Silas feels wrong the second my hands reach him.
Not the still cold of a body already gone. Something more terrifying. A cooling that should not be happening yet. Sweat shines over his skin. His lips are losing color by the second. Dark lashes lie against cheeks gone too pale beneath the bruises, the blood, the wreckage of everything that just happened to him. His chest barely moves. His pupils have narrowed to terrible little pinpoints. A faint rattling lives at the back of each breath, fragile enough to miss if I were not listening for life with every part of me.
“No,” I whisper, cupping his face roughly, as if holding him together with my hands might count as medicine. “No, no, no. You do not get to leave me here with him. Do you hear me? You do not get to do that to me.”
His head tilts weakly into my touch.
Nothing else.
No answer. No fight. No Silas in it, only the awful, slack weight of a body sliding away from itself.
My own breathing comes apart into sharp little fractures of air. The room collapses down to instructions and pleading. Tip his head. Clear the airway. Get the Narcan open... my fingers won’t stop shaking. Slipping the plastic against blood-slick skin, everything feels too slow for how little time there is. Behind me, the Handler is half-fallen against the bed, one hand still jammed against his ruined throat, trying to breathe around blood. The sounds coming out of him now are wet and failing.
He is no longer the center of anything.
Silas is.
Silas, balanced on that hideous, microscopic line where a person is either still here or already becoming memory.
Pressing the spray into one nostril, my thumb shoves down.
A tiny click answers me.
Such a small sound for the amount of hope it has to carry. Such a stupid, fragile little noise to hold an entire life.
“Come on,” I sob, pushing blood-stiff hair back from his forehead with fingers that already feel ruined forever. “Come back. Come back to me. You are not dying on this floor. You are not leaving me with your blood in my mouth and your knife in his hand. You are not fucking leaving.”
Nothing changes.
The wait that follows is not made of seconds anymore. It is made of whole griefs. Whole futures trying to die before they start. I stare at his chest so hard my vision blurs around the edges. One breath. Too small. Then a pause long enough to split me open. Then maybe another. Or maybe only the ghost of one. Tears spill uselessly down my face. Somewhere in the blur of panic, my free hand presses hard to my side without thought, trying to contain the hot spill there, but the sensation barely registers beyond a distant throbbing insistence. Every part of me is shaking too hard to sort pain from terror.
“Silas,” I whisper again, forehead nearly brushing his. “Please. Please. Please.”
No miracle. No dramatic jolt. No sudden violent return.
Only waiting.
Then his chest drags in a deeper breath.
It is small. Ragged. Broken at the edges. But it is more.
My whole body goes rigid around it.
Another one follows.
His face pinches as if something inside him has reached deep and hooked him backward by force. A cough catches, fails, shudders through him without fully breaking loose. His shoulders twitch, his mouth opening wider. Air comes in sharper now, harsher, scraping through him like his own lungs resent being dragged back into service. It is ugly. It is painful. It is not enough yet.
It is still more than dying.
“Oh my God,” I choke out, cradling his face harder, terrified of hurting him, terrified of not touching him enough. “Yes. Yes, that’s it. Breathe. Breathe for me.”
A broken cough finally tears out of him, his body jerking with it. His eyelids flutter. One hand twitches against the floor, fingers dragging weak, useless little lines through the carpet. The sound that escapes him is wrecked, the sound of somebody being hauled backward through poison, pain, and sheer refusal against the pull of oblivion.
“That’s right,” I whisper through tears, the words shaking so badly they barely sound like language. “Hate it. Fight it. Come back furious if that’s what it takes, just come back.”
Another inhale. Bigger this time. Jagged enough to make his whole face tighten around it. His brows draw together, his head shifting weakly to one side.
For one endless, unbearable moment his eyes open without landing anywhere. They drift past me. Through me. Unfocused, lost in whatever dark place he is still clawing his way out of.
