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When I heard that sound
When the walls came down
I was thinking about you
—
When my skin grows old
When my breath runs cold
I'll be thinking about you
"Skin," Rag'n'Bone Man
Anne Mason opens her eyes in a blanket of murky blue, cradled and embraced by it, carried along comfortably.
It’s peaceful.
Safe and serene in a way she hasn’t known in years.
She closes her eyes.
Wake. You must save him.
“What?”
You must save him.
Wake.
Anne breaks the surface of the water in a storm of flying droplets and gasping breaths, kicks her feet and finds her toes just barely scrape the silty bottom.
Arms thrown out to tread the small waves breaking against her, she coughs, spits out water as waves lap her chin. She claws at the edges of her memory for any explanation of how she ended up here, or even where here is, and comes up empty. Looking around does nothing to spark recollection.
The air is full of smoke, the more distant horizons nearly hidden in its haze. Beyond the forest on the shoreline, black plumes float skyward like malicious feathers.
The sky itself is empty.
Empty of airships, empty of beamers, empty of hornets. Empty of all but gray clouds.
Like it was all a dream.
Have they done it? Did Tom succeed?
The last thing she remembers is Weaver's hands on her face as she mourned the loss of yet another baby, stolen from her by the Espheni; mourned for the losses Tom would return to, another wife, another child; mourned that she would be unable to tell him goodbye, tell him all the things she had been afraid to. Make sure he knew how much she loved him. That he had saved her, back in those early days, and every day since.
Feet touching the ground easily now, Anne pushes to her feet, water streaming from her clothes in sheets, and slogs toward the shore. She is confused, lost, alarmed by the missing time, but she feels stronger than perhaps she has in all her life, energy coursing through her, thrumming along her bones. And somehow, impossibly, she knows that her baby is alright, too.
And there—there in the water, near the shore, a dark figure sits huddled, up to his elbows in the tide, head hanging low as the waves rock him. She would recognize the slope of those shoulders in any world.
“Tom?” she calls, voice nearly lost in the crash of the water, the rush of wind. “Tom!”
He doesn't so much as lift his head. She moves faster, the dark water dragging at her ankles as if reluctant to give her up, until at last she crashes to her knees at his side.
Still he sits motionless and fear flushes the chill out of Anne's bones.
“Tom?” she whispers, hand hovering over his shoulder. He's pale and soaking, shivering with cold, eyes open but blank—empty of him. The wool of his coat scratches at her palm as she squeezes his shoulder, with her free hand tipping his face toward her, thumb urgently tapping at his cheek.“Tom? Tom, hey.”
He shudders. Sighs. Blinks. And at last, his eyes land on hers, dull and unfocused though they are.
“Hey, baby,” she smiles, voice thick. “You with me?”
Tom swallows, blinking again. He gives his head a hard shake, sending a hail of droplets against her face. Then he looks at her—really looks at her—and his face collapses into that familiar map of lines worn by past joys and present pains, head tilting as his eyes fill with tears.
“Anne?” he manages, voice breaking. He lifts a shaking hand to brush her cheek, as if to see if she's real. The moment his icy fingers touch her skin, his eyes screw closed and she finds herself being pulled against him, her face pressed into his collar as he wraps her up, crushing her against his chest with desperate force as sobs ravage him like a ship in a storm.
She may not know how she got here—how either of them got here—where here is, or even how she's alive, but she knows this. Knows he weeps for the fears she had wept for herself not long ago. For the impossible catharsis of them. Few emotions has Anne found to be more overwhelming and conflicted than thwarted grief. He buries his face in her shoulder and she clasps his head more tightly to her, and he still doesn't feel close enough.
“I'm here,” she whispers, her own tears too thick for her to speak properly. “I'm here. I'm okay. It's okay.”
She goes on like that until at last he lifts his head, taking her face in his freezing hands and kissing her—her lips, her forehead, her temple, her cheek, finally just pressing his face against hers, so close that his wet lashes brush her skin as he breathes her name again.
A laugh bubbles up in Anne's chest and bursts free, nearly a sob. “Hey,” she responds, dipping her face more deeply into his. “Do you think we can finish this on dry land?”
He huffs, breath warm against her neck as he kisses it, rests his forehead against her shoulder again for a moment. “Right.”
“Yeah,” she smiles against his hair and reluctantly pulls away. “Speaking of which,” she says, pushing against his shoulder and leveraging herself to her feet. “What are we doing in the—what, the Potomac? Wherever we are?”
Tom makes no move to follow her, merely sitting in the water and staring up at her with eyes so full of wonder that she blushes.
“Tom,” she redirects pointedly, again noting the astonishing strength she feels. How long has it been since any of them were truly healthy? “Where are we? Why did I wake up in the water, and why are you just sitting here?”
“I was waiting for her to bring you back,” he says, shaking himself and pushing himself upright with difficulty on shivering arms. She reaches out to steady him, for the first time, seeing the bloodlessness of his lips, the faint color in the very middle of them a cool purple. A wisp of a dream or a memory brushes her mind, but it’s gone before she can grasp it. How long has he been sitting here?
“Who?” she asks.
“The Dornia. She saved you. She—” Tom's eyes widen and he grasps her shoulders urgently. “The baby?”
“The baby's fine. I don't understand how, but we're both fine. What do you mean, she saved me?” At the mention of the supposedly benevolent alien, the dream fragment nudges her consciousness once more. A voice, maybe?
Tom shakes his head, taking her hand and leading her to shore as it all comes out. How Ben had found Tom and brought him to her, that she had been dead or so near it was indistinguishable, that he'd brought her here and demanded help from this alien—whom, in Anne's mind, has done little but use him, turning him briefly but intensely into someone he was not.
“I completed their mission,” Tom finishes, as they move into the copse of trees bordering the beach. “In exchange, she saved you. The baby.”
Anne stops in her tracks, tugging his hand so he turns to face her, hope and fear rendering her breathless. “So you did it? We won?”
He smiles, eyes filling with tears again as he looks up, around, taking in the barren sky. “It worked. The virus worked. The queen died and everything just started...disintegrating. It's over.” He doesn't sound like he quite believes it himself, yet.
Before she can reply, the ground shakes. An intense rumble in the earth nearly knocks her off her feet, and it does Tom, who falls gracelessly on his seat as a loud, low shrieking joins the chaos.
“What’s going on?” she shouts, already certain of the answer. Of course. Of course it was too good to be true. They were foolish to believe it so easily, to think that—
Tom catches her hand, pointing to the water. She follows his finger and his line of sight and is once again knocked breathless. She sits heavily next to Tom.
A huge craft rises from the water, streams flowing from its facets and orifices, jet-like vents expelling a sleet of droplets with such force that she feels the vapor of them on her face. It’s a streamlined vessel, sleek. Not like the Espheni ships at all. It must be—
“It’s her,” Tom says in her ear. “I guess she’s going home.”
They’ve gone maybe a mile in their quest to rejoin the others, Anne relishing the hum of energy in her limbs, the clearness of her mind, when Tom stumbles. He rights himself quickly, but that voice, the snatch of dream sounds in Anne’s mind once more, and this time she catches it.
Save him.
She frowns, eyeing him. He’s still pale and his hand around hers continues to convey his tremors, despite the fact that she herself has walked off the worst of the chill. He’s watching his feet, breathless as he rather clumsily puts one foot in front of the other, the toes of his boots occasionally not quite clearing the ground, carving trailing furrows in the dirt.
It could be exhaustion. It could be cold. It could easily be any number of relatively benign things, but—
Save him.
“Tom,” she starts carefully, but before she can find out what he’s hiding from her, he’s crashing to his knees.
“Whoa!” Anne goes down after him, wrapping her arms about his chest before he can fall on his face. “Tom. Tom?”
He grasps her wrists, tipping against her as even his knees give out and he lands on his hip. “I’m okay. Sorry. I’m okay.”
Almost immediately, he tries to push back to his feet, but Anne doesn’t even have time to tighten her grip on him before he falls back to the ground, back against her, gasping with unfulfilled effort. Calling his name as his chin falls to his chest, she rests him against a nearby tree, freeing her hands for examination.
“Hey, hey,” she says, lifting his face, relieved to find his eyes still open and lucid, if drowsy. She settles his head against the bark and moves downward, fumbling with the buttons on his still-soaked coat. “What’s wrong? What happened, are you hurt?”
He sighs heavily, rolling his head against the tree in a clumsy no. “It’s nothing. I’ll be okay. She just—she took some of my blood. That’s how she contracted the virus.”
Anne’s eyes burn in the smoky air as they widen. “Who, the queen? What do you mean, she took your blood?”
“She said she could smell it—my blood—and she had this…kind of proboscis." He grimaces. "She stuck me with it and just started siphoning until I was able to activate the virus.”
Anne doesn’t know why she’s stunned. It’s not even near the top of the list of absurd or disturbing things they’ve seen. Still…
She forces her jaw shut with an audible clack.
Tom huffs. “Yeah, that’s—that’s about what I said, too.”
She forces herself back into gear, pushing away his outer layers. “How much blood did she take?”
His eyebrows lift quizzically. “I didn’t exactly have a way to measure it.”
“Well, where did she take it from?”
But before he can answer, she finds it—a large patch of blood on his shirt, previously concealed by his coat and jacket. Her heart sinks as she unbuttons the garment, but most of the blood on the fabric is muted from the water, and while the amount of fresh blood glinting on the material in the gray light is enough to alarm, it isn’t enough to suggest life-threatening injury. A moment later, she slips the shirt over his shoulder and exposes the wound.
It’s not as deep as she feared, nor as large—a vicious puncture maybe the size of the tip of her index finger marring the skin just below his clavicle. The location explains the amount of blood from such a small wound, and one so many hours old.
“It looks like she went right for the subclavian vein.” She shakes her head, prodding gently. If the queen had gone any deeper, Tom likely would have bled out after she…withdrew herself. Anne shudders.
Tom’s chin grazes her hand as he looks down at the wound. “Didn’t realize it was still bleeding.”
She grimaces as she applies pressure. Anything she could use as a compress is already water-saturated, so she grips his shoulder and presses the heel of her palm against the wound as hard as she can. “Well, she wasn’t exactly gentle on the way out, by the looks of things. You’re lucky she missed the artery.”
Tom lets his head fall back against the tree. “Seemed to know what she was looking for.”
She can feel his eyes on her as she works, knows he’s uneasy because of her unease, that he’s trying to gauge her level of upset. But she can’t bring herself to tailor her reaction, to hide her worry or frustration. This has happened far too many times, and here, once again at the end of the world, she finds her patience worn thin.
“I’m okay, Anne,” he says softly.
She bites the inside of her cheek and levels her eyes on him, unable to keep the heat from her voice. “You are not okay, Tom.” Freeing a hand to catch one of his and lift it into his field of vision, she presses her thumb briefly into his skin, watching as it remains white with the sluggishness of his capillaries, the absence of blood. “You see that? Your cap refill is crap, you’re white as a ghost, freezing, and shaking like a leaf. You can’t even stand up. I don’t know how much blood she took from you, but it was clearly more than enough to be dangerous. You could die, Tom. Do you understand? This is serious.”
He stares at her as she catches her breath. “I didn’t ask her to do this to me, Anne. I didn’t just lie down and let her.”
She vents her irritation in a sigh, softens a bit. As much as she’s angry that he didn’t tell her, she’s far more angry with herself for not noticing until he literally collapsed in front of her. “I know. I know. It’s not that you’re hurt—although I’m getting pretty tired of that, too—it’s that you hid it from me. Again. That you keep pushing like you have no limits. You’re mortal, Tom. You’re a man. You can die.” She shakes her head, lets his hand go and redoubles her pressure on the wound. “It’s that you got hurt and you thought it wasn’t important enough to tell me.”
She can feel him thinking, weighing his words. Finally, very softly, he says, “Well, it wasn’t.”
Her eyes cut sharply to his, but her anger is quenched before it can properly kindle by the depth of love she finds in his as he looks back at her.
“It wasn’t important. We won, and I thought—” his voice breaks and he looks away, his lids falling to shield her from his internal pain as he had with his physical pain. “I thought you would be able to patch me up like always, and I’d be fine. We’d won. But then Ben came, and,” his face tightens with remnants of grief, and Anne feels tears sting her own eyes as he swallows and tries to find his voice again. It’s rough when he continues. “By the time we got back to you, you were—you…I had to get you to the Dornia. That was all I could think about. It was the only thing that mattered.”
Anger quelled by understanding, Anne presses a kiss to his frigid temple. “You matter,” she murmurs against him.
“Not without you.” He whispers it like the confession it is, and her breath catches. But before she can object, he continues, shaking his head. “And I know, I know. But that’s how I felt. We won. I didn’t have to—I didn't have to fight anymore. It was all over, and if I lost you…I didn’t really care what happened to me.” His voice is heavy with the guilt of parenthood, disquiet with the ill-fitting selfishness of those who have forgotten how to want anything for themselves.
Even if that something is just to stop.
Anne can’t say she would have felt any differently in his place. Still, her heart aches with his admission.
She leans her cheek against his hair, kisses it. “Well, you did it. You saved me, you saved our baby. Now we’ve gotta get you taken care of, because I have no intention of losing you, either.” A quick glance under her hands shows that the bleeding has slowed almost to a stop, and she lifts them, wiping the blood on her damp jeans. “Why didn’t you ask the Dornia to help you, too?”
Tom blinks at her. Raises his eyebrows in deference to her point. “Didn’t think about it.”
“Tom…I don’t think you’re hearing me on how serious this is.”
Tom turns his face away. “Yeah, well. I was a little bit distracted.”
She softens further. Catches his face and turns it back to her, kissing him. “I know,” she presses her forehead against his—she thought she was cold, but his skin sends a chill through her. “I know, I’m sorry, baby.”
When she pulls away, he’s staring at her again, watching her like she could disappear at any moment, eyes wet with quivering tears. She wipes them away when they spill over. Weakly, he pulls her against him much like before, burying his face in the crook of her neck and shoulder, breathing her in. She does the same, drinking in the scent of him beneath the dirt and gunpowder and river water and blood.
Slowly, his head grows heavy against her, and she drags herself away. He’s fading.
“Tom.” She lifts his head from her shoulder, taps his cheek when she sees his half-lidded eyes. “Tom. Hey. We need to get you taken care of.”
He inhales, blinks. Settles his head back against the tree, eyes crinkling with mirth. “You gonna carry me?”
He's teasing, but oh, how she wishes she could. “Does anyone know where we are?”
Tom averts his eyes again and Anne is certain he would be flushing if he had enough blood to do so. “I don’t think so.”
Anne blinks heavenward in search of patience. “You’re telling me you carried me out here, all alone, while you were actively bleeding from an open stab wound that cost you God knows how much of your blood volume, and you didn’t bother to at least tell someone where you were going?”
Tom offers an appropriately abashed smile. “Sounds kind of stupid when you put it like that.”
Anne presses her fingers to her lips and shakes her head, scanning the area as if a solution will spawn from the ether. “I don’t know what to do, Tom. I have to get you help and there’s no way you can walk any distance like this.”
“I can walk. Just need a minute.”
And, considering all the times he’s crossed impossible distances in impossible conditions to get home to his boys and herself and his cause, he’s probably right. But Anne isn’t nearly as eager to bet his life on another miracle as he appears to be.
“Tom, I don’t want you walking like this. Your body is shutting down. Organ failure is a real risk. If you keep pushing now, it could kill you.”
He lets out a breath, eyes wandering as he takes in her words. “Then…I guess you should go. Get help.”
Anne scoffs. “Yeah, I’m not leaving you like this. There could still be rogue skitters running around for all we know. Not to mention bandits. Besides, I don’t even know where we are.”
“Weaver…” Tom sighs, eyes slipping shut. “Weaver and the boys—they’ll be paying attention. We don’t show up soon, they’ll come looking. I didn’ ‘zactly cover my tracks....”
Anne frowns at the slur in his words, the way he trails off. She taps her fingers against his cheek again. “Eyes open, Mason.”
He does as he’s told, amusement plain in his tired gaze. “Yes, ma’am.”
She tries to give him a stern look and can’t manage it. Sometimes he looks for all the world like a basset hound. “Okay—okay, so they’ll be looking for us,” she starts. “How long was I gone? How long since you left?”
He blinks at her, frowning, and tips his head to look at the sky through the patchwork of trees. “Looks like…Few hours, at least. Three, four.”
“So they’ll be coming. They’ll come soon,” Anne says, mostly to reassure herself. “Okay. We’re gonna be okay.”
“I know,” he says, staring at her again and looking far too content for a man actively going into hypovolemic shock.
She shakes her head with a snort even as her mouth twists in a smile against her will. Maybe they will be okay. “Put those eyes away, Mason,” she says, pushing to her feet. “I’m gonna start a fire and pray you’re right about the skitters all being gone. We need to keep you warm, and maybe the smoke will help the boys find us a little faster.”
Of course, the sky is already dark with smoke, but she hopes Weaver will distinguish the gray smoke of a woodfire from the black plumes of the would-be alien empire.
Tom doesn’t respond, so she leans down and lifts his chin. Eyes that had fallen shut open again at her touch, blinking hard.
“I’m here,” he assures in little more than a whisper.
“Let’s keep it that way. I’m gonna get some wood for a fire, but I need you to stay awake for me. Can you do that? Tom.” She taps his cheek when his eyes drift, lids drooping, and he drags them back to hers. Weaver and the boys better get here fast. “Can you stay awake for me?”
He inhales sharply, nodding, and tries to sit up a little straighter. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m okay.”
She plants a firm kiss against his forehead and pokes him in the chest. “Stay. Awake.”
“Yes, Doc.”
He tries. She stays as close as she can, occasionally calling out to make sure he is still awake, prodding him each time she comes back with an armful of fodder. But his replies become less and less frequent, tapering into mumbles she can’t decipher, until eventually, he doesn’t answer her at all. She hurries back, dropping her load gracelessly by the others and falling to her knees at his side.
His eyes are closed and his head has sagged to his shoulder like a flower too heavy for its stem. She notes that his lips are bluish now, that he’s diaphoretic and still shivering beneath the sweat. Fingers pressed against his carotid pulse reveal he’s tachy, heart fluttering far too fast and far too weak.
“Tom, hey. Tom.” She taps his cheek hard, shakes his shoulders, rubs her knuckles against his sternum.
Finally, he gasps and jerks weakly, trying and failing to raise his head. She does it for him, rubbing her thumbs against his skin to hold his attention.
“Hey, are you with me?”
He frowns at her, eyes glassy but nearly lucid. “Anne?”
“Hey, there. You said you were gonna stay awake.”
“Oh. Sorry,” he mumbles, sounding very unsure of what’s going on, voice young in the way it only is when he’s either very sick or very happy.
“You’re hurt, Tom, remember? You have to stay awake until help gets here, okay? Stay with me, baby.”
She watches as the pieces click into place and he nods in her hands, taking a deep breath. “With you.”
“Yeah, you are.” She rests his head against the tree and kisses it before moving a few feet away to build the fire. “Talk to me, Tom,” she calls, setting up the sticks and leaves she gathered for kindling.
She can practically hear him thinking in the long beat before he speaks. “What?”
Please, God. One more miracle. “Talk to me. Stay with me, here. Tell me, uh—tell me how you found the Espheni queen.”
Tom hums, regret souring his voice. “She destroyed the Lincoln Memorial.”
Anne looks up at him, trying to gauge his presence in the conversation as she rubs a stick briskly against a larger piece of driftwood. “What?”
“The Queen. She destroyed it. I was standing right next to Abe’s severed head.”
She can’t help her incredulous laugh as smoke begins to curl from the wood. “Tom, they destroyed everything.”
“I know, but…” he shakes his head sadly, and Anne thinks she actually sees tears forming in his eyes. “Maybe we can fix it.”
She shakes her head. “Tom, you just took out an alien queen and her armies by infecting her with a virus from another alien species, all while being actively exsanguinated. I think we can handle putting old Abe back together again.”
Tom lets out a clumsy sound of protest. “I don’t think I like that word.”
“What, exsanguinate? You’re right. Let’s agree to never have a reason to use it again.”
Tom huffs. “Deal.”
The fire is burning briskly by the time he fades out on her again, and she kneels back at his side, repeating the earlier process until he stirs beneath her touch.
“Becca?”
It’s not the name that scares her. They are each other’s second spouses. They were both bereaved suddenly and traumatically, with little to no opportunity for closure. When they wake to the inevitable nightmares, the first names on their lips are always those of the dead. They have both grown accustomed to this, and their shared grief lends them understanding. She’s never resented the ghost of Rebecca any more than Tom has resented those of her own son and husband.
It’s not the name. It’s the fact that he’s looking right at her when he says it, glassy eyes locked on hers with none of the grief that usually accompanies that name. She swallows. He is somewhere else altogether. Another lifetime.
“No, Tom, it’s me,” she manages past the lump in her throat. “It’s Anne.”
“Anne?” He frowns, weakly shaking his head. His voice is little more than a whisper. “Where’s Rebecca? The boys?”
That, at least, she can work with. “The boys are coming, Tom. They’ll be here any minute. You need to stay awake for them, okay?”
He merely hums, eyes fluttering as she unzips her jacket and pulls open his coat. His shirt is still largely unbuttoned from her earlier examination, and she feels the chill of his skin through her T-shirt as she straddles his legs and pulls him against her. The muscles in his shoulders flex in an aborted motion, as if he were trying to respond in kind and simply did not have the strength. If the weight of his head sinking deeper and deeper against her own shoulder is anything to go by, that is very likely the case. Catching his wrists, she lifts his arms for him, draping them around her neck before burrowing more deeply against his chest, pressing her face into the juncture of his neck and shoulder and praying she herself is warm enough to be of any help.
She speaks to him, trying to tether him to her as he drifts, his shivers growing worse as his breathing slowly degrades to shallow gasps that rock both of their frames. Anne can’t remember the last time she was this afraid. Even when she herself was dying just a few hours before, she hadn’t felt terror like this. Her own heart thunders dizzyingly in her ears as her husband’s fades to weak and erratic flutters against her searching fingertips.
It seems impossible that he would die now. After everything, after crossing the universe, after nearly singlehandedly bringing the war to an end, saving the world—it’s impossible to fathom losing him like this.
She had always feared it, as the jokes about the immortal Tom Mason began circulating way back when. No one is immortal, and with the recklessness with which Tom had begun to treat his personal safety, she feared he was testing the limits. Shaking his fist at God, in a way. So many had died so swiftly, easily, unexpectedly. The reminders of the fragility of human life had grown nearly constant.
Yet he was still here. Inexplicably. Every time.
She knew it couldn’t last forever. Knew that for all Tom Mason had garnered a reputation on par with the immortals of mythos, he was still just a man like all the rest.
But now, with him shaking apart in her arms, deaf to her pleas for him to stay with her, she realizes that at some point, on some level, she had bought into the idea herself. His weakening breaths against her neck are a battering ram at her belief, pounding away until her hope is in splinters.
But before it can be crushed completely—
“Anne?”
She sits up at the voice, heart in her throat. Weaver and the boys crash through the brush toward them, their shock-wide eyes locked on her, distantly reminding her that just a few hours ago, they were going through this very same process with she herself.
“I’m okay,” she assures, turning back to Tom, hoisting him higher against her. “I’ll explain later. Help me with him, we’ve gotta get him to camp. Now.”
There’s a brief beat of silence, and then everyone is moving, kneeling at her side, lifting Tom away from her. She has to force herself to let go, to allow the boys to help Weaver maneuver him over his shoulders.
“What happened to him?” Hal asks, breathlessly pulling Matt against him so he’s out of the way as Weaver stands and shifts Tom’s deadweight into a secure position, his slack limbs swinging sickeningly.
She explains as much as she can as they hurry back the way the boys came, and realizes she really doesn’t know that much. Weaver’s jaw tightens when he learns that Tom had already been hurt when he came back for her.
“I didn’t see it,” he says, voice heavy. “He was so sure he needed to do it on his own. I didn’t see it.”
“None of us did,” Ben bites out. Anne notes the guilt cloying his face and recalls that Tom had said it was Ben who came to bring him to her.
A loud sniffle sounds, harsh even against the noise of their trudging feet and panting breaths, and Anne looks over to find Matt furiously scrubbing tears from his face. “Is he gonna be okay, Anne?” he forces out, sounding more like the little boy of eight she used to know than the cynical teen he’s grown into.
“Of course he is, Matt,” she says, praying it’s true.
He always is.
He has to be.
Save him.
She does, barely.
The strength she felt upon waking dims only faintly as her blood travels from her arm into his. Not for the first time, but she hopes for the last, she gives thanks that her blood is compatible with Tom’s—that she is able to sacrifice to save him the way he has sacrificed to save all of them so many times over.
She knows, of course, that his cells will eventually replenish and replace hers, but there’s something appropriate to the thought that he has more of her blood running through his veins than his own after all the times she’s put him back together again.
When she’s given as much as she can, she tapes up her arm and wedges herself on the narrow gurney alongside him, brushing his hair out of his face, tracing the lines of his features with her finger. Memorizing them.
They have been granted one more miracle today, both of them. She vows not to take it for granted.