eerieindiana | fic - Cold Recovery

One week of drabbles! Still have a few more, then I'm going to start reposting some of my other Eerie fic that I want to keep before purging the old journal.

Cold—it was cold, Marshall knew that much, and he also knew pain, all over, like pins and needles stuck all over his body. He forced his eyes to open, and he found himself staring up at a gray, dreary sky. And that made him realize why he was cold: he was lying on his back in the snow. Suddenly, though, his view was obscured by a messy gray-haired head leaning over him. Dash’s eyes looked almost black.

“Oh, you’re alive.”

“Not unless this is hell frozen over,” Marshall croaked and sat up, body throbbing with the effort. He coughed and clamped a hand over his mouth; when he took it away, there was blood on the palm. “Ugh. That’s… that’s not good.”

“You look like shit,” Dash remarked, unhelpfully. His dog tags rattled as he squatted by Mars in the snow. “What happened to you?”

“I…” Marshall’s eyes were fixated on his blood. He tried to focus, but his brain was fuzzy. “I-I have no idea. I don’t remember anything.”

“Tch, I’m glad you’re the one with amnesia for a change,” Dash muttered; Marshall shot him a dark look. But suddenly he realized something—rather, someone important was missing.

“Dash?” His voice sounded shaky. “Where’s Simon?”

Dash’s answer was exactly what he’d been afraid of. “Dunno. You were alone and KO’d by the time I showed up.”

“Oh, god.” Marshall immediately tried to get up, but his legs buckled; Dash had to catch him by the arm and make him sit again.

“Just stay here, will ya?”

“But Simon is—“

“And you really think you’re gonna help him when you can’t walk and you’re coughing up blood?” Dash shot back. “You’d probably just make things worse.”

Marshall groaned—whether it was out of frustration or pain, he didn’t know—and flopped back down on the snow, closing his eyes.

“Everything hurts,” he mumbled, “like I got hit by a car…”

He trailed off and opened his eyes again, looking pointedly at Dash. It took Dash a few moments to make the connection, but once he did, he scoffed.

“I didn’t do this,” he snapped, narrowing his eyes. “Please. Don’t you think I’d be a little more subtle?”

Mars snorted, letting his eyelids drift shut again. “Right. My mistake. Your methods of killing are much more clever.”

“Oh, come off it, Teller. Am I really your biggest problem right now?”

Marshall sighed, his breath forming a frosty white cloud above his lips. “No. Right now, we need to find Simon.”

“We?”

“Yes, we. You just put up with me, but Simon’s actually your friend,” Marshall pointed out, and Dash couldn’t argue against that. “And anyway, in the state I’m in, I can’t go by myself—“

As if for emphasis, he coughed again and had to roll over to spit the blood into the snow. It made him wonder if he had some kind of serious internal injury, and it nearly gave him a panic attack.

No, no, can’t worry about that now, he thought, pushing himself up on his knees. Simon’s probably in serious trouble. He comes first.

“You’re not gonna die on me or anything, are you?” Dash asked him, frowning. Marshall smiled wryly at him.

“No, Dash. If you can’t kill me, no one can.”