A/N: Been away for a while dealing with some family stuff, so finding time to write was difficult. This story is slow-moving, full of emotions and conversations. I'm not sure how long this will be. Not an epic like SvsHL, but perhaps longer than my others. We'll see. A huge thanks to nevr for reviewing!
I wake screaming in a cold sweat.
In my nightmare, I was still in the compound being tortured. My body reverberates with the phantom pain from my memory.
I had plenty of nightmares in the beginning, fresh from witnessing Bryce's slaughter. I had them back when I was still afraid, when I could only imagine all the horrors that would eventually become real experiences. Once I had seen all the sights in hell, the nightmares stopped. I was so exhausted, so sleep deprived, my few hours of sleep were snips of oblivion where my mind just shut off.
This nightmare was new. Full of the torture Diaz had saved for last, the prod and the whip and his botched attempt at killing me.
And Chuck…carved open like a game bird, bleeding out, his beautiful hazel eyes clouded with death…
I scream and scream, clawing at the bandages on my face. I've forgotten I'm blind, that uncovering my eyes will not dispel the darkness any longer. Tears spill, pouring down my cheeks, and my eyes feel like they are on fire.
I miss the sound of footfalls, the door opening. I jump when I feel hands wrap around my wrists. Holding me firmly, with strength, but gently enough that nothing hurts. He has intentionally avoided the wound beneath the bandages.
"Sarah, it's alright," I hear, over and over again, I don't know how many times.
I finally understand him, comprehend the words, and I stop screaming.
Chuck.
He's alive. Those awful shadows inside my head are not real. We're here together in a cabin in the middle of nowhere…because he saved me.
I don't understand why, but it is knowing he's alright that settles me, calms the turbulence inside me.
I have an almost endless reel of atrocities both witnessed by me and perpetrated on me—yet nothing compares to this nightmare—the hopeless, bottomless despair that comes with believing Chuck is dead.
The sound of my own voice startles me. I didn't know I was talking, or what I was saying.
"You're alright…you're alright…"
Once the words are intelligible, and he hears them, he is shocked. He lets go of me, allowing me to reach up and touch his face. I caress his lips, his closed eyes, his cheeks. My fingers need proof.
"Sarah…" A statement and a question, though his voice doesn't rise on the second syllable of my name.
I control the hysterical shuddering, still touching him. "Nightmare…Diaz killed you…and…"
I have woken him from a dead sleep and he's still sluggish, but he is firm when he replies. "He's dead, Sarah. He won't hurt you…or anyone else, ever again."
It just never occurred to me until now to acknowledge that Chuck was the one who killed him. Chuck.
I wish I knew more than what he's told me. The Intersect made him an asset. The upgrade he spoke of made him an agent. But…a killer?
No. Bryce knew Chuck, trusted his decency and his innate goodness. Bryce had protected Chuck at Stanford because Chuck was not a killer and wouldn't have survived in the CIA, surely not in the Omaha Project.
But Chuck killed Diaz to save me. Diaz was seconds away from slashing my other wrist. Chuck had no choice, I know. But what has that done to him?
More guilt, piled on the shoulders of the most selfless person I have ever met…
Something warm rushes from my frozen heart. I can't control it. I lean against him, pressing my head against his shoulder. He leaves his arms at his sides, but he's tense.
Ellie would have told him how adverse I was to being touched. He is making monumental strides to not touch me.
He makes me feel safe, safer than perhaps I have ever felt since I was a small child. I revolted against Ellie, the doctor, touching my skin, but I'm crushed up against him and all I want are his arms around me, pulling me closer.
His arms stay at his sides, but his chin is on top of my head, like he has bent his head over mine. I can't resist the urge to hug him. I wrap my arms around his back and squeeze with all my strength. I'm warm and safe. I need this…like water, like air to breathe.
He is moving in slow motion, hesitating and faltering, but I feel his hands on my back. It takes forever. but eventually he is holding me, more loosely than I grip him, but enough that I think of it as an embrace. "Is this…is…"
He sounds tortured, like he doesn't know what to do…hold me or release me, sure that whatever he is doing now, here in my room in the middle of the night, could be upsetting me.
"Please don't let go," I whimper, unsure of what else to say. Ellie's hands, caring physician hands, had been like unbearable pressure on my body. My urge is to shrink down deep inside under my skin, and yet…I don't want him to let me go. I want, no need, him to hold me.
Something inside me cracks, a sliver in the cement that encases my heart. The torrent of emotion, pushing its way out like a force of nature, floods my insides.
I so rarely cried before, maybe all the times in my life countable on one hand between the age of seven and my capture. My father thought it was a sign of weakness, a tool that I could use to control others, but something I needed to mask from myself. The CIA taught me to bury my feelings, to play whatever role was required, so long as I didn't feel any certain way about anything.
I found many more reasons to cry while being held against my will as a sex slave. I cried the first time I was violated, the first time I was drugged, the first time I was tortured. I cried when Bryce was murdered before my eyes.
Eventually, the routine of my captivity dried up my tears, burned out my ability to feel anything. My CIA training was in overdrive.
But now the dam inside me bursts. I cry in a way I don't remember ever crying before, from the depths of my soul. It is everything in my life, all at once, too much to bear. My body is wracked with heart-wrenching sobs.
It goes on and on and I can't stop.
He whispers my name and only my name over and over. He holds me tighter, unafraid of my reaction in the face of my suffering. I wear myself out with crying, choking and sputtering ungracefully.
Once I have cried myself dry, I stay in place, shuddering against his shoulder, firmly clasped in his arms. He breaks the long silence. "Please try to sleep, Sarah." He is pleading, but because he's worried…for me.
"Will you stay?" I ask on an impulse, an instinctive need. I cannot bear the room…and the darkness…alone.
"If you need me to, yes." He doesn't hesitate…because I asked. Because he wants me to sleep, for my own welfare.
"Please," I whisper, new to the feeling of needing another person. Oh, but I do. Nothing is quite as frightening or overwhelming when he's there.
He releases me, like he is going to stand. There must be a chair or maybe another bed in the room. I grab his arm, a silent plea for him to stay next to me.
His muscles tense and he sighs, but he won't refuse me. I lay my head on the pillow and roll onto my left side. I hear the mattress creak, feel the gentle shaking as he sits on the other side of the bed. The sounds I hear lead me to believe he is sitting up against the headboard.
"Chuck, please…just sleep," I whisper. I've asked him to stay, but not at the price of his health, his ability to rest.
His breathing becomes strained, rattling in his chest, like he is on the verge of suffocation. "Sarah, I…" He swallows hard, and I hear it like a sob.
Is he still dwelling on what happened between us while I was drugged? Internal torture–he is burdened by guilt, for something that in the end I believe I caused.
I resolve to find a way to talk to him about this, about what happened between us while he was undercover, trying to rescue me. But not now, not in the middle of the night. "Please," I whisper.
He doesn't want this, but because I am pleading, he complies, sliding down until his head is on the pillow. I listen to the sound of his breathing, like waves crashing steadily against the shore, and gradually, I fall back to sleep.
I wake again, screaming.
The nightmares this time are amorphous, dark specters lurking on the edge of my consciousness. I claw helplessly at my eyes, like if I dig deep enough, I will find the smothered light.
I jump at first when I feel Chuck reaching for me, holding my shoulders from behind, as I have forgotten he agreed to stay in here with me. I have shifted down the bed from my pillow and he is at an angle behind me.
Again, he is awkward, unsure of what to do, how much he should touch me, if I need physical comfort. His hands hover so lightly that I'm unsure if he is still touching me.
I pull my knees up and rest my feet flat on the bed, hunching over my legs. This is the urge to curl myself into a tight ball, like an armadillo, a solid casing of armor to protect me. Most of that armor I have employed all my life is gone, damaged and destroyed, so there is no protection available any more.
He is soothing me again, or trying to, as I weep heavily against my knees.
"Talk to me, Sarah."
I have no words, and only make incoherent sounds, through my strangled tears.
"Ellie was worried…that this place, the care that I could arrange for you, wasn't enough. I know it's not. I'm terrified that in some way, I'm making this worse." He is full of regret, but his voice is firmer, stronger when he continues. "But at least here, you're safe. No one knows where you are. No one but my small group knows you're even alive."
What does he know that he isn't telling me? There is no disguising it, no denying that he's hiding something from me. It isn't sinister or mal-intentioned. He is only thinking of me, protecting me.
Instinctively, I know it must be something he's learned in a flash, as he told me I was in the Intersect. There is something he learned that caused him to go against the CIA and risk his life to save me. My cognition isn't sharp enough at this time of night, while I'm shaken and crying, to question him. But I know I must, at a later time.
"What am I going to do?" I wail, rubbing my face on the soft sheet draped over the tent created by my raised knees. "I'm blind and my hand is ruined…I'm useless now…you should have let me die…what happens to me now?" More self-pity and helpless rage, but my fatigue overwhelms my control.
"Sarah…" He sets his hands on my shoulders, gently, without gripping me. "I know it seems awful now. That everything you knew is gone, changed…and you have no idea how to cope. Trust me, I know what that feels like." He speaks of the Intersect, how it changed him from a Buy More clerk into a CIA agent. "You may have convinced yourself that your life was disposable, that working for the CIA shortened your lifespan, and you were ok with that…or you told yourself you were…but I don't believe that."
"The CIA was my only option," I tell him, surprised at where this truth is coming from. "I had no one, nowhere to go, no hope. All I had was my job. So I put everything into being the best I could be. And I was for a long time."
My capture, torture and abuse has now excluded me from the only life I had ever known. I had been content to be alone, self–sufficient, since I was a teenager. I prided myself on needing no one, not even Bryce when we were together.
I could no longer even feed myself with a spoon. I didn't know if I would ever see again. My feeling of spinning out of control is legitimate.
"Did that make you happy?" he asked, with wisdom in his tone, like he knew the answer already. "Being alone? Not having to rely on anyone or anything?"
Happiness? The word was not part of my life's vernacular. What was happiness? Something I honestly did not remember experiencing. In my life, all I have known of happiness is what its absence feels like. My captivity surely was the manifestation of anguish, an extreme of unhappiness. Being raped and tortured a hundred times–pure anguish. But my life before that was not an antithesis of anguish. It was merely the absence of torture. A blank, empty life, only desirable when it was seen in contrast to being chained to a bed and raped.
"I have no idea…what that means. To be happy." I feel vulnerable, saying this out loud to him.
"It's not fair, Sarah," he whispers sadly. He sounds like he is fighting tears. "You deserve to be happy, to have a life that belongs to you, to do with as you choose. That was worth risking my life for. To give you the chance to have that."
"I wish I understood why you think so," I say, rubbing my cheeks, drying my tears.
"I promise, we'll talk again tomorrow. Please try to sleep now, Sarah."
Twice tonight, without the drugs I had been given for pain that have the side effect of dulling my senses, I have woken screaming. If rest is what I need to build my strength back, I worry this will become problematic. Without asking him, without saying anything, I roll towards him, until I feel the warmth of his body on the sheet underneath me. I feel him stiffen, like his first instinct is to roll away, to leave the gap between us. But I lay my head on his chest. I hear his heart beating underneath my ear.
I have never slept, not even for a few hours, with another person near me. The man I lost my virginity to stayed in his room after we had sex, and I left. I would come to Bryce, but there was no tenderness in our couplings. We would have sex, but the moment he was finished, the moment he would roll from atop me, I would climb out of bed, into the shower, and then back to my own bed. I had never felt the need for it, and I had been adverse to it. The vulnerability sleeping presented was more than I was willing to give another person.
But now, the idea of sleeping up against Chuck, is a comfort I cannot resist. Everything I know Ellie has told him about how I will react seems to make no sense. I have no explanation for it. But the fear that has been gnawing away at me, a foreign invader unbeknownst to me before my time in captivity, is finally quiet.
I sleep for the rest of the night, nightmare-free, curled against Chuck's side, with his arm loosely resting around me.
