Epilogue

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Watch the world go by. Listen to words. Watch mouths. Eat food fed through a tube. Brace yourself for bath day and failed therapy and lost hope.

Three years and every minute, every hour, every day, was the same.

When I closed my eyes and settled in for another long day of nothing, it was easy to fantasize. Easy to daydream. And it was always the same dream. Three years ago I killed my father, and then before I could squeeze the last bits of the serum out of me, August crashed in and saved the day and saved me and we lived happily ever after. And the world was none the wiser.

That was not how it went.

Three years ago I killed my father, and then I squeezed all the last bits of the serum out of me, and Jessica and Blake were the ones to find me. Everything to do with my existence closed up and fizzled away, and August hadn't visited me once since my three years of this hospital being my permanent home, and the world was none the wiser.

The door to my cell opened. Jessica walked in, hair cut in a short bob, her entire being as radiant and beautiful as always. The door clicked softly shut behind her. One gaze toward the TV and she scowled, flicking it off. "They make you watch Soaps all day?" she said, with a hint of a chuckle in her voice. "Why don't they just kill you?"

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to smile; to give her some indication I was alive in this useless body, hearing her, reacting, but I could not.

She pulled up a chair and folded her hands and just stared at me, and all I could do was stare vacantly in the same direction as always. Jessica visited me the most. Sometimes Blake stopped by. He was enrolled in culinary school and doing inhumanly well and so he didn't have a lot of free time. He might have even been in Paris by now. I couldn't be sure. Time passed differently in a hospital.

I waited forever for August, heart breaking over and over when he never showed, but I didn't stop believing. And I would never stop waiting.

Jessica insisted I give up. She insisted I forget about him. Granted, she probably said these truths because she thought I could not understand her, but I could. And they were as useless as my arms and legs.

"Three years, El," she said this time. "Over three years. Three years and a couple weeks. I've tried to find him, but he's August; if he doesn't want to be found, he won't be found. And you need to let him go."

I didn't expect her to understand. She who experienced pure physicality in their relationship. And maybe this whole comatose-not-comatose thing had made me bitter. But I wouldn't expect her to understand the impossibility of two halves not ever being made whole. He had to come back. Eventually he had to come back.

That certain voice inside me was dying a little bit more each day, but it hadn't deserted me completely. And until then, there was only hope.

"I met somebody," she stated, reaching in her purse and pulling out her phone. She showed me a picture, and even though she thought I couldn't see it, I could. Her with another man, slightly taller, wearing rugged boots and jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt. A dog-tag hung around his neck. His right arm slung around her neck, hugging her close. He was missing the left one.

"Army veteran," she murmured, stroking the sides of her phone with loving caresses. "He's a few years older. Three, I think. Wasn't even in the army that long before his arm got blown all to hell." She chuckled darkly. "I guess I have a type, huh?"

I wished I could speak. I wished I could laugh.

Jessica sniffed, dropping her purse to the ground, folding her hands in a gesture of prayer. "Oh, Ellie," she said, tears carving paths down her cheeks. "You gotta get better, man. They want to pull the plug. They want to pull the plug on you. I keep telling them no, that you'll get better, that they just need to be patient. But they insist you're dead inside and this stupid tube is the only thing keeping you alive." She grabbed my immobile hand. "Just give me a sign. Please. You can't give up. You can't stop fighting. The world may never know, but I will. And Blake will. And August. Damn him for losing you, but he will know, too. You can't just give up, okay? You're a fighter. You're a fighter."

Not even my tears would work right.

And I sure didn't feel like a fighter right then.

She swallowed hard, seeming to debate whether or not to tell me something, and eventually decided she might as well. And when she did, I almost wished she hadn't.

"Three days," she whispered. "They're giving you three days, Ellie. And then nothing. Nada. You're gone. Do you hear me? Gone."

And there was nothing I could do about it.

Jessica stood so abruptly the chair teetered on its legs. She wiped away her tears and grabbed her bag, and without another word, breezed out of the room.

And with her absence, it felt as if I'd just lost my last ally, and the loneliness was overwhelming.

Jessica was right. I heard them talking; the nurses. They didn't think I was alive. They didn't want to keep looking after me, using resources, wasting space. They were going to pull the plug. I was going to die if I didn't do something.

But I couldn't do anything.

Jessica didn't visit me. Blake didn't visit me. Nobody visited me but the nurses doing their rounds and avoiding my face and each time I thought one might feel extra pitying and just end it right there. But they never did. They always left. And I was always alone again.

Two days passed. I sat into the evening of the third day, waiting, terrified, because this was the end. This was how it would end. I saved them all and broke myself and none of them knew, and they just wanted to pull the plug on me. If I was capable of rage, I would show it.

The clock on the opposite wall hit seven o'clock. My heart jumped. The hospital was closed. No more visitors. No more wandering eyes. Two seconds later somebody twisted the doorknob to the door. I mustered everything up inside me, that if I could just twitch a finger, they would keep me alive. But nothing. Nothing. I was hurt deeply by my body's own betrayal.

The door opened slowly, unnervingly slow, and I wished I could close my eyes to escape the scene of the inevitable.

But I couldn't.

And I was glad I didn't.

Because sauntering forward out of the shadows, hands thrust in a pair of jeans pockets, occupying the space of the nurses, was not a nurse. Was not a doctor. Was not the Angel of Death come to take me away.

He was a different kind of death to me entirely.

He looked much the same. Three years didn't do a whole lot. His hair was a bit too shaggy. The stubble on his face was cleanly cut and well-groomed. He smelled nice. He smelled familiar.

He was everything. He was everything.

He was August.

At first he didn't say anything. He didn't say anything for a long time. He stood there with his knuckles shoved into his mouth, shaking his head, staring at me with such longing and pain it hurt. It hurt.

"Oh, my God," he whispered, stepping closer, closer, stopping right by my cot. "Ellie . . . baby . . ."

Let me reach out to him. Let me touch him. Please, God, just let me show him I'm awake.

But nothing worked. Nothing moved. Nothing happened.

August dropped to his knees and set his elbows on the hard mattress and grasped his hair with his hands. At that moment the door opened again and several nurses strolled in. They started, shocked to see August.

"Sir, you can't be here," one began, but August shot her such a loaded look she clammed up and glanced away.

"You can't take her away from me," he spat, sounding almost hysterical. I wondered just what his last three years had been like. "After everything, you can't be the one to kill her."

They stared at him with no idea what he was saying, and nobody would know what he was saying anymore because nobody would have the wherewithal to know. But I knew.

Let me touch him.

"You can't," he continued.

Please, let me touch him.

A woman with short brown hair and strict brown eyes stepped forward, the lines around her mouth and eyes softening. "Sir, I'm sorry, but we need you to leave. Visiting hours are over."

"No."

"Sir-"

"No, dammit! Can't you hear what I'm saying?"

"I hear what you're saying just fine, but we need you to leave-"

"So, what? So you can pull the plug and kill her and then act like she was never here? Like she isn't a human being? Like she doesn't have any people on this earth who love her?"

I'm right here, August. I'm right here.

There was a lot of thrashing, and lashing out, to the point that the nurses had to call in security. They hauled August away, and I never knew how I did it. I never did and I never would. It was the tear in his eye, maybe. Because my August never cried. And to see him crying broke something in me passed the point of shattering, a paradoxical break, because it put something back together.

It was a greater strength. A divine strength. Something more powerful than I could ever imagine that fired a synapse and twitched my arm.

My first movement in three years. Everybody in the room stopped. The nurses' jaws dropped. August snapped toward me so fast I feared he might have given himself whiplash.

I tried again. A bigger twitch.

More silence.

With a spurt of effort, I nearly lifted my arm, but not quite.

The brown-haired nurse shook her head, a smile ghosting her lips. "Well, I'll be damned."

They didn't pull the plug on me that day.

And August stayed. Every day he was there with me. He helped me dress and prepared me for therapy and was there even when I failed and crashed and burned. He forced me to get up on days when the depression was worst. On days when I wanted to sleep; when I wanted to curl in on myself and die because it was so hard.

It took weeks. Weeks, just to stand again.

He helped me through that, too. Standing in front of me as I gripped the poles, keeping me from falling, telling me he loved me and I could do anything and so I could do this. And after a while, I believed it. I could. I could do this.

"She'll never speak again," the doctor said. The specialist. "She will be able to walk with some help. She will be prone to headaches and anxiety. Her brain will not function as fast as it should at her age. But she will live."

I would live.

I thought August might grow weary of my suffering. Maybe annoyed with how much help I needed; how much support. But he was there. After three years of nothing, he never left my side.

Four months later, the doctor let him sign me out. And two hours in his familiar corvette was rehabilitating. And after the two hours, I saw one of his projects that he'd been working on over the three years.

I tasted the salty sea air.

I saw the sand glinting in the setting sun.

I saw the tiny beach house, our house, and I started to cry.

"Welcome home," August stated.

And that was huge, because nobody had ever said that to me before. I had never had my own home. Never had a place to call mine

And this wasn't just mine. It was mine and August's.

He swung me up into his arms, carrying my bridal-style over the threshold of the house, and around me was Tia and Jim and Esme and Ryan and Lucille and Dr. Edmund; Lana and Muffy and Ray and everybody else who had to die. And I wanted them to know, Ryan especially, that they wouldn't be forgotten. And I wanted them to know that I survived. That I lived. That I would be broken and damaged for the rest of my life, but I was alive and I was human. And to every single government rat and Prophet and Bounty Hunter and traitor who tried to break me and succeeded and failed, this was for them. I wanted them to see this; August setting me in our living room, pulling out the ASL books and DVDs he claimed we would learn together, telling me he loved me now and tomorrow and forever. And I wanted them to see this and know that they had failed when they tried to break me.

Because I knew that now.

I didn't know it then, but I knew that now.

And I would not be broken.


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