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Ashley wakes up in so much pain she’s numb, and for a full twenty seconds she cannot remember how to breathe. She manages it eventually, a painful knife of a gasp that feels like it comes between her ribs as much as beneath them, but she coughs harshly afterwards and something feels distinctly lighter. Like the worst chest cold has finally broken up.
She shudders, swallows a compulsive urge to vomit, and tries not to think about it. Still, when she closes her eyes and then blinks, trying to force her vision back, she cannot help seeing the distorted flashes of the plaga bursting out of the men after her and she claws at her own chest, wanting feeling back. Wanting anything but those images.
Sensation comes back as pain, as adrenaline, because when she finally sits up and looks around for Leon she doesn’t see him: not until she looks at the floor to her left.
He’s not moving at all, black veins marking him like streaks of oil, and as she frantically scrambles out of the chair she just knows the memory of pressure on her hand had been him.
He’d held on. Held on to her till the last moment.
Till his last moment.
She doesn’t let herself blink as she kneels next to him, pulling his heavy, fevered body against her legs.
“Leon??”
She’s softly frantic, tapping his cheek and then grabbing his shoulders with a weakened shake. He’s boneless, hair sticking lightly to his temples with sweat, and she tries desperately to push back the image of a plaga bursting out of him. She cards back his hair instead, and irrationally takes solace in the warm solidness of his skull.
His slack face doesn’t change, even when she spends a few moments stroking his hair and searching it, and when she tries to find a pulse at his throat all she can find is stillness and skin that’s uncomfortably warm.
She doesn’t know if it’s because her hands are shaking or if it’s her lack of experience. She can’t simply accept that the man who spent the last ten hours protecting her tooth and nail is just dead and there’s nothing she can do about it.
“Come on Leon, you’re too heavy for this,” she says through grit teeth, mustering herself anyway. She manages to get behind him, to lock her arms around his chest and try one futile heave before realizing she’s going to have to figure something else out. As a starting point, his gear is too bulky and has to be adding weight.
She makes short work of the velcro on his kevlar and slips off his shoulder harness, not daring to take the time to disarm him otherwise. With a fresh grip around his damp T-shirt, the full brunt of his fever heat oppressive against her own body, she grits her teeth and tries again.
She manages; dumping enough of him into the chair that she has time to run around and pull the rest of him up before he has a chance to fall. “This is why you should have gone first,” she says with a grunt, breathing heavy as she steadies his head and then turns back ot the computer.
Frowning, she tucks her hair behind her ears with an unconscious swipe, waiting for the machine to register a new patient. It does, but the blur of images on the screen are confusing, chaotic, and frankly frightening to look at. What she doesn’t understand pulses and throbs in a way that’s almost alien, and what she does understand is alien.
She looks away and presses the enter key, watching Leon and the whirring arms instead.
She remembers how much it hurt, so it scares her worse when Leon doesn’t react to it with more than a reflexive inhale that sounds painful and a spasm of his muscles. It looks more like a disconnected seizure, or some kind of halfhearted electrocution, and she doesn’t dare get in the way of the machine but she does brace a hand against his forearm and his shoulder to keep him from falling.
His takes longer.
Or maybe it doesn’t. Her perception of time is stretched and warped by pain and by fear. Maybe it takes seconds.
All she knows is the searing heat of the radiation suddenly and abruptly ends—and so does all tension in Leon’s body.
She looks up, first at him then over her shoulder at the screen. There’s fragments of the plaga actively breaking up on the scan, but other things are still moving eerie and sporadic and she’s reminded that his infection was farther along. She’d gotten the last dose of suppressant. And the plaga filling the bodies of their enemies had very clearly been more than a clinging insect in their chest.
She can’t stand to look at what’s moving, in case it is Leon and it’s about to stop, and in case it isn’t Leon and it’s about to kill her.
Instead, she cups his face and pleads with him.
“You promised to get me home safe. Come on Leon. Wake up.”
She searches his face for any sign but there’s nothing and when she tries again to find a pulse she’s unsuccessful. A hand against his parted lips doesn’t feel breath. As a last resort, she squeezes her eyes shut and tries to listen for a heartbeat: but over her own in her ears and Leon’s heavy stillness there’s nothing.
He can’t be dead. He can’t be dead. Tears begin to well and she casts around, wiping annoyed at her eyes and trying to think. Anything. Something. There’s a stethoscope slung over a dusty monitor and she trips moving towards it, catching herself on the leg of the chair. She turns back to Leon, fitting it in her ears in the same motion.
When the bell touches his chest, she holds her breath, closing her eyes and gripping his forearm with her free hand.
“Come on,” she pleads, barely a whisper, willing her own heart to stop drowning out her ability to check on Leon’s. She lets out a slow breath to try and calm down, opening her eyes to look at his face through her tears.
It’s soft. It’s so very soft, but she can hear something.
She swallows painfully, presses a little closer and looks for movement. She tries shifting where she listens, unsure of what to do other than try to follow the soft sound to a place where it may be stronger. She doesn't know what she's doing, only remembers where she'd felt it once strong and fast when she'd hugged him.
It's not strong or fast anymore, but it is there, and she lets out a breath that's more sob. Her vision blurs with tears and she cups Leon’s jaw, pressing the bell of the stethoscope harder. That seems to do the trick; the stronger seal drowning out scratching from unsteady hands and his shirt, and finally she can hear the distinct thud thud of Leon’s heart.
Weary, softer than she'd hoped. But steady. He takes a breath and furrows his brow, and Ashley's thumb brushes across a freckle on his throat without thinking. That's when she finally finds his pulse, and she shifts her fingers to cover the freckle, encouraged that the throb in his throat feels stronger than the quiet of his heartbeat would imply.
She takes a moment to listen, to feel, to let a tear or two wet her cheeks, and then she blinks, finding the courage to look at the scan again.
What she sees contracts with the thud in her ears and she recognizes the shadowy outline of Leon's heart at last. She stares for a few seconds, feeling strange and vulnerable, and she doesn't understand any of it.
Leon’s heart remains soft, remains slow. But it doesn't stop, and around it as a haze of smoky grey his lungs expand with the kind of breath that suggests he may wake up soon.
She breaks away from the screen and takes the stethoscope off, reverently draping it back over its monitor. "Thank you, Luis," she whispers pas the lump in her throat.
Behind her, Leon groans.