who lives, who dies, who tells your story // self para
tw: bullet wounds, blood, death
It all happened so fast that Imogen hardly had time to think about what was even really happening. It was just this - One minute, she was standing there, trying to play a part, but also thinking about what sort of shit she would give Rye and Fox when they got back to the ship, when they were safe, and the next, there was a bullet something sharp and stinging, and a hell of a lot of blood - when she put her hand to her side, at least, it felt like a lot of blood, wet and warm and sticky and.. Hell, this was bad.
Pale faced, she turned to Rye, trying to keep her composure. “We’ve gotta get off this damn rock.” She wasn’t going to die, she wasn’t going to die, she wasn’t going to die.. She couldn’t. Not here, not on Ersa, but also, not on the ship, not on Hemera. No, she couldn’t die anywhere but on Earth, on the solid ground of the only planet she’d ever loved.
One might have thought that Imogen’s memories of her mother would have faded by now, after so many years, but she could remember it like it was yesterday. Her mother, coughing at the kitchen table and telling her father that she would never leave Earth. Over my dead body, she’d said, and it hadn’t been a week after her funeral that her father had told them about the job he’d got on Ersa. over her dead body, exactly like she’d said.
But not mine, Imogen thought to herself. No, she would fucking live.
later, in the infirmary
“I can’t die out here.” She said to Rye, though everything was beginning to feel fuzzy. She’d always wondered what dying would be like, perhaps a side effect of seeing someone die so young. But this was different. She couldn’t do it here. Fuck. She squeezed Rye’s hand, though it was relatively weak. “Can you pray for me? Do you know prayers?”
There wasn’t much more, after that, just a sort of fade before everything went.
