You're choking.

Something is jammed in your mouth, down your throat. The beeping becomes frenzied, deafening, and you're scrabbling and tearing at your throat, your mouth. Your fingers close around something long and thin, snaking out from between your lips. Before you can yank it out, hands close around your fingers, prying them loose, then seizing your wrists and pinning them down on either side of your head.

"Jake. Jake. Stop it."

You struggle beneath that iron grip—you're dying, you can't breathe and you're dying, and they won't let go.

But you're weak, and thrashing around leaves you dizzy, and you stop, still gagging.

"Jake. Hey. Listen to me, alright." The hands wring your wrists.

You don't know what else to do then, so you try to nod, but when you do, the thing stuck in your throat shifts and catches a little and you gag again.

"Stop trying to breathe, okay. Relax. Stop trying."

Your eyes are watering too damned much to see anything at all, to look for the source of the voice. The smell of some antiseptic, or alcohol, burns in your nose. Your head feels light.

"Good. That's really good, Jake." The voice sounds relieved. "Okay, listen, so the thing in your throat? It's breathing for you. You need to let it breathe for you right now, alright? Can you do that for me? Stop fighting it."

You don't dare nod again, so you squeeze the fingers now squeezing yours, shut your eyes, and stop breathing.

Whoosh. Hiss. Whoosh.

"Good." A sigh. The fingers lace themselves with yours, and you know that voice. You open your eyes again.

And it's Dirk, leaning over you, pinning you down. Of course it's Dirk, you feel like you should have known that, really, but nothing makes a lick of sense to your addled brain at the moment.

He's missing his shades. That's the first thing you notice.

His eyes—wide, pale amber—are inches above yours, staring right past you, like he can see through the wall. They're ringed with bruise-like shadows, trademark of the insomniac but darker now than they've ever been. You squeeze his hands again and he gives you a strained smile.

"Welcome back to the land of the living, moron." Cautiously he lets go of your hands, tugging them back down by your sides. His own hands reposition themselves—one finding your chest, fingers splaying out over your ribcage, the other repositioning itself over top of the slack grip of your right hand.

"Pneumonia," he says at last. "And clearly one severe-assed case of it, too. You should have said something," he adds, quieter, through his teeth.

Well the buggerfucking hell if I knew that, you think, but you squeeze his hand anyway. You're not sure if he takes it as a yes-I-should-have or an I'm-sorry, but his expression softens nonetheless.

"Goddamn, though, with every shitty pun intended, you should see yourself right now." His fingers skim your chest, carefully, tracing bumps and lines snaking beneath what must be a hospital gown. "You're hooked up to a metric shit ton of hardware here." His fingertips sweep the palm of your hand, brush up the inside of your forearm and into the inner crook of your elbow. There's an IV there, hooked up and taped in place, you can see now. He draws his index finger across the edge of the tape—it tickles, and goose bumps erupt on your arm.

"At least you had the courtesy not to pass the fuck out until I was all stitched up," he says then, holding up his old forearm, where there's still a long, neat white gauze rectangle taped in place, extending nearly from elbow to wrist. He's wearing blue, you notice. A pair of loose, wrinkled hospital scrubs. Now that he's let go of your hand you reach for the hem of his shirt, your brow furrowing.

His hand lights over yours and he seems to understand. "Oh. Hah. Sexy, right?" He grabs your fingers and moves them a little lower, to his hip. "Feel that elastic waistband…"

His smile fades and he lets your hand drop. "I woke up in these yesterday."

Yesterday?

You seize his hand again, squeeze it hard, twice, hoping he gets the message and tells you just what the fuck had happened.

He says nothing, his mouth a taut line, and lifts his chin a bit. Sits up straighter. You can't see those pale orange eyes anymore from where you're lying. "They tell me you're doing a lot better," he says, and something in his voice sounds odd, shut off. "Your fever's down." He takes his hand out of yours and places both of his on either side of your chest. "Your lungs are a lot clearer than they were. See?"

Hiss. Whoosh. Hiss.

His hands rove up and down your chest, slowly, meticulously, mindful of the wires taped there. "Feels a hell of a lot better than it did."

And it does, now that you can breathe unobstructed, and you can only feel a vague fraction of that painful, bubbling gunk that had been stuck tight down in your lungs. You wonder if they've drugged you. Probably. But, you wonder, exasperated, it feels a hell of a lot better now than it did when, exactly?

But he doesn't elaborate. A moment later gentle fingers are sliding up to the side of your neck. Tracing your jaw, lingering a moment to circle your earlobe before carding softly through your hair.

And your eyelids are growing heavy. Damn it all, Strider…

...

You wake again to Dirk talking in a low voice to someone you can't see. All you can see is the back of Dirk's head from where you're lying, and his hair looks soft and bright in the glow of the fluorescents overhead. His hand is still in your hair.

Dirk's voice is tense, with an undercurrent of irritation, and eventually you hear retreating footsteps and the creak of a door hinge. He huffs a long sigh, and you reach up and take his hand again.

"Hey," he says, turning back towards you. He's holding himself like a spring coiled too tightly and his brows are drawn together over pallid eyes. You wonder where his shades are; he never takes them of out of the house as a general rule. His eyes are a sight for you and you only and then again only rarely.

He frowns. "So the fuckers called Roxy on me…" he mutters. "Trying to make her make me leave your ass to rot in here."

At the mention of Roxy you crane your neck, trying to see the door—wait, then, was she just here?—and wind up jostling the breathing tube and gagging yourself yet again for your efforts.

"Alright, relax, relax, okay?" He pushes you back against the pillow. "She'll come see you later, Romeo, I'm sure. She's not leaving here without me," he adds, bitterly. "And apparently," he mutters, "she says that according to them it's either home or the psych ward at this point…"

You blink. Psych ward? What the hell…

"But you're grandmother will be here," he continues. His shoulders slump a bit. "She was the first person they called for you, obviously, that first night, and she was…" He trails off, shrugs. "She sat with me for awhile while they were busy trying to make you breathe again."

You haven't let go of his hand, and he's brought it down to lie on your chest again. He says nothing for a long time. Then eventually he fidgets a little and huffs a breath. "Your grandma'll be back soon, though, she and Jane were headed to our place to pick up some things…so."

So…what? Your fingers pump his hand. Something feels very wrong here.

His thumb slides up to rub a small circle on the inside of your wrist, and he clears his throat. "So I figure I'd better tell you what actually happened, give you the quick and dirty here before everyone shows up again to give you the shitty Lifetime movie version of events." He takes a very long pause, looks preoccupied and transfixed by some thought, or memory. "So apparently I didn't do so well without you."

You watch his face. He seems to have aged ten years in ten seconds. The shadows under his eyes are more pronounced than ever.

"You passed out, and when they took you away they stuck me in a waiting room with some poor graveyard shift intern to babysit me." He smirks faintly but it's humorless. "I don't actually remember much, but apparently I decked the guy. Broke his nose. And that's when they sedated me."

Whoosh. Hiss. Whoosh.

Your chest feels tight. Dirk's eyes are wide, glassy. He looks lost somehow, very lost and overwhelmed. Your stomach is contorting itself into impossible knots, and suddenly you wish he'd stop telling you this, and just lie down next to you now and sleep. Anything to get that look off his face. But he keeps talking. His voice sounds even, nearly nonchalant, but you know that he's fighting to keep it that way. "Your grandma came not long after that, I guess. All I could really do was lie there and drool at her like a stoned asshole, but yeah. Uh. It was nice of her, especially when she had no idea how you were doing yet." He swallows hard. "So. That was two days ago."

Two days… You feel vaguely as though you've been socked in the gut. So you've been out cold while a machine pumps oxygen into you for two full days?

And you'd left him alone that long. You feel nauseated.

You stare at Dirk, and he must've sensed that your eyes were practically bugging out of your head at him due to this particular revelation, because he pats your chest lightly. "Don't worry, dude. Another few days at most and we're blowing this joint, I promise. You're doing a lot better now." He pauses, his hand clenching into a fist over your heart. "And the hell if they think I'm going to leave you here." His voice is soft, but it has a deadly edge to it. You shiver. Just what on the good green earth had he been through while you'd been out? Sedatives, threats of the psychiatric ward…

"I hate hospitals." He laughs weakly, but it's an awful sound that makes your chest ache. "I really, truly fucking hate hospitals." His hand is trembling under yours, and his face seems to have gone as white as the bedsheets. He laughs again, a short harsh sound, and turns his face towards the ceiling. "I know I'm gonna live to regret this but for once in your life you can't talk back so what the hell." He taps your chest somewhere between your heart and your collarbone. "I don't think I ever told you about how I went blind, did I."

Hiss. Whoosh. Hiss. Your fingers are cold.

"It was…God, I guess it was a year and a half ago, now." He shakes his head. "I was getting ready to present a double Master's thesis. Was running mostly on caffeine and adrenaline back then, was catching maybe two, three hours of sleep a week if I was lucky. Didn't really think anything of it when I started feeling run down. Just pushed through it. Pretty stupid of me in retrospect." He lifts your hand up suddenly, holding it in the air in both of his. His calloused fingertips brush over every inch and contour of your hand as he talks, prodding, exploring.

"You know it's rare for meningitis to cause swelling of the optic nerve. More often than not you'll go deaf, and that would have really sucked…got lucky there." He lets out a shaky breath, his fingers examining your nail beds. "You should've seen the fucking ridiculous $5200 pair of headphones my bro showed up with for me that first week after." He snorts. "God, what an asshole…" His voice cracks, and he presses your hand against his mouth, shaking his head again. Something behind his eyes fractures. And something inside you fractures watching him.

"You know that douchebag was going to retire, then and there. Only two films in and he was gonna flush his whole career down the toilet." He's talking rapidly now, blinking just as rapidly. The sound of his voice vibrates against your hand still held up to his lips. "And of course he proposes this bullshit plan to me while I'm the one lying there like you are with a damned respirator shoved down my throat, and I couldn't see him and he just…" He gulps. "That motherfucker just sat there and cried, and I couldn't…" There are tears in his eyes now. You squeeze his hand hard. He clears his throat again, but his voice is low and rough. "Well, uh, as soon as I was able to, I told him to stop being a fucking idiot and that if he didn't get his ass back on the first plane to Los Angeles as soon as I was better that I'd never talk to him again." He gives a small watery chuckle. "He didn't like that. But he listened, on one condition. I told him to give me a year, one year to adjust to all this shit without him breathing down my neck, and if that after that I still needed somebody to hold my hand to cross the street and wipe up spittle from my invalid chin he was more than welcome to come claim the job." He wrings your hand a bit. "Good thing I found you to do all that though, huh?" He pauses. "Now that I'm on my own and working again, though, he's decided to extend that year into two years, and he knows that if he ever shows up on my doorstep before then having decided to quit it all for my sake that I'll eviscerate him and his body will never be found. And I swear that if I ever catch that dickwipe crying over me again I'll…"

His voice falters, and you reach up, slowly, to touch his cheek, swipe tears away with your thumb. His shoulders are shaking now, fine tremors running through his body, and he lets his eyes fall shut. "God, I hate hospitals…" It's barely more than a whisper. His face crumples.

You squeeze his hand so hard it hurts.

...

Roxy and Jane take Dirk home with them that night. As it turned out, the doctors were serious about the psych ward; it had been a full-blown and violent panic attack that Dirk had experienced that first night in the waiting room and the unfortunate nurse who had tried to calm him down had wound up with a deviated septum for his troubles.

"A change of atmosphere is in order," the doctor who had first treated Dirk's cut had said. "I'm no psychiatrist but a hospital clearly isn't a healthy environment for a long-term meningitis patient to return to, let alone one left with a disability. And I really couldn't say if he'd fare any better in the psychiatric ward. He should go home. Come back for a bit during proper visiting hours if he wants." Her eyes were kind and sad, exactly the sort of thing Dirk would hate to have directed at him. But there had been nothing for it but to agree. Jane had walked away down the hall with the doctor then while she drew up some referrals to a few different counseling and psychiatry centers, making sure to keep the woman out of Dirk's earshot.

Dirk looked livid when he'd found out that he had no option except to leave, especially when he was told that you had to stay another three days at least, and had one day left to go before they'd take the ventilator out. Roxy and Jane had tried to tell him that you'd be out of it most of the time anyway—and they were probably right, you couldn't stay awake very long because of the drugs they were pumping through you to dull the deep, constant ache in your chest, throat, and head, and a stubbornly lingering fever that left you feeling drained at all hours. But by the tone of Dirk's voice you'd have sworn he thought the doctors were going to do something dreadful to you if he left your side for a moment.

"This is such bullshit," he'd muttered in your ear before he left, then kissed your forehead. "I'll be back tomorrow, alright? I promise."

His eyes were still tinged with red from earlier, but he'd jammed his shades on his face before he'd turn back towards Jane and Roxy. Roxy had slung an arm around his west and he'd let her walk him out of the room that way. Jane had given you a sweet smile and waved before following them.

Your grandma's the one sitting by you holding your hand now. When she'd arrived, you'd sat through a perfectly warranted lecture on the need to take proper care of yourself, and to "suck it up and go to the damned doctor when you're sick once in awhile, why don't you." You'd tried your best to look contrite, and considering that you had a breathing tube sticking out of your mouth, you must've looked a pitiful enough sight to dispel her worried anger. She'd given you a warm look, ruffled your hair and slid your spare pair of glasses from home onto your nose, and had then launched into some colorful anecdote about last week's bungee jumping excursion with her bingo buddies to take your mind off things.

Her cell phone rings once, hours later while you're both dozing off. She says it's for you and hands it over, and you hold it up to your ear with an arm that feels rather like lead.

"Hey, English."

You can't talk back, but you fall asleep listening to the sound of Dirk's voice.

*End*