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Chel had lost her ability to speak and even breathing was getting hard. She was quickly going into shock, the only thing remaining in her vision was a swimming vision of Evan's face. Twisted, ugly, heartless. It was like a nightmare that the legacies had souped up for her, only this one was so bone-chillingly real that it couldn't compare to the other visions.

Love. This was what begot love. She had forgotten, but now she was viscerally reminded of the consequences of loving someone.

If Jack came in, Chel was unaware. She was trying to cling to reality- with Tenebrae's help of course. Breathing. Air. Only the most vital actions were functioning and even those were failing. The pillows were stained with a mixture of blood and her own tears, the sheets were an absolute travesty. The entire room reeked with the coppery sent of blood. Chel's face was oddly pristine, if you ignored the red rings that resulted from tears and choked-back screams.

< Estimated time of syncope approxi ma t e ly ...

She just hoped someone would keep Chris safe. Maybe Jack would feel bad about the text and take care of him in her stead out of guilt. Ha. It was good for a final laugh.

If Evan continued, she would die.

Oh, good, no response. Maybe he could--Damn it. There went his phone. The SOS stuck out, however, and once again Jack cursed himself for ever bothering to answer the thing in the first place. Didn't he tell himself he would stop stepping into people's affairs after the Ian-Shiloh s**t? God.

But there he was, dutifully and briskly entering the infirmary anyway, cursing himself. By the time he got there, however, there were already several techs fussing over Chel--no, "fussing" sounded more patronizing than it was. Angry, yes, but frantically dabbing at blood and muttering dark things under their breaths, adding and removing things his brain forgot names for because he was trying understand what the hell he was watching. He got only one good look, however, before he was pushed past and set to retrieve various tools to help out; and wordlessly, he did.

Time passed and he was forced to patrol the section essentially, because apparently something was in the water or some s**t because people were starting to act strangely--near deaths weren't uncommon at all in the infirmary, but there was evidence pointing to intentional murder, and the hunters on the shift were just done with that noise for the day. Jack stood like a green-headed lampost, bored and waiting for Chel to wake up already so he could interrogate her on what stupid s**t she had gotten herself into this time.

(What stupid, serious s**t more like.)

Fortunately for her, he did.

"Who did you piss off?" Jack asked without preamble, arms crossed. He wasn't aware Chel had enemies, but it wasn't a hunter gone mental or else others would have been targeted--a lot of damage had been done before it had been noticed after all.

"You almost died," Jack replied bluntly, still expectant, still cross arm'd, as if they were talking about bruises and scrapes on her knees and not severe internal bleeding. Whether she really had been that close to death, he didn't know, but he decided spooking Chel was his form of payback. "They managed to stabilize you before too much blood was lost, but you're lucky they caught it at all. I've been instructed to bind you if it turns out the damage was self-inflicted." It was clear by his tone that he didn't believe that theory; she wouldn't have been the first hunter in there who preferred dying over surviving, but Jack believed her to be of sterner (more annoying) stuff.

"What happened, Craft?" he asked more seriously.

The area around them seemed to get colder at the joke. Jack was in no mood for her jokes--not that he ever really was, but at least normally he would have made a derisive comment acknowledging it. It was clear now he was takin this very seriously.

He clicked his tongue reproachfully as she surveyed the damage and grew sickened; additional stress wouldn't help the healing process, nor did the excessive movement. Jack took the sheets and tugged them over her stomach, giving Chel a stern look to hopefully deter her from moving.

"And what is it you fought about?"

For a moment it didn't look as though he'd give her even a second, because clearly, clearly only sheer idiocy would have gotten her in this position. And given how Chel acted during that mission, it wasn't a stretch of the imagination to him.

Jack made a show of checking his wristwatch. "Not for another . . . half hour at least," he announced, "judging from your rate of healing. We wouldn't want you to irritate the lining of your stomach with gastric acid before it's healed. Then I would have to mop up half-digested pudding as well as blood, and I imagine they'd stitch your mouth up just as a precaution. I am fairly certain you can survive without food until then."

He looked as though he would say more--the intensity in his eyes certainly said something, and his voice was dripping with more sarcasm than usual--and then abruptly Jack turned away and let her be. Forty-five minutes of letting her breathe later, he returned more tired, more annoyed, and with a bottle of red Gatorade and a plastic cup, which it was poured in and then promptly drained of without the same courtesy he gave to coffee. His shoes had squeaked against the floor as if wet.

"Ready yet?"

He stilled for some unknown reason, took a deep breath, exhaled slowly through his nose, left the empty cup on the table by Chel's bed with deliberate motions, and drank several gulps Gatorade. Count down now: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

He capped the bottle with a satisfied sigh.

"Yes, I do." Her journal had been carefully put away in his shelf, on the alcove reserved for information about the various legacies. Jack's brow raised. "Is this about Penumbra?" At least, he thought that was the word she had written; Chel's handwriting was atrocious.

He had been there, off to the side, when the argument had begun. In hindsight it was better that he hadn't gotten involved; the man, Evan, looked like a doberman in human form. Jack was quiet as she spoke, his eyes already closed in thought by the time Chel began devolving into tears. Five, four, three, two, one. No contact, no words of comfort, just slow breaths and quick thoughts.

(His bedside manner did need work after all, he thought wryly, Peyton's bratty words returning for a moment.)

He remembered what had happened all right: Chel had died. Just dropped from that b***h's assault while his focus was on getting Finn's a** out of the fire. Noemi had been much the same, made worse by the fact that it was while on his watch. His entrance had appeared so gallant, just like one of those big goddamn heroes moments in the movies--but in that moment Jack had become a self-preserving runaway, for what little good it did them.

(His vision had some truth to it: he would die. He would always die because of these people, whether they were actively made it their mission to or not. The resentment piled.)

"You thought you would stand up to him when you can barely sit up?" The emphasis was light, the tone surprisingly calm. "Stick to your moral stance stubbornly and just agree to disagree?"