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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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.

Meredith’s hand trembled so badly, she nearly pushed the small container out of the stranger’s hand. It was the strangest sensation, being able to smell water that was neither in motion nor tainted. The stranger made sure that it got safely into her mouth, and though it stung her cuts she had never tasted anything so sweet, so pure as that first mouthful.

She held it in her mouth for as long as she could stand, before a need for air made her carefully swallow. The second she gulped down, feeling it slide down her throat and pool coolly in her stomach.

She carefully leaned her head back against the wall, eyes open into the darkness that did not seem to affect her savior. Bloodied clumps of hair caught and pulled against the rough masonry, and she had to readjust. Her fingers had stiffened while she had crawled, but she fought with the buckles on her gauntlets until the buckles loosened. The leather of the gloves were still tacked to her by her blood, but they’d never get anything done if she coddled herself.

The cuts on her hands began to seep again as she carefully set her gauntlets down next to her leg where she could find them again. Her vambraces were next, though those buckles were tighter and harder for her to reach.

She blinked, and turned her head toward her savior. She had forgotten. It felt like sand shifting upward through her throat, but the words did come.

“You may.”

Tali made a quiet sound of protest as Meredith fought to undo her own armor, but didn't make any move to stop her. When Meredith's attention once again focused on her, Tali squirmed slightly; when Meredith gave her permission, however, Tali leapt into motion.

Tali, very gently, undid the buckles holding Meredith's chest and back plates together, to allow the woman more room to breath - she did not move Meredith just yet, as she wasn't sure what injuries lay beneath the heavy metal shell. Tali did unbuckle and unwedge Meredith's spaulders and her pauldrons from around her shoulders. The tasset belt was unbuckled, and very gently laid open - Meredith would have to stand again to get the back tasset out from under her, and Tali wasn't ready to let her chance that. The undamaged greave came next, along with the boot beneath and the sock stained by seeping blood.

Tali paused, looking from the armor around Meredith's torso (and the likely damaged back plate) to the greave that was still sluggishly welling blood from the cracks splintering the metal. "Knight-Commander, I will need you to sit forward away from the wall in order to remove your chest plate and back plate. I will also need to remove your ruined greave, but that will likely hurt. A lot." As Tali spoke, she cracked the casing on a dose of medi-gel and began to dab the gel on the injuries that she already had access to. As she watched, the gel went to work, closing the cuts on Meredith's hands and the scrapes across her cheeks.

"What would you have me work in first?"

Meredith stared at the light, blurry though it was. She listened intently, matching syllables and emphasis to its flickering. Magic of some sort, though there was no metallic tang on her molars while she breathed. Perhaps an enchantment of some kind?

Her ponderings distracted her from her savior’s removal of her armour. She felt the pieces as they were removed, tracking where each was laid. When something cracked, Meredith was able to manage her surprise down to a twitch of her shoulders, but when something cool was spread across her face her hand shot up and grabbed her savior’s wrist in alarm.

Then, a cool tingling seemed to spread out from her cheek, easing even the throbbing over her nose a little. She released her savior’s wrist, only to have them take her hand and spread more of her strange poultice over her palms.

Meredith stopped her, holding her savior’s hand between her own. She felt, carefully, over the strange gloved hands. She could almost believe that her savior had suffered some injury, but there were no stubs where the rest of their fingers should be. Not even more than the two joints for their pair of thick fingers.

“Wha.” She managed to croak.

Tali very gently took her hand back from Meredith, coughing nervously. "It's....not important right now, Knight-Commander." She hesitated, and then decided that little, white lie wouldn't cause too much of an issue. "It's just my gloves, Commander."

Tali peered at Meredith's face, and gently ran a finger tip along the bridge. Broken, if Meredith's reaction was anything to judge by. "Commander, I will also need to reset your nose before I try and apply medi-gel. Do you want me to help you with your breastplate, your greave, or your nose first?"

Gloves, they said. Their gloves gave them only two joints in their hand.

“Lie.” Meredith snarled, ignored the pain blooming in her nose as she pulled away from the stranger’s unnatural fingers. She clenched her hand tight and threw the fist straight for the dimly flickering light, all her pain and adrenaline and betrayal behind it. She twisted at the waist to add more torque, and her knuckles cracked when they hit a helmet of some kind.

Her back plate made a wet sort of noise as she twisted, and the next thing Meredith was aware of she was lying sideways on the floor. She tried to move her fingers, and had no idea if they had so much as twitched. A creeping horror curdled in her guts and began to seep upward. She tried to wiggle her left foot. No feeling there either.

Meredith shuddered, but only felt her head and shoulders shake. With no voice but all sincerity, she mouthed, “O Maker, hear my cry: seat me by Your side in death.”

Tali tried to dodge the incoming strike, and wasn't quite fast enough. Meredith's punch slammed into the side of her helmet, and Tali tumbled backwards swearing loudly in Quarian. For a human as battered as she was, Meredith could still pack a punch. Tali hoped that nothing had cracked or broken - there were no flashing warning lights on her heads-up interface...yet.

Tali watched from the short distance she had fallen away from Meredith as Meredith twitched and shuddered. She had an unfortunate suspicion, but there wasn't any easy way to tell with the Knight-Commander in as bad shape as she was. Tali pulled the tiny journal out of a belt pouch pocket, and quickly scribbled a note to Neria and Anders, hoping that they would see it soon. Tali got here feet under her again, and crab-walked over to where Meredith lay.

"Well, I suppose I deserved that. Knight-Commander, I promise you. I swear..." Tali hesitated, and then continued, "I swear by the Maker that I will not willingly do you further harm. I am trying to keep you alive and in as few pieces as possible." With that said, as gently as she could, Tali undid the final buckles and pulled Meredith's breastplate and back plate out from under her.

Meredith’s eyes stayed fixed on that speaking light. As though it were some indication of the truth. The stranger’s hands were gentle, easing her armour away while supporting her head and neck.

Meredith blinked slowly. Panic churned in her guts, her skin was still trying to crawl off her bones, but Andraste guide her and let this be the right choice because she had finally reached the end of herself. “Very well.” She slurred slowly, and submitted to her strange savior’s care.

Meredith's backplate had crumpled, battered inwards in sharp corners and edges by biotic force - the metal gleamed the faint burnished blue that biotics occasionally left behind on man add materials. Meredith's back was a soaked mess of sliced cloth and flesh - Tali could not contain a gasp of horror and a soft croon of pity at the sight. As carefully as she could, she removed the fragments of torn fabric from the wounds and used the remaining fabric to wipe away as much of the blood as she could.

Three long gashes in a spider's web outwards from the point of impact, low between her shoulders. Tali gently applied medi-gel to the cuts, bruises and scrs scattered across Meredith's back. She hoped that someone more familiar with human anatomy would be able to take a look at the damage to Meredith's back, before she had to close the wounds - she wasn't sure Meredith would be in any state to have them reopened for examination.

With a soft whisper of "I'm sorry, this will hurt," Tali set her fingers on either side of Meredith's nose and set the bones back in line with a wet, painful sounding click. She was quick to apply medi-gel to the bridge of Meredith's nose, the numbing effect of the gel hopefully cutting the pain quickly.

Meredith grunted an acknowledgement of the warning a second before her nose was put back in place. Bile rose, but she swallowed it back down. She could not afford to lose a drop of moisture if it could be helped. The cooling poultice worked its healing, and after long minutes only an aching throb behind her eyes troubled her.

But that easing came with consequence. With a thirst. Her other pains had been more urgent, and Meredith had ignored the crawling, aching itch that rushed through her veins and tore at her skin from beneath. She was missing something. She ~~was missing~~ ~~wanted~~ needed something, and she didn’t have it.

She listened to her strange savior moving, trying not to flinch when her abnormal hands would suddenly touch her. Tried to focus on anything but- on anything else.

The last thing to go was the crumbled shin guard, peeled out of Meredith's likely broken leg. The fact that Meredith didn't so much as flinch as Tali pulled shards of shatters metal out of her leg spoke volumes to Tali's unfortunate suspicion that Meredith has some severe nerve damage in her back.

Best case scenario, the force of Aria's blow has compressed muscle and bone around the nerves and they were currently cut off due to the pressure of the wound. Worst case...Tali fervently hoped that the worst case wasn't going to happen.

Tali untied the wrap of cloth that covered the back of her helmet and her shoulders, and folded it into a pad that she slipped beneath Meredith's head. She warned Meredith again that the next few moments would hurt, and then straighten the Meredith's wounded leg to align the bones as best she could. After cleaning the wounds as best she could, and applying a through layer of medi-gel (the last of that package, though she had at least one more on her person), Tali used the undamaged greave to splint the leg.

As Tali worked, she hummed - a quiet, cming lullaby that her Aunt Raan had used to comfort her when she was little.

((ooc: just tell me when to show up))

Meredith focused. On the noises, the vibrations that passed up through her body as parts of it she could not feel were manipulated. The taste of bile lingered. Her helplessness made her sick.

Her strange savior- no, it was unworthy to continue calling them that. “Name.” She rasped, demanding an honest answer through will alone. But their song was so strange, the rhythm surprisingly quick for such a softly sung tune.

((OOC: Go ahead, order can be Neria, Tali, Meredith until someone else comes along.))