I pushed back the pain again.

"I'm Maggie Davis," I said. "From Indiana. That is, from Indiana at present."

"Benton Fraser," he responded, and paused, as though he was leaving something usual out. "From Chicago, at present."

"How do you do." And I realized his hand was moving slightly in its place at his side, so I reached up through the bed's side railings and managed to twine my fingers lightly in his, in some kind of nod to a handshake.

"So, what do you go by?"

"Hmm?"

"Well, do people go around calling you Benton? Your parents I mean, or Detective Vecchio."

"Detective Vecchio calls me Frasure," he said, seemingly oblivious to the discrepancy in pronunciation. "Or sometimes Benny."

"I can't call you Benny," I decided aloud. "It sounds kind of shady."

"Yes," he considered. "I guess it rather does." He smiled faintly, as if the idea appealed to him.

"How about Ben," I asked. "I could call you Ben."

"I like that," he said, agreeing. "Some people call me that."

Time passed as we each held our positions, he out of an inability to move, me out of a brief desire not to.

Ultimately though, I broke the silence, apologizing, but admitting that being down on the floor was not the most comfortable place to hang out with still-new stitches in the back of my head. It was the first time I had referenced my stitches, even though he had asked after my injury earlier.

After apologizing I excused myself, planning to leave the room. Surely Vecchio would return before long, and I was not certain I was even supposed to be consorting with his partner, much less keeping him from his rest.

"Don't leave," Ben called after me, and I heard the catch in his voice from before, the one where he had been calling for Victoria, and realized that what I had first identified as fear had really been loneliness. A sound I had heard often enough in Kara's voice when we had to leave her alone.

"Hospitals are desolate places," I said, as I acquiesced and moved to sit in the chair between the windows. He didn't reply, but then it had not been the kind of statement that required a response.

We sat in silence for so long that I was sure he had fallen back to sleep, but as I shifted--quietly, I thought--in the chair, sliding out the foot rest, he spoke.

"Do you sing?"

I thought about pretending I hadn't heard him, or hadn't understood, but answered despite thoughts to the contrary. "Nothing fancy," I confessed.

"Would you--sing something?"

In normal circumstances I never would have done it--not even considered it momentarily. But then, nothing in my life had been going normally for days at this point.

"All right," I complied. "Give me a second."

It is one thing to sing something silly off the top of your head, something to yourself, something like Dancing Queen or even You've Lost that Loving Feeling. It's quite another to have to respond to someone's request for music. Necessarily it takes a bit more effort, and a bit more dignity as well.

"This is a song--maybe you know it--my mother used to sing my sister and me to sleep. So I guess it's a kind of lullaby."

"Thank you," he said, before I even began. Perhaps he had the right idea--that if I really stunk--sang off-key, under pitch, the whole nine yards--he wouldn't have to try and summon genuine thanks after.

I straightened up in the chair, thinking of sixth grade choir and lectures on the diaphragm. Light fell across the bed in front of me through the large windows over my shoulder. I was positioned at an angle where I could not see anything outside the room except the blank wall of the corridor.

I could not see Ben's face, he was again just a body--a form in a hospital bed. It was not at all like I was in Chicago. I could have been anywhere in the world. I could have been sitting in that chair, keeping a vigil with my own past.

Ben's breath, which he strained slightly against the bed's hold to get, reminded me of Kara. Of how at some point even taking her own breath had been an accomplishment.

The silhouette of the room swam in front of me, and I began to sing, slowly, the way I had heard it last, the way that Kara had sung it to me. "Down in the valley, the valley so low. Hang your head over, and hear the wind blow. Hear the wind blow, Lord, hear the wind blow. Hang your head over, and hear the wind blow."

I do not remember blacking out, coming to, or trying to walk out of the room only to collapse into a jello-legged heap on the floor. I only remember chanting the circular memory of the song's line into the half-darkness, over and over and over again until I could almost feel it returning to me, like the strength I no longer had.