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It was easy to stay awake that first night. The first night was work.
The second he failed outright, conceding hours to a small meal, the soft embrace of a cushioned armchair, and an alarming lack of caution.
This night, the third, was easy again. The third night was pain.
It was overdue, Harold knew. The shadow was always with him, but the full dark was something he'd been expecting for some time. He figured it was well earned by now.
Just days before he was thrown to the ground by the shockwave of a bomb, the second he'd somehow managed to survive in this fractured lifetime so far.
The night after that he was actively struggling to keep a man alive, moving him, drugging him, wiring him up like a breadboard.
Today was worse than all those prior, hours on end simply sitting and doing nothing at all. Watching. Monitoring. Waiting. Time killed rather than spent. The kind of time you feel bleeding from you like an open wound.
At least Reese himself was no longer bleeding. His side torn open and sewn closed again like a busted seam was now safely hidden away, buried under a fresh layer of clean white gauze and medical tape. If only that were remotely enough. The tear on the outside was nothing. It was all the damage on the inside that would decide the outcome, and no one could see that now.
Before, Harold could indeed see it, far too much of it. Layers of skin exposed to the air. Muscle and sinew and blood all differing shades of red that glistened in the light with every shallow halting breath. Harold looked forward to some future time when he could stop seeing it on a recursive loop inside his mind. That would not be anytime soon.
As he rose he breathed through another clenching spasm between his shoulders. It was the transitions that were always the worst, shifts in weight and orientation. Pain like this was temporary, he reminded himself. It could be survived. You could never escape pain completely, but you could outlast the worst of it. When things were calmer, he could lie in his own bed again. He could take his medication. He could rest and recover.
But that would not be for days yet.
And only if John lived.
One more check of the readings, another row in the spreadsheet. The trend lines were flat, all the vital signs steady. There was no change, nothing statistically significant, just as he had observed for almost a full day now. No news was good news, Harold tried for not the first time to convince himself. It meant Reese was stable, and stable was alive. He'd take it.
It wasn't as if he had a choice either way.
But it was impossible to avoid the fact that every hour that passed was harder to accept than the last. He craved change, any indication at all of recovery at this point. But every check was the same, time and again. John slept on, and thus Harold could not.
A stretching lap or ten around the room loosened tight muscles enough to not feel exactly like being crushed flat under a mountain rockslide. It felt now only very much like that. His stomach growled again, registering its ongoing complaint at churning nothing but acid and lightly sugared sencha. Food was a risk, an alluring trip to the cliff's edge. Sure, he would feel better if he ate. But feeling better meant tempting sleep again.
He put the kettle back on to boil.
When it came, the whistle startled him out of the blank haze he'd fallen into and he felt his pulse jump rabbit quick. An inordinately hopeful glance up at the monitor showed no such effect on Reese. Nothing changed the line spiking up and down in perfect time. It was as if he was not in the room at all, which of course he wasn't. This was only John's body, the simple biomechanical parts that contained him. The man himself was lost inside, trapped somewhere between bone and breath, waiting to re-emerge when and if his cage was prepared to free him.
The still silence that returned to the room was welcome. Harold had only been able to stand the ceaseless electronic chatter of the machinery attached to Reese that first day, the unmistakable sound of hospitals and surgeries and suffering. Afterwards, he left the alarms on should it come to that, although what exactly he was supposed to do should they trigger was never clear to him. Rudimentary CPR? A scrambling attempt to use the automated defibrillator he'd stolen? Of course. He would certainly try those and anything else he could think of.
But then what?
Even if it worked, even if all the statistical odds were beaten, then what?
That question remained wholly unanswered. He could only hope it would remain that way.
He rubbed at his aching temples and tired eyes beneath his glasses. Harold was used to functioning for long stretches on little sleep, but his effectiveness eventually waned. Reese would probably be as sharp now as he always was, razor keen, but exhaustion was gradually winning against Harold and he knew it. He felt slow, punch-drunk. This was why he had the spreadsheet and the timers, all the notes and instructions. They would think rationally for him even if he could not fully trust himself to do so anymore.
Trust. A rare commodity Harold had believed was entirely lost to him.
And yet.
And yet, there was John Reese.
John Reese, who spent his last words before he lost the ability to speak trying to protect Harold's safety at the expense of any hope of saving his own life.
John Reese, whose words to Harold just before those were somehow gratitude, genuine thanks for the very job that got him shot in a voice rasping with pain and weak from blood loss.
This man was different, unusual among all the people Harold had ever known. It was why he chose him in the first place, that difference, that innate and compulsive pull toward decency and protection. Never for himself, of course. John had no kind thoughts for himself and an extravagantly reckless lack of care for his own survival.
Reese instead saw value only in others, others' morality, others' lives. Harold's, in fact, quite frequently and much to his continual surprise. He'd abandoned the idea of deserving any such generosity years ago. But Reese gave of himself freely. He was humane and passionate about that humanity, as open as the unbuttoned collars he favored for his shirts. Whatever the danger, John's heart was always exposed.
Harold downed the last of his tea before it cooled and hoped the mild dose of caffeine might take some of the edge off his headache, but it seemed well outmatched. Without a steaming mug to hold, his hands felt fidgety, purposeless. They seemed unwilling to keep still, so he crossed his arms to trap them and actively took back to pacing. If he was going to do something compulsive and repetitive, it may as well be something he could pretend was exercise.
An orbit is falling forever toward an object, never to meet it. Harold found his orbits around the room were irregular at best and inexorably decaying. Each one was shorter, closer. Inevitably he drifted into the gravity well of Reese's side and was pulled to it, unable to escape. Once again he fell to earth.
It never stopped feeling strange to look down at Reese like this. It seemed like an insult to a man this tall. John was meant to be looming above him, peering over his shoulder at a computer monitor, or standing at his side at the cracked glass to meet the latest of the souls they were bound together to save.
Harold had often wondered what the experience of life was for him from that height. How was it to get by in a world designed for a populace half a foot shorter than you? What was it like to see from such a vantage point? Could you see more of the world or just a different view of it? How did it feel to be the most conspicuous person in every room you entered, the most visible on every street you walked down?
John never told him.
Harold never truly intended to ask.
Their lines needed to be drawn clean. He had decided that even before they met.
So what was he supposed to decide now?
Because deny it as he might, whatever lines they may have drawn were blurring rapidly and they had been for days. Longer. He'd heard the real fear for him in John's voice before the bomb exploded and the deep empathy in it when Harold was beside himself with futile regret afterwards. He remembered the calming pressure of John's hand on his back imparting his care and his stability, a connection made and so quickly vanished. The same hands capable of such violence were also capable of an astonishing gentleness.
Those hands now sat tucked by his body half open and unmoving, exactly where Harold had left them. It had taken two full hours to clean John up properly after all the medical necessities were in place and he was safely settled. The blood crusted under his fingernails turned out to be particularly insidious.
Nothing about Reese currently was his choice or his doing. He did not come to this house, Harold brought him here. He did not lie on this bed, Harold laid him upon it. He did not remove his shirt, Harold had to cut it off of him.
And he did not shoot the hole punctured through his side. That one was on Detective Carter, who didn't pull the trigger of the rifle, but may as well have.
It was hard to say what was more dangerous for John at this point. The severe internal damage his body was struggling to endure at this very moment? Or the soulless intelligence apparatus actively hunting him down like an animal until they could finish the job they started?
Which was worse? To slowly and agonizingly recover from a gunshot wound only to be murdered by the same vicious men in a new and likely even worse way later, or to suffer a quick and painless cardiac arrest from acute trauma without any further involvement of the professional torturers and assassins but also without ever regaining even a flicker of consciousness?
At least the first option did not make Harold sick to his stomach to imagine, even if it was obviously the crueler, more selfish choice.
John had to wake. He had to stay with him. That was all there was to it. It was an unreasonable and irrational demand he knew, something a tantruming child would make while screaming and thrashing on the floor, but Harold could not part with it. He could not part with him.
He needed his presence beside him, his voice in his ear. Whatever it took, he needed to keep Reese with him. He had to. He found himself instinctively reaching out for him, pressing him to the bed with an open hand on his chest as if to hold him down, as if the man was about to float away out of his reach at any time, an errant balloon moments from being lost forever to the depths of the sky.
But he was not floating away, of course. John was exactly as he had been, absolutely still save for the gentle expansion and contraction of his breathing. Harold immediately felt ridiculous for the sudden outburst of illogic and unfettered emotion. It was an embarrassing lapse, even if only he himself witnessed it and he could attribute it away to nothing more than physical exhaustion draining his customary control, a perfectly plausible excuse.
Plausible, but not honest. He discovered he still could not bring himself to pull back his hand.
Because somehow, he could feel it.
He could feel him.
It was impossible to quantify exactly what he was detecting at that moment, a point instantly proven by looking at all the medical telemetry that reported every measurable vital statistic but missed this sensation entirely. Beyond the raw warmth of his skin and the fine wisps of his hair, past his muscles and his ribs and the even rhythm of his heart, it was there.
He was there.
Harold closed his eyes to try to narrow his focus. What exactly was it that he was perceiving? An electrical current, perhaps, something akin to the sense that sharks use to find prey? That immediately seemed too mercenary for a sensation as fragile and tender as the one flowing now through his fingertips and tingling up the nerve pathways of his arm. But that was the best analogy he could muster, some sort of electrobiological method of detecting life from a separated distance.
There had to be some rational explanation for it, something more than the metaphysical he did not believe in. Because that was what he was certain he was feeling.
Life. John's life. Life beyond the sheer mechanical processes. Harold refused to move for fear of severing the delicate connection.
A jumble of ideas raced by as he tried to think this moment through. Was it possible that Reese could sense him in the same way? Even if his brain could not yet manage consciousness, could it at least perceive some of this strange, ephemeral spark too?
Harold poured all his concentration into the feeling, trying to amplify it if only by pure determination. It felt almost malleable as it passed between them, shapeable like soft clay. Maybe the mere existence of life was not all this current contained. Or could contain.
With the last of the mental effort he could muster after these arduous days and nights, he condensed the whirlwind of his mind down to a single concept that he imagined braided together with that feather thread of energy he could still feel trickling through his spine. Would that it somehow, someway be received by the one who needed it.
You are not alone, John.
You are not alone and neither am I.