Belle drifted up to consciousness, her eyes blinking away the ebbing haze of the ether to find bare ceiling where Jack's fiercely determined eyes had been seemingly moments ago. Gone was the surgery, replaced with a private room surrounded by family, save the one person she longed to see. Instinctively, Belle turned her head to the right, where she had last seen Jack, had last felt his touch on her face.
Through the observation window—breathing heavily yet somehow frozen in anxious anticipation, his quick, clever hands still red with her blood and now manacled—his eyes met hers. And as his name flew from her lips, his fear swallowed into relief, writ plain in his unguarded smile and brimming eyes. Her mother’s hands gripped her own left hand tightly, endeavoring to pull her attention back into the room, but Belle's eyes hung on Jack and her right hand reaching out, her whole body, beckoned him.
Unwilling to deny her anything within his ability, Jack slipped quietly into the room by the door behind Rainsford and her father and fell easily to his knees at her bedside, taking her hand between his own bloody hands to press tightly to his lips. Dimly she could feel her mother's dumbstruck fury simmering to her left, but Jack's trembling lips against her fingers wet with her own blood and his tears cast all else aside. Their eyes in silent communion remained fixed on each other.
Belle uncurled her fingers against his beloved face: brushing through unnumbered tears, her fingertips caressing his cheek, his jaw, his ear, as the heel of her hand came to rest half across his lips. Jack's right hand remained pressing hers against his mouth while the fingers of his left returned home to the pulse point at her wrist. The way he tenderly kissed into her palm and his warm eyes shone with joy at the steady drum of her heartbeat was indescribably dear.
“I love you, too,” Belle breathed, a reply that had lodged in her throat when the pain had stolen her breath just before he had kissed her and then anesthetized her, and had been waiting on her tongue since. Words she could only now say because of his love, his devotion and peerless skill.
Distantly she heard Fanny gasp in delight somewhere near the foot of her bed—her mother's teeth ground faintly.
Jack's welling, attentive eyes were all she cared to see.
Far too soon Belle was slipping again below the tide of unconsciousness, hoping, perhaps against reason, that Jack would be by her side where he belonged when next she emerged.
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