Title: Survivor

Author: BardWisp

Pairing: Kahlan/Cara

Word Count: 4,427

Warnings: Implied character death.

Disclaimer: I own nothing here.

Summary: This was supposed to be an ordinary errand. Until they find themselves in a completely twisted situation.

A/N1: This is a sort of vague post-Tears ordeal.

A/N2: English is not my first tongue. And this is my first fic ever. So, be critical, but be a gentle one.


Survivor

- I -

Cara had accomplished similar tasks before.

It was simple, really – push forward, break the tip, pull back. So many times, in fact, that it did not make sense that she had been so embarrassingly… excited by doing so with Kahlan; knowing it would've most certainly caused the other woman a significant amount of pain during and after the process if she were to be awake was as thrilling a sensation as it was disturbing.

She frowned at her own train of thought; she did not want Kahlan to hurt. Sure she didn't, for the woman wasn't helpful at all – the Confessor would've likely fainted just like she did that one time when Cara had used her Agiel to close her wounded thigh – but even so. Well, she did care for the Confessor; it was a matter of fact to the Mord'Sith by now. It was not a thing to be thinking it over and over. It was just that, a simple misstep of life.

And of course, in the end it went as good as it could be considering the circumstances.

Cara squinted down at Kahlan's still form and sighed.

The Confessor was still asleep, lying on her left side with floppy arms and her legs snuggled between the Mord'Sith's knees, and hopefully she did not get to witness one second of the process in which Cara had successfully managed to push, break the arrowhead and pull the rod out of her lower back, all awhile battling the impulse to... Her frown deepened.

"This is ridiculous." She huffed, shaking her head as she discarded the bloody stick.

The Mord'Sith felt something in her chest constrict when the woman beneath her made the softest noise, as though she had been sensing Cara's anxiety all the time, as if she was trying to communicate. The sound stirred the Mord'Sith into action again. She began to untie the laces of Kahlan's corset and, as the dark leather loosened enough, she tugged it up a little and began to clean up the blood-marred spots and embalm the twins wounds as best as she could with the press of time, and then wrapped the woman's lower back in bandages – those she spared in her own pack. The ones she found in Kahlan's, Cara used to drape over the nasty slash across the Confessor's left thigh and to band her wounded forehead.

When she finished retying the laces, the Mord-Sith took the Confessor's daggers and sheathed them back in her boots. She did the same with her own weapons, tucking them into the holsters now loosely knotted on her left thigh, putting her gloves back on carelessly.

Cara then bound their backpacks together, tying their straps to create an elongated one which she threw round her neck to cross her back, all the time keeping a watchful eye on the surroundings. The long strap was slung over the Mord-Sith right shoulder so that Kahlan's pack was dangling in front of her knee and, with the way the leash slid across Cara's leathered-clad back she tied it to her holsters, and thus her own pack became a pendulum by her left side.

It seemed unpractical to do so, as it was additional cargo, but she could not let the packs behind, for all their food, water and healing salves were secured in them and, moreover, she could not afford having Kahlan hurt like this, thirsty and starving at the same time.

Plus, she was not so sure if she would manage it back to this meadow and collect their things in her current physical state.

Cara did not even know if she could make it to get Kahlan out of this cursed valley, as she kneeled and bent in front of the Confessor, taking the unconscious woman in her arms and lifting her upper body carefully until Kahlan's front folded inward and over Cara's sore shoulders.

Her injured thigh protested loudly with the effort it took, but Cara managed to stand and lock her knees, before bending slightly forward so that she could support most of the weight on her legs; they were very strong legs, even if one was barely alive by then.

Cara was hurt, badly so. She knew the limits of her body.

But she would cross them if needed be. She was Mord'Sith, after all.

"Perhaps I am becoming soft," she grumbled to herself, "A little," an afterthought.

A tremulous sigh was her response.

She got in line and hurry she did as the mantle of the night settled heavily over them.


The shot that hit Kahlan had come from behind, where Cara should be protecting the Confessor's back if she herself had not been caught by the rough blade of that mammoth of a man the minute earlier.

She had shifted her stance at the last moment possible and the blow missed most of its intent. Still, the sharp edge slipped under her arm and cut past her leather, slicing her left side to the ribs. That was when she felt a kick to her midsection and staggered backwards. Though Cara managed not to fall, she dropped her guard momentarily and, as the momentum followed, she saw as the huge sword whirled in the air, aiming to split her skull in half.

And then dark spots danced before her eyes.

In the faint, bluish dusk light Cara felt more than saw as the dull whistle by her left side brought a sharp jolt of pain to her head. She could hardly adjust her focus to determine what was happening, for next the swarm of black flying sticks raced toward her, a flurry of death surging from where the fog was thicker around the meadow; from the obscured tree line to which Kahlan had her back turned.

They arrows flew, swishing past her ears and through her body until she fell onto her knees with a grunt of pain, her Agiels gripped tightly in her fists by her sides.

With an animalistic howl, the man who had been about to finish her off slumped to the ground and his sword, the end of it glistening red, fell next to Cara, as did the dozens of the brutes that were charging them not but a moment ago. Some of the men hit the grass already dead while others writhed on the ground, agonizing for a swift end that would not come.

Cara hadn't had the time to register what was going on yet, only vaguely remembered hearing a distinct sound above all others, a womanly cry, when she had tumbled to the ground.

Her blood ran cold as a faint whisper crossed her lips, "Kahlan."

Cara spun around and began to lope.

Only then she realized that there were four bloody shafts protruding from her front; three were rooted in her upper body and one into her right thigh.

She did not care.

She felt something warm leaking from the top left side of her head and as it slid into her eye, her senses clouding with sudden sickness, she stumbled sideways. Bile rose to her throat with what her not obscured eye was seeing five strides afar.

Kahlan had been felled.

The Mother Confessor was lying with her face downed into a pond of blood and dirt, daggers loosely grasped in her fingers and arms gone limp at her sides.

Cara saw that one lasting bastard arching his stance, both hands raising the sword above his head to deliver the blow that would end the Mother Confessor's life.

Time slowed to a deafening cadence, and then it all came crashing down as something both dark and liberating surged into the Mord-Sith.

With an enraged shout Cara jumped to her feet and launched herself onto the giant man. Her right shoulder slammed into his midsection and they both crashed onto the ground paces away from the felled Confessor.

A tangled mess of hissing Agiels and cries of utmost misery ensued and then there was nothing but stillness.


Cara crawled on her right side; it was all she could do with the arrows still achingly pierced into her front. When she reached the other woman she kneeled beside her, dropping her Agiels as she did, and as gently as she could she turned Kahlan's head to the side so the woman could breathe. The Mord-Sith's fingers went immediately to her neck, feeling for the pulse of life there.

It was faint, but there; a constant beat animating the fragile skin under her gloved fingertips.

Relieved beyond words, and despite herself, Cara smirked down at the prone woman.

"Not so easy to kill, are we?"

But then grimaced as she brushed dark locks of hair aside and saw the bloodied cut on the side of the Confessor's dirty face, its purplish swelling marring the skin above her right temple, near the hairline. That was what had rendered Kahlan unconscious, just after that one arrow pierced her on the right side of her lower back; it also had kept the Confessor from meeting a swift death with all those arrows shooting around, Cara assumed with a frown.

Pursing her lips, Cara steeled herself as she eyed the long projectile jutting from Kahlan's back, then glared down at the ones into her own body.

Without further thought, the Mord-Sith ripped off the arrow in her thigh first; the most urgent to pull off and seemingly the most troublesome at the same time. She suspected it had nipped at some important blood vessel, for it was starting to pour out rather hastily from the resultant wound.

She pressed her right hand down against torn leather and flesh while her other hand yanked out the arrow bellow her right ribs; the other one that had plunged into her belt, a little to the left on her belly, came off as swiftly. These had not reached too deep, being the less damaging; or so the Mord-Sith assumed.

Clumsily, Cara then undid her belt and fastened it as a tourniquet around her injured thigh to try and keep the bleed at bay.

The Mord'Sith ignored the last arrow in her left shoulder for the moment; she knew it would require a more cautious maneuvering to be removed.

Most obstacles from her body dealt with, she leaned a little forward as her left gloved palm splayed firmly against the blood-damp black leather covering Kahlan's back, her thumb and forefinger angling with the arrow rod. Her other hand that had been on her bleeding thigh came to her mouth and she bit the tip of her middle finger, easing the glove off. Then, fisting her hand around the wooden shaft, she gave it a tentative, but solid pull.

Nothing.

Cara released the breath she had been holding in an annoyed huff.

The arrowhead was stuck.

She thanked whatever Spirits that protected Confessors that Kahlan was not conscious, or else she would be experiencing an awful moment in a little while.

Sitting back on her heels, she pulled her other glove off as she took in her surroundings. Several corpses were tossed about in various crude positions and the smell of death already tainted the air.

Those things had come from nowhere; too many and too fast as they were.

She wondered what those creatures were, because there was no way they could be human. They looked like men and even fought as such, albeit their vestment were composed of rustic tattered skins and ill-tanned furs, and they had acted much more like bloodthirsty beasts than anything else when they had attacked, seemingly materializing out of thin air and moving faster than their over muscled forms and towering height would have permitted. Cara even had a few marks and rips of teeth along her clad arms. Yes, the bastards had dared to bite her.

Banelings would have been a better sight, as they were predictable. But then again, the veil being repaired a mere fortnight ago already prevented the condemned souls from coming back to the land of the living, and had sent the rest of the dammed right back into the deeps of the Underworld.

So what of those beasts? What if there were more of them milling about? And where in the Keeper's name had those arrows come from? Had the brutes actually fired their own comrades in the hopes of killing the two of them along? If so, where were the archers now?

She did not have any interest to know, anyways.

The only thing that mattered now was taking Kahlan away from that cursed place as soon as possible.

Cara grasped the middle of the arrow planted into her shoulder, her darkened green eyes still seeking through the mist as she pulled experimentally. With a snap and a gasp, it gave in under her fingers. The rod had likely cracked when she struggled with the lasting brute aiming for Kahlan's life; the tip of it remained buried deep into her breast muscle and a hand span of the rod still linked to the arrowhead would be the painful reminder until she got the Mother Confessor to a safer location.

But then again, she had never held qualms in bearing the damage already fated to her body.


Cara felt her sight blurring suddenly as the memories of that afternoon flirted with her weary thoughts and she paused for a moment.

Breathing in deep, she exhaled a gust of warm air.

The resulting pallid wisp dissipated before her clouded eyes like a mocking ghost.

That was when her ears caught the pained, almost inaudible whimper that came from behind her. They were increasing, these distressed sounds the Confessor was making. She shifted her feet, careful not to cause any more pain to the other woman and knowing it would even so, as she tried to raise her head to see if there was some clean area further on, or at least a crease on the rocky wall she had been following for the past hour.

She needed to stop. Urgently.

But it was dark, she could barely see three paces ahead of her. Worst, it was too cold and frustratingly muddy in those eerie forests. If she was one given to superstitions, she would swear these woods had eyes and fingers, and rather ominous lingering ones, for the hair on the back of her neck had been bristling since she grudgingly entered this valley earlier that afternoon. That sensation coupled with the howling noises coming from the trees every now and then was of no comfort to say the least. As it were, being surrounded by those unforgiving nettles and the strangely lookalikes trees she had ever come across with had the Mord-Sith on the brink of screaming in anger and frustration.

Chastising herself for this moment of weakness, Cara gulped in another lungful of air, slowly, trying to center herself, but this time a wet sizzle in her chest brought up a metallic tang to her tongue.

Just as a heavy drop landed on her forehead, and then another on her nose.

Cara looked skywards, glared deaths toward endless grayness, then tried to peer down at the deep aching split on her left side bellow her ribs, only being able to see the piece of the arrow rod still lodged into her shoulder, mere inches above her heart.

She cursed under her breath.

Cara knew she had to find shelter and do it quickly.

She picked up her urgent yet cautious pace down the narrow clammy trail alongside the rock face.

As for her predicament, a rainy moonless sky in an gloomy forest inhabited by ravenous beasts was all she did not need in this night; but alas, the Creator had provided her precisely with such scenario along with the task of saving the life of one Mother Confessor, who currently was a half deaden weight on the Mord-Sith's shoulders, with her dark head and left arm hanging limply behind Cara, the other arm captive by the blonde while her long legs were kept under the firm clasp of the Mord'Sith's right arm.

I've faced worse odds before. I can do it, Cara assured herself as she stepped aside of a puddle of mud – her right thigh cringing painfully as she did –, or so it looked like mud.

But the thing was that she hadn't had much to lose those times besides her own life, which by all means had been forfeited since she was a child.

Now, carrying this woman, the heavy meaning of this woman on her shoulders, made Cara feel a foreign pressure behind her eyeballs, made her think that perhaps she could be something other than what she had been twisted into, the monster she had been for almost her entire life; something beyond the tool of pain and faultless killer.

She could be more, for this woman alone she knew she could be. If only Cara could ignore the terrifying fact that the warm slick liquid slipping away at each step she took meant less time to even be that which she was; the dark crimson soaking her skin and torn leathers that was her own life mingled with Kahlan's.

She was bearing the weight of the world on her back, in more ways than one, and it was breaking her apart not only physically.

And she could not break; she had to stay alive, if only to fight this one last battle.

Or else Kahlan would die.

Cara would not allow that.

The taste of blood had always felt sweet on her tongue.

"Not today," She murmured to the cold night air as she pulled Kahlan's right arm more firmly against her chest.


It seemed that the Creator was testing her faith, or more accurately trying her patience, for the Deity had presented the miracle but it was about sixty-five wide paces ascending into a tapered bifurcation of the trail, up to a pebbly pathway covered with slime that gave way – she hoped so – to what seemed to be salvation.

Cara had spotted it when a lightning crashed into the skies a quarter of an hour ago; by the time she reached the cavernous spot rain was pouring down with a hungriness Cara had only witnessed once before, when they were traveling to the Palace of the Prophets to find Richard.

She shook the disquieting memories off as she gingerly dropped to one knee, the muscles of her thighs quaking with overexertion as she lowered a soaked Kahlan onto the even stony ground in front of the horizontal slit that apparently was the only way in and out of the hollowed stone wall.

She then proceeded to warily drag the prone Confessor, their packs and herself further into its humid interior, which was lower than she had predicted. Cara had to keep on her knees to try and move inside of the dim place, but it provided asylum and all that mattered now was keeping Kahlan at least mostly dry and warm.

Her eyes were losing their focus again so Cara felt with her gloved fingers, attempting to find Kahlan's legs and, finding them, she grabbed the back of the Confessor's knees and carefully rearranged the position of the sleeping woman so that Kahlan rested mainly on her left side, facing the cave's entrance.

The Confessor had got a deep cut that crossed from the outside and down to the front of her left thigh, ending just above the knee-cap, but that was not the cause of Cara's concern right now. Her worry was for the internal damage the arrowhead had caused.

With a numbing mind and rigid fingers, she hurried to get Kahlan out of her soaked clothes.


About two hours, perhaps more.

That was the time she took to get Kahlan here, to this helpless hole. It was oppressive and dark and too low; the only light came from the roaring flashes of lightning outside. But by then, she had no say in the matter. Cara was only grateful that the cave was out of inhabitants, been it animal or not.

She had to arrange to a fire, though.

The sharp throbbing on her left shoulder had become a dull ache, where the piece of wood remained cooped in. Her middle's and leg's wounds were in no better odds, as they had likely wasted most of her blood already.

She felt dormant.

Cara had considered using her Agiels to close the wounds, but she feared the intense added pain would get her unconscious and therefore she would be of no help to Kahlan. It would have to be done the old way, if only she had the time.

As she fingered the slash on the side of her head she felt like she might faint, her whole body shuddered in a nauseating wave.

She was cold, soaked to the bones and would not last long enough. She had lost too much blood and her lung was without doubt impaired.

Sitting as she was beside the unaware Confessor, trying to reclaim her breath and the use of her limbs, back to the hard cold stonewall, Cara looked with barely open eyes at the twitching lines of the Mother Confessor's frame; between bolts of white-blue light she could see only her pale face for she had wrapped Kahlan in a bundle of blankets and bedrolls. She could see her eyeballs as they flickered behind closed lids; the morbid pallor on the Confessor's face only adding to the tormented look on Cara's own semblance.

She knew Kahlan's body was fighting that which her own could not. Not any longer.

But still she did, Cara would keep fighting. For her.

And so she fought to her hands and knees and, turning to the left, she crawled towards the cave's mouth.

She had seen a few twigs by there when she arrived, perhaps it would be enough to start a sparkle with her Agiels.

Four stricken lopes later and her hand reached out, grabbing one. She fisted it until it crumbled.

Rotten.

A sudden, violent cough took her breath away and blood spilled from her mouth onto the wet black pebbles beneath.

She fisted another. Rotten. All of them were… rotten.

Cara's arms gave in and her forehead slammed down onto the tiny rounded stones as her body convulsed with harsh coughs, the brusque movements against the ground plugging the piece of arrow further in as she tried to regain control over her body and failed miserably.

Tried not to cry and cry she did, "No…" She moaned lowly between shaking breaths.

"Cara?"

Her heartbeat faltered in prelude.

Slowly, her head turned to the side; cheek sliding over slime, spit and blood. Cara tried to focus her hazy eyes on a face bathed in shadows and found she could not. Thunder exploded somewhere to her right, but she barely registered it, for her ears had gone numb as well. Her entire body had by now.

"I'm here." She croaked after a moment.

"Cara, do it. Kill me." Came the urgent plea.

Crumbled to the ground as she was Cara sobbed in anguish. How could Kahlan ask that of her? Again?

"Please. I'm... It's the only way to… save us both."

She closed her eyes at that. Cara had promised herself long ago that she would die before letting this happen. And here she was, for all her intents doing exactly that.

Dying and letting Kahlan die.

"No. Not like this." She refused, her voice hoarse, defeated.

"You must do it. I need you to."

Silence was her response.

And more silence.

"Cara? Are you there? Please, answer me!" Her voice sounded shallow, panicked even.

It was not like Kahlan to sound frail like this, to be frail like this. And Cara hated how it pained her listening to this, listening to the truth of Kahlan's words.

"Spirits… Cara. Talk to me, please."

The Mord'Sith said nothing, forcing herself back on her knees, and started to creep toward the darkness.

Blindingly, she bared a hand and reached out with wobbly fingers, touching a cold forehead, a paled cheek.

"No, Kahlan."

"Why?"

"Just… can't."

"You can. You will. And then I'll take care of you. We'll be fine, Cara. Do it."

The Mord'Sith felt the staccato rhythm of those words being breathed on her naked palm; they were warm and full of hope and she could not swallow them, for they were like cinder in her throat.

How could Kahlan speak like that now, so confident while Cara was already breaking apart with what she was about to do. With what she had to do.

To save her. To save Kahlan.

"Too late… for me…" She whispered erratically, pulling an Agiel free and holding it with numb gloved fingers, the yielding hum of it filling the chilled and suddenly still air. Her other hand slid down Kahlan's face, fumbled to her chest and, as slender cool fingers found her own there, squeezing in reassurance, Cara made the hardest decision of her life.

"But not…" And her Agiel screamed for her, a hairsbreadth from taking Kahlan's life with its burning touch. "... without you…" Cara lowered her face down and down until her cooled, bloody lips brushed Kahlan's bluish and parted ones, the Confessor's eyes widening in shock and pain as she stared into the depths of Cara's dulled ones, "…knowing the truth about..."

As chilly darkness claimed her senses, the only thought in Cara's mind was that her last breath in this world couldn't have been more glorious.

Kahlan would live.


To be continued?

(I'd need a beta to do so. Volunteers?)