Susan gave Reid a playful slap on the arm. "What's up, doc? Really? I don't see you for weeks, and that was what you decided to go with?"

Did she say weeks? Didn't she mean days? Eh, it didn't matter. Reid grabbed her and pulled her into his lap, squeezing her tight. "I'll have you know it was all your daughter's idea. Blame Sara, I'm innocent."

She laughed - a beautiful, bubbly tone that washed away everything else in the world. The laugh was also a bit raspy, the same way it sounded when Susan overworked herself. Reid brought a hand to her face, stroking the ridges from the surgical mask with his thumb. Sara was still at his side, leaning into his arm. Reid had his family again. Everything was perfect.

"You should rest a bit, Sue." He said softly. "We can all rest a bit."

Susan pressed her cheek into his hand and sighed through her nose.

"That sounds great - but I should finish here. The next wave will start soon, and if I'm not done with everyone, patients are going to pile up. These people need me."

Reid felt his wife breathe. With herculean effort, he stopped himself from saying he needed her, too.

They stayed that way for a bit - his family just holding one another, content to simply be close. But then things started to go sideways.

"Dad!" Sara yelped. "Are you bleeding?"

Reid looked down - his new jeans had a wet red patch the size of a drink coaster. It was probably from one of the bites or the stabs he'd taken during the fighting. In either case, it was an injury he hadn't had time to heal.

Susan jumped out of his embrace and wheeled on him.

"What? Where's he hurt? Show me!"

Sara pointed out the injury, and Susan leapt to action. She put both hands to his bleeding wound, and brought forth a torrent of energy.

Reid had lost track of how many wounds he'd had to mend using his self-healing. There were the clean ones, the ragged ones - ones where bone was broken and some where the muscle felt like it was gone entirely. But they all had things in common. Healing himself hurt. It burned, it ached, and it gave him a headache that always threatened to knock him on his ass. He'd come to associate the very concept of healing with pain.

Which was why - when Susan's magic reached his wound - he gasped.

It was warm. Not like the heat that burned when he worked on himself, but the sensation of a cozy blanket on a cold winter's day. It was stepping through the doors of a warm bakery after being stuck in cool fall rain. The first sip of hot cocoa after shoveling snow - the one that felt like it thawed you. It was serene.

The sensation ran over his skin, stopping at each injury to knit him back together. There was no pain - only warmth, and light. Susan's hands glowed with power, and the spots she healed echoed that glow as she passed over them. Reid felt so calm, he could fall asleep. Muscles he didn't know were tensed unclenched and mended. He lost himself in the feeling of her healing - and all too soon, Susan was done. She breathed heavy, the glow slowly fading from her hands. Reid's vision felt fuzzy, like he was still about to fall asleep.

That feeling lasted until he saw what his wife was doing. One hand was on her hip, and the other was balled in a half fist, tucked back and almost touching her shoulder. Her mouth was a flat line, and her feet were shoulder width apart. This was bad. This was very, very bad.

'The stance' was a terrifying thing. Reserved for only the worst of lectures and the most indefensible arguments, Reid had seen it dozens of times over the course of his relationship and marriage with Susan. Reid had gotten very good at breaking tension and making up with his wife over the years - but there was no solution to the stance. It was unbeatable.

"Reid. Oliver. Calderwall."

Oh shit. Oh fuck. Oh shit. Full name. This was a full-name-level stance.

"You walked, into this building. You saw your daughter, and me. Took a shower, ate a meal, put on some new clothes. And you didn't once think to mention that you were seriously injured-" She gestured to his pants - "and literally still bleeding!?"

Reid held up his hands. "It really wasn't that bad, I-"

"Wasn't that bad!?" Susan was half shouting. "I just healed you, Reid, I know exactly how many punctures and cuts you had, and I know you had serious blood loss, and I know your muscles were so strained and so rigid - you were close to having your entire body lock up on you. So tell me, Reid - what exactly wasn't that bad?"

It was a trap. It was an obvious trap, and he should say nothing. That's right, saying nothing was the best option here. Except Reid's mouth moved anyway.

"Sue, I promise I'm fine. Those cuts don't even come close to how bad I was in the forest. After most of those fights I really was in rough shape. So yeah - compared to that, I really didn't think anything was bad."

Susan's eyes narrowed. Reid had activated the trap. He was about to be raked over the coals for downplaying his injuries to his wife - which, in hindsight with her being a nurse and now a healer, was a bad idea.

But like an angelic savior, a timer buzzed nearby. Commotion went around the room, and James - he'd learned the man's identity from Mark - ran in and barked out orders.

"That's wave nine, people! Defenders to the wall! Runners, get going! Remember - two medics for triage, the rest stay here! Let's go, people!" He jogged over to Susan, like a mouse hopping into the jaws of a lion. "Susan, it's time to get back to work. Break is over." He ignored her eyes boring into his skull and focused on Reid. "I'm James, if you haven't heard. If you're up for it, we could use your help on the wall. You - you could help keep a lot of people safe."

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

Susan's voice was calm, and dripped with a sweet venom.

"Reid, dear - you're going to tell me exactly what happened in the forest." She turned to James. "Which he's going to do after he spends the next hour or two resting."

Reid started to protest, but she wheeled back at him. Her voice rose as she spoke. "I just got you back. I don't care if you feel fine now. I don't care that, somehow, you managed to triple your muscle mass in the middle of the woods. I don't care if you can fight monsters, Reid. Unless the wall's going to break down, you stay here. You just went straight from brain cancer to weeks of fighting beasts in the woods. You are going to rest. Then we are going to talk."

Sara had risen to her feet. "Dad has CANCER!? That's what you were hiding from me?"

Realization spread over Susan's face - righteous anger morphing into horrified shock. She stumbled over her words as she rushed to answer her daughter.

"He did - and we were going to tell you, sweetheart. We were going to do it as soon as we got back from the trip. But your dad - the awakening cured everyone, right? So he's fine now. Cancer free! Everything's fine now."

Sara stared at her mother. Susan shifted uncomfortably on her feet.

There wasn't going to be a good time to have this conversation, Reid knew. There would never be a right moment. If he waited an hour or a week, it would be painful and messy. It would suck.

But letting them both think everything was better would be cruel. He couldn't do that. Giving them false hope and tearing it away was so much worse than just coming out with it. So he did.

"Uh, yeah. Funny story about that, actually - "

#

Susan was pale.

"I don't understand." She said helplessly. "I don't know why I can't fix this."

Her reaction to Reid's very-not-funny-story about the system being unable to cure him was... not great.

She had focused on Reid's head with her skill. Her hands glowed while she investigated, and she soon told him that she'd found his cancer. It was still there, and looked almost unchanged.

Just hearing that was hard. Reid had hoped - just a bit - that the system's messages had been wrong and that the awakening had made him better. That hope had been snuffed out as soon as she said she'd found the cancer. Then another hope died when they realized her healing didn't seem to work on the disease.

Seeing her face after those failed attempts to cure him hurt his very soul. Susan wore a mix of confusion and hopelessness. Sara had run and locked herself in the bathroom halfway through the healing attempts.

Reid thought about his options, and remembered what the shackle had told him.

"What about the beacon?" He asked. "Interacting with the beacon cures things too, right?"

Susan shook her head. "No. Marlene made us try that. Just some papercut wounds, and one volunteer that got bit by a coyote. But using the beacon didn't heal any of them." She looked towards the bathroom, and back at Reid. "It... doesn't look like it's gotten worse since the doctor diagnosed you, Reid. Maybe that's a good thing - if it's not spreading... even if it's spreading slower, it means we still have more time. How do you feel?"

Reid thought it over for a bit before answering. "I still feel a little nauseous sometimes, but nowhere near as bad as it was. And I get the headaches, but only really bad when I'm doing... skill stuff. So maybe I am better-ish? If the cancer is slow - or it isn't growing, I should at least have more than four months, right?"

The loud honking of Sara blowing her nose emanated from the bathroom.

"I'm not sure, Reid. I hope that's right, but I don't know. What I do know is I don't want our daughter to stay locked in that bathroom. Come on."

#

Despite minutes of pleading, Sara was still locked in the bathroom. Reid and Susan were both leaned against the cheap, unfinished hollow core door. The wood grain pulled at the arm of Reid's shirt whenever he shifted. Sara had been rambling for a while, but finally gave them another chance to speak.

"And - you were both acting weird with each other before we left for the hiking trip. How long? How long did you know and not tell me?"

Susan gave Reid a look that said she would take this one. "I think what matters now, sweet pea, is we're here. We're together, and we'll get through this together."

"No we won't! I just got dad back. I just got him back. It's not fair."

Every fiber of Reid's being was screaming, 'go hug your daughter'. He looked at the doorframe. With his strength now, he could definitely tear it off the wall. Just a quick pull, and he could be in there. Susan started to answer while he was imagining how easy it would to get the door open - or punch through it.

"Oh, honey. He -"

The rec center's double doors slammed open hard enough that they bounced off the walls. Lowell - one of Sanctuary's young defenders - was carried in on a stretcher. His right arm was gone, and his left hand and wrist were missing. Both wounds were wrapped in towels. Lowell was very obviously trying not to scream.

James followed the stretcher in, and scowled when he saw Susan was in the great room. As he bee-lined towards her, Reid stepped away from the bathroom door to put himself between James and his wife - then took a few steps forward. The man's walk nearly halted, and fear played over his face. If Reid wasn't in the middle of a very shitty conversation with his daughter about cancer, he would've smiled. James had been an ass towards Susan earlier, and while Reid understood why the man was stressed - he wouldn't tolerate anyone talking down to his family.

Lowell was carried down the hallway, which sparked shouts from the nurses and medical aides working there. One aide ran into the great room to get Susan - and immediately froze when she leveled a 'don't try it' gaze at him.

James reached Reid and gave a glance towards Susan before he started talking. "Reid, I know Susan wants you to rest and I know you probably want to do whatever makes her happy right now, but we need your help. This wave's beasts are more powerful than the last, by a wide margin. Things have gone downhill, and you could help stop it from getting worse." He glanced at Susan again. "I was hoping she'd be in the back so you could leave without her noticing, but please come with me. Even if she's upset - you could save lives."

In that very brief exchange, Reid realized he needed to re-evaluate his opinion of James. The man hadn't been scowling at his wife - he'd been upset that Susan was there because he needed to ask for something Susan didn't want. James was worried about creating a rift between Reid and Susan by asking for Reid's help. That meant James wasn't a shit-heel - even if he was still a bit of a dick.

Reid cracked his neck. He felt helpless when he tried to tell Susan and Sara that everything would be fine. He felt hopeless when Susan couldn't fix him with her skill, and he felt useless when he failed to get Sara to come out of the bathroom and talk to them. If there was danger at the gates - danger that could come for his family - then at least Reid could be useful. Smashing salamander skulls was so much easier than hard conversations.

Reid shared a look with Susan, and was relieved when she nodded. He was slightly less relieved when she mouthed 'die and I'll kill you'. He motioned for James to go, and the two of them headed for the doors.

He still wanted to rip Sara out of the bathroom and give her a hug, but that could wait for later. Maybe by then, he would even have thought of something good to say to her. Something like 'I love you, and I'll be here as long as I can', or 'Don't worry, I'll figure it out'. He'd need to workshop it.

His thoughts were interrupted when sneakers squeaked against the great room's floor, and Sara slammed into him from behind. She wrapped her arms around him, and pressed her still-wet face into his back. Her voice shook as she tried to control it.

"I'm so mad at you, Dad. You're the worst, and -" Reid tried to spin around to face her. "Don't turn around. I'm being serious and I don't want to cry. I want to keep being mad at you. I want to yell at you for treating me like a kid - and I want us to find some crazy, magic thing to make you all better. So you have to come back, and you have to get better, and then you have to keep coming back. Keep coming back so I can be mad at you."

Reid felt the tears well in his eyes and grabbed Sara's hands in his own.

"I'll always come back, sweet pea. There's nothing in this entire universe that could ever stop me from getting back to you. I promise you that."

He gently squeezed her hands, and walked out the doors.