Every muscle strained with the attempt to contain and manage the driving, beating pain, to remain silent, to prevent from raising further discomfort in the single most beautiful voice he'd ever heard. Awkward and lurching and wholly devoid of grace, Elias let her hands guide him forward, then around. And he would have laughed, had he been able, when he realized where they'd ended -- he'd just left this bench minutes ago. To come to her. To come to herand hercompanion. They shouldn't just be sitting here, they should be following...
But before he could protest, he heard something about Charlie's friend.... And then even her words were lost. The light was screaming at him. Pulses of it, streams of wordless violence. Blinding, deafening. He tried. He tried to stay with his surroundings. Tried to keep from being drawn into whatever wretchedness was taking over his senses. But it was a struggle now to remain above it, to stay detached, to continue thinking through it, when all his world was turning white, with cracks that showed in its darkest places a creature -- a thing -- a beast he did not know how to name.
And then it lessened. The breath he hadn't known he'd been holding seeped through his teeth as quietly as he could release it. He did not want to frighten her away. "Who are you?" he asked, and his voice sounded as jagged as his sight. He took a shallow, careful breath, afraid to move -- not because he feared movement would trigger another bout of light and pain, but because she was holding his hand. It felt... He'd forgotten what it felt like to have a woman's hand clasping his own. Dizzying. Or was that the aftermath of these strange attacks?
His muscles were beginning to relax again. She'd asked him something else, hadn't she? But he couldn't remember, couldn't rightly recall what it was... He'd heard her speaking, but it had sounded so far away. He took another careful breath.