AN: Warning: The second section of this chapter contains (extremely) brief (read: three half-sentence) M-rated flashbacks. Just didn't want to catch you all by surprise "Game of Thrones"-style. ;-) Now you've been warned.

Also, the language is bad, but if you've read this far, you know that's par for the course.

Ooh, and if you find any typos, help me out and message me, would you? I'm leaving for work in a rush and want to get this posted, so I haven't Beta'd! Thanks! You're all great!

With that, we proceed...

Four-Wheel Drive

Charlie's world crumples with Miles' body. He's grinning and wavering on his feet, and for a just a second, she thinks he's okay, because he's always okay; he's always been okay before – and then Miles drops to the ground like someone cut his strings, and Charlie's whole world collapses.

"Miles!" That's got to be her screaming, but she doesn't recognize her own voice until Jason claps an iron hand over her mouth and an arm around her waist. He's right – someone will hear them – but she's past caring and he's trapping her there, and she's got to get to Miles, so she bites down on Jason's hand as hard as she can, driving her elbow into his solar plexus just like Miles taught her, and Jason lets go.

She's on her knees next to Miles the next moment. It's so dark his body is half in shadow, but she can see that his coat is torn to shreds from his shoulders to his waist. She reaches out a tentative hand to the back of the coat, palm first…and pulls it back soaked in blood. And she's seen plenty of awful shit in the last six months, but this is Miles. She ducks her head for a second, fighting back the urge to gag.

And then her stomach drops out entirely, because it's so dark and he's so still and oh, shit is he not breathing? She's terrified to roll him onto that filleted back, but she grabs the shoulder of the blood-soaked coat and drags her uncle onto his side. Her hand leaves a smear of blood across his three-day-old stubble as she bends down and tilts her ear as close to his mouth as she can, trying to hear past her own desperately thudding heart.

Please, Miles… Charlie's hands shake and her back aches with coiled tension as she holds her position, waiting for – there. A soft exhale echoes in her ear, and she nearly bursts into tears with relief. "Just keep breathing. Please," she whispers, and she's not sure if she's begging Miles or praying. It feels like praying.

She straightens as Jason kneels next to her, across Miles' body. His eyes flick quickly to Miles' injuries, and then away. "You guys have a med kit?" he murmurs. And she's suddenly immensely thankful that he's decided just to be a soldier right now and not…whatever else he is to her. Soldier is easier. She needs to be that right now, too: analytical, decisive, confident.

"Nora has it. Other side of the road, in the trees."

Jason nods, and vanishes into the darkness.

Charlie looks over Miles' wounds again, and quickly strips her jacket from her shoulders. Be analytical. It's probably just the blood loss that's caused him to pass out. If she can stop the bleeding, he'll probably be okay. Probably. Her jacket isn't the most absorbent material in the world, but it'll have to do. Only about half of the wounds are still bleeding, so she chooses the worst ones, and applies pressure.

Then she waits, keeping up the pressure as she waits for Jason. Under her hands, Miles takes one shallow breath, and then another. And another.

Another.

Another…

...

Nora nearly runs face-first into the Neville kid in the dark.

They'd just gotten the spooking horses under control after that unearthly snarl – mostly thanks to Rachel and Danny – when she'd heard Charlie's suddenly cut off scream. Rachel had stood stock still, holding three horses' reins and looking at Danny, so Nora had shoved her reins into the kid's hands, shouldered the rifle Harry had given her, and bolted into the woods.

Jason – that's his name – bounces off her shoulder and then immediately raises his hands in surrender before she even levels the rifle at his chest.

"Nora?" She nods.

"It's Miles."

Oh.

They have to go back for the med kit, and Rachel looks like she'd shoot Jason on sight if she had a gun. Danny just stands fractionally closer to his horse and says nothing.

There's obviously no fucking way Rachel is staying with the horses, so all four of them plus five horses hurry across the road and into the clearing behind the tall grass – heavy on speed, light on stealth.

Passingly, Nora registers the corpses of two big animals – deer, mountain lion. Oh, shit. A mountain lion?

Charlie's crouched in the center of the clearing, between the corpse of the mountain lion and the deer, and Nora can see a dark form on the ground behind her, but Charlie's too close to it to make out –

And then Charlie hears them and turns and rises, and the whole grisly tableau is bared to Nora's eyes.

Miles looks like he's dead.

The trampled grass is slick with dark blood, and it looks like Charlie's been using her own jacket in an attempt to staunch Miles' bleeding.

Nora's stomach flip-flops into her chest, and she shoves it back down with a violent surge of anger. She – and maybe Jason, who hasn't earned her trust – is the only one with any sort of combat medical training, so she'd sure as hell better be able to lock up her personal feelings for a second, because if she falls apart, Miles is gone.

She shoves He might be gone already into a dark little corner of her brain and throws away the keys. Right. Assess vitals, stop bleeding, dress wounds. Don't think about being in bed with Miles five hours ago. Safe. Happy.

Nora kneels next to Charlie, opens the med kit, and begins to work. She has to literally slice the coat off Miles' back with her boot knife – digging her nails into his back as he moves inside her – and when she peels the collar away, there's a set of inch-deep puncture wounds dotted across the side of Miles' neck – gasping into his neck as one of his hands finally finds her breast – all the way into the top of his right shoulder – sinking her teeth into his corded shoulder muscle as he wraps his arms around her – Nora shakes her head violently, trying to clear the conflicting images.

Shit.

She really can't do this. She's not going to be able to hold it together. If she's honest with herself (like she never was with him), this is the reason Nora left Miles all those years ago. It hadn't been Bass, or the Militia, or even Miles' own rapidly blackening soul.

Really, it had just been this:

She couldn't sleep with Miles one minute, and watch him die the next.

Other guys, yeah, maybe – and it had happened before – but with Miles, she'd let herself get too invested, care too much. Maybe even love him.

She doesn't realize she's frozen until Charlie grabs the bottle of iodine Nora's holding and twists the cap, and suddenly Nora snaps, "Take it easy; that's all we have," and just like that, her head's clear and she's back in the game. Water, iodine, dressings, bandages – all the extra supplies she grabbed from Harry's house are (hopefully) going to save Miles' life.

And Nora Clayton may not believe in God, but she knows Harry Eberhart is a goddamn angel. And he'd tell her that pain is the fuel of resistance.

So she stills her shaking hands, and peels back Miles' coat.

...

They can't stand around here. Danny knows it from the shifting of the horses if nothing else. They're nervous. And with good reason. He hadn't spent a lot of time on horseback back at home, but he's spent all his life (that he can remember) around farm animals, and then four months on the road quietly observing a troop full of Militia cavalry horses, and he's learned to pay attention to the subtle indications – a raised head, a swiveling ear, a slight widening of the nostrils. They don't like the dead mountain lion, that's for sure.

But Danny's more concerned about the live Militia soldier. He knows Charlie (for God knows what reason) has a crush on this guy, and he's thankful – really, he honestly is – for Jason throwing her off the train, but he's still not sure if the guy is genuinely on their side, is just trying to send one giant "Screw you" message to his dad, or wants to get into Charlie's pants. As far as Danny sees it, the likelihood is two out of three that Jason has ulterior motives.

And that's assuming that the guy isn't just here to lead Neville's patrol straight to them. He doesn't think Jason would do that, but after watching his mother over the last month, Danny's given up on thinking that he knows what people will do.

Nora and Charlie are bent over Miles' body, half coated in blood – his, the mountain lion's; it's hard to tell – and Danny feels like a complete ass when for just a second, he thinks how much easier it would be if Miles died. His Dad would be ashamed of him, thinking like that.

But he's not wrong. They really can't stay here. Danny's always had a good sense of time, and he makes four and a half hours since they left the Eberhart plantation. That would make for a decent head start, except that Jason Neville's here, and someone will have noticed him go missing within, at most, forty-five minutes of his disappearance. And that someone will most likely be Jason's father.

Danny knows how Captain Neville works. (And screw calling him "Major;" he'd call him "Douchebag" if it didn't make him sound thirteen.) Neville will make Jason think he's gotten away clean. But in about half an hour, the whole patrol will be riding down their throats, and Neville will be all smiles and "Thank you for tracking them for us, son," and his sister'll give Jason that doe-eyed hurt look of betrayal and vow to hate him forever until the next time.

Danny doesn't say much out loud, but in his head, sometimes, he wonders why he didn't end up as the older sibling. He thinks ahead more – although maybe that's by virtue of growing up with a disease that kept trying to kill him every five minutes – and, quietly, he notices things.

Charlie sees the black and white of life. It's why she'd just hated Maggie when Danny could see how lonely his father was and the gap that Maggie filled (not as a replacement for his mother, but just…something different, to fill the empty space, like painting a room a different color). It's why she calls him Danny when he prefers Dan, because people are either one thing or the other, and he can't be her kid brother if he's an adult in his own right.

And it's why Miles is her hero, her savior, her knight in shining armor, because he can't also be the monster who imprisoned and tortured her mother – Danny's sure that's why she never broaches the subject with Mom, though it's got to be obvious to her by now – but Danny knows that Miles is both, that he is all of those things – the hero and the monster, the knight and the villain – and the problem with Miles is (and his mother had let this slip, when she'd unloaded on Danny simply because he'd been the only one there) that you could never know which one Miles was going to be from one moment to the next.

So, his Dad would have chastised him for wishing their lives simpler by the absence of Miles. But his Dad had been more like Charlie, and Danny is more like his Mom: stuck seeing every shade of people, all mashed together, so you couldn't remove the bad from the good.

Which is why he's not surprised – as he watches his mother stand very, very still and stare at Miles' battered, motionless form – that she's crying.

...

Miles swims back to consciousness faster than he would have liked. Honestly, he'd been hoping for a bit more of a break. His face is plastered to the grass and someone's leaning on his back, which feels like it's taken every losing blow from every swordfight he's ever had. He gives an incoherent, "Mmmf," into the ground, hoping this will convince whoever's leaning on him to get the hell off.

"Hold still, you idiot." So that's Nora, and he must look like hell; she only calls him names when she's really and truly worried.

"Think I'm s'posed to be awake before you manhandle me like that," he manages, suggestively. Abruptly, half the weight leaves his back, and Nora snaps,

"Charlie, put pressure back on those wounds."

Oh. Miles briefly considers sewing his own mouth shut.

"Sorry, kid – "

"Shut up, Miles." Great. Pretty soon they'll both be calling him "idiot." Miles opens his eyes a fraction. The icing on the cake would be if R –

– achel Matheson's eyes are staring directly into his own, and even in the dark, with blurred vision, and from fifteen feet away, he can tell that she's crying.

She looks surprised, like she's been caught out, and spins away from him abruptly.

Holy fuck.

Holy fucking fucktastic fuck.

It is absolutely not possible that the world would be that kind to a fuck-up like him.

Rachel Matheson didn't cry when she and Ben blew up the whole goddamned world.

Rachel Matheson didn't cry when she left her children and her husband to turn herself in in Philadelphia.

Miles has only seen Rachel cry once before, ever, which is why he knows this like he knows he has two hands:

Rachel Matheson only cries over one thing.

Him.