Chapter Text
There's no warning, no announcement preceding it, just her name yelled from within the crowd. The voice should be drowning within the sea of interview requests and camera shutters the dense media contingent is creating, but there's a quality to it that catches her attention.
It carries an edge that makes goosebumps erupt on the back of her neck and she almost reaches up to cover it, uneasy with the feeling of vulnerability it elicits. Instinctively, she searches for its source, her arm brushing against Grace's as she stops and turns. Before she can find it, a shot rings out and something hits her chest hard enough to make her stumble.
Eva has a split-second of clarity, of recognition, and she understands that this might be how she dies.
A choked gasp falls from her parted lips, so quiet she can barely hear it herself, yet in her periphery, Grace reacts to it. His gaze snaps to her face, but she can't look at him, can't even move her eyes or squint against the blinding sun as the impact of the bullet thrusts her out of reality and into the first phase of shock.
For a moment, there's complete silence, a temporal vacuum as all air leaves her lungs and her legs start giving out. Then, the screaming begins, followed by gun after gun being fired, but the noise blurs and twists until all she can hear is a high-pitched ringing.
Even as her higher brain functions blink out one after one, she distantly expects to hit her head on the bottom of the concrete stairs they've barely descended — and she would have, if it weren't for two arms catching her and slowly lowering her onto the floor. A blanket of warmth forms around her rapidly cooling body, a familiar shadow shielding her from the bright afternoon sun like the first omen of a thunderstorm.
Nothing hurts, not yet, as adrenaline and endorphins flood her system in response to the sudden threat. Her lungs are still seizing up in shock, and the lack of air makes wave after wave of instinctual dread crash over her. Breathe, she needs to breathe, needs to fill the empty space before she forgets how to, but it's a fight she's losing.
Above her, a face appears in the shadow. Wide eyes, lips moving, hands fluttering across her body before finally settling on her chest.
Grace.
He is saying things, so many things, and she forces herself to cling to it as he drags her back to the surface. Suffocation is a lot like drowning: quiet and invisible, you don't notice someone else has gone under until you search for them and find nothing but empty space. Despite the iron grip around her lungs, she tries to suck in any amount of oxygen she can get.
Through the ringing in her ears, his voice starts to emerge, low but panicked, and something about that feels… wrong. The distress is an error to revise, a problem to fix, and it's her responsibility. He's offering rushing words that flow together and are partly lost to the encroaching static.
"—va? Can you hear me? Good, yes, breathe, please breathe, keepbreathingplease."
Distantly, she understands that one of his hands is pressing down on the wound, that it should hurt but it doesn't, not quite yet.
Blood is smeared across his palms, her blood, a lot of blood. Too much blood. It's contrasted by his knuckles almost gently running down her cheek whenever her vision begins to darken and her eyes flutter. Drowning would be easy but he keeps reaching for her, keeps pulling her back from the ledge and the point of no return.
Grace is a source of radiating warmth that isn't seeping into the concrete below, softness not despite the violence but because of it. His fingertips find her neck over and over again, leaving smudged red marks as he checks her rapidly beating pulse.
Around them, chaos.
Within her, pain, slowly unfurling and stretching throughout her body, rooted in her chest. Creeping vines that bury their thorns in her flesh, puncturing nerves, releasing her lungs just to claim the rest of her. Being able to breathe comes at the cost of feeling the full extent of the gunshot wound; no more merciful numbness. Her lips part but no word comes out, no sound at all, but somehow Grace understands.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you're in pain, I know, but please- please don't- please just keep looking at me."
When his tears hit her skin, her own begin to fall, carving warm paths across her temples and into her hair. Shaking fingertips try to wipe them away, but even through the static taking over her vision, she can see in his eyes that all it does is smear more of her blood across her face.
"I'm here, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Don't leave, please, you can't-," he breaks off, realizing that she will slip away from him no matter what he does.
After a few more seconds, minutes, hours, he gives up and cups her face in his palm instead, keeping her head steady. Grace bends lower and lower until their foreheads are almost touching, becoming a wall, a shield, her world, in a futile attempt to save her by sheer force of will.
The pain is like nothing she has ever experienced before.
It burns, the heat of inflammation spreading through her tissue like boiling water as her body rushes to try and repair the damage. Impossibly, she can almost sense the path the bullet took, ripping through layers of skin, muscle, and cartilage before bursting out on the other side.
There's the sticky feeling of her blood drying on her face, the weight of Grace pressing down on her chest despite the tremors wrecking him. Her breaths are coming too fast and shallow to provide enough oxygen, and distantly she can hear him trying to count, encouraging her.
"Breathe, dammit, come on, one, two, thre— look at me, there you go. Keep looking, alright?"
She is immobilized, overwhelmed, trapped within herself. His voice and warmth are her only anchor. If she could speak, if she could make any sound at all, she wouldn't be screaming but sobbing. Her fingers twitch at her side, aching to reach for Grace, to beg him to make it stop, please, make it stop.
From the back of her throat, a cry arduously claws itself to freedom, low and hoarse. It makes him flinch, the hand pressing down on the wound slips, and hushed apologies disrupt his counting further; not that it matters anymore.
There's molten iron in her veins and acid in her lungs, and the fire burns and burns and burns until no part of her is left unchanged; cells dying, cells fighting to live, all efforts rapidly failing. There's not enough blood left to carry the hard-won oxygen.
Reality slips away, the promise of a darkness without pain wrapping around her limbs and pulling her down. Grace's voice fades with his face, her eyes fluttering a few more times as he leans in closer again, and she wishes the darkness could take his pain, too. There are worse ways to die — at least she isn't alone.
She always thought she was going to die alone.
The last thing she hears before the shock and hypovolemia finally claim her is, "Don't leave, you can't leave. Don't leave me here, live, please, just live."
Looking back, the events are out of order, fragments with sharp edges he cannot help but run his fingertips over, reopening wounds that have barely begun to heal. Blood, he remembers that. So much blood.
He also remembers that someone of her statue has 4 to 5 litres of blood flowing through her body and that she can safely lose maybe about 20% of it without severe side-effects; a 'fun fact' that is everything but. Maybe he can tell her about it later. There has to be a later.
Before the blood, there was Eva on his right, silently walking alongside him, so close their arms kept brushing together. They were exhausted and happy the conference was finally over, they'd fly home soon — he doesn't remember when he'd started thinking of the ship as home.
(Maybe it's her, not the ship. He refuses to return without her, he can't. This is not how it ends.)
Too focused on not tumbling down the stairs, he didn't hear the voice she did, didn't turn his head to reflexively search for it. She stopped and he took another step, expecting her to follow. He wasn't paying attention, stupid, stupid to be negligent, even though there was no reason for fear. Sunlight stung in his eyes and the low chatter of the people around them had cocooned them all day, accompanying them from meeting to meeting.
A normal day. He should have seen it coming.
When the bullet appeared out of nowhere, he did not scream or even flinch, too surprised to process the reality of it. Warm drops splattered across his face like a warm summer rain but there were no clouds in the sky, how can it rain without clouds? Then Eva made a sound like she'd been punched in the stomach, swaying on the spot, bumping into him, and the muted green of her shirt suddenly began to grow darker and darker.
Oh.
No rain from a cloudless sky but a storm, lightning searching for the highest point in the world before striking.
There's the blood.
There are concrete stairs and a mass panic as the press scrambles to escape to safety, and he can hear gun after gun going off. Security firing at the threat, too late.
A rip runs through his recollection, one moment he is standing, the next kneeling on the ground with her blood on his hands, desperately trying to keep it from escaping.
She can't lose that much, echoes through his mind, another rip, another fragment.
Caged in the aftermath, forced to wait. Pacing up and down the hospital hallway in front of the large double doors he's been forbidden from passing through. Physically held back as he tried to cling to her, to follow.
Splatters of her blood on white linoleum tiles, a thin red line leading to Eva, deadalive, resurrected and dying at once.
More blood drying on his hands and staining his clothes. Someone attempts to steer him towards a bathroom, then disappears when he blindly shoves them away hard enough to make himself stumble against a wall, repeating with a failing voice "she can't lose that much."
Over and over until his throat is hoarse and his legs tired. Eventually, he slides down the nearest wall and sits on the floor, and he can't tell if he's tasting his tears or her blood on his tongue.
Time warps, chokes, stretches. A wet towel is dropped in his lap, and he mechanically cleans his hands, not resisting when it's taken from him again and replaced by a bottle of water. Everything he touches is stained, changed, and it can't be all that's left of her, it can't be.
"Drink."
He remembers that voice. Carl. He failed her, too. They all did.
"Too much blood," he murmurs, emptying the bottle in a matter of seconds, and familiar hands cover his, squeezing, before taking it away.
"She'll be fine."
The memory breaks on that, and a new splinter buries itself in his mind.
"You'll be fine, Eva, you'll be okay. Please be okay, please- please don't- please."
Red smeared across her face, his fault, his touch, but he can't help himself. He has to reach for her rapid pulse over and over again, has to press his palm to her cheek whenever her eyelids flutter and her vision becomes devoid of recognition.
It's ruined, the shirt. She liked that shirt. Likes. She likes it and he will get her a new one.
When she passes out, there's another crack, another big chunk missing from his recollection, and he's back on the cold hospital floor. Waiting and waiting until Carl calls out to him and his head snaps up, sending him scrambling towards the tired surgeon that came from the other side of the forbidden door.
"…-table."
"What?"
The woman sighs, exhausted not annoyed, and turns towards him; her scrub cap is the colour of Eva's blood-soaked shirt. A hospital ID is clipped to a pocket on the right side of her chest, and he tries and fails to read her name.
"She's stable. The bullet went clean through and she had a whole lot of luck."
Luck. Nothing about this is lucky.
Carl is talking, giving instructions and making inquiries about hospital security with a steady voice. He processes none of it, too focused on a few smears of dried blood on her scrubs, wondering what Eva's blood type is; he doesn't know but it feels like he should. Grace is waiting for the relief to set in, for some of the fear to dissipate, but it only settles, deepens.
An unfamiliar hand taps his lower arm, and his attention flicks back to the surgeon fast enough to make him dizzy.
"Did someo—", she pauses, glancing down his body and taking in his blood-stiff clothing, understanding something he wouldn't know how to say. A facet of himself he has barely begun to understand.
"Did you catch her, before she fell?"
"Yes."
Grace doesn't recognize his own voice, distant and rough, and he's almost floating above himself, watching it all play out. The surgeon nods, it confirms what she'd probably already been told by the paramedics that had wheeled her in.
They'd been patient with him, had allowed him to cling to the foot of the stretcher as they tried to keep her alive on the way to the hospital. One had worried about him, had asked if he was also injured, told him he was 'in shock' and needed fluids and rest.
(He'd told them to 'fuck off'.)
The entire ride, he'd kept his eyes on Eva, and all he could say in response to the litany of questions they threw at him was, too much blood, she doesn't have enough.
"Good. If she had hit her head on the concrete, I'm not sure she'd…" Deciding against finishing the sentence, she gathers herself and starts over. "You're completely sure she did not hit her head?"
Fragmented but lit up, bright and colourful like stained glass in the sun, and he remembers now: his arms wrapped around her, his hand on the back of her head as he lowered her to the ground.
She'd stared up at him with wide, terrified eyes, struggling to breathe and unable to move, red dripping onto the concrete before her body covered the stains.
"I'm sure."
Some of the tension leaves her shoulders while she types a message on her pager, and when she addresses him again, her voice has lost most of its edge.
"Our ICU is packed and she's stable, so we have her in a nearby room to monitor her. Are you…" she trails off yet again, looking past him and finding the answer to her unasked question with someone else.
"Room C405. No security inside, only family. There's an empty bed you can use."
It doesn't register then, the exact phrasing, only the message, that he is allowed to see her, and where to find her. The elevator is visible from where they're standing, and the surgeon seeks out his eyes one last time. Whatever she is seeing seems to erase any doubts about allowing him access to her, not that it would have stopped him at this point.
He needs to see her, needs to watch her, needs to do it right this time.
Grace tries to read her ID again, managing to decipher 'Dr. med. Monroe, S.' with some squinting. The woman who saved Eva's life and is now letting him return to her after hours upon hours of gruesome waiting.
"She'll pull through. I can't promise anything, but she should wake up within the next twenty-four hours." He is moving, almost stumbling over himself in his hurry, before she can disappear through the double doors she came out of.
Aching fluorescent lights and colourful arrows guide him across white linoleum, blood glueing his clothes to his skin. People stare at him during an elevator ride to the fourth floor that barely registers.
Past the blinking, beeping monitors of the ICU, he comes to a stop in front of her room, which is already flanked by two people with bullet-proof vests who are holding something larger than a handgun.
Details he doesn't need but it feels good, knowing things again instead of trying see through walls and into the operating room. They ignore him and he ignores them, and the overwhelming urge to see her morphs into the fear of what he will find.
Another glass shard burrows into his memory when he grabs the handle.
Earlier, much earlier, before the blood, before concrete stairs leading to death and men in suits sitting around a table. Above the clouds and far away from the threat, from gunshots, from bloody handprints on ashen skin.
There's a new 'before' and a new 'after' which he is walking into now, helplessly watching it create itself.
"Does it bother you? That I follow you around so much?"
Eva lets out a noise between a huff and a laugh, looking up from her tablet to lean back in the comfortable seat of today's private jet. The dark grey leather is beautifully contrasted by the green of her shirt, both of which make the copper in her hair shimmer. She seems happier lately, more at ease.
Cashmere, she had told him when she'd caught him staring, it's nice fabric, I can get you one.
"I invited you to, remember? Didn't even give you much of a choice."
He shrugs, the self-deprecation coming naturally, its remaining foundation unshaken by her efforts and consistent praise.
"Maybe something has changed since then, I don't know. I'm not that great company."
Surprisingly serious, she pins him down with a stare, the memory shifting and contracting until it's only her left in the light. Until she is all glinting metal and smooth ivory even though they're flying away from the sun, not towards it. It was dark outside, the sky a deep purple, but the core of it is untouchable and real.
"You, here with me, it's nice. It keeps me… grounded."
Everything begins to fade, and he distantly processes that he's opening the door and stepping through it, shutting it behind himself. Three steps closer and a world away.
"Are you bothered by this arrangement? Would you prefer to stay in the lab?"
It's a genuine question, and he considers it for a moment, the memory flickering.
Keeping his eyes straight ahead and then on the floor, he picks up a chair and sets it down closer to her bed, careful to avoid any noise.
"No. To both. It is nice. Besides, I can't imagine having to do all this alone."
Clean and pale, that's what registers first. No more blood, only stark white bandages and IV-drips, her hair a glowing halo surrounding her face on the powder-blue pillow.
She's disappearing now, the bright-eyed and almost joyously alive Eva, and he slips two fingers under her wrist to feel her pulse, slow and steady.
"Who else would bring me coffee? I barely have the time to drink it."
Deflection, acknowledgement, a memory he can't be sure happened exactly how it is playing out now; it must have, in some way.
"Glad to be of service," he'd responded with a smile and exaggerated bow, bumping his head against the small table between them, and she'd laughed, a secret sound most don't have the privilege of hearing. It can't have been the last time, it can't, he refuses to accept that, to even consider it.
He wants to hear it again and again, he wants her happy, he wants her alive, no, he needs her alive.
Behind him, the night turns as pale as her before disappearing, the sun rises and warms his back. Grace leaves her side exactly once, for the few minutes it takes to peel off his ruined clothes and slip into new ones after Carl had brought their bags to her room, dropping them by the door without a word. Not once does it occur to him to lie down and sleep.
When he sits back down, he checks her pulse again; he doesn't trust the monitors. There's a splatter of dried blood on her neck, right below her ear, which he carefully wipes away, but outside of that, he doesn't move.
He holds vigil, tired and determined, and waits for her to wake up.