DISCLAIMER: They're not mine, I swear.
He looked peaceful. Wordlessly she watched him slumber through a drug-induced stupor, her arm growing numb from where she'd balanced her chin in her palm and her heart thumping unsteadily.
We're even.
Yes; if it came down to objective technicalities, they were even in every sense of the word. As she'd hesitated to fire, Marshall had sprung up from beside the SUV and saved her life... And as he lay bleeding and fading against a decrepit couch, she'd saved his with a half-empty water bottle and the window-washing fluid tubing. That cold spot still lingered in the pit of her stomach; it troubled her that she had only been the vehicle by which Marshall's life had been saved - it had been with his directions that she had acted. Her own contribution, a whispered conversation in the gloom of an abandoned gas station, had done nothing for him. His action seemed more concrete.
Her eyes wandered over his prone form: she took in the tilt of his head and the gentle sweep of his hair, the regular rise and fall of his bandaged chest, the way his lips would quirk in and out of dreamy smiles. Do I look like a hero to you? he'd asked her. For several more minutes her gaze remained fixed, as if drawn by a magnet that made her chest glow with a pained warmth. I'll try not to die. For you.
The realization came to her with the brevity and illumination of a flash of lightning: they'd worked themselves into a vicious cycle. He just kept giving, and she just kept taking... And then, when he had nothing left to give, she finally relented and gave something back. Or do I? This new thought offered a fresh wave of anxiety. Marshall slept on unaware. But Mary knew; they would never be even with one another, the same way that people were dependent. They were indeed friends - best friends, as they'd each confessed - and with that came a distortion of otherwise clear lines. They would never be even, because they were engaged in a constant interaction; in a constant exchange - of banter, of experiences, of laughter. Of hope and determination. Of friendship.
And quite frankly, with her eyes flitting once again to his unconscious form, she didn't mind that debt.