Book 3: You Don't Want My Love (Slash FanFic)

Ch. 32: Dead Horse

The plane trip to Seattle was foggy in my memory, my mind too focused on the ultimate goal ahead to even focus on anything else. Duff.

Steven and I rented a car from a company just outside of the airport, snagged a few maps of the nearby area, and took some twists and turns through the city until we reached the correct hospital. Duff.

A thought crossed my mind as we walked through the hospital doors, about how this was the same city that Kurt Cobain had come to live out his final days only a month prior. And now I feared that Duff would be meeting the same fate. This was the city where rockstars came to die. Duff.

I picked up my pace.

"Michael McKagan's room, please," I said as soon as I reached the front desk, not even waiting for the receptionist to greet me first.

"He might be under 'Duff' as well!" Steven sounded just as out of breath as I felt.

She gave us a raised brow, as if annoyed by our lack of a proper hello. Fuck you, lady. "I'll be right with you, gentlemen."

She returned to talking into the phone that was pressed to her ear. I rolled my eyes and pulled away from the desk. "Never mind, we'll find it ourselves."

Steven and I briskly walked down the halls, reading signs and taking elevators along the way. There was one point when Steven had to physically reach out and pull my hand away from the elevator buttons because I kept jamming my fingers into them, expecting the door to somehow magically open quicker to appease my impatience.

"Look!" We'd nearly given up searching the seventh floor, but Steven stuck his arm out to stop the elevator doors from closing when he noticed Duff's mom Alice being wheeled out of a hospital room in her wheelchair. She had Parkinson's disease, so seeing her here was almost even more alarming news. I figured whatever it was that had hurt him must be really bad if his sick mother was here to take care of him.

When she spotted us, she didn't look quite as scorned as Steven's mom had. Then again, her son hadn't been as screwed over by the collective band as Steven had been. Or perhaps he had, just in a totally different way. Regardless, I still felt scummy about it.

Alice smiled and greeted us as warmly as she could under the circumstances. I looked anywhere else but at her body, all stiff and frail in her chair. My eyes darted nervously all along the hallway over her shoulder. Steven took his usual Steven approach, with lots of smiles and hugs and "how are you"s and being really good at pretending we were anywhere else but here.

"He's in a bad state," Alice told us after all of the initial greetings were over and they had come back to reality. "He's hooked up to so many different drips and tubes...but he's stable for now."

"What happened?" Steven asked as I unconsciously took a few steps towards Duff's room, paused, waited for her reply.

"His pancreas had swollen and exploded. The acids burnt him from the inside." Her expression grew more pained the more she spoke, and you could tell that seeing Duff in this state had taken its toll on her.

"But...he's okay?" I needed the reassurance. It sounded like he would be okay, but I just needed that extra security. I had to hear someone else who was closer to the situation say it themselves. "I mean, he's not...?"

Dying. I couldn't even bear to say it.

She seemed to understand and, like Al, didn't bother to pussyfoot around with other needless shit. Duff's mom was a real saint. "He should be fine, but he still has a few days of recovery left. This may seem like the worst of it now, but I'm sure he will have an even rockier road ahead."

I'm sure she meant rehab. I frowned even at the mere implication of it. The only thing worse than throwing your life away for drugs and alcohol was getting off of the stuff and learning to rebuild. Duff was already pretty fragile, suffering from long bouts of anxiety and panic attacks. It was part of why he'd gotten addicted in the first place. He was going to have to find better ways of coping with those kinds of episodes, or die trying. I really hoped he would choose the former.

"Well, let's go see him then before the pain meds knock him out or something. It was nice seeing you again, Alice!" Steven had clapped me on the back forcefully enough that I started walking again. "I'm sorry it had to be under crummy circumstances."

As Steven and I hurried passed Alice and towards the hospital room, Steven muttered "Is that what it felt like talking to my mom? Because damn that was awful."

I nodded in agreement. We really were a spoiled bunch of assholes, always needlessly worrying everyone else around us with our bullshit antics and unabashed carelessness. Just how many chances were we going to get? I felt like we were all cashing out from the same karmic checking account, and the funds were starting to run dry.

Entering Duff's hospital room was a helluva lot easier than walking into Steven's. Maybe because I had less to be guilty about. I think it helped too that I was just desperate to see Duff and make sure he was okay. The rest of us were always dropping like flies and struggling to stay healthy, but this was the first major health scare that Duff had thrown our way and I think that was what made this all the more worrisome. Duff had always been somewhat invincible. He was as tall and unwavering as the LA skyline, and this was his San Andreas.

I sucked in a breath as we turned the corner and saw Duff lying in the hospital bed, a pale blob of a man with shocks of bleached blond hair splayed out on his pillow like some sort of wonky halo. He had been swollen for months, ready to pop if anything brushed up against him wrong. Apparently, his organs had looked much the same way.

"Oh no. Not you guys too." Duff's voice was breathless and small.

"Hello to you too!" Steven replied in a sarcastically cheerful voice.

"My mom being here is bad enough. But you guys seeing me like this? How uncool...." He was using jokes to pretend like he wasn't actually mortified with himself. Classic Duff. I guess somethings truly never change.

"Waddya' talkin' about? Almost dying is like a rockstar rite of passage," Steven teased back. "It definitely makes you cool. It would've been uncool if you had died like Sid-unless you came back, like Nikki."

Duff forced a smile at that, genuine but with undertones of sadness underneath. He was bad at hiding his true feelings a lot of the time, or maybe I had gotten too good at reading him. He might fool others, but to me, his eyes always gave him away. "Maybe it's a bassist thing."

"Well congrats on being one of the cool ones."

Steven was quick to flop into a nearby chair and make himself right at home. I, on the other hand, stood awkwardly in the doorway. I didn't really plan on leaving, but I also suddenly felt unsure of what I was doing here.

Duff was safe, but still hurting. There was nothing I could do for him except wait and watch and hope for the best, and that bothered me a lot.

"Hey," Duff mumbled in my direction.

"Hey," I replied back.

"It's okay, Slash. I don't expect you to do anything," he suddenly said, as if reading my mind. "In fact, I didn't want you to even bother coming here."

"Why not?" I had suddenly gotten a grip on my voice, and it rose with indignation.

"You know why," was all he said.

"Well we're here now, and we're not going to leave you alone," came Steven's quick reply. "Right, Slash?"

I nodded in agreement. "That's right. We've let this go on for too long. We've been a band this whole time, but we've all been acting on our own and only thinking of ourselves. From now on we're actually going to have each other's backs-like we used to."

"Oh really? It's that easy, huh?"

I felt the outline of the toothbrush as it pressed against my thigh through the denim. Al's swaying ponytail flickered through my mind like a banner. "No. No, not exactly. But it's a start."