Chapter Text
Garret
"Don't be an ass, Garret," she laughs at my snarky comment.
"You love my ass, Wellsy," I laugh back, winking at her.
She rolls her eyes and looks out the window of my Jeep, but I catch her smile in the reflection of the glass anyway. She always thinks she's sneaky about it. She isn't. Never has been.
The radio's on low, some station Hannah picked because she claims my taste in music is "aggressively hockey bro," which, fair. Outside, the streetlights slide past in these long orange smears against the windshield, and it's cold enough that she's got her feet tucked up under her on the seat even though I've told her a hundred times that's not safe in a moving vehicle. I don't say it tonight. I let her have it.
"So..." she starts.
"Huh?" I glance over, just for a second, eyes back on the road.
"What if, hypothetically..."
I don't answer. I just wait, because I know Hannah Wells well enough to know that when she starts a sentence like that, finishing it is a process, not an event. She does this thing where she circles a request three or four times before she actually lands it, like she's testing the air first to see if I'll say no. I never say no. She knows that. She still circles.
"We rewatch Dirty Dancing tonight."
I groan, long and theatrical, mostly for her benefit, because we both know I'll say yes before she's even finished making her case.
"Come on, Wellsy, we watch this all the time."
"And it's literally my favorite."
"You said that same sentence last Tuesday. And the Tuesday before that."
"It's still true both times."
"Did something happen today?" I ask. I know her. She only campaigns this hard for Patrick Swayze on a bad day. Otherwise, she just puts it on without asking, curls into my side, and doesn't say anything about why.
"No," she says, too quickly.
I give her a look. The one she calls my "captain face," like I'm running a locker room instead of just looking at my girlfriend in a car.
"No," she laughs, swatting at my arm. "It was a good day. I promise."
I give her another look, the one that means try again, Wellsy, I've got all night.
"Garret, I promise my day was good," she says, and this time there's something almost exasperated in it, fond exasperated, the kind she only does with me. "Can a girl just want to watch her favorite movie with her favorite hockey player without there being a conspiracy behind it?"
"When it's you? Yeah. There's always a conspiracy."
"I liked you better when you were less observant."
"No you didn't."
She doesn't argue that one. She just smiles out the window again, and this time she lets me see it.
"Okay," I say, and I let the whole thing go, because I do believe her, mostly, and because some interrogations aren't worth finishing when the answer's just going to be more of her laughing at me anyway. "We'll watch it. Again. For the what, fortieth time?"
"Thirty-two. I've been keeping count."
"Of course you have."
"But you know what did happen, this was so funny. I was training the new waiter and he legitimately did not know what a ramekin was. Like, at all. I said 'grab me a ramekin' and he just stood there, like I'd asked him to grab me a live raccoon."
"Did you tell him?"
"Eventually. After I let him suffer for a solid thirty seconds, because that's the least he owes me for making me explain fine dining vocabulary at nine p.m. on a Thursday."
"That's cold, Wellsy."
"I contain multitudes."
I laugh, actually laugh, the kind that comes up out of nowhere and takes some of the tightness out of my chest that's been sitting there since practice this afternoon, the kind of laugh I only really do around her. The light up ahead is green. I ease us toward the intersection, only half listening for a second, watching the way her hands move when she tells a story, always a little too big, always a little too enthusiastic for whatever the actual stakes are, and I love that about her more than I could ever explain to anyone who asked.
"And then," she continues, twisting in her seat to face me better, "he brings the wrong ramekin. The wrong one. There's only two kinds, Garret. Two."
The car in front of me slams on its brakes. I do too, my arm shooting across her chest on instinct before my brain even catches up, some part of me faster than thought.
"Wow. My protector," she says, smiling like it's a joke, like my arm braced across her collarbone is cute instead of automatic, instead of the thing my body just does now, has done since the second month we were together, without me ever deciding to.
"Always," I say, easing off the brake, checking my mirrors out of habit, starting us forward again through the green light.
"Anyway," she says, already back to it, already forgetting the near-nothing that just happened, "he brings me the ramekin for sauce when I very clearly said—"
And then I see it. And I know, somehow, in the half-second before it happens, that it's already too late. Everything slows down, stretches out, the way people always say it does, and you never believe until it's happening to you. A car barreling through the red light at what feels like a hundred miles an hour, headlights swinging wide and blinding, and there is nothing, nothing I can do about it. I don't even have time to say her name.
Ringing. That's the first thing, a high, thin ringing in my ears, and underneath it my own pulse, too loud, too fast, hammering somewhere behind my eyes like it's trying to get out. For a second I don't know anything at all. I don't know my name, don't know where I am, don't know why everything smells like scorched metal and gasoline. Then my head throbs so hard it takes my breath away, and it takes a long, dizzy moment after that to understand that I'm hanging upside down, held in place by nothing but a seatbelt and what feels like every bone in my upper body rearranged.
The windshield is gone. Just gone, a hole where it used to be, glass everywhere, catching what little light there is and throwing it back at me in a hundred broken pieces. My hands won't stop shaking when I reach for the buckle. It takes three tries.
I fumble the buckle loose and drop, hard, onto what used to be the roof of my car — the ceiling upholstery under my palms, the dome light smashed and dark. Glass bites into my hands as I brace myself, dozens of small cuts I don't feel yet and won't feel for hours. I start clawing my way toward the broken window, pull myself through it inch by inch, denim catching and tearing on the frame, and collapse onto the pavement outside, into a puddle of something I don't want to think too hard about.
For a second I just lie there. The world tilts. Somewhere very far away, a horn is still blaring the other car's, maybe, or mine, I can't tell one long unbroken note that doesn't stop no matter how long I lie here waiting for it to.
Then I see the Jeep. Flipped completely, resting on its crushed roof at an angle that shouldn't be possible, and it's starting to smoke a thin gray curl at first, then thicker, climbing up from somewhere near the engine block.
Hannah.
"Hannah." I try to scream it, but I'm not sure any real sound comes out, just something raw and broken that doesn't sound like my own voice. I get my knees under me. Standing feels impossible, and I do it anyway, one hand braced against the underside of the car, and I half-crawl, half-stagger around to what used to be the passenger side.
The door is caved in from where the truck hit, folded inward like tin foil, metal crumpled in places I didn't know metal could bend. Through the shattered window, I can see her. Still buckled. Hanging the same way I was, upside down, her hair loose and hanging toward the roof, dark against the pale of her face.
Still. She's so still.
Unconscious. She has to be unconscious. I won't let my brain go anywhere past that word.
I know I should wait. I know there are people trained for exactly this, people with the right tools and the right training and steady hands that aren't shaking the way mine are right now. But the smoke is getting thicker, curling in through the gap where the window used to be, and underneath it now I can see a flicker of orange starting low near the dash, and I understand with a horrible, clear-eyed certainty that there isn't enough time to wait for anyone. There's maybe not be enough time at all.
"Hey. Hey, Wellsy, I've got you, I've got you, stay with me," I say, or try to say, my voice cracking apart in the middle of it. I don't know if she can hear me. I need her to hear me.
I reach in through the broken window. I'm half inside the wreck now, glass shredding what's left of my sleeve, my head so heavy I can barely hold it upright, black creeping in at the edges of everything I look at. I will not pass out. I will not leave her here. I say it to myself like a countdown, as if I repeat it enough times my body has to listen.
My fingers find the seatbelt buckle. It's jammed, or my hands are just shaking too badly to work it; I can't tell which, and for one horrifying second I think it isn't going to give at all — that I'm going to have to leave her here, buckled into a car that's on fire, because I can't get one small piece of plastic to release. Then it clicks free, all at once, and her whole weight drops into my arms.
My arm screams — actually screams, a kind of pain I've never felt in eight years of hockey, not in any check or slap shot or fight I've ever walked away from, a pain so total it goes white behind my eyes for a second. I look down and understand why. It feels like my skin is burning off because it is; the flame has crept close enough now that I can feel it against my forearm, and when I look I see that Hannah's shirt has caught too, a small licking edge of orange along her collar, and I rip it away from her in one motion, tearing the fabric apart with hands that don't feel like they belong to me anymore, before it can reach any higher, before it can touch her face.
"Come on. Come on, come on—" I'm talking the whole time, I realize, a steady stream of nonsense, half to her and half to myself, anything to keep my own head from going under.
I drag her out through the window, her body limp and impossibly heavy in a way that living people usually aren't, and we both go down onto the asphalt together, hard, my bad arm taking most of the impact so hers doesn't have to. I pull her into my lap, cradle her head against my chest, and the edges of my vision start going properly dark now, black creeping in from every direction like something eating the world from the outside in.
There's so much blood. Too much blood, more than one person should have outside of their body, dark and warm and soaking through my jeans, through my hands, and I press my palm flat against her hairline like it will do anything, like pressure alone can hold a person together, and behind us the Jeep's flames climb higher, throwing long orange light across the wet pavement, across her face, across the two of us huddled here in the middle of an intersection that used to just be a place we drove through on the way home.
I hear sirens somewhere, distant, getting closer, and I don't know if they're close enough. I don't know how long I have left before the dark wins.
"Hannah. Hannah, baby, look at me." Nothing. Not even a flicker. I press my forehead down against hers, feel her breath faint, but there, thank God, there against my cheek, and that's the only thing keeping me tethered to this moment instead of the black creeping in around it.
"I love you so much. Please, please wake up, Hannah. Please open your eyes for me, Wellsy. Please, please, ple—"
The dark takes me before I can finish.