Chapter Text
John tries to pick you up and throw you across the room like a professional wrestler. The only thing stopping him is that you’re an awkward shape. Instead, he drops you on top of him, and you lay in a heap, laughing.
You and John have silent conversations, signing and writing at each other. The signs you don’t know—or that the books don’t have—you make up. Eddie tells you this is important, but won’t explain why. You ignore him; it’s not like he’s particularly helpful anyway.
One week, you show him how to make paper airplanes, tearing pages out of your notebook. You experiment with different folds, different angles to throw them. The next week, you do the same thing, but have him shoot each plane down with his lasers.
Some days (not as often as you’d like), you don’t train at all. Instead, you focus on building a relationship with each other. You play games. At first, John asks if you’re letting him win. You’re not, and you enjoy seeing him smile with each victory. He smiles when you win, too, giving you a thumbs up or a high five. They’re simple games—card games, dice games, drawing games—but you both enjoy them.
Once, when you come in, the boy looks exhausted. “Tuckered out,” as your mother would say. His eyes light up when he sees you, but it doesn’t last long. The dark circles under his eyes resemble bruises. He sways on his feet. You wonder, once again, what they’re doing to him.
“Nothing,” he says when you ask. His voice has the note of confusion. He yawns. “I had bad dreams and didn’t sleep good, is all,” he mumbles, looking at the floor.
You take the pillow off his bed, and sit down against the wall. You place it in your lap, and pat it lightly. You gesture for him to come over. He sits down, looking at you with both suspicion and confusion.
“Rest is importent as work,” you sign, spelling out a word you don’t know. You say it slowly, working to remember the motions. John squints, and nods in understanding. He doesn’t look any more sure than before though.
“I guess….” His eyes shift around, looking for someone to disapprove.
“Trust me,” you say. You tap the pillow again, the way you’d summon a dog to hop in your lap. He lays his head in your lap, and falls asleep almost immediately.
You can’t sing him to sleep the way you want to. (— Not that you’d have sounded much better before, says Godfrey. You roll your eyes.) As you run your armored fingers through the boy’s hair, you close your own eyes. You spend the rest of your time like that, in the space between sleep and wakefulness, listening to John breathe, feeling him twitch, pressing a gentle hand on him when he seems distressed.
When the time is up, you gently wake him and walk him back to his bed. He’s back asleep before his head hits the pillow. As you pull the blanket over him and give him a light kiss on the cheek, you wonder if anyone has ever done this before. If anyone’s ever tucked him in, sung him to sleep, read him a bedtime story.
You write a note on a piece of paper and tear it out before leaving. You grab the nearest white coat worker you see and shove it in her hand. You gesture at the note, at John’s door, and at the note again. You make a V-shape with your fingers and point at your eyes, at the white-coat, and at you again. Read the note. It’s about him. Do what it says. I’m watching you.
As you storm off, once again furious about the John’s situation, the lab assistant uncrumples the note, and reads the three words childishly scrawled on the paper.
LET HIM SLEEP