by pebble/scifipony
Fandom: Tracker (2024)
Characters: Colter Shaw
Tags: Colter-Whump, Hurt/Comfort, Episode Tag
Story Warnings: Blood and Injuries
Chapter Warnings: Blood, Impalement, Bloodloss, Dizziness, Self-Sacrifice
Words: 2,944
Author's Notes: First chapter takes place during the showdown scene in 2x05 "Preternatural". Any dialogue you recognize is taken directly from the episode.
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In his line of work, Colter had to accept a certain level of risk. He could reduce the odds of something bad happening, through careful planning and the use of his survival skills, but he couldn’t eliminate it entirely. Every job he accepted could end up being the one that took him down.
Still, he really hadn’t thought this case was going to be that one.
It was hard to ignore that possibility now, though.
The bolt from the crossbow had gone straight through him, pinning him to the wall. His brain was still catching up with what happened, but his body was already on fire, every nerve lighting up. He didn’t have the strength to keep standing, but couldn’t move with the arrow’s shaft still impaling him. He could barely choke down any air. Trying to breathe more deeply was out of the question, every attempt resulting in a surge of new agony.
Cold steel pressed sharply into his forehead. Axel’s gun. Colter tried to focus, keep the threat in sight, but his vision kept blurring from pain.
Not that it mattered. His own gun was gone, dropped when he’d been hit. And he couldn’t wrestle the gun away from this guy while trapped. Even if he could, he was outnumbered and too injured to stand on his own, nevermind shooting his way out of here and taking on however many more of them were still waiting outside. He was out of options.
The initial dissociation from the injury was wearing off and his brain was crashing back into his body hard. Every movement was killing him.
The kidnappers argued briefly and Colter wasn’t able to keep focused long enough to hear all of it, but he understood the meaning well enough. They were going to take Emmaline and leave. They were leaving him for dead. Neither of them even bothered to take his gun with them. They knew he didn’t stand a chance of walking out of here on his own, and so did he.
He didn’t need to run the percentages through his brain to know he was probably going to die.
The adrenaline that had been keeping things at least somewhat numbed was wearing off much too quickly, blinding pain sending shockwaves through his body. He’d been shot before, but this was an entirely different level of torture.
The most terrifying part was that he knew it was about to get so much worse.
Because the probability of walking out of this building alive had already plummeted to the point where it wasn’t even worth taking that into consideration right now. So that really only left one priority to worry about: Emmaline. There was no way he was going to let those guys drag her back to their compound. If he was going down, he was at least making sure she made it out safely first.
Pulling the arrow back out the way it’d gone in was not an option. The arrowhead would only cause more damage if dragged back through, and there were too many vital organs in the area to risk it. That left the other direction.
Technically, he knew the ideal scenario would be to avoid removing it at all. The arrow was doing a pretty decent job of keeping the wound closed up, pulling it out was only going to do more harm than good. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do anything while still trapped against the wall, so leaving it alone wasn’t possible. He needed it out, and the safest way would be to break off the fletching and pull it the rest of the way through.
He didn’t need his survival training to know that doing this was going to hurt. A lot.
Sucking in as deep a breath as he dared, he tried to prepare himself for what he had to do. His vision was blurring in and out and he wouldn’t be able to stay on his feet much longer. It was now or never.
Colter gripped the arrow shaft in both hands and twisted. The rear end snapped off. It jostled the rest of the arrow despite his best efforts at holding it still. He only barely managed to choke back a scream as the shaft moved inside him. A loud groan managed to escape past his defenses, but it couldn’t be helped. He tasted blood and realized he must have bit his tongue trying to keep quiet.
Now for the hard part.
He braced his hands against the wall and pushed himself forward.
The world tilted crazily around him. Bright flashes blotted out his vision momentarily and a rushing sound blocked his hearing. There was a very strong possibility he actually had screamed this time, though he was in too much of a hurry to worry about it for long. Either the bad guys knew he was coming or not. It didn’t change what he needed to do next.
Heaving in a few rough breaths, he finally managed to blink away the disorientation. As the world righted itself around him, Colter realized that he’d ended up on the floor.
He grimaced at the drops of blood gathering below him. Now that the arrow wasn’t plugging the wound anymore, he was losing blood alarmingly fast. Too fast. Something needed to be done about that or he wouldn’t make it far enough to help anyone.
A pile of clothes lay discarded nearby. Remnants from the store’s merchandise that hadn’t been cleared out when the business closed. It would have to work.
Colter shuffled forward, barely making it the few feet before his arms began to give out on him. Gasping for air, he snagged one of the shirts from the pile and collapsed into a sitting position. Breathing was impossibly hard. Every time his lungs moved, something shifted inside and made the wound burn even hotter.
The shirt was just big enough to wrap the whole way around his stomach. Tying it off was torture. He knew he needed it tight enough to slow the blood flow, but any pressure only made him want to pass out.
Okay, one task done. Now it was time to focus on rescuing Emmaline.
Her protests echoed loudly in the abandoned store, letting Colter know that they must be halfway to the doors already. While he had still not managed to get his feet under himself yet.
The annoying part of his brain — the part that Reenie hated so much — was unhelpfully calculating the chance of actually pulling this off. The odds weren’t good. Well, he would simply have to ignore probabilities and go with his gut on this one.
If he took a shortcut behind the shelves, he’d only have to cover half the distance the others had to. It would help. He still needed to move fast if he wanted to stop them in time.
Luckily, his gun wasn’t far away. It was still lying on the ground where the kidnappers had discarded it.
One hand pressed into his wound to help apply pressure, he used the other to drag himself forward. One painful inch at a time. His body nearly gave out on him again before he finally made it.
The cold steel was reassuring in his hand as it closed around the gun’s grip. His palm was slick with blood and he took a second to steady his hold on the gun.
The first task was to check the chamber to make sure it hadn’t discharged when he’d thrown it away. It hadn’t. That was the good news. The bad news was that that still left him with only one bullet. One bullet, while there were still two bad guys to take down. And that was assuming there weren’t more waiting outside.
Turning back towards the front of the store, Colter tucked the gun into his holster and began the excruciating process of moving again. He managed to drag himself along the ground to the closest support column. Sweat dripped off his forehead and his arms were shaking with the exertion. And he still had to get to the door before the kidnappers got there with Emmaline.
First things first. He needed to stand up. This was going to suck.
Bracing one hand on the support column, he grit his teeth and pushed himself upward. He halfway made it upright before his arm slipped. His torso slammed into the column and he grunted as it jostled his injuries. There wasn’t enough time to recover. He pushed himself the rest of the way to his feet.
The world spun wildly around him for a nauseating moment before settling again. Colter leaned heavily on the column while he rode out the wave of dizziness.
Judging by the sounds he could hear, the other group was already nearing the doors. Launching himself forward, Colter stumbled haphazardly along the side wall. Various racks and shelves added support as he moved, but others proved to be more of a hindrance than a help.
He was nearly there when a fresh stab of pain lanced through his midsection. It took him off guard and he stumbled against a shelf. Everything blacked out for several agonizing seconds.
Before he could push off again, Colter felt his legs give out on him. He landed on the floor with a sharp gasp. The impact jostled something deep inside the wound. It might be his imagination, or the adrenaline, but he was pretty sure he could feel the blood leaking out faster now than it had been earlier. He tried to push himself back up, but his arms shook violently and collapsed under him.
This wasn’t going to work. His body was beyond done.
“Please stop! Please, just let me go!”
Emmaline’s distressed pleas echoed around the store, breaking through the haze of pain. She sounded so close now. He was almost there. He had nothing left to give, but he was so close.
Colter clenched his jaw. No, if he was going to die in this forsaken part of the country, he was at least going to make his last minutes alive count for something. There was no way he was letting an innocent teenager be kidnapped, and likely killed, while there was still a chance he could prevent it.
There was an opening in the shelves ahead, a perfect spot for an ambush. He scanned the immediate area and spotted an old fire extinguisher. Hopefully it was still pressurized. It was the only idea he had.
Colter shoved the extinguisher ahead of him, pulling himself along the floor after it. He made it to the opening just about the same moment the others did. Maybe miracles really weren’t such a farfetched concept.
Not wasting a second, Colter gave the fire extinguisher a shove. It clattered across the floor, skidding noisily to a halt in front of the trio.
Drawing his gun, Colter rolled onto his side and took aim. Everything was a bit out of focus still, but he thankfully had a decently large target to hit. He fired off his last bullet.
The extinguisher erupted, releasing a cloud of fumes into the air. Emmaline took advantage of the smokescreen to draw the knife Colter had slipped her earlier. She slashed one of her captors in the face, snatching up the crossbow as he dropped it.
“Colter!” she yelled, sliding the crossbow across the floor to him.
He grabbed it up as it landed in front of him. He raised the crossbow at the same instant one of the kidnappers drew a gun on him. They both took aim. Colter managed to squeeze his trigger before his foe. An arrow sliced through the air and embedded itself into the man’s chest. He went down with a heavy thud.
And that was the last of his ammo. No more bullets in the gun. No more bolts in the crossbow. One man still standing, and he was out of options.
Emmaline was hovering over him. He hadn’t even seen her approach.
“Colter, come on,” she cried, trying to help pull him up.
It was no use. He didn’t have any energy left to try standing again. Even if he did, his body didn’t seem capable of it any longer. He’d pushed himself well beyond the limit at this point. There was nothing left to use up.
He collapsed back against a display case, blood smears marking the trail of his movements. Emmaline squatted down next to him. She was still pleading with him, her voice shaking with fear, but he couldn’t gather enough breath to respond.
Axel’s voice rang out, drawing both their attention. He was on his feet, face bleeding from where Emmaline had slashed him with the knife. He was grinning harshly as he strutted toward them.
“Now this,” he said smugly, “is the part where I watch you bleed out. And then I take her.”
Emmaline stifled a sob and leaned in against Colter’s shoulder. “It’s just him,” she said. “We can take him.”
He shook his head, hating to squash what little hope she was managing to cling onto. “I’m not going to make it,” he gasped out, words barely above a whisper.
Emmaline turned to him, face shocked and desperate. He needed her to understand, though. She was a good kid, he knew she wouldn’t leave if she thought he stood a chance of surviving. And, right now, her only chance was to make a run for it on her own.
He took a deep breath and steadied his voice the best he could. “I’m not going to make it,” he told her.
The look of fear and grief on the kid’s face almost broke him. Instinctively, he wanted to provide some reassurance, but he didn’t have any to offer. She didn’t need comfort right now, she needed to run.
“Axel?” a new voice joined the fray.
A lone beam of sunlight pierced the gloom as Gideon appeared in the doorway. Apparently some of the search party had been waiting outside after all. He was armed as well.
Colter grunted as a new pressure appeared on his wound.
“Sorry,” Emmaline whispered, keeping her hands pressed against his stomach.
He appreciated the effort, but there wasn’t much point. He’d already lost too much blood. Even if they somehow managed to get out of this mess — which was a slim to nonexistent possibility right now — he wasn’t going to survive long enough to get medical treatment.
As much as he tried to keep track of the conversation going on between the kidnappers, his attention kept drifting. The world refused to stay in focus for more than a few moments at a time. He did catch just enough to get the gist of it. Their sick relative was alive and recovering. Whether Emmaline had actually helped or not, they at least believed that she’d done what they asked. That had to count for something, right?
“You got your miracle,” Colter said, the words dragging from his exhausted body. “Please, just… let her go.”
“No,” Axel snapped. “She belongs to us now. We paid in blood for her.”
They were both approaching now, their steps rapid and menacing. Colter instinctively tensed, even though he knew he couldn’t fight either of them off in his current state.
Emmaline was suddenly moving from his side, the loss of warmth making him realize just how cold he was. A distant part of Colter’s brain wanted to stop her, but his thoughts were already becoming muddled once more. Everything was once again shifting out of focus and he had to strain to keep track of what was happening.
Voices shouted back and forth above him. His eyelids drooped shut unbidden. They flew open again a moment later as Emmaline’s shout jerked him awake.
She was threatening them. Something about mountain spirits and curses. He couldn’t tell if she actually believed any of what she was saying, but her words were solid and convincing. The important thing was that the kidnappers were superstitious enough to believe it. He could see the doubt on their faces as they took a step back, giving Emmaline more space.
Things grew fuzzy and he had no idea how much time passed. He vaguely heard the men’s parting words as they retreated from the field of battle.
“It ain’t worth it. He’s dead anyway.”
As much as he hated to agree with them on anything, that was probably the truest thing Gideon had ever said. Colter could feel it. He was fading fast.
Emmaline was in front of him again. How had she moved so fast? Or maybe he’d drifted off again.
She might have been saying something, but he couldn’t keep his thoughts together enough to pay attention. His cell phone was in her hands. That was good. At least she could call for help, get some reinforcements out here before the Drell clan changed their minds and decided to come back for her.
“You’re gonna be alright. You’ll be fine. You hear me, Colter?”
Her words were echoing strangely, sounding muffled. As if she was yelling through water.
Colter tried to respond, but nothing came out. His eyelids felt so heavy. His entire body, for that matter. It was as if someone had poured sand into all of his veins.
The last thing he felt was Emmaline’s hand pressing against his chest, though whether she was trying to reassure him or herself was unclear.
Then he lost the weak grip he still had on reality and felt himself slip away altogether. There was a brief moment of quiet and peace, finally, before everything hollowed out and he fell into the dark.
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