"Cid?" Shera asked, limping over to him on her crutch. Her left leg was in a cast, her right arm in a brace, and covered in a bandage that obscured vision in one eye. "Cid?"

"You gonna be okay?" he asked. He seemed as distant as Vincent did in one of his worse days. There was a bloody bandage around his head for a scalp wound he’d never noticed. His arm was in a sling, but not a cast.

Shera nodded. "I’ll get better. I think I’ll spend a while on the couch, though. I don’t think I want to go up any stairs soon.

Cid sighed. "Yeah. You do that."

"Cid…?"

"Please don’t hate him."

"I don’t Cid. It’s not his fault."

Cid sighed. He had to know. He’d been torturing himself with thoughts of Vincent dragged away to some room with padded walls and crying, he thought about funerals and wheelchairs, imagining everything from Vincent hating him to Vincent whispering he loved him as his last words. He had to know. He had been plaguing himself with millions of situations; he had to narrow it down to one. "How is he?"

"Cid…" Shera put a hand on his unhurt shoulder.

"He’s dead?"

"It’s… complicated. They had to restart his heart. He was breathing again soon after that, but…"

Cid said nothing. He didn’t move. He didn’t look at her. He jus stared unfocusedly at the floor and Shera wondered if he were even listening.

"Cid… He’s in a coma." She put her arms around him gently, but he didn’t react. "I’m so sorry." Tears were running down her cheeks, but Cid did nothing. "Do you want to go see him? Cid?"

"No."

"You wanna go yell a the doctors?"

"No."

"What do you want, then?"

"I want him back."

"I know you do," Shera said, squeezing harder. "I know you do."

Cid reached up and touched his shoulder. Vincent had dislocated it when they’d both hit the floor. It hurt more now that it was fixed. The hospital always seemed to know how to make things worse. "I want to go home."

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