White lies

"Please," she murmured.

"A nurse will be in here with him most of the time until he’s completely off the drugs. His reaction may be unpredictable. If anything happens, it’s important that you move away from the bed and not hinder anything we have to do. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Can I trust you not to faint and get in the way?" "Yes."

"All right. I’ll hold you to that." His stern military gaze measured her, and he must have been reassured by what he saw, because he gave an abrupt nod of approval. "It won’t be easy, but I think you’ll hold up."

Jay turned her attention back to Steve, dismissing everyone else in the room as if they no longer existed. She couldn’t help it. He crowded everyone else out of her consciousness, flattening them into one-dimensional cartoon characters. Nothing mattered except him, and since his agonized attempt to talk to her, the feeling was even stronger than before. It shattered her and terrified her, because it was so far outside her previous experience, but she couldn’t fight it. It was so strange; Steve was exerting far more power over her now than he ever had before, when he’d had full use of his senses and body, and his full range of charm. He was motionless and, for the most part, insensate, but something deep and primal pulled her to him. Just being in the same room with him made her heart settle into a stronger rhythm, heating her flesh as her blood raced through her veins, energizing her.

"I’m back," she murmured, touching his arm. "You can go to sleep now. Don’t worry, don’t fight the pain…just let it go. I’m here with you, and I won’t leave. I’ll watch over you, and I’ll be here when you wake up again."

Slowly his breathing settled into an easier rhythm and his pulse rate dropped. His blood pressure lowered. Air hissed from the tube in his throat in what would have been a faint sigh had the tube not been in place. Jay stood by his bed, her fingers lightly stroking his arm as he slept.

Where are you? He came awake, screaming silently as he clawed his way through the shrouding darkness and pain into an even greater horror. The pain was like being eaten alive, but he could bear that because despite its force, it was secondary to the horrible emptiness. God, was he buried alive? He couldn’t move, couldn’t see, couldn’t make a sound, as if his body had died but his mind had remained alive. Terrified, he tried again to scream and couldn’t.

Where was he? What had happened?

He didn’t know. God help him, he didn’t know!

"I’m here," the voice crooned soothingly. "I know you’re frightened and don’t understand, but I’m here. I’ll stay with you."

The voice. It was familiar. It had been in his dreams. No, not dreams. Something deeper than that. It was in his guts, his bones, his cells, his genes, his chromosomes. It was part of him, and he focused on it with an intense, almost painful recognition. Yet it was oddly alien, connected to nothing his conscious mind could produce.

"The doctors say you’re probably very confused," the voice continued. It was a calm, tender voice, with a slightly husky catch in it, as if she had been crying. She. Yes. It was definitely a woman. He had a vague memory of that voice calling to him, pulling him out of a strange, suffocating darkness.

She began reciting a litany of injuries, and he listened to her voice with fierce concentration, only gradually realizing that she was talking about him. He was injured. Not dead, not buried alive.

The tidal wave of relief exhausted him.

She was still there the next time he surfaced, and this time the initial terror was of shorter duration. Fractionally more alert, he decided she was hoarse rather than teary. She was always there. He had no concept of time, only of pain and darkness, but gradually he became aware that there were two darknesses. One was in his mind, paralyzing his thoughts, but he could fight it. Slowly that darkness was becoming less. Then there was the other darkness, the absence of light, the inability to see. Again he would have panicked if she hadn’t been there. Over and over she explained, as if she knew he would only gradually comprehend her words. He wasn’t blind; there were bandages over his eyes, but he wasn’t blind. His legs were broken, but he would walk again. His hands were burned, but he would use them again. There was a tube in his throat to help him breathe; soon the tube would be removed and he would talk again.

He believed her. He didn’t know her, but he trusted her.

He tried to think, but words boomeranged around in his head until he couldn’t make sense of them. He didn’t know… There was so much he didn’t know. He didn’t know anything. But he couldn’t catch the words and arrange them in proper order so he’d know what it was he didn’t know. It just didn’t make sense, and he was too tired to fight.

Finally he woke to find that his thoughts were clearer, the confusion different, because the words made sense even though nothing else did. She was there. He could feel her hand on his arm, could hear her slightly hoarse voice. Did she stay with him all the time? How long had it been? It seemed forever, and it nagged at him, because he felt as if he should know exactly.

There was so much he wanted to know, and he couldn’t ask. Frustration ate at him, and his arm flexed beneath her fingers. God, what would happen to him if she left? She was the one link he had to the world outside the prison of his own body, his link to sanity, the only window in his world of darkness. And suddenly the need to know coalesced inside him into a single thought, a single word: Who?

His lips formed the word and gave birth to it in silence. Yes, that was the word he’d wanted. Everything he wanted to know was summed up in that one small word.

Jay gently laid her fingers over his swollen lips. "Don’t try to talk," she whispered. "Let’s use a spelling system. I’ll recite the alphabet, and whenever I get to the letter you want, twitch your arm. I’ll do the alphabet over and over until we’ve spelled out whatever you want to say. Can you do that? One twitch for yes, two twitches for no."