Linger
Disclaimer : Not mine.
Spoilers: Anything up to & including Dead Doll
All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden
He wakes in a cold sweat, eyes popping wide open, breaths heavy. The sweat on his skin is clammy, cool, resting on his brow and trickling down into his eyes. For a brief moment, he wonders how his sweat could be cold when it was so hot, so stifling.
Breaths still heavy…rapid, eyes still lidded with sleep, the first thing he does is look down to his right, where she had settled down to sleep the night before. The pillows she had propped her arm on in sleep are empty. The pillow she had rested her head on is missing. Momentary panic sets in before his senses begin to waken and he can feel her on the other side of him, the side she had slept on before the large, heavy cast commissioned her to sleeping, or rather, more often, trying to sleep, on the opposite side of bed as was normal.
The cast has forced her to attempt her nights on her back. She props it on pillows against him in hopes of sleeping without rolling over onto her broken arm. It was he who had suggested it, and she had agreed, but now it seems she has tired of spending her night staring up at the ceiling as she has been prone to do, and has found a way back to her side and a way to again curl herself around him. He wishes he didn't mind it, but a part of him worries. Is this comfortable? Will it end up hurting her? Is she only doing this to return to a bit of normalcy? Whatever the reason, some time in the night, some time when he must have finally drifted into a heavy sleep, though he didn't know how as it felt like he hadn't slept in days, she had gotten up and returned to bed on her ordinary side. She lies there, tucked into his side, cast flung over his stomach, leg wrapped around his.
He is so tired. It has been days…has it only been days, since he had a decent sleep? Sara sleeps only on painkillers and even then, her sleep is not something that offers rest or respite. Mostly she shuffles around a lot, trying to get comfortable or to relieve pain, but often, more lately, she has been twisting and turning, trying to shake off something unspeakable. Mostly he stares at her, his heart missing beats, relieved and exposed.
Things are changing. Soon they will have to face this and will not be able to ignore what they have been trying to ignore. In the hospital, in their inquiries on how Sara was doing, not one member of his team could meet his eyes. They had looked away, to the side, slightly below, but never directly at him. He could see their concern and feel their distance. They still have yet to say anything to him…to them, unwilling to broach a subject he only exposed in desperation. Instead, they call and check in and skirt around issues. They will not ask him and he will not tell.
He cannot stop clinging to her. He is a part of the world that destroyed her and he cannot forget that. He wants to return to before, but it felt like before was not days, but a lifetime ago. In a couple of days, or perhaps in another lifetime, he will return to work, and everything, everything he has sheltered, everything he has tried to protect, will be on display. Sara's return later, her cast, her visible scars, will all be evidence of what he has tried to conceal.
Gazing down at her, he sees how little room she has to sleep, a sliver of bed left as he has made room for her on the opposite side. She is tucked in tight against him, her fingers tiny as they peek out of the cast. Traces of silver sulfadiazine, flamazine, silver, purpling and blackening in color, are still visible from application to her severe sunburns the night before. His fingers lift to remove the locks of hair from the cream, flicking away the strands from her brow.
Soothing, his fingers continue to comb away the hair, even after all strands are brushed safely away. He continues to gaze down at her. The scratches on her forehead and nose and chin are visible, but the ones on the right side of her face are only visible at the extremities, the rest hidden by her face tucked into his side. He stares at each scrape and bruise, each line cutting through her skin, the edges of cuts not visible, picturing with heartrending accuracy the rest of each scratch. He stares at the smeared, silver-purplish-blackish flamazine on her brow, noting the change in color over time and exposure to oxygen and to light. He stares down at the pucker in her brow, the not quite frown that has him wondering where her subconscious has gone in her sleep.
Staring down at her scratches and cuts, the oxidized flamazine, her arm in a cast, he wishes he weren't so god damned observant, wishes he did not possess the ability to see so much more than he wants to. He is angry. For the occasional moment, he can even be angry with her. This was what he was protecting himself from, this hopelessness…this helplessness. For the occasional moment, he wishes he could return to his ignorance, to return to a state of quasi-denial, to imagining that by sheltering himself off he could pretend to not be a part of this world, to pretend to be so unaffected.
He can't. The ability to live in denial is past him. That life is now foreign and so is this one. He feels exposed and wonders it is not yet too soon for Sara to feel the same.
In his fear, he sometimes thinks he would have traded what had happened for the time they have had together, but he is not sure if that was accurate, or even true. Perceptive as Natalie Davis is, he wonders if she may have still known how to get to him had he not taken the chance with Sara. She probably would have. She probably still would have seen that Sara is his greatest weakness, will always be his greatest weakness, irregardless of whatever relationship they have. In the scene that revealed his love for Sara to Natalie Davis, the quiet, concealed intimacy Natalie David had witnessed would have been exchanged for a poor attempt at concealed longing. Personal detachment when Sara is around is only imagined. He knows, that had Sara gone through this ordeal without them having finally come together, he would still find himself in suspension. He would be existing in some sort of tidal life, wading on the edge of emotional consciousness, bitter with regret, understanding that his fragile life holds only fractured meaning. Sara has taken his fragmented self, the man who needed to compartmentalize, and she somehow fit the pieces into a unified whole where each piece works off another, supports another. His emotions have blinded him, but have also made him more perceptive. Had he denied himself of her, he would be in the same place as now, only more disjointed, angry and confused and counting far more regrets than he could count right now. Now, right now, because of the choices he has made to be with her, he can hold her, measure her life, feel her weight and try to mend each rift. She is here because of him and also, here because of him. Hope has sustained her. How much sooner would it have died without the promise of them to return to? What would he have been left with now?
His fears and his longing for his past life, that now foreign life, are temporary, moments when he wants to lash out. Love is still the prevailing emotion. Give him the choice and he will choose this foreign life, this uncertainty, his exposure, all of it, over returning to a time when he felt even more conflicted, torn between yearning for her and fearing he could not have her.
He looks down at Sara in sleep and sees only innocence. Yet, he knows she is a part of it too. He can feel the weight of her heavy cast upon his chest, her elbow pressing uncomfortably into his ribs and knows that it is perhaps the sweetest thing he's ever felt. The recent sounds of her quiet snores from having to sleep on her back are perhaps also the sweetest sounds he's ever heard. Now on her side, the sounds of her snores are absent, replaced by even breaths, but the uncomfortable feel of her cast is still there and it is anything but a discomfort. Sara is beside him, alive and breathing.
Absently, he traces the shape of a heart over the uppermost edge of her cast. He has been tracing that shape, in that spot, ever since she has returned home. A heart. The symbol of love. In the recesses of his mind, he knows some might expect him to trace something else, as the heart shape bears little of the actual shape of a heart. He might, perhaps, be expected to draw something like a double helix, two strands interwoven and joining to create the basis of a life. He may even find it appropriate, if he could gather his thoughts, but if he were to be honest, he cannot summon many coherent thoughts at all. Besides, the heart is the prevailing symbol, common and international and it is the only shape his finger will trace.
Over and over, the tip his finger traces the small pattern, the two segments joined at two ends, one segment traced and then another mirroring it, beginning at one tip, meeting at the other, two fragments joining to make a whole. That is what he is drawing, two separate segments joining to make a whole, the completion of mirroring lines, one fragment completing the other.
At times, he feels that it is all he can do. A part of him knows that he can only live because she is. A larger part of him knows that something has died in both of them. For him, it is ignorance. For her, he fears, it is hope. He does not know what he fears more, the loss of his ability to ignore or the loss of her capacity to hope. In his gazes, he does not see someone who sees herself as surviving. There is nothing renewed about her life, no revelation nor life-is-short resolution, no outlook of a second chance, or for Sara, a third or a forth. She has begun looking beyond, and back, and is trying to hide it. Her eyes are often sad, or vacant, and she can't conceal that.
Every so often, there are these amazing, breathtaking moments where he can see her eyes fill with love, an all consuming, overwhelming love and there is even grief in that. Before…before her…before, in their intimate moments, it was love and only love, a radiant happiness in love. Now, now, there is mostly sadness in that look, as though it pains her to love and to be in love. There is softness too, as though she knows he understands how it pains her. And there is relief, and something almost beyond belief, and even that fills him with sorrow, but still he clings to it, because as sad and as painful as it is, it is still love.
He doesn't know what to do. He hopes that time will heal them, but it is more hope than expectation. She is still on that journey back. So much of her is still missing. Over their time together, she has amazed him. She has stunned him and left him breathless. She has taught him so much about life and love, and has given him the chance to really experience life and to fall in love. He has seen so much through her eyes or in her eyes. She has shown him so much beauty. It is his turn to show her, to remind her, only he fears he cannot. He does not possess that ability like she.
Gazing down at her, he wonders about her day in the desert, under that heat, dehydrated, disoriented, no water, no roads, no people. He wonders at what it took for her to survive, wonders if he could survive such a journey. He thinks about all that she has clawed her way out of, the tragic childhood, the trunk of one car, the water and sand, rock and metal beneath another. She has stumbled and crawled her way through the desert and he wonders if the last of her hope died the last time she fell and finally, could no longer summon the strength to get back up.
Sara stirs. Her cast rubs over his chest, heavy, painful, comforting. She has clubbed him with it many times in sleep, but he'll take it. He'll take it because she is there with him. He'll take the bruises and the weight and the accidental knocks to his jaw or chest and the apologies she can barely gasp out when she realizes she has hit him. He'll take the sorrow in her gaze and the tears that threaten to fall but that she fights to hide away. He'll take all the pain wrapped up in loving her and in being in love with her, because it is Sara.
She turns and moans and smacks him with her cast and he knows she is lost in that place he cannot reach. He turns and pulls her into his arms and whispers gentle sweet reassurances. It will be alright. Everything will be alright. He whispers it over and over, even as she calms. He keeps whispering it, his new mantra, because maybe if he whispers it enough, he can begin to believe it.