~SAGE~
Isneeze.
The sound erupts with the abrupt, uncontrollable violence of a body expelling an irritant through channels it did not consult its owner about, the blast echoing off the nurse's office walls with enough acoustic force to make the IV stand beside the bed tremble in its wheeled base.
I yawn immediately after, the two reflexes overlapping in the specific, miserable combination of a woman who has been awake for too long in an environment too cold and whose immune system is beginning to file complaints that her stubbornness has been overruling for the last three hours.
My eyes are fighting me. Heavy-lidded and dry, the muscles responsible for keeping them open operating on the emergency reserves that my body allocated approximately ninety minutes ago and has since been threatening to revoke. The fluorescent lights in the nurse's office are dimmed to their nighttime setting, a pale amber glow that softens the clinical surfaces and convertsthe space from medical facility to something approaching habitable.
Archie is still asleep.
He lies on the narrow infirmary bed with the specific, total immobility of a body that has surrendered every voluntary function to the recovery process. The thin hospital blanket covers him from chest to feet, his bare shoulders visible above the fabric, the freckled skin carrying a flush that the nurse attributed to a slight fever during her last check thirty minutes ago. His ginger hair is a mess against the pillow, dried in unruly patterns from the shower that my brain has categorized underevents I will be processing for the remainder of my natural existence.His breathing is deep and steady, the slow, rhythmic cadence of a man whose nervous system has finally achieved the stand-down that the panic attack denied him and is now conducting repairs at a pace that consciousness would only impede.
The nurse said he would be fine.
She delivered the assessment with the practiced, reassuring efficiency of a medical professional who has encountered Alpha stress responses before and considers them serious but manageable, her stethoscope confirming what her experience already knew: elevated heart rate gradually normalizing, blood pressure returning to baseline, core temperature slightly elevated but within the range that the body produces when it is processing the chemical aftermath of a sustained adrenaline event.
The office remains open twenty-four hours at Valenridge. A policy that the nurse mentioned with the casual pride of a woman whose institution has committed to round-the-clock care and whose shift schedule reflects that commitment. The twins could stay if they wished, she said. Or they could return inthe morning. She would monitor his vitals through the night and notify them of any changes.
Rowan and Ronan left reluctantly. Their departure negotiated through a silent exchange with me that carried more information than most verbal conversations:we trust you with him, we will be back at dawn, take care of our brother.They did not need to say the words. Their amber eyes communicated the delegation with the specific, weighted clarity of twins who have been managing Archie's crises for six years and are now entrusting that responsibility to someone new.
I stayed.
Not because anyone asked me to. Not because the nurse recommended a bedside companion or the twins explicitly requested a vigil. I stayed because leaving required walking through a door that would place distance between me and the man on the bed, and distance is the one currency I am not willing to spend right now.
The chair beside the bed is plastic. Hard. Designed for the brief, functional occupancy of visitors whose stays are measured in minutes rather than hours, its ergonomic profile suggesting that the manufacturer considered sustained comfort a luxury that medical furniture does not owe its users. My spine has been filing formal objections since the first hour. My neck has developed a crick that will require either professional intervention or the passage of geological time to resolve.
I am cold.
The nurse's office maintains the specific, climate-controlled chill that medical facilities consider optimal for patient recovery and that the underdressed Omega occupying the bedside chair considers a personal assault on her core body temperature. I am wearing the clothes I threw on after the shower: compression tights, a t-shirt that is not Archie's because his was soaked, and the thin hoodie I grabbed from my suitcase during therushed dressing sequence that preceded the twins carrying him here. The ensemble provides approximately thirty percent of the insulation my body requires, and the remaining seventy percent is being supplied by willpower and the specific, stubborn refusal to leave this room for something as trivially addressable as a blanket.
I could get a blanket.
The supply closet is fifteen feet from this chair. The nurse pointed it out during her last round and mentioned that extra blankets were available for companions who intended to stay the night. Fifteen feet. Thirty seconds of walking. A negligible absence from a bedside that my presence at is not medically required and that the unconscious man occupying the bed would not register regardless.
But I do not want to leave.
Not for fifteen feet. Not for thirty seconds. Not for the duration of any absence, however brief, that removes my eyes from his face and my hand from the proximity of his. Because the last time I was not watching him, he was standing in a shower confronting a man who hurt him, and the image of his body folding to the tile is carved into my visual memory with the specific, permanent, indelible depth of a moment that will never be overwritten regardless of how many better moments I accumulate on top of it.
So I sit. In my plastic chair. Cold and tired and watching his chest rise and fall with the metronome regularity of a man whose body is healing from a wound that no nurse can reach and no medication can address.
My eyes droop.
The lids descending in increments that my willpower resists and my physiology ignores, each blink lasting longer than the last, the interval between open and closed narrowing with the gradual, inevitable progression of a woman who has been awakesince five AM and is now sitting in a dim, warm-ish room listening to the rhythmic breathing of a man whose respiratory pattern has accidentally become a lullaby.
Stay awake.
He might need you. Might stir. Might produce the specific, distressed sounds that the nurse said can accompany the resolution phase of acute stress episodes, and if those sounds arrive, someone should be here to provide the grounding contact that redirects the dreaming brain away from the replay and toward the present.
Stay awake, Sage.
I do not stay awake.
The transition from vigilance to unconsciousness occurs without a boundary marker, the specific, seamless kind of falling asleep that happens when the body overrides the mind's objections by simply removing the mind's access to the controls. One moment I am watching the rise and fall of his blanket-covered chest. The next moment, nothing. The plastic chair and the fluorescent amber and the clinical chill dissolving into the black, dreamless void that exhaustion provides when it has been denied long enough to become aggressive.
A touch to my cheek.
Warm. Light. The specific, deliberate contact of fingertips against skin that is designed to alert without alarming, the pressure calibrated by someone who understands that waking a sleeping person requires gentleness rather than force.
