Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Eli
I'm not going to die. I know it the way I know weather, even gray on the floor with her hands in my side.
The wound's low and wide and bleeding bad but it's not the kind that takes you, not if someone keeps their head, and Wren is keeping hers better than men I served with kept theirs.
But I'm losing the daylight in my eyes and I need to give her the rest of it while I can still talk, so I do.
"Listen." My voice is going thin. "There's a kit. Under the bench. Green case. Quick-clot, pressure bandage, the works. I'm going to talk you through it. You're going to do it. You can do it."
"Tell me."
So I lie on my own floor and bleed and talk her through packing a wound the way I was taught in a war when I was young, and she does it.
Finds the kit, gets the gloves on, packs it hard the way I tell her even when I gasp, leans her whole weight into the pressure when I tell her don't stop even if I tell you to stop, and she doesn't stop, this woman, she follows the real number past her own fear exactly like I asked her to two nights ago, and somewhere in the white-edged haze of it I think: she's better at this than I was at her age.
She's better at keeping someone alive than I am, because she does it without the cold.
She does it with her whole heart open and her hands steady anyway, and that's a thing I never learned.
I had to go cold to be good. She's good and warm at the same time.
It's the most extraordinary thing I've ever watched.
I talk her through all of it, and the talking is the thing keeping me on the right side of the gray.
Pack it deeper than feels right. Wrap it tighter than feels kind.
Don't watch my face, watch the wound, my face is going to lie to you and the wound won't. She listens to every word and does the opposite of comforting me, which is exactly what I need; she follows the order past the part where I'd forgive her for stopping.
There's a moment her hands slip in the blood and she swears, low and vicious, and resets her hold and bears down harder, and I think, even through the haze, that this is the most beautiful thing I have ever watched a person do.
A woman who has never done violence and never packed a wound, refusing to let a man die on the strength of nothing but instruction and nerve.
The bleeding slows. Then stops. Her packing holds. The world stops graying at the edges and comes back into hard bright focus, and the first thing in focus is her face, streaked and fierce and wet, two inches from mine.
"There," she says. "There. The structure holds.
I told you. The numbers say you live." And then her composure cracks, all at once, now that the work is done.
The shaking she didn't allow herself comes for her in a rush, and she presses her forehead to my chest and breaks, and I get my arm up, the one that works, and hold her while she comes apart on top of me on the bloody floor, and it's the closest I've come to whole in nine years.
"You did it," I tell her into her hair. "You held the line. You made him earn it and you held me together. I had it backward, Wren. The whole time. I thought I was the one standing between you and the cold." My voice goes rough. "You're the one who came down into the dark for me."
"Stop talking. Save your blood for being alive."
"In a minute. I need to say it while I'm still scared enough to mean it.
" I make her look at me. "I spent the last nine years up here so I'd never have to carry anyone down a mountain again.
And just now I was on this floor thinking the only thing I was scared of wasn't dying.
It was that I'd die and you'd have to carry me.
And then you didn't carry me down. You brought me back.
You did the thing I came up here because I couldn't do anymore.
" I'm crying now, which I haven't done in longer than nine years, and I don't care.
"You took the worst thing in my life and you fixed it with your bare hands on my floor.
I'm not afraid of losing you anymore. I watched you survive.
You're the most survivable person I've ever met. "
The afternoon goes long and gold. The men are gone.
I'll deal with what's left of them, and the body in the mine, and the truth that has to go down to the right people, when I can stand.
For now there's just the cabin, and the fire she builds up high, and the slow tending work of two people who almost lost each other learning that they didn't.
She gets me to the bed, eventually, the two of us a wrecked procession across the room, and she lies down beside me, careful of the packed wound and her own cracked ribs, the most banged-up pair of survivors at the top of the world, and the sun goes down over the snow and turns it to fire and then to blue and then to dark.
"Tell me the real number," she says, into the dark, her hand flat over my heart.
"The real number," I tell her, "is that I love you, and we both lived, and I am going to take you down off this mountain and stand on your solid ground in the daylight, every bit of what I am, and I am going to spend the rest of whatever I've got loving you out loud where everyone can see it.
" I find her hand in the dark. "That's the real number.
That's the only one that matters anymore. I stopped counting the rest."
She presses her mouth to the scar she's seen me earn and the bandage she packed herself, and somewhere out in the cold Juniper barks once at the dark and goes quiet, satisfied, the whole mountain ours and silent and safe.
"I love you, Eli Brandt," she says. "Now sleep. I've got you. I'm keeping watch."
And for the first time in nine years, I let someone else keep watch, and I close my eyes, and I sleep.