“That looks broken.”
From this ask meme
“I... ah... T-Think you might be right...” He can feel they’re right. It’s all John can do, right now, to lay there and try and focus on the voice on the other end of the holocomm, his eyes squeezed tightly shut and his breathing light and jagged from the pain. He knows, without looking, that his shin has been snapped at an awful angle, agony crawling up his leg like there’s an army of wriggling biting ants skittering up his nerves. His lungs feel full of liquid fire, something in his chest burning with every inhale.
That’s not right.
Wood creaks somewhere high above him, concrete groans. Ginger lashes struggle open and John, his head tipping to the side helplessly, gets a swinging, fractured view of a cracked, unstable ceiling with a bright, gaping hole right through it, far, far above him.
Oh yeah. John thinks, somewhat blearily, blinking dust and ash from his lashes. Fire. Collapsing building. Ground rescue. He’d... fallen? From up there?
Geez...
“W-what h-...?” He tries to ask, over the buzzing in his head. His suit feels entirely too warm and everything keeps sliding about, blurry, even though he’s reasonably certain he’s laying still. He takes second to swallow down a growing, rolling wave of nausea, squeezing his eyes shut again to try and stave off the terrible, whirling vertigo sensation that’s going on. He must have hit his head on his way down. Stubbornly, John’s fingers scrabble for purchase on something in the loose dirt and rubble, trying to push himself more upright to alleviate some of the pressure on his lungs. “W-What happened to the workers wh… aah!”
He seems to have twisted at just the wrong angle, and a lance of hot, white agony shoots up through his back. Everything whites out for a moment, the world melting into nothing but low buzzing and a brilliant, blasting heat.
John’s suit cam picks up the glowing embers twirling downwards from the ceiling above him long before he does. The hot ribbons of light are blurry, distant things that look almost like little red fireflies doing a small, but dangerous dance downward. The hot ashes twinkle, kind of mockingly, sparking and swirling in the hot, oxygen-rich air before cascading earthward, setting alight any dry, combustible material they come across.
Why did Scott drag him out on this one anyway? John thinks, hazily. He can’t quite seem to remember. His focus settles lazily on one of the crackling tongues of fire that’s spreading hungrily off to his right, watching as it attempts to consume anything wooden in its path. The flames flicker, mesmerizing, as they feverishly devour everything they touch, fed by a light breeze from high, high above him. The fire is gobbling especially hungrily at the wooden floor John’s sprawled against, blackening and turning what were probably once some beautiful old oak floorboards into weak, treacherous carbon. The polish on them bubbles blackly, belching smoke as they burst.
John coughs. His chest too-tight and his leg searing.
He hopes the workers on the floor above have gotten out alright but... as he watches the flames creep steadily closer, John concedes, logically, that maybe he needs to worry a little less about who he was supposed to be rescuing, and a little more about whose gonna rescue him...