As promised, here is the first chapter! For any new readers, this is the sequel to my story Arrow of Trust, which I would highly suggest reading first!

For this story, it won't be nearly as action oriented as the last, because I want to focus in more of how the trauma over the years and from recent events has affected them, which is something I don't often see done. Heroes go thought all kinds of physical and emotional pain, that's bound to leave it's mark of the psyche. This will revolve a little more closely around Rex and Kateri's relationship, and hopefully answer any questions I left in the last story(although, feel free to ask them anyways, because I may have missed something, or it may not have a place in this story and I can just PM the answer).

I'll have more at the bottom, I hope you guys enjoy the first chapter!

Smack, smack, thud.

Smack, smack, thud.

Smack, smack-

"Son of a bitch." Standing, the girl went to retrieve the little red ball from where it had bounced to across the room when it slipped through her loose grip. Sighing, she set the ball down on the ledge of the window, overlooking the vast, flat desert from several dozen stories up in the air.

Really, it wasn't that bad. It wasn't exactly the apartment she'd had in Arizona, but it definitely could have been worse. Hers was one of very few rooms with a window, and it had taken quite a bit of talking to allow her to get it, the number one condition being that it stayed remotely locked at all times. You know, because everyone can escape out a window that's about ten stories off the ground on a completely smooth wall. It was also directly across from Rex's room, something she'd put up very little fight to. Honestly, it was nice to know that he was only just across the hall, and it had satisfied White's need to have some kind of supervision for her.

She flicked off the shade from the holographic touchpad on the glass, the dark tint fading in less than a second. She closed her eyes against the bright glare, and just simply stood in the warm sunshine for a minute, allowing it to heat her skin. No, it wasn't that bad, but it didn't change the fact that it could feel like a prison sometimes.

She sighed at the soft knock at her door, not even needing to turn to know who it was. "Yes, Rex?"

The door slid aside to reveal the Latino, chewing his lip nervously as he hesitantly stepped inside. That had been another condition, the door stayed unlocked at all times, though she was able to lock it. However, it set off an alarm if it stayed locked for more than thirty consecutive minutes.

"You don't have to act like a kicked puppy, I said you could come in anytime as long as you knocked first." she said, not turning. "You did, so you can come in."

"Sorry, it still kinda feels like I'm invading your privacy to just walk into your room." he said sheepishly, eyes trained on the girl. Though her back was to him, he was still distracted by the golden glow around the upper half of her body cast by the sun. He found her like this frequently, standing out the window. "Um, I just came to tell you that your late for your session with Doc."

Another sigh. "I know, I was hoping no one would notice if I ditched today."

"On Doc's watch? Not a chance." he chuckled, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "Look, I know you're sick to death of hearing this, but those sessions are to help you, Kateri."

"Yeah, I am kinda sick of hearing it, though it's usually String Bean or Holiday saying it." she said, flicking the ball at the wall once again in a motion Rex was more than familiar with. "It's been almost a month, Rex, they have to loosen the leash as some point, or I'm going to start pulling."

"I know, but I can tell you from experience that you're going to be pulling for a while before they do anything, and even then, it won't be much." he said, moving to sit on the edge of her bed. "And it's been a month since we got everyone out, but you've only been awake two weeks."

Initially, the girl had been in a coma as her body took time to get itself running properly, giving Rex far more anxiety than he ever thought he would have to deal with in the process. She had been very confused and disoriented, but the girl had shed that quickly, asking to see her father almost as soon as it clicked what was going on. It played through his head in perfect clarity, something he wished he could just erase…

(*)

Rex had refused to leave the room, regardless of what anyone said or did, even deaf to White's, ultimately hollow, threats. That being said, he was the first to know when the girl stirred, thirteen days after the lab had gone down. Now it was a massive sinkhole that conspiracy theorists were just tearing apart.

"Kateri?" He was at her bedside almost instantly after she shifted and let out a soft murmur.

Her head lolled back and forth a couple times as her eyes slowly began to blink open, revealing the soft green to Rex for the first time since the facility. "...nngghh...t'aa shoodi, da'alzhin, not now…" Her voice, although rough and scratchy from disuse, had a sharp tone to it, as if she was speaking to someone she did not want to see.

"Kateri?" Rex sat on the edge of her cot, waiting for her to come to her senses enough to recognize him. She blinked a few more times, reaching up with her right hand to clumsily rub at her eyes...oddly clumsy, it was almost as if she couldn't find her own face.

"Hnn, Rex?" she hummed. "Wh-Where 'm I?"

"Shh, relax, you're safe." he said, pushing lightly against the tops of her arms since her shoulders were still wrapped in bandages. He reached over and pressed the call button on the table beside her to alert someone that she was awake.

"Rex, what's...going on?" she asked, trying to sit up, but the Latino's grip was firm.

"Stay down, you're pretty messed up. Let Doc take a look at you before you start moving around." he said, keeping his voice quiet and even. Holiday had told him to keep her calm and still if she woke up while he was there, something pretty likely since he never left.

"Doc, who's…" He could practically hear the click in her head when the pieces of what had happened fell into place. Her eyes became distant and she leaned back without protest. "Where's my dad?"

Rex remained quiet, eyes falling to the ground. "He's...getting help."

An elusive answer and they both knew it.

"Is he awake?" the continued, too tired to snap at the other teen to give her straight answers.

"No."

"Is he okay?"

"..."

"Rex, please don't do this." she asked, her voice a whisper. "Don't give me these half baked answers and half truths, I really don't have the energy for incomplete answers."

Before he could answer, Holiday walked into the room, a clipboard in her hand. "You're awake."

"So I've noticed. I take it you're the infamous Doctor Holiday?" she asked.

"The one and only. You seem to know who I am, but I don't know much about you." the woman said, walking closer and fiddling with the machines she can connected to.

"I don't believe that." Kateri said matter-of-factly. "If you're half as smart as Rex led me to believe, you've dug up every single thing about me you could possibly find."

"There wasn't much." Holiday said, not bothering to deny it. "Everything about you was buried deep, and there's almost no record of you even existing after the age of eleven. Miss Begay, you've proven to be very elusive."

"I don't know if a sorry is the right thing to say here or not." Kateri told her.

"Then start with one for the mess you got one of Providence's best into." the older woman said with a stern tone. "And you'd better have another good one for all the worry it put everyone through around here."

Guilt weighed heavy in her eyes and she looked down at the sheet tucked around her body.

"Doc, maybe ease up-"

"No. I'm not going to just wait by until she's feeling 'up to' explaining this." Holiday's own green eyes turned to Rex, eyes still filled with enough hurt and pent up frustration that Rex felt about two inches tall. "You were gone for fifty seven days, and I only heard from you once, a text, that didn't do anything but tell me you were alive."

"I'm sorry Doc-"

"You have Noah lie for you, which lasted all of two days, I might add."

"Doc-"

"And when we do finally find you, you've been down in this underground lab that no one knew even existed, much less what was going on, bleeding and injured. Then, you turn around and go back into it to go after this girl, the one who got you into this whole mess in the first place, coming up in near hysterics because-"

"Stop."

Rex and Holiday both looked over at the Navajo, Holiday speaking first. "Excuse me? You aren't in any position to be telling me to stop."

"You're right, I'm not." she relented, still refusing to look up. "But don't take that out of him. He went because of me, because I asked him to. I'm the reason he was gone and I'm the reason he got hurt."

"I'm also the reason you're alive." he cut in. "You would have died down there."

"Maybe I would have, but that doesn't excuse what I put everyone else through. I'm not dead, and I'm not going to let someone else take the fall for my actions." She finally glanced up, locking eyes with Rex for a moment before looking over at Holiday. "So don't stand here and yell at him for things that are all on me. He doesn't deserve that."

"Rex, can you leave us for a bit?"

"But-"

"Twenty minutes."

He didn't respond for a moment, then just turned and walked out of the room.

"So." Holiday began once he was gone. "You took quite a beating."

"I guess."

"You could have gotten him killed." There it was, right to the point.

"I know. Don't think I don't."

"He cut communications with us so we wouldn't follow him. You knew that he had people that cared about him, that would go looking, but you let him shut us out anyways, just so he could help you."

"I don't need you to tell me about the selfishness of it, I promise I've already thought of it first." she said bitterly. "Let me make something clear, I don't like other people having to step into the line of fire with me, and you bet your ass I wouldn't have asked him or anyone else if I had another choice. But you saw how many people we saved, how many lives were at stake that were saved."

"The lives of many are worth more than one, right?"

"Only if the one is mine. Otherwise, no, I don't think so." Especially not his.

"Then why ask him?"

"I...hadn't intended to, but the things he can do would be something that could make or break it. They were. If not for him, if not for any one of them, we would have failed." She licked her lips, chewing the chapped skin. "But I wasn't trying to just drag him to his death, it that's what you're thinking."

Holiday hadn't, people don't try to get someone killed on a rescue mission. "I'm not happy with you. Before I got that call from one of your friends, I'm assuming he was, I didn't have a very high opinion of you whatsoever, the best thing I could say about you being that Rex seemed to have some degree of trust for you. Even after that, I may not have helped you if Rex hadn't carried you on board, practically begging me to do something."

Kateri's eyes slid closed, those words hurting her more than anything. "I'm so sorry for that. I can't even imagine-"

"You have a lot to be sorry for, but nearly dying isn't one one them, and it wasn't something I was going to let happen, not after what I saw with Rex. He's got a thick skin, it takes a lot to push him to that point. He really cares about you, and I'm not going to let him get even more hurt over petty feelings. Regardless of how I feel about the situation, I'm not going to just leave someone to die, even after all that."

Kateri remained silent.

" I think this it's best this conversation take a break, your stress levels don't need to get too high." Holiday said, putting her clipboard down and beginning to get supplies to change her bandages.

"Yeah." she said numbly.

"You're a very stubborn young lady, you know." Holiday said, writing down more numbers from the machines connected to the girl. "There were several times that, honestly, no one was sure if you'd pull through. A normal person wouldn't have."

"I'm not exactly normal." Her next words were mumbled. "Not exactly a lady, either."

"No, you aren't." She moved to slide as arm behind the girl's back, carefully helping her sit up. "But then again, most normal people haven't been tortured like that, so I'm sure you're pretty resilient."

The archer's fingers trailed over a few of the scars on her side absently. She was wearing a sports bra so Holiday had easy access to all of her wounds. Her shoulders were nothing but tape and gauze that hurt every time the moved in the slightest. But then again, just about everything did.

"Probably gonna regret asking, but how bad is it?"

"Well, for starters, your shoulders are healing remarkably slowly on an external level, it took two days just to get the bleeding to stop. You lost quite a bit of blood, but we got it under control. A few of the tendons have been cut in your left shoulder and those are going to take some time to heal, though they seem to be healing at a regular pace for some reason. It's going to affect your motor skills, so keep the physical strain to a minimum."

"What is it going to affect, exactly?" she asked. "Is it a 'can't pick stuff up' kind of bad, or a 'fingers don't bend right' kind of bad?"

"Both are close, actually." Holiday replied. "The tendons are connected to the ones in your arms, and while those are intact, the tension is gone. Your fingers wouldn't have much pressure if you closed them, so holding things will be difficult for a while. It will take about ten weeks to fully heal, so I'd say keep any kind of physical activity to a minimum."

"If that's true, how was I able to shoot my bow?" Kateri asked. She remembered having a hard time keeping hold of her bow, but hadn't thought much of it.

"Assuming you're right handed, I would think it's because you didn't need as solid of a grip on it, but I couldn't tell you for sure. Adrenaline can work miracles." she replied.

"What about the others? Are they okay? Is Alice doing better? Is...Is my father…?" Questions tumbled from her mouth one after another.

"She's fine, she woke up a few days after she got here. After a little tinkering I managed to get her stabilized and reverse some of the effects of whatever was done to her. She's still here, you know, recovering, so is Kira. The others were released, though, once I'd disabled the disks. They couldn't be safely removed, not fully, but I gutted them so they can't ever work again."

"That's good-wait, you said you reversed it?" Her brain came to a screeching halt.

"Don't get too excited, I couldn't fix her nanites, or yours." At her shocked look, Holiday elaborated. "Rex told me what happened. Because of that be had to be careful what we hooked you up with, and that's why you don't have a heart monitor. Acrylic or ceramic needles, polymer braces, nothing metal."

"Braces?"

She nodded. "Your left ankle has a hairline fracture, likely from when you kicked Rex back. He told me it had been injured before then as well and was probably still fragile."

"Great. So I'm still stick as this walking spark plug and my ankle is messed up again. Fun." She leaned on one of her hands as Holiday unwrapped the gauze from her shoulders. "What about my dad?"

Holiday was quiet for a moment. "He's...not good. We have him stable, but his diaphragm collapsed. Whatever hit him had some kind of acidic venom that ate away at the muscle and we couldn't stop it before it couldn't support his breathing anymore. He's on a ventilator and has been in a coma ever since he got here."

The girl had become stiff beneath her. "Is..Is there even a chance?"

Realistically, no, and Holiday got the feeling she knew that before she asked. "It's possible he could wake up and live out his life attached to the ventilator, but he'll never be able to breathe on his own."

Kateri just nodded.

Pulling away the last of the gauze, the Native American girl turned to look at the wounds. Honestly, the scars would be small, the six on the back of her shoulders getting lost in the others. Stitches held the skin together in a suture less than two inches long, but the flesh was still bright red and stung.

"You're on a few painkillers, but we didn't keep the too high while you were under. We'll up the dosage now that you're coherent." Holiday told her, dabbing at the wounds with antiseptic.

"Don't bother." she said, looking at her hands. There were a few red patches, probably healing electrical burns, but they seemed to be healing remarkably well. "It's just pain, I don't need it."

Holiday raised an eyebrow. "You have eight deep punctures in your shoulders, a resprained ankle, over three dozen other cuts on your body, internal bruising everywhere else and all kinds of hyperextended muscles. I'm surprised you've got the composure you do."

"I've felt worse. This is nothing." she said, picking at a loose thread on the blanket. "Have you ever been shocked, I mean really shocked?"

Holiday hesitated, then went back to wrapping and taping gauze.. "No, I suppose I haven't."

"Every nerve in your body, every last one, turns into its own nuclear blast, like acid someone boiled in the sun. You aren't sure if you're melting or burning alive from the inside out. No sight, no hearing, only red and white until it's all black. Pain is insignificant." She tugged the thread free from the blanket with two tiny, muffled snaps. "After wishing you could go back to the torture, because it was almost pleasant, getting to a point you're not sure if you're even alive or dead anymore…"

"You almost were."

They both turned to where Rex stood in the doorway. "Twenty minutes are up."

He and Holiday seemed to have a silent conversation for a moment before the woman nodded, gathering her things and quietly leaving.

"I almost was what?" Kateri finally asked, breaking the silence.

"Dead." He sat down beside her bed, fingers laced and looking at the floor. "For three days after you got here, your heart would just...stop sometimes, and no one knew why. You kept going into cardiac arrest and Holiday said if it didn't stop soon, your heart could just collapse. It finally did, but your pulse is too fast and there's a possibility it could happen again."

Brows furrowed, she lifted a hand to her chest, feeling that her heartbeat was, indeed, much faster than it should have been, as if she'd been sprinting moments before. Rex's eyes stayed on the floor as he kept talking.

"When all that electricity was running through you, it made your heart stop. If I hadn't gotten you out when I did…

"Rex." He finally looked up at her, this time her eyes clear and aware. "I'm alive. I'm alive because of you. Nothing you told me is going to change, so dwelling on it won't solve anything now." She reached for ward and took his hand, ignoring the spasms of pain all over her body, and laid it on her chest. "Look. My heart is beating. I'm okay, I'm right here in front of you, and I don't plan to go anywhere."

She felt the slightest tremble in his hand. "I was so afraid. You weren't moving, weren't breathing...I thought I was too late."

The shake to his voice was like a hot, rusted knife right to her soul, and her vision began to swim. "But you weren't. You were the hero, just like you're supposed to be."

He watched as one small drop slid from her eyes, falling onto the red and orange sleeve of his jacket, before vanishing. He stood and carefully slid next to her, wrapping his arms around the wounded girl, who seemed so small in that moment as she just leaned into his chest, the light scent of bananas wafting over her. He stroked her hair with one hand, the motion soft and soothing.

Her next question made his stomach sink. "Where are Ema, Salem and Abe?"

"I don't know." he finally said. "No one's seen them since that night."

"Did they make it out?"

"I don't know." he repeated. "But Providence has been crawling all over where it was, and the one in Arizona, and no one's found them so they could have. If anyone could have made it out of there, it would be them."

She nodded. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"...everything. Trusting me, helping me...saving me. You saved my life. If that's not a hero, I don't know what is." She shifted a bit, leaning into his chest a bit more.

"Maybe I don't want to be a hero to you. Maybe I just want to be a friend."

The dam broke and tears flowed silently down her cheeks. "Right now, I just don't want you to let go."

He didn't. Rex held the girl until she fell asleep in his arms, and even after that, he didn't let go.

So yeah, most of this was a flashback. I hadn't intended for it to be so long, but as I kept going, I quickly realized it wasn't something I could cover in a few paragraphs, but I also didn't want to have that be the starting point so I could skip past the boredom of her being in intensive care for several chapters.

But like I said before, this won't be quite as action oriented because I think it needs to dig little deeper into the PTSD and other mental trauma people suffer from leading those sort of lives. That being said, I promise this isn't going to be just fluff and therapy, I like to think this story will still be plenty interesting.

Please leave me a review and tell me what you thought, and any other questions you want answered in this story(even if you already think it's something I'm going to include, I don't like doing the things people expect:))

Thanks for reading, I'll see you all next Tuesday!