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Rich wakes up once, the first time since he passed out in the ambulance a few hours earlier his tearful mother told him later on, being wheeled through the hospital on a stretcher with a mask over his mouth that guided his breaths and bandages covering every inch of him. Every part of him hurt and he let that be known, shaking as his breath hitched and the doctors yell at each other that he was awake and other words and phrases that get lost in the rush. There’s a shout as two large doors get closer, coming from a woman (His mom, he realizes with another tear, his mom who is meant to be working right now so they could afford another meal and he ended up taking her away from that). She smiles as they drag him in, eyes red and cheeks wet, mouthing words (Or maybe speaking, he can't tell) that looked similar to it’s going to be okay. His mouth feels as though it's glued shut as he tries to force out a reply but then he’s in the surgery room and there’s no one but the doctors there as he passes out.
He wakes up again, the second time his brother says, smiling as he wipes tears from his eyes. A pit forms in his stomach when he thinks back to it, knowing he took both his mom and brother from their important lives all because he blew four hundred dollars on a tic-tac that went haywire. It's right after his skin grafting surgery Mike mentioned, though he has no idea what that means. He is apparently loopy with pain medicine and covered entirely in wrap that he is sure makes him look like a mummy, with space left for a mask that rests over his mouth and nose. Mike takes the silence as a cue he’s asleep and continues to ramble, saying that it wasn’t his fault and he was so sorry and he wished he had been there more to help when Rich needed him the most. Promises are made as the bed dips under another's weight, of going out to the movies and meeting the roommate that Mike always talked about with a lilt to his voice that made Rich wonder if his brother was as crystal clear as he thinks. Tears accompany every word, apologies and promises and I love you so much baby bro it’s going to be okay. Mike continues on as a Rich slowly falls asleep, confused then but grateful for every word once the medicine wore off.
No one mentions the third time, not until he brings it up when offering to help. They refuse, as always, telling him he needs to focus on his studies so he can pay for everything they can’t once they’re old and their bones are brittle. It’s all teasing, but it makes him ache when he thinks of that C he got on a test or how his math average was dropping and he was trying but the SQUIP told him not to. Their focus is on being popular only , and how could he refuse electric shocks up his spine that left him aching for days? His mom, dad, and brother are nearby, hushed voices whispering, but just loud enough for him to hear. Dazed with wrap covering his body, there’s not much he can do or say to let them know he hears them. There is mention of “we can’t all stay here if we want to pay this off any time soon” and “I’ll get an extra job mom” and “no honey focus on your studies” and “mom please” and “we can do this. Go back to your classes, we’ll call you with any new developments Mikey.” A door closes and Rich wants nothing more than to call him back.
There is silence for a moment, until he hears his father whisper “want me to get something from the cafeteria” and he doesn't hear anything else except a door closing and his mom’s sigh. He hears it a lot when she thinks no one’s around, when looking through his report cards or looking at their bills or when she gets a “we’re sorry to inform you” letter that she’ll tear up and cry into until Mike or Dad shows up and tells Rich to go upstairs and that “mom’s okay just a little stressed” as she screams and cries into their arms. He’s heard depression runs in the family a few times, from Dad when Mike started wearing long sleeves during the summer and when Mike was gone for a long time after Rich found him with different pill bottles scattered around his feet as he threw up blood onto the nice shirt Mom bought him for an interview. It was never confirmed whose side it came from, but it wasn’t hard to tell sometimes. Rich hears a sniffle as a hand presses against his wrapped one. Her voice is barely above a whisper and so he can’t hear her as he falls asleep once again, but he thinks it was another reminder that he couldn’t be blamed for it all.
A beeping heart monitor wakes him up the fourth time, though his dad says it’s the third with a grin and a very tired look in his eyes. He seems to mostly be off any pain meds and the breathing mask is finally off. His upper half is free, though there’s an IV stuck into his left arm, but he decides he can deal with that after finally getting half the bandages removed. His arms raise in an attempt to stretch, but his dad pushes them back down, saying how “you gotta be careful Richie or else you might tear it again” and he stops because the thought of pushing them more into debt leaves his stomach twisting painfully. Dad leaves to talk to a nurse and it finally hits him that there’s no voice in his head telling him to make his dad stop using that nickname. Rich takes a deep breath, grips the sheets under him, and lets out a single word: “Thaththafrath.” Sassafras. The word he struggled the most with to get correct when his SQUIP berated him, using Mike’s face to say his “lisp was ugly and weird” but now there is no machine to fix it and there is no fake Mike telling him he needed to be better because his Mike was at college and his SQUIP was gone . He wants to scream, but it will alert the nurses and he doesn't want that. Instead, he leans back and repeats the word over and over, wearing a grin too wide for his face. The evil tic-tac is gone and all it had taken him was-
Rich stops and stares straight ahead. His heart beats louder than he likes and it’s faster than he likes and when his dad walks in and asks him what’s wrong all he can ask is “how many died?”
There is no fifth time for when he wakes up, considering he can't fall asleep and hasn't been able to for a long time. His dad had hesitated to answer, until Rich was near tears as he begged him to tell him and he admitted there were no deaths but five kids were in the ICU and no one knew their chances of survival. Dad told him that he shouldn’t worry, that those kids would be safe and that he had no reason to feel guilty, but Rich still cried into his shirt because he knew that every kid injured was on his hands and any kid that may even die would haunt him. Later, when he’s alone and staring at the ceiling wondering who he got sent to the ICU, his mind wanders to costs and his stomach churns at the thought of his surgery and the time he has been here and what the other kids’ parents have to do about money. Whispers of dejected classmates holding tests come back to him, snippets of “I need to get a scholarship or I’ll never get to college” and “I didn’t have time to study because my mom’s medicine payments were getting late” and he wishes he had went up to those kids and just complained with them. His friends are nice, but they are richer than he ever could dream to be. Their lives were hard too, he knows, but he just wishes that he can see what it was like to shop for clothes without frantically checking the price and calculating tax to it and not cramming for a test while helping out at a gas station to hopefully get enough to pay for Mikey’s and Mom’s antidepressants. (They were never able to, and for a while it was just him and Dad, working to pay off expensive bills for mental hospitals that only did so much). Rich hopes that the kids live in well off homes with well off parents and that what they’re paying doesn’t prevent them from eating dinner for the third day in a row (“I’m so sorry Richie, we have a few cheese sticks and some chips and dip left over in case you want anything.” He took only one cheese stick and a few plain chips because he knew that Mom and Dad needed them more so they didn’t pass out at work). His body gives in, hours later, his eyelids drooping as he tries to calculate how much all the free jobs in town would pay him.
The fifth, or maybe sixth, time Rich wakes up, he is still in the same condition he was before, but this time Mike is by his bed, rubbing small circles into his palms. It's Mom's signature signal for I'm so sorry and something is wrong and he wonders what could possibly be worse than the five kids he might have killed. Mike's phone is in his lap, sporting a few cracks he doesn't remember being there and outside there's crying. It takes a few moments before Mike can speak, voice gentle in hopes that will soften the blow.
"There's, there's kids spreading rumors about you, Richie. They're, uh, they're saying that you, um, you started the fire." Why didn't I just die in that fire. He isn't done though, continuing to rub circles as he attempts to get out everything plaguing his thoughts. "But… but, um, well..." There's a pause. " Did you do it?"
Rich silently ponders if the reason he seems to be unable to move is because someone pranked him and glued him to his bed abecause he doesn't think a human can physically be this still ever. Tears are wiped from his face as Mike shushes him, leaning over to hold him a little closer.
“It's okay, Richie, we, we know it was just an accident. We still love you so, so much."
At that moment, with his brother's cracked phone abandoned to another chair and the muffled crying outside his door, Rich is sure of one thing: he will never tell anyone the truth about the fire.
The (seventh? Eleventh? Thirteenth? He’s lost count at this point) next time Rich wakes up, he’s alone in the room and there are no more wraps constraining him. He feels a bit of an ache, but his head feels clear and he guesses that’s a good sign. The doctors have already moved him into one of the regular hospitals rooms and he might be released soon. He really hopes it’s soon because he’s overheard that his parents are working extra jobs and that Mike has even gone as far as to get two more jobs alongside college classes. He knows he needs to pull his weight and help because he did this and he can’t make his family suffer anymore. He’s been nothing but cost after cost since birth and the least he could do was try and help keep them off the streets again. (That’s supposed to be a family secret between Mom, Dad, and Mike but his memory was just too good as a baby. He also remembers mentions of a baby named John, but the last time he brought that up Mom has a shutdown in the kitchen. He knows to just go along with it now).
His fingers drum against the bed he’s been laying in for a week or two, if he had to guess correctly. Most of the time he’s alone when he wakes up, causing him to drift off again, or it’s just because he had to pee or was too hungry to stay asleep for any longer. The IV is out of his arm and that adds to his calm, not having a needle he had to be careful with 24/7. There’s no voice yelling at him in his head, nothing telling him to “wear that don’t wear that get up stand up straighter get rid of that god awful lisp” and he slouches. It feels nice, having an empty head. Maybe the smoke or something messed up the SQUIP? Maybe he didn’t really need Mountain Dew Red after all. Maybe he's free.
The left side of his head explodes in pain and he doubles over, clutching it. Motherfuc-
Calibration in process.
He wishes he went back to sleep.
Please excuse some mild discomfort.
No screams escape him but he’s biting into the blanket hard and his vision is covered with stars. His heart monitor is steadily increasing and it just won’t shut up like this damn fucking voice get out get out-
Calibration complete. Access procedure initiated.
The beeps slow down and the pain fades, but he only bites harder. He knows well enough what’s coming next.
Discomfort level may increase.
Rich screams into the blanket, his heart monitor going off the charts fucking crazy as he swears his skulls nearly splits in two. Some nurses or doctors or whatever Jesus Christ this hurts just make it stop make it stop-
Accessing neural memory. Accessing muscle memory. Access procedure complete.
All the pain fades and he drops the blanket, falling backwards as he stares straight ahead, letting whoever came in to check whatever they needed to. They ask him questions but he can’t hear them. It’s drowned out by the voice he knows too well and it’s back it’s back it’s back it’s back-
Richard Goranski. Welcome back to your Super Quantum Intel Unit Processor.
The voice comes from his left and when he turns to look, Mikey stands there in a silver suit, the edges of his light brown hair turning black. His back is straight and the way he looks down on Rich makes him feel so small.
Your SQUIP , Fake Mike sneers. We have a lot of work to do.
Rich wakes up on the day of the play, stuck in the hospital and stuck with a very fashionable and very rude Mike. No one sits in the plastic seats next to his bed, except for Fashionable Asshole Mike.
Creative.
Oh yeah. He’s in his head. Worse.
Nothing is worse compared to what you did at that party. Rich’s stomach lurches and the SQUIP continues on. His entire house was burned to the ground Rich, and for what? To get rid of me? You know that’s not possible.
It worked for a little bit.
You got a week of silence, congratulations. Six kids are in the ICU and all of their chances are unknown. Wasn’t it five? One of the kids in regular care got worse. As of right now, her condition isn’t predicted to get any better.
There’s no response after that, just him staring at the wall as his knuckles go white, nails digging into the hospital blanket. They stay like that for a few minutes, until it speaks up again.
You understand what you’ve just done to what I spent two years creating, right? You burned down the most popular boy in school's house during a party, injured nearly half the attendants, and ran around screaming for Mountain Dew Red like a lunatic. I’m going to leave you here to think about why you shouldn't have done that and when I return I expect total cooperation. There can’t be even any resistance if you want even a chance of fixing this.
I won’t let you SQUIP the entire school. I’ll stop you again.
I don’t need your cooperation for that. Jeremy Heere is already taking care of that as we speak.
It fades away, leaving Rich alone with beep beep beep beep beep beep- He wants to calm down so no one runs in again and tries to find out why his heart is beating so loudly but all he can think about is that Jeremy is going to SQUIP the whole school and there might be no one else who knows and no one will be able to know because his phone burned up in the fucking fire. He blew four hundred bucks on some batshit computer program and then told some nerd about it and now it is going to commit world fucking domination. He runs a hand through his hair, leaning forward to rest his head against his knees, only to feel a shock up his spine, forcing him to sit upright. Okay, today fucking sucked.
A few hours later, Rich is awoken with an intense pain concentrated in his head that spreads through his body and he starts screaming. It hurts so fucking much and he's thrashing around the bed and it hurts it hurts what the fUCK- Someone grabs his arm then let's go and he hears sobbing and “Rich honey what’s wrong rich what’s happening someone help” but he’s blinded by white and the flashing pain oh god just make it stop - and somewhere he hears scrambled Japanese and English screaming his name and Jeremy’s and something red, but then he passes out.
When he wakes up, there’s someone out cold in the other bed and there’s people beside his bed and there’s no one in his head. The back of his head throbs and he has an ever-worsening headache, but he feels as alone as he did before the SQUIP rebooted itself. Fuck yeah. Mom is the first to notice he's awake, reaching for his hand and whispering "oh thank you for keeping our boy safe" over and over again as a prayer. Mike is there too and for a second Rich is unsure if he's real or not because he wears the same silver sweater the SQUIP wore only a year ago. The smile is too kind and the tears are genuine and he berates himself for thinking something so stupid. He's not sure if SQUIPs can even cry . Dad smiles at Rich when their eyes met, proceeding to slump into his chair and whisper a prayer of his own. For a while, it's just silence between all four of them and, when the three have to leave to talk to a doctor, it's still just silent. A part of him feels missing, but his thoughts are silent and, for just a moment, that's all he needs.