John H. Watson, MD (watson_md) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-02-11 00:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | denethor, john watson |
Who: Sevastian and Alexander
What: Sevastian comes back from his first trip through the door. It doesn't go well.
When: Sunday.
Where: Alexander's house.
Warnings: Seizures and a fair bit of vomiting, if that's your thing.
Sevastian felt entirely groggy when he crossed out of the door in Passages. His head was ringing, and the faint lights in the corridor seemed to dance. Probably not a good sign. He had no idea how long he’d been in there. A while, that seemed certain. He made his way slowly down the elevator, out the door, and into his car. It took him a few minutes to feel confident enough driving in the dark, with all the lights, and that obnoxious cough was back. Maybe he should’ve taken his medicine before he left. It was hard to remember what he’d been thinking when he left. Only that the guy in his head had been insistent, and it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
The drive home took a while. The guy in his head -- Watson, how weird was that? -- was quiet, withdrawn, and Sevastian didn’t know what to do about it. He just turned the music up and tried to concentrate enough to get back to Alexander’s house.
Alexander woke up because there were headlights shining through his front door. He was only there to see it because he had been sitting on the staircase. He’d called into work pleading his absence with promises of a sick child -- the truth was too weird to be told -- but he’d already been late, he’d kept the other dispatcher in at least two hours longer making calls of his own trying to find a volunteer replacement, and he thought it was distinctly possible he no longer had a job. Or if he still did on Monday, it probably wouldn’t last till Friday. By the time the headlights were turned out and the keys were slotting into the front door, he was on his feet, leaning awkwardly against the wall. His cane was... somewhere. He couldn’t remember falling asleep, couldn’t even really remember why he’d decided to sit at the bottom of the stairs. To wake up for this moment, he supposed.
It was a relief to turn off the motor of the car, and Sevastian just sat there for a moment, leaning his head against the steering wheel before gathering himself and going inside. He fumbled with the keys, fumbled getting the door open -- why did his hands feel so heavy? But there was Alexander, and immediately, instinctively, Sevastian smiled. Then, his face sobered, turning sheepish. “I’m sorry it’s late,” he apologised in Russian, not even thinking about it. “I’m really sorry.”
“Are you okay?” Alexander blurted, color flooding into his pale face. “What happened?” He didn’t move from the half-lit hallway, illuminated by a light in the kitchen and the annoying night-lights his daughters had insisted on plugging into every outlet when he’d first started walking with a cane.
“I’m okay, I’m okay, just got a headache, that’s all,” Sevastian said, closing the door behind him. He switched the lock automatically, and the sound of the deadbolt sliding into place was a comfort, somehow. “The lights are kind of swimmy. I don’t know, I just ... I went to the hotel.”
“Your medication is on the kitchen counter,” Alexander said, the words almost automatic. He almost brushed over the end of the sentence. “You missed two doses, dinner and bedtime. I’d go take a dose right now.” The plan, half-formed in his head, was starting to grow in shape and dimension. All he had to do was take Sevastian’s key. There were a thousand and one places in this house he could hide it where John Watson would never find it. And if they wanted to go anywhere, they’d have to ask him. And there would be no more missed medication, no more unanswered phonecalls, no more of the wild fluttering panic that had bruised at his chest with too-fast heartbeats when the world started to fall in.
“Okay,” Sevastian said, remarkably compliant. He coughed a bit, and started his lumbering way to the kitchen. His feet felt heavy. Were his boots heavy? He couldn’t remember if they were or not. They didn’t seem heavy. The counter was far away. That was good, he thought. If it was far away, he wouldn’t smack his head on it. The thoughts were coming in sharp bursts, strange and disjointed and mechanical, and the nightlights were flaring strangely, throbbing and pulsating as he tried to walk in a straight line.
“Sevya?” Alexander asked in a soft voice, watching that erratic wobble. No. Too late. Too late. He’d driven home amongst the flicker of bright lights and a dark night. He’d missed his medication. Something was overclocking. Alexander struggled to limp towards him. Where had he put the cane? It didn’t matter. He couldn’t use it anyway. “Sevya, stay away from the tile, just stop where you are, let me help you into the living room.”
“You know,” Sevastian said in a strangely detached and sort of crisp voice, not like him at all, the vowels too round, the consonants too clear, “I really think I ought to lay down before it all happens. I estimate about five minutes if the lights remain low.”
“Stay there,” Alexander pleaded, the voice hitting him like a punch in the gut. “Close your eyes and stand right there and do not move, for the love of God.” He threw himself away from the staircase, his leg a lead weight behind him, propelling himself forwards with borrowed strength, trying to reach Sevastian. “I’m going to lead you into the living room.”
“Yes, that’d be best,” Sevastian said, in that strange voice, and he reached out for Alexander’s hand automatically, as if he could sense where it was. Fine tremors were starting in his limbs. Everything was getting cold, and he could hear the high-pitched whine. “Less than five. Less than five, decidedly.”
But the countdown ticker was in Alexander’s head, not Sevastian’s; forty-five seconds, or thirty? He counted, counted, silently, dragging Sevastian from the hallway to the living room, to the middle of the floor, the big rug on the carpet; twenty seconds, he was so slow, so damnably slow, so unsteady. “We’re going down,” he said, pulling Sevastian floorwards gently. How would he get up after? He couldn’t get off the floor. But he was out of choices. Fifteen seconds, Sevastian’s hands grasping at the thick soft piling as Alexander simply fell, the weight of his leg dragging him down.
As soon as Sevastian hit the floor, the countdown ended. His body started to jerk and shake erratically, his eyes rolling up in his head, and he made a terrible, high-pitched keen as the seizure got rolling. It was a terrible thing to watch, the way his body moved like a rag doll in the clutches of an angry toddler, his face vacant, the sounds coming from his throat animalistic and distressed. But mercifully, it didn’t last overly long. A minute. Maybe two. And then finally, Sevastian laid limp on the floor, his eyes glazed and half-lidded, unmoving save for quick intakes of breath.
Alexander forced himself to watch. It had begun as a young man, forcing himself to watch the seizures, to know what they looked like, to understand how the world was when Sevastian missed his medicine or got too upset or hit his head. It made him sick, every time, even though he had stopped crying hysterical tears of fear and helplessness a long time ago. Gingerly he dragged himself across the carpet behind Sevastian, laying a gentle, cold hand against Sevastian’s forehead, gently searching for serious bruises, any sign of a concussion. “You’re going to vomit now,” he said, in the kindest voice possible. “It’s okay, I’ll clean it up later.”
Sevastian slurred something impossibly foul in Russian, then convulsed, bending sharply in the middle. Just as predicted, he threw up, mostly miserable bile, and he panted and moaned and tried not to get a whiff of it. But the smell was overwhelming and made him gag despite his best efforts, and he couldn’t stop shivering, so cold, so utterly wretched.
Alexander didn’t recoil from the vomit or its smell. He just waited, and when the shivering seemed to overrule the vomiting, he pulled Sevastian away from the puddle of bile gently, into a sitting position. “Let’s get you on the couch,” he said gently. He would have to stand up. He would have to stand up, without help, without his cane, without two daughters pulling his hands until he could struggle to one knee. Alone. Maybe weighted. Pain preemptively shuddered through his leg, a reminder why it wasn’t a good idea. But he didn’t get choices.
“No, no, no,” Sevastian moaned in Russian. “Your leg, your leg, you can’t, Sashenka, you can’t.” He tried to curl up again, like a dog nestling down on his favourite patch of rug shamelessly.
But Alexander didn’t listen. He hesitated only a moment before he threw himself onto his knees. Pain, ice cold, like a stone knife, ground into his leg, and numbness radiated like spears every direction. He saw white, and the world rang like the high-pitched whining of a computer in the moments before it overclocked the fan and started smoking. He bit his lip hard, shut his eyes against the dancing shapes of the room and the involuntary watering, and dragged all six feet of him up off the ground, until he was standing, teetering, trying not to add his vomit to Sevastian’s own.
“No, no,” Sevastian moaned, but he was up, on his wobbly, weak feet, his knees threatening to buckle. But he knew where they had to go. Towards the couch. Towards, towards, borne on by the current, meaningless words jumbling together, and he could think of poetry and violin music and the smokey whisper of tea all at once as he stumbled, staggered, fell, right into the coffee table with a sharp bang.
But there Alexander was, surprisingly fast behind him, pulling Sevastian off the coffee table with arms made strong pushing his own wheelchair and dragging dead weight in first aid training. He pulled Sevastian off the table and shoved him onto the couch, unceremonious but efficient, staggering. His disjointed, lumbering movements seemed like the exaggerated disembodied gait he affected when pretending to be a zombie to chase his daughters down the hall. But there was no playing now; his face was that sallow, sickly color it had been in the baleful lights of the hospital, and his breaths came hard and uneven, torn from his chest in painful gasps.
Upstairs, a light flickered on. Soft steps crept towards the top of the stairs. “Dad?” Melanie’s voice was uncertain, scared, trying to be grown-up and trembling. “Is that you?”
Alexander’s eyes shut tightly, and he swallowed hard before he called, his voice raised so she could hear him, “it’s okay, kiddo. You can go back to bed. I’m not hurt.” His voice managed to be deceptively steady.
Sevastian made a low noise, a faint moan, raspy and dreadful in his throat. He didn’t move otherwise.
“...are you sure?” Melanie asked nervously. “Dad, what happened?”
“Sevastian is a great clumsy oaf and has probably skinned a shin,” Alexander called back up the stairs. He was trembling faintly with the effort of keeping his voice steady. “Go back to your room, honey Tell Alya everything is okay. It’s really okay. I’ll come upstairs soon. Do you want me to come inside when I get there?”
“Yes please,” Melanie said meekly. After a moment later, the light upstairs faded as she closed her door. Alexander sagged, and nearly lost his balance, catching himself on the arm of the couch. Agonized tears streamed down his face and showed no signs of abating.
It took a while for Sevastian to even remotely come back to himself. Everything was spinning, his head was throbbing, and he was so cold, so impossibly cold. His eyes slid open as if they were made of sandpaper, and even still, he couldn’t quite see.
Alexander gradually lowered himself onto the end of the couch, and tried to focus his way through the white blossoms of pain that kept making his leg involuntarily twitch by systematically going through Sevastian’s jacket pockets. It was something to think about. Not the housekeys. Not the cell phone. Not the little brown book. His fingers closed over the skeleton key in the far jacket pocket and he removed it, sliding it deep into the pocket of his jeans.
“Sashenka?” Sevastian slurred. The words weren’t right in his mouth, the Russian heavy, faltering. “I don’t ... am I on the couch? Did I get home?”
“Yeah,” Alexander whispered. He didn’t trust his voice. Not when he couldn’t stop crying. “You’re home. I’m sorry, I left your pills in the kitchen.”
“That’s good,” Sevastian said. A long pause followed. “My head hurts. I’m sorry I didn’t call you back. I should’ve. I’m a bad trophy husband.”
Alexander didn’t say anything. He watched his leg jump, as if being shocked with something electric, and tried to wipe away the tears that kept coming. He wasn’t sobbing, and they didn’t fall in any hurry, just steadily, new tears accompanying each jerk of his leg as his crushed and pinched nerves tried, unceasingly, to understand what had happened to his leg. “It’s a good thing I love you,” he said, in tired English. “Never do that to me again. Do not make me wonder if you are alive or dead or...” he trailed off, not even knowing what he had been trying to say.
“I just wanted to see what the hotel was about,” Sevastian said, then paused. As his brain spun tiredly, trying to grasp at what Alexander had said, he fumbled into English. “Wait. Wait, you love me? Really?” His lips were crawling into a smile. “Really?”
Alexander pressed his hands against his face. His heart was still running, inappropriately fast, mismatched to sitting in the dark room, like it thought he was trying to outrun supervillains with giant monstrous lobster minions. The tears kept coming. Wouldn’t they ever stop? Silence, awkward, loaded, restless, was sitting in his mouth and he couldn’t swallow it down to speak. He cleared his throat, once, twice. A spike of pain jerked his leg so hard his foot made an audible noise coming down, like a kick. “No, I sat up all night hardly breathing because I hate you,” he spat, sharp with pain. “Duh.”
“Is this ...” Sevastian started, then floundered. He couldn’t make his mouth say what he was thinking, and his heart was slugging uncomfortably along. “This is the same as usual, I’m your best friend, like your brother, you feel familial towards me.”
“Don’t insult yourself by saying you’re like my brother.” Alexander replied. He wanted to yell. That wouldn’t help with pretending everything was fine. He forced his wavering voice to make a stab at normality, but it only came out flat. “He used to sit on me and shove the pillow in my face trying to suffocate me. What the hell, Sevya?”
“I don’t know. I don’t ... I have this lingering awful sense that everything and everyone important to me is going to vanish and it’s awful and I love you, too, you idiot, I just didn’t come with a factory-installed feelings chip, that wasn’t handed out in the breadlines,” Sevastian said all in a rush, then he closed his eyes. “I feel sick again.”
“I cannot get your medication,” Alexander replied, and the words sounded desperate and upset, instead of angry. “It’s on the counter. You have to make it yourself. Unless you want me to call for Mels.”
“If I get up, I’m going to fall again. My temple is throbbing. The room is spinning. I’ll just sleep it off here. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you deserve better than this, I’m so sorry,” Sevastian apologised, his own brand of desperation creeping in.
Of course I deserve better, Alexander thought sadly, his mouth curving downwards towards a frown. I deserve to have died with my wife, not to be held captive by a couple of nerve endings that are stuck thinking I am still trapped in the car and Alys is always in the process of dying. My leg is trapped forever in 2007 but the rest of my body keeps moving. Even I don’t deserve that. Instead, he reached an awkward hand to rest gently on Sevastian’s forehead. “This is why we take our meds,” he said gently, not caring it was patronizing. “This is why we make schedules and stick to them and keep up with our doses. Give me a little bit. I’ll get off this couch eventually. I’ll even bring you the right dose.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sevastian whispered, but he closed his eyes. He didn’t care that Alexander was patronising, or awkward. He was beyond caring. Alexander was there, and not angry, and the rest was manageable in the face of those two facts.