Chapter eight

enjoy, amacma

Short before noon, the following day, Teddy woke up – well, the light that shone in from the little gap between the curtains made her stir, but the headache didn't allow her to go back to sleep.

She sat up in bed and looked around. God, she didn't even remember how or when she'd gone to bed. After all, she lay here, still fully dressed beneath the blanket.
She sat up.
That was waaaaay too quick.

She didn't remember how much she'd had last night. Quite a lot of drinks with Mark and then there was this bottle of wine.
She opened the door and found the empty bottle standing on the couch table. God, that must be the reason for her headache. Jack hadn't really helped with that one...

He just came out of the bathroom, putting his shirt back on. She was surprised to see that he had removed the bandages around his head and the one on his nose. For the first time at all, he almost looked like the man on the photograph that the agents had showed her.
But her view got caught in the shirt he was wearing. One of Henry's… damn, she shouldn't have given him this one. Every other time that she saw him wearing Henry's clothes, it nearly broke her heart. He was a bit smaller than Henry, the sweatpants were at least an inch too long. And he was a lot skinnier than Henry, probably just undernourished, another evidence of what he'd gone through.

"'re you alright?", he asked her.

Teddy held her forehead, as she slightly nodded yes. What a silly situation, to be asked how she was, from someone who was in his state.

"I made some coffee", he silently added, hoping to cheer her up.

She smiled. She could already smell it.
Sill holding her head, she went over to the kitchen counter and poured herself a cup of coffee. It didn't make the headache better.
The glasses and the jug were standing on the counter, right next to her.

Her eyes searched for Jack, finding him standing out in the living room, watching her, too.
"How are you today?", she finally asked, and referenced to the cup of coffee in his hands, "you shouldn't drink coffee."

He looked at the almost empty mug, finishing it in one draught. "You should have told me that three hours ago.", he added, softly smiling. "You look like you should go to bed again, right away.", he joked.

Teddy shook her head, "no, I really can't." She ran her hand through her messed up hair, trying to think back. "When did we go to bed yesterday?", she asked. She couldn't remember.

"You mean today? You fell asleep around five." That was when she had suddenly gone silent, still sitting in the leather chair, having hugged her legs.

She didn't dare ask him if it had been him who had brought over to her bed. But judging from how silent he was, that probably was how it had happened and now he didn't want to cause her an awkward moment.

"Your guy left a message.", Jack added and nodded at the answering machine. The call was what had woken him up a few hours ago.

"God…", she held her aching head once more and went over to play the message. Mark was asking her out on a date again, for tonight. It seemed that she'd gotten his hopes up the day before.
She took the phone with her and went into her bedroom to call him.

"I'll leave, whenever you want me to.", Jack said as she came back out a few minutes later. She looked a bit relieved, when she put the phone back down again. "No, you don't have to leave", she said, "I told him once and for all that we won't repeat yesterday evening." The past evening had been a good one – but the part after coming home, not the part being with Mark. "I never really wanted to go out with him in the first place.", she added.

Jack had to smile as he heard that. "You told me that… yesterday night."

"Really?"

He nodded. "About five times, to make me feel sorry that you sacrificed yourself to hide me." She had really been drunk.

Embarrassedly she tried to change the topic as quick as possible. "I should have a look at your abdomen. And your back…", and your arms and your ribs and your head, she could have added, but she didn't enumerate all his injuries, "in a few minutes", she added and let herself fall down on the leather chair, in which she had spent half of the night talking.

Jack took a glass of water and put it down on the table in front of her, before he lay down at the sofa again.

As she saw it, she gladly took it. "Are you taking care of me now, mister?", she asked him.

He slightly shook his head. It was just a glass of water, the only thing to help against the headache.

"But it was you who brought me to bed, right?"

"You needed a little help walking.", he murmured. She had gladly taken his help, put an arm around his neck, murmuring a few unintelligible things. When he put her down on her own bed she had grabbed him by his shirt, telling him to stay there, calling him Henry. She didn't even want to let go any more, not even as he tried to pull the fabric out of her hand – it had only made her tell him to stay, murmuring that she loved him.
He let her have the illusion, confusing him with some other guy who her heart still belonged to. It were only few minutes anyway, after which she finally let go, when she fell asleep.

Even though she couldn't remember all that, Teddy felt embarrassed. Hadn't she been the one to help him walk, just another day ago? She didn't even remember. Stealthily she glanced at him lying there. He looked better than on the day before. Day by day, he got more of his strength back. She could swear that he had even put a little bit of weight back on.
She forced herself to drink that glass of water. Otherwise the headache would never go away.
For a long while she sat there in silence. Jack had his eyes closed, trying to sleep. The laceration on his temple didn't look that bad any more. His right cheekbone was still swollen and black, but the scratches on his chin had also healed off within the last days.

Half an eternity later, she slowly stood up and went over to him, sitting down on the couch table. Jack stirred as she took his right hand into hers and brushed the sleeve of the shirt back, to get to the bandage around his right hand and forearm. But he saw that her view lingered on the sleeve of the shirt he was wearing, and not at his arm. Maybe she remembered now how she had fallen asleep. Or maybe not.
"You miss him a lot, don't you?", he said, silently, not to rip her out of her daydreams.

Teddy just nodded and turned back to his arm, loosening the bandage. "I don't wanna talk about it.", she breathed and kept working. As she was finished taking off the gauze, the disfigured skin came to light. The skin on the back of his right hand, on his wrist and on the inner side of his forearm was hurt- red, burned, barely healing. At first, she had thought these were second degree burns, but then again, these wounds looked different than the ones she had seen before.
"What caused that?", she asked, grabbing a fresh piece of gauze.

"Now that's something I don't wanna talk about."

Their eyes met.

"I just asked because…" she tried to explain,

"I know.", Jack cut her off.

Teddy watched him, as he slowly lifted his right hand, to have a look at it. It was the first time for him to see it, after getting away from the Chinese. Slowly, he turned it, and looked at it from all sides. Throughout the past days, it had always been bandaged. Now, for the first time, he could see it clearly. The disfigured skin. The burns. Even if it would heal someday, it would always look that way.
"It doesn't even hurt now", he commented, surprised, after seeing how big the damage was.

"Cortisone ointment.", Teddy answered, "And it's only superficial."

He still looked at it. He hated to think back. Would this ever end? Would he ever be able to look at himself, in the mirror, or just at his hand without being reminded of what had happened?
He hated to remember. And yet it was inevitable.

"Acid.", he said.

Teddy froze. It was a fitting answer. Chemical burns often left similar traces to normal burns.

"The first time it happened… I guess it was a month or two ago, before I was brought to the ship." He kept sight of his hand, "They poured some transparent liquid over the back of my hand… it ran down here", he pointed at the spot, where the red marks enclosed his whole wrist, "and got spilled all over the table", he showed her the inner side of his forearm, that had lain in the pool of caustic liquid.
"It hurt like hell. After a few minutes, they let go of me, poured water over it to wash the rests of the liquid away and put me back into my cell. It was just a little bit red then. But I knew this wasn't yet over." He had another look at the skin just beneath the knuckles. "They repeated that, the day thereafter. And then once more. After the third or fourth time they didn't even care to wash the rests of that acid off."

A cold shiver ran down her spine. She could hear it in his voice, in every single word, how hard it was for him to talk about this.

"A few hours later, one of them came into my cell and took some water to wash off the rests. They repeated that routine… and every other day, this looked worse." He remembered how the itching red skin had started to blister, then to weep and after some days to bleed, breaking up after the smallest contact with anything. "The time until that one came to wash it off, it got longer and longer. And one day, he came and I already thought that it would now be over, but he didn't have water. He poured even more of that stuff over me." He wondered how easy it suddenly was, to talk about it. The first sentences had been like repeating this torture, but now it was almost healing to let it out. "They stood just outside the door and took delight in hearing me scream. I don't know how, but I managed to rip the soaked clothes off me and crawl away from that caustic puddle."

Spellbound, Teddy sat there, listening. She didn't move an inch. She couldn't have. It was unimaginable what he'd been through, and yet she felt with him, with every word he said, like if they were here, doing this to her, as well.
She was staring at it, as he laid his arm down on her thigh again, to let her dress it. She was used to seeing such things. Wounds of all kinds, shot wounds, blood all over, broken bones, skin ripped apart. She was there to mend things, to heal, and she hardly ever took her time to think about how painful it must have been to get hurt like that.

"Teddy?"

She startled, awaking form her apathy again.

"I didn't mean to frighten you.", he silently said.

"You didn't", she hurriedly said.
She grabbed the new pieces of gauze that she'd already prepared and fixed them with the bandage.
"You can't even imagine what things I've seen before.", she remarked. All kinds of severed limbs, victims of explosions and landmines, shot wounds… But yet it felt a little different, hearing him talk about the torture that he had endured. He was not just another nameless soldier. At least not to her.
"Finished." She put on a little smile and looked up again, "I asked and I got an answer. I'm used to seeing ugly things."

"I'm sure." He had seen her wearing an army combat uniform on one of the pictures that hung on the walls around here. But he decided not to ask her about it.
"I hadn't thought it would be that easy to talk about it.", he added, having a look at the new bandage around his right arm. All the evidence was hidden beneath it again. "Thanks."

"I'm your doctor, Jack, and we're strangers. That makes talking easier, I guess."

He slightly nodded. "I guess you're right."

She stood up and went to prepare some breakfast, while he still lay there, thinking. To him, she was way more than a stranger. She had become a friend – his only one.

.

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