Chapter 28: Chapter 28: Licking your wounds

Kay was already asleep. Her light snoring resonated through both the kitchen and living room every few seconds, since she’d left the door to her room open.

Out of everything that had happened that night, the pale girl could at least be content with that.

Having sent away poisoned gang members and rerouted all of the others to keep looking for the Ripper, Emily had inevitably failed to bear with each of the deep wounds for long, giving up on the chase herself and calling it quits for the night. As much as she hated to admit it, she doubted she’d be able to find him at this point, anyway.

She ensured to misdirect all gang movement and otherwise clear of her area through the Phantom’s general communications, making her way back unnoticed, and barely managed to push herself inside the sisters’ shared apartment, blood still dripping from all the countless cuts and wounds.

The white-haired girl stumbled weakly through the living room, bumping into the small tea table on the side of the couch before she’d realized it, and nearly barreling to the floor, though she just barely managed to catch herself, holding tight onto the side of a small chest of drawers just ahead of it. She’d been thankful her hand had at least happened to latch at it from the top instead of pulling one of the drawers out. That would’ve had a terrible outcome.

It was fairly quiet inside, still. Part of her had been afraid the way she’d forced the window open would be too loud and startle her sister awake, but thankfully, it hadn’t. Plus, the lock hadn’t taken as much damage as she’d expected, either. They could probably go at least a full day without Kay noticing it before she properly managed to replace it.

At that point, Emily was already having a hard time standing upright, and wouldn’t be able to think of much at all, let alone straight for any longer than the occasional blink.

If nothing else, though, she needed to do something about the wounds. She had cuts in her lower and upper arms, upper legs, navel, and a few shallow ones scattered all over her face. It had been nearly a whole hour since she’d lost that guy around the deeper hoods, half past two in the morning precisely. The bullet wounds were gone, and so were all the pellet injuries, but every single slash and stab she’d received remained visible through the gashes in her clothes.

(What do I do now…?)

They burnt and stung like nothing she’d ever felt before…

No. That wasn’t right. She had felt something akin to it, at some point…

When she was little. No older than three or four.

How odd. When was the last time she’d ever recalled anything from that time? Every day, she kept herself almost exclusively focused in her present endeavors, little to no regard for the past or any remote future.

Now, however, a tiny bit of her prior life had come back to greet her, without any semblance of ceremony either. Those kinds of stabs, the long burning, the sharp pains were essentially the norm for her once upon a time.

Back when there was no haema.

But currently, she used the enhancer on an almost daily basis. The longest she’d go without it would be the five to ten hours she usually spent at school or just generally outside during the day.

The girl wasn’t very prone to getting herself in painful situations during that time, though, steering mostly clear of trouble and usually reserving all instances of risk-taking for the Phantom’s shady activities after dark. Due to that, winding up injured like this had still been nothing short of a shock.

The human body was a defined existence in itself, and at the moment, hers wasn’t doing so well. Half-limply dragging herself back there had been a chore of its own kind.

Those wounds she had now, they were certainly not healing at the desired rate, no matter how much haema she desperately took in.

But she couldn’t exactly say they’d stagnated at an incurable state, either. The torn-open tissue was still reacting. Rather slowly, but it was. It had reacted to the cold on the outside and had slightly changed as time passed.

The severed skin where the lacerations were located had been bleeding rapidly like usual at first. However, instead of slowing to a crawl and drying out as the opening in her skin closed up in a matter of seconds, as was usual, it had instead run on for far longer as dyed surfaces swole further, and from its midst several translucent, grape-like droplets of a yellowish tone had begun to spurt here and there along the abrasions. The burning had become even more severe while in contact with the cold air on the outside.

All in all, the wounds hadn’t closed in the slightest, but there had still been some changes, few as they were.

Over that short period, they had devolved into that odd state. And she remembered it from that certain time, far away now.

That meant those specific wounds were reacting as though there was no haema in her system at all… Was that it? Perhaps the allicin’s true purpose, despite the burning and gashing itself, wasn't precisely to kill cells in the given area it was directly applied on, but simply to nullify the effects of the juice on the affected area of whomever came into contact with it. It could be, perhaps, that any additional adversities were merely secondary effects. That was the most logical conclusion, even if basic at its core.

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It made sense why she could barely even rationalize properly at that moment. Were the wounds to work along regularly without any artifacts, she wouldn’t go very far just letting them be like that. Without haema to cull the reactions, they would most likely become infected, if they weren’t already, and from there several other complications could arise.

Just the way it used to be. Just how it was, back in those days she could now barely even remember.

But what should she do? Katherine had to have been the one treating her wounds back then, without a doubt. She probably still did it to herself nowadays, seeing as she wasn’t involved in late-night street business anymore. But just how did she do it? Was there some kind of specific method?

The girl closed her eyes, trying her hardest to recall what she’d nearly lost. What did Kay call it?

‘First aid’. It was obvious. Why had it been so hard? It was a bunch of stuff she always kept around somewhere in the bathroom, though she couldn’t be too sure where, as she wasn’t used to ever looking or asking for it. The pale girl would always just swallow some of the good old crimson tubes when she was sure nobody was looking.

Staggering toward the half-opened door facing her on the far end of the living room, she pushed it inwards upon reaching the handle and turned on the lights inside. It was a neat-looking division, kept more so on random obsessive impulses than any proper schedule from any of the sisters. She looked around. The large bathtub compartment hidden behind two frosted glass doors on the opposite end, the simple toilet unit on the left, the irregularly colored tiles lining up the four walls that surrounded her. Not there. Not anywhere over there. The white sink facing the toilet and the small mirror right above it. Not there either.

Looking up over the mirror made it clear to her that storing some kind of everyday item in any one other of those places would’ve been absolutely ridiculous. There were two fairly sized cabinets hanging from the walls diagonally on each side of the mirror, and if they really did have a first aid kit, Kay would’ve put it in there no doubt. But the girl’s head was aching, and she felt far too tired to even begin to question the environment around her. Heck, if the first aid kit just so happened to have been shoved inside the toilet for whatever reason, she would’ve taken it anyway without even thinking about it.

And then came the moment when she remembered it would be a good idea to take off her shoes, which had been nearly covered in mud from the chase through the rainstorm, as well as her defeated trod home soon after. Putting both shoes aside, she then had another sudden realization, and slowly turning around, she stared behind herself in pure horror.

Countless dark-brown footsteps, they were enormous, spanning all the way from the bathroom to the window, in a straight line across the corridor and circumventing the sofa in the living room. It was hard to believe she had actually made them with her own feet.

As if by instinct, one hand instantly moved up over her bloody features, her palm producing a rather odd sound she could only recall having ever heard during the rare instances she’d made the Phantoms’ higher ranks meet up to discuss field strategy.

Awesome, just great. More shit over the fan was exactly what she needed, wasn’t it…?

At first defeated, she now felt utterly crushed. Giving up on her own thoughts, she opened both cabinet doors and looked for the kit. After shuffling aside a few boxes and glass containers, she finally found what she‘d been looking for. A plain-looking bag lacking any notable features. She took it with one hand and placed it over the empty stool she painstakingly pulled out from under the sink, not expecting for much as she opened it.

The girl wasn’t sure on how exactly to use any of the stuff inside, but waking up her sister was out of the question… She could faintly remember Kay having done the procedure on her in the past a few times, but the memories were all far and between. She somewhat recalled her using some kind of cream and blocking the wounds after, but that was it.

In any case, ridding herself of her tattered clothing came first. She took off her gray jacket, then the black t-shirt underneath along with her now sorry-looking pants, dropping it all on the floor with abandon, revealing the previously smooth skin of her pale legs, arms and torso to have been torn up beyond belief with even more gashes and lacerations than she’d previously guessed.

The wounds were still bleeding. Not profusely as she’d felt them before, but still quite unpleasantly. It was somewhat surprising that she hadn’t collapsed from heavy blood loss as it usually happened with unenhanced citizens, though it was fairly probable that while those allicin-ridden blades firmly affected their area of contact to prevent blood flow to the outside properly stopping immediate coagulation, that still did not change the fact that her own blood cells would be regenerating fairly fast inside her system, so blood loss shouldn’t be too grave of a problem as long as she avoided extremes like being cut in half and such. Lesser damage might still be doable, if treated soon enough.

The girl blindly picked up the first item that seemed useful from the bag. A package of… baby wipes? They looked new, too. They’d have to do.

She managed to clean up most of the blood on the cuts, hoping at least a good portion of the poisonous grains attached had come off along with them. Miracles were cheap, though.

In the meantime, her vision blurred out further. She picked out a few more boxes from the bag. Bandages, tape, and some weird gel thing. She couldn’t read whatever had been written on that package, no longer able to even focus her eyes on the text proper, and the added annoyance of the long, bloodied white bangs over her eyes not helping at all in that endeavor. In any case, there was no harm in giving it a try. She applied the gel in as many wounds in her legs and torso as she could, focusing on the arms soon after.

The large amount of blood initially coming out had been quite alarming. For what it was worth, it turned out the cuts weren’t nearly as wide as they were deep. None of her main vital points seemed to have suffered damage, though, but she should still try and close off as many of those things as she could, before that long period of exposition left them in an even worse state than they were already in.

She’d nearly covered herself up completely with bandages before managing to muster up the last of the strength she had left in her arms and knees to close the first-aid bag back inside the cabinet and drag herself out of the bathroom and into the living room, her left arm uselessly scuffling with a few of her longer white locks which had somehow stuck themselves over a small wound she’d forgotten to cover on the back of her upper thigh.

Next up was… her bed, maybe? But that was too far from there. She could barely even force her own legs forward anymore, and even if not to the same extent, all the cuts and gashes were still burning insufferably. Had she even applied all that stuff right? Well, did it matter?

Moving and thinking were overrated, in any case. All she needed was a cozy place to just lie down and die already. And the good old couch was right there in front, softer and warmer than it had ever looked to her any time before.

She slowly staggered toward it, soon approaching its light orange surface, then promptly lost all feeling in her knees and feet, her own head soon following their lead. The numb, battered pale girl fell face-first into the couch’s cold surface, passing out soon after.

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