Chapter Text
Consciousness rips Alex open like tearing paper, separating him from the medicated placidity of dreamless sleep. Orange daylight radiates through the shades pulled down over the windows of his hospital room. Even diffused, the intensity makes his head pound.
There’s a tube in his face streaming cold oxygen through his nose, his stomach is in knots, and he feels like how a mounted bug specimen behind glass must feel as a deep, piercing ache around a tingling point of numbness in his chest keeps him pinned to the bed. Neck, ribs, back, shoulders, the space behind his eyes, and the plates of his skull. It all throbs with a deep pain. His limbs feel useless and sandbag-heavy. His lips are chapped, his tongue dry and sore. It’s a labor to breathe but he’s doing it anyway, inhaling thin puffs to limit his movement. Moving hurts. Everything hurts.
He doesn’t have the cognizance, yet, to recall things in order. The last thing he remembers is The Green-Eyed Woman and the muzzle flash of Marvin Heckler’s gun.
His mind clouded with a refreshed sense of panic, Alex scans the room, rolling his head from one shoulder to the other. Immobilized in a hospital room, he knows he’s easy prey. He manages to roll his limp right arm against his body, trying to grasp the edge of the bed to pull himself up. He’s still in danger. He has to get out of here. But, before he can make a futile break for it, of course, a pair of hands stop him, reaching over his body.
Reflexively, Alex fights back. At least, he tries to. Letting his fingers un-clasp from the hard plastic bed rail to his left, the full force of his limp upper arm swings back as it dislodges, his elbow launching like a battering ram. He hears a padded thump as he connects with someone, a woman, who grunts in protest as he struggles against the fatigue and the pain and his hospital bed trappings to free himself.
Despite all his effort, he’s powerless against the pair of arms working to restrain him. He’s grown aware of a pain in his left side, the jabbing of a tube rim sutured to the skin making him gasp and wince. The hands keep him still and Alex’s ineffective huffing devolves into quiet, strained cries. All he can move now is his right shoulder, which he still shrugs incessantly to try shaking her off. If he’d been more lucid
“Alex- Alex, stop it,” the woman pleads with him.
She has the voice of his sister. It’s Cameron.
“Alex, calm down,” she says, hushed but stern, warning him, “Jesus, Alex, seriously, before a nurse comes in here and sends a shrink!”
Tiring himself, Alex stills. The right corner of his lips twitches, the intimation of something unspoken falling silent in his cotton-ball dry mouth. It would seem this were real. Not Hell. Though he hasn’t discounted the idea it might be a form of Purgatory, the tangible sensation of discomfort feels far too terrestrial, much too annoyingly real. It’s hard to keep the scowl on his face from flattening and disappearing altogether with the effects of a sedative analgesic still coursing through his system, so Alex trains his eyes on the wall, glaring, looking away from his sister, stubbornly catching even more headache-worsening, nausea-inducing late afternoon sun in his eyes. He isn’t calm, but he’s stopped resisting.
Now, he only hopes the sharp uptick of his vitals was brief enough to go unnoticed. It’s nothing like a serialized doctor drama. There’s no constant beeping of a monitor. It’s quiet. The room is just serene. And sterile. He wouldn’t be reluctant at all to admit aloud that it was more eerie than soothing, if it weren’t for the newfound ache in his throat. Even though he doesn’t know an endotracheal tube had been pushed down his windpipe in the operating room, he certainly feels it; every stinging nerve fiber is set ablaze as he tries and fails to make a sound.
Feeling his shoulders release tension, Cameron slowly unhands him. It takes him a while to let her help him back into a comfortable position—or, at least, as comfortable as he could possibly feel, given the circumstances.
Cameron realizes that she hasn’t talked to him like that since the two of them were teenagers, frowning deeply.
“Hey,” she says, as if trying to greet him anew. Like she’s already trying to forget what just happened.
Alex can’t blame her. They were both adept at it; the impulse to distract and evade and cover-up came to them both like second nature. He doesn’t know what to tell her. He can barely lift a hand to properly wave at her, or maybe flash a facetious thumbs-up. What is he supposed do about ‘hey’ ?
He doesn’t watch her directly, not even out of the corner of his eye, but he can see movement in his peripheral vision as she pulls a chair close to the side of his bed and sits herself down. There’s so much he wishes he could say right now and he can’t even bring himself to look her in the face.
Things came to mind every second longer the room remained uncomfortably silent. He doesn’t know where to begin. The fact that she’s gone so long, already, without breaking the silence was a bit surreal. He wondered if this were real time passing, or just his perception of it slowed by whatever pharmaceuticals were pushing their way around his bloodstream, making his brain feel lost, his mind hazy, making his gut hurt, and his mouth feel dry like paper pulp.
Cameron’s thinking, too. Thinking of what to say. Are you comfortable? Of course he isn’t comfortable. He was shot in the chest. I’m sorry it took me a few days to get here. It’s a long drive from Odessa. She’s here to support him, not trigger his guilty conscience by reminding him just how far away she decided move to escape every reminder of their life in Austin. Can I get you anything? Could she, really? She wonders what he’s eaten in the last few days he’s spent trapped here. But, between the sky blue hospital smock and the gauzy purple shoe covers and the banana-yellow facemask, she’s not certain she can even do so much as fetch him a cup of lukewarm coffee without it first being approved by all the nurses patrolling the ICU all hours of the day and night. Why get his hopes up? Should she try?
She knows her brother. She knows he won’t accept help even if it’s offered, as if he’s allergic to it. Even when it hurts him. Even when it’s clear how miserable he is. Does he realize that, yet, himself?
Cameron sighs. “I know it’s probably difficult for you to talk right now. But we don’t have to talk,” she says, “I’ll just be here for you, if you need me.”
Something in the drugs makes his eyes prickle, makes his vision blurry around the edges. It’s the drugs. It has to be the drugs. Alex closes his eyes, nodding in the silence after she speaks.
He’d blinked, or he’d thought he did.
Opening his eyes, Alex wakes to find the room changed. Outside the window, the sky is dark. A shadow of sunlight still paints the clouds orange and purple like deep bruises. The ambient hospital lights are dim, white halogens faded a soft yellow. Far from the abrasive glare he’d been bracing for just a moment ago.
Alex asks, his voice caught in his throat, as he tries to call for his sister, “Cam?”
“Right here,” she replies. Without missing a beat, she leans forward.
She doesn’t touch him, but her elbow rests along the bed rail and she nudges her chair forward with ankles pressed against the backs of its legs.
It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust, still bleary. The ache behind his eyes has fizzled out. As the air conditioning seeps into his room, falling down from the vent slats in the ceiling above the windows and above the bed, the stale chill of artificial breeze settles on the top of his head and it feels like a bucket of cold water poured over the smoking embers of a fire to put it out. The pain in his chest is shallower, and each time his eyes weigh heavy with another tempting spell of medicated drowsiness, his breaths get easier and easier, aided by the gentle hiss of oxygen in his nose.
Alex looks at his sister like he’s trying to find her through a veil of dense fog, finally harnessing enough strength in his right arm to assert some control over it. He turns his hand at the wrist, exposing his open palm to her. His fingers open. She doesn’t need to be told, she just places her hand in his.
“You want me to get you some water?” Cameron asks.
He shakes his head in the negative. Some of the moisture has returned to his mouth, the insides of his cheeks no longer sticking uncomfortably to his gums. He doesn’t know what he wants, other than for her to be there. It’s not something Alex knows how to admit. He doesn’t want her to leave. He just squeezes her hand, at least as firmly as the morphine will let him. Cameron understands.
He feels like he’s been reduced to a mass of limp muscle wired to a pathetic excuse for a nervous system. He feels like the pain has used him up, has spent him and snuffed him out. What he feels isn’t a lack of pain, just a blanket of numb over his sore body. There’s no relaxation to it, only a drifting that reminds him he’s at the mercy of sedative analgesic on a drip through his arm. With Cameron around, he knows he can’t exactly pitch a fit. If she told him it was for his own good, he’d be at a loss for an argument to insist otherwise.
He hasn’t felt like this since the last time he was seriously ill, bedridden with bacterial pneumonia in the tenth grade. When he looks at his sister, it’s like being transported back into his weak, powerless, little pneumonia-infected body; he’s searching for an easier way to accept her presence here, supporting him, like he’s supposed to, like he wants to, like he knows he should, because she’s the only one who knows what he needs without him having to say anything.
Cameron Esposito has the eyes of their father. Gray, like his had been, but kindled by a warmth that he’d never once seen in their father’s steely, dead-cold stare. All the features she inherited, that she embodied, the contours of her face that resembled him closest—from the ridge of her nose to the sharp angles at the corners of her brows—almost made up for all the times Alex had been stared down at while he tried not to flinch at their father’s outbursts, nor lose his composure when those same eyes full of rage grew vacant and dark. Every time Cameron laughed, it was as if she’d stolen the wrinkle on her forehead from right off his drunk and angry face.
Alex wonders what she must be thinking when she looks at him.
“Alma’s going to try visiting tomorrow, or the day after. Depends on when she can catch a flight,” Cameron says.
Alex frowns, his face falling at the mention of their youngest sister. He wonders what that conversation must have been like, how they’d even found out in the first place. Had Deitz called them both, or just Cameron, who then had to break the news to Alma?
Alex’s stomach soured as he remembers having to list Deitz as his emergency contact the week he joined homicide, guilt now churning it further when he realizes he’d never gotten around to finishing the opt-in life insurance in personnel self-service. If he had died, his sisters would have to fight and claw their way through so much paperwork. On top of that, they’d have to deal with his funeral. He hasn’t even written a will, yet. He’s only thirty-one. The fact that he’ll live to see a very pathetic thirty-two and thirty-three and so on doesn’t comfort him much.
If he’d had anything substantial in his stomach, he’s certain it would’ve been spilled out onto the floor by now. But Cameron cups his hand with both of her own and squeezes it. With a firm grip, massaging his palm, it anchors him in place, slowly returning him to reality from the ceaseless tide of worry.
Alex looks at her again and Cameron gives him a flat smile. Though her mouth and nose are masked, he can see it in her eyes, the way they squint like she’s happy to see him. No, relieved.
“Does mom know?” he asks her, the corner of his lip twitching again.
To anyone else, it may have seemed non-sequitur. But Cameron knows better. She can feel the dread and fear that radiates off of him as she gives his hand another squeeze with both her hands, seeming to flatten it out, spreading the sides of her thumbs across his palm in opposite directions.
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “Nobody told her. She won’t be coming.”
Some of the lead-heavy weight on his shoulders lifts and Alex exhales sharply through his nose, the closest thing to a grateful sigh he can manage with his healing lung. Cameron hadn’t promised him anything. It’s what he would’ve done, if their roles had been inverted. It was smart of her. For w moment, he feels proud.
Their mother was an unpredictable woman. Part of him felt reluctant to believe his sister. If anyone had given her notice about him, surely it would’ve been Deitz. If he’d been scrupulous enough to do the digging required to get a hold of his sisters, a couple of ex-Austinites, surely he would’ve also been capable of tracking down the only other member of familia Esposito still left living here. He was tense at the thought. With his rotten luck, he’d end up conjuring her into the fabric of his nightmares like a stain.
“Good,” he mutters, despite the expression on his face not looking very eased by Cameron’s reassurance.
Cameron holds Alex’s hand between both of her own, gently accommodating for the Tegaderm-covered I.V. port between his knuckles and wrist.
“I’m glad I got to see you today, y’know,” she says.
There’s sincerity in her voice that he hasn’t heard in years, since after she moved north to Tulsa for college on a voicemail message, that same warmth now clear of the background telephone fuzz. Giving it some thought, he realized it might be the first time he’s ever heard her speak this way with him in-person. The prickling sensation returns to his eyes, for a moment, until he blinks it away.
“Sorry I wasn’t able to talk much, then,” he apologized, uncomfortably clearing his throat, welcoming the return of a chance to crack a wry comment, the clearer his focus became.
“I know I give you a lot of grief for not sleeping enough, but you really need your rest. Now probably more than ever,” Cameron says, shaking her head a little. She strokes his hand with the sides of her thumbs and he lets himself relax against the incline of his hospital bed.
“How long was I out?” Alex asks.
“You mean today?” Cameron asks, then answers herself, “You were asleep when I got here, and you were up for a little bit before you went back to sleep for a few hours.”
“What about… since the shooting?” he asks, tentatively.
Cameron has to glance down at her wrist, at the calendar ticker on the face of her watch. “It’s been a couple of days,” she explains, “but your friend said you’d been drifting in and out of it since waking up from surgery.”
Alex cocks his head, appearing confused, no longer thinking about how much he dreaded having been laid up in a hospital for so long already. “Friend?” he asks, “You mean my partner, Deitz?”
“No,” she chuckles. “Your friend, Marlo,” Cameron clarifies.
If there’s an expression on his face, Alex can hardly feel it; he doesn’t realize just how slack-jawed he looks.
“I was going to come yesterday, but they were already visiting you,” she continues, “I asked the nurses, though, just to be sure, and they told me it’s only non-family who have to be in here one at a time. When Alma gets in from Newark, we’ll both get to be here.”
Cameron, showing a level of competence and responsibility he had never really known her to possess, went almost completely unheard as he tried to keep his mind focused, but over and over unable to keep it from wandering.
Marlo had been here? HelpText Marlo? Unofficial crime-solving partner Marlo? When had that been? Was he talking to them? Why can’t he remember? Why is his head so useless right now?
“Hey, Alex, you still with me…?” Cameron asks, her head craning to try and look him in the eyes as his gaze drifted.
“Yeah,” he replies, blinking. Finding clarity again is so difficult, it’s like being swept away by waves, but he manages to pull himself back to alert consciousness before too long.
“Is something wrong?” Cameron asks, her brows pinched together with concern.
“No,” he answers, saying, “not at all.”