(Morgan has by now moved all of their supplies over, and the sandstorm is properly upon them. She will bury Rollo later, when her skin won't get sandblasted, thank you.

She closes the door and covers all the holes with recently re-salvaged religious iconography to prevent any sand from leaking in, and then sits down in a far off corner and gets to caring for her gun. Which has gotten sand in many places despite the wrapping, mostly on account of the violence.)

It mostly works, yeah. It tugs at his consciousness and starts fraying the edges of the cycle, which lets him start to break out of it. What happens then is less clear because, being out of the cycle, he realises how much he's leaking and clamps down on his feelings altogether. His eyes refocus on her and he notices that "I bled all over your white clothes."

"Probably for the best! Doctor asshole wears a lotta white, too, pretty sure it's what caused the freakout!" calls Morgan, from her perch.

"... It's fine. I don't mind. Um. But would you perhaps like to stop bleeding now."

Rollo isn't bleeding anymore, because he's dead...

"I don't think I can, while the bullets are still there."

"Yes, you dork, I wasn't telling you to use your bullshit powers to just literally stop bleeding, I was telling you to please let me help you do that," she sighs. "C'mon. Let me see. There's a pair of tweezers in the basic med kit I've got."

Which she had gotten out and then totally failed to use because Zash was having a meltdown and needed hugs more.

"Oh," he says, inanely.

So he takes his jacket off—it, too, is covered in blood—and then his shirt, and...

"Covered in scars" doesn't begin to describe it. There are patches of his skin that have a strange leathery growth, there are metal plates in various places, he's almost patchwork. The edge of his upper bicep, from where his arm was cut off, ends in a clean flat metal disc that he uses to attach his metal arm to, though the arm itself is also now off.

And of course, there are the bullet holes. Blood oozes out, slowly, much more slowly than it would in a human, but of course he's not human.

"Oh. I'm sorry, this is embarrassing..."

"Oh, hush. None of that. Try to hold still, this'll probably hurt, because I am so incredibly not qualified..."

And then she can start digging them out. She doesn't have any kind of control over the feelings she leaks to him while she does it, because she is not a bullshit human-plant hybrid, but. She feels awful and like this is somehow all her fault and that, furthermore, she wants to hug him and keep him safe forever.

But all she can really do is get the bullets out of him, so. She does that.

He barely winces when she does that, but it's mostly out of self-control.

There aren't that many bullets. A couple went clean through, and a couple were glancing hits. She only has to fish four out of his torso and one out of his thigh and then he's alright, for some value of "alright" that has to be stretched beyond recognition to cover Zash the Stampede.

"Thank you."

"Of course."

And then it can be back to hug time. She does not give him time to get his shirt or arm back on, she just. She needs to hug him, okay.

"Is it pointless to try to bandage you, or...?"

"It... helps the blood not get anywhere new. But..." He gestures.

The holes of the bullets that went clean through aren't bleeding at all, and the ones Yvette was just messing with are doing so only very very slowly.

"So you will not be escaping from hug time, then," she agrees, almost brightly.

(She is STILL HERE, GUYS.)

"I don't want to bleed all over you any more than I already have..." Not that he's, you know. Doing anything to cease hugging.

"Bleach is cheap. And these clothes are a lost cause anyway."

... Sniffle.

"Okay. Thanks."

"Least I could do. Um. ... Sorry. I'm sorry. I. Guess you were probably right about me following you."

"...what?"

Because that sounded an awful lot like she's saying she's going away and he does not want to contemplate that right now.

"I-I mean I, am, absolutely just a squishy human and I'm so sorry I got in the way and, caused..."

At that, Morgan abruptly stands up from where she had been sitting. This new shelter? Way too fucking small for this nonsense. She will take being sandblasted. It is better than this.

"I was the one who shot the guy," she sighs, irritated, searching through her clothes for where she put the picture she found. "Will you two stop falling over yourselves to find every goddamned excuse to play sad martyr and just, just fucking. Ugh. Here."

Picture. Zash-wards. And then she's LEAVING because AUGH.

Oh. That picture. He'd—forgotten they'd taken that picture. "Thank you," he calls after Morgan but it's too late, she's gone. He looks back down at the picture then at Yvette. "Let's put a moratorium on self-flagellation, for the moment."

... Sniffle.

"Easier said than done. Um. You knew him, right? Do you want to talk about him?"

He shrugs a bit, still looking at the picture. "There isn't much. I was here when he was born... It was a windless day and they had no power. I helped his mom deliver him. And then... years later I visited again and found out he had a congenital illness. He said he'd die before he grew old, because of the illness.

"He said that maybe if he believed in God enough he'd have been saved but he didn't."

Fortunately, she is already hugging him, so she can just hug him some more.

“Oh,” she says, because that’s horrific and awful and sad and almost certainly completely preventable with proper medical technology. Which they didn’t have.