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She wakes up with a silent gasp. A breath of controlled trauma.
His - Jacob's - arm over her midsection, closer to her ribcage than her hips, feels almost cold against her bare skin.
She doesn't move or turn to look at him, and as she blinks to focus on the far end wall of the flat, her alerted senses tell her that the reaction is reciprocated by a similarly averted gaze.
The slightest touch of Jacob's hair against hers on the pillow, the inaudible breaths, and the tense, outwardly falsely relaxed muscles bring back the echo of the rain and the constant danger of Yamatai.
- She wants to swallow but it would take more courage than she has. -
The late morning light is filtered into the apartment by the city, all too bright and X-ray-like because curtains are another item of normalcy that somehow has escaped her in some hazy moment of trying to claw her life back in order. The faraway sounds from elsewhere in the building and the cars honking in the streets echo the threat of the Stormguards and cult members scouting around the island. Only a small shelter, whether the remnants of an old wooden building, a partially broken slab of concrete, or the damp smell of a cave, is missing from around her and Jacob. The cold sweat of needing to hide from hunters is notably present though. It's easy to imagine the monsters barging into the room, infiltrating the kitchen and the bathroom like ants on a skin. The terror washes from the back of her neck to her fingers and toes, paralyzing her for a few seconds until the wave passes with a breath that makes her all the more aware of Jacob's arm around her.
- Who would have thought that a simple centipede could cause you to crumble down when much larger horrors had been lurking behind every corner? -
Shame and regret.
Jacob's arm is not heavy but it's not light either, teetering between grounding and hesitant, scared and vengeful, and all the while extremely mindful not to put weight on the cauterized injury on the side of her stomach that is still not fully healed two surgeries later.
The burns on Jacob's hand and the fractured shoulder blade had to still be hurting as well, even if he had made no comment about them.
Her skin is cold too, dry but with a hint of old warmth to make her aware of the lack of a blanket.
- Lack of oppression. -
She blinks and takes in another shuddering breath.
She can sense how Jacob moves his head the tiniest amount and wets his lips, ready for words that don't dare to break the heavy silence.
He hadn't meant this.
She hadn't meant this.
He probably already kicked himself over this.
It was trauma all in one. Tainted even before bloom. Another heartbreak before acknowledging it could even have the power to become one.
Yet despite that, she feels inner calm somehow, like she always did on the island with Jacob agreeing with her plans and accompanying her in saving Sam. She feels bad about throwing all her ideas of the next exploration trip at him last night - ideas which she can quietly admit were a bit adamant . Jacob hadn't wanted to be part of anything that could be too much for them to chew, and she can understand that, but he is still the only one she can share her theories with, and whom, despite all, would understand, would not judge.
She lowers her chin a bit, and almost immediately Jacob shifts a little and starts to play with his right-hand fingers, a nervous tick she isn’t sure if he had before. She bends her knees to draw her bare feet closer to her body on the cotton sheet. Neither one of them acknowledges the snuggle out loud. How would one even word it?
- How many nights had they slept like this on Yamatai? -
She glances a bit to the left of him, remembering his silent admission from last night of how he had failed to make progress with mending his relationship with his daughter. They had not talked about the pain of his divorce, only danced around it before the shipwreck, but she knew how desperate he, like Reyes, had been to get back home. It was still impossibly difficult for her without Roth and no one left of her past, but it must be excruciating to have fought oneself from under the shadow of mortal peril only to come face to face with the fact that the people you had fought to come back to didn't seem to acknowledge the gesture.
She cannot understand, and yet she can, but it all leaves very few - and all too many - adjectives to describe Jacob's daughter and ex-wife, and unlike her, Jacob seems all too willing to understand.
So the silence is all that encompasses them. Against the noises from the outside, here it's only the nearly inaudible hum from the ventilation and the fridge, making the whole space feel like a sterile box, like death. And neither one of them seems to know the right choice. Maybe it was right to pretend to ignore how he didn’t have a better place to go to and how her ragged fingernails have suffered more by her own teeth than due to the countless hours on the local climbing gym.
Ignoring things is easy.
There is the unavoidable outcome that the awkward curtain of uncertain choices will hang over them once they get up, and he'll leave with short goodbyes and an averted nod, leaving her to shake it off and shun the world out. Yet, a tiny part of her - mortally wounded but still alive - hopes that they'll turn out to be too awkward to break the silence, and one day will turn into another, a question about a book into a journey to the London Archives, a late breakfast into shared plane tickets to escape the mind-breaking numbness of everyday life.