Chapter Text
The one good thing about transporting a man you kidnapped who is dangerously close to septic shock from injuries you’re technically to blame for is that his infection paired with the medication to fight it makes him sleep excessive amounts. Adam shuffles into her car, the front seat this time since the back is still sticky with blood, gives her a wide-eyed, glassy look, and conks right out. He sleeps until Amanda finds somewhere to stay, with the exception of a rough patch of road, where the pain causes him to wake up crying.
They’re laid up in a motel for… a while. For a lot of it Adam has no real sense of the passing of time, and it doesn’t take long for it to blur together for Amanda too. Still paranoid, she checks into a single and sneaks him in after setting up her best imitation of a hospital bed. She stations Adam on the left side, adjusting his arm and shoulder so he doesn’t have to move it, and hooking his left arm back up to an IV. With no actual equipment to monitor him beyond a stolen blood pressure cuff and stethoscope, Amanda spends her nights tucked next to Adam with her hand circling his wrist. The medicine makes Adam sleep like the dead, but he’s restless by nature. Never one to sleep heavily and living under three kinds of stress, Amanda wakes up every time he so much as twitches. She runs on no sleep while Adam drifts in and out, but the marvel of seeing him actually get better after so long of watching John fail causes her to barely register the exhaustion.
After only a few days, Amanda becomes intimately familiar with the sound of Adam crying. He’s too out of it to feel embarrassed, and so overwhelmed by everything that the slightest upset sets him off. He cries when Amanda finds a dirty patch of skin that the hospital missed when they bathed him, he cries when she disinfects his shoulder, he cries when the scrape on his ankle opens and he sees blood on the sheets. It reminds Amanda of an overtired infant, exhausted past the ability to even comprehend what’s wrong. It’s mostly just soft, overwhelmed tears that don’t do much beyond wear him out more and get salt all over his face. She gets used to him thanking her for helping him with his hand in his face, wiping his eyes.
When he’s not crying though, he smiles at her. Especially as his vision gets less blurry and he realizes that her hair has gotten even more wild since the last time he really saw her. When his eyes are fully back to normal he confesses that when he first saw her in the car he thought she was an angel, there to take him to the other side. The infection made his vision blurry, and the passing streetlights looked like halos.
As he starts to heal and get his energy back, Adam begins having severe nightmares. And while his dose is lowered, his pain medicine throws any hesitation he has around Amanda out the window. He starts to wake up hysterical and sobbing in a childish, hiccuping way that twists Amanda’s heart around in her chest, only to upset himself worse with the pain it causes him. The first night it happens he reaches out for her blindly, pushing his bad shoulder into the bed in his effort and redoubling his pain and panic. It takes Amanda turning on all the lights and holding him to her chest for him to fall back asleep, red-faced and shivering while listening to her heart beat. He sleeps on the right side of the bed after that, so he can turn to her without hurting himself. She starts leaving a lamp on, eventually sleeping on her stomach so she can sling an arm over him while they sleep.
Adam regains awareness at an awkward pace. A day or so into their motel setup, he wakes up and asks Amanda where he is and what her name is. She sees a flicker of recognition at the name, but it’s pretty much subconscious. If he’s heard of her in connection to John, it’s in passing. The name Jigsaw had barely begun to gain notoriety when he was kidnapped, and Amanda Young much less. Adam asks how she found him, why she’s taking care of him. Those questions she leaves unanswered until he drops them.
The moment he’s got his bearings, Adam begs to know if Lawrence made it out. She tells him yes, and ignores the bile in her throat at the half-truth. It becomes a bit of a trend, with Adam’s fevers still spiking, that he gets blurry on what he’s asked and what he hasn’t. He always remembers Amanda’s name. He remembers that she saved him, but he’s always confused how she found him. He asks about Lawrence about a half a dozen more times before it sticks in his head that he’s okay. The day he remembers that Lawrence is alive is the first time he sleeps calmly the whole night through.
Gradually, Adam needs less support. His blood pressure stabilizes, so he goes off his vasopressor. Whether he needs more antibiotics is questionable, but by the time Amanda’s stash runs out he’s most of the way to healthy. He’s eating and drinking almost entirely on his own by then, so he goes off the IV. Their routine stabilizes alongside his recovery until they’re waking up at the same time every day for Amanda to check his bandages, dab on topical antibiotics, and apply a fresh bandage. Amanda goes out once or twice a day to get food or supplies, and they fall asleep side by side at night. More often than not, Amanda wakes up with Adam tucked against her chest, bad arm held tight to his body.