It's early fall when the boy turns up in Blue's woods. He's small, skinny, dark haired and big-eyed, sporting a book, a cast, and a black eye. He's an unobtrusive presence, quiet, but taking up what might be her favorite spot beneath her favorite tree. In his defense, he doesn't know any better — he's never been here before.
They relocated him to his foster home about a week and a half ago. His father got away with a lot for a lot of years, but as it turns out throwing a kid out of a speeding car, breaking a few bones, and letting them turn up at the hospital with a complete stranger who picked him up hitchhiking is enough to raise concerns with social services. It was a pretty open-and-shut case, particularly when the social worker turned up with the cops and found his father raging drunk. He started throwing beer bottles at them.
Now, Jack's got a bedroom in a strange house with strange adults and a few strange kids, all of which harbor a similar suspicion and wariness as him, all of them a handful of years older and disinclined to break the privacy bubble he's been surrounding himself with. He has no friends; the few he made back at his old school weren't friends-friends because he never got to bring them home or spend the night with them. He only ever saw them at school. On the bright side, it means he doesn't really feel like he's giving much up when they make him move.
He's not convinced it's permanent. Mostly he's just biding his time, keeping his head down, and trying not to think about how mad dad's gonna be when he finally goes home. Silver lining, he gets a ton of books now. The house is just full of them, amassed from years of housing foster kids before he got there, not in particularly high demand because most of them aren't as big on reading as he is. They're worn down, a little tattered, the corners folded and a few pages torn or water-logged, so he doesn't feel particularly guilty taking them outside.
Besides, it's nice out, and he's alone. It's not like anybody's gonna see him with it out here in the middle of nowhere.
It's hard to be lonely in a house filled to the brim with people. People being women of all ages, varying levels of psychic ability, and more or less tenuous relation to the more permanent residents of the house.
The house is filled with bodies tall enough to reach for books on the highest shelf, hands and mouths to soothe scraped knees or fill a glass of milk, laps to sit in, mouths to press a goodnight kiss against her forehead, and arms to envelope her in too tight hugs.
It's also -- according to common knowledge in the little rundown elementary school with rusted swing sets and plastic slides, their color slowly fading in the sun -- filled with witches.
Blue Sargent is not lonely. Blue Sargent has no friends.
The two facts exist together as two indisputable truths.
There is always something going on at the house. A reading. A lecture. A practice in self-guided mediation. The laying of hands. Dinner being made in the kitchen while a veritable litter of children play on the floor. All of the above at the same time. There's laughter and screaming and only at night does a kind of stillness settle over the house and its inhabitants.
Blue Sargent loves her family. Blue Sargent hates the noise that fills every corner of her home.
In a house full of bodies and arms and laughter and crying, it's easy to overlook the absence of one quietly serious little girl who does all of her homework on time and carefully hides her broccoli in a napkin rather than kick up a fuss about its presence on her dinner plate.
The house is particularly loud today. Blue's shoulders are nearly to her earlobes, molars grinding together hard enough to shatter rocks by the time she slips out through the backdoor and runs to a crack in the fence that separates their backyard from the forest beyond.
The forest is her Fortress of Solitude. Her Forest of Solitude, if you will. A moniker Blue has never spoken out loud but is immensely proud of all the same. A secret that is just her own. In a house where most things are shared or handed down, it's a treasure in and of itself.
It's her favorite time of the year, when the sticky heat of summer gives way to the crisper warmth of autumn and the trees explode in a kaleidoscope of colors. The further she walks down the worn path winding between the trees, the easier she breathes.
Inside her hand-me-down rainboots (a faded yellow with water color sunflowers re-painted on them after each rainstorm washes them away) her feet are too hot in the two pairs of thick socks necessary to keep her from stepping clean out of her boots. Underneath her arm she carries a book that the school librarian said was Too Complicated for her age.
Blue stops short at her destination, a tall and wide beech tree that's the perfect shape to read beneath. The spot -- the Perfect spot, Her spot -- is occupied by a strange boy.
One she hasn't seen before.
For a moment, she thinks that maybe he's a ghost. Maybe everyone was wrong and her Sight is just finally coming in.
But Blue's pretty sure ghosts don't have black eyes or grimy looking casts or jeans with frayed hems.
"Who are you?" Blue demands sharply, her eyes pointed with accusation. "That isn't your tree."
One of the kids in the house mentioned that there were witches nearby. The thing is, he did it in this dumb spoooooky voice that left Jack pretty much convinced he was lying, and he's more or less forgotten the story. Even now with the sudden appearance of a girl, his mind doesn't go to witch house. It doesn't actually... go to anything at all, really. Completely blank, startled at being addressed out here in the middle of nowhere.
His eyes go wide, and he freezes with his hands clutching his book.
Jack got thrown out of the car because he couldn't stop hiccuping. Because noise set his father off. Because kids were meant to be neither seen nor heard, and saying the wrong thing could bring down a world of pain. He was safer not saying anything at all, particularly after being levelled with something confrontational.
That's the same strategy he employs here — no answer, total silence, just... staring at her.
He wants to say that he's pretty sure the tree doesn't belong to anybody, that she doesn't own the forest. Probably. He wants to apologize, maybe. Mostly, he just wants her to go away.
If prompted, Blue would be happy to discuss the particulars and implications of tree ownership and how they apply to this situation. But there's no reply to Blue's question and she takes a moment to re-evaluate the ghost theory. What that looks like from outside is intense staring followed by a narrowing of her eyes, a pursing of her lips and finally a decisive shake of her head.
No. He's not a ghost. Not only does he look like just a kid like her (if more accident prone) she's pretty sure ghosts don't read. Also, ghosts don't look scared. Again. Pretty sure.
(She'll have to ask her mom when she comes home. Or maybe Persephone. Persephone is less likely to ask any uncomfortable questions in return. Questions like "what were you doing in the forest?" and "what have we said about talking to strangers?")
"Are you mute or just rude?" she asks, testing her back-up theories out loud. Maybe he doesn't understand English. Everyone in town understands English. But one time, a lady came to stay with them for a month and she didn't speak a word of English that whole time. Persephone had to translate everything in her soft and unobtrusive voice.
Blue liked that lady. They spent some time in the cat/telephone/sewing room together. Blue playing with one of the cats and the lady sewing on the ancient sewing machine. The only sounds the rattle of the sewing machine and whatever spilled in through the doorway from the rest of the house.
But he's not giving Blue that blank, but polite, look the lady would always give anyone directing a question to her in English. And, now that Blue thinks about it, the raggedy paperback he's clutching is definitely in English. (Begrudgingly, she has to admit that it's a good choice. Even if he is mute or rude.)
"When someone asks you a question, you're supposed to answer."
He's supposed to answer, but he doesn't know what he's supposed to say. He doesn't know what answer is right, and it leaves him seizing up with some executive dysfunction — heart pounding, words stuck in his throat that just refuse to leave because if he can't say the right thing he'll say the wrong thing. She's just a kid, it's not like the consequences are the same here as they are with his dad, but it isn't really about anything so logical as that. It's ingrained, instinct, habit, automatic anxiety that he can't shut off.
He won't get in trouble, he won't get hurt, but he still can't... say anything.
Finally, finally, what he manages is a croaked out, "Okay."
It's said as he urgently climbs to his feet, and without waiting for another question or sticking around to find out if he got it right, he takes off into the woods. He'll just hide in that room they gave him and read in there. Again.
It sucks, though, because that was a really good spot.
Two days later, the memory of that mild confrontation has faded mostly to something benign. What are the odds she'll be out there again at the exact same place at the exact same time as he is? Probably pretty low, right? A couple of the older, troubled kids are having a screaming match that stresses him into breathlessness, so he decides to chance it. He heads out to the beech tree.
The forest has probably never seen such a strange standoff before. Blue staring down the silent boy, one hand on her hip (her other arm unfortunately busy keeping the too thick book from falling onto the leafy ground), and her chin jutting out defiantly, while the boys face twists in some internal battle.
Blue's brow creases. It's not like she asked him something hard. But he's acting like she's Ms. Marlowe asking him to do a math problem on the board in front of everyone.
Okay
Not mute then. Just rude.
Blue barely has a chance to finish the thought, much less ask another question, before the boy scrambles to his feet and disappears between the trees. Blue's creased brow turns into a proper frown. The tree trunk and the worn spot at its base are both warmed from his body. Try as she might, she can't quite get settled into her book after he's left.
Blue doesn't end up asking Persephone or her mother about the finer points of ghosts. Forest-boy is added to her carefully hoarded collection of secrets. Not the good ones -- like forest of solitude or the polished bit of green glass she picked up on a rare beach vacation and keeps beneath one of the floorboards of her bedroom-- but the ones Maura doesn't necessarily need to know about. Like the crudely drawn witch with a crooked nose and bird's nest hair someone shoved into her backpack last Friday. Or the Mickey Mouse watch she lost to the river last winter. Little pinpricks of guilt.
She tries to put him out of her mind. He's never been in the forest before. Odds are he won't be there again. Except something about him nags at her like a splinter stuck beneath her skin. Maybe it's just guilt. The look on his face before he ran off keeps snagging in her memory. She's not mean. Not like Jenna at school. But, he looked at her like she was.
Two days later, Blue sits at the base of the beech tree in a pair of artfully patched jeans, her sneakers stained with sharpie where she's drawn intricate patterns along the side of the sole. Some of it has smudged and faded, she'll need to redraw the lines soon enough. The book she's reading is significantly thinner than the one from the other day (but only because she finished the other one, thank you very much, and her class isn't going back to the school library until next week) a look of intense focus on her face. She twirls one of her tight curls around her left index finger, teeth working against the inside of her cheek as she reads, her eyes flickering across the words.
The air is getting cooler, but the sun is still warm.
Later, Blue won't be able to say exactly what makes her raise her eyes from the page. But she looks up from her book and there he is. Standing in front of her. Forest-boy. Just when she convinced herself she'd never see him again. She bites her lip and considers him like she would a wild hare or bird crossing her path in the forest.
"How did you hurt your arm? Has someone signed your cast yet?" That's what people do when you have a cast. Blue's never had one or signed one. But she knows these things.
He didn't mean to stand there staring at her, it's just that he stepped out around the path and only noticed her two seconds too late to hide. It drove him to utter stillness, frozen there with another book of his own, stuck like a deer in the headlights before she'd even looked up at him. Waiting for the flight instinct to kick in, except that it got delayed by curiosity. Too busy looking at her to remember to bolt.
He's been caught. His eyes go wide again, and it takes him a few too many seconds to answer.
How did you hurt your arm is complicated and embarrassing, but the concept of lying has been firmly beaten out of him. Honesty is a sharp, constant tug — one he can evade by not saying anything at all. The second question is easier. He looks down at his arm like he has to check, even though he already knows the answer.
"No."
It hadn't really occurred to him that anyone might want to. Actually, he wasn't even aware that's something expected of him, that he should have planned for. If he'd have known, he'd have asked one of the older kids to do it just to get it over with.
The silence stretches out for a few seconds (that might as well be an eternity) uninterrupted by everything but the occasional angry chirp from the birds flitting through the branches of the trees above and around them. (Blue could tell him, if he asked, that those particular noises are territorial. The birds above them are chasing off intruders from their tree.)
It seems, from the wide-eyed (frightened?) look on his face, that this might be a repeat of the other day. Blue's throat tightens around a barrage of follow-up questions to break the silence. But she's distracted by the glance down at his cast followed by the monosyllabic answer.
(Blue learned the word monosyllabic only two weeks ago, and she takes care to use it at least once a day. Even if just in her own head.)
Not rude today then.
Perhaps Blue would press on the unanswered first question, if she wasn't so thoroughly distracted by the confirmation of the latter. She makes a sound similar to what a mechanic might make after popping open the hood of a car and finding the engine in complete, visible disrepair. The kind of noise that makes it clear that there's going to be a problem here.
An unsigned cast at their age tells the whole world that the wearer has no friends. If Blue is ever so lucky to break anything and require a cast -- sadly, she seems to have been cursed with particularly hard bones; even falling from the top of a tall tree last year didn't break them -- everyone at the house will sign it and decorate it with their own little flourishes until there's simply no room left for anyone at school to leave their mark there.
From the back of her book -- tucked between the last page and the cover -- she pulls a bookmark. Even from a distance, it's obviously handmade by someone who does not have a great career in bookmark-making ahead of them: Light blue cardstock absolutely covered in stickers (ranging from obscure children's characters to little gold stars) with a silky dark blue ribbon threaded to a hole punched in one end. Arguably the top. Carefully, she tucks the bookmark between the pages to keep her place and then she shuts the book around it and puts it down on one of the exposed roots of the beech tree.
With one hand braced against the tree trunk, she carefully climbs to her feet. From a pocket in her jeans, she pulls a green sharpie with a flourish and holds it out to him to view.
"I can do it," she offers, like she's doing him a giant favor. "If you want."
Blue considers showing him her sneakers, as evidence of her artistic ability. But honestly, with no signatures at all, he probably doesn't care either way.
For as timid as he seems, he's equally sharp. His eyes flicker over everything from her bookmark to her sneakers to the cover of the book to her expression, keen like she's a puzzle to solve or like a wrong move might have her pulling out a knife.
Everything about her is colorful. Everything about her looks happy, except for the attitude. That, like the birds, seems territorial and barbed.
But she's offering to sign his cast, and that's probably a good thing, right? If it's something people expect him to have done? Maybe it'll make him look less like a loser showing up to school on Monday if he has someone's name scrawled on there. Who's that, your mom, your brother, your daddy? He'll be able to honestly, defiantly tell them no. He won't really be able to say that it's from a friend, but it's still better than the alternative.
Plus, maybe if she signs it she'll let him sit on the other side of the tree today.
"Okay."
He casts one last glance over his shoulder like he's saying goodbye to the version of events where he runs again, and instead takes a couple of slow, wary steps her direction. He stops maybe just a few feet too far away, and holds out his forearm in offering. It's a bright neon orange affair that doesn't remotely mesh well with his dark blue hoodie, arguably overkill for the largely perfect, mild weather. It looks like he probably ought to be too hot, but he's skinny, he's healing, he's a little anemic. He runs cold — particularly that arm, and the fingertips at the end of the cast.
Last year, everyone in the house piled into the aging Volvo (a vehicle without much going for it aside gets-you-where-you're-going and has-decent-cargo-space-I-guess) and Calla drove them to the traveling carnival. Blue rode every fast ride she was allowed onto -- argued (unsuccessfully) with a particularly disinterested ride-worker about the unfairness of the height requirements on the rickety rollercoaster -- and wished fervently that she could be having hot dogs and cotton candy instead of the homemade sandwiches Maura magicked up from her purse as the sun went down.
They played none of the midway games (scams, Calla scoffed) even though the stuffed animal prizes tugged hard on Blue's soul. Persephone paid five dollars to have her palm read in a rickety little tent with stars painted on it. The genericness of the fortunes told entirely made up by the showmanship of the so-called fortune teller inside.
But, most importantly, Maura took Blue down to the small petting zoo set up on the very edges of the carnival. They bought one small cone of animal feed and waded into the fray. The little enclosure smelt of saw dust and animal droppings and the cute baby goats were desperately outnumbered by the people wanting to pet them. The bigger goats roamed around eying white paper cones clutched in sticky hands, butting their heads against hips and elbows in their attempts to get at the little food pellets.
A deer stood shoulders above the rest of the animals with soft and gentle eyes. Disinterested in handfuls of animal feed offered out to her, she shifted out of the way of each attempted touch. Blue spent an eternity in that tent, slowly inching her way closer, letting the doe get used to her scent, before holding out a mostly-clean hand, and waiting until her arm trembled with the effort. Finally, the doe allowed Blue one gentle pet. Blue's fingers astounded by the softness of her ears before she darted away.
Forest-boy reminds her of that doe when he stops just out of her reach and offers his cast out. Every line of his body seems to signal that he's ready to dart back into the trees. So it's with a solemn look on her face that she steps forward, and tugs the cap off the sharpie. Decisively, she snaps it onto the back of the sharpie and reaches out her left hand to support his wrist.
"I'm going to add some vines and leaves too," she tells him. Fact rather than statement. He's a boy, so she won't do little flowers.
First thing first though, she neatly prints her name (B L U E) across a finger's length of the bright orange cast. There's a look of intense concentration on her face, her tongue trapped between her teeth and a frown bearing down on her brow. Once the letters are finished, she begins on the winding vines.
Fingers and eyes locked on her task, Blue's mind is left free to roam. Forest-boy is more of a mystery than she thought when she first saw him. He looks old enough to go to school, but he doesn't go to her school. Blue knows because everyone knows everyone in the little elementary school. And there are no other schools in town. Blue knows for certain because when she begged Maura to send her to any other school but That One, after her first day of first grade, they spent an evening researching the nearest elementary schools and marking them on a map. Children his age are required (by the law) to go to school. Blue knows that from the same evening when their pins on the map all proved too far to travel daily and she said she'd just not go to school then and learn everything she needed from books instead. Patiently, Maura helped her look up school laws, and by the end of the evening, Blue was resigned to her fate.
So, by not going to school, he is basically a criminal. Or his parents are. Maybe he's a runaway. Maybe his whole family are runaways. On the run from the law for some-- diamond heist or something.
With a flourish, Blue finishes the last leaf and looks up at the boy.
"You have to tell me your name now," she tells him. Her eyes dart down to her name on his cast and back up again. It's only fair.
For what it's worth, he wouldn't mind the flowers — though, it's better that she doesn't. His dad would mind the flowers, and whenever he gets around to picking Jack up again he'd be bound to hear another round all about how he's a pussy and a queer and a few other things Jack only understands the context of but not necessarily the actual definition. He thinks they were pretty on her rain boots the other day, anyway.
He stands patiently, passively accepting whatever it is she's set her mind to, not a word or a twitch of protest in him, even though his foot hurts a little from standing as rigid as he does. Not because he's afraid to move, necessarily, just that he doesn't think he's supposed to, and he doesn't want to mess her up. He doesn't want to mess this up.
Blue.
He's young enough still, insular enough still, that it doesn't occur to him Blue might be a weird name. His dad has a friend called Red, though that's mostly because of the color of his hair. Hers isn't blue, but that's none of his business.
When she finishes, he hugs his cast to his chest like it's something precious. Whether it's because he's defensive of his injury or defensive of his handiwork is impossible to decipher. It feels a little bit like she might've been trying to trick him, but he doesn't feel tricked. He's not keeping it a secret, he probably would have told her if she just asked.
"Jack," is the simple answer, but it's accompanied by a visible pause that suggests he's got more to say. Something about the part in his lips, the quiet preparatory intake of breath, steeling himself. "I'll leave you alone if you let me read on the other side of your tree."
He won't bother her. Won't mess up her spot. Won't even be in her line of sight, he'll go on the complete opposite side.
Please.
There are, technically, a thousand other spots in this forest to read. Twice as many trees. It's just that this one feels like the one. The correct and appropriate place.
It's a good thing that he stands still. Practically, because the cast is an uneven canvas and even the smallest motion could mess up the intricate (for an eight year old) lines she's drawing along its surface. More importantly, it makes Blue feel like it did when the doe stood still for her. Even if it was just for one tremulous second, and this stretches out for far longer.
Jack
Blue turns the name over in her mind and decides that (1) it suits him and (2) he is probably not a fairy. The book sitting forgotten at the base of the beech tree is a collection of faerie tales. Not childish fairy tales like Cinderella or Snow White. But tales from faerie where the fairies aren't dainty women with butterfly wings, and not knowing the rules can have dire consequences. Like returning after a day to find a hundred years have passed. But if he was a fairy -- the dangerous kind -- he probably wouldn't have given his name so easily. (Though it would've been a good explanation as to why he's in the woods.)
It wasn't her purpose to trick him into giving up his name. Unless he was a fairy, in which case that was a pretty clever trick. Wasn't it? Except he's probably not a fairy. Fairies don't have names like Jack.
Blue blinks when he continues and a rush of words (easily twice or three times as many as he has spoken to her across the span of two days) fall from his lips like they're in a hurry. She tugs the sharpie cap free and clicks it back into place. She has green sharpie stains on her right index finger and reflexively she rubs her finger over them.
An immediate and sharp NO sits heavy on Blue's chest. She's been brought up to share, to make space, to invite-- but she count on one hand the things she has that are both only hers, and have never belonged to anyone else before her. The beech tree is one of them. (Presumably, other people have read beneath it. But not in Blue's lifetime.) But her name is printed on his cast like a promise. Perhaps, if it was a trap, she's the one who fell into it.
"Is that a threat?" she asks, more curious than accusative. "Or a promise?"
See, with a conditional clause like that, it sounds a little like maybe if she doesn't let him read on the other side of the tree, he won't leave her alone, but bother her until she gives in. If it's a threat, she will never give in. Blue Sargent does not negotiate with terrorists. Even when it leads to her walking home with sopping wet sneakers for reasons she'd rather not get into at the moment.
Jack winds up invalidating his answer a little simply by giving it.
"Which one do you want it to be?" It's a genuine question, and the implication is it's that one — which doesn't make for a very good foundation if it's threat. He's not even sure how he'd follow through. Bug her, maybe, but he doesn't... actually want to do that. First, because it sounds resoundingly uncomfortable and would draw too much attention to him. Second, because he's pretty sure she wouldn't tolerate it even if he tried, and he's not sure how exactly it is she'd retaliate. Some boys find that to be a challenge, they find it exciting, they pull pigtails. Jack has a long history and a cast on his arm that has taught him not to poke things knowing they come with consequences. He still has bruises on his ribs and his toes are too broken for him to really run. If she decided to stomp on his foot there's a very good chance he'd piss himself.
He figures if threat is the right answer it means he won't have to follow through, and if promise is the right answer, well, obviously he won't have to follow through either. He doesn't have to know which one is right if he lets her pick it herself.
If the answer is neither, well, he'll just go home. Maybe try again tomorrow, but earlier this time.
When the phone rings up in the cat/sewing/telephone room, the shrill sound tearing through the wallpaper, Maura Knows.
The certainty hits her like an arrow through the chest.
When she picks up the receiver it's only for confirmation of the facts that already sit at the front of her mind like simultaneously uninvited and belated guests. Without the deafening ringing, 300 Fox Way is plunged into uncharacteristic silence. Like the building itself is holding its breath alongside Maura. The sympathy in the sheriff's voice carries through the static of the tinny line somehow floating down to her where she stands at the bottom of an endless ocean.
The exact details of the conversation will forever escape her. She remembers the sympathy and the image of a cheap car wrapped around a familiar tree trunk seared into her memory, but no words. Not the sheriff's, and not her own.
There's a little empty chasm between picking up the phone and staring down at Calla's hand carefully covering her hand, the receiver back in its place beneath them. Calla's fingers are achingly gentle where they peel Maura's away from the cheap plastic.
In the car, Calla's hands grip the steering wheel so tight her knuckles blanche, and she takes a quiet turn that adds fifteen minutes to the tense car ride, but saves them from seeing with their eyes what their minds have already showed them.
The hospital corridors smell empty and antiseptic, but the waiting room smells of cheap plastic and unrealized sorrow. The bones of Maura's hands ache, Calla's and Persephone's grips so tight it grinds them together. Tethered to them, she is awash -- but not lost -- in the crushing ocean of time.
Chronology, sharp and orderly, reasserts itself when Harriet walks through the doors of the waiting room. Suddenly, there's a purpose to be found in relaying information and offering comfort.
There are too many children in Harriet's care for her to devote herself singularly to Jack. Once the worst is over, once there's only waiting left to do, she leaves Maura to it.
Persephone and Calla and Jimi and women whose names have never crossed the mouths of anyone in this little town before take turns bringing food and coffee and comfort and Maura splits her days between the plastic chairs of the waiting room and the equally uncomfortable brown chairs in the corners of two hospital rooms.
The first person Maura blames is herself. What good is her gift if the knowing couldn't have come a day sooner?
The second person she blames-- No. She stops herself short of it. Lets the guilt rest on her own shoulders, because the other set of shoulders is in no place to take it.
On the day when Jack wakes up, Maura is settled in the chair in the corner of his room. There's a vase of fresh flowers -- picked from two gardens -- sitting among a few scattered more or less homemade cards with the general sentiments of get well soon or you are missed.
Cards rustle restlessly between Maura's fingers. She's been shuffling her tarot deck since this morning, laying pattern after pattern, before regretting herself and shuffling them back without looking.
He still sometimes sleeps, but it's getting gradually more infrequent. A common enough occurrence not to be a shock, infrequent enough that his body drinks it in like a dying plant does rain. Desperately pulling out every scrap it can get, leaving him bleary, confused, and disoriented for a while after he wakes up. It's no different now, he thinks, except maybe it's one of the worst mornings so far. He still feels tired. His body aches.
He opens his eyes, and his room looks different. Insanely, nonsensically, his first theory is that someone redecorated while he was out — until recognition kicks into place. Rails on the bed. Curtains, sterile white. He's very familiar with hospital rooms, he's been in and out of them growing up, and with increasing frequency lately. Usually he's not in a bed, though.
The second thing he notices is the sound of shuffling cards — by now incredibly familiar. He can almost tell which of the women of 300 Fox Way it is by the unique way they each shuffle and place. Maura's snap with much more intention than Calla's, usually — or at least that's the word he'd use to describe it.
Relief unfurls small and feeble, like a sidewalk flower. It's completely unfair to Harriet to say that Maura's felt more like a mother to him; Harriet's been caring and kind, supporting and constant and stable. But she's also always had an abundance of kids. kids before him, kids after, attention split evenly across ten different directions. Each one might be unique, each one might be special, but if everyone's special, nobody is.
Maura's got fewer wards under her purview. It feels different.
Also, probably incredibly weird of him to think of her that way while dating her daughter, but all of them are weird. Everything about each of them is weird. At a certain point, you stop questioning the ones that aren't hurting anything. The ones that feel right.
Nothing feels right, right now.
"Hi," he says — or tries to say. His throat is drier than the fucking Sahara, and his tongue feels like Velcro on the roof of his mouth. The sound that comes out is more a raspy grumble, a friction-y paper-thin noise. His brain's still foggy, cotton-stuffed, probably from medication, maybe from a concussion. It means his question comes out a completely eloquent, "Why... this?"
It's hard to say if it's the papery rustle of stiff hospital sheets or the faint greeting that alerts Maura to the fact that Jack is (finally) awake. The cards pause between her fingers and her chest squeezes tight around her heart.
Relief wages a war against something darker. Something angry and dark and resentful that Maura wants no part of now or ever. Biologically, Blue is hers, carried right below her heart for nine months and held in that same heart ever since. But Jack is family too. Ever since that first dinner when a brush of Calla's fingers revealed more than he ever told them of where he came from and what kind of people his biological family were.
It's not a surprise that Jack doesn't remember what happened. (It's like the morning after a break up or a death in the family, that moment between sleep and waking where you can't remember how the world has been torn apart. Before the pain slips back in like a knife, when everything feels normal until you remember it won't feel normal ever again.) But it's disappointing. Maura would've hoped she wouldn't have to be the one to remind him.
"You're awake," she says, voice soft and quiet like the hum of the air-conditioning. Maura sets the deck of cards down and wraps the better person she wants to be around herself like a blanket. Wraps the warm and fond love she's felt for Jack as long as she can remember on top of that as she pushes to her feet. She moves slowly, like her body was in the car with them, her joints stiff and aching.
"You're okay," she reassures him, her hand finding his, careful not to jostle his IV line. It doesn't matter how many days she has spent in quiet vigil at the hospital (and she can't put a number to them anyway), the right words haven't appeared yet.
"Try not to move too much. You're pretty banged up." Her thumb rubs along the base of his thumb, slow and reassuring.
The artificial bubble of semi-normal is going to burst and she wishes she could give him another couple of pain-free moments. But the best she can do is be here for him as the memories flood back in.
He'd been a touch-starved, touch-shy kid when they first met, but it's impossible to stay that way for long with Blue's family. The love is a physical thing — even without ever laying a hand on one another, it's so strong in that house it presses up against skin and atoms like a force field. The hands just follow naturally. A few months into Official Best Friendhood eased him well into the territory where it began to feel nothing but comfortable.
He tightens his hand around hers impulsively, thoughtless instinct. It pulls at tight skin, and he glances down to see a few scrapes on his knuckles. Did he get in a fight? That's hilarious; of the two of them, he's the less likely of the pair for that.
There was an accident.
Oh, shit.
His brow furrows, tightly-knit concentration, searching, pulling, tugging at tangled threads too stubborn to give.
"No," he murmurs after a beat, slowly shaking his head. Eyes on the sheets; eyes on nothing. "No, I don't- I remember driving."
Bags packed, windows down, an island of relief in a sea of fear and depression. Road, radio, optimism, and a plan. The diagnosis was fatal, but prematurely lying down for it would never have flown with her. They were going to go see... everything. Well, everything they could, considering neither of them were exactly made of money.
He remembers all of that, and then nothing. Blackness.
But it does raise the most important question, and his eyes fly up from the blankets back to Maura.
"Where is she?" He sounds concerned, but not desperately. Not like he has any clue how bad it actually is. Not like he expects her to have been seriously injured. Heartbreakingly naive. It's not a possibility, not even in the strangest alternate reality version of their lives, that she could be seriously hurt. It's just weird that she's not here, too. Knowing her, she'd probably get into a heated debate with the hospital staff about how visiting hours are a scam, and she's perfectly fine staying with him in the room, thank you very much.
The vague hope that the words would trigger something in Jack's mind dies a quick and mostly painless death. Partial memory loss isn't unusual in cases of trauma. The sentence is dragged up from nowhere, the voice that accompanies it the kind of authority she'd expect from a doctor. The doctors said a lot of things those first couple of hazy hours before Maura started collecting information like an obsessive compulsive magpie.
The investigation is still pending. Maura thinks she heard Tom mention a second driver, but after those first, terse, conversations she hasn't spoken with him. Calla took that over. Afraid of what she might learn, Maura's been laying her cards over and over, asking the same question and pulling back before she finds the answer; She's not ready to lose both of them.
Jack's tone, more than the question, cuts as deep as the first ring of the telephone that day. It breaks Maura's heart all over again. He's not wrong about the fight over visiting hours. But it wasn't Blue who fought it, it was Maura.
The wrist of the hand holding Jack's braces against the metal railing of the hospital bed, and Maura leans forward so he won't have to strain to look at her. There's a certain poker face psychics develop. A necessary barrier between them and the client sitting in front of them. No one wants to read their future in their fortune tellers face. So Maura's learned to tuck away sorrow and sympathy, anything that might give away an unwanted fate, beneath a kindly and calm expression. She's never had to turn it on family before. But she levels it at Jack now.
Calm. Kind. Gentle. A rock in the middle of the current.
"Jack, sweetheart," she says, her fingers brushing gently along his hair line down to the curve of his ear. "She--"
Maura's mouth opens and not a single sound comes out. The words stick sideways in her throat, lodged into a lump that just keeps thickening. Her brow knits and her eyes heat with the sting of tears. She's cried before now. In the Volvo in the darkened parking lot in big heaving sobs. In Calla's arm in the ICU waiting room where the chairs are even less comfortable than the ones up in the ER waiting room. In the visitor restroom with the back of a wrist pressed tight, tight against her mouth. But she'll be damned if she cries here.
Her gaze flicks up at the ceiling, and like fighting gravity, she forces them back so when she looks back down, her eyes are still bright but her lashes are dry. It's the smallest of victories considering that the brief hitch in her words must have already given them away. Her throat works around the lump and it feels like swallowing glass.
"She's still in the ICU. As soon as she's stable, they'll be transferring her to another hospital." A better hospital. Somewhere with specialists and bills that will put Maura Sargent in medical debt for life but it will be worth it if--
If.
That's the other question she hasn't dared ask the cards yet. She thinks she knows the answer. Thinks she's known it since the phone rang.
He likes when the people he loves touch him, but for some reason, he does not like the way she starts touching his face. No, he wants to say, no, don't do that, it makes it seem like you're about to say something bad. But he can't bring himself to move, to pull away, to do anything but stare at her as his mind goes blank and something somewhere drops to the floor. Maybe that was his heart, or his stomach, or some other vital organ he needs to live.
Inside his head, the voice gets louder. Stop looking like that, why are you making that face? Why are you crying? Stop it. Don't say whatever you're about to say.
Has he seen her upset like this before?
No. He doesn't think he has.
The ICU. As soon as she's stable, as in, she's not. She's not stable. Why isn't she stable?
None of this is making any comprehensible sense.
"Why-" His throat sticks, rusty vocal cords rubbing raw against one another. He has to clear his throat to get them to keep making words. "Why- why are they transferring her? Why is she- what's wrong with her? She's gonna be okay, though, right?"
He doesn't realize he's slowly raising his voice, or that questions at some point turn into statements.
Hardly stoic, Maura Sargent has never seen the point of hiding her emotions. Life is meant to be lived and felt. The good and the bad. Through the years, Jack's seen her full to the brim with joy and laughter, absolutely furious (though never aimed at him or Blue), enveloping both of them in a love that runs deep like the ocean, and crying real tears at the end of Disney movies. But this? Maura hasn't felt anything even close to this since she walked through the door of her childhood home without even a glance back.
Maura's hand drifts down from Jack's face to settle on his chest, fingertips curved around his shoulder. There's no pressure (yet), just resting gently there. A reminder for him to stay still. His injuries may be mostly superficial -- unlike Blue's -- but he needs to take it easy.
"Jack," she says softly, keeping her voice low and even, refusing to let it rise alongside his. "Shhh, shhh, sweetie. I know this is hard. I know."
Maura's voice breaks on the last word.
A light knock on the door jamb and a nurse peeks her head in as if summoned by Jack's raised voice, though in all likelihood it's the sudden uptick in his heart rate on the monitor that's sounded the alarm.
"How are we doing in here?" she asks, eyes drawn to Maura out of habit before they drift over to Jack and she answers her own question. Like she can't read the anguish on his face or sense the tension in the room her whole expression brightens.
"Oh we're awake!" she says, bubbly in the way of people who wake up at 5 AM to get a quick workout in before heading to the hospital for a sixteen hour shift. "I'll go let the doctor know."
"Yes, thank you," Maura manages, her eyes flickering only briefly from Jack's face out of politeness even these circumstances can't quite squash. Her fingers curl around Jack's a little too tightly. Like Calla and Persephone held on to her in the waiting room those first couple of hours.
The door doesn't quite latch behind the nurse.
"I will tell you, but you need to stay calm and take it easy," Maura says, fingertips pressing gently against his shoulder. "Okay? You working yourself into a state or hurting yourself isn't going to make anything better."
Somehow, her soothing only makes it a little worse. He doesn't want her to comfort him, because he doesn't want to need to be comforted, because he wants it to be wrong. He wants it to be a misunderstanding, or a mistake, or a lie. Why are you telling me this?
Because it's true.
No. Absolutely not. Not possible. It's not.
His utter disbelief shifts its target to the nurse, like maybe she can make the world make sense again. Or... maybe like he can't believe she can be perky when things are obviously incredibly wrong right now. She's so happy, he hates her.
"I'm calm, I'm fine," He says, not calmly and definitely not fine, "I wanna go see her. We should- why are you here? She's gonna want you when she-"
His voice cracks. He falters.
Why is she here, if Blue is downstairs? Why, unless there's basically no chance she'd wake up alone? Unless there's no-
The wavering in his tone doesn't fade when he persists, despite what a small voice in his head tries to tell him. A small truth he's ignoring. Quieter, with less certainty, "You shouldn't be here. You should be down there. For when she's- stable."
Because she's going to be. And then she'll wake up, and she'll want her mom. That's the truth. That's- what's going to happen.
Thankfully, perhaps, whatever ire he throws at the nurse goes entirely unnoticed. Perhaps her level of cheer also requires a layer of teflon for everything negative in this world to just slide off.
"I am here," Maura says, her voice cracking beneath the pressure of calm she is trying to squeeze it into, "because you were always going to wake up first."
The statement sits in the air like an exclamation point and guilt sinks its deep claws into her shoulders. Her fingers are pressing too hard against his chest and she makes herself let up, makes herself lean back and wrap her hand instead around the metal rail of the bed. One hand on his, one on unfeeling metal and all she has to remember is to hold his hand lightly where she grips the railing so hard it's a wonder it doesn't snap beneath her fingers.
A deep steadying breath as she arranges her features back into the calm she hasn't had to maintain for days now. The nurses don't care about her redrimmed eyes or the way she's been drifting like a ghost between the floors, spending one night in the foldout chair in Blue's ICU room, and another cramped in the decidedly-not-foldout chair in Jack's very regular hospital room.
"I wanted to be here. For you," she continues, a little steadier now, with no bite to her voice. The joints of her fingers are stiff and iced over, crackling when she forces them to unfurl slightly from around the bed. She grips his hand with both of hers, so achingly gentle now. He needs her, and as much as she hates it, Blue doesn't.
It's the worst sentence she's thought in her entire life.
"Jack," she says, and she's not sure if his name is a plea for his attentive silence or a command. "Blue suffered severe head trauma on impact."
The words are soft. Parroted from the doctor who spoke them in a no-less-gentle tone though devoid of the emotional attachment that clings to every syllable from Maura's throat and lips and tongue, tying them together with her heart.
She is not waking up.
"She--" Maura's voice feels too thick for her throat. The words lodge somewhere around her heart and she knows she can't speak them out loud, so she switches it up, goes down a different path. "They are waiting for the swelling to go down enough for them to risk transporting her to a hospital with a proper neurologist and the right equipment."
Through the cracked open door, Maura is aware of the approaching foot steps. Dr. Lindsfield has a very distinctive gait.
"You can see her as soon as the doctor says you're well enough. Okay? I'll go with you."
Jack isn't stupid. One day down the line, between the cognitive decay of his disease, sleep deprivation and an overabundance of medication, he'll be a little slower to connect dots where those connections seem obvious. Now, he's still coming off that post straight-A sharpness. He's still clever enough to intuit what that means. The implications.
To pick up on what she isn't saying.
Any indication to the contrary is utter willful ignorance. He wants to stay ignorant. He doesn't want to understand.
But he does.
His vision swims, and it's strange, but the urgency in him suddenly goes... quiet. It retreats, seems to mute, seems to leave things cloudy and numb, as though to protect him from the jagged, rusty edges. The news, the offer, they're met with a long period of silence. He stares at their hands.
He's not sure how much time passes. The question arises, and he grapples with it for what feels like forever, unable to force the words out of his throat. It locks up as soon as he tries. When they finally bloom like blood on white sheets, there's a sheen over his eyes and his voice is barely audible.
"When is she going to wake up?"
Maura should know. She should. She's psychic. She should know the answer to this. If she's ever known anything in that way, in that sixth sense time is a circle or a sea way, it should be this.
In every way that matters, the muted silence that Jack falls into is worse than the near frantic pleading. So much worse. Maura's hands feel clumsy and awkward around his and she fights the growing lump at the back of her throat.
He is, she thinks, finally understanding and watching him go through the process is like going through it herself a second time.
When he finally speaks, his words are so quiet, Maura wouldn't even have caught them if it wasn't for the fact that she's been watching his face shut down on itself through it all. Her hands tighten around his and her throat tightens along with them.
"Jack--" her voice falters, and her face falls. The remnants of that calm poker face shredding until she's not the all-knowing psychic or the calm and loving maternal figure. She's just a woman trying to come to terms with the fact that even if her daughter wakes up, there is no guarantee there won't be lasting, catastrophic damage.
"I don't know." The words are soft and broken. A quiet confession. Time is a bathtub filled to the brim, an ocean, a constant, an all at once. And Maura Sargent can dip her toes in the water, can submerge herself fully and swim through it. But she can't see her daughter waking up.
The door swings fully open to admit Dr. Lindsfield, a man whose body and voice both fill up any room he enters near immediately, the nurse from earlier trailing close behind.
"Good afternoon, Jack," he says, his booming voice filling the room from corner to corner.
Maura lets go of Jack's hand and takes a step away, ostensibly to give the doctor some room to work. If it's also giving her the opportunity to turn half away from the bed so Jack can't see the bright sheen in her eyes resolve itself into tears, then that's just a bonus.
"Or should I say good morning?" he adds with a wink and grin.
Behind him, the nurse breathes a quick and obligatory laugh.
"Glad you decided to wake up. Gave us quite a fright, young man. Quite a fright. Your mom here has been worried sick." A quick gesture towards Maura who doesn't make any attempt at correcting the assumption, too busy looking up at the ceiling and surreptitiously wiping her eyes with the heel of her palm.
"We'll have to run you through some quick tests, but good news is you made it through relatively unscathed." The doctor picks up the chart from the foot of the hospital bed, flicking through it while he speaks. "No broken bones. Couple of scrapes and bruises. You'll probably feel some soreness around your ribs and where the seatbelt caught you. State that car was in, it's a damn miracle anyone got out of it alive."
A seed is planted that does not grow today. He doesn't even realize it's been slipped into the soil. I don't know. Why not? It could bud into resentment, or into anger. She can see so many other things, why can't she see this? For that matter, why couldn't she see-
But he can't think that clearly yet, he doesn't have the capacity for any more emotion yet, and even if he did it's all so numb he can't feel it. He says nothing, and the answer hangs in the air.
The doctor comes in and disrupts a placid lake in a way that feels irreverent. Jack looks up at him with red-rimmed eyes, wordless, and doesn't correct the mom thing either. It doesn't matter. It's close enough to be completely irrelevant.
For the first two or three days after his dad threw him out of the car, Jack barely spoke. Not to the social worker, not to the doctor, not to Harriet. Sometimes it's because whatever they said to him didn't matter enough to process and retain, sometimes it's because he didn't know what to say, sometimes he just...
Didn't.
It's like that now.
It's a damn miracle anyone got out alive.
Shut up. Just shut up. It's not a miracle, this isn't a fucking miracle. This is a nightmare. Maybe that's what it is. Shit, maybe that's what this is. Maybe this is a nightmare. Maybe he just needs to wake up. His sleep is fucked up, his dreams are vivid, maybe he's asleep, or the accident happened but he's on some weird drugs giving him bad dreams, and he just needs to wake up. That should be easy, he never manages to stay out long once he becomes aware he's dreaming. What can he do? Look at the clock. In dreams, clocks never show the same time if you look at them, then look away, then look back again.
He looks up at the clock on the wall above the doctor's head. Looks down at his empty hand. Looks at the clock again. It's the same.
Looks down. Looks up. It's the same.
He's not dreaming.
Okay. This is okay. It's going to be okay. It's fine. Everything's going to be okay, he can deal with it, it's going to be-
He turns over abruptly, lurching toward the side of the bed to hang off the railings and throw up on the floor.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eight
They relocated him to his foster home about a week and a half ago. His father got away with a lot for a lot of years, but as it turns out throwing a kid out of a speeding car, breaking a few bones, and letting them turn up at the hospital with a complete stranger who picked him up hitchhiking is enough to raise concerns with social services. It was a pretty open-and-shut case, particularly when the social worker turned up with the cops and found his father raging drunk. He started throwing beer bottles at them.
Now, Jack's got a bedroom in a strange house with strange adults and a few strange kids, all of which harbor a similar suspicion and wariness as him, all of them a handful of years older and disinclined to break the privacy bubble he's been surrounding himself with. He has no friends; the few he made back at his old school weren't friends-friends because he never got to bring them home or spend the night with them. He only ever saw them at school. On the bright side, it means he doesn't really feel like he's giving much up when they make him move.
He's not convinced it's permanent. Mostly he's just biding his time, keeping his head down, and trying not to think about how mad dad's gonna be when he finally goes home. Silver lining, he gets a ton of books now. The house is just full of them, amassed from years of housing foster kids before he got there, not in particularly high demand because most of them aren't as big on reading as he is. They're worn down, a little tattered, the corners folded and a few pages torn or water-logged, so he doesn't feel particularly guilty taking them outside.
Besides, it's nice out, and he's alone. It's not like anybody's gonna see him with it out here in the middle of nowhere.
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It's hard to be lonely in a house filled to the brim with people. People being women of all ages, varying levels of psychic ability, and more or less tenuous relation to the more permanent residents of the house.
The house is filled with bodies tall enough to reach for books on the highest shelf, hands and mouths to soothe scraped knees or fill a glass of milk, laps to sit in, mouths to press a goodnight kiss against her forehead, and arms to envelope her in too tight hugs.
It's also -- according to common knowledge in the little rundown elementary school with rusted swing sets and plastic slides, their color slowly fading in the sun -- filled with witches.
Blue Sargent is not lonely.
Blue Sargent has no friends.
The two facts exist together as two indisputable truths.
There is always something going on at the house. A reading. A lecture. A practice in self-guided mediation. The laying of hands. Dinner being made in the kitchen while a veritable litter of children play on the floor. All of the above at the same time. There's laughter and screaming and only at night does a kind of stillness settle over the house and its inhabitants.
Blue Sargent loves her family.
Blue Sargent hates the noise that fills every corner of her home.
In a house full of bodies and arms and laughter and crying, it's easy to overlook the absence of one quietly serious little girl who does all of her homework on time and carefully hides her broccoli in a napkin rather than kick up a fuss about its presence on her dinner plate.
The house is particularly loud today. Blue's shoulders are nearly to her earlobes, molars grinding together hard enough to shatter rocks by the time she slips out through the backdoor and runs to a crack in the fence that separates their backyard from the forest beyond.
The forest is her Fortress of Solitude. Her Forest of Solitude, if you will. A moniker Blue has never spoken out loud but is immensely proud of all the same. A secret that is just her own. In a house where most things are shared or handed down, it's a treasure in and of itself.
It's her favorite time of the year, when the sticky heat of summer gives way to the crisper warmth of autumn and the trees explode in a kaleidoscope of colors. The further she walks down the worn path winding between the trees, the easier she breathes.
Inside her hand-me-down rainboots (a faded yellow with water color sunflowers re-painted on them after each rainstorm washes them away) her feet are too hot in the two pairs of thick socks necessary to keep her from stepping clean out of her boots. Underneath her arm she carries a book that the school librarian said was Too Complicated for her age.
Blue stops short at her destination, a tall and wide beech tree that's the perfect shape to read beneath. The spot -- the Perfect spot, Her spot -- is occupied by a strange boy.
One she hasn't seen before.
For a moment, she thinks that maybe he's a ghost. Maybe everyone was wrong and her Sight is just finally coming in.
But Blue's pretty sure ghosts don't have black eyes or grimy looking casts or jeans with frayed hems.
"Who are you?" Blue demands sharply, her eyes pointed with accusation. "That isn't your tree."
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His eyes go wide, and he freezes with his hands clutching his book.
Jack got thrown out of the car because he couldn't stop hiccuping. Because noise set his father off. Because kids were meant to be neither seen nor heard, and saying the wrong thing could bring down a world of pain. He was safer not saying anything at all, particularly after being levelled with something confrontational.
That's the same strategy he employs here — no answer, total silence, just... staring at her.
He wants to say that he's pretty sure the tree doesn't belong to anybody, that she doesn't own the forest. Probably. He wants to apologize, maybe. Mostly, he just wants her to go away.
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No. He's not a ghost. Not only does he look like just a kid like her (if more accident prone) she's pretty sure ghosts don't read. Also, ghosts don't look scared. Again. Pretty sure.
(She'll have to ask her mom when she comes home. Or maybe Persephone. Persephone is less likely to ask any uncomfortable questions in return. Questions like "what were you doing in the forest?" and "what have we said about talking to strangers?")
"Are you mute or just rude?" she asks, testing her back-up theories out loud. Maybe he doesn't understand English. Everyone in town understands English. But one time, a lady came to stay with them for a month and she didn't speak a word of English that whole time. Persephone had to translate everything in her soft and unobtrusive voice.
Blue liked that lady. They spent some time in the cat/telephone/sewing room together. Blue playing with one of the cats and the lady sewing on the ancient sewing machine. The only sounds the rattle of the sewing machine and whatever spilled in through the doorway from the rest of the house.
But he's not giving Blue that blank, but polite, look the lady would always give anyone directing a question to her in English. And, now that Blue thinks about it, the raggedy paperback he's clutching is definitely in English. (Begrudgingly, she has to admit that it's a good choice. Even if he is mute or rude.)
"When someone asks you a question, you're supposed to answer."
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He won't get in trouble, he won't get hurt, but he still can't... say anything.
Finally, finally, what he manages is a croaked out, "Okay."
It's said as he urgently climbs to his feet, and without waiting for another question or sticking around to find out if he got it right, he takes off into the woods. He'll just hide in that room they gave him and read in there. Again.
It sucks, though, because that was a really good spot.
Two days later, the memory of that mild confrontation has faded mostly to something benign. What are the odds she'll be out there again at the exact same place at the exact same time as he is? Probably pretty low, right? A couple of the older, troubled kids are having a screaming match that stresses him into breathlessness, so he decides to chance it. He heads out to the beech tree.
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Blue's brow creases. It's not like she asked him something hard. But he's acting like she's Ms. Marlowe asking him to do a math problem on the board in front of everyone.
Okay
Not mute then. Just rude.
Blue barely has a chance to finish the thought, much less ask another question, before the boy scrambles to his feet and disappears between the trees. Blue's creased brow turns into a proper frown. The tree trunk and the worn spot at its base are both warmed from his body. Try as she might, she can't quite get settled into her book after he's left.
Blue doesn't end up asking Persephone or her mother about the finer points of ghosts. Forest-boy is added to her carefully hoarded collection of secrets. Not the good ones -- like forest of solitude or the polished bit of green glass she picked up on a rare beach vacation and keeps beneath one of the floorboards of her bedroom-- but the ones Maura doesn't necessarily need to know about. Like the crudely drawn witch with a crooked nose and bird's nest hair someone shoved into her backpack last Friday. Or the Mickey Mouse watch she lost to the river last winter. Little pinpricks of guilt.
She tries to put him out of her mind. He's never been in the forest before. Odds are he won't be there again. Except something about him nags at her like a splinter stuck beneath her skin. Maybe it's just guilt. The look on his face before he ran off keeps snagging in her memory. She's not mean. Not like Jenna at school. But, he looked at her like she was.
Two days later, Blue sits at the base of the beech tree in a pair of artfully patched jeans, her sneakers stained with sharpie where she's drawn intricate patterns along the side of the sole. Some of it has smudged and faded, she'll need to redraw the lines soon enough. The book she's reading is significantly thinner than the one from the other day (but only because she finished the other one, thank you very much, and her class isn't going back to the school library until next week) a look of intense focus on her face. She twirls one of her tight curls around her left index finger, teeth working against the inside of her cheek as she reads, her eyes flickering across the words.
The air is getting cooler, but the sun is still warm.
Later, Blue won't be able to say exactly what makes her raise her eyes from the page. But she looks up from her book and there he is. Standing in front of her. Forest-boy. Just when she convinced herself she'd never see him again. She bites her lip and considers him like she would a wild hare or bird crossing her path in the forest.
"How did you hurt your arm? Has someone signed your cast yet?" That's what people do when you have a cast. Blue's never had one or signed one. But she knows these things.
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He's been caught. His eyes go wide again, and it takes him a few too many seconds to answer.
How did you hurt your arm is complicated and embarrassing, but the concept of lying has been firmly beaten out of him. Honesty is a sharp, constant tug — one he can evade by not saying anything at all. The second question is easier. He looks down at his arm like he has to check, even though he already knows the answer.
"No."
It hadn't really occurred to him that anyone might want to. Actually, he wasn't even aware that's something expected of him, that he should have planned for. If he'd have known, he'd have asked one of the older kids to do it just to get it over with.
no subject
It seems, from the wide-eyed (frightened?) look on his face, that this might be a repeat of the other day. Blue's throat tightens around a barrage of follow-up questions to break the silence. But she's distracted by the glance down at his cast followed by the monosyllabic answer.
(Blue learned the word monosyllabic only two weeks ago, and she takes care to use it at least once a day. Even if just in her own head.)
Not rude today then.
Perhaps Blue would press on the unanswered first question, if she wasn't so thoroughly distracted by the confirmation of the latter. She makes a sound similar to what a mechanic might make after popping open the hood of a car and finding the engine in complete, visible disrepair. The kind of noise that makes it clear that there's going to be a problem here.
An unsigned cast at their age tells the whole world that the wearer has no friends. If Blue is ever so lucky to break anything and require a cast -- sadly, she seems to have been cursed with particularly hard bones; even falling from the top of a tall tree last year didn't break them -- everyone at the house will sign it and decorate it with their own little flourishes until there's simply no room left for anyone at school to leave their mark there.
From the back of her book -- tucked between the last page and the cover -- she pulls a bookmark. Even from a distance, it's obviously handmade by someone who does not have a great career in bookmark-making ahead of them: Light blue cardstock absolutely covered in stickers (ranging from obscure children's characters to little gold stars) with a silky dark blue ribbon threaded to a hole punched in one end. Arguably the top. Carefully, she tucks the bookmark between the pages to keep her place and then she shuts the book around it and puts it down on one of the exposed roots of the beech tree.
With one hand braced against the tree trunk, she carefully climbs to her feet. From a pocket in her jeans, she pulls a green sharpie with a flourish and holds it out to him to view.
"I can do it," she offers, like she's doing him a giant favor. "If you want."
Blue considers showing him her sneakers, as evidence of her artistic ability. But honestly, with no signatures at all, he probably doesn't care either way.
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Everything about her is colorful. Everything about her looks happy, except for the attitude. That, like the birds, seems territorial and barbed.
But she's offering to sign his cast, and that's probably a good thing, right? If it's something people expect him to have done? Maybe it'll make him look less like a loser showing up to school on Monday if he has someone's name scrawled on there. Who's that, your mom, your brother, your daddy? He'll be able to honestly, defiantly tell them no. He won't really be able to say that it's from a friend, but it's still better than the alternative.
Plus, maybe if she signs it she'll let him sit on the other side of the tree today.
"Okay."
He casts one last glance over his shoulder like he's saying goodbye to the version of events where he runs again, and instead takes a couple of slow, wary steps her direction. He stops maybe just a few feet too far away, and holds out his forearm in offering. It's a bright neon orange affair that doesn't remotely mesh well with his dark blue hoodie, arguably overkill for the largely perfect, mild weather. It looks like he probably ought to be too hot, but he's skinny, he's healing, he's a little anemic. He runs cold — particularly that arm, and the fingertips at the end of the cast.
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They played none of the midway games (scams, Calla scoffed) even though the stuffed animal prizes tugged hard on Blue's soul. Persephone paid five dollars to have her palm read in a rickety little tent with stars painted on it. The genericness of the fortunes told entirely made up by the showmanship of the so-called fortune teller inside.
But, most importantly, Maura took Blue down to the small petting zoo set up on the very edges of the carnival. They bought one small cone of animal feed and waded into the fray. The little enclosure smelt of saw dust and animal droppings and the cute baby goats were desperately outnumbered by the people wanting to pet them. The bigger goats roamed around eying white paper cones clutched in sticky hands, butting their heads against hips and elbows in their attempts to get at the little food pellets.
A deer stood shoulders above the rest of the animals with soft and gentle eyes. Disinterested in handfuls of animal feed offered out to her, she shifted out of the way of each attempted touch. Blue spent an eternity in that tent, slowly inching her way closer, letting the doe get used to her scent, before holding out a mostly-clean hand, and waiting until her arm trembled with the effort. Finally, the doe allowed Blue one gentle pet. Blue's fingers astounded by the softness of her ears before she darted away.
Forest-boy reminds her of that doe when he stops just out of her reach and offers his cast out. Every line of his body seems to signal that he's ready to dart back into the trees. So it's with a solemn look on her face that she steps forward, and tugs the cap off the sharpie. Decisively, she snaps it onto the back of the sharpie and reaches out her left hand to support his wrist.
"I'm going to add some vines and leaves too," she tells him. Fact rather than statement. He's a boy, so she won't do little flowers.
First thing first though, she neatly prints her name (B L U E) across a finger's length of the bright orange cast. There's a look of intense concentration on her face, her tongue trapped between her teeth and a frown bearing down on her brow. Once the letters are finished, she begins on the winding vines.
Fingers and eyes locked on her task, Blue's mind is left free to roam. Forest-boy is more of a mystery than she thought when she first saw him. He looks old enough to go to school, but he doesn't go to her school. Blue knows because everyone knows everyone in the little elementary school. And there are no other schools in town. Blue knows for certain because when she begged Maura to send her to any other school but That One, after her first day of first grade, they spent an evening researching the nearest elementary schools and marking them on a map. Children his age are required (by the law) to go to school. Blue knows that from the same evening when their pins on the map all proved too far to travel daily and she said she'd just not go to school then and learn everything she needed from books instead. Patiently, Maura helped her look up school laws, and by the end of the evening, Blue was resigned to her fate.
So, by not going to school, he is basically a criminal. Or his parents are. Maybe he's a runaway. Maybe his whole family are runaways. On the run from the law for some-- diamond heist or something.
With a flourish, Blue finishes the last leaf and looks up at the boy.
"You have to tell me your name now," she tells him. Her eyes dart down to her name on his cast and back up again. It's only fair.
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He stands patiently, passively accepting whatever it is she's set her mind to, not a word or a twitch of protest in him, even though his foot hurts a little from standing as rigid as he does. Not because he's afraid to move, necessarily, just that he doesn't think he's supposed to, and he doesn't want to mess her up. He doesn't want to mess this up.
Blue.
He's young enough still, insular enough still, that it doesn't occur to him Blue might be a weird name. His dad has a friend called Red, though that's mostly because of the color of his hair. Hers isn't blue, but that's none of his business.
When she finishes, he hugs his cast to his chest like it's something precious. Whether it's because he's defensive of his injury or defensive of his handiwork is impossible to decipher. It feels a little bit like she might've been trying to trick him, but he doesn't feel tricked. He's not keeping it a secret, he probably would have told her if she just asked.
"Jack," is the simple answer, but it's accompanied by a visible pause that suggests he's got more to say. Something about the part in his lips, the quiet preparatory intake of breath, steeling himself. "I'll leave you alone if you let me read on the other side of your tree."
He won't bother her. Won't mess up her spot. Won't even be in her line of sight, he'll go on the complete opposite side.
Please.
There are, technically, a thousand other spots in this forest to read. Twice as many trees. It's just that this one feels like the one. The correct and appropriate place.
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Jack
Blue turns the name over in her mind and decides that (1) it suits him and (2) he is probably not a fairy. The book sitting forgotten at the base of the beech tree is a collection of faerie tales. Not childish fairy tales like Cinderella or Snow White. But tales from faerie where the fairies aren't dainty women with butterfly wings, and not knowing the rules can have dire consequences. Like returning after a day to find a hundred years have passed. But if he was a fairy -- the dangerous kind -- he probably wouldn't have given his name so easily. (Though it would've been a good explanation as to why he's in the woods.)
It wasn't her purpose to trick him into giving up his name. Unless he was a fairy, in which case that was a pretty clever trick. Wasn't it? Except he's probably not a fairy. Fairies don't have names like Jack.
Blue blinks when he continues and a rush of words (easily twice or three times as many as he has spoken to her across the span of two days) fall from his lips like they're in a hurry. She tugs the sharpie cap free and clicks it back into place. She has green sharpie stains on her right index finger and reflexively she rubs her finger over them.
An immediate and sharp NO sits heavy on Blue's chest. She's been brought up to share, to make space, to invite-- but she count on one hand the things she has that are both only hers, and have never belonged to anyone else before her. The beech tree is one of them. (Presumably, other people have read beneath it. But not in Blue's lifetime.) But her name is printed on his cast like a promise. Perhaps, if it was a trap, she's the one who fell into it.
"Is that a threat?" she asks, more curious than accusative. "Or a promise?"
See, with a conditional clause like that, it sounds a little like maybe if she doesn't let him read on the other side of the tree, he won't leave her alone, but bother her until she gives in. If it's a threat, she will never give in. Blue Sargent does not negotiate with terrorists. Even when it leads to her walking home with sopping wet sneakers for reasons she'd rather not get into at the moment.
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"Which one do you want it to be?" It's a genuine question, and the implication is it's that one — which doesn't make for a very good foundation if it's threat. He's not even sure how he'd follow through. Bug her, maybe, but he doesn't... actually want to do that. First, because it sounds resoundingly uncomfortable and would draw too much attention to him. Second, because he's pretty sure she wouldn't tolerate it even if he tried, and he's not sure how exactly it is she'd retaliate. Some boys find that to be a challenge, they find it exciting, they pull pigtails. Jack has a long history and a cast on his arm that has taught him not to poke things knowing they come with consequences. He still has bruises on his ribs and his toes are too broken for him to really run. If she decided to stomp on his foot there's a very good chance he'd piss himself.
He figures if threat is the right answer it means he won't have to follow through, and if promise is the right answer, well, obviously he won't have to follow through either. He doesn't have to know which one is right if he lets her pick it herself.
If the answer is neither, well, he'll just go home. Maybe try again tomorrow, but earlier this time.
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The Accident
The certainty hits her like an arrow through the chest.
When she picks up the receiver it's only for confirmation of the facts that already sit at the front of her mind like simultaneously uninvited and belated guests. Without the deafening ringing, 300 Fox Way is plunged into uncharacteristic silence. Like the building itself is holding its breath alongside Maura. The sympathy in the sheriff's voice carries through the static of the tinny line somehow floating down to her where she stands at the bottom of an endless ocean.
The exact details of the conversation will forever escape her. She remembers the sympathy and the image of a cheap car wrapped around a familiar tree trunk seared into her memory, but no words. Not the sheriff's, and not her own.
There's a little empty chasm between picking up the phone and staring down at Calla's hand carefully covering her hand, the receiver back in its place beneath them. Calla's fingers are achingly gentle where they peel Maura's away from the cheap plastic.
In the car, Calla's hands grip the steering wheel so tight her knuckles blanche, and she takes a quiet turn that adds fifteen minutes to the tense car ride, but saves them from seeing with their eyes what their minds have already showed them.
The hospital corridors smell empty and antiseptic, but the waiting room smells of cheap plastic and unrealized sorrow. The bones of Maura's hands ache, Calla's and Persephone's grips so tight it grinds them together. Tethered to them, she is awash -- but not lost -- in the crushing ocean of time.
Chronology, sharp and orderly, reasserts itself when Harriet walks through the doors of the waiting room. Suddenly, there's a purpose to be found in relaying information and offering comfort.
There are too many children in Harriet's care for her to devote herself singularly to Jack. Once the worst is over, once there's only waiting left to do, she leaves Maura to it.
Persephone and Calla and Jimi and women whose names have never crossed the mouths of anyone in this little town before take turns bringing food and coffee and comfort and Maura splits her days between the plastic chairs of the waiting room and the equally uncomfortable brown chairs in the corners of two hospital rooms.
The first person Maura blames is herself. What good is her gift if the knowing couldn't have come a day sooner?
The second person she blames-- No. She stops herself short of it. Lets the guilt rest on her own shoulders, because the other set of shoulders is in no place to take it.
On the day when Jack wakes up, Maura is settled in the chair in the corner of his room. There's a vase of fresh flowers -- picked from two gardens -- sitting among a few scattered more or less homemade cards with the general sentiments of get well soon or you are missed.
Cards rustle restlessly between Maura's fingers. She's been shuffling her tarot deck since this morning, laying pattern after pattern, before regretting herself and shuffling them back without looking.
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He opens his eyes, and his room looks different. Insanely, nonsensically, his first theory is that someone redecorated while he was out — until recognition kicks into place. Rails on the bed. Curtains, sterile white. He's very familiar with hospital rooms, he's been in and out of them growing up, and with increasing frequency lately. Usually he's not in a bed, though.
The second thing he notices is the sound of shuffling cards — by now incredibly familiar. He can almost tell which of the women of 300 Fox Way it is by the unique way they each shuffle and place. Maura's snap with much more intention than Calla's, usually — or at least that's the word he'd use to describe it.
Relief unfurls small and feeble, like a sidewalk flower. It's completely unfair to Harriet to say that Maura's felt more like a mother to him; Harriet's been caring and kind, supporting and constant and stable. But she's also always had an abundance of kids. kids before him, kids after, attention split evenly across ten different directions. Each one might be unique, each one might be special, but if everyone's special, nobody is.
Maura's got fewer wards under her purview. It feels different.
Also, probably incredibly weird of him to think of her that way while dating her daughter, but all of them are weird. Everything about each of them is weird. At a certain point, you stop questioning the ones that aren't hurting anything. The ones that feel right.
Nothing feels right, right now.
"Hi," he says — or tries to say. His throat is drier than the fucking Sahara, and his tongue feels like Velcro on the roof of his mouth. The sound that comes out is more a raspy grumble, a friction-y paper-thin noise. His brain's still foggy, cotton-stuffed, probably from medication, maybe from a concussion. It means his question comes out a completely eloquent, "Why... this?"
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Relief wages a war against something darker. Something angry and dark and resentful that Maura wants no part of now or ever. Biologically, Blue is hers, carried right below her heart for nine months and held in that same heart ever since. But Jack is family too. Ever since that first dinner when a brush of Calla's fingers revealed more than he ever told them of where he came from and what kind of people his biological family were.
It's not a surprise that Jack doesn't remember what happened. (It's like the morning after a break up or a death in the family, that moment between sleep and waking where you can't remember how the world has been torn apart. Before the pain slips back in like a knife, when everything feels normal until you remember it won't feel normal ever again.) But it's disappointing. Maura would've hoped she wouldn't have to be the one to remind him.
"You're awake," she says, voice soft and quiet like the hum of the air-conditioning. Maura sets the deck of cards down and wraps the better person she wants to be around herself like a blanket. Wraps the warm and fond love she's felt for Jack as long as she can remember on top of that as she pushes to her feet. She moves slowly, like her body was in the car with them, her joints stiff and aching.
"You're okay," she reassures him, her hand finding his, careful not to jostle his IV line. It doesn't matter how many days she has spent in quiet vigil at the hospital (and she can't put a number to them anyway), the right words haven't appeared yet.
"Try not to move too much. You're pretty banged up." Her thumb rubs along the base of his thumb, slow and reassuring.
The artificial bubble of semi-normal is going to burst and she wishes she could give him another couple of pain-free moments. But the best she can do is be here for him as the memories flood back in.
"There was an accident. Do you remember?"
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He tightens his hand around hers impulsively, thoughtless instinct. It pulls at tight skin, and he glances down to see a few scrapes on his knuckles. Did he get in a fight? That's hilarious; of the two of them, he's the less likely of the pair for that.
There was an accident.
Oh, shit.
His brow furrows, tightly-knit concentration, searching, pulling, tugging at tangled threads too stubborn to give.
"No," he murmurs after a beat, slowly shaking his head. Eyes on the sheets; eyes on nothing. "No, I don't- I remember driving."
Bags packed, windows down, an island of relief in a sea of fear and depression. Road, radio, optimism, and a plan. The diagnosis was fatal, but prematurely lying down for it would never have flown with her. They were going to go see... everything. Well, everything they could, considering neither of them were exactly made of money.
He remembers all of that, and then nothing. Blackness.
But it does raise the most important question, and his eyes fly up from the blankets back to Maura.
"Where is she?" He sounds concerned, but not desperately. Not like he has any clue how bad it actually is. Not like he expects her to have been seriously injured. Heartbreakingly naive. It's not a possibility, not even in the strangest alternate reality version of their lives, that she could be seriously hurt. It's just weird that she's not here, too. Knowing her, she'd probably get into a heated debate with the hospital staff about how visiting hours are a scam, and she's perfectly fine staying with him in the room, thank you very much.
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The investigation is still pending. Maura thinks she heard Tom mention a second driver, but after those first, terse, conversations she hasn't spoken with him. Calla took that over. Afraid of what she might learn, Maura's been laying her cards over and over, asking the same question and pulling back before she finds the answer; She's not ready to lose both of them.
Jack's tone, more than the question, cuts as deep as the first ring of the telephone that day. It breaks Maura's heart all over again. He's not wrong about the fight over visiting hours. But it wasn't Blue who fought it, it was Maura.
The wrist of the hand holding Jack's braces against the metal railing of the hospital bed, and Maura leans forward so he won't have to strain to look at her. There's a certain poker face psychics develop. A necessary barrier between them and the client sitting in front of them. No one wants to read their future in their fortune tellers face. So Maura's learned to tuck away sorrow and sympathy, anything that might give away an unwanted fate, beneath a kindly and calm expression. She's never had to turn it on family before. But she levels it at Jack now.
Calm. Kind. Gentle. A rock in the middle of the current.
"Jack, sweetheart," she says, her fingers brushing gently along his hair line down to the curve of his ear. "She--"
Maura's mouth opens and not a single sound comes out. The words stick sideways in her throat, lodged into a lump that just keeps thickening. Her brow knits and her eyes heat with the sting of tears. She's cried before now. In the Volvo in the darkened parking lot in big heaving sobs. In Calla's arm in the ICU waiting room where the chairs are even less comfortable than the ones up in the ER waiting room. In the visitor restroom with the back of a wrist pressed tight, tight against her mouth. But she'll be damned if she cries here.
Her gaze flicks up at the ceiling, and like fighting gravity, she forces them back so when she looks back down, her eyes are still bright but her lashes are dry. It's the smallest of victories considering that the brief hitch in her words must have already given them away. Her throat works around the lump and it feels like swallowing glass.
"She's still in the ICU. As soon as she's stable, they'll be transferring her to another hospital." A better hospital. Somewhere with specialists and bills that will put Maura Sargent in medical debt for life but it will be worth it if--
If.
That's the other question she hasn't dared ask the cards yet. She thinks she knows the answer. Thinks she's known it since the phone rang.
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Inside his head, the voice gets louder. Stop looking like that, why are you making that face? Why are you crying? Stop it. Don't say whatever you're about to say.
Has he seen her upset like this before?
No. He doesn't think he has.
The ICU. As soon as she's stable, as in, she's not. She's not stable. Why isn't she stable?
None of this is making any comprehensible sense.
"Why-" His throat sticks, rusty vocal cords rubbing raw against one another. He has to clear his throat to get them to keep making words. "Why- why are they transferring her? Why is she- what's wrong with her? She's gonna be okay, though, right?"
He doesn't realize he's slowly raising his voice, or that questions at some point turn into statements.
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Maura's hand drifts down from Jack's face to settle on his chest, fingertips curved around his shoulder. There's no pressure (yet), just resting gently there. A reminder for him to stay still. His injuries may be mostly superficial -- unlike Blue's -- but he needs to take it easy.
"Jack," she says softly, keeping her voice low and even, refusing to let it rise alongside his. "Shhh, shhh, sweetie. I know this is hard. I know."
Maura's voice breaks on the last word.
A light knock on the door jamb and a nurse peeks her head in as if summoned by Jack's raised voice, though in all likelihood it's the sudden uptick in his heart rate on the monitor that's sounded the alarm.
"How are we doing in here?" she asks, eyes drawn to Maura out of habit before they drift over to Jack and she answers her own question. Like she can't read the anguish on his face or sense the tension in the room her whole expression brightens.
"Oh we're awake!" she says, bubbly in the way of people who wake up at 5 AM to get a quick workout in before heading to the hospital for a sixteen hour shift. "I'll go let the doctor know."
"Yes, thank you," Maura manages, her eyes flickering only briefly from Jack's face out of politeness even these circumstances can't quite squash. Her fingers curl around Jack's a little too tightly. Like Calla and Persephone held on to her in the waiting room those first couple of hours.
The door doesn't quite latch behind the nurse.
"I will tell you, but you need to stay calm and take it easy," Maura says, fingertips pressing gently against his shoulder. "Okay? You working yourself into a state or hurting yourself isn't going to make anything better."
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Because it's true.
No. Absolutely not. Not possible. It's not.
His utter disbelief shifts its target to the nurse, like maybe she can make the world make sense again. Or... maybe like he can't believe she can be perky when things are obviously incredibly wrong right now. She's so happy, he hates her.
"I'm calm, I'm fine," He says, not calmly and definitely not fine, "I wanna go see her. We should- why are you here? She's gonna want you when she-"
His voice cracks. He falters.
Why is she here, if Blue is downstairs? Why, unless there's basically no chance she'd wake up alone? Unless there's no-
The wavering in his tone doesn't fade when he persists, despite what a small voice in his head tries to tell him. A small truth he's ignoring. Quieter, with less certainty, "You shouldn't be here. You should be down there. For when she's- stable."
Because she's going to be. And then she'll wake up, and she'll want her mom. That's the truth. That's- what's going to happen.
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"I am here," Maura says, her voice cracking beneath the pressure of calm she is trying to squeeze it into, "because you were always going to wake up first."
The statement sits in the air like an exclamation point and guilt sinks its deep claws into her shoulders. Her fingers are pressing too hard against his chest and she makes herself let up, makes herself lean back and wrap her hand instead around the metal rail of the bed. One hand on his, one on unfeeling metal and all she has to remember is to hold his hand lightly where she grips the railing so hard it's a wonder it doesn't snap beneath her fingers.
A deep steadying breath as she arranges her features back into the calm she hasn't had to maintain for days now. The nurses don't care about her redrimmed eyes or the way she's been drifting like a ghost between the floors, spending one night in the foldout chair in Blue's ICU room, and another cramped in the decidedly-not-foldout chair in Jack's very regular hospital room.
"I wanted to be here. For you," she continues, a little steadier now, with no bite to her voice. The joints of her fingers are stiff and iced over, crackling when she forces them to unfurl slightly from around the bed. She grips his hand with both of hers, so achingly gentle now. He needs her, and as much as she hates it, Blue doesn't.
It's the worst sentence she's thought in her entire life.
"Jack," she says, and she's not sure if his name is a plea for his attentive silence or a command. "Blue suffered severe head trauma on impact."
The words are soft. Parroted from the doctor who spoke them in a no-less-gentle tone though devoid of the emotional attachment that clings to every syllable from Maura's throat and lips and tongue, tying them together with her heart.
She is not waking up.
"She--" Maura's voice feels too thick for her throat. The words lodge somewhere around her heart and she knows she can't speak them out loud, so she switches it up, goes down a different path. "They are waiting for the swelling to go down enough for them to risk transporting her to a hospital with a proper neurologist and the right equipment."
Through the cracked open door, Maura is aware of the approaching foot steps. Dr. Lindsfield has a very distinctive gait.
"You can see her as soon as the doctor says you're well enough. Okay? I'll go with you."
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Jack isn't stupid. One day down the line, between the cognitive decay of his disease, sleep deprivation and an overabundance of medication, he'll be a little slower to connect dots where those connections seem obvious. Now, he's still coming off that post straight-A sharpness. He's still clever enough to intuit what that means. The implications.
To pick up on what she isn't saying.
Any indication to the contrary is utter willful ignorance. He wants to stay ignorant. He doesn't want to understand.
But he does.
His vision swims, and it's strange, but the urgency in him suddenly goes... quiet. It retreats, seems to mute, seems to leave things cloudy and numb, as though to protect him from the jagged, rusty edges. The news, the offer, they're met with a long period of silence. He stares at their hands.
He's not sure how much time passes. The question arises, and he grapples with it for what feels like forever, unable to force the words out of his throat. It locks up as soon as he tries. When they finally bloom like blood on white sheets, there's a sheen over his eyes and his voice is barely audible.
"When is she going to wake up?"
Maura should know. She should. She's psychic. She should know the answer to this. If she's ever known anything in that way, in that sixth sense time is a circle or a sea way, it should be this.
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He is, she thinks, finally understanding and watching him go through the process is like going through it herself a second time.
When he finally speaks, his words are so quiet, Maura wouldn't even have caught them if it wasn't for the fact that she's been watching his face shut down on itself through it all. Her hands tighten around his and her throat tightens along with them.
"Jack--" her voice falters, and her face falls. The remnants of that calm poker face shredding until she's not the all-knowing psychic or the calm and loving maternal figure. She's just a woman trying to come to terms with the fact that even if her daughter wakes up, there is no guarantee there won't be lasting, catastrophic damage.
"I don't know." The words are soft and broken. A quiet confession. Time is a bathtub filled to the brim, an ocean, a constant, an all at once. And Maura Sargent can dip her toes in the water, can submerge herself fully and swim through it. But she can't see her daughter waking up.
The door swings fully open to admit Dr. Lindsfield, a man whose body and voice both fill up any room he enters near immediately, the nurse from earlier trailing close behind.
"Good afternoon, Jack," he says, his booming voice filling the room from corner to corner.
Maura lets go of Jack's hand and takes a step away, ostensibly to give the doctor some room to work. If it's also giving her the opportunity to turn half away from the bed so Jack can't see the bright sheen in her eyes resolve itself into tears, then that's just a bonus.
"Or should I say good morning?" he adds with a wink and grin.
Behind him, the nurse breathes a quick and obligatory laugh.
"Glad you decided to wake up. Gave us quite a fright, young man. Quite a fright. Your mom here has been worried sick." A quick gesture towards Maura who doesn't make any attempt at correcting the assumption, too busy looking up at the ceiling and surreptitiously wiping her eyes with the heel of her palm.
"We'll have to run you through some quick tests, but good news is you made it through relatively unscathed." The doctor picks up the chart from the foot of the hospital bed, flicking through it while he speaks. "No broken bones. Couple of scrapes and bruises. You'll probably feel some soreness around your ribs and where the seatbelt caught you. State that car was in, it's a damn miracle anyone got out of it alive."
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But he can't think that clearly yet, he doesn't have the capacity for any more emotion yet, and even if he did it's all so numb he can't feel it. He says nothing, and the answer hangs in the air.
The doctor comes in and disrupts a placid lake in a way that feels irreverent. Jack looks up at him with red-rimmed eyes, wordless, and doesn't correct the mom thing either. It doesn't matter. It's close enough to be completely irrelevant.
For the first two or three days after his dad threw him out of the car, Jack barely spoke. Not to the social worker, not to the doctor, not to Harriet. Sometimes it's because whatever they said to him didn't matter enough to process and retain, sometimes it's because he didn't know what to say, sometimes he just...
Didn't.
It's like that now.
It's a damn miracle anyone got out alive.
Shut up. Just shut up. It's not a miracle, this isn't a fucking miracle. This is a nightmare. Maybe that's what it is. Shit, maybe that's what this is. Maybe this is a nightmare. Maybe he just needs to wake up. His sleep is fucked up, his dreams are vivid, maybe he's asleep, or the accident happened but he's on some weird drugs giving him bad dreams, and he just needs to wake up. That should be easy, he never manages to stay out long once he becomes aware he's dreaming. What can he do? Look at the clock. In dreams, clocks never show the same time if you look at them, then look away, then look back again.
He looks up at the clock on the wall above the doctor's head. Looks down at his empty hand. Looks at the clock again. It's the same.
Looks down.
Looks up.
It's the same.
He's not dreaming.
Okay. This is okay. It's going to be okay. It's fine. Everything's going to be okay, he can deal with it, it's going to be-
He turns over abruptly, lurching toward the side of the bed to hang off the railings and throw up on the floor.
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