Nine
Death is cold. Numbing, permeating cold. It's colorless and silent. But it also hurts, and it shouldn't, because death is the end.
He blinks and the colorless is actually gray, shades of gray blurred and sloping into each other. The cold is real: it's wet and pierces into him like a thousand needles. The gray is actually clouds and rocks and mountains sloping down, and white and gray snow cradling him on a hard ground.
The pain is real, too. The cold numbs some of it, but the cold is painful. Death shouldn't hurt.
But he's not dead, even though he should be. The fall felt endless and he can't remember when it ended, when he landed, why he's not dead and why he's staring up into gray silence and why it hurts so much.
He closes his eyes. Maybe if he tries hard enough, he can actually die. It would be better than freezing to death and rotting, forgotten at the bottom of this ravine. He doesn't even know where he is, where and how far he fell. No one else will, either. The odds always were against him.
He floats in and out of a haze of snowy, icy pain and waits to die. The silence should be frightening but after the whistling wind and roaring train and thundering pulse it's welcome. There's only the whisper of snowflakes and the beat of his heart. I can handle this. I can be happy like this, he thinks and it's good to think but he also wishes he'd stop thinking and give into the odds already. You won, universe. You won.
The cold seeps in. The silence wraps around him. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes he's numb, he just keeps waiting.
Then there are shadows hovering over him and now he's pretty sure he's actually dying, and thank God, because it was taking long enough, and he wonders if dying will still feel cold, and then there isn't cold, but fiery pain throbbing through his whole body, and he's screaming and someone is dragging him through the snow by the back of his coat; and now that his head's up some, he can see a trail of blood in the snow, bright red on his left side, and it's because his arm is gone just above his elbow.
He wants to scream and he wants to cry and he wants to curse because he actually wanted to die, was finally ready to die and somehow, somefuckinghow… he's beaten the odds.
Again.
He will always beat the odds, no matter how much he wants to finally lose, and if it ever does end, it will be with a fight.
That's the one thing he is certain of, even as faceless figures drag him off into yet more uncertainty, the trail of blood growing ever longer behind him.