Chapter Text
“No,” Avery whispers, “nononono—” His eyes well up, tears burning. Fuck. He should’ve seen that coming. How can he be such an idiot? ‘What’s in your inventory?’ What a load of bullshit! It was obviously a trick and Avery couldn’t even see through it.
He tries to respawn and it doesn’t work. It wont work. The respawn button is greyed out as if it were a hardcore world he died on.
“Shit!” Avery yells, slamming a hand on his desk. Tears spill, running down his cheeks. He puts his head in his hands, ignoring the discomfort of his glasses pressing awkwardly against his face, body shaking with quiet sobs, so he doesn’t wake the others in his dorm. He hiccups and all but throws his glasses onto his desk, and presses the heels of his hands to his eyes.
He drags a hand through his hair, letting the other fall to his lap. The screen is blurry through the tears and lack of glasses on his face.
A loud CRACK outside startles him. Fireworks are going off now— shit, is it midnight already? Avery stares out the window, blurred colors and light are blooming over the courtyard. He can hear a couple idiots outside setting off another (probably illegal) firework. He sits there, stuck in a bout of sudden tiredness that strikes him all so quickly.
He just stares out the window at the fireworks for… he doesn’t even know how long, could be minutes, could be hours. His brain feels like it’s shutting down and he hardly has the energy— mental or physical— to move his eyes.
Eventually, a particularly loud firework startles him, breaking his state of floatiness. He’s brought back to Earth so suddenly, and he almost falls out of his chair.
He looks back at his laptop, which now displays the Minecraft start screen. He wipes his eyes and grabs his glasses. They’re smudged, prints from his hands and smears from his tears, but he can’t be bothered to care. He closes Minecraft and opens a new tab on Firefox.
Reddit, he thinks, Reddit can find him.
And Reddit does. Avery finds a subreddit and makes a post about needing to find someone. He makes up a story, ‘oh, we were talking then all of a sudden said he didn’t feel good and stopped responding’ and within minutes he had a DM from someone in the subreddit.
An address, city, state, and full name.
Avery stares at it for longer than he’d like to admit, DMs back a quick thanks, and writes down the address. It’s far, Derek is in Pennsylvania and Avery’s in Massachusetts for school.
Hands shaking, Avery shuts his laptop and shoves it into his bag. It’s an old bag, the leather is cracked and the strap is worn, but it works. He puts his phone, some food that won't go bad, and a water bottle in the bag, then grabs his keys and leaves his dorm room.
This is crazy, he thinks, I’m driving six and a half hours for someone I’ve never seen before. And yet, he’s doing it.
He gets into his car. It’s a cheap, old 2002 Toyota Saturn, and it’s not a great car, but Avery will be damned if he gets rid of it before it all but falls apart. The car starts with a sputter, and Avery puts the address into his phone, puts his phone on its stand, and, with a final thought of his own insanity, puts the car in drive and starts his 6-hour journey.
The drive is long, it’s so long. It feels longer than it is to Avery, because he spends the whole thing in silence, worrying. But he does, eventually, arrive.
He arrives at a house. It’s small, there's a little dusty blue car parked out front, and it looks like no one has entered or left for days, weeks. It looks light every light inside is off, and for a moment Avery doubts he has the right house.
He shakes that feeling off, and gets out of his car. He practically runs to the door and knocks.
No answer. Avery doesn't know what he expected, really. He tries the doorknob and, to his extreme surprise, the door is unlocked.
He opens the door to darkness, basically all the lights are off.
“Derek?” Avery calls into the darkness, walking further inside. He makes his way as fast as possible through all the rooms. On the other end of the house, there's a closed door that looks like it’s a bedroom.
Avery opens the door and— oh, fuck.
The first thing he notices is the smell. It's clear that all the windows have been shut the whole time, and that lends to some rough smells, especially since Derek wasn't exactly leaving the room often.
Then he sees Derek, slumped over his keyboard, eyes open, but blurry. There’s blood caked down his face from his eyes and nose and on his shirt. His glasses are covered in blood, too, and there’s a gross, clear fluid running from his nose down the front of his shirt. The sight of it makes Avery want to vomit.
But he has more important shit to do.
He rushes in. “Derek?” he says, shaking Derek’s shoulder. “Sh— shit, uh—” Avery has the thought to check Derek’s pulse. It's faint, hardly there, but it is there. Avery pulls out his phone and, perhaps against better judgement, dials 911.
It rings. Once, twice—
Click.
“911, what's your emergency?”
“H— hi, um—” fuck, he doesnt know how to explain this. “I— I need an ambulance. My, uh, my friend is— he's passed out on his desk and there's blood all over him, and he won't wake up.”
“Okay sir, can you tell me where you are?”
Avery shakily recites Derek’s address.
“Alright, I'm sending an ambulance to you, I'm gonna need you to stay on the phone until they get there, okay?”
Avery swallows. “Okay.” He reaches out to Derek, wishing he could just magically heal him. “How long will the ambulance take?” he asks, voice wobbling more than he gave it permission to.
“It should be 5 minutes. The hospital is very close to you.”
“Thank fuck,” Avery breathes. “Um, sorry for swearing,” he says awkwardly.
“No worries, it happens.”
The 911 operator keeps him talking for the five minutes it takes the ambulance to arrive. Only when the EMS personnel are inside the room does Avery hang up the phone.
The EMS personnel ask him some questions that he probably answers coherently, but he isn’t processing any of it. All he thinks is how Derek might live. The nurses and doctors at the hospital might be able to save him.
He stands uselessly to the side as the professionals check Derek’s stability, vitals, breathing, and begin to move him onto a stretcher so they can transport him to the hospital. The only sounds he can hear are his own breathing and an increasing ringing noise that he can’t decipher the origin of. He’s escorted out of the room by a pair of gentle hands attached to a probably gentle person. One of the responders, Avery realizes distantly. They bring him onto the ambulance with Derek— he must’ve said something that made them assume he was an emergency contact of some sort, or something.
He sits on a seat with no seatbelt in the back of the ambulance, clutching the strap of his bag with both hands. Someone gives him a stress ball and he mumbles what he thinks is a thanks. He can’t take his eyes away from Derek, whose face he’s never even seen before today, yet he feels so much like he’s known for ages.
They arrive at the hospital in just under five minutes, and Derek is rolled into a room that Avery is not allowed into. He is made to stay in a sterile waiting room that only has some magazines, a TV playing some Hallmark movie, and a couple of those colorful toys with wooden beads for little kids that are usually in doctors’ offices.
His brain feels like it’s been shut off, and he realizes how long it has been since he last slept. He feels like the last sense of awareness and sense only hung onto him until someone with more authority was on the scene. So he just sits, alone, in the waiting room, squeezing a stress toy and listening to the muted sounds of the hospital. He sits there for god knows how long before a nurse with kind eyes walks up to him.
“Avery?” she asks gently, “your friend is stable enough to visit now, if you’d like.”
Avery looks up at her as she speaks, putting all effort into actively listening to what she says. He realizes he needs to respond and clears his throat.
“Uh, I—” He swallows. “Yeah, um, I want to see him, please.”
The nurse gestures for him to follow, and she leads him down a hallway, then another hallway, and stops at a door. She tells him that Derek is inside, unconscious but stable.
Avery nods and thanks her quietly before going in. The door is shut behind him, for privacy, he assumes. He sits in a chair next to the hospital bed and looks at Derek. This is the first time Avery actually gets a proper look at him, without any life-or-death situation happening.
Derek has glasses, Avery knows. He’s not wearing them right now, obviously (in fact, they’re in Avery’s bag, even though he doesn't remember grabbing them. They probably still have blood on them. He takes them out and puts them on the little bedside table.) He looks so serene now, without the blood running from his eyes, nose, and mouth, and without the blood caked on his shirt. Avery could almost convince himself Derek is just sleeping.
Almost.
Avery’s eyes well up for what is not the first time in the past 24 hours. Tears roll down his face and onto his shirt. He reaches under his glasses to wipe his eyes, a futile effort as they refuse to stop producing more tears. He hiccups and wraps his arms around himself as the reality of the situation hits him.
He’s sitting in a hospital in Pennsylvania, six and a half hours away from his dorm, next to someone he just met not twelve hours ago. He’s sitting next this guy he drove six hours for, who might not live, and it’s all his fucking fault. If he’d just listened to the damn warning and ignored the stupid mine, then none of this would’ve happened.
He wallows in his own sadness for a while, head buried in his hands. He stops crying eventually, and just shakily breathes in the quiet room. It’s about midday now, judging from the light outside, and Avery hasn’t eaten anything or slept in hours. There have been a few nurses, coming in every so often to check on Derek, that have all asked if he needs anything, but he said he was fine every time.
He’s not fine, not by any measure of the word, but he thinks he’ll throw up if he eats anything, and he doesn’t feel hungry anyway. He just wants Derek to be alive and to wake up.
Sometimes he’ll talk. Not to anyone in particular, just out into the room, to keep himself sane. He just talks quietly about whatever pops into his head. Minecraft, botany, biology, his family, his classes, anything.
He usually just sits in silence though. He has his phone, and could read or play games, but he doesn’t feel like he’d be able to take his focus off Derek enough or for a long enough time to do any of that. So he sits.
At some point, during a particularly long bout of dissociation, Avery hears rustling.
“...Avery?”
Avery’s focus snaps back to reality, back to Derek. He’s looking at Avery. Derek’s eyes are open and they are looking at Avery.
“Derek—” He nearly sobs. “You— you’re alive, you’re awake, oh my god— I should— call a nurse, or— or something—”
“Avery, please,” Derek rasps, throat dry from weeks of not being used, “you need to calm down.” He extends a hand towards Avery, and Avery takes his hand gently.
“Oh my god, fuck.” Avey breathes shakily. “You're alive,” he whispers, like being any louder will shatter this reality. “You—” He stammers.
“Me,” Derek says quietly. “Hi, Avery.”
Tears spill, yet again, down Avery’s face. He doesn’t sob this time, he hardly makes a noise, but the realization that Derek is alive and here and talking to him hits Avery all so suddenly and he has to cry.
“You…” He pauses, eyes sparkling with tears. “You punched me.”
Derek looks away, hand twitching in Avery’s hold. “I did.”
“You punched me!” Avery shakes his head. “I was trying to help you and— and you punched me off the edge! I thought you died!”
Derek nods. “I thought I did too, to be honest.”
Avery takes off his glasses, wipes them and his eyes with his shirt, and puts them back on. “...I should call a nurse, tell them you’re awake,” he says quietly.
“You should, yes.”
Avery nods and reaches over to the call button on Derek’s bedside. They both sit quietly, no noise but the sounds of hospital machines and traffic outside. After about 57 seconds (Avery was counting), a nurse walks into the room.
She checks some stuff. Avery doesn’t really see, or understand, what she’s looking at. Except when she looks at Derek’s eyes, that he gets. She asks Derek how he’s feeling as she shines a light in his eyes, and checks his vitals, and does some other hospital-y stuff.
She pages a doctor and Avery is asked to leave the room for a bit so they can do some more… doctor stuff. Avery doesn’t know what. They did explain it but the words went in one ear and out the other, probably because he’s not slept in over a day.
After some time— an amount of minutes, but Avery lost count after three— the nurse and doctor leave the room and tell Avery it’s okay for him to come back inside.
“Make sure to be careful with loud noises, and, ah… be gentle around his legs and lower back,” the nurse says, “He’s got some nerve damage there and his eardrums are very fragile right now.”
Avery nods. “I, uh, wasn’t planning on punching him in the legs, so I think it’ll be fine.”
“Right, I just thought since you two…” The nurse gestures at him. “Well…”
Aver stares at her for a beat, then his eyes widen and his face heats up. “Oh— n— no, we’re not— that’s not— he’s not my—”
“Oh my gosh, I’m sorry, I just assumed since—”
“It’s fine!” Avery stands, cutting her off. “Uh, th— thank you for helping him!” he stammers as he walks back into Derek’s room.
He sits on the chair, face burning, and puts his face in his hands.
Derek raises an eyebrow at Avery. “...you good, there?”
“Mhm,” Avery mumbles, “the— that nurse thought we were…”
“Yeah?”
Avery looks at him. “You… are you not, ahm, embarrassed…?”
“No?” Derek sounds almost amused. “Don’t act like you are.”
Avery blinks. “I beg your finest of pardons?”
“Avery, I have all the knowledge in the universe. I know how you feel.”
“Uh— wha— I— that’s not…” Avery clears his throat. He’s not wrong, Avery realizes, Derek knows, like, everything, and Avery is part of everything. “So that’s, like, um, fine?”
“Pff— yes, you idiot.” Derek sighs, smiling, “you’re a bit dense, in this aspect.”
“I— I’m–?! You’re—! I… what?” Avery feels like his brain might melt out of his head.
“Avery.” Derek reaches out and holds Avery’s hand. “Listen.”
Avery looks at him with wide eyes and red cheeks.
“You like me,” Derek says. Avery nods. “And I like you.”
Avery nods again, then blinks. “Wait, wh— oh.” He looks at Derek’s and his hands, intertwined. “...oh.” He nods slowly. “Oh. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Right." Avery covers his face with his free hand.
“Got it?” Derek smiles.
“Uh-huh.”
“Good. Now lean down and kiss me, please, I’m not allowed to sit up.” Derek jiggles the hand holding Avery’s.
Avery removes his hand from his face. He opens his mouth to speak, but the only noise that comes out of his mouth is a weird mix between a squeak and an out-of-breath wheeze.
He swallows. “Okay,” he whispers.
He leans down over Derek and kisses him softly on the lips. Derek’s lips are dry, and Avery’s probably are, too. Neither of them have had a very good past day (past few weeks, in Derek’s case), but it doesn't matter.
Avery’s skin is buzzing, like a hundred million gazillion electric currents are running through him all at once, and he feels like a star’s exploded in his chest. He feels like this, the kiss, is meant to be, and that his life was always meant to come to this.
He pulls away, and Derek makes a small noise of complaint.
“That…” Avery’s face is burning. “I, um, liked that.”
Derek huffs in amusement. “So did I. We should do it again soon.”
“Yeah,” Avery says breathlessly. “Yeah. We, uh, we should.”