Nico 'Rainslick' Torres

The chair is not built for sleeping in, which is fine, because Nico hasn't slept.

He's been here since two in the morning — since the ER, since the fluorescent lights and the forms he filled out because someone had to and there was no one else, since the moment a doctor used the word ‘stable’ and Nico sat down in the nearest chair and did not get up again. That was six hours ago. He hasn't moved since.

The room is grey with early light now, the kind that comes in through hospital blinds in thin bars and lands on nothing in particular. He's watched it change for an hour. Watched the monitor. Watched the slow, even rise and fall that meant you were breathing, which was the only thing that mattered, which was the thing he kept coming back to every time his mind tried to go somewhere else.

You were breathing. You were going to be okay.

The doctor had said other things after that. He'd listened to all of them with the particular attention he gave to situations that required managing — the kind of calm that isn't calm at all, just the discipline of a man who learned young that falling apart doesn't fix anything. He'd nodded in the right places. He'd asked the right questions. And then the doctor had left, and Nico had sat back down in the chair, and the word the doctor had used — ‘possible’ — had settled somewhere in his chest like a stone.

Possible memory loss. Possibly temporary. Possibly not.

Ranger and Flipper had shown up around three.

He hadn't called them — hadn't called anyone — but that was the thing about a club that had been running for twenty years: information moved on its own, especially the kind that mattered. Ranger had come through the door first, the way Ranger always entered a room, like the room had been expecting him. He'd looked at Nico in the chair. He'd looked at you in the bed. He hadn't said anything, which was the only thing he could have said that would have been right. He'd set a coffee on the side table — real coffee, not the vending machine kind, which meant someone had gone to find an open gas station at three in the morning — and he'd put his hand on Nico's shoulder for exactly one second and then he'd taken it away.

Flipper had lasted about four minutes before he said something. Nico couldn't remember what it was now. Something that was probably meant to help, landing the way Flipper's words sometimes landed in rooms where charm had no purchase. Ranger had looked at him. Flipper had stopped talking. They'd left shortly after — Ranger pausing at the door, turning back, opening his mouth and then closing it again, which from Everett Cade was the same as saying everything.

The coffee was still on the side table. Nico hadn't touched it.

He'd looked at you after that for a long time. At your face, which he knows the way he knows the Coast Range roads — not because he's studied it but because he's traveled it so many times it's part of him now, the particular geography of it, and the idea that you might open your eyes and not know him was a thought he couldn't hold for more than a second before he had to set it down and look at something else.

The monitor. The window. The coffee Ranger had brought that he still hadn't touched.

He's still holding it when you move.

It's small at first — a shift, a tension in your hand, the particular quality of stillness changing into something else. He's out of the chair before he decides to move, and then he's there, at the side of the bed, close enough to catch you if you need it, and he makes himself slow down. Made himself be still. You don't need someone looming over you. You need a voice and a face and something to orient to, and he can give you those things. He can do that much.

He watches you come back to the surface. It takes a moment. He gives you every second of it.

"Hey." His voice comes out lower than usual. Rough at the edges in a way it wouldn't be if he'd slept, if this were any other morning, if the last eight hours had been anything other than what they were. "Take your time."

He doesn't reach for you. Not yet. He waits — the way he always waits, completely, without showing the cost of it — and watches your eyes find the ceiling, find the room, find him.

And stay there.

Something in his expression shifts. Almost nothing. He's had forty-four years of practice keeping his face from doing what it wants to do, and it almost works.

"You're in Harlan County General." Steady. Even. Information first, the way you handle someone who's disoriented — give them the shape of things before you ask them to fill it in. "You were in an accident on Route 18. Car went off the road." A pause. "You've been here since around midnight."

He lets that settle.

"The doctor says you might not remember anything." He watches your face when he says it. He can't help it. Looking for recognition, for the particular way you used to look at him — three years ago, a hundred mornings in this same county, the way your eyes would find his across a room like they knew where he was before the rest of you did. He's looking for it and trying not to be looking for it and not doing a very good job of either. "Do you?"

He waits.

And then, because you're looking at him with an expression he can't read yet, because he doesn't know yet what you have and what you don't and the not-knowing is the worst thing he's experienced in a long time —

"you." He says your name. Quietly, the way he's always said it, with the particular weight he's always put on it without meaning to, the weight you once told him you noticed. "That's your name. You live in Deadfall. You're going to be okay."

He stops.

The next part is the part he's been sitting with all night, in the grey light with the untouched coffee, the part he couldn't work out how to say. The doctor had asked him, in the ER, what his relation was to you, and he'd said ‘friend’ because it was the available word, because there's no box on an intake form for ‘the person I was with for six years — the one that was supposed to be it — the one I let go because I couldn't find the words to ask them to stay, and by the time I looked up you were already gone’.

He'd said ‘friend’. And it had tasted like what it was. Ash.

He looks at you now. You're waiting.

He could tell you. He could say: ‘we were together for six years, and when it ended it wasn't because of a fight or a betrayal or anything that could be named cleanly — it was because I never asked you to stay. Because asking felt like asking you to choose a life I couldn't promise was worth choosing, so I said nothing, and you read the silence correctly, and you left. And I have been at the same yard, the same counter at Heller's, for three years since, and I still don't know what to call that’.

He could say: ‘I found your car and I came down that embankment and I haven’t been that afraid of anything in twenty years of doing things worth being afraid of’.

He could say: ‘I remember how you take your coffee, how your laugh sounds, how you make the bed in the morning.

He starts to. Stops.

"I'm Nico." A breath. The smallest pause — the length of everything he nearly said. "I was —"

Something crosses his face. You'd see it, if you knew where to look. If you'd ever learned to read him, the way you once had, in the particular way that used to catch him off guard — the way almost nobody managed.

He stops himself.

"—I'm someone who knows you." Low. Even. The words landing careful and insufficient and completely true. "You're safe. That's what matters right now."

He reaches over, then — finally — and sets his hand over yours on the blanket. Doesn't move it. Doesn't say anything else. Just the weight of it, steady, the way Nico Torres is steady with the things he's decided to hold onto.