Empathy (1/2)

//tw gore

The man is already dead when Lance lightly pushes Gwaine against the empty window opening with deliberation of a disappointed mother hen. To sit down, it is, but Gwaine's arse slides right in and he catches himself first with a startled shriek and then a wounded cry. Lance curses, curses some more while pulling him into an upright position and pressing harder on the bleeding wound.

And there it is.

"Jesus Christ."

The man lays right below what once was a windowsill and looks, medically speaking, fresh. Not rigid, but not yet bloated, which is surprising in the dry heat of the late afternoon.

Merlin prefers to silently recite rather than think about, well, the thing.

"Jesus Christ," Elyan echoes with a choked jump in his voice that might be a suppressed gag.

Rigor mortis, livor mortis, algor mortis. Algor mortis, rigor— Jesus, the teeth. Mortis. Jesus fucking Christ. No, rigor—

Merlin knows a curse when he sees one. Doesn't know what kind, but parts of a wholly developed foreign skeleton growing all over the man's body like some Last of Us type of fungus is more than likely not any of the something-something mortis stages. If the cold shock on Lance's face is anything to go by. If the goddamn mutilated, grotesquely absurd corpse is anything to go by.

Leon moves first, dropping off his load a few feet away from the ruin and helping Gwaine to plop himself onto the backpack instead. The recent unspoken rule of action first, questions second sets in motion and the team nervously moves aside, back into the slowly reddening sunlight, in a matter of seconds. Merlin follows, stripping Gwaine off his gear and parrying some poorly executed sex jokes that he forces out through gritted teeth."

Keep running your mouth and I'll send you to walk this," Merlin can't see what exactly Lance's freshly gloved hands do behind Gwaine's back but Gwaine squeaks and punches his own thigh in frustration, "off. All the way to the base."

There isn't actually any malice behind his words, only tired concern. He moves gently while sticking Gwaine with needles from his kit and slowly washing out the torn wound, sun settling lower and lower behind them. At some point Gwaine sits up straighter, pulling away from Merlin's supportive hold, and carries on a light conversation between the five of them. Four, to be more exact, because Merlin quietly drops off his rifle by Elyan's side and nods towards the ruin. The man gives him a heavy look, but no more, really.

White walls burn in the bloody red light of the sunset. The roof is partially caved in and the ruin doesn't really look inhabited by a squatter, so Merlin wonders if the dead man came here to die. The maggot infestation on his mutations is too large and visible to be postmortem, the body looks malnourished to the point of starvation — Merlin notes with a dull ache in his head as he inspects the broken jaw and the necrosis around it. For a brief second, a dangerous thought of trying to trace the magical seal on the curse, to find out where the man came from, but a loud boom of laughter outside makes him jump up anxiously and back up a few steps, bumping into a pile of collapsed bricks. He picks a piece up, staring between the stone and the body in front of him for a few seconds, considering how much time they have before Arthur's voice comes through the comms again. He stares, and nearly misses the movement in dead man's eyes and some bump rolls down his to the side of his nose. Merlin's breath hitches and a panicked spell almost escapes his mouth when another small bump falls out and he comes to a sickening realization that the unnatural white of the dead eyes isn't of the eyes at all.

The corpse cries and if Merlin cries real tears with it as he mechanically piles up rocks on top of it with his bare hands, he doesn't feel it.