Pain.
Slow and deep in my body.
I don't open my eyes.
I take inventory over my body instead.
Ribs are cracked, three at least, maybe four. The right side bears down the worst. Each breath grinds against them.
Left thigh — wrapped tight. The bandage pressing on where the lion had scored a blow. The puncture point aches like a hot wire in the meat.
My jaw is bruised but not broken. Hurts to swallow.
Nothing that won't heal. I've had worse in my previous life.
And underneath everything, my core hums.
Slow and cold. Pleased with itself.
It's been working. I can feel where it's been working — stitches pulling against tissue that's already trying to close around them, healing too fast; they'll need ripped out soon.
I let the memory run.
The lion bursting up through the asphalt. Its shoulder hitting me and the world spinning. The wobble of the sword as I forced too much through the construct. The body-check that put me through pavement. The fire.
Laughing.
I could shift now.
If I went ghost the core would pour into my body and my stitches would pop and I'd be standing in five minutes. I know it.. The cold pulse against the inside of my chest is waiting for me to yank on it.
I don't.
The pain is mine and I earned every line of it. I want to savor it.
My body can knit on its own clock. I'm not in a hurry.
There's a sound somewhere off to my left. Someone shifting weight in a chair.
Sam, probably.
I should open my eyes.
I'm not ready to. I let myself drift back to sleep, the world can wait.
-DP-
-DP-
-DP-
I open my eyes.
Light.
Not the sun — too soft, too low. A slatted gray. Morning's gone. Afternoon, still hours away. The light comes through the high windows of the building, broken by the skeleton of an old air handler, throwing diagonal stripes across the concrete.
I know this place.
The training building. The one me, Sam and Tucker have hjoled up in, week after week.
I turn my head, my jaw pulses with pain.
Tucker.
He's sitting against the wall about six feet away. Knees pulled up. Phone in his hands but the screen's dark. He's not looking at it. He's looking at me. He's been looking at me for a while.
His face contorts slightly when our eyes meet.
I can't read it. That's the first thing wrong.
Tucker's face is the easiest face I have ever know. Six expressions on rotation, all of them loud. This is awesome / this is bad / I'm hungry / where's the pretty girl / oh god what now / haha. This isn't one of those, this is new.
He shifts, and it wakes Sam.
She's in a folding chair near my feet, slumped sideways with her arm bent under her head at an angle that's going to hurt when she sits up. Her hoodie is bloody at the cuffs. Her hair's a mess. She bolts up fast.
Her eyes land on my and they widen as she gasps in obvious relief
"Hey," I say.
Unfortunately my throat fails halfway through the word and it just comes out a croak so I try again. "Hey."
Sam bolts out of the chair, on her knees beside me. Hands hovering tover me like she doesn't know where to touch. I grin at her and start sitting up to pull her into a hug..
"Don't sit up."
"I wasn't going to."
"I could see you moving."
"Sam."
She breathes out — a softy sigh of relief. She looks at Tucker. Tucker looks at me. Sam looks back at me.
"You've been out a day," she says.
I grimace. A day.
"Your parents think you stayed at my place." Her voice flattens slightly. "I told them you crashed at my house after —apparently people think the ghost was a gas line blowing up."
Tucker clears his throat.
"Dude," he says. He's trying to find the floor of his voice and hasn't quite. "You look like absolute hammered shit. Like, Fatality-screen levels of shit."
I grin at him, “Well mate, I am a ghost, I suppose I already was a fatality.”
The silence is deafening.
-DP-
-DP-
-DP-
"You should drink something," Sam says.
There's a water bottle by the tarp. She passes it to me. I take it slow — three sips, the swallowing painful. She watches me drink, holding something back. Whatever her plan was for waking me up, the gentle parts are over. She has something else to say.
I hand the bottle back and look at her.
"Sam."
She closes her eyes for half a second.
Then very obviously forced out.:
"Three people died."
I don't move.
"In the — the fight." Her voice flattens. "Your parents and the city used the gas line as cover. But there were people. On the street. When the lion came up."
She swallows.
"They didn't make it out."
She's watching my face.
"Three?" I say.
I don’t really feel anything but I need to confirm.
"Marcus Webb," she says. "Teresa Huang. David Chen."
I roll the names through my head.
I never met them. I will never meet them. They were standing inside the kill zone of my fight and I bought everyone else on the block with their three lives. That was the price and I can not really bring myself to care.
I know this.
I open my mouth to say it.
Sam's face though.
Sam is waiting for something. Sam is waiting for me to be horrified by this loss of life.
I should fake it.
It would be easy. Oh god. Oh god, Sam. Hand over the mouth. Eyes shut. I've watched grief on enough faces ito know how to fake it.
I don't.
I don't because lying to her with my face right now feels worse than the truth would. I don't because I'm so tired, so so tired of lying about myself.
"They were dead the second it showed up," I say.
Quiet and flat.
"There wasn't a world where they lived, Sam. If I hadn't been there it'd have killed everyone on that street and then kept going. I'm sorry there were three but there could've been thirty."
Sam's mouth opens.
Tucker has frozen.
-DP-
-DP-
-DP-
Sam's face twists.
She makes a strangled sound that isn't quite a word. She looks at Tucker like she needs a witness to confirm what she just heard. Tucker is looking at the floor. He's going to be no help.
She looks back at me.
"You don't care."
Not a question yet. Just her checking to see if she heard me right.
"Sam—"
"You don't care?"
Now it is a question. Now her voice has the brittle thing in it that I heard in the hospital, when she was telling me the portal was her fault.
"Danny — Danny, you don't care that peopl—"
"I'll never be Danny."
The words come up and are out before I can stop them.
I say it too loud, my jawe pulses in protest and it echoes in the room. I push up onto my elbow anyway. My ribs scream. A stitch pops and I feel blood leaking down my side. I do not care.
"I'll never be Danny." I say t quieter now. "Please stop asking me to be. I don't have his memories. I lost everything in the fucking portal. Everything. Your Danny isn't coming back. And I'm so fucking tired of people thinking he will."
The silence is heavier now.
Sam is sitting back on her heels.
Her face has gone still amd slack.
I watch tears spring to her eyes
She thinks she finally understands.
She thinks the portal broke me. That the boy she pushed into the lab died in there and what came out was the wreckage and I have just confessed to feeling like a wreck. Her face softens by a single degree. She isn't forgiving me. Not yet. But she will.
I could correct her.
I don't.
I lie back. The stitch I popped is bleeding into the gauze. I let the silence hold.
Tucker is still looking at the floor. His hands are clasped so tight his knuckles have gone white.
When he finally moves it's only his head. His mouth opens.
"Danny—"
He doesn't finish.
I don't know what was supposed to come after.
The silence holds for several minutes.
I count the slatted bands of light on the concrete. Seven of them, from where I'm lying. The eighth is cut by Tucker's leg. The ninth would land on Sam if I moved my head.
I don't move my head.
"Sam."
She doesn't look up.
"Sam, look at me."
She does.
Her eyes are wet. She isn't crying. But shes close to doing so.
"Can you just accept who I am now."
It comes out as a statement. The way you say something when the question's already been asked and refused too many times to ask again. Quiet. Close to a whisper.
"Please."
The only request I have left.
She doesn't answer but at least she doesn't look away.
I close my eyes.