Fox
It was hot, so hot that I thought my skin would come sliding off my bones in blackened strips. The air was thick with smoke, cutting off my breath. My eyes stung from it so I squeezed them shut as if I could ward off the danger that I couldn't escape. My leg throbbed but it was a distant pain compared to the damage the fire left behind; the entire right half of my face screamed in agony, searing through skin and muscle and into my bones. I was blinded by the pain and could only curl tighter into a protective ball, unable to move, to get to my feet, to run to safety. I was trapped, and now I would die.
There were distant voices somewhere but I couldn't hear what they were saying. I couldn't be sure of who they belonged to. They shouldn't have come, whoever they were. They would die, too.
Somewhere was something that sounded like it might have been my name, but each time my mind sorted out senseless noise into a word it was snatched away and lost to the pain that overtook everything. A moment of silence and then again—a familiar voice, something I was supposed to respond to but couldn't, and then it was gone. The dark nothingness pulled at me, promising release. An escape from the orange light that burned my eyes even when they were closed, from the heat that tore through everything it touched as effortlessly as if the world was paper against a sharpened knife. The dark was cool and calm; it dulled the pain until I could feel it no longer and my frantic heartbeat, racing like the wind to its end, slowed to nothing. With feather-soft fingers it stroked my hair, my ruined face. It whispered a lullaby into my ear, sending me drifting further down into a deep, welcome sleep.
A scream shattered the calm, and suddenly rather than floating in the blissful nothingness I was bound to it, chains wrapped around and around my wrists and ankles, clattering as I fought against them. The screaming continued above me, the sounds of the agony I had been so eager to escape. I could wish it on nobody, especially not my companions. Their pain was my fault. I had led them to their deaths.
I pulled at the chains with all my strength, shouting as they dragged me further into the dark. I tasted ash, the bitter taste of death on my tongue. Among the screaming came one word, spoken so softly it hit me far harder than anything else. The name I had ignored before, and now it was too late to answer.
"Fox."
His voice was broken with pain and longing and my heart crumbled away. It was hardly a whisper, but it echoed in my mind again and again, leaving me screaming. Our voices mingled, two different kinds of pain, until his faded to nothing and only mine remained.
My eyes snapped open and the screaming continued unbroken, my own ragged, raw cry that rose as the chains around me tightened. I was no longer in darkness but in a ceaseless light so vivid and bright it burned as painfully as the fire, the color of snow. The chains did not pull me down but held me against something, and voices swam above me. My voice died as soon as I realized with a start I was not dead but awake, leaving my throat sore. I struggled to suck in a breath, my chest aching. The air was clear and clean, not black and smoky, but the smell of antiseptic stung my nose and lungs. The faces and voices around me were unfamiliar, frighteningly different from the only ones I could remember ever knowing. But they knew me; they spoke to me by name.
"Fox, it's alright. You're fine."
"Calm down. Everything's fine."
"Can you hear me, Fox?"
"Fox?"
My name echoed in a million foreign voices—Fox, Fox, Fox, Fox.
"Fox!"
I gasped as his voice reached me, the only familiar thing in a sea of confusion, and jerked away from the hands that held me down. They stepped back, letting me roll off the bed and scramble to my feet. My dark hair fell in long tangles around my face and I pushed it away so I could see, unused to having it down. It took a moment for my vision to clear so I could see him, tall and lean and proud in the doorway, flanked by two men in white coats. They held him back and his dark eyes burned.
"Let him go," I commanded, my voice hoarser and far less intimidating than I would have liked but better than I had expected it to sound. They obeyed without hesitation and he darted towards me before anybody else could think to stop him.
He swept me into a hug and I braced myself for my various injuries to scream in protest, but they didn't. I stood there for a moment processing the absolute lack of pain before it fully sank in and I realized I was not hurt. I had felt no pain since getting up. It had vanished with my nightmare.
But the memory of it lurked just below the surface, like a snake ready to strike if I looked it in the eye. I wrapped my arms around him as tightly as I could, closing my eyes and resting my head against his shoulder.
He ran his fingers through my hair, another strange and new but comfortable sensation. "I thought I lost you. We lost you," he added quickly, as if correcting himself. "They wouldn't let anybody see you or tell us how you were." I wanted to reply but I didn't trust my voice. It took too much work to keep from crying and if I opened my mouth I was sure it would all go to waste. We stood like that for what felt like hours, silent and content, and then Griffin pulled away. He traced his fingertips down the side of my face, the side that had been burned. "How?"
"How?" I echoed, the question bouncing around my still-fuzzy head.
His dark eyebrows pulled together. "There's no way that could be healed without scars."
I was still confused but one of the men by the door answered. "Look at yourself, Griffin. We have talented people here."
"I know what you did for me," he replied, the slightest edge in his voice. "But that was nothing compared to this."
I registered their words and looked down, staring at his bare arms. Where bloody gashes had once crisscrossed the skin was nothing; smooth, flawless, without a trace of the wounds SAM had left behind. The last time I'd seen Griffin he'd been careful with every movement, pale with the effort it took to hide his pain and clearly exhausted by it. But now it seemed as if it had never happened. Surely I hadn't been asleep long enough for them to be healed—and I couldn't believe they would heal without leaving behind marks.
I took a step back, looking around the room finally. It was a small, square place done all in white and a soft, dusty brown shade. The fluorescent lights overhead were harsh and still stung, though not as badly as before. The only furniture was the flat bed I'd woken up in, with a variety of monitors and machines beeping on either side. Four people I had never seen before stood around, two by the door and two by the bed. Three were men, one a woman, all middle-aged and clad in sharp, professional dress and white coats. Next to them Griffin looked even scruffier than usual with his tousled brown hair, ripped jeans, and worn gray t-shirt. He was cleaner, though, without any of the blood, dirt, or scrapes and bruises I'd grown accustomed to seeing him with. It felt odd, as if I should treat him as a different person.
He had hugged me with the desperation of somebody who had nearly lost a person they cared about. The last week of my memory wouldn't just vanish, I knew—we'd been through enough together to seal us in a solid companionship at least—but I didn't know what else we were. Friends? Were we the same as we had been, now that we weren't alone scavenging for food among the eerie remains of a ghost town, or would civilization change that?
Was he the same person who had dueled with me with dusty plastic swords, who had backed me into a corner and kissed me until he couldn't bear to any longer, because every touch hurt him?
I had no answer and no idea how to find one, but he wrapped an arm around my waist easily, as if he'd done it a thousand times before. The doctors scurried aside at our approach, something akin to fear in their eyes. I filed that away to ask about later and decide whether or not to take advantage of it. "We'd really like to talk to you, Fox, and make sure there's no damage—"
Griffin cut him off without hesitation, clearly having done this before already. "I don't care what your policies are or where you want to take us, we're not going until she gets taken care of. You look like hell, Fox."
I managed a weak laugh. "Where would I be without your charm?"
"Still sleeping in a freezing motel and living off of ancient canned ravioli."
"Are you going to tell me what's going on? Where are we?"
"It's a long story. The others are here, we're all okay, and supposedly once you're up for it we'll get to find out exactly what happened."
"I'm up for it," I replied quickly. I was sick of not knowing.
He laughed, pushing me lightly towards a closed door. "Shower first. I know we all got used to the lack of hygiene before but you wouldn't believe how much better clean clothes make you feel after waking up in a hospital surrounded by people who won't give you straight answers."
I looked down to what I was wearing: a pair of jeans with frayed ends and a long tear in one leg, mud ground into the knees, and a faded shirt dotted with dried blood. My attention trailed over to my wrist, which had in my last memory been wrapped in crude, bloodstained bandages from a dog bite. The combination of real bandages and t-shirt strips we'd used were gone and not a single mark remained of the bite. The skin there felt tingly, like the distant feeling of pins and needles, so subtle I didn't notice it until I focused on it. When I did I realized I felt it along the side of my face and in my ankle as well, and to a lesser extent scattered across all the little scrapes and bumps I'd gained. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant feeling.
"They healed us," I said to Griffin, not a question and not quite a statement, either, just wrapping my mind around the fact aloud.
He just shook his head. "I don't really know, either, I just know we're not there anymore. Get cleaned up and then we'll find out. Hopefully."
"It's safe?"
"As far as we can tell."
I considered that answer for a moment. I didn't trust these strangers, not yet, but I trusted Griffin to let me know somehow if we were somewhere he suspected was dangerous. He seemed relaxed enough that it took the edge off of my worry, though didn't erase it completely. I'd decide exactly how safe we were for myself.
But a hot shower sounded really, really nice.
"Okay," I murmured, nodding. "Better than nothing."