A/N: This actually may be one of my favorite stories I've written other than In the Darkness. I just love them.

Hope you enjoy!

Elizabeth | Before Extraction – Nine Years

She glanced at the scoreboard—this was their shot. Just one more point and they'd be tied for overtime, and she knew exactly the route she was going to take if she just could get ahold of the ball. Coach told her a different route, the team was set up for something different, but Elizabeth looked at the senior on the team, Jenny, and they nodded at each other.

Jenny had taken Elizabeth under her wing immediately, the senior and the freshman getting along better than anyone else, and they played together like they'd been playing on the same team for years. In reality, Elizabeth hadn't ever played with someone so challenging as Jenny. She thought outside the box, she didn't always follow what the coach said but it always worked. She was smart, she knew what her defenders were doing before they even knew what they were doing. Elizabeth liked that.

She ran along once the ref whistled, and soon enough, Jenny was getting the ball to Elizabeth. Her feet felt like they were floating as she sprinted toward the goal, a defender hot on her trail and Jenny defending Elizabeth. She was watching the ball carefully and watching the goal, shifting her eyes back and forth between the blur of her feet and the net now in kicking distance.

Maneuvering to the left quickly to lose the defender, she took her shot—straight in. The crowd cheered, but Elizabeth was on the ground in pain, and the defender was getting up off of her and apologizing. "Are you alright?" She'd ask, but Elizabeth was holding her leg and writhing in the grass.

Jenny was standing over her yelling for the coach, and before her coach ever got there her parents were standing there, too.

"Elizabeth, honey, what's hurting?" Her mom's voice brought her back to reality, back to the one without pain at least, so maybe not reality at all. Her mom always had a way of doing that—it was like her voice immediately calmed her down somehow.

But at fifteen, she never would've admitted that to her mother.

She patted her leg above her ankle, grabbing at it, "My ankle, Mom, my ankle!" She said it like Suzanne should've known, and Ben leaned down and carefully examined it.

"It's already bruising," she heard him say, and soon enough, Jenny reached under and scooped her up into her arms.

"The ER down the road, right?" Jenny asked as she loaded Elizabeth into the car, "I'm coming."

"You don't have to do that, sweetie," Suzanne said as Elizabeth laid in the backseat with her leg propped up on the door, her forearm covering her eyes.

"I want to," Jenny said.

And on the ride there, Elizabeth whimpered until she was at her breaking point. Everything, somehow, was burning because of this ankle. She made the mistake of looking at it once—it was black and blue already and she could see the dip in the side of it. Her toes couldn't move, and that was the most frustrating part for her—not being able to move.

Suzanne looked back as Elizabeth felt the sway of the car, turning into the hospital lot, "You can cry, honey." She breathed, reaching back for Elizabeth's hand.

Elizabeth let her head fall over and felt the tears on the rim of her eyelids, ready to fall down, and Suzanne gave her a small nod before squeezing her fingers. Elizabeth felt her shoulders shake, one last effort to keep it all in, and finally she let the dam burst.

The burning had intensified so much that she couldn't even think straight. Why had she been holding it in all this time anyway?

Because she was the tough one.

And in a measly few months, she would hold all her tears and sobs in again while she held onto Will at their parents funeral, while she told him they'd be okay, while she watched over him so protectively that he could barely even leave the house with her going with him.

Elizabeth | Post-extraction – 63 Hours

She woke up to Dr. Jordan looking at her, "There you are," she murmured, and Elizabeth took a sharp breath. She looked around—she was just in x-ray, and now she's back in a room? She didn't remember the trip here, and her head felt so light and swimmy, yet also so, so heavy.

"What happened?" Elizabeth groaned, shutting her eyes again.

"You were in x-ray and passed out," Dr. Jordan said, fumbling around at the side of Elizabeth's bed before stopping and looking at her. "And when we saw how bad your ankle was, it was no wonder. We did emergency surgery on it right away."

"Oh," Elizabeth mumbled, her eyes dropping down to where her toes were sticking out of the blanket. She could just barely see the cast underneath her toes, and then she became painfully aware that she had a cast all the way up her ankle and to the middle of her calf. She shut her eyes again, trying to fight the overwhelming urge to cry.

Her eyes fluttered back open momentarily when she heard the door open, and in walked Henry McCord again. She looked at him and blinked a couple times, trying to get the tears to clear away, but they just kept flooding her eyes.

"How is she?" Henry asked, then realized she was awake. "Oh," he murmured, his demeanor changing. He had lost the IV pole since just a few hours ago, she noticed, and he was still shuffling but now in a Marine Corps tee and sweats.

She looked at him as he carefully made his way to the chair beside her bed, and she realized the indentation earlier was from him sitting there—it had to be. When he sat down, she could've sworn she saw the indentation match his hip width exactly.

"I was in a debrief," he mumbled, Sarah looking over her shoulder at him. Elizabeth didn't see Sarah giving him the eye because she was too busy being bewildered at Henry.

"Why are you here?" She asked softly, her voice groggy still.

He swallowed hard and glanced at Sarah, and Elizabeth looked at her too.

"Don't look at me," Sarah said, "I've been trying to kick him out since he found out he could shuffle his ass down the hall and into your room," she added, finishing Elizabeth's IV change and leaving the room.

Elizabeth felt a sudden ache in her body, not one from the pain this time, but a stiffness or soreness that she couldn't quite describe. She pushed her head backward into the pillow and felt the tears rise again, her ankle was throbbing and she wondered why it wasn't numb yet with all the medications they had to be pumping into her.

Her fingers grabbed the sheets beside her underneath the blanket and bundled the material up, squeezing hard as every inch of her body was working to keep her from letting her tears fall, from letting the sobbing start.

Not only did she not cry in public, but she also didn't cry when she knew it wasn't going to stop any time soon. If she let the dam burst now, it would flood this entire country. The country.

"Where am I?" She asked, her head falling over just slightly to look at Henry through her blurry tears.

He looked around suspiciously as though she were asking him a trick question, "The Marine Corps infirmary."

"No," she murmured, closing her eyes to fight off the pounding in her head, "I don't know what country I'm in…I suspect I'm not in England anymore."

"Oh," he said, and she watched as his gaze dropped down to his hands. "Maybe I should go get Sarah to explain—"

"I don't—" Elizabeth spoke too fast and her voice hitched, so she stopped and tried to gather her breathing before it all fell out of control, spiraling downward into a sob-fest. She swallowed hard and took a shaky breath through her nose, barely a breath at all, "I don't want to hear about the mission right now." She whispered, "I know as soon as I start asking they'll start telling me, and I don't want to know yet."

She could feel his eyes on her, feel him wanting to reach out for her. Her head fell over again and she looked at his hands, down where his fingers were twitching in his lap and mindlessly fumbling around with his sweatpants to keep them busy. She moved her head again so that she stared at the ceiling, her breathing hitching once more, and he stood.

"Are you okay?"

She nodded, but she couldn't get the words out. If she started trying to talk, she would cry—she was barely holding on as is.

When she felt him touch her this time, she didn't jump. She kept her eyes closed, though, and felt as the pain medicine was starting to kick in—the fiery-hot burning down her leg subsiding to just a mild burn. She knew it was the pain medicine because she started to feel a little dizzy, too, and he squeezed her hand carefully.

She wanted to rip it away when he squeezed because he was pushing in on her cuts, but she didn't want the warmth to leave her. When her shoulders shook with the sob that was starting to bubble up, she felt the aching return in her chest. Don't cry. Not now.

And that's when she heard him say: "You can cry."

Her eye popped open at him, her swollen one even making the effort, and she thought of her mom in that instant. The way she'd ridden in the backseat to the hospital as her dad drove them, the way Jenny had loaded her into the car so that her leg was propped just like it is now on some sort of pillow. And the way he squeezed her hand.

When she let out her first sob, it was so guttural that it scared her. It genuinely scared her because it sounded like someone else, someone who she had not known all her life. Maybe this was Eleanor Morgan coming out, crying, sobbing, screaming over what happened to her. Maybe this was just Elizabeth Adams after all, finally reaching her breaking point.

He stood there and rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand, staying completely silent as she cried. She couldn't look at him anymore, so she closed her eyes and thought of the way her mom's voice used to calm her down—she'd love to hear her mom's voice right about now. She'd love to know the last nine years were actually just a dream—a nightmare—and that this whole mission never even happened.

After a while of her sobbing in otherwise complete silence, he reached back and scooted the chair closer to her bed, never letting her hand go. "You know," he whispered, his voice barely there but enough to catch her attention as she kept blinking through the tears, "One of my last flights my first tour with the Marines…I was up there really high of course." A smile came across his face as his eyes blinked slowly, and she liked the way he looked sleepy yet also so attentive.

"It was standard patrol—nothing intense," he said, shrugging one of his shoulders. She noticed he favored one arm greatly, and she suddenly remembered how he had an IV pole yesterday. What were his injuries he got from saving me? "We were up there for hours—I was so exhausted. Like I said, it was toward the end of the tour and I was just ready for real food…no, what I was ready for was a McDonalds cheeseburger, if I'm being honest."

It made her smile just a little, but her sobs quickly replaced it.

"Eyes on the radar, scanning the horizon, doing my job…" he shrugged again, just with that one arm, "You know, the normal. And then there was just this…this moment," he paused and breathed out with the word, staring down at her hand now. "The light started to change. When you're thousands of feet in the air and thinking about, well, war…you don't always get to see the pretty stuff." He swallowed hard and kept rubbing his thumb along her hand, his other arm down at his side, "The sun hit the water at this perfect angle, and it was the most beautiful, golden sunset I'd ever seen in my entire life. The ocean looked like it was on fire, and there was just gold everywhere."

When he spoke, he didn't look at her eyes except her hands, and it made her feel a little self-conscious. She knew she must look pretty bad, and though she hadn't seen herself yet, she imagined she wouldn't want to look at her, either. Her breaths had evened out now, though, and while the tears were still streaming, her sobs had stopped.

"I remember looking at it and just thinking, 'Wow,'" he paused, swallowing hard again and shaking his head, "I'm so small. You feel like you're not when you're in those jets…for one they're so small that you feel so big in them, but you also know you have the power to take a whole city out."

When he stopped this time he looked up at her, "It was all just so small. The plane, the mission, me…the whole weight of everything we'd been doing just kind of…I can't say it disappeared, because it never disappears. Especially when you lose guys like we did on that mission." She let her eyes fall down to watch his throat as it tightened and loosened over and over again, "It all just caught up to me."

She let her eyes dart back up to meet his, and she noticed he'd been watching her this entire time.

"I told myself it was the altitude," he continued, "Or the exhaustion or, you know, yadda yadda." He smiled at her, and it made her smile a little, too, because yes—yadda yadda is quite universal. "But the truth of it was that I just needed a second. I needed a moment to just sit there and take it all in, staring at that giant ocean and that gorgeous sunset, and I just let myself feel it. Just for a little while."

His eyes moved slowly from her eyes to somewhere around the top of her head, and his hand never left hers, his thumb still slowly motioning on her skin. "It doesn't make you weak," he said, not meeting her eyes, "It just makes you human."

She swallowed hard and blinked a couple times, feeling the tears want to start all over again. Her face and pillow was drenched, and so was her hair around her cheeks. She felt cold, felt wet, and just wanted to wake up from this entire nightmare.

Henry never moved, and his eyes never left wherever he was staring at. After a few moments of her struggling to not start sobbing, but losing the battle with her tears again, she sniffled and moved to wipe the wetness from her cheeks. She flinched when she touched a sore spot, then another, then another, and he reached up with his other arm and winced when he did. She wanted to tell him to stop, it was clearly hurting him, but he was drying the places she'd been trying to dry herself.

"The color of your hair reminds me of that sunset," he said suddenly, and her eyes darted up to him. He was still carefully dabbing the wet spots—she had plenty. "I think that's why I thought of that moment, maybe."

She turned her hand over and he looked down at hers, and she wrapped her fingers around his. She didn't say anything, the lump in her throat was too painful for her to want to speak, but she just laid there in silence after he dried those spots from her face.

After a couple of silent minutes, she looked at him again, "What country am I in?" She asked softly.

He hesitated, his lips twisting to the side as he looked over at the closed door and then back at her, clearly making a decision in his head. "Kuwait," he said, "But don't tell anyone I told you that."

"I won't," she mumbled, shifting a little so that she could sit up better.

She was trying to move so that her head was propped up a little more, but nothing was working. When she tried moving, her ankle started throbbing again, and he immediately was grabbing for her remote and handing it to her.

"Here," he said, "This is the up and this is the down," he pointed to the buttons on the remote, and she pressed the up one shakily. While the bed was raising up, she avoided his eyes.

Why's he being so nice to me?

Even though she didn't understand where his niceness was coming from, she was glad for it. She didn't really want to be alone to deal with both Eleanor Morgan and Elizabeth Adams' trauma right now. Without the mental trauma, the physical was enough to deal. She was glad he was here to help her, even if she'd never asked for him to be.

She looked over at him again and furrowed her brow, "You knew my name," she whispered, thinking of when he looked at her so intently and helped her with her breathing. She'd been so out of it, so groggy, but she does remember this man standing here in a hospital gown, extending his neck and puffing out his chest to show her when to breathe and when to let it out.

He looked down at the bedrail, his fingers no longer holding hers after he'd reached for the remote, and she wished he'd take them again.

"I'm not supposed to know it," he whispered.

"No you're not," Elizabeth answered.

He looked up at her and swallowed hard again. When she was eyeing him, she wondered if he was somehow involved in all this in another way—what if he wasn't just the person who extracted her? How was he the one to know where to find her, anyway? This creeping ache rose to her chest again and she pulled the blanket up closer to her.

"How do I know you're not with them?" She asked.

He looked at her suddenly and frowned, "With…"

"With the guy who took me," she provided quickly.

He frowned deeper, "Oh," he mumbled, "I—I'm not…" the way he was stumbling over her words made her want to feel better, but she knows he could be trained just as well as she is in lies. "I'm just a captain in the Marines," he breathed, looking up at her again after his eyes had fallen down to the bed. "I'm actually a fighter pilot, and I got grounded on this mission because my major wanted two guys who could safely be the flank." When he stopped talking, she could see the darkness fill his eyes.

She swallowed thick, "And the other guy?" She asked.

Henry shook his head, going completely silent and looking down at the bedrail where his hands lingered. She pressed her lips together and watched him for a moment before turning her head forward, unable to look at how small this man had just become again.

"How did you know where to find me?" She asked.

He sniffled and after a moment he looked up, and she could tell he was disheveled from her asking about the other guy. Another one who was killed because of me, I suppose. She'd have to unpack that later.

"I kept having this feeling," he admitted, shaking his head, "I don't know how to describe it other than that I felt like something was telling me to go right when everyone else was going left. I told Lacey—" his voice choked up and he looked away, and she realized that must have been the other man. The one, apparently, that they'd lost. "I told him I was leaving to go look that way. I was glad I did because not only did I find you, but that bomb…"

"Right," she whispered, looking down at her hands resting in her lap. Only then did she see all the cuts and bruises all over her hands and arms, and she realized just how terrible she looked. In fact, she looked a lot like Will did after he'd been in that wreck. When the bruising the day after the crash, he looked like he'd been beaten. And now, she'd been beaten but looked like she was in a car wreck. The irony was not lost on her.

She took a shaky breath and exhaled slowly, and then she got this terrible smell filling her nose. Her eyes darted around the room, her ears pulling backwards. What is that smell? She didn't want to look at him in case he smelled it, too, and she just kept staring down at her hands. She exhaled again to test her theory. Oh my God, she thought, realizing it was her own breath.

She looked over at Henry and then at the table by her head, "Do you think you could hand me that water?" She asked softly, afraid to move her mouth much in case he smelled it.

Why do you care if he does? He sees you haven't exactly been thinking about brushing your teeth lately.

When he moved to grab it, she became painfully aware of how hot her face felt, and she realized her cheeks must be bright red. She grabbed the cup and thanked him quietly before tipping it back, swishing around and hoping she didn't just draw attention to her breath by doing so.

When Dr. Jordan comes back in, I'll ask her for some mouthwash.

She set the cup down in her lap, empty now, and he immediately asked if she wanted more. "I'm okay," she whispered, then looked over at him, "Thank you though."

"Of course," Henry answered.

She stared down at her hands for a few moments and his hand slid into her view, "I can take that," he said.

She let him have the cup and he got up to throw it away, but she noticed he was limping and also looking incredibly stiff. "What did you do?" She asked, not thinking about it before it came out of her mouth.

"What do you mean?"

She knew he'd ask that because her question didn't make much sense—it had just tumbled out before she'd really put much depth behind it. "I mean—like…injuries. What did you do?" She asked, "I see you not using your left arm."

"Oh," he murmured, looking down as he sat back in the chair. "I had a hemothorax apparently—something with the lungs. I wasn't really paying attention." He said, "I also broke my rib, which apparently that's what caused the hemothorax, and then I got a nasty concussion. Some boy hit me with his rifle."

Immediately, her brain brought up the image of Fadi's fourteen-year-old son with the rifle, standing in the room with that terrible closet she'd spent too long in. "Oh," she murmured, not mentioning she knew exactly which boy hit him.

When he stopped talking, though, he got very quiet, and she looked up at him to notice he'd pulled back into himself. His shoulders were slumped, different from when he'd been sitting straight up. He looked sad, maybe broken. And then the thought crossed her mind that there was probably a fight from that boy hitting him, and that it probably didn't end well for the boy since Henry was sitting here next to her.

She felt like all the air was pushed out of her lungs suddenly, so she gasped for air and watched as his eyes immediately went to her. "Are you alright?" He asked.

She nodded, "Sorry," she mumbled.

He swallowed hard, "Are you hungry or anything?"

She shook her head, but then she stopped and really thought about it. Am I hungry? The more she thought about it the more she decided she could definitely go for a little food. "Actually, yeah," she said, grabbing his attention. She swore she saw his ears perk up just like a dog's.

"I can get you some pudding?" He offered.

She nodded, and in no time, he was shuffling out of her room. He came back quickly with a chocolate pudding in his hand, "I didn't know if you wanted vanilla or chocolate, so I just went with my gut."

She reached out for it after thanking him, and she didn't tell him that chocolate was her favorite.