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He’s right where she left him.
But not quite as she did.
There’s a moment when she steps up next to him on the hospital bed and passes out of the grimy dark into the light from the monitor above the two of them, and with her eyes full of that light, she can see everything – and everything includes the way that the warmth to the tone of his skin has faded into an ashenness; and that the blood soaking through the bandage on his bicep and seeping from his every scratchmark and bitemark and abrasion has darkened near-purplish black; and that she swears the sweat has thickened where it gleams on his brow, has further soaked his khaki green tee to the point that if he’d been standing and facing her, she might’ve thought he’d taken a buckshot to the chest.
And he’s not awake to quash the worry that stings her chest with a casual quip or a suffering smile.
With what of her breath she’s caught, Jill huffs. Whispers, “Damn it, Carlos,” shaking her head and trying to snuff out that worry herself.
But as soon as it occurs to her that she’s got the inclination to try, the worry doubles, aching tight between her ribs till she grits her teeth, knits her brow, shuts her eyes to at least purge that.
Worry’s natural. She’s not naïve enough to pretend that it isn’t. She has worried for strangers. She’s worried for friends. Hell, she’s come to be of the mind that the capacity to worry is a good sign she hasn’t lost sight of herself in a line of work where she’s only ever had so much pull in choosing what intentions her services ultimately, well, serve. No matter what, let her loyalty lay intact where deserved – and it’s always deserved by the decent, the innocent, the people sucked into hell when it opened up beneath them.
The key is not to let it overwhelm – common knowledge.
And she tries not to think about whether she’s afraid of this worry’s capacity to do that, and from there, what’s so wrong that it is. What’s so different now from every other time she’s seen a companion wounded, or a good man on a gurney within an inch of his life.
As it always is, her hammering heart and turning insides and tempestuous thoughts aren’t enough to keep her from steadying herself enough to work cleanly, prudently. She uncaps the syringe. Leans over Carlos, picks a shoulder, rolls up a sleeve, and injects.
But then she lingers.
Deriving more steadiness from extending the moment that she waits for a sign that she's made the right choices.
“Come on, Carlos,” she husks softly between ragged breaths. “Come on.”
Keeps one hand on his upper arm, thumb sweeping beside the injection site again and again. When she realizes what she’s doing, she scoffs at herself, tosses her damp hair – she’s not a doctor, but why not, she thinks; see if she can stimulate his flesh into taking the vaccine all the more quickly the way one sees if picking a four-leaf clover really does improve their luck compared to a reality they can’t see.
But what she’s focusing on is the warmth she’s pressing through to underneath his clammy skin.
The warmth of lingering life, the warmth he carries in everything about him, the warmth that death and disillusionment and being made into a prey animal just can’t snuff out if a person like him refuses to let it.
Something like it begins to swell in herself as if it’s woken up to reach out to it, pushing against that tight worry, against cobweb-knit tangling thoughts of all she’s seen and learned tonight, leaving her as sore as it always does to hope when it’s hardest.
All the while, he makes no sound.
And everything she hears processes too fast until too-long, too-short minutes, hours, time later, the fire of her rifle has finally cleared from her ears, and she’s found herself able to feel the burn of blood racing with the near-desperately restless desire to protect, to save whatever she can.
And she hears a voice shouting in the facility below her that snaps all struggle from her body.
Her pulse races the way it does when one wants to run. A smile like one of wonder lifts onto her face as she leans against the railing – one hot drop of dread on sighting the stalker that poisoned him, now stretched and hunched like a giant skinned boar with a human’s face.
But she barely feels it when she spots him – spry as she first met him, as far as she can tell – staying alive, as he does, lowering a smoking pistol to reload.
She calls his name like she’s seen him through the clearing dust of a collapse, miraculously spotless, and he looks up, his shaggy hair tossing, and she hears the surprised laughter in it when he returns with some of the play that she needed earlier: “G.I. Jill!”
She can’t see his face, and is no longer beaming, herself. “Focus on that thing! I’ll be your spotter!”
“Roger that!”
They’re miles from being out of the woods. Now that he’s fighting fit again and back in her sights, they have things to do, and ever-dwindling time in which to do it.
But in this moment, her concerns have returned to the manageable, the pragmatic – the tightness slackened, the cobwebs as easy to pass through as tissue paper.
Her warmth has reached through to his, taken it like a hand.
Carlos feels the way it does when hope is validated, even if in small ways; like when cynicism dies.
And for that, she feels one with him in a way she could feel forever, the definition of indomitable truly found in two sources of light in the darkness to keep one another burning.