He hadn't seen the water until it was too late.

The night had been young, a perfect opportunity to go borrowing.. That was always how those horror stories seemed to start, anyway. A simple, careless mistake, and whoops! Borrower caught, human discovers them, and then dead.

But Jack wasn't dead. Not yet at least. It just felt like it.

He was pretty sure he'd blacked out for the first bit; he remembered feeling groggy, faint as he came back to awareness. His senses felt fuzzy, and there was a delay before the clogging sensation in his chest finally gave away, allowing a shaky gasp of air to finally enter his lungs.

The next thing he noticed— apart from the sort of muffled underwater feeling in his ears— was the ceiling, and how high up it was. Nothing unusual there, but his borrowing hook was still embedded in the side of the counter that loomed on one side of him. The line was lazily glinting in the moonlight, but Jack's vision was fishy, darker like he was in a tunnel. Borrowers usually had such pristine night vision, why were the edges of his sight blackened and dancing with flakes of swimming stars?

The answer lay in his final discovery.

Jack had been trying to move before he was even fully conscious, but everything just suddenly came flooding back to him. The wind was snatched from his lungs once more, and he felt like a beached fish gasping for air on land. The pain was unbearable! He felt so numb, and yet his body ached like it was on fire. And his leg...

Nausea was setting in by now, but Jack was already lifting his head up to look; he immediately regretted it. It was far too visceral to be put into words, but his left leg looked... wrong. It was most certainly broken. His vision swam once more, and so Jack let his head go limp, struggling to breathe amidst the quickening staccato of his sluggish heartbeat.

He remembered now. It was such a blur, like it'd just been one of his catastrophizing nightmares. Salt. He needed salt. He had to go past the sink. But there was water... He'd slid, and then lost control of his balance, slammed into an empty glass left out, and...

His heart skipped a beat. He forced his body to move, to just tilt his head enough to see the shattered fragments around him. Miraculously, none had impaled him, yet it was equally miraculous that he was alive to begin with. He was still in shock though, he reckoned. He couldn't move much else.

His vision swam again, and Jack felt a gag itching to trigger his diaphragm. But even if he'd had the energy, he couldn't bring himself to, since his stomach was empty anyway.

But then the darkness suddenly gave away to light, and Jack's eyes scrunched shut with a breathless groan.

He knew he was missing out on chunks of time. Who knew how long he'd already been laying here, yet it still somehow came as a surprise to crack his eyes back open in the houseowner's shadow. Right, the glass. No doubt it had been loud enough to sumon the human. Probably made him mad too, the houseowner was usually asleep at this hour. The borrower couldn't get up anyway, couldn't run... Would it have even done him any good, if he could?

Jack tried to will his body to get up, to make something move, but he only found his eyelids drooping shut. There was another hazy disconnect from reality, and he suddenly opened his eyes again as he felt the human's hand— an entire knuckle as large as his head— gingerly nudging him; it was such a careful motion that he would have mistaken it for someone just slowly pushing on him, or maybe he was already that far from the living world.

Another blink, and the human had moved position, setting something large, metal and red down beside him; the houseowner's lips were moving, holding something to the side of his head as he spoke, but Jack couldn't register any of the words. His eyes finally focused just long enough to watch the human for a few seconds; right, he forgot just how terrifying his houseowner was. Of all the shapes and sizes he'd seen humans come in, his was the scariest, both big and muscular. The houseowner was undoubtedly powerful, and there were so many times when Jack's nightmares reminded him how easily he could probably be snapped in half— or maybe shattered to pieces, like the glass that had mysteriously disappeared. Or like his leg; had it moved?

Another blink, and hands— human hands— were taking up his whole vision. Moving around him, over him, above him, everywhere. They were definitely touching his leg, doing something with it, but Jack's eyes were already drooping again.

This time, he seemed to blackout for longer, but when his eyes finally cracked open once more, he didn't feel the cold hard surface of the floor beneath his bruised back. The air felt stuffy, but Jack found himself able to take a stronger breath now. He couldn't feel his leg. He could feel something was there, but he couldn't feel the skin nor bone. The ground beneath him felt soft. There was something on top of him too, but while it felt heavy and dense, it didn't feel suffocating. Jack blinked once, and then his eyelids slowly drooped shut, lashes curtaining into darkness as time seemed to skip for him once more.

When Jack finally woke, he felt groggy, thirsty and hungry. His eyes blinked, but time had finally stopped skipping around for the little borrower. He could discern the quiet light of the sun, beaming from behind clouds to softly shine against the pulled blinds— almost as if it was too shy to ask how he was doing, and was simply watching, keeping close. But even without the sun, Jack felt comfortably warm, so much so that a thought in passing asked if he was sick.

Sick... Why would he be sick—? The fall!

Jack's eyes snapped back open, and with effort he forced himself to sit up. Oh thank whatever god was watching him, he could still move his arms! His head felt dull and throbbed from the simple movement, however, making the borrower squint with pain. But when he looked down to survey his legs, it was with a jolt that Jack realized his broken limb was no longer... Jutting, and instead wrapped up firmly in a white coarse fabric. He was unable to bend it, but with a good amount of effort he could sort of flop it; it was secure and snug beneath the wrappings. But it didn't feel like cloth, what sort of bandaging was this?

Who even bandaged him?

As Jack was checking how his other leg was faring, his hand came to rest down on the surface beneath him, only for a shiver to go down his spine upon contact. Strange, his fall must have knocked his borrower sense out of sorts, surely...?

But Jack looked down at the ground, studying it. It was a floor of fabric, finely woven and free of any dust. Could it be...? No, there was no way. How was he even still alive? If the fall had spared him, then surely the human wouldn't have... But scarily enough, Jack recognized this cloth. It was the human's cardigan— and it only took an additional split second before Jack realized that the floor beneath occasionally rose and fell.

He was on top of the houseowner. And the houseowner was high up on the couch, right in the heart of the living room. The large screen of the tv was on, but the audio played so quietly, that even without adrenaline the borrower would have a hard time discerning the individual words.

But Jack was frozen stiff, the poor thing. What should he do? What could he do?