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He still felt tired in spite of oversleeping. The buzz of his phone woke him up with another groan, but his eyes felt like someone had tried to glue them shut and only partially succeeded. He barely made out the message through his eyelashes.



There was no point in lying.

Jack rolled over onto his back with a wince and covered his eyes with his hand. Even the strips of morning light through his window shutters were enough to hurt. His body greeted him with a symphony of aches and pains and itching from the runic bandaging like an old friend.

He looked at the time and cursed. He didn't have a shift today—someone had been kind enough to take it for him while he was recovering—but he was burning daylight pointlessly. But when he tried to sit up, enough pain to make him dizzy shot through his side. Almost cracked your ribs, his physician had said. Maybe he'd tussled more in the night than he could remember. Jack cursed again.

He was still on his bed when she arrived, looking as though he had tried to sleep again and failed. In nothing but his dark gym shorts, Jack looked like a long roll of parchment with too many ink blots that had been crumpled and tossed away after attempting to use white out on the mistakes. The ugliest bruises were at his jaw ( which was close to merging with a black eye) and on his left rib, which showed even around the gauze and runic bandages. His hair was unruly and somewhat plastered to one side of his face.

At the time Chel opened the door, he had been reaching for something underneath his bed. He immediately shot up at the sound of his name and grimaced.

He took in one detail at a time: Bracelet. Scar. Hair. Face. Resources. Red dot (bracelet again). Face again. Didn't look so good. Jack also noted that his sweeping hadn't been as thorough as he would have liked; there were still small pieces of the broken mug about.

"Yeah," he said in a sandpaper voice, eyes squinting. "'Sup."

"Chair," he replied. Then he blinked hard and rubbed his eyes. "Bandages," he corrected himself. "You can use the desk chair. I don't feel like craning my neck more than I have to."

Then he gestured at the desk itself. "Grab the sunglasses out of the first drawer for me while you're at it. Everything's still too bright. There's also water in the mini fridge." The last one was more of an open invitation.

Contrary to the laborious movements from before, he took her sunglasses with ease and put them on before sitting up himself. He could lounge in pain on his own, but it was beneath him to show it to others—even though that was the reason he had texted Chel over in the first place.

He didn't move away as she brushed his hair, but a muscle near his eye twitched.

Ignoring her joke, Jack considered the bandages. Not a full roll. He almost would have snapped at her, but then he remembered that she wouldn't have done that on purpose. Probably that was all the tech felt like giving her. He glanced at her bracelet again, pressed his lips together, and began to undo the bandages around his right hand. Multiple cuts from the glass were still evident but had begun to scab over.

He could deal with the bruises and bone aches on his own, but the health of his hands was a priority. He was useless to his division if only one was good.

"Remember how you did it last time," he told Chel, slowly extending his arm out and biting on the back of his teeth. Against his will, his arm shook slightly.

Jack clicked his tongue. "Burning me didn't kill me before, so...yeah. Maybe." But he still hated too much light and he still had bitten into Peyton's arm looking for blood. "Maybe I'm a werewolf instead or something."

He resisted the urge to curl his fingers and yank his hand away, but it trembled under Chel's ministrations. The bandages were already working their magic, but the cool sting felt like a hundred bees were going under his skin, shooting up through his arm and getting sympathy pangs from nearby brsuises. Almost as bad as applying rubbing alcohol. He was glad the sunglasses at least partially concealed his expression.

"You're here," he said curtly, "so just do it. You need to learn anyway."

After checking that the gauze was in place, Jack flexed his hand a little. Not too tight or too loose. Still smarting. He nodded in satisfaction, then checked in with his parter.

Well, G-man? He hadn't used the nickname in a long time.

The giant remained quiet for a few beats longer, then sighed. Your lungs struggle, and your jaw has nearly come off its hinges several times.

Dropping his arm, Jack winced and turned himself so that Chel faced the left side of his body. "Here," he said, lifting his arm and picking at the bandages over the large purple-green bruise therein. The tape wanted to stick to his skin, making even the removal more arduous than it needed to be as he unwound it from his torso. He tossed them off to the side of his bed and coughed.

"Pffff. Waffles taste better." He would have said more, but the area was a lot more tender than his hand. Jack clenched his teeth and a few times even grasped the bed sheets with one hand as his other firmly pressed the pack to his jaw. Half melted or not, at least it did its job. The bandages were cool to the touch as well but not nearly as numbing. He swore Chel was cracking his ribs.

Jack only spoke when she had moved to secure the remaining length of bandages around his shoulder, and even then it was through his teeth. "Yeah. Kickass. S'in I got my a** kicked," he said ruefully.

He closed his eyes tight and tried not to feel like he was being coddled and failed. "Yeah? So did the coffee table." Willing Chel to hurry up, he traced the afterimages on his eyelids and silently counted to keep his mind off the pain.

The encounters with Peyton kept swimming up to the surface, just like they had while he was in the infirmary. And just as before, it made his insides reach a strange balance of frigid and boiling. He'd never wanted someone dead so much before. Lina? He'd feel a little regret about while he did it. Peyton's grave meanwhile would get pissed on after a pound of asparagus for lunch.

His hands trembled for a different reason.

When Chel was finished, he cautiously moved his arm about to check it. The bandages would hold for now, but more length would have been nice. Ah well, it wasn't like he would be doing anything particularly strenuous for a while.

"Same reasons any sane person should," Jack replied, still wry in tone. He didn't seem to notice the bag of chips, his gaze so fixed on the wall as it was. "Used to think she was upset 'cause I beat her the first two times we fought and ******** her without a care in another world. Now?" The corner of his lips twitched. "Now it's just 'cause I dug past her s**t and made a nest inside."