i like space, whump and spooky stuff

He’d gotten good. Other kids had stopped messing with him. He’d been able to defend others, even, which had brought him a sense of satisfaction unrivalled by any sort of academic success. 

And then he’d been thirteen, and his parents…. He’d returned to Finland angry and hurting, a hurt that is still burrowed deeply in the core of him, cold and dark and aching. He’d sought out fights, and unpleasant places and people, and had only gradually pulled himself out of this by sheer force of will. 

These skills, developed first by means of necessity and then by those of deflection, had been trained up in the police college, where he’d learned formal techniques, but also, more importantly, means of nonviolent deescalation. Then he’d joined up with the financial crimes unit in Helsinki, where he’d never had to put those formal techniques to the test. 

Since joining homicide, however, he’s had to put those skills into practice a couple of times. He’s still capable of holding his own, he’d been pleased to note, but would on the whole always prefer to not have to resort to violence. 

He’s resorting to it now, though, for all the good it’s doing him. Because Sakari may know how to fight, but these guys, all three of them, are professionals in the business. 

Three-on-one is hardly fair. Not that his opponents give a damn about fairness. They’ve ganged up on him–appropriately enough, considering that they are gang enforcers–and Sakari has been doing his best but he’s only one person. 

He’s on the ground now, which is not a good place to be. But one of them had kicked his knee from behind and he hadn’t been able to stop the leg from buckling, the knees of his pants tearing where they’d impacted the asphalt. 

He tries to get up, but the same guy who’d kicked him before, and who is definitely wearing steel-toed boots, delivers a kick to the centre of his torso. There’s enough power behind it to send Sakari sprawling backwards onto the ground, and to knock the wind out of him besides. 

A wave of fear floods through him, absolutely instinctual and animal. He is flat on his back on the ground, adrenaline is pumping through him and making him shaky, and he is in deep shit and knows it.

The enforcers use his momentary incapacitation to surround him, kicking him from all sides. Evidently, they all have steel-toed boots.

Sakari tries to protect himself. It’s all he can do. He puts his hands behind his neck, attempts to curl into a ball, shaking, but the kicks keep coming. Legs, stomach, back, once or twice the head when someone manages to find the right angle. 

He is afraid. He’s been outnumbered before, has found himself on the ground before, but those were schoolyard or bar fights. Nothing so deadly serious as this. 

There is a noise nearby, and it takes him quite a while, over the ringing in his ears and the blood pounding in his head, to realise that it’d been a gunshot. 

He tenses up even more, because weapons change this whole thing dramatically, except no one shoots him. In fact, no one even kicks him. 

He opens his eyes. He doesn’t recall having closed them. Everything is blurry and he can’t tell if it’s because he’s lightheaded or because he’s crying. 

A pair of legs is approaching him. Presumably they’re attached to a body, but he can’t see that far up. They look familiar, though, the closer they get. 

“Fuck,” says the owner of the legs, and the voice confirms it. 

Sofia. 

“Are you okay?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“They ran off, but they might come back. We need to get out of here.”

He wants to, very badly. 

But when he tries to sit up, his entire body screams out in protest, and he gets terribly dizzy, and anyway he’s tired, and so he gives up. 

And then a hand is reaching down to him, Sofia’s face blurry behind it. 

“Take my hand.”

He raises a shaking arm, reaches out, misses, corrects his aim, and grabs onto her hand with all the strength he can muster, which is not very much. 

“This is going to hurt,” Sofia says, and, grabbing hold of his elbow too, hauls him to his feet. 

Everything goes white for a second, and he bites down on his tongue to keep from screaming. Blood fills his mouth, warm and sickly, and he’s suddenly so lightheaded he feels like he’s floating. 

He staggers, would fall right back to the ground, but he falls instead against Sofia, who catches him and holds him up. The pressure of her body against his hurts, but it’s also solid and real and safe, and he leans into her for longer than she’d probably like. 

“We need to go,” she whispers into his ear, lightly touching the back of his head. “Can you walk?”

He’s honestly not sure, but he recognises the urgency of the situation. And so he steels himself, spits a mouthful of blood onto the ground, and walks. 

Sofia’s car is, thankfully, not very far away. Sakari looks in the rearview as she peels away from the curb, and swears he sees three figures approaching the spot where he’d lain on the ground just a moment ago. He’d sigh in relief if it wouldn’t make his chest hurt even worse.

Sofia drives them straight to the hospital. He doesn’t want to be at the hospital at all, he doesn’t like hospitals, but he feels dangerously close to passing out and everything hurts and he just wants it to stop. 

The process is a bit of a blur. Everything is very bright and loud and his head feels like exploding. Sofia speaks for him, answering questions he can hear but not form replies to. A light shines in his eyes and hurts horribly. Cool scissors touch his skin as someone cuts his shirt off. Someone gasps when this happens. Sofia, he thinks. 

They give him medicine. He doesn’t know what it is, but the pain slowly ebbs away. He’s sent for x-rays, scans, various pokes and prods that he doesn’t mind so much with the medicine flowing through his body. 

He falls asleep in a bed that is not his, with someone–it must be Sofia, but he cannot find the strength to open his eyes and confirm–holding his hand. 

When he wakes some time later, aching and fuzzy but definitely present, Sofia is still there, sleeping while sitting straight upright, her neck at an angle that makes Sakari wince in sympathy. Her hand rests against her knee. There’s blood on it. 

His eyes fill with tears for reasons he cannot quite articulate. A wave of something at once familiar and strange washes over him, and he does not so much realise as simply becomes aware of what it is.