churbooseanon

Summary: It’s hard, once you‘re down and out, to get back on your feet. But that’s always what she does. What she’s intended. Only this time maybe she needs time.

Churby is back again. Two weeks two updates. I’m so winning at this. Now, let’s check on another character in Fragments shall we? Also, Churby has a Ko-fi. This week any tips I may get will pay for the bus to work and back seeing as my husband is out of town. Three bucks is exactly the fare to and from here <3

Fragments - Hit The Brakes

She can taste blood in her mouth, feel the cut inside her cheek when she probes around with her tongue. Strange how it’s the wound she cares about before everything else. Or maybe it is that she doesn’t want to think about the rest of it, the itching of her arm where the IV is in her arm. There’s a tickling of a short-cropped hair brushing near her ear, and she hates that, but can’t raise her arm to fix it. There is an ache between her toes and an itch on her hip, and all of it is annoying.

Annoying and wonderful and perfect. The whole mess of it made her lips curl into the faintest of smiles. Alive. All of those things proved she was alive.

“You’re doing pretty good,” the young woman running the clinic assured her as she fussed around Carolina, checking her over. “Which is pretty impressive, don’t you think?”

That made her scoff lightly. “Yeah, it’s that simple,” Carolina sighed. “Sorry, don’t mean to sass you, Cynthia.”

“No problem,” said woman chuckled before settling down onto a stool. “I think that by now I’ve figured out that you’re sixty percent badass, and forty percent snark. So I’m not offended.”

“You’ve done so much for me so far…”

Again the woman chuckled, but Carolina wasn’t surprised. In the week she’d been in the back room of this little clinic, under the care of the matronly old nurse, the woman almost hadn’t stopped laughing. No, she was just a cheerful person, brighter and happier than anyone Carolina had ever met before. At first it had been exceedingly jarring, almost rubbed her nerves the complete wrong way. Yet time and exposure could make a lot of strange things seem normal, seem acceptable, maybe even push them in that direction. After all, she’d gotten used to York’s half-hearted pursuit, Wash’s curly straws, and North’s extreme passive-aggressive nature and taken all of those into stride. She could handle Connie’s hair cut, South’s hostility, and even Maine’s silence. The only time she hadn’t let something run right off of her like water was with Texas, and she still wasn’t certain she could. But Cynthia?

“Ready to tell me how you ended up on my doorstep with that fancy UNSC armor yet?” Cynthia teased as she pulled a tray from a drawer that always seemed to have the damn trays in them. From it she produced a gauze ball and moved to lean over Carolina’s arm. “We’re just going to change this out dear. I think you’re good enough to be trusted on your own fluids my dear.”

“I’m really not,” Carolina assured the woman.

How did you explain the end of the world as you knew it, the betrayal of your father, and how you failed all the people that mattered to you? How did she explain the new, burning hatred deep in her gut that threatens to consume her? How did she explain that there were shards that sang discordant whispers in the back of her mind, in her heartbeat, in every breath she took? Those were things that couldn’t be explained, ever. That couldn’t be shared, never would be shared. Those weak and fragile and broken parts of her own heart and mind were her burden to carry alone, like she had carried her broken body through the thick drifts of snow in the dead of night to escape the shadow of the crashed Mother of Invention. Every night she staggered further, tunneling out little ice and snow caves every time daylight threatened. And by the time she finally reached a distant city, she had hidden in the alleys where no one would look, certain that Freelancer would be after her.

Instead she had found Cynthia. Or rather, the woman had found her. Had been too brave to back down when she found a ruined soldier on the street, hiding behind a dumpster, and had taken her to the clinic she ran to nurse her back to health.

“Remind me of my son you do,” Cynthia noted, her voice soft and warm as she pressed the gauze over the IV and then pulled the needle out. “Hold this here darling.”

She guided Carolina’s fingers to press into the soft, sterile gauze, holding it in place to staunch the bleeding, a soft smile still on her lips. As if it was that simple, as if it ever would be for Carolina again. Being like someone’s child? Hardly. She hadn’t been like a kid since her mother died. After that she became… Carolina doesn’t even know what she became. All she knows is that she put that name and that history behind her. As far behind her as she could.

“He was stubborn too,” Cynthia continued, “never wanted to tell me what mess he got himself into at school. When he got that age where he could sign up, he did. Something tells me you did the same. Hold still for a moment while I…”

Holding still for small pains was something Carolina was used to. The medics in the project had poked and prodded and fiddled for a long time leading up to the AI implants. It was something she thought she had gotten used to. Yet there she was, flinching at the tiniest injection in her arm, another dosage of vitamins no doubt. Maybe, though, maybe it had more to do with the observation and how spot on it was. How spot on it is. With a sigh Carolina looks away, not willing to face that kind understanding.

“It’s okay to run, you know. Going back to that can be hard. Sometimes people just…”

Desert. That’s what Cynthia was implying, and Carolina turned wide green eyes on her, horrified at the implication. Run from the war? She’d wanted to fight it since her mother had been lost to the fight, lost to the Insurrectionists fighting on the wrong front of a two-front war for survival. And now she was running, wasn’t she?

“I’m not running,” Carolina insisted. The second she can move she was going to… she wasn’t sure what she was going to do. Find some way to fight the war of course. Fight the war her father ignored, save humanity. How she would, she didn’t know. But she had her armor, she had her helmet, she even had her mods still, so there had to be something she could do.

“It isn’t a problem,” Cynthia responded softly. “I’m not going to turn you into the UNSC.”

“I am,” Carolina countered immediately. Her fingers came off of the gauze, pulling it away to see that the blood had stopped. The next phase of healing, and she was ready to keep moving on. “I’m going to do this. I am going to get back into the fight.”

“Not sure who you’re trying to convince,” Cynthia observed before passing over a glass of water and turning her attention back toward the work before her of making Carolina better.

The problem was, Carolina didn’t know either. She just know she wanted the pain in her body to go away. Maybe it will make the pain in her mind seem less pressing.