“So today you call her a medicine woman instead of a witch doctor?” she asked, clearly teasing. Her voice was like a cool breeze on a hot day. Refreshing and so soothing that it made his heart ache for something so different. He said softly, “I’ll call her whatever I need to in order to get the answers I need.”
“So driven,” she murmured.
“You know it,” he said, nodding.
“I can see it,” she said. “Every day you’ve been driving yourself hard, pushing to get back to full strength.”
“I’d be happy to get back to having a full set of brains,” he said. “I feel like somebody took mine and shook them, until they looked like spaghetti, and now I’m left trying to hook them back up into a normal brain pattern.”
She chuckled softly. “That’s not a bad description,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily ready for more though. The brain protects itself, and, when it can handle more, it will give you more.”
“Then my brain needs to get a better understanding of who I am,” he snapped, “because I want it now.”
With the softest of smiles, she headed out of the room.
He groaned. “Sorry. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”
“I know,” she said in that same gentle voice.
He just sighed. Anytime he raised his voice or talked to her in anything other than his gentlest voice, she would quietly withdraw her presence. He knew it was likely the result of some kind of training, but he didn’t understand. It was almost like he’d ended up in some monastery, and she had these rules about how she was willing to be treated.
The thing is, her tactics worked, and he always felt like a heel whenever he raised his voice. It didn’t matter how frustrated he was, just something was seriously special about her. And, even though he’d apologized, it would still take a while before she returned. He could try to convince her to come back, but it never worked, or at least it hadn’t so far.
When she returned this time, he frowned as he stared out of the window. “Any chance of going down to the beach?”
She spoke quietly. “Maybe this afternoon.”
“Good,” he said, with a note of satisfaction. “It looks awesome out there.”
“It is,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“How long have you been here?” she replied, with her usual parry back.
He glared at her. “At least eight weeks,” he said.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’ve been here at least five years.”
“But only five years, so you weren’t born here, huh?”
“Where were you born?” she immediately responded.
He groaned. “In Germany, I think,” he said, looking pensive as he stared outside. “But I don’t think I was there very long.”
“Any idea why?”
“My parents,” he said. “Something happened to my mother.”
“And that caused your father to do something different?” she murmured.
“It did,” he said quietly. “Hard to get all the details though.”
“Maybe, but you’re doing so much better,” she said, always with that soft smile of hers.
He smiled back at her. “You are such a cheerleader.”
“I call it as I see it,” she said, with that same gentleness. When she walked out the next time, he hoped it was to get him food. He was never one to sit and to be waited on, but, in his current condition, he didn’t have much choice. He thought that he was somebody who liked to cook, but he didn’t have any proof of that, just that his mind dredged up really good meals that he’d had. He wasn’t sure if he had done the cooking, but he had the feeling that he was a capable hand at a lot of things.
Now if only he knew where that training had come from or just what those skills actually were. Just then, the same blond woman drifted through his mind again. He shook his head. “I’m not sure who you are,” he said, “but we’re close. Are you upset at me being missing, or were you already gone first?” Of course nobody could answer his questions as he lay here, but he thought about the old seer woman on the island that he called the witch doctor.
She’d come in a couple times, and clearly she didn’t like him much, although she had been open about his future, which hadn’t looked positive. She said that he was being hunted, that people were looking for him. Something sounded really familiar about that, and, while he could accept her analysis, he didn’t understand any of the details. He didn’t think she would provide him with any of them either. She wasn’t even sure what she was doing here. But she kept coming back, sometimes with weird comments.
Like this Terkel character. Bullard wasn’t sure if anyone named Terkel was after him or what the reason was or even if it were true. What had Bullard done to warrant being hunted? Funny how Leia had used that hunted word as well. It was almost like these two women had some kind of inner communication system or a line to the outside world that they weren’t sharing with him. That would piss him off if he found out they had access to a comm that they hadn’t told him about.
Apparently they had no phones of any kind, and Leia hadn’t been to the mainland in a long time. He wondered at a woman so obviously content to be where she was.
Not much was here. At least nothing he saw, but again he didn’t know if she was keeping anything from him. It wouldn’t surprise him in a way, but he hoped not. A part of him didn’t want her to be keeping things from him; yet that was also selfish on his part because he was keeping a lot from her, just not by choice. He called out to her. “Leia?”
“I’m coming with food in a few minutes,” she said.
“Thank you.”
And he shifted again. One of the things he really wanted to do was get back on his feet, so he didn’t have to ask for assistance to the bathroom. A big man like him shouldn’t be brought down by something so simple as bodily functions, but, at the moment, there was really no other way. Or was there? He slowly pushed himself to a sitting position on the edge of the bed, wincing at the newly healed shoulder joints that had taken such a bashing. He had a broken leg, which was splinted and had a rough cast. It was doing much better. Leia had said she’d look at it a little bit later to see if the cast could come off, so they could start working to get that leg more flexible.
And also something was happening with his ribs and his spine, which he sure-as-hell felt. Everything seemed to poke and to prod and to push at him, as if he had a live wire inside. He wasn’t even sure what else was going on, except for his head injury. He reached up and felt the full line of stitches across his skull. The actual stitches were gone by now of course. Just puckered skin remained, which said a lot about how long he’d been here. He wondered if everybody in his life had given up on him. That would be hard too.
He sighed as he sat here for a long moment, then decided he would try to get up again. He noted a pair of crutches leaning against the end of the bad. He frowned at that, wondering how Leia had known.
Sometimes he swore to God that Leia was a witch herself. Grabbing the crutches and moving very slowly, he pushed himself to his feet and hobbled to the simple makeshift outhouse. As soon as he was done, he stood, shaky and weaving ever-so-slightly. As he tried to remain upright, he studied what looked to him like a Pacific island. Completely uninhabited, he saw no sign of anyone, except for the little hut he was in. A little farther back was another hut, a cabinet-looking thing, and he wondered if that was Leia’s.