Sunday Morning

Matt's awakening is fuzzy and ill-defined, a thin line between conscious and not. His body isn't allowing the luxury of anything else. He can hear his lungs giving in to the liquid pressure within them, and he's certain that he has broken at least two more ribs. Possibly his ankle, too, though it's hard to hear with all the pressure built up in his ears. Goddamn it.

Something disgusting is lying on top of Matt's face. He turns his head several inches to remove it, and realizes it's a rotting banana peel. Strange. Matt feels the surface underneath his hands to figure out what it is. Some sort of smooth plastic. . .? It smells really bad too. . .

Matt clenches his fists tight in frustration. He's in the garbage again. As if it wasn't bad enough the first time. He needs to get out of here. . .he needs. . .

An unholy breathless spasm wracks his body. He coughs and spits bloody mucus into the trash over and over, trying to get it all out. His ribs are moving strangely too somehow, which is weakening the strength of his coughs. It's also making it more difficult to breathe properly; everything inside him is out of sync.

Only one coherent thought stands out in his brain when his body mercifully stops rejecting its insides. Matt is actively dying, he knows this now, and he refuses to do it in the garbage.

He pushes himself up on his elbows, and then somehow to a sitting position. There's barely enough oxygen in his lungs for stasis, let alone movement, so he rests there for a moment and wills himself not to cough. He raises a leaden arm to tap at the sides of the dumpster. The trash is almost to the top; it would only take a little push to get him to the ground.

Matt gets caught up in coughing before he can get into position to launch himself out. It seems like every inch of him has at least a little sweat on it; he'd need a shower if he was going to be alive much longer. Instead, he just needs to get out of the damn garbage. He wipes the moisture from his hands onto his damp pajama pants and tests their grip against the edge of the dumpster. Good.

He pulls himself up onto unsteady feet, shaking like a leaf and suddenly so cold. Oh. It's not sweat on his skin. It's snow. There's a thin layer of snow covering his body, and he nearly cries with harsh, ironic laughter picturing himself as the little match girl dying in the trash. No, unlike her he's going to find some sort of building to die in. Hopefully there's a church nearby but first - out of the dumpster.

Matt swings one leg over the edge, and groans at the pain in his abdomen. His bones are rattling like stray lincoln logs, threatening to disintegrate any moment. He wills them to behave; they won't be needed for very much longer and when he's dead they can do whatever they want. The other leg swings over, and he lands four feet down on his. . .yeah, if it wasn't crushed before it is now. . .ankle. He rests a hand against the dumpster and breathes and coughs and breathes and coughs and -

It's so tempting to just sit down and rest against the dumpster but again - he's not taking the easy way out now or ever. He pushes his body away from the dumpster, and sets off in a walk-and-drag sort of fashion that leaves him sweating not two feet from where he started. Just a few more steps. . .a few more. . .and he's out of the alley. There are lots of people around, and it jams up his senses even worse than they already are. He falls to his knees, right in the way of pedestrian traffic, and people bump into him and around him uncaringly. The world swims in and out of focus, crowded and then airless, loud and then silent, and he rasps out the word 'no' on repeat as if verbal commands could stop his body from failing.

He's unconscious again before his head hits the pavement.