[b]Ranch House, Location Unknown[/b]

Mina sighed, pausing by her room to grab her backpack out from under the bed. [color=#C4B14D]"I don't think he's gonna join us,"[/color] she said, shouldering it and leading Drake toward the trap door in the ceiling. 

"The old Larke" was a considerably tougher pill for her to swallow than the lozenge she had passed to Drake. 

There was Larke as a child, who had made her help him bring back a sparrow who had snapped its neck against the glass window of his parents house; the Larke who had called them a team, who was sure that there was no problem they could not solve together. And a slightly older Larke, who had taken her to their final school dance. Then Larke the Medic came, and he learned that some things could not be fixed, even with the both of them. 

Her last memory of Larke was his lifeless face staring up at the ceiling. A nearly week-long binge had outpaced even his healing factor, and she found him on the couch with blue lips. She had shocked his heart back to life again and again, sitting over him for half an hour, waiting for his body to fix itself. 

She left, after that: Into the military, into the Ash. The further she could go, the smaller her chances of ever seeing him die again. 

Fate was a real bitch.

[color=#C4B14D]"You can talk to him,"[/color] she said, puling down the trap door so that a ladder descended from the ceiling. The smell of blood and bile was strong upstairs. [color=#C4B14D]"I uh- I generally try not to."[/color]

She ascended the steps to find Larke just where they had left him, slumped against a wall, his hands and feet tightly bound. She did not look him in the face as she moved in to patch his wounds, and he offered little response save for a muffled grunt as she cut away the dirtied bandages around his torso. His eyes were half-shut, his head lulled back against the wall- his skin was warm enough to indicate that his fever had not broken. The wounds had closed almost completely, though, and she started to wipe down the gore with a wipe.

[color=#C4B14D]"You got a visitor,"[/color] she said, nodding for Drake to come in.