A/N: Posting early tonight! The next chapter is up, and will probably be up soon because it kind of goes hand in hand with this one. :D
Enjoy!
Jack's patience proved more resilient than he'd ever given himself credit for.
As her ability to remain awake grew, Samantha's condition was made even more concerning. Physical injuries aside—for they remained numerous, and were slow to heal—the most pressing remained her memory.
It seemed as though her short-term memory lasted only so long as she remained completely focused. The moment her attention wavered, the moment her thoughts wandered, she lost it all again.
Sometimes, it was just facts she lost. Jack would be talking, and one minute she'd be listening intently, the next she'd be distracted by a sound or a bird outside the window. When she turned back, she'd have forgotten his name and what he'd been telling her. But those were easy enough to work with.
The trouble came when she lost everything—she'd forget where she was, that she was safe… all of it.
The end result was so physically jarring that even Jack could read it in her expression before she could even start to panic. And panic she did. The nurses soon became used to delivering a light sedative to help keep her calm if needed, and some days they were constantly coming in and out in response to the rapidly beeping spikes in her heart monitor.
But every time it happened, he explained everything one more time. Calmly, patiently, he'd tell her what her name was, what hospital she was in. He even told her the cause of her injuries—which he'd judiciously and simply termed an accident. He refused to confuse her with the cover story, and figured she didn't need to know about Romeo. Not when she'd just forget again.
The bastard was dead, and he would stay that way.
The doctors encouraged him to let her rest as much as possible, and he obeyed without protest. It was clear she needed the sleep, and that it did her good—each time she woke up, despite the newest lapse in memory, her eyes were brighter, sharper.
For weeks she drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes gradually, but more often at the drop of a hat. The doctors assured him it wasn't worrisome for her to drop off in the middle of a sentence, especially with a head injury like hers. As long as she kept waking up, there wasn't any immediate concern.
He could do nothing but wait, and be there whenever she opened her eyes. In time, he grew familiar with those eyes—to the point where he could even picture them in his sleep. Sometimes he continued to speak when she slept, in low tones that could barely qualify as a murmur. He couldn't prove it, but he could swear that she seemed a little more at ease when she woke if he did, as though the sound of his voice had remained familiar when every other memory had fled her mind.
She healed, but even as she did, new problems seem to arise. She had migraines—fierce, blinding, pounding headaches that left her in tears until someone dosed her with something. They came on almost without warning, and each time preceded a flush of recent memory. In the rare instances she recovered enough to converse before falling into an exhausted sleep, she'd forgotten again.
Her injured leg and shoulder both lost mobility—the doctors were unsure whether she'd be able to regain full use. And to make things worse, she couldn't do any conventional physiotherapy, since even the action of nodding her head ran the risk of triggering a migraine.
She lost weight, weight she couldn't afford to lose. Even when not suffering a migraine, she was constantly nauseous, and had difficulty keeping any sort of food down. The doctors said it could either be a result of the brain damage or a side effect of the many medications she was on.
Whatever the reason, it meant a G-tube was needed to provide the bare minimum of food she could manage. Between that and the IV, she remained hydrated and got the nutrients she needed, but it wasn't enough—she was still painfully thin.
And on top of all that, as if all that wasn't enough, she had these… lapses. Episodes, really, where she just seemed to lose it. Sometimes she rattled on and on in gibberish, speaking to him as calmly as if they were talking about the weather. Other times she threw fits, shouting accusations of snake and goold (or was it gold? He could never tell...) at the doctors and nurses who were assigned to her.
He was the only one who never received such accusations. In fact, he was often the one who calmed her, brought her back to reality long enough for her to be safely sedated. He was the one she begged for help, when she saw monsters everywhere she looked. But even he did not remain escape unscathed.
He would never admit to anyone, but sometimes he heard her call him a fifth—a fifth of what, he didn't know, but it was thrown at him with such scathing abhorrence that it made his hair curl. It made no sense to him, but his skin crawled regardless. He asked her what she'd meant once, when she was lucid, but she didn't remember any of it.
To him that was proof enough that her brains were scrambled. He could only hope that the damage might resolve itself, as the doctors remained optimistic that it might do just that. The human brain is a powerful thing, they said, as if that explained everything. As if waiting was all it took.
They didn't mention the constant ache of worry, or the headaches that came with the knowledge that she was just as likely to worsen as she was to improve. The only thing that kept him sane were the brief moments she was both awake and lucid, and they could almost have a conversation.
Eventually, he came to trust in her as much as she seemed to trust in him. He trusted in her to heal—she'd survived in the Arctic, she'd survived as Jennifer Blaine, and she'd survived a car wreck that still gave him nightmares. He trusted in her because he knew that if anyone could recover from this, she could.
Because the doctors were wrong. The human brain wasn't capable of anything. Not just any human brain anyway.
Her brain, on the other hand...
Her brain made its own fate.