fadewalk | RP: Tali, Neria, Garrus ((TW: blood, mild self-mutilation))

Cold. She was…

Pain bloomed across her body, but Meredith refused to fall back into the sweet, quiet darkness. Pain was real. She was…

Meredith opened her eyes to darkness as absolute as that which had held her back from her pain. She couldn’t feel her fingers, until she tried to move her arm and they exploded into tingling sensation. The toes of her right foot would not wiggle, but her left did and they would have to be enough. She lifted her head and she was…

She came close enough to the surface of the darkness to notice that she no longer felt the cold. She knew that was not a good sign, but she was…

She was awake.

The chains of the shackles holding her wrists rattled as she felt the links. They were threaded through an old metal loop stuck into the floor, presumably in the middle of the room. She wriggled carefully downwards and found the wall nearly her height away from the loop. When she tried to stand the shackles barely let her get to one knee. At a probing touch to her bad ankle, she nearly screamed for the pain, and the crumpled, sticky state of her greave left her no illusions as to what state she was in.

Meredith sat, legs bent with her right closer to protect it. Her mouth was dry, but she was not yet hungry that she could tell. There was an itch. And something she was forgetting, something important.

Meredith took the metal loop in both hands, and pulled. It shifted. Her fingers moved downwards, searching along the metal plate attached to the floor. One bolt, tight. A second, loose. She tried to twist it, but her numb fingers couldn’t catch on it. The third was similarly not quite loose enough, but the fourth.

Meredith smiled, and licked blood from her lips. It was a start.

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The smell of rusted iron grew thick in the air, not all of it from the bolts Meredith worked at. She put her fingers in her mouth, sucking the blood and rust from them. The flavor seemed familiar, but something about the metallic taste wasn’t quite…

She spat out the rust and went back to twisting the second bolt free. It had gotten stuck, which was to be expected of something so old. Frustrated, she kicked at it with her left foot, then froze when she heard a tiny snap. The bolt wiggled a little more freely in its socket, so she shuffled to a better position and lashed out.

The first two hits were awkward, striking with the ball of her foot. The third was with her heel, but skidded off and scraped up the back of her calf halfway to her knee. The screech of the bolt against her greave was piercing after so much quiet, and Meredith had to stop herself from clapping her hands over her ears.

The ringing passed eventually, and Meredith breathed shallowly through it. Her fingers scratched idly at her scalp while she waited, and when she realized what she’d been doing she pulled her hands away. She could feel the blood thick under her nails, but she knew somehow that it wouldn’t satisfy the itch. It was something too far under her skin for fingernails to reach.

She lined up her foot carefully, feeling exactly where her foot would strike before she pulled back. The first hit landed perfectly, the second as well, and on the third there was a crack that reverberated through the loop up through her chains, and with one last hit the bolt flew free into the darkness. She heard it hit the wall and roll, but it didn’t matter where it had ended up now. She shuffled back to her sitting position, feeling for the other partially loose bolt.

Halfway there.

Meredith coughed and blood flew from her mouth onto her forearm. She rasped her dry tongue against her vambrace, swallowing down what of the tacky fluid she could find. Anything that might help.

She wriggled the third bolt back and forth, feeling it beginning to give. But her fingers slipped yet again and she hissed in frustration. She lapped at her lacerated fingertips, sucking the moisture away regardless of the rust that went down with it. She chewed on them only a little, just to satisfy the itch for a moment, before she put them back to work.

Again, she pried at the bolt. It shifted, feeling like the threading was nearly all gone. And then again, her bloodied fingers slipped. Growling in frustration, she grabbed her chains and yanked on them.

Something cracked.

Meredith froze, waiting for the flash of pain. But there was nothing other than the haze that had settled after she’d stopped trying to probe her right ankle. She cautiously pulled on the chains again, and this time she heard the metal plate shift against the floor.

The third bolt had snapped.

She shuffled to her knees, collected what little slack remained to the chains, and yanked. Over and over, listening to the grating of the final bolt against the stone. At last, forcing it every bit of the way, the bolt ground loose and the metal loop released from the floor.

PAIN.

Meredith fell to her side, releasing her chains to clutch at her nose. But the instant she touched it she had to pull her hands away for the pain. A fresh gout of blood ran down over her mouth, and she did her best to lick it up. It joined the blood running down her throat and she had to gasp for air between swallows. Her nose throbbed in time with her heartbeat, and she lost count four times while she waited for it to ease. Finally, she could delicately trace the damage. Broken, certainly.

Irrelevant. She was loose.

Meredith crawled to the wall and began to circle, looking for the door that she knew had to be there. It took three walls before she found wood, and she eagerly traced the edges she could reach. The latch was just level with her head when she straightened on her knees. Breathing fast, still rasping her dry tongue against her blood smeared lips, she pulled on the handle.

The door rattled, but did not move.

Confused, she tried again. And again. She shook the handle, pulled as hard as she could. Nothing. She felt around the door, as high as she could reach, but there were only the hinges to show that it should swing inward. Bracing against it, she struggled to stand on her good foot. There was nothing along the top, nothing that was holding her back.

Not on this side.

Meredith pressed her body against the door, too dry for tears, and started banging her gauntleted fist against the thick, ancient wood.

Edited Date: 2015-08-31 12:33 am (UTC)

Meredith didn’t want to move away from the door. Somehow, she was certain it would disappear the moment her hand pulled away from it. So she reached, feeling along the floor, first feeling nearby but reaching farther and farther until her fingertips were barely brushing the wood. She felt the solidity of the door and let it reassure her, and then pulled away.

She crawled slowly, letting her fingers linger over the grooves in the flagstones. They were somewhere in the room, and she only needed to find one. Her open mouth panted dry breaths over her knuckles, and she didn’t bother trying to lick the seeping blood away as she crawled. It only settled in a cloying layer over the tongue now, useless.

She thought she felt something for a moment, but it rolled away as she bumped her fingers into it. But it made noise as it went, and she reached out again. Her hand came down on top of the bolt, and she pulled it toward herself ever so carefully. It took some time for her battered fingers to form a fist, but she clutched it tight as she hurried back to the door.

It was still there when she returned, and Meredith gave herself a moment to let out a choked sigh. Her arms and legs shook badly, the itch under her skin had become a crawl, but she could not lay down. She didn’t remember why, but she was sure that if she did, something terrible would happen.

She sat up against the wall next to the door, and the moment of rest was nearly enough to undermine her determination to stay awake. But she lifted her fist, pressing the bolt against the underside of the hinge, and pushed. She could feel the hinge pin lift ever so slightly, and she had to pull away to readjust the bolt and ready the metal plate still hanging from her chains.

She pushed up with the bolt, slid the plate under the head of the pin and carefully, so carefully, pried it up enough that she could grab it and pull it out. She lost the bolt in the process, but now it didn’t matter. She held the pin in both hands and practically crawled her way up the wall so she could reach the second hinge. The hinge pin fit perfectly, displaced it’s pair with astonishing ease and the sound of it falling and rolling away was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard.

Meredith laughed. It was hoarse, and breathy, but it was a victory.

She tried to pry at the door with her fingers, and then the hinge pin, but it wasn’t until she used the rusty metal plate that the door finally pried loose. And then in a cacophony, the door leaned, twisted, toppled, and slammed to the ground.

Slowly, Meredith went back to her knees. She crawled over the prone door, out into the pitch black hallway beyond, and freedom.

((OOC: Hopefully I've given a fair picture of Meredith's injuries, but I couldn't find a natural way to make it clear in the prose so I'll do it here as an FYI to anyone who comes across her: Meredith can't see.))

(OOC: How does meeting an off-worlder sound? *grin*)

((OOC: Absolutely delightful.))

Ever since the Envy demon incident, Tali had been spending more and more time away from the Normandy. It was too quiet in the powered-down ship - she kept waking up afraid that something had gone terribly wrong with the engines, only to realize that something already had and she couldn't do anything about it.

Today, she was being incredibly nosy and exploring all the out-of-the-way hallways and rooms of Skyhold. Or at least, she had been until she'd read Inquisitor Lavellan's warning about a dangerous criminal lose in the fortress. Now, she was wondering whether she should have stayed in the more populated areas of the castle - this woman sounded as dangerous as Aria T'Loak, and earlier Tali had been startled by a loud bang, as if something heavy had fallen from a great height. Who knew who was around and what they could do to a fragile (hungry - she had been rationing the food so that Garrus and she could eat, but they were being to get low...) quarian?

She rounded a corner and let out a shriek of surprise at the sight of a woman in badly battered armor crawling along the floor, a trail of splattered blood showing the woman's progress down the hallways.

The hallway seemed to have no end. Her left knee guard scraped as she shifted it forward, then her right vambrace as she pushed her forearm ahead. Somewhere, she knew, there had to be light. There had to be water. She kept pushing, though everything below her elbows had gone numb. Though she couldn’t feel her face. There was light somewhere.

She had stopped moving. Or rather, she had stopped moving forward. She was still shaking, the crawl under her skin wracking her with tremors. She shifted her weight so she could heave her right leg forward, but-

Noise!

Meredith’s arms slid out from under her, and her face ignited into pain as it smacked into the floor. There were noises scraping their way out of her throat, and she stifled them immediately. Something screeching was here in the dark with her. Her ears strained, eyes wide to catch some hint of movement.

"Oh damn." Tali stared at the human woman in shock. She'd met many of the others from Skyhold who wrote in the journals - that this woman was someone she didn't recognize (even through the dirt and blood and the damage) meant that this was likely...

"Meredith? Knight-Commander Meredith?" Tali took a cautious step forward, trying to see the extent of the woman's injuries (broken nose, smashed in armor, and there was something wrong with her eyes).

A voice called her name. Higher pitched, distorted somehow, frightened? Younger, though not a child. She tried to offer a brisk reassurance, but managed nothing more than a gasp. Meredith braced her shoulder against the wall of the hallway and got her left foot underneath her. The screeching of her pauldron in her ear made her cringe, but she did make it to a standing pose.

She swung her head around, trying to focus. There was something, blurry and dim, but it was there. She worked her jaw and swallowed, but only ended up cracking the skin of her lips and tongue, and the majority of the blood - little though there was left - dribbled out and down her chin.

Tali watched in fascinated horror as the broken, battered woman pulled herself up the wall and made it to a standing potion. "Oh keelah..." Tali's voice was horrified, and she moved forward to support the much taller woman without thinking. "No, no, you shouldn't be standing, you're bleeding too much, please, I'll help you sit down..."

Tali, as gently as she was able, tried to slide herself beneath Meredith's arm to give her something to lean on.

Meredith flinched and her fist was flying before she could think. Her gauntlet hit with barely enough force to move the anxious stranger, and then her arm was over their smaller shoulders and they were taking her weight. Consciousness wavered, but Meredith refused to collapse. They had yet to kill her in her helplessness, so she had to suppose they were actually trying to help her. Crushing them would be impolite.

“Huuh…” She breathed, locking her knee so she couldn’t be forced down. “Wuuh-huh.”

With her free arm she tried to gesture farther along the hallway, even knowing that the stranger couldn’t see any better than she could.

Edited Date: 2015-08-31 11:15 pm (UTC)

Meredith's fist glanced off the side of Tali's helmet, and she rocked back, more surprised that hurt. Tali shook herself, but kept Meredith upright. She frowned as Meredith refused to sit down, and followed her gesture to look further down the hallway.

"I'm not sure that's wise, Knight-Commander. You've lost..." Tali glanced behind, and stared in awe at the massive splatters of blood along the floor. "...a lot of blood. I have some medi-gel - I think the closest analogy for you would be elfroot potions - but it needs to be applied locally in order to work."

Meredith wavered, staring at the small, dim, blurry light that appeared and disappeared in time with the stranger’s speech. She blinked hard.

She nodded, relaxing as the stranger guided her back down. Her right foot got caught for a moment and a warbling cry escaped through the cold, tight pain. Eventually, she made it to the floor again, back leaned against the wall as she breathed hard through her mouth.

“Wuhh-guh.” She groaned, and made a motion of drinking.

Never had Tali been more happy to know that water was a universal constant. She pulled ampule of distilled, desalinated water from her armor's belt pouch and opened it, cracking the neck with a sharp plastic sound. Tali very gently took one of Meredith's hands, and wrapped it around the container, helping Meredith hold it to her lips. "Here...distilled water. It may taste a little flat, but I promise, it's potable."

Once Meredith had finished the small amount of water (a little less than six ounces, just about three mouthfuls for the small quarian), Tali looked the Knight-Commander over with a critical eye. She winced at the extensive damage that Aria must have caused. "Knight-Commander? I'm going to have to take some of your armor off in order to treat your injuries. Do I have your permission?"

Tali remembered what the female version of Shepard had been like when they hadn't been able wake her before removing her armor. Tali didn't need any more bruises from flailing commanders.

RP: Tali, Neria, Garrus ((TW: blood, mild self-mutilation))

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