A faint voice came to her as Sam's vision blurred, "
Good job! You really did it." If Sam was in a regular state of mind, she would have snorted at the praise, not sure what to do with something she didn't receive very often. However, she was not in her normal state. No, she was indifferent to almost everything except what was effecting her now: exhaustion and cold.
The next hour was fraught with a battle of sorts between the two forces. Exhaustion would pull her into unconsciousness, where she longed to rest, but then she would be awoken by her body racking herself with shivering. The shivering refused to be calmed and looked more similar to convulsing even, with the sad little woman curled up in a vain desire for warmth. It wasn't just an uncomfortable cold, it was a sharp one, as if she was drowning in ice water. The ice would force the breath out of her and attack at her joints and at her breath, like shards of crystal had formed around them, making any movement feel rubbery and sharp at the same time. It was different from chilled water though in that eventually you found some comfort in being numb, but the numbness never came. Instead, the numbness only came with the exhaustion which slowly drowned her after she had drained her body of all strength from shivering. It went on like this for what felt like an eternity with nothing unchanging except for one instance where she recognized the taste of blood in her mouth. Her body had forced out such an event of teeth chattering that her lips were raw from being bitten. From here she had summoned the strength to put some of the blanket in her mouth, in hopes that it would not get any worse.
Words in the next room came as background music. It seemed like they were all in there. They had left her in this room to suffer without even offering her clothes. They couldn't fathom what she was going through and yet they had left her in a bed without even trying to help her. They hadn't turned up any heat, they hadn't started a fire, nothing. A fire! That's it!
Sam clung onto this hope as she tore her eyes open, which had felt like they had been frozen shut. There it was! In the corner of the room was a fireplace with a gas knob. Desperate, she fell with a thud onto the floor. That would leave a bruise. She crawled, crying, across the floor to the knob. Sam's shaking hand fumbled over the knob which she turned, bringing forth a few lights of flame. It was only a little bit, not enough. She would need to give it fuel. The woman struggled, back to the bed, grunting and gritting her teeth along the way. The small woman groped at the bedsheets, tugging the resistant things to the floor. She balled up the sheets into a ball and moved to a nearby stack of wood. There she took a small, though sizable log off of the top and tucked it into the white fabric she held with quaking arms in a bundle to her chest. It was with this, freezing and weak that she crawled into the fireplace. She tucked the flammables to her, wanting to keep everything safe and controlled as she formed herself in a ball around the log and sheets.
A fire roared to life and in an instant she found relief. Samantha let a slight moan escape her lips as she finally felt the ice-like feeling to ebb from her joints and to find her shivers start to cease. Her body had been so tense from the ordeal that the relaxing was such ecstasy. Now with the force of freezing gone, the exhaustion now with strong arms, pulled her under, and she went down with it gladly into a well deserved slumber.
- - -
The woman, exposed, woke up some time later covered in grey ash. She didn't know how long she had slept. It could have been thirty minutes, several hours, or many days. Her deep, hazel eyes blinked themselves open as the powder fell from her lashes to annoyedly sting at her eyes. As her body continued to reanimate, her body was shocked more awake as she suddenly made a series of sneezes from the ash. Sam lazily pulled herself out of the fireplace and along the floor. She was very exposed, but at the very least she felt now not a bit of chill. The suffering was over. With rubber legs she brought herself to stand and pat off the grey and black covering. She didn't manage to make much work of it so she stubbornly took the loss and worked around to finding the last white sheet on the bed, which had been graciously spared. She wrapped the thing around her, looking like a Roman woman with a toga who had just crawled out of Pompeii.
Sam passed a mirror, but stopped in her tracks to cackle at her appearance. She was an absolute reck. Her damaged hair was now a nest of sweaty tangles with a few pieces of burnt bark stuck in them. The lady's hard-earned makeup had disappeared and now her tired face was what had been left behind.
Oh, well, she mused,
I don't give a singular fuck what they think. She offered herself a wicked smile (with black bits of ash it it) and she trumped into the room. Yeah, she might appear to be a train wreck on the outside, but inside she felt like a champion. She had defeated this new, inner foe and had essentially saved the city through her sheer force of will. As Sam walked into the room the others occupied, she thought back on the distant words she had heard before,
Yeah,I really did do it. With that, she met their gaze and gave back her own snide expression. "
I know what you're probably thinking, but I totally had that the whole time." She smirked. "
I just wanted to see the stupid looks on your faces, thinking I was gonna blow up or something." Samantha added a snorting laugh. Once she was done, her face turned back to what was going on and what everyone was doing, "
So! What I miss?"
@Eklispe@Leolycan@rivaan@TheWinchester4@Ambra@Adalrod@DFAP.S Honestly, I don't know at what point that she's kinda popping in here. I just kinda went with it. I guess she's just jumping in, no matter what time (I'm kinda going on the assumption that it took a bit of time for people to go about eating some of the things offered and cleaning up the mess that was made).
