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The first words on Mac’s lips as he sits beside Dennis’ hospital bed, tears in his eyes, are promises to never ignore his roommate's complaints ever again. They're futile words, of course, because the recipient is totally passed out, looking sicker than he ever has in the time Mac's known him (almost his whole life), but they're more for Mac's sake anyway. Like self-flagellation, the whip against his skin is almost comfortingly familiar.
This is your fault. If you had just believed him, he wouldn't be like this now.
This morning, Dennis hadn’t got up for coffee at his usual time. In fact, he wasn't awake at all when Mac went to check on him, his face buried under the covers so only a small tuft of hair was visible.
“Wake up, dude.” Mac grumbled, poking the mass of covers until Dennis poked his head out from beneath them. He looked awful. Face pasty white, sweat beading on his forehead, but somehow Mac had looked past all of it.
“Come on, man. Time to get up.”
“Gon- gonna take the day off, I think.” Dennis replied, voice unusually small and croaky.
"Really? Christ, dude, you're pathetic."
His roommate had looked vaguely hurt. He swallowed, brow furrowing, then buried himself back under the covers.
Mac hadn't pushed the matter. Instead rolled his eyes and irritatedly berated him for ‘slacking off to do chemical peels’ before he himself slacked off to Charlie's place to huff glue and drink liquor that tasted like paint stripper.
When he'd returned hours later, the apartment was weirdly quiet, and there wasn't any sign of Dennis anywhere. Surely, Mac reasoned, he couldn't still be in bed?
Oh, how wrong he was.
“I'm sorry, Den.” he whispers, taking his roommate's hand and rubbing his thumb along the back of it. “I should have listened. I should have listened.”
The sight that greeted him when he entered Dennis' room for the second time that day is still so vivid in his mind that it makes his eyes water anew. Sheets pooled around ankles. The acrid scent of sweat and vomit. His roommate, so pale and cool and still that for a moment, he'd thought him dead.
“Den? Den, wake up. I need- I need you to wake up, man.”
Shaking his shoulders had done nothing, and when desperation had brought his palm to Dennis' cheek, hard, he was met with little more than a slightly red mark where his hand made contact.
Sepsis. The word still feels as unfamiliar in his head now as it first did when he brought Dennis in hours ago, carrying him into the reception of the hospital and frightening everybody in the waiting room in the process. It looked like he was carrying a corpse.
The rest is a terrifying blur of doctors and medical jargon and frantic phone calls to Dee and Frank and Charlie. Of questions about care plans and other decisions to be made by next of kin.
At one point, terror had gripped him so forcefully that he'd asked a doctor whether Dennis was going to die. The noncommittal response did nothing to allay his fears.
The door to the hospital room creaks open, and Dee steps in. Her eyes are bloodshot from the tears.
“Frank… Frank and Charlie are making their way over.” She says solemnly, swiping at the bottom of her nose with the back of her hand. “Charlie offered to bring soup, so… so I don't think he's quite grasped the severity of the situation.”
It almost makes Mac laugh. It almost makes him cry.
“Yeah… that's Charlie, alright.”
If Charlie does bring soup, the only person consuming it will be him. Mac doesn't want to eat anything right now. Dee threw up in the trash can by the door the moment she saw Dennis in the hospital bed, so she won't be eating either.
And Dennis?
Judging by the tube snaking into his nose, taped to his cheek, he’s not going to be up to eating for quite a while.
“Any updates?” Dee asks, coming to sit beside Mac.
He shrugs. “Nothing, really. Just repeated that the antibiotics they've got him on seem to be working, so he should start to get better soon.”
“God, I hope so.”
It's odd to hear her be so openly caring about her brother. Her love for him (always there, of course, even Mac knows that) is usually resigned to small glances and discreet shoulder squeezes when she thinks nobody else is looking. Now, she reaches over to stroke his hair like it's the most normal thing in the world. This incident appears to have changed her, just like how it's changed Mac.
For him, though, the road to acceptance is going to be a lot rougher. After all, the blame still sits heavy in his gut.
And he will sit right here, by Dennis’ side, til all is well again.