and then nothing.

Silence continued until the chill dissipated to something tolerable, until Evan had enough time to recover himself and his meaningful little deck.

Jo took her time in turning, her mind only coming back in slivers. She _hated_ this place. She hated how it made her feel... but usually she was alone when something like this happened. When she locked eyes on Evan, she didn't look friendly. She looked distinctly the opposite.

By then he had managed to push himself up onto his knees, and tuck the deck (with shaky hands) into his back pocket, the pocket that clearly had been holding it for some time, and impression and outline left in the denim. He'd had enough time, too, to shake off the disjointing of his mind and the freezing of his fingers enough to cling back to lucidity, barely. 

He watched her turn, pushing himself to stand again and damn his floppy limbs. That gaze froze him in place worse than the chill.

"Jo," he tried, wary, afraid. Nothing made sense; none of this was good. She had helped, saved him, even, but moment by moment things were changing. Was she? "Jo?"

For a few moments, she only glared at him, but soon enough she sneered, breaking eye contact. "I told you to keep _moving_, jackass, why the fuck won't you listen to me? It's not safe here. Let's go."

"I gathered," he said, faintly. He didn't apologize; it seemed a stupid, meaningless thing to do, and he hadn't a justification anyhow. 

Wrangling his shaking, heavy limbs, shaking out his hands, limping painfully, he meekly obeyed.

------

The walk wasn't overlong for Jo, but she'd been back and forth along this trail for months, and even feeling frost-crusted and shaken, she knew the way. Stopping for Evan every so often made it longer, and she had to cajole him now and again. It wasn't a pleasant reunion.

At least here, wherever 'here' was, was in the midst of a warm summer afternoon, and as they descended a gentle slope, they entered a picturesque forest alive with birdcalls and the rustling of very mundane plant life.

The Inn was built along a dirt road that seemed to head onward to a town, though Jo didn't comment on it. She brought Evan in through a side door, dropping an unusual key back into her pocket, and marched him up the steps slowly and painfully until they reached a room marked by symbols that didn't parse.

Jo said, plainly, "this is my room. Sit down there," she pointed to a bed as she set her pack on a low-backed chair, and hung her rifle carefully off its back. She disappeared for a minute through a side door, perhaps to some kind of bathroom.

This place was plainly a hotel room, rented for some time. The sheets were rumpled, and clothing was piled loosely all over the floor and out of a simple chest. Every surface was covered with supplies or tokens strange places. Near where Evan sat, a journal was open to a mostly empty page.

The sound of pouring water and rustling from the next room heralded Jo's return. "We're gonna get you cleaned up. You look like fucking Carrie right now. That fucking _eye_." 

More than the wounds, more than his rescuer's anger, Evan spent the whole walk back behind Jo trying to get his head around what happened.

Partially that was distraction. If he thought at all about the state of his body -- if he paid any attention to how much he hurt, he was at real risk of sitting down on the trail and curling up into a little ball. But while he couldn't do anything for his body, he could at least try and get his mind in order. 

It was an uphill battle, considering.

By the time he was sat, unsteady and near passing out, in Jo's weirdly medieval rented room, he thought he had pieced something of it together. Maybe. He had theories, anyways. Jo derailed him, though, thoroughly: he had been really trying not to think about his eye.

He brought a hand up to his face, but didn't touch, too afraid of the pain. The eye was still closed for the same reason.

"How bad?" He swallowed. "It does... it hurts quite a bit."

"It looks like you burned the shit out of it," she said, and she settled her supplies on the bed next to him. "Hold still, I'm gonna look at it." Jo, despite her harsh tone, was careful as she leaned in. "Or maybe those wax things burned it... but still. Shit, I wish I had some magic." She sighed, like that was a real thing she regretted. Then she picked up a pair of tweezers, sucking in her lower lip as she shook her head. "You're not bleeding too bad. We'll get this shit out of you and get some bandages on."