"Keep them back, no! I said—" Nani hunches forward with a ragged cough. Black hair that drips with blood falls into her face. Gani does his best to push it back. He smears most of it.
Red's hands are shaking and his lips feel numb; he doesn't know where Blue is. Dark eyes cut back to Nani and Gani—or what little he can see of them. Gani's foot hangs out of the bathroom doorway while he leans over his mother's legs. His eyes look a little lower and he sees the blood. Swirling, curling on itself.
Pooling.
The hairs on his arms stand up and the boy blinks his eyes to make it go away, but it doesn't work. There's too much of it. He knows that there's too much of it.
"Mom—" Red calls.
"St-stay back, Baby, keep Blue back, just a little—nnrhg," the noise makes his stomach twist. The room spins and his head starts to split. The toe of her boot begins to droop and bile shoots up into the back of his mouth. Red coughs and spits and stumbles forward, one hand grasping the doorframe to balance himself. It's so wrong. It feels so wrong.
"M-mom are you—hh.." the words die in his mouth and rot on his tongue.
He sees the last bits of her guts before they manage to stuff them back inside of her. Her jacket lies across her lap and in a moment Nani has it up in front of her belly. Her face is grey and it makes him sick again. "Momma," Red sucks back mucus and spit and wipes the rest of it off of his cheeks and chin as he sinks to his knees in front of her. Her jacket is already soaking.
"Hey baby, hi.." it's too tender. It's too warm. He wants her sharpness. He wants her to scold him for being so reckless and to hit him across the ear again. Her lips barely open for these words and it isn't fair. "You need to take care of each other—you and Blue, okay?" a grey hand fumbles for his own and when Red grasps hers, he doesn't care if he crushes it. He drags it to his mouth and rubs shaking lips over her palm and wrist.
"I need you to do something for me, Red—" she starts, struggling.
"N-no no Momma, no- it's okay Momma," he shakes his head and rocks where he sits. His fingers have left marks on her wrist.
"I need you to tell.." while she fights to take in a breath, Red interrupts her. He can't hear it. Can't make it real.
"Momma it's gonna be okay, we're—" Red shuts his eyes tightly and holds her hand against the burned half of his face, pressing her fingertips into the dips and ridges of old scar tissue, "We're gonna get Jeff to fix you up, Gani can carry you! It's not far Mom, p..please…" Red chokes.
Her eyes look past him to the empty doorway. She doesn't fight.
It makes him feel sick again.
"Gani go get Jeff," Red says. "Run, please, bring Jeff, I—she's my.."
He cracks his eyelids apart and has to blink and sniff and smear the bridge of his nose against Nani's wrist before he can even see her face. Some part of him always wishes that he didn't open his eyes. There's a glassiness to her eyes that shouldn't be there—and he sees himself inside of them. It scares him.
He pukes in her lap and tries to hear words never said.
He doesn't forgive himself.
The dirty tile floors are cold. Everything is cold.
Red sits just outside of the bathroom. The smell of blood and death collects in the air around him, and what little breeze there is outside isn't enough to clear it out of the ruins of the school house. He tries calling to Blue, but his twin isn't anywhere to be found. He knows he's alive, though. He can still feel that much.
Red and swollen eyes shift too slowly when he hears footsteps approaching. He doesn't hide—doesn't ready his weapons. Even if it isn't the others he can't make himself care.
"Here, he's right there—" Gani's voice booms out as his boots shake loose another piece of the tile on the wall. It breaks when it hits the floor. A little dust rises.
He can't look away.
"She's inside," Red says. He hasn't moved her. Hasn't touched her.
Can't.
Jeff—the shortest and by all appearances the oldest—darts past with a quickness rivaled only by its silence. O'Leary follows with wild eyes and shakes in his hands and knees. Red's lips part; he wants to say something else- it feels like he should say something else. Nothing comes of it, and when he feels their pants legs nudge against his shoulder as one after the other they file into the bathroom, he doesn't fight it either.
"It's so loud." Red tucks his chin closer to his chest.
It's quiet.
Jack sits beside him against the wall and when he feels the heat from his body radiating off of him, it only makes him miss her more. The older man's legs stretch out much farther than his own, and it isn't the first time that he feels small.
"She's inside," he says again—more quietly this time.
Choking sobs ring out in the air. Awful, gut-wrenching heaves and blubbers— and it takes him a long time to realize that he isn't the one crying. Every few seconds there's a quick gasp and a series of, Come on, Nani- one, two.. three.. that follows. Red starts to shake his head slowly.
Jack merely nods once, knowingly.
The group stays inside of the abandoned school that night. They won't leave until they find Blue.
Every time he rounds a corner he keeps thinking that he's going to see her walking farther down the hallway, wide hips carrying countless packs and supplies, machete hanging loosely from a strap. Every time it gets too quiet he hears her—but only at the end; only when it wasn't her anymore.
It doesn't matter where he tries to settle down in the halls, he can still hear O'Leary crying and sobbing, and Amani's gentle Shh, sh each time after.
Hours pass. They keep searching, keep fortifying.
He wants to scream when Alaine takes Nani's cast iron pan with wet eyes. His tongue is too swollen and his mouth is too dry. Instead, his knuckles go white as he clenches his fists. No one eats. She ends up burning the food anyway.
It isn't until crickets are wailing outside that Blue comes back.
Red is sitting just outside of the building and as far from the glow of the smoldering embers as he can get when he sees him; his mirror—minus the burns—walking through the overgrown fields just past the west wall. Blue doesn't say anything, he never does and Red barely remembers if he ever has, but he knows where he went and what he means when Blue furrows his brow and thumbs in the direction of their old camp.
He knows what he means when Blue stiffens and begins wringing his hands together.
"It smells wrong, doesn't it?" Red breathes.
Blue starts scratching the backs of his hands, slowly and firmly.
"Mom wouldn't have burned it." He spits, lips tying themselves together as he looks away and off to the back end of a school bus.
More than once he wishes he could have told him another way.