Starter for @morinotsume
Logan w/Xion
Xion had everything she owned with her.
The small bedroll she kept tucked in her bag, laid-out across the old worn floor of the choir loft. A few gas station snacks and items for a meal: pop-tarts, small bottles of juice, chips, and packaged cookies. Her phone, a stolen Android, was on charge in the wall socket and she had laid-out beside her the various small implements of her survival: a metal canteen, her knife, an improvised first aid kit kept in a metal tin, and a small, electric lantern that provided her thin light in the old church. And at her side was her sword, kept within reach.
Ebenezer Evangelical Lutheran Church, was a long abandoned relic of the West side of Chicago. There were signs of work, and life, still in the sanctuary and the bell tower, where Xion saw the left behind tools and implements of workmen attempting to restore the space for some unknown purpose. Otherwise the faded brick building was a shell of its former glory: smelling of dust, mold, and aged, warped wood. Yet, it was empty, and the walls served to block the bitter, chilling lake wind of the frozen day outside. It rained, Xion heard the patter on the roof and on the floor somewhere down in the parish below her. The floor boards and the foundation creaked, but tucked away in the loft she was dry.
Which was all she asked for as she attempted to pull a metal thorn out of her left ankle.
Blood oozed from the wound, reddish-black and viscous as Xion gripped the object with slick, pinched fingers. Pain echoed dully through her nerves, eased only by a numbing spell which she was too drained to properly fuel. Her right leg tucked under her and she hunched over her knee, teeth grit, pulling against the clinging suction of her own flesh. It felt like a scrape of bone and the slick give of meat, before the thorn, a fist length long and two inches deep, slipped out of her lower leg. Xion tossed the object, the cruel weapon of her attacker from an hour earlier, and pushed a wad of gauze into the wound. She packed the hole, laid down an absorbent pad, and bandaged her ankle tightly. Hands blood soaked, skin swallow and flushed, and ankle hurting, she groaned and collapsed back against the floor, arm swinging across her face to muffle her senses.
A little magic numbed her pain, a little more took the edge off the bleeding, but Xion spared nothing else. The power in her was on dwindling reserves and until she slept another night or two, fully, not the handful of hours she'd caught in the past week, she'd remain exhausted. But the wound was packed, she was alive, and she had some food, and shelter, and a place to sleep. She'd worry about other things in the morning.
Xion sat-up, reaching for a pop-tart, blueberry. She popped the foil open and broke off pieces of the cheap, bland and overly sweat treat that made for her dinner, chewing, swallowing, and listening to the ran. Until her eyes narrowed and she reached over to turn out the lantern at her side, plunging the sanctuary into darkness except for the glimmerings streetlight outside, burning through the old stained glass. She had heard an unusual creak in the building: of a hinge, a door opening on the East wall. Someone had come inside and they tread lightly on the dust thick carpet floors.
But Xion still heard them and in response she picked-up her sword in its scabbard to lay across her lap, hand grasping the hilt. She waited.
