Phoenix Maplewood Who do you think you are

She'd half-expected to die when she collapsed in the snow — as much as she could have expected anything in those chaotic, fleeting moments of panicked consciousness. Her grasp is tenuous even now, flickering with each rousing sensation that bleeds through the haze. She stirs at the first touch, shifting and grimacing slightly as the contact registers, but it seems it's gone just as quickly, and she does not stir again until she registers the second touch. There is no thought in the space between, no room for rationality; she clings to consciousness only because her body's devastation keeps her tethered, reactive to each twinge of pain, and it is so all-consuming that for a time she processes nothing else.
A whine slips from her, low and faint, at the return of sensation: warmth at her side, the fiery feeling of a tongue against her wounds. She shifts again, closer to the warmth, and for a few moments she imagines that it is Merrit — that she'd never left her brother, that she'd insisted he come with her and now he has come to save her. But then a slightly-distant voice cuts through the daydream and she stirs again, tucking closer to the warmth despite the way her body protests the movement and taking in the scent of her savior. Her teenager's heart, blissfully unchanged even by the trauma of being gnawed nearly to death by a stranger, skips a little to realize that it is Derg beside her, though she cannot linger on the thought long. It is only a small respite; a brief distraction lasting no longer than a breath before she slips back into half-conscious oblivion, forgetting entirely the voice that had roused her and everything else with it.