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to talk to someone

Summary:

Wes, at the mental hospital, was just tired. He was tired enough he started seeing Rebecca, duct-taped and terrified, like she was when he last saw her. When he last failed her.

Notes:

Writer’s Month: Hospital
Augusnippets Day 21 hallucinations

Work Text:

Wes wouldn’t admit anything beyond what he already had. He hadn’t meant to say as much as he had, certainly hadn’t meant that joke about shooting himself - he was just too tired. He looked terrible, Laurel had said that much, and Wes was sure she wasn’t wrong about that - Laurel was rarely wrong about anything, although changing the lie to being his girlfriend was likely wrong, since it made the psychiatric nurse angry at her. Wes was too tired to really care when Laurel was brought out of the hospital.

 He just wanted to sleep. He didn’t particularly care if he woke up, either. Sometimes he would swear he could see Rebecca duct-taped and terrified out of the corner of his peripheral vision, which he knew was a hallucination because Rebecca wouldn't be caught dead in a hospital the way Wes had been, and fuck, thinking that phrase, caught dead, just made Wes more aware of how likely it was Rebecca had been murdered, murdered like Sam had been murdered. Wes was just so tired.

“I'll just ignore the bomb drop about your mom if you promise me there's nothing else going on with you right now. It's just law school?”

“Yes, that's all.” Rebecca had treated Wes revealing what happened to his mom like a bomb too, only she was dead now because Wes hadn’t trusted her. Wes hadn’t fully trusted anyone since. Wes wasn’t even sure he had ever fully trusted Rebecca - if he had, he would have never kidnapped her, right?

“Wes. We were so close. Annalise Keating... the professor you work for who got shot?”

Annalise Keating, the professor Wes shot. “That has nothing to do with this.” Wes had first begun losing sleep after he murdered Sam Keating, but he had Rebecca to help him back then. He had nobody now. He was alone now. 

“You've been triggered, Wes.” Triggered, right. Hearing Rebecca was dead was the trigger, had him pulling the trigger, as Annalise Keating ruined his life just like his mom had by derailing all of his plans. 

“Your boss was shot. She almost died. And it may seem unrelated to you, but... it's making you remember.” Wes wasn’t going to say another word. He knew this wasn’t fucking unrelated to him - he was a godforsaken murderer twice over. Wes Gibbins hadn’t even always been Wes Gibbins, and somehow Annalise knew he was as a child too. 

He was alone in a hospital, only by the time he was discharged, he very obviously wasn’t. His coworkers, friends maybe, were threatening hospital staff to try to break him out. Wes was lucky. He had people who cared about him, even if he didn’t have a family.

“I talked about my childhood to get her off my back. It worked.” 

“Must have been nice, though, to talk to someone. I mean, we don't ever really do that. And I get it... It's not like we need to be up each other's butts all the time. It's just...I don't know. I thought maybe it'd be nice if we didn't lie to each other from now on.” Asher was really the one of the Keating Five that had been lied to the most, Wes thought, remembering how difficult hiding Sam’s murder was all that time ago.