singillatim | bad luck, old sport

Raju makes his way closer to the arm as carefully as he can while still going quick. He ducks underneath the fallen branch, not wanting to risk disturbing the walls or the few parts of the ceiling that haven't yet come down, and his gaze darts over the way Francis' arm is trapped before choosing chunks of ice to move. There's something gruesome about the sight of it, the arm severed at the wrist rising on its own from underneath the blanket of ice. There's something about seeing it this way, as the only part of a man he's used to seeing in whole, that draws attention to the scars, to the magnitude of the loss.

It doesn't matter, not really. He puts it out of his mind. He focuses on the ice, the sharp stab of the cold into his hands, the bitter feel of the air on the parts of his face not covered by the blanket. If it really was warm in here when the place was whole, it isn't any more. "You'll have to settle for four walls and a fire for a while. At least until the morning. I don't suppose you sleep with your coat?"

If he doesn't, getting Francis to shelter after this without it will be something else again. Something for later. Free the man first, and then focus on the rest.

"'course I don't." He couldn't sleep with his coat, or his warm outer trousers or the fur-covered boots. It's warm, almost bordering on hot in the ice hut at night, and that's taking into consideration that he sleeps in a bed of caribou and wolf. Thankfully his inner layers are sealskin, and the waterproof tunic and trousers are the only things keeping him from actually freezing to death under this insanely stupid collapse.

He can feel some of the pressure release from his chest, and Crozier takes a halting, gasping breath at the relief of it all.

Of course he doesn’t. If there’s one thing living inside a block of ice would have been good for… But Raju hadn’t really been expecting it, anyway. His blanket isn’t nearly so warm as Francis’ usual coat looks, but it’s kept Raju going so far, and it will have to do until he can get the man warm. Warm but, first, free; that gasping breath is a good sign, worrying as it sounds, so Raju focuses on that area too, on freeing the arm, lifting weight off from what must be the chest. It’s hard to see what oart of the man is where, but hearing him and orienting himself by that arm helps.

“Then we might have to run to a cabin,” Raju says, lifting one block and then another, looking at what’s in front of him to try and see how far he still has to go. “You don’t know where the nearest one is, do you?”

Useful to know it but, still, it’s most important to keep Francis talking. If there’s some injury under all that ice that they can’t afford to ignore, hopefully Raju would hear it in Francis’ voice.

It gets easier and easier to breathe every passing second. He can feel Raju shifting and moving the blocks of ice above him, the weight lifting and redistributing on his battered body. Some of the pressure redistributes on his chest and he gasps in slight shock as it presses against some tender part of his body.

He was asked a question, wasn't he? A cabin, yes. His head's swimming slightly now, little lights flashing behind closed eyes, but he manages an answer through gritted teeth.

"Quarter of a mile northwest."

Closer than it could be, then. Good. And Raju is close, too, to uncovering enough of the man to at least have a hope at freeing his arms, if not to pull him out. It's a good time for it, if Francis' voice is sounding that way, and Raju moves to what he can tell now are the shoulders, and maybe the head there. His fingers are starting to go numb, a little; he keeps working. "Good. I should have your arm free in a moment but keep talking, so I know you're still awake. Tell me about your icebox. You're certain it really was warm in here and you weren't just dreaming, or ill?"

Not that Raju isn't prepared to believe it, with a little more explanation. But Francis had seemed indignant enough about it a moment ago; maybe this will give him something like a second wind now.

Unfortunately being indignant alone isn't enough to keep him warm or the pain at bay, but it does do a fine job of distracting him while the bits and pieces of his house are moved away from his fragile body.

"It's warm enough that I'm hot at night, even without the furs." Another piece moves, this time his breath comes out sharp. "T-the Netsilik people, they make ice huts..."

He trails off, feeling enough freedom of movement that he's able to move the other hand slightly.

"Netsilik." He doesn't quite remember the word, but he remembers what Francis had said about them. He moves another block, watching his fingers to make sure he's got a good grip, and then moves another. He's going quickly, trying to uncover as much of the man's body, particularly his upper body, as he can. Once Francis is able to help, this will go even faster. "They're the ones who saved you, and taught you to sew."

But there's more here than unburying the man and keeping him talking. There's the way he sounds, and what he hadn't been able to tell when Raju had gotten here, so soon after the roof had fallen. "You didn't know if you were hurt at first. Can you tell me now? What are you feeling?"

Raju remembers that he’d spoke about the Netsilik before. He doesn’t know why it surprises him so, just that it does.

“My chest,” he admits, the struggle for breath remaining even after the removal of the weight. “And my head.” He’s got a pounding headache behind the eyes.

The limbs seem okay, and Crozier takes advantage of that to kick and push off some of the ice and snow on him. Finally, he’s able to see starlight.

Raju nods and then, remembering Francis can't see him: "Your arm will be free very soon. The, ah... Your hand." Raju's brief brush with an awkward moment — You know, the arm with the hand on it. The one hand you have left. In case you'd forgotten, more aware of it with the way the stump of the other is sticking out from the ice and unsure how to talk about it — is forgotten as the latest block starts to slip out from numbing fingers and Raju grunts, catches it just as it starts to thump back down on top of the other debris, picks it up again and tosses it to the side. "Then this will go more quickly. You'll be out soon."

He tries to see what he can of the man; more now, thankfully. "Where in your chest? Can you tell? If you have a rib broken getting to that cabin will be tricky. We'll have to be careful with you."

He doesn't detect any awkwardness, but then again he is half frozen and just wanting to be out of the mess of his own making. "Lower in my chest, almost off to the side, that's where the pain's centralized." He pauses, inhales with a low hiss, as if to confirm his own suspicions. Yes, he may have broken something.

He tries for another kick, another push, feeling the start of a crumbling of the ice and blocks of snow away from his shoulders and above his face. He can almost sit up, so and the gesturing of his arm takes on a different purpose -- a rope extended to Raju to pull him up and out.

Raju grasps the forearm, shoves a block or two further away from that lower left side of Francis' chest, and pulls, getting his other hand on Francis' shoulder as soon as he can to try and alleviate the pressure on the ribs as he's moved. Once that's done he studies Francis for a moment, eyes darting over his face, before hurrying to pull the blanket over his own head.

It'll be easier to get it around him without moving his arms too much, particularly that left side, if Raju can untie the straps he's sewn on here but his fingers won't do it as easily as he's used to and he lets out a sharp, frustrated breath that puffs out frozen air around him. He looks up and around at the still-standing walls, what had been the ceiling, the branch.

"It wouldn't be wise to ask you to climb that branch out of here if I could pull one end inside," he says, looking back down at the efforts of his fingers. "Not until I've had a look at your ribs. And what I think was the way in is blocked. We'll have to make our own way out. How are you feeling?"

Like Christ, with more nails.

No, not that terribly.

"Like a complete fool," he grunts, reaching down with a shaking hand to touch and prod at his own ribs. It feels tight when he inhales, aches when he exhales. Yes, something must be broken. "There was a sharp pain when I sat up. Anything more than a shallow breath makes the ache much, much worse."

He hopes that's helpful enough. He turns his attention to the virtual mountain of ice and snow around them.

"Up and out then? If we stay any longer in this cold it'll start to do permanent damage."

Raju looks up again, sighs, looks back down to watch his hands. "We'll have to. That way, I think." He nods in the direction, finishes untying the blanket, flings it around Francis' shoulders and begins wrapping it loosely around him in quick, efficient movements. Speed above thoroughness; they can adjust the fit of it to keep more cold out once they're moving toward the cabin.

"Everything's piled up more there, and the wall is cracked above it, see? I can push our way out from on top of the pile." Nevermind what he's going to do that with. If he's lucky, the construction of this thing was flimsy enough that he'll only need to push, even though Francis doesn't seem the type to settle for anything like that.

A part of Raju is aware that he might need the... the fire. From that damned dream. Melting some of the blocks around those cracks might give them the time they might become more desperate for the longer they're outside this way. That this may be one more hateful, impossible mystery on top of all the others, that this one lives inside him, but that Francis might need him to use it.

He'll think about it once he gets up there. If he has to think about it at all. Not yet.

"Your mittens are in the—" He starts toward the pile of debris and then, "Damn," he says, stopping as he realises he's tied the pocket closed and Francis only has the one working hand, heading back. He realises his hands are shaking as he watches them open the pocket, but it doesn't matter, because this knot is intentionally looser and easier to undo, and he's got it already.

"Here," and he gives Francis a small smile, a hint of humour peeking for a moment through his matter-of-fact efficiency. "But I will be taking these back once you've dug out the rest of your things."

The construction isn't perfect, not like it would be if made by his friends and not a pretender, but it's definitely not clumsy or half-arsed in any way. The branch broke the structural integrity of the dome and caused it to collapse in on itself, but in the folding in of the ice hut it had somehow joined together again. Raju had gotten some of the blocks out of the way, but it's not going to be an easy climb out.

He's surprised when he finds himself beginning to shiver. How...he doesn't know the last time he's been cold like this. Truly cold, down into his bones and arteries cold. He takes the blanket and the mittens with a grateful little nod, almost too cold to find it within him to share the joke.

"My body temperature is dropping." His teeth are starting to chatter. His! Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier's teeth are chattering! "If I suddenly start to feel warm, don't let me take off the blanket."

Raju's expression goes serious, realising the extent of the danger here. It's cold, of course it's cold, but it doesn't feel so bad as that. Raju's hands are shaking, he's shivering a little, the chill is bitter and hateful but it doesn't feel dangerously cold. But it hasn't, has it? Not for a while. Since the dream.

Francis is injured, anyway. That has to be making it worse for him. Raju nods in understanding, holding Francis' gaze, and then takes the man's shoulder, puts a hand on his back, tries to steer him toward the pile of splintered walls and blocks of ice. "I'll tie it over your head if I have to. Do you think you can make this? I'll get us through once we're high enough, but I can't carry you with your ribs that way."

He's walked with a half-healed amputation and lead in his blood, he can scale a damned ice wall. Hell, he did it half drunk and in colder weather than this! He can do this, he's certain of it.

He stomps his feet in an attempt to get the feeling back into them, his eyes roaming the ice wall for hand and foot holds. "I can do this," he tells Raju, breath coming out in warm puffs of steam. He's reassuring himself too. "First hold is there. Put your foot there and your hand just there -- it looks steady. The rest we'll figure out as we go."

God. If he survives this he'll have to bring firewood and whatever he catches to Raju in gratitude.

Crozier inhales with a wince and then starts up, biting his lip to hold in a groan as his insides protest.

Raju gives him a sharp nod and starts up it as well, frowning over at him for a moment. But only a moment: climbing that he's sure should be relatively easy — climbing anything has always come easily to him — is hard without looking, bared hands and fingers that should be able to find handholds by feeling needing to be directed. He knows enough, vaguely, about the kind of cold that comes in this place to know a total loss of feeling would mean something dangerous, and it isn't so bad as that yet. But he has to look, to focus, to see enough of where his hands are resting to adapt to those scattered blocks of ice that start to shift under his weight.

Still, every now and again Raju's climbing will pause so he can pay attention to Francis, or slow so he can keep pace with him. What he'll do if Francis starts to fall, he isn't sure. His own grip isn't strong enough here to be sure he'll be able to hold someone else's weight, too. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't watch out anyway. He'd figure out something.

At least this thing doesn't look like it was very large in the first place, even when its roof was intact. Not as much to climb as there could be, even if a man with at least one injured rib probably feels differently.

Going up is fine, it's the sliding back down that'll come after that will undoubtedly hurt. Once he's on top of the rubble he pauses to grip his side, pressing down to relieve some of the ache caused by jostling himself around.

He's still absolutely freezing, but it's a good sign. He's not hallucinating either, still experiencing perfectly rational thoughts, and he doesn't want to strip the blanket and clothes off of himself in a fit of paradoxical undressing.

The apex of the crumbling debris is no place to pause. It's not a long way down, per say, but not one Crozier's looking forward to going down. He inhales sharply, steadying himself.

At the sound of that bracing breath Raju looks over, gives Francis a quick smile, squeezes his shoulder. Smiling is a little easier than it would have been a few minutes ago; from up here, he can tell he won't have to force the crack between the wall's pieces wider after all. There's plenty of room to fit between. It loosens something inside Raju's chest, even in the bitter, numbing cold, even dangerous as things are. Dangerous is alright. He doesn't have to use the unexplainable, impossible thing that the dream woke in him. He doesn't have to think about it. He can handle anything else.

"I'll go first."

The way down is steep but not smooth, not rough enough to have given him handholds to climb up but rough enough that his back might bruise a little later. He lands easily on his feet, turns to look up.

"I can steady you when you land," he calls back up at Francis. "Aim yourself this way."

"Like the worst kind of sledge," Crozier calls back down to Raju, finding a small piece of humor now that they're almost free of the former igloo. He grabs onto his side and then takes the metaphorical plunge, easing himself down over the rough brick with only the sealskin on his back to protect him. He aims as best he's able, though thankfully it's not a long way down.

Raju puts one hand on Francis' shoulder and the other on the uninjured side of his ribs, trying to steady Francis as he lands and looking over his expression and posture to try and tell what the way down might have done to that injury. "Quarter of a mile, now," Raju says, adjusting the blanket over Francis to give it the same kind of hood with which Raju'd wrapped it on himself before he'd taken it off. He's reminded while he's watching his hands do it of the way they're shaking, their colour. Strange, how easy it's been tonight to forget about that.

He tucks his hands into his armpits, hunching his shoulders and ducking his head, though that latter doesn't do him much good now, turning to try and remember. It's so hard to tell in this damned awful place where the sun never properly shines. But the moss on the trees, the growth he's spent so much time staring at, for lack of anything else in the snow-covered forest to see...

"That way," he tries, sounding confident about which way is northwest even as ready as he is to be wrong and be corrected. "Even if the wind gets worse, it isn't far."

Quarter of a mile. That's nothing. Less than the frozen walk between Terror and Erebus, and certainly less than the 800 miles he forced his men to attempt --

He avoids the word 'close' at all costs. Even now, knowing they've got just a short hike up a hill and then a clomp through some brush, he can't bring himself to think it. It was Edward Little's last word. Does Raju know Edward? Could any of them ever guess he met his end the way he did?

Crozier stomps his feet a little harder onto the ground to get the blood to circulate again. Raju must be in utter agony from this cold, and so he hurries as best a lame, half-frozen man can, silent as he walks because he's afraid of what he might let slip.

Ahead, through the tree line, he just barely make out the top of an old hunting shack.

The snow is deeper than it looks in places, of course. And the cold is bitter, of course. The loss of the protection he’d had against it is… strange. The chill is hateful, tiny knives against his face and neck and ears, aching in the joints of his fingers and scraping against the inside of his throat, but just as the feelings should tip over into something worse than they were before, there’s something… not warm. He isn’t warm. But that’s the word that comes to mind anyway. Something inside him that’s resisting it.

Maybe he’d only been expecting this kind of cold to feel differently from what it is. It’s convenient, anyway, because what matters is getting the man beside him to shelter safely, and Raju doesn’t have to waste any thought on himself when he doesn’t feel too differently than he did before, when he’d been out here purely for himself, for something to fight against. He can focus on Francis this way.

He keeps a hand on the man’s shoulder, trying to steady him, letting go only those times the snow tricks him into expecting solid ground and getting a hand back on Francis once he himself is steady again. It isn’t comfortable, keeping his hand out that way, but he wasn’t going to be comfortable anyway.

Raju pushes the dead branches of a bush aside for Francis, looking away from him long enough to look over the cabin ahead. “Here. This must be it.”

It does at least look abandoned. But it can be impossible to tell that, here. Raju will have to go first in case of waking someone who would probably be more inclined to attack the two of them first and ask questions later.

He doubts someone's occupying the lone cabin. Surely no one would be so foolish as to live far away from other people in such an inhospitable place such as this --

His spiral into self-deprecation is cut short as he discovers one of those not-so-stable patches in the snow. Crozier stumbles forward with a gasp, catching himself before he falls onto his face, but only just barely. He lands on his knees instead, hand flying up to his mouth to muffle the scream that's wrenched from him by the shattered rib.

It's not enough, and his cry of pain is answered by a distant, lone howl of a wolf.

Edited 2024-02-15 23:04 (UTC)

The noise that comes out of the other man's mouth is a particular kind of pain, the kind which all at once steals self control and dignity and thought, and Raju's still reaching out toward Francis when the howl comes. And then, of course, come more. Raju's head snaps toward the first, and his eyes dart around to try and figure where the others will be coming from the sound. The first is closer, but animals can move faster than the two of them can. Especially like this.

He crouches, movements hurried now, then goes to his knees regardless of what a bad idea it would have seemed before to get his trousers wet in the snow. More stable this way, if he's going to be trying to pull Francis back up.

"We're closer to the cabin than they are to us," he says, wrapping an arm around Francis' back, changing what wants to be urgency in his voice to something a little hurried, but very firm. "Can you stand? Lean on me, I'll get us there."

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