Laura's Wolf (Werewolf Marines) (40 page)

Miguel had nightmares when he slept and sat around staring at nothing when he was awake. Russell slept day and night, rousing only when Roy shook him awake to eat or shower. Keisha diagnosed herself with exhaustion and acute stress disorder, went to bed, and left it only to check on Russell and treat Nicolette’s gunshot wound. Nicolette patrolled the grounds by night and day, going to full alert every time some animal rustled in the bushes. It exhausted Roy just watching her.

Roy treated them as stress casualties. With all the experience he’d had on the other side, he knew the drill. Maybe it hadn’t been that helpful in the long run, but it had gotten him back on his feet in the short term, and he didn’t have any better ideas.

He made sure they all ate and showered and put on clean clothes, coaxed Nicolette into napping while
he
patrolled, reminded Laura that she’d done what she had to do to save his life and the lives of the pack, sat by Laura and Miguel when they slept and talked them down when they woke up screaming, assigned Laura and Miguel and Nicolette easy household tasks to make them feel useful, reassured them all that he’d seen Marines go through the same thing and it was normal and temporary, and kept touch with them through the pack sense, sending them messages of safety and protection and hope.

He glanced out the living room window at the lowering sun. Nicolette was prowling around the driveway, reminding Roy that he needed to warn her that DJ might show up and was friendly.

He couldn’t seem to keep anything in his mind lately. Every now and then, he’d remember that he should ask if anyone had a phone, so he could call the Torres family and leave a message for DJ that the hostage situation had been resolved and he didn’t need to rush up or bring weapons. But he’d have to get Laura to steady him in the pack sense and he wasn’t sure she had the focus to do that, and anyway he kept forgetting to ask.

He looked around to see if there was anyone he could ask now. Russell was still racked out in front of the fireplace. Keisha was asleep in the bedroom. Laura lay on the sofa bed holding a book open, but she hadn’t turned a page in hours. Miguel sat in the corner, not even pretending to do anything but stare into space.

It didn’t seem like a good time to ask anyone for anything, but Roy recalled seeing a pad of paper and a pen on the kitchen counter. He went to write himself a note.

He found the pad, wrote
Don’t forget to
, then stopped, trying to remember what it was that he didn’t want to forget.

The room began to spin around him.

Roy hung on to the counter, his ears ringing. He tried breathing deeply, but it didn’t help. He supposed he’d better go sit down on the sofa bed until the dizzy spell passed.

The next thing he knew, he was blinking up at a ring of worried faces. He’d somehow ended up flat on his back on the sofa bed, with the entire pack gathered round. Laura sat beside him, holding his hand. Keisha was leaning over him, in pajamas and with a stethoscope around her neck. Even Russell stood by the bed, rubbing his eyes, his face creased red from lying on the carpet.

Though Roy was finding it hard to think clearly, that caught his attention. “Russell. You woke up.”

Russell patted his shoulder. “Two hundred plus pounds crashing to a linoleum floor will do that.”

Roy couldn’t follow that at all. “What?”

“You passed out in the kitchen,” Laura explained. “He and Miguel carried you here. Did something electrical turn on?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was writing a note. I got dizzy.”

Keisha frowned at him. “How much sleep have you had since the pack got here?”

“None,” Roy admitted, feeling vaguely guilty.

“None?” Laura echoed. “I thought that was just the first night. You’ve been going to bed with me.”

“I got up later.”

“When was the last time you ate?” Keisha asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“Have you eaten anything since the pack got here?”

“No.”

Keisha pinched a fold of skin at Roy’s wrist, and watched disapprovingly as it slowly returned to place. “When was the last time you had anything to drink?”

“Uh… That stayed down?”

“Goddammit, Roy!” Laura exclaimed. For the first time since their date in the barn, her face was alive, not blank with shock or lost in sadness. She looked royally pissed off. “You have to tell me stuff like this.”

“Dehydration,” Keisha informed him and the pack. “Sleep deprivation. Hypoglycemia. Electrolyte imbalance.”

“Combat stress,” Roy added helpfully.

“How long were you in combat?” Keisha asked.

Roy was too tired and lightheaded to calculate time deployed vs. time in the US, let alone time spent in literal combat vs. time asleep or waiting around. “Twelve years.”

“Fatigue stress injury,” she pronounced.

“You don’t have to call it that,” Roy said. “I know the other name.”

“It’s got a lot of names,” Keisha replied. “It’s been around since Achilles and Hector fought at Troy.”

Her lips kept moving, but Roy couldn’t hear her. He didn’t quite black out again, but he lost track of things for a while. People moved around him, saying and doing things he couldn’t understand. Whenever he closed his eyes and sometimes when he was sure he had them open, he saw the crack in the wall, the crack in DJ’s side, blood and soot, plastic melting into skin, flesh merging with plaster. The bed started to dissolve beneath him. Roy tried to jerk away, and came fully awake with a gasp.

The room was empty except for Laura. He was hooked up to an IV on a steel stand, but it didn’t seem to have done much good yet; he was still dizzy, his mouth dry as paper.

“Are you awake?” Laura asked. She didn’t look a fraction less angry than she had when he’d last managed to focus on her face.

“Yes.” Roy’s voice was hoarse.

“Hold on. I’ll get you something for that.” Laura went to the kitchen before he could tell her not to bother, and returned with a cup.

“I can’t—”

Laura tipped the cup so he could see that it contained only ice chips. “Keisha says if you let them melt in your mouth one at a time, they won’t make you sick. But if you’d rather go on being stoic and dry-mouthed—”

“No.” Roy picked up a chip and managed to get it between his lips. It slowly melted, moistening his mouth without forcing him to swallow.

“Roy, why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“I kept thinking it would wear off. And you were all stress casualties. I couldn’t ask
you
to take care of
me.
”

“You have before,” Laura said.

“I know, but then I think, ‘I can’t ask
again
.’”

Laura gave an exasperated sigh. “Do you think if you’d gone to me or Keisha and said, ‘I’m in trouble and I need help,’ we’d have said, ‘Sorry, you’ve exceeded the number of times we’ll help you after you got hurt on our behalf?’”

“No, of course not. It just seemed like too much to put on you.”

Laura deliberately looked from him to the IV, and then back to him, eyebrows raised. He took her meaning: he’d put more on them all by waiting than if he’d said something earlier.

“I know, here I am,” Roy said. “Another casualty. Just what you needed in an alpha.”

“It was, in a way.” Laura’s chill thawed enough for her to give him a little smile. “Nicolette figured if you could call in sick, she could call in sick. She’s in bed, and everyone else is out of bed.”

He was too tired to touch the pack sense and find them; he was too tired to reach for another ice chip and too embarrassed to ask Laura to put one in his mouth. “Where are they?”

“Miguel’s with Nicolette, and Russell and Keisha drove into town to go grocery shopping. I think Russell’s planning to cook. You went down, and we all realized we had to step up. So good job, I guess. Don’t you dare do it again.”

“I can’t promise you that,” Roy said wearily. “Believe me, I tried my hardest to keep it together. I was trying right up to the point where I blacked out.”

“That’s not what I meant, Captain America,” Laura retorted. “I meant that if you have to try that hard to keep it together,
tell me
.”

He wanted to agree, but only if he could do so honestly. It wasn’t any easier to admit to weakness or ask for help now, no matter how much he loved and trusted her, than it had ever been.

“Every fucking time,” he said, only realizing that he was speaking aloud when he heard himself. “Such a goddamn endless struggle.”

“Then practice more,” Laura said coolly. “Practice a thousand times. Eventually it’ll get easier.”

Even through Roy’s exhausted haze, he recognized her tone as that of a drill instructor informing a recruit that he was going to get through a ten-mile hike, uphill, wearing a sixty-pound pack and carrying a seventeen-pound SAW and its seven-pound box magazine, with no possibility of failure accepted.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, only half-joking.

For the first time in days, she was the one who reached out to touch the bond between them. Her presence filled his senses: her sweet and bitter scent, her sparkling surface and unexpected depths. Whenever he put his hands on her body, she seemed to be nothing but luscious curves, until he pushed down and felt muscle and bone.

She was soft on the outside and strong inside; she needed his help to climb trees and open pickle jars, but she’d squared off unarmed against men with guns and a real life super-villain. She cracked under pressure, then picked herself up and kept on going. She decided that she wanted to be a better person, and she turned her entire life around overnight.

Roy had always been the biggest and the strongest; on that ten-mile hike, he’d carried his own load and pushed an exhausted recruit up the final hill. He always maxed out the scores on the physical fitness test. He’d run out under fire to carry wounded men to safety. But he couldn’t swallow a bite of pastry. He couldn’t keep down a glass of water. He couldn’t tell the woman who loved him that he needed her to shore up his weakness,
again.
Laura and Miguel had faced their nightmares, while Roy had been so afraid of his that he’d stayed up until his body, which had once been able to take anything, had collapsed beneath him.

But he’d never truly been able to take anything. Marines were issued tactical vests because the human body was made of bones that broke and flesh that tore. Combat stress existed because the human mind couldn’t endure anything, indefinitely. Nothing that lived and breathed was made of steel, unbreakable and unchanging.

Every time Roy blinked, it was harder to lift his eyelids again. Every time they closed, images flashed, clearer than anything he saw with his eyes open. Blood running down the wall and soaking into his shirt and pants. A blackened armor plate falling off DJ’s body. Gregor’s face pushing through the plaster. Black hair matted with blood. Charred flesh and white bone.

A thousand times…

Roy caught at Laura’s hand. “I’m in trouble, Laura. I need help.”

She stroked his hair, pushing tickling strands out of his eyes. He turned his face into her palm, allowing himself at least that much rest.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“I’m afraid to sleep,” Roy confessed. “I know you can’t make it not be fucking awful. But I at least don’t want to be alone with it.”

“Roy, you took care of me day and night! Of course I’ll stay with you.”

He’d known she’d agree without hesitation. Even so, an enormous tide of relief lifted him at her words. “Don’t run yourself into the ground. It doesn’t have to be you all the time. The pack could take turns. If they don’t mind.”

“They won’t. They wanted to sit with you, actually, but they thought you’d be embarrassed.”

“I am embarrassed,” Roy muttered. “But I want them anyway.”

Laura slipped beneath the blanket, stretching out beside him and putting her arms around him. He held on to her warmth and solidity with his body and mind, knowing that soon enough, he wouldn’t be able to feel it any more.

She kissed his cheek. “Go to sleep, Roy. We won’t leave you alone.”

***

Roy sank into nightmares every time he closed his eyes. But when he woke, disoriented and frightened, someone was always there with him: Laura holding him close, Miguel or Russell sitting by his bed and keeping a hand on his shoulder, or Keisha checking his vital signs and informing him that he wasn’t in danger and he’d feel better soon. Sometimes he reached out and touched fur, and found a wolf or two stretched out beside him.

He wasn’t strong enough to access the pack sense himself, but Laura linked him to it. The bond didn’t penetrate through his nightmares, but it comforted him in his intervals of consciousness.

Russell helped him to and from the bathroom, since Roy would have had to be dying to not do that on his own. He’d first encountered that particular set of pans and tubes while he was recovering from his shrapnel wounds, and he had no intention of doing a repeat. The pan was humiliating and the tube fucking hurt. But Roy could walk if he had some support, and Russell was stronger than he looked.

“You play sports?” Roy asked, as he lay back in bed.

“I played lacrosse when I was in boarding school,” Russell said. “And I did archery. I don’t know if you’d count that as a sport.”

“Did you ever hunt with a bow?” Roy had a pleasant picture of himself and Jim Sullivan and Russell and maybe Nicolette hunting together. Four of them, like a fire team. But the walk across the living room had exhausted him, and he was asleep before he heard Russell’s answer.

Roy dreamed that Laura had driven her car over an IED, and woke up having the worst panic attack of his life. Choking and gasping, unable to get any air in his lungs, he struggled as if he was being held underwater, certain that he was dying.

Someone grabbed him and hauled him into a sitting position, telling him it would be easier to breathe that way. A male voice coached him to inhale deeply, from the belly rather than from the chest. The panic faded as Roy obeyed, getting his breath back under his control. When he came back to himself and the present, Miguel was holding him up, surrounding him in the scent of caramel and the comfort of pack.