PINPOINTS

by elfin


He dreamt of a large bird with light-blue, man-made feathers and blue human eyes, with purple wings so thin they were almost transparent and a beak that tapered to a needle-sharp point.  It flew around his room, close to the ceiling, small, concentric circles, round and round.  Every time it passed over his head it made a shrill, squawking sound like a man screaming in pain.

He watched things change shape when he was awake, and saw colours constantly shifting through the spectrum.  He wasn't sure what was real and what wasn't, couldn't swear to the decoration in his own quarters or the patterns on ceilings and floors he walked passed everyday.  Michael had brown eyes, he remembered.  But he only knew because he did remember.  Sometimes when he looked at them now they were green, or blue, or changeable like clouds passing over a puddle.  

He often tried to walk through doors that weren't there, or look out of portholes that were only in his mind.  He smiled at people who didn't exist, reached for drinks he'd only imagined.  It would drive him crazy if he let it, but he'd survived something so terrible that a few moments standing staring at walls and daily smiles at absolute strangers weren't going to finish what Clarke's men had given a damn good shot.

He didn't mention it to Stephen.  Blood tests had already proved the psychotropics weren't leaving his system and what else would be causing reality to alter so regularly like that was how it usually behaved?  So he kept it to himself, the things he saw, the things he didn't quite believe, and instead believed only in the things he could touch and feel; physical sensations, of the soft fur of the bear on the floor by his bed, of the hot water that pounded his skin when he crawled into the shower at the start, middle and end of the day, the ironed cotton of Michael's shirts when he spread his hand on his chest and concentrated on his heart beating.  And sometimes even those sensations were lies to himself, he just couldn't be sure when. 

Reality and imagination, shifting across one another, changing places.

# 

Had there really been an explosion?

Sitting in chaos and wreckage he stared down at the dark rose blossoming vividly in the front of his crisp white shirt.  A thin shard of glass protruded from the centre of the flower like a gruesome stamen, black drops falling from it in slow motion to the mesh floor between his parted legs.  He couldn't feel anything; not the slicing pain he would have expected, not the glazing euphoria of blood loss, not the panic which should surely have accompanied such a devastating injury.  Lifting a trembling hand he poked the sharp glass with a careful finger, cutting himself as he did, his skin skidding across the razor edge as a particularly forceful shudder took a hold of him.  Putting his finger to his mouth he sucked the blood, licked the cut, and still couldn't feel anything from the wound in his stomach. 

He heard shouting somewhere, a long way off, and he listened for a while.  Male and female voices, calling out words he couldn't quite place.  Not his name though, and he didn't think to respond.  They were looking for someone else, probably, someone who'd been hurt.  And who was to say if they were real?  He was probably imaging them.  He'd decided he couldn't be hurt, not really, because he was feeling okay.  There was the shaking, sure, his whole body was shaking as if the station was trying to tear itself apart underneath him.  But there wasn't any pain and it had been a long, long while since he hadn't been in pain.  It was a great relief, an incredible release when he'd had so little over the last couple of months.  So he relaxed; putting his hands either side of his legs, palms up, he leant back against the heated hull and closed his eyes, taking a deep, relaxing breath.  Maybe he could sleep, and maybe he wouldn't dream of the blue bird with the purple wings.

~ 

"John?  JOHN?!"

Michael yelled, shouted, screamed into the red-hued black of the wrecked observation deck.  The computer's last registered location for Sheridan was on this deck and he knew John loved to come up here and stare out at the stars as if their constancy was the only thing he could really trust.  But it had been hours since the explosion had torn up through from the war room, ripped out the ceiling (the observation deck floor), torn through the walls, torn apart the massive strategy AIs used in the Shadow war and the war against EarthForce.  There was no sign of him.  The only motive for the bombing was destruction as far as they could tell and no one had claimed responsibility yet.  For the time being their immediate focus was on those caught up in it all.  The injured were being pulled out and taken to MedLab as quickly as the rescue team could work.  But Michael's fear was for their off-duty captain, caught up in a terrorist attack certainly aimed at him, if not personally then politically although the lines between the two had become so blurred they barely existed any more. 

"JOHN?"

Stephen picked his way through the twisted metal and smashed glass, burnt-out wires and blackened electrics.  The emergency lighting was all they had after isolating this section of the station from the grid to prevent the rest of Babylon 5 losing power, and the shafts of white from the flashlights the emergency teams were using to see by criss-crossed each other over the scene of devastation. 

Two bodies were found, one in two halves, sliced apart by a pane of glass, the other crushed by the falling ceiling.  Neither was John Sheridan.  Michael's voice was starting to fail him and Stephen took over, calling his name.  He should have been in MedLab, should have been overseeing the medical effort from the epicentre, but after spending the last couple of months of his life keeping John Sheridan alive he wasn't going to allow something so trivial, so banal, so everyday as a terrorist bomb to end it all.

Michael's flashlight caught on something small, something tiny in the massive chaos.  A glint of white, a reflection off a shard of red glass sticking out of what looked right then like a third dead body.  "John….  STEPHEN!"  He yelled over his shoulder as he clambered across the burnt landscape. 

John was slumped against the hull, unconscious, bleeding from the right side of his head.  Michael pressed cold fingers into his crooked neck, relief flooding him.  Not dead yet, but his pulse was almost random and barely strong enough to push whatever blood was still in his arteries any distance around his parched body.  A low groan of pain marked Stephen's arrival, from the doctor rather than the patient, and as he knelt carefully next to John he made a call to a medical team to join them. 

Both the head wound and the slash through his stomach were field-dressed with the shard left in place, blood and saline were set through IV and an oxygen mask was placed over his nose and mouth.  Once it was done and he was ready to be moved to MedLab, Michael looked up from John to Stephen and for the first time saw that he was silently crying. 

~

Why John hadn't called out for help when the rescue teams were searching came up later - much later - as Stephen sat with his pale, hurting patient in one private corner of MedLab 3, at a time of night when the station was as quiet as it would ever be; the markets closed, the bars empty, the command crew watching the monitors and logs with hands wrapped around long mugs of coffee as the minutes ticked slowly by and nothing much happened. 

"I didn't think it was real."

John had more stitches in his already damaged stomach, two in his head, and more drugs in his already ravaged system. 

"You didn't call out to us."

Despite being on the edge of exhaustion, John's accusing glare was as accurate as it had ever been. 

"I didn't want to die."

"Are you sure?" 

"I'll pretend you didn't ask me that."

Stephen flexed his thumb on the back of John's fingers - this physical contact had become second nature since his rescue from Mars; holding his hand meant that in the event of a sudden, unexpected flashback it was more difficult for him to reach for the nearest PPG if he had to untangle his fingers first.  The first time he'd almost shot Michael in the head before turning the weapon on himself, and that was with a parade of injuries including several smashed bones in his hand.  They weren't taking any chances. 

"What made you think it wasn't real?"

Sheridan shrugged minutely, his eyes closing.  "Nothing's real, is it?  Everything changes shape and colour all the time."  Stephen didn't understand.  He wanted to ask more but John looked as if he couldn't string another sentence together.  A minute later he was proved wrong.  "Do something for me?"  Quiet, but definitely spoken. 

"Anything."  He knew he would.

"If you see a blue bird with purple wings and a beak like a knife, keep it away from me for a couple of hours?  I really need to sleep."  They were a long way from the finishing line, Stephen realised at that moment, further than he'd ever believed they could be.