Chapter 16: The Pine and Oak's Trust
He felt an intense burning sensation in his leg, it spreading like a fire through his veins, and with a groan he blinks opens his eyes, seeing a hand putting a cool, wet cloth to his forehead.
As soon as his eyes fluttered open, the pair of electric blue colored eyes meet his gaze and immediately filled with tears. Layla's arms wrap around his torso, him still laying down and her awkwardly on top of him, and he heard her sobs of relief and felt her body shake. Without even thinking he puts a hand on the small of her back and rubs gently to comfort her.
Ford couldn't help but think that her body was pressed against his, his face feeling hot. When he was younger he didn't think much about starting relationships with women, he was too focused on his academics and research. Stanley was the one who was interested in relationships, he had even wanted a family of his own… but Ford wasn't that type.
Or so he had thought.
Feeling her against him felt like it was the natural thing in the world. He could feel her heartbeat slowly going into sync with his own. At this realization his heartbeat increased, feeling his heartbeat bouncing against his chest.
Layla's face then looks into his, and he tried his best not to have his burning face be totally shown. Her eyes were red and puffy from her crying, tear streaks down her pale cheeks.
"You…" Layla barely whispered, her voice soft. Then her eyes narrowed angrily, making Ford flinch, and she practically growls, "You… IDIOT!" She then slaps him across his face, not very hard but hard enough to startle him. "Why would you do that?! I… I thought you were going to die!" she cries, tears starting to stream again.
Ford's chest clenches, him feeling guilty. "I'm sorry…" he apologizes. "I didn't mean to make you worry…" The weight from Layla being on him then disappears, him suddenly feeling cold as the warmth of her body left him. He then tries to sit up but hisses in pain.
"No, Ford!" the woman exclaims. "You shouldn't be moving, you're still bleeding from your wound!"
"W-wound?" Ford gasps. He then sits up slightly, wincing through his pain, and he saw that his leg was wrapped in Layla's purple sweater, blood seeping through. "Oh…" he whispers. He then looks up back at Layla, seeing that her coat was wrapped extremely tight around her. He finally made the connection that she had used her shirt to bandage his leg. "Oh, your shirt, Layla…"
"I'll get a new one," she quickly said. "I was waiting until you woke up so I can get some healing ointment."
Ford raises a brown brow. "Healing ointment?" he questions. "Why didn't you get it before?"
Layla's face blushes red. "I-I had to make sure you didn't die…" she stammers. "Now that you're awake… I can go get it. These parts of the multiverse have extreme medical advances here…" She then leans on the wall, and it was the first time that Ford was looking where he was in.
It was an extremely small room, but there were dark blankets and pillows about. Someone was here… but Layla had said she had never been in this dimension before. That means… Dr. Bartek was here at one point. Another secret alcove it seemed to be, it must've been his technology that made them, and by the looks of it Dr. Bartek was hiding out in this dimension.
"I… I also found this…" Layla then whispers, holding up a wrecked book, a pale blue in color with dark stains in its cover. "It's a journal…and… it's a very detailed journal on his victims." She was referring to her father. "My father seemed to send his failed experiments to these dimensions, testing out his portal. He met a few of them here… them bleeding and dying as their bodies started morphing into demonic creatures. Demons like to prey on weak souls… so they preyed on the victims… causing them to become bloody demons themselves…"
Ford's heart seemed to skip a beat. Innocent people that Dr. Bartek had taken and did unethical experiments to them. They had a fate worse than death. The people became monsters in eternal pain…
"So… this is one of the alcoves?" Ford guesses, figuring that's where they were.
Layla shakes her head. "No… this is a warehouse. But my father seemed to… continue with his experiments here," she says to him. She then gets up and grabs another blanket and throws it over Ford. "I'll be back, okay?" she stated, her voice wavering. She then gets the gun from her side and takes a deep breath. "I will be back…" she says again, this time it seemed like she was most likely trying to reassure herself. Layla then slowly leaves the room, but not before she looks back at Ford, whose brown gaze behind his glasses look at here with a worried expression. "W-what…?" she stammers.
"Just come back, okay?" Ford tells her, a small sad smile on his face. He wanted to believe that she could handle herself out there, after all she was in the multiverse for sixteen years before he had arrived.
Layla then gives Ford a brilliant smile and walks back towards him. She crouches down and gives him a tight hug, careful by his injured leg. "I will come back!" she says again, this time her voice a lot stronger and more determined. She then releases her embrace with Ford and walks out from the room, leaving Ford alone.
Ford's leg was throbbing painfully, and despite having a makeshift bandage on it, blood was still slowly dribbling from the sides. He felt his body becoming colder, thus why Layla probably threw a blanket on him to keep him warm. Ford felt his eyes grow heavy and his breathing slow, him becoming extremely tired. A small smile spreads on his face, him thinking that sleep would be so nice.
"Layla was very warm… she's… very… warm…" his eyes flutter shut.
What seemed only a few moments that he had shut his eyes, a warm sensation was spreading in his leg.
Ford gasps as he sits upright, his heart pounding in a panic. He then sees that Layla was at his leg, a tube of some kind of ointment in her hand as the other was on her leg. She looked at him startled, her blue eyes wide.
"Stanford…?" she says cautiously.
"Layla?" Ford's confused expression then turns into a large smile, his brown eyes looking a little hazy. "You came back! That was fast!" he cries out happily.
Layla cocks a black eyebrow. She then looks at the tube of the ointment she had in her hand. "Huh… I wonder if this is making you high…" she wondered aloud curiously.
"What…?" Ford gasped, him dramatically and clumsily putting a hand to his chest. "Never did drugs in my life and I was in school during the seventies! That's a no-no!" he then wags his finger the way his mother used to when he and Stanley got in trouble as children.
Layla laughs, one that sounded musical, "No… this medicine actually does give you a high… you're high, Stanford." She then looks at his leg, only a hole in his pants and some dried up blood showing that he ever had a wound there. "Better then you dying that's for sure…" she then mumbles, but Ford didn't hear.
"But you came back!" Ford cries out again. "That's great! And I only closed my eyes for a second!"
Layla then says slowly, "Ford… I was gone for an hour… you were snoring when I came back, and it took at least another four hours to get your leg to heal." She kept her gaze on his as she talked. "I'm assuming because of your blood loss that your high is a lot stronger…"
"I don't snore." Ford then says seriously, his expression hard.
Layla gives him a mischievous smile. "Yeah, you do," she sternly tells him. "And very loudly too."
As time went on Ford's high slowly dispersed from his system, him eventually actually forgetting what they had talked about earlier. Once he felt strong enough he tested out his preciously injured leg, the hole in his pants revealing a pale scar that was there. He moved his leg around and found that it was perfectly fine. With a sigh of relief he then goes into his trench coat pocket and grabbed the small case that had contained the infinite sided die. Was it worth almost dying for?
"Why did you grab that, Ford?" Layla asks him, her gaze on the die, noticing how it constantly changed.
"I… I figured with something as dangerous as this that Bill or even Magum shouldn't try to get their demonic hands on it…" Ford explains, him observing the changing symbols. "One of their minions would've stolen it and gave it to them, or rolled it themselves." He sighs as he puts the die away. "Hopefully I made the right choice… I didn't mean to make you worry."
Layla gives him a sympathetic look. "Hey, it's okay… I know in your heart you believed you were doing right," she tells him as she playfully punched him in the shoulder. Then her expression went hard as she punched him forcibly against his shoulder. "But, you're still an idiot for doing that!"
"OW!"
"What if I did'tt get us out of that situation!? What if I hadn't found my father's cursed warehouse full of damn dead people in the other rooms!? What if I didn't manage to find a medical facility!? What if… what if I had come back and you were dead, Stanford!?" the more she listed the more hysterical she sounded, her eyes filling with tears as her voice wavered and cracked. She had been pacing the room back and forth, Ford nervously scratching behind his head.
"Hey… I didn't mean-" he tried to say but was cut off.
"NO!" she screamed at him. "I don't care that you 'didn't mean to'!" she gave him such an icy glare that Ford felt frozen in place. "You're supposed to be intelligent right, Mr. I Have a Gazillion PhD's!"
"I have twelve-"
"You should've thought that whole thing through!" she insisted. "I could've stolen it while you distracted if you had just told me!" She then said something with such a defeated sounding tone, her voice cracking as tears began to fall, and that it almost made Ford's heart shatter, "Do you even trust me?"
Ford hadn't trusted in a long time. The first person who truly betrayed his trust was no other than his twin brother, Stanley sabotaging his project that costed his chance to get into a real good school on a scholarship. Then when Ford trusted a demonic entity and his trust was once again thrown back into his face. Slowly he had slinked into madness, becoming sleep deprived and becoming so paranoid that he almost shot his twin with a crossbow when he was the one who invited him in the first place. Even when he first met Layla one of the first things she said was to trust no one.
But then he thought of how she must've felt during her years in these lonely dimensions. She had trusted her father was doing the right thing experimenting on those people. She had trusted Magum and his gang and she had become abused in more ways than one. She was even betrayed by someone she thought she could trust with information, but that creature had wanted the reward of the bounty that was placed on Ford's head.
Layla knew better than anyone about trust…
"Of course I trust you…" Ford honestly admits, him glancing away from her powerful blue gaze in nervousness. "I… I just didn't think it through… that was all my fault. I wouldn't want you to feel guilty if I got myself killed for something."
She then walked over to him and wrapped her arms around his torso, putting her head to his chest. He then noticed that she was wearing a navy blue sweater, her most likely stealing it during her medicine run, but what he really noticed was the warmth that pulsed from her. The iciness he had felt within his veins melted away, slowly being replaced with her lovely warmth.
"I trust you," he states firmly again, not wanting to make her feel that she was untrustworthy.
Layla gazes up at him with her electric blue eyes, her slightly upturned nose still looking so pixie-like and her splash of freckles across her nose making her look almost childlike. A few strands of her long, jet black hair framed her thin face. Without thinking Ford uses a hand and tucks the strands behind her ears.
"I trust you too, Stanford."
A/N: Welp, if "trust" isn't love between these two I don't know what is. Wait... I should know, I'm the one writing this story!
So, I have been practicing my drawing once again and this time I did a couple of head sketches of Layla, so I have been thinking about getting a Devianart or something like that to post my artwork, and that way people can link me easier to any art they would like to share.
Thanks for reading as usual everyone!
~Skye Hendersen~
