A/N: Who is she, writing a chapter a night? Look at me go (procrastinating on other work...)

This chapter is TUGGING on my heart, guys. I also realized that I'd forgotten to put whose POV it was at the beginning like I normally do in my stories-but the issue is being resolved from here on :)

Hope you enjoy!

Henry | Post-Extraction – 42 Hours

They told him not to get up. They told him to stay in the bed, that he had a catheter for a reason, that he needed to stay the hell in bed.

When his feet touched the floor in those grippy socks, he felt an inch of freedom, though he had to sit back down immediately after getting up much too fast.

His hands rested beside his hips on the bed, steadying himself as he felt a bit dizzy. The concussion, he'd found out, was one of the worst in severity that one could possibly have unless they had broken their skull. The doctor assured him, though, that he had not broken his skull and that the concussion symptoms should be better with rest.

But he couldn't rest—he was completely restless because he was, ultimately, bored. Every time someone told him to rest, he cringed. He hadn't joined the Marines to rest, he joined the Marines to make a difference.

And then his brain would trail off into the thoughts of how he could possibly make a difference when there were situations like Lacey—leaving a man behind just because it was too dangerous to get him out. The thought made his chest ache, made the cracked spot in his ribs pound. I should've been the one to be left, he thought over and over, not the man with a family. Not the one with a wife who he'd probably promised he'd come home.

His feet were still resting against the floor when he pushed off the bed again, trying to gain some strength in his legs. It hadn't even been a full forty-eight hours since the mission, but his legs had become two useless sticks over the past days as they felt like they were made of jelly and water. Sarah told him that all the morphine would do that to him, that he was so doped up on pain medication that he'd be feeling that way for a few days at the very least.

He held onto the bedrail as he put all his weight on two feet finally, his body groaning in protest. His ribs ached loudly, and he shut his eyes to try and take a deep breath, though it just hurt more to do so. He squeezed the railing and opened his eyes back, breathing controlled breaths through his nose and focusing on one spot in the wall—if he only focused on one spot, his head hurt a little less.

Slowly, he moved his left foot first, shuffling it carefully against the cold tile soaking into the pads of his feet. He scooted his hand down the bedrail when he shuffled his other foot in front of him, thinking about how much hell Sarah will give him if she catches him. The other doctors, he knew, would give the same hell—but it meant more coming from Sarah. She'd become like a sister over this entire mission—he liked her, but in the same way he liked Maureen (on the rare occasion he felt that way toward her). She had a reputation for being bossy, but Henry saw it for what it was—a woman who knew what she was doing.

When she'd come into his room and cried that first night, he couldn't help her, he couldn't reach out to her and comfort her. All he could do was stare at the ceiling and pray about the woman Sarah had just spent hours saving, and try to focus through his throbbing headache. And then he'd fallen asleep, and he was even less help. But when she came back into his room the next day, he reached out for her hand as she was checking his wound dressing where they'd repaired his lung.

She looked down startlingly at it, "Henry," she breathed, frowning.

"I don't mean it like that," Henry said, frowning, too. "I know you're married, and from the pictures I've seen whenever I've passed by your office, I don't think I'd ever want to get in the way of that man."

She'd cracked a little smile, and yet again, Sarah Jordan didn't look so tough. She looked like a woman who had seen hell, and he knew she had. He knew she'd almost watched a woman die yesterday, a woman who was mostly solely her responsibility to keep alive.

"I just want…" he wasn't sure what he wanted, really. He just pressed his lips together and looked at her, and she must've understood because she nodded.

He let his hand slide off and she continued doing what she had intended, and when she pulled his gown back down underneath his body, she looked at his eyes again, "You're not gonna tell anyone I cried, right?"

Henry smirked a little at that, doing his best impression of locking his lips and throwing the key away even though he was too sore to really move much. "Our secret," he whispered.

And now he'd made it to the end of his bed, and he had nothing else to hold on to with the next step except his IV pole. Which is why, ultimately, he was paused there—if Sarah had to come in here because he'd fallen, she'd kill him herself. He finally calculated his chances of catching the wall if he'd just push off a little, and he grabbed out for it and shuffled along until he reached the door.

He looked both ways down the halls, and finally he decided to just go right—he wasn't sure what had told him to do so, but it felt good. Left—nothing felt good about left, and right was calling to him. Maybe it was intercepted, however, by the morphine dangling above his head. In his right mind, he would've been surprised to not see many people around—that's normally unusual in the infirmary. But he hadn't been in his right mind since the extraction, and truthfully, he had been thinking way too much about the woman with all the blood in her hair. Elizabeth. He had been saying her name over and over again to remember it, and it worked.

He shuffled along the hallway, passing only one other person who Henry realized was just a grunt and wouldn't tattle. However, he did feel a bit embarrassed when he realized the back of his gown was open, and he reached around to tie it before continuing to shuffle back down the hall.

He'd looked into each little room, which weren't many, but each one was empty. Finally, he got to a closed door and heard Sarah talking inside. He looked around for anyone down the hall, but no one was there. Quickly, he moved around the corner of the hall and waited until he heard the door click open, then click shut again. After he heard Sarah walking down the other way, he made his move around the corner and back in front of the door.

Quietly, he pushed the handle down and peeked into the room.

What he saw:

A woman with the most beautiful, blonde head of hair. So beautiful, in fact, that he almost missed the bruises covering her throat, the swelling around her eye, the cuts on her lips, the cords she was hooked up to. She was asleep, too, and Henry noticed she looked beautiful because she looked so at peace.

How can she look at peace when her body looks like war?

He wondered briefly who Sarah was talking to, but he didn't let it stop him from walking into the room. His cart stuck on the door, and he clamored until he was able to maneuver it around the door and into the room, shutting the door back behind him to not raise more suspicion. It was only a matter of time until Sarah figured it out, anyway—she'd be making her rounds and see his empty bed soon enough.

He almost tip-toed into her room, staring at her the entire time.

Her hands were folded over her stomach, just under her chest, and if it hadn't been for the beeping of the heart monitor and what he recognized as a ventilator breathing for her, he might have thought she was a corpse. She'd been laid there so beautifully.

He swallowed hard as he continued to make his way into the room, standing beside her bed now but still a foot or so away. He felt nervous—not for Sarah to catch him, but for Elizabeth—God, what a fitting, beautiful name for such a beautiful woman—to wake up and find him there.

His eyes roamed over each bruise on her neck—especially the ones under her jaw. Someone had left fingermarks in her skin, and he felt his fingers getting hot, and then his chest, and then his face. The anger just rose within him so fast that he felt like he could punch something, but then he felt dizzy from the sudden rush. He gripped onto his IV pole and moved to the singular chair in her room, sitting down in it and catching his breath.

This was the most activity he's had since coming to the infirmary.

He moved from her throat down to her hands again, noting once more the way they looked like they should have a bouquet of flowers in them. Her fingernails had been cleaned the same way her hair had been. He supposed someone was in charge of hygiene around here, though he didn't know who. He swallowed thick when he saw the scrapes on her hands, the cuts around her fingers where it looked like she'd clawed at something sharp.

"What the hell did they do to you…" he murmured, not realizing he was saying it aloud until he heard himself and subsequently startled himself, too.

He swallowed thick, taking a shaky breath and feeling that pain in his ribs again. He wanted to look up at his morphine bag to make sure it was still dripping, but he didn't want to take his eyes off her. He was afraid, somehow, that now that he's seen her, she would be taken away and tortured again if he didn't watch over her.

But again, that may have been the morphine.

"McCord," he heard a barking voice, causing his shoulders to jump and his grip to slip off the IV pole. He turned too quickly and got dizzy, closing his eyes tightly after getting a short glimpse of Sarah Jordan. He hadn't even heard the door open.

"I just wanted to check on her," he said.

"You've been asking for updates every time I go in your room, McCord," Sarah said, walking to Elizabeth's bedside and putting up a new bag on her IV pole before changing her tubing over to the new bag. He was all too familiar now with the process. "And I tell you the updates every time I go in your room. Why do you feel the need to put yourself in danger and come down here?"

She was chiding him again, and he could feel it, but he wasn't hearing her. He was just staring at Elizabeth, looking at the black eye she had and the way it was swelling all around her nose and through her cheek. He didn't know it, but his face was bright red.

"McCord," Sarah's voice said again, and this time he moved his eyes to her. She was awaiting a response to something he hadn't even heard.

He swallowed hard, "Who did this to her?"

"Confidential," Sarah said, "I don't even know."

He looked at Elizabeth again and tried to take another deep breath, but was met with a pain both in his chest and in his head. He wanted to close his eyes and try to focus on ridding himself of the pain, but he couldn't—he couldn't move away from her now.

"You need to get back to your room," Sarah said, and Henry felt the young-child-need to whine, something like but five more minutes…

He just looked at Elizabeth, continuing to focus on her until his vision blurred.

"She's under sedation," Sarah said, "Remember? I told you that."

"I know."

"Then why are you looking at her like you expect her to say something to you?"

He looked at Sarah only briefly, then back to Elizabeth. "Because I feel like she has a lot to say." A lot to say to me, maybe.

"McCord, you really need to—"

"What harm am I doing being in here by this woman's side?" He finally snipped, and Sarah recoiled while simultaneously looking like she was about to yell at him. "I'm keeping her company, and she's doing the same for me."

"I—"

"Please," he finally begged, the word coming from somewhere deep in his gut before it spilled out—not unlike his vomit had on Sarah's shoes. "I need to be sure she's going to be okay."

"We're doing that," Sarah said, "We're making sure she's going to be—"

"Sarah," he begged again, his voice cracking. His ribs were throbbing and his head too, and he could barely see her for the squigglies in front of his eyes.

She swallowed thick, "Be back in your bed at twenty-two hundred hours or I'm tracking your ass down."

"It's been a long time since I've had a curfew I've paid attention to." He mumbled.

"I'm serious, McCord," Sarah said, and this time he felt the weight of her statement. He glanced at the wall, and though it was very blurry, he thought it said 8:29. That meant he had less than two hours here before he had to go back to his room, and he was going to make the most of it by making himself comfortable in that chair.

Henry | Post-extraction – 50 hours.

Before Sarah had made her morning round, he'd gotten out of the bed again and shuffled his way down to Elizabeth's room. He knew she'd chide him for it whenever she got around to his room to find it empty, or got to Elizabeth's room to find it doubly occupied, but he didn't really care. He hadn't slept all night, anyway, because his mind wouldn't stop racing about her.

This morning, as he sat down in the chair, he thought he could see that maybe some of the bruising around her neck was starting to turn from that ugly purple to an uglier green. The ventilator made her breathing look violent, and though he'd never been on a ventilator before, he was sure it must feel violent, too. The way the tube went down her throat in itself looked bad enough.

Her hands were still crossed over her stomach—she hadn't moved at all, but Sarah had reminded him again last night that she was sedated. He believed she'd called it a medically induced coma, or something of the sort. He hadn't been fully listening.

This time he didn't startle when Sarah came in—he felt less like a child getting caught stealing cookies from the cabinet late at night. He just briefly looked at her to acknowledge she came in, and then he set his gaze back on Elizabeth.

Sarah moved around Elizabeth and changed her IV bag again, the first thing she always did whenever she did her morning rounds, he was finding. "She's coming off the ventilator today," Sarah announced, and this got Henry's attention enough that he looked up at her. "We worked on weaning her off yesterday, and now we're going to take her off."

The nervousness in Sarah's voice was something new to Henry—he had never seen her be so worried about anything. But he assumes that after three hours of surgery to save this woman's life, she also must feel pretty attached to her.

"When are you doing that?"

"Right now." Sarah said, starting the process.

He watched as she carefully unhooked the ventilator tube from the breathing machine on the other side of the bed. "Alright," Sarah murmured to herself, talking herself through the steps. She seemed nervous, Henry could tell by the way her hands shook just slightly. She was, as always, trying to hide the tension, but Henry could see right through it.

His eyes fixed back onto Elizabeth—the ghostly color of her skin that wasn't covered in bruising made him feel uneasy. She must've lost a lot of blood. And when he thought about seeing her for the first time in that closet, he remembered seeing a lot of blood, he just didn't know where it had been coming from other than, obviously, her. His stomach lurched again at the thought of that night.

He felt a terrible pressure in his chest—one different from the one he'd felt with his ribs. He was heavily medicated overnight, as always, so the pain was more bearable in the mornings. This wasn't pain, this was simply a weight.

As he watched Sarah slowly removing the tube from Elizabeth's scabbed mouth, he found himself wondering why he had such an attachment to her already. He had just pulled her from a life-threatening situation, sure, but did all people feel this way toward the people they extract? Did all Marines develop this…protectiveness? This deep attachment that made him want to just hold her body in case anything else bad happened to her, it would come through him first?

She added to his sense of purpose, he supposed, but he's still not sure that he should feel this much of an ache toward her.

Henry hadn't even realized, but the tube was out, and he could see the subtle rise and fall of Elizabeth's chest. He was telling himself he shouldn't be staring at a woman's chest who he didn't even know, but it wasn't sexual—it was purely joyousness. Her breaths were shallow, but he knew for certain that they were unmistakably hers.

Sarah checked the monitor over Elizabeth's head, lowering the bed's incline for a less harsh incline. When she had apparently gotten it to where she wanted it, she stopped and glanced over at Henry. "Waking her up now," Sarah said, the sterility in her voice coming through. She was a medic, after all—not just the woman who he'd watched cry a few nights ago after saving this very woman's life.

The room seemed to hold its breath as Sarah adjusted Elizabeth's IV, slowly reversing the drugs that had kept Elizabeth unconscious these past few days.

After the minutes passed by with the two of them—three of them—in complete silence, Henry swore he saw Elizabeth's finger move. A twitch, maybe. He was about to tell Sarah, but when he glanced up at her, she looked like she was deep in thought.

She'd been counting Elizabeth's breaths, he realized.

He had been, too.

He turned back to Elizabeth and saw her finger move again, and then again. "She's moving," he whispered, a sudden fear striking in him. What if she's scared of me?

I'm the last person she saw before it all went to black for her.

What if she thinks I did this…

"Yes," Sarah said as though it were common knowledge.

Henry leaned forward just slightly, anticipatingly, as he watched her eyelids flutter. He felt like he should jump up and leave, rush out of this room before she could ever notice he was here. But he couldn't jump, he couldn't rush, he couldn't do any of those things—the hemothorax and concussion had really taken away all his ability to do any of that.

So he leaned backward in the chair, trying to make himself as small as he could as he watched her eyelid crack open—the black eye struggling more than the other. She blinked again, and he felt a pain in his ribs—he'd been holding his breath and hadn't realized it.

"Hey there," Sarah said in this sweet voice Henry had never heard from her before. It barely even registered to him that it was Sarah speaking at all. "You're alright, you're waking up from some heavy medicine, okay?"

Elizabeth's eyes closed again and Henry panicked, but then they opened and looked over at where the voice she was hearing was coming from.

"Just take it easy, okay? You're safe."

Sarah was trying to reassure her, and he couldn't figure out why she was emphasizing her safety so much until he realized her breaths had quickened. Her chest was rising and falling much too fast, and the heart monitor was beeping quicker, too.

"You're going to feel disoriented for a while," Sarah said, still trying to reassure.

Elizabeth's heartrate was still fast when she closed her eyes, and he saw her fingers dig into the sheet and blanket over her stomach. She looked like she was in pain, and immediately Sarah started pressing buttons on the IV pole.

He noticed, too, that she hadn't used Elizabeth's name the entire time. Confidential, he thinks. CIA.

Sarah was still trying to give Elizabeth empty promises about being okay, but Elizabeth's heartrate was starting to get faster again, and he watched her chest as her breaths became shallower. He could see the panic in her eyes—the one good eye, at least—and he could tell that she wasn't here anymore, she was somewhere else. Somewhere, he supposed, with the person who bruised her up and did all this to her.

He needed to step in.

With a sharp breath, he stood. Slowly, carefully, as to not scare her or hurt his ribs even more, and he moved closer to the bed. Sarah didn't seem to notice him—she was too busy messing with the IV and focusing on the monitor above Elizabeth's head.

"Elizabeth?" He said softly, his voice cracking a little as he spoke. The way her name felt on his lips…he wanted to say it aloud again just to feel the intoxication. "Listen to me, okay? You diffused the bomb, you're not in that place anymore. You're not alone."

Her eyes fluttered over to see him, and immediately her breathing stopped. He panicked, grabbing her bedrail and looking up at Sarah to see what to do, but Sarah just watched, and finally Elizabeth breathed again. This time a little deeper.

Though the panic was still visible in her eyes, she looked a little less nervous. Henry's words had seemed to anchor her, somehow, even if she couldn't fully comprehend them yet. Maybe it was his voice, maybe he reminded her of someone. He had no idea, he was just glad she wasn't so scared.

"You're okay," he said softly, his grip loosening on the bedrail, "You're banged up, but you're going to pull through, okay?"

He knew, somewhere deep down, that she wasn't able to respond yet, but he still talked to her as though she might.

"I'm not going anywhere, I'll be here."

"McCord," Sarah mumbled.

He looked up at her to see that chiding look, "I'm not leaving her, Jordan." He said sternly, "I'm not."

She swallowed thick and he looked back at Elizabeth whose eyes were still on him, and she seemed to have relaxed enough that her heartrate was back to normal. She tried to breathe in once and got choked, and the panic settled back into her eyes quickly.

"Hey," he said, reaching and touching her hand. She jumped, and he immediately felt horrible about touching her at all. He let go just as quickly as he'd grabbed it, but her fingers twitched, and she looked at him with tears in her eyes. "You're going to breathe again, okay?" He whispered, unsure where the words were coming from. His brain was too frazzled to really be thinking of them himself. "Just focus on me, breathe with me."

He stopped talking and pressed his lips together, taking a deep, painful breath through his nose and watching her try to mimic him. He nodded, cheering her on silently as she attempted to breathe in, too, and he smiled a little. "Keep going…" he encouraged quietly, nodding again as they both breathed in together. The pain in his side hurt like hell, but he didn't even really care—she was breathing, she had her eyes on him, and that's all that mattered.

"You're safe now." He whispered again, the words pouring out of his lips without filter.

Sarah was watching him and finally straightened her back up, shoving her hands into her pockets. "I'm going to pretend like you're in your bed tonight when I do my last rounds," she murmured, and that's all that was said on the matter before she walked toward the door. "I trust you'll tell me if you need me."

"I will," Henry said, but he didn't look at her—he didn't even know who was talking anymore, really, because he was too focused on being lost in Elizabeth's eyes.