TIMING: Current LOCATION: The woods PARTIES: Regan and Hazel SUMMARY: Unicorns are no pushover... even for a berserker. Regan finds Hazel with a very glittery, very serious injury.
It wasn’t like Hazel had intentionally gone out just to find something bloody and wounded to finish off and eat. No, that part came on a whim, when her devil got the coppery scent of a dying animal off in the middle of a clearing in Gatlin Fields. Since moving to Wicked’s Rest, she had found that to be a somewhat regular problem when she would go for runs. And each time, she was just lucky enough to be alone. But this time was different. This time there had been a strange cloud of dust floating in the air, so when the berserker had run through it on the hunt for the moaning and wounded creature, Hazel found herself facing down a unicorn that she had unintentionally angered. And unfortunately for her, her berserker half literally lived for a fight.
Fangs bared and lips snarled, the beast charged forward at the unicorn’s shadow in the glittering dust cloud time and time again, while it dodged left and she went right. This went on for a time, until she managed to rip into its leg with her razor sharp canines and rip off a piece of its flesh further angering the magical pony. But just as quickly as it bled, it had healed, much like the cuts and bruises Hazel was rightly earning as she rolled around taking blow after blow. It was the final charge, though, that the berserker had found herself on the pointy end of the magical creature’s horn, which sent a bone chilling yelp through the quietness of Gatlin Fields, before she managed to back off of the horn and stumble out of the cloud dust - her fur sparkling and her body slowly starting to redesign itself into her human shape; severely wounded, bloody, and sparkling like a vampire straight out of a Twilight movie.
—
Don't run toward loud noises was advice usually best heeded in Wicked's Rest. Regan often was the loud noise in question. This time, though, she wasn't. And she had to admit the pained, high-pitched yelp that tore through the sky was impressive in its volume (not banshee impressive, though), and she couldn't resist. That was reason enough for Regan to investigate – and, of course, someone or something might have been hurt. Also reason enough.
Regan hadn't been far from it, the source of the sound. Someone had mentioned there was a dead moose nearby (which animal control beat her to, and she'd have a word with them about it). "Hello?" She couldn't feel anything dead. No moose (those animal control gadaithe), no lemmings, no anything. Maybe whatever had made the noise was still alive – Regan hoped as much through a stab of disappointment, and then shame for being conflicted. "I'm not good with animals," she admitted, pushing through brush, "But if you're a human, I can help. I'm a doctor. Just a moderately friendly, human-to-human doctor in the woods, nothing unusual." Her pockets rattled with raccoon teeth each step. "Say something, if you can. I know I heard–"
Oh.
Regan's mind worked to process it all at once. A young woman lying on the ground in a puddle of her own blood, hands pressed to her abdomen where an obvious wound overflowed. Dirt mixed with blood covered her face, her arms, everything. The smell hit Regan too. Perforated stomachs and bowels had their own distinct odor. The woman was conscious, just barely, and before Regan truly made a decision she was kneeling next to her, balling up her jacket and applying pressure where it was needed. "Something speared you through the stomach. I need you to remain as still as possible while I assess." Shock. Check for shock. The woman's pulse was weak, a pitter patter against Regan's fingers. Much stronger was the storm brewing in Regan's lungs, but it hadn't insisted yet. No exit wound, she was able to confirm. That was good. "What is your name? Don't try to move. Stay. Your name, and if you can tell me what happened..." It would make autopsy easier. Regan wasn't ready to give up, though – as far as her scream was concerned, nothing was certain.
—
This was it. Hazel’s last stand. Her devil had gone too far, and now, she lay here in a field dying alone without anyone to acknowledge her final moments. At least it would be peaceful. She would be with nature. Her favorite place in the world. Surrounded by trees and wildflowers and birds chirping their songs of love to one another. She could go out peaceful, and she almost did, until she heard the voice. Hazy at best as she lay in the soft green grass with her eyes closed.
But Hazel didn’t want to die. Not yet. Not here. She still had things she wanted to do. She still had people she wanted to meet and maybe even those she wanted to reunite with. The sun was bright as it shined down on her face, but she had managed to open her eyes just enough to see a pale shadowy figure standing over her. One that was observing her and asking her questions. Questions it took for her a moment to comprehend, “H-Hazel. My name…is Hazel.”
Her eyes shifted from the woman standing over her to her surroundings and what was once peace had suddenly turned to panic in the realization that, even though the pain could’ve been far worse, it was the smell of her own blood and guts wafting through the air and hitting her hard in the face that was starting to freak her out. And the feeling of having someone push on her stomach when her stomach had been eviscerated by unknown circumstances had made things a million times worse, “I-I don’t want to die. Please don’t let me die…” Her eyes shot back over towards the woman who was trying to save her life as tears broke the threshold and began to roll down her dirty and sparkling cheeks.
—
I don’t want to die.
The words hit Regan with a force that outsized the currently-fragile girl bleeding out in front of her. Those specific words almost always felt too big for the people speaking them. It wasn’t Regan’s first time hearing them, and it would not be her last. She had predicted deaths preceded by those same desperate words, but this would not be one of them. Regan would make sure of it. Her body knew what the girl — Hazel — didn’t; the wound was bad, but not necessarily fatal, and the sound building in Regan’s chest was nothing more than a warning right now.
“I know, I know you don’t,” Regan said, her voice softening in a way she rarely allowed it. “I do not want you to die in these woods either. You will die elsewhere, eventually, some day. Years from now, we can hope, though hope never influences such an outcome.” These situations always reminded Regan about how poorly her bedside manner had been rated when she saw live patients, once upon a time. She liked to think it improved. It did change, but in the wrong direction. “Besides, spot autopsies are inconvenient. So let’s get you back into town.”
Regan kept pressure on the wound while reaching for her phone. The strange sparkles on Hazel had transferred over to her hand. She made note of them but determined them to be irrelevant for now — Regan had seen stranger things, and they were not the cause of Hazel’s wound. She managed to get through to dispatch. “Ambulance. Gatlin Fields, coordinates…” She checked and specified location. “Patient has severe abdominal trauma with significant blood loss.” Through the cracked phone screen, Regan found the button to put it on speaker (Jade taught her how to do that). She set it down and dedicated her full attention to Hazel again.
“What happened? What was the weapon that did this?” She narrowed her eyes, thinking, but also watching Hazel closely for signs of shock onset. “I cannot get a good look at it now. Hey… Hazel, focus on your breathing.” Leanbh. The word followed naturally in her head, and she shivered at it, keeping it locked behind her teeth. “The ambulance will take about fifteen minutes. You will stay with me until then. Not just because you’re incapable of physically moving, but because you’re going to remain conscious. So breathe, slow and steady, and do not drown. Speak to me if it helps. Or I can speak to you.” Though that second option hardly satisfied Regan’s gnawing curiosity, did it?
—
Hazel could feel herself drifting in and out of consciousness. What was the woman standing over her even saying? She had caught glimpses of words like autopsies and ambulances. It was all one big blur, so she tried to focus on something else. Tried to focus on the woman’s pale skin. The curiosity on her face. And eventually her words again, but intertwined with those moments had come moments of her childhood back in Tennessee. Time spent with her family and playing soccer with her friends. Her first kiss with her high school sweetheart and long time friend. And even though, just like everyone in her life back home, he had turned his back on her, her mind only went to the lighter moments. The good moments that made her feel warm and whole. Like a person again. And not some abandoned stray that she was pretty sure her family saw her as now.
She couldn’t focus on the question of what had done this to her, because she didn’t really know, “Um…I-I don’t know. It was a horse, I think. It was a horse and it was angry. My devil was angry.” Her answer was breathy and forced, and she could feel her mouth getting dry and her body growing colder from its natural instinct to direct what remaining blood she had towards her heart with the hopes of saving herself. “Please…please if I don’t make it, tell my momma and papa I still love them. And my brothers and sisters…please.” It wasn’t like there was a way Regan could just tell them, but Hazel was desperate. She had even longed for her devil in that moment to come back. At least it would protect her. Make her whole again, but even the devil himself couldn’t hold back death.
Letting her bloody, yet iridescent hand move up to slowly meet Regan’s, she latched onto it not wanting to feel so alone in such a vulnerable moment. A moment that she may not have lived through. All she had wanted was to feel softness and warmth. Love and like she actually mattered. A single tear rolled down her dirty cheek leaving a clean track of skin and her dark brown eyes focused on Regan in desperation as if to be staring straight into the other woman’s soul.
—
The dying had a look in their eyes. No, not just the dying — those who thought they were going to die shared the look. Those so inclined might insist there were higher powers involved, that the boney gates were opening and Death, or an Angel — same thing — were reaching for their hand. Regan was not so inclined. It was a lack of oxygen in the brain, an ocean’s worth of neurotransmitters being dumped into a shrinking pond, the cognitive need to find meaning. Her decedents already had that look by the time they came to her. She saw it posthumously, more often than not. She brushed their hair or held their hand and they showed her their most intimate moment, their last moment. Keeping any secrets from Cliodhna was unbefitting of duty, but Regan did keep one or two: a part of her, sometimes, pretended she was there when it happened. She could see it, feel it, so was it a stretch? It was sentimental rubbish, the wishful thinking of humans, a crusty layer of foulness over the stain her father had left on the genealogical carpet. Regan should have spat the confession at her grandmother as she sank.
She was beyond doing rotations in the ED or palliative, where the look was often paired with confessions Regan scarcely knew what to do with. Rarely now did she have the opportunity to actually be there. No, Hazel was not going to die. It wasn’t written in blood yet. But Hazel thought she was. And Regan gripped Hazel’s hand back firmly enough that only death itself could pull her away. And Regan saw it, the look. Pupils dilated and nearly eclipsing the iris, the desperate intensity of the stare because it could not be shared with others, some muscles slack and others taut. There was always only honesty in the look. In it, a thousand faces collated into one. Hazel had the eyes of someone expecting the end, in the way everyone other than banshees expected the end. People died as they were birthed — present but somewhere else, imitating the palmar grasp reflex, trading a caul for a paul, grappling for answers that would be impossible for them to understand in their limited capacity, the date etched into their headstone.
Whether the explanation was nonsensical babbling (not unlike her own stream of consciousness) or a genuine attempt to describe what Hazel experienced, Regan wasn’t sure. But it didn’t make sense. Or maybe it did, in a Wicked’s Rest kind of way, but the margins of what that meant were impossible to measure. Regan had autopsied horse-related deaths before, accidents (the humans, not the horses). This was rural Maine. None of them involved sparkles. Few involved sharp force trauma at all. They were kicks to just the wrong place at just the wrong time, falls, on one occasion head trauma resulting in very little head to be examined. “A horse… did this? What is this about a devil?” Regan wouldn’t put any stock in half-delirious answers, but it kept Hazel busy, and that was sufficient for the moment. “Are the sparkles some kind of calling card?”
Blood seeped through the improvised compress, slippery between Regan’s fingers, and it ushered in the follow up to the look. “You can talk about them, your family. But you will be able to tell them yourself.” There was a rock in her stomach. It rolled when Hazel mentioned siblings. “Your wound — it missed major blood vessels, missed your heart and your lungs. You will be going to the hospital, not the morgue.” Not yet, anyway. She heard sirens past her ears, a distant but beautiful blaring (Rock Lobstah would have been more tolerable had they switched to this soundtrack). “They’re close now. The EMTs. I will stay and explain… what you have told me.” Which was next to nothing informative. And Regan couldn’t follow to the hospital. “Hazel. If whatever or whoever did this to you remains out there, at large, I want you to tell me. You are going to live, but their next victim may not, and it is not going to be among the first 20 questions they ask you.”
The rock rolled again. Why? Because the explanation might extend beyond the comfortable realm of science? The sirens grew louder. Hazel clung on, both literally and figuratively.
—
The sound of Regan’s voice lingered within the dying confines of Hazel’s mind. Her words danced and buzzed, and even entranced the brown eyed girl whose sights were set so hard on the woman in front of her, she could have bore holes into her. But the harder she focused the more tired she became. It was like a young child trying to fight off the sleep monster after playing all day, and that’s what the berserker had been out doing. Playing in a most violent way like it normally had when it had crossed the wrong animal to fight.
Hazel could feel her eyes shutting, but the sound of blaring sirens inching closer and closer to them seemed to startle her back into what little consciousness remained. And in doing so, the young woman latched onto Regan’s words once more. All garbled except for the nagging question of what? What had jabbed its boney horn straight into the belly of the beast leaving Hazel fighting for her life. The visions of it were a haze. If only her devil, who liked to keep things so secretive about its life and its choices away from Hazel to spare her sanity could give her a crumb it might save her life.
And then just like that, closing eyes once again flashed open, but much quicker. An epiphany of sorts; her sparkling and blood stained face contorting into something of confusion. And as she looked into Regan's eyes one last time, she whispered a single word, "Unicorn..." and she was out. Leaving her weakened form in the hands of a complete stranger not knowing if that would be the last word ever muttered from Hazel’s lips.
