Summer Camp Day 1; Fanfiction
Title- Split Second
Genre- General
Word Count- 3,359
Rating/Warnings- T for underage drinking, slight peer pressure themes, stealing, carjacking, blood, violence, guns, hacked first aid jobs.
Summary- Alfred gets more of an adventure than he bargains for when he steals a vehicle; an ambulance, no less.
A/N I think I stretched the theme a little too far :/ oh well, please tell me if there is any problems with it :)
-x-
|Split Second|
-x-
Alfred is not a bad person; he just lives for adventure.
This is why he stops when he hears the brawl even though he is not really a medic and had just hijacked an ambulance. But, to understand this, we should probably start at the beginning.
“It’s just sitting there,” his friend sighs dramatically, his hands rested underneath his chin.
He was talking about the ambulance they were all sitting in front of. Alfred is only seventeen but the vodka that had burned his throat when he first tried it (it was an adventure) now went down with ease. He was right though; the ambulance was just sitting there. They were behind the wall of the hospital, where they always sat (there was no park to drink in and no youth centre to convince them not to drink). The vehicle was a couple of feet from any other ambulance, and by the looks of it there were hundreds. Okay, maybe seven, but who’s counting?
“No one would even need it,” the girl his friend has his arm around giggles into her blue tinted bottle. She’s barely taken three sips out of it, yet she is somehow completely wasted. Alfred is not convinced. He has seen many like her, been like here.
“You’re right,” he replies and that is the wrong thing to say because suddenly the group’s eyes are on him.
“You should take it,” a smaller kid whispers excitedly, his hands balled up into fists around the can he is holding, crushing it so cheap liquor stains the ground. He can’t be more than fifteen; he doesn’t look older than ten. Alfred bites his tongue so he doesn’t retch; his breath smells like stale alcohol. That is not a nice smell.
Alfred wonders why he is the one who has to take it. He wasn’t the one who brought it up. He wasn’t even the one who had any interest in it. He really wishes he hadn’t said anything but it’s too late as someone, who was suspiciously rightfully prepared, hands him a broken coat hanger and someone else pushes him towards the vehicle.
He hasn’t actually done any carjacking before, contrary to what the rest of the group believes apparently. He’s seen it on television a couple of times on CSI and various caught on camera shows but up close it is a lot harder. He tries to use the coat hanger, just to find that it doesn’t even fit down the door, whatever way he is holding it. A bead of sweat trails down his forehead as he feels the group stare at him and he daren’t disappoint them. He is their show tonight.
By some miracle, it forces its way down and the door clicks, swinging open. There is a unanimous cheer from the group and a couple of swigs are taken from paper bags as Alfred feels himself shake with fear. He expects that, at any moment, a flurry of guards and medics will come rushing out of the hospital doors and he will never see daylight again. Nothing happens though.
“Well,” someone in the crowd says, “Are we taking it for a spin or not?”
Alfred is just about to back away, let someone else take the wheel, when his friend’s hand snakes its way across his shoulders. He is uncomfortable and tipsy but doesn’t let it show.
“Hey guys, it was little Alfie here who got us in,” he slurs, a lot more wasted than he was three minutes ago; maybe the effects were just settling, “Surely he should give it a test drive?”
Alfred is shaking his head desperately. “Oh no no, I’m drunk, I cant,” he tries, but he hears a snort from the girl from earlier.
“You’re the most sober here,” she laughs and Alfred wants to say something, let everyone know that he has had far more to drink than this little society brat, but he holds his tongue. He never liked it when drinking was made into a competition. It was always an adventure for him.
He stops protesting then. Isn’t that what this is all about? Adventure? Surely everything is about whether or not he can live life to the full, not about fearing every day. Carpe Diem, not YOLO, however.
He grabs the coat hanger off the short, scruffy teen who took it off of him in the first place and hops into the driver’s seat. “I’ll let you know how smoothly it rides,” he smirks at them as he shoves the metal wire into the ignition and feels the ambulance start up.
Someone makes a sexual innuendo, their arm around the waist of some girl who would be horrified if she could even see straight. He puts it into reverse and jolts when it brakes. He soon recovers though as he does a U-turn and speeds out of the hospital car park, revelling in the cheers and hoots he hears behind him.
It’s when he is out on the open road he starts to regret his decision. What if he crashes it? He has had quite a bit to drink. What if he gets caught? The police are probably on his tail already. What if there’s an accident? He has taken one of the ambulances and maybe there won’t be enough to cover the injuries. What if someone dies because of him?
He shakes it off. How likely is all of this? He concludes that nothing bad will happen and then he looks for the radio. He stops just before pressing the dial. What if this connects him to the hospital and they catch him? He groans at himself. This was meant to be an adventure, not a guilt trip.
He presses the dial and after a few moments of static and held breaths it tunes into a local radio station playing music for an hour non stop. He checks the time on his watch; it’s 10.56. This will probably be the last song, he decides as the pop tune playing fades out.
He thinks it’s peculiar, but appropriate, that the radio starts playing some tune from an animated movie that was in the cinemas recently. He remembers going with his younger brother and the kid dancing around the kitchen to the sound track for weeks while he and his mother looked on in amusement.
He hits the side of the steering wheel with a chortle. “Hear that, vee?” he laughs, “You’re my spirit of adventure alright!”
He hums along to the tune; he’s heard it a dozen times but still doesn’t know the words. He is keeping a reasonably good grip on the steering wheel and is amazingly staying in between the lines. He’s only just got his driver’s license (he almost failed too) and he’s tipsy, so he thinks this is an achievement worthy of his mates buying the cheap supermarket vodka next time they meet.
It’s lucky that the song ends when it does, because if had played on for even another moment, Alfred wouldn’t have heard the shouting. He almost stops dead in the road to have a gawk, but decides that, adventure or not, it is safer to pull into a nearby parking space. He checks the street up and down before getting out of the ambulance, lest some doddery old lady, friends with his grandmother, spots him and asks his family when he got his college degree.
The street is deserted and he hops out, leaving the door ajar and hoping that someone doesn’t have the same bright idea he had and go off with it. He follows the sound of the ruckus. Behind a wall, he can hear bits and pieces of what is going on, but not much. Something about money, something about not having money and then a ‘for the love of God, what was that for?!’
Alfred peers over the whitewashed plaster, making sure that he can’t be seen before settling his nose onto the top so he can watch. There are five people in total. It appears to be three against two, which is just as unfair as two against one in Alfred’s mind even though he knows it divides into one and a half against one which isn’t that unfair but still quite hard to beat.
The taller one of the two has scruffy grey coloured hair that’s almost white. His face is contorted into a sneer but his piercing, bloodshot eyes say that he’s in a predicament. The sampler’s eyes are covered by a mop of straw coloured hair until he shakes it aside to look one of the three in the eye and Alfred can see emeralds.
The fight begins again and Alfred stifles a noise that rises in the back of his throat when he sees the emerald guy get hit in the face. He wishes he could do something but he only lives for adventure; he doesn’t have a freaking death wish. He knows that he, a suburban spoiled brat that thinks alcohol makes him a badass, would be knocked out in three seconds in this fight, regardless of having made it even.
The fight continues and Alfred doesn’t know where to look until, in one single split second, what seems like a million things happen at once. The bloodshot guy looks up and sees him. He doesn’t have the emerald one’s back. Someone pulls out a gun. It glints under the quarter moon. The bloodshot one looks back to the fight, too late. The gun fires. Emerald falls.
Everything stops moving in slow motion. It’s now three against one and the emerald guy is cussing, holding his leg with his palms to try and stop the bleeding. Someone goes to kick him in the head but the other guy trips him and he falls. Alfred screams at some point, but no one hears him over the chaos.
The only one left standing from his duo, the bloodshot guy looks desperately up at Alfred who shrinks away slightly. With a nod, the guy runs in the opposite direction and, with hoots and hollers of ‘he’s getting away,’ the other three follow him and forget about the one they already had, cussing on the tarmac.
Alfred makes sure they are gone before hopping the wall and rushing over to where the emerald one looks worst for wear. He had done a couple of classes of first aid in freshman year; he started mitching that class after that though. CSI is the only thing that tells him what to do in this situation and he almost laughs at the memory of his teachers saying that he’d never learn anything from television.
“Are you okay,” he asks quickly, falling to is knees in front of the other. When the emerald one looks up, he realises that he probably isn’t much older than him, only a year or two at best. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
There’s a moment of silence where Alfred fears the worst and the other looks blankly at him as if contemplating his existence. Then he answers, “Two and a thumb.”
Alfred checks and the other is right. He tries again. “What’s your name? Can you stand?”
“Arthur,” he replies and he tests and winces before continuing a, “No.”
Alfred fiddles with his fingers and ponders his options while shifting from one knee to the other. He decides that the best thing to do is to hook his arm around Arthur and life him from the ground. He earns a bemused expression for this.
“What are you doing?” Arthur asks, incredulously and disbelieving.
“Helping you over this wall so I can fix you up,” Alfred replies and he is quite proud of himself because he has no idea what he was doing at all and admitting that wouldn’t have sounded too good. “My name is Alfred, by the way.”
He has Arthur up in his arms and sitting on the wall before the other manages a retort. “But why? I’ll be fine, don’t bother,” he huffs.
“I’m already bothering,” Alfred grins and he hops the wall again, turning once he reaches the other side with his arms outstretched, “Now fall back.”
He hears splutters but can’t see Arthur’s face. “You wont catch me,” he hears finally, a low tone of disapproval, “I’d rather not be injured more, thank you very much.”
However, he doesn’t get much of a choice or much of a chance to fight back as Alfred grabs him by the arm and hauls him backwards off the wall. In the few seconds that Arthur is falling through the air, Alfred manages to fix his arms underneath him so he can catch him, barely. His arms hook around Arthur’s waist but he still cant help his feet dragging along the ground; Alfred’s not tall enough and Arthur is not small enough for a clean catch in this manoeuvre.
“You know, that would have gone much smoother if you just fell back when I asked,” Alfred hums and he can feel Arthur scowl against his arm.
“Yeah, well,” he hisses, suddenly aware that they are now on a public street where anyone can see them and notice the big, bleeding gash in his leg, “You can just leave me hear, alright?”
Alfred chuckles. “Not a chance. Get over here.”
They limp and drag themselves over to where the ambulance is haphazardly parked. Arthur gawps at the vehicle with a few sputters as Alfred swings the back doors open, hauling them both inside and setting Arthur down gently, his hands still pressed to the wound, before rooting for supplies in the dark as he cannot find the light switch, if there is one.
“Oh God, you’re a medic,” Arthur groans, burying his face in his hands as Alfred chuckles lightly again, looking around at Arthur. His cheeks are tinted red with either pain from the injury he was sporting or embarrassment at his predicament.
“Not quite,” he laughs and Arthur knows better than to pry the guy who is holding the disinfectant in his hands.
“Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” he does ask however, because he doesn’t want blood poisoning and he most certainly does not want to die. The bullet appears to still be in his leg though as Alfred quickly disinfects around the hole, having to tear away a good deal of the fabric of Arthur’s slacks. The blood keeps coming and Arthur, though he will never admit it, feels faint.
“I don’t think it is,” Alfred admits, “But it is the best I can do. Now use this to apply pressure while I get bandages.” A white cloth is pressed into Arthur’s hand and he tries to do as Alfred asks.
It is ages before Alfred can find the bandages. For an ambulance, they sure are unorganized. He wonders if it is only a spare ambulance that doesn’t have any equipment. Then he finds the bandages and rushed over to Arthur again, wishing that they showed this part of fights in more detail on the television programs he watched.
Arthur looks like he is about to pass out, his eyes Alfred knew him by drooping in slow motion. His hand is lax and blood is still gushing; he didn’t keep enough pressure, Alfred realises as he bites his lip. He rips the whole leg off of the slacks, up over the gunshot wound and disinfects again, trying the wipe the blood that has already surfaced and stop more pouring out. He realises it’s fruitless after a second or two and wraps the bandages tightly around the blood.
He uses almost a whole roll of bandages and Arthur looks like death. Alfred hopes Arthur doesn’t die, because that would really suck after all his hard work. Okay, he’d be guilty too but hey, if he hadn’t stolen the ambulance, Arthur wouldn’t even stand a chance. He thinks the bandages are tight enough to apply the right pressure, but he urges Arthur to keep pressure up anyways. He takes a closer look at the purplish bruise forming around Arthur’s eye where he was punched before deciding not to treat it yet. He has worse injuries to worry about and he needs to get a real doctor who had learned textbook medicine and not Hollywood ideals to take a look now. He hops out of the back in a flurry of limbs and panicked states.
“Cold.”
Alfred looks back into the ambulance. He had been just going to get back into the driver’s seat to get back to the hospital.
“Sorry?” he asks.
“‘m cold,” Arthur mumbles again and Alfred hears him.
Alfred panics for a minute. Is he going into shock? Will he die? Or is it really that cold? Can Alfred not feel the cold because of his jacket? This was far more adventure than Alfred was cut out for. Still, he sheds his jacket and wraps Arthur up in it, the collars up around his chin.
“Better?” he asks and Arthur doesn’t manage an answer but he’s no longer shivering.
Alfred shuts the back doors and all but throws himself into the front seat of the vehicle, starting up the engine with the coat hook again. He doesn’t look right or left as he does a complete U-turn and it is lucky that the street is still deserted as he speeds off down the road. His heartbeat is erratic, but he supposes that that is only a minor thing to worry about compared to the extensive injuries Arthur has.
He checks the mirror and realises he can’t see Arthur behind the seats. “Are you okay there?” he shouts back. He speeds up when he doesn’t hear a reply.
The radio had thundered into life with the ambulance and was playing some other cheesy pop song that didn’t fit. Alfred shut it off as he turned a corner. He appears to have sobered up considerably, which is a good thing. The last thing Arthur needs is for him to crash on top of everything else.
He gets back to the hospital much faster than he left it. He’s going one hundred miles an hour now as opposed to fifty five and he presumes that’s the reason. He almost knocks down a doctor on his cigarette break who immediately drops his smoking tobacco and races to where Alfred is parking; someone going that fast obviously must have a serious case on their hands, right?
Alfred sees this and leaps out of the car, terrified of being caught. He still feels like a coward though as he races to where his friends are long gone and hides, watching in safety while the doctor looks around in bemusement before opening the back doors and paging for nurses, when he sees the hacked job of first aid Alfred has done on Arthur and the amount of blood that stains the inside of the doors. When Alfred looks down, he realises his hands are covered in blood. He grimaces and wipes them in his jeans.
Arthur looks up when he is lifted out of the back, his eyes foggy with pain. He does what the doctor did not and sees Alfred in his hiding place. Their eyes catch and that is all the thank you that Alfred needs as Arthur is pulled away on a stretcher.
Alfred’s heart hammers in his chest. What an adventure.
He stumbles up and picks up an abandoned paper bag with an empty vodka bottle inside it. Maybe he’ll go visit Arthur tomorrow; he will surely still be there with that kind of dangerous injury. Maybe he likes flowers; Alfred could bring him flowers and he definitely wont ask for his jacket back. Maybe Arthur will sit up and cuss at him for getting involved, his own form of thank you, when Alfred hands him a card and tells him he’s not really a medic and explains his story prior to hopping that wall. Maybe Alfred will grin across the rickety hospital bed; that will surely earn a small smile, maybe even a number, from Arthur.
Maybe that would turn out to be the best adventure of all.
|END|
Genre- General
Word Count- 3,359
Rating/Warnings- T for underage drinking, slight peer pressure themes, stealing, carjacking, blood, violence, guns, hacked first aid jobs.
Summary- Alfred gets more of an adventure than he bargains for when he steals a vehicle; an ambulance, no less.
A/N I think I stretched the theme a little too far :/ oh well, please tell me if there is any problems with it :)
-x-
|Split Second|
-x-
Alfred is not a bad person; he just lives for adventure.
This is why he stops when he hears the brawl even though he is not really a medic and had just hijacked an ambulance. But, to understand this, we should probably start at the beginning.
“It’s just sitting there,” his friend sighs dramatically, his hands rested underneath his chin.
He was talking about the ambulance they were all sitting in front of. Alfred is only seventeen but the vodka that had burned his throat when he first tried it (it was an adventure) now went down with ease. He was right though; the ambulance was just sitting there. They were behind the wall of the hospital, where they always sat (there was no park to drink in and no youth centre to convince them not to drink). The vehicle was a couple of feet from any other ambulance, and by the looks of it there were hundreds. Okay, maybe seven, but who’s counting?
“No one would even need it,” the girl his friend has his arm around giggles into her blue tinted bottle. She’s barely taken three sips out of it, yet she is somehow completely wasted. Alfred is not convinced. He has seen many like her, been like here.
“You’re right,” he replies and that is the wrong thing to say because suddenly the group’s eyes are on him.
“You should take it,” a smaller kid whispers excitedly, his hands balled up into fists around the can he is holding, crushing it so cheap liquor stains the ground. He can’t be more than fifteen; he doesn’t look older than ten. Alfred bites his tongue so he doesn’t retch; his breath smells like stale alcohol. That is not a nice smell.
Alfred wonders why he is the one who has to take it. He wasn’t the one who brought it up. He wasn’t even the one who had any interest in it. He really wishes he hadn’t said anything but it’s too late as someone, who was suspiciously rightfully prepared, hands him a broken coat hanger and someone else pushes him towards the vehicle.
He hasn’t actually done any carjacking before, contrary to what the rest of the group believes apparently. He’s seen it on television a couple of times on CSI and various caught on camera shows but up close it is a lot harder. He tries to use the coat hanger, just to find that it doesn’t even fit down the door, whatever way he is holding it. A bead of sweat trails down his forehead as he feels the group stare at him and he daren’t disappoint them. He is their show tonight.
By some miracle, it forces its way down and the door clicks, swinging open. There is a unanimous cheer from the group and a couple of swigs are taken from paper bags as Alfred feels himself shake with fear. He expects that, at any moment, a flurry of guards and medics will come rushing out of the hospital doors and he will never see daylight again. Nothing happens though.
“Well,” someone in the crowd says, “Are we taking it for a spin or not?”
Alfred is just about to back away, let someone else take the wheel, when his friend’s hand snakes its way across his shoulders. He is uncomfortable and tipsy but doesn’t let it show.
“Hey guys, it was little Alfie here who got us in,” he slurs, a lot more wasted than he was three minutes ago; maybe the effects were just settling, “Surely he should give it a test drive?”
Alfred is shaking his head desperately. “Oh no no, I’m drunk, I cant,” he tries, but he hears a snort from the girl from earlier.
“You’re the most sober here,” she laughs and Alfred wants to say something, let everyone know that he has had far more to drink than this little society brat, but he holds his tongue. He never liked it when drinking was made into a competition. It was always an adventure for him.
He stops protesting then. Isn’t that what this is all about? Adventure? Surely everything is about whether or not he can live life to the full, not about fearing every day. Carpe Diem, not YOLO, however.
He grabs the coat hanger off the short, scruffy teen who took it off of him in the first place and hops into the driver’s seat. “I’ll let you know how smoothly it rides,” he smirks at them as he shoves the metal wire into the ignition and feels the ambulance start up.
Someone makes a sexual innuendo, their arm around the waist of some girl who would be horrified if she could even see straight. He puts it into reverse and jolts when it brakes. He soon recovers though as he does a U-turn and speeds out of the hospital car park, revelling in the cheers and hoots he hears behind him.
It’s when he is out on the open road he starts to regret his decision. What if he crashes it? He has had quite a bit to drink. What if he gets caught? The police are probably on his tail already. What if there’s an accident? He has taken one of the ambulances and maybe there won’t be enough to cover the injuries. What if someone dies because of him?
He shakes it off. How likely is all of this? He concludes that nothing bad will happen and then he looks for the radio. He stops just before pressing the dial. What if this connects him to the hospital and they catch him? He groans at himself. This was meant to be an adventure, not a guilt trip.
He presses the dial and after a few moments of static and held breaths it tunes into a local radio station playing music for an hour non stop. He checks the time on his watch; it’s 10.56. This will probably be the last song, he decides as the pop tune playing fades out.
He thinks it’s peculiar, but appropriate, that the radio starts playing some tune from an animated movie that was in the cinemas recently. He remembers going with his younger brother and the kid dancing around the kitchen to the sound track for weeks while he and his mother looked on in amusement.
He hits the side of the steering wheel with a chortle. “Hear that, vee?” he laughs, “You’re my spirit of adventure alright!”
He hums along to the tune; he’s heard it a dozen times but still doesn’t know the words. He is keeping a reasonably good grip on the steering wheel and is amazingly staying in between the lines. He’s only just got his driver’s license (he almost failed too) and he’s tipsy, so he thinks this is an achievement worthy of his mates buying the cheap supermarket vodka next time they meet.
It’s lucky that the song ends when it does, because if had played on for even another moment, Alfred wouldn’t have heard the shouting. He almost stops dead in the road to have a gawk, but decides that, adventure or not, it is safer to pull into a nearby parking space. He checks the street up and down before getting out of the ambulance, lest some doddery old lady, friends with his grandmother, spots him and asks his family when he got his college degree.
The street is deserted and he hops out, leaving the door ajar and hoping that someone doesn’t have the same bright idea he had and go off with it. He follows the sound of the ruckus. Behind a wall, he can hear bits and pieces of what is going on, but not much. Something about money, something about not having money and then a ‘for the love of God, what was that for?!’
Alfred peers over the whitewashed plaster, making sure that he can’t be seen before settling his nose onto the top so he can watch. There are five people in total. It appears to be three against two, which is just as unfair as two against one in Alfred’s mind even though he knows it divides into one and a half against one which isn’t that unfair but still quite hard to beat.
The taller one of the two has scruffy grey coloured hair that’s almost white. His face is contorted into a sneer but his piercing, bloodshot eyes say that he’s in a predicament. The sampler’s eyes are covered by a mop of straw coloured hair until he shakes it aside to look one of the three in the eye and Alfred can see emeralds.
The fight begins again and Alfred stifles a noise that rises in the back of his throat when he sees the emerald guy get hit in the face. He wishes he could do something but he only lives for adventure; he doesn’t have a freaking death wish. He knows that he, a suburban spoiled brat that thinks alcohol makes him a badass, would be knocked out in three seconds in this fight, regardless of having made it even.
The fight continues and Alfred doesn’t know where to look until, in one single split second, what seems like a million things happen at once. The bloodshot guy looks up and sees him. He doesn’t have the emerald one’s back. Someone pulls out a gun. It glints under the quarter moon. The bloodshot one looks back to the fight, too late. The gun fires. Emerald falls.
Everything stops moving in slow motion. It’s now three against one and the emerald guy is cussing, holding his leg with his palms to try and stop the bleeding. Someone goes to kick him in the head but the other guy trips him and he falls. Alfred screams at some point, but no one hears him over the chaos.
The only one left standing from his duo, the bloodshot guy looks desperately up at Alfred who shrinks away slightly. With a nod, the guy runs in the opposite direction and, with hoots and hollers of ‘he’s getting away,’ the other three follow him and forget about the one they already had, cussing on the tarmac.
Alfred makes sure they are gone before hopping the wall and rushing over to where the emerald one looks worst for wear. He had done a couple of classes of first aid in freshman year; he started mitching that class after that though. CSI is the only thing that tells him what to do in this situation and he almost laughs at the memory of his teachers saying that he’d never learn anything from television.
“Are you okay,” he asks quickly, falling to is knees in front of the other. When the emerald one looks up, he realises that he probably isn’t much older than him, only a year or two at best. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
There’s a moment of silence where Alfred fears the worst and the other looks blankly at him as if contemplating his existence. Then he answers, “Two and a thumb.”
Alfred checks and the other is right. He tries again. “What’s your name? Can you stand?”
“Arthur,” he replies and he tests and winces before continuing a, “No.”
Alfred fiddles with his fingers and ponders his options while shifting from one knee to the other. He decides that the best thing to do is to hook his arm around Arthur and life him from the ground. He earns a bemused expression for this.
“What are you doing?” Arthur asks, incredulously and disbelieving.
“Helping you over this wall so I can fix you up,” Alfred replies and he is quite proud of himself because he has no idea what he was doing at all and admitting that wouldn’t have sounded too good. “My name is Alfred, by the way.”
He has Arthur up in his arms and sitting on the wall before the other manages a retort. “But why? I’ll be fine, don’t bother,” he huffs.
“I’m already bothering,” Alfred grins and he hops the wall again, turning once he reaches the other side with his arms outstretched, “Now fall back.”
He hears splutters but can’t see Arthur’s face. “You wont catch me,” he hears finally, a low tone of disapproval, “I’d rather not be injured more, thank you very much.”
However, he doesn’t get much of a choice or much of a chance to fight back as Alfred grabs him by the arm and hauls him backwards off the wall. In the few seconds that Arthur is falling through the air, Alfred manages to fix his arms underneath him so he can catch him, barely. His arms hook around Arthur’s waist but he still cant help his feet dragging along the ground; Alfred’s not tall enough and Arthur is not small enough for a clean catch in this manoeuvre.
“You know, that would have gone much smoother if you just fell back when I asked,” Alfred hums and he can feel Arthur scowl against his arm.
“Yeah, well,” he hisses, suddenly aware that they are now on a public street where anyone can see them and notice the big, bleeding gash in his leg, “You can just leave me hear, alright?”
Alfred chuckles. “Not a chance. Get over here.”
They limp and drag themselves over to where the ambulance is haphazardly parked. Arthur gawps at the vehicle with a few sputters as Alfred swings the back doors open, hauling them both inside and setting Arthur down gently, his hands still pressed to the wound, before rooting for supplies in the dark as he cannot find the light switch, if there is one.
“Oh God, you’re a medic,” Arthur groans, burying his face in his hands as Alfred chuckles lightly again, looking around at Arthur. His cheeks are tinted red with either pain from the injury he was sporting or embarrassment at his predicament.
“Not quite,” he laughs and Arthur knows better than to pry the guy who is holding the disinfectant in his hands.
“Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” he does ask however, because he doesn’t want blood poisoning and he most certainly does not want to die. The bullet appears to still be in his leg though as Alfred quickly disinfects around the hole, having to tear away a good deal of the fabric of Arthur’s slacks. The blood keeps coming and Arthur, though he will never admit it, feels faint.
“I don’t think it is,” Alfred admits, “But it is the best I can do. Now use this to apply pressure while I get bandages.” A white cloth is pressed into Arthur’s hand and he tries to do as Alfred asks.
It is ages before Alfred can find the bandages. For an ambulance, they sure are unorganized. He wonders if it is only a spare ambulance that doesn’t have any equipment. Then he finds the bandages and rushed over to Arthur again, wishing that they showed this part of fights in more detail on the television programs he watched.
Arthur looks like he is about to pass out, his eyes Alfred knew him by drooping in slow motion. His hand is lax and blood is still gushing; he didn’t keep enough pressure, Alfred realises as he bites his lip. He rips the whole leg off of the slacks, up over the gunshot wound and disinfects again, trying the wipe the blood that has already surfaced and stop more pouring out. He realises it’s fruitless after a second or two and wraps the bandages tightly around the blood.
He uses almost a whole roll of bandages and Arthur looks like death. Alfred hopes Arthur doesn’t die, because that would really suck after all his hard work. Okay, he’d be guilty too but hey, if he hadn’t stolen the ambulance, Arthur wouldn’t even stand a chance. He thinks the bandages are tight enough to apply the right pressure, but he urges Arthur to keep pressure up anyways. He takes a closer look at the purplish bruise forming around Arthur’s eye where he was punched before deciding not to treat it yet. He has worse injuries to worry about and he needs to get a real doctor who had learned textbook medicine and not Hollywood ideals to take a look now. He hops out of the back in a flurry of limbs and panicked states.
“Cold.”
Alfred looks back into the ambulance. He had been just going to get back into the driver’s seat to get back to the hospital.
“Sorry?” he asks.
“‘m cold,” Arthur mumbles again and Alfred hears him.
Alfred panics for a minute. Is he going into shock? Will he die? Or is it really that cold? Can Alfred not feel the cold because of his jacket? This was far more adventure than Alfred was cut out for. Still, he sheds his jacket and wraps Arthur up in it, the collars up around his chin.
“Better?” he asks and Arthur doesn’t manage an answer but he’s no longer shivering.
Alfred shuts the back doors and all but throws himself into the front seat of the vehicle, starting up the engine with the coat hook again. He doesn’t look right or left as he does a complete U-turn and it is lucky that the street is still deserted as he speeds off down the road. His heartbeat is erratic, but he supposes that that is only a minor thing to worry about compared to the extensive injuries Arthur has.
He checks the mirror and realises he can’t see Arthur behind the seats. “Are you okay there?” he shouts back. He speeds up when he doesn’t hear a reply.
The radio had thundered into life with the ambulance and was playing some other cheesy pop song that didn’t fit. Alfred shut it off as he turned a corner. He appears to have sobered up considerably, which is a good thing. The last thing Arthur needs is for him to crash on top of everything else.
He gets back to the hospital much faster than he left it. He’s going one hundred miles an hour now as opposed to fifty five and he presumes that’s the reason. He almost knocks down a doctor on his cigarette break who immediately drops his smoking tobacco and races to where Alfred is parking; someone going that fast obviously must have a serious case on their hands, right?
Alfred sees this and leaps out of the car, terrified of being caught. He still feels like a coward though as he races to where his friends are long gone and hides, watching in safety while the doctor looks around in bemusement before opening the back doors and paging for nurses, when he sees the hacked job of first aid Alfred has done on Arthur and the amount of blood that stains the inside of the doors. When Alfred looks down, he realises his hands are covered in blood. He grimaces and wipes them in his jeans.
Arthur looks up when he is lifted out of the back, his eyes foggy with pain. He does what the doctor did not and sees Alfred in his hiding place. Their eyes catch and that is all the thank you that Alfred needs as Arthur is pulled away on a stretcher.
Alfred’s heart hammers in his chest. What an adventure.
He stumbles up and picks up an abandoned paper bag with an empty vodka bottle inside it. Maybe he’ll go visit Arthur tomorrow; he will surely still be there with that kind of dangerous injury. Maybe he likes flowers; Alfred could bring him flowers and he definitely wont ask for his jacket back. Maybe Arthur will sit up and cuss at him for getting involved, his own form of thank you, when Alfred hands him a card and tells him he’s not really a medic and explains his story prior to hopping that wall. Maybe Alfred will grin across the rickety hospital bed; that will surely earn a small smile, maybe even a number, from Arthur.
Maybe that would turn out to be the best adventure of all.
|END|