Love in a Time of Death

2 - From one extreme to another

Hello all, hope you enjoy chapter 2! Please let me know what you think :)

Jade finally got the guts to help Nick off the train, but now what?

The song for this chapter is Into the Fire by Thirteen Senses

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He ran out onto the platform and bent over, breathing hard.

Jade wanted to go to him, but was frozen to the point where she could barely breathe. She had actually done it, she had reached out to this guy she had never spoken a word to in her life. She couldn't believe this was the same person who had done nothing but sleep for the better part of a year.

She wanted to pat herself on the back and scream and run all at the same time.

Instead she kept her face calm and impassive, while her heart tried to pound its way right out of her body.

This was real.

Extreme emotion was something Jade didn't deal well with. It instinctively brought out the need to turn tail and run far, far away. You could tell her almost anything at all in a normal tone and she'd stay composed and supportive, but get too loud or intense and she'd turn into a basket-case. Susan and Toms' anguished screams flashed sharp and clear through Jade's mind, and her stomach churned violently.

Almost as quick as it came in, Jade pushed it out. Those memories were in the no-go zone. Turning her attention back to suit stain guy, Jade felt her jaw clench as she watched his laboured breathing turn into frantic gasps for air.

Oh god, he's hyperventilating.

She shook her head roughly, clenching her trembling hands into tight fists and mashing them against her sides. Now was not the time to lose it. She needed to pull herself together. Jade knew there was no way she could walk away from this now.

Shutting his panicked, anguished face out of her mind, she rummaged through her handbag for the battered brown paper bag that had held her lunch today. This was probably the first time she'd ever been glad she was a poor uni student who couldn't afford to buy lunch.

She walked up to him as purposefully as she could, trying to ignore the fact that her knees were basically knocking together. She hesitated for a good five seconds before she laid her hand gently on his back and held the bag up to his face.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

After a few minutes he calmed down a little, his back softening against her hand, rising and falling with each deep, ragged breath. But when he crumpled the bag in his hand and straightened up to look at her, Jade felt the colour drain from her face. His eyes....they were wilder than an ocean at the height of a storm, and as desperate as the person getting drawn under. There was no calm in his world, only the bare minimum of what he needed to keep breathing.

Jade realised then that she had entered some kind of alternate reality, where all the societal rules she had grown up with were gone. Like Alice after her tumble down the rabbit hole, Jade was in a strange new world. But this was no Wonderland. In this world, she had a virtual stranger in front of her, and she had to touch him and treat him with an intimacy that way surpassed that. She needed to be all-in, to take control. She couldn't help this guy with one foot in normal world and the other in not-Wonderland world.

She swallowed hard, cursing the fear that had her mouth clamped shut and her body frozen solid. Ok, that's enough. This starts now.

Taking a deep breath, Jade took his face in her hands and forced him to look at her. She held him steadily as she made herself take deep even breaths for him to follow.