Angel

11 - Jeremy

Everything was swirling.

I was in a place that wasn't a place, torn between reality and something else. I could hear sounds, but I couldn't process them; I was listening for something, but I hadn't heard it yet so it didn't matter what the other sounds were. My body was still, but I felt myself swaying, desperate to fall forward into blackness but tethered where I was because I couldn't.

I couldn't.

I was waiting for the sound. So I kept swirling, fitful and fearful, stuck restlessly in a state offering no peace, no patience, not even the fucking decency to let me lose a few hours of tortuous time.

Something touched my arm.

"Jeremy."

No.

"Jeremy?"

It wasn't the right sound.

"Mr. Whitlock?"

There it was.

I opened my eyes, dropping firmly into reality as I blinked up at the nurse. She had tired eyes and messy hair pulled back and held in place with one of those clear plastic ballpoint pens. Beside me, Mom had her hand on my elbow, barely masked concern on her face.

"Yep," I said. "Any news?"

"Ethan's stable, but we're keeping him sedated. Dr. Cook wants to check in with you in about fifteen minutes. She wants to run more tests but it's going to take some time."

Is there anything so fucking frustrating as hearing that?

"How much time?" I pressed. "An hour? Two?"

"Oh, definitely not," she said. "He's going to be here overnight, at the very least."

"Overnight?" Mom said. "It's that bad?"

I was wrong. Mom's apparent shock that it was "that bad," despite the fact that we were in the fucking ICU, was the most frustrating thing to hear.

He'd been feeling off the day before. Not sick, not puking, not even tired--Ethan had just been "off." He wasn't talking back, but he wasn't listening either. And I'd thought he was just... I was so fucking aggravated with him because I didn't know, I didn't fucking know it was... I thought he was just being moody. I'd asked him if he was in pain or if something was bothering him, but I'd just gotten listless shrugs and eye-rolls.

So I'd been annoyed. Until that week, things had been great. He was done with chemo for a while and he seemed to be doing good. So when he started pulling an attitude, I ended up picking a few more battles than I usually would have. The last straw was some smart-ass comment, so I told him he was going to bed early and without a story that night. There was some bickering and some tears, and then he'd gone off to the bathroom to brush his teeth before bed.

Three minutes later, he collapsed on the bathroom floor and I was frantically calling an ambulance because he wouldn't wake up.

I'd shut everything off and gone into focus mode, ignoring that every part of me ached with the guilt of being such a shitty dad. Once we were in the back of the ambulance and I was watching my unresponsive son lie there, I felt it. I was thinking how small he looked amidst all those goddamn machines and shit as they prodded him, and how big I felt crammed in there. He'd been holding Spike when he collapsed and for some reason I'd grabbed the toy. I was still holding him, the Westley in Ethan's stories, filling the back of that ambulance like I was Fezzik. Only I wasn't Fezzik, Ethan was Fezzik because he didn't want to be Inigo since Inigo's dad--fuck.

Just fuck.

I turned all of that off again, clinging to the disgustingly soothing routine of the hospitals and the paperwork and the tests, the waiting and the worrying and the quiet sound of footsteps on linoleum in darkened hallways. Ethan faded in and out, sobbing and panicking so badly during his waking moments that the doctors decided to sedate him. I sat with him every so often, but the ICU's visiting policy was strict and most of my time was spent in the waiting room.