The In Between - 9. Convalescing

09 ~Convalescing~

For Jordan, the transition between unconsciousness and awareness was a quick and confusing thing. He blinked, and upon seeing nothing, sat up too quick, a strong wave of dizziness and nausea assaulting him.

"Whoa, easy there blue eyes," a voice said and warm arms came up around him, holding him gently. "I've got you."

There was a shifting of weight and then something cool was pressed against Jordan's mouth. "Here, drink this. Just water."

Jordan took a tentative swallow. Maybe it was just his taste buds coming back to life, but Jordan couldn't ever remember a time when water tasted that good. "Brandon?" Jordan asked. A warm chuckle filled the air. "You were expecting someone else?"

Jordan blinked a few times. Shades of gray swam in front of him, but that was all. "I can't see," Jordan said, trying not to voice the panic he was feeling.

Brandon's arms tightened around him in the form of a hug. "I know, baby. Ana said it will return in time."

"Ana?"

"We're staying with her until you recover. She said she's treated this before."

"Do you trust this Ana person?"

"No. I don't trust anyone here; this is Keith's world, his Charion. But you need to get better and she knows medicine, so I grudgingly leave you in her care."

Jordan felt himself getting sleepy and was annoyed with himself. He had just woken up. "I can't stay awake," he complained.

"That's fine, baby, you need the rest. Can you take some medicine first?"

"No."

"Of course you can," Brandon replied. Jordan opened his mouth and the foulest taste he had ever experienced filled his mouth and throat. "Swallow," Brandon said sternly, and Jordan did, and then made a face, sticking out his offended tongue. He could feel the vibrations against his back and knew Brandon was trying not to laugh at him. Brandon gave Jordan some more water.

"That stuff is awful," Jordan murmured as he was slowly lowered back down. "Tastes like swamp water or something."

"I am supposed to ask you some really dumb questions once you woke up, so stay with me for a minute."

"'Kay."

"What is your name?"

"Jordan."

"Last name?"

"Dyson."

"What is my name?"

"Brandon Williams."

"When is your birthday?"

"March eighteenth. "

"Good job, you pass. Go back to sleep now."

Jordan did.

When Jordan woke up again, Brandon wasn't there, but a woman with a gentle voice and rough hands was.

"How are you feeling?" she asked. Jordan could see light, colors, instead of that endless field of gray. Everything was still fuzzy and indistinct, large blobs of color rather than actual objects.

"Okay," Jordan answered cautiously. He sat up. "I can see better."

"Good. I told your companion it would come back. It always does."

"Where is he?" Jordan asked.

"Outside, helping with chores," Anailde answered. "Would you like me to send him in?"

"Please."

"Take this first," Anailde said, taking his hand and pushing a cup into them. Jordan raised it to his mouth and remembered how bad it had tasted the first time tried to swallow as much as he could at one time. If anything, the flavor was worse, but Jordan forced himself not to make a face as he passed the cup back to Anailde and managed a rather humble "thank you".

As soon as he heard Anailde leave the room, he carefully felt around until his fingers came across another cup. He picked it up and slid a finger inside until it touched cool liquid. He sucked the droplet off his finger. Water. Satisfied, he took a cautious sip and relaxed slightly. Definitely water, no question about it, but it tasted just a little bit different from Earth's water, a bit sweeter.

A door opened, shut and Jordan heard someone approaching, could see their indistinct shape. "Bran?" Jordan asked uneasily, hating how vulnerable he felt with his vision damaged, even momentarily.

"Yeah," Brandon said, sitting down next to him. The first thing he did was tilt Jordan's face up so he could kiss him. "God, you have no idea how nice it is to see you sitting up. You look so much better than you did a few days ago."

A few days ago? "How long have I been out?"

"Four days, including today."

Jordan let out a shaky, trembling breath. "Damn."

"Don't worry," Brandon said. "I've been taking care of everything."

"Thank you," Jordan murmured, knowing that Brandon hadn't been given much of a choice.

"What's your middle name?" Brandon asked after a moment's silence.

Jordan blinked. "Adam. Why?"

"Well, the woman who we are staying with, Anailde, has not asked for our names. She calls us Outworlders and she has made it kind of obvious that while she is willing to accommodate us, she does not like us. And while we are here, in Charion, I just don't think it's a good idea to have our original names floating around."

Jordan nodded. "Yeah, that's a good idea. So we use our middle names. What is yours?"

"Hades."

Jordan raised his eyebrows and decided to keep his eyes closed, since holding them open took a whole hell of a lot of effort and didn't seem to be doing much good anyway. "Are you serious?"

Brandon grinned and nodded. "Yeah. Did I tell you about my older sister, Sophie? Her middle name is Hera."

"What about Kelly?" Jordan asked, curious.

"Lindsay." Brandon shrugged. "I guess by the time they got down to her, they were tired of being so creative. But I'm not complaining. Most Goths would love to have the moniker of an ancient death god."

Jordan leaned his head against Brandon's shoulder, feeling tired and overwhelmed. "So, do you think these people are dangerous?"

"I'm going to be of the opinion that everyone is dangerous until something happens to prove otherwise. But we can't move you until you are stronger and no longer sick. And I have some interesting things to show you once your vision returns."

If my vision returns, Jordan thought rather pessimistically but didn't share that with Brandon. If he couldn't see, he couldn't Enable. Simple as that. And if they couldn't Enable, then they couldn't leave this place. Ever. Jordan tried not to think about it. Instead, he opened up his psychic mind slightly, found Brandon and connected, drawing comfort from their bond, which was still strong.

"Lie down," Brandon said softly, helping Jordan lower himself down onto his side. "You need more rest and then some food."

Jordan could feel Brandon settle down beside him with an arm wrapped around his waist. "Is this okay?" Jordan asked anxiously. He didn't know anything about this new world, their people and their tolerances.

"I'm just going to lay with you until you fall asleep, okay?" Brandon said. "Don't worry. This house is crawling with women, even at night, and I'd bet my life there is some heavy lesbo action going on somewhere."

Jordan wanted to argue that point, but he could already feel sleep creeping up to claim his mind, so he let himself succumb to it without argument.

Brandon waited until Jordan was asleep again, then climbed out of bed and slipped out one of the back entrances. Anailde's house was shaped like a U, with a garden in the middle, carefully shaded from the sun's scorching rays. That was where the more delicate herbs Anailde used for her medicines were located. The east wing of the house was where the bedrooms were located for Anailde, her daughter and her staff...the clan of females that joined them at mealtimes and spent their days outside, some of them working in the fields where they got most of their food and some who helped Anailde mix up her various foul tasting medicines and helped her tend the ill that came in and out on a daily basis.

The sick room where Jordan was resting and Anailde's workspaces were in the west wing of the house. The front of the house was where the kitchen and common room were laid out. It was a simple design, and there was a stone pathway through the herb garden, in case Anailde or her staff needed a short cut to get to the sick room or workshops.

Brandon bypassed the herb garden, the regular garden where crops were grown in neat orderly squares, some familiar to Brandon, some not, and stood at the fringe of the field of tall grass. Brandon mostly spoke with Maralya, who regarded him with a kind of awe mixed with a heavy dose of intimidation. She had told him that fields with weeds that grew that tall were not, in fact, common. This was the only one that Maralya, with her limited geography, knew of, and it bordered the far off woods, the trees of which Brandon could see in the distance, small green smudges of foliage.

Behind the tall blades of grass, a stone structure rose up into the sky. Brandon called it The Chimney, and from the vantage point of Anailde's house, that's exactly what it looked like. A stone chimney in the middle of a field of fucking grass that grew taller than he was. If he had more of a Freudian way of thinking, he might have had something to say about a large phallic symbol set in such close proximity to a dwelling composed almost completely of females.

Brandon stretched a little, pressing his hands against his low back, and tilting his head back towards the sky as he did so. Beads of sweat already littered his face, dampened his hair and slid down the back of his neck to wet his shirt. The sky here was a mild, unassuming shade of light blue, the one sun shining a light that seemed to bleach the color from its surroundings. It looked so much like his home that at first Brandon was mildly disappointed. Now, however, having spent several days in his new, unfamiliar home, he found this similarity to Earth comforting.

He approached the edge of the field where the grass towered. He touched one of the long blades. These weren't regular grasses like the ones at home, which he doubted could stay upright at that height. No, this grass grew in a kind of tube that curled back onto itself, leaving the inside hollow, growing tougher and thicker near the ground. Brandon stepped into the field, pushing aside long blades of grass, the edges gently scraping against his hands. The Chimney couldn't be set that far back in the fields, and he wanted to see the place where he and Jordan had entered this world, because it was highly likely that if this stone edifice was the place where they came in the world, it was also the place where they would be able to leave. Once they found Leia. And Brandon already had a pretty good idea of where to look. He just had to wait until Jordan felt well enough to do some traveling. And Christ, he hated waiting.

"Hey! Outworlder! Stop!" Brandon turned and saw Maralya running towards him. Brandon hesitated for a moment, and then decided to see what she had to say.

Maralya ran up to him, panting, stopping just short of where the grass sprouted up. "You can't go in there," she said breathlessly.

Brandon arched an eyebrow, a trick that had taken him forever to master and that he used very seldom. "Oh really? And why not? My chores are done and we have a free hour before dinner, do we not?"

"You aren't allowed to go into the high fields, no one is," Maralya said. "It's too dangerous. The Sacred Place and the hooping cats are out there."

"Hooping cats?" Brandon asked.

Maralya nodded. "They make a noise like this." Maralya opened her mouth into a little o and made an odd whooping sound. "They have claws longer than your arm and can tear open your chest with one swipe."

"Scary," Brandon said with a mental eye roll. Somehow the term hooping cats didn't make them sound all that intimidating. "How come you don't put up a fence or something?"

"They don't leave the fields," Maralya said, as if it were a certain fact. "Some people say they guard the Sacred Place."

"The stone building out there?" Brandon guessed.

Maralya nodded. "It is Sacred. No one goes there."

"Why not?"

Maralya shrugged. "It's hard to find. People have gone on pilgrimages to find the sacred place, but they never come back."

Brandon wondered what Maralya would say if Brandon told her that himself and Jordan had come from that 'sacred place'. "What makes it sacred?" Brandon asked.

Maralya shrugged again. "Mama said it's a birthplace of the Gods. But I don't know what that means. Babies are born in their houses. Mama goes to help if something goes bad." She turned away from the fields. "We are going to the villages tomorrow. Mama says we are running low on meat. If you finish chores on time, you can come too."

Brandon felt himself torn between seeing what the village looked like or spending some uninterrupted time with Jordan. Jordan would probably be sleeping and Brandon wouldn't want to disturb him. And he wanted to see some more of this world so he would have a good idea of what was waiting for them when they left this place. "Okay. I would like that."

Brandon ate with Anailde and what he thought of as "her clan" that night. He had requested, pleaded and cajoled to eat with Jordan in his room, but Anailde was steadfast in her rules. He was not allowed to eat in the sick room, due to the risk of cross contamination of food and eating utensils, even thought it was quite obvious that whatever Jordan had was not contagious. So Brandon settled for sitting in the sick room after dinner, watching Jordan sleep, while he thought about many things--Charion, their predicament, Leia and getting her home. He wondered if his family missed him, if they were worried. He wondered if they thought that he and Jordan had run away together. Romantic, but impractical. The idea of Jordan doing anything that unpredictable and insensible was amusing. Hell, he was still surprised that Jordan had gotten them to where they were now.

Brandon smiled at his lover as he slept. "I love you, you know."