[i]'What are you?'[/i]

Her first instinct was to fight, to fight the hands that wrapped around her chest. But that was the instinct of a drowning woman, and then suddenly? Suddenly she just wasn't anymore. 

Somehow Bree knew, with a certainty almost as terrifying as the hungry waters all around them, that the arms that held her belonged to the green-eyed man of her nightmares. There was no one else this could possibly be. He was keeping her afloat, both of them afloat, somehow, and even when her head fell back beneath the roaring river waters, he wasn't shoving her there. 

It was Ethan's arms that bought her breath, carried her above her waves, kept her safe from rocks and drowning alike.

It was Ethan's hands around her that kept her life anchored to this world.

He was strong. Bree could feel that beneath her shoulders, her back, her neck in those eternal minutes they hurtled down the whitewaters. But she knew just as certainly that it wasn't mere human strength that was fighting the river for their lives.

It couldn't be.

[i]'What are you, Ethan?'[/i]

Those four words pounded through her head, over and over again, a roar almost as loud as the river itself. Somehow, they weren't shattered against a single rock. Somehow, he never lost his grip on her, pushed her head above the waters with his own body. Ethan refused to let her die though she could feel the unspeakable strain in every last sinew of his arms, the rasp of his breaths at her ear.

The rapids couldn't last forever, and somehow this man saw her through them. Ethan, the green-eyed man who banished her sleep... He'd just carried her through hell on Earth. And as the waters smoothed out, Bree could hear his breaths at her ear, feel the desperation thrumming through the muscles of his arms, his hands, as he clung to her still, keeping her close as if she might yet slip away from him, and be eaten by the river. But the breaths were slower, slower still, no words even now...

Bree's grey eyes opened wide, the sky above clouded and eerily still, as she felt him sink behind her. She twisted in those arms that still would not let her go, breath hissed through her teeth in shock. Those intent, impossibly green eyes were rolled up into his head, the whites bloodshot through, beads of river water mixing with the scarlet trailing from his nose, his mouth and even his ears, like obscenely brilliant ribbons trailing back to the water. 

[i]"It's all right... I got you, Ethan,"[/i] Bree whispered, instinctively wrapping her own arms around his chest, pulling him closer. One hand reached up to pull his head to her shoulder, cradling him there as she kicked to the riverbank through the far kinder, gentler waters that now seemed to push them to safety.

And though he spoke not a word, likely didn't hear a single other thing in this world at all, Bree whispered soothing comfort as powerful strokes of her legs propelled them to the rocky shore. [i]"Shhhhhh... I have you now... I won't let go either... "[/i]

Bree heaved them both to the shore, twisting and pulling as carefully as she could, knowing to the bottom of her soul that ever breath she took from now to the end of her days had been bought by the man in her arms. She struggled to sit up on those rocks, pulling Ethan to lay in her lap. There was no sign the man was conscious, that he saw or heard a thing about him or so much as knew they were no longer in the river. And yet his arms refused to relinquish their hold on her, as if she were somehow his lifeline too, every bit as much as he'd been hers.

She cradled his head in the crook of her arm, and struggled with the other to awkwardly pull her T-shirt over her own. "What are you, Ethan?" she asked softly, almost tenderly as she dabbed at the blood on his face with the only cloth she had, frowning, grey eyes lit with concern.

Could monsters really be angels, if you just scratched the surface?

"What [i]are[/i] you?"