Title: Vanishing Point
Category: TV Shows » Eleventh Hour
Author: MoonShadow2
Language: English, Rating: Rated: M
Genre: Drama/Romance
Published: 01-27-11, Updated: 01-27-11
Chapters: 1, Words: 1,425
Summary: Special Agent Rachel Young is exposed to an unknown substance and loses all memory of the past 3 years, including the time she's been assigned to protect Dr. Jacob Hood. Follows on from a few months after the end of the series. Alternates POV between Rachel and Jacob with various chapters.
=====================================================================
Vanishing Point: Chapter 1
I awoke to the sound of a steady electronic beep. My eyelids felt heavy. So did the rest of me. I must have not moved for quite a while. My limbs must be asleep. I managed to open my eyelids a tiny bit and see a sliver of light before pain flooded my senses and pushed me back into darkness.
Okay. Maybe I'll just lie here for a minute. Hangover city. I've been here before.
The beeping sound pulled me up out of the darkness again but I decided against opening my eyes right away. The pain would find me. I lay there for a while and worked on remembering where I was and how I'd gotten there.
No luck. The details were just beyond the limit of my memory. Okay, fine. Maybe I should just open my eyes and see. Maybe. The pain crept in slowly but it was wrapped in something that muffled it. I breathed in and out a couple of times – tentatively - to see if that did anything. Nope, no change.
Okay.
Whatever made the pain dull made my body heavy. I was flat on my back so everything was numb. No surprises there. I must have been spectacularly drunk to sleep flat on my back for so long. I flexed a muscle in my hand. It took ages for it to respond. But at least I knew then that I was still attached to my body. I might get to flexing other parts later.
Time now to try and open my eyes. Okay, no pain, no push backwards into the dark. Good. I was staring at a ceiling. It was not my bedroom ceiling. Did I fall asleep at Kara's house after a party? It didn't look like her ceiling but maybe I was in a different room?
I considered the ceiling some more. There was a slider rail on the ceiling with a curtain attached. And there was a light over me, a dim light, above my head. It seemed familiar, like a place I'd been before though definitely not Kara's spare bedroom. I tried to piece the information together.
Curtain, dim light, beeping sound.
I became aware that my arms were cold. I tried to move them but they didn't seem to get the message. Some detail wanted my attention. But when I reached for it, it moved away from me.
I turned my head a bit to the left and saw a pole with a clear plastic bag hanging from it and a tube dangling from the bottom of the bag. Just beyond it was the box making the beeping sound. A scribble of a line crossed a small screen on the box. At least I think it did. It was kind of fuzzy. And it felt so familiar. I pondered these facts for a bit of time before it came to me.
Hospital. I was in a hospital. I wondered who I was visiting, whose room I'd fallen asleep in.
I turned my head slowly the other way and saw a man on a short couch. He seemed to be asleep because his eyes were closed and his head was thrown back and he was breathing slowly. Whoever he was, he wasn't snoring but he looked tired. Exhausted, actually. I realized then that I was looking down at him.
Wait a minute.
He was on a couch. And I was looking at him from under the light and I was next to the pole with the bag hung on it. Which meant…
Which meant that I must be in a hospital bed and I must be the one hooked up to the monitor. My body got heavier. I tried to turn my head back the other way but the effort made me tired and I closed my eyes. As I fell backward into the inky blackness, I wondered what had happened that I was in a hospital bed.
The next time I woke, there was a woman in a colorful shirt reaching over me. She seemed to be checking things I could not see. And writing on a chart. She looked intently at the machine making the beeping noise. Monitor. That's what it was called.
My eyes were open a tiny bit. I tried to speak to the woman but I could not gather enough breath to make a sound. She moved down towards my feet, poking at me and lifting my limbs along the way. It made no sense to me, what she was doing. I turned my head to find the man but he was not there. There was no one on the couch. Where was he?
I concentrated hard and raised my left hand. The woman saw the movement. She came up to my side and took my hand. She was talking but the words were indistinct. I opened my eyes a little more and she smiled at me and said not to worry. I blinked several times and tried to speak but the black softness called me back and I went.
I was not worried about not being able to speak. I just wanted to know where the man had gone.
Sometime later, I opened my eyes again it took a few minutes for the curtain to come into focus. I realized that there was a voice in the room. I looked around slowly and saw the man who'd been on the couch before. I recognized him from before. He was leaning against the far wall, talking on a cell phone. I could hear him talking but the words were too far away and mushy for me to understand. He was wearing a light blue shirt that looked like he'd slept in it. His pants seemed like a dark blue wool and also looked like he'd probably been wearing them for some time. The hand he held the cell phone with was bandaged. There were dark circles under his eyes. He clearly needed to sleep.
I wondered why seeing this sleep-deprived man in wrinkled clothes made me feel better. Maybe I knew him?
I watched him for a moment. I blinked several times and flexed my jaw instinctively. That's when the pain in my head came alive. It felt like something large and angry had kicked me in the head. I couldn't really feel the rest of my body. If it felt as bad as my head, I wasn't going to push for the feeling to return.
I moaned a little bit and the man put down the cell phone and came to the bedside. He picked up my hand and spoke to me with a deep, scratchy voice. He'd obviously been without sleep for a long time. I couldn't understand the words he was saying but he looked at me with obvious concern. Maybe he could make the pain in my head stop. Maybe that was why I needed him close.
I flexed my jaw again and the pain shot through to both temples. I drew a tiny breath and looked at him and said, "My head hurts a lot. My arms are cold."
He leaned over me and then kissed my forehead with incredible gentleness. He straightened up and yelled, I think, for a nurse. He then looked back at me with such concentration that it was almost mesmerizing. His eyes were so green, so clear, almost fathomless. He had a small scar next to his mouth and unruly curly brown hair. A nice looking man, probably around 40.
He brought his face down close to me and spoke slowly and clearly so that I could understand him finally. He said, "Welcome back. You don't have my permission to stop breathing, ever again. Don't forget that."
Next thing I knew, there was a man in a white coat shining light in my eyes and asking me questions. I managed to breathe out the word, "Head" and "cold" before I slipped back towards the blackness.
As I slid away, I realized what the man had said. He must know me. I found that odd because now that I had seen him up close, I realized didn't know him.
