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Death is a mouthful. Spoonfed at first, silver and shining, IV drip-slow and still she choked on it. She’s choking again, but it’s coming back up, like it finally reached the very bottom of her guts and didn’t like what it found.
To be fair, it’s all gore and gurgling, lapped on every breath in, out, in and tonguing back at her fingers. She hasn’t moved them since the tunnels. Since a different handful of them bit into her intestines, all teeth.
Scott’s drop down between one gritted inhale and the next, and she chokes on a flinch this time around. A clench down to her fingerprints, her stomach, dragging another wave of pain out of her kicking and screaming. She bites down on the feeling, keeps it behind her lips. A sound seeps out of her nostrils instead, but it’s shrunk down small. Angry.
She shouldn’t be afraid. She shouldn’t be afraid of anything anymore. What’s left after dying?
Just pain.
It's just pain.
The red of Scott’s gaze is bloody, but not any bloodier than her hand. The sound that comes out of him is wounded like hers should be, but it’s all animal, thickened like skin. More breath than word, anyway, and when his jaw closes, his teeth bump into each other like strangers in his mouth. Something like surprise that they’re right there in his gums, a mirrored flinch around too sharp a click.
“Where…” he says around them, lips all stiff, succinct, unlike the clumsy motion he aborts before it can reach her. His hand lands too heavy on the table instead, flesh against metal warmed by her dying body, the lights humming white hot and still too dim, not dim enough.
At least she’s not on her stomach this time.
“Your arm is probably... easiest,” he points out while his face flickers like a question, but it’s Liam that he wags it toward too open, spills over. Something not meant for her.
Liam’s eyelids bunch up.
Scott’s are the opposite, the whites of his eyes brighter than the color in them.
She elbows out the arm that isn’t stopping her insides from being outsides before either of them can say anything. Not say anything. Her left hand, held out like a bone. Scott’s own is steady as he takes it, holds it, her breath even as she holds back, mouth thinned. Still frowning even though the look in his eyes makes her want to stop.
“Here okay?” he nods at the meat of her wrist, his other hand bracing it by the elbow.
She swallows the spit in her mouth. Remembers Tracy's spilled out gray on the school floor.
She nods and looks at Liam instead of Scott’s fangs. She can almost hear them, clicking wet and hollow on the back of his tongue as it shapes around the taste of her blood.
Her skin pops like a grape. The pressure makes her jolt, the sound– hits the back of her throat, the pit in her stomach, but not any farther than that. It isn’t instinct that makes her look where she’s just looked away, palm to a hot stove and touching, still touching, barely more than a twitch in the knuckles cradled in Scott’s hand blinking black like Lichtenberg figures; pain. More pain.
Her pain.
Swallowed up.
Scott removes all his teeth before pulling away. Nice and neat, but something’s held heavy to his chest, in it, afraid to drop. He pulls away but not his hands, still spiderwebbed like broken glass, pre-shatter.
Liam makes a sound and moves like he’s going somewhere, but he doesn't. Just hovers, watches, his own hands torn between the two of them. “Let me do it,” he tries, quiet, while Hayden watches the murky veins wade beneath Scott’s sleeve black on black. Scott only shakes his head, but it spills again. Dips out toward Liam on a weighted string she wonders if she’ll feel sewing into her skin shortly. It catches and hooks in somewhere she can’t see, not meant for her, but wherever it is sinks back into him too.
Liam ebbs in as he ebbs out. Each of their hands take turns, the pitch-sticky current in her running through them both for only a second. A foggy exhale trips after it, and she's not sure if it’s her or Liam or Scott, but she can only think of another classroom floor, Scott’s back propped off it on a desk, corpse-stiff, the tone of Liam’s voice almost frantic.
The last time they tried this and failed, Liam almost killed him.
It had been one of the few things that made being alive mean something again. It almost had to.
Didn’t it? It does now, her blood on Scott’s chin, in his mouth.
She doesn’t know what any of this fucking means other than that she’s going to live.
She needs to live.
Doctor Deaton breathes out slow, and she doesn’t realize she’s been matching it until she breathes out with him, gaze softening as the rest of her sharpens. She blinks at him and feels it bat at her entire body, adrenaline more like an after-image glowing out of her. Her arm slips in Liam’s fingers. Clings red while the fingers holding her up by the shoulder remain firm. The veterinarian's eyes warm with the faux leather of her jacket crinkling before they flit over to Scott’s place by the counter against the wall, braced there by the heels of his hands. The weight of it reaches higher, though, pinches somewhere at the throat and jerks when he swallows.
The skin there is still just an imprint of a darkened pink. A collar where she’d seen blood like a tag on the back of his neck.
She feels like she should thank him. Or say sorry. One of the two. She doesn’t know what to do with any of this other than survive it.
“How–” leaps from her mouth instead. Botches the landing. She tries to look between all three of them and ends up scrabbling somewhere at the windows, moonlight glinting off their elbowed locks. “How long does it usually take to…?”
Liam looks at Scott even though both of them have an answer. It takes a second to find him, to anchor him in the room by the eyes again before they can drift back over to her.
"Um," he starts, but it comes out thick. Stuck in his throat and clearing until what comes up is easier, louder, as if he’s gotten closer without moving a muscle. “Less than a day, usually... Could be by morning.”
She nods once, twice, mouths okay when her voice isn’t there. Liam holds tighter.
“... I can stay with you. If you want,” Scott offers, his own voice still too far away, but he takes a few silent steps closer. She can't even hear the soles of his shoes reach the floor. “I’ve got nowhere to be tomorrow,” and it comes out more solid, this time, the line of his shoulder close enough to trace Liam’s.
“It’s a school night,” she almost deadpans, her teeth suddenly painfully human in her skull. “For all of us.”
Scott shrugs, Liam nodding, while Hayden just stares.
She doesn’t know how they’ve lived the lives they have and not dropped out of school. She doesn’t know how she’s going to.
“How the fuck are we supposed to graduate?” she breathes, finally letting her body down, her skull clunk-ed back against the table. The lights wink down at her like eyes.
“No idea,” Liam blurts like he’s thought the same thing.
An impossible smile chews at her mouth. She hides the room behind her eyelids, buries herself somewhere low where it’s stopped bleeding but it’s still warm, still beating. Pulsing with the veins beneath her fingers twined back in Liam’s. She has to strain to hear Scott’s beat behind it, but she can. Strong and steady and safe behind its ribcage, cushioned in the lungs. She follows it to the curve in his voice.
“One day at a time.”