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She wakes up on the hospital bed screaming.
He is there. She fights him. Bites him, too hard. tastes his blood. The flex of his muscle in protest. She chokes, then. On his blood, and on her own. It's all going down the wrong way. Her neck -- her neck is broken and she's choking on blood, gurgling and wheezing.
A clamor. There are other doctors there. They pry her off of him. They are marveling, frightened, unprofessional. One of them jams her with a sharp needle and she starts to slip away from wakefulness. But she had just been cruelly brought back to wakefulness by a sharp needle.
Couldn't they just decide?
She needs Danny. She flails her fingers out and he's there, catches her hand as the doctors start to prepare her. For what? Surgery?
She's dying again, she's falling away. Danny is there, holding her hand, telling her she's a fighter, telling her he's so glad, telling her it was a success, telling her Herbert was right.
Herbert? Herbert West. As she goes under she vows to live through this, if only to throttle the man who took everything from her, starting with her father's life and ending with her boyfriend's heart.
She goes under with Danny's fingers still holding hers.
2.
She is laying on a different hospital bed. Danny is there, stroking her hand with his own, speaking in low, earnest tones.
"I can't believe it. It's a second chance. I don't know what I'd do without you, Meg. I really don't. I'm just so glad. You're going to be released tomorrow, and then I can take you home." He kisses her forehead. She rolls in the bed as much as she can with the thick bandages, just enough to be looking away from him as she cries.
All she is now is a heartbeat in a warm body. All she is now is someone that Daniel Cain loves. Not so long ago that was all she could have wanted. But now she feels betrayed.
"I died." She whispers, voice thick with her tears.
"But you came back!" Mistaking her reaction for fear, Danny wraps his arms around her soothingly, burying his nose into her hair. "You're going to be okay now. Nothing can ever hurt you again."
He doesn't understand. She finds she can't hold it against him, even though she wants to. To Danny, nothing is worse than death. Her screaming and sobbing at her father's death, he can understand; he grieves with her, after all. But she has to mourn her own life alone.
Because now she is alive again, and so to Danny nothing is wrong.
She wakes up on the floor, disoriented, like the covers had just been yanked off her and she had been pushed out of bed.
"-Halsey. Miss Halsey. Wake up, Megan."
Meg opens her eyes to Herbert's pinched face looming over her. Too close. On reflex, she brings her hand up and swats him away effortlessly. The force of her slap, much stronger than she had meant it, snaps his head to the side and knocks him away from her. Herbert rubbs his jaw ruefully as she sits up, still shaking.
"Well. Hello to you too, Ms. Halsey."
"Herbert?" Why is everything so -- weird? Her head is spinning. "What happened?"
"You died briefly. Only for a moment, though, should be no cause for alarm. I brought you right back." West looks pleased with himself.
"I died?" She repeats numbly. She should be able to muster up more emotion, but everything seems so far away… she feels that she isn't in control of her body, her hands strange and foreign. Just moving her lips enough to speak is almost impossible.
"Again, yes." He clarifies as he rolls his eyes and slips a bottle of glowing green liquid back into his pocket. A nasty bruise is starting to bloom on his jaw where she hit him. Why are her hands still shaking?
"I must say I am very interested." He was looking at her like she was one of his experiments, eyes glittering behind those square glasses. "As the first successful reanimation that has lasted this long, it appears that the one dose of reagent didn't do the trick." She could see him mentally taking notes. "You must have been feeling so sluggish this past day because your body was shutting down again. Of course!" He actually brings out the notebook this time, scribbling furiously with a golf pencil. "We should start you on a four-day schedule, see if that's too much, find the effects of different doses."
Panic. Blind panic, beaten out by anger. She is sitting right there, doesn't he know she can hear him? She grabs his arm, squeezing until he drops the pencil.
"Stop it! Stop it! I'm not one of your experiments!" She shakes him roughly, words not enough to convey her fear.
"Miss Halsey, you're hysterical." He says calmly, though his face is pale with pain.
"I'm not hysterical!" She screams. "I just died again!"
"And now you're feeling the negative side effects of the re-agent. Please let go of my arm, Megan."
Meg stares at him. Her own breathless panic is mirrored on his dark eyes.
She lets go. She realizes belatedly she had been squeezing hard. Too hard. His tendons are stretched and crackled under his skin. He carefully takes his arm and starts feeling it, rolling his wrist around with a pained grunt.
"Oh, I'm so scared." She whispers. "Danny. Where's Danny?" Danny, sweet Danny with his boyish charm and his strong arms. She needs him right now. Not this half-feral scientist who had injected her with his horrible serum. He had brought her back from the dead again. She had died again.
She doesn't realize she is tearing at her face until something sticky trickles down her hands. She brings her red hands away with a gasp. What was happening? Were these her hands?
West is crouched away from her, looking at her nervously. Like she is dangerous. Like she might attack him again. He looks small.
"You want Danny?" He asks her softly.
"Yes. Herbert." He swallows nervously as she looks straight at him. Why is he shrinking back? What does she look like now? "I think… I think I need to calm down." The writhing in her chest she is feeling is worse because it is familiar. It's waking up on the hospital bed again, except this time there isn't a team of doctors to hold her down. It's up to her to resist the urge for destruction by herself.
"I gave you too high a dose, I'm sure of it." He is babbling now and she can't focus. "I panicked, of course I panicked, if Dan came home and found you dead on the floor it would be the end for me. I got sloppy." He needs to shut up. She unclenches her fists. He keeps talking.
"Herbert West." Finally, finally he clams up, clutching his notebook to his chest protectively as he peers at her over his knees.
"I need. To calm down. And you're not. Helping. Me." She is breathing unsteadily. Her fingernails had broken the skin on her hands and she feels her own blood trickling down her hands.
And so he shuts up and looks at her, eyes round. And Meg puts her hands together and counts in her head, matches her breathing to West's own. Slowly she feels her arms belong to herself again. The pain and panic are no longer as all-consuming.
"So I have to take more of it?" She is holding onto her sanity by a single thread.
"Yes." Herbert nods slowly. still watching her with wide eyes. "I can figure out a way to keep this from happening again." He licks his lips, hesitates for a moment. "I will need to study you." He says carefully, afraid of setting her off again. He was being almost polite to her. It was downright uncanny.
"Okay." She can't say anything else. There isn't anything else to say. "Okay." She repeats it, as if to make it true.
She gets to her feet unsteadily, her legs like a newborn animals' under her. She slumps against the wall and cries for a moment. Herbert looks away, uncomfortable.
And so Megan Halsey lives another day.