Dawn Chorus (Proxies x Reader)

Immune

"Stop fighting," he says.

I lift my head enough to glance over his shoulder. The strain is hot along the muscles of my back and upper-back thighs. I'd hardly call it a fight. The two men are twisted against each other, each grabbing the other's wrists and pushing them aside so they can't hit or grab, resulting in the odd posture. Since they can't use their hands, they've seemed to have crashed their foreheads together. Both gritting their teeth and grumbling.

The one with the goggles lets go and steps back first causing the man with the white mask to stumble forward. It also gives the man with the white mask a second to smack the back of the other man's head, hard. I wince just seeing it.

But the man with the goggles just says, "ha! Di-d-d-didn't hu-hurt!"

"Da-da-da-didn't hurt," the man with the white mask mocks, crossing his arms over his chest.

"You both are being unusually childish," the man carrying me--Hoodie, I remind myself--says.

The jab, though it did not have the tone of one, seems to get to the man in the white mask more. His shoulder's tense and his arms drop. He starts to follow rather stiffly behind Hoodie. The other one takes down the mask over the lower half of his face, sticking out his tongue, leaning in to the 'childish' remark. I suck in a sudden breath seeing the side of his mouth, now fully in view. His lips look they have been peeled back or off on one side, showing off his teeth. His head jerks my way and I let myself drop, not wanting to meet his eyes.

I can hear him snickering. Then suddenly he is beneath my face, smile still visible and now goggles lifted away from his pale brown eyes. The man carrying me shows no response to this sudden closeness, nor to me jumping.

"What's wrong?" He asks softly.

It catches me off guard and I find a stuttering of nonsense sounds spilling from my mouth. He snickers some, leaning in closer so I can feel and smell his breath as it hits my face. I try to pull myself up and further away from him. He opens his mouth again to speak, and then he is suddenly jerked back and all I can see are the browns and greens of the forest floor.

"Leave her alone," the man with the white mask snaps.

"I was ju-just curious," the other mutters.

The group falls into silence after that. The mockery of my situation has fizzled to strung nerves and palpable tension. It keeps me on edge, keeps me up despite the puffiness of my eyes and the blur of exhaustion filtering my thoughts. Hoodie moves more smoothly than the white masked man, so I'm jostled a lot less. It almost feels like I'm floating if it weren't for the pressure against my stomach.

I take the time to process the night, sense I'm not sleeping anyways. Sadie burned and beaten and fleeing through the woods. Camilla bursting from the water in triumph. She didn't look back. I'm so glad she didn't look back. Still it stings a little. Then there is Mason. Mason, jaw broken while he was alive so he couldn't scream. The pain he must have felt. Did he know I was near? Did the man with the white mask torment him? He was still warm when I found him. Could I have missed the last stuttering breaths as he lay there dying? Did he watch me pass by, feel me coldly search him like a body and not my dead friend? Did he die thinking I did not care about him while facing my own mortality?

The thoughts sink in like knives, cold and hot all at once. The world around me is blocked out as the image of Mason dead or maybe not swells and swells. Bloated like his body as he begins to rot. Will he be recognizable when they come to get him? Will anyone retrieve is body at all?

Hoodie, no, the hooded man squeezes my hips harshly. It's an increasing pressure until it blocks out my thoughts of even Mason and I can't stop the whimper that escapes. He stops in response to my pain, again gently patting. My brain spins up questions. Why are you taking me? Where are we going? What are you going to do? Why did you attack us? What did we do to deserve this? I scratch the last two--we chose the risk---and don't bother asking the others. I think them, but the questions are just a mental reflex. I can't bother to care.