Work Text:
May 22, 2019
It’s a busy enough day in the ER that Baela can’t always check her phone immediately when it buzzes in the pocket of her scrubs. Tiktoks from Visenya that keep her entertained on her lunch break, Daenaera’s additions to the grocery list, a response to Jace’s text in the groupchat they share with Cregan, and a couple pictures from Luke of the guys getting ready to head out on the lake for Viserys’ bachelor party earlier in the morning. There’s one of Jace, his arm around Vis’ neck, a rosy sunburn already appearing on the high points of their faces, their shoulders. Luke, somehow, has escaped the Valyrian sunburn curse, tanning like Harwin and looking more like him by the day.
She trades out her lockscreen of Jace at dinner, blushing and laughing, for the picture of him and Vis before she locks it, tucking it back into her scrubs and getting back to the endless work.
Buzz. Baela can’t check it as EMS brings in a trauma and the energy in the room shifts drastically. A little girl, face purple, sobbing parents in pursuit. Buzz.
Buzz, buzz, buzz. The rush and crowd of nurses, the questions of how long? Did they have an epipen? Yes? Good-
Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz-
Detach, don’t think about Daenaera at this age, or Jocelyn, or Alyssa, or Daella-
Buzz, start compressions, feel the bend and crack of rib and sternum under her fists, see the nebulizer treatment seal over the girl’s mouth out of the corner of her eye as seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve-
Buzz, buzz-
Rhythm, an ache in her shoulders, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, a pause in compressions, airway check, buzz, buzz, buzz-
Buzz, one, buzz, two, buzz, three, buzz, four-
Crack, rib gives way, don’t think about it, think about it later, someone is crying behind her, someone is screaming. Next to her, someone is calm, two fingers against a pulse, another dose of epinephrine, and her phone is buzzing, buzzing, buzzing-
She’s breathing, someone says, and relief rolls in like a wave, a tide of exhaustion as Baela can finally pull away, can see the girl’s face bloom with color as her wheezing breaths practically echo in the room. Thank you, God, someone says, over and over again, and one of the other nurses squeezes Baela’s shoulder, moves to the side to let her out of the crush so she can catch her own breath. The lingering adrenaline makes her hands tremble as she pulls the gloves from them, dropping them in the trash and stepping out into the quiet of the hall. Her phone buzzes again, insistent, and she takes it out.
Her heart stops at the top message.
[11:06 - Rhaena - stay at the hospital, im on my way ]
She scrolls back to the beginning of the notifications, an endless line of texts and missed calls, her settings having sent those calls to voicemail after one ring so she wouldn’t have to decline them while talking with patients. So she could remain focused.
[11:02 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:02 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:03 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:04 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:04 - Missed Call - Luke]
She sways, lightheaded.
[11:05 - Luke - call me ]
[11:05 - Luke - its jace ]
[11:05 - Luke - answer the phone ]
[11:05 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:05 - Luke - its Jace ]
[11:05 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:05 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:05 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:06 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:06 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:06 - Luke - its jace ]
[11:06 - Missed Call - Rhaena]
[11:06 - Missed Call - Luke]
[11:06 - Missed Call - Rhaena]
[11:06 - Missed Call - Rhaena]
It’s Jace.
It’s Jace.
It’s Jace.
She mashes her thumb over the nearest call from Luke, hands shaking as it begins to ring. It’s Jace, he’d said. Is he in an ambulance? They’re twenty minutes away at the lake, what hospital are they taking him to-
Are you okay? Someone is asking-
Cara. Her coworker, watching her with worried eyes as the phone rings and rings and rings-
“It’s Jace.” Is the only thing that makes it out, an echo of Luke, and Cara’s eyes go wide and she runs. She’s calling for someone, Baela can’t quite focus enough to figure out who. The phone finally clicks, answers, and through the line she hears Luke take in a shaky breath and she can’t wait anymore-
“What hospital?” She asks, running to the nurses station, and Luke lets out a sob that makes her stumble, makes every nurse in the station look to her, “What hospital, Luke?”
Cara appears out of the corner of her eye with the charge nurse, with the nursing director-
“What hospital?” Her composure breaks and she yells it, screams it down the line to Luke.
“He’s dead, Baela.”
What?
“You’re lying,” She says, because this is Luke. Stupid little brother Luke who put a rubber snake into Joff’s winter boots once and laughed his head off at the shriek, “He’s not. Why would you say that?”
Her phone buzzes against her ear once, twice, three times. She can’t look. She can’t look.
“He wasn’t wearing his life jacket and I don’t know what happened but he ended up in the water and we couldn’t get him up and when we got him out and the ambulance got here-“
Luke sobs, trails off, and none of it makes sense. It’s Jace. Responsible eldest son Jace who bullies every single person in this family to wear a life jacket when they’re on the lake. Who insists on it for any body of water that isn’t a pool and does insist on it for said pool for the kids under ten. No arm floaties, only buckle life jackets. How many times has she seen kids in the ER who silently drowned in a pool full of people? Who stopped breathing and never started again? She’s told him enough horror stories that, combined with his own innate sense of safety, kept seatbelts buckled, lifejackets on, and helmets protecting vulnerable skulls.
So it has to be a lie. There’s no conceivable way for it to be the truth because Jacaerys Strong wears his life jacket. He always does. He’s a strong swimmer. He wears the jacket and puts on sunscreen and drives a car with the best safety rating he could find and he does not die in stupid, preventable ways-
“Which hospital?” She says again, desperate, and Luke can’t breathe let alone talk and someone takes the phone-
“Baela,” her father’s voice is sobering, ice water over her head. He wasn’t even supposed to be there at the boat, he was meant to be at the airport with Rhaenyra, leaving for a weekend trip-
If they’ve cancelled-
No no no no no no-
“Put Jace on the phone.”
She can’t breathe.
“Honey, I can’t do that. I am so sorry, but I can’t do that.”
. . .
[11:08 - Rhaena - im almost there ]
[11:08 - Rhaena - do not drive ]
[11:08 - Rhaena - well deal with your car later im ten minutes away ]
. . .
Somewhere between the nursing director coaxing her into an office to sit down and Cara bringing in her bag from her locker, she gets out her phone to text Jace. She freezes mid-sentence, halfway through a call me right now and doesn’t know what to do until her numb fingers manage to open the groupchat instead and send one frantic, numb, help me, into it. Sending it straight to Jace’s phone, where she can’t even begin to process the fact that it will go unanswered, and to Cregan’s because eighteen years ago he sent the same text in the middle of the night when Arra was dying on the table and Baela knows now without a doubt that he will find her. Just like they found him.
Baela needs him here because he loves Jace too, because he loves her kids, because she knows that he’ll set his grief aside to protect them and care for them while she doesn’t have the strength to do it herself. She needs him here to tell her the truth, because it’s still not real, its still not possible, it can’t be possible.
The clock on the wall ticks, ticks, ticks, 11:14. A part of her brain that isn’t completely numb remarks on the fact that its only been twelve minutes since the little girl with the bee sting was rushed into the ER. In two more minutes, it will be ten since she started breathing again. Ten since Baela looked at her phone, the lockscreen picture she’d changed that morning covered up by a dozen frantic notifications. Ten since there was absotelly no doubt in her mind that Jace was breathing. There’s something about that knowledge that’s just too much, that drags the trash can closer, brings her down and heaving into it until she can’t breathe. Someone rubs her back, someone brings her water, someone takes away the bin.
Her phone, open to the groupchat, finally is silent. Help me, sits there in its sharp blue bubble, waiting, waiting, waiting.
The door clicks and then Rhaena is there, red-eyed and shuddering and in Baela’s arms and for a moment they’re ten and eight years old all over again, holding each other in a hospital waiting room an hour after cancer stole their mother cruelly, slowly. Shaking, warm-limbed, clinging, Rhaena is sobbing, Baela can’t escape the feeling that she isn’t even in her own body, floating above like a ghost. Help me, she wants to send again, help me help me help me-
They step out of the hospital, step out into the ambulance bay, the bay where they should have brought Jace, into a day that is too bright. It should be night already, Baela can’t believe it isn't, it’s felt like an eternity since it happened.
The familiar truck pulls up before they can take a step off of the curb, door opening, still running even as Cregan drops out of the driver’s seat.
It only takes two breaths for him to be there, for her face to be buried in his chest, and the third breath is sacrificed to the scream that leaves her; the scream that cracks her throat and rattles her chest and burns, burns, burns-
. . .
It will never fully make sense to her, what happens.
It will never matter how many times she reviews the details, hears the story from Luke, from Aeg, because it will never put itself together in her brain. The puzzle pieces will never fit flush against each other, they will bend and break, they will warp the picture, sticking out ugly and awful, and she will not believe.
It will be like a court case in her mind, late into the night, evidence versus testimony, witness versus character statement. The judge that wears her face will slam the gavel down upon the podium in an attempt to silence a room in uproar, but they will not heed it.
It will never fully make sense to her, what happens, but it doesn’t matter.
Just because it doesn’t make sense doesn’t mean Jace isn’t dead. It just means it doesn’t make sense. It just means for a moment, someone made a mistake, and someone died, and an accident like that never quite makes sense in the mind of the grieving. There’s too many what if’s, there’s too many why not’s, and there’s nothing that can be done to fix it.
. . .
It’s instinct, really, to call Jace as he’s running to the truck.
He’s in the ER bleeding from the head while a surgeon tries to save Arra and Rickon’s lives on an operating table? Call Jace. Rickon falls off his bike and breaks his arm? Call Jace. Sara’s car breaks down on the side of the road while Cregan’s out of town and can’t help her? Call Jace. It’s as natural as breathing after all these years, to call and be called on. To grab a few more two liters of soda on the way to Daella’s birthday party or pick Baela up from work when the roads are icy. They’re family. They’re the godparents to his son, he’s the godfather to their daughters, lives intertwined, keys to houses on rings, emergency contacts at the schools.
So when Ben reads the text out to Cregan because his hands are full measuring a beam at the construction site and says, from Baela, help me, there’s simply no other option but to drop everything and run.
To call Jace’s phone three times in a row, the ringing of it alongside the pounding of his heart, the blare of the horn as he runs stop signs and red lights all the way to the hospital, but Jace doesn’t pick up.
He’s not going to, he’s never going to, it hits him as Baela screams into his chest. The realization punches a shuddering breath out of him that he has to fight to control because this is what they always prepared for, isn’t it? This is what Jace feared when he was a pallbearer at Arra’s funeral? What he thought of when Jocelyn was born and he asked Cregan to be her godfather as well, not just Daenaera’s, and what he thought of when he did the same for Alyssa and Daella when they came along? When they stood together at Harwin’s graveside, suits damp from the rain, and Jace made Cregan swear to him that if anything happened to him, he’d take care of his family?
They’re his to protect now, his to care for, and that feels like the weight of the world on his shoulders. A weight separate from the pain of saying goodbye to another brother, another friend, another member of his family who he never expected to say goodbye to before he even turns forty.
He wants to ask what happened, but he doesn’t, he can’t, because the only way he can make it through getting everyone home and taken care of is by not having that image in his mind yet. He’d spent far too much time when Rickon was a newborn mentally checked out, constantly remembering how Arra looked in the wreckage of their car. He can’t afford to do that again, not now, not when he’s the safety net. There’s no Jace and Baela sleeping in the guest room with Daenaera as a newborn, getting up with her and Rickon in the middle of the night. It’s his turn, now, even if he doesn’t want it to be.
So he does not ask, instead he gets back in the truck and calls the highschool. Has Rickon and Daenaera and Jocelyn pulled from class as he watches Rhaena’s car follow him there in the rear view. Grounds himself as much as he can in his hold on the wheel even as his phone begins to buzz next to him.
[11:26 - Rick - whats happening ]
[11:27 - Rick - are you ok ]
[11:27 - Rick - Jocelyn and Naera can’t get ahold of anyone what’s going on? ]
With an ache in his chest, Cregan pushes the car to go faster-
Daenaera’s already in tears when they get to the office and there’s a horrifying moment where he watches her brain put the pieces together, where he watches her realize it before Rhaena can even say it. She looks like Jace then, dark hair and dark eyes and freckled and she trembles beneath the realization of it before Baela collapses into a chair and her eldest daughter climbs into her lap sobbing like a baby all over again, clinging to her-
Jocelyn sits frozen in the chair, staring at Rhaena in horror, and Rickon stands next to her with an identical expression. When the tears come, it’s Rickon’s arms she goes to, a foot shorter than him, tucked in under his chin. How bad is it? she keeps asking, how bad is it? until Daenaera breaks and screams he’s dead, he’s dead, don't you get it? He's dead-
. . .
He goes to get Alyssa alone.
Daenaera’s temper is quick and Baela’s composure is swiftly declining by the time they leave the highschool and Alyssa is, well, Alyssa. Emotions buttoned up close to the chest and wanting anything but to be the center of attention. He tells her outside on the benches, sitting next to her, does his best to find a good way to say it. But there isn’t one. Just like how there wasn’t a good way for that doctor to walk out of the OR and break the news to him that his son was alive but his wife was dead.
He tells her it was an accident, that her Uncle Luke called her Momma after, and that they could go home when she was ready.
Alyssa sits there, still, fingers fidgeting, and when she finally speaks it’s in a whisper, “Are you going to leave too?”
“No.” He shakes his head, “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“Okay.”
She ducks her head, her hair falling where he can’t quite see her face anymore, but he hears her sniffle.
“Do you want me to close my eyes?”
A nod.
He closes his eyes and she scoots under his arm to press against his side, sniffling.
. . .
By the time they get home, Visenya’s there with Daella, tucked away on the couch in blankets, and when he’s summoned to give the nine-year-old her hug he goes without hesitation, rubbing her back up and down as she cries.
Rickon catches him in the kitchen after and he opens his arms to his son without hesitation, pulling him close.
“You okay?” Cregan asks, even though he knows the answer. Rickon nods though, brave boy, “Don’t lie to me now.”
His son takes in a shaky breath, “It doesn’t feel real.”
He hums in agreement, “It doesn’t. But it is and our job is to take care of things like how he would have for us.”
“I don’t know what to say. What to do.”
“Just be here with them. That will be enough."
“Are you okay?”
He desperately wishes to feel stronger than he is. Wants for a moment to lie, as if the lying will make it real. Will make Cregan strong enough to carry on. But instead, in the face of his son’s concern, his throat closes up with tears and his vision finally blurs.
“I’m not,” He admits as Rickon’s arms go tight around him, “Not at all.”
When he glances up, he finds Daenaera in the doorway, and without hesitation he shifts Rickon and lifts his other arm to her. She goes to him without question, tucking herself under his arm, and suddenly he’s twenty-one again. He's twenty-one, holding his best friends’ baby in one arm and his baby in the other after putting Arra in the ground.
Then he blinks and he's thirty-nine again, holding his best friends’ baby in one arm and his baby in the other, and death has struck them yet again, cruelly, coldly.