NOAH

I stood outside the room waiting helplessly as the doctors and nurses were doing their work. My mind went back a few minutes prior.

It was the same as ever, watching Cassian breathe while I worked. I had memorized the rhythm of his heart without ever meaning to, the short, steady beeps becoming the background noise to my entire existence.

You don’t realize you’re tracking a sound like that until the music suddenly changes.

The shift wasn’t dramatic at first. A single digit on the top row staggered, dropping three points in the space of a breath, and then another number beside it flashed a dull yellow.

The steady beep-beep-beep altered its pattern, breaking into a frantic, uneven stutter. It sounded like a spoken sentence that had suddenly lost all its grammar, the words jumbling together in a panicked rush.

I looked up from my laptop, my eyes jumping to the glass screen, then down to Cassian’s pale face, then back to the monitor.

The numbers were moving in the wrong direction. They were sliding down, tumbling faster and faster into digits that made my own breath freeze in my throat.

I was out of the chair and at the heavy wooden door before the thinking part of my brain had even given the command to stand. I slammed my hand against the frame, my fingers slipping on the smooth varnish as I lunged into the corridor.

"Nurse!" I called out, my voice coming out thin and dry. I swallowed hard and swallowed the terror down, shouting louder into the long hallway. "Someone! I need someone in here right now!"

The response was Instantaneous. The entire floor seemed to shift on its axis, the nurses’ station erupting into sudden, focused motion.

Three people in blue scrubs were already running down the linoleum before I could even take another breath.

They moved with that frightening efficiency of professionals who are trained to sprint without showing an ounce of panic, even when everything is falling apart right in front of them.

A hand caught me by the crook of my elbow, a firm, unyielding grip that immediately steered me backward, away from the mattress.

"Sir, you need to wait outside," a nurse said, her voice tight as she used her shoulder to block me from the room.

"What’s happening?" I stammered, my boots dragging against the floor as she pushed me into the hall. "What’s wrong with him? He was fine a minute ago—"

"Please," she interrupted, her eyes already looking past me to the cart her colleague was wheeling in. "We need the space to work, Noah. Wait outside in the corridor."

The door swung shut in my face. It didn’t latch all the way, leaving a tiny crack at the edge, but the small rectangle of thick glass in the center was all I had left.

I pressed my forehead straight against the pane, my palms slamming flat against the wood on either side of the frame.

Through the narrow window, the room was a blur of frantic blue scrubs and shifting bodies. There were too many of them in there now, crowded around the small mattress, their movements too fast and too jagged to follow.

I couldn’t see the green numbers on the screen anymore; they were completely blocked by a doctor’s broad back, but the voices leaking through the gap in the wood were muffled and sharp, carrying an urgent terror underneath their professional phrases.

Then I saw a male nurse pull a heavy, square machine off the wall cart. My heart dropped like a stone into my stomach.

I recognized the shape of the defibrillator instantly, the way you recognize a nightmare you’ve spent your entire life praying would never show up in a room with real walls and real air.

"Clear!"

The word was just a dull shout through the thick wood, but I heard it perfectly. A second later, Cassian’s entire body gave a violent, terrible lurch off the mattress. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

His back arched up, his shoulders lifting clear of the white sheets in a horrible, involuntary jerk before slamming back down onto the frame like a piece of dead wood.

Something catastrophic happened to my own body in that exact instant. My hands went completely numb, the tips of my fingers tingling as if the blood had suddenly turned to ice water.

My hearing went strange and hollow, the quiet hallway behind me receding until the distant sounds of the hospital felt like a old recording played from another room.

The whole world was going wrong. The bright fluorescent light tubes overhead felt too sharp, then too dim, bleaching the color out of the walls until I couldn’t tell if I was looking at stone or mist.

A couple of staffs walked past me down the corridor, their mouths moving as they talked, but the sounds didn’t match the motion of their lips. Everything was out of sync, broken and skipping like a scratched disc.

My own heartbeat was the only loud thing left, a deafening, wet thudding that pounded right against my eardrums, drowning out the rest of the building.

"Again!" the voice shouted from behind the glass.

And Cassian’s body rose off the bed a second time, that awful, mechanical violence tearing through his spine while I stood there completely useless.

I leaned the full weight of my head against the door, the coldness of the pane biting into my skin. My breath was coming in short, panicked gasps, fogging the glass in front of my lips until the room inside vanished behind a white mist.

I kept my palms pressed flat against the wood, my fingers digging into the veneer just to remind myself that I hadn’t fallen through the floor. My legs were still beneath me, but they felt like hollow tubes, present only by some technical script rather than any strength of my own.

Through the clearing mist on the glass, a nurse finally noticed my face staring in at them. She left the side of the bed and moved straight toward the door, her hand reaching up for the white plastic cord at the top of the window.

With a slow, deliberate tug, she pulled the plastic blind across the pane from the inside, cutting off the view inch by inch until there was nothing left but a square of gray plastic.

It was a specific, deliberate piece of cruelty, but I knew it was also the only kindness she could offer me right then. It was both at once, a sharp blade and a bandage.

The hallway was just a hallway now. The muffled thuds from inside the room grew even quieter behind the plastic sheet, leaving me with nothing but the sound of my own ragged breathing. It was the only thing in the entire universe I could actually confirm was still happening.

Is this real? The thought didn’t arrive with a scream or a wave of hysteria. It was just a quiet, genuinely uncertain question drifting through my mind.

I looked down at my fingers against the wood, but I couldn’t feel the grain. I tried to swallow, but I couldn’t feel my throat. My face was completely numb, and the linoleum beneath my boots felt as distant as the moon.

I kept drawing the air into my lungs simply because my ribs forced them to expand, not because I actually remembered how to breathe on my own.

There was a low row of plastic chairs bolted to the wall directly across from the door. I crossed the narrow hallway and sank into the middle one, mostly because standing up had become a gamble I wasn’t sure my knees could win anymore.

I sat there and did absolutely nothing. There was nothing to do, and that was the true, grinding horror of this kind of waiting.

The hospital didn’t need my help; the doctors didn’t want my input, and nothing was required of my existence except to sit in a plastic shell while a group of strangers decided whether the person I loved got to keep his life.

I started to pray, but it wasn’t the sort of prayer you learn in a church. There were no structured words or sentences, no formal verses.

It was just a raw, desperate direction inside my head, a frantic plea pointed straight up toward the ceiling lights, toward whatever entity was or wasn’t listening behind the acoustic tiles.

It was the messy, broken prayer of someone who hadn’t believed in a higher power since he was a boy, but was doing it anyway because the alternative was a black hole that would swallow him whole.

My hands were resting in my lap, palms up, the fingers slightly curled. I stared down at them for twenty minutes, watching the lines in my palms. They looked exactly like my hands, but they felt like they belonged to a mannequin, cold and entirely disconnected from my wrists.

I had to remind myself to breathe, doing the work manually like a machine. Inhale. Hold the air until the chest hurt. Exhale. Let it go until the lungs were empty.

Then do it again. My blood felt wrong, the temperature dropping until it felt like freezing slush moving through my veins, heavy and sluggish.

He survived being shot, I told myself, repeating the old facts like a mantra to keep the dark from closing in.

He survived multiple bullets in the warehouse. He survived years in a cell.

He survived every single monster the city ever threw at him. Cassian Wolfe is not the kind of man who lets his heart stop in a clean room with white sheets. He is not that weak—

The door stayed firmly shut. The gray plastic blind didn’t move a millimeter.