Chapter Text
The only things worse than the bombings were what they left behind.
Pieces of cement and drywall and broken pipes, use-to-be-buildings that caved in under the blast, their skeletons barely standing. A dark, toxic sky, heavy with ash falling like rotted rain. Streets covered in soot and sinew, the smell of smoke, of fire, of the bodies being burned as the blackbirds came hungry and left full.
Jack hated those birds.
Hated the way they arrived in flying swarms, swooping down on whatever was left of a person, picking off the meat, having their fill. Hated the way it didn't faze the creatures, the way they managed to be calloused against it all, the way the thousands of lives that were taken here didn't change their nature. The way that their presence signified his failure; the fact that he was too late for this place.
Ana walked next to him, checking in the cracks of the pavement, the ruins of what used to be a home. She didn't say much. When he looked her way he saw the clamminess of her skin, the way her hands were hesitant to stray far from where her sniper sat slung across one shoulder, like she was itching for a fight, a conflict, something tangible to take to hell. Anything but this. Anything but a massacre.
She reached up to her radio, pressing a finger to where it sat in her ear. “Block B is empty. Moving forward to C, over.”
This was day three of clean up.
That’s what they called it, anyways: clean up; as if it were fixable, as if they could put it all back together again, good as new, like the ten omnic bombs weren't dropped, like nearly nine-thousand people weren't killed in the nighttime, no warning, no preface. Just gone. Gone, gone, gone.
“You think anyone’s out here?” Jack asked, not because he didn't know the answer, but because the sound of crackling fires and silence was beginning to get to him in a bad way.
Ana shrugged, helped him overturn a slab a pavement, revealing nothing underneath but a room full of rubble. “I don't know. There’s always the chance.”
She was trying to be hopeful, and he appreciated it, but they both knew that this wasn't a place for that. Not now. Maybe never again. He lifted his head, looked out over miles of what used to be a prospering Swiss town, now a grey wasteland, what would one day be only grass and fields and ruins.
“We should have been here,” Jack said, no louder than a whisper.
Ana only nodded, like she couldn't bear the words, and then they continued to pick through the wreckage, because that’s all they could do, because that was all that was left.
Hours pass, and they find nothing. Reyes radios in, tells them that he’ll pick them up in less than sixty minutes, that they gave it their best shot. Ana just says they’ll be ready for extraction. Jack says nothing.
The light was getting bullied down under the horizon, the nighttime growing closer, signifying the end of another day full of walking among the crashed cars and carnage. It was hard to believe that anyone survived the bombings, especially this close to the impact zone, but Jack knew that this was better than pacing in his room, burning a hole in the floor with the soles of his boots. Besides, like Ana said, there was still a chance they’d find someone out here. A chance of infinitesimal probability, but infinitely larger than nothing.
Flickering on his flashlight, Jack did a circle, glancing at the collapsed concrete around him, the sheets of bent metal, the bloodstains. His chest was full of lead, sleep pulling hard at his eyelids. His feet halted on their own accord.
“I think I’m done,” he said, simply.
Ana slowed to a stop, looked back behind her shoulder. She hesitated, her eyes dropping down to the rubble at her feet, like she didn't want to give in. “Me too,” she admitted quietly, almost ashamed.
They sat on the hood of a broke-down truck and waited, shared a flask of water, watched the light die out and bleed red against the bumpy, battered skyline. Ana lied her weapon across her lap, ran her hands over the muzzle, the loaded cartridge, like she was trying to find comfort in the familiarity. Jack just buried his chin into his palms, breathed through the cracks of his calloused fingers. The sunset washed over them in a brief burst of warmth as they listened to the shifting debris, the crackling, the cawing of the birds and the faint scratching. Before he knew it, Jack’s eyes began to drop, his mind wander—
Wait. Wait.
Scratching?
He lifted his head, hands dropping as he perked an ear, trying to triangulate the sound. Ana looked up, alarmed.
“What?” she asked.
Jack shushed her frantically, praying he had heard correctly, that it wasn't just the wind against stone. He hopped off the vehicle, held up a hand to the woman, waiting. A heated sensation began to flood into his chest, a mixture of adrenaline and anxiety and a dangerous splash of hope.
A stretch of silence, empty and long. He took a slow step forwards, ignoring the concerned look burrowing between his shoulder blades, courtesy of Ana. Then he heard it again: the sound of something brushing against the concrete, barely audible, but there. The feeling in his chest doubled, and suddenly he was very much awake.
“Did you hear that?” he asked, rushing towards a pile of walls in pieces, wrapping his hands around the edges of a large slab and pulling it away. Ana was hot on his heels.
“No,” she said, bending down to help him, “What was it?”
Jack just shook his head, digging vigorously down into the debris with enough force to bruise his fingers, muscles straining as he struggled to lift some of the heavier blocks. “I’m not sure, but… I just— I heard something,” he said, not pausing from his work.
Ana opens her mouth to say something, but is cut off by another soft, small sound— the scratch, scratch, scratching of something under their fingers, just barely loud enough to notice, barely anything more than a whisper. But the quiet sound is enough to fill them with the determination to dredge out this entire block, uncover every corner, hollow every building.
They look at each other once, lips parted, eyes wide. Then they dig like they're digging for gold.
It feels like hours, honestly. Every second stretches out, a moment into a millennia, everything they did taking too long, too long, too long. Dirt wedges under their fingernails, splinters cutting into their palms, their knees scraping against the rocks as they kneeled over to reach for the next pieces of cement, the broken slates of roofing, what they assume use to be part of a kitchen sink. Anything they could get their hands on, anything that would bring them closer to what they begged to be a survivor.
“Hello? Can anyone hear me?” Jack yelled, not stopping.
Nothing responded, not even the sound of scratching. It had been minutes since they heard it last, and it made the adrenaline spike in Jack’s chest.
Ana brought away a final fraction of rock, revealing a sort of alcove leading down, narrow and dark and extraordinarily unstable. They looked at each other, both knowing that one wrong move in there could lead to a complete cave in.
“Hello?” Jack called again, suddenly desperate.
Ana was already halfway through shedding her outer coat, leaning her gun against a pillar. “I’ll go,” she said, and Jack shot a hand out to grab her arm, frightened that she would slip away before the words were out his mouth.
“No,” he stated, giving her a hard look, “That place could come down if you so much as breathe on it wrong. Too risky.”
She shot him an incredulous glare. “Since when do we give a damn about risk? Someone could be in there— could have been stuck for days. They might not have much longer.”
“I know,” Jack agreed, fitting his flashlight between his teeth and zipping up his jacket, tossing his cap to the side, “That’s why I’m going in. Keep you comms on, okay?”
Ana narrowed her dark eyes, teeth bared. “I’m smaller. I can fit better.”
“I’m the captain. I can give orders, and I am: Stay. Here.” He got down on his hands and knees, gauging the dimensions of the tunnel, not saying what was really burning a hole on the tip of his tongue: One of us is a mother, Ana. One of us has to give a damn.
Looking over his shoulder, he said, “I’ll be back.”
She nodded stiffly, and he was gone, crawling carefully through the darkness and dirt, tucking his flashlight into the crook of his arm.
The air was stale and sour, churning like a storm in his lungs, and for a moment he had to pause to adapt to the tightness of the walls around him. He wasn't a claustrophobic individual by any means, but it wasn't hard be unnerved by the lack of space down there. Every movement was a risk, so he proceeded forward slowly, slithering on his forearms and hips and taking in the wreckage around him, wondering if someone really could have survived having a building dropped on them. Despite his better judgement, hope blossomed in his chest.
It was quickly choked out when the smell hit him.
He fought the urge to be sick when it pressed up against his face with no warning, the scent of decaying flesh and dried blood and bodies, the scent of death, of something rotting. It pushed down his nose and throat, thick and endless, determined to reach his lungs, his heart, the fragile things he kept there. It took him a minute to convince himself to move forward, forcing himself not to gag.
He went on like that for awhile: dragging himself onwards with his elbows and knees, trying to breathe through the terror, the dust catching in the rays of his flashlight and dancing like fireflies. Soon, Ana checked in.
“Anything?” she asked, steely.
“No. I haven't gotten that far, though. Standby.”
“Jack, it’s not safe for you to—“
“Standby.”
The silence she sent him was suffocating. He got back to work.
It is only when he reaches a final dead end— when he is completely convinced that this place is empty of life, carrying only carnage and cold bodies— that he finds her.
At first she appeared only as another amorphous blur out of the corner of his eyes, swallowed up in dark, just a bolder, an out-of-place bundle of debris, he concluded. For a moment there, he was about to turn himself around, crawl back out the way he came, hang his hand and tell Ana it wasn't anything, just the walls settling, the sound of cement cracking under the pressure. Tell her that it was time they go home.
But then the light catches something— something that takes a moment for him to compute, like he was a satellite struggling to find a signal, like there was just too much information coming in at once. For a handful of seconds, he could only stare.
Her eyes— the only things that kept their color down here, that weren’t slathered in shades of dirty grey— struck him like blue fire, little orbs of ice that eyed him through half-shut lids. They blinked long, heavy blinks, trailing him tiredly, as if she wasn't sure of what she was seeing. She laid crumpled against the ground, bleeding from her hairline, bruised and battered with blotches of purple and brown, her little fingers curled around nothing. Jack can see her ribs when she breathes, in and out, in and out, shallow and hungry and harrowed.
He nearly rushes forward, the adrenaline flooding like fire into his bloodstream, but then remembers how he must be careful here, lest he risks having this place swallow them whole. Swallowing hard, he maneuvers closer, trying to keep his heart from crawling out his chest.
“Hello,” he says gently, moving the flashlight into one of his hands. The figure just whimpers, trying to pick her head off the cold cement only to drop it back down, obviously exhausted, not to mention half-starved. Jack shakes his head, slowly drawing closer.
“It’s alright, I gotcha, don't move,” he tells her softly, keeping the panic far from his voice. Up this close, he can see how one of her legs is stuck under a heavy pile of rock and rubble, painted red and probably broken. “Don’t move, sweetie,” he says again, this time with more urgency.
Her lips are cracked and bleeding, chapped to a point where forming words was difficult. “Mama,” she wheezes, arm dragging against the debris as she tried to reach for him, her accented voice so quiet he nearly misses it. Her fingers brush up against his sleeve.
Jack nods, lets his hand cover hers for a second as he assesses the situation. “She… she’s not here right now. But I’m going to get you out, okay?”
She groans, a sound that grows into a cough, racking her small form for all it’s worth. Carefully, Jack reaches behind him, bringing out the canteen of water from his back pocket and wishing he had left more inside it. He helps lift her head up, one large hand gently supporting her upper back, the other moving the lips of the carton closer to her mouth. The girl winces, and for a moment Jack worries that he had accidentally aggravated her leg, or perhaps some other injury he couldn't see. But then she latches onto the water jug with both hands, draining it with a few thirsty gulps. He watches as her little shoulders droop with relief.
“Better?” he asks, positioning himself so she could lean against him, trying to determine how bad of a shape she was in. It was difficult to see the bruises and scratches littering her skin under all the dust, but despite that and the darkness that surrounded them, he could see she was young— six at the oldest, her wrists thin and her face soft and youthful.
She doesn't reply, just paws at the empty canteen, as if asking for more.
“I’m sorry,” he says, putting the metal contained back in his pocket. “It’s empty. My friend can give you some, though. Once we get out of here.”
Much to his surprise, the girl just shakes her head at this, attempts to lean away from him as if the touch of his flesh was unpleasant. “Mama,” she says again, just as quietly, looking at her trapped leg and tugging feebly. She whimpered when something shifts above them, a rock coming loose, possibly, a consequence of the motion. Jack holds up his hands, trying not to panic at the thought of it all coming down— cement and cobble and ceiling tile collapsing in on all sides, burying the both of them alive in a tomb of ruins.
“Woh, woh, take it easy,” he tells her, and he kicks himself mentally when he recognizes how distressed he sounds. He swallows and tries again, managing to keep his voice level this time around. “Just… just let me help.”
She gives him a hard, measured look, and suddenly her eyes are too old, too sad, too hurt to belong to such a young child. She flicks her chin to the gun on his back, flinching when he reaches for it.
Right, he thinks. Because the bad people with guns did this to her. No wonder she’s afraid of him. Slowly, he removes the rifle from his back, empties the cartridge before her eyes and then sets it aside as far as he can, which, admittedly, isn't far considering how narrow the passage was.
“I just want to help,” he reiterates, emphasizing every word.
They look at one another, eye to eye, soul to soul, listen to the the world above them creak and groan. Then she just nods, giving in, her limbs going limp once more against the ground as if she simply lost the energy to keep herself up. Jack moves to her trapped leg, looking at how it was completely covered from knee to toes underneath the rubble. He puts a finger to the comm in his ear.
“Ana,” he says, praying the signal hadn't gone out this deep in.
For once, he was lucky. “Still here,” comes his friend’s voice, “You coming back?”
“No. No, Ana, I got a little girl in bad shape down here. It’s not good.”
There is a silence on her side, what he assumes to be shock. “You… you found someone,” she responds slowly, not quite a question, like she wanted to make sure she hadn't misheard.
He looks at the girl beside him, her half-lidded eyes, the blood dried atop her forehead. “Yeah,” he says, something besides adrenaline burning in his chest, “I found her.”
He explains her condition briefly, tells Ana to have a med pack ready for when they got out along with any rations they had left. She encourages him to be gentle, explains how three days without sustenance could affect someone so young, tells him to make sure to keep her calm best he can.
“What’s her name?” Ana asked, somewhat breathless.
“Ah… I don’t know. She doesn't talk much.”
“Shock, probably.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll, uh… I’ll see you when we get out, alright?”
“Alright,” she says, and he thinks she’s gone for a moment. But then she’s back in his ear, hesitant, softer than before. “And, Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Good call.”
They leave it at that.
Jack points his flashlight down at the girl’s injured leg, winces in sympathy at the sight of the torn skin, the layer of crimson covering her flesh. He is beyond surprised that she isn't wailing with the pain. When he glances her way, he sees the girl staring at him, icy orbs watchful and unmoving, like she is anxious over what he’ll do next. He wishes he knew.
He runs his fingers gently over the place where her leg stopped and the rock started, surprised to find a softer texture, much different than concrete. Frowning, he moves the light down, trying to better see what he was touching. He nearly throws up.
It’s a body.
No, no, that’s the wrong word— it’s a corpse.
The thing cushioning the little girl’s leg from a ton of debris is a dead woman, only partially visible, much of her body buried by the wreckage. From what he can see, her skin is pale and encrusted with bile and blood, her flesh rotting slowly, her fingers rimmed with black and her body bloated. The horrible smell intensifies, and again, Jack struggles to not be sick.
The girl is still staring at him, sending short glances to the dead body on top of her, as if she preferred to not look at it. Then she lowers her eyes, tugs her trapped leg once more, and Jack can only imagine what it would be like to be tucked against a stranger’s decaying flesh for three days, how much it would repulse him, how terrifying this girl must have been down here, keeping the company of ghosts.
“Mama…” She says the word like a lament this time, all heavy and aching and anguished.
Jack blinks, eyes suddenly widening in terror. He raises a numb finger, points it at the dead woman. “Is she… that’s not… her, is it?”
The girl only turns her head, sniffles once. Jack feels his world tilt sideways.
“I’m getting you out of here,” he says, very clearly, for himself as much as her, because suddenly the thought of this girl suffering silently in the dark for seventy-two hours straight, pressed up against the dead and dying, makes him want to find the nearest omnic and put their head through a wall. Gently, he puts one of his hands on her upper leg and the other on the stone surrounding it, as far away from the corpse as possible. The girl stiffens, a noise trembling deep in her throat.
Jack hushes her softly, trying to dig out some of the loose rubble around her thigh, not feeling it when his fingers scratch and bruise from the effort. “Just breathe, baby. You’re doing great.”
When he is forced to touch the body once more he does so quickly, calloused and cold, is if it were nothing but squishy stone. He would have given anything to have had his gloves on. Carefully, Jack attempts to lift the dead woman, pleading silently that it would leave enough room to remove the leg— he didn't wand to think about what the other option was if he couldn't get it loose.
The entire place groans at the shift of structure. Jack stays very still.
“Okay,” he says, little more than a whisper, bracing himself. “This is going to hurt, but I promise everything’s going to be fine.” He hopes for a response, but gets nothing except a silent, distracted nod, the girl’s eyes still focused far away.
With a considerable measure of strength, Jack lifts the corpse higher, managing to raise it and the wreckage crushing down atop it an inch, ignoring the bodily fluids smothering his palm. Then he stuck his arm in beneath it— parallel to the girl’s leg— finds what feels like the twisted flat of her foot, and then pulls. Hard.
The limb slides out from under the dead body just as the girl lets out a broken sob, the pain making her convulse and shutter out sentences in what he assumes is German as the feeling rushed back into her leg, her shoulders shaking with the strain of it all. The walls around them settle with a few concerning sounds as he releases his hold on the corpse, but they don’t collapse. He wipes his hands on his pants, then reaches for the smaller figure.
“I’m sorry,” he starts, the sight of her crying driving his heart into his throat. He rests his hands on one of her little shoulders, atop the torn sleeve of her shirt. “It’s over, now. It’s okay. Show me where it hurts— could you do that for me, please?”
She doesn't flinch away from his touch this time, and if anything, his request seems to calm her. Sniffling, she nods, twisting herself around slowly to point at the space directly beneath her kneecap, where he could see most of the half-dried red gathering. When he focuses the light on it, he sees a sliver of white, what he assumes to be bone. He inhales sharply, passes it off as an attempt to clear his throat.
“Right,” he says faintly, lifting his head to glance at their exit, swallowing hard. “Just a scratch, then.”
The girl tilts her head, brows bending down ever so slightly. She shakes her head, her bangs falling in front of her face.
“Well,” Jack admits, cradling her injured leg with one careful hand, “Ah, maybe a little more.”
“It is shattered.”
Her English is a bit shaky, catching on the edges, but he understands every word, and for a moment he just stares, shocked. She says this shyly but without doubt, leaning down to lay her back on the ground, wincing.
When he finds his voice once more, he explains, “Don’t worry. My friend outside can help with that, but we have to get to her first, okay?”
The girl looked away, glancing back at where the figure laid crushed by the rocks, opens her mouth like she needs to tell him more but instead speaks nothing but silence. Her head shakes from side to side slightly.
Jack feels that tug in his chest once more, struggles with words he doesn't know how to say. “Mama… she can’t come. I’m sorry.”
There is a pause, a hard reckoning. He can practically see the grief taking root within her, watches as her nose scrunches up, her breathing shallow as she struggles to compute.
“She just… she can’t leave with us,” Jack says again, trying to get her to understand.
The girl looks up at him. She shakes her head once more, azure eyes tired and sore and confused. “She already left,” the child replies quietly, like it’s obvious.
Jack just nods, because he fears if he says the words, they’ll shake.
Ana is waiting for them at the mouth of the exit, framed by the newborn nighttime, her hair blowing out behind her as she eagerly helps take the girl from Jack’s arms. Everything about the sniper is turned soft and gentle at the sight of her little, battered form, setting her down carefully on a block of cement, smiling and helping brush off some of the dirt from her shoulders. The woman’s voice is warm and welcoming, trying to wash away the terror painted in grey pastels along her face.
“What’s your name, dear?” Ana asked, helping the girl twist the top of her canteen, watching as she drank so fast the water ran down her chin. When she pulled away from the bottle’s lips, short of breath, she made no move to respond.
Ana knelt down by where her injured leg hung, inspecting the break with calculating eyes. “Do you have any family close by?”
The girl nodded slowly, nibbling on the granola bar that had been taken out of its wrapper and handed to her.
“Where are they?”
She stuck out a scrapped hand, pointed it down to the way they had came, under rubble and wreckage. Ana swallows and says nothing.
Once Jack finishes dusting off his knees and elbows, he draws closer, squats down next to Ana and takes a breath, trying to find balance. The sky is big and boundless above them, speckled faintly with stars, constellations he’s not sure he recognizes anymore. He is thankful for the breeze rushing against his skin, helping him cool off, taking away the stench soot and singed skin. The soldier leans in, whispers in the woman’s ear.
“Ana,” he starts, not knowing how to finish. The corpse is fresh and clear on the underside of his eyelids.
“Yes,” she says in that same low tone, digging around in her coat for medical supplies, bringing out some bandages, boxes of needle and thread.
He fights for every syllable, cringing when they turn out flat, dropping to the floor like lead. “She was buried under her mother’s body. For days.”
He watches as the woman takes out a bottle of disinfectant, shakes it well before soaking a rag in the clear liquid. For a moment her eyes are hard, emotionless things, like she was refusing the urge to recognize the repulsive picture Jack had just barely painted for her. Then they loosen, stare up at the little girl, who now appeared to be inhaling the granola bar whole.
“It’s a hard war,” she says quietly, as if that was supposed to make it easier, as if that were supposed to make it right.
Jack rubs his hands together, forcing the heat in his chest to quell, forcing the air to enter and leave his lungs. “What can I do?”
She hesitated, the rag still clutched in one careful hand. “Sit with her. This won’t be pleasant.”
Nodding, he stretches out his legs, rising to his full height for a moment before settling down next to the girl, leaving a sliver of space between them. She glances sideways at him, still finishing off the ration, and then she does something that makes his heart do front-flips, makes his chest compress and expand like a blackhole, hungry and suddenly addicted: She smiles. All lips and no teeth, not huge, but enough. In her own strange, unconventional way, she was thanking him.
“I’m Jack,” he says, realizing he had forgotten to introduce himself down there in the depths. She nods. “Ah, my friend Ana is going to help heal your leg, but it’s going to sting a bit.” She nods again, her eyes drooping despite the warning. Hesitantly, her hand brushes against the hem of his sleeve, fingers folding into the fabric, white-grey against the blue. The space between them ceases to be.
Jack nearly puts and arm around her, draws her in close, but decides that after being stuck in such a small space for so long, she probably would appreciate a little room to breathe. With effort, he restrains himself.
“Deep breath,” Ana said from beneath them, and then pressed the soaked material tightly against the injury, holding the leg still as its owner nearly jumps off her perch.
The grip on Jack’s sleeve tightened immensely, twisting into the fabric, blue eyes dilating as the air catches in her throat. She tucks her chin between her shoulder, hair once more falling into her face as she shakes with the pain. Despite this, she doesn't scream. Jack leans down closer, murmurs soft nothings against her ear— how she’s doing so well, how soon it would all be over, all finished, all gone in the wind.
Deft hands pull the rag away— ruined with watered-down red and filth—and then unravel a small army of bandages, pulling the sterile, white material around the girl’s knee and foreleg, tight and practiced.
“All done for now,” Ana says smoothly, removing her latex gloves. “Stitches are going to have to wait until they properly set the bone. I can’t do it here. And then maybe a week off her feet, depending on how good of a doctor she gets.”
“She’ll get the best,” Jack states, his fingers brushing gently through the girl’s hair, finding it off-white under all the grime. Ana looks like she wants to say something, but just resorts to packing up her kit, tucking it back into her long coat. She brings herself up and settles on the other side of the child, managing to send a small smile her way before turning to glance up at the empty sky, wondering why Reyes was taking so long to get there.
She is surprised when a tiny hand weaves its way into the fabric of her coat, right before her wrist, tugging weakly.
Looking down at the contact, she see’s the girl staring up at her, eyes brimming and barely open. She points to herself, a finger digging into the torn, dirty shirt covering her chest.
“Angela,” she says, quietly.
Ana’s lips fall open, her head nodding slowly, and then she watches as the girl deflates into Jack’s arms, the grip on her sleeve going slack. Her eyes nearly close, her breath evening out as what’s left of her consciousness comes loose. Taken off guard, Jack gently guides her closer, helps her tuck her cheek into the bend of his shoulder and brushes the ash from her eyelashes as she drifts between the shores of restless and waking. He doesn't know how tightly to hold her, hesitates to so much as touch her wrong.
He looks up at Ana, lips parted, throat tight with things he doesn't know how to put into words— an intense sort of desperation, like he needs to know if she is sharing the sensation swelling in his chest like a storm. The woman just stares right back at him, tired, wordless, reminding herself to call Fareeha at the end of all of this.
Reyes radios in. He says he's three minutes out, asks them if they’re ready to blow this proverbial popsicle stand.
The two soldiers stare at one another, at the child between them, listen to the way the breath enters and leaves between her half-open teeth. Jack radios back:
“Yes. Yes, I’m just about sick of this place. Have an IV ready, will you?”
“Yessir,” Gabriel responds, cushioned between the sound of switches being flipped, engines turning, “Saddle up, chicos— home is just around the corner.”
Angela doesn't leave Jack’s side the entire trip back, hooking her arms around his neck as he carried her onto the carrier, sitting on his lap as they flew through the dark midnight. Likewise, she doesn't say another word, not even when they ask her to rate her pain from one to ten, nor when Ana comes at her with a needle and warns her gently that the IV may sting. When they offer her food, she looks away.
In between her dozes, she grows a fascination with Jack’s hands. Carefully, she takes them in her own grasp, brushing over the bruises, the scrapes, the splinters and the split skin— all received by trying to dig her out. Obviously unhappy, she looks up at him from under his chin, frowning and fretting over the scabs, reaching weakly over Ana who sat in the adjacent seat.
“Yes?” she asked, amused. The girl motions to the little hurts on Jack’s palms.
The man laughed tiredly, smiling despite the exhaustion etched into his bones. “I’m fine, I promise.”
Angela ignores him, points to the bandage on her leg— the one Ana had recently changed— and then to Jack’s hands. The woman nods, understanding. She reaches into her coat, rummaging for a bit before bringing out a metal carton of bandaids— the kind painted in neon colors, the ones she usually saves for the younger children.
A minute later Ana is helping her dress the cuts, shooting Jack a threatening glare when he opens his mouth to protest. Grudgingly, he lapses into fresh silence. The child in his lap meticulously smooths over the bright bandages, running out the creases as Ana places them on the man’s callouses, the young girl eyeing her work carefully despite her obvious fatigue. The act seemed to calm whatever unease she was still managing to harbor. Soon she drifts off again, hands still wrapped around Jack’s palm as she fades.
Reyes makes his way out from the pilot’s pit, rubbing the glow of the instruments out from under his eyelids. It only takes one look at Morrison— one measly glance at his Hello-Kity bandaided hands, the little girl using his chest as a pillow— for him to break into laughter.
“She whipped you right into shape, eh Jack?” he teased, quieting his voice at the harsh hushing of Ana.
Jack tries to tell him otherwise, but the syllables catch in his throat like something dry. “She, ah, she just needed some help getting to sleep,” he says, obviously. Ana and Gabriel share a look, a smile, and say nothing.
“She doesn't speak often,” Jack tells the woman in white, Angela still cradled in one arm, her leg beginning once more to bleed through the bandages. “I’m not sure if she’ll tell you if something hurts, so just— just, ah, really try to be sure her ribs are alright, and her hips, and… well, just make sure, okay?”
The nurse dipped her head, a wheelchair waiting by her side. “Of course, Captain.”
Jack seems reluctant to finish. “I’m not sure how much Amari told you about everything, but don’t be surprised when— if she doesn't like to be touched, sometimes, you know?”
“We’ll take very good care of her, Mr. Morrison.”
“I know, I know you will, but just… she deserves to take it slow for a while is all,” Jack says, Ana standing silently behind him, arms crossed and silent. She watches critically through ebony eyes.
Angela still hasn't said a word, but now looks on the brink of breaking her vigil. Her blue orbs stare up at Jack, confused, afraid, hurt; her grip on his jacket tightens with as much strength as she could muster. Obviously, she doesn't want to let go anytime soon.
He looks down at her. “You have to go for a bit,” he says, trying to smile. She appears thoroughly alarmed. “The doctors here are going to help you, okay? They’re good people, like us.”
This doesn't calm her, not even a little. Her mouth opens and she begins to say something, but its a scratching sound that quickly evolves into a cough, tearing through her like lightning. Ana moves forward, puts a hand to the girl’s forehead.
“Jack,” she says, “She needs to go.”
Before he can so much as respond, Angela tries again, succeeding only at one word, one very simple, very crucial question:
“After?”
Jack and Ana exchanged looks, hesitances drifting between them like cigaret smoke, unpleasant and lingering. Because, usually, this question was not under their jurisdiction— they save people, pull them out of war-zones or wreckages, get them to safety and then do it all over again. “After” is not their jobs. For them, there is only the now: the war, the fighting.
“We—“ Ana is cut off by Jack, a voice she does not recognize coming out of the man’s mouth.
“We’ll check up on you, yeah?” he says, lowering the child in his arms down into the wheelchair, brushing the bangs away from her eyes. “I’ll try and drop back in a week or so. Two, tops. Don’t worry, I’m not going to disappear.”
He didn't know what he was saying then, not really. Didn't know the implications, the foils, the faults. He just knew that when he said it, she had smiled, and the world felt a bit warmer, a bit less cruel, and as the nurse wheeled her away off the carrier, Jack looked down at his hands— colorful and bandaged— and knew he would do yesterday all over if he had to. He’d do it a thousand times, and a thousand more, just so see her bare her teeth like that, soft and strong and white, just to feel her small hands worry over his own.
He didn't know what he was saying, and he didn't care.
Even though it was a lie.
Because the truth was he wouldn't see Angela in a week, or even two, or three, or four. No. He didn't know it then, watching her go from the mouth of the carrier door, but that was the last glimpse he would get of those azure eyes for a long, long time.