Predator (DWT x OC)

74

I come back to him, still wavering in and out of consciousness, face screwed up in agony, shivering despite the fact half is body is still burning itself from the inside out. I gently peel off the bandages I can, trying not to cause him any more pain. When I've removed what I can, I grab a pair of angled scissors, snipping away the last bits of his clothing, soaked bandages stuck to his weeping wounds.

I grab some gauze, finding bottles of drinking water stacked behind a collection of broken pickaxes and dirt hoes and drench it. Thankfully, the freezing temperatures of the underground hell-hole we're trapped in has its advantages, and I'm able to use the water and gauze as cold compresses while I prepare everything else. 

He's fluttered back into consciousness, agonised lines creased into his face loosening, as the coolness of the compresses leech the irritating heat from his wounds. Bubbling fissures skin runs down his right thigh, all the way up and around his side, his stomach, his ribs, coasting over his collarbone to tear at his face. One eye is milky and swollen, the usually bright blue clouded and unseeing, I flush it out with water, gently tilting his head to the side, but I know it's too late. 

I take off the gauze, now warm from the heat radiating from his body, and let the wounds breathe in the air. It would be better to get him outside, away from coal dust and smoky embers, floating ash and recycled oxygen, but there's no way we could move him. 

I'm surprised they even were able to get him down here in the first place.

"Q-Quackity?" He rasps, and I would barely be able to hear it if not for the cascading downpour of complete and utter silence through the dark. The name makes me pause, freezes my hands of scissors and bandages and every little task I use to distract myself from what happened yesterday.

I bite down on my lip, before looking up with a wobbly sigh. "He- he didn't make it Tubs."

He flinches at the nickname I haven't used in years, and I can tell the words haven't really sunk it yet. Not properly, not fully. 

Because you don't just flinch at death, when you lose someone you love. It rips you apart from the inside out, tearing at your organs and shredding your skin, snapping those fragile bones as it claws its way out, born in your heart and set loose on the whole big, awful world. 

"What?"

"He's dead." I say, and I can't make it nice, and I can't deliver it wrapped in a pretty bow, coated in sugar that rots my teeth from the lies, because no matter what, no matter how I say it, or the words I use to try and soften the blow, the truth is that he's dead. 

And that's the only thing that you really feel, in the end. That loss and that pain, and the open, empty, unfillable hole they leave behind in your life, carved out of memories and dreams and the chair next to you, the laughter they won't hear, the love they won't feel anymore. 

He's gone, and that's all Tubbo's really going to hear. May as well not waste words I don't think I have the energy to say.

"No- no." He whimpers, through the pain of his burns and the shock of the news and everything that is piling on top of him, this fucking kid, that I can't stop, that I can't save him from. 

I should've gotten there earlier, should have started running the moment Schlatt had people put their hands on him, should have known that it was Schlatt and he will kill, again and again, without regard, without care, should have known that he was going to fire the moment he had a target in his grasp. 

Should have known because we're more similar than we think. 

Should have known because I've done the same.