A/N. My thanks to floraposte (fromlaughter) and Sam (foooolintherain) for their thoughtful early reviews.

The Distant Hours

We shall new shadows make the other way.

There was light sifting through the pale yellow curtain—the fabric beating like tired wings, the pattern he has had to unlearn each time, the image shifting like a hologram. Or was it pressed flowers? But this was not home, and he wondered if it was just blood.

He had been alarmed at the sheet getting stained. Often the sight of the pillow with a smear of pink would make him retch. Earlier, he had requested the nurse to change his sheets and she had said the same thing, that there was nothing wrong, he was imagining things. Doctor's orders, he would have sneered, but it wasn't right, somehow. She would give him a mocking look, roll her eyes, wave her cap in the other direction and say she had other patients to attend to. But then, he had mentioned it to her—Mary—once, and then they had sent clean sheets from Downton. They had the same smell, like air-blue skies, her volunteer's gown. When she was near, adjusting the pillows, her face so close he could pinpoint the birthmark under her eye, he felt it had been. And he stared and waited, even long after she had left. On nights, he would lay against the clean pillow with the faint gold-twined embroidered insignia and he would seek, trying to break the spell.

She was there every day since he arrived, was it two days, four? He couldn't exactly remember, even though there was a clock on the grey wall opposite his bed. When they had brought him to the hospital, he had been asleep, doused on morphine, they said, because of his legs. When he had woken up, it was the brightness, the colorlessness of it all, that struck him with its wrongs, as if he had died, unburied.

But then she had laid a hand on his arm, the warmth of her flesh stabbing him, so he had thrust hers immediately, shoved her away from him so he half-hung out of the bed, a vicious flight. She had pressed on, pushed him back with equal force so he felt her skin-sheathed bones, her fingers digging into him, his fight leaving her with bruises, fire against the pale. Yet she hadn't pulled away. Not even when he tried to tear the sheets, shaking with anger, this madness that roused him from that artificial plain.

"It's all right. It's all right, Matthew," she repeated, the soft-strength of her body and its trappings branding his memory though her voice was foreign, a distant song, or was it a cry?

She hadn't left this side that first day, even though others had visited. Lord Grantham had tried to reassure him that these things happened and he would recover.

"You are home, Matthew. You have a chance, so be thankful." He could have retorted, arguing with something equally pathetic. But he couldn't understand how that was possible, this talk about home.

Sybil, the second nurse on his floor, had gone through the motions, and Mary had watched, her face arrested as he lay measured among the ruins: the counting of his pulse, recording of his temperature, awakening fresh wounds as the dressing came undone. She had sent Sybil away and told her father she would come home later. She wasn't afraid. He wanted to ask, but she just kept, her calm chastening the storm.

He felt it, the pitter-patter against the windowsill, the faint spray of wetness, the stream of answers outside his reach. Safe in those walls, he heard a different sound.

It was the stillness, the silence that filled it. He didn't hear the blind soldier—Tom—coughing consumptively in the screened room next to him. He didn't hear the nurses wheeling food on the old screeching food cart, he didn't smell the half-eaten sick, even what lay underneath. He didn't hear the rain.

It was her, lying on the chair in front. Her eyes were closed but he felt her eyelids fluttering, tormented beneath the shadows. Her dark eyebrows were motionless, secreting those expressions he had seen. He mapped the contours of her face, the uncommon angles puzzling him as they became her. It was like a painting, he could tell. Her lips were closed, as if barred from revealing, even in her sleep. Her dark hair had come loose from the pins that set it, where her head had lain against the hard back of his seat. The sails of her skirt waved gently in that airless room. Her shoes were the same color as that of her bound book, which she had been reading to him and which now lay on her lap, shut tight. It was heavy. He watched her breathing, heard those soft rhythms, not labored, not loud, not peaceful. Then hearing their notes shot something of sadness through him. As his eyes fell on the swell and flow of the collar clasped tightly around her white throat, something rose in his chest, the ache rippling through him, so he felt like he was bleeding afresh, the bandages coming loose. He sucked his breath, almost cut his lip. He wanted it to last, her near frame small, yet formidable, her presence a reminder.

The cruelty gnawed at him, stealing his hours, masking every moment like second skin, like the mummy tape that kept him bound. It was as if he was tethered somewhere in space, in some spider's trap, held hostage by an invisible fate. He couldn't remember sleeping, just that something was being torn away from him by the minute, something he couldn't reach, something so far and yet so near, but incomprehensible. The pillows clogged, the stillness dangerous, a conflagration with the slightest move. It came crushing down, this weight of nothing.

And then she awoke, her eyes looked at him, searchingly, and held his own. She caught him just in time as he reached for the bowl. But it was the wrong kind, another need.

And he didn't know her.

—

"Tell me. Don't hold anything back," she had said and her father had told her what he knew: that Matthew had been disoriented when he was brought in, that he had a fracture and burns in his legs. But she hadn't prepared for what she would see—the violence, the escape, the forced bind. It took all of her to fight and give, to beat against the current when everything crashed, splintered like his memories. Yet she found she was spared. Anna said the blood had stained her dress permanently, the exertion marked like spilt milk, their salt tears etched on her face.

"He hasn't lost all. His cognitive functions are normal." Still, it wasn't that she distrusted Dr. Clarkson; it was that she saw it in Matthew. Then she began to doubt herself. For it was all like a dream, that last time and now she had lost her conspirator, her guide. Now was not the time to confirm. She must go on. So when her father said Lavinia must know, she did the right thing. Whether she had heard or not, whatever it was, she ordered the telegram. "Don't worry" not "All is well." Nothing more, nothing less. It was her father who had phoned Lavinia.

She looked in the mirror, her hair in disarray, his presence in its splits, even the pins that now scratched her neck. Was that a tear near her white collar? She undid the buttons, wondered if that was an insect bite on her chest. She pressed it with her finger, to see if it bled. Was it an infection? How long had it been there? Could she undo it? The mirror was old. She could see doubles. There were no answers.

A/N. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you suspect is going on. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!