Chapter Text
You could have sworn that you had only closed your eyes for a split second, and now they were wide open, trying to blink away the sweat that was running down your face and couldn’t be swiped away by your already drenched handkerchief.
“Mayday! Mayday!” What was one supposed to say? SOS? Would they even understand you if you spoke English? After all, you were currently flying over the Peruvian Amazon. “Can anymore hear me? Alguém me escuta?” Shit, that was Portuguese, wasn’t it? “Please respond! I might be losing my engine due to overheating, I think…” The pop that came from somewhere below you didn’t sound good, and when the plane suddenly shuddered and the constant beeping and whirring of different machines reached your ears; you completely lost it. You were now 100% crashing.
With a sudden jump and a thud following immediately after, similar to a car running over an obstacle in the road, the plane veered to the right and started to plunge down. You tried to find the eject button, in case there is one in a civic aircraft, but with a loud bang, the explosion of the left wing made the plane somersault in the air, throwing your head around like a rag doll before you hit it somewhere and succumbed to the darkness.
x-x
Smoke filled your lungs as you took a deep breath, causing you to start wheezing as soon as you woke up and clutch your right side. You laid there for a while, covering your mouth with your hand while coughing into it - was that blood? - and tried to remember what had just happened. And then you remembered. You remembered the heat, the alarm, the screams - your screams? - the lights, the crash…
And now everything was so eerily quiet, so dark and motionless.
Your headache did not get better, in fact, it seemed to get even worse, and the ground you laid on seemed to get wetter by the minute as well. Grunting, you tried to blindly heave yourself up into a sitting position since the smoke and ashes burned in your eyes. As soon as your free hand touched the metal beside you, you slumped back down, hissing and shaking your now burnt hand, desperately trying to cool it down. The metal was hot, scorching hot.
Without your eyes, you had to rely on your ears and other senses. That’s when you noticed it. You were previously too distracted by your pounding head and your cough attacks. Not only was the metal scorching hot, so was the air. Then you heard it too, the faint hissing of escaping gas, the sizzling of melting metal and the crackle of an ever-growing fire. Knowing that your engine failure came probably from overheating, you drew the only logical conclusion. You were laying in a burning aeroplane wreck.
“Hello?!” you called out, coughing. “Is anybody out there?!” You knew it was hopeless, but you also knew that you somehow had to get out of the debris before it was too late.
You heaved yourself up again, more carefully this time, still clutching your wet right side while wheezing and making sure that all of your skin was covered by some kind of clothing item.
You shook your head. Bad idea. Soot and ash fell out of your hair to the floor or down on your face, which made you sneeze, and a pang of pain went through your body. Doubling over, you groaned as you realised that you must have broken, or at least cracked, some of your ribs.
Slowly brushing the soot and ash out of your eyes, you tried to open them a little, to orient yourself and find the ‘exit’. When you finally managed to open them wide enough to focus on your surroundings, you saw straight into the Amazon rainforest.
A metal pole was sticking out of the wall beside you, so you grabbed it as an aid to stand up. However, as soon as you put pressure on your left leg, pain flared up, which caused you to scream and collapse. You shut your eyes and bit on your lip, trying to suppress the tears that wanted to leave your body and the ringing that started in your head again.
When you opened your eyes again just moments later, you slowly started to move your leg from under you to be able to look at it. Panting, you fought against the pain to able to more or less comfortably sit on your butt, almost throwing up when you looked at your leg. There was a long cut, beginning just underneath the left side of your knee and ending only a little above your ankle. It wasn’t a neat one. The skin looked like it had been torn apart by some kind of animal. At some parts, it was missing completely, while at others, shreds were still clinging loosely to the wound. Luckily, you could say that the cut wasn’t deep enough to have reached any important muscles. Looking at it more closely you saw that multiple little metal pieces were sticking in the wound, and you groaned at the thought of having to pull them all out later on.
A small explosion behind you shook the wreck and made you scream, causing you to lean forward, even though that caused you pain, and to put your hands protectively over your head. Then you felt it, the whole plane was moving. You couldn’t have realised it from where you were laying before, but now that you were upright and looking out, you could see it; the wreck was sliding down a hill that ended abruptly at a cliff. And it was taking you with it.
A scream, not really a cry for help, but more like a general plea to nobody in particular, escaped your lips. You threw yourself on to the scorching ground, ignoring the roaring pain in your body and started to pull yourself forward with only the strength of your arms.
“Y/N!”
‘No, it can’t be. It must be a hallucination. The pain must have taken over my body. There’s no way that-’ And yet before your pounding head could finish the thought, two feet appeared in your blurred vision. There was no strength left to raise your head, not if you wanted to get out of this alive (adrenalin could only do so much), so you didn’t know who exactly was running towards you. You were still pulling yourself forward, grunting and groaning in pain, burning yourself even more on the hot metal, but suddenly, the hard ground had changed into a soft and muddy one.
Then a hand started to caress your face. A voice began to apologise frantically as you jerked and cried in pain when they tried to lift you up but held on too tightly to your sides and completely neglected your injured leg. Some of the pain eased a little bit, not the pain on your right side, of your ribs or leg, but the pain of the burns. ‘They’re rubbing cold mud onto my burns.’
Tears rolled down your cheeks as you were put down again, and you looked up into the sky, or whatever you could see of it that wasn’t concealed by the trees.
Almost out of your field of view, the shuttle exploded the moment it reached the edge, brightening up the surrounding forest for a moment before it disappeared entirely over the edge of the cliff.
Incredible, sparkling blue eyes framed by a dark mop of hair appeared in front of you, but your mind and thoughts were all over the place and your vision so blurry that you couldn’t really focus on what was happening right before you. It hurt to focus, and you could only look into the distance.
“Y/N!” said the same voice from before as they shook your shoulders, more carefully and cautiously this time.
‘How do they know my name? Did they hear my emergency call? Did I say my name back then?’
“Come on turtle, don’t do this to me. Not again. Not this soon.”
Turtle? You tried to open your mouth, but it felt like you had swallowed too much smoke and ash and already screamed the voice out of you, making it impossible for you to speak. Your throat was burning, and your eyes, thoughts and heartbeat steadily slowing down.
The pain in your entire body made it increasingly harder to breathe and to stay awake in general. You were losing the ability to feel the ground beneath you and the cold mud on your skin. The only thing that you could still feel were those hands, warm and strong, caressing your face, whipping away your hair and dirt.
“Ah…,” you croaked after some time. Still unable to focus on anything, you could hear a faint splashing sound as if water was falling. Was it raining? Your cheek seemed to be getting wet and then something firmer was pressing against your forehead.
“Sh… Sh…” The voice was getting quieter as if moving away from you, even though you knew they were right there. “Don’t strain yourself.” A light feeling flooded your body, the pain and agony vanished and something willed your lungs to take one last deep breath, letting you inhale the scent of the surrounding forest. There was also something else, something sweet and familiar in the air. “Just promise you’ll dream a little dream of me. My love, my turtle.”
Then the face disappeared, and so did the pressure of the hands. Without the support, your head fell to the side before your eyes closed indefinitely.