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“Ye-heh-eah! Outta my way losers, I got a ginger bitch to make fun of! Where’s Alastor’s room!?”
Hospital doors made for great entrances when kicked since they were designed to bounce open under force, but everyone behind this hospital door was too busy acting somber to notice. Rude. It was a hospital, not a morgue. They all did their time on the table; only bleeding hearts and drug salesmen bothered to look all serious about it every time.
“He’s still in surgery,” Charlie, an example of a bleeding heart, said nonsensically.
“What? It’s been like eighteen hours.”
“And he’s still in surgery,” snapped Charlie’s one-eyed guard dog. They were both still in their grubby, tattered costumes, which was really harshing the vibe.
“Are they playing tick-tack-toe on his organs or something? Hey, who’s running this operation? Hah, see what I did there? Anyway, what the fuck’s taking so long?” Another door opened without any pizzazz whatsoever, which usually meant - yup. “Oh, good, here’s the doc - get him out here so I can make fun of his ass.”
Ethan, who he’d sent ahead to get as many juicy details as possible while he was stuck cleaning up the fallout of Alastor’s big epic loss and Lucifer’s big clumsy rescue, exchanged what appeared to be too few words with the doctor to be conveying his message. Whatever, the doc would’ve heard him, what with how quiet the room was.
Ethan scurried over with a weird and deeply uncomfortable look on his face. Vincent’s amusement had the audacity to flicker.
“Um, actually, sir…”
The doctor had made his way to Charlie, and now there was sound. Charlie’s sobbing, specifically.
“He- He didn’t make it,” Ethan managed, choked up himself.
“Yeah right, if only! Seriously, where’s he at? Don’t let him hide from me, he’s got this coming!” He pounded his knuckles into his opposite hand. Once he finished his epic verbal smackdown, Alastor would be the one in tears.
Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything. Charlie kept crying.
“Ethan.” He prompted. “Stop joking around.”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s not a joke.” Vincent read from Ethan’s lips over the awkward roar of blood rushing in his ears.
“When.”
“Just now.”
“Where.”
“I-In the operating room, I guess? That’s usually wh-”
He zapped himself into the lights over echoing shouts meant to stall him. Like hell he’d be stalled. Like hell Alastor would get himself killed. Like hell was he allowed to die.
Useless loitering nurses jumped when he landed beside the operating table. There was Alastor, his dark skin ghostly pale, his chest ripped open and stuck full of the hospital’s stainless steel. There was his heart, bared, static.
“Sir, you can’t be in here-”
Nurses were nothing a little burst of D.C. power couldn’t send flying. They clashed and clattered back, out of his way as he hoisted himself up to straddle Alastor’s waist.
“You fucking faker.” He ground out over the droning note some machine or other was drilling into his skull. “I know you’re not dead. You wouldn’t let that disgusting loser kill you, and I’m gonna prove it,” he thrust his hand into Alastor’s chest, gripped the only proof anyone could ever find that he had a heart. “Rip my heart out, I’ll burn yours.”
The wet, slimy thing pulsed against his hand. It wasn’t all that hard. He had one of these beating in his nicely sealed up chest. He just had to mimic the electrical signals he could feel there and send them into Alastor’s. The droning note changed. Seemed too fast. Maybe mimicry wasn’t quite right. Maybe he should slow it down.
Alastor gasped, his eyes opening, and what the fuck, had they fallen for Alastor’s sham so hard that they’d stopped the anesthesia?
A groggy dark stare rolled its way around to him, his brow furrowing below the ugly hair net that hid his curls.
“Vin…cent…?”
“I knew you were faking!” Vincent crowed, counting to two once per second. “I’m not gonna let you fool them again, got it? You’re not getting out of me laughing at you for running away with your tail between your legs!”
The nurses were scurrying around like scattered ants now, their queen the doctor arriving and cutting through them on a path to the table. Vincent had shown them.
“Sir, can you do that from beside the table?”
“I can do it as long as I’m touching him for as long as you need. I won’t let him duck out,” he sneered. Why was Alastor so blurry, anyway? Must be sweat in his eyes. This was why doctors had nurses to pat their brows. Blurry Alastor was giving him a funny look. Not scared. He’d never be scared. Not relieved, that wouldn’t make sense with him around threatening to rub his loss in.
“You need to slow the beats down so he can go under,” said the doctor from far away.
“Yeah,” Vincent had figured, smartass, but how the fuck did he do that? How slow was too slow? He slid off the table, placed his hand on Alastor’s arm and sent the signals at a marginally less than once-per-second rate. Alastor’s eyes slipped closed, thank god. There was something in that look that he just couldn’t take much longer.
“Somebody get me a metronome.”
Alastor jerked awake and regretted it immediately. His chest felt numb and heavy and ached in an unnatural, mortally wounded sort of way. He feared what fresh new hell the rest of his body would fling at him once he got past that.
“Alastor!” Cried Charlie. Stage-whispered Charlie, more accurately, and oh good, just what he needed: chirpy, well-meaning clumsiness to grate on what few nerves weren’t already screaming. “Here, have some water. You’re gonna be ok, you just got hurt real bad.”
Charlie rudely lifted his head, forcing him to remember he had a head and notice how very much it hurt, and pressed a straw to his lips. His extremely dry lips. Alright, Charlie was forgiven, he decided, sucking down the contents of the glass as fast as he could work his mouth.
Feeling a bit like a plant, perhaps a vegetable, he wrangled his eyes open after she’d replaced him on his ominously spill-resistant pillow.
“Why are you whispering,” he charged her fuzzy outline. Probably no point in asking for his glasses. He doubted he’d be awake long enough to appreciate them, and his eyesight appeared to have gotten twice as bad as his last prescription while he was under anyway.
“Um, well…” Charlie’s hands floundered in the air much like the meandering fish the motion was named after.
“Your growth is asleep,” Vaggi supplied at full volume.
“Shhh! Not so loud, Vaggi! He’s been up so long…”
“He might want to wake up for this.”
“Mayyybe, but I don’t think he’s… processed his feelings enough to be gentle with Alastor.”
That was all very worrying. So worrying that he summoned the energy to turn his head, since he couldn’t have a growth on the side where they were standing unless it was as white as the rest of the room, small, and inanimate.
His growth was as white as the rest of the room, but it was neither small nor inanimate.
Vincent Whittman, an unmistakable outline, drooled by his left wrist. His left wrist, which was also Vincent’s captive.
“Ugh! Free me from his clutches.”
He attempted to do it himself but found that Vincent’s monstrous, grabby hands were more inescapable than ever.
“They told us you woke up on the table, but it sounds like you don’t remember being dead for four and a half minutes.” Vaggi drawled. Alastor paused. “He kept you alive for the entire back half of your surgery and he’s restarted your heart a few times since then. He stays.”
Vincent’s mad grin in his red face, his eyes spilling over his cheeks. His hands disappearing deep into Alastor’s chest. The machine tracking Alastor’s heart beating in time with the pulse in Vincent’s neck.
I knew you were faking!
Faking death. Because he’d died.
Yes. Unfortunately, he remembered now.
“I thought that was a bad dream.”
“Wish I could tell you it was, Al. But Charlie’s right, you’re gonna be fine. We were gonna go get food, you want anything?”
“I don’t think I could chew just now, but thank you.”
“We’ll sneak you some yogurt, how’s that?” Charlie whispered.
It was the morphine that made his smile so real, that was all.
“Try not to let the authorities catch you, I hear you can do hard time for giving an invalid nutrition around these parts.”
“What, reall… was that a joke?”
“Come on, Charlie, he’s high as a kite. Let’s let him rest a little longer, ok?”
It seemed he had a nice hospital room. It took more than two footsteps for them to reach the door and quietly exit. Alastor couldn’t work out the details of it since it insisted on spinning whenever he looked directly at it.
He could think about the room later. There was something closer at hand that he didn’t need to look directly at to know the details of.
“Vincent.”
Wonderful that flicking one’s fingers created so much force with so little effort.
“Ow! Who the fu- oh, it’s you,” Vincent rubbed his forehead as if he had any right to complain about the stinging impact when Alastor had a hole in his chest big enough to fit Vincent’s massive paws.
“What the fuck are you doing.”
“I am not done with you, asshole. Quit trying to run out on our fight,” Vincent snapped. Then he slouched in his chair, averting his gaze. “Go back to sleep. I cannot wait to make fun of you, but you’re half dead and I haven’t slept in a few days. I can savor your loss later.”
It seemed Charlie wasn’t quite correct about his emotional volatility, but he’d already known that. Nobody knew Vincent better than he did. Vincent would find his bleary, sluggish state too uncomfortable a change in the status quo to enjoy it for long, and he’d certainly be finished enjoying it if he’d been unconscious for days and semi-reliant on Vincent’s fine control over electricity to survive.
He’d accept Vincent’s answer, he supposed. It was an obvious lie, but Vincent appeared to believe it. The truth was too shameful for him to admit even to himself, and Alastor wasn’t in the mood to taunt him into violence.
There were no analog clocks anywhere anymore. Alastor rather missed them. Nothing signaled the passage of time as he lay feigning sleep under Vincent’s watchful eye.
“What.” Vincent snapped.
“Nothing.”
“You’re cold, aren’t you.”
“They condition this place to be below freezing and give the patients blankets made out of loosely stitched twine as if they want them to leave and they have a choice in the matter. Of course I’m cold.”
“It’s sixty-five degrees in here. Normal people find that comfortable.”
“Normal people are not in a hospital missing half their goddamn blood supply,” Alastor snapped, giving in and shivering.
“That’s… a good point, actually. What the fuck is their problem.”
Vincent raked his hand through his hair in Alastor’s peripheral vision. Alastor was sure Charlie would’ve brought him enough blankets to break the bed’s wheels, but ten layers of loosely stitched twine did not make it anything other than loosely stitched twine. Vincent either also thought this, or thought nothing at all on the subject of blankets before leaping to another solution.
“Whatever, this’ll be easier anyway.”
The bed dipped under the weight of a second, much heavier adult man. Alastor located just enough energy to rear sideways, away from the invading limbs of his most persistent fan.
“What are you- don’t you dare you intolerable disgusting harassing-”
He gasped, his hand flying to his silent chest. The heart monitor shrilled its trademark alarm, darkness crept into the corners of his vision, and the last thing he was going to see was Vincent Whittman’s raised eyebrows with both of his hands raised annoyingly in the air for some godforsaken reason-
One dropped back to his wrist.
His heart restarted. The machine calmed as if nothing of import had occurred.
The nurses didn’t even bother to come investigate his temporary death.
“You gonna behave now?”
Vincent kicked off his shoes and set about making himself comfortable in the sliver of space on Alastor’s left.
“What the hell did you do to me?”
“I stopped touching you like you wanted.” This close, Alastor could make out the unsettled frown that accompanied Vincent’s words. “They think I keep jumpstarting you. I figure they’d get pissy if they knew I was the only thing keeping you alive. Ethics of life support or something. Plus, even if you agreed to it, this is a lot easier and more reliable than their methods to keep you going.”
The chill of the room increased. The same chill he felt in the few seconds of awareness he’d had with Vincent blocking out the operating room lights, a tangible mirror of him standing in the way of the open maw of death. The still-open maw.
Vincent’s hand rested over his heart. The marginal increase in his blood pressure from the relocation of his living lifeline worsened everything. He must’ve tensed, because Vincent started running his mouth again in what sounded almost like a rough attempt at comfort.
“Your heart’s not dead. It’s trying to do its job. Just gotta give it a boost until it can function enough to keep you going. I think we can both agree nobody needs to know.” He took the liberty of tucking his nose behind Alastor’s ear. “Now shut up and let me sleep.”
“Won’t I die?”
“No, you idiot, I wouldn’t be sleeping if it’d kill you. Think I’ll be keeping this rhythm in the back of my head for the rest of my life now.” The last he muttered, his voice trailing off into slumber.
It was for the best Alastor’s heart was too battered to beat on its own. Vincent would’ve noticed the way it tried to squeeze painfully at his words.
There was no analog clock. The machines were quiet without warnings to blare. Only Vincent’s deep breaths marked the slow passage of time.
Alastor was fine.
Alastor gritted his teeth.
Alastor did not think of his heartbeat.
Alastor’s heart kept beating as Vincent slept.
Pent-up breath rushed out of him. Damn the morphine and its assault on his emotional control. Damn Vincent and damn Vincent’s over-strong heart. Damn the weakness in his own.
His fingers slid up, threaded over and between Vincent’s on his chest. Everything he’d done, and Vincent still couldn’t let him go. And he’d have to do more. What a wretched man he was.
“If only I could tell you…”
He bit his tongue. The walls were listening. Always.
But who would know if he turned his head, pressed his forehead to Vincent’s. Who would take it as anything but the human desire for connection after a near-death experience, and think that, drugged out of his head, he’d sought it wherever he could find it?
Just… for a second…
He nodded off without realizing.