| [Mar. 4th, 2008|10:30 am] |
"'m not dead," Ryouma said. Or thought he said. His mouth moved against the tile, with little shreds of agony at each twitch of his broken lips, but he wasn't sure if any sound actually made it through. His ears were ringing, and a tap-dancing elephant seemed to have taken up residence inside his skull. He blinked muzzily against the vagueness that kept trying to eat away at his vision, and decided, "Kind of wish I were."
But his brief experiences with dead, mostly in the form of unconscious, had convinced him that death was probably totally boring. Living hurt like hell, but it was infinitely more interesting, and where was a certain prospect of change. He could look forward to that. At the moment, he could very much look forward to getting warm and clean and possibly doing a little less bleeding.
"'f I were dead," he said, shoving himself up to his knees in what was possibly the most painful push-up he'd ever done--the cut beneath his armpit ripped a little more, and oozed red warmth down his side--"wouldn't hurt this bad. Or smell this bad." He reeked of corpse-rot and Kakashi stank of charred meat, and together they were probably enough to put the entire village off its feed.
He clutched at the bench and somehow forced himself to his feet. His head did interesting things and his stomach tried to climb out his throat, but he was vertical.
"Hot water," he said. "You look t'r--terrible." And he probably looked worse, and he was babbling.
At least he was still awake. As long as he kept talking, he was fairly sure he'd be awake. And as he stayed awake, he was fairly sure he'd stay alive. |
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