Relay out of Death
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Summary
[Each time he wakes, it’s for a little longer. The tide recedes, exposing dull pain, frayed nerve endings; offering split flesh up to an unrelenting sun. Sometimes Jean is there, in that chair by the bed, the shadows beneath his eyes sketched in blue, and in the moments between sleep and sleep again their eyes meet, and there’s a smile in there somewhere, just out of reach; there’s a desperate kindness lodged in the bloody meat of his chest like shards of something broken.
(this is a place where people come to die.)]
Kim is shot at the tribunal. Jean stays with him.
Series
- Part 1 of Relay out of Death
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[Try me, Kim said, the last time – days after he’d formalised his transfer, and they’d barely spoken since the hospital, but it had seemed like they should start over, the way professionals do, waving those days at his bedside into thin air like vapour – but he’d dismissed it with a shrug, though there’d been no judgement in Kim’s eyes, only a pensive semi-comprehension. And Jean had realised, belatedly, that it wasn’t the fear of not being understood, or worse, being condemned in that silent, staring way of his; but that Kim, paradoxically, was the only place that Harry’s ghost could not follow him.]
Kim, and Jean, and all his ghosts.
(and small kindnesses; and learning one another slowly; and living-room surgery)Series
- Part 2 of Relay out of Death