Jess feels cold.
They'd taken her jacket – the one she'd found in the mines by pure chance, the one that saved her from frostbite – and given her a large wooly blanket, but it's totally wrong; it's huge, heavy, scratchy. She can't move properly with this weight on her shoulders, can't run quickly.
She feels stuck underneath this fabric trap, and she fidgets with the material nervously as the nurse assigned to her carefully finishes disinfecting the worst of the scrapes above her eye.
"You're a very lucky girl," the short man says approvingly, looking over her battered state almost in awe. "Very lucky indeed. No signs of infection so far; for falling into a mine shaft, I'd say that's damn near a miracle."
"Yeah," Jess agreed quietly. "A miracle."
Something in her tone must come off as worrying because the nurse draws back a little, eyes meeting her hollow blues for a moment before sliding away again.
She doesn't much care if he's uncomfortable.
She's too cold, too hungry, too tired to care. All she wants is to go to sleep.
He finishes up his examination of her remaining injuries – a majority of them are just dark bruises all across her face and arms, a few dotting her chest and legs, nothing too major – and she curls the blanket tighter around her body, wishing not for the first time that she'd simply stayed in the lodge.
The door opens suddenly, without a knock or a polite word, and the nurse rounds on the police officer that enters with a righteous, indignant fury, stepping half in front of his patient as if to shield her.
"Hey- no! She answered all your damn questions when you brought her in! She needs to rest-!"
"We're not here for that, sir. One of the other survivors asked for her-"
Wait.
Other survivors?
Jess lifts her head from where she had been staring at her pale, exposed stomach in time to witness a bruised and bloody Michael thundering into the room, shouldering his way past the police officer without a care about potentially being arrested. Once he's made it inside, his eyes fasten on Jess and he freezes in place like a statue.
The terrible, squeezing ache in her chest abruptly lessens, and she has to blink rapidly against the sudden flood of tears.
"Mike?" she breathes, mind warring between disbelief and relief, uncertain if she'd fallen asleep during her exam and this was all just a dream.
Her fears prove unfounded as he rushes forward, heavily scarred arms clamping around her shoulders and pulling her painfully tight against his chest.
Her blanket fell off in the middle of the embrace, and her bruised ribs twinge in protest, but she doesn't care about any of that; she buries her face in his neck, inhaling the smell of smoke clinging to his body like a second skin, and lets the tears come.
She feels warm again in his arms.
They were together. They would be okay now.
A/N: I'm sorry I just
In my first playthrough, Matt died and I ended up having Jess go through the mines all alone, she faced the fucking wendigos all on her own and I am very emotional about this girl. She's literally my number one favorite aside from Josh and I have a lot of feelings for these two.
Don't judge me.
~Persephone
