Waking
Acepilot

8 - * - * - 8

If there was a part of him that didn't hurt, Phil DeVille couldn't name it.

He came to slowly, hearing what sounded like a tiny little vaccum cleaner running very close by his left ear.

"That's loud," he said, except he didn't say it, because he couldn't - he made some noise but he was quite certain that it wasn't what he intended it to be.

"Is he okay?" a familiar voice cut across him, louder than he'd ever heard anything, and he winced from the noise. His body did not seem interesting in obeying his commands, however, and he had to give up on that concept and endure the noise.

"He'll be fine," another, softer voice offered. "He had to inhale the anaesthetic and it hasn't particularly agreed with him. He'll come out of it in a few minutes."

"Good." He finally identified the first voice as Chaz Finster's - albeit he had never heard his stepfather sound quite so concerned in his life.

Phil contemplated speaking to the other people in the room but decided he wasn't quite ready yet, and decided to start with wiggling his toes. It was a slow start but eventually he felt them moving around under the sheet so he guessed he must have been successful. He moved his way up to his fingers and onto his elbows and finally his eyebrows before attempting to talk.

"Hey," he uttered. "Water?"

"Can he?" Chaz asked.

"Only a little," the other voice told him. Phil couldn't bring himself to turn his head - or even, he realised belatedly, open his eyes. They were still shut. He settled for deciding the voice was probably a nurse. "He's not going to get dehydrated but his mouth and throat will be pretty parched."

Phil felt a cup pressed to his lips and he drank, but there was barely enough to wet his mouth. He doubted that he actually swallowed anything - it had all been absorbed by his desert-like tongue.

"Thank you," he said, finally forcing his eyes open and watching as Chaz swum into view above him, albeit somewhat blurry.

"No problem," Chaz told him.

"I'll be back," the nurse's voice said, and Phil wasn't sure if he imagined that it was fading from his hearing.

As sensations other than pain returned, Phil became vaguely aware of a wet patch by his head. He didn't so much turn his head as allow his neck to roll with gravity, leaving him staring at Chaz, who was seated next to his bed. "Did you spill the water?"

Chaz shook his head. "You threw up while you were waking up."

"Oh," Phil managed. "I don't feel well."

"You won't for a while," Chaz said.

"Where's Mom?" Phil asked.

"She's...she's asleep," Chaz told him. "She was feeling a bit stressed out and the surgery took a bit longer than they thought it would - "

"Is she alright?" Phil managed. Talking was growing steadily easier but his hearing was still fuzzy and he really wasn't sure if he was making all the sounds he was aiming for.

"She'll be fine," Chaz assured him. "She just needed to go have a lie down."

Phil ached with the absence of his mother. He had never wanted to see her so badly in his life.

"Please? Can you...can you get her?"

Chaz nodded. "Of course, of course," the older man said, rising from his seat - a move which made Phil dizzy to follow.

"No!" Phil shouted.

"What? Phil?"

"Don't go," Phil said. "Please. Stay?"

He flopped out a hand and reached for the side of the bed.

"Get someone to go get her. Don't leave?"

Chaz seated himself, slowly, and nodded. Phil squinted, realising belatedly that the world was probably at least a bit blurry because he didn't have his contacts in and wasn't wearing any glasses. But the squinting cleared up at least some of the problem, and he was almost certain he saw tears on the edge of Chaz's eyes.

"I'll get one of the nurses to go wake her," Chaz told him, pressing a button on a control attached to the wall by Phil's bed. "I won't leave."

"Good," Phil said. He relaxed his eyes to try and stave off adding a headache to the assorted other pains he could feel all over his body. "Am I going to be okay? Do they know?"

"They tell me it went well," Chaz said. "The operation was a success."

"Good," Phil said.

The rational part of him knew that this was barely the beginning: the operation was a success but that didn't mean he was going to be okay. He had cancer, and maybe the operation would get it all but maybe it wouldn't, maybe it would come back and maybe it would stay gone.

But the operation was a success, and that was a start.

He heard Chaz ask the nurse to go and get his wife, in the interminably polite way that only Chaz could manage.

"Don't suppose you brought my glasses, did you?" Phil asked.

Chaz winced. "Sorry, Phil. I'll have Lil and Chuckie bring them by."

"Thank you," Phil said. "I think I'm going to close my eyes for a minute."

"Of course," Chaz said. "They said you'd be tired - "

"You going to be here when I wake up?" Phil asked.

"...Yes."

"Good," Phil said, feeling his eyes drifting shut from the very effort of keeping them open. "I love you."

There was nothing but blackness for Phil for a moment, before he was able to recalibrate the sound of breathing, the beeps of the hopsital, the squeaks of beds on wheels and the imagined drip of IV fluids.

"I love you too," was the last thing he heard before drifting off into a particularly bizzarre painkiller-induced dream.

8 - * - * - 8

okay, so this is both the first new work I've done in quite a while and a bit of an unusual piece in general. This is part of a broader series, following "Dating" and "Moving" but preceding "The Hospital Story". It's largely based on my exprience following waking up after surgery, and also my experience with step-parents. I've belonged to blended families my whole life, and it's a topic I've rarely, if ever covered. The series has so far focussed on the relationships as they pertain to Chuckie, I wanted to look at the relationship between Phil and Chaz as they move into a new, very strange and sometimes scary dynamic.

This universe is much bigger in sketches and notebooks in my study than it is on - there is a 16-year-long plot for Lil to live out that I haven't yet been able to write to my satisfaction, not to mention a number of stories about the Finster/DeVille family in general. If I ever pull myself together I'll get them down.

My muse has been nonexistent for the last five months. There has been nothing for me to write, nothing has come to me at all, and as a result I've dropped entirely out of this world. This is the first step in getting myself back on track. And I'd like to thank the incomprable Starry Nights for the incredible new HA fic that gave me inspiration.

Reviews are appreciated, as always.