No Way Out - Chapter 3

"Do you think..." Marian pants, bending down to brace herself against her knees, pulse running like a spooked horse and breath coming in short, painful gasps, "do you think that will hold them?"

Something – a walker's fist, hell, maybe a whole walker for all of how loud the sound is – pounds into the door. She jumps at the noise, nearly toppling backwards over a package of pain killers, but while the shelves shake from the impact they stay firmly in place.

"I think that's as good of an answer as we'll get for the time being," Fen says, breathing heavily as well, sweat making his bangs stick to the front of his forehead.

"Ok." She takes a handful of short, unsteady steps backwards, until her back bumps into the end of another self and she leans herself back into it. Her head tilts back, brows furrowing while she tries to calm down, taking deep, slow breaths in and out through her nose. "Ok."

Of all the ways she could have seen this run going, winding up trapped in an oversized closet with nothing but a broken door and a few flimsy shelves between them and a store filled with undead was not a blunder she had made a contingency plan for. For a second she wishes she'd thought to put together more of her Molotovs before setting out – but really, what good would they do them now? Maybe if she'd had them out in the street she could have bought them some time or used them to clear a path, but at this point the only good they'd do is kill the both of them off from smoke inhalation before the walkers manage to get their hands on them.

Another spike of cold dread races down her spine at the thought, her brain betraying her as it puts together some very unpleasant, very vivid images of just what either of those outcomes would entail. Her chest tightens as they flash past, panic building in her chest and threatening to rise up and swallow her whole for how hopeless the situation seems – but she forces it back down, eyes screwing shut with the effort. Going to pieces has never helped before, and it certainly won't help now. She needs a clear head if they're going to make it through this; decisions made out of fear are just as likely to kill them off as the walkers at the door if she isn't careful.

It takes a minute that feels more like an hour, but eventually she feels her heartbeat start to slow down to something sharing a close enough resemblance with normal. This isn't good, but it isn't terrible either. Not yet, anyway. They're both alive and, more importantly, not bitten, and their barricade seems to be holding up alright despite what sounds like the walkers' best efforts. Fen's arm is fucked, but not catastrophically so, and between the first aid kit in her backpack and the supplies in the room they have everything they need to at least make sure he doesn't keel over from infection anytime soon.

Of course, looking on the bright side of the situation will do all of nothing to help with the fact that they are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, trapped like a pair of overly intelligent rats.

It doesn't take long for her to realize Fen has come to the same conclusion as well, the barest hint of what she thinks is worry, but could very well be aggravation, appearing in his face when he says: "We're safe in here for the time being, I think. But we need to hail the others on the radio. They'll be able to get a better idea of what the situation looks like then we will in here, maybe even set up some kind of a distraction."

"Right. The radio. Er, about that," she says sheepishly, already cringing. "I... Well. I may have... lost it?"

"You what?"

"Lost it," she repeats herself, though if the way Fen is glaring at her is any clue she doubts the clarification is necessary for anything other than stalling his attempts to strangle her. "It fell off my belt when we made it back into the store. You didn't think I was sitting up there looking for loose change, did you?"

He looks as though he's caught between utter disbelief and wanting to punch something – possibly her. There's a long moment where he does nothing but gape at her, nose flared and the fist of his good arm clenched around where he's holding the injured one against his chest, skin and fabric now thoroughly stained with his own blood. Then his chin drops and he scowls down into the floor, white hair falling in his face while he bites out another indistinguishable but thoroughly violent-sounding curse.

"Damn it, Hawke," he growls, his eyes narrowed and cutting back up towards her. "Fuck."

"My thoughts exactly."

His hand pulls away from his arm and makes to run through his hair, only to be pulled back when it reaches eye level and he spots the mess coating his fingers. Instead he spins on his heel and starts to pace, storming back and forth across the cleared space left by the shelves, the toe of his boot sending several of the spilled meds rolling across the floor.

"Ok, look, I know this seems bad," Marian says, her hands raising half in a placating gesture, half out of impulse when he goes after a bottle of cough syrup with a little more force than is necessary and sends it flying within a foot of her face. "Really, really bad even—"

He snorts. "You don't say?"

"—but honestly I don't think it is." And then, when his brows raise and he looks at her like she's grown a second head, she adds: "As bad, I mean. It's still pretty terrible."

"You do know you're horrible at offering reassurances, I assume?"

"Everyone already knows we're out here," she says evenly, choosing to ignore his jab for the moment. "We were supposed to check in with them... hell, by now, probably. When we don't try to reach them they'll try themselves and when that doesn't work they'll know something went wrong and come looking for us. It's the whole reason we use the stupid things in the first place."

That makes him pause, and he turns to look at her with one foot raised mid-step. "That's... something, I suppose."

She nods. "Better than resigning ourselves to living out our last days on Flintstone vitamins and Metamucil mix if you ask me."

"And what do we do in the mean time?" he asks, brow cocking as he turns to face her. "Just... wait?"

"It isn't like we have much else in the way of options, is it? I'm sure we'll come up with something to pass the time." Her eyes fall to the gash in his arm, lips twisting to see the bloodstain has spread even further just in the past few minutes. "We could make sure you don't bleed out any time soon, for starters."

His free hand shifts automatically over the wound – a poor attempt to conceal the evidence if she's ever seen one, the grimace that flicks across his face even more of a dead giveaway towards his discomfort than the blood. "That isn't necessary."

She snorts, crossing the space between them in a few short strides. "Don't be ridiculous," she says, eyes rolling as she reaches out to take a careful hold of his arm. "There's no point in you risking an infection when we're in a damned drug store of all places. It isn't like we're hurting for supplies to take care of it."

Her fingers give a gentle tug, and after a long second of sour-faced hesitation he gives in, reluctantly letting her pull the limb off of and away from his chest. The sleeve of his thermal is a wreck, tattered edges starting to crust and stick to his skin. Between the mess of blood and fabric she can't see much of the cut, so she takes the cuff carefully in hand, making sure to move slowly as she rolls it up to his elbow. Fen hisses a little when the pieces that had stuck to the wound are pulled free, but otherwise he doesn't protest and Marian finds herself thankful that he has enough sense not to fight with her over this.

Finally the sleeve is tucked up and out of the way and she glances back at the gash, breathing out a sigh of relief when she sees it isn't nearly as bad as she had thought it would be. Running almost perfectly parallel with one of the thicker lines of his tattoos, the cut sits a little more than two fingers' width below his wrist. It's about as long as she had expected, between two and three inches if she had to guess, but it's not nearly as deep as she'd worried.

"Looks like today's your lucky day," she says happily, offering him a bright smile without letting go of his arm. "Much deeper than this and we'd be finding out just how good my sewing skills are. But I think cleaning it and wrapping it up should be enough for now. At least until we get ourselves out of here and Anders can take a look at you."

She feels him freeze up at that, the tension creeping into his voice when he asks: "You'd honestly have tried to give me stitches?"

"'Course I would have," she says absently as she turns his arm to get a closer look at the damage. "You know, if you had needed them."

"Do you even know how?"

"I've a vague idea. I've seen Bethany practice them loads of times, it's pretty straight forward."

"Your sister is a vet tech, Hawke."

Marian brushes the statement off with a wave of her hand as she turns and crosses the room to collect her backpack from the corner. "Semantics. We're all animals, you know. And you don't need them anyway, so no worries there."

She hears Fen make a short, snorting sound behind her. "Small mercies, I suppose."

"Watch it, you," she says over her shoulder while she settles herself on a pile of boxes of paper towels stacked along the wall, the warning losing most of its threat when she follows it with a grin. "You're stuck in here with me until the reinforcements come, remember?"

If they come, a voice in the back of her head whispers, and her smile falters. A second later and she's thrown herself into tearing through her pack, mouth pursing as she paws through the hodge-podge of meds and toiletries she'd collected earlier, doing her best to ignore the way her stomach had seized up at the thought.

She pats the empty space on top of the box next to her, not bothering to look up from her things while she finagles a bottle of hand sanitizer and peroxide out of the pack one handed. "Come on, no sense putting it off."

He doesn't join her immediately, lingering by the door long enough for her to set her things down on the floor and dive back in for the first aid kit buried at the very bottom. He's there by the time she manages to pull it free though, settling himself on the very edge of the box and tapping out an uneven rhythm against his leg with his fingers. Marian notices it after pulling the kit free and setting at her other side, glancing up to find Fen staring into the opposite wall as though he's trying to bore holes into it with his eyes.

"Er... is everything alright?"

The question seems to snap him out of wherever his thoughts had gone, head turning towards her enough for his eyes to flick over her face. "Yes, I..." he says, words coming out a bit uneven while the fidgeting hand falls back to rub itself along the length of his thigh. It comes to a stop and closes around his knee at the same time he tilts his head down to clear his throat, still looking a bit uneasy by the time he glances back to her. "Apologies. I'm fine, I just—"

"I mean, I won't lie, cleaning it out is probably going to hurt," she says, interrupting him with a shrug and a guess at what has him so suddenly anxious. "But it's better than letting it spread and give you a fever, and a hell of a lot better than washing it with something else. Had to use whiskey on Carver once, back around when all this first happened. Jesus, you should have seen the faces he pulled."

"What?" he asks, blinking, before his expression shifts, glowering at her like she's just thrown him some heinous insult against his mother. "I'm not— frightened, Hawke."

"Well you could have fooled me," she says matter-of-factly as she starts to unbutton the cuffs of her sleeves and pull them back towards her elbows, "You look more like someone who's about to be dragged to the electric chair, not have his arm patched up."

"I'm not."

"Alright, alright, I get it," she says, eyes rolling while she squirts a generous amount of hand sanitizer into her palm and rubs it between her fingers. "Wouldn't want to hurt your manly pride or anything."

His mouth opens only to be left hanging, and she's almost certain she can hear the cogs turning in his head while he no doubt tries to decide if it's worth his time to argue the point further. It apparently isn't, because a few seconds later he's snapped his mouth shut again, jaw going tight as he shoves his injured arm out over her lap.

"Just— get it over with, would you?" he grumbles, turning his head to glare off into the opposite corner of the room with a huff.

The cap of the bottle of peroxide cracks open with a twist of her wrist and she snorts. "Jesus, you're even worse than Carver was," she mutters to herself as she pulls the plastic seal off of the mouth of the bottle. She shifts in her seat, too busy with positioning herself and his arm the way she wants it to notice that Fen has screwed his eyes shut or how his free hand has balled itself into a fist against his leg. "On three, ok? One... two... three."

His arm nearly jerks out of her grip, and she hears him make a strangled noise in his throat, the sound caught midway between a growl and a whine. White foam fizzes and spreads across the whole of his forearm, the excess running in little rivulets across the top of his hand and down into the bend of his elbow, and she has to do a double take.

What in the hell...?