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“Maybe you should see a doctor about that.”
The words echoed in Axl’s mind for something like the five hundredth time as he sat in the Los Angeles Community Hospital emergency room. They were the kind of words a person doesn’t take seriously until the last second. The exact kind of words that one does not expect to be so true until they are waiting among a greying, pale crowd for the next name to be called. Axl hoped fruitlessly time and time again that the next one would be his, but it was to no avail—tonight, the emergency room was packed full of people, and each of them was suffering a condition much more serious than his. For example, there was the man in the corner: that guy had a kidney stone, and it showed. He was wincing, painfully, and would mutter a quiet “Jesus fucking Christ” every ten minutes or so, not entirely unlike the girl sitting across from him; who was both visibly drunk and visibly crying with the pain of the broken hand she held in her lap. A few pale-faced boys had come in with bad burns and open wounds on their hands and arms too; from what Axl could only assume was some kind of fireworks accident. There had been more before—a stocky woman with serious blue-lipped shortness of breath, and a mother bouncing a little boy on her lap, who had something lodged so far up his nose that both he and the mother were crying about it—but doctors and nurses had come and gone with kind, tired expressions; and had taken those patients and many more to the fluorescent white rooms beyond.
Axl bit his lip and couldn’t help but ask himself again. Should I even be here? He knew the answer was yes. The answer was yes simply because everyone agreed the answer was yes. Duff said so, and Slash agreed. Izzy wouldn’t say anything, but the way he had tipped his head in half-acceptance when Slash said it meant more than words could really say.
“Maybe you should see a doctor about that.”
“Yeah.”
Silence.
They all thought he was fucked up somehow. Axl knew that. He could tell they thought it when they were practicing together. He’d feel his voice catch on a word, even just the slightest bit, and then he’d have to stop and do the whole verse over again, because he just couldn’t mess up. It needed to be redone until it was perfect. And every time he didn’t get it exactly right was just another swinging ax to the tree of his sanity, until it crumpled under its own weight and he ended up having a fit, or going on a tangent, or breaking something. They all thought he was fucking crazy for that, for needing everything to be just so, because otherwise dishes would fly and shatter. Axl would look at the way their eyes avoided him completely as they tuned instruments that didn’t need tuning, and he’d scream on the inside; sometimes the outside, too. Nobody would say anything. At least Steven had said something. At least Steven had acknowledged how weird and perfectionistic he could be. But now Steven was gone, and Axl hurt thinking about it, so he did his best not to.
Eventually, it all got so bad that he stopped going to practices. If they needed anything, they could just telephone him. Axl liked it better that way; except sometimes he didn’t, because there was really nothing as lonely as being in your room, surrounded by smoked-out cigarettes and empty coffee cups, lowly singing this one verse over and over, muttering “fuck, fuck, fuck…” when you got it wrong, and then pulling out your hair when you just couldn’t find the words to make it sound right. Axl wondered how many clumps of hair the hotel maids had found so far. It was probably a lot, but he couldn’t guess at the number.
That was the kind of thing that had made the guys really worry: when he would start freaking out for real, pulling out hair and cursing at himself, right in the middle of songs. Axl wasn’t sure what made it happen, exactly, other than the awful timing of whatever entity Fate could be considered; but he’d be singing, dancing, doing whatever; trying desperately to forget himself and his worries and get back into that crazy-mother-fucker persona that people revered so much it hurt; and for no reason, no reason at all, he would choke up, stop singing, and just clutch onto the microphone for dear life. It felt like he would fall over, pass out, throw up, die, something—only he was never sure which it would be; so the world was left spinning into static, sinister darkness while Slash put a hand on his shoulder and asked if he was okay. It was so awful he just couldn’t bear to be around them sometimes. It would happen almost every time he practiced, and there was a point at which even he had to say no more. He couldn’t stand the way they looked at him. As if they were just trying to be nice to appease the lion in their cage.
Somebody in the waiting room coughed. Axl jolted upright and felt a pain in his lip, then realizing he’d bitten so hard it was bleeding. Quickly, he took a tissue from his pocket and pressed it to his mouth, hoping nobody else would notice—and nobody did. It stopped bleeding, but still felt a little warm, so Axl cautiously put the tissue back in his pocket and licked his lip like a cat licking its wounds.
So yes. That was why he was here. That was all. He was just crazy. Axl sniffed mildly, tapping his foot and looking around for the millionth time since getting to the emergency room. He was there for no reason at all. Just for feeling scared and dizzy sometimes.
Well, that, and the crushing pain in his chest, too. That might have had something to do with it.
Axl didn’t know what to think of that at all. He’d gone to bed just fine, after a little bit of whiskey and something resembling dinner, and after he’d kicked out another female not-exactly-friend because he’d decided he wanted to be completely alone with his thoughts. And then, after falling asleep to the charming background noises of the television playing Seinfeld, he’d woken up at almost three in the morning with the sensation that somebody was stabbing him in the chest. When it happened, he leapt up and tore off the blankets, absolutely certain that somebody had snuck in, that somebody had finally fucking got him. But there was no blood. There was no knife. There was no attacker, and there was no stab wound through his heart. Even as he realized this, the pain did not go away—in fact, it almost got worse; to the point where he thought “oh, God, I’m having a heart attack”, and that was when he ran downstairs to hop in the car and attempt to drive himself to the E.R. That was the real reason he was here, tonight; though the uncontrollable panic and anger was the reason he felt like seeing a doctor. And, seeing as he was still alive and relatively well after at least an hour, Axl had a suspicious feeling that this wasn’t a heart attack. It was just as useless of a problem as the panic was.
At that moment, the doors behind them opened to let another severely-damaged person in, and the entire waiting room seemed to sag a little more at the prospect of an even longer waiting time. Axl did nothing but tap his foot some more, wondering if you were supposed to be able to feel your insides squirming around, or if he was just so fucked in the head that his senses were broken at this point. He forgot to breathe a few times, and that worried him. Was it a sign? Was he already dying? How can a person forget to breathe? Maybe it’s something with my spinal cord, he thought, feeling faint as the room swam in front of him and a woman spoke in low tones at the front desk. Maybe it’s an illness crawling its way up to my brain. Well, if it is, good luck, shithead. I’m already so sick up there that it’s gonna take more than that to kill me…
“Oh, that’s—well. That’s quite a while. Okay. Thank you. Over here? Alright.” The new woman who had come to join them was a little bit too polite for the emergency room, Axl thought. But one look at her, and he knew she was right where she needed to be.
The first thing he noticed about her was that she was pregnant. Heavily so. She walked upright, but with an unpleasant expression on her face, and the way she slumped onto the bench next to him and immediately let out an exhausted breath told him she was just plain sick of standing up and walking around all day with a nine-pound bowling ball in her gut. The next thing he noticed was what he guessed to be the reason she was in there with the rest of them. Her face was covered—covered—with cuts and bruises. And it wasn’t like Axl hadn’t seen anything like that before. He had. He remembered when his mother had Amy; he remembered—well. He remembered what she’d looked like a lot of the time, when his step father had decided that nothing was too precious to spare the brunt of anger. But looking at the (h/c)-haired woman beside him, and watching her slip her purse off of her shoulder and pull out a little tin of concealer and start covering up her purpled bruises right there in the middle of the waiting room—it made him feel sick to the stomach, because she was used to this. Good God, she was so complacent with it; just sitting there, powdering her face like it was just a bout of acne, like it would all disappear when she closed the lid of the makeup tin. Axl began to tremble again, and he knew the panic wasn’t far behind.
The waiting room sighed and winced and groaned. The drunk girl with a broken hand got taken to the back, and they heard her crying while the doctors tried to reset all the bones that had been smashed. Somebody got a water bottle out of the vending machine in the corner. Somebody else answered the telephone ringing at the desk. There was the scratching of pen on paper. The woman next to him closed the concealer tin and cracked open a tube of bright red lipstick, and at that point, Axl was breathing loud and heavy, hunched over in his chair just in case he should fall over and die. If he did, it would be a short trip to the ground, and nobody would see him drop like a pathetic drunkard—hopefully, it would just be a clean, smooth slide to the floor, like his soul had been plucked neatly from his body and tossed into the depths of hell. Another breath. A big breath. Axl squeezed his eyes shut to keep the black from creeping in on his vision, but saw red behind his eyelids, because the emergency room lights were so bright; and he opened them again to a world slightly more blue and unforgiving than the one he had left moments ago.
“Hey.” A soft voice sounded from next to him. He turned, blinking sweat out of his eyes and wishing the goddam chest pain would fuck off already, and there she was, the lady-with-child, gently putting her hand on his arm. “Are you okay?”
Axl tried to open his mouth to say something, but it was there again—the locking up, the sense that his words were imprisoned in his mind. He couldn’t even move his lips to whisper, so he just shook his head instead. He wished she wouldn’t touch his arm. It reminded him too much of that wholesome kindness girls have, the feminine way that makes them all too friendly, sometimes to the wrong people. He wanted to ask her who had given her the bruises all over her face, and—now that he could see them—her arms and legs. She was just a little thing in a white nightgown and a black wool coat to keep warm in the waiting room’s air conditioned housing. She was just a frail little girl with a belly bigger than her. Who had done her wrong? Had she been so kind to them?
“Take a deep breath with me, okay?”
Oh, God, he couldn’t see. He couldn’t see. Axl felt his hands trembling like they were about to fly out from under his control. But he tried for her sake. He breathed in so deeply his chest pain seemed to writhe a little, and then settle itself.
“Alright. And let it out.”
That he did. It was louder and shakier than the winds off the coast during hurricane season, but it was something. It was sure something. Axl tried blinking and discovered, thankfully, that his vision was coming back.
“And take another deep breath.”
Axl did that, too. And he kept doing it, repeating himself, breathing in and out as she told him to, as the woman leaned over and let her fluffy hair tumble onto his shoulder. She smelled a little like green apples, which he figured was some kind of soap she used; but there was a natural scent under it too, a sweetness not too unlike the brown sugar his mom used to stir into his oatmeal whenever they could afford to buy it. God. Axl wished he could just stop thinking about his mom. It was bad enough to be here, in public, freaking the fuck out and only being comforted by the person nearest to him—but to be inundated with memories of his childhood every five seconds was a special kind of hell reserved only for those who deserve it. And—well. Axl thought he probably did.
“Oh, sweetheart. What’s your name?” She put an arm around him and rubbed his shoulder gently as he came back to himself, staring down at the ground in a slumped, defeated posture, forcing himself to breathe in a pattern and watching his hands shake against the backdrop of whitish grey tile flooring.
“Axl.” He whispered, so quietly he hoped she wouldn’t hear him. Her arm squeezed him a little tighter and he found himself willingly leaning towards her, resting his head on her shoulder.
“Ah, just like on a car.” He could hear her smiling. It was the sweetest, saddest thing. Axl sighed and then sniffed and then thought oh, God, I don’t want to do that here.
“Yeah, well. It’s spelled different.” His face felt impossibly hot as he fought against the notion in his head. Did he need to cry? Probably. Should he? No. Right here and right now? No. Right this instant? NO. The pain in his chest seemed to think otherwise. It twisted his heart so hard he swore he could feel it snap in two, right there in his ribcage, and he tried so hard to keep still as he listened to her speak again.
“Well hey, Axl, I’m (Y/N). This is Baby.” She patted her belly as if it were already her child’s head, and Axl closed his eyes and leaned on her, hard, pretending for a moment that his mother was there; that it was really her. “It’s nice to meet you. We’ll keep you company, okay?”
Not here, not now, not here, not now, Axl’s mind chanted, over and over, but it was useless. It was going to be here, and it was going to be now. He turned his head to bury his nose in her shoulder and hopefully not make too much sound as the first tears slipped from his eyes, tracing hot tracks down his cheeks like drops of acid rain.
“I’m so sorry,” he kept whispering, voice hitching occasionally, hiccupping in the middle of a word. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Shush, sweet pea. You’re okay. You’re gonna be just fine.” She hummed lightly to him and pulled him to her with both arms, now, reaching all the way over her belly to get to him, to give him the care he so desperately wanted, but could never quite bring himself to ask for. “What’s the matter? What’s hurting you?”
At this, Axl could have said any number of things. There were quite a few reasonable ones, such as the significant pain that he was now pretty sure was going to be death by spontaneous combustion; or the fact that he had been panicky like this since he-didn’t-remember-how-long; or the sudden realization that he had been suffering for as long as he could remember with only quick bursts of happiness and contentment here and there to get by. Any of these seemed like completely sound reasons why a 28-year-old man would now be sobbing in the arms of a pregnant woman in a brightly-lit emergency room, but the real reason that he blurted out, and the one he realized hurt the most, was that…
“I’m all alone.”
It would have made him cry harder if he weren’t in public, surrounded by people with much worse issues than loneliness. But on the inside he was howling like a wolf, baying at the big sad moon. He was alone. Completely and totally alone. Duff and Slash weren’t there. Izzy wasn’t either. Not that he expected them to be, because he hadn’t called them, but—what if he really was dying? What then? Then they would have left each other on a sour note, and he would have been the one to blame, and their last memory of him would be one tainted with the phrase “man, what a fucking asshole”. Steven wasn’t there, even though Axl had waited up all night that one time, to see him wake up in the hospital, to make sure he was alright. Steven wouldn’t want to be there. Steven would fucking hate him.
(Y/N) held her new friend close, protecting him from inconsequential-yet-inquisitive stares as he broke down and sobbed into her shoulder, and she whispered to him all while combing her fingers through his hair. She didn’t know him at all, but he seemed like such a sweet boy; and she understood how horrible it felt to be alone; especially in a room full of people such as this. Alone was all she had felt for the past eight months. Although she’d stopped crying long ago, she still felt it sometimes, like a weight on her shoulders, a heavy ache in her heart; a yearning for something or someone that wasn’t there but should have been. It made sense that he was so upset. Without thinking too much about it, (Y/N) leaned over and pressed a kiss to the top of his ginger head, and felt him wrap his arms around her and hug her tight.
Though she knew he meant no harm, that didn’t stop it from smarting something awful when he pressed a spot on her back that she’d hit a little too hard in her fall down the stairs—and all of a sudden, it came back to her. (Y/N) tried to breathe as shallowly as possible through her nose and not let on that she was afraid or hurting; but then she began to fear anyway. The notion came back to her that she was really at the end of her rope; that she was finally going to crack and have a nuclear-sized meltdown, because tonight was the worst it had ever been. She knew her boyfriend Kenny didn’t want a baby, but she’d thought that he was just fine with giving it up for adoption—she thought they’d settled that argument a hundred times over, and that each time, she had won. It was her body, she’d said, and she ought to know a thing or two about it, and besides, somebody else could take care of this child better than either of them really could right now. At the end of each argument, he would say nothing; just glowering at her with that hot-as-coals look, the one that said she was in trouble. She knew something was wrong with Kenny about the whole thing, and yet she had stayed by his side, attempting to throw sand on the raging fire, trying to convince all her friends that he really was okay, that he was the same Kenny they’d always known. But he wasn’t. (Y/N) didn’t know where that Kenny had gone—that brown-haired, blue-eyed beauty she’d fallen in love with—but she was still trying to figure it out, to get back to where they had begun together. It didn’t matter how many different women he snuck over to their house when she was out working or shopping. It didn’t matter how many times he swore at her, or threw dishes at her, or smacked her straight across the face—she knew he was still in there, that once Baby was gone and adopted by somebody else, then they could be together again like they were before, when Kenny was sweet on her and she would laugh and giggle her way through the night; a slim little red dress on and a fruity drink in hand while he tried to convince her to go back home with him and let the night sing.
Tonight was different. Something cold was setting in; the hard truth that Kenny was lost to the world. A certain terror of commitment had turned him bitter towards her instead of the precious sweet thing he used to be, and eight months later, she was in the emergency room in the Los Angeles Community Hospital, cut up and bruised from being thrown down stairs already littered with glass shards, her womb bleeding so heavily she thought she might faint before she could get up to go see the doctor.
(Y/N) had come here with one thing in mind, and it wasn’t any kind of hope at all. Although she’d introduced Baby to Axl, and made pretend like they could be a family for the moment, she knew with a low ache in the cavern of her chest that it was all over. Baby was gone. There was nothing to do now but cling to the civilities she had, while she had them. She would be polite to everybody here—the front desk workers, the nurses, the doctors—and she would take care of this young man. And then she would learn of her baby’s death, and she would collapse to the floor in a heap, writhing, sobbing, until she bled out. Death by heartache. (Y/N) knew what was coming, and she knew she was powerless to stop it, so she used the power she did have to pull Axl closer, and to tuck her chin over the top of his head while he clutched onto the lapel of her coat and wept.
“I mean—” Axl sniffed, and (Y/N) tuned back in to what he was saying while rubbing his shoulder gently.
“Mhm?”
“I mean I… I never liked the guy that much, you know, not when—not when he was high all the fucking time—but he was so… goddamn… happy. You’ve never seen a happier person than Steven. I swear to God. He was always happy. If he had one girl he was happy. If he had two girls he was happier. If he had his drum kit you couldn’t fuckin’ tear the man down, he would just keep bouncing around, off the walls, crashing cymbals… I just… I miss him. I think I miss him more than I should. Because he probably fucking hates me.” There was a pause, and then a quiet, broken, “I know he does.”
“Oh, honey.” She rubbed his shoulder some more. “Why on Earth would he hate you?”
There was a long, exaggerated sniff, and then Axl mumbled, “It’s complicated.”
“I see.” She really didn’t, but there wasn’t much more she could say. All she could do was hold him there and blink out into the bright white lights of the emergency room, feeling tired, which was pretty reasonable, for the hour they were visiting at.
After a moment, Axl continued, softer than he’d spoken before. “I remember this one time, I was having a real shit day. Like the kind where you know you have to get up and do whatever, but you just can’t, because you don’t want to, because the world sucks and everyone sucks and everything sucks and you just want it to be night already so you can go to sleep and try again. One of those days. I was in bed—it was like, I don’t know, noon—and I was trying to figure out how I could put some jeans on without getting out of bed to walk across the room to the dresser. And Steven just waltzes in with this bigass smile and a shopping bag in one hand and a bowl and spoon in the other. You know what he did?”
“What did he do?” (Y/N) asked in a gentle tone.
Axl let out a quiet, melancholic laugh. “He made a sundae. That’s what was in the bowl. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, at first, but he’d made me a vanilla ice cream sundae with a shit-ton of sprinkles and that cheap chocolate syrup stuff. And he put it in my lap and told me he’d “never seen me upset while I was eating ice cream, so there”. Then he showed me what was in the bag, and he said he went down to the record store because he heard the next Stones record was out, and… I’m sorry.” Here, his voice began to quiver again, and (Y/N) held him a little tighter, just so he knew she was there, that she was still listening, that she cared.
“Don’t worry about it.” She soothed, and kissed the top of his head once more before speaking again. “Steven sounds like a wonderful friend.”
“I know.” Axl gulped in air and tried to quell the shivering fits rippling through his shoulders. “He is. I just wish I… I wish I hadn’t… fuck. I just wish he was here.” For a moment, he paused, trying to see if his tears were really all dried up, or if he was just too busy processing the hole in his heart and the emptiness in his mind to give a damn about crying anymore. Axl blinked and then croaked, “I just feel so alone.”
“You’re not alone as long as I’m with you.” He felt her whisper the words into his hair, as if she were trying to speak directly into his mind instead of just waiting for his ears to do the job. Axl began to feel bad again, but this time for an entirely different reason. “And I plan to see this night through, with the both of us. Okay?”
“Okay.” He said, biting his lip and tasting faint iron, and then he decided, out with it. “(Y/N), I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t be laying this on you right now. I shouldn’t—I shouldn’t even be laying on you right now.” Axl tried to sit up, but she squeezed him a little tighter, so he stayed put, but just for the moment. “(Y/N), seriously, I don’t want to do this to you while you’re…”
“Pregnant?” She huffed, and he shifted somewhat to give her a “really?” look.
“No, dumbass, while you’re hurt.” He said sarcastically, and added, “I’m sorry, I just—you remind me a lot of someone, and I just wish you wouldn’t let people throw their problems at you while you’re suffering. Because you are suffering. I can see it.”
“Oh.” Her voice was quiet, and her grip on him slackened just enough for him to pull away from her and look her in the eyes. She wouldn’t look back at him, though. She just stared into her lap—well, really, more like at her belly—and he could see the gears grind to a halt in her head. It seemed to have stalled her, the thought that someone she didn’t even know might actually care.
“I just—I know what it looks like. And I know the type of fuckhead who did this to you, and they’re not good people. There isn’t even a part of them that’s a good person. Once they cross the threshold of hitting a pregnant woman, bam, they’re gone. Anything good is wiped out. I know you’re gonna want to think otherwise, because my mom did too, but you’re wrong, and you have to get out of there while you still can. I’m sorry. I’m—oh, (Y/N), oh God, don’t cry,” Axl said, hurriedly searching his pockets for any scant tissue that he may have had, watching in distress as (Y/N) seemed to crumple inward on herself, her shoulders sinking forward and her face finally falling as she cried louder than anybody in the emergency room had so far. Eventually he just had to hold her, as she had held him; gently rocking her back and forth as she took her turn sobbing into his shoulder and babbling words to him here and there. Every time she would calm down enough to get a full sentence out to him, though, he would respond with something she apparently found devastating, and she would dissolve into tears all over again. It got so bad that Axl wondered if he should be trying to get somebody to help—what did hyperventilating sound like, exactly?—but then the worst of it seemed to be over, and (Y/N) just lay in his arms, shuddering and sniffing every now and again.
“Better?” He whispered to her, and she nodded, still squeezing her eyes shut, the last few tears falling from her lashes like drops of crystal from silk threads.
“I’m just glad you understand,” she whispered back to him, and before he could say anything else, a tired-looking man in blue scrubs walked into the room with a clipboard and called,
“Axl?”
Axl wanted to tell her something more, anything to make her feel better, but she was already shoving herself away from him, straightening up his jacket for him and brushing off his shoulders as if her tearstains were simply bits of dust. He opened his mouth, but the nurse called again, and she looked at him with those big, beautiful (e/c) eyes, and said,
“Go.”
“But—”
“Go, Axl, you’re here for a reason, now don’t keep ‘em waiting.” She chided, watching as he reluctantly stood up and began edging towards the doorway where the nurse was standing. “And thank you. You’re gonna be just fine, okay? I know it. You’re going to be just fine.”
Axl didn’t like the way she’d said that, not at all; but the nurse had suddenly gotten the idea that he was close enough to be following him back to the unit, so now Axl had a man in blue walking away from him and a woman across the room waving and smiling sadly at him, and he was torn between who to run to. Quickly, he tried to come up with something, and he shouted it to her as she sat there on the bench, looking small, exhausted; scared, but strong.
“Like you said, (Y/N), we’re getting through this night together.” No response. “I’ll wait for you, okay?” No response. Axl started moving down the hall, backwards, trying to keep his eyes on her, looking over his shoulder to see if he could still spot the nurse. He looked back at her and begged, silently, for something. “(Y/N)? You hear me? I’m gonna wait for you. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, her voice still tight and watery, her eyes still betraying her with that gleam of sadness. “Okay, Axl. I’ll see you when we’re both out.”
And with that, Axl turned around and jogged to catch up with the nurse, noticing only a minute later that his chest pain had completely disappeared.
-
Two hours later, Axl was slouching behind the wheel of the car he’d driven into emergency parking, trying desperately to keep his eyes open as wave after wave of sleepiness and utter exhaustion crashed over him. He’d already dozed off a few times, finally able to sleep without disturbance of any kind, including the chest pain—which, funnily enough, turned out to be nothing, as he had predicted upon his second hour in the waiting room. The doctor had set up an EKG machine, and he had to have all these funny little wires running up and down him, and somewhere, a readout printed—a readout which, the doctor in question noted, was approximately normal. So he got to take the wires off and sit up and describe what the pain was like, when it had started, when it had gone away, and all sorts of various things, including but not limited to the very slim knowledge he had of any family history regarding cardiac arrests or other such extraneous events.
“Um, no, I don’t think so,” Axl had said, sitting there on the cot, scratching his head and trying to think of anything his mother might have offhandedly mentioned about a relative dying young from a heart attack. “Nope. Not that I know of.”
“And would you say you’ve been undergoing some stress at this point in your life?”
The silence between them seemed to tell the doctor everything he needed to know, as he pursed his lips together and jotted something down in blue ink. Axl couldn’t read it, because it was written in that scribble-script that doctors often have, but if he could have, it probably would have said something like “Stupid Motherfucker Just Has Bad Anxiety. Prescribing Prozac. All Other Signs Normal. How Much Am I Getting Paid For This?”. And after that, he’d been given a laundry list and a brochure and a half about how to de-escalate stressful situations in life, and how to handle prevalent anxiety, papers which Axl threw in the garbage bin out in the waiting room while walking up to the women at the front desk to ask how (Y/N) was.
“Oh, she’s going to be back there for a while,” one of the women said almost instantly, while the other shushed her.
“Why? Is she okay?” Axl asked, furrowing his brow as the first woman opened her mouth again and the second one started shaking her head wildly back and forth. “Wait, she’s not okay? Then what’s wrong?”
“Oh no, I meant to—” the second woman started, but the first jumped in.
“She’s going to be a while, she probably has to have a D and E. Are you driving her home?” The first woman was unnaturally cheerful for the situation, Axl felt, but couldn’t focus on it, because he was too busy wondering what the hell a D and E was and if that really meant what he thought it meant, which was nothing good.
“I—why? Does she need someone to drive her home?” He caught himself looking down the hallway, leaning out from the desk as if he might be able to catch a glimpse of her behind some papery blue curtain.
“I don’t know, she might. I wouldn’t be able to walk if it were me.” The first woman said, and the second one practically leapt up from her seat.
“Martha,” she hissed, and the first woman looked about as startled as Axl felt.
“What?”
“Just put a goddamn sock in it.” Then she turned to Axl and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s likely she’ll be back there for a while. Can’t say much because of confidentiality,” she looked pointedly at Martha, who blushed pinker than a carnation in full sun; and then looked back at him. “Give it a couple hours. You’re welcome to wait here, if you want. It’s calmed down since you got in.” She gestured broadly with her hand at the swath of empty chairs, save for the little elderly couple sitting near the wall beside one of the many ugly paintings that hospitals seemed to reserve for their less important rooms. Axl thought about staying there, but decided against it. He would wait out in his car and watch for (Y/N) to leave the hospital. That would be fine. He could do it; he could stay awake.
But now it was a whole different story. Axl fought off another wave of sleep only to think of how soft her embrace was, how warm, how inviting. Of how nice she’d been to him, how sweet of a person she really was, despite all that had happened to her. He could hear her voice echoing in his ears as he slipped off into the blissful black of his subconscious mind, a tweetling of a bird somewhere, that ironic thing called hope, the gentle nurturing call of the mother robin to her beautiful child.
“You will be okay,” her voice sounded, filling his mind with the sounds of leaves rustling in the wind, sunshine coming down through the greenery to wash his face in brilliance. Off in the distance, harvesters growled over the corn fields, crows cawed in victory over cigarette stubs and shiny coins, and somebody’s guitar was playing in the background. “You’ll be okay, Axl. You’re not alone.”
“‘M not alone,” Axl mumbled, and then his head tipped forward, and he fell asleep.
-
When he woke up, it was cold.
Well, maybe not cold. Maybe just normal for a chilly morning. The sun had just barely started to come up over the horizon line, and Axl had suddenly snapped awake for no reason in particular that he could remember. His mind was still cloudy with sleep, and he could barely see straight, so he rubbed his eyes and tried to remember why he’d fallen asleep in his car so early in the morning.
Then it all came rushing back to him in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, he remembered why he’d woken up—the foreboding sense that something had gone wrong, that he needed to know if (Y/N) was okay, the dream of a dark shadow looming over him and booming curses at him in the voice of the devil he had tried to forget—and he jumped up so fast he hit his head on the low ceiling of the car, swore at it, and then threw open the door and tumbled out onto the pavement. He scrambled to his feet, looking around wildly, at the few cars here and there—and then he spotted her.
She was standing just outside the hospital doors, holding her coat tightly around her and shivering so hard he thought she might fall over and hurt herself again. She was crying. He didn’t need anything to tell him that; he didn’t need to hear her or feel her to know it; he just looked at the way her head was bowed and her shoulders were turned inwards, and he knew something awful had happened. She was bending over so far, too far. In an instant he was running, the Indiana trackstar he once was; racing to her with tears of his own blurring his vision and with arms held out to her so she could fall right in them, fall against him and sob. She welcomed it, and as he ran up to her and crashed into her and pulled her into his embrace, right up against his chest, she began to cry and wail like a wounded animal. Axl was just barely awake and thought he might still be having a bad dream—the mother robin’s twittering call, turning into the mourning wolf’s howl—but he still held onto her as best he could, patting down her hair, feeling a similar emptiness in the pit of his stomach as he pressed her close and realized her belly was just a little bit smaller, enough to know what had happened, and who she had lost.
“Hey,” he tried to say, grasping for straws, not knowing what to do, how to act, other than to cradle her head to his chest and let her be as she was. (Y/N) had wrapped her arms around him so tight he thought he might have to walk back into the emergency bay and ask them to set his ribcage back in place, but he knew he wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t leave her here. Not like this.
“Hey.” Axl said again, pressing his cheek to the top of her head and listening to her cries become less and less wild, and more and more sad. The sun poked its head out from behind a cloud, as if unknowing whether it should be watching the situation unfold. Should it give them some privacy? Perhaps. It slid back behind the clouds, then, lending a pale gold glow to the sky, letting the world know in the most gentle of ways that it was time to get up. It was time to get out. It was time to move along. Axl breathed. “I’m here,” he said, and he said it again, and again and again and again, as many times as she would let him say it, as many times as she shivered and shuddered and cried into his shoulder. “I’m here. (Y/N), I’m here. I’m here.”
She quieted down as much as she could, still sniffling loudly here and there, still shaking in his arms. Axl thought about picking her up so her legs wouldn’t wobble so much and she wouldn’t have to worry about toppling over, but figured she was leaning on him as much as she could already, and he didn’t know what kind of pain she would be in if he tried. So he didn’t. But he did listen to her when she spoke.
“I know.”
Without another word, he simply hugged her tighter. Whatever transpired after that was going to be up to her, he decided. If she wanted him to stay, so be it. He didn’t have anything to get back to, anyway; just a house larger than he knew what to do with, just rooms filled with uncomfortable, eerie silence and the feeling that he had done something wrong. He would stay out there on the sidewalk in front of the hospital for the rest of the day, if she needed him. For the rest of his life, if she wanted him. Axl knew that this kind of devotion only came out of desperation, but even then, his heart went out to her as she pressed her face to the crux of his neck and whispered,
“Can we go home now?”
Axl held her for a moment longer. Just a moment, one more moment with her, where he stood promising himself he would never forget—and then he nodded quickly, so that the pain of leaving her wouldn’t hurt as bad. Had she walked here? Or was one of the few other cars in the lot hers? He didn’t know, but figured that if he didn’t see her walking towards one of the others in a few minutes, then he would offer her a ride. But it was clear now that she wanted them to go their separate ways. She wanted to go home. Gently, he let go of her, gave her a small smile, and brushed her hair out of her face.
“It was so nice to meet you,” he said, and the words felt so strange coming out of his mouth, as if he’d never said them in that kind of combination before. But as strange as they were, they just kept coming. His smile faltered a little, but he kept it up for her sake. “I hope you’re okay. And I hope we meet again, somewhere that isn’t here.”
“Axl…” She said softly, but he had already turned away, unable to bear it anymore. It was too much. Axl had done enough crying for the night, but now it was morning, and the clock had reset itself. He wiped the tears from his eyes and began to walk back towards his car.
“Axl.” She said again. “Axl, I meant… I meant to ask, can I come home with you?”
Now that—that changed everything. “Oh. You mean—oh!” There were really no words for how relieved he was. Axl spun around and momentarily forgot why he’d been treating her so gently, instead gathering her up and swinging her around in his arms, first a twirl for happiness’s sake, and then a settling-down twirl, before he carried her to the car. He smiled again, brighter than he had in a while. “I knew that.”
“Sure you did.” Although grimacing a little from the twinges of pain in her legs and abdomen, (Y/N) managed to keep a smile on her face as her sweet boy, her knight in a denim jacket, carried her like a broken bride to the backseat of the blue sedan. He opened the door for her and leaned over and into the car to gently set her down, and as he pulled away from her, her eyes filled with tears again—not for any reason other than the inevitable; the recognition that finally, here was a man who was being kind to her. She sniffled a bit and Axl opened up the passenger-side door and dove into the glovebox in search of a few tissues, but resurfaced with a handful of napkins and a sorry expression on his face, which just made her laugh, even as the tears were falling.
“I know it’s not the best,” he said, handing them to her, but she waved him off and gladly accepted the napkins. They weren’t all that different from tissues anyway, she figured, and he was already being so kind to her that she just couldn’t help but love him for it.
“Doesn’t matter.” She smiled and sighed and leaned back in the seat, absentmindedly rubbing her stomach as Axl shut the glovebox, and then both car doors, and came around to the driver’s side to hopefully get them home in one piece. As he wrestled with the finicky seatbelt, felt it stall, felt it give, and then felt it stall again; she asked,
“What’s your house like?”
“Oh, it’s… it’s okay. It’s pretty nice. In the hills, and whatever. Most importantly, it’s got a bed.” Axl said, thinking of her, but also thinking of how nice it would be to finally go back to sleep, after hours of painstaking, grueling anxiety and waiting-room business. He glanced at her relaxed form in the rearview mirror and loved the look of her, face peaceful and still, breathing deep and slow like it was all she meant to do for now. He spoke again. “And I bet you’d like a bed right now, huh?”
“One of life’s greatest pleasures. Of course.” She smiled as if in her sleep, eyes closed, and Axl smiled back before sticking the key in the ignition and turning it. The car spat and growled to life, giving a little wiggle here and there as if it were a horse twitching at the gate. One of the broken car door alarms dinged, as it usually did, but given a few minutes, it eventually quit and let Axl put the gear stick in reverse.
“Hey, Axl?” Her voice was soft, and he felt her lean forward and put her hand on his shoulder, as the car swung back and then pulled forward through the empty side of the black tarmac parking lot. The sun peeked back out from behind its cloud, and for a moment, everything was yellow and serene, light glittering and glinting over the dashboard, dancing over the hood of the car.
“Yeah, (Y/N)?”
“Thank you.” She squeezed his shoulder, and he took a chance on it, turning his head and pressing a kiss to the back of her hand before straightening up to drive them home.
“Don’t worry about it.”
And for the first time in eight months, she felt completely, totally free.