Chapter Text
Thrashing, gasping, drowning, he burst through unconsciousness with a shout he didn’t recognize. Terrible shapes lurked in the edges of his mind; for a second, he swore he could hear someone’s giddy laugh. Something cut into his neck, so solid that he brought his hand up to peel the thick strap of leather away. He found nothing there but a deep bruise, making him wince in pain.
More sensations started to filter through his mind.
Also mostly pain.
Everything, everything …
He couldn’t see.
He bolted upwards, a crack of agony lurching through his skull. Instinctively, his palms went to press against his eyes, like he might be able to feel the problem. Nothing. When he pulled his hands away, he still saw nothing.
More than just seeing … he recalled nothing.
What was his name? Where was he? Why was he blind? The sheets seemed to go on for miles around him; his hands skittered across the bedsheets like an insect. His face felt oddly stiff, and there were these bizarre ribbons of numbness all around his body. His hands passed over them and felt nothing but lightly raised skin, and god, Christ, Christ in heaven, what was going on, was he dead, was he …
“Everything is alright.”
A rumbling, gentle voice, much closer than he expected.
It could have been the most gentle voice in the world. He was far, far too panicked to care. With a yelp, he leapt backward until his shoulders struck the headboard. Fuck him, but that hurt like anything, and he kept scrabbling backward, instantaneously certain that this – this person was going to pursue, attack, and kill …
His hand found nothing but empty air.
Before he fell off the bed entirely, he was saved by two hands around his shoulders. They were large and oddly bony, but strong enough to keep him from going onto the floor. He righted himself on the bed, still breathing hard.
Blood roared in his ears; a sudden headache splintered at his temples. Despite the warmth of his bedding, he had started to shiver while he smelled smoke, like burning cloth. Something odd twinged at the back of his mind, a ghostly thought: I think I’m going to pass out.
“Breathe,” the voice said again. “Don’t think of anything else. Nothing is urgent, and you’re safe.”
That voice seemed almost fragile in its softness. It seemed … friendly. He might not have remembered anything, but he was no fool – a friendly voice scarcely guaranteed a friendly person. He thought about ignoring the advice entirely and trusting his gut. His gut said to run far, far away until he found something familiar, because surely something had to be familiar out there. Surely this was all exceptionally temporary, like a bad dream. Like one he’d just escaped from.
But …
Everything in his body screamed for rest. Though he’d just woken, everything ached. He wanted to lay back down. He wanted to be safe. How far could he even run, not knowing where he was running to? God, he wasn’t sure if he could even put any weight on his legs.
A hand shifted against his back, right between his shoulder blades. This figure, whoever he was, was urging him downward, forward, until his head was practically wedged between his knees. The hand stayed.
“Breathe,” he said.
Okay. Yes. Yes, he could focus on that, even if he could focus on nothing else.
Slow. Slowly. He had to expend a terrible amount of willpower, and couldn’t allow his mind to wander a fraction of a degree. The hand on his back was a marvelous anchor to focus on. Almost supernaturally steady, with more pressure at the tips of his fingers. As his breathing started to quiet, he became aware of this fellow’s own breathing. It was quite loud.
Gave him something to center his own breathing on. In, out, in, out. With darkness all around him, he was forced to feel inward. He could feel his organs shifting inside him as his body shifted up, down. It was hard to tie together the expansion of his lungs with drawing breath. He had to expend effort to keep breathing, but soon, the panicked, shattered-glass feeling between his ears began to ebb.
With a final, slow exhale, he relaxed and pressed his head against his kneecaps. Okay. Okay ...
The hand pulled away from his back. “Slow, Arthur. Slow.”
“M-my name is Arthur?”
He’d centered on this man’s breathing long enough to recognize a hitch in it.
“Shit.” Quiet, scarcely a whisper. “Yes.” Gone was some of the gentleness, replaced instead by only a vague frustration. “Yes. Your name is Arthur.”
Arthur. That was his name. It held no familiarity to him. He pushed himself back from his knees, instead going to press at his face. His cheeks were sunken-in but clean shaven … at least, as far as he could tell. One of them had peculiar rough patches along the side, almost scaly in nature.
Before he could probe further, his wrists were taken by the other man. “Don’t.” A breath of exhaled air struck him in the face, smelling vaguely of coffee. “Take it slow.”
Take it slow? It was his own body. What horrors could probably lurk on his own skin? Arthur encountered no resistance as he pulled his wrists away. “What happened? I’m – I can’t see,” Arthur told him, in something akin to a whine. He could hear the other man’s breathing shift again. Though having difficulty recognizing emotions in his self, he could clock the other man’s worry.
Arthur took a deep breath. Slow, he repeated to himself. “I-I can’t see, my body is –” All at once, Arthur realized he was missing a little finger. He had to cut himself off, the jagged-glass sensation in his brain again. “What happened to me?”
“You were missing for a long time. You were found only recently. You’re recovering.”
Missing. A long time? And why? And where? And what on Earth he had managed to do that’d resulted in … all of this? Everything ached so terribly. He could feel his ribs.
“I can’t answer most of your questions, but Arthur. All of this ends with you being here, safe. No matter what happened, you are safe, now,” the man urged, every word carefully chosen.
Christ, he was a convincing one, wasn’t he? Something about this man’s presence made Arthur want to believe him. Then again, wasn’t he a doomed soul if this man wished him harm? He had nobody else in the whole universe, at the moment. He could be anywhere on Earth. “And who …” He asked, uncertainly. “Who are you?”
“My name is John.” The bedding creaked as John leaned; Arthur vaguely felt his pillow being adjusted behind his back. “I’m your nurse.”
“Nurse--!” Why did the thought seem so absurd? Arthur racked his mind, before the obvious conclusion came to him. “I certainly didn’t hire you.”
No answer. A cold chill ran up his spine, his neck, and settled itself right in the middle of his mind. His head started to ache again; Arthur had to dig his fingers into the sheets to maintain his concentration.
“Your accent. It’s not English. Are we in England?”
If the man didn’t answer, Arthur would run. He couldn’t take not knowing. Better to assume a lighter in his hand than an open palm.
(A lighter? No. Not right. Why a lighter? A knife. A gun. Anything else.)
“No,” John eventually answered, trailing off. “We’re in America. Massachusetts.”
Massachusetts? America? Try as he might, Arthur could not pull up any memories of his life in England, but he knew what an accent sounded like and he knew that he had one, ergo …
No.
He was meant to do something in America. He had made a promise, to somebody, at some point. To do something when he got to America … with that someone? Even that felt oddly intangible. God, that headache was growing worse. Reflexively, Arthur coughed when he felt the sharp tang of smoke in his nose again.
“Your wife hired me to look after you. After your … difficulties.”
Wife. A wife. A wife, a wife, a wife. Entirely unfamiliar to him. Arthur turned the term in his head, over and over, but he could not conjure a face, a name, a laugh. He reached for his fingers. No wedding ring. He –
“You were found in the woods, nothing on you.”
A husband for all of ten seconds and already a fucking terrible one. Brilliant. He could feel his lungs pressing up against his ribs, the pink flesh pushing through like hands through prison bars, aching, burning.
“You had a nervous breakdown,” John continued, the syrupy, gentle tone returning. Arthur didn’t like it. Didn’t trust it. Before he could ask something else, however, some breakthrough ripped through his mind – simple word association. Husband …
Father.
He was someone’s father.
That was solid. That, he knew. Arthur clung to it like a life raft.
“Faroe.”
No hitch of breath from his nurse, but instead a faint groan. Arthur didn’t give a damn. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, ignoring the sudden spike to his temples. A peculiar taste rose from the back of his throat, like bile and blood.
A hand pressed downward onto his shoulder. Though the intent was clear, Arthur wrapped his arms around the man’s (admittedly large) upper arm and pulled himself to a standing position anyway.
Beyond conscious control, his head dipped forward, his muscles faint. Could he even run out of here? If he had to?
No, he must. He must. Faroe was out there, somewhere.
“Sit down.” The other hand found his other shoulder. “You’ve had a nervous breakdown, you need to –”
“I can’t be having a nervous breakdown, I’m meant to be a father!” Arthur forced his way out from John’s hands. The confirmation that John was significantly taller, and most likely broader, didn’t do much to calm him.
Like a newborn deer, Arthur got a few steps from the bed before he had to catch himself on the wall.
He expected this John’s hands on him again, since he’d been so keen on guiding him physically before. Nothing, even as he was dimly aware of how close John was. “You’re … you’re standing?”
“Yes.” Not without certain effort, and the sensation that his lungs were on fire. “John.” He was starting to pant. “Where is my daughter?”
Arthur had no reason to think so, other than that he knew of three people in the world and one of which was grievously injured, which didn’t inspire confidence in his odds.
But there was something deeper. A deep, profound certainty inside him that something was wrong with Faroe. Parents had a sense for that sort of thing: a sudden, suspicious silence. This one was just at a cosmic level.
To his frustration, John’s hands were on him again. “Lay back down,” he returned with just as much conviction. “Your legs are shaking. You won’t make it past the door.”
“Then I’ll fucking crawl! Where is she?”
“Arthur.”
Arthur. Like this man knew him, like this man understood what it was like to be a parent that had no idea where your daughter was. Who had been looking after her? His wife? The woman he couldn’t recall? He’d left his daughter entrusted to a relative stranger?
He pulled himself away from John’s terrible grip, stumbling backwards until his back hit the wall. As if to compensate for his physical weakness, Arthur demanded, “Tell me where my fucking daughter –”
“Daddy!”
“Faroe?”
Oh. Oh, hell. Oh, god, his baby. She was just in the front room, so close, and it felt all the more a betrayal that this bastard hadn’t just come out and said it. What proof did Arthur have that John was even his nurse? Was he a robber? A warden?
“Fuck,” John cursed, only confirming Arthur’s fears.
Arthur hadn’t the faintest idea who he was. He might’ve been a monster. Given his daughter’s safety was in the balance, he was likely to assume the worst.
John’s fingers brushed over his shoulder and Arthur weaved out of the way, using the wall to guide his steps. The pain at his head was starting to grow overwhelming. Scarcely helped that he could hear John behind him, and if John really wanted to keep him from leaving this room, then – unless –?
In the other room, Faroe started to wail. Arthur’s mind cracked.
He lashed out. Using dexterity that he didn’t have, Arthur whirled around to swing his fist at his captor.
John caught him by his forearm. For the first time in their short association, when Arthur tried to pull away, John’s grip only tightened.
His voice was sharper, crueller. “Stop fucking doing this,” John returned, exasperated. “You’ll just make us both fall over.”
What the fuck did that mean? When Arthur tried to pull his arm away, his other arm was snatched in John’s own. Faroe’s wail abruptly hushed in the next room. He heard no more from his daughter.
Far more than the concern, than the pain, than the confusion – panic welled up in him. No, no, he had to get out, he had to get away, but John’s grip held tight and Arthur’s brain spun with possibilities, and why did each feel like a dagger to his brain, why was he breathing broken glass, was the fucking apartment on fire, until he – until –
Out of options, Arthur spat at him.
He hadn’t thought it would work, but John made a noise of disgust and released him. Arthur grinned triumphantly. Only then did he realize that his nose was bleeding, and a trickle of it bled into his mouth.
Fine. Fine, he just had to get Faroe and then …
But it was too late.
Arthur took a step back. His foot sank into the floor. For a moment, Arthur earnestly believed that he’d somehow managed to shove his feet through the wood without a piece cracking, but his foot just kept going – and the world seemed to tilt – and then he was falling, falling, and Arthur couldn’t recall hitting the bottom. Only one sound broke through the darkness.
“Jesus Christ.”