Work Text:
“Family of Tyler Strand?”
The doctor’s voice carries across the waiting room to their little trio, and all three of them stand up as a unit. Tommy is the first one to find her voice.
“Yes? How is he?”
“You’re family?” the doctor asks with a skeptical look, which, rude and presumptive but technically legally correct.
“Practically, yes. Nancy and I work with him, and this is his boyfriend, Carlos--”
Carlos visibly flinches and Nancy, still holding tight to his hand, feels it and pulls him in under her arm. He knows Tommy is just anxious like they are and that’s probably why she forgot and it’s not her fault but...it still hurts to remember it isn’t true.
“--and we also work with his father, Owen Strand, but he’s been unreachable. I assure you that you can let us know developments. If nothing else, Nancy and I are the ones that worked on him before he was brought in.” Her face is earnest, and she won't take no for an answer, and the doctor seems to get that. He sighs.
“Very well. Mr. Strand, as you already know, is severely hypothermic--”
Carlos starts to tune out when all the medical jargon starts getting thrown around. His attention span at this point is spotty at best, and he just hopes Nancy and Tommy will explain things to him in words he can understand.
He just wants to know if TK is okay. Well, if he’s going to be okay anytime soon. Nancy has been vague about the situation so he hasn’t been able to form a clear picture in his mind of what’s actually happened. He knows TK fell into a frozen lake, and that it was pretty bad. But that’s all.
“Okay, thank you doctor,” Tommy says, and when she turns back to them her face is...well, Carlos doesn’t want to think about it too much or he’ll conjure up images of Charles’ funeral. “They said he’s been moved to the ICU, and that we can see him but only one at a time.” She pauses for a moment, and Carlos just blinks at her. “Carlos? I think you should go see him.”
He finally makes eye contact. Opens and closes his jaw a couple of times. Finds his voice, even though it’s strained. “I...I don’t think it...it wouldn’t be right,” he stammers, shaking his head. Why should he, the ex-boyfriend, get to see TK and not his closest work friends who are practically family? Sure, he wants to see TK for himself to make sure he’s whole, but Carlos is not the one who should be the front of the line here.
“Carlos,” comes the hard interruption from Nancy, “You know that’s not true.”
He doesn’t say anything. He can’t think of anything to say to put his thoughts into words.
“She’s right, sweetheart,” Tommy adds, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. The weight of it feels like it might cause him to collapse, but the love behind it is holding him together. Barely. “We’ll wait here, and you can go see him for an hour or two. It’s alright.”
No, no, no, it is not alright, his brain screams, but nothing comes out of his mouth.
“Hey.” It’s Nancy at his side again. “Tell me what’s happening in your head right now. What’s wrong?”
Besides everything? he thinks.
It takes him a very, very long moment to put it to words. “If I stay out here, it’s not real. I can’t see him lying there, unresponsive, not knowing when he’ll wake up, again. I can’t--I can’t do it. I can’t make it real.” He feels the tears burning behind his eyes, and wills them away.
Nancy gives a defeated sigh. “Carlos, I know you’re scared, but...” She takes so long to continue that Carlos looks up at her. He sees her exhaustion, her fear, her longing, and feels a deep camaraderie with her that he’s never felt before. If Tommy’s face had reminded him of Charles’ funeral, Nancy’s was reminding him of Tim’s.
Maybe that should have clued him in.
“Listen,” she continues, “I don’t want to...to have to say it like this, but...” She turns his body to face hers and puts a hand on each of his shoulders. “You might not get another chance. To see him, to talk to him.” She sniffles and wills her own tears back, it seems.
Carlos stops short. “It’s...it’s that bad?” Nancy sighs and looks away for a moment. “Tell me, Nancy.”
“It is. His organs were already starting to fail when we got him in the rig. We had to defib twice--once in the snow and once in the rig. Carlos, I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but please, please take this chance to see him even if you think you don’t deserve to.”
And wow, did she just hit the nail on the head. He’s speechless, aching and desperate.
“Look, I’ll go with you, okay? I’ll walk you up there and I’ll be right outside the door. We’ll go together. Okay?” She squeezes his shoulders and he can see how much it costs her to also go and see her partner in his current state. To make it real, as it were.
He takes a deep, aching breath. “Okay.”
“I’ll be here, okay kids? Take care of each other,” Tommy says as she settles into a seat, clasping her hands against her knees. She gives them a sad smile that looks like it physically hurts. He and Nancy turn away to the elevators.
When they make it to the ICU, Nancy takes the lead since presumably she was paying attention when the doctor gave them TK’s room number. All the rooms are walled with glass so any changes can be quickly seen and attended to by the nurses at the station in the center. It’s eerie, seeing all these people barely hanging on to life and not being as detached from it all as he might once have been.
“This is it. Go on in, and I'll be right here waiting for you, okay?” Carlos doesn’t know how she’s being so strong in this moment. She looks like she’s about to crack, but she never does. He wonders where her well of strength ends. All he can do is nod at her.
He takes another deep breath, steeling himself, and goes in.
It’s worse that when TK had been shot. Back then, when Carlos had gotten to his side, he’d honestly just looked like he was sleeping. His face was peaceful, and the steady rise and fall of his chest was comforting, even after knowing what had happened in the interim.
This TK looks...Carlos doesn’t even want to think it.
There are wires and tubes all over him, including a large respirator tube down his throat with tape all around his face. His eyes are surrounded by purple and his skin looks blue, like all the warm blood has left. His breathing looks and sounds mechanical, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm that’s not quite natural.
Carlos lets himself think it: TK looks dead. He looks entirely unlike the TK Carlos has been madly in love with for nearly two years, even unlike the slightly flat and awkward TK from earlier this morning at the furniture store. It’s like looking at a wax figure, the man he loved used as a reference but clearly not contained in this facsimile.
Quickly, he pushes those thoughts from his head and focuses on the steady beeping of the monitors, showing TK’s heart pumping steadily and his lungs filling and refilling. He’s not dead, he’s not, he’s not, he’s not.
There’s no chair, so Carlos goes to stand next to the bed. Tentatively, he reaches out to touch the dry knuckles of TK’s left hand, but decides against it at the last minute. Again, this is different from the shooting. Back then, even if they weren’t something yet, Carlos knew he’d be welcomed. Now, staring down into the face of the man he loves more than life, he’s not sure if that’d be true, no matter what Nancy says. He can still hear the things they said to each other that final night before TK left the house for good, and he wonders if TK would tell him to fuck off if he could.
But, he supposes, TK can't tell him to fuck off, and Carlos has wanted so badly to be close to him for so many months now, so he takes advantage. He reaches out more confidently this time and takes TK’s fingers loosely in his own.
They’re freezing to the touch.
“Hey, baby. Sorry, I know that’s probably not what you want to hear from me, but you’re just gonna have to suck it up and wake up if you want to yell at me about it. God, I miss you, so much. I can’t take much more of this life, TK. I can’t come home to an empty house when I know it’s supposed to be filled with you. I can’t go out on calls knowing if I see you that I can’t even talk to you to ease some of the anxiety of the job.
“I am so, so sorry for what I said that night. I know you’re sorry, too, and you think that we can’t go back after that. I thought that, too. I couldn’t even sleep in the house for that first week. I stayed at the ranch with my parents. It was too empty, and I’d rather their lumpy guest room pillows than sleeping in our king sized bed alone.
“But TK, nothing ever stays the same. You told me that. So this isn’t going to last. We’ll find our way back to each other, someday. I hope, at least.”
He falls silent, running his thumb back and forth over cold skin and listening to the beeps from the monitors. Watching TK’s chest rise and fall. Wishing against the universe that TK will suddenly squeeze his hand, and living each new minute that it doesn’t happen in agony.
In his mind, it happens in slow motion. He’s still half listening to the rhythm of the beeping from the heart monitor, but without warning, it morphs into something else. A long, shrill, sustained noise.
On instinct, Carlos looks over to the screen to see exactly what his brain tells him he would, because he’s seen it in a dozen movies and TV shows but never in real life, and never with someone he loved more than his own life.
The line on the screen is flat. The shrill sound is splitting his ear drums, even though it can’t be all that loud.
In the next moment, he isn’t alone. The room is filling with nurses and doctors, swarming TK’s still body and moving Carlos away from the bed. They’re shouting at each other, though Carlos can’t make out their words through the numbness in his thoughts. He just keeps staring, even though all he can see are the backs of the scrub-clad nurses and doctors, but knowing TK is still right there.
“Ty?” he chokes out.
“Come on, Carlos, let’s let them work, okay?” Nancy’s strong grip is on his arm, but he isn’t budging. He can’t. His legs have also gone numb, along with the rest of his body.
“Tyler?” he whispers, calling out, wishing it would make a difference. He can’t hear anything past the whooshing in his ears and the terrible, terrible beeping of the flatline.
“Carlos, come on, we have to move away--”
Carlos’ body flinches just as hard as TK’s when the first shock goes through it. The flatline remains, and the doctor is still yelling. The second shock hurts Carlos just as much as the first, even though he’s no where near. He watches TK’s body bow up off the bed and drop back down, and he feels like he’s being ripped in half as Nancy tugs on his arm again.
This time, he stumbles toward her, away from TK, and she uses the leverage to pull him completely out of the room just before he watches the third shock from through the window.
“No, no, no, no, no--” He isn’t sure if any sound is coming out, but that’s the only word he can think of in the moment.
“Carlos, come on, come on, we have to go.” Nancy is crying in earnest now, but still somehow she’s stronger than him.
“Ty--baby--” Carlos realizes he’s crying too, when the first actual volume in his voice comes out on a sob. He turns into Nancy’s arms and collapses, and she holds him there in the middle of the ICU floor, and even though they are several feet away from the door, Carlos could swear he can still hear that horrible sustained beeping.
He’ll hear it for the rest of his life now, no matter what happens. He’ll hear it waking and in his sleep. He’ll never be rid of that sound, or how he feels, or the despair he carries right in this moment. He’ll always be able to hear the love of his life dying, and he’ll never forget it.