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thedistantstorm · 5 years

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Keep On Rising (Until The Sky Knows Your Name) 09

A story about how an orphaned Amanda Holliday comes to belong in the Last Safe City and the family she finds along the way.

(Or, the story of how Commander Zavala finds himself responsible for one Amanda Holliday.)

Chapters: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08

This time: Wants and needs and waking up.

The Speaker chooses his words carefully, thus they sit in a momentary silence before he begins. The ambient noise of the room - puffs of air from the nasal cannula that helps her get enough oxygen, monitors that check blood pressure, gentle beeps of the monitors, the idle drip of medication into IV lines all blend together in a strange symphony. Zavala does not find it anything but anxiety inducing, though he keeps still and does not act in a way that would readily flag him as such.

Not that it matters, the Speaker knows him well. “I would presume,” He says, slow and quiet, mindful of the child sleeping in the bed an arm’s length away, “That you have spoken to your Ghost about this?”

“Shiori has made her opinions known,” Zavala admits, after a moment’s thought. Likely, also that he’s spoken to said partner, through the link that Guardians share with their Ghosts.

He hums in reply, leaning back in a gesture that isn’t quite relaxed, but appears more casual than official. “And your opinions do not line up?”

Amanda stirs beside them, a frown cutting through her features, but shifts and resettles without waking. Zavala sighs in relief, having been immediately distracted by it. “Wants and needs are two different things," He offers, instead of answering the question.

"Yes," The other man agrees. "Unless your want and her need aligns."

"It does not. My lifestyle is not conducive to raising a child, regardless of whether I would consider it or not," Zavala replies.

"And yet you're here," The Speaker answers. Though his expression is covered by a mask, the inflection of his voice gives away his feelings on the matter. He tips his head to the left, evaluating.

"She calls for me when she wakes," He tells the Speaker, just as he had Ikora, but it feels inadequate as a defense. Flimsy.

"Could the matron not fulfill her needs?" He asks gently, yet there's something blunt in his tone. "She could sit with the girl."

"Yes," Zavala agrees morosely, "I just-"

"But the matron cannot console the girl when she's in the throws of panic, certainly not when she's altered by medication and plagued by fever dreams. The trust is not intrinsic, subconscious." The Speaker crosses his arms. "Nor can she give the girl favor, even if she wanted to. She has other duties, other children she is responsible for."

The child whines in her sleep from discomfort, and as if to prove his point, Zavala is at her side, gently adjusting the sheets tangled around her lower half, mindful of her injuries.

"I want to help her," The Commander admits, wistfully, looking down at the girl’s face.

Circling back, the Speaker reminds him, "And being at her bedside when she wakes, then withdrawing will help her how? The child trusts you. It would crush her."

"Then what do I do? I could not possibly forsake my duties."

"You could do both." Zavala stares, slack-jawed at the other man's masked face. "She will need therapies and treatments… A hospital stay like this requires rehabilitation, according to the matron. It will be months at least."

"It's impossible. There is no way I could take care of a child."

The Speaker ignores him. "Plenty of time to get your affairs in order, and this would not be easy, certainly not. This one hasn't hit her teenage years, and from what I've been told by others, it is rather taxing."

"I can't do this on my own," Zavala hedges. "There is no way. The Vanguard, my Titans, I-"

"Think, Zavala." The Speaker's voice cuts through his argument, firm and blunt, yet not unkind. "I never said you should raise her on your own." He rises. "I’m merely suggesting you consider that it may not be as impossible as you think." As he passes the Titan Vanguard, he squeezes his shoulder in a show of support, speaking softer. "A reminder of why we do what we do would not be remiss around here."

The Speaker leaves. Once alone, Zavala brings the chair he'd been sitting in to rest almost against the bed. Silently, he evaluates her: the wrinkle of her brow and nose while she sleeps, the way her fingers curls over the blankets before she pulls them against her chest.

"He's right, you know."

"He always is," Zavala answers, watching his Ghost shimmer into being on the other side of the room.

She sighs. "You really want this, though."

"Yes," He admits, after a time.

"So we ask for help. Like he said, they don't plan on releasing her any time soon."

"Shiori-"

His Ghost continues, speaking over him in that soothing mezzo-soprano of hers. "She hasn't been awake for more than twenty minutes and even that was debatable." Her white shell orbits her core slowly. "I don't think it's wrong to be happy, Zavala. And I don't think you're going to blow off your responsibilities to everyone and everything else because of her."

"But is it fair to her?"

That gives her pause. "Well, I would suspect she'd agree."

"That is not the question. She's a child. I have doubt that she knows what is best for herself."

"Well-"

He frowns. "She's been harmed because our efforts to keep the City safe failed her. I cannot tell if I feel guilty of if it's just that I somehow feel a connection-"

"You're doing it again, always overthinking," She tuts. "Listen to me, Zavala. You wanted to take Amanda home with us the first time we met her. You were beside yourself that you upset her." She drifts closer. "And when she came around, you spent an entire visit holding onto her. I teased you about it for a week. You remember what Karena called her?"

Zavala closes his eyes. Shiori takes it as a yes.

"You were furious with me when I told you we should at least consider taking her. You gave me every reason I'm sure you're thinking of now. But you forget: I know you, Guardian. I know you're going to make the right choice. You always do."

Scrubbing a hand down the side of his face, he regards his partner warily. "That transparent, am I?"

Shiori bumps his hand away from his face. "No. You just don't do things in half measures," She says fondly, her single eye meeting both of his. "You never have."

“I just want to be sure,” He says in reply. “I need some time.”

Amanda wakes when midnight and morning bleed into each other. Unlike other times, the muzzy fading feeling seems to burn off, leaving her licking her chapped lips and squirming. She feels uncomfortable. Something isn't right.

The only sound in the room is a not unpleasant timed click, an easy shuffle, and the muted sound of a monitor. She exhales long and loud, taking stock. Only three extremities respond to her. The fourth tingles in an angry buzz of pain and numbness. Trying to move it makes her whimper, the conscious thought put into moving her knee ends in a furious confusion of synapses that don't have anywhere to go.

With her muffled cry, the cadence of clack-shuffling stops. She takes a few more breaths, forcing them to stay even, her eyelashes beating against her cheeks as she tries to make sense of the strange new feelings she’s confronted with.

Instead of speaking, he watches as her stormy eyes open and clear, adjusting to the fluorescent lighting. She looks down and bites her lip, but does not make any more noise. Her eyes water but she doesn’t make any more sound, other than the tiny groan of adjusting herself. She’s already propped up between pillows and the angle of the hospital bed.

She almost topples over reaching for her bad leg, but her left arm manages to keep her upright while she regards the lumpy bed linens. It hurts, but she flips back one end of the covers to see what her leg looks like and immediately flinches back.

It’s a large bandage that starts almost where her leg meets her trunk, but it goes down to just short of where her knee should be - and stops. She closes her eyes, squeezing them shut and then braves another look. On the second inspection, she notes that there’s blood leaking through the dressings, faded and iron-brown. No knee. No foot. Gone.

The hand that touches her head makes her freeze, and only then does she realize Zavala’s watching her evaluate herself. She looks to him with something like panic twisted by despair.

"'m not dreaming, am I?" She asks softly.

The edge of the bed dips as he sits, perched on the edge facing toward her. "No," He answers.

She closes her eyes and leans back against the pillows. "E'ryone else's okay?"

"They are," He answers. "Do-" His voice catches on the prospect that perhaps she'd rather be consoled by her foster family, though they'd withdrawn rather easily - too easily, Karen's said, though she'd never been planning to allow Amanda to return to them. His stomach lurches at the thought that her calls for him were simply hallucinations, that maybe he has this completely wrong. "Do you want to see them?"

There is no hesitation in her reply. She shakes her head in the negative. "It had me by this leg," She points to the wrapped stump. "Did you get it?"

"The Guardian who found you killed it. It won't hurt you or anyone else."

"But you said they go through you." She doesn't look at him, still eyeing the bulge of gauze.

"I am the Commander. The Guardians answer to me." He sighs, trying to explain it in a way she’ll understand. "I was in command all night, making sure everyone that was in trouble was seen to." Selfish as it may be, he’s grateful he didn’t know. It would have ate away at him all night while he was trying to organize relief efforts, the way it had while he had sat with the matron what felt like the longest day he’d had in years.

"I thought it was you," She admits. "They - It was like lightnin' but… Th'same blue as yer eyes," She drawls.

They sit quietly for a few moments.

Her resolve crumbles with a mumble of, "I really wanted t’see you." She reaches for him and he obliges, letting her press her face into his chest, feeling her lip curl and her shoulders shake through his sweater as she cries. It’s muffled against his sweater, but he hears her confessions. The fear of what she’d surely though was her death. That she should have tried harder to make them believe her, that she knew and it was all her fault.

That she didn’t want to die without seeing him again.

It felt like he’d never be able to walk out of the room. Part of that might have been the tiny fingers that threaded through his own with a surprising strength, but… There was more to it than that. It was like his bond with Ghost but not quite, a natural connection so wholly different from any he’d forged before and it was plain and obvious, terrifying and yet comforting all at once.

The morning comes too soon, and with it, the realization that he would have to leave. She seemed to know it too, her tiny grip growing exponentially.

“I’ll be okay,” She tells him, her voice faint against his side. Her fingers twitch and pull away from him. He doesn’t miss the way they wrap around herself as he rises. “It’s fine.”

He’s never been more certain that it is anything but. “Karena will come sit with you, or one of the houseparents,” He says. “Someone you know.”

“Would-” She squeezes her eyes shut, as if looking at him - seeing the truth on his face - would upset her. “Would you come back sometime?” She asks meekly.

It’s only after he rises, patting her head, that she sees the folded blanket in progress - a shade of red far brighter than the one she’d left behind at the Baumsol’s. He removes it carefully from the chair at her bedside and opens one of the drawers in the small half-dresser beside her bed, tucking it and the rest of his knitting supplies inside.

He smiles at her, she knows it not because of his lips - those are set in a firm line. His eyes spark, almost. Bright and good and true. “I’ll come back as soon as I am able,” He tells her. “You have my word.”

#destiny fanfiction #shipwright september #amanda holliday #commander zavala #the speaker #destiny #destiny stories #fluff and feels

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