Peace Studies 2
Title: Peace Studies (2/3?)
Author: Alsike
Fandom: X-Men/Criminal Minds x-over
Pairing: Emma Frost/Emily Prentiss
Rating: R
AN/Disclaimer: Not my girls.
Word Count: 3189
Apologies: The Gary Paulson rip-off!!! This story... is psychotic. But everyone loves field operations, right?
Summary: In one world, Emma and Emily didn't disobey their parents. They didn't fight for freedom. And they didn't find each other in the midst of loss and terror. They met at a party instead.
Opening Salvoes
Emily’s head ached and her body ached, but it was the shivering that had woken her up. She was soaked to the bone, and ice cold. She was still inside the Jeep, which was upside down, hanging painfully against her seatbelt. The canvas roof had been ripped to shreds and rain was pouring through the holes, every drop stinging her chilled aching skin. She was the only one in the Jeep.
Her frozen fingers fumbled with the buckle until finally, surprisingly, it popped free, and she slumped down to the mud that had formed beneath the bars. She crawled, every motion causing her to discover a new area of pain, out of the slightly sheltered area of the Jeep. It was pitch black outside, but every few moments there was a flash of lightning, and she could see the huge slope of tumbled rocks and trees. She looked and looked, but the road they had come from was completely invisible.
Then she saw the small bundle of cloth. Slowly and painstakingly, pain shooting through her knees with every step she took, she made her way over to it. It was Derek, slumped as if he were dead, his leg pinned. She dropped down next to him, quickly checking his breathing and feeling for a pulse. He was still alive, but very cold, and unconscious.
“Fuck,” she hissed, starting to scrabble at the stones pinning him. The water kept bringing down more as she moved them, and she didn’t realize that she was crying in the rain.
There was a hand on her shoulder and she almost screamed.
“Emily.” It was Emma, she looked like she had been slicked with mud, but when the lightning flashed again, Emily noticed that there was a line on her thigh, and the dark color that had soaked into her jeans below it wasn’t mud.
“Oh my god.” She thrust forward, wrapping her arms around the woman’s waist. She gasped a little, in pain and Emily jerked back. “I’m sorry.”
Emma ignored her. “There are caves over there. Some high enough to be still dry.”
Emily stared at her uncomprehendingly. “We have to get him out.”
Emma grabbed her upper arm. “I came back for you. But we need to get out of here!”
“No! I can’t just leave!”
“You’ll die with him when the second wave comes!”
“Fuck you!” Emily turned back, dragging stones away again.
“Shit,” Emma hissed, and she stepped in, pushing against the other side of one of the heavier rocks. With both of them it moved, just pivoting slightly up and rebalancing. “Hold it!”
Emily grabbed onto it, putting all her weight into keeping it upright, and Emma ducked down, grabbing Derek by his armpits and dragging. His knee bent in an ugly way, like it was stretching, and Emily kicked out, forcing away another stone, and with a last jerk he came free.
Emily dropped the stone, gasping, and staggered forward. She scooped up is legs, and Emma lifted his shoulders, until his was hanging, his hips barely an inch above the scree-covered ground. They lugged him towards the hill, half dragging him along, their feet sinking into the mud, wind and rain whipping against their faces.
“This way.” Emma led the way up a slippery pile of boulders to a ledge. There was a small hole at the end of it, and Emma put Morgan down and crawled through it. Then she reached back out and started dragging him in. Emily pushed, and holding onto his legs, crawled into the tiny claustrophobic passage. It was pitch black.
“Emma?” she asked, and her voice echoed slightly, suggesting that the space was much larger than it seemed. She could hear water running, even underneath the roar of the storm still raging outside.
“Come here,” Emma replied. “There’s a dead tree. If we can break enough of it off we can start a fire.”
“With what?”
There was no answer, just a slight snort and the cracking of dry branches. Emily followed the sound as best she could. She helped, adding sticks and crispy leaves to the pile. Her body ached, and her mind was so busy panicking, that it was all she could do to keep focused on one task.
Then there were some clicks, and a light flared, so bright as to be blinding, and then one of the leaves caught and there was smoke.
“You have a lighter?”
“Just lucky I didn’t lose it, or get rid of it when I quit.” The sticks had started to catch and the flickering light began to illuminate the cave. Emma was sitting by the small pile of wood, her blood-soaked leg pulled up to her chest. The area was big, and the twisted tree and other odd things suggested that it had been formed by a rockslide of its own, but it felt stable and it was dry. There was an aperture part of the way up, and rain was coming in there, but it was running down the wall and forming a small pool over in one corner before flowing away between the rocks.
Derek was still slumped in the entrance where they had left him, and Emily dragged herself to her feet to go to him and pull him closer to the fire. When she finally made it her teeth were chattering, and she sat down by the tiny fire, her clothes like a clammy hand covering her body.
“You need to strip,” Emma said softly.
“What?”
“Your clothes won't dry with you in them, and you won't dry in them either. You’re going to freeze to death like that.”
Emily ignored her and moved to feel Derek’s forehead. In the light she could see what had happened to his trapped legs. His knee looked twisted out of shape and the rocks had viciously mutilated them. “What if he dies?”
Emma glared at her. “What if you die because you catch pneumonia while you’re whining about this!”
“He’s going to die because we wanted a fucking tour, and you were just going to leave him there!”
Emma stared at her blankly. “It was an accident. We’ve done everything we can. There’s no point in martyring yourself by panicking when there’s nothing you can do.” She crawled over to her, every move clearly painful. She reached out, tugging at her shirt.
Emily jerked away. “I don’t want you to touch me!”
“Don’t be an imbecile!” Emma reached out and grabbed, jerking hard, and the already beaten shirt ripped and pulled away. Emily flinched as if she were about to be slapped, but Emma hadn’t moved.
“That looks bad.” The places where the seat belt had dug into Emily’s skin were raw and glaringly bruised. Emma slowly peeled off her own shirt and then moved over to the pool, dipping it into the water, rinsing it once, and then bringing it back wet. She rubbed it over Emily’s neck, wiping away mud and gravel. Emily winced when it caught a raw area, but slowly shrugged out of her shirt. Emma’s fingers ran over her neck.
“You’re so cold.”
Emily nodded weakly. The shivering had started again now that she wasn’t moving, and she felt sick and unfocused.
Emma leaned in and brushed her lips against her cheek. They were just a touch warmer than her skin, but just enough to make Emily lean into it to try and steal some of the heat. "Let me warm you up."
"This is such a cliché," Emily whimpered, tilting her head up.
"It's only a cliché because it works." And Emma cupped her face and pressed her mouth to her neck.
Then there were only hands moving over chilled damp skin, soggy clothes dropped in a pile by the fire. It took a long time, but eventually the touches stopped being painful. Emma mapped her bruises and aches, and she did the same. The cut on her thigh was deep and ugly, but it had stopped bleeding, and Emma caught her hand before it went too close. “Just leave it.”
Emily felt the heat building in her, the shivers turning to sweat. She moaned, wrapping an arm around Emma’s still chilled back and lifting her hips, ignoring the ache in her knees and the rocks pressing into her back. Emma's long fingers slipped between her legs, and Emily tensed, suddenly remembering who this was and why they had ended up there in the first place.
"This doesn't mean anything," Emily hissed.
"I never said it did."
* * *
“How did we end up in a bad survival movie?”
Emily was not happy with waking up stiff and sore and cold and clearly in a cave. She was even less happy with the way she had just submitted that night, submitted to the accident, to the elements, to the cold, and to Emma. Just because she didn’t come across as aggressive did not mean she let anyone walk all over her. She had dealt with enough people who considered her a threat, or less than human, and she hadn’t backed down then. She glared at Emma.
“Come on. We need to find the Jeep. There could be emergency supplies there.” She marched off as best she could on the irregular rocks and mudholes. Emma limped after her, and Emily had a flash of guilt, but if she wasn’t going to let her do anything about it, Emily wasn’t about to give her any slack.
“I don’t think this is the right direction, darling.”
Emily paused at Emma’s snide commentary and looked on in amazement. She had climbed up a small pile of rocks, and on the other side the rocks and mud were not in evidence. There was a small patch of grass, a trickling river, and a clump of trees that spread off into a forest.
“I can’t say it’s a terrible direction,” Emily responded. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was. “Do you think…”
Emma didn’t need any more explanation. “There’s only one way to find out.”
Emily frowned. “There might be an iodine kit at the Jeep.”
“There might not be a Jeep. You were asleep when the second wave hit.”
Fuck it, Emily scrambled painfully over the rocks and dropped the last few feet to the grass. It was grass, long an thick with sharp blades, but unbelievably, not rocks, and she fell on her hands and knees, just breathing it for a moment. Emma was slower and more careful, but following behind her. “Race you!” she yelped, and took off toward the stream, every step a strain, but every step working, and an unbelievable relief in itself.
“Fuck you!” Emma swore at her. But Emily didn’t bother to look back. She reached the water and flopped on her stomach in front of it. It tasted like nothing else, stirred up grit and inadvertent tadpole and all.
* * *
All they found of the jeep was the corner of one roll bar sticking up out of the mud and rocks. But amongst the debris a few things had been tossed out and scattered, an empty water bottle, some scraps of canvas, a bent metal pole. It was a meager load, but they brought water back to Derek in the bottle. He was still unconscious, but feverish, and Emily soaked some of the rags, putting them on his forehead and the tail end of one into his mouth so the water would drip in.
Emma watched her carefully. “Do you know about this sort of thing?”
Emily snorted. “I’m making it up as I go along. I always wanted to be a boy scout, but they took the fact that I was a girl far too seriously.”
Emma laughed. “My brother was a boy scout, but he got all his badges for cooking and making crafts. Wilderness survival was not really his forte. And I know less than him.”
“Then we should probably try to be rescued as soon as possible.” Emma agreed and they started out again, back towards the Jeep and up the steep slope of rocks and mud beyond it, looking for the road. Emily led the way, scrambling over rocks and picking her way through slippery areas of scree. The soreness and discomfort that had plagued her all morning slowly loosened up and as the sun grew hotter and approached its zenith, she almost felt happy.
Well, she did until she glanced back and saw Emma leaning stiffly against a boulder, not putting any weight on her injured leg. The blood on her jeans had blackened, but there was a new trace of red, and Emily froze. She glanced around. They had gone up pretty high, not near the top of the mountain at all, but at least to where she thought the road should have been. But it was nowhere to be seen. She should work her way from one side to the other, but the center was nearly vertical. She would have to make separate ascents, one for each side, as far as she could go, and even then… the road hadn’t been that wide or well defined as it was. What if she saw it and didn’t recognize it?
Emily worked her way back down to Emma.
“Well?” Emma snapped at her, more irritable than she had been the last time they spoke.
“I can’t see anything. I’ll try going up the side later.” She looked down at the fresh blood oozing through Emma’s jeans. “That looks awful.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re an idiot,” Emily snapped back. “We have to clean that. We have no fucking idea how long we will be here, and I won’t let you just sit here and bleed to death.”
“Christ! You don’t have to be a fucking saint all the time!”
“You don’t have to be a martyr!”
“And what do you propose to clean it with!”
“I don’t know!” Emily felt helpless again. “But anything has to be better than leaving it to fester.”
“Why do you even care?”
“I don’t want to be alone here!” Emily couldn’t keep the desperation out of her voice and Emma looked at her, as if she wasn’t sure she could believe it. Then she looked down.
“What do you propose?”
“Let’s go down to the river.”
Emma nodded slowly and rose, making her way stiffly down the slope, trying not to show how much it hurt. Emily closed her eyes. She really didn’t think she was going to be very good at field operations. She went ahead and looked everywhere she could for something that might be useful. Back in the cave she moved quietly so as not to disturb the bats nesting on the ceiling and picked up the bent piece of metal. That was probably not going to be useful at all.
Morgan was moving a little, tossing and hot. She re-wet the rags and put them back over him. Then, frowning, she checked his pockets. Her fingers closed around a cool heavy lozenge: a pocketknife. She slipped it out and looked at it, then she looked down at her jeans. Quickly she placed the knife at her knee and started cutting. She wrestled it off, and then started for the river.
Emma was sitting next to it, hugging her knees to her chest, looking pained and tense. Emily wasn’t exactly feeling less tense than she looked, but at least she had a plan now. Emma glanced up as she came closer and gave her a puzzled look.
“What did you do to your trousers? You still don’t look like Flo-Jo, I’m afraid.”
Emily laughed and twiddled the pocketknife. “Look what I found! Now get your pants off.”
That was a bit of an operation, and Emily spent the time ignoring Emma’s grumbles and occasional hiss of breath, and cutting the leg of her jeans into one long zigzag strip. Finally Emma chucked the blood and mud soaked jeans to the side and sat down again, stretching her long pale legs in front of her.
“Ready to play doctor?”
Emily glared at her. The wound looked awful, and she could barely see it with the gunk caked around it and over the top. She soaked some of the canvas and moved over to start wiping it clear. Slowly it revealed itself to be a long ragged tear with ugly purple bruising around it, but at least it wasn’t red and swollen, much.
“How did you get this?”
Emma shrugged, and then hissed as Emily moved over a particularly stuck knob of smut. “Probably on the way out of the Jeep. I think that’s my skin, try not to remove all of it.”
“Sorry.” Emily worked her way to the edge of the cut where it narrowed to smooth skin. She barely brushed it and Emma gave a strangled gasp and blood welled up. Emily jerked her arm back and stared. “Is it- Is there something inside?”
Emma just made a harsh noise in her throat. “I could really use some vodka right now,” she muttered.
“I could too.”
Emma managed to roll her eyes. “That sounds like an excellent idea.”
Right then Emily pressed her thumbs to either side of the wound and pulled it apart. The indrawn breath was horrified, and fingers curled around her arm and clung like a vise. It looked like there might be something there, but she couldn’t really see. She released it and a sob came out of Emma’s chest. She leaned forward, resting her head on Emily’s shoulder.
“I hate you.”
“I probably deserve it.” Emily picked up the pocketknife and opened it. She wiped it off as best she could, and then looked at the wound, considering which would be the best angle. Eventually she decided and moved herself into a position half on Emma’s lap with the cut in front of her and well lit. Emma’s arm snaked around her waist, and Emily was willing to give her that to hold onto, she just hoped she could still manage to work if the grip was so tight that she couldn’t breathe.
Slowly and carefully she opened up the wound with her fingers and probed gently with the knife. Emma’s grip tightened and she leaned into Emily’s back firmly. She found the edge of the penetrating object with the knife and poked a little to see if she could lever it out. Emma made a choking sound, and it was probably now or never. Emily jabbed the knife in a little farther and flicked, and Emma’s teeth sank into her shoulder, muffling a scream. The jagged lump of metal popped out, and Emily gasped at the pain and the release of tension the bite had caused.
Emma let go with her teeth, but leaned in to her, breathing hard as the blood flowing from her leg lessened. Emily felt warm drips running down her shoulder and back and didn’t move, letting Emma hold onto her and knowing that looking would shame her. It was pretty obvious that Emma wouldn’t want anyone to see her cry.
* * *