Carisi looked confused. Air and blood bubbled past his lips, dripping down his chin. He looked down at his belly and felt a soft, liquid warmness surrounding a scorching agony. He was falling, crushing something odd and squirming beneath him. He slid down the wall into a nest of angles, screaming, and tears.
Amanda sprinted to him, grabbing his elbows and lowering him to the floor as Finn extracted the little girl from behind him. "Are you okay? Are you hurt? ¿Estás bien?" The girl looked horrified, her face and shirt splattered with blood, but she didn't seem to have been hurt. Finn saw two bullet holes in the wall – they wouldn't have gone through both of them even at that close range – and an outline of the girl's shoulder painted in red. Miraculously, only Carisi was hit.
Carisi was hit. Amanda felt like she was swimming through ether. She slowed Carisi's fall, lowering him to the ground. There was so much blood. An instant, and Amanda was covered. She looked at Sonny's belly, a mass of mangled crimson, and tried to apply pressure but didn't know where to start. Sonny never took his eyes off her face. Liv was screaming for a bus, the uni's scrambling, while Oliver, Dodds, Finn, and the lost girl stood speechless.
"Amanda?" There was rugged fear there.
"Sonny, it's okay darlin'. It's okay. You're going to be all right." Already Carisi's breath was changing, there was a shaking wheezing in each shallow breath. So this is what they mean by death rattle, the small part of Amanda's brain that was still functioning thought.
"My family…"
"Shh, Sonny, you're going to be fine, 'kay baby? Just look at me. Breath with me okay? In, out, in, out." She had coached herself through much of her own birth until complications had lead to a c-section; now, she was ready to coach Carisi back from the edge of life. "Just breath with me, Sonny, just breath with me. Okay, stay with me, stay with me." They never took their eyes off each other until the paramedics arrived, practically picking up a shellshocked, bloodsoaked Rollins and setting her aside to get Carisi onto a gurney.
