Here's my story for day two of SEAL Team Week.

Prompts used: Clay, trapped

Story title from Far From Home (The Raven) by Sam Tinnesz; chapter title from I Followed Fires by Matthew and the Atlas.

This was supposed to be a short one-shot, but didn't cooperate. The second and final chapter will be posted by the end of the day.

Out here in the darkness
And out of the light
If you get to me too late
Just know that I tried

-Far From Home (The Raven), by Sam Tinnesz

When Clay looks behind him, he sees blood in the snow.

He isn't completely sure where it came from, but figures the source was probably him. There's not a lot of pain right now, mostly just numbness, but he thinks he remembers something bad happening. Recalls losing his footing and falling into blankness, an endless expanse of white.

After that, his memory blinks out and there's a gap. Next thing he remembers is just now, standing in the feathered shade of a conifer, looking back at a trail of footprints surrounded by dribbles of fresh blood as vivid as berries on the surface of the snow.

The sun is still up but hangs low over the mountains, casting long, distorted blue shadows. Evening is close. After it will come night, and night means cold even more intense than this.

Urgency pushes at Clay like phantom hands. He needs to get moving. Needs to go... somewhere. Doesn't remember where.

Is his team here? Where is here?

He tries to take a step forward, but the world does a sickening flip and he stumbles, only a last-second grab at a tree branch keeping him from falling. He stares at his gloved hand, finally realizing that he's wearing full winter gear, without which he'd surely be a lot worse off. Even with it, he can feel himself shivering.

Regaining his footing, Clay lets go of the tree, lowers his hand, and watches dumbly as a slow, steady trickle of blood drips off the fingertips of his glove.

Well, that's one question answered, at least.

He rotates his arm until he finds the gash that cut straight through all three layers of clothing and into the flesh beneath. The wound is just above his elbow, and it's deep. At least the bleeding isn't arterial; if it were, he'd probably already be dead.

What did this? A knife maybe, but it could also have been a sharp rock, if his blurred memory of falling is accurate. Blood loss may help explain some of the confusion; a head injury probably accounts for the rest. Even the fading sunlight cuts into Clay's eyes like a blade, and the horizon seems to keep tilting. His temples throb with each heartbeat.

Focus, he tells himself. What's the priority here?

Stopping the bleeding. Finding shelter. Making contact with his guys if possible, because a rescue would be really nice right about now.

It occurs to Clay to check for a radio, but he doesn't seem to have one. He's wearing a balaclava but no helmet, which means no helmet strobe.

On his own, then. No easy way to reach out for help - and with zero idea where he is or what enemy forces could be in the area, he doesn't dare send up an obvious signal, like smoke, that might draw the wrong kind of attention. At least not until it's his absolute last resort.

Clay has a feeling that stripping down in this kind of cold, when he's already shivering, probably wouldn't be the best idea, so he ends up just widening the tear in the fabric over the wound until he can get in there and apply a pressure bandage. Then he wraps extra layers of gauze over the top to try to shield the gash and surrounding skin from exposure to the subzero air.

After the sun drops below the mountains, it doesn't take long for the light to start fading from the sky. Head throbbing, Clay pushes on, afraid of what will happen if he stops moving. The air grows so cold that every breath sears his lungs.

In the last of the pale twilight, he glances behind him and realizes half the footprints he's leaving are rimmed in pink. That's when he finally registers that the dull throb in his calf must be from something more than just muscle cramps or bruising.

He's still bleeding.

That discovery takes on a whole new dimension when Clay hears the wolves.

Fuck. He's still bleeding.

He's been leaving a blood trail this entire time. And while he knows humans aren't generally wolves' preferred prey, he doubts a hungry, hunting pack will pass up the opportunity to pursue a clearly wounded and weakened target. No way he's that lucky.

As the eerie, hollow chorus of howls rises from the sparse forest behind him, Clay locks down the fear, the age-old instinct telling him to run, and tries to force his scrambled brain to think through the situation logically.

The trees around him now are mostly spindly, wind-cowed conifers with branches nowhere near strong enough to support his weight. He vaguely remembers seeing bigger, sturdier trees back where he came from, but doesn't think he could reach them in time, especially since trying would require going toward the howls.

So, climbing a tree is out. What else does he have to work with?

Besides his knife, his only weapon is a Glock, with little extra ammo. Fighting is also not an option.

He has no NODs or helmet light, only a penlight he found in his pocket. Once full darkness falls, which will be soon, he's going to be pretty much blind.

Turning so quickly that he makes himself dizzy, Clay does a rapid, frantic sweep of the terrain that's still visible in the faint light.

There has to be something.

This is not how he's going to die.

He's going to be Tier One someday, goddammit. He's determined to erase his father's footprints. Ash Spenser's idiot kid who wandered off and got mauled to death by wolves is not exactly the legacy he's been dreaming about ever since he joined the Navy.

Off through the scrubby trees to the west, where the foothills begin and the light is still brightest, Clay catches sight of a few steep, jagged outcrops of stone.

It's the best chance he's got, so he gets moving.

Even that brief pause let the cold sink in deeper, and now Clay is shaking hard, unable to determine how much of that is from cold and how much from pure adrenaline. The howling has mostly died back - maybe it just signaled the beginning of the hunt - but now he hears occasional excited little yips carrying clearly on the brittle-cold air, growing steadily closer as he hauls ass through the iced-over snow.

Clay makes it to the closest wide spire of dark gray rock just ahead of the wolves. There's almost no daylight left. It will have to be enough.

He scrambles up, clawing for cracks and toeholds, climbing half by feel. At one point his gloved fingertips slip off a patch of ice and he swings to the side, heart hammering, world tilting as pain spikes through his brain. Clay clings to the rock with his other hand, jams his boot so hard into a crevice that something in his ankle pops, and somehow manages not to fall to his death.

He forces himself onward until he reaches a ledge that's maybe eight meters above the ground and just big enough to roll onto and sprawl out in an exhausted, shivering heap.

Clay lies there for a while, wheezing, each inhale like liquid fire in his throat and lungs. Below him, the wolves prowl restlessly. He hears huffing breaths, the soft crackle of ice crust beneath massive paws, and the occasional faint whine.

The good news is that the rock face is too sheer for the predators to follow him up. The bad news is that the night has only just begun, it's gonna get colder from here, Clay is well and truly trapped, and he's got no way to call for help.

Flicking on his penlight, Clay confirms that the spire continues its sharp climb upward from the rock shelf where he now lies. From this angle, he doesn't have a chance of determining how far up it goes, and he immediately dismisses the idea of continuing the climb. He barely made it this far without falling, and now it's even darker than it was then.

But if he stays here, stays still, he is going to freeze to death.

Movement. He has to keep moving.

Arms shaking, Clay pushes himself up, ignoring the dull ache from his injured calf and ankle. He sweeps the light from one side of the ledge to another. It runs along the cliff face for probably about four meters in each direction, and juts out just a little farther than the width of his body when he lies flat on his back. Snow clings to the rock in a few places. He wouldn't be surprised if there's clear ice too, invisible against the dark stone.

The ledge is precarious as hell, but Clay has no choice. If he doesn't want to die of hypothermia, he has to get moving again, and then he has to keep moving until the night ends, someone finds him, or he slips and falls and gets ripped apart and consumed by wolves. Whichever comes first.

"Goddammit," Clay mumbles, wincing at how slurred his voice comes out.

Beneath him, there are a few hopeful whines.

"Oh, shut up," he tells the wolves.

Keeping his shoulder against the rock, he pushes shakily up to his feet and starts pacing, one unsteady step at a time. All the way to the south end of the ledge, careful turn, then back to the north.

Everything else slides away. The world narrows down to Clay's boots on the stone, his shoulder pressed against the cliff, and the narrow strip of illumination provided by the penlight. His breath rasps in and out. His injured leg aches, tries to buckle. He keeps going.

At some point he starts sweating, but that's okay; the triple-layered winter gear is designed to work with his body heat to wick moisture away from his skin and move it to the outside layer. Keeping his core temp from dropping too far is the important thing here.

Clay paces, one foot in front of the other, one end of the ledge and back, and he gets angry.

Fuck this, all of it. Fuck waking up in the frozen wilderness with no goddamn idea how he even got here.

Fuck proving Morrison right about what a useless idiot he is.

Their new team leader pretty openly dislikes him for having the gall to bear the last name Spenser, and Clay's standard response to that sort of situation ("You want to hate me? Fine, I'll give you a reason to hate me") has not exactly helped matters.

Honestly, if Clay dies out here, Brian Armstrong will probably be the only person who gives a shit.

At that thought, the anger twists into something sharper, lancing pain up under Clay's ribs. His grandparents are dead, his mom is... his mom, and his dad is a raging asshole incapable of loving anything except his own reflection.

Clay isn't sure he's ever felt more alone in his entire life. He misses his grandparents, whose ashes he scattered to the wind, and he misses Brian. Is Brian here, somewhere? Looking for him?

What if Brian is already dead and Clay just forgot? Is his head scrambled because he hit it on something, or because he doesn't want to remember what happened to leave him alone and bleeding?

Down on the ground, one of the wolves huffs a frustrated-sounding little bark.

"No. Bad dog." Clay means to snarl the words, but they come out in a listless mumble instead.

He reaches the end of the ledge, turns too quickly, and his bad ankle gives way, boot slipping on snow and ice.

There's a terrifying instant where he reels, his weight teetering over nothing. Blind with panic, Clay throws himself away from the edge, his wounded arm slamming into the wall of the cliff with a bright burst of pain.

He loses his grip on the penlight. It clatters once on the rock shelf and then falls silently to the snow below, landing among the gathered wolves.

Now engulfed in darkness, Clay huddles against the stone at his back, cradles his throbbing arm against his chest, and quietly shakes.

He's going to die here.

And he isn't sure there's a single person left alive who will actually care.