[closed/in progress]
WHO: Mello (virucide), Dexter Morgan (gettingawaywith), and eventually Matt (lungrot).
WHAT: Dexter finds Mello after this incident.
WHERE: On the beach, by the train tracks.
WHEN: Day 76, right around dawn.
( For every violent moment the world has become, the cure will come, thy will be done. )
WHAT: Dexter finds Mello after this incident.
WHERE: On the beach, by the train tracks.
WHEN: Day 76, right around dawn.
( For every violent moment the world has become, the cure will come, thy will be done. )
To be honest, he wished he hadn't woken up.
Sleeping overnight on the ground, sporting a broken, punctured hand, a leg with its muscle completely torn, and a handful of cracked ribs -- it wasn't very safe. The wounds would probably get infected; he was still lying in his own blood, after all. It had long since gone cold against his skin, a disgusting slick presence, like sleeping in a shell of icy slime. He wasn't sure how he was still breathing, but there must have been a hole at the top of the tied plastic where the rope came together.
Not that it would do him much good. He'd either bleed to death or bleed enough to drown before anyone would find way out here.
He almost wished that bastard had hacked him up and finished the job. This was painful, slow. This was torture. He was a rotting corpse with working vitals, half-dead but still capable of thought. Still capable of taking in his situation.
Mello kept his eyes closed against the wet blood, lips sealed, breathing carefully through his nose. He felt like he was going insane. He wanted this agony to end. Please, please, please.
And then, at last: he heard something. It was faint, but it was definitely there.
Footsteps.
Someone was here. Someone was here..!
Spurred by the weak, dwindling flame of survival within him, Mello rocked his body in its plastic prison, trying to catch whoever's attention it was through the movement.
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Mello.
It was that kid he'd taken into his apartment, the one he'd patched up after the bar fight. The one whose anger had resonated in some far away, almost forgotten part of Dexter.
He took in the sight of the blond, immediately noting the seriousness of the injuries, and picked him up as carefully as possible.
Dexter's voice held a calm that he absolutely did not feel when he spoke to Mello.
"Mello. I'm going to take you somewhere safe, and get you cleaned up. You're going to be fine." Clearly, concisely, he spoke the words. Dexter did not know how close the young man actually was to dying, but he knew that getting him First Aid at his own place would be faster than waiting for an ambulance.
Dexter had gone to medical school, after all. He'd be able to do the same things with his emergency supply, which was extensive--you never knew what kind of injuries you could obtain when going after other killers.
He placed Mello into the backseat as gently as he could, climbing into his car and taking off for his place at a rate that would hopefully leave the bumps in the road as smooth as possible.
Yes, he sounded unworried and reassuring. But what really concerned him, what had his heartrate knocking at his chest like an urgent housecall, was the deep cut that reached Mello's bone on his leg. It had been obviously executed with a bone saw, even Dexter could manage that much of an observation upon just glancing at it.
The thing was...that wound placement looked familiar. Dexter had been working on a case on and off for the past several months, which involved body parts (mostly the lower parts of legs, including the feet) washing up on the shore of the beach. Parts that the AMC hadn't been able to match up using the missing person's DNA samples that they had on record. Parts of legs that were all from different bodies, cut at the same place, the bones neatly taken off with a mechanical saw.
Especially made for this purpose.
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Mello was more disorientated than he'd originally thought, though. When the sheets were torn away and unwrapped, a strangled gasp of pain slipped from his moist lips. The sunlight almost burned him. He'd been a prisoner to enveloping darkness for so long, he felt he'd evaporate on the spot. But he didn't. In fact, the warmth settled into his skin, staving off the chill of the blood he was still plastered in, red like an early Christmas present. This was unbelievable.
Bleary blue eyes watched the man helping him, clouded over by pain and confusion and desperation and a myriad of other things, too many emotions caught within the snare of this tragedy. He felt like he was dying, but then, that wasn't new. He'd been dying ever since last night, since that monster slammed the lid of his trunk down on Mello's hand.
Was he safe? Or did -- did that man come back to steal another round, did he--
Mello couldn't resist the powerful grasp of whoever had found him; he let himself be carried to the car, whole body wrought with tension as they passed the trunk. But he wasn't shoved in there. No, this time he was nestled in the backseat. Maybe it wasn't... Somehow, his so-called savior's voice was familiar. He recognized it, and he let himself be soothed by it, let himself listen.
Maybe he wasn't going to die. Maybe.
A swell of hope crested within him, swamping through the state of terror he'd been stuck in since earlier. Every time he blinked, the backs of his eyelids betrayed his nightmares, the wicked thoughts that plagued him. He relived the previous evening's events every second he let his mind stray from survival, from what was right in front of him here and now, from the immediate objective.
His breathing came shallow, weak and brittle. His chest ached.
"Matt," the blond found himself murmuring, too delirious to dig up a face belonging to the name that meant so much to him suddenly. But saying it made him feel better, warmed him from the inside. "Matt," he repeated. "Matt, Matt, Matt..." He was talking quietly, but he didn't care if his rescuer could hear him. In fact, they might even be able to help him find this person who mattered so much then.
"You--" Mello started, but erupted into a violent coughing fit, catching a splatter of blood on his already sullied palm. A groan filtered through thin, gory lips.
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And each time he looked, he liked less and less what he saw. Mello had obviously taken a serious beating, along with some special attention paid to his limbs, his extremities. The fact that the blond was covered in blood made the man uneasy for the state of Mello's closeness to passing out again or dying, and neither would be of any help to Dexter for finding out what had happened.
Dexter clenched his jaw behind a closed mouth when he heard the coughing, the murmuring. It was the cough that concerned him, because it sounded wet. And sure enough, when he glanced back again at Mello, the blond's lips were glistening red with fresh, somewhat bubbly blood. Given the obvious blunt force trauma to Mello's chest area, there was a good chance that his ribs were broken, along with the also very likely chance that he'd sustained internal injuries in his lungs.
Dexter spoke firmly, enough to hopefully hush the injured party in his back seat.
"Don't talk. It'll make you cough more, and the more you cough, the more it'll hurt." His voice lightened up a little as he turned a corner, approaching his apartment and slowing down to park in the little garage area.
"...focus on breathing, but do it slow; not too hard." Dexter cut the ignition and climbed out of his car, noting when he leaned into the backseat that he'd be doing a fair amount of cleaning in the interior once he was done patching Mello up--if, that was, he could make do with what he had. Internal injury would complicate things.
He'd check for it later. The scientist lifted Mello again, knowing that it must hurt pretty much everything in the young man's body when he did it. He carefully closed the door to his car, managed to auto-lock it, and then turned to carry Mello to his apartment. As Dexter looked down at the Wasp Boy, he had a chance to take in more of the injuries, which made even his eyebrows climb upward toward his hairline.
Seldom was he able to get this brutal with any of his own prey without their succumbing to death, giving up and letting Dexter do the work he did so well. The kid had a lot of fight in him, and he wouldn't go without acknowledging that.
The first thing that Dexter did once inside of his apartment was to set the thermostat so that the apartment became significantly warmer--warm enough for Mello, who would have no coverings for the majority of the next hour or so, to be comfortable. Then he lay Mello down on several towels draped over his own bed, spreading the injured young man out as slowly as he could afford, given the seriousness of the open wounds that Mello sported.
Once everything was set up, Dexter wasted absolutely no time in administering a local anesthetic powerful enough to help with the pain in the leg area, before suturing the veins and vessels that had been severed in Mello's calf. Then he closed up the muscle layers and the skin, dressing the wound before he moved on to the hand. Dexter did something similar for the puncture there, and then set the bones against a temporary splint to keep it stable for the moment.
In the amount of time it had taken him to do all of the urgent things, he had noticed that the assault had also been sexual, judging by the blood staining the inside of Mello's thighs; there had been no other wounds in the vicinity. Dexter said nothing about it for the time being, and spoke to Mello again.
"I know that your chest is in a lot of pain. I'm going to give you some morphine to take the edge off first, but we're going to figure out how bad the damage is before I can give you more," the man continued, as he readied the needle of anesthetic. "I can go get an oxygen tank once we're done with everything else."
"I need to know who did this to you, and who I should be calling." Dexter studied the young man. "Should I call Matt?" This Matt could be the answer to either of those questions, but he assumed nothing until he was given the information.
((OOC: OMG SO LONG. I am so sorry. >_<;;; You don't have to acknowledge everything he did here, I was just explaining the process. >_> *nerd*))
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When the car slowed, Mello tried to get a good idea of where they were. It looked like a parking garage. He blinked once, keeping his eyes closed for a long moment before opening them again. Inhaling and exhaling very carefully. Every inch of him hurt in some way, whether from bruises or strained muscles or deep gashes. Most of it centered in his chest, left hand and right leg, and spread outward from there.
But someone was trying to help him.
Who was it? Their face seemed familiar; the blond watched him as he was carried inside, through the blinding flashes of pain slicing down to the core. Mello laid still where he was placed down on the towels covering the bed, blinking rapidly now.
His wounds were being treated. First the nasty tear in his leg, which was probably the best decision because it hurt the most out of all three of his major inflictions. Painful grunts and short-breathed groans drove free from his throat whenever a particular part of the treatment hurt too bad, but mostly, Mello was exhausted. His voice was sore. He'd screamed too much these last twenty-four hours, and he knew if he tried to say anything coherent right now it would only come out ragged and rasped.
The anesthetic helped, though. Anything would help. Anything that could dull the brunt of this agonizing torment.
Luckily, the person with him seemed to know what he was doing. He dressed the wound and tended next to Mello's hand, which was the injury that had probably the most potential of getting infected, considering how long he'd had it. Rather than focus on what was happening, the blond turned his eyes up at the ceiling, mind hazing somewhere between sleep and reality. He thought about what he was going to do after this. And suddenly, with startling weight, the realization dawned on him.
Then his rescuer was speaking. Saying something.
"No," Mello responded at last with great effort, the word scratchy, foreign to his ears. "Not yet." Don't call him yet. Not when he looked like this.
I don't know who it was I don't know I don't know I don't even fucking know who raped me who nearly killed me
This must be what absolute paranoia felt like.
He tried to raise his head as best he could to see the man with him, finally able to bring a name to his face. Dexter Morgan, from the bar. Breathing sharply, Mello spoke, "I don't know." I don't even fucking know who or how or why-- "I don't know him."
Silence. Then: "Go ahead." I can handle it. I can handle anything now.
Because what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Right?
OOC: I LOVED IT ♥♥♥
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Mello's voice was ...dry, full of the sand that terror and pain left behind after hours of screaming.
Dexter knew because he'd heard a full grown man's yell go from an almost demonic roar of fury to this same, sandpapery sound, the barely-there whispering of someone who found that it hurt too much to speak after the time they'd spent trying to voice the pain they were in.
Dexter had listened to the progression happen more times than he could count during his own night-time forays. Those hours of screaming were spent with Dexter leaning over a table as he heard the humanity on his table decrescendo into the pathetic sort of animal whimpering that every person, in the end, was reduced to after enough time under his knives. His longer kills were uncommon, but the sound of it had successfully stayed with him every time.
This was why he knew that Mello hadn't just been raped against a wall in an alley and then beaten with a baseball bat on a whim.
No, Mello had been restrained, judging by the abrasions on his limbs and the way that the rope had rubbed splinters of twine into Mello's skin, which Dexter would be picking out with tweezers after everything else had been taken care of.
He'd been carefully bound. The blond had been an intended work of art, likely created by the same person who'd been chopping up those bodies and leaving parts of legs to wash up on the beach, if this bone-saw wound halfway down Mello's calf was any indication.
Dexter stared down at Mello, at the wounds for a moment. He took in the bruises that had flowered onto his skin, the fierce brutality of the cuts, the delicate way that Mello looked...shattered. As though a sharp, perfect knife had come through and cut apart the wasp, taken off its wings, ripped off its legs and sectioned its body apart.
At least that had been the intention. The lack of completion suggested an interruption.
Dexter went to pull on a new set of gloves, listening to the metallic laugh, almost giggle, in the back of his mind, the scaled rustle of the Passenger's peaked interest.
Strange, and amusing at the same time, that the same person whose work he intended to stop was the same person whose work he'd come to admire. The pieces that had washed up had been clean, cut at exactly the right curve--they'd paid attention to the beauty of taking the body apart. Careful attention.
Dexter knew it was him because the Passenger knew.
It made Dexter want this killer even more, the thought of catching them and returning their favor to them by sending them off into the sea in neatly packaged pieces. He was certain they would appreciate the poetic nature in his expression of admiration.
All of that speculation took about as much time as it did for Dexter to finish pulling on those gloves and move to Mello's side. Behind his immobile facial mask of quiet concern, a little smile sat, perfect and crescent shaped in a gentle curve upward.
That killer had sent him a survivor of one of their endeavors, by making the glorious little mistake of being interrupted. Dexter fully intended to catch him and show his appreciation once everything else was over with.
Dexter's eyes skated over the bruising on Mello's chest, and then the scientist gave him the injection of morphine before he knelt to look at the damage done to the blond's ribs.
"You're coughing up blood. It means your lungs might be damaged from some broken ribs, but if it's not too bad, they'll heal on their own with an oxygen tank and some time. Same goes for the ribs." The man put on a stethoscope and picked up a clean pad of gauze.
"..I'm guessing that taking you to a hospital is out of the question." His voice wasn't intrusive, a warm sort of monotone.
If Mello hadn't spoken up about the emergency room by now, he didn't want to go.
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Mello had witnessed his own fair share of horrors. Spending time with the American Mafia did that to you; you saw things you shouldn't see, you did things you shouldn't do. But nothing had ever gotten this close to him. Nothing had ever reached out a hand, plied back all the barriers of his mind, and slithered in so easily, contaminated him so easily. Nothing had ever poisoned him as badly as this did, because nothing had ever taken advantage of the chance to.
In a way, it reminded him of how mortal he was. Just how human he was. That, with enough negative intent, someone really could hurt him, kill him, make him regret, make his life seem worthless and oh-so fragile. He'd become too accustomed to always playing the upper hand, always leading the situation and making the decisions for others. This was a blow to his pride unlike anything he'd ever encountered before. It was a wake up call.
And he was certainly awake.
Blue eyes, darkened with distance and a lack of regard, followed his rescuer's mechanical movements. He didn't try to curl his body up into a protective shell to shield himself from sight as someone else might have, but it wasn't because he knew Dexter's treatment required him to lay flat or because the muscles in his body wouldn't allow it. No, it was because Mello didn't care what was seen. The damage was extensive, gory and sickening, but Mello didn't care if anyone saw, didn't care if the clues brought the heavy realization of what had happened.
He had no dignity left. Dexter could spread his limbs out like a doll and prod every inch of him for injuries, and Mello wouldn't fight.
This would make him stronger. Wouldn't it?
Mello heard the other's words through a blanket of empty, aimless thought, and it was like listening to half of a conversation underwater. Hospital. No, he didn't want to go there. They would wrap him up in a cage of legal documents and doctors and questions and he'd never see sunlight. It would be the same as the plastic prison full of blood: suffocating, horrible, endless dark.
No, he wouldn't be taken there.
"Yeah," the blond struggled, turning his head to the side until his neck cracked with the motion, "don't. Don't go there."
Dexter understood, right?
A dizzying inhale.
"What are you," came through red thickness and soreness and the grit of complication, "my Guardian Angel?" His face was blank as he said it.
How had it come to this?
I guess I owe you a thank you.
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He'd survived, but his mind hadn't. Right now, Mello's sanity was attempting to do for itself what Dexter had been doing for his body, but it really wasn't that simple, was it? The mind was a slippery thing, never meant to be held firmly and stitched back together, and pieces had a habit of wandering off just when you needed them the most.
Dexter knew about that. He'd done his fair share of introspection while he was growing up, having learned how different he was. In fact, he'd gone through enough psychology books on enough different psychological traumas that he knew, for himself, that Mello could probably never recover from this completely.
Dexter was a walking, talking example of what specific traumas could do, wasn't he?
It was just a different kind.
So, because he understood, he agreed not to take Mello to the hospital. He remained silent, took the gauze and wiped the blood out of Mello's mouth to look at it. Dexter let out a slow breath in realizing that the blood was thinning already, one of slight relief. The ribs had probably fractured, but the blood in Mello's lungs was probably just from the blows, not from a puncture. Thankfully, it meant that Mello's ribs would also heal with some amount of time and rest.
When Mello asked him if he was a guardian angel, Dexter finally smiled, and then laughed a little.
"It'd seem like it," he chuckled. "Guess I was just in the right place at the right time." Dexter didn't let on, however, just how amusing the statement was.
Yes, he was a Guardian Angel. He saved innocent people from getting killed by his own criminal victims all the time, didn't he?
Dexter turned to look at Mello, injecting him again with more morphine now that he'd deduced the extent of the damage. The pain of breathing wasn't extreme enough for the damage to be one that needed a hospital.
"Listen." Dexter's eyes skated along the wounds. "You've survived your injuries and shown that you're tougher than what happened to your body." The man took off his gloves and changed them again (getting close to the blood so repeatedly made it a habit for him to change them regularly).
"Whatever happens from here, you need to remember that you still have your life." Dexter looked Mello in the eye, leaning down to provide...his own blankness, a muted hazel. It was a blankness he'd acquired from his own distance, one that matched Mello's, one that he usually hid to hide the fact that he lived alone in his head.
It wasn't exactly a flailing, screaming admission of the fact that he was an axe murderer, but it backed up his statements.
"You're old enough to know how to cope. It hasn't set in too early. And you're obviously stronger than the person that attacked you."
And Dexter, just as easily as he'd swung down to look Mello in the face, sat back up to pick up a few more bandages.
"So, do you want to be asleep while I clean up everything else, or would you rather wait it out until I'm done?"
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Mello's eyes slid down his body for the first time, taking in the damage done.
Bile rose at the back of his throat upon seeing himself like this. A shell of a person who had been broken at the whims of another, bent and fitted to bring them pleasure and satisfaction, to fulfill some fantasy of theirs, to bring it to fruition. He could still taste salt on his tongue, even through the copper of blood. He could still feel that bastard's pulse inside of him, thundering in tandem to his own. He wanted to be sick.
Breathing proved difficult, but the last thing he wanted to do was hyperventilate.
He had his life.
Tougher than what happened, stronger than who did this.
He had his life, and he wasn't going to give it up for someone's sick idea of entertainment or whatever that had been.
The blond's attention swung back to the man with him when the question was posed, and for a moment, he wondered if he wanted to sleep. He wondered if he'd float in black unconsciousness or if he'd wake up in a dream, a dream with seashell wallpaper and an off-white ceiling and an off-white mask hovering above him, a mask that owned a smooth voice and a wicked sense of a humor, that possessed a bone saw and a pair of shiny shears.
Would it happen like that? Would he be traumatized, like so many people he'd seen and met and heard about but never really understood, people he'd even mocked for letting themselves become so mentally frail?
Now that he had morphine in his system, the pain didn't blind him senseless. So when Mello spoke, the words weren't quite as brittle as before. "I'll wait." No sleep, not yet.
"Do you have..." There was a pause, and then he continued, "Chocolate?"
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When the question of chocolate came up, Dexter blinked, and then moved to stand.
"Yeah." Honestly, what kind of question was that to ask a man like Dexter? And he was moving from the room, returning within minutes with about three bars of the stuff, all three of them dark.
Dexter had obviously recently restocked his kitchen.
The man unwrapped one and handed it to the young man, before he went to retrieve iodine, bandages, and a wide assortment of other first aid materials for the more minor injuries, as well as to prepare several wet washcloths, in order to clean all of the blood off of the young man.
Dexter had thought of everything, really. And he went about cleaning Mello off, making sure that every injured inch was taken care of, and that there wasn't a speck of blood to be found anywhere. He even took out the splinters.
The great thing about having Dexter as a caretaker was that...well, maybe he didn't exactly care for your well-being as much as he cared for cleanliness and was slightly obsessive compulsive about it, but at least he paid attention to detail, and he was extremely thorough.
He even pushed a towel under Mello's head and somehow managed to wash it out by means of a spraybottle full of shampoo-water.
It was warm in the apartment now, warm enough that Mello didn't have to be covered with a blanket to stay comfortable while everything was being cleaned and stitched. Dexter's long-sleeved shirt was getting slowly drenched in sweat as he worked (he got hot very easily, which was why he kept the apartment so cool in the first place), and by the time he was done, the man's face was also slightly sheened with a thin transpired layer.
Mello looked like a patchwork of bandages and stitches, but he was done.
Dexter disposed of everything, changed his gloves, and returned again to change the towels under Mello, and to set some bottles of water next to him.
The man said nothing, but the look on his face might as well have asked if Mello needed anything else.
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Mello stayed absolutely silent through the progressive process of being cleaned up and taken care of. He fumbled momentarily with the chocolate bar, resting his good wrist against the mattress, head tilted toward it at an angle, teeth gently nibbling bits off at one end. It melted on his tongue, eased some of the disgusting bitterness from what he'd last been force-fed before, and for that he was grateful.
The chocolate was familiar. Tasted familiar, reminded him of who he was. Made him get a grip on reality, on what was happening now, what would happen to him now.
He was Mello. Mihael Keehl. Twenty-one years old, and a paid assassin in Reggio Calabria. He could handle anything that came his way; he could exploit the heads of mafia families and use their resources to do whatever he wanted; he could wring circles of deceit and manipulation around an average individual, lead them to an early grave; he could laugh in the face of the devil.
But this.
This. This was different.
What had he been doing with his life?
Where had he planned to go? Who had he planned to be? How had he planned to live? To die?
Something like what almost happened last night, surely.
Numbed and exhausted, Mello slept, and dreamt of nothing. When he awoke hours later to a darkened room, his pulse was racing and his skin gleamed with a delicate sheen of sweat. For a startling moment of bone-deep terror, the blond didn't know where he was or what he was doing. One glance down the length of his bare body answered all the questions he could have had. Mello shifted his hips, tried to slide over the mattress as if intending to stand though he'd never make it that far, and wondered why he couldn't think.
His mind was clogged with static dust.
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When he'd returned, he'd made some food and eaten a rather large portion of it (steak and potatoes), saving a certain amount on a plate. He set it aside while it was still hot, and walked toward his bedroom.
Dexter didn't turn on the light, because being blinded after being raped and tortured simply didn't seem like a very nice thing to him, as little as he knew about being human. However, he noticed that Mello was now awake when he opened the door.
So he moved toward the blond and stood next to the bed, wheeling the oxygen tank over, bringing the pills, and speaking quietly in that un-nuanced voice of his.
"I made some food. You'll have to eat a little with the antibiotics you need to take to keep from getting any infections," he stated, and then added as a side note, "I also have Valium, if you need it." He then pulled his thin red cellphone out of his pocket.
"...do you want to call Matt, now?"
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