Lost and Found
Title: Lost and Found
Artist: liliaeth
Author: hunters_retreat
Other Pairing(if applicable): Jared/Jensen
Rating: PG
Warnings/Spoilers: Boys in space
Summary: Jensen was the first captain to see this side of the universe. His ship was the most advanced made, an experimental beauty, with a crew ready to explore. Of course, they hadn't counted on second rate backup generators (thanks corporate douche bags!) or a rapidly disappearing crew.
Jared was a space treasure hunter. When he comes across an antique ship, he takes it back to his own and tries to figure out who the ship belonged to (and if he can make a profit from towing it back to port).
Things aren't what they seem and somehow Jared has to put the pieces together because the strange cloud he brought back to the ship might be the key to everything
Author's Note: Written for the j2_reversebang challange. I don't know how many times i've been lucky enough to work with liliaeth but her art always speaks to me and this year was no different :P She's probably tired of me by now (OMG! Another wierd space story??!!) but I get so excited whenever I get to work with her! Hope you enjoy... yes... another wierd space story by hunters_retreat (I SOOOO need an icon for that :P)
Art| Ao3
Jensen stared at the computer screen and wondered what the hell would happen next. It seemed like everything was going wrong on the ship and there was only him and a handful of techs to try to get it all right. Not like their lives depended on it or anything. Not like they were flying in an experimental space fold or anything. Not like the corporate douchebags (who had passed themselves off as futuristic visionaries) who promised state of the art equipment and the best of everything had decided to start cutting corners when no one noticed (who would care if the building material was slightly less quality, right?).
Jensen fumed as he typed furiously to get the main shields up as the backup shields tried to buckle under the radiation of the coming solar flare.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t understood what he’d been getting into. He knew taking this particular mission was a possible (probable, his ex had said with an inappropriate amount of glee) one way ticket. It was the thrill of the unknown that had called Jensen to space though, the thought of being where no one else had ever gone before (Star Trek had that right at least). He was the best at what he did and being the first to captain a ship this far in space wasn’t something he could pass up; no matter how experimental the equipment they were flying was.
The dangers he faced were the unknown and nothing could prepare them for that. However, faulty second rate backup generators and neothermal shielding that couldn’t cut out the radiation it was supposed to, weren’t part of the deal.
He fumed as the generators came back on line and shouted out of joy that he’d managed to salvage another near disaster.
He looked up when there was no answering cheers from the other side of the bridge. He looked over the readings one more time to make sure they were in the clear before he unbuckled his protective belt and got up. He walked down the hallway to the back where engineering was. As he passed each section of the ship it was empty. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves.
They’d started the journey with 37 crew members. Pilots, engineers, biologists, physicists, doctors, support staff, anything and everything they should have needed. A month after the journey began, the first member of the team had gone missing. No sign. No way to track what had happened. Just an empty bunk and a trunk full of things that none of them knew what to do with. No one had planned for murder on the ship so there were no cops, no investigators among them. They did their best to figure out what had happened, but there was no trace.
When it was down to just 15 of them they noticed there was one commonality among the disappearances. They all happened after a radiation event. Every time the shielding failed and the backup generators had to go into effect to try to shield them until the shielding could be fixed, someone disappeared.
There were just 5 of them now. The silence filled Jensen with dread as his heels made a dull thud with each step down the empty hallway.
“Jake?” he called out. The kid hadn’t started out as the Head Engineer but he’d gotten the job pretty quick when the guy had disappeared and Jake had stepped into the vacuum of authority it had caused. Not really a kid, but he was an all shucks, wheat field bred, southern comfort kind of guy and while his genius had him at the top of his field, he was still the youngest member of the team by 7 years.
“Jensen!”
He felt a wave of relief as he walked through engineering to the holding bay. Jensen opened the doors and Jake threw himself out of the room. Jensen barely caught him before the younger man fell on his face.
“Jake? Was there anyone else with you?”
Jake’s eyes were wide as he shook his head. “I saw it, Jensen. I saw them disappear. Just gone… it … they…”
His hands were shaking as he grabbed Jensen. He needed to calm him down before he could start. “Come on. Sit down and tell me what happened.”
The kid was frantic but Jensen grabbed a water and pushed it into Jake’s hands before he let him start. He needed to know what had happened to his crew but he needed Jake to calm down so it was more than ramblings.
Jake took a sip of the water, then closed his eyes and downed the rest of it, like he needed the time to fortify himself.
“I was in the holding bay when the alarms went off. I was running a few tests.”
“And per protocol the doors were sealed,” Jensen said. He understood part of Jake’s fear then. The doors sealed from the outside. If the others had all disappeared Jake would have been locked in the holding bay with no one to let him out. No food. No water. A long, painful death in store for him. If he didn’t disappear like the others.
“Exactly. When the alarm went off Katie came to open the door but, she didn’t make it. She stopped and Jensen, she looked terrified. I could hear the radiation alarms blaring and then she just … it was like she turned to smoke and drifted away. I couldn’t … there was nothing I could do. I didn’t see it all but the room was full of this cloud, colors swirled and,” he shuddered. “There was this noise, not a scream exactly but this… it was awful. And then the whole cloud let out this screech and I swear it tried to attack me. It hit the door and just kept hitting. There was nothing but the smoke of the others and when the radiation alarm hit critical the smoke was gone. The radiation destroyed it completely. Them, completely.”
“What the hell?” Jensen asked.
“I swear, that’s what happened.”
“I don’t doubt you Jake,” Jensen said. A part of him wanted to because people turning into smoke? It was crazy. But Jake wasn’t showing any other signs of psychosis. He was level headed and coherent. “What about the readings you were taking? Did they pick up anything from the … cloud.”
Jake looked down at his hands. “A cloud… a … a soul cloud. That’s what it was. A soul cloud.”
“Jake. I need you here, man. It’s… it’s just us now. Can I count on you?”
“Yeah,” Jake shook his head as if clearing it, then took a deep breath. “Right. The readings. My tablet is in the holding bay.”
“Alright,” Jensen saw the way Jake’s hands shook as he spoke of the room. “I’ll go grab it.”
Jensen walked back into the holding bay and ran a hand across the large rock in the center of the room. It took up half the lab and they’d moved all the mobile tables into other spaces to make room for it. It was almost soft to the touch and left a talc like powder on his hands when he drew them away. They’d captured it from the straggling end of a comet’s tail and the scientists had been going crazy over the non-Earth components. Pure exploration, they’d laughed. Something they knew nothing about, something they could put their own claim to. Jensen had let them at it, glad enough to have something positive to report back to Earth after their first jump through the space fold. The Cosmic Blade (Jensen didn’t name it, he just piloted it.) performed admirably and their first attempt to do a little research had started as a success as well.
It wasn’t for a few more days that the first radiation event happened and all hell broke loose on the Blade.
At the very back of the holding bay was an array of computers and equipment. Jensen didn’t know what any of it did, but he trusted his scientists did. He found the tablet on the floor which spoke of the terror Jake must have felt when the alarms went off. No one would have been that clumsy with the equipment in here otherwise.
He dropped down and picked it up when the entire ship jolted. “Damn it!” he cursed as the radiation alarms blared to life. He ran to the front of the bay in time to see the door close.
“Jake!”
The kid looked at him through the glass, but he continued to type away at the computer. “I think I can get it, but the bay has the best radiation shielding. If I can’t, you’ll still have a chance,” Jake said.
“Jake! Let me out now!”
“The door will open automatically in an hour,” Jake said without looking up. “If anything happens to me, you’ll still…” he stopped mid-sentence and looked at his hand.
To his horror, Jensen watched as Jake began to fade in front of him. Jake began to form into the cloud he’d just told Jensen about. “Jake!” he screamed.
Jake looked up at Jensen and he saw the dawning of realization in Jake’s eyes. He hit the keys to open the door to the holding bay, but there was nothing substantial left to hit it with. He was nothing more than cloud particles.
“The rock! Get to the rock!” Jake’s voice was ghostly, dissipated in some way that Jensen didn’t understand. Jake was gone then, his body turned into the soul cloud that Jake had described. If it wasn’t such a horror, Jensen might have called it beautiful. Colors swirled in some sort of dance to music that Jensen couldn’t hear. He needed to get to Jake, to try to understand, but then the cloud shifted and the full force of it flew at the door.
Get to the rock, Jake had said. Jensen looked around the room and tried to understand. Was it a warning that he knew he was going to attack? No, Jake’s voice had sounded almost hopeful as he’d said it. He had tried to open the door. He’d tried to get himself in there too. When Katie had become a cloud, she’d tried to get in. The rock… Jake needed the rock for some reason.
Jensen couldn’t open the door though. There was no way to open it from the inside. They’d designed it in case of an outbreak or alien contagion. He was trapped inside and Jake was trapped outside.
“Jake!” He ran to the door and banged his fist on it as he watched the cloud on the outside prepare to charge the door one more time. As it rushed towards the door though, the cloud dissipated.
“Jake,” his voice sounded empty even to himself. He banged on the door again, but watched in horror as his own hand began to turn misty. “No, this can’t…”
The rock. Jensen backed away from the door. Jake said, the rock, get to the rock, and there was hope. Jensen felt the cloud taking him over, felt his own body as it left the pull of gravity and became something else. And he had the lightning moment of understanding, the moment of realization that he’d seen in Jake’s eyes. This was the rock. The radiation was killing Jensen and to protect him the rock wanted to change him into something else. It changed him so that it alone could save him. Only none of the others had been able to get to the rock once the change was made. It tried over and over again to save the crew when the shields went down and the radiation killed them. Jensen was the only one with a chance of making it. He rushed to the rock and poured himself into the porous surface until he was part of the core itself.
Radiation destroyed the ship’s engine and the power died around him. He felt the cold seeping in quickly and he did the only thing that he could in that state. He pulled in even tighter to the core.
He tried to investigate it in a way the scientists hadn’t been able to, but Jensen was only a pilot. He knew the rock had given off special properties that had been deemed important but he didn’t know what. He knew it had some sort of life or it wouldn’t have been able to pick up on the danger to him and his crew, but there were no signs of consciousness that he could see. Nothing in his previous state and nothing in this one either. He couldn’t leave this new cage for fear of radiation and there was nothing here for him to find.
In time, Jensen gave up on being found. He gave up on finding anything useful in the rock that surrounded him. Instead, he watched. He waited. And then, he slept. In dreams, he hoped that someday, someone would find him again.
**
He floated in and out of time. It had no meaning as he was. His pain seemed to ebb and flow, his grief over his lost friends and coworkers. If he tried to leave the safety of the rock, he could feel the radiation trying to burn what was left of him.
He stopped trying at some point, hovering on the edge of wakefulness and blessed oblivion. He was safe so long as he kept himself hovering under the surface of the rock. He didn’t know why he stayed, why he continued his existence in this half-life that he was caught in, but he hadn’t been able to give up yet.
Every so often something pinged his consciousness; a passing ship or a nearby meteor. He’d stopped trying to understand what was out there. No matter what it was, it never freed him from his current prison and it never helped him find a way to form his body again.
So when the doors of the holding bay came sliding open, Jensen was taken completely by surprise. He could hear the radiation alarms but the two men that came through the door were in thick space suits with heavy shielding. They didn’t seem in a hurry and after a moment the alarms shut off. A third man came through the door and looked around the bay. With a couple of gestures Jensen watched as they began to work a harness around the rock that held Jensen.
He tried to leave the rock but he felt the radiation still and hid within it again. He had no idea what would happen next but he had no choice but stay and see what happened next.
The harness was closed and Jensen felt himself pulled along as the rock was pulled from the bay by a loader of some sort. The design wasn’t familiar to Jensen and he began to wonder just how long he’d passed out of time in his current state.
He felt a panic begin to rise but there was nothing he could do. The rock and ship together had supported him. What would happen when he left the holding bay? There was no answer and nothing to do but wait and see. He had no way to stop what was happening.
The loader took them away from the holding bay and towards the docking bay. A ship was docked at the far end and Jensen could see them moving towards it. It was an unknown vehicle type and Jensen could almost feel the safety inside the ship’s shields.
He dug himself deeper into the rock to keep from being left behind. The loader docked them into another holding bay on the new ship. The three men came aboard the ship and they secured the rock before closing the bay doors.
Jensen felt the engines around them as they moved away from the ship. He felt a blast of air (it occasionally dawned on him to wonder how he felt or saw anything but he didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of) and realized they were decontaminating the rock. As the spray seeped into the rock, Jensen felt the blackness of oblivion and didn’t have time to wonder if he’d wake again.
On to Part Two
Artist: liliaeth
Author: hunters_retreat
Other Pairing(if applicable): Jared/Jensen
Rating: PG
Warnings/Spoilers: Boys in space
Summary: Jensen was the first captain to see this side of the universe. His ship was the most advanced made, an experimental beauty, with a crew ready to explore. Of course, they hadn't counted on second rate backup generators (thanks corporate douche bags!) or a rapidly disappearing crew.
Jared was a space treasure hunter. When he comes across an antique ship, he takes it back to his own and tries to figure out who the ship belonged to (and if he can make a profit from towing it back to port).
Things aren't what they seem and somehow Jared has to put the pieces together because the strange cloud he brought back to the ship might be the key to everything
Author's Note: Written for the j2_reversebang challange. I don't know how many times i've been lucky enough to work with liliaeth but her art always speaks to me and this year was no different :P She's probably tired of me by now (OMG! Another wierd space story??!!) but I get so excited whenever I get to work with her! Hope you enjoy... yes... another wierd space story by hunters_retreat (I SOOOO need an icon for that :P)
Art| Ao3
Jensen stared at the computer screen and wondered what the hell would happen next. It seemed like everything was going wrong on the ship and there was only him and a handful of techs to try to get it all right. Not like their lives depended on it or anything. Not like they were flying in an experimental space fold or anything. Not like the corporate douchebags (who had passed themselves off as futuristic visionaries) who promised state of the art equipment and the best of everything had decided to start cutting corners when no one noticed (who would care if the building material was slightly less quality, right?).
Jensen fumed as he typed furiously to get the main shields up as the backup shields tried to buckle under the radiation of the coming solar flare.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t understood what he’d been getting into. He knew taking this particular mission was a possible (probable, his ex had said with an inappropriate amount of glee) one way ticket. It was the thrill of the unknown that had called Jensen to space though, the thought of being where no one else had ever gone before (Star Trek had that right at least). He was the best at what he did and being the first to captain a ship this far in space wasn’t something he could pass up; no matter how experimental the equipment they were flying was.
The dangers he faced were the unknown and nothing could prepare them for that. However, faulty second rate backup generators and neothermal shielding that couldn’t cut out the radiation it was supposed to, weren’t part of the deal.
He fumed as the generators came back on line and shouted out of joy that he’d managed to salvage another near disaster.
He looked up when there was no answering cheers from the other side of the bridge. He looked over the readings one more time to make sure they were in the clear before he unbuckled his protective belt and got up. He walked down the hallway to the back where engineering was. As he passed each section of the ship it was empty. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves.
They’d started the journey with 37 crew members. Pilots, engineers, biologists, physicists, doctors, support staff, anything and everything they should have needed. A month after the journey began, the first member of the team had gone missing. No sign. No way to track what had happened. Just an empty bunk and a trunk full of things that none of them knew what to do with. No one had planned for murder on the ship so there were no cops, no investigators among them. They did their best to figure out what had happened, but there was no trace.
When it was down to just 15 of them they noticed there was one commonality among the disappearances. They all happened after a radiation event. Every time the shielding failed and the backup generators had to go into effect to try to shield them until the shielding could be fixed, someone disappeared.
There were just 5 of them now. The silence filled Jensen with dread as his heels made a dull thud with each step down the empty hallway.
“Jake?” he called out. The kid hadn’t started out as the Head Engineer but he’d gotten the job pretty quick when the guy had disappeared and Jake had stepped into the vacuum of authority it had caused. Not really a kid, but he was an all shucks, wheat field bred, southern comfort kind of guy and while his genius had him at the top of his field, he was still the youngest member of the team by 7 years.
“Jensen!”
He felt a wave of relief as he walked through engineering to the holding bay. Jensen opened the doors and Jake threw himself out of the room. Jensen barely caught him before the younger man fell on his face.
“Jake? Was there anyone else with you?”
Jake’s eyes were wide as he shook his head. “I saw it, Jensen. I saw them disappear. Just gone… it … they…”
His hands were shaking as he grabbed Jensen. He needed to calm him down before he could start. “Come on. Sit down and tell me what happened.”
The kid was frantic but Jensen grabbed a water and pushed it into Jake’s hands before he let him start. He needed to know what had happened to his crew but he needed Jake to calm down so it was more than ramblings.
Jake took a sip of the water, then closed his eyes and downed the rest of it, like he needed the time to fortify himself.
“I was in the holding bay when the alarms went off. I was running a few tests.”
“And per protocol the doors were sealed,” Jensen said. He understood part of Jake’s fear then. The doors sealed from the outside. If the others had all disappeared Jake would have been locked in the holding bay with no one to let him out. No food. No water. A long, painful death in store for him. If he didn’t disappear like the others.
“Exactly. When the alarm went off Katie came to open the door but, she didn’t make it. She stopped and Jensen, she looked terrified. I could hear the radiation alarms blaring and then she just … it was like she turned to smoke and drifted away. I couldn’t … there was nothing I could do. I didn’t see it all but the room was full of this cloud, colors swirled and,” he shuddered. “There was this noise, not a scream exactly but this… it was awful. And then the whole cloud let out this screech and I swear it tried to attack me. It hit the door and just kept hitting. There was nothing but the smoke of the others and when the radiation alarm hit critical the smoke was gone. The radiation destroyed it completely. Them, completely.”
“What the hell?” Jensen asked.
“I swear, that’s what happened.”
“I don’t doubt you Jake,” Jensen said. A part of him wanted to because people turning into smoke? It was crazy. But Jake wasn’t showing any other signs of psychosis. He was level headed and coherent. “What about the readings you were taking? Did they pick up anything from the … cloud.”
Jake looked down at his hands. “A cloud… a … a soul cloud. That’s what it was. A soul cloud.”
“Jake. I need you here, man. It’s… it’s just us now. Can I count on you?”
“Yeah,” Jake shook his head as if clearing it, then took a deep breath. “Right. The readings. My tablet is in the holding bay.”
“Alright,” Jensen saw the way Jake’s hands shook as he spoke of the room. “I’ll go grab it.”
Jensen walked back into the holding bay and ran a hand across the large rock in the center of the room. It took up half the lab and they’d moved all the mobile tables into other spaces to make room for it. It was almost soft to the touch and left a talc like powder on his hands when he drew them away. They’d captured it from the straggling end of a comet’s tail and the scientists had been going crazy over the non-Earth components. Pure exploration, they’d laughed. Something they knew nothing about, something they could put their own claim to. Jensen had let them at it, glad enough to have something positive to report back to Earth after their first jump through the space fold. The Cosmic Blade (Jensen didn’t name it, he just piloted it.) performed admirably and their first attempt to do a little research had started as a success as well.
It wasn’t for a few more days that the first radiation event happened and all hell broke loose on the Blade.
At the very back of the holding bay was an array of computers and equipment. Jensen didn’t know what any of it did, but he trusted his scientists did. He found the tablet on the floor which spoke of the terror Jake must have felt when the alarms went off. No one would have been that clumsy with the equipment in here otherwise.
He dropped down and picked it up when the entire ship jolted. “Damn it!” he cursed as the radiation alarms blared to life. He ran to the front of the bay in time to see the door close.
“Jake!”
The kid looked at him through the glass, but he continued to type away at the computer. “I think I can get it, but the bay has the best radiation shielding. If I can’t, you’ll still have a chance,” Jake said.
“Jake! Let me out now!”
“The door will open automatically in an hour,” Jake said without looking up. “If anything happens to me, you’ll still…” he stopped mid-sentence and looked at his hand.
To his horror, Jensen watched as Jake began to fade in front of him. Jake began to form into the cloud he’d just told Jensen about. “Jake!” he screamed.
Jake looked up at Jensen and he saw the dawning of realization in Jake’s eyes. He hit the keys to open the door to the holding bay, but there was nothing substantial left to hit it with. He was nothing more than cloud particles.
“The rock! Get to the rock!” Jake’s voice was ghostly, dissipated in some way that Jensen didn’t understand. Jake was gone then, his body turned into the soul cloud that Jake had described. If it wasn’t such a horror, Jensen might have called it beautiful. Colors swirled in some sort of dance to music that Jensen couldn’t hear. He needed to get to Jake, to try to understand, but then the cloud shifted and the full force of it flew at the door.
Get to the rock, Jake had said. Jensen looked around the room and tried to understand. Was it a warning that he knew he was going to attack? No, Jake’s voice had sounded almost hopeful as he’d said it. He had tried to open the door. He’d tried to get himself in there too. When Katie had become a cloud, she’d tried to get in. The rock… Jake needed the rock for some reason.
Jensen couldn’t open the door though. There was no way to open it from the inside. They’d designed it in case of an outbreak or alien contagion. He was trapped inside and Jake was trapped outside.
“Jake!” He ran to the door and banged his fist on it as he watched the cloud on the outside prepare to charge the door one more time. As it rushed towards the door though, the cloud dissipated.
“Jake,” his voice sounded empty even to himself. He banged on the door again, but watched in horror as his own hand began to turn misty. “No, this can’t…”
The rock. Jensen backed away from the door. Jake said, the rock, get to the rock, and there was hope. Jensen felt the cloud taking him over, felt his own body as it left the pull of gravity and became something else. And he had the lightning moment of understanding, the moment of realization that he’d seen in Jake’s eyes. This was the rock. The radiation was killing Jensen and to protect him the rock wanted to change him into something else. It changed him so that it alone could save him. Only none of the others had been able to get to the rock once the change was made. It tried over and over again to save the crew when the shields went down and the radiation killed them. Jensen was the only one with a chance of making it. He rushed to the rock and poured himself into the porous surface until he was part of the core itself.
Radiation destroyed the ship’s engine and the power died around him. He felt the cold seeping in quickly and he did the only thing that he could in that state. He pulled in even tighter to the core.
He tried to investigate it in a way the scientists hadn’t been able to, but Jensen was only a pilot. He knew the rock had given off special properties that had been deemed important but he didn’t know what. He knew it had some sort of life or it wouldn’t have been able to pick up on the danger to him and his crew, but there were no signs of consciousness that he could see. Nothing in his previous state and nothing in this one either. He couldn’t leave this new cage for fear of radiation and there was nothing here for him to find.
In time, Jensen gave up on being found. He gave up on finding anything useful in the rock that surrounded him. Instead, he watched. He waited. And then, he slept. In dreams, he hoped that someday, someone would find him again.
**
He floated in and out of time. It had no meaning as he was. His pain seemed to ebb and flow, his grief over his lost friends and coworkers. If he tried to leave the safety of the rock, he could feel the radiation trying to burn what was left of him.
He stopped trying at some point, hovering on the edge of wakefulness and blessed oblivion. He was safe so long as he kept himself hovering under the surface of the rock. He didn’t know why he stayed, why he continued his existence in this half-life that he was caught in, but he hadn’t been able to give up yet.
Every so often something pinged his consciousness; a passing ship or a nearby meteor. He’d stopped trying to understand what was out there. No matter what it was, it never freed him from his current prison and it never helped him find a way to form his body again.
So when the doors of the holding bay came sliding open, Jensen was taken completely by surprise. He could hear the radiation alarms but the two men that came through the door were in thick space suits with heavy shielding. They didn’t seem in a hurry and after a moment the alarms shut off. A third man came through the door and looked around the bay. With a couple of gestures Jensen watched as they began to work a harness around the rock that held Jensen.
He tried to leave the rock but he felt the radiation still and hid within it again. He had no idea what would happen next but he had no choice but stay and see what happened next.
The harness was closed and Jensen felt himself pulled along as the rock was pulled from the bay by a loader of some sort. The design wasn’t familiar to Jensen and he began to wonder just how long he’d passed out of time in his current state.
He felt a panic begin to rise but there was nothing he could do. The rock and ship together had supported him. What would happen when he left the holding bay? There was no answer and nothing to do but wait and see. He had no way to stop what was happening.
The loader took them away from the holding bay and towards the docking bay. A ship was docked at the far end and Jensen could see them moving towards it. It was an unknown vehicle type and Jensen could almost feel the safety inside the ship’s shields.
He dug himself deeper into the rock to keep from being left behind. The loader docked them into another holding bay on the new ship. The three men came aboard the ship and they secured the rock before closing the bay doors.
Jensen felt the engines around them as they moved away from the ship. He felt a blast of air (it occasionally dawned on him to wonder how he felt or saw anything but he didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of) and realized they were decontaminating the rock. As the spray seeped into the rock, Jensen felt the blackness of oblivion and didn’t have time to wonder if he’d wake again.
On to Part Two