Bleddyn unsteadily hauled herself up from the ground with filthy clothing. "I feel particularly useless right now," she commented perkily and proceeded to violently shake out her hair. "Also, this whole imminent doom thing suddenly seems a whole lot less depressing. Thanks for that, Pete."
"I don't know about that," Sherri said, ears flicking. "Nothing can make it less depressing. But I suppose I can say I'm getting impatient." Sherri sat with her palms pressed into the rocks and her legs spread. As she got up, she could see red dents in her skin, and rubbed her hands together.
"True- I mean, the world that raised us is legit crumbling around us." Bleddyn skipped forward, then paused mid-bounce when her brain decided to realize that her thigh still hurt. She then continued for the front of the ragtag parade with a renewed frown and a jerky limp. "Besides being a serious existential crisis inducer, that's pretty much the old tomato of depression."
Wolfram narrowly avoided tripping over a large rock, casting a wary glance over his shoulder to look at the rest of the group, before looking back to the road ahead. He tightened his grip on the wolf, fearing that one wrong move would mean that Connor would fall from his grasp.
Sherri tried raising an eyebrow, but it mostly looked like an angry constipated face. "You sound like my science teacher."
Indigo caught the keys with a rather cringe-worthy stance that probably would cause the referee to make up a new penalty for football. She smiled a goofy smile. "What do I do with these?" she shouted, jangling the keys in front of her.
All because of the word science, Bleddyn's face paled as efficiently if someone had doused her expression with spit milk; reborn panic shoved all of her decently prepared responses to some inexistent oblivion. She whirled around and, in a fashion that had become common over the past 48 hours, her hands flew forward to latch onto Sherri's shirt neckline with frantic desperation. "I had a biology test."
"Yeah," Sherri said. "And why do you even care about your education right now? The school was probably reduced to a smoldering pile or rubble." She bit her lip, wondering if everyone was okay.
"Wolfram." Ash's left hand snaked up Connor's fluffy underside so she could find his throat's pulse and just relish in the blessing of being able to hold her palm to it. "I'm going to say it again. If you hadn't happened into our lives or if you had...if you gave up a while ago, every single one of us would be dead right now." She glanced away from the road to exchange a second's glance with him. And although it was gone in a fleeting moment, it had to be one of the most meaningful looks she'd ever given anyone. "Understand that, okay? We've lost what we've lost. And maybe...maybe we're going to lose more. But, right now, we're here, we're okay, and, because of you, we all have potential futures."
