It was an awkward business, coming back from the dead.

Not that it had really felt like that to Yana, which was likely where the awkwardness stemmed from. Oh, of course she had thought she was going to die. Made her peace with it, even. But as hazy and confusing as the past few days were in her head, she didn’t remember actually properly dying. That seemed like the kind of experience you’d remember.

Either way, she woke to the sight of Mig, the hardiest medic she’d ever met, sobbing violently on a stool next to her. When she tentatively asked what the problem was, he gave her a bone-crushing hug and told her that she’d been assumed dead for the past five years. The war was over. Everyone believed she’d died saving the world.

It really was a lot to take in. For both of them, in different ways. 

“You’re still a fucking disaster though,” he said when he pulled back. “Would have done less damage if you’d put yourself through a blender.”

Now that was a tone she was familiar with. “Would have probably hurt less too,” she complained and gracelessly flopped back into her pillows.

“You came in through the Winklewoods?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you leave any of the woods there? Because I must have dug most of them out of your knees.”

An ugly snort burst out of her before she could help it. It hurt her chest, but it felt good. It felt normal. “I did leave some in the escape tunnel.”

His laugh was still a bit wobbly. “That one’s out of use anyway.”

And just like that, normal was over. For the first time, Yana allowed herself to look at Mig properly. It had always been easy to read the age and stress in the lines on Mig’s tanned skin. There were more of them now, bunched around his brown eyes and the corners of his mouth. His formerly red curls were now entirely grey. But his face and figure were fuller – the last time she’d seen Mig, he had been haggard and overworked, with circles carved into the skin beneath his eyes. He seemed softer, now.

“You look well,” she said hoarsely.

“You don’t,” he replied, but turned his face away to wipe at it. “Where have you been?”

That was a question Yana also dearly wanted to know the answer to. “Winklewoods,” she said.

Mig turned her way again only to gently poke a part of her shoulder that wasn’t injured. “I meant before that.”

Yana closed her eyes. “I’m not really sure. I remember running, from the explosion, I think, in the bay. But I couldn’t really see. And then I woke up in the Winklewoods.”

Mig’s stool creaked as he shifted a bit. They sat in silence, until he cleared his throat. “In five years, that’s all you remember?”

She closed her eyes a bit tighter to force the tears back. “Yeah. It feels like it’s been a couple of days.”

The stool creaked again and now she could feel Mig hovering over her. Gently, he ran a hand over her head. For all that Mig was a hardass, for all that he verbally prodded and bantered with her, his hands were always careful.

“Could you open your eyes for me?” His voice came from just above her, so close that his breath stirred at her hair. She blinked a couple of times and tried to focus in on him.

“I’ve been monitoring you for a concussion,” he said with a frown, and tilted her head so she was staring at the overhead light. At least the hospital still had the bare white LEDs. “You did hit your head, but your pupils are dilating normally, and I see no other indications so far.”

Yana nodded, and his hand dropped away from her face. “You do look… oddly young,” he added.

She tilted her head at him, still not sure her voice wouldn’t betray her.

“It’s been five years. You look fucking terrible, but not much older.”

Yana hadn’t even really thought about what she must look like, yet. The last time she had seen herself in the mirror was in that horrible room, with every surface mirrored at a different angle. It made her ill to think about. Maybe she really did have a concussion.

“I… I did have trouble with my eyes, at first,” she croaked. “Don’t know if it was my pupils.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I first woke up. Not here, in the woods. I don’t know how much of it was that it was night, but everything was blurry and black and white. It took a while for my hearing to come back, too. At the time, I thought it was because of the explosion.”

Mig had pulled up a clipboard from the bedside table and scribbled a few notes. “Interesting. I was actually going to ask about the explosion when you mentioned it just now. Where were you in relation to it?”

Yana hummed and tried to think back. The memory of waking up was loudest in her head, but she pushed through it, past the confused stumbling and the terror of feeling autumn leaves under her hands when it was summer. She forced her thoughts onwards, past waking up blind, past the burning light and force tossing her body through the air. “I…”

Ejecting Jo from his aircraft seat when she realised she couldn’t steer the craft out of its route. Helplessly watching as she was dragged back to the bay, back over the water, back towards [enemy place]. Trading fire with the other crafts to cover Jo’s escape. Getting hit and ejecting her own seat, only to be caught in a tree with a broken seatbelt watching the craft spiral into the buildings.

“I was right there,” she said, almost wondrously. “I was stuck in a tree because my seatbelt jammed when I ejected. I saw it go down. There’s no way I could have survived that.” She looked down at her hands. The parts that weren’t covered in bandages, plasters, and two formidable IV tubes were bruised purple. Her arms were equally as bad. But none of the pieces of skin she could see were burnt.

“Why am I not covered in burns?” she asked. “I was right there. It was right in front of me.”

“There were a couple of burns on your back,” Mig said slowly. “But they looked a bit more… deliberate.”

“Yeah, I remember getting those,” she replied impatiently, “but that was before, before I got out. This was, I was looking right at the centre, and I couldn’t get away.”

Mig pursed his lips and took a few more notes. “You were tortured, then.” It wasn’t a question. He could probably read it in her injuries. Maybe Niko had told him years ago.

“Sure, but that’s not the point right now,” she said. “The point is, how did I get away, and where have I been the past five years?”

“Maybe we can figure that out.” He flipped a few sheets of the clipboard. “Your injuries are still new. I’m treating some that are only about a week old. If you can remember what [enemy] did to you, maybe we can find evidence of treatment that can help us.”

Her stomach turned. “Do you think someone else has hurt me recently, then?”

“I’m afraid it’s a possibility, yes. I hate to ask this, but can you recall where you were injured before the explosion?”

Yana shuddered. “If it helps.”

It wasn’t like she didn’t remember. It had been difficult to forget, especially when it turned out that the escape plan was to swim through the bay. She’d been just stable enough to run without drawing attention to herself. Swimming… well. There was no way she’d have survived it alone. Almost didn’t.

She pulled the thin, sweaty sheet further up her legs and gripped it tight, until the needles in the backs of her hands twinged in protest. Her right pinky was strange and stiff and painful. “The stomach was the worst,” she began and cringed at the reedy sound of her voice. “There was, they, well. They stabbed me when they first found me. It was ugly. They had to stop and let it heal a bit. It reopened when we got in the water, I think.”

Mig nodded. She was grateful that he had his eyes firmly locked on the clipboard. Reciting this made her feel exposed, ashamed, though she didn’t quite know why. It would be worse, if he was looking at her too. “Jo had mentioned it.”

Jo. She wanted to ask where he was, how he’d taken everything. She’d never seen him so angry, and for all he knew, that had been their last interaction. But this wasn’t the time. “They burned my back,” she continued and swiped at her eyes. “Slowly. And they’d… they’d sit me on a chair and just hit at me. Sometimes I’d been in this mirrored room, and they’d leave, and all I could do was sit there and watch myself from all different angles, I…” she gasped for breath, tried to laugh. “That’s not an injury, I guess. I don’t know. My nose bled quite a lot. I think they broke my pinky finger. And they burned my back in places.”

Mig’s pen scratched faster and faster on the paper, until he set the whole clipboard to the side. “Shit,” he said, and reached for the uninjured shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Captain.”

Yana pressed the balls of her hands into her eyes and tried to breathe. “Shit just about covers it,” she said wetly.

For the second time today, and for the second time ever, Mig pulled her into a hug. She set her forehead down on his shoulder and squeezed her eyes shut. “This is so abominably weird,” she mumbled through the lump in her throat.

His shoulder twisted a bit as he rearranged one of the IV tubes away from his arms. “Which part?”

“You, hugging me.”

This time the shoulder shook as he laughed. “You’re right, that’s fucking weird. It’s been a weird day.”

“Because I came back from the dead and forgot the past five years?”

“I’m not sure you did.”

She pulled back a bit too quickly and hissed at the way it tugged at all the hurting parts of her torso. “What do you mean?”

Mig helped settle her back against the pillows. The wrinkles in his face were scrunched into a familiar worried frown. “The injuries you described match up perfectly with what I observed when you came in. You also have a mighty bruise across your torso which I’ll assume was the seatbelt, and the woods did a great job shredding your arms and legs to bits. But all of this is recent. There’s no way your stomach has looked like this for five years.”

Automatically, Yana looked down, but all she saw was lengths of white bandage. Her head was starting to throb. “So…”

“I don’t know.” With a heaving sigh, Mig reached up and ran a hand through his wiry grey curls. “Makes no fucking sense.”

Her wounds were recent. Everything was odd, and the past few days were spread across her memories like sticky, rancid slime. By all accounts, she should have been blown to bits five years ago along with the rest of [place].

“Wait.” Her mouth was moving before her brain could make sense of the thought that was arranging itself. “Do they know what caused the explosion?”

Mig shook his head. “We thought you rigged something before you left. Something you had to return to.”

She shook her head, and her heartbeat began to shiver the edge of her vision. “No, no, I didn’t have time, I thought… they said so many things while they were at it, I didn’t think it was real, I thought they were messing with my head, but…”

“What are you saying, Captain? One thought at a time.”

Somewhere, the sound of a door opening caught at the edges of her perception. “They were torturing me and I thought they were planting information, so I’d escape and feed back false intel. It was so stupid, I didn’t think it would… it was insulting, almost, how dumb they thought I was.”

“What did they say?”

“Something about time,” she said, cringing at the stupidity of the phrase as it came out of her mouth. “They said something about turning back time.”