Chapter Text
End of Junior Year, June 2007
Tree Hill Hospital
It’s Lucas that’s at his bedside when he comes to, muttering his absentee wife’s name as he emerges from his post-op haze.
“Haley? Haley?!”
Lucas stands from his chair and leans over Nathan, carefully placing a hand on his arm.
“Hey, Nate?” he says carefully, quietly but firmly.
Nathan sighs deeply and slowly opens his eyes.
“Nate,” Lucas repeats. “Hey, it’s me. Don’t worry.”
Nathan, still groggy, still with visuals from his bizarre dream is distressed and attempts to sit up.
“It’s okay, it’s me,” Lucas reassures him as Nathan looks down at his own left hand, frowning at the gold band he sees.
“Hey … welcome back little brother,” Lucas continues, still speaking quietly but clearly thrilled to have Nathan back in the land of the living.
Nathan, a bit disoriented and not knowing what to say, settles on saying nothing at all and Lucas smiles and shakes his head, resuming his seat and letting the quiet settle.
“How’re you feeling?” he asks a long while later, after Nathan has fallen asleep for another hour or so, then reawakened.
“Like I hit a brick wall,” Nathan replies drily, making Lucas laugh and shake his head.
“Well, the doc says you’re gonna be fine,” Lucas advises him, but Nathan merely sighs heavily. “You know, what was this anyway, huh? Some sort of messed up… anything Lucas can do, I can do better?” the blond jokes. “Even getting knocked around inside a car?”
“No… you wanna hear something really messed up though?” Nathan replies, struggling to breathe a little. “I thought I died and went to heaven.”
“No kidding,” Lucas replies, nodding a little.
“Yeah. Only … heaven was a place where … Dan chose your mom … over mine.”
Lucas looks away and laughs nervously. Sounds like anything but heaven to him.
“Then Haley was tone-deaf,” Nathan continues. “But that was only a dream. I did kick your ass in one-on-one, though.”
“Well, I guess it was a dream then, huh?” his brother quips, making Nathan laugh then wince as his chest and abdominal area hurt. Lucas’ smile falls as he thinks about how to phrase what he did while Nathan was still out for the count.
“I know you … you asked me not to, but … I called Haley,” he admits. There’s a silent beat as Nathan looks at Lucas with narrowed eyes.
“She’s your wife, Nate. And she loves you. She needed to know,” Lucas says to justify himself, but Nathan remains silent. Strangely, as Lucas sits and waits for Nathan to say something, anything, he thinks the brunette looks not angry, but … resigned. He’s not sure what that means.
“Up to you, I suppose,” Nathan eventually says with a shrug.
“You … I thought you’d be pissed at me.”
“I don’t know what I am, Lucas. That dream was just …”
“You wanna talk about it?”
“You sound like a girl,” Nathan chuckles before wincing again.
“I think you’re feeling better; you’re already giving me shit. So … weird dream?”
“Yeah. I …”
“What else happened?”
“Maybe later? I … need to think about it.”
“Sure. Anytime. Nate? I have to ask you something,” Lucas says nervously but with some determination. “When you hit the wall …” he pauses, shakes his head, can’t finish the sentence.
He watches Nathan, looking for some sort of reaction but his brother merely looks at him with a passive face.
“You’re asking me if I did this on purpose?” Nathan eventually asks, speaking very deliberately but without any emotion or emphasis so that his brother, even though alert for any hints, can’t detect anything other than the words themselves.
Lucas nods but there’s no time for Nathan to say anything further as the door to his room opens and Deb enters, looking distracted at first, but then exuberant as she realises her son is awake.
“Nathan!” she exclaims as she shuts the door. “Oh, thank god!”
“I’ll let you two, uh …” Lucas says as he stands up.
“Nathan, I …” Deb begins as she approaches his bed.
“I love you, mom,” Nathan interrupts her, with a confirming nod, causing her to sigh contentedly as Lucas beats a hasty and disappointed exit. He’s going to circle back to that crash though, and Nathan knows it. Right now, however, he’s got some amends to make.
“I mean that,” he continues to his mother. “And I … I know I’ve been a jerk lately; to you, to everybody else.” Deb rests her hands on his arm and smiles tenderly.
“I’m sorry,” he says, meeting her teary gaze.
“You’ve been hurting …” she begins in a conciliatory way.
“It doesn’t matter,” he counters. “I know you’re just trying to be a good mother.”
He holds his hand out to her, which she happily takes with her own while smiling a now very teary smile. She stands and moves to perch on the edge of his bed, overcome at his words.
“I haven’t been a good mother, Nathan. But that’s going to change now,” she says firmly.
“What’re you talking about?” he asks, clearly confused.
“I need to be stronger for you … and for myself,” she tells him. “So, while you’re healing from this … I’ll be healing too. I promise you.”
“Whatever it is … I got your back,” he tells her as they share another smile. He watches her, and his mind flickers back to that dream.
“Do you ever …” he begins, wondering if it’s a good idea to ask her this, then deciding that he’s going to have to get his head sorted out somehow. His Mom’s as a good a place as any to start, right? After all, she’s the one that met him first in this world. “Do you ever wonder what life would be like … if Dan had married Karen … and just stayed out of our lives?”
He half expects her to be angry or shocked, but she’s not. She’s strangely contemplative.
“Maybe not all the time, but certainly not rarely either” she says after a pause, then takes a breath in. “Why?”
Nathan opens his mouth to reply, to tell her about his dream, and Deb’s Den and what a great relationship they had without his father being around, but the damned door opens again and, speak of the devil, maybe literally, Dan enters. They both turn to look at him.
“Glad to see you’re awake, son,” he says as Deb turns away from her husband, her tears finally overflowing. Nathan scowls, not sure if it’s his real father or his dream father that he’s pissed at. Probably both. Dan leaves the room while Deb continues to look down. Typical Dan Scott; walk in, lob a grenade and leave. Nathan smiles at his mother and gives her hand a squeeze. They’re going to be okay; he’s going to make sure of it.
After Deb has departed, Lucas returns with a coffee in hand and Nathan, not prepared to go near the topic of conversation that was raised before his brother left the room earlier, alternates between keeping up an inane conversation about anything basketball related that he can think of, and closing his eyes pretending to be resting. That’s when he thinks, when he ponders over the dream. What does it mean? Does it mean anything?
When Lucas stands to go, promising that he’ll be back for the evening visiting hours, Nathan opens his eyes and asks him to bring some of the others with him. He’s bored, he says, to which Lucas rolls his eyes and says he’s glad that Nathan finds his conversation so stimulating.
“Well,” Nathan says drily, “your next big thing after ball is books, and I’m not sure I can converse for long on that subject.”
“True,” Lucas chuckles. “Sure. Of course, I can round up some troops. Anyone in particular?”
“I dunno,” he says with studied nonchalance. “Someone funny … oh! Peyton,” he suggests as calmly as he can, not wanting to give any inkling of motives other than boredom-busting. “And Brooke,” he adds as a way of making it seem less … something. “They’re funny. And a damned sight easier on the eye than you are.”
“Not Tim?” Lucas grins.
“Oh God. Maybe tomorrow. Or the day after.”
“Peyton?”
“Hey, Brooke,” she replies from her bed, glancing at the brunette in the doorway before dropping her gaze back to her drawing portfolio and continuing on with the lettering for her sketch.
“So … I thought I’d head to the hospital,” Brooke says tentatively as she steps into the room, looking a little nervous.
“Cool. Say hi to Nathan from me.”
And that’s a studiously masked expression if ever there was one. Not even a flicker of an eyelid.
“I … thought you might come with me?”
“Nope.”
“He’s … Nathan is your friend.”
“Yep.”
“Peyton, I know it’s …”
“What, Brooke?” she interrupts, finally looking up, her green eyes fiery. “Messed up? Crazy? A nightmare? That our friend somehow managed to drive into a wall at two hundred an hour? Or that you somehow think I’m a fit person to see him and talk to him in the aftermath when we all know it’s his wife that should be here doing that?”
“All of that, but also … I know it’s hard for you to go anywhere near that place. Harder than for most other people.”
“Yep. But that’s not why I’m not going.”
“Then why?”
“Because this should be about what Nathan wants, not what anyone else wants. And not about ticking off little boxes that anyone thinks are the right and correct thing to do.”
And it remains unsaid, but it’s also because she just really doesn’t have a clue about all of this. She and Nathan are friends. Amazingly and oddly after everything, they’re pretty decent friends. And when she heard about the accident, she nearly puked. It took ages for her to be able to breathe normally again. And she probably won’t ever forgive Haley for leaving and for putting Nathan through this, but if … if he … God, if he hadn’t pulled through … well, she really doesn’t know what she’d have done. But he did pull through. He made it. He was going to be okay. If Peyton ever saw Haley James again though, she didn’t think the same would be able to be said about the shortass little ... tutor girl? Traitor girl, more like. Selfish, selfish traitor girl. Another person that left. That left something amazing. Someone amazing. Just turned and walked and left them behind. No warning. No backward glances.
Peyton looks at the sketch in front of her. And even though she could, at the moment, quite cheerfully do some serious damage to Haley James, she still hopes beyond hope that, for Nathan’s sake, the words that she plans to add to the drawing of joined hands will become a prophecy. Sometimes they come back.
“Um … hey.”
The girls both turn their heads to see Lucas has appeared in the doorway. Hands deep in his jean pockets, shoulders semi-hunched, looking like the boy version of coy that he often does.
“Hey, Luke,” Brooke says quietly. “I’m … just trying to convince P. Sawyer to go see Nathan with me.”
“And … you’re not going?” he asks, looking at Peyton with what looks like a little worry etched on his face.
“Nope.”
“Well, that makes me look like a tool, then,” Lucas says, stepping into the room.
“What? Why?”
“Because a while ago I promised Nathan that I’d take you two there for evening visiting hours.”
“Why would you do that?” Peyton asks, looking somewhat pissed. “You don’t speak for me, Lucas.”
“No,” he says mildly, “but he asked me to, so …”
“He ... Nathan asked you to?” Peyton asks, with a curious look on her face.
“Uh-huh. He said to bring you two in because you’re cool and funny and because he’s sick of my talking points apparently so …”
Brooke looks at Peyton hopefully and the blonde, knowing Lucas has very cleverly pushed just the right buttons, mutters under her breath.
“Fine,” she mumbles. “But I need half an hour to finish this sketch. It’s for the car crash survivor himself so ….”
“We can wait,” Brooke says.
“No. I’ll meet you two there.”
“Are you going to bail on us?” Lucas asks suspiciously.
“No. Not if you’re telling the truth and Nathan asked for us.”
“I am. He did.”
“Then I’ll see you there in … forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour.”