Archive of Our Own

The gleam of his own blood is the memory that really haunts him.

He wants so badly just to be angry, and truly, that's working fine for him, because most of the time, he is. He lies motionless in his bed and feels the rage move like a silent but screaming thing up and down his spine. There's a caged animal inside him, one who hates him and everyone. Nothing like a panther or wolf, as he would prefer to be seen: more like an elephant completely chained down, eyes rolling, or a rat that wasn't quite killed when its neck snapped inside the trap. Sometimes drool slides over his lip and he can't wipe it off. That's his fury seeping out of him.

The fear only makes him angrier. He's suffering enough at the hands of what happened to him once. It shouldn't get to revisit him. The haze of the drugs makes him sleep deep, and he's floating upside down, his whole body pierced with spikes, and when he opens his eyes, all he can see is his own thick blood. It's the color of his anger. It tastes like despair.

So he would really appreciate it if this resident would get the fuck out of his face.

“I think it's time to start weaning off the dilaudid and see how he does on a lower dose of fentanyl instead. They'll want him in physical therapy within a few weeks.”

“That's fine. Write an order for the nurse,” says the doctor supervising. “Pay attention, he's awake.”

The intern steps back from fiddling with his IV and smiles brightly. “Oh, good morning, Mr. Neumann.”

Dark thinks that the force of his glare must be severely undercut by the bruises and stitching on his face, because on a typical day, he's pretty sure he could send both of these jackasses running.

“How's the pain right now?” the doctor asks.

“Leave me alone,” says Dark. His voice is still trashed, thick from the swelling in his neck. “Everyone needs to stop touching me.”

The kid and the doctor exchange looks. At least the stupid grin is gone. Dark closes his eyes and fights the instinct to try and turn away from them. He won't get far in his neck brace.

“I'll turn it up a little,” offers the intern.

“And I'll send the crisis therapist around again,” says the doctor. “Things could still improve, Seo.”

“Just close the curtain,” Dark tells them. “Just get out.”

They leave him alone. He opens his eyes again and stares at the ceiling. A white light burns down on him. He remembers the flashing of lights, and his own voice screaming with pain. That's his fury seeping out of him.

The funniest thing – or most annoying, depending on your perspective – is that there's really no rest to be had in the Intensive Care Unit.

Dark would think there would be. If people were dying or recovering from nearly dying, it seems logical that you should let them fucking sleep. But he supposes most everyone in here is so drug-thick or so struck down by catastrophe that they don't notice the constant alarms, chattering nurses, medical students doing rounds, and that relentless goddamn beeping that makes him want to tear his ears off his head a-la Van Gogh.

Maybe that's a sign that he's recovering, that he's conscious enough to notice all the noise and movement and light. He knows he's been out of things completely for more than a week. He's been a bird endlessly falling, wings splayed, waiting to see if he'll catch himself before he strikes the ground.

Well, he's caught himself. Yippee.

The chaos of somebody dying in the bed next to his, therefor, isn't all that surprising. The old lady in that bed died a couple days ago from liver failure, so this must be someone new. There are a lot of nurses over there, swarming them, but more than anything, Dark knows it's a big deal because there's a doctor he doesn't recognize standing on the other side of the bed, watching the chaos with blank eyes as the ICU doc does what he can. Someone must have been moved from upstairs down into the ICU – and the doctor's attached enough he's followed his patient down just to watch them die.

Dark watches wearily, without comment. The team jabbers medical jargon from the sort of hospital dramas his brother would probably make him watch. There are needles everywhere – Dark's arms ache in sympathy, not to mention his catheter – and they intubate the patient with that mix of delicate and forceful meant to make you breathe without ripping through your esophagus.

Dark licks his dry mouth. Fuck, he is glad to have that thing out of his own throat. Waking up like that was... it's not worth thinking about. He clenches his fist as best he can and looks back to the other patient.

Must be ten minutes before there's any semblance of stability. Dark sees a white hand flop from the bed – like a skeleton protruding from an opening to make some adventurous but naive protagonist gasp in shock – and a thin chest moving with artificial breath. The ICU doc steps back and the other one steps forward. They whisper at each other.

A nurse comes to check on Dark, probably noticing him awake. “Sorry about the noise, honey. You comfortable?”

He bites down the urge to snarl at her about how no one could possibly be anything that even resembles comfortable in his current situation, is she stupid?

“Can I have some ice chips, please,” he says instead.

She bustles away and bustles back. He licks at the ice chips as she gives them to him – trying to bite hurts.

“What happened to him?” he asks.

“Oh, that poor thing,” she says. He smells her lotion, rose-scented, and it reminds him of his eomma for a second. “He's in and out of here the last six years. They'll look after him. And you too. Get some rest. You know, they're talking about moving you upstairs tomorrow.”

Escaping the ICU at last. Should be a good sign, but he just feels...

There's no making sense of it. A wave of anger rises up to cover everything else up like a shadow, and he relishes it, burns with it. Dark clenches his teeth and crunches his damn ice, never mind the pain.

He's dozing off as the upstairs doc finally approaches his patient. He pushes that white hand back into the bed and turns his head delicately, making him comfortable on the pillows. Dark hears him whisper to him too. The patient doesn't move.

His pale face is turned to Dark, mouth parted for his tube, eyes swallowed in grey clouds. He's pretty beneath all the sickness. Maybe even despite it. Dark wonders what he looks like right now. If the other patient opened his eyes, would he give him the same pity look as the nurses did before he started snarling at everyone in sight? Or would he just gaze at him, hollow and trapped in place, just like Dark.

If Dae would stop crying for five minutes, Dark might be able to tell him that he's going to live. Then again, he might not – Celine won't stop kissing him, and Will looks about ready to start doing the same.

“I am begging you to stop.”

“If you're begging, things must be really bad.”

It's meant to be a joke, he thinks, but the cadence of his sister's voice is falling down the stairs.

“I can't believe this, I really can't. I'm so sorry it took us so long to get a ticket out here. Will lost his passport and Dae was still running a temperature from the flu til yesterday.”

“You didn't all have to come.”

“Of course we were going to come, Dark,” says Will. “By jove, you could've – you could've died.”

Damien breaks down again, coming forward to kiss Dark too, and Dark sighs, letting him touch his lips very tenderly to his forehead. His little brother's shaking. Dark doesn't think that Dae's frail, exactly, but when he reaches a breaking point he's broken for days.

“It would have been better to have someone back home running the company,” Dark insists.

Dae wipes at his face, speaking in a croak. “Don't be such a miser, Dark.”

“I'm sorry that I don't want the company I built from the ground up to fall apart while I am laid out like a fucking fossil.”

“I will handle everything from my computer,” Dae tells him testily. “You need to recover, that's all that matters now.”

“They didn't tell us what happened,” Celine says, pulling a chair up and sitting beside him. “Just that it was a car accident.”

Dark puffs out a breath through his nose and glances over at the bed beside him, where the other patient is flickering in and out of consciousness a little, doped up but fluttering his eyes. Dark's sure he was in the same state for days. Maybe it would have been good for him to see the twins or his brother-in-law while he drifted in and out, scrambled as eggs and needing something to ground him, but he would've abhorred being seen by them in that state. Even now, his gut's curdling with the humiliation of all of it, from his stupid neck brace to the bag of urine hanging off his bed. He flexes his fingers weakly. They barely seem to twitch.

“It was raining,” he says shortly. “I was going back to the hotel. Somebody slid and hit me. Threw me off the side of the road and I flipped.”

“What happened to the other driver?” asks Will.

“Snapped her neck. Dead on arrival. I couldn't get the fucking rental car to call 911. Or 999, whatever it is here.”

Damien looks ready to cry again, and Celine's staring grimly at the bedsheets.

“Did somebody pay my utilities?” asks Dark.

Will sighs. “Everything's handled, Darkest. Are you exhausted? We need to talk to you about what all of this means.”

“What all of what means?”

“Seo, when they called us, they told us they didn't know if you would survive the night,” Celine says, leaning forward.

Dark stares at the ceiling. He feels his sister touch his hand, sort of, and he tenses.

“Have they talked to you about your prognosis?”

“I'm not going to die anymore.”

“They told me that last week. I mean... everything else.”

His ruined fucking back. His ruined spine. His legs.

“Can I get some ice chips?”

There's a long pause from his siblings. Dae gets up to go find some for him, but Celine stays, staring at him, and Will is standing over him like a castle guard, or maybe an angel dyed pink.

Dark feels hot tears tracing floodpaths across his face. When Celine gets up and wipes his cheeks with a tissue from her purse and murmured reassurances, he hates her so much he's glad he can't move, or he thinks he might hurt her.

Dark lets his siblings do what they need to do to feel like they know what's going on with him. They drag the doctor over with a lot of intensity, draw the curtain around his bed, and have a discussion about things like physical therapy, mobility aids, and the surgery he needs for his ruined nose, which not only broke, but managed to make itself the target for a flying piece of glass. The plastic surgery is something that won't happen for months and months, maybe all year, as they wait for his strength to come back, but he knows that the twins need to feel that he'll return to some semblance of normal, and that includes the stupid nose. It includes getting him back to America and getting him walking and, more improbably, weeping to a therapist. Never once do they mention words like 'chronic pain,' 'severe damage,' or 'disability.' The doctor brings those ones up for them, and the twins look equal parts stricken and outraged, as if they'll be able to get the doctor to say something else if they just let him know how rich their family is. To be fair, it's worked for them in the past.

Will's taken Celine's seat, and he entertains himself next to Dark more patiently, humming aloud. Dark glances over at him, recalling that Will's spent time of his own in an ICU. He was never quite the same after the concussion he received from the explosion overseas. The honorable discharge had seemed to hurt him worse than the injury, of course. When they got him back to the states, Dark thinks he visited him twice in the hospital four minutes from his workplace. Now Will's flown across an ocean to see him.

Will catches him looking and winks.

The doctor leaves, and Celine and Damien spend two hours restraining themselves from fussing over him. They look more like twins than ever when they're sitting side-by-side, each wondering to themselves if it would be too much for them to offer to brush his hair, he's sure. Despite everything, he feels a faint swell of affection for them. It makes him wish they were at home instead of wasting time with him here. Now he has to worry about them being bored too.

“He needs to sleep,” Will tells them finally, and Dark glances over at him. It's true, he's exhausted, but then again, he always seems to be. “Let's get to the rental and check in.”

“Can't I stay with you through the night?” Dae asks. “It's the ICU, isn't one person allowed?”

“Don't stay,” says Dark. “Go sleep. That's all I'm going to do. Do you think you could bring back your laptop tomorrow, though? I need to check my email.”

Celine's disdain turns its eye to him like an irascible pet sitting on her shoulder. “You're not working in here, Dark.”

“I am painfully bored, Celine.”

“We will bring the laptop for entertainment only.”

“I need to sign payroll.”

“I signed payroll,” Dae says. “You are incorrigible.”

Not the first time he's heard it said.

“Our beloved Darkling is feeling vulnerable, which you all know he hates,” Will says, and Dark shoots him a look with murderous intent. “Let's give him some space. We'll be back tomorrow, my dear.”

“How long will you stay?”

“Dae and I will return to your cherished organization over the weekend. Celine will stay as long as she's needed.”

Celine smiles at him coyly for a second, but it quickly turns to worry again. Dark tries not to sigh.

Dae leans in for the closest thing he can do to a hug. “I'm so glad you're still here, oppa. I love you.”

Dark touches his brother's wrist, deciding not to correct his grammar. Oppa is what Celine calls him, sometimes – correctly, since she's a woman, but it's not for men to use. The twins missed out on so many of the years of Korean Dark had with his real mother. Their mother, he corrects himself, though it never feels right.

“I'm glad you're here too,” he says. He doesn't mean it, but he wants to. Celine brushes his hair from his face and tells him she loves him so much. Will just sticks out his tongue, makes a farting noise with his mouth, and bids him adieu.

The doctor from upstairs comes to visit his ICU patient again. Dark wakes up to the sound of him talking to a nurse – is that a German accent? Any break from English is a reprieve. A couple of the ICU team come over to help, and they remove the tube from the patient's throat. Dark winces, not sure why he didn't look away as they pulled the spit and acid-drenched tube out with a harsh squealch. The patient chokes, and then heaves for air, and the nurses give him an oxygen mask instead. The German doctor stands over him and rubs his back for several long minutes, watching his vitals as the patient coughs, wheezes, and eventually settles again.

Dark looks at the dark head of hair and white side profile, the patient's face turned up towards the ceiling now. The oxygen mask fills with his air in a white cloud, and then he pulls the breath back in. A puff of white condensation. Emptiness. A puff of white. He breathes.

The upstairs doc touches his face. Readjusts the strap of the mask to make it more comfortable.

“He came back fast,” Dark mutters, feeling hazy. He's sure the night shift nurses turn up his meds to avoid dealing with him, and that's fine by him. The upstairs doc turns.

“He's tough,” he says, in what should be a hopeful or maybe proud way, but sounds, instead, like he's just escaped, wounded, from a losing battle. “Would you prefer the curtain closed?”

Dark's half-asleep already, too tired to bother with a response.

“Be careful, then,” says the doctor, not moving the curtain. “If you're the first thing Jackie sees when he wakes up, he'll latch right on. Never could resist someone looking miserable. And you look miserable, I must say.”

“Jack,” says Dark.

The doctor puts his chart back on the end of the bed and leaves them be. Dark drifts off. In his nightmares, he's suspended upside down, pierced through a thousand times. Jack is hanging next to him, his oxygen mask puffing with his breathing, in and then out, in and then out. A line of blood trickles out of his mouth and into his hair. He looks cold, Dark thinks. Someone should get him a blanket.

“Well,” says the counselor, getting comfortable in the chair next to Dark's bed. “They're moving you upstairs today. Big change.”

Oh, yes, it matters so much to Dark whether he suffers on the first floor or the third.

“Your care will be different from here,” the counselor continues. “You'll get assigned a doctor instead of whoever's floating around. Might get to know the nurses. Not to mention a few less roommates.”

None, actually. He's sure Celine has already made sure he'll have a private room. Might actually get some peace and quiet for a minute. Is he allowed to lock the door?

“For some patients, as they start transitioning you off some of the heavier medication and moving towards physical therapy, this can be where reality starts to sink in. Are you feeling that?”

Dark looks at her balefully. The counselor throws her hands up. “Come on, Seo. I've been visiting you everyday for almost two weeks, and you still won't do some work with me? You are going through a huge trauma. Your life is never going to be the same as it was before this accident. You have got to accept some support.”

He hates when strangers call him Seo. And it doesn't matter how much this woman talks to him, she'll always be a stranger.

“I feel fine,” he says, voice scratchy. “My brother and sister are here now. I don't need other support. Thank you.”

“It took them a while to get out here.”

He scowls. “They had to fly from America.”

“Will they stay around?”

“Yes.”

“Older siblings? Younger?”

Dark resists the urge to grind his teeth together, which will hurt. “Does it matter?”

“I'd like to know.”

Dark shoots her another look. “They're younger.”

“Mmh. You strike me as the protective sort. Is it difficult, to be the one needing help now, as the oldest brother?”

He feels his mouth fill with a rush of bile and he throws up. There's a flash of alarm from the crisis counselor, but she gets up with composure and pushes the alert button, reaching out carefully to turn Dark's head just enough to stop him choking on his own vomit. He spits out sick and croaks out a cry, feeling it going up his nose and down his throat, burning. There are tears on his face. He vomits again, liquid bile spilling over his beard. A nurse is helping him tenderly, holding something beneath his cheek and wiping him up as best she can. He groans aloud.

Someone's summoned the doctor, too, who starts checking his vitals and medication.

“Was he upset?” he hears him ask the counselor.

“No, it came out of nowhere.”

“Sorry, Mr. Neumann. It can happen when you're numb, that you skip the sensation of nausea and go right to throwing up.”

He can barely pay attention, let alone care. His mouth is trembling. He wants a shower and a toothbrush. The nurse washes his face more thoroughly, and then she and the doc get him readjusted carefully, making sure nothing has been moved too roughly. The rods inserted under his skin are holding him in place. He heaves again like he'll vomit once more, and the nurse grabs his shoulder, but he swallows it down.

He's still short on air when she clears him to be left alone again, but that goddamn counselor is still sitting there, gaze sympathetic. “Has that been happening?”

“Only when people ask me stupid questions,” Dark sneers.

The counselor nods in a way that manages to be pensive and chiding at the same time. Dark thinks she has eyes like a bird, fixated and blank.

“Leave me alone,” he says.

“I'll come talk to your siblings later, Seo,” the counselor says, and she leaves him alone with the curtain drawn, so Dark is completely alone, surrounded by noise and sickness.

The new room is... quiet.

Hm. Well. Good.

Yes. Good.

He looks up at the ceiling. It's a different ceiling from the one he's been staring at for almost two weeks. Celine and Dae and Will are on their way by now, aren't they? What time is it? He can't turn his head far enough to see the clock.

The call button for the nurse is on a remote beneath his hand, and he thinks about pressing it, to ask for something. He is feeling kind of weird, ever since they moved him up here, like his body's heavier than it has been. The jostling was... was... well. Frightening. Maybe. He closes his eyes and sucks in a breath.

Fuck, it's quiet. He's sure he's more sober than he has been in weeks. He knows because there's a weird sting up his back in a place that's usually numb. He wishes he could readjust a little, but he's been frozen for so long. Stiff as a corpse. Dark swallows, mouth dry.

Maybe Dae will let him work today after all. He starts trying to catalog everything that will need to be done, an internal conversation he's been avoiding, but he doesn't know how he's going to do any of it from here. He wonders if anyone even called the potential partners he flew all the way out here to meet with, or if they were just waiting at the meeting, wondering where the hell he was. Did they call the office in a rage? What would his office manager say? That she didn't know where he was, but she would try his cell if he could get service in the UK. Or had she heard the news from someone? What would her reaction be? He gave her a raise two months ago, so surely she'd be sad for him.

And his management team would be so taken aback, he thinks. But they'd probably just be grateful it would get rid of him for another... how long is he going to be here? When will he be able to go back? The wheelchair ramp at his office building is on the back side of the building, beside the dumpster.

His body feels heavy as a stone around his ankle, and he can't move more than his fingers. Dark tries to breathe in again, chest hurting. He sees himself for a second, rolling out of the elevator, everyone turning around to look at him, his nose lopsided.

Dark clicks the button under his hand. It takes several minutes for the nurse to come. He wonders if he has an emergency button within his limited reach, or what would happen if he threw up again?

“Hi, there, Mr. Neumann,” says a nurse he's never seen before. “I'm Gracie, how can I help?”

His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. “I need more medication.”

She comes over and turns it up a couple clicks, as much as she's allowed without the doctor's permission, but the usual sleepy, warm feeling doesn't come. He doesn't like his new medicine. “I'd like the doctor to come.”

“She's going to be by at two o'clock, sir. Is the pain too high to wait?”

He grits his teeth despite the warning in his mind, and the pain rocks down his neck. Is the pain too high? What kind of a question is that? I am broken in half in three places, he wants to scream. Why don't you fucking guess if the pain's too high?

“I'm just going to try to sleep,” he says, and he needs it, no matter how much he seems to sleep every day, endlessly. “Close the door behind you. Please.”

She leaves him alone. It's really quiet in here.

“Dark. Seo. Oppa.”

He's hanging upside down. His mouth is full of blood. He groans and tries to reach for something, but his body doesn't answer.

“Seo. Hey. Hey. It's okay.”

“Eomma, Eomma,” he begs.

“Dark.”

Is that Celine? Celine's there? Yeodongsaeng. He remembers when they took her away from him, and he bit a social worker and wet himself, screaming for his brother and sister. He cracks open his eyes, groaning out something that might be her name. Celine's there, face torn with worry, her hand on his face. He wants to bite her. Doesn't she know she's hurting him? He's pierced through again. They've pierced him like Christ and left him hanging. He's crying, choking for air.

“Mr. Neumann, where's the worst of the pain? Can you rate it 1-10?”

He doesn't know this other woman talking to him, but he needs her out of his face. She has a stethoscope around her throat. Why won't she help him? He babbles for someone to do something, his words escalating into a scream as he feels himself being moved. Somewhere he catches a flash of Will's pink hair out of the corner of his rolling eyes. He tries to call his name, but he just hears himself screaming and crying like a kid. He's on fire, he's bleeding, he's going to die like this!

Dark doesn't know how long it lasts for. An eternity or five minutes, it wouldn't matter to him. He hears himself moaning even as the pain recedes, an animal noise of anguish. He can't make out anything anyone's saying. The familiar lightness of his usual medication walks through his body again, picking him up like a kid.

By the time Dad and Mom got him, he was really too big to be picked up, and far too mistrusting. Still, there were one or two times when he dozed off on the couch or in the car, and when Dad came to get him, Seo pretended to be asleep. Dad heaved him into his arms and carried him into the big house with its own bedroom just for him. And Dad kissed his head and called him his son. Good night, my son.

At the time, Dark thought he was pretty sly. But now he thinks Dad must have known he couldn't have slept through being picked up. Dad picked him up anyway.

Dae's close now, Dark can feel him. Dae's brushing his hand through his hair and crying, trying to hold him. Dark's eyes flicker and he talks to his brother, tells him, “I'm okay, Dad got me. We all get our own room in this house.” But all that he hears come out of his mouth is a slurred mess of meaning. Dae whispers back to him, and he can't understand that either. Seo falls asleep.

Problem with his epidural.

That's what they tell him. Actually, they tell him a lot more than that. His new doctor – what did she say her name was? – sits down with him while he's pretending to sleep and, apparently informed of this particular trick of his, tells him in a level tone that there was a problem with his epidural while he was transported, medication interruption, she's going to look after him now, blah blah blah.

They've switched up his drugs, and that much he can feel, because he's as high as he was in the beginning, just floating above himself for days. Will and the twins come spend all the time they're allowed with him, get him his damn ice chips, and talk or watch movies to entertain him. No one will let him check his email or call his employees – you're hardly coherent enough to recognize us, Dark, let alone run the company. Why don't you trust me to handle this? – but they do agree to order a new phone for him, at least, so he'll find a way to do it then, whether or not he can hold the fucking thing.

Not only does the crisis counselor keep coming, but they send a real psychologist to assess him too. He stops talking to her at all, and when he closes his eyes and ignores everything around him, he can actually feel Celine's frustration and worry buzzing nearby like a cicada. If he could move, he would swipe everyone's concern away and crush it against the wall.

“Your dose is going down tomorrow whether you're ready or not,” the counselor warns him one night. “They have to take steps to avoid a dependency. If you don't start engaging, all you'll have to think about is the pain.”

He's so angry it's painful despite the drugs, so maybe she should keep her mouth shut. He curls his mouth at the shrink, but it just makes his neck burn. When he wakes up crying at night, completely alone in his room, he's sure that if he had one more minute of movement, he would use it to break everything in this damn hospital. And then he'd break what little is left of himself, too.

“Dark.” Celine pushes his hair out of his face. “I need you to keep trying. Okay? I'm sorry this is all happening, but I am asking you to keep trying. We need you, Dark.”

For what, he wonders to himself. For nothing.

“Hi, there,” says the other patient.

Dark blinks at him slowly. Is this a dream?

But no. He can hear Will talking loudly about rugby with the nurses in the hallway, and his spine is one sharp ache down the stiffened curve of his body, like the pain is what's really keeping him in one piece. He parts his mouth and breathes out slowly, trying to wake from his hazy sleep.

“Sorry to bother you. The TV remote in our room is broken. Can we borrow yours just for a second?”

The boy who was laid out beside him in the ICU steps into his room, leaving the door open, and picks up the TV remote the twins left on the bedside table. He shakes it in Dark's direction. “You mind?”

Dark tries to clear his throat. “It's fine.”

“Dude, you need some water. Want a cup of ice?”

He's sure the twins would be overjoyed if he let them get him a cup of ice, but he rarely does. He wants some, but it would be a betrayal to allow a stranger to get it for him instead.

He doesn't feel quite like a stranger, though. Dark thinks he's been dreaming about him, weird dreams. Stuff where he's throwing up all over himself and can't stop, the other patient looking on, or they're both crushed beneath metal, lying in silence together, dripping blood. He laid staring at the boy for two days. Guess it got in his head, without much else to think about.

“No,” he says.

“I'll just come right back with the remote. We've been stuck on some god-awful reality show for about six hours. Don't worry, though, I got connections. Maintenance worker says he'll bring us a new one tonight when he gets in. Rick, you met him? Nice guy.”

“Jack,” says Dark.

The boy stops short. “What?”

Dark wishes he had asked for the water. His throat feels so swollen again. “You were downstairs.”

Jack nods slightly, eyes raking over him. “I'm sure you were too, man. Sorry. I was pretty out of it down there.”

“You're... up.”

“Yeah. Just needed the fluid drained.” He brushes a hand over his ribs. Dark can't see their outline through the heavy red hoodie he's wearing. He wonders if Jack should be in a hospital gown, but then again, he's not lugging around an IV stand or anything either. Instead, there's a fancy little backpack over his shoulders with a small oxygen tank and an IV bag on the side.

“I'm Jack,” says the other patient, like Dark hadn't just said it to him. “Or Jackie, as most friends call me.”

Dark decides never to call him Jackie, as he would rather be something other than his friend, and anyway, he prefers Jack. Jack doesn't look good, not even through the most rose-colored glasses, but he's up. And inside the purple circles like bruises around his eyes, there's a pair of bright blue stars. If they were in another world, another timeline, they might meet at a bar without neck braces or nasal cannulas in sight, and Dark would sweet-talk him with lines like that and lead him back to his hotel room. They'd both enjoy each other so warmly for a night. He would make Jack feel wanted, like anyone who ever rejected him was so utterly wrong to do so that they were regretting it now, and Jack might do the same for him too, make him feel like a man, make him feel worthwhile. Loved. Just for a couple hours.

Dark's never going to be able to do that again. The realization is like there's another person standing in the room with him and Jack, and he's only just now noticed them, staring at him.

He won't walk up to a boy like he has a secret to tell him and press him confidently closer to the table he's sitting at, curving their bodies into attunement. He won't throw him bodily onto his bed to make him gasp, to make him realize how powerful he is and then prove it to him. He won't crawl on top of him and connect their bodies or yank him into his lap. He might never have sex again, might never have sensation in his penis, might watch as his memory of what intercourse is like erodes into echoes and cravings. The thought's been there – one of a thousand worries and rages he's had, a particularly personal one – but to look at Jack now and have no sensation of arousal whatsoever feels like being naked in front of a room full of strangers.

“Usually people tell me their names too,” Jack says, summoning Dark back to the now, whatever that means anymore. The now, the endless now of this hospital. “You doing okay?”

Dark lets out another slow breath.

“Just take the remote.”

Jack looks at him for a second, and then flips the remote in his hand, ducking his chin in a 'thanks' before he turns and leaves the room.

Dark's not sure how long it takes before Jack comes back with the remote. Five minutes, five hours. The twins are still gone, and Will's still puttering around in the hallway.

“Jack,” he says again, as he hears the boy come into his room.

“Hi, stranger,” replies Jack, maybe teasing. “You okay, man?”

“My pain's high, can you tell the doctor?”

Jack hums, a worried little noise, and comes over towards him. “You have Greene or Schneep?”

Dark blinks, opening his eyes. “What?”

Jack nods at the clipboard on his bed. “Greene or Schneep. Your doc?”

Dark stares at him. He doesn't know. Jack sets the remote down and goes over to the end of his bed, picking his chart up. “You've got Dr. Greene. She's cool. Schneep's mine, though. Dude, they've had you on the good stuff, haven't they?”

Dark frowns. “Will you tell the doctor or not?”

Jack hums again, flipping the next page of his notes. “I've spent a lot of time in this hospital, you know. I know you've got family around. I've seen 'em coming in and out of your room. I hear the accents.”

Jack's isn't English either, Dark takes the time to notice, watching his mouth as he forms words. Irish, he thinks. The way he speaks is a rhythm.

“Oh, yeah, and the nurses talk about the bossy Americans on the floor. I know they want what's best, it's okay. But I'm sure your family would be happy to tell the doc. If your pain really is high.”

“I've been fucking shattered,” Dark says, and the vitriol of his own voice shocks him. He's not sure he's felt the force of his own words in days. Maybe he really is sobering up. He doesn't want to. He's not ready.

“Yeah,” says Jack, not without sympathy. “But they won't change their minds. You can't just live on dilaudid. And they need to test your feeling. I'm really sorry you're hurting, but... it might be better than feeling nothing?”

Dark stares at him. Jack sighs and raises one hand in a shrug. “If you want the doctor, tell your siblings, okay? Not to be a snitch, but I've seen your sister trying not to cry in the breakroom. Bet they'd be happy to help.”

Dark grimaces and turns his eyes away, exhausted now, and his anger is eating at his throat. He doesn't think it's pointed at Jack, but it will be if he keeps talking.

“You jump or crash, anyway?” Jack asks.

Dark blinks. “What?”

“What'd you jump off? Or did you get in a crash?”

Dark looks at him for a long moment.

“I jumped,” he says at last. “My office building. Had roof access.”

Jack whistles. “Long fall?”

“My building has four stories.”

“Four! Hell. It's hard to wake up when you didn't mean to. When it was all supposed to be over, and then you have to keep going.”

“I did think it was over,” says Dark.

“I've been there before too,” Jack says. “Like, 'this time, I'm not waking up again.' Maybe even didn't want to get up, a few times. But I keep getting up. Guess we got some unfinished business before the world turns us into ghosts, huh?”

Dark would never have thought that. “Yes,” he says anyway. “I suppose.”

“Hang in there, man,” Jack tells him. “In this building, we're all standing on that ledge together.”

Dark looks away again. He's just hit his meter for emotion allowed in a conversation. “You should go now.”

“Sure. Thanks for the remote.”

Dark doesn't look back at him until he's certain his back will be turned. Dark watches his fancy little backpack until Jack's disappeared out into the hallway again, taking the stars with him.

“You're really worrying the twins,” Will says.

Dark's looking out the window. A pair of birds are in an argument on the sill, stepping around the nest-prevention spikes to peck at each other.

“Dark.” Will touches his hand. Dark can feel that, at least. “I am so sorry this is happening, but I know you. You used to live and breathe for those two. If you're doing this to them on purpose, you have to get your head on straight. They would do anything you asked them to do.”

The first pigeon sends the other one flapping away, disgruntled, and it preens itself on the sill, still poking its head back and forth in triumph.

“I know you're not ready to talk, but I'm here when you are,” says Will. “You used to tell me everything. When did you stop doing that? Please give the twins something to work with, Dark. They're scared.”

The pigeon starts trying to fight its own reflection. Dark snorts and closes his eyes. Stupid bird.

He wants that boy to come back.

He had wanted Jack to leave, at the time, but now he feels disappointed in himself, because he's sure he could still get some attention from him even if they could never sleep together. Considering that his body is currently mostly immobile, he should have set slightly lower goals instead of stressing himself out.

The doctor's trying to explain to him that he needs another surgery.

Dark likes it when guys try to get his attention, although he thinks his ability to seduce Jack is more inhibited than it's ever been. Does he look good at all? Rugged at all, with the bruises? Probably not. But neither does Jack. Even playing field, he hopes. He just needs to strategize. He'll be the lion and Jack can be the mouse who pulls the thorn out of his paw.

"We can schedule you later this week," says Dr. Greene. "I know it's not ideal for you to have to go through this so soon, but we need to get this handled to optimize your recovery. After that, we'll be on to physical therapy. What questions do you have?"

Actually, he was just wondering if Jack's in the closet or not, but that only makes it more fun, so he doesn't ask. Celine starts asking questions about what he'll need, recovery time, who's doing the surgery, etc., and Damien's sitting next to Dark's bed, looking at him with big, worried eyes. Dark wishes Jack would come and worry about him instead. It's not like his siblings can actually do anything for him.

“Dark?” Damien whispers.

Dark's eyes come open to the ceiling. He's high again, in a way that's becoming normal, and he can't feel his body. Will and Celine are arguing out in the hall. It's dark out. The whole day went by, he's sure of it. He's been drifting. Suspended.

Dark tries to look over at Dae. The blur of his brother's body appears in his vision somewhere to his left.

“Hey, did you understand what the doctor said? I could get her again, if you want. What do you need?”

Dark presses his tongue to the inside of his mouth. Damien watches him carefully. Will and Celine come back inside, trying to pretend they weren't just disagreeing over whether or not it's appropriate to hope Dark will walk again someday.

"I can stay longer," Damien adds in a hush. "For the surgery. Will and I don't have to leave tomorrow. I can be here when you wake up. If it would help."

Dark rakes his eyes over his brother's face for a moment before turning away. Dae used to be so tiny as a kid, all pink cheeks and black curls. Did he have to grow up? Sometimes, the person sitting next to him may as well be a stranger.

“Dark?”

“Can I check my email now?” Dark asks. “I want to tell Erin myself why I missed the meeting. I'm still interested in the merger.”

Silence from his brother. Dark can imagine his mouth pursed tightly, his eyes boring into Dark's head, deep and black as onyx, but still alight with fire.

“You don't love me anymore,” Damien says.

Dark stares out the window. Celine and Will have gone quiet near the door.

“You did once, when I was little, but you don't now. You haven't loved me in years. You don't love me at all.”

Dark lays his head back and closes his eyes. Someone's turned on some stupid fucking reality show on TV, and the noise is annoying him.

He hears Damien get up and leave. He does not slam the door, and he doesn't say goodbye.

Will and Dae fly back home.

He hears Jack talking in the hallway twice before he ever comes in to visit him again, and it's an added form of torture, as far as he's concerned. Jack passes by, talking animatedly with his doctor - he's so loud Dark can hear him with the door closed - and on the next day, he's out by the nurse's station, chatting with a whole shift of them about some new movie half of them have seen and the other half want to go to. From the way he talks, Dark wouldn't be surprised if Jack invited every one of them out to see it at that very moment. Just load up the ambulances and head over to the theater. He has that sort of brightness. Dark wonders where the dying man in the bed next to him went. Is Jack recovering? If he leaves the hospital, Dark doesn't know what he'll think about all day. None of the nurses are attractive.

Jack must feel him watching one day - Dark's so glad he told Celine to start leaving the door cracked - because he comes in again without reason. Dark's trying to figure out the least annoying way to make sure someone mows his lawn when his eyes catch on the dark hair and green backpack, and Jack stops in his doorway, tilting his head at him. "You got nothing else to do but stare, do you?" he says. It's sympathetic but maybe teasing too, which Dark thinks is an excellent sign.

"Jack," he says.

"Hi, stranger," Jack replies, definitely making fun now. He steps into his room, coming over to stand by his bed. It's past visiting hours and Celine's back at the rental, probably researching the credentials of every doctor and nurse in the hospital. "You going to tell me your name this time?"

"I think you prefer the intrigue."

Jack raises a brow at him and grins, going back to his chart at the end of the bed and picking it up. "Huh. Seo is a unique name. I've heard of the name Seojun."

The sound of his real name startles Dark out of all his scheming. He stares at Jack, mouth very dry.

"Are you Korean?" Jack asks, and then adds, in Korean, "I love Korean barbecue so much.”

Dark's off-balance, or maybe just knocked off the balance beam and flat on his ass. He purses his mouth, trying to decide if he wants Jack to stay or go.

"I'm Korean-American," he agrees finally.

"And German, Herr Neumann?"

Dark sighs through his nose. No. Not really. "Sure."

Great conversation-making, very suave. Dark sighs again, closing his eyes. Forget it. He can't do this in this condition. Jack can go and Dark's just going to rot away here. Dark feels a swell of something press up against his throat, hot and stinging, and he tries to breathe through it. What other choice does he have? He can't give in to the urge to smash things or slam doors no matter how desperately he wants to.

"Why'd you come in here?" Dark asks, more harshly.

"Dude, I spend all day stuck in this hospital. Might as well talk to some people. Don't you want someone to talk to?"

Dark looks out at the window next to him. He doesn't need Jack's pity or anyone else's.

"Well, I do," Jack says.

Then he starts to talk.

And he keeps talking.

Holy hell, Dark had imagined him as shy.

Jack talks about video games, and then manga, and then how he had been trying to get in shape before this all reared its ugly head again, about how he misses his own bed and a little bit his ex-girlfriend, but she was always so exasperated with him, which was probably his fault but whatever, and has Dark played the Last of Us? The second one was okay but the TV show was so good, like, they should watch it right here if they can get a laptop, oh, does Dark's sister have one? And he's been to Korea three times, and he doesn't speak it very well, but a little bit, at least, and has Dark ever visited? Was he born there? That's so cool, Korea is so cool.

Dark's not sure he says more than three words back. The fantasies of the last week all begin to take different shapes in his mind, even more improbable ones. Sure, Jack is the sort of man he would probably dismiss as too talkative, maybe too needy or annoying if he was watching him at a bar, but right now, to listen to him and look at him is not unpleasant. Maybe he could just hold Jack in his lap and become familiar with the cadence of his voice, or cook with him while Jack talks, or they'd take a long drive and Jack would finally stop talking, and Dark would look over to see him dozing off, finally tired and feeling safe with Dark driving, like he trusted him to protect him.

And then a BMW would thrust into them from the side and the whole world would flip over once, twice, three times, so fast he wouldn't feel his nose smashing against the steering wheel until he had been thrown around twice more. Glass and blood would explode like a pipe bomb and the car would start talking while Dark screamed, telling him to turn left at the next exit, and his mouth and eyes would fill up with blood. He'd dangle and Jack would dangle next to him with his neck broken, already dead.

"Seo?" Jack asks.

Dark blinks and finds him sitting beside him, leaning in closely, his brows furrowed up.

"Dark," he replies.

"What?"

"That's what everyone calls me."

"Oh. Dark."

Jack looks him over, and Dark's keenly aware of how unimpressive he is just then. How wrecked he must look.

"It suits you," says Jack, and Dark feels, for a second, that he might mean it with some warmth. "You drifted off for a second. Want to get some rest?"

"All I do is sleep."

Jack's mouth quirks. "Yeah. Been there. I'll sleep twelve hours after my next dose, if I'm lucky."

"If you're not lucky?"

"I'll be throwing up for twelve hours instead. Cause I'm hot like that."

Dark looks at him, his mouth curving. Jack curves his mouth back at him in a much wider smile.

"Get some sleep, Dark. You need it more than you realize."

Dark watches him get up and go to the door. He thinks about asking Jack to come again tomorrow, but that's showing his cards far too early.

"I'll come see you again tomorrow," says Jack anyway. "I got my rounds to do too."

So Jack's not just visiting Dark for a chance thing. He goes around and talks to everyone, because that's the sort of person he is, somebody bright and extroverted, with a lot of affection to hand out. Maybe it means Jack won't ever feel the connection to him that Dark feels. But if he comes back, Dark can watch him talk, and imagine things he can't have, and call that a reprieve.

"Good night, Dark," says Jack, and it lingers around the room like the purring of a cat.

“I shouldn't be drinking this in front of you,” Jack realizes two nights later, covering the straw of his soda with his hand, a guilty look flashing over his face. “Oh, shit. Sorry.”

Dark's watching him as always, smiling a little despite himself.

“You can't have anything but water right now, huh? That sucks!”

Dark breathes out through his nose and blinks at Jack.

“See, with me, I probably need a break from my own food choices sometime. My sugar intake is going to kill me if the rest of this shit doesn't.”

Jack tilts back his head and laughs. Dark's eyes trace the curves of his neck. He's developing a nice idea of taking Jack down to a beach somewhere and laying him out on the sand, sunning and kissing him while Jack talks about everything and anything.

“Sorry, man, I've been here a while. Want me to go so you can get some sleep?”

Dark rumbles at Jack. “No,” he says.

Jack looks at him for a second of silence, and Dark likes to imagine that for a moment, his smile is more secretive, a tilt of the corner of his lips meant just for him.

“I'd get bored too,” Jack tells him warmly, and he starts telling him about his childhood dog. In the other universe where the real Dark still lives, the one where he waited five more minutes before trying to drive back to his hotel, he's buying Jack a new one to make up for it. And then anything else he asks for, Dark thinks. Anything else in the world.

On the night before Dark's surgery, Jack doesn't come.

Dark lays in bed and tries not to think about anything but him. Celine's next to him, talking about the surgery like she has been all day, and Dark is trying not to lash out at her, because he knows he's been acting like an ass, but he hurts and he's – he's – he doesn't want another surgery.

Jack had come last night, and the night before that. Why doesn't he come tonight? Dark thought he might actually tell him that he has to go into surgery. Jack knows all the doctors and nurses around here. It would be a good sign to have someone else checking in to see how he's doing. And afterwards, when he was really bad again, Jack would come and maybe hold his hand, wouldn't he? If Dark looked pathetic enough, he might comfort him?

“I'm going to be here as soon as they bring you back out tomorrow,” Celine tells him. “I'll watch over you.”

“Do you ever get mad about Mom and Dad changing your name?” Dark asks.

Celine sits back slightly, frowning. “Seriously? Why are you bringing this up now?”

Dark goes to shrug, then remembers he can't. Celine keeps talking anyway.

“I prefer the name Celine. Sure made it easier to fit in in school anyway. I don't even remember going by anything else. And we still call Damien 'Dae.'”

“They could have left my full name.”

“Well, you can change it back if you want, Seo. I mean, if you were our age when they got you, I'm sure they would have changed your name completely. I think Mom talked about 'Simon' being cute.”

Dark actually startles at that, and the slight movement hurts his neck. “You think they would have changed my name?”

“They only left it as Seo because you were old enough to care about it. They were trying, Dark. I know that these days, everyone would realize it's a little messed up, but it was the 90s. They weren't perfect, but they loved us. They just wanted us to fit in. It was like my own American name.”

“You were already American,” Dark tells her harshly.

Celine sighs through her teeth. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Melting Pot, I forgot.”

“Do you ever use our last name?” Dark answers.

“Fuck.” Celine actually moves back from him, crossing her arms. “No, I don't. Do you?”

“No.”

“Do we have to do this now? I know I'm not the one in hospital, but I've been nauseous all day.”

“I was just wondering.”

“Have you been wondering about whether or not you want to sign a DNR?” She waves a pamphlet at him. “Because that's the fun stuff I've been trying to talk to you about since I got here.”

“How am I going to sign that?”

“Just an X if it's difficult to write your full name. They'll notarize it.”

“Go get the notary. And I want to be buried, not cremated. Next to my mom. Okay? No flowers.”

Celine gives him a look that actually does make him feel guilty for a second. But that just makes him mad.

“You wanted to talk,” he snaps at her. “Do you feel better?”

“Ass,” she snarls back, getting up to get the notary. “Why am I even here?”

“Good question,” says Dark.

He didn't know, before all this happened, that you could cry from being angry.

Breaking things, sure. Lashing out, yes. He's gotten into fights, he's destroyed things, he's ruined relationships. But before this fucking crash, even when he was a kid, he doesn't think he ever cried from being angry.

"Dark, it's going to be okay, they just have to do this," Celine tells him. Her hand's on his shoulder, and the warmth soaks through his skin. He can hardly breathe to say anything back.

"I know it's scary, Seo, but they have to. They need to repair that damaged disk. It's the best shot at getting you walking again someday."

"I am never going to walk again," he chokes out. "Just leave me alone, tell everyone to leave me alone!"

The psychologist's somewhere in the room, murmuring to Celine and his doctor, looking at him from nearby. He wishes for so many things to be different all at once that he thinks he's going to make himself throw up again. You can throw up and cry if you're mad enough, apparently. He strikes his hand against the bed and it hurts all the way up his neck. Celine grabs his hand.

"Dark, deep breaths."

"I don't want another fucking surgery. Just get out."

"Oppa, they need to do this."

"I'm saying no, I won't."

"You are, Seo," says Celine, voice brooking no argument. "Listen to me. You are getting this surgery today. Do you understand? I'm so sorry it's scary. I'm so sorry it's one more thing your body has to go through. But you have to get this surgery. If you let them give you the anesthesia, it's just going to be like going to sleep. And I'm going to watch over all of it."

Dark can hear himself whimpering like a kid. He's hot and his body aches as far down as he can feel it. "I want my mom."

"Dark - "

"I want that boy Jack, will you bring him in here?"

"What? Who is Jack?"

"You mean the other patient?" asks Dr. Greene from behind his sister.

"He comes in and talks to me. Ask him to come in and talk to me. Jack knows all the doctors and nurses."

Celine looks at him for a second, flummoxed, but when she turns back to the staff, they're shrugging at each other.

"I'll go check on Jackie," says the psychologist. Dark tries to suck in deep breaths til she's back, letting the doctor adjust his medication so he's a little more numb. He swallows. Celine rubs his arm very gently.

The doctor and psychologist talk to each other quietly in the doorway for a second. Finally, they approach him without Jack in tow.

"Jack's not able to come see you, Mr. Neumann," says Dr. Greene. "He's on bedrest today."

Dark flinches, closing his eyes. "What's wrong with him?"

"I'm sorry, I can't talk about other patients' medical information."

"He said to give you this," the psychologist adds, stepping forward with a folded piece of paper. Celine takes it and turns it towards Dark, unfolding it for him.

In very shaky lines, there's a drawing of a sloth. “Hang in there,” Jack's written, with a stupid smiley face beside it. Underneath, he's added "sorry, surgery sucks ass. I'll try to come say hi tomorrow."

Dark stares at it. He wonders what's wrong with Jack for him to not be allowed to get out of bed. Is he in pain? Does he have fluid that needs to be drained again? Did Jack lift this up above him to draw it through a drug haze, thinking of him?

Dark swallows again and sniffs wetly. Celine wipes his face with a tissue.

"They need to get you down there," she tells him softly.

Dark blinks at her through wet lashes. He wonders how he'd feel if she had never come at all. Would he feel sad? He's not sure anymore. He thinks maybe it would be an excuse to never see her again, and that might be a relief.

There's no reason for it. The twins have always been good to him. Petty childhood arguments dissolved, some lingering issues over the differences in how they remember their mother were put in back closets, and they did normal sibling things like coming to each other's birthday parties, burying their parents, and visiting at Christmas. Celine, in particular, always insists on frequent get-togethers. Sometimes they even see their parents' older children, and he knows he's a part of the family even to the ones nearing retirement while he has yet to hit thirty. Why does Dark wonder if it would be better for them to cut him off and never come back?

"I can put your sloth in your hand," says Celine, shaking the picture slightly.

"Don't tease me," rumbles Dark, and Celine manages a smile. She wipes his face again.

"Just a few hours, Seo, and it will be over."

Or he'll be dead. He doesn't know how he feels about it. He supposes there's nothing left for him to do if that is the case. He'll just be gone.

"Fine," he says. "Let's get this over with."

He feels scared again when they put the mask over his mouth. He turns his gaze and sees Celine looking at him, watching everything they do. When they pull him away and her hand leaves him, he wants it back where it was.

He dreams about the doctors, and the nurses, and the surgery; maybe some of it's real but it doesn't much matter. He has the sensation of wanting to wake up, and he tries, perhaps for a long time, but he can't get there. Sometimes he thinks his eyes are open. His gaze flickers and rolls.

"Dark," someone says to him. Maybe Celine was right. Maybe it's nice just to be given a name as a present. He doesn't think he could bear to be called Seojun anyway. That was a present from someone who can't hold him anymore.

"Yes, I'm here," he tries. His body goes to move but it can't, and he feels his breathing pick up. He's trapped. Why won't someone help him get free?

"Dark, breathe, okay, breathe for me."

He doesn't want to be in a hospital. He doesn't want to be trapped in his cast. He wants to step off the ledge. To be done and not get up.

He can't breathe. He can hear himself hyperventilating over the sound of Celine trying to talk him down. He thinks someone must give him more medicine, because the darkness eats him whole again, and he goes back to sleep in the stomach of that emptiness.

Ah, yes. The beautiful ceiling. Dark comes awake sighing, annoyed by the sight of it.

"Mr. Neumann?"

"Come on," he groans, licking at his dry mouth. He thought he liked being called Mr. Neumann, but he's sick to death of it by now. "Just call me Dark."

He turns his gaze and finds a male nurse grinning at him, apparently unimpressed by the tone of his voice. "Dark. Glad you're up. Feeling okay?"

"Where's my sister?" asks Dark. "You have me so high again. Do you think I want to be doped up? I'm slurring. I sound like an idiot."

"You sound normal for what you're experiencing," says the nurse. "It's kind of the least of your problems. It's past visiting hours, but I'm sure your sister will be back in the morning."

"She said she'd be here when I woke up."

"She was. Had a whole conversation with you. It might be a little fuzzy. I think you were still stressed. They put you back to sleep."

Dark rumbles, wishing Celine were here to get the gunk out of his eyes. He can't do anything for himself.

"Your surgery went well," the nurse adds. "You need anything?"

"That boy Jack, is he doing better?"

"Oh, Jackie down the hall? Schneep's got him on strict stay-in-bed orders. He gets restless. Just lost a patient in his room, though. Went fast. I think Jackie was awake all night watching. Trying to talk to her as she went. He's always trying to be a hero like that. Rough stuff."

Dark thinks about it as the nurse helps wash him up. About Jack laid out in his bed, watching someone die, and only wanting to comfort them even when he was too weak to rise.

“Do you know Jack?” Dark asks sleepily.

“Dark, you know Jack and you've been alone in this room with no other visitors but your sister. Of course I know Jack. Everyone knows Jack.”

He'd been here dreaming about how easily he could have Jack if he could just turn time back a few weeks. Now he realizes that if he were himself as he usually is, Jack would have felt no need for him whatsoever. Jack doesn't need someone to make him feel worthwhile for one night. Everybody loves Jack. He must know how special he is, how charming. Earnest where Dark is playing games.

Dark revolves the faces of old conquests in his mind, trying to remember the name of the last man he slept with. He doesn't know it. He never called.

“You're a little red. Are you feeling hot?”

Dark blinks at the nurse. Yes, he is hot. The nurse puts his hand on his forehead.

“Let me just call the doctor,” he says.

Celine presses a cool washcloth against his forehead and wraps an ice pack inside.

“Mmh,” Dark hums, blinking at her.

“Is it bad?” she asks.

“Just a drug fever,” Dark mumbles.

“They can't be sure there isn't an infection inside. Or you could get sick. Plenty of sickness going around in a hospital, and you're not in a state to handle it.”

Dark sighs. “I suppose.”

“You hurting?”

The way that everything comes and goes is the hardest part, really. He's standing in the middle of the highway and different sensations move past him at rapid speeds. It hurts: he's frightened. It hurts: that means he can still feel. He's drifting. He's trapped. The white headlights of his rage flash over him again and turn his pupils into pinpricks, tearing his clothes and hair as the truck passes. He looks over and sees Damien standing by the rails around the road, calling for him to come back to safety. Screaming for him.

“Dark?” Celine asks.

“Will you do something for me?” he asks hazily.

“Of course I would.”

“I don't think I like being in a private room. Can't you check if they have spare beds in the room with the other patients? One of the ones on this floor.”

“You don't want a private room?”

“When you leave at night it's quiet,” Dark mumbles. Blame it on the fever. “Sometimes I wake up and I don't know where I am. I'm just in pain and alone.”

Then the nurses come rushing in to check why his heart rate has spiked, why he's hyperventilating and trying to move til it hurts. Then he wants Celine, and any and all of his parents, and even Dames and Will, but especially Jack and his voice.

“Well, I think those long-term care rooms get pretty full, but I can check.”

Something tells Dark there might be an opening.

“Hey,” somebody whispers to him. He cracks open his eyes, vision hazy. There's a bright star sitting next to him, silhouetted by the darkness of the night sky outside. Dark tries to purr at him, a low rumbling, and Jack smiles.

“There's a rumor going around that they're going to move you into one of the group rooms. You didn't pull some strings, did you?”

“The doc said it wasn't good for me to be in here alone so much,” Dark croaks. “I do get a little disoriented.”

Some of the teasing slips away from Jack, and he looks at him softly instead.

“You just happened to have a spare bed in your room,” Dark adds firmly.

Jack grins. “Well. It's good luck, then. I hate having the empty bed anyway.”

Dark tries to make him out. He's back to his nasal cannula, but he looks, well, worse. Grey. “Should you be up?” Dark asks.

“No,” Jack says. “I'm supposed to be on my mask. But I can't sit in there all the time. Chase sleeps so much, and poor Ellen's in a coma.”

“You should go back to your mask, Jack.”

“I just wanted to go somewhere else for a minute. And if I walk around outside, the nurses will make me go back to bed. You met Bing yet? Good guy, but he has straight-up carried me before.”

Dark breathes out slowly. “I have a confession.”

“Mh?”

“I'm terrible about meeting people. I never remember anyone.”

Jack chuckles, then coughs, shaking his head and taking a couple deep breaths. “Well, it's a skill you have to work on.”

“I don't think it's even that. I just never seem to have an interest in other people. My parents had me tested for sociopathy as a kid, you know.”

“Even sociopaths can work on being kind to people. I know you snap at the nurses, but they'll give you a pass if you try harder. They know you're just in pain.”

Dark winces, closing his eyes. He doesn't know how to explain that the pain is just a sidekick compared to the rage. The rage is eating him, one piece of spinal column at a time. He's upside down. Dark bites his lip. He's hanging upside down. He's pierced through. Take a turn at the next exit, the car instructs him. He's screaming. He can feel the place where his spine has turned into a knife, piercing the rest of his body.

“Dark.” Jack's hand comes to his arm, squeezes carefully; his thumb journeys over his veins. “You're okay. You're here.”

Dark grits his teeth and groans, fighting down the urge to start screaming again, to turn the anger into a noise and let it go. He wishes he could grab Jack and press him onto the bed. If he could hold him, if he could turn their bodies into one moving part, he's sure it would distract him. Jack would stroke his hair and make him feel better. Make him feel warm. Safe.

“Dark,” Jack whispers again, and Dark feels a tissue pressing against his eyes, working at the tears building there. Dark looks up at Jack in agony. He wants to explain to him that he's not pathetic, not really, not outside of all of this. He's a man, the real kind, the tough kind. The humiliation of surviving like this is such a wear on him. A weight.

“I wish this hadn't happened,” Dark whispers.

Jack gives him a sorrowful smile. He's so pretty. In a starry way, in a grass swaying under moonlight way. “Me too,” Jack says. “If I could take it all away from you, I would.”

“I shouldn't have woken up,” Dark croaks. “Didn't mean to.”

Jack squeezes his arm again, so gentle. “I'm sorry, Seo.”

Dark hears himself make a noise he doesn't recognize. Jack wipes the rest of the tears off his face, and then cleans up his ruined nose very tenderly. For a second, his fingers brush over the deep bruise around Dark's right eye.

“You get some sleep,” Jack says. “Tomorrow, you'll come stay with me and Chase, and we'll all get through this together as much as we can. It'll be good. I'll get to watch as you get better. We can sneak out of our room together once you're mobile. We'll come bother whoever it is that's lonely in here after you.”

Dark's chest pangs. He closes his eyes and tries to breathe in. “Okay,” he says.

“Okay.”

Jack gets up. His smile drops, his eyes flutter, and Dark hears him try to breathe in.

“Jack?”

Jack grips the back of the chair, huffing out a weird, strangled breath. “My, my right side.”

“What? Jack, sit down.” Dark presses the call button for the nurse and Jack sways, squeezing the chair hard.

“Whoa,” he mumbles, head faltering. “I got dizzy for a second.”

“Jack,” Dark repeats, locked in place beside him. “Sit down.”

“Yeah,” mumbles Jack, and then crumples to the floor.

Dark makes a strangled noise, some version of his name. “Help,” he calls, voice rough, strained against his neck brace. “Someone come in here now.”

It takes another thirty seconds at least before anyone comes in. Dark shouts for help and stares to the side of him, where he can't see anything but the wall and his side table. He knows that Jack's down on the floor, fallen onto his IV arm, not answering him, making a noise like he's choking, and Dark starts to cry from pure fury, locked in his body, screaming for help.

Dark lays awake and stares at Jack.

He's unconscious in the bed next to him. His mask has closed over his mouth again. A puff of white, emptiness. A puff of white, quiet. Dark watches him breathe. Any delay in the rhythm and his finger twitches towards the call button on his remote.

“He's. Not. Not. Not. So bad.”

Dark turns to look at the bed across from Jack. He's not sure he had even noticed the two other beds in the room when they brought him in after Jack. In the one across from Jack, a young man with a whole swathe of bandages wrapped around his head is looking back at Dark, sitting up and hanging over himself slightly. Drool runs out of his mouth. His hand tries to rise to swipe it away, but he can't quite coordinate it. His arm flops over his face and he makes this tired noise, a groan or a huff.

“What's wrong with him?” asks Dark.

The bandaged patient tilts his head at him, or maybe he's just falling. “If he. If. When he's. He's not got the. The tub. The tube? The tube. The tube. The tube. So, it's, it's. Not so bad.”

“When he's intubated, that means it's bad?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you Chase?”

Chase looks pleased even as his head falls back a little. “Chase. Hey, you. You did. Me too. Yeah? I.”

He puts his hand closer to his head and manages to form the loose figure of a gun. He makes a noise with his mouth. An explosion. He pulls the trigger of his thumb.

Dark realizes with a short burst of panic that he's referring to what Dark told Jack – that he jumped off something instead of crashing. He had lied without caring at the time. Why did he say that? Somehow, to tell someone who attempted suicide that he did the same when he didn't feels fucked up. “It was – no. I mean. It was mostly an accident.”

“Ah, yeah,” says Chase. Dark isn't sure exactly what he's agreeing to, but he thinks Chase is trying to find more words. He sits there for a moment, blinking at the floor, and then Dark watches his eyes go blank, and Chase sits staring, hunched over himself, falling quiet.

Celine comes in in a rush just a few minutes later, which must have involved some bribery, because it's still early, not even really sunrise. “Dark, are you okay? They told me you had a rough night. What happened? Shit, are you sure you want to be in this room?”

She glances at puffing Jack, comatose Ellen, and drooping Chase. “Shit.”

“They called you?”

“Yeah, they said you were upset last night.”

Dark sighs, trying to pick his words right. “Sorry. I'm fine.”

“Dark, come on,” Celine says, with real frustration. “How long are you going to tell me that?”

“I don't know what else to tell you.”

“You know, you just won't say it. Meanwhile I have to watch you breaking down twice a day.”

Dark scowls and tries to turn away. Nope. Still locked in place.

“I'm just having bad dreams.”

“Okay, so, talk to the shrink.”

Dark purses his mouth tighter. “That's not for me.”

“Look, I know you hated having to go as a kid, but you can decide what to talk about now.”

“Oh, I chose what to talk about as a kid too, Celine, and six years of therapy didn't do anything but piss me off worse.”

“You chose not to talk.”

“Yes, and I'm choosing not to talk again.”

Celine looks down at him, her teeth touching together with a furious click.

“Can you move?” he waves his hand at her as much as he can. “I'm trying to look out the window.”

Jack's in front of the window, but Celine doesn't need to know about that. She throws her stuff on the ground and moves around to his other side, crossing her arms over her chest.

He can tell his sister's exhausted from calming him down, because the next time he has a panic attack, she starts crying too. It actually almost stops him, for a second, or at least interrupts the train of hanging upside down, screaming, pierced through, turn at the next exit that keeps barreling through his head. The emotion doesn't come down, though, and when he sees the tears coming down her face, he's seven years old and he needs to go get his little sister, and why won't they let him, and don't they know Dae will start crying too if his twin does? Eomma's gone and so are his siblings. He doesn't understand where Eomma is. She was there and then she wasn't. Then she was just a body and not his mom anymore. And he wondered, where are you mommy and why didn't you bring me with you?

“It's okay,” comes a shaky voice from the other side of the room. “You're doing great! You're taking good care of him.”

“Shit, I'm so sorry,” Celine chokes out. “I should have kept him in a private room, I'm sorry we're causing so much fuss.”

“No, no, it's no fuss. We're all in this together. Go ahead, just talk to him, put your hand on him somewhere that doesn't hurt. Yep, that's good. I'm going to ask the psychologist to come again and you two can both meet with her this time if he doesn't want to talk. It's okay, he'll come down just fine. It's scary, but it's not hurting him.”

“It just keeps happening.”

“It's scary stuff. It will take him time to work through it. Just like it's going to take him time to get mobile again. You're both going to be okay.”

Celine talks to him. Her hand is on his shoulder, near his heart. She brushes at his hair with the other one. He recalls that she's not a toddler anymore, that she doesn't need him like she used to. Maybe she never did. Maybe no one ever did. When he was throwing violent tantrums and blocking off the twins' rooms to keep their new parents out, he wasn't protecting them from anything. He was the problem. The one twisted remnant of the past that kept throwing a spanner in the works of the perfect lives the twins were supposed to have without him. And now here he is, just ruining more of their lives. More of everyone's lives. He should've died upside down, pierced through, his blood running over his face.

“Jack,” he whispers, coming awake.

“Ah, he can hear me, I'm being too loud,” comes a jubilant voice. “Sorry, Dark, you can go back to sleep.”

“That's. Yeah.” There's a noise like a difficult laugh. “Loud.”

“Me too,” Jack laughs back. He starts coughing afterwards and Dark comes fully awake, eyes flashing.

“Jack?”

“Sorry, Dark,” Jack says again, less joyfully. “Sorry.”

He has a little more color in his face today, and Dark takes a minute to look him over. The bed is clearly his long-term set-up, with his green backpack sitting against the wall, a crowd of flowers and balloons set up along the left bedside table, and his phone charging nearby. He doesn't look well, but this is where he's settled – not roaming the hospital without enough oxygen.

“You're up.”

“Yeah. I'm sorry about the, uh. The fainting the other day.”

“Sch. Schneep,” says Chase, with some intensity.

“Oh, yeah, my doctor's pissed I snuck out of bed. Now I'm really stuck with my mask, cause Chase says he's going to snitch on me if I try to leave again.”

Chase gives the difficult laugh again. Jack grins, sitting up in his bed. He's got his mask on and a tray of food he hasn't touched over his legs.

Dark looks around for Celine, but she's not here.

“She's talking to Layla,” says Jack.

“What?”

“She's talking to the counselor.”

Dark sighs. “Great.”

“They're not going to let you give up,” says Jack, more seriously.

Dark turns his gaze over him, letting Jack see him looking. “What are you sick with, Jack?”

Jack grins, but not his usual smile. There's no brightness there. He picks at a pudding cup. “Carcinoma in my lungs.”

Dark hums, frowning. He tries to remember what Jack said to him when he told him he had tried to kill himself, so he can parrot some comfort back. “Sorry.”

Jack sets down his pudding cup and turns away from him, glancing out the window.

“Dark?”

Celine comes back inside, looking for him, and he turns to her. Her face is still red, and he supposes his is too. He feels a low boil of guilt in his gut, letting his eyes fall. “Doing okay?” she asks.

“Fine now,” says Dark.

Celine grimaces at him. Dark tries again. “I think I need to be moved.”

Her face lightens again and she breathes. “Sure, I'd be happy to get the nurse. And maybe we can FaceTime Will and Dae?”

He winces. Personally he'd rather be kicked right in the broken spine, but he thinks he's making this hard enough on her. “Or tomorrow?”

She doesn't push it. Celine goes to get a nurse to help him wash up under his brace and readjust enough to avoid completely rotting his muscles. It's painful no matter how careful they are, but sometimes it helps with the trapped feeling.

The male nurse from before comes in and Jack perks up. “Bing!”

“Jackaboy,” Bing winks. “How you doing, jailbreak?”

“Come on, it was just a few minutes.”

“Sure it was. And Chase?”

Chase hums at the rest of the room.

“And of course, Dark himself. How you doing, man?”

“If you could please readjust me,” Dark says, glancing over to see if Jack's watching him be nicer to nurses.

“You got it, sir.”

Celine draws the curtain around him, which is for the best. Still, he keeps looking over to try and look at Jack, listening to the rhythm of his heart machine beeping. Across the way, Ellen and Chase's machines are keeping tune too, someone's phone is ringing, and Adventure Time is playing on the TV. Bing readjusts him gently, massages a safe part of his ankles, and covers him back up again.

When Dark tells him “thank you,” he finds that he means it.

The strangest part of being in the shared room, Dark thinks, is the way everyone comes and goes.

It does provide some entertainment, some change around him. Chase's grandma comes once every two days to bring him some candy and a kiss, even though she's not looking too well herself these days. Chase's neurologist comes just as frequently, and so do the therapists: one for speech, one for counseling, and one for movement.

“That's Shepherd,” Jack points out to Dark, and Shepherd turns to greet them both. “Shepherd's going to be working with you too, Dark.”

“Oh, you're my spinal cord injury?” Shepherd asks, as if Dark isn't visibly in a neck and back brace, and Dark hates him immediately. “I'm really excited to help get you out of that bed, sir.”

Dark glowers. He glances over and Celine looks up from where she's playing on her phone, giving him a stern look.

“Yes,” Dark manages.

Ellen has a husband and a kid, and then three grandkids, and some of them come throughout the week, but even the husband never seems to stay that long. Dark supposes he understands. There's no reason to be there, not really. She's just sleeping. They can't help. He glances at Celine, who's now trying not to fall asleep on the side of his bed. She hasn't recovered from the jetlag at all, or maybe she's just worn down.

More than anyone, though, Jack is the one who gets visitors. Nurses stop to talk to him when they should be working, other patients occasionally check in or let him know they're being discharged, and a couple friends from outside will come in with more flowers, balloons, or whatever the hell else they think is an acceptable “sorry about the carcinoma” present. Dark finally meets the German doctor who accompanied Jack downstairs when he storms into the room on the first day Dark's moved there, pointing a finger right at Jack.

“The call that I got last night was so infuriating – ”

“I'm sorry!” Jack starts to wail, but he's laughing, too, and then coughing, and Dark resists the urge to snap at the doctor to stop working him up. “I just felt so cooped up.”

“You felt cooped up? Look, Mr. Neumann over here is stuck in place in a literal sense, and you feel cooped up? Next time you feel cooped up, you look at him and decide, 'well, this is not so bad.'”

“Holy shit, Schneep, the death glare he is giving you right now...”

Dark scowls harder.

“Jackie, why can I not get you to take this seriously?” Schneep pulls the curtain around the two of them for some faux privacy, and Dark tries to pretend he's listening to Celine instead of them as she talks about some new refurbishment idea Will has for their house.

“I am trying to take care of you, my friend, I – ”

“Doc.” Out of sight from everyone else, Jack suddenly sounds worn completely through, and Dark's heart drops. “I know you are. I appreciate it. I just. I just couldn't stay in this bed.”

There's a long pause between them. Celine is talking about cabinet colors.

“You still talking to the therapist?”

“Yes. Trying.”

“Jack, you know, we've been through this a couple times now, and... you're different. I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but I wonder if, maybe, you've given up this time.”

Another long silence. Dark feels his heart pick up – and then hears it, as the machine starts beeping. Celine leans forward and he works to calm himself down.

“Shouldn't I have?” asks Jack on the other side of the curtain.

Dark blinks at his bedsheets. Celine asks him if he needs something, if he feels okay.

“No, you shouldn't have,” says the doctor, but his voice has started to shake. Oh, just barely, but Dark hears it. “Your prognosis – ”

“This time,” Jack cuts him off. “My prognosis this time. With this round of chemo. With the next round of radiation. Maybe it goes away again. And then next time? My prognosis next time? And the time after that?”

“If this has to do with your situation – ”

“I told you I don't want to talk about that.”

“Are you even looking for somewhere right now? Jackie? You're not.”

“Henrik,” says Jack, voice small, the low burn of bitterness gone again. “Please.”

Dark hears that doctor say nothing. He wonders if he's looking at Jack the same way Dark looks at him. Trying to memorize him. Thinking about things that could be, but aren't.

“I won't sneak off again,” Jack promises. “I'm sorry.”

Schneep clears his throat. Dark hears his paper shift. “I'm sorry too,” he says, and then, flatly, “ready for your steroid shots?”

“Yeah,” says Jack. “Course I am.”

Dark startles at that more than anything. He had never realized before that Jack could fake sounding cheerful so well.

“Do you think it was something in particular, in terms of wanting to die?” asks Jack a couple days later, popping cashews into his mouth. One of his friends from the psych ward sent them up to him. How does he even make friends in the psych ward if they're not allowed to leave their floor? “That pushed you over the ledge, so to speak?”

It's after visiting hours, but the three of them are still up. Dark's practicing with a straw while Bing helps.

“Didn't you say to save that sort of discussion for the shrink?” Dark asks. He manages to get some water in his mouth and – he's got this, he can do it – yes! Swallows without panicking. It doesn't even hurt too bad. Dark coughs a little and nods to himself. “I don't know, I guess it was because I was away from home. I didn't have to worry about my siblings finding me. It was an opportunity I'd been waiting for.”

“You were here for a business meeting?”

“Yes.”

“That's dull.”

Dark hums in disagreement, going for the straw again. He gets a little more water and swallows it precisely. “I enjoy success in my work.”

“What do you do?”

“I manage an auditing company that reviews financial records for non-profits.”

Jack stares at him for a long moment. “Of course you do.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Did you even sight-see at all while here?”

“It's England, Jack. Everything you have here, we have in America.”

“Not Nando's.”

“You think I eat at Nando's?”

Jack tosses another cashew in his mouth. “Buzzkill.”

“It's been said.”

Chase inputs something that takes him a couple minutes to get out, but Dark's grown accustomed to waiting for him. It's not like he has anything better to do anyway. “I'm American too.”

“Where you from in America, Chase?” asks Jack.

“Cali,” Chase says.

Jack gives him a skeptical look. “You're from Cali.”

“What?”

“So that Cornhuskers shirt your grandma brought you...”

Chase reddens visibly and Dark snorts out a laugh.

“Is being from the Midwest your secret shame?” asks Jack.

“Ugh,” says Chase, which is plenty enough said. “I moved.”

Dark nearly spills his cup as he tries to drink from it and Bing catches it neatly, putting it back in place for him. Dark's still having issues with wanting to strangle every nurse who touches him, but Bing does have this particular skill for acting like nothing that happens in the hospital is weird or gross or shameful. He doesn't give the pity looks, Dark thinks. Makes things a little easier.

“So what pushed you over the edge, Chase?” Dark asks.

It's strange that he asked that, he realizes a moment later. He doesn't really care about Chase, because why would he, and that's a personal, intense question, one that will probably take Chase half an hour to answer, and might even upset him. But Jack asks those questions, and they all know they're fucked up cases in this room. He supposes they don't have to tiptoe.

Chase hums. “Mine. Mine.”

They let him take his time, and eventually Dark pieces together that Chase's wife left him after some problems with alcohol. Jack hasn't tried to help guess what he's saying, which leads Dark to believe he already knew this. Jack probably asked. He's always checking on everyone like that. Dark looks over at him, finding him now staring down at the rest of the cashews, sort of green in the face.

“Bing,” he says.

Bing follows his gaze and spots it too. He reaches patiently for a waste bin and strides right over to Jack, who throws up as if on cue, and then doesn't stop for several minutes.

“Sorry, Jackie,” Chase says. He seems to get stuck on it, because he says it fifty times at least while Jack heaves until there's nothing but bile coming up. Bing holds him carefully by the shoulders. In brief seconds between vomiting, Bing presses the oxygen mask back to his face, and traces of sick smear along the edges and cling to Jack's short beard.

Dark starts thinking about that other universe again. Jack's not healthy there this time, though, and Dark's not sure why. Dark's well in that other world. And there, he hurries right over to Jack and pets his hair from his face, holding him tenderly while he vomits. He kisses his head and his temple. As he's holding the bin up for Jack, some of the sick gets on his hand, but he doesn't care. As soon as Jack's done, he's going to run a hot bath for him and wash him up himself, and then he'll hold him until he goes to sleep.

Jack's crying through the vomiting. Dark lays awake and looks at him.

“Why don't you tell me about your childhood?”

Oh, for the love of all that is holy and damned. Dark bites down hard on his tongue – ow – and forces himself to take deep breaths. Layla looks at him expectantly. She's got a new sort of determination today, and Dark is extremely concerned that both Celine and Jack have given her pep talks about what he needs.

They have also given him pep talks – one much more aggravating than the other – and damn it all, he knows he really fucking has to try this at least enough to soothe their worries a little. And he has to fucking FaceTime Dae and look at his big sad eyes. Fuck.

“It was difficult, and then easy,” he says.

“What do you mean by that?” says Layla.

He means he's going to bite her as soon as they take this neck brace off. “My parents became very wealthy. After that we had everything we wanted.”

“And what did you want as a kid?”

“A snake, mostly.”

“Oh, that does not surprise me, Seo.”

“Thanks,” he grumbles.

“Did you get one?”

“Yeah, actually, they did get me a snake, but it only lived a couple years.”

“Was that upsetting?”

“No, I was thirteen by then.”

“All thirteen-year-olds are famously emotionally stable.”

“I had some rages, but that was about it.”

“And where do you think that comes from?”

“If I could shrug, I would.”

Layla at least seems a little amused with him. “I know you don't like talking, so I brought you some info of my own today. I'd like to read you a case study about a patient with a similar injury to yours.”

Dark gets that boiling sensation in his stomach again. He looks away.

“How do you feel about that?”

“I think that one patient happening to get a good outcome doesn't have anything to do with me being fucking broken in two. Or three.”

“This is about someone who uses a wheelchair now, and some of their feelings as they adjusted to that. Might not be the kind of good outcome you mean. I think it is, though.”

Dark feels his face get hot. He stares at the ceiling. “Setting my hopes high, I see.”

“I think this could turn out either way for you, but this could validate some of what you're feeling as you wonder about different possibilities.”

Here it is, the stupid 'your feelings matter' talks he gets every time. Some feelings do matter, if they piss everyone else off because you broke a plate during dinner again to see if you could make Dad punch you in the face (he never does). Feelings like that matter because then you get sent to your room and to therapy, or you get suspended, or put in juvenile detention. And some feelings matter because you have to learn to set them aside and try to stop causing problems, or else Damien will start crying and Mom and Dad will give each other looks like they're about to fall apart, or maybe drop him off at the side of the road like a dog that can't be housebroken. But most feelings don't matter, because no matter what, you have to keep living. You have to go to work, go to sleep, go to a stupid family reunion and smile through it. All of it, always.

His feelings right now? The rage, the fear? They matter less than ever. He can do nothing about them, literally, stuck as he is. Like Celine said before he had to have his surgery. He has to do it scared. He has to lie here furious. He has to pine after Jack with no outlet for his affection. Since the crash, all that his feelings do for him is make him hyperventilate and scare his sister.

And maybe drive Dae and Will away.

The shrink is reading something about feelings of being humiliated. Dark sighs angrily to himself, closing his eyes. Anyone would feel humiliated like this. Dae and Will don't need to see it. Even Celine doesn't, but he knows there's no getting rid of her.

Dae had asked him if he still loves him. Dark just ignored it. Now the question comes back to him, and he realizes, with a sudden coldness all the way down his back – all the way, past the numbness – that he doesn't know.

He doesn't know if he still loves Dae.

How could he stop loving his little brother? He couldn't. He reaches for the memory of Dae now, and there's... there's no feeling. If he tries to remember the toddler Dae, with his big eyes and dark curls, he just gets the feelings he had in those days, the rage and the fear and the feral need for him. But there's no warm affection. He thinks of Dae now and he feels like he's looking at an employee.

Did he stop loving Dae? When? How?

He can hear his heart rate beeping on the monitor. Layla has stopped reading. “Dark, what's wrong? Practice talking about what you're feeling.”

He doesn't, does he? He doesn't love Dae. That's why he was able to stay silent when he asked. If he loved him, he would have told him so, even if he was hurting, even if he was humiliated. He would never have let his baby brother believe he didn't love him if it wasn't true. What is wrong with him? The ASPD test was wrong. He is a sociopath after all.

Has it happened to other people? Celine? He tries to imagine her. There's no warmth, not really, just a sort of exhaustion. He thinks it would be better if she went away. If everyone went away. He doesn't want Will. He thinks back to his eomma and realizes he doesn't feel anything about her either.

Seojun bites on a sob, trying to grab at his chest, his hand just making it. His real mom and he just gets a feeling of helplessness. His parents and he just feels shame. He thinks back to his stupid fucking snake and he feels nothing looking at it. He buried it in the backyard and cried so much that he even let Mom and Dad hug him and rub his back. They told him they'd get him a new snake. But he didn't want a second snake. He didn't want a second Mom. He wants his eomma. But if she were here, she'd know that he grew up broken and cruel, just like his real father, and she would wish that she only had the twins, just like his second parents.

And now he's nothing but a burden to everyone, maybe for the rest of his life.

The shittiest part is that when he breaks down, usually someone helps him calm down or drugs him, and he can go right to sleep and close the goddamn scene. But Layla won't let him. She's got her hand too close to him and she's talking to him, firm and insistent, telling him to tell her what he feels. He doesn't know how long it takes for him to break, but eventually, he starts screaming at her.

“I hate myself,” he screams. “I feel like I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself and everything.”

“You don't have to feel that way forever,” she replies, letting her voice be loud. “You are so loved, Seo. You are loved, you are worthwhile. There is nothing that could happen to your body that would change that.”

“You don't know anything,” he shouts at her. “Nobody's ever loved me, not before this, they sure as fuck won't afterwards.”

“Your sister's here, she's been here looking after you. She loves you.”

“Well, then, tell her to stop or I'll make her.”

Layla looks at him steadily, sucking in this big, determined breath. Dark sees that she's going to keep talking, but he knows how to make her stop. He lashes out a hand and manages to grab the IV hooked into his arm, and he yanks it out in a splurt of crimson blood.

“Seo! Hey, someone get a nurse!”

Dark hears the rustle of the curtain and turns to see Jack standing up, staring at him.

“Jack!” Dark says, something cutting through his blind rage. “Go lay down. You could faint again.”

“I still have my mask on,” Jack says crossly. “Don't do that to yourself, Dark. Come here.”

“Don't, you'll get my blood on you! What's wrong with you?”

“What's wrong with me?”

“Why do you even give a fuck about anyone?”

“Oh, dammit, Dark,” Jack snarls. “Don't be such an edgelord.”

He grabs Dark's arm and puts his hand firmly over the puncture wound, and Layla slaps her hand on top of his at the same time, stoppering the blood together. Dark reaches up with a desperation he didn't know he had in him and grabs Jack's free hand in his own.

Jack looks down at him with that pretty starlight gaze, faces close.

Then he blinks, coughs, turns his head, and throws up all over Dark's side.

“Oh, shit,” Jack curses, nearly crumpling. “I'm so s-sorry, oh, shit, that's disgusting.”

Dark's rage goes out of him in a second. He reaches up and cups Jack's neck tenderly, helping to hold him steady as he vomits again, and Dark whispers to him that everything will be okay as the nurse rushes in.

Celine is red around the eyes again.

Dark's exhausted. He stares at the ceiling. He wants to stare at Jack, but they took him for a scan to look at the carcinoma. From Jack's attitude about it – uncharacteristically surly, maybe even a little waspish – he's sure it will be bad news.

“I do love you,” Celine says.

Dark needs to look at her. He doesn't think he can do it.

“I love you a lot.”

Dark needs to tell her he knows. That she's shown him. That he's grateful. He can't.

“Can you... can you at least tell me how long you've been feeling this way?”

His mouth is so dry. He closes his eyes, flexes his tongue, wishes there was any way to stall this moment. He knows when it started, but he wishes he didn't.

“Celine, I can't talk about this right now.”

She's staring at him in despair. He can feel it, even if he doesn't look over.

“You could have told me.”

“No,” says Dark flatly. “I couldn't have.”

Celine falls quiet. He turns to her at last and sees her staring blankly at Ellen, eyes empty, mouth slightly parted. He wonders if she's asleep with her eyes open. If nothing else, he thinks she's far away.

“Celine,” he says softly.

She blinks but doesn't look back at him.

“Go back to the rental and sleep.”

She sighs thickly and closes her eyes. “I'll just lie awake thinking about you hurting yourself.”

“I wasn't doing it to hurt myself. I just got angry. You've seen me rage before. There's no logic to it.”

“There's always logic to it.”

“There's – ”

“You were always so strategic about it. Mom and Dad, they talked about you having uncontrollable rages. But I always knew when they were coming. When Mom and Dad were too nice, or when something reminded you of Eomma. I'd see you get the idea in your head, deciding what you would do this time. How you were going to try and make them mad. Make them prove that they were villains.”

Dark stares at her, unable to keep the shock off his face. How had she known that? She looks at him now, sniffling.

“You wanted them to give you a reason to hate them. They never did. Nobody ever hurt you in that house. You got yelled at a little harshly sometimes, and I know Mom told you you were a bad kid one time. But they never gave you the reasons you wanted. And you're here now, as an adult – but you still haven't forgiven them for not being Eomma.”

The idea that Celine has even thought about this is... so far from what he understood about her perspective on their family. The idea that she has always known he was looking for his mom – did she understand that before he did?

“You can't hold on to that, Dark,” she says, with this weak shrug that's not at all like her. “You just can't. They loved you. You deserve to let yourself love them too.”

“I... did,” Dark says. Didn't he? Yes... yes. When he finally started to settle, when he started wanting Dad to be proud of him and Mom to brush his hair or rub Vaseline on his chest when he was sick. When he stopped feeling scared when they came near the twins. He remembers having a regression when he was fourteen where he wanted to sleep in their bed and stay home from school, crying and clinging to Dad all day, and his therapist told them it was actually a good thing, because it meant he was trying to figure out how to be a kid for once in his life. So they let him have them. Mom planned a whole day just for him, didn't she? Not even his birthday, just a day for him. She sent the twins to Grandma's and cooked him his favorite meal, and Mom and Dad took him to a movie and then ice cream. When they got home and he felt overwhelmed, Mom sat down with him on the couch and held him. His stranger of a Mom holding a wrecked fourteen-year-old Asian kid in her lap and calling him her son. She always used to pet his hair out of his face. He remembers her smelling like citrus.

“I did,” Dark repeats. “But I... stopped.”

Celine's staring at him, and he knows she needs him to keep talking.

“I don't know what happened, Celine,” he whispers. “I think something's broken in me. I think it always has been.”

Her eyes flutter, sliding closed. He waits for her to keep talking, but instead, his little sister just leans down and lays her head on his bed, next to his arm, and holds his hand.

Jack's bad sick.

Dark gets the sense that he and Chase are both equally aware of this. When he turns to look over at Chase, he keeps finding him laying on his side, almost diagonal, tilted to watch Jack's bed. Any of them could close their curtains, but they don't.

“Dose day,” Chase had said to him earlier, quiet but surprisingly clear. “That's – his IV bag. His key – key – his chemo.”

Jack has his arm laid across his face, pressing down on his mask as if to keep it in place. Dark keeps hearing him swallow, like he can't get something out of his throat, and around one in the morning the night after his dose of medicine, he buzzes a nurse for pain medication. Jack doesn't get any skepticism, either. They put something extra in his IV and he relaxes, flopped over his bed, just breathing and holding his mask.

"Not sleeping through this one?" asks Dark softly.

Jack startles slightly, glancing over at him, eyes glazed. "Mh. You neither."

"I'm fine."

"Oh, fine... big man, aren't you?"

He's trying to tease him, but his voice doesn't quite get there. Dark can hear Chase snoring in the other bed. At least he's getting some sleep.

"Where's the pain?" Dark asks.

Jack winces. "Let's not talk about it."

"Do you ever talk about yourself, then?"

Jack looks offended. "I talk about myself all the time. Probably too much."

"You talk about everything else but this."

"Sorry I'm not your chemo patient inspiration porn," Jack sneers, and the harshness of his voice surprises Dark. "Sorry I don't want everyone falling all over themselves to pity me, or thinking to themselves 'at least I'm not him, dying again.' Making myself sick and miserable to survive another sick, miserable day."

It's the first Dark has heard of Jack dying. The doctor didn't think he would. The doctor told him not to give up. He stares at the patient in the bed next to his.

"Jack," he says.

Jack coughs, holding his chest. "This is my third cycle of this shit, did you know that? Third cycle and then some."

Dark didn't know that. Jack didn't say.

"I'll be happy and pleasant again in the morning, okay?" Jack croaks.

"You don't have to be."

"I want to be," Jack says, breath hitching. "I want to be remembered that way. Smiling. When I'm... when I'm like this, when I'm upset, when I talk about it... there's just a wave of darkness that comes over me. And I realize that I'm so young and so sick. I like to be up, I like to be talking. I feel close to people again. I feel like Jackie."

Dark makes his low rumbling noise, and Jack shifts slightly to look at him better. "What do you do to feel like yourself? When you get down?"

Dark pauses, mind turning. "Well," he says. "I used to like to go pick someone up."

"What? Oh, like pick someone up at a club or something. I bet you had a knack for that. Good-looking dude, with the whole aura of mystery."

In his other universe, he would take that moment to hit on Jack, teasing him for thinking he was attractive, putting the idea in his head that Dark thought he was attractive too. But neither of them are up for it tonight.

"Yes," he says instead.

"The sex would make you feel better."

Warm. Wanted. Worthwhile.

"Yes."

"So just strangers or you had a girlfriend?"

"I've really never dated seriously."

"No? You crave that connection but then you wouldn't make a lasting one."

He thinks it would sound judgmental coming from anyone other than Jack. "Maybe I just wanted to get off."

"Nah," says Jack, and for a second, he actually grins, like a flower opening up. "You wouldn't have said it made you feel more like yourself otherwise. Mh, I miss sex. I guess I miss wanting sex. My drive for it always gets wiped out by this shit. And I'm too tired for it anyway. Not supposed to get my heart rate up or anything. But you do feel close to someone when you're intimate like that, huh?"

Jack settles again. Dark watches him for a long time.

"I think it made me feel loved," Dark says. "Like I could be open with someone for just a little while. And then I'd wake up in the morning and realize I was alone again."

Jack opens his big blue eyes at him, mouth turned softly. After a second, he gets up, keeping his mask on, and pulls himself over the few feet between them. As Jack leans down for a semblance of a hug and places his head on his shoulder, he smells the sterile hospital smell on him, and his coconut lotion.

"You didn't have to do that," Dark says, despite how warm he feels for a moment. "I was trying to make you feel better."

Jack steps back to bed a little shakily and sits down. He looks terribly thin in that hospital gown, skeletal knees poking out. Dark misses his red hoodie and sweatpants and little green backpack.

"You did," says Jack. "I feel close to someone again."

Dark feels his whole face rush with heat. He thinks Jack is chipping away at the part of him that was always so suave and self-assured around anyone he wanted to sleep with. A sentence from him and he's flushing like a teenager.

Maybe it's a good thing. Dark remembers how he had wanted Jack in the beginning, just for a single night of sexual connection, and suddenly, he's so glad he didn't have a chance to destroy this moment. His fantasy of another world takes shape in his mind again, and he sees himself in that other universe, just standing next to Jack's bed, his hand on his shoulder, telling him he's glad that they're friends.

“Try to sleep, Jack,” Dark murmurs to him.

“Maybe... maybe if you talk to me,” Jack replies, rubbing at his head, starting to look green again. “Can you just distract me?”

Not his skill set. Jack asked, though, and he would give Jack anything.

“What should I talk about?”

“Anything. Maybe Korea?”

“I'm sorry, Jack. I haven't been since I was little.”

Mom and Dad wanted to take him, actually, but he refused. It strikes him as strange, now, that he hadn't wanted to go back. He had told them he didn't want to be on a plane that long. But now, he thinks that, maybe, he just didn't want to be in Korea without his eomma. He's never been back since.

“Maybe we should go,” says Jack, in a voice that would be playful if he didn't sound like he was about to throw up. “And we'll go see everything. Do you remember anything about it? Tell me about it. We can be each other's tour guides. Some of what I remember, and some of what you remember. We'd have a good time.”

Dark thinks about it for a long moment.

“I remember my mom, mostly,” he says, and he tells Jack about her. He doesn't know when the last time he told anybody about her was, and somehow, he remembers more and less about her than he expected at the same time. Her cooking. The walks to the nearby park where she would swing his hand in her own. The Josh Groban Christmas album she played all year long.

Jack sleeps. Dark watches him. In his other world, he's with him in Korea.

Dark is hanging upside down, but this time, he's not bleeding.

Glass is smashed around him. A shard of it has caught on his hair, a strand of it hanging down over his eyes, so he can see the glint of the white headlights in its reflection. One of the twins is crying. He tries to move, to go get them, but he's stuck in place.

He finds himself in the backseat and he blinks, trying to clear his vision. In the passenger's seat in front of him, he can see the black sheen of his mother's hair, matted and torn. He coughs and tries to reach for her. No luck.

"Mommy, Mom," he calls. "Eomma, get up."

Her limp hand dangles towards the ceiling. The other twin starts to cry too, loud and squalling, but he doesn't know where they are. Seojun tries to get up, but the pain draws a scalpel through his spine, and he wails aloud.

"Mom?"

Something moves in the car, but it's not his mother. Locked inside his body, he can only turn his eyes to the driver's seat, where he sees his father's face turned back towards him.

"Dark." Something grabs him and he jolts awake, heaving for air. A shaky hand is squeezing his shoulder, and a form hovers too close over him, swaying. Dark tries to rear back, but the pain lances up his neck.

"Sorry, sorry," mumbles Chase, and Dark gasps in a breath of air as a line of drool drips onto his cast. "Bad dream. You. You. I don't remember, the, uh, word."

"Sorry," Dark manages back. "Sorry, shit."

Chase pats his shoulder a little too hard, hand twisted up, and tries to pull back from Dark. He ends up hitting his hip on the bedside table and grunts, hurt flashing through his face. "Ungh," he says. "Can't w... walk."

And yet, he got up from his bed and struggled over here to wake Dark from his nightmare. Maybe he even fell and had to pick himself up again. Dark breathes out slowly, trying to get his heart rate back under control, and nods at Chase.

"Thanks."

"Yeah."

In this room, they're all getting through it together.

"Hey, Celine."

She looks shocked to be greeted, which is entirely his fault. Dark clears his throat and tries to seem calm, settling against his pillows. Okay, maybe they had to address some old feelings still lingering, but he remains her big brother, reliable and steady as the earth.

"Hey," she says back.

Then she says: "I have to go back home."

Dark chokes on his own spit and coughs, shaking his head slightly - ow, but not as much of an ow as it used to be - and trying to collect himself. "Sorry, what?"

"I know, I know," she says, faintly panicked. "I'm so sorry, Dark, I really, I - I meant to be here through all of this, but something's come up. I have to go. You're taken care of here - "

"Celine," Dark says. "For crying out loud, sit down for a second."

She falls into the seat beside his bed, staring at the sheets. Her lip is pulled into her mouth, held between her teeth. "I know you feel like you're not loved, but this is not about that. I do love you, I know this doesn't show it, I have to go."

"Celine. What the hell happened?"

"I have to go."

"Well, it won't make me think you don't love me. I know that you - yeah, I know you love me."

"You didn't seem to!"

Dark all but growls. "That was just one fucked up day. I'm okay. If you need to go - but why? Celine - "

"I think I'm pregnant," she says.

He purses his mouth, running his eyes over her. "Okay. How sure?"

"I took a test last night. And, uh. Then two more."

"Wow." He stares at his sister as someone stirs a cocktail of emotions in his stomach. "That's... how do you feel?"

"I just really need to see Will," she whispers.

"Celine, you two are stable these days. He is stable these days. You can do this. Go ahead and go home, don't worry about me."

She doesn't look any calmer. "You're only saying that. Are you going to start pulling out your IV again as soon as I'm gone?"

He sighs out bitterly. "No. I will keep it together. Especially if it means you can figure this out. I mean, that's... it's... it's wonderful."

And it is, isn't it? How had this thought never occurred to him before, that one day his little sister might get pregnant? Will has been in plenty of trouble with Dark for making jokes that are just too close to telling him something about his sex life with Dark's sister before, after all. But he had never thought of it. Celine and Will with a baby of their own. Would it be as fat as Will is in his baby pictures, or have Celine's tiny frame and big eyes? Would it have both of their full heads of black hair? What would they name it, after their parents or after one of Will's latest passions, some sweet or ferocious name he drew from his mind on the spot?

"You'll have a baby," he says. "That's wonderful."

Celine stares at him for a long moment, brown eyes languid, and he worries that he's said the wrong thing. But she lurches up and kisses his cheek, touching his face for a second, and he feels her relief.

And he realizes he does love her. He doesn't know how he thought that he didn't. He doesn't understand the way his mind is working lately, but of course he loves Celine. And now, he loves his nephew. His niece. He'd never thought about it.

"I need to go," whispers Celine. "Please, for me, do the things you need to do to heal, Dark."

They're both well past the illusion that his body is the only thing that needs healing. He touches her side for a second, already missing the closeness of her, and he's sorry he's made this so hard on her.

"And you keep an eye on him too," Celine adds, and Dark realizes, with a start, that she's standing up to look at Jack, who turns to them - he'd been politely pretending not to hear - and smiles broadly.

"Of course I will," says Jack. "You should add me on, like, WhatsApp or something, so I can message you in America."

"Yeah, you'll tell me if he does anything stupid?"

"Of course." Jack winks at Dark.

Dark has no idea when the two of them had any time to talk. “You two have been gossiping about me,” he accuses.

“Little bit,” Jack agrees. “Little bit. And about your nutjob brother-in-law.”

“Hopefully Will can come back and meet you next time, Jackie,” says Celine.

“He better!”

Celine leaves Dark with some currency to keep with his personal belongings, the new phone they ordered for him, and her laptop, which quickly becomes Jack's, seeing as Dark can't use it and Chase would definitely drop it. Dark had worried that the feeling of being alone and unwanted would crash down over him in the hours after Celine left, but pretty soon, Chase is sitting between their beds so they can all watch Lord of the Rings together, Jack is laughing about hobbits, and Dark doesn't feel so bad.

“Well, Dark, how are you feeling since the last time we spoke?”

Dark's watching Chase try to get a lid open on a can of soda. Who the hell gave that to him without cracking it for him? He'll have the nurse fired.

“You can get it, man!” Jack comes over to Chase's side and sits down on his bed, but instead of helping him, he just nudges his shoulder. “Don't give up.”

“Dark,” Layla repeats. She doesn't quite have that same pep-talk energy as last time, but he's sure she's convinced herself that him shouting at her was a breakthrough, and he won't be able to ignore her out of existence anymore. “Come on.”

“He does that every time,” says Dark, nodding over towards Jack.

“What?”

“His instinct is always to do the kindest thing possible. As if there's never any anger in him.”

“Instinct might not be the right word,” Layla says. “I'm sure he had to practice it.”

Dark frowns at her, unimpressed. “Some of us have softer natures than others.”

“You're more than just nature, Dark.”

He looks back over at Chase, who seems about ready to give up. He pouts at Jack, and Jack just insists, helping guide his hand around the can.

“Do you think there's a reason you might have a... harsher nature?” Layla asks.

Dark's mouth quirks in a terrible grin. Right. He wants to snarl at her that he's not like his father just because of the things he saw him do, but if he raises his voice, Jack will hear. And maybe call him an edgelord again.

“My childhood was difficult, and then it was easy.”

Layla clicks her pen, turning her head at him. “You've said that to me before.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you said it just like that. And you told me about your parents becoming wealthy, but what was the difficult part?”

“This isn't about that,” Dark says, feeling his heart rate tick.

Layla just holds up her hands in surrender. “You can tell me you're not ready to talk about something. You don't have to shout me away.”

Doesn't he? It hadn't occurred to him that she would leave him be if he said no.

“Do you want to have a gentler nature?” she asks.

Dark heaves a breath through his nose. He's trying at this. He has to try. He promised... well, everyone who matters.

“You are fully aware that I am experiencing a great deal of anger,” he says finally, feeling tired just by the words. How humiliating, to have to talk to a shrink. “It would be better, in this situation where I can do nothing about it, to be less angry.”

“And do some kind things like Jack does?”

Dark snorts. “I can't do anything right now.”

“I don't think that's true. You've done lots of angry things without being able to move. Why couldn't you do some kind things?”

“Like what? Yelling less doesn't count as kind, it's just not mean.”

Layla shrugs at him. “Maybe you should do some thinking on things.”

“I've been doing much too much thinking lately,” he mutters.

Layla pats his hand and lets him be. On the other side of the room, Chase cracks the lid of his Coke and immediately spills half of it onto the floor.

“That's great,” says Jack, and he throws his arms around his neck to hug him, making Chase grin after all.

Jack's struggling again that night.

Dark hears his breathing start to get strained again, sees him getting faint and disoriented, sees the oxygen monitor start to get agitated and alert the staff. He feels a horrible foreboding that Jack will have to go back to the ICU and be intubated yet again, sliding down into that shadowy haze between life and sleep, but Schneep is on call and he comes in quickly to handle it. They give him some steroids, or at least Dark thinks that's what all those shots are about, and then they put him into a deep sleep, to let him rest. “Just getting weak,” he hears someone says. “If you do need to remove the rest, then...”

If they can just remove it, why don't they? If Jack's been through three rounds of treatment and he's starting to lose hope, they should at least try to remove the carcinoma. Is he too weak for it? How does Dark help him get his strength back? He should never have let him come talk to him in his room last week. What is he not understanding?

“You need anything?” asks Schneep quietly as he steps away from Jack.

“Hm?” asks Dark. “No. Don't most patients go home after their chemo dose? Would he do better at home?”

Schneep sighs, glancing back at Jack. His hand raises up and pinches above his nose. “I'm – I really can't talk about that.”

“I'll just ask him myself.”

“Don't,” says Schneep, less gently. “Don't ask him about that.”

Dark's mouth purses. Schneep lets a breath go and comes over to set a stress ball back into Dark's hand. It had rolled away from him on the bed. “I'll check on him in a couple hours.”

Fine. Dark lays in bed and rolls that stress ball in his hand, watching Jack sleep. None of this is about him anymore, he decides. Why would it be, when he's going to get better and Jack might not? When Jack is such a better person than him anyway, in every sense of the word, so much more worthy of being alive?

So he's trapped here. Fine. So he doesn't understand what Jack's going through and doesn't think he ever will. Fine. It doesn't matter anymore. From now on, everything he does, he will do for Jack.

And he's getting the fuck out of this bed.

“Hey, Chase! How we doing today?”

Chase turns his head, blinking heavily as Shepherd comes over to his bed. He stares at him blankly and Dark frowns.

“Hi, I'm Chase,” Chase says uncertainly, words he practices with the speech therapist frequently.

“Chase, I'm Shepherd, I'm your physical therapist. Do you remember working with me a little?”

“Oh,” says Chase.

“It's no problem, man, but I'm here to help you move a little easier. Feeling ready to work on coordination with me?”

“Oh, okay. Y-yeah.”

Dark looks over at Jack, who's frowning too. Chase has never forgotten Shepherd before.

Shep must notice their concern, because he stops to say hi to the two of them too, and tells them that he'll make a note of it in Chase's chart.

“Thanks,” says Jack. “He has good days and bad ones.”

“Shepherd,” Dark interjects. “When are you supposed to start working with me?”

“Oh, I haven't checked. Usually, with severe spinal cord injuries, it's about four weeks before we can even start shifting you.”

“I'm getting there. Can we do something today?”

Shepherd hums, turning to squirt sanitizer on his hands and rubbing them together. “Not much without doctor's orders. But they let you out of that neck brace for a while every day, right? Let me see your neck.”

Shepherd unclicks his neck brace and puts his hand carefully beneath Dark's head, lowering him flat onto the mattress, and despite his determination, Dark feels a flash of real fear. “I'll be careful, I'll be careful,” murmurs Shepherd. “You been moving your neck at all?”

“Not if I can help it,” says Dark tightly.

Shepherd double-checks his chart while Dark lays very still. He wishes he could look over to see Jack's face, because he can feel the other patient's gaze on him. Shepherd's back in his vision again a moment later, hands on both side of his neck, and Dark winces.

“Painful?”

“No. Not there.”

Shepherd feels around his head and neck gingerly. “I'm going to feel around your neck. Tell me if it hurts.”

“There,” Dark hisses.

“Scale of one to ten?”

He wets his mouth. “Five.”

“Okay. Does it hurt lower on your spine?”

“No, just where you're touching.”

“That's a good sign. You had whiplash, but nothing broke up here. Did you have a concussion?”

“I don't know. I was sedated for the first several days.”

“Okay. I want to try and move your head.”

Dark feels himself flush. “You're sure?”

“I'm sure.” Shepherd holds his skull and his neck and, slowly, he tilts Dark's head back, back, back, until he's staring at the headboard of his bed – which he's sure he's never seen before – and his chin is stretched out and up. The muscles beneath his chin haven't stretched in weeks. Dark can't help it – he lets out a low groan of pleasure.

Shepherd guides his chin back down and slowly moves his head to the right, and then to the left. It's a relief until something very sharp stabs Dark in the back and he yells, hand spasming.

“Sorry, a little too low. Okay. I'm going to lie you back on the pillows. Have you been defecating?”

Dark's mouth curls, scowling at Shepherd. “What are you talking about?”

“They've had you on a liquid diet still, right? A bowel movement requires a lot of muscle movement. You'll need to learn how to defecate again without hurting yourself.”

“Fine, but I have to be able to get to the bathroom before I can do that.”

“You can use a bedpan right here. No shame in the hospital. Everyone in here has used one before.”

Dark stares at him. Shepherd gives him a clap on the shoulder.

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if you're feeling ready to get started, it's time for me to tell you that physical therapy is a lot of small steps that are really hard work. And it will piss you off that you have to hurt so badly and try so hard for something that used to be so easy you didn't even think about it – yeah, like using the bathroom. But that's what you're in for. And it will feel impossible, sometimes, but it isn't. I know because I've seen other people do it. Time and again, when they thought that they couldn't.”

“Spare me the speeches,” says Dark bitterly. “I can fucking do it.”

Shepherd raises his hands in surrender. “I'm going to conference with Dr. Greene. The most important thing is that the bones in your spine fully heal. I won't do anything to risk that. And we should get you measured for a wheelchair.”

“I want to walk, I don't want a wheelchair.”

“Well, you can use a hospital chair if you want, but it's better to have one fitted for you, and to be frank, I've heard you have the money. Look, we will continue to plan on you walking, but if you want mobility, you'll at least start with a chair. It's better to start thinking about it now. Even if you can walk, you might find that you want a chair for the times when you're in a lot of pain.”

The reminder that he'll have pain no matter how mobile he becomes puts a cramp in his gut, something scared and angry again. His motivation from the night before feels stupid now, like he could just will this all away, the same thing he tried at the beginning. No amount of determination will change the fact that he hurt his spinal cord so badly they still don't know to what extent he'll even have feeling in his legs after all this. If he wants to do PT, they'll have to take the epidural out, won't they? He has no idea what the pain will be like. What if it's like when he was in the car, screaming? He's hanging upside down –

“Dark?”

Jack's voice is smaller than ever, worried, and Dark's eyes flicker over. Jack's sitting up so he can see him better, smiling at him. “They'll get you through it.”

Before he can reply, Shepherd is holding his head again and putting his neck brace on. Dark hates that he feels better with it in place. He closes his eyes and sighs out.

“I'm really glad you reached out to him, Dark,” says Jack. “That's wonderful.”

Dark covers his face with his hands. Praised just for letting some fucker touch his stupid neck. Jack's completely sweet, and Dark's completely pathetic.

But he needs to do this.

“Thanks,” he mumbles, and Jack makes a soothing noise, a little hum of agreement, just for him.

“I'm glad you're alive, Dark,” says Jack gently. Dark remembers that he told him he did this to himself. That Jack still thinks he tried to kill himself.

“Thanks,” Dark says again. “I'm glad that we're friends.”

And Jack gives him a smile that would make poets put pens to paper, something bashful and pretty in it that Dark hopes is just for him. Even if it isn't, though, he'd do it just for Jack's friendship. For his joy. Yes. He'll do what he has to for Jack.

Dark can't believe he's doing as Layla asked, but it starts him brainstorming about kind things to do. What a drag. The shrink can say what she wants, but some things come easier to one person than another.

He was never a sensitive or affectionate kid, and he knows how close that came to preventing his adoption. He wouldn't have blamed his parents, either. He was a bad kid, and he caused them so much misery over the years after they took him in. They would have all been happier with just the twins.

“Grim thoughts, or are you falling asleep?”

Dark blinks, glancing over at Jack, who's balancing his cafeteria tray on his lap, moving his peas around. He always seems to notice when Dark's in his head.

“No appetite?” Dark asks instead of answering.

Jack looks over at him guiltily. “Ah, well. I try not to complain – most of the food is pretty good – but I don't really feel like chicken salad.”

He spears a pickle and tentatively puts it in his mouth. Dark watches him chew with intention, turning his face away, one hand gripping at the fabric of his robe.

You haven't eaten all day, Dark thinks about saying, but what would be the point?

“Chicken's okay,” says Chase, sitting up against his headboard. “But sometimes I miss the real – the real – oh... I forget. The real... bad stuff?”

Jack chuckles. “Uh... carbs?”

“No,” says Chase. “J...”

“Junk?”

“The real junk I used to – used to eat! Fast food when you need a... a treat.”

“Yes,” laughs Jack. “I had a problem with, like, Taco Bell. Or just getting McDonald's and feeling guilty... but so satisfying. Until it made my stomach hurt, haha. I was a food delivery guy, can you blame me?”

Dark turns an idea over in his mind.

“You into junk food, Dark, or do you only eat kale?”

“Really, kale is the assumption I get?”

“Come on. Look at you. You look like a Whole Foods sort of dude. Organic section sort of dude. Goat cheese on the grocery list.”

Dark looks over at him. “I miss pizza.”

He doesn't, really. If he got takeout, he liked local places and dishes with some damn quality. A tongue-burning curry from the place on Main Street, or kimchi ramen, or that turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce and a side salad from the bakery... but that's not the point. The pizza wouldn't be for him.

“Mmh, pizza,” says Jack, almost groaning. “When you get a whole one for you and you can't eat that much, but for a second, you think you're going to.”

“Domino's,” says Chase emphatically, pulled from his mind with confidence.

“Okay,” says Dark. “So let's get some.”

Jack furrows his brow at him and then laughs. “What? No, no. This is fine.”

“We only get so many treats in here. You want pizza, so let's get some.”

“Dark, you can't even have any.”

“I would be pleased just to watch the two of you eat.”

“Dark,” says Jack, more seriously now, and Dark thinks he might be on to him. “Look, I... I'm just not that hungry.”

“If you eat two bites and enjoy the smell, I'll be satisfied,” says Dark.

Something genuinely surprised comes over Jack's face, and he looks at Dark with a pursed mouth, head tilted.

“You know what?” Dark reaches down to click the button on his bed remote that calls for a nurse. It's Bing who comes in again, looking slightly frazzled from the day, and Dark's even more sure about his decision. “Bing, how many staff are on your shift?”

Bing blinks at him. “On this floor? Five other nurses, the doc, and two residents. Janitor and orderlies come through as needed.”

“Do you have your phone?”

“Yeah? What's going on?”

“We're getting pizza,” says Dark. “For everyone. Just get twenty, they'll get eaten. Call and order for us, okay?”

Bing starts laughing. “Come on, you do not want to get pizza for everyone. I don't mind ordering just for the room.”

“No, get it for everyone. Get a table and set it in here, so everyone comes in for some and socializes.”

“Dark,” Jack says, sitting up from bed. “Hey – ”

“Don't ruin this for us, Jackie,” interjects Chase, only half-teasing, Dark thinks. Bing laughs again, and Jack lets out this low breath, almost to humor.

“Dark, don't do this for me,” says Jack as Bing and Chase start to talk toppings, something more serious in his voice.

“For you? Chase is hungry, Jack. Come on.”

Jack's mouth parts slightly, an uncertain smile there.

“Jack,” Dark says. “My wallet won't notice anyway.”

“No?”

“No.”

Jack does smile then. “Okay... big dick moneybags over here.”

“What did you just call me?”

It starts him laughing for real. Dark turns away from Jack so he doesn't see Dark's face turn soft when he hears it. The pizza comes and so do the staff. Chase is so pleased and flushed he nearly loses all words, and a nurse comes over to check on him even as he grins at her and everybody. For a second, Dark sees him as he was before his TBI, good-looking and charismatic with a sarcastic streak and a glint in his eye. He realizes he's never asked how long Chase has been in hospital.

Next to Dark, Jack greets every person who comes into the room, talking and laughing and sitting up from bed, his verve back for an hour of time in which he does, in fact, eat a whole slice of pizza, and very much enjoy the smell.

Dark realizes how much he needs to see them both get better. It's so much that, for a second, he feels afraid again.

He hadn't thought that he remembered the original images they took when he was still in the ICU, but as he's pushed carefully into the CT machine, he feels a hot rush of memory, one he wants shut down right away.

Instead of hanging upside down, he's stretched out very flat, white lights shining from every direction. Everyone's moving, but he's pinned like a bug.

Dark breathes out slowly. Just a memory. Just a memory.

“Try to hold very still, Mr. Neumann,” someone calls. “It's going to be loud. Do you want any music playing while we do this?”

“No,” croaks Dark.

“You sure? It will take a little while.”

“No, thank you.”

“Okay.”

They leave him be, and the noise of the machine comes on. He's so closed in in here. Dark wets his mouth, breathing out.

He's been having bad dreams about the crash, he can acknowledge that. But he hadn't realized that even something harmless like this would make him feel... feel this. He just wants to be angry. It's not anger.

Is he really going to be fucked up from this, psychologically? Is it not enough that his body might be ruined?

Dark closes his eyes and tries to think about something else. Jack was just telling him about some superhero flick he's really into. He wonders if Jack would go with him if he invited him to a movie when this is all over. He thinks he'd spend the whole show just watching Jack's face. He's never met anyone so expressive, except maybe Will himself.

The machine makes a loud clunking noise and Dark flinches. He remembers the crunch of the other car impacting him. The audible noise of his own bones as he was thrown so violently that he thought, for a moment, his head had come fully off his body. He had heard that once: that someone can blink for several seconds after decapitation. That they might still have awareness even after their head comes off.

“Seo, are you doing okay?” Dr. Greene asks over the intercom.

He licks his mouth and tastes salt there. He realizes he's crying. They can see him on the camera. “Yes.”

“Seo – ”

“Just get this over with,” he rasps, putting the force of his anger behind it. “I want to start PT.”

But he doesn't, really. He just wants this all to be over with, and it never will be.

“Are you in pain?”

Actually, he is, a little more than usual. Maybe that's part of the reason he's feeling overwhelmed. He breathes out. “It's fine.”

They must know better than to argue with him, because they let him get through the scan. Dr. Greene comes out to check on him, putting a cool hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Seo, I know those can be difficult.”

He stares up at the ceiling, breathing as steadily as he can. “I want to go back to my room.”

“You're flushed.” She touches his face and he resists the urge to bite her hand. “Are you feeling hot?”

“It was hot in there.”

“I think your fever's back,” she says, voice more concerned. “Come on, let's get you checked out. We switched up your medication last time.”

He's wheeled back towards his room, the movement making him grit his teeth, which only makes the pain worse. It's only ten in the morning and it's already been a rough day.

“Did you have a fever last night?” the doc asks as his bed's returned to its place, and Dark feels more than sees Jack's attention swivel his way, his air turning timid and worried.

“No,” says Dark. He doesn't think he did.

She takes his temperature. “How else are you feeling?”

Dark sighs out bitterly. “I – I guess a little more achy than usual, if I have to be honest.”

She listens to his heart and his breathing, and then pokes around his neck. “Your sinuses are a little swollen. I'm sorry, Seo, but I think you've picked something up.”

“Well, I can deal with a damn cold,” he grouses.

“You're not as strong as you usually are. We'll get you on some antibiotics. The good news is, you're healing as expected. I'm going to let Shepherd come to start work with you, and we'll put you on some stool softeners and solid food.”

The pit of discomfort in Dark's stomach becomes so intense he closes his eyes. “Please draw the curtain.”

“Okay, Seo. I'll come check on you later.”

She pulls the curtain around his bed, and Chase and Jack are quiet outside. He hopes they're sleeping. Jack's been tossing and turning so much, coughing through the night, and Chase woke up completely disoriented at seven, not sure where he was or what was going on. They need rest.

The default ringtone of his new phone interrupts that. Dark huffs impatiently, turning his gaze towards his bedside table. Jack appears at the side of his curtain, pulling it back to reveal his face.

“Jack! Get your mask back on,” Dark chides.

Jack sticks his tongue out at him. “Schneep said I can have my cannula today. I'm mobile, baby!”

Dark looks at him, unimpressed.

“Don't be a grouchy goose.” Jack comes over to pick up his phone for him. “It's a FaceTime from someone called Damien.”

“My brother.”

“Want to talk to him?”

Absolutely not. But it would be the kind thing to do to talk to Damien. And... he owes him.

“Sure.”

Jack answers the call for him and waves at Damien, helping to set the phone up so it can sit looking at Dark and Dark can see it. His gut turns over at the sight of Damien, their last, one-sided conversation coming back to him. He didn't even tell his baby brother he loves him. He wasn't sure that he did.

Does he now? Damien looks a little undone. His hair's fluffy and loose instead of tamped down with product, and he's wearing a t-shirt of all things.

“Dark,” he greets him, with a little false cheer.

“Dae, what's going on?” Dark asks.

Dae's smile falls. “Seriously, I can't even call you now?”

“It's early there, Dae. You look exhausted.”

Damien regards him wearily. “I just wanted to hear from you. You couldn't have given me a call?”

Dark sighs. “I've been sleeping most of the time, and when I'm up, the timezone means you should be sleeping. I apologize.”

He lets his little brother rake his eyes over him. He can feel his disappointment through the phone, and he wonders, with a pang of some panic, if there was some different way he was supposed to answer this call. Should he have poured out a heartfelt apology immediately? He knows he couldn't if he tried. Dark scowls at the wall beside him.

“Okay, well.” Dae sounds defeated. “I just wanted to see you.”

Dark clears his throat. “I'm fine. How's the company? Is Hugo giving you trouble?”

Damien's face shuts down. “I'll keep things running, Seo. Sorry to bother you.”

“No, Dae, that's – ” Dark hisses out a breath, looking away from him. “I just don't know what to ask you about. Don't, uh. Don't go yet.”

There's a long pause from his little brother.

“Dae,” Dark says again. “I think I got weighed down, while you were here. It still wasn't right how I ignored all of you. But it wasn't personal. I was just adjusting.”

Damien looks down, and Dark seems him swallow. “I shouldn't have said that to you while you're going through all this. Of course you were feeling down. I shouldn't – I should have waited. I'm sorry.”

“You should have waited?” Dark feels his mouth turn down. “Waited for what?”

Damien's eyes flicker. “Are you feeling better now?”

“Fuck's sake, Damien, if you have something to say, say it.”

Damien frowns back at him, eyebrows furrowing with it. It's so unusual to see his little brother looking genuinely angry that Dark feels as though he can't look away from him.

“I've been feeling that way for a while, Dark,” says Dae.

“What, like I don't love you?”

“Yeah, that,” Damien snaps back. “That small thing.”

Dark sighs harshly. “I'm not exactly fucking affectionate.”

“I don't need you to tuck me in at night, Seo! I would take any kind of attention or – ”

“Oh, attention.”

“Yeah, fucking attention, can you not be – dammit! Just... yes, a little attention from my older brother, is that a horrible burden on you?”

“I always talk to you at our get-togethers,” says Dark. “I check in on you at work.”

Damien looks at him aghast. “Do you think that's all you have to do to be brothers? Celine forces us to get together and you help me set the table? You call me into your office and ask me how the new hires are working out?”

“You wanted to work for me.”

“I wanted to be close to you,” says Damien, voice suddenly frail, and Dark resists the urge to grind his teeth. He can't deal with this fucking twenty-two-year-old crying like a kid, so Dae better not start. “You used to know everything about me. I always knew you had my back, you were watching, you were there if I needed you. But ever since you got out of college, you... you don't even want me anymore.”

Dark blinks, wishing he could turn away for a second. He'd felt nothing when Dae said he didn't love him, but to hear Dae say he isn't wanted strikes a different chord in him.

“You're always wanted,” he says.

Dae pulls back from the camera slightly, anger changing to uncertainty. “You don't act like it.”

“Damien. Honestly, I thought we were fine. We sit together and chat at social events. If you wanted me to invite you out for ice cream or hold your hand while we cross the street – ”

“I can't believe you're making fun when that's exactly the sort of thing we used to do together.”

It cuts Dark off. Of course, when Dae was little, Dark did all those things. He would walk both the twins to school and hold their hands across the street, all the way up until they were in middle school. Sometimes they'd walk to the park, too. When he got his driver's license, the first place he had driven all on his own was to the gas station with the twins in the back, listening to them singing along to a trashy Maroon 5 song on the radio. He let them roll the windows down so their hair got messed up. He'd bought them both slushies.

Dae used to come to his room, too, just for the two of them to hang out. Dark loved having him in there, he remembers. In his own space. He had one of those lofted beds with a desk underneath it, and Dae would climb up into his bed so the two of them could watch a movie on his laptop. Dark has a sudden memory of Dae's thick breathing near to his ear when he would have allergies in the spring and watch over his shoulder as he played Nintendo. He always knew where they kept the allergy medication in the cabinet. All the medicine, really. He'd rub Vaseline on Dae's chest when he was sick, or bring him a melatonin tablet if he was up stressing about one of the thousands of things that made his sensitive little brother worry.

But sensitive hadn't been a bad word to Dark back then. He loved that Dae was soft with him. Sometimes, Dae would give him really close hugs, and Dark would feel his head press against his chest, close to his heart.

“What happened to that, Dark?” Damien asks him.

That forlorn voice. Those big dark eyes. Dark feels sick, suddenly, and not just from the cold.

“I don't know what happened,” he hears himself say.

“You don't love me anymore,” Damien says, just like he did before. Dark tries to find the right words to answer, but he doesn't know where they are. He... realizes he doesn't know what this is about anymore. He doesn't know when things changed.

“I don't know what happened,” he repeats.

“What does that even mean?” asks Dae, sounding exhausted.

“Of course I love you,” Dark whispers. “I just don't know what happened to the feeling of it. Maybe I... have been a little depressed. I suppose that could contribute, in theory.”

Damien looks at him uncertainly. Dark wishes he had more to give him.

“I would die for you,” Dark tells him, something desperate in him, trying to make him understand. “I do love you.”

Damien closes his eyes for a second, and Dark thinks he realizes what it is. He thinks that Damien looks too much like him. Damien grew up, and Dark saw himself in him, and turned away.

“I'm going to fly back out to see you, since Celine's back,” says Damien. “I love you too.”

Dark feels himself nodding. He doesn't know what else to do.

“He's always looked a lot like me,” says Dark, when Jack asks about it later.

Actually, Jack asked why he's called 'Dark,' but that requires some explanation. Jack's sitting in the chair beside Dark's bed, sucking on a spoon of that cheap sorbet that comes in a little Styrofoam cup, and Dark feels better to see him eating.

“He's how much younger?”

“Four years,” Dark tells him. “I was just old enough to be jealous when they were born. With there being two of them, they took all my mom's attention.”

Jack giggles – honest to God, giggles, a sound like sugar spilling – and takes the spoon out of his mouth. “Were you a Momma's boy, Dark?”

Something pangs in his chest. “You've caught me. I think I would have stayed glued to her side forever if I could have.”

“Aww, how sweet is that?”

“You're a menace.”

“Hey!” Jack laughs again. Dark's so glad to see his color up.

“Damien and Celine were the twins, and I should have been the odd one out, but everyone's always said he and I look just the same. Then, when my parents...”

Dark realizes he almost told Jack about his second set of parents, a fact that always comes with so many unpleasant questions and even worse answers.

“Well, Damien was also called Dae. And as he grew up into this cute, cheerful little kid, I was more...”

“Grouchy goose,” Jack says sagely.

“Reserved. So as a nickname, they started calling us Dae and Night, and then Will came along and said Dark was better, and it caught on.”

“Do your parents call you that too?”

Dark blinks as the image of his parents comes to his mind, smiling in a family photo with the twins on their laps. “They did. When I was in trouble, mostly.”

“They're gone now?”

“They were really old when they got us.”

“When they got you?”

Dark twists his mouth, looking away. He's supposed to be working on talking about what's going on with him, so he tries. “These were my adopted parents. They already had adult children, thought they were all done with that part of their lives. But they were fostering and got really attached to the twins.”

He sees the moment Jack goes to ask about them getting attached to him, and then the next moment when he thinks better of it, putting another spoonful of sorbet in his mouth. “Dark. Seo. Seo's unusual too.”

“You actually got it right, what you said when you saw it,” murmurs Dark.

“What? Wait, you mean Seojun?”

He shouldn't have brought it up. He wasn't ready to hear his name from Jack's mouth again. Dark closes his eyes for a second, touching his head.

“What about you, Jack?” he murmurs. “Where are your parents?”

Jack scrapes his spoon along the side of the Styrofoam. “My dad's passed. Not sure where Mom's at anymore.”

“No?”

“She was never particularly present in my life.”

“You have siblings?”

“One in jail,” Jack says wearily, looking down at his cup. “I tried to bond him out, but it was way too much money no matter what I moved around. It's hard on him. Knowing I'm sick and he can't be here.”

Dark feels that ache, for a second, just imagining it. If something happened to Dae or Celine now, with him stuck in hospital halfway across the world, he'd be destroyed.

“When will he get out?” Dark asks.

Jack looks back out towards the window of their room, turning his head away from Dark.

“He's waiting for a trial, maybe a deal. I don't know. Either way, I expect I'll be gone by then. It's... it's hard knowing I'll never hug him again.”

It strikes Dark in the chest. He would sit up if he could, if he wasn't trapped in place. He wants to be holding Jack.

“Are you so sure you're going to die?” Dark whispers.

Jack looks back at him, eyes slightly red. “Aw, Dark. Let's not talk too much about it. Somehow it feels harder to lie to you.”

“Schneep still thinks you can get through this.”

“I might get through this,” says Jack, gesturing back towards the stand where they hang his chemo dose when it's time. “And I so appreciate the love and care he gives me. A true friend. But if this round doesn't get me, the next one will. It's too aggressive, it always comes back. One day, there just won't be time, or I won't have the strength, or it will happen too fast to help me. A month from now, a year from now, two. But not longer than that, I don't think.”

Jack looks down at the bed. “These days, it feels sooner rather than later.”

Dark's mouth is dry. He doesn't know how Jack senses it, but he must, because he reaches over to pour some water into Dark's empty cup, his straw still propped up inside.

“I want to enjoy what time I have left,” Jack says, maybe trying to lift the mood. “I don't want to be a tragedy. I want to be... a big dumb goofball.”

Dark can't help the little noise that escapes him, disgruntled and surprised. Jack laughs, tilting his head back, and Dark thinks for the thousandth time how pretty he is.

“Do you get mad?” Dark asks.

“Oh, pissed,” Jack hisses, closing his eyes. “You didn't see me my first time around. I went wild. I lashed out, I drove people off, I laid in my apartment and hated everything. Oh, yeah, I know you think I'm a nice guy, Dark, but... I've done some things I shouldn't have. Before and after all this started. Part of the reason I'm trying so hard to be better.”

“But you can be mad, Jack,” Dark insists, though he finds that his voice sounds small. “You can be mad.”

Jack smiles at him, head falling down. “Thanks. Yeah. When you're up and about, and I'm between doses, maybe you'll bust me out of here for a night and take me somewhere out of town. And I'll just go out there in the open and start screaming my head off. Or we'll go break things, something. We can both be pissed off together.”

Dark can see it. He can see Jack with a piece of plywood, ramming it into concrete again and again, howling his fury at the universe. He can hear him now, screaming because he's mad, screaming because he wants his brother and his mom and his body back, because he's been through enough, because he's tired. And when he made himself faint and started to crumple, Dark would grab him under his arms and catch him before he fell, pulling him to his chest. He would hold Jack and hear him panting and starting to sob, and he would whisper to him that it was okay, that he wasn't alone, that Dark would look after him now, that he would save him.

How?

Dark closes his eyes. In another world, they're just together doing... what? The other versions of Jack who aren't angry, who aren't sick, they aren't the real Jack.

“You can't give up, though, Jack,” Dark says, and he doesn't care if he doesn't understand fully, he just needs to ask Jack to keep going. “You have to fight.”

Jack scoffs, shaking his head slightly. “People say that sometimes. But it's not a battle, Dark. It's my own body trying to destroy me. What am I supposed to do?”

“Hello?” A shaking voice interrupts Dark before he can say anything, and he and Jack both turn towards the shifting in the other bed. “Hello, some... someone?”

“Chase.” Jack gets up and pulls aside Dark's curtain, going to his bedside. “Hey, we're here, man. We're here.”

“Who are you?” Chase asks, eyes frightened. “I... I... I feel...”

“Chase, you have a traumatic brain injury, do you remember what happened?”

“A b-brain injury...” Chase reaches up and his hands find the bandage around his head. His eyes widen.

“Dark, call for a nurse. Chase, my name's Jackie, and here's Dark. We've been hanging out here in the hospital for weeks. Do you remember? We're friends.”

“Weeks?” Dark sees Chase trying to sit up, but he can't make it. His hands keeps drifting off the wrong way; his head isn't lifting.

A nurse named Jenna comes in and ends up calling for the doctor, just to be sure. It's that damn resident who was watching Dark in the ICU, the one who looks like he's about seventeen. He comes over, starts questioning Chase and poking and prodding at him, shining a light in his eyes.

Then he hits an alarm and there's this rush of motion as everyone comes to get Chase out of the room, like a huge flock of birds all swooping towards the earth, and then away again. Somebody starts throwing around words like “stroke” and “brain bleed.” Dark remembers seeing Jack standing in front of his bed, dumb-founded, watching them take Chase away.

He never comes back.

Dark's hanging upside down.

Dark's hanging.

Dark's hanging upside down. He looks over and Chase is hanging next to him. Blood runs out of his ears. His eyes are still open, but he doesn't see.

“Chase?” Dark says.

“Dark,” he doesn't say back.

“Jackie. You've got to get to bed.”

Jack sits in Chase's bed, his friend's blankets pulled into his lap. He wrings them in his hands. Like he could snap their necks. Schneep reaches out and touches Jack's shoulder.

“Jackie.”

He cries rough and bitter, face contorted with rage and despair. There's no fantasy left in Dark's mind. He's just here. Right here in this universe. This world where Chase is gone and won't ever come back. Won't ever see his son again. Watching Jack cry.

“You're making yourself light-headed,” Schneep says, like Jack won't already know that. “I need you back in bed and on your mask, now.”

Jack shakes his head. He's clinging to Chase's blankets. He was just sleeping there. He was just sleeping there hours ago. He had eaten his pizza in that bed. His grandma will come tomorrow, and he won't be there. She'll have to pick out a suit for him to be buried in. He'll be so white in his little box.

Jack starts coughing. Dark stares at him. Schneep and Bing are there. They help walk – drag – Jack back towards his bed. For a second, he lurches like he'll go where he's told, but instead, he throws himself at Dark, hugging him tightly. It hurts, the way he jostles him. Dark's hands close frailly over his back, but he doesn't clutch or squeeze him. He feels too far away. He smells Jack's coconut lotion. A little of the Old Spice deodorant Chase wore. Jack coughs hard against his shoulder, breathing skipping harshly, a cassette player getting jammed. Bing and Schneep pull him away and lay him down. They put him to sleep with medicine and fix his mask back over his face, talking to him. Dark can't make out what they mean.

“Dark. Dark. Hey.”

It takes him several seconds to realize he's being spoken to. He drags his eyes away from Chase's empty bed. Bing is standing close to him. “Do you need anything, Dark?”

“I'm hot,” he thinks he says.

Bing touches him. “Yeah, you are. Schneep...”

They check his temperature, and then his chart. “It's up,” Schneep says. “You're stressed. Sleep, Mr. Neumann. Dr. Greene will be by in the morning.”

“I don't think I can sleep,” Dark whispers.

He wonders if this is how Chase felt as he awoke for the last time. So disoriented. Like the world was slipping away. Like this isn't reality at all.

Schneep gives him some medicine too, and Dark falters into empty sleep.

He's got the flu, somebody tells him.

He's not sure who, because the next day is a blur to him, like something someone else lived and then talked about while in a crowded subway. The details don't belong to him, and neither do the emotions. He lays staring at Chase's bed.

Jack's listless, sleeping for hours, silent when he's up. It's halfway through the day that Dark realizes it's time for his next dose, and he turns his head in alarm to see Jack already hooked up to his chemo, and the wave of rage he feels makes him real again for a second, makes him present.

“He's not strong enough!” he cries. “He's been through enough today. Take that out of him!”

Schneep turns to him in surprise, one hand resting on Jack's arm. “It can't just be put on pause, Mr. Neumann. I – I'm sorry, truly.”

He looks down at Jack too, who has his eyes closed and mouth twisted, ignoring them both. “I'm sorry, Jack.”

Jack makes a low noise, like an animal caught in a trap.

“Give him his medication, at least,” Dark orders. “He has pain with it.”

“He's already on some.”

“Then give him more!”

“Dark, he's got what he can have.”

“You're fucking incompetent if you think you've done enough for him. You're not doing anything to help him. None of you are. No wonder he thinks he's going to die.”

Schneep whirls on him like a flame swirling on its wick. Dark had always thought of Schneep as a small man, but in that moment, Dark feels a presence like a grizzly bear, paws up to swipe.

Schneep breathes out this short, strangled exhale and stalks out of the room, shouting a mangled version of someone's name. Some little nurse comes running in to supervise Jack's chemo, giving one worried look back at Schneep before she rushes over to Jack's side.

The encounter leaves Dark's head pounding, a sharp pain right up by his temple. Worse, there's... a stirring in his gut. He's going to need a bedpan.

His face flames red with fever and humiliation. There couldn't be worse timing for any of this. He can't take it anymore. He's losing a couple needy tears before he can help it, completely overwhelmed. A second nurse has to come in since Jack's vomiting on the other side of the room, and Dark can't even admit what he needs. He asks for Shepherd and thanks all that is holy when the physical therapist shows up not five minutes later, takes one look at him, and politely draws the curtain.

Shepherd was right, and Dark hates him for it. To make progress requires that tiny motions and tiny events become whole mountains to climb. He can't take his hand away from its place hiding his eyes, like the two people who just helped him have a bowel movement will forget this happened if they can't see him. He's sweating and his hips and back hurt so sharply it feels intentional, like his body's punishing him for trying to heal. But it's over when it's over, and no one is laughing at him. The nurse cleans him up.

“One step closer to the way that things were,” Shepherd says gently, squeezing a safe part of his arm.

“Things will never be the way that they were,” says Dark blankly. He's staring up at the ceiling now. He can't watch Chase's bed anymore. “Did you hear about him? Did they tell you?”

Shepherd's breath catches. He looks away too, like he wants to be out of the room. “Yeah.”

Dark looks up at him. “Is there anything anyone could have done? To realize that would happen? To stop it?”

Shepherd shakes his head at him, no hesitation there, despite the grief. “Everything they could do, they did do.”

Dark stares at nothing for a moment longer. “He killed himself.”

“Yes,” says Shepherd.

“He wanted to live,” Dark says. “I saw him eating his pizza and laughing with everyone. And I felt that he was glad he had survived it. Even with all the damage done to him. He wanted to be alive.”

Dark thinks that Shepherd's going to cry from the way he's blinking fast. “Yeah.”

“It's not fair,” Dark says.

Shep shakes his head again, with even less hesitation.

“The hospital gives and takes,” he says. “Sometimes more giving than taking, sometimes more taking. But either way, it never does play fair.”

Dark closes his eyes. He goes back to his other universe with Jack. Chase can have the apartment next to theirs, he thinks. Sometimes, on the weekend, they'll all get a pizza together and watch Lord of the Rings. When he and Jack steal a kiss on the couch, Chase boos and throws popcorn at them. He's laughing and glad he's alive.

“I've seen so many people die in this hospital,” Jack whispers.

Dark pulls himself from the edge of sleep, gaze flickering towards Jack. Did he really speak, or was it a dream? Jack's been so sick for days.

“There was someone else before you,” says Jack. “Someone in your bed. Came and went pretty fast, we didn't talk much. But still. You watch them pass away.”

Dark wishes he could get up to him. Move close and touch his hand. Look directly in his face, instead of from the side.

“My first round of chemo, there were three other long-term cancer patients here at the hospital. I went and met every one of 'em. We decided we were all in it together. Only one of them is still alive. Rosie, I was holding her hand while she slipped into her coma. Didn't come back up. And John collapsed at home three weeks after being released. He had missed his follow-up appointment to see if he needed surgery. I think he missed it on purpose. He knew he was going to die. Guess that's where most of us wind up.”

Dark listens silently as Jack turns and pukes into his bucket. The effort leaves him heaving for air, clutching his mask to his face. There's sick on the inside and clinging to his beard. Dark knows it must smell like acid and nausea. He presses his button for a nurse. Jack can't keep himself clean anymore, as weak as he's been.

“Where's the third?” asks Dark.

Jack blinks at him dazedly in the darkness of their room, maybe forgetting what they were talking about. “The third... my buddy JJ. Lovely guy. I wish you could meet him. He actually offered to let me move in, even though he hardly has space for himself. But I couldn't make him relive all this.”

Dark pauses, eyes scanning Jack as he lies on his side, just breathing.

“Move in?”

Jack's eyes open with a flicker of guilt. “Oh. Yeah.”

“Where are you living now?”

Jack bites down on his mouth, hissing out a breath. “Dark...”

Dark takes a second to breathe too. Nothing is worth saying if he can't say it gently. For Jack. “You don't have anywhere to go, do you, Jack?”

Jack keeps breathing. Dark can see the puffing against his mask.

“That's what Schneep wants you to be looking for. Somewhere to live. But you won't. You don't think you're getting through this time.”

“I'm tired, Dark.”

He sounds it, too, sounds tired enough to fall apart. Dark's heart burns so harsh and so suddenly that he feels vomit rise in his throat too, and he has to swallow it back. He doesn't know if Jack is asking him to let him sleep or let him die.

“I know you are, Jack,” Dark whispers back. “You get some rest.”

“I can't rest here. There's so many ghosts.”

“He would want us to keep going. In this room, we're getting through it together. You remember? That's what you told me. Those are the rules.”

“Dark,” Jack whispers. There's no reason for him to say it except to say it.

“Yes,” answers Dark. “I'm watching over you.”

The nurse comes in and helps wipe Jack up. He's asleep before she's even put his mask back on. Dark's glad she got it right in place. He needs to be able to see the air moving in and out of his body.

So strange, he thinks to himself for a moment. His life was on such a different path a month ago. He could have just kept moving, and never known Jack or Chase. Never laid here at all or so much as set eyes on this hospital. He would be home, alone, and he would be... miserable.

He was miserable. He's been miserable for – for years. Hasn't he? Why has he never stopped to think about it? He became all the things he wanted to be – a strong man, successful, respected, stable. He had a place of his own where he felt safe and he could have companionship whenever he wanted it. And behind all of it, he was miserable.

I hate myself, he remembers screaming at Layla. I hate myself.

He told Jack that he jumped off the roof of his office building for a reason. If he's always known that, he's only now ready to look it in the face.

“It's because I wanted to die,” he says to himself, to Jack's sleeping face. “I said I was suicidal because I am.”

The morning comes quiet and cloudy, like a child creeping around the house because they can sense their parents' bad moods. Jack looks completely white to Dark, pallid as a corpse, but maybe it's just the rainy lighting from outside. He knows he's as exhausted as he's ever seen him, though, because he can't make it to the bathroom. One of the nurses has to help him sit up to urinate. Jack doesn't even thank them, just flutters back down into bed and falls asleep.

When Dae walks into the room, it's like two realities colliding. Dae and Jack are so separate in his mind, the same as when he couldn't imagine Jack taking the time to talk to Celine, even though Jack takes the time to talk to everyone. He wonders if they really have been texting.

“Dae,” Dark croaks.

“Seo.” Damien comes over to him and gives him another awkward hug. Dark tries to sit up slightly to hug him back, and Dae looks encouraged. “You're less pinned down!”

“I'm on less medication. Can feel my body again. We've started physical therapy.”

“Have they talked to you more about your prognosis?”

Honestly, they haven't, but Dark hasn't wanted to ask. “They're going to give it a couple more weeks and then test my feeling again. I still have numbness, tingling.”

“Shit,” says Dae, which isn't like him, and he runs his hands through his hair. “I thought it would be, uh. Less scary the second time I saw you. Are you feeling any better?”

Dark doesn't think he can hide his illness from Dae. “I have the flu.”

“Oh, no. I thought you looked flushed.”

“It's not helping.”

“Poor Say-Say,” sighs Dae, and despite the exasperation, there is something nice about his brother being here.

He's going to try and hold on to that.

“I'm sorry about ignoring you before,” says Dark. “Will's right. I just feel vulnerable.”

“I'm sorry, Dark,” says Dae miserably. “I wish we could change this. I know we're kind of... I guess working some things out. If you're tired, we can talk later.”

“We're going to talk, but you just had a long flight. Let's not hash anything out right now. I want you to tell me about your life.”

Damien blinks at him. “What?”

“What's going on with you. Who you spend your time with. What your life's like outside of work. Talk to me.”

“Oh.” Dae's cheeks turn a little pink. “Really?”

“You said that I used to know everything about you,” says Dark. “So tell me everything again.”

So Damien starts talking, about things like his cat and his favorite book and a bar where he goes with some friends, and Dark tries to listen. The fever that he's running isn't helping, but he'll hold on to what he can. He doesn't know if it counts as kind after years of feeling distant from him, but he's going to start bridging this gap. For Damien and for himself.

Not everyone gets the chance to come back from what he came back from. Not everyone gets a chance to live and smile again. They've changed the sheets on Chase's bed.

Dark's mostly asleep the next day when someone knocks on the door, and he doesn't look up. People come and go from the room – less now, without Chase, and since word has gotten around that Jack's not up for as much conversation as he was – but they still get plenty of foot traffic throughout the day. Anyway, Damien's next to him, messing around on his laptop, and Dark knows his brother can handle it for him if someone needs something.

So he only opens his eyes when Jack gasps and the bed creaks as he sits up straight for the first time all day. “JJ!”

Dark looks just in time to see the visitor devour Jack in a hug that has none of the caution most people would show him. He's squeezing him close, almost tackling him into the bed, and Jack is hugging him back so hard it has his arms shaking.

“How are you here?” Jack asks, laughing and coughing, reaching up to touch JJ's face as they release each other. “I wasn't expecting you!”

JJ reaches into his back pocket to get out his phone, fingers flying over the screen, and a moment later, it announces in a British accent: “You didn't tell me you were in again.”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” chuckles Jack, but the laughter doesn't make him sound less guilty. “JJ, I just didn't want you to have to come down from London, and I was so glad you were in remission.”

“We are always in this together,” JJ says through the phone. Dark can see why as he takes a seat facing Jack diagonally. JJ has a stoma in his throat and some severe scarring around the whole area of his voicebox. The incision sits above a tidy collar. JJ strikes Dark as clean and cute, not exactly his type, but undeniably sweet-looking with those mousy curls and big brown eyes. “Schneep called me and said that someone here was asking me to come visit this room.”

“What? He usually takes confidentiality so seriously. Maybe I should have, but I didn't ask for you.”

“No, I don't think you did,” JJ agrees.

Jack's face is confused and then astonished. His head turns towards Dark almost comically. JJ follows his gaze and gives Dark a wink.

Dark chooses not to comment. It was easy to drop a hint to Schneep about an old patient that Jack could benefit from seeing. He thinks that the doc actually would violate confidentiality – and any number of laws – to make Jack feel better, but he didn't have to in this case.

He's just been so low since Chase. With the way he was talking about his cancer companions dying, Dark thought he needed to see the one who made it out alive. He wants to give Jack some pep talk about how lots of people survive cancer these days, how two out of three of his friends being dead is just a bad draw of the cards, but truthfully, he doesn't know anything about it. He's holding on to hope because he has to.

His own thoughts have sobered him. But Jack gives him a look like... well. Dark sort of thinks that Jack looks at him, in that moment, the way Dark always looks at Jack.

“You got his friend here?” asks Dae softly.

“We've gotten to know each other,” Dark says.

“What's going on with him?”

“Going through chemo.”

“Geez. Poor thing.”

JJ and Jack talk as Shepherd comes in, and Dark asks Damien to give them some space.

“You sent him out?” Shep asks, coming to stand by his bed. “Why? He could cheer you on and learn about your exercises.”

“I'm trying to improve things between us, but that does not mean I am eager for my little brother to watch me grunt and sweat through an attempt to move my leg, Shepherd.”

Shepherd hums, coming over to unclip his neck brace, which he's been using less and less. “You know, Dark, I get that you're a private guy, and that's fine. But sometimes, the whole 'letting other people love you' thing... is the 'loving other people' thing.”

“You're not Layla,” says Dark crossly.

“No, but I've seen her notes.”

“Fucker,” scowls Dark, and Shep starts to laugh.

“PT's more about therapy than surgery, man, I always say.”

“Why don't you make it more about shutting your mouth?”

“Give me your hand and let's try to sit up. I'm going to get you in a chair by the end of this week.”

“Even with the flu?”

“Well, let's see how you do today and aim high.”

Dark looks over to see if Jack heard that. He's talking too closely to JJ, but maybe, when he does get in his chair, that will make him brighten up again.

JJ's phone chirps up again, and faintly, Dark hears it say, “If it's time, then it's time.”

His enthusiasm vanishes. Maybe he shouldn't have sent for JJ.

“You are so knotted up today,” mutters Shep, pushing at his neck a little. “We're going to do a massage one of these days.”

“Can I ask you about something else?” Dark asks.

“Anything you like.”

Dark swallows once, glancing at the ceiling for a second before he can meet Shep's eyes again. “I know they haven't done all my sensation testing. I was just wondering if you know anything about how this will affect sensation in my. In my genitals.”

“Oh, your injury is most likely too high up for that,” Shepherd responds, with such confidence that Dark immediately feels a rush of relief. “There is an area beneath your spinal cord with nerve connections that affect your buttocks and groin, but you're going to be dealing mostly with your legs, coordination, and some hip movement. Have you been wondering about intercourse?”

It's been on his mind. Shepherd nods at the look on his face. “I'll bring you some info about sex after a spinal cord injury. It's completely possible, full range of pleasure included. It will just be about changes in positioning and movement.”

Dark mulls it over, looking down at himself. “I'll get my movement back.”

Shepherd's quiet for a long moment, helping Dark move his arms through some gentle stretches.

“Dark, I am very supportive of you hoping to walk and have a full range of motion again. You should always aim to get back as much mobility as you can. But I want to make sure that someone has had the conversation with you that, with what they saw initially and the severity of your injury – ”

“Let's just focus on getting me in the chair,” Dark cuts him off.

Shepherd lets it be.

It reminds Dark of helping Dae with his homework, watching his brother bent over the laptop, tongue sticking out slightly in concentration. “I had no idea there were this many options,” Dae mutters. “Do you want it to be able to recline?”

Dark rolls his stress ball in his hand, trying to focus. He knows getting a wheelchair is important, but his head is an egg being cracked against the counter on repeat. The ache came when his fever spiked again last night, and he's sweaty and disoriented, grateful for the cool washcloth Bing set over his forehead.

“No, I don't think so,” says Dark. “Just a low-back one so I can move it. If I need to lay back, I'll get out of it.”

“There's about a billion of them, and they're all expensive.”

“As long as it fits what Shepherd measured, it's fine.”

Dark tilts his head slowly, stretching his neck.

“You okay? You look worse.”

“Thanks for that. I'm just waiting for the antibiotics to kick in.”

“Want me to let you sleep?”

Dark looks at Dae for a long moment. He does look so much like himself as a younger man. Dae's barely past his college years. Back then, Dark was focused on money more than anything, so his parents would know he was a success after all. So they would be proud despite everything. Maybe then, he'd feel worth something.

“No,” says Dark. “I want to talk to you for a minute.”

Damien shuts the laptop hastily and sets it aside, and Dark could almost laugh at how eager they all are to encourage him to talk about anything. “Okay.”

“I've been thinking a lot about us as kids, ever since I got in here. There's not much else to do but think. Some things caught up with me, I suppose, things I've been putting out of my head. I decided you're right. I've kept you at arm's distance. I've kept everyone at arm's distance. I don't know. I think I did it on purpose.”

Dae looks at him with those big deer eyes, pursing his mouth for a moment. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” Dark tries to sit up a little more, wincing. The movement actually makes him slightly dizzy. “The truth is, Dae, I... don't think I've been able to open up to anyone outside of sex in years. And even then, it's shallow, just comfort for one night. I haven't wanted you and Celine in my life. I know we're siblings, but I've been thinking about how I... I don't think I've ever been able to shake that feeling of being unwanted.”

Damien bites his mouth and looks down at the floor for a second. “We want you.”

“I want you too,” says Dark softly. “I'm sorry I didn't show you. I thought you might be better off without me.”

“I know the foster system was more rough on you than us,” Dae continues, “but you know Mom and Dad wanted you just as much as they wanted us.”

Dark's startled to hear him say it. He glances away, instinctively over to Jack, grateful to see him deep asleep against his pillows. “Well,” Dark begins uncertainly. “I mean... no, they didn't.”

“Dark, of course they did. They loved you.”

“They learned to,” Dark agrees. “I'm trying to accept that too. But in the beginning, they were one of a half-dozen foster homes who would have rather not had me.”

Damien's mouth curls with frustration. “Seo, you have to accept what I'm saying. They wouldn't have – ”

“No, I mean I'm telling you, objectively, our parents did not want me.”

“That's not true!”

“Damien. When they first decided to adopt you two, our case worker told me I wasn't going to be able to stay with you.”

Damien stares at him, eyes wide. His hands are limp in his lap.

“I was too high needs,” Dark shrugs. “Too old, with too many attachment issues. They were going to have to send me away.”

“Mom and Dad wouldn't do that,” Dae manages.

“No, they wouldn't. That's why they ended up keeping me. They knew it was what was best for you two. But that's about you and Celine, not about me. I felt like a pet that nobody wanted.”

“Does Celine know about this?” Damien whispers, clutching slightly at his stomach.

“I thought you both did,” Dark says. “They took good care of me, but I always knew I was just some – some vestigial appendage sticking on to the two of you, one who caused a lot of misery to them. And when you're a kid, I think that fucks you up. I don't know that I ever got over it. I don't think I ever got over losing my mom in the first place, and then – maybe I've been drifting since the day she died. Just. Not knowing where I belonged. To whom I belonged.”

Damien's eyes pool. He's chewing on his lip, one hand clutched into a fist.

“I've been Seojun, and Seo, and Dark,” he continues, softer. “But when I'm home on my own, I don't feel like any of them. There's the kid sitting next to his mom's body, and the kid not understanding why no one would take him, and then this grown-up who's supposed to have moved past all of it a long time ago. But I think I've been jealous of you and Celine, and I think I've seen myself in you, and I think I've isolated myself for a reason. I've been tired, Dae. When you all came to visit me, I was angry this had happened. But I was also angry that if it was going to happen, it didn't just kill me.”

He opens an empty hand, not sure what else to say. “I'm still broken, Damien. I'm sorry I haven't been what you need me to be. I've never tried to fix it before. I don't know if it can be fixed.”

“You can be broken,” says Damien, in this very small, raw voice, and water slips down his face. “You can be Seojun, or Seo, or Dark. All you need to be is my brother.”

“Come here,” murmurs Dark, reaching for him, and he lets Dae hug him tightly – tenderly – against his bed.

“You can still heal, Dark,” Damien swears, pressing his head against his shoulder. “I'm going to help you do it. I want you. I'll always want you.”

Dark wraps his hand into Damien's hair and holds him there.

The kid comes to fill the empty bed in their room a few hours later.

Dark watches as they wheel her in, a tiny teenager with very dark circles under her eyes, pursued at all times by two attentive parents, who fly in and out of the room like penguins taking turns alternately guarding her and fetching her something to eat. Dark stays quiet, waves a hello when prompted, and mostly lets Jack do the talking.

The girl's name is Saoirse, which excites Jack enough to get him sitting up and sipping on a little water; he talks with her Irish dad in a thick accent. Saoirse's been waiting for a new heart for almost a year, explains the father, nearly dipping with exhaustion in his chair, but proud nonetheless.

“She got a heart transplant?” Jack asks. “I didn't know they could even do those here.”

“Well, there's no program for it, so we've been waiting on a call from the London Children's Hospital. But this is where she's had most of her care. Out of the blue, they call us up and say an organ donor with a head injury died here in the hospital. It was such a blur. Four hours later and she was in surgery. We were just cleared to leave the ICU today.”

Jack's frozen solid across from Dark, who looks over at him quickly. Jack glances back, blinking for a moment before he can focus on the father again.

“She got a heart from someone here at the hospital?”

“Yes, it was an incredible blessing. Of course, when someone dies because of something in their head, the rest of the organs are all still healthy. I think they found someone who needed the kidney and – what did they say, honey?”

“A lung and the pancreas,” pipes in the mother. “Maybe more, if they were able to get the organs to other hospitals.”

Dark stares at Jack as he pulls in a breath, closing his eyes. “That's. That's so wonderful. Thank you. For, um, telling me. I'm glad she has a new heart now.”

Saoirse calls for her dad a few minutes later and he returns to her side, the curtain closed around them. At last, Jack looks to Dark, eyes big and watering, and Dark's hand twitches in his direction. Only three days from his last dose, Dark knows Jack is still laid out with exhaustion and sickness. He needs to rest.

But Dark doesn't have it in him to make him go lie back down when Jack struggles out of bed and falls into the chair by Dark's bed, grabbing his hand. Dark reaches out for him, cupping his face with his hand, and Jack's tears spill over, squeezing at Dark's fingers. He sets his head down on the bed, his dark hair pressing against Dark's stomach, and, together, they close their eyes and listen to the sound of Chase's heart beating on the other side of the room.

“Seo,” says Dr. Greene. “Seo, can you hear me?”

His eyes feel sticky. He drags them open reluctantly, the light above him hurting his eyes. The pain in his head is a drum march rhythm, throbbing against his sweaty temples.

“What is it?” Dark mumbles. He makes out Damien standing next to the doctor, frowning down at him. “Is it morning already?”

“Mr. Neumann, your fever isn't breaking. We're going to give you some steroids to help you get through your flu, okay? I'm going to put this in your arm.”

“Ugh,” groans Dark, resisting the urge to pull away. She gives him a shot that stings, but not half as bad as his back aches today. “Can I have more pain medication?”

“Are you sore? Where's the pain?”

“All down my spine and into my chest,” he groans. As he breathes in, he starts to cough, and the movement does not help. Damien's hand comes down to touch his shoulder, as though he can stop the cough rattling through him if he just holds him down.

She prescribes him an extra half-dose just this once, and the haze of his drugs becomes thick and sweet, an old friend that leaves him relaxed and a little distant. Damien's brought him a smoothie he picked up on the way in today, and Dark lies back on the pillows without his neck brace and works on his drink. His stomach's churning, but the cold fruit soothes his sore throat.

“Not feeling so good?” he hears Jack chirp from the other bed.

“No, he's got the flu,” says Damien. “Can't seem to catch a break.”

“A lot of us end up catching something extra in the hospital,” says Jack sadly. “If you're too weak, something small becomes big. That's why it's better to be at home if you can.”

Damien seems to take an interest in that. “Should we be trying to get him out of the hospital?”

“Not quite yet. He still needs a lot of pain management and some help with his digestion and PT. Once they've got him in a chair and off anything intravenous... yeah, I guess then, well. He could go. Yeah. He should go. Maybe even the next couple weeks, if he can.”

“No,” Dark puts in, not realizing how loud his voice is until he says it. His hand twitches and he's not sure what he's reaching for. “I'm going to stay right here.”

Damien touches his shoulder again. “Okay, Dark, okay. Don't get worked up.”

Is his heart rate up? He looks dazedly around for his monitor. Is he even still on that? He's been in here forever.

“What about you?” Damien asks Jack. “Do they have a discharge date for you?”

“Well, the good news is that next week is my last dose of chemo.”

“Oh, wow! That's huge. Congrats. Is that the last step of this?”

“Um, ideally, I suppose.” Jack's false cheer is lacking today, Dark thinks. “They'll do a scan and check if the cancer has responded to the treatment or not.”

“Oh, gotcha. And then – okay.”

Dark can almost hear Damien deciding not to ask what happens if the cancer hasn't responded. He reaches for his smoothie and knocks it over, growling in frustration as strawberry mango slush drips out of the straw. Damien grabs it for him and sets it up again. “Geez, Seo.”

“My whole chest burns,” Dark coughs.

Damien's face furrows with worry. “Okay. They're monitoring you real close. Why don't you try to get some sleep?”

“I want my smoothie,” he grumbles, rubbing at his pounding head. “Or maybe, you know, let Jack have it.”

“You should have it, Dark,” says Jack warmly.

“No, no, I'm going to sleep.” Dark pushes away the little table they attach to his bed. “Let Jack have that, Damien.”

“He can't have it, he'll catch what you have,” Damien points out. “I'll pop it in the mini-fridge.”

Catch what he has? How has Dark not thought about this before? His head whips around to look at Jack, eyes wide. “What if he does catch what I have?”

“Dark – ”

“He should be isolated. This – he was just saying this. He'll catch something at the hospital. He'll get more sick.”

“Dark, I'm okay,” Jack tells him. “We're both okay.”

“No, you can't have a cancer patient around someone with the flu. He's sick enough already.”

“I'm sure he'd go home if that was what's best for him,” Damien murmurs between the two of them. “He must need to be here.”

“No, that's not right. He doesn't have anywhere to go. You – you take him back to the rental, Damien.”

“Dark,” Jack interjects, louder. “Stop that. I'm fine right here. Get some rest.”

“You can stay there til it's time for your next treatment,” Dark says, starting to cough again. “Damien's renting it anyway. You could go sleep in a real bed, Jack.”

Jack gets up and comes over to him, pulling a second chair to his side. Dark almost panics, waving his hand at him. “No, Jack, go rest. Don't touch me. You could catch it.”

Jack just puts his hand on his arm and gives him a look. “Dark. I'm okay right here. It's not your job to find me somewhere to live. As sick as I am, there's government housing for me.”

“Then why don't you have it now?” Dark asks.

Jack's face reddens and he lets out a hiss of a sigh. “Look, I was... I was living with my brother when he got arrested. Afterwards, I thought I could still keep up with the payments, but I got sick again. Even if I had the money, I kept forgetting to pay, and I couldn't take care of the place. The brain fog is like a computer getting reset, sometimes. I think the landlord thought I was on drugs.”

“They kicked you out while you have cancer? Where are all of your things?”

Jack crosses his arms over his chest, turning his head away. “It's not your place to worry. There are apartments I can apply for with subsidization.”

“But you haven't looked for them,” Dark croaks. “Don't you have to bid for places in the UK? You won't do it.”

“I could help you,” Damien interjects. “Do you need a computer?”

“No, the social worker here has offered to help me before.” Jack looks away from them, face faintly pinched. “I'll be fine.”

“You don't think you're getting out of here,” Dark says.

Blame it on the fever, but he's suddenly overwhelmed by it. Chase is dead, and Jack thinks he's going the same way. What if he does die, and Dark's still here in this hospital room? What was the point to any of this if he can't even make things better for Jack?

“Dark, don't cry, oh, darling,” says Jack, shocked. Damien moves forward too, squeezing his shoulder and making him lay fully back again. “Are you feeling just terrible?”

Dark hears himself coughing harshly, and the burning along his chest changes from an orange flame to a white one. He grabs at his side, tears dripping down his face.

“Get some sleep, Dark,” Damien all but begs him. “You just need some rest.”

“Make Jack rest,” Dark croaks. “He's had enough. Can't everybody see that? It's not fair.”

“Dark, close your eyes. Close your eyes.”

“Don't get any more sick, Jack,” Dark tells him, feeling Jack's hand slip into his own. “It's going to respond to the treatment. It will. You have to keep fighting.”

“Okay, okay,” Jack says, squeezing his fingers. “Okay, Dark, just sleep.”

“Dark?”

He's aware of Damien near to him, touching him gently again. He mumbles and stirs, looking for his little brother.

“It's the end of visiting hours. I have to go. I'll be back in the morning again.”

“I'm still hot,” mumbles Dark.

“It's your fever. They've been giving you reducers and everything.”

“Shep was supposed to come help me get into a chair.”

“You were sleeping, Dark. You need it.”

“I don't need it,” Dark grouses. “I'm just... just hot.”

Damien gives him a hug, and then Dark feels him hovering over him for several minutes, trying to make himself leave. “M'okay, Dae,” Dark coughs. “Jack'll watch me.”

“He went to go see a friend in another room and visit with the nurses.”

Dark opens his eyes, blinking. He's mobile? That's a great sign. “Good,” he says. “He feels so much better when he can talk to people. He's – he's extroverted, you know? He's very good at people. With people.”

Damien's smiling at him. “I'm glad you two are getting along. You can be a real grump sometimes, you know.”

“Jack's my friend, though,” Dark says, swiping at his head. Someone's nicely put another cool cloth there. “You take care of him, Damien.”

“Of course. Everyone's taking good care of him here.”

“No, but I mean you,” Dark insists, blinking at his brother. He tries to wave his finger at him, but he feels disconnected from his body, and so hot. “You. If something happened to me. You take good care of him. Jack and my new nephew or – or niece. You take care of them. You know, my will only has you and Celine in it.”

“Dark,” says Dae, more worried. “Nothing's going to happen to you.”

Dark sucks in a thick breath, starting to get tired again. “Okay, but just, if.”

“Fine, 'if.' I will take care of Jack.”

“Okay. Then I'm okay. Good night, Dae-Dae.”

Damien looks at him warmly, mouth pinched up with worry. Seo wants to reach out and soothe away the frown. That's his job, to watch the twins. He reaches for Dae, but he's fallen back into sleep before he can manage the coordination.

When his fever still hasn't broken two days later, he can tell everyone's given up on the idea that this is just the flu.

It is the flu, but as he's been told, sometimes small things aren't small when fate has already punched you in the back and left you sprawled out in a hospital bed. He's not fighting it off, even with the steroids.

“Dark.”

He's aware of someone holding his hand, squeezing at his fingers. Jack, it must be. Damien's hands are bigger, but Jack's fits right in Dark's. He shifts his head dazedly, looking for the other patient.

“I'm here, man,” Jack says.

Dark prefers 'darling,' like he said before. Maybe Jack will call him something sweet again if he has another breakdown. Does he say lovey in that pretty accent? Or some nice Irish pet name Dark can't quite translate, but sounds pleasant on his tongue? Maybe, if he catches him off guard, Jack might slip and say 'babe,' and Dark would feel the zing of knowing that Jack feels what he's felt all along. Growing closer to him these last weeks has meant a great deal to Dark, but now, through his fever, he feels his patient but passionate interest in Jack raise its head like a dog whose name was called. He finds Jack in his vision and reaches out his spare hand for him, touching his cheek.

“Jack,” he says. Wow, his voice is thick. Not ideal for romance. “Hi.”

“Hey, pal,” chuckles Jack, but it lacks real joy, and Dark's heart sinks. Is he worrying him? “You know I'm supposed to be the sick one, right?”

“We're in this together,” Dark reminds him, and Jack nods slowly, eyes sliding closed. He's on his nasal cannula again, which is a relief. Dark used to think it was sad to see such a young man needing oxygen. Now he knows it's a much better sign than his mask, or, worse, intubation.

“You feeling any better?”

“I'm glad you're here,” says Dark, feeling so warmly towards him it's making him sweat, his back drenched against the pillows. “You're so nice, Jack. To everybody, but especially to me, because I'm hard to be nice to.”

“You have such a fever,” Jack replies, managing a laugh. “Oh, poor thing.”

“Yeah, I do have a fever, don't I?”

“Uh-huh. It won't come down.”

“Is Dae panicking?”

“A little. He keeps calling your sister.”

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“It's kind of hard to breathe.”

A flash of alarm crosses Jack's face. “Oh. Okay. I'll just buzz a nurse.”

Dark coughs, thumping his chest for a second. “It's tight.”

“Okay, lie back, Seojun.”

Dark catches his face with his hand. “I love my name on your mouth.”

“Oh, stop that,” chides Jack. “You dork. Is this how you are with all those girls you were talking about going out with? You a natural flirt?”

Dark shakes his head. “I only flirt with intention, my dear. I always mean every word.”

“I bet it's more impressive when your voice isn't quite so raw.”

Dark ponders a line about other ways to make his voice raw, and then drops it. That's not the point. He could correct Jack about girls too. Jack had said girlfriend before, and Dark hadn't told him otherwise. It interests him to hear it a second time, because, just the other day, he heard Jack asking a nurse if her new necklace was from her 'partner.' But with Dark, he says girls.

Is there any chance he's testing to see if Dark will correct him? Dark blinks at the image of him, a scenario floating through his head of Jack glancing over at him every now and then, wondering if there's any chance that Dark might like men, trying to imagine Dark with a boy instead of a girl, trying to imagine Dark with Jack. How his hands would fit around his waist. Does Jack wonder about his sexuality? Or did he just figure Dark was straight? He could correct him now, but then Jack might stop wondering, imagining, and Dark doesn't want him to. He wants to wonder if Jack wonders. Besides – not the point, not the point.

“I'm trying to tell you how grateful I am for you, Jack,” he says, attempting to suck in a deep breath and getting most of it in. “You know how low I was when this started. Don't you? That's why you came back in to check on me again?”

Jack looks at him gently. “I would have tried to make friends with you anyway.”

“But you knew I was hurting.”

Jack reddens and glances away. “I don't want you to think I pitied you.”

“No, you're too sincere for that. Jack. You'll be done with chemo next week. Are you going to sit in the hospital for weeks after, just waiting to see what they decide to do next? Please let me find a place for you to stay. You can't give up.”

Jack blinks, maybe startled to hear him say please. He opens his mouth and then pauses, eyes moving away. Dark sees him bite back on his words.

“What?” Dark asks. “Talk to me, Jack. We're friends, aren't we? Don't you know how fond I am of you?”

Something trembles in Jack's expression. He bites down on his lip, eyes flickering. “It's not just about me feeling... feeling like this might be the end. My brother, he's my only family left. And they just took him away. They don't even let us have video calls at the jail. I didn't even get to say goodbye to him.”

Jack turns his head away, tears welling in his eyes. Dark feels his eyelids starting to get heavy again, but he summons his strength. This is important. Jack is important.

“I don't want to go home to somewhere knowing he's not there,” Jack chokes out. “And all my stuff – they threw it out on the street and let it get taken. All my books and comics and blankets and games. All of Anti's things that I was supposed to keep safe for him. I wasn't even strong enough to get anything into a storage unit or to a friend's house. Everything is gone. Everything's been taken from me. I just want to go home to my home. I just want my brother. It will be so lonely without him.”

“Come here, Jack.” Dark beckons for him and Jack all but crashes into his shoulder, letting Dark wrap a strong arm around him. He holds his head and strokes his fingers through his hair, murmuring to him. “I'm sorry, darling. I'm sorry it's not been fair.”

“I just want another life than this,” Jack cries. “I'm sorry, I know I'm supposed to be brave, I'm supposed to accept things, but I want my brother and I want my health and I want Chase and John and everybody back. I don't want to die. But I think I have to. I'm sorry, Dark.”

“No, Jack, no,” Dark whispers. “Listen to me, pet. I am going to find a place for us to stay. You won't have to be there alone. If you get out first, you'll get it ready for me, and if I get out first, I'll get it ready for you.”

Jack's sobbing against him, clinging to his gown. “I'm sorry, Dark,” he's saying again and again.

“You're not going anywhere, Jack. You'll come stay with me. I'm not going back to America. In this room, we get through it together, do you remember? We're going to take care of each other. I'm going to take care of you.”

He clutches Jack to his chest, turning his head to cough. It burns low in his chest, and he feels himself get dizzy, hand slipping away from Jack's hair.

“Dark?”

“Yes.” Dark blinks up at the ceiling, coughing again.

“I shouldn't have made you talk, I'm sorry,” Jack whispers.

“You are everything to me,” Dark whispers back. “Don't ever apologize.”

“I – I'm fond of you too, Dark.”

Jack looks up as he hears the nurse knock at the door, and Bing comes in with a worried look on his face. Swiping his tears away, Jack ignores questions about himself and directs him towards Dark, who feels himself starting to cough again.

“Having some trouble breathing, Dark?” Bing asks, putting a hand on his arm.

Dark can't answer him through the coughing. He touches his chest and tries to get a breath in, but something's lodged in his throat. He leans over himself and hacks sputum up onto the mattress of the cot, head starting to spin. Jack stares blankly at the discharge, eyes huge.

“I'm going to call Dr. Greene,” Bing says.

Dark doesn't get a chance to reply, slipping abruptly back into sleep.

He's not hanging upside down.

Upright in his car, Dark turns the wheel gently, guiding the rental around a curve. It's rainy out, but he's always a careful driver. The pattering of the rain is soothing against the metal of the car.

Dark's phone buzzes and he glances over at it for a second as the screen lights up in the passenger's seat. It's an email from the office. Who the hell is emailing him at nine at night? He supposes it's not that strange. He's certainly sent emails later than that.

He sighs out, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. He'd thought that a business trip in the UK would at least be a change, but he feels the same way now as he has every day back home. Empty.

Dark scoffs at himself, shaking his head. His own thoughts feel so dramatic to him. He has everything he needs. Everything he ever wanted. There's no cause for any gloom or self-derision. He doesn't understand where the thoughts come from when he's lying in bed at night, the ones that pull him down into the depths of some ocean too thick to swim through. He just needs to get over himself. To shove it all aside.

But why? asks one side of him. He has a weird memory of himself as an eight-year-old, curled up mutinously on the floor in his parents' living room, blood running from his nose. He remembers that. He had thrown a tantrum so aggressively that he slammed his own face against the wood floor. He blinks the memory away. Why keep going like this? What's the point to shoving it aside and doing the same fucking day over again tomorrow?

Well, he has to keep running the business. He's making such good money, and an even better name for himself, not including the gossip about him being a terrible person to work with.

Who cares about the business? You don't even need the money.

He wants to be able to provide for the twins.

Please, they have more than they need. Mom and Dad left you all everything you need. They even got their love.

“Mom and Dad loved me,” he says aloud to himself in the car.

You watched the only person who ever loved you die.

The hatred in the thought nearly distracts him from the road. He wets his mouth and eases off the gas, rolling his neck. He just wants to get back to his stupid hotel room and sleep. Still, his mind is preoccupied with the thought of a six-year-old boy kneeling down, trying to get his mother to turn over so he can see her face. She's a little stuck to the floor, though. He takes a hold of her chin and tries to pull her, but the drying blood is trapping her against the wood. One of her eyes is open, looking up at him emptily. “Mommy?” says the boy. “Dad's gone now. Can I sleep in your bed tonight?”

A terrible thrill of fear runs up Dark's spine and he shudders, gripping the wheel tightly. It's nothing, it's nothing. He just gets that feeling sometimes, lately, a feeling like he's being strangled. Sometimes it makes it hard to breathe or hold his hands steady for a few minutes, but it's fine. He's a man, after all. He's successful, tough, powerful. And you know what, he doesn't even have to be lonely. Maybe he'll go out tonight after all. He's exhausted, but sometimes, the best thing for that feeling is just to find someone who can distract him. He doesn't need anyone, that's for sure, but sometimes, after sex, when there's a boy just holding him, he feels so much better. So wanted. Yeah, maybe he'll go out. He can prove that he's worthwhile.

He hooked up for the first time at nineteen, he remembers that. It was a good friend of his, Adam, and they'd finally fallen together while slightly drunk in Adam's apartment. It had been good, too, despite the inexperience. Two days later, though, when Adam tried to call him, he'd blocked his number. They'd had college classes together and Dark just avoided him. He wasn't even embarrassed about it, he just didn't want to see him. Why did he do that? He can't remember anymore. They could have tried to date, or laughed their way through another encounter, kissing and holding each other in Adam's blue bedsheets.

You just know you can't be loved.

Dark grits his teeth hard, upping the speed of the windshield wipers. He just needs this to stop. That fucking voice keeps getting louder and louder. The feeling when he thinks about Eomma is more and more frequent. Why can't he make it go away? He has everything he ever wanted.

He could make it stop, though, if he chose to. The twins are an ocean away. He could stop it all. He doesn't have to keep doing this. Day after day. Alone.

The voice doesn't say anything. He thinks that it agrees. Dark turns the car around the edge of an outcropping, his exhaustion becoming heavy on his chest. He sees the lights of another car approaching, sees the tires turning through the water, and then –

Well, shrugs the voice in his head as the whole world shatters into glass around him. Dark hears himself screaming as his body snaps in half. Not what I had in mind, but that ought to do the trick.

He's being dipped in and out of black water.

Was it Achilles's mother who held him by the heel and dipped him into the river Styx? That's where Dark is now. He's in the open air, in the same hospital room as before, looking around him, with Saoirse and Ellen and Jack. Then he's dropped back down into the river of death. He can't breathe. He's blind in the darkness, bleak memories swirling around him in a carousel of ghosts.

“Wow,” he says, not sure when or where he is. It's hot in here, wherever it is. “Now I really do sound like an edgelord.”

Damien's close, holding his hand and blinking at him in astonishment. “What? Dark, how are you feeling?”

His nose tickles. He reaches up and finds a plastic tube resting on his lip, poking into his nostrils. They gave him oxygen. He dips back down again.

Chase is to his left the next time he opens his eyes, and Dark gapes. He's here? There must have been a misunderstanding. Someone else died and gave their organs away. Chase has just been down in the ICU, or he went home, and he's visiting them now. He's standing by Jack's bed, his back to Dark.

“Chase,” Dark croaks. He's so glad he'll get a chance to tell Chase that they're friends too. That he's so proud to be fighting through this with him. “Chase.”

Chase turns around, and Dark's heart falls. It's not Chase. It's JJ, looking back at him with the concern of a stranger, glancing over at Schneep, who's on Jack's other side. Dark tilts his head, but he can't see Jack between the two of them, just his IV stand and the bag hanging off of it. His last dose of chemo. He'll be so sick. Dark wants to be holding him so badly it hurts. Where's Shepherd? He said he'd help him get into a chair. Dark tries to pull himself up, panting, but somebody touches his chest.

“Dark, don't strain yourself, okay? I'm here, lie back. Can you hear me, Seo?”

“Get Shepherd,” Dark croaks. Shit, his voice is trashed. The tickle of speaking starts him coughing again, and he reaches out, finding Damien's shirt and grabbing it. “I want to go to Jack.”

“He's right next to you, Dark. You have to stay down.”

“Want you to find a place for us,” Dark coughs. “An apartment where we can stay together. Two bedrooms, ground floor. He needs somewhere to stay.”

“You already told me. It's going to be okay.”

“Jack,” Dark says.

“Dark – ”

He gets faint and can't follow Damien's words. He grips tighter to his brother, finding his eyes in the blur of the world around him. Damien talks to him, but he's not sure what he says.

He wakes up thickly, and knows it's late at night.

He's bad sick. He gets the feeling he and Jack are both equally aware of this, because when he manages to turn his head to his left, Jack is looking back at him.

“Jack,” his mouth forms, but he doesn't hear the word come out.

Jack's wearing this white scarf of moonlight, a sliver of it coming through a broken blind on the window beside his bed. Dark can see him stretched out on his side, arms flopping in front of him uselessly, and his pale face is shadowed by its own hollows. The smell of disinfectant in the air is so strong that Dark knows he's been vomiting, probably for hours. Neither of them can sit up for the other.

“Are you there?” Jack asks, in this raw whisper. Dark's hand twitches towards him. Is he imagining that someone has moved their beds closer together?

“Yes,” Dark croaks back. A wave of dizziness passes over him like the shadow of a carrion bird.

“They think you have pneumonia,” Jack says. “From the flu. And the intubation, when you first came in.”

“What about you?” Dark says.

Jack's face furrows as though in pain. His eyes slip closed. Dark thinks he won't answer.

“Did you mean it?” Jack says, so soft he barely catches it. “When you said you'd stay, and we could live together a little while?”

“We could live together forever if you'd have me,” Dark tells him, coughing at the end.

Jack laughs without joy. “I'm not going to live forever.”

“You will to me.”

Jack looks at him from his pillow, blue eyes languid in his grey face.

“Just tell me you'll come stay with me,” says Dark. “I promise I'll get better if you do.”

Jack makes a noise that could be a laugh or a sob. “Dark,” he whispers. “I'll just leave you alone one day. I'm just going to break your heart.”

“Please break my heart, then,” Dark tells him. “Please come home with me and break my heart.”

Jack closes his eyes again, and Dark hears him catching his breath, his mouth shaking as he tries to find the right words. “I'll think about it. If you really do get better.”

“Then I'll get better.”

“You can't leave me, Dark,” Jack whispers. “I've lost so many people. It's supposed to be me. I can't bear for it to be you. If the ghosts start calling for you, you tell them they're supposed to be at the next bed over. You send God to get me if he'll leave you behind.”

Dark feels himself starting to slip back into sleep again. He tries to keep his eyes open. He wants to watch Jack as long as he can.

“Jack?” he says, pulling in a slow, thin breath.

“I'm here.”

“I lied to you. You should know. I didn't try to kill myself. I don't know why I lied. I just got in a car wreck.”

“Oh, lovey,” Jack says, with a sorry laugh. “I know. I was holding your chart when you said it.”

Dark blinks, shaking his head slightly. “You never called me out on it.”

“Aw, Dark. You would not have said it without a reason.”

Dark lets his eyes fall shut. “You make me want to live, Jack.”

“Okay,” he hears Jack's voice, shaking and frail. “Then live, Seojun.”

In another world, in the universe he finds in his dreams, Jack stands up and comes over to him, flushed with health, and when he gives Dark a kiss, they both take a breath so deep the doctors call it a miracle.

The black river is all around him.

There's talking. Someone sticks him with a needle. Someone's holding his hand. They adjust his cannula. He can't breathe. The heat burns him. There's sleep. Someone brushes his hair. He thinks he hears a baby crying, and he tries to sit up, calling for the twins. He's high, he's swollen with haze and breathlessness.

There is one moment he sees so clearly that he knows some part of his brain must have sent a red alert to his adrenal glands, because he's awake, fully, just for two minutes.

“No, wait!” he hears Jack gasping. “No, no, Schneep, listen – listen.”

“Jack, sit back and breathe, lie down, breathe, breathe.”

“I changed my mind. I changed my mind. I'm not – I'm not – ”

“No, my friend, you have to find the will again. I will guide you through this, but – ”

“I don't want to stay if he doesn't. Please, please, I'm scared.”

Dark makes a jerk of motion towards him, like an animal trying to get out of its trap, and when he moves forward, he hears Dae gasp and sees Jack turn in shock to look at him. His big blue eyes are red, and Dark's going to get to him. He's going to get to him and he's going to make him live, because he won't wake up and find that Jack's not there. He can't.

He never makes it out of the bed. Dae grabs his shoulder before he can fall onto the floor – he's distantly aware of the way that his legs don't respond to his desperation at all – and the lurching makes him so dizzy he almost faints completely in Dae's arms.

He feels himself start to cough, and it hurts like he hasn't hurt in weeks. When blood splatters the bedsheet beneath him, honestly, he isn't even surprised.

If Dae calls for him, he doesn't hear it. He doesn't hear anything.

Jack's body is warm against his own.

They're in a bed big enough for two, with a dark red comforter than smells like rose. Rose and Jack, his coconut lotion and soft hair. Dark awakes with his arm around his waist, their bodies slotted together, and an intense warmth heats him through. He knew Jack would fit just right against him.

“A dream,” he whispers, pressing his mouth to the patch of skin beneath Jack's ear.

“Or a little more than that, maybe,” Jack whispers back. Dark wishes he would keep speaking, like he does whenever he has the energy, filling the air with the swirls and rolls of his voice. “A little deeper.”

Dark doesn't care. He clutches Jack to his chest and moves to tangle their legs together, but his leg only twitches, and a shard of pain embeds itself in the base of his spine, drawing a gasp from him.

“Even here?” he asks, touching his back.

Jack turns to face him, his hand raising to touch Dark's face. “It's a part of you,” he says.

“I don't want the broken parts.”

“I do,” Jack whispers.

He presses his pretty mouth to the side of Dark's lip. He's soft as a bird.

“Jack,” Dark says, clutching him close. “You just have to fight.”

“I don't know. One day, it becomes time for the fight to stop. Sometimes, there's nothing left to fight for. You make your peace with it and you accept that you're leaving.”

“But not today.” Dark squeezes his body against his chest, tight, tight. “Not now.”

Jack hiccups a sob. Dark's so glad to be holding him.

“You could come with me.” Jack grips his hand, entwining their fingers. “We could go together.”

They could go together.

“It's just through the other door,” Jack says. “If we get out of bed. Your wheelchair's right here. We can go, if you want. Hand in hand.”

He can see it now. Maybe there's something after life, something worth having. Maybe there's a place where he and Jack can laze around in bed all day, exchanging slow kisses and holding each other, or where Dark can take him for long drives that make him fall asleep, or just listen to his pretty voice for the rest of eternity. Maybe Chase can come over to play video games with Jack while Dark watches warmly from the couch, Dark will have a chance to tell the woman who slid into his car that it wasn't her fault, and they'll have every friend that Jack has ever lost over for dinner one night, staying up late, drinking wine and talking. Maybe Eomma will come hold him in her lap, brushing his hair like she always used to, and Mom will take the day off work just to take him out for ice cream, and Dad will carry him to bed and call him his son. One day, Dae and Will and Celine will come too, and Dark will rest, at peace, with Jack.

Or maybe there's just darkness. But he could take Jack's hand and travel into it with him, and they could sleep. And no more pain. And no more loneliness.

But he doesn't think he wants to die anymore.

He thinks he wants to be a better brother. He thinks he wants to hold his niece in his arms. He thinks he wants to look in a mirror and know his own name, and say it out loud, and not hate the person who wears it.

He doesn't want to die.

“You said we'd get through this together,” Dark says.

“You won't come with me?”

“I won't come with you.” Dark leans down and kisses his mouth, hard, as though to keep him in place, forever. “And you won't go.”

Jack's crying again, tears falling down his white face.

“Tell me you won't go.”

“Dark,” Jack whispers.

Jack kisses him back, and Dark feels himself breathe.

The beeping in his ears is familiar, but it really is giving him a fucking headache.

His own heart monitor, fine. But this is a constant bip. Bip. Bip. chanting at intervals around the room. There's a machine pumping nearby, curtains and doors closing and opening, and chatter from around him, quiet but persistent on several sides.

The constant noise of the ICU. Dark tries to touch his head, puffing out a breath. He doesn't feel as annoyed about it as he used to.

“Seo?”

He cracks open his gunky eyes. Yuck, he's gross.

“Hey.” Celine touches his face with the pads of her fingers, standing to the side of him, her hair a mess. Dark frowns at her. She's supposed to be home.

“You're here,” he rasps.

“Course I am,” she says, getting a tissue from her purse and swiping at his eyes, taking the crust out. He finds that he doesn't mind. “You haven't been well.”

He turns his head and sees the twins both sitting next to him, Will coming back towards the bed while trying not to spill several cups of hot coffee all over himself. "Dark!" he cries joyfully, and a nurse shushes him. "Sorry. Dark, you're up."

"You're all here," says Dark. "What about the baby?"

"Oh, Dark, I'm barely along. Of course we came back as soon as we heard that you started... going downhill again."

He finds a cannula in his nose and adjusts it, wondering if he should ask how close he came to dying. Instead he starts, "what happened?"

"Your fever just broke last night," says Dae. "The inflammation is coming down in your lungs. You were so out of it for days and days."

Dark shakes his head. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be, we were just worried."

"Where's Jack?"

The twins look at each other. "We went to check on him this morning, but he's not up in your room."

Dark feels a hot wave of anger – agitation – anxiety? The more time he's had to wrestle with the feelings, the more he thinks he may have been confusing them for years. "Well, go ask the doctor."

"They can't tell us anything. Confidentiality."

"They'll tell me. Can't you get the doctor?"

"I will get your doctor," says Celine, "if you rest. You're still really weak, Dark."

"I need to know where Jack is. Why would they take him out of our room?"

The others don't know. Dark accepts a cup of terrible hospital coffee from Will and takes sips of it with Dae's help. They all seem to realize that he's brooding over Jack now, because they summon conversation with all the enthusiasm they can and surround him in a circle of family.

He looks around at his siblings as they talk about the place that they're getting set up for him here with the help of the occupational therapist at the hospital, Marvin, though they all snap back to attention anytime he shifts or speaks or takes too shaky a breath. It almost makes him smile. They want so badly to take care of him.

“Thank you for coming back,” he says, as Will helps adjust his pillows. His brother-in-law smiles broadly at him.

“Of course. We love you, Darkest.”

He glances around to make sure no one else is watching, sits up straight, and tells them all, “I love you too.”

The next morning feels surreal to Dark.

He's starting to realize that too long in the hospital warps your sense of time. A night of not knowing what the fate of someone you love will be is a hundred days long, but put him on the right drugs and suddenly the days have flown by in seconds, blurred like melted frosting.

He's been in the hospital for weeks now, and the time he spent in the ICU the first time is a completely different life from the time he spent with Jack and Chase. His life before that, where he walked and worked and never talked to anyone unless he had to – that's not just another life, it's another world. Another person, one who was scared to grapple with the things that Dark finds himself thinking through every day now.

More pressingly than anything, he finds himself wondering, for hours that last years: what if Jack is already gone?

He's glad when Will and Celine come to relieve him of his musings.

"I went to the front and asked about Jack," says Will, hurrying in front of his wife to get the closest chair to Dark. He looks vaguely pleased with himself for stealing Celine's spot before he turns more seriously back to Dark. "They said he's not allowed visitors right now."

A tree trunk of relief crashes down over Dark's head. He's alive.

"Why can't he have visitors?" he asks.

"They said he was post-op."

Dark lifts his head from his pillows. "What? What operation?"

"I don't know, they didn't say."

"He didn't have any operation planned. The... the chemo must not have worked. Not enough. What did they have to do? What if he needed – I don't know – a stint or a transplant? That's dangerous!"

A cord of strong twine is wrapping itself in circles around Dark's chest.

"I knew you shouldn't have said anything," Celine scolds Will.

"He needed to know! He would have made us ask anyway."

"Go spy on post-op," Dark says, nodding towards the hallway. "It's on this floor. Just peek in while they're distracted."

"What?" asks Celine.

"On it," says Will, getting to his feet.

"Will!"

He's already gone.

"Is escorting Will from the building the best use of hospital resources?" Celine asks, hand on her hip.

"I'll go look myself if he doesn't," warns Dark. "I'll get out of this bed one way or another."

Celine sits down. "So you're making friends now?"

"You know Jack's been through this with me."

"He didn't break his back, though, Dark, it's lung cancer. You know that."

The implication being that he can't do anything for him, especially if he's going to die. Dark doesn't say anything. Celine sighs.

"Dae is trying to bring your wheelchair. He took a rideshare instead of the bus. Loaded it in the back."

"Oh." Dark hasn't had much time to think about it. "Alright."

"I suppose you can't try it out today?"

"Probably not a good idea from the ICU. But maybe, if Shepherd comes down."

Will comes buzzing back a few minutes later, more somber than before. "I saw him as the doc went in to check on him. He's a tiny little thing, isn't he? He doesn't look well, Dark, I'm sorry."

Dark purses his mouth, glancing around the room. He knows about confidentiality, but still, he's sure that if Bing or Schneep or a familiar nurse would show their face, he could wheedle some info out of them. He can't just sit here not knowing.

But nobody comes around for hours.

“I took his lung out.”

There's a pause as Dark realizes this voice is addressed to him. He opens his eyes, pulling himself halfway from sleep, and finds Schneep standing next to his bed, arms folded, looking at him.

“Good evening,” says Dark dryly.

“Hush,” says Schneep. “Your voice is aggravating.”

It's good to know that the feeling of him being an intruder on his and Jack's time is mutual. “What are you talking about?”

“I took Jack's lung out,” Schneep replies, slower. “Finally.”

It lances through Dark's chest. “What? He had a transplant? How is he?”

“Not a transplant. Cancer would just grow in the new lung. It's been a rough couple days for him, and a very long fight.”

“You just took his lung out? He's not well? Schneep, start at the beginning.”

“No,” says Schneep. “That's for him to tell you. But I will watch over him.”

Dark throws his hands up, all but snarling. “That's all you're going to give me? Why didn't you take the lung before all the chemo, if that was an option?”

Schneep says something in German, sharp and self-important. Then he shakes his head. “Don't ever hurt my friend, Neumann, or I might take your lung out too. Just so we're on the same page.”

“Take me to see him,” Dark shouts after him. “My brother brought my chair, just bring it to me.”

“No visitors. He's resting.”

“I just need to see him.”

Schneep's already leaving him behind.

Dark strains against his body as though it's made of metal, heavy with a cursed Midas touch: instead of making anything gold, a car hit him and turned his lower half into lead.

“Dark, don't try to lift yourself on your arms,” Shepherd tells him sharply. “We've got you.”

“I can do it.”

“Not without pushing yourself too far. All you have to do is stay sitting up like this. Okay? We'll move you. Ready?”

He needs to be. “Yes.”

“Okay, one, two, three.”

He feels Bing and Shepherd both lifting him enough to get him down the transfer board, and then –

He's in a wheelchair.

Dark pants, sweating from holding himself up, but he can sit back a little now, so, while the position will leave him aching all night, he's... okay.

He's okay.

Celine and Damien are clapping and smiling at him, and Dark can see Will focusing hard on resisting the urge to try and hug him. He thinks he would have found it condescending a few weeks ago, but he feels ready to recognize what a big step this is.

He's really in a wheelchair.

“Feel up for moving yourself?” Shep asks, hovering closely, still holding a hand to his chest in case he falls.

Dark sets his hands on the wheels of the chair Damien ordered for him, giving himself a careful push. There's more resistance than he expected, and he knows he'll make his shoulders sore too if he keeps this up. But one push sends him rolling slightly forward, and he finds himself in the middle of the room.

He's back upstairs with Saoirse and Ellen, though he's been trying hard not to think about the emptiness of the bed beside his own. Still, it's nice to be somewhere familiar. He's never seen the mirror on the back of the door before, though. As he rolls away from his own bed, he can see... himself.

Damien's been helping him shave, though his stubble's back now. Not that anyone would see that first. He touches his nose. “Broken” was a word that he thought he could picture, even knowing how badly it was smashed. Now he sees that the glass shard which impacted it sliced down the side of his nose, leaving a white, puckered scar that reaches to beneath his eye. He could have been blinded on that side if the glass was any higher. His dark hair is overgrown and frames his tired eyes.

And he's sitting in a chair with a short red back, fitted just for him. This is how he moves now. This is part of his autonomy. Maybe even part of him.

He glances back at Shepherd. “They came and tested my responses today. Poked and prodded all over my legs and hips.”

Shepherd meets his gaze, a shadow passing over his face. “Yeah.”

“Did you see the report?”

Shepherd glances at the floor, and then back up. “Yeah, I did.”

Dark turns to the mirror again, seeing himself in his hospital gown and his chair. Even now, though it hurts all the way down his back, he can barely feel his legs.

He's not going to walk again, he realizes.

Maybe he always knew. He remembers raging about it in the emergency room, but he was only angry about where he was then, about the pain and the accident and the disruption to his life. Once he was settled – once he had some brightness to focus on again – he was sure he could return to normal one day. To imagine himself like this was... what? Too humiliating? Too frightening, to think about his whole life changed so drastically forever?

Maybe he can get up on a walker, maybe even, one day, on a cane. But he won't walk on his own, and not for long, and not without pain. That's the truth.

“Dark?” Celine's beside him, putting one hand on the back of his chair. He can feel the warmth of her hand there. “You okay?”

He's thinking about that other universe in his mind, the one where he seduced Jack, or became friends with Jack through random, harmless circumstance, or cared for Jack through every part of his sickness. He tries to see that version of Dark in a wheelchair instead of standing, but he can't quite do it.

But... he can't picture Jack anymore, either. The cancer's an intruder, that's a fact, and there's no “what doesn't kill you makes you stronger” to it, it's just a nightmare. The fight that Jack has had with it, though – the part of him that knows how to be kind because he's seen so much suffering – the part of him that knows how to be joyful even in the darkness – that's a part of him.

There's no other universe, not one he can ever go to or have back. There's just this one. He's an accountant, he recalls distantly, so here's what the numbers say, the probabilities and statistics: he can't walk. And Jack might die.

Jack might be dying now. No amount of hope can change that. He thinks he understands what Jack meant when Dark told him to keep fighting, and Jack asked him what fight he was supposed to be having. Even his determination, his strength, his being so deserving of life: what part of that is going to stop a carcinoma? What amount of willpower can stop his cancer? What part of that has saved any of the other people who have died of the same thing, just as deserving as Jack?

So Jack can't save his life by 'fighting,' whatever that means anymore, it was a stupid thing to tell him, it's not the right word. And Dark can't throw Jack onto his bed, or save his life with money and pizza and housing, or kiss Jack with so much love it cures him of everything that ever hurt him. He just can't.

But he can sit beside him.

“Dark,” Celine replies, softer, crouching down to be close to him. “You're okay. I'm here.”

He blinks, coming back to her, sucking in a slow breath.

“Yes,” he says quietly. “I'm okay.”

“Let's get you back into bed,” says Shepherd. “I need to know how sore that will leave you before we try again.”

“But we will try again,” says Dark.

“Yes, every day.”

There's a knock on the door and Layla pokes her head in. “Oh, wow! I knew you were getting close. Congratulations. I suppose this is a bad time for me to check in?”

“No,” says Dark, before anyone can answer for him. “No, this is a great time. Come in.”

He lets her in.

Dark has heard about people looking small in hospital beds many times. How the sheets eat them up. The whiteness of the room turns them into the only mass of color. The silence presses them down into a box and keeps them there, tiny against the pillows.

Dark thinks that Jack looks like the world could revolve around his gravity.

Oh, he's thinner than ever. But his presence must be felt from all the way outside the hospital, mustn't it? Aren't passersby stopping short to turn his way, to wish that they could take him out of that bed and carry him home, put him to sleep somewhere soft and comfy instead of cool and sterile? Aren't birds songless and planets unmoving for Jack half-dead in his hospital bed? They should be.

He lies slightly propped up on his pillows, hooked into an IV and a blood bag and his nasal cannula. He doesn't even have his gown on that Dark can see, his shoulders bare, the rest of him tucked under thin blankets. He's not just white but grey, his face infested with shadows, and even from here, Dark can see that his mouth is cracked and trying hard not to bleed. A pale hand stretches out from his blankets.

Dark touches it tenderly.

“Need to borrow the TV remote?” comes his rough voice, and Dark nearly jumps.

“Jack.”

His blue eyes slip open, then shut again. “Hey, Dark.”

“I didn't think you'd be awake,” he says, pushing his wheel a little more forward, so the side of his chair touches the bed. “You can sleep. I want you to rest.”

“You're out and about.”

Dark glances down at himself, still unfamiliar and... short. He wishes he could stand to see Jack better. “Close enough.”

“That's wonderful,” Jack whispers. He doesn't have much voice to do anything other than whisper. When he has the air for it, he's so loud that he can be heard from outside their room, even when only talking. His fingers squeeze Dark's gently, and then he's still again.

Dark doesn't mind. He was glad enough to finally be allowed to come see Jack in post-op, days since his surgery. He's been training the whole time to be able to get down here himself. There's a burn all the way down his back and what he can feel of his legs, but that's not important now.

“I can stay up,” Jack tells himself belatedly, drawing a breath. “All I been doing is sleeping. I want to talk to you.”

Dark can't tell if he's supposed to make him rest or encourage him to reconnect with the world. He brushes his thumb over Jack's hand, and Jack opens his eyes, glancing down at the places where their hands join before he looks at Dark.

“I'm glad you're okay, Dark,” he says.

“Are you going to be?” Dark asks in reply. “Schneep wouldn't tell me hardly anything. You were getting chemo, it was supposed to be helping. Then you were just in surgery. A serious surgery. What happened, Jack? If they could just take your lung out, why didn't they do it years ago?”

Jack swallows, his free hand rising to rub at his head for a second.

“I was twenty-two,” he begins. “When this first started. Thought it was my asthma for the longest time, til I was passing out and coughing up blood. Had a round of chemo – didn't help. Round of radiation, made me miserable, but shrank the tumor just enough, they said. They did take my lung out, Dark. They took the bottom lobe of my right lung.”

Dark blinks, looking across at the blankets over Jack's chest like he'll be able to see that now, some hollowness that he never noticed before.

“That surgery nearly killed me,” Jack breathes out. “I was septic afterwards. The recovery was more than a year for me. My brother and my friends looked after me through all of it, but I was so... so sick, Dark, it's just... I was so sick. My whole life had been in front of me, I was active, full of energy, excited to be alive – and then I lost two years and a part of my body I could never get back. I continued to feel weak, sick, damaged. It was hard.”

He fixes his eyes on the ceiling for a long moment.

“Then it came back.”

Dark wets his mouth and breathes out. “You... didn't want to go through another surgery.”

Jack worries his cracked lip between his teeth. “I didn't even want the chemo, Dark. My chances have never been good, the fact that it's come back once despite the surgery means it probably will again, and I was ready to go. No more sickness, no more poverty, no more grief. I asked for hospice care. Schneep barely talked me out of it. Told him I'd try the chemo and that was it.”

“You wanted to die.”

Jack closes his eyes. “I thought I was going to die anyway. Why do it at the hospital when I could be at home? Why add extra suffering that wasn't going to save me? Losing my whole lung sounded so hard. Another major surgery, with a shortened life expectancy afterwards. Worst of all would be to die on the table. Schneep would never forgive himself, and I'd have died hoping to live instead of at peace.”

Dark feels something burning in his eyes. Jack turns his head to him, curling in on himself slightly, so they're closer. “The chances of dying during a pneumonectomy are about one in five, Dark.”

Dark wipes harshly at his face. He thinks he's cried more in the last five weeks than he has since he was six years old, and he didn't want to cry now, when Jack needs him. Still, when he speaks, his voice comes out shaky and wet.

“Did I make you suffer longer, Jack?”

Jack's face creases with dismay. His hand pulls out of Dark's, and then he's leaning over to wipe at his tears. “No, Dark.”

“Did I make you take a risk you didn't want?”

“Dark,” Jack breathes, in this voice like summer air. “You made me realize there were still things worth risking this for.”

Dark grabs his fingers again, hiding his face against his hand. “I wanted you to be okay so badly I didn't think about what you needed.”

“I made this decision, Dark,” Jack says. “I'm my own man. It was just... when you started talking about us taking care of each other, being in this together – ”

“You were the one who told me that, Jack.”

“I'm sorry to break it to you, but I have a habit of believing everybody around me is going to outlive me, Dark, for good reasons. But for a while there, when you would talk, or... just be there... I started to think about how we really could get through it together. It was like there was this other universe where we had already made it out the other side. In my head, I could see us in a little apartment together, or going to my favorite restaurant in town, or taking the wood path out by the beach. Then you got sick.”

Jack's face pinches like he's in pain. “I thought you were going to go too, Dark. Like everybody. And I realized how ridiculous it was, for me to have been thinking to myself all along 'it must be nice to have a chance at getting better. A chance at surviving.' Because maybe I had a chance too. And maybe the people I thought would get out of this hospital and would get their lives back... maybe they wouldn't. I realized I would want you to try anything if it meant you might survive. It wasn't naive or selfish to tell me to fight, Dark, or if it was... that's what hope is. Naive, and, sometimes, a little selfish.

“Maybe I really did want to die, and I called that making peace with it. I had to find my hope again. If I was going to have hope for you – for Chase, even though he would never be completely well again, for Ellen, even though she can't do anything for the people she loves anymore – I could have hope for me too. If I get sick, if others have to take care of me, that's okay. I'm still worth fighting for.”

If ever there was a time Dark could have summoned magic healing powers and leapt to his feet, that would have been it. Instead he just holds Jack's hand with both of his own and tries to breathe, staring up at him, in love with him.

“I am so glad you're here,” he chokes. “You are worth anything in the world.”

Jack grins that big smile of his, the one that makes his eyes squeeze and his face light up. Dark loves his slightly crooked front teeth. “We're in this together,” he says.

“Yes.”

“I can't believe you're in your chair. It's so wonderful.”

Dark closes his eyes. He needs to return Jack's honesty with his own. His vulnerability should be met in kind. That's part of love. Loving someone is letting them love you back.

“It's a little frightening,” he says. “I still have to learn how to live like this. I don't want to do it without you, either. Jack. Come stay with me, like we talked about.”

Jack winces slightly. “I won't be at all well for a long time. I... I could still get an infection, or a sickness, or the cancer could come back. I meant what I told you before. No matter how this goes, Dark, no matter how much you or I fight, there's only so much that can be done for me. You don't want to watch me die. You can go back to America with your family, and be well there.”

“No, Jack, you don't understand,” says Dark, and the shakiness is gone from his voice. “If that's what has to happen, then I do want to watch you die.”

Jack's mouth parts slightly. His eyes are fixed on Dark.

“I want to be with you through anything,” Dark says. “When we decided we were in this together, it wasn't just for the hospital. If you die in two weeks, or two years, or if you live forever, let me stay.”

Jack's eyes water. “Dark. I promise, I have other people to help look after me. You don't have to feel guilty, you're not indebted to me. Why – why do you care so much?”

Dark looks him in the eyes, tilting his head closer. “Do you not know?”

A hint of blush grows in his face like a drop of watercolor spreading. Jack lets out a small breath, words gone. Dark reaches up and touches his cheek, and Jack's eyes flicker over his face.

“If you come a little closer,” says Dark, “I will show you how I feel about you.”

There it is, the pretty little smile he saves for embarrassment, his head ducking slightly, color coming back to his face for a moment, and ah, the monitor's betrayed him: his heart is beating fast. Dark watches him intently, scanning the features of his face, trying to memorize this second in time, so he can dream about Jack – shy, at last – instead of pain and glass.

“Don't tease me, Dark,” Jack whispers.

“Jack,” says Dark. “When it comes to you, I am intent on every word.”

“You act so cold, sometimes,” Jack says, and though it could be a tease, he says it like it's intimate. “But you love your people so hard. You've always wanted to take care of me, even when all I gave you was a friendly voice. I didn't make you want to live, Dark. You found your reason. Not just for me. For everybody you love. Do you see? You remembered how. Now you're full of love.”

Dark draws in a breath, almost overwhelmed, for a moment, curling his fingers against Jack's chin. “Come here to me,” he breathes. “Come here. Come home with me.”

Jack shifts. He brings his face close to Dark's. His pupils are wide. They dart down to Dark's mouth, and then back up. He's trembling, just a little.

Dark runs his fingers down his neck, over his cheek. He lets his eyes trail over his whole face. His throat and the beat of his heart therein. He looks at his eyes. His starry Jack.

He doesn't need to be able to stand. He doesn't need to be able to pick him up or corner him or show off. He feels attractive again. Suave. Right here in his chair, with Jack, there are no games. Nothing fleeting. Nothing false. No need – only want. Only comfort and warmth. He's full of love.

And he's loved in return.

“Jack,” he says.

“Hi, stranger,” Jack whispers.

When Dark kisses him, he feels them both breathe.