OTA - An explosion

[anamusebouche]

The first blast came at twelve. Hannibal had just seen out a patient, when a large explosion shook Gordon Square.

Hannibal hadn't seen what had happened exactly, but shouts and screams indicated people had been harmed. He rushed inside, grabbed his doctor’s bag and ran to cross the park to the building on the other side. He took his Hippocratic oath seriously and if he could help before the ambulances came, he would.

Through the rubble and the dirt and the fire Hannibal could see the wall and windows of the first floor of this building had been blown out. Immediately, he began helping to free the people who had been caught in the rubble, giving them urgent medical attention where needed.

Misfortune would have it that a group of tourists had just been passing the building, so there were victims on the inside and the outside.

***

The second blast came at twelve thirty, blowing away the front of the building next door. Hannibal got hit by a chunk of flying debris. It hit him so hard that he fell to the floor and nearly lost consciousness.

It barely registered. He rose again and continued what he had been doing; trying to prevent a girl from bleeding to death.

***

Hannibal was still a little dizzy, but he hadn’t mentioned this to the doctors in the ER. He would live, he knew, and he had judged that their efforts should be aimed to help the internally bleeding and dying.

His suit was ruined. The jacket had been lost in the rubble and he had torn off part of his shirt to make a bandage at some point, when he needed something quick to stop the bleeding. His waistcoat was covered in other people’s blood and the knees of his trousers were ripped.

How easily a peaceful London street can turn into a warzone…

His right wrist had been broken in two places and there was a wound on his head where he had hit the pavement. The rest seemed fine enough. It wasn’t until he was out of the hospital, at the first whiff of fresh air, that the dizziness truly hit him.

He made an effort not to stumble, and took a seat on a bench in front of the hospital. He was aware how he must look, but it hardly mattered to him. He regarded his hand, cast and wrapped against his chest and wondered how long it would be before he could cut up his meat again.



((tag him at any point during this post (after first explosion, after the second, at the hospital…). At the moment this is just a gas-leak explosion. If anyone wants to make it something more, feel free :) ))

ota

[pixiesweat]

Days all felt much the same to Manuel. Thanks to Willy, he was living in a flat rather than on the streets, but he still spent the same amount of time doing nothing.

He was clean now. He had new clothes, his hair was brushed and tied back in a rough but relatively neat ponytail. He could easily be taken for a regular (if rather miserable) teenage boy rather than a street thug who was out of a job.

Technically, he wasn’t wanting for anything. He had enough money for food, but most of the time he didn’t feel hungry enough to bother eating. He’d lost a little weight--just enough that someone who knew him (or had met him before and had a good enough memory) might be able to notice. He’d noticed it himself, and he didn’t care.

He didn’t have anywhere to go, but he went out sometimes. Walking the streets felt different than it used to. The days he’d spent living in alleyways after his sister died seemed fuzzy and very far away.

Today, like usual, he wasn’t headed anywhere in particular. He’d walked in a big circle and was heading back to his flat when he came across a car, parked out of the way of immediate onlookers, with somebody’s phone and wallet left carelessly discarded on the front seat. Almost without thinking, he smashed its window, emptied the wallet of cash, grabbed the phone and shoved it all into his pocket.

He didn’t know why he was doing it. He didn’t need the money. He didn’t particularly enjoy breaking the law.

He didn’t care why he was doing it.

He didn’t take the same kind of precautions that he would have, once. He didn’t cast an illusion to hide himself from human eyes, and there were incriminating fragments of broken safety glass left clinging to his shirt.

He headed off down the street, at a brisk but not suspiciously fast pace, with more cash that he would probably never spend and a phone that would likely end up thrown away or lying in the bottom of a drawer in his flat, forgotten.

((So, here’s a Manuel :) Your pups are free to:

-notice the broken glass on his shirt and figure out that he’s been Up To Something;
-catch him in the act (though be warned, you’ll have to have a way to literally catch him, cause he’ll leg it);
-it can even be your pup’s car that he’s broken into, if you have a pup that’d be silly enough to leave their valuables unattended in plain sight :D
-or you can just run into him further down the street, and have a normal conversation not related to his petty criming :) whatever suits you and your pup best!))