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People had always looked at Purpled weird when he had said he considered himself lucky. He stopped mentioning it around the second year of him being a child soldier and never really thought much about luck since then.
Now, as he sits in a muddy trench with blistered and burned fingers putting pressure on his friends mangled leg, he thinks about it again. He thinks about how maybe his luck has finally run out.
And then he hears the footsteps. He hears them and he knows he is not lucky enough for the soldier approaching to not be of the enemy.
He thinks he should be feeling something, anything.
He's going to die.
He's going to die and he only feels numb.
The footsteps stop.
He turns his head and makes eye contact with a girl in Antarctic blue and who's hands are rapped around a new ray rifle, the different pieces of the gun buzzing with energy.
She frowns but doesn't move.
He wonders how pitiful he must look for her to not fear him.
She turns and leaves them alone, probably to die despite her mercy with the way things are going.
His hands are shaking and he can't feel his fingers.
Maybe he has some luck left.
——
Tommy is terrified.
He is more scared then he's ever been and he doesn't know what to do.
The flesh on his leg is bubbled and split from being cooked by a heat grenade, the bottom of it blackened.
He chooses not to look at it.
Instead he stares at Purpled.
The fucker's face is blank as he places a tourniquet on Tommy's leg, the magnetic force quickly working to squeeze his thigh and stop the bleeding.
He... he loses time. Awareness floating in and out like the path of a drunk bumblebee. When he has the mind to notice he finds he isn't in the trench anymore.
He's practically being carried by purpled as they race to the nearby wood.
His lungs spasm as he breathes in smoke.
Tommy lifts his head and realizes he's sitting, leaning against the rough bark of an oak tree.
"Here."
He turns his head to the voice, Purpled, who is holding small green pills in his bloody fingers.
He grabs them and proceeds to almost drop them four times before he can shove them in his mouth. He imagines them dissolving in his stomach and spreading whatever it is inside of them that will keep him alive.
He feels like shit.
He is tired.
Purpled, apparently, does not care.
Instead, he pulls Tommy up ( and it burns and it hurts so much he can't breathe can't think can't see and he might as well be dying) and then they are back to trekking through the forest.
He wonders if he is going to die.
It's not a word breaking idea given the circumstances.
Frankly it wouldn't even be the first time he's wondered it.
It's kinda fuckin depressing if he thinks about it.
The first time had to have been when he was only eleven and L'manburg was being annexed by the SMP. When the war first started being real and not some tragedy happening far far from where he was. He remembers listening to the explosions as they hid in the basement. Remembers the dread in his gut when the age to be drafted as a hybrid was lowered to just sixteen.
He'd been almost immediately stationed in pogtopia, where the only person even near his age was an axolotl hybrid named after a fucking color. Apparently even SMP names stupid. Tommy is obviously superior.
He's barely there for two months before the post was directly attacked and now he is being dragged through the woods with a hunk of charcoal for a leg.
He's tired.
——
Sticks and rocks dig into Purpled's poorly bandaged hands as he heaves into the grass.
They had stopped to re-rap their wounds and slap on the cheap skin grafts that were stuffed in the bottoms of their pockets.
It was as he was deactivating the tourniquet to semi-properly tend to Tommy's wounds when the blackened flesh below his knee just- sort of crumbled. The meat sliding off as the bone fell apart.
Tommy hasn't stopped screaming.
Part of him wants to tell him to shut up. That the noise will lead the other soldiers right to them and they will either be captured by the enemy or shot for deserting.
He might do it anyway, if he can get his breathing under control. Acid and saliva drip from his lips.
Purpled heaves another breath and listens as Tommy's screams shift into sobs and whimpers.
He pushes himself up and with shaky hands he gets to work applying the artificial skin to the wound. In a way they are lucky that most of it is already cauterized, it means the can safe the extra skin grafts incase they get injured later.
Tommy won't look at him.
"We have to move."
He doesn't know if the other boy is even listening to him, if he's even saying the words for Tommy.
It doesn't really matter anyway.
Purpled squats down and begins maneuvering tommy onto his back. Pulls his arms over his shoulders and hooks his elbow around the the others only remaining knee. Grunting, he straightens up and begins the journey to some place else.
The sun sets and the stars fill the sky. He keeps his gaze ahead and focuses on moving his feet. He can't think of anything else.
He thinks he should feel something, feel different after deserting when he had spent the last eight years as a soldier. It's almost disheartening that he doesn't.
He doesn't know where they'll go next, what they'll do next.
If there is even anything beyond this forest. If they'll stumble past the tree line just to find more trenches. War eating the land and people with an insatiable hunger.
His neck is damp from where Tommy's pressed his face into it. The other boy has yet to say anything, the only sounds he makes being the occasional whimper when his leg is accidentally jostled or bumped.
Purpled keeps marching forward.