Disclaimer: I have no claim whatsoever many of these characters. All dialog is from the episode "Darkness," written by Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper.
Awakening
by Helen W.
Nicholas feels like crap.
Has he been asleep? Why is Johansen… perched on his pallet?
Shit.
"Hey, how are you?" Johansen asks, in a voice pitched to mollify a crazy person.
The answer should be obvious, so he responds with a question of his own. "How'd I get here?" He'd been in the lab…
"You're not that heavy."
So he'd collapsed; that's how it had ended. And someone had carried him to this nook. One of those filthy soldiers had hefted his own filthy body…
"You passed out for a little while," Johansen says.
"How long?"
"About ten hours."
That shakes the feeling of physical disgust; he's got to move… got to…
He gets as far as his elbows before Johansen stops him. "It's probably the first real sleep you've had since we arrived here," she says.
Her voice is still kind. Kind. She's not simply checking up on the crazy guy, she's being kind. Actively kind.
"Has anything happened?" he asks.
"Not since we lost power, no, you haven't missed a thing."
Rising to speak was - perhaps a bad idea. Now his head's pounding, and being sick isn't entirely out of the question.
"How do you feel?" Johansen asks again.
He answers honestly: "Embarrassed." He'd argued with the colonel… Young had had it coming, but Nicholas remembers screaming at the man, as the room span faster and faster…
"Don't be," says Johansen. Of course she says that.
"Oh, you weren't there." Thank God. This woman - can never see him like that. He must never, never… not near her.
"You're head's pounding, right?" She nails the caffeine withdrawal… she nails the nicotine…
"Double whammy, huh?" she affirms, smiling. So very, very kindly.
He follows, of course, when she asks him to.
He doesn't want a friend here. If they are going to die, he would prefer to die alone.
* * * THE END * * *
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