For Disclaimer, see chapter one. Thank you for the reviews and the follows! You guys rock! Just one more chapter after this one! Hope you like it.

Death stares back at him.

Familiar.

Striking.

I am…

This dark, imposing figure draped in his favorite cloth, a meticulous cut in pant, vest, and suit jacket, adorned in a well-chosen fedora, pieced together with a tie and an overcoat to drag on broad shoulders. Red regards the mirror image of himself on days where snuffing out various lives takes its bitter toll on him. All the edges of his face, the lifeless, chilling doppelganger, hold the whispers of destruction and turpitude. Every sin is marked, felt, exuded from this…creature that stalks towards him through the grass; the silent harbinger of fear into the air about him.

Accepting of the irony but reticent to be shown this next leg of the journey, inwardly recoiling in the face of a judgment he'd been so ready to face numerous times before, he flinches when the grim feature of his own frustrated facial expression is tossed his way; a hand lifted in the direction of where Lizzie had disappeared just a short time ago.

There is no taking of this ghoul's hand. No words spoken that can coax him forward. It is as though Anslo's chain has dug into his chest again, and that searing, frigid sensation is there to tug him along with every step this devil takes in Lizzie's direction. Dragging him along, an invisible tether of soul and mind, it captivates Red in the most awful way. To see one's own misery, one's own evil, one's own demise. But when the painstaking journey into the trees is over and the babbling noise of running water fills the air, Red finds himself beside his reaper as Lizzie faces a lonely grave by the waterside. She is mid-rant, flustered, crying, her fists balled and shaking.

"Down." He feels the dark rumbling of his own voice from this awful specter beside him and he is unable to resist the heavy command as he falls to his knees behind Lizzie's enraged figure. The heaviness of the moment magnifies, piling again and again into the area until it stifles him with sorrow, with fear. He is wrought with longing once more, that familiar grief in knowing he cannot reach out for the one he cherishes. It is a sensation of paralysis and the desperate desire to move when he knows he can't.

"There were a dozen other avenues. A dozen other plays that we could have made to ensure you made it out of that place alive but you didn't take anyone's input! You stormed in there on your own, locked us in a fucking bunker, and you-" she cuts off so harshly that he winces, staring at her as she presses the back of her hand to her mouth, breathing harsher than what he'd seen in the bathroom with Sam. A sick feeling of regret washes through him and he yearns to yell back. To defend himself as if he knows, deep down, the way he's betrayed his friends and his love for them. For her.

"I'm sorry I haven't visited you in a few months, it's just…No matter how many times I come here," she watches the water, her head lifted and body bending to crouch before his grave. He wonders, looking at her, how many times she came to visit here. Why? I'm not here. Go live your life! It's why I've sacrificed so much. Go, Lizzie. Go. "I never feel at peace." Her voice is ruined by the emotion pressing to the back of her throat; a sound he can feel as though her fist has gripped his heart and pulled.

"Dembe and Kate took me on a road trip. Well, not exactly a road trip, it was more like a trip around the world. Aram came with us. You should have seen him in Mykonos." She aims for something happy to say, some sort of laugh. Red, unsettled, watches her flip between laughter and smiles before flopping into sadness. "Couldn't get him to leave Matoyianni street until we bought everyone a souvenir. I bought an Etro dress from Soho-Soho…figured you'd be proud of me for that one." She grows quiet again, her head bowing every so often as she attempts a deep breath.

"They took me to all your favorite places; let me meet the decent people you had in your life, even if some of them gave Aram a heart attack. That sweet old lady in Poland with the guns? Seriously?" She swallows around the thickness in her voice, and he wishes, desperately that he could move so as to see her face and witness what is in her expression. This nonsense of only being able to see her from behind is madness. "That kind family you stayed with in Marrakech after you almost-" His eyes jump to every tense movement in her shoulders. Her back. Her neck. The sides of her jaw when she clenches it to steel herself.

"I made them take me to those places because I thought I would enjoy it. I thought it would…commemorate your life or something." A breeze picks up and stirs the fly-away hairs around her face. She brings a hand up to try and tame them behind her ears. "Every time we dined out or tried a local delicacy, I couldn't help but hear your stupid voice. Try the pho, Lizzie, it's absolutely to die for; Charles is the only man I know that takes his soup stock seriously. Don't shy away from the khash; it's a humbling experience, so try not to mind the head. Make sure you get a good cup of coffee with your rétes, Lizzie or it won't be worth it." Red can't help but smile when she tries to mimics his voice and, for a moment, there is a trace of fondness in Lizzie's tone that makes him draw in a sharp breath. All of these things, and more, had made his life beautiful, and the fact that she had gone and experienced some of those things…that Dembe and Mr. Kaplan had taken her…

"Dembe took me to visit Josephine. Red, if you had just-" Josephine's name slams into him and finds himself in a kind of panic. All of the contingency plans he had in place in case something happened to him, all those accounts and all that money for various people to be taken care of…he never accounted for Lizzie meeting one the few he held dear to himself. What she must think of him not being able to protect Josephine from a thug. What Dembe must have told her of his desire to make right his failure. What she must feel in light of it.

Her head drops so she's looking at her hands, balled up one moment, then fidgeting the next in her lap. Hands he's held. Hands he's kissed. Hands that tried to stem the flow of his blood on almost every close call over the years. Hands that held him back. Hands that used to clench in the extra fabric of his jacket in moments of weakness and relief. "You didn't share yourself with us! You just barreled forward. You weren't supposed to leave-" he flinches when she curses, rising to her feet, and he can only stare up at her in solemn horror for her expression as she turns her back on his grave and stares blankly in the direction they'd come.

"I miss everything, Red." Her face crumbles into a sorrow he can't console. She turns and faces his grave again, only this time, she moves to sit against it, to lean into it. He is overcome and, feeling a jarring sensation, he looks up to see that his silent self is frowning at Lizzie. "I miss how crazy my life was. It's still crazy, just in a different way. I'm not...me. How can I be? The last few years were unbelievable. How can I tell anyone new about a life that feels so old? I've been fighting for so long, I don't know how to function, Red. I'm just...lost." Drowning. Trying to come up for air in an ocean with no surface.

Tears well up in her eyes; tentative things that threaten to spill on a lower eyelid that trembles. He watches her lift her sleeve to her eye to dab at them, burying her face in in her forearm before she draws it away.

"I miss you." Chin wobbling, she leans her head back against the tombstone and casts her eyes into the canopy of the trees overhead as her tears finally leak out the corners of her eyes. The water from the creek murmurs by and the tranquil sound sends him into motion, feeling anything but calm.

"Is this...?" He rises and rounds on the grim version of himself, facing the bemused and sinister expression on his own face as if it will scare him back into his place on the ground before Elizabeth. Before death and the lack of reckoning. "Is this the future?" But this murderous version of himself simply sizes him up and shoves him back a few steps. Red's heart is pounding as he watches himself evolve into the subdued rage that exists within him when he's settling a score. The tick under his eye twitches, a snarl forms on his reaper's face.

"Down." Again, that heaviness weighs on his entire body, and though he fights the power being exerted on him, he can't hold himself upright. His legs shake, and his breathing comes in strangled gasps until he is on his knees; once more facing her. The sound of the overcoat whispers through the air as the ominous doppelganger moves behind him. There is a distinct note of critique in Red's mind as he wonders what purpose his Ghost of Christmas Future has in speaking when the original, if he remembers correctly, stayed silent throughout Ebeneezer's horror and pleading to make it right. This can't be, this simply cannot be.

Looking at Lizzie, watching her grief overwhelm her, he hears the faint rustling of the figure behind him, of something metallic being weighed in hand. It isn't until she draws her knees up, wraps her arms around them, and rests her face against the fabric of her jeans as her body shakes, that his brain clues him in on what he is hearing.

"You know," Laden with a heavy baritone, his reaper's voice seeps into the air around him like his presence had when he first appeared. A dark cloud, a poison, a finale. A malignant wave of guilt, shame, demons, and regret. "Oppenheimer taught himself Sanskrit so he could read Hindu scripture. Specifically, Bhagavad Gita. And while his translation might have been off, that famous quote of his still echoes in the brightest and darkest of circles today." The cold, hard press of a muzzle at the back of Red's skull makes him close his eyes as he listens to his own voice recount the verse.

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky…that would be like the splendor of the mighty one." He can feel the moment drawing down upon him as if he were aware of the end; the tension that holds him fast, the reality the same as the fear or indignation he's seen in countless victims before. Amid his anticipation, it's the small noises from her crying that tear him apart. The light of her, even in this broken state of all-consuming sorrow, doesn't diminish; an atomic flash of hope and salvation.

The sniffling, the gulps of air between sobs. Lizzie seems to be falling apart before him and there is no way for him to tell her that she isn't alone. But she is alone. He left her. He made sure to leave her and Dembe and undoubtedly Ressler and Baz. Kate…she would have known there would come a day, and if she had been willing to give Lizzie that trip, perhaps she doesn't hate him for his selfish martyrdom.

"Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." The final excerpt of the verse hangs there in the air, and Red, on impulse, sucks in a breath to steady himself. Finished off by a thing that wears his worst attributes as if they were natural and not forged in fire and blood, loss and betrayal. "We're not so dissimilar to Oppenheimer, are we?" Thoughtful, resounding, all Red can do is open his eyes and drink in Elizabeth's folded features as she cries on against his grave; a cold stone that won't offer her any warmth or solace or truth.

"Just do it," Fractured and brittle, his voice is a hoarse thing. He wants to leave this place, this dream, this nightmare of a time. A sick churning in his gut makes his shoulders slump and he leans back to sit on his legs in defeat; no longer able to kneel as rigidly as before.

"There are protocols." Anslo's words echo through this version of him, and Red cants his head back, interested, but unwilling to look away from Lizzie. There was too much he needed to tell her. Too much that she would hate him for. Too much he could hardly think of without wanting to disappear from existence. Forgive me, Lizzie. Forgive me, please, forgive me. Useless, helpless, he remains with that gun pressed up against his head; a far cry from the auction at the King's, but similar in all the right ways. At least, this time, she was before him. A visual that didn't need to be concocted. I just wish she wasn't…devastated…I'm not…

"There it is." His voice from behind stops him mid-thought, and a cold sensation steels over him. There's a click, the sound of leather being strained as gloved hands clench, and then there is nothing but the fading image of Lizzie and her waterside grieving.

"Elizabeth," Dembe's gentle voice from the doorway startles her attention away from the setting sun outside the window in Red's room. She looks from Dembe's guilty smile to Red's still form. "Dinner's ready. The doctor said he won't be awake for a few more hours, if everything goes well." If everything goes well. If Mr. Kaplan, Dr. Renovich, or Dembe say that one more time, she might lose it. But she sets the book she had on her lap onto the chair cushion, having been too lost in her thoughts to even begin reading it, and makes her way to the door. She keeps Red in the corner of her eye as she passes by his bed, knowing that, if she turns to look at him again, she might not leave this room.

"What are we having?" It's a hushed question that she really has no interest in asking as she falls into step beside him while they head down the hallway. Still numb from her discovery earlier, from Dembe's debriefing of the information they acquired from the people holding Red, from her discussion with Ressler, from Tom's call...God, from everything, the last thing she wants to do is eat. But Mr. Kaplan will give her that stare from earlier, and Dembe will look on her with his compassionate eyes, and that might be worse than shoveling a few morsels of whatever into her mouth.

"Mr. Kaplan has made us a stew," Liz wrinkles her nose a little and Dembe must have caught the gesture out of the corner of his eye, because he leans in and adds, "It's her specialty, trust me." There's conspiracy in his eyes and a slight smile to his lips when she looks at him. He goes ahead of her down the stairs, a subtle movement that lets him lead, and it takes her a moment, but she realizes that it's his habit; to proceed into a room that could, potentially, be full of danger. It's a bit ridiculous to imagine, especially with the team guarding this place, but it reminds her of the countless instances where he must have preceded Red down a staircase, and then followed him up another so he didn't get blindsided from behind. Seamless. Practiced.

He waits at the bottom of the stairs for her, a quiet hesitation that allows her to lead the way into the kitchen, and when she swings the door open, the smell of home collides into her, and she stops. Mr. Kaplan is scooping out portions into three bowls, but turns to stare at Liz, a quizzical expression on her face.

"It's beef stew." Liz looks to see the truth of it in Mr. Kaplan's eyes as she says it; voice lost amid the recollection of Sam cooking in their kitchen in Nebraska. In the cabin by the lake when she was a kid, when she was sick with strep throat, when they were snowed in. She can feel a warmth spread through her cheeks, and Liz, sensing Dembe holding the door open for her, moves determinedly to the table to take a seat. A moment or two later, a bowl is set down in front of her with a spoon. The steam weaves its way up from the broth, and she leans in to take a deep breath. It smelled exactly like-

"Are you alright, dear?" She doesn't know it, but she's closed her eyes, and when she opens them, she finds Mr. Kaplan reaching for her shoulder and dodges the comfort with an inelegant flinch.

"I'm fine." Liz snatches her spoon up from the table and moves the beef, potatoes, and carrots around a bit; feigning an attempt to cool it down.

"It's been a stressful day." She avoids Mr. Kaplan's stare, and merely nods before she endeavors to take a bite of the stew. The potatoes are seasoned in paprika, the meat tender and not overcooked, there's a slight kick, and the broth is...before she knows it, her vision is blurring and she shakes her head.

"You put cumin in this." Dembe and Mr. Kaplan smirk at one another, and the older woman rests her spoon in her bowl before she turns her full attention to her.

"It is goulash, Elizabeth. What else would I put in it?" Goulash. But not just any Goulash. Not to me. A laugh gets choked out around Liz's tears and she smiles.

"Cinnamon and olive oil and and hot paprika and- are you two trying to make me cry?" She isn't embarrassed, in fact she's grateful to them. It shouldn't surprise her that they have this recipe on hand, that Mr. Kaplan is an expert at making it, though she does wonder if she cooks it because Red likes to eat it after particularly hard days. In her mind, it wouldn't be a stretch for Red and Sam to have shared recipes at some point in their lives.

"No, but it's good to see you've come out of your stupor." Kaplan's droll reply gets a smile out of Dembe as he takes another bite, and Liz narrows her eyes a little, trying to discern whether or not she should respond seriously or with something witty. Liars, the both of them. She simply sits there, spoon in hand, and only takes up another bite once Mr. Kaplan has resumed eating. Their meal is spent, mostly, in silence, with Liz trying to control a smile every now and then when something happy crosses her mind. She still feels a bit disconnected, but the memories that her mind is conjuring up are full of light. They aren't the jumbled images of disarray from her past with Red.

Baz comes in to hand Dembe a phone, which has the three of them frozen in place for whatever news might be coming from the other end of it. He listens to the voice on the other end, a barely discernible murmuring, and he answers in a language that sounds a lot like Arabic, before excusing himself from the table. Liz watches him disappear through a side door to the kitchen, and discovers she has no idea where that door actually leads to. This place is too big.

"Can I expect you to get a few decent hours of sleep or will you be resuming your spot in Raymond's bedroom?" Mr. Kaplan has turned to fix her with a quiet look of summation; weighing every little indication towards one answer or another. Liz looks down at her empty bowl and then at the door Dembe vanished through a moment ago. How was she supposed to sleep when Red was scheduled to wake up in a few hours? If everything goes well, he could be up and about by as early as tomorrow, given how his heart sounds, how his lungs are functioning. "I thought as much." Mr. Kaplan rises and takes up her bowl, indicating Liz's empty one. "Would you like some more?"

"No, thank you." Distracted again, but eager to be of some use, Liz stands and takes her bowl and spoon before Mr. Kaplan can snatch it from her. "You did the cooking, I can do the dishes." Surprise lights the older woman's face, and she hands her bowl over to Liz a little too quickly. By the time Mr. Kaplan has put away the leftovers and Liz has started in on the pot the stew had been prepared in, Dembe comes back in through the door he'd left by, and resumes his eating. He casts Mr. Kaplan a slight, but meaningful look, and, as if it were her queue, the older woman takes her leave. Not for the first time, Liz is struck by the fact that so much of the communication in this odd little circle of people, this family, is done with a silent shorthand she isn't yet privy to. It's infuriating.

"Agent Ressler is back safely at the Post Office." Dembe sets his bowl beside the sink and Liz looks at him through a bit of hair that has fallen into her face from scrubbing out the pot. "He and the two Cabal members made it inside the building without incident, and our man is about to deliver the tapes we have from our own interrogations." She rinses the pot out and sets it to dry on the rack, and then she braces her hip against the counter when she faces him, arms folded across her chest.

"Ressler will take it from there, the team will investigate it, and then they might be more on board with this whole...," She extracts a hand to wave between the two of them, a frown drawing her features into a contemplative look. "Cabal mess." She looks down at Dembe's bowl on the counter, the last bit of her self-appointed chore, and then at the door she and Dembe had come through before dinner. How the hell was she going to approach the topic that lay festering inside of her all day? How was she going to discuss with the man a very private, but very personal, intimate event that concerned not just her, but him? God, it concerned him more than she had ever imagined. After remembering that she killed her father, after Red confirming it the way he did...she had never seen him so torn up about anything like that.

"I'll wash out my bowl, Elizabeth." Dembe takes her gently by the shoulders and maneuvers her away from the sink, peering down at her in understanding and a shared concern for the man upstairs. "Go on up, it shouldn't be too much longer, now." With a bit of protesting on her part, admittedly halfhearted, he ushers her out of the kitchen. Lost in the dimness of the corridor alongside the stairs, Liz meanders her way up to the second floor and is halted by Mr. Kaplan and Dr. Renovich standing outside Red's door.

"How is he?" She closes the distance enough to lower her voice, and Dr. Renovich looks to Mr. Kaplan for permission before taking a deep breath.

"Better, actually." The surprise in his tone denotes that he had not been expecting such an outcome, and Liz feels herself take offense on Red's behalf, as if the man were personally insulting his ability to survive. "As I was telling Kate, his heart sounds normal, EKG was normal, compared to earlier." Earlier when his heart stuttered and nearly stopped, when he'd had another seizure, when they were sure that if his fever didn't go down that they were going to lose him. "We're concerned about his right lung. There's some crackling with his breathing but that could just be due to his having been lying in one position for three days under duress. We'll be monitoring that pretty closely."

The right lung. Liz crosses her arms and catches the slight purse of Mr. Kaplan's lips at the news. It had barely been a month since he was shot, and he'd been off gallivanting around the globe with her, rescuing her, getting her out of the country, lifting things that were probably too heavy for him to be lifting. Like undercover cops bleeding out, and bags of supplies, and holding a man off the side of a building. She'd seen the way he winced at times when they'd had to flee DC, how subdued he seemed for a few hours after the Arioch Cane incident, and she'd meant to ask, but he was so damn-

"He has a few electrical burns that were on the cusp of infection, some lacerations from the cuffs around his wrists and ankles, and a cracked fourth rib, some of the others are bruised. We've given him antibiotics to help with the infection, and we're flushing his system with fluids. His blood work came back showing levels of valium and norepinephrine bitartrate, and we'd like to give him another dose of phenobarbital for the seizures once his labs are clear." Liz can hear her heartbeat in her ears, and she shifts her weight to her right just enough to lean a little in the direction of Mr. Kaplan. Her strong, stolid presence a balm to Liz as the doctor continues on. "It's just as a precaution, mind you. If he's alert and his fever hasn't returned, we won't need to, and he might be able to clue us in on how many doses he was given. His vitals are steady for now, with just the slightest increase due to trauma his body has suffered. Same with his brain activity. Again, we won't really know the full extent of the damage done until he's awake."

It's a nice, clinical way of saying that the Cabal wasn't kind to Red while they had him, and if it weren't for Ressler stumbling upon their hideout, she and Red's team might not have gotten to them in time. Mr. Kaplan thanks the man and he tells them that he's just down the hall should they need him. Liz watches the doctor disappear into a room two doors down from Red's and finds Mr. Kaplan staring at Red's door, a distant look in her eye. The cleaner seems to sense that Liz is studying her, and she draws in a breath as though she were coming back to herself.

"When do you plan on speaking to him about what you saw?" Straightforward, a bullet to the gut. Liz should have been more prepared for such a question. For such a sharp look. But she isn't, and she takes a small step back from the slighter woman.

"I'm not sure." She looks at the knob on the door, wishes for nothing else but the chance to burrow into that chair she'd been occupying for the most of the day, to be there when he woke up, to assure him. See his eyes. Hear his voice. Any measure of comfort she could draw from his being conscious and lucid was like a fantasy after such a long few days. "I don't even know how I would start it. What I would say. Would I cry? Would I get mad at him? I'm so tired of being mad at- I can barely handle thinking about it." Mr. Kaplan's bottom lip trembles and Liz is struck, deeply, by this sudden show of emotion. The softness with which the older woman takes her hands in hers, the way she squeezes them, how her eyes shine with tears for a moment before she shakes her head and bids them away.

"When it does come up, remember that you fight the same war, Elizabeth." One of her hands sneaks up and touches her cheek, and Liz keeps her eyes riveted to the typically stoic and immovable cleaner. It's enough to make her indignation at her comment fizzle. We can't fight the same war when we aren't on equal ground. She wants to say it so badly, wants to move away from the tenderness with which Mr. Kaplan is handling her, right now, but she can't. She just can't. "You deserve to know the truth, but when you ask for it, know that the way you feel is the way he feels too. Whatever good it's done you, he's trying to protect you, but he's also afraid to lose you."

Mr. Kaplan leans past her to turn the knob and, before Liz can formulate a question as to what the hell that last part meant, she finds herself engulfed in the tentative quietude of Red's room once again. It smells, faintly, of whatever antiseptic they used to clean Red's side when they changed the bandages; a routine they'll have to fall into until he's healed. Burns, even electrical ones, were known to be temperamental. Though, she supposed he knows all about how temperamental burns can be. Liz winces as she steps up to the side of his bed; her eyes drawn to the vitals on the screens.

The steady sound of his breathing is interrupted by a sharp exhalation, and Liz looks down to see his brow is furrowed, his face sweaty. She leans over to rest the back of her hand to his head and is relieved to find that he doesn't seem to be running a fever. His breathing becomes a bit more distressed, and she glances up at the screens to see his heart rate has spiked a little bit more. She reaches for his hand and takes it in hers, notes how cold they are in stark contrast to their usual warmth. Sitting on the edge of the bed now, and mindful of his side and the bandage around his wrist from where the cuffs dug in, she tries to soothe him.

Between her attempts to hush him, and his, clearly, troubling dream, she wonders if he'll ever let her in, if he'll ever let her help him the way he's helped her; if she'll ever be able to comfort him or hold him up when he needs it. Let me care about you. Let me help. But as he quiets and she watches his vitals on the screen, she knows that she'll have to fight him every step of the way if she wants to break through the iron curtain he protects himself with. Feeling exhaustion tug at her, Liz abandons the thought of that chair by the window and moves, instead, to the chair that Mr. Kaplan had, no doubt, situated beside his bed; a convenient barrier between Red and whoever came through the door. She notes, though the size of the room is impressive, that there's just enough space between the door and the chair for her to be on her feet and ready if the moment arises. But they were safe here. Dembe was downstairs. Kaplan was in the room across the hall. Baz and his team were scouring the grounds around the mansion and property. Her team was probably following a few leads by now. Their latest battle against the Cabal was a success.

They were fine.

When Liz wakes next, it's to a crick in her neck. The dim light of pre-dawn creates an eerie atmosphere in the room; elongates all the shadows, and somehow makes the darkness deeper. As she rolls her head back and forth, a hand grasping and massaging the sore area, she looks to the bed and finds in empty; blankets tossed back, IV pole missing and heart monitor paused. For a moment, there's utter panic in her chest, and she finds herself on her feet as if to run. Run after him, run for help, run away... But there's a distinct shadow cast across the bed where he should be, and she looks up to find him leaning heavily against wall just beside the window, across from where she'd sat before dinner.

"Jesus, Red, you scared the hell outta me." The statement encompasses the last few days and her startled leap from her chair when she realized he wasn't where he was supposed to be. "Red?" He hasn't looked back at her, hasn't even canted his head to indicate he's listening. There's no cheerful greeting, no pleasant or pained smile in her direction. A chill races through her. He's shrouded in the wan light; half in darkness, his figure hunched, jaw clenched. She drags the blanket from the bed with her and rounds the bed so she can see his face a little more clearly. His eyes, still hidden by the shadow from the wall, seem to be staring out at the grounds as if he were completely lost in thought. It isn't until she's three feet from him, her heart in her throat, that she catches him watching her from the corner of his eye before he bows his head, eyes blinking as though he can't keep them open. His lips draw in to a grimace as he means to stand up away from the wall's support.

"You know, you really shouldn't be up." Soft, coaxing, she steps up and places the blanket around his shoulders; careful of his IV and the stand. He flinches a little at its weight, and she freezes, her hands up by his shoulders, ready to lift the blanket off of him. But he turns to her, and one of his hands reaches to adjust the blanket in quiet gratitude. He looks at her, then, exhausted and restless all at the same time. There's an uneasiness about him, a burning sleeplessness that she seems to absorb into herself as her heart begins to pound again. "Are you okay?" He looks like he's about to drop when he leans back against the wall again, head turned lethargically towards her as her question and gentle tone seem to register.

"No."

I have most of the next chapter written so I hope I can find a satisfying end for this fic. Hope you guys enjoyed it!