Will jerked awake with a muffled cry. He pressed his fists into his stomach and curled over as a wave of acid heat shot through his torso. He cried out again and threw the blanket off himself, fingers desperately fumbling to find the source of the stabbing pain. Riley awoke at once and grabbed for his shoulders, still giddy with sleep, "Will!" she cried. "Will, what's wrong?"
He tried to answer her, but another rough cry escaped him. The pain was so real, crashing over him in irregular bursts of agony, but there was no source: no blood or wound. His sleep-muddled brain wasted precious seconds as it tried to process this experience and the two of them stumbled onto the answer at once. "Will!" Riley exclaimed again, hanging loosely over his shoulder and they locked wild eyes.
"Somebody's been stabbed," he exclaimed breathlessly, at almost the same moment. He threw the sheet off himself and sprang out of bed, his hero complex fully activated as he imagined one of his cluster lying in a pool of blood. Almost immediately he doubled over again in pain.
"Riley," he gasped, looking back at the girl still curled in a puddle of sheets who was suddenly looking at him with a strange expression. "Riley, we have to – " he cut off as she suddenly exploded in a gale of laughter. In all the time he had known her, he had never seen her laugh this hard. She rocked back and forth on the bed, gasping through her giggles in a way he would have found endearing at any other moment. He stumbled back to her side and put a baffled arm around her shoulders. "Riley, please, what's going on?"
After several false pauses, she finally gained control of her mirth and put her little hands up on either side of her boyfriend's face. Tears still in her eyes, she said, "Will, nobody's been stabbed. This is nothing an ibuprofen won't fix."
"What?" he gasped.
"I'll go and get some now, but I'm warning you, it will still take a few minutes to take effect." Her face squinched up in laughter again as she watched the realization dawn on his face.
"This is what it's like for you? Are you serious? This is cramps?" Will asked, looking slowly from his torso to her own.
She slid neatly out of bed, dainty and glowing in his t-shirt. "I will fix it for you in just a minute," she promised, hurrying to the bathroom while still choking on giggles.
He folded his hands on his torso and leaned gingerly back on the headboard, wincing as the heat stabbed through him again. She came out, swallowing down a couple of pills, and grinned endearingly at the man. "This should take about twenty minutes," she said, curling up next to him again.
"It feels like an angry gerbil has gotten inside of me and is just shredding everything," Will said, gazing down at his stomach in something akin to awe. "This is what you deal with every month?"
She shrugged. "Sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse. You never know what you're gonna get!" She laughed again, quietly. "You thought you had been stabbed!"
"Well, yeah," he murmured, gazing down at her in wonder. "Women are incredible. You didn't even wake up!"
"I would have soon," she explained, already sounding sleepy again. "I guess your body's just not used to it."
Even though Riley explained that the pain only lasted for the first few hours, Will treated her like a queen for a solid week. He lavished her with gifts and attention and watched her continue about her life with eyes so wide they were almost worshipful.
At the next cluster gathering at Lito and Hernando's apartment, Nomi mentioned this. "Did something happen between you two?" she asked, watching Will curiously. "I mean, you guys have always been cute, but he keeps looking at you like you took a bullet for him or something."
Riley tried to smother a giggle with her hand. "The pain of my cramps transferred to him one night. He thought one of you had been stabbed."
Sun grinned. "Lito ended up with some of my PMS before either of us knew what was going on yet. He did not handle it gracefully."
The movie star looked up from where he was tucked into the couch with Hernando. "I did not!" he agreed with some pride. "I was sure I was going to die!"
"I was sure he had started doing meth," his boyfriend stated wryly. "He lost his mind."
"It is a side effect I would not have anticipated," Lito hummed affectionately. "But it seems logical. I am only glad it has not happened to me again."
Kala wandered up, sipping an iced tea. "What side effect has not happened to you again?"
Nomi laughed. "Apparently several of the guys are experiencing 'women's issues' for the first time by telepathic transfer."
Kala's cheeks turned bright red and her eyes jumped across to Wolfgang, who stood slightly apart from the group in conversation with Will, but he seemed instantly aware of the discussion as well and looked acutely uncomfortable, meeting her eyes for a minute before dropping them swiftly.
"Hold up, what is this?" Amanita's sharp eyes missed nothing and she jumped off Nomi's lap with excitement. "This looks like a story that needs to be shared!"
"Yeah, seriously." Will looked happy to have the conversation shifted from himself. "What could possibly embarrass our perpetually nude German?"
Wolfgang smiled slowly and raised his eyes to Kala's with a small shrug.
"I do not want to tell it!" she exclaimed, cheeks reddening even more as the eyes of the room shifted to her. "Or, anyway, he does not want me to say."
"You may say what you like," Wolfgang replied, raising his chin defiantly. "It does not shame me."
"That doesn't seem to be the case," Capheus chimed in teasingly as he glanced happily at Amanita. The two of them had been shipping 'Kalagang' shamelessly from the moment they met, since the tension between the German and Indian had been almost unbearable since Riley's release.
"Yeah, I didn't know the two of you were hanging out alone," Amanita agreed, watching them with an eager grin and ignoring Nomi's unsubtle warning cough.
"We – we weren't 'hanging out'," Kala began hesitantly, avoiding Wolfgang's eyes as she looked at the floor, still slightly flushed. "That is – I was in my bed." She missed Capheus and Amanita's significant glance, but Wolfgang did not. "And all of the sudden, he just showed up."
Kala was dreaming of him again. It was one of those golden dreams that filled her head every few nights. They were walking through a small garden near her father's house, a place that only existed in sleep. The dream was simple, and redundant: filled with the warm haze of an Indian summer, and dotted with pinky flowers and green buds. They walked side-by-side; she talked with animation and he watched her with that wide-open expression that his face took on only for her. As they walked, his shoulder kept bumping her and when she looked up at him to apologize, he pushed his shoulder back into hers and took her hand, folding their fingers together. She looked down at their hands in surprise and when she looked back up with a question, he gently leaned down and took her lips with his own.
Kala hated the dream. She woke up each time with a warmth bubbling in her chest, giddy and glowing, to find her fingers empty and her lips cold. The image was replaced instantly with the memory the chilled, sour air of Berlin, the chattering of guns, a cold floor beneath her feet and a colder look in the eyes of the man as he told her he was a monster. A family-killer.
But on the night when he finally appeared to her, she was still caught up in the rose-gold of the dream. "Kala!" her name, spoken sharply and in urgency, cut through the dream, the man's actual voice interrupting that of his image. She lay tossing on the bed, murmuring in her sleep, her thick soft curls splayed out on the pillow exactly as he had so often imagined it. Her sticky eyes blinked open at his voice and she saw him for one second standing at the foot of her bed, naked again and with panic stamped on his face.
"Kala!" he choked out again, and ran for her, falling on his knees by her bed and lifting a hand to cup her chin. "What's wrong?"
"Wolfgang," she said groggily, baffled by the suddenness of her transition from dream to reality, by his sudden nearness, and she heedlessly echoed him. "Wha – what's wrong?"
He pulled himself back slightly, but kept his hand on her face. "I came to ask you – you are in pain!"
"What?" She pulled herself up slightly on her pillows, unable to pull her eyes away from his face.
"Y-you are in pain," he repeated, his own voice thick with sleep interrupted. "I felt it, I thought something had happened. Was it not you?"
Kala's mind snapped into the present as she understood and her hand dropped to her stomach. "I am in pain, yes, but I have not been hurt. Are you alright?" she asked in concern as his mouth clenched hard.
"Is this your pain?" he asked, looking up in surprise. "You do not seem to feel it."
She laughed quietly, laughing in humor at the moment and in bitterness as she realized the transience of it. He would leave as soon as he understood. "I am used to it, Wolfgang. It is only cramps such as I have every month. I will survive, but you seem to be in real pain. Please, let me help you!"
"You are alright?" he asked, earnestly, and in that moment she felt the depth of the fear he had felt for her and her whole body gentled.
"Yes, I am quite well," she said calmly. "But – "
He stood immediately, looking slightly flushed either at his mistake or his reaction. "I will go-"
"Wolfgang!"
He looked up and she stood before him, so real and human, sunlight that was also fire, gentleness and ferocity tangled in her being. He saw her again as she was the night she saved him, on her knees in the kitchen, her untrembling fingers knitting together the bomb that would kill a man and save his life, and he remembered the softness of her lips under his.
"Wolfgang, please. Please, you must speak to me."
She was asking him for all that he wanted and it was too much. He should not have come. As he vanished from her sight, he felt the wave of her anger and confusion and the wildness of her grief.
"Wolfgang felt my cramps one night and he thought I had been stabbed. He came to check on me, very concerned. Men are too surprised to learn that we too feel pain, are they not?" Kala's words came out in a rush, condensing the moment into two sentences that remained packed with meaning to the group listening quietly in the room. The implications of the last statement were lost on no one. Her eyes lit up suddenly in a warm halo of tears and she turned quickly and fled the room.