Chapter Text
Tell me you love me, come back and
haunt me.
Oh, how I rush to the start...
Dex swears he sees a ghost.
The waiting room at New York-Presbyterian smelled like floor cleaner and misery, which Dex thought was probably appropriate. It smelled like a place people ended up rather than chose. He was one of those people.
The ER at midnight had its own specific misery. It was in the overhead lighting. It was in the way everyone in here was pretending not to look at each other. Which meant everyone was looking at each other, just slightly off-center. The way you looked at something you weren't sure was safe to look at directly.
Dex was good at that. He had that particular practice.
He shifted in the plastic chair.
Bounced his knee twice, stopped himself, started again. The Gatorade bottle, lukewarm now, sat balanced across his knuckles like it was once an ice pack and was now doing its best. His school lanyard had flipped backwards sometime between the parking lot and the intake desk. Elmwood Middle School, Physical Education. He hadn't fixed it. Small mercies.
The television mounted in the corner cycled patient numbers in red. Currently: 112. He was 117.
He unfolded his patient ticket. Folded it again. The crease was getting soft.
His bad hand had swollen in the way hands swelled when you introduced them, at velocity, to a school gymnasium’s maple hardwood floor; which was a thing Benjamin Poindexter, Elmwood Middle School physical education teacher, had done tonight at approximately 11:15 PM, alone in the school gymnasium, because a basketball would not stay where he put it as he set up the gym for the next day's lessons.
He was aware of how that sounded. He was also aware that it didn't change anything about his hand.
The gym had been almost right. That was the thing. Almost-right was its own specific category of wrong. Almost-right required correction. The cones had been evenly spaced, equipment symmetrically arranged, basketballs in a row that had taken him four attempts and was finally correct. He'd been about to leave.
Then one ball had shifted. Just a little. He frowned.
He'd fixed it. It had shifted again.
Fix this. Something in his mind blared, If this isn't fixed tomorrow doesn't start. If tomorrow doesn't start—
He'd fixed it again.
And then, right when he thought he was done, someone's leftover soda cup tipped off the bleacher where a student had left it three hours ago and crossed the floor line he'd already measured twice and suddenly the school gym was no longer a system he could manage. It was a system with a leak.
He didn't decide to punch the floor. That was the closest he could get to the truth of it. It just... happened.
He did not, now, look at his hand.
Across the ER waiting room, tacked next to a poster about recognizing stroke symptoms, was a flyer. LIVING AFTER THE BLIP: A COMMUNITY SUPPORT GROUP. Below that, a hotline number, and then in smaller text: You are not alone in returning.
He looked at it for three seconds, then looked away.
Returning. The Returned, they'd called them, in those first weeks. He'd hated the word with a quietness that surprised even him - the way it made five years of nonexistence sound like a shipping delay. He imagined the universe checking a manifest somewhere. Poindexter, Benjamin. Misplaced. Re-routed. Delivered. Sorry for the inconvenience.
One minute he was in Fisk's office, receiving instructions for something he no longer needed to remember. The next: nothing. Not darkness exactly. Not sleep. Just the absence of the next moment, until the next, next moment arrived and it was five years later and the office looked different and Wilson Fisk was in federal custody and half the city had grief the other half didn't share and somewhere across town, allegedly, Matt Murdock was still performing his particular brand of sainthood in a devil costume.
The Daredevil of Hell's Kitchen. The papers still said it like it meant something. Like there was something saintly about a man who broke your ribs in an alley and called it justice.
Dex thought about that sometimes. Not productively.
The government had sent him a check.
The Returned got stimulus packages, which was the bureaucratic way of saying here is money, please don't destabilize the economy or the social fabric, we are handling this, someone is handling this, everything is being handled. He'd stared at the check for a long time.
He had thought about moving to Puerto Rico.
An itch of a thought. A small house. Sun on a baseball diamond. Teaching kids baseball. How to swing properly. The only bullseye in his life being the one between a line-drive and home run.
There was a version of him that bought the ticket. He was certain of this.
But that was not this version.
New York was a cocoon and Dex didn't know what he was becoming inside it but he knew he wasn't done yet.
So he'd become a gym teacher instead, which was either the most or least dangerous thing Benjamin Poindexter could have chosen to be. The lanyard around his neck said ELMWOOD MIDDLE SCHOOL. It also said his name, which he'd stopped finding strange approximately three months in.
Dex watched the screen.
115.
He thought about a drink. He thought about a bat in his hands, the specific rightness of the grip, the way throwing something with precision felt like the only sentence in a language he was fluent in. He thought about not thinking about that.
Dex unfolded the ticket. Folded it again.
"Patient 117 to Triage Bay A. Patient 117 to Triage Bay A."
The crackle of the speaker was loud.
Dex stood up. He placed the lukewarm Gatorade on the chair. He looked at his hand once, briefly, the way you looked at something you already knew the answer to, and then he didn't look at it anymore.
He went through the door.
There was a thing Dex's face sometimes did when it didn't know what to do, some leftover reflex from when his expressions had been coached into usefulness. Not a smile. Not a grimace.
His therapist - Dr. Ramirez, Tuesday afternoons, forty-five minutes of her looking at him - had pointed it out twice. Your face does something, she'd said, when you're processing something large. She hadn't been able to describe it more specifically than that.
Dex was probably doing it now.
Triage Bay A was the kind of small that made you aware of every object in it. Dex sat on the paper-covered bed and did what he always did: took inventory.
Tongue depressors in a glass jar. Scissors on the counter. Blood pressure cuff velcroed to the wall. Rolling stool. The fluorescent light slightly too close and slightly too bright. Eight ceiling panels, evenly spaced.
His hand throbbed. He rested it against his knee and looked at the curtain.
Then, in the corner, a shadow shifted under it and his chest did something stupid and physical, like it had made a decision without consulting him to.
Dex saw...
A shoulder. A jawline. The particular way someone stood at a counter and wrote on a clipboard like the world would behave if their pen told it to.
He knew before she turned. He didn’t know how he knew and wasn’t going to try. The knowing had already happened.
Regina George.
His face did the thing. His voice something worse.
"Reg?"
The word came out before Dex cleared it. Croaky. Slightly embarrassing. The voice of someone who had not used his throat for anything meaningful in several hours and had chosen this as the moment to start.
The woman paused. Then turned.
She looked… older. But then again, so was he. Her brows furrowed at the file in her hands, eyes weary; with sleep and something else he couldn’t quite name. She's wearing scrubs. Scrubs. Regina George wouldn't be caught dead in hospital scrubs, except if they were branded by Juicy Couture.
She walked over.
But it was her hair… that surprised him. Crisp brown, in the place of the champagne blonde. He wonders how often she dyes it. Besides, this was the same girl who once told him that, “Blonde’s have more fun, Benny.”.
Her eyes landed on him. There was no recognition in them. Just polite confusion.
"I'm sorry?" She steps closer, professional smile already in place. "Are you patient 114?"
Dex was, apparently, just another patient.
"R-Regina?" Dex croaked out again, his voice coarse.
She glanced at his hospital wristband. Then at her clipboard.
"I'm Dr. Palmer. Christine Palmer." She said it the way you said things you'd said before, at this hour, to people in this condition. "Triage report says possible fracture of the fourth and fifth metacarpals." She looked up. "Mr. Poindexter?"
He nodded. He didn't correct her. The name on the clipboard was the name on the lanyard, which was the name his mother had given him, all of that was consistent and fine. He was looking at the line of her jaw.
"How did you injure the hand?"
He could have said he fell. It was late and she was clearly tired and she would have written it down without looking up. The lie was right there; simple, load-bearing, the kind that cost nothing.
"Punched something," he said instead. Because Dr. Ramirez had encouraged him to practice honesty in their therapy sessions.
Something moved across her face. Just briefly. He knew the expression. He'd seen it before, had seen it on faces that had more reason to wear it than she did, faces that had seen what he looked like with a target on his chest, and a weapon in his hand. She was a doctor in a midnight ER and she'd just revised the category she'd put him in and he watched it happen in real time and there was nothing to do about it, there was never anything to do about it.
Still, she hid the feeling well. He'd give her that.
"What did you punch?"
"The floor."
"Of—"
"The gym. At the school." He paused. "M-My school. I'm a teacher. Phys-Ed."
She wrote something. He watched her write it, watched her hand move across the clipboard, and he thought: she used to doodle in his copy of Hamlet like that and her penmanship was the kind that looked careless but landed perfectly on the line every time.
He realized he was smiling slightly; or as close to a smile as he could get. It felt odd on his face. It was probably arriving late.
"Dyed your hair, huh, Reg?" Dex said. Again, with the name that didn’t match the one on her hospital badge. It came out almost fond. Fond was not a register he visited often.
She glanced up, puzzled. The question registered somewhere in her expression as odd. The way a patient saying something slightly left-of-center at midnight registered as a data point rather than a diagnosis.
"I've always been brunette," she said casually, returning to the chart. "Experimented with blonde once, in college. Didn't like it." A pause, professional and not unkind. "Is that where we know each other from? Did you go to Columbia?"
"Before that," Dex said.
She ran a finger down something on the clipboard. He watched her find it; the address history, probably, the intake form he'd filled out on a tablet in the waiting room with his non-injured hand, taking twice as long as it should have.
"You grew up in New Hampshire?" Said plainly. Not unkindly. "I didn't go to school in New Hampshire, Mr. Poindexter. I grew up in New Jersey."
"No," he said.
She looked at him, a bit taken back.
"No," Dex said again, quieter. Certain, but trying to be… less threatening in his certainty. "You went to North Shore High, Reg. You were in Mr. Callahan's English Lit, junior year. Third row from the window." He stopped. "I sat behind you."
She was quiet for a moment. Her pen was still. He watched her face - the way she was weighing something, the way doctors weighed things, when the patient presented in front of them was beginning to feel like a liability.
She turned a page on the clipboard. Tilted her head, that familiar little angle Regina used to use when she pretended to listen. The motion knocks the air from his lungs.
"Mr. Poindexter-" Her tone shifted, careful now, the kind of careful that had a purpose. "Says here you were Blipped."
Dex didn't answer. He was looking at the small mole on her chin that he was certain had always been there.
His silence apparently answered for him.
She exhaled through her nose. A particular exhale - the exhale of someone who had had this conversation before, in this same room, at this same hour, with people in this same condition.
"I was too," she said.
Dex blinks. “You too?”
Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “Five years gone. Woke up in the same apartment, same clothes. Like no time passed at all.” She’s matter-of-fact, but there’s something brittle underneath. “Except time did pass.”
Dex winces, “Everything… feels different.”
She nods, makes a note. Doesn't look at him. "It must be disorienting. A lot of patients experience confusion, false memories, even—”
"My memory's fine," Dex said.
"—processes time and identity, and sometimes—"
"My memory is fine." He repeats, flatter this time. Like he needs her to know this. Like he needs himself to know it.
Christine - no, Regina - paused and looked at him. Dex looked back. He was doing the eye contact thing; holding it slightly too long, because he'd been told to hold eye contact and had learned the rule, the way a robot learns code.
"I know who you are," he said. "You're the one who's confused, Regina."
Something flickers across her face. Not recognition. Something else. Discomfort, maybe. Or pity.
"Mr. Poindexter—"
"You sat in the third row. You used to smoke behind the bleachers at the baseball diamond." His voice was even. It was always even when he was certain. "You forgot your copy of Hamlet so many times that Mr. Callahan stopped bothering to remind you. You used to borrow mine and doodle in the margins and I never—" He stopped. "I never said anything about it."
Silence.
"You doodled these little—" He made a vague gesture with his good hand. "Flowers or something. In the margins. I still have the book somewhere."
Christine Palmer set her clipboard down on the rolling tray. Carefully. Deliberately. She takes a small step back, professional mask slipping just enough that he can see the woman underneath. The one who looks tired. The one who looks like she's had this conversation before; maybe with a dementia patient, maybe with another Blipper.
"I have never smoked in my life, Mr. Pointdexter." she said with a whisper.
Not unkind. Not angry. Just very, very certain, and facing him with all of that certainty at once, the way someone stood when they were drawing a line in a place they weren't going to move from.
He opened his mouth. She beats him to it.
"My name is Christine Palmer. Dr. Palmer." Firm. Final. "I'm going to order an X-ray for your hand. Possible fracture of the fourth and fifth metacarpals. Radiology is in the basement." She picked the clipboard back up.
She was already moving toward the curtain. He moves a foot closer.
"Maybe you forgot, Reg." Dex said. He heard his own voice doing something involuntary. A kind of desperation he didn't have a name for and didn't particularly want to give one. "Maybe something happened and you just-- maybe the blip did something and you just—"
She paused at the curtain. Doesn't turn around. For a moment he thinks he's broken through. Then she looks over her shoulder, and her expression is so genuinely apologetic it makes him want to scream.
“Good luck with the x-rays, Mr. Poindexter.”
And then she was gone.
Dex sat in Triage Bay A.
He looked at the curtain.
The monitor beeped at an interval he counted automatically, against his will, four seconds between each pulse. His hand throbbed.
He did not look at his hands.