Page 86 of Uncharted

“Forgot to ask about that. What kind of state are you in?”

“This whole thing added a few more weeks,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Didn’t completely re-break my arm, but it did some damage. I’m gonna have a scar on my face, and my hair ain’t ever growin’ back right. I’m gonna look like Frankenstein by the time I’m old.”

“At least we’ll be on bed rest and light duty together,” I told him with a chuckle, twisting so I could run a finger over the bandage on his face. “You had to go and rescue me again, didn’t you?”

“You took a bullet meant for me,” he told me grumpily. “Ya don’t get to complain about me protectin’ you or any of that bullshit again.”

I squinted at him. “I’m sorry, is that anger I hear? Are you, by any chance, just a little, a smidgen, a mite mad at me because I chose to do something that got you out of danger and put myself in danger without thinking?”

“You’re cute, Reno, but ya ain’t cute enough to get away with this. I get what you’re sayin’.”

“What, no ‘that’s not the same thing’ or ‘this is different’ or anything?”

“No, fuck you.”

“Pretty sure we’re not going to be allowed to do a whole lot of that for a bit,” I told him with a chuckle. “I’ll…quietly ask the doctor about that when no one else is around though.”

“Good idea,” he said, closing the only eye I could see outside the bandage. “What was that with my brother?”

“Darren?”

“Well, Ryan still cannot get ahold of us apparently, so that’s the only brother I could mean.”

“He, uh,” I began uncomfortably. “The last time you were in the hospital, he…told me something.”

“What’s that?”

“He told me I was the only one you asked about when you first woke up, and that I should…take care of his little brother.”

Jake’s eye opened and stared at me for a few seconds before he spoke. “He said that?”

“Almost exact words,” I told him.

He scoffed. “Stupid man.”

“Me or Darren?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t need him to tell me,” I told him. “It’s not like I haven’t been trying to do that forever as it is. But…hearing it from your brother made it suddenly more important. Like, someone else, someone who cared about you and you cared about, saw it was something I needed to do and…confirmed it.”

“Everyone’s always trying to look out for me and take care of me,” he said, sounding more confused than irritated.

“That’s because you’re important to them,” I told him with a snort.

He huffed quietly, and his eye closed again. I wondered if he was falling asleep. I was perfectly content to stay there while he did, to let the sound of his breathing wash over me and perhaps even take me into a gentler sleep. One that didn’t have bloody dreams and gaping holes in bodies that moved around between tall shadows.

“How are ya?” he asked me softly. “And I don’t mean your wound; I already heard all that.”

“What do you mean then?”

“Unless ya left out a big story, you’ve never had someone tryin’ to kill you. And…ya killed someone, Reno. I know how much that follows ya around, how much it can haunt ya.”

I suppose he did, didn’t he? It wasn’t like I believed he’d simply killed people and went on with his life. Sometimes he had jerked, moaned, and curled up in his sleep, even as far back as the first month of working and bunking together. It was the wounded sounds, almost like suppressed cries, that had bothered me the most, but I had never pried.

If anything, I would wait for him to wake up or ‘accidentally’ wake him up by dropping something or playing my Switch loudly. Then I would act completely normal when he jerked awake, looking around as if searching for a threat that wasn’t there. And then he would settle, and the tension would bleed out of him as he talked to me in the middle of the night, usually with both of us giggling like little kids desperate to have fun but not wake Mom and Dad.

“I don’t know how I feel about it,” I answered honestly, closing my eyes. “I’ve…had a couple of dreams. But I haven’t…felt anything. I mean…I shouldn’t feel much of anything. He was going to kill you, and he would have killed me. It’s so fucked up, but I feel nothing at all.”