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Chapter 5: (Sh)It Follows
Sawyer
Sawyer's lip split, and she wiped the blood from her lip with a wimper
"Gigantic freak!"
She screeched as she pulled her signature jump attack throttling Brooke's neck as she wrapped her legs around her waist
Brooke didn't have much time to react short of throwing her arms up and saying something to the effect of, "How?" before she Sawyer was on her.
Brooke swayed wildly on her feet.
"Get off of me you fucking hyena-ass bi..."
She flung Sawyer from her with bodily force...
Sawyer
Sawyer flew back into a tree, a loud crack being heard. Slumoed on the ground, the small girl cradled her right arm as it hung unnaturally. Clearly it was broken.
She looked up at Brooke with tears in her eyes, but these were not tears of sadness or pain, these were tears of anger.
"I hate you!" she screamed as she got up and tackled Brooke
Brooke staggered back, looking at her handiwork.
"I..." she began faintly, "I did...that?"
Honestly, she didn't think she possessed the dexterity. But it was unsightly. Her stomach turned...
"Um...okay, so that looks pretty ba..."
Sawyer launched herself at her, knocking her clean off her feet. They went over a rise, a confused, tangle of limbs, turning and tumbling, the muddy detritus of the ground tearing at hair and clothes...
Not helping matters was Sawyer's dislocated arm feebly whacking Brooke about the head until they come to rest (in a manner of speaking) in a tangle at the very bottom.
"Oh..." she began, "Oh hell. Christ."
Coughing up several whole blades of grass, she turned to Sawyer, "What, are you made of plastic or something?"
Sawyer
Sawyer was shaking, the stress activating a round of tremors.
"No, Im just not some muscley freak like you.." She groaned. She didn't have fight in her as she tried to stop her arms from shaking, especially the dislocated arm causing extreme pain
"No, seriously, that looks..." Brooke began uneasily, "That looks pretty bad, I..."
This had never been as easy thing for her to say, and her stomach twisted particularly perniciously this time.
"I'm sorry. Maybe...maybe I can have a look at it, or..."
Better idea.
"Stavo!" she called, "Girly fight's over! Get down here!"
Sawyer
"Oh, you're sorry?" She asked Brooke, with a roll of her eyes, and a wince of her face, letting out a small whimper.
"So gracious of you after attacking a freshman."
"You slapped me first!" Brooke snapped.
"This time."
Sawyer
"Technically I scratched your pretty face....And sadly it's only made you hotter." She sighed. She was still holding her arm, reluctantly she motioned her dislocated arm towards Brooke with a wince
Stavo had looked away for a second when these girls had begun to throw hands.
"Jesus Christ," he muttered, immediately getting to work trying to pry them apart once Sawyer flung herself onto Brooke. Some violent throttling later and a nasty fall, Stavo was left staring down at the two of them from up high on the hill. "Jesus Christ!"
Brooke had called him down and so he obliged. "Twice. Twice, you people can't help yourselves. I don't even know what's so great about me in..." He trailed off when he saw Sawyer's arm. "Brooke, what did you do?"
***
"That's just what we all gotta do," Nicodemus threw his arm around her shoulder. "And you're doin' dandy, man."
-Stavo and Nicodemus
Sawyer
A few sniffles and she looked up at Stavo, "She hurt me bad Stavipoo..." She whimpered. "She's a....Monster."
Brooke glared, "I wasn't trying to pop her arm out! She's Polly-fucking-Pocket, is that my fault?"
She looked Stavo over, "Well? Pop her arm back in."
***
"I haven't done a thing," Phyllis tutted, paying only the slightest mind to his hand on her shoulder.
She supposed she ought to shake the hand off, for propriety's sake, but she didn't.
"Besides abide. I don't know, these last few hours I feel like I've slipped into a different world. Everything is either too unbelievable to be real or too painful to be anything but true."
-Brooke and Phyllis
Sawyer
"She's lying, you should've seen the blood lust in her eyes Stavo!" Sawyer accused
"Stavipoo..." Stavo repeated to himself, near retching at the sound. He'd give Sawyer this: delusional, yes, but dedicated? Even more so.
"Pop her--WHAT?!" He said in shock, holding Sawyer upright, causing her arm to fall limp. "Oh, fucking hell..." Stavo muttered, coming to terms with the fact he had to pop it in. He just wasn't 100% sure how.
"OK, OK," he looked around nervously, trying to think on his feet. "She needs something to bite on that's not her tongue."
Stavo thought of a world where Sawyer would pester him without her tongue. Would it be quieter? Yes. Would she still cling onto him and bother him with shit like ESL and smoke signals? Most definitely.
He denied the temptation of letting her bite her tongue off.
"Something that won't break," he looked around, before settling on a fallen branch nearby. "There!" Stavo broke the branch in half and handed it to Sawyer. "I'm not gonna lie but this is probably gonna hurt like hell. Are you ready?"
***
"I'd say the world's kooky as usual," Nicodemus shared his belief. "It's just harder to understand that when you're comfortable, dig? And I figure it's been a pretty uncomfortable night for us all."
The two strolled out of the infirmary, greeted by the evening breeze and singing of cicadas. "Regardless, that abidin' is what I call 'rollin' with the punches,' and that's somethin' you need to do in this crazy world. You're doin' a fine job of that already."
-Stavo and Nicodemus
"Don't be a baby," Brooke scolded, "You've done worse things with those arms."
She looked Sawyer over, "No, seriously, do you have a Vitamin C deficiency or something? Because holy Christ."
***
Phyllis sighed, "That would be an understatement."
She laughed softly, feeling the wind stir her hair, "Micah was good at that. Spontaneity, chasing his gut, being stupid...whatever you want to call it. He felt in his heart he wanted to do something and he did it. For better or worse, that's never been my way. I'm too..."
She thought of the tapes, her voice echoing out over the campground.
"I'm too calculated."
In an admittedly desperate attempt to alleviate the mood, she looked at Nicodemus out of the corner of her eye, "...consider this a question asked from professional curiosity, but what, exactly, do you have against the letter 'G', Dr. Langley?"
-Brooke and Phyllis
Sawyer
"You want me to bit on a branch?" She asked Stavo? "Do you want me to break my teeth?"
She turned to Brooke and literally spit a mixture of blood and saliva at her, it Landing on her shirt.
"Fine!" Brooke snapped, "Don't bite on the stick! Maybe gravity will be merciful and take the arm right off! Just try not to scream too loud. I hear there's a killer on the loose."
Sawyer
"Do either ov you have something leather? Like a belt." She said thinking it was obvious
"Oh, sure! Let's have the stud drop his pants in the middle of nature!" Brooke threw her arms in the air, "Subtlety, honey, do you speak it?"
Sawyer
"Oh honey, don't you know anything, a belt or leather strip tends to be used in these situations. And I know you're pretty... friendly, but a belt coming off doesn't mean the pants come off too."
"Fine, not the stick," Stavo threw it aside, eyeing his belt. "The belt. We're using the belt." He handed it to her and took the dislocated arm, bracing himself to pop it back in. "Alright, squeeze my arm when you're ready, Sawyer. Got that?"
***
"It's just the way I talk, is all," Nicodemus explained nonchalantly. "Not a fanna hard-G sounds. Think of where ya hear 'em: anGer, aGGressive, arroGant. That's not my vibe, so I try to say 'em as little as possible."
He sighed, slowing in his step. "Course...there are...other reasons."
-Stavo and Nicodemus
"What about Grace?" asked Phyllis, "Glamour? LonGinG?" she smiled getting into it, "Those sound pretty Good to me."
She did a double-take on Nicodemus's lower tone, "Wait. Seriously?"
Sawyer
She smiled at Stavo and stuck her tongue oit at Brooke before taking the belt and put it in her mouth biting down and nervously squeezed Stavo's rather muscular bicep.
Noah
With much anxiety Noah jumped from the roof hoping Zach would catch him
Stavo closed his eyes, steadying his breathing until it was all he heard, giving him complete concentration.
He shoved the arm back into the socket with an alarming crack.
***
"Those words do remind me of a better time. My favorite is Guitar, if it ain't obvious," Nicodemus said with a smile, albeit an usually serious one. "Same reason I don't say 'em too often. It hurts rememberin'."
He glanced at her disbelief. "Yeah, for real. I can tell ya if ya like." Nicodemus took his guitar from his back and gave a strum. "In song." Realizin' that might be strange to her, he explained, "It helps me tell it. Copin' mechanism, we'd call it as professionals, you and I."
-Stavo and Nicodemus
Sawyer
A loud muffled scream could be heard as tears pricked at the small asian girl's eyes.
she spit out the belt and what came next was a sight to see.
"ShitFuckMotherfucker!" She sped rge words out of her mouth faster than anything she had said before as she held her arm.
Phyllis supposed, after her introduction to this man, the fact that he preferred to exposit in song shouldn't be surprising to her, yet here she was, surprised.
"Whatever helps you tell it," she invited.
***
"Oh my God!" Brooke covered her eyes at the sight, trying not to pull a Noah and point out that the cumulitive screams issuing from their little threesome trio tonight were bound to bring the killer on them eventually.
"Jesus... " she struggled to catch her breath, turning to Stavo, "Good job," then, addressing Sawyer, "You okay, I asked politely?" she asked, politely, entirely expecting an impolite-or-worse response.
***
Ryan returned to the common hall, rubbing his cigarette out against the wall as he did. Looked like a bunch of the looks mooks had hit the wind again, though this time there wasn't much of a concentrated effort to find anybody who'd left, so either they could suddenly come and go as they pleased, or nobody gave a shit.
Which both amounted to the same thing, really.
"Yo, Platinum!" he nodded to the tiny, docile figure of Aleks Martaine, "You know, sitting there, all shaky and stuff, you look uncomfortable levels of chained up, dog, right? Where's the posse at?"
Though, he supposed, any second that Zach didn't spend joined at this girl's hip was preferable. He'd never quite been able to quit a bad feeling about her.
-Phyllis, Brooke and Ryan
Sawyer
Saeyer still in some pain nodded,
"Yeah, at least it isn't just hanging there anymore." She said in a rather polite response. Brooke wasn't being a bitch, so she supposed she didn't have to be either.
Well. Suspicions unfounded.
"No, but, seriously I..." she cleared her throat, "I didn't mean to do that, that was...totally an accident. Major She-Ra moment."
She still wasn't entirely sold on that being entirely on her part, though. Comforting as it would be to imagine she had amazing powers of super strength, Brooke was pretty sure she remained a mere (for a very loose definition of 'mere', sure) mortal.
Sawyer
"It's fine." She said plainly, with a wave of her hand.
"I'm not that hard to swing around like a rag doll." She said and because she did like irritating Brooke, after saying that she winked at Stavo. "Super light and Bendy."
After saying that last part she almost wanted to puke, she was not a slut, but the joke persisted, it's not like she could take it back and look like a baby.
Brooke winced, "Honey, one day somebody is gonna give you the 'no man is worth it' talk, but it is not gonna be..."
Something crunched under her foot. Remembering the 'Here Lies Maggie Duval' incident well enough, Brooke's first instinct was reviled terror, but it turned out that she had stepped on a bit of wood on the ground, well hidden beneath moss and lichen and other swamp detritus.
"Well, well, well..." she said with approval, "That bit of Mortal Kombat may have been worth something after all."
The edges of the rubbish, once cleared away, reveal a very neat trapdoor, part of some larger wood structure concealed in the earth.