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Melanie's knees felt weak. In the rush of the fight, every movement she made had felt spring-loaded, steely solidity propelling her from one body to the next. With no more meat moving and the blood already being mopped away, that sureness seemed to abandon her. She made it to the Archives, but wound up sitting with her back to her desk like an abandoned doll because walking around to the chair was just too much.
She was bleeding. None of it was mortal enough to stop her, or to be noted by any of the people she passed- not many, but there were some- but she didn't notice until she was sitting and wondering just how dirty the Archives were, after all the storms they'd weathered and she'd witnessed.
Melanie never wanted to think about Elias again, but she prayed that it was his active interference that brought the images he forced on her to the top of her mind. Why care about that Prentiss woman, when Jon gave his wild rant/lecture about what he'd learned running around America? He noted Ivy Meadows in the same rant and she nearly stormed out, furious that he would drag her father into it when most of the other Statement were just sorted into stacks with the offer of further explanation if they asked. But where did he put Ivy Meadows on that stupid red-string chart?
Could the same thing be seeping into her own veins? Even if ECDC did their job perfectly, what sort of pathogens did that meat carry? All over her, all over her, inside her, everywhere. She panted, lungs constricted by oncoming illness.
You weren't supposed to suck out snake venom because you risked poisoning yourself for very little gain. She remembered that before she remembered the trick, and mourned between the stolen relief of a solution and the sinking terror of what she might have done to herself, spreading the infection faster, doing the monster's job for it.
Melanie froze, hand sneaking toward the knife she dropped when secondhand visions of her father overtook her. Little moth, little moth, were there any that were poisonous? Even if she was already dead, she'd like to take whatever killed her down with her.
"Melanie?" Basira called. It took a long moment for Melanie's muscles to unclench, forced out of the protective violence that would do her little good against one of her last allies.
"Here," she called.
Basira rounded a corner, a slight smile on her lips. "I didn't see you on the floor. Are you alright?"
Melanie realized there were tears on her cheeks. She dropped her head and traced the lines of one of the wounds on her thigh with a finger. "Fine." No use worrying Basira when there was nothing she could do.
"Do you want to take that to A&E, or do you want me to help?" Basira asked, as though Melanie wasn't a dead woman walking.
"Does it matter?"
Basira sighed, and walked away. Melanie relished the loneliness of her moment of death, because to do otherwise would feel like defeat. They could trap her in a job and pump poison into her blood, but they couldn't take her mind.
Elias didn't just show her the infection. He shared the dementia preceding it, as well, the terror of being unsure where you were, who you were with, what was happening, why your family kept leaving you alone. It froze in her guts every time she had a thought, a sensation, a dust mote in her eye that recalled some aspect of that terrible feeling. Would knowing what was happening when the dementia began to overtake her make it any less frightening? She doubted it.
There were footsteps again, but Melanie struggled to see the point when she was on death's door. She tensed when a hand touched her leg, but didn't move otherwise.
It took a long time for Basira's confident, matter-of-fact dressing of the injuries scattered over Melanie's body, coaxing her out of ruined clothing just long enough to dress the wounds and wipe the rest down with a Clorox wipe and then into a fresh set. The Clorox was harsh and stinging, but it was hard to care. When she'd done so much to her body already, it seemed doubtful that ordinary cleaning supplies would be the thing to take her out.
"Infection." The shape of the injury she traced before was different under cloth and bandage, but the sinister edges of veins seemed no less threatening. She didn't even realize the thought slipped out her mouth until Basira responded.
"I used lots of hydrogen peroxide and antibacterial ointment."
Melanie let herself be coaxed down into the tunnels where, whatever might find itself stymied or take a convenient route to kill them while they slept, it would at least be out of sight of Elias.
She wasn't supposed to think like all that, she thought as she drifted nearer to sleep. Georgie thought it was bad for her. Maybe. Georgie was often right about that sort of thing, but Melanie couldn't bear the idea of opening the seamy innards of the tattered banner of her soul to a stranger. She was never taking Georgie up on that offer to help her find a therapist. That was fine for other people, but not for Melanie.
Besides. She lived through the infection and made it all the way to bed, her last thought something vaguely pleasant. The horrors of talk therapy couldn't match all her other horrors, and Georgie was a far better thought to fall asleep to than blood and venom.