Chapter Text
It took a shamefully long time for Loki to visit Alex (Barry?) while he was still in the hospital. He couldn’t quite place what it was that made him take pause every time he drive down the road to the hospital, hit his blinker, pull into the parking lot, and maybe even make a few laps around “looking for a parking spot” before finally pulling out and driving back home.
“Not today. Not today.”
He was in the building himself just a few days ago. He was there, maybe just a few doors away. There was too much going on. He wasn’t a relative, it wasn’t visiting hours, he had just been shot in the head and was too tired and in too much pain to find him. Lots of reasons.
He saw the Dover girl the morning he was discharged though. Well, he hadn’t asked to see her. She was rolled in with barely any time for him to really think about whether he had wanted to see her.
There was no way that girl had asked to see him. Maybe she had, but she was not in that wheelchair when she was rolled into his room. He could see that. He could look into her eyes and see right through them the thick fog she was lost in.
He saved her, but he was too late.
When he pulled back that splintered wood panel and got his first look at what had happened to the Jones (Milland?) boy… He’s still seeing that on the insides of his eyelids. Eyes swollen and crusted. Nose bent in a painful Z shape and wet with a never-ending flow of fresh blood and what he prayed was just snot. Forearms and chest and belly blister and sloughing and the back of the tub slick and grimed with fluid and skin. Loki kept the image of his nudity a respectful distance from himself, but it begged questions he needed answered but never wanted to ask. How bad was it? How much did his failures cost Alex?
Above all, when Loki couldn’t get out of his head was the way Alex looked at him in that moment. When the wild panic in his puffy red eye gave out to something spaced out and lost. A place between madness and serenity, somewhere between reality and unreality. The eyes of a man stuck in limbo. A man who was Not There.
Eyes that said to him, “Where were you? Why were you so late? Why come now when I’m so far gone?”
He saw that in the Keller girl’s eyes.
He’s going to see it in the Jones boy’s eyes again if he goes in to see him now.
He saw it when the kid signed his name on the release form. Those eyes that looked right into his, wide and clear and lit up bright and pleading.
“Why are you letting me go? You can tell something’s wrong, but you’re just letting me go so easily?”
He’s in the parking lot now. He saw many empty spots from the street, and yet this is his third circle around all the spaces. He’s still trying to make his choice.
He saw it in the man’s eyes in the rain the night it all started, lights shining in his eyes.
“You finally found me. Can’t you tell I’ve been lost? Didn’t you know?” they said to him.
He turned the wheel, hand over hand.
Would he judge him for taking so long just to come see him? Would he see how afraid and indecisive he has been in the time since his rescue? Would Alex look into his eyes and see a coward? Would Loki look into his eyes and see someone in there, or would he have that final confirmation that he was too late? That he had saved the boy’s body but he was too stupid to save his spirit in time? (God, Loki. You were practically in the room with him and you left him behind for a fucking false lead! Idiot!)
Or maybe, just maybe, he’ll see a future in Alex’s eyes. Maybe he came just in time and Alex (Barry?) has a chance at happiness thanks to him. Maybe he did make it right in the end.
How long can he go not knowing which way he had gone?
“It’s gotta happen someday.”
He turned the key.
…
Alex was going home today. Not to the pull-out couch in his aunt’s house or his RV (Where is his RV now?) but to the home he was searching for on Thanksgiving.
He was sitting on the edge of his hospital bed in clean clothes he had never seen before. His sister got them for him and they felt awful on his skin but he was wearing them without complaint like a good boy that appreciates what he is given.
In the chair next to him sat Detective Loki. He had stitches on his head that were not there when he last saw him. (Of course, he wasn’t haloed by rainbows like that time either.) Loki got hurt at the same place he had when he crashed his RV (Where is it?). They had something in common now, and that felt funny to Alex.
“Do you want me to call you Alex or Barry?”
“Does it matter?”
Everyone just called him whatever they wanted. Names are just something other people decided for you. Why even bother asking him?
“I think you should have a say in what I call you.”
Alex (Barry?) turned his head away from Loki.
“I don’t know.”
He sounded a little lost. Loki’s chest squeezed.
“It’s okay if you don’t know yet.”
Neither Alex nor Barry felt like names that belonged to him.
“Both are fine.”
Silence hung around them. Loki shuffled through his pocket, paused, and placed his empty hand back on his thigh.
“So… Barry…” Loki tested the name out. “...I hear you’re moving in with your mom today. How are you feeling? Excited?”
Alex had trouble figuring out how he felt about anything. He had trouble recognizing when he was hungry or thirsty until it became so urgent he was shaking and nauseated with pain. Other feelings were like that for him most of the time. Unless a feeling has his bones itching and has him practically hopping out of his skin, it barely registers. Joy, sadness, anger… He feels these, sure, but he can only recognize these in their most painful extremes. If only he could explain to Loki how joy could be painful, or how the in-betweens felt in a way he could understand.
He had his own vocabulary for them, but no one would ever understand it even if he tried. His words never work.
Like coffee aftertaste. Like a wobbling sheet of metal. Like he swallowed a piece of a garbage bag. That’s how he felt. Is that excitement? Is this happy? He could split most of the in-betweens into “funny” and “icky” and this was… Both.
“Mm.” was all he could say to Loki. It wasn’t a yes or no, but the best he could offer that wasn’t a lie.
Loki pursed his lips and fiddled with something in his pocket again.
“Ah, so… You probably already know we can’t take you back to your aunt’s house, right?”
“Mm.”
“I thought you might want to keep some of your old stuff, so I got the team to box up what we could for you. We can bring what we could save to your mom’s house for you to go through whenever you’re ready. How does that sound?”
Barry looked at him, and there was a trace of a smile on his lips.
“Actually, I brought something of yours with me today.”
Loki dug his hand back into his pocket and finally pulled out the lump he had been fiddling with. He placed it into Alex’s hand.
His toy RV.
Barry brought it up to his eyes, looked at it from different angles, and rolled the wheels against his palm like always. Something familiar. It was nice.
He looked back up to Loki. He felt like water lapping against his ankles.
Loki looked into his eyes. He did good.
“Thank you.”