ZERO PUNCTUATION ☆ red

[RED]

[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]He feels like he’s trapped in his own mausoleum. Selby’s got him bedridden, holed up in the bunker because Crow doesn’t have much room for houseguests. His head is wrapped, stumps of horns still leaking blood where Jervis nearly tried to pry them out of his head; a thick bandage covers a few stitches across his nose. His torso is heavily bound, and while Selby had tried hard for the first few days to keep the bandages rotated, the wound still continued to bleed through the seams. His bed is heaped with extra blankets, extra pillows, extra everything - he recalls Selby’s fretting, telling him to keep this and that elevated, apply heat to this, apply ice to that, don’t touch this, don’t do that. It’s an excess he isn’t accustomed to. He feels more or less smothered.

The pain in his chest makes it hard to breathe. Selby had said that he was lucky to not have pierced any major organs, or he’d be dead by now. He wonders if he can die, or if he’s like Beck - doomed to wander the Earth until either of them decided to succumb to the will of the forces they could not control. He wonders if the kid hates him now, hypocrite that he is for following in the poltergeist’s failed footsteps. He wishes someone were here to talk to - Beck, to yell at him, Selby to worry over the slit hole in his torso, even Wormwood, tenuous as their relationship was, if only to ask why he bothered being so kind.

The longcoat hangs from the bedpost of his bunk, alongside his utility belt. The sight of old blood on his blade stirs a strange, sickly feeling in the back of his throat. He closes his eyes and thinks he ought to clean it once he can get himself out of bed. The coat, he studiously ignores; what to think of Wormwood or his peace offerings, he isn’t sure. At some point during treatment, during his initial recovery at Selby’s, the lion must have slipped the little bracelet onto Red’s wrist while he was under. Now he just fidgets with the colored string and pretends it had been there all along.

He recalls the day of his return in hazy, half-there images. He was only teetering on the edge of consciousness at the time, too beaten down to do little other than lay on the ground and bleed. But Wormwood was there - and frightened, upset in a way that didn't make sense. Red digs through his memories and recalls when Worm first snapped at him for questioning why he'd visited the Pitt to meet with his "spy". Then, between the flickers of anger that blinded him in the midst of battle, he sees Worm crying out to a Pittian as they slammed into the body of their leader. Now Wormwood had stood over him and bit back tears, the memory a mere blur as his head hit the ground. Now he was some kind of monster, something undead or close to dying that reeked of an aggressive aura, something he never associated with Wormwood before. Connecting the dots didn't lead him anywhere positive.

He isn't sure where the Chaser's loyalties lied these days, not anymore.

But speak of the devil and he shall appear - a creak of metal grinding against concrete, tentative and slow in a way that was unlike Mikolaj's own mode of entry, jerks him away from his thoughts. Red braces a hand against the thin, vinyl sleeping mat and pushes himself up a little. An uncomfortable warmth spreading across his chest tells him that he's bleeding again. "Uh, yeah." Red winces a little at a twinge of pain under his bandages, but ignores it in favor of swinging his legs over the side of the bed and forcing himself upright. The floor spins and he rubs a hand across his face; Selby's been giving him a steady supply of herbs, and he found some pills in the storage room of his safehouse that kept the worst of the pain at bay. "Been... Thinking about that. C'mere. I can't yell too much." The words come out as a low, raspy slur. Under the frame of his bed are a few bottles of something strong he'd found stashed behind a wall socket, between the sheet rock and thick concrete walls of another bunker room. They're nearly empty.

Part of Red wants to hammer him about the battle, or what he could remember of it. The rest of him is pensive - about the undead creature standing in front of him that used to be Wormwood, about the Pitt's activity and if that had something to do with it all. He's been dancing around it for days, only because Selby would have an aneurysm if he had to deal with any more stress. Now, the two of them were alone for better or worse, and he could address it properly - as properly as he could, hovering just to the left of agony and still bleeding from a gaping chest wound. Maybe he'd hit up Selby for more herbs before the day was done. "...Tell me what happened again. From the top."