Way Down I'll Go

As Those Two Eyes Become Thy Face

Soft orange.

It was the first color of which he became conscious, the rest having slipped away with the stars. All too soon, the apricot hue loosened its embrace and Jo opened his eyes. It took him a few moments to realize where he was; the place looked familiar but he couldn't remember waking up here before. Staring at a plank slat above him, he noticed someone had carved a word into it. Sam.

Oh.

As he shifted in his brothers bunk, he began to notice other things. His body felt heavy, bound by invisible weights. There was a sharp pain in his left ribs that felt like someone had stabbed him and forgotten to remove the knife. Something cool was running up his arm and he lifted it to find an IV attached to a bag of fluids, hanging from a shirt hanger above his head.

I'm dreaming, he thought. This was all too strange to be real.

And then, she walked in.

Oh, I'm definitely dreaming.

This was an improvement. Dreaming usually meant nightmares, and they never contained anything as beautiful as her. She looked strangely familiar to him, though he couldn't place how. In real life, he'd never stare at anyone so openly, but this was a dream, and a very good one at that, so he took her in.

She was taller than average, her build somewhere between petite and athletic. Her hair was honey blonde and he could tell it was long, despite being pulled back in a ponytail. Her face was perfectly symmetrical, with a straight nose, high cheekbones, perfectly shaped rosebud lips, and her eyes...oh...those eyes. The most stunning shade of green. They jarred him and suddenly, he remembered her.

Oh, shit.

His eyes snapped down as he realized he'd been staring at this woman in broad daylight. He could hear her coming toward him and realized belatedly that he didn't have a shirt on. Clutching the sheet up to his chest, he couldn't figure out where to look when she knelt beside him.

"Hey there."

He could hear her smile.

"You're looking a whole lot better."

It all came back to him then. The clinic, the car ride home, seeing her in his doorway, the feeling of falling, and then...nothing. How long had he been asleep? Where were the boys?

"You've been out since last night," she said, reading his mind. "You had a pretty bad fever and a pneumothorax, a collapsed lung. That thing in your side is a chest tube. It's draining the fluid from your lung cavity so your lung can re-expand. It's not putting out much fluid now and your lungs sound pretty good, so I think we're safe to clamp it and then maybe take it out."

She paused, looking at him as if to see if he'd understood any of that. He'd had a chest tube before, when his dad had almost killed him for the last time, so he knew exactly what was going on, but he didn't tell her that. He snuck a glance up at her face and found an expression he couldn't read.

"The boys are at school right now, and I've just been hanging out with Johnny, who is also doing much better today."

As if on cue, Johnny began wailing in the other room, and Rachel, yes, that was her name, left to see to him. Jo used the opportunity to slide painfully out of bed, finding to his horror that he was wearing nothing but a frayed pair of boxers. He dressed himself hurriedly, ignoring the waves of dizziness, nausea, and stabbing pain that came over him. When Rachel returned with Johnny in her arms, he was reattaching the IV line to the catheter.

"Oh, you really shouldn't be up yet," she said, voice concerned. "I don't think you need the IV though. You can probably leave it off."

Jo did as she said and looped the line through the shirt hanger, not knowing what to do with himself. He wasn't used to being cared for. Questions flew through his head but he couldn't bring himself to ask them.