Signs Above

(C)Travis M. Reynolds, 2006

      "Look, if you don't stop thrashing around these stitches are going to hurt you worse than the knife did." Isaac roughened his grip upon her shoulder, fighting against her deceptive strength as fiercely as he thought he could. The other medical personnel kept their distance, something that Isaac could both understand and condemn as cowardly in the same thought. She was an Unsanctioned, after all, an outsider. Simply touching her sunbrowned skin posed a risk to his health; here, within the sterilized halls of Acropolis, the sorts of diseases that her kind could shrug away could prove to be debilitating, even fatal. That was the entire purpose of exiling the Unsanctioned anyway... to keep Acropolis clean.
      Bit by bit, the nameless woman's limbs ceased to flail, and her taut musculature relaxed. Isaac breathed out in relief, and relaxed his own grip as well. "Thanks," he laughed, "now, this is going to hurt."
      Throughout the stitching process, Isaac stole glances into the face of this Unsanctioned woman. Of course, it hadn't been a moment of fancy that had drawn him into trying to help her. He knew her well, knew those commanding green eyes that seemed to miss not a single detail of anything around her. Sitting in his study, gazing out over the desolate plains of the outer land... he'd seen her. The first time she had been foraging with other women, plucking roots from the ground and searching for lizards to cook with hands that moved so quickly they almost seemed inhuman. She had been the only one to look up at him, as if she knew exactly where to turn her eyes, sweeping the furious red of her hair out of the way and gazing just long enough to pass him a strange, alien smile.
      Stitch... stitch... she barely even flinched, almost as if the needle meant nothing to her as it wove the slashed ends of her skin back together. Her eyes had locked upon him, the thoughtful slit of her lips drawn together in ponderance. He'd called her Eve, in his musings about her. The name had popped into his mind the fourth time that she had shown up in front of his telescope, and cast her eyes upon him. She always carried herself differently than the other women, not quite in an aloof sort of way, but... almost as if she were a noble in their little group. He had called her Eve, and knew her every detail by heart: the lean iron of her muscles speaking of years of survival in the wild, the soft curve of a chin that had known the back of many hands. It had taken three weeks of watching before Isaac realized that he had ceased his stargazing, instead panning the ground with his telescope, searching for her. 
      "There we go," Isaac quietly whispered to her, eyes glimmering a little bit. He could see it in the way her lip quivered, the familiarity in her wild eyes; she knew him, just as he knew her. The surgeon set his tools aside, but his gaze could not be moved. She beckoned to him, screamed for him, without moving or uttering a word.
      "Alright, Doctor, come on and let's get you sterilized," one of the other medics called to him from behind a screen, through a medical mask. Isaac only heard his words in muddled, bubbling traces. "Isaac. She's filthy, get away from her. Isaac?" He found himself leaning down, a lump of emotion rising in his throat. "Doctor, get away from her. The wound is closed, shoo her out already!" Eve simply gazed at him, eyes widening in wonder. As alien to her as the gesture was, the Unsanctioned woman made no move to resist when his lips touched hers for the very first time.