Chapter 501: Six Months Gone

The cable should have caught him at twenty feet. Franz counted the drop the way he’d rehearsed it a dozen times that week, the airbag a pale square below him getting bigger on schedule, the harness biting into his shoulders in the same familiar place. He’d done this fall in three other films. His body knew the rhythm of it better than his mind did.

At twenty feet, nothing caught him.

The primary line held its tension a beat longer than it should have, and then the world tilted sideways instead of down, the rig above him making a sound he’d never heard a rig make, metal finding an angle it wasn’t built to hold. The airbag stopped being a target and became something he was falling past instead of into, the crew’s shapes smearing at the edges of his vision, someone’s shout cut off before it finished. He had time for one thought, whole and complete before the ground took the rest of the sentence away from him — not fear, nothing that organized, just her name, half-formed, no verb attached to it, and then nothing at all.

Nothing at all lasted a long time.

Sound came back before light did, a low mechanical rhythm he didn’t recognize and then did, a heartbeat monitor’s beep matched to nothing that felt like his own pulse. Franz surfaced into it all at once, too late to brace for it, his own breath the loudest thing in the room, ragged and unfamiliar in his throat.

His throat. Dry didn’t cover it. Every swallow dragged against something raw, and his tongue felt too large for his mouth, thick and useless, a stranger’s tongue fitted badly into his own jaw. He tried his eyes next, and the light through them arrived in pieces, a white ceiling smeared into a paler white wall, no edges anywhere yet, everything bleeding into everything else until he blinked it into something closer to shape.

A window. A chair. A crayon drawing taped crooked to the wall across from the bed, a stick-figure family holding stick-figure hands under a sun with too many rays.

He knew that drawing. He didn’t know how he knew it, only that some part of him recognized the crooked, too-many-rayed sun before the rest of him had caught up to where he was.

He tried to lift his hand and found the effort of it strange, a command sent down a line that answered slower than it should have, his arm heavier than an arm had any right to be, the muscle underneath it thin in a way his own skin didn’t remember. His fingers, when they finally curled, felt borrowed. He turned his head instead, because that cost less, and the ceiling gave way to a room he half recognized through the fog sitting behind his eyes — not the hospital he remembered, not the one with foreign voices and a nurse’s careful English. Home. Rochefort Group’s own private floor, the one he’d never expected to need for himself.

Two shapes resolved at the edge of the bed before anything else did, small enough that his mind reached for them before his eyes had finished the work of bringing them into focus. Leo. Lily. Taller than the last time he could place, their faces longer than he remembered, Lily’s hair past her shoulders now instead of whatever length it had been.

The last time. He didn’t have that yet. He had the fall, and then this, and nothing in between wide enough to hold whatever had happened to make two seven-year-olds look like this.

"Uncle Franz?" Lily’s voice cracked on the second word, disbelief winning out over anything else she might have said, and then she was crying before she’d finished getting his name out, hard, gulping sobs that shook her whole small frame, months of holding herself together giving out all at once. Leo’s face went the same way a breath later, tears spilling before he’d made a sound at all, and he grabbed for his sister’s hand at the same moment he was already turning toward the door, already shouting a name Franz’s ears caught a half second before his brain assembled the sense of it.

"Grandma! He’s awake! Grandma, come look, he’s awake!"

Amanda was through the door before the sentence finished, close enough that she must have been just beyond it, and the sound she made on seeing his eyes open wasn’t a word at all, just breath breaking apart on its way out of her. She crossed the room faster than Franz had ever seen his mother move for anything, and her hands found his face before he’d fully worked out how to hold his own head steady against the pillow, her thumbs wet against his jaw, her voice going in and out of whatever she was trying to say to him.

"You’re awake. Franz, you’re actually awake." She said it twice like the first time hadn’t been enough to make it true. "Six months. Six months, and you just — "

Six months. The number landed somewhere Franz couldn’t fully reach yet, too large to fit through whatever narrow door his mind currently had open. He tried to answer her, and what came out instead was barely a sound, more air than word, his own voice a stranger to him the same way his arm had been a moment ago.

"Water," he managed on the second try, the word costing him more than it should have.

Leo was already at the pitcher on the side table, careful with the cup in a way that told Franz someone had taught him exactly how to do this, how to tip it slow enough that it wouldn’t spill down a chin that hadn’t remembered how to drink on its own in longer than the boy holding the cup could probably imagine. The water hurt going down and helped anyway, and Franz let his head fall back against the pillow once the cup was gone, the effort of holding it up already more than he had to spend.

He tried to push himself higher against the pillow and got nowhere with it, his legs answering the way his arm had, a full second of lag between the order and anything happening at all, and when they finally moved, the effort behind it felt disproportionate to how little ground he’d covered. Six months of a body doing nothing but breathe and heal had cost him more than the fall itself had, some private, unglamorous debt nobody had warned him he’d be handed the bill for the moment he woke up to pay it.

He caught sight of his own hand where it rested on the blanket, and didn’t recognize it the way he should have. The wrist was thinner than it had any business being, the veins standing up under skin that had gone pale in a way six months indoors would do to anyone, muscle he used to take for granted no longer there under the surface of it. He flexed his fingers once, testing the distance between what his body used to do without asking and what it apparently did now, and found the gap wider than he wanted to sit with. He’d lost weight he didn’t have to spare in the first place, the kind a mirror would tell him about faster than any doctor’s chart, his frame a size smaller than the one he’d left behind on a rig thirty feet off the ground.

"Where’s — " He stopped, his throat rebelling against the length of the sentence, and tried again in fewer words. "Arianne."

Amanda’s hand tightened where it rested against his cheek. "She doesn’t know yet. Aunt Estella will call her the second I tell her, I promise you that." She said it like a vow rather than a comfort, certain enough that Franz let his eyes close again without meaning to, the promise doing more to steady him than anything else said in the room so far.

Lily hadn’t stopped crying, only hushed it, wiping at her face with the back of one wrist without letting go of the blanket with the other. "I thought you weren’t going to wake up. Everybody kept saying you would, but it was so long, and Mommy and Daddy didn’t." Her voice broke on the last word, and she pressed her mouth shut like saying it out loud had cost her something she hadn’t meant to spend yet.

"I’m here." Franz said it plainly, the only true answer he had for a fear that size. "I’m sorry it took me this long to prove it."

"Don’t fall back asleep," Lily said, half order and half plea, climbing onto the edge of the mattress with a caution that told him someone had also taught her exactly how close she was allowed to get. "You just woke up. You can’t go again yet."

"Not going anywhere." The words came out thinner than he wanted them to, but they were true, and Franz found her hand with his own borrowed-feeling fingers and held on to it the way he’d have held on to anything solid in a room that hadn’t finished deciding how real it was. "Just tired. Not the same thing."

Leo climbed up on the other side without asking, careful the same way his sister had been, and Franz let both of them settle against him, weight he could actually feel in a way that told him more than anything Amanda had said so far — real, present, six months heavier and taller than the children he remembered holding. Somewhere past the door he heard his mother’s voice pick up again, quicker now, already dialing, already saying Aunt Estella’s name into a phone before Franz had finished working out that the number six months meant a season had come and gone somewhere he hadn’t been present to watch it happen.

He kept his eyes open as long as he could manage it, watching the door, certain it wouldn’t open again for a while yet, and let the fatigue take the rest of the decision out of his hands sometime before his mother finished the call.