[center][u]Cordelia Lynn Holmes[/u][/center]

"Yeah, she's getting help," Lynn said, fortunate to have someone else here with her. "Grab your t-shirt or something and hold it on my back for a sec then - " Lynn turned back to Eli, but she was in some kind of trance, crying and completely zoned out, shaking and trembling. She'd seen it before. Amelia in the woods last time, for starters, but a lot of times before then. Him trying to run in the restaurant or Spoons up and leaving. At least that was a little better. This looked worse, and Lynn had seen that too. That feeling of "Fuck me," Lynn muttered to herself again, turning back to the dead man. Lynn had seen a great number of injuries, and cared to a great many more. Not with any real semblance of medical expertise, mind you, but she may have qualified as a nurse in the Revolutionary War or something similar.

Besides, there were always people who would take a hideous scar and a few seconds of searing pain over a hospital visit that ended in handcuffs. This was...hideous. He didn't look human any more, and had it been any other time, the irony of that may have made Lynn laugh until she cried. Lynn had no love for Radvi, and didn't delude herself into thinking she was helping Radvi for any particularly altruistic reasons, but this was horrific. And she was in it. She was in him. As he breathed, his skull shifted, and she could see bone and sinew pull from one another each time he did, the ruined mess of his face shredded and bleeding out over Lynn's hands. She was soaked to her forearms in blood, and the ground she kneeled in was quickly turning into crimson mud. What was left of one of his eyes spilled over her knuckles. "What the fuck, Cara, hurry up!"

Then he and Natalie arrived. Lynn couldn't turn away without taking too much pressure off, but he started shouting like he fucking owned the place. [i]Call Cara? I did[/i]. And he was sitting there comforting fucking Eli while she tried to stop Carrie with hemophilia from gushing out all over her face. Lynn's face was inches from Radvi's mutilated skull. She could smell nothing but iron and blood. Behind her, she could hear Archie's voice rising in pitch and intensity. [i]You absolute bastard,[/i] she wanted to shriek, biting her tongue only because she knew it would kill them all faster. [i]You come down here only to kill us all.[/i] Lynn felt the heat in her chest longing to be let out, to dance down her fingers and scorch away all the open spots, but she knew better. [i]When he dies of burns they'll say it was me. They'll say he would've lived.[/i] No shit he was hurt, no shit D needed to be getting help, no shit they should call Cara. 

"Someone fucking help me," Lynn muttered. Christ. She was in a pit full of mouthbreathers, and she counted the one who tap-danced on kids' faces among them. 

Then out of the continuous meandering of panic came one person with their shit together and Lynn could not believe it was Amelia fucking Nelson. Vaguely, Lynn tucked away a reminder to herself to perhaps reappraise her opinion of the girl. [i]Maybe she found the balls this guy probably shot off himself in the woods back there.[/i] She appeared, which may have startled Lynn more had she not been wrist deep in a man's skull, and wisely pointed out that she could carry them all back. "Fucking do it," Lynn said, not thinking of witnesses. He was going to flip any time soon and she wasn't going to be stuck in the death pit with the lizard when it did happen. Eli was cool. She didn't want to leave Eli to the wolves. But she couldn't die in here. There were people. People with dolls. She had to keep from losing it.

Lynn lost it when Denim came and opened up Cara.

"No fucking shit!" Lynn snapped back at Cara. "Which wounds need focusing? Bitch, there's a hole in his head! No, scratch that, he has like 10% head and 90% hole! It looks like Gennedy skullfucked him harder than he tries to fuck us!" It was more than this. She felt naked in here with all of them, with her, and with Denzel sitting there on a vision quest or some shit, after - [i]how much did she remember? What the fuck did I tell her?[/i] - and a robot confirmed dead and back to life more times than Elvis staring wordlessly at them the whole time. [i]How many times does this bastard have to be at the scene of a crime before we stop getting hauled in, huh?[/i] All of them just standing there. There was the steel staccato beat of her brain running through the ways they could pin this on her, what would happen if she went down now that Keaton was on the scene, if Arianna came back, if Salamandra still had people in prison. And in the dark part of her brain that ran through that, everything else was soaked in this cop's blood and brain matter, and everyone behind her seemed to be having a tea party behind her.
And on top of that, he was here, and he meant a great many things, Godzilla chief among them. Eli started talking about where the bullet hit, which seemed like the most no shit Sherlock analysis to Lynn, until she realized she must've been using illusions on him. [i]Why?[/i] Lynn wanted to ask, from the only cold place in her body at the moment. [i]Why play tricks on a dead man?[/i]

The dude from earlier - the watch guy - [i]Shit, was he Fossil?[/i] joined the party, and Lynn nearly evaporated the deadfall into steam. [i]We can have a class reunion but not a single one of you can get your hands bloody, is that fucking it?[/i] She turned back to the half-skull ahead of her, Radvi's eyes aimlessly staring back into hers. She'd - she'd seen gunshot wounds before. Lynn found herself rocking back and forth trying to keep as much pressure on him as she could, her stomach churning inside her. Lynn had an iron stomach, and was not about to let any weakness seep out in front of any of them, but there was nothing but liquor in her belly and nothing but bad memories in her head. Lynn had been shot before. Worse than this guy, she would argue, even if she still had her face attached afterwards.

"Anything obvious?" Lynn shouted. "You could grab a tampon from any one of these pussies and come fucking staunch the bleeding!" Lynn shouted, her hair flaring with purple light. [i]Let me hear it, Spoons. Let me hear you say you're worried about my flipping out. And, oh, you saw me here first, didn't you, maybe I had something to do with this.[/i]

And then the kicker.

He grabbed Eli in his arms, sending another corkscrew into Lynn's gut, and fucking gave her orders. Looked at her and barked at her. Like a dog. Like his bitch. It was the first time he'd looked at her all night. So he could carry 5'8 and beautiful to the fucking hospital? What was wrong with her? [i]I fucking faced her,[/i] Lynn wanted to scream. [i]Who do you think was dead if this dipshit hadn't shot himself first, Anderson? Did you look in the woods? Did you ask? Did you see if I was fucking shot? But you're taking her to the hospital, aren't you?[/i]

Lynn looked down at the body before her. [i]You're a get out of jail free card,[/i] Lynn said. [i]I don't expect anything more. I've got a pretty good idea of how people on this station say thank you. You stop a lizard, they haul you in. You kill a - [/i] Lynn's mind slipped for a second, like static on a tv, and there were four people, gone, vaporized, ash, and the feeling of her jaw shifted out of place by an elbow, and then she was back staring at Radvi's mangled jaw, shaking as she pressed down harder. She'd seen enough people hurt to know when one was no longer a person, and instead a temporarily breathing body. The for-now person's tongue and the muscles of his cheek and bits of bone were pressing into the palms of her hands, like when she was little and she'd cover Lucy's mouth with her hand to shut her up, and Lucy would lick it to make her let go. Through it all, she kept her power in line, not once burning a single cell on his dead man's body. Not one. Not that it would matter. Lynn could make fire, but you should see what Gennedy could pull out of thin air.

A thought came to her, from him, from the last time in the woods, from hospitals, from gunshots, from Che. It and the laughter hit her as suddenly as the  gunshot that put this dumbass on his ass. "I tell you what," she murmured down to him, watching him gurgle and cough by pure reflex. "If you survive, I'll bring you flowers in the hospital."