Synchronicity

Chapter 1

For tumblr blogger my-friend-the-frog's lovely blind!Dirk and caretaker!Jake AU. Based on this comic (my-friend-the-frog) (.tumblr) (.com) (/post/6270410638 1/i-dont-know-how-author-notes), in which Jake is sick in bed and Dirk attempts to help him out by fetching some painkillers from the bathroom.

Crash. "Fuck." Crash. Thud.

The shattering of glass.

"Dirk?!"

A sheepish, muttered apology from the next room.

"Ah…sorry."

Then, crash.

Crash. You wince.

"Uh…I'm okay."

But you're already on your feet. Your head gives a nasty throb and a sudden lurch of vertigo threatens to knock you right back down, but you grimace and vault yourself towards the bathroom.

…Only to have the door promptly slammed in your face, and to hear the click of the lock catching.

"Dirk?" you call, then cough, jiggling the handle.

"Gotta take a leak, dude," comes the muffled response, but you hear him rummaging around in there, probably under the sink, more glass crunching under his shoes.

"And since when have you ever bothered to lock the blasted door while you're doing that?" You roll your eyes.

But there's no answer, just a minute or two more of rummaging, a muttered curse and a sharp hiss of breath through his teeth.

You should be more worried than you are, probably, but mostly you're just annoyed to lock you out, and too exhausted to see straight. Oh, and irritated that he's left you with what's sure to be one fine mess to clean up in there when you're feeling like so much shit, and you know it's unfair of you because he was just trying to help you and he's probably in there trying to clean it all up himself, bless him. But your head's so heavy and your chest feels funny and before you quite realize how you got there you're sitting on your ass in front of the door, head in your own lap, wheezing.

"Jake?"

You didn't even hear him come out of the bathroom. He sounds alarmed, and you didn't even have to indicate to him where you were sitting before he drops to a crouch in front of you and you feel his hands on your back.

"Jesus, you sound awful."

"….feel frigging awful…"

Lifting your head is a monumental effort- it's full of rocks, you swear, or snot more likely, but it's so heavy. You do it anyway, and when you do you start and swear and nearly have a heart attack right then and there because he's kneeling in front of you and he's covered in blood.

His brows draw together above his shades at your startled sound, but it's not until you grab his wrists to search for the source of it that his mouth presses into a tight line and he shrugs.

"I took care of it." His voice turns sheepish when you peel away a bloody and poorly-taped gauze strip from the inside of his forearm. "It's fine…"

"No, it's bloody well not fine, Jiminy Fucking Christmas, Dirk…"

You lift his arm closer to your face and squint—you didn't have time to grab your glasses. You don't see any bits of glass in it but it's a doozy of a gash on the inside of his wrist, long and fairly deep and definitely in need of stitches. You prod at it gently as you dare and he suppresses a grimace when a rather alarming amount of blood seeps down his arm and over his fingers.

"Come on then," you say, clapping him on the back. "Stitches. Now."

You start to stand back up, but too fast apparently, because dizziness slams into you like a brick wall and you fall right back down, the force of it making you cough several times. Hard. Dirk winces at the sound but snatches his arm away while you're preoccupied, your face buried in your own elbow.

It's when you can't stop coughing that he starts looking worried. Well, from what you can see of him through your watering eyes when you look up, wheezing.

"Hey." And he's reaching for you, his hands catching on the front of your shirt and smearing some blood there. One hand finds your shoulder, the other splaying out across your chest. "Jake. Breathe, okay."

Blood drips between you and him and onto the carpet, onto the knees of your sweatpants.

You manage to nod, eyes still burning, but when you suck in a breath it's like inhaling the mirror shards that are currently scattered all over the bathroom. What you wouldn't give to lie down right here and now and sleep. But another fat drop of blood hits the carpet, and you mentally shake yourself, take as deep a breath as you through all the gunk in your lungs, and vault yourself unceremoniously off the floor.

He gets up too, kind of just standing there and shifting from foot to foot, as though he's not quite sure what to do. You tell him to stay put for just a tick and head past him into the bathroom, feeling nauseous as you sidestep the mess of blood and shattered glass on the floor. One pane of mirrored glass from the medicine cabinet is almost completely missing now, save one long thin sliver still stuck in the frame, which must have been where Dirk cut himself. You realize with a twinge of guilt what must have happened—that mirror pane had been loose for some time now, and you hadn't thought to repair it. All it would have taken for the whole thing to fall out and smash to bits would be somebody opening or shutting it a little too hard, and you'd completely forgotten to say anything. Hell, even a bit of masking tape probably would have done the trick, or at least prevented this from happening.

There are a few red fingerprints on the first aid kit sitting open on the toilet seat. There was a kit in every bathroom where Dirk could get to it, an emergency measure, every item inside with its own printed label in neat braille.

But even so it's apparent that Dirk needs more medical attention that he could administer to himself out of a box under the bathroom sink, even if he could see what he was doing.

You grab a fresh towel and re-emerge from the bathroom, and you figure he heard the linen closet door open because he snatches the towel out of your hands before you even get the chance to fold it and press it against the wound.

"Keep pressure on that," you say, and cough again, as he swathes his arm in the towel and hugs it to his chest, and he snorts dismissively but doesn't smile.

You let out a long breath that makes your throat tickle and ache, and nearly start coughing again, but you gulp it back down, running your fingers through your own rather sweaty hair.

"Alright. Okay. Uh, let's just sit you down here—" You take his shoulder and steer him to the bed before he can really stop you, though you know he hates being herded anywhere—"and I'll get your wallet and med file and we can go."

But Dirk doesn't sit down, doesn't move at all, his face blank. You think he looks a touch paler than before—you can't be sure, but it sets your heart pounding.

"Dirk?"

He starts a bit at your voice, but the barest of smirks touches his lips. "Yeah. Well hurry up, asshole. Time is precious lifeblood here."

"Hah…right." You don't think it's very funny but apparently neither does he, if his stiff shoulders and clenched jaw are anything to go on.

But in under two minutes, you're both in the car and pulling out of the apartment lot, Dirk trying not to bleed through a second towel. You'd nearly ran out the door and down to the car once you'd scooped up Dirk's and your own wallets, Dirk's file, and the car keys, and Dirk had had to actually cling onto your arm to keep up with you and to keep from falling flat on his face.

But now you're regretting it, because you feel as though you're going to pass out at the wheel. When you'd first reached the driver's side after letting Dirk in, you'd staggered against the car door, knees threatening to buckle beneath you and cold liquid fire seeming to fill your lungs every time you tried to draw a breath. After one more obnoxiously drawn-out coughing fit, deep, wet and hacking coughs that nearly bent you double and probably woke the neighbors, you got in the car, clinging to the wheel with numb fingers and not entirely convinced you wouldn't faint before you made it there.

Your throat feels unbearably scratchy, so you breathe as shallowly as possible for the entirety of the ride—through your mouth, because your blasted nose is too damn stopped up—afraid of setting off another coughing fit and wrecking the car.

Dirk already looks concerned—funny, considering he's the one with his own blood seeping through that second towel pressed to his arms and leaking out between his pale fingers.

The corner of his mouth is tugged downwards, and he's holding himself very rigid in the seat. "Your breathing sounds fucking gross, dude," street lamps reflecting off his shades. "And loud, damn, you want to make me deaf too?" His voice is terse and anybody else might think he's just being a prick but you know better.

You roll your eyes. "Well, do forgive me my necessary bodily functions, Strider."

"You know you could have called Jane or Roxy to take a look instead of trapping me in here with you and your airborne viruses…"

"You need stitches," you counter.

"And you need to be in bed."

"I've told you, it's only a bit of chest cough, and I'll pop in to the doctor's if it's not all sorted by Monday but I'm sure I'll be right as rain soon enough…" It doesn't help your case that saying that many words that quickly all at once leaves you winded, and you can feel another cough building in your chest. His eyebrows disappear beneath his hairline but he doesn't say anything.

A minute passes in silence. Dirk is facing forward, his foot tapping an agitated rhythm into the car floor. A sidelong glance tells you that he's definitely paler than before, and you nudge the gas. His tapping foot aside, he's holding himself very still, his back very straight in the seat.

"Alright there, chap?" You frown when he doesn't answer, doesn't make any indication that he heard you. "We're nearly there now."

"Well I'd better be on the brink of death here because I did have shit to do tonight," he mutters through clenched teeth. "Got a deadline coming up and I don't particularly want to be sitting around for hours telling you how to fill out my release forms." He huffs. "Stupid fucking mirror…what was it stuck in there with, Elmer's glue?"

"Might as well have been," you say, apologetic, because he was getting painkillers for you at the time. "Though, to be fair, it is my bathroom. You're never in there."

"It's my favorite fucking room." His voice is too pissy to be deadpan.

"Duly noted," you say carefully as you pull into the hospital lot. You're not entirely convinced anymore that it's your coughing that's got him so on edge.

When the car stops, he jumps. You touch his shoulder gently, and he jumps again.

"…Dirk?"

"What." His voice is taut, like a rubber band about to snap.

You reach into the center console to hand him one of his collapsible canes, but his uninjured arm darts out and he snatches it up.

"What's wrong?" you tease lightly as you open the car door for him. "Don't tell me a few lousy needles are going to send the great Dirk Strider running for the hills."

He calls you a dick under his breath and shuts the door with unnecessary force behind him. And normally you'd laugh at him, but you don't, not only because it would have you on your knees on the asphalt coughing and wheezing, but because dread has sunk into the pit of your stomach like a cold lead weight.

Wordlessly he grips the arm of your jacket, folding his injured arm tightly against his chest. He's still standing stiff as a board. You wait for him to open his cane—or to hand it to you to open it, rather, because he can't very well do it with one hand—but he never does.

When you start working towards the hospital entrance, Dirk clutching your sleeve and following along behind you with his head ducked, almost meek, your dread just about quadruples.

You'd had to park further away from the entrance than you would have liked, and the chill of the night air is doing a number on your thoroughly abused lungs. You have to hold your breath a few times along the way to avoid yet another coughing fit—just what you need when you're about to enter a building full of sick and injured people, you think, and you vaguely wonder if they'll kick you to the curb if they catch you at it. Or stick a surgical mask on your face or something.

By the time you're seated in the ER lobby, you feel lightheaded. There's a stack of white forms on a clipboard sitting on your knees that you're trying not to think too hard about. Your face is tingling, and your limbs are a bit numb, and really you just want to sleep. You'd been completely out of breath while trying to explain to the receptionist just what had happened, but you think she thinks you're probably just frantic. Dirk's standing stiffly beside you, offering no input aside from the occasional nod, but he does look rather a mess himself right now, bleeding like the dickens all over his shirt and the rumpled towels on his arm.

You still haven't filled out a single line of paperwork when a nurse appears to usher the both of you back into the emergency room. You wearily tuck the clipboard under your arm—you'll have to fill them out while they're stitching him up, and maybe you can let him talk you through them. When you'd looked at them earlier you'd found you were so exhausted that all the words were running into each other and every which-way all over the page, so you'd given it up and found yourself staring blankly at the nubby carpet while Dirk's foot tap-tap-tapped beside you…

Dirk trails along behind you again in the ER hallway, silently, two fingers hooked in your jacket pocket. But then his hand slides into yours, his fingers freezing and his palm sweaty, and you're so startled that you nearly stop walking. When he falls in step beside you and you turn to look at him, he very pointedly turns his face away in the direction of the wall. You squeeze his fingers as you're both ushered in the direction of an examination area, but you're too stunned to do much else.

Flirtation is no big deal to Dirk, particularly flirtation with you, and showering you with public displays of gratuitous affection for his own amusement has proven to be one of his favorite pastimes. A few days ago he'd grabbed your ass in the supermarket checkout line, and last week he'd slung an arm around your shoulders while you'd sat side by side with him on a park bench, and he'd called you "babe" for the better part of the day. But he was messing with you—he loved it when you got flustered and irritated and it only egged him on. Roxy had implied in passing that he was gay ages ago, but when you'd asked him about it—"Wait, so you're gay?"—the only answer you'd received, with a smirk and a voice dripping with sarcasm, was "Wait, so you're straight?" And you'd let it go, knowing he'd never give you any sort of direct answer, and you'd batted away his frequent advances with as much good grace and benefit of the doubt as you could muster. And you ignored the quickening of your own pulse and the dry mouth and the flush of heat in your face that occurred sometimes, because he was joking, wasn't he, and you were his caretaker and there were boundaries of propriety that you at least had to maintain even if he wouldn't. And you could sort out your own jumbled up feelings towards him on your own time. You had a job to do, after all.

But this? This is entirely different. There's honest-to-god desperation in the grip of Dirk's fingers now, something awful about his stance and averted gaze even if you both knew that all you'd be able to see is the reflection of your own worried eyes in his stupid oversized shades. You skim your thumb over his knuckles. "Dirk?" Your voice is quiet.

He shakes his head once, minutely, and he withdraws his hand.

Your head is buzzing and your chest is aching like a bitch by the time they start stitching Dirk up. And Dirk seems weirdly fine again, easily chatting with the doctor who is extracting tiny fragments of mirror that you hadn't seen earlier from his long jagged cut with a pair of tweezers. And you're glad for that, because you are officially out of the energy required to maintain a proper conversation. And really you just want to lie down. You've abandoned the paperwork completely, the clipboard having slid and clattered to the floor at your feet some time ago.

But Dirk has a white-knuckled grip on his chair with his other hand, you notice as the doctor snips off another completed stitch, and that doesn't quite sit well with you.

You don't realize that you've been dozing off until the doctor is shaking your shoulder. Startled, you blink up at her, to be met by eyes narrowed in concern over thick-rimmed glasses.

You open your mouth to say something—apologize, maybe—but all that comes out is an odd little wheeze.

Over the doctor's shoulder you can see Dirk's face turned in your direction, and he's frowning. "Still with us, English?" he asks, and when the doctor moves you can see that a clean gauze pad has been taped to his arm, the stitches completed. His frown deepens when you don't answer. "If you're nodding to me, dude, I can't tell."

But you're not nodding, you're not doing anything but sitting there and staring at them both stupidly, your jaw slack and your hands slack in your lap. The air around you feels very thick, and very stuffy, and you can't quite remember how to draw oxygen from the air into your lungs. Even if you could, where would the oxygen go, you hazily wonder as your eyes roll upward toward the tiled ceiling. Your lungs and throat are full, full of some burning bubbling choking fluid. And why is it so blasted hot in here all of a sudden? Dirk and the doctor are both talking again, and it sounds frantic to you, maybe, but it's like you're hearing it through deep water. The doctor's fingers are cool on your forehead and then the side of your neck, and you think you hear Dirk shouting your name.

You can't answer.

You can't breathe.

You can't breathe.

"Jake!"

You remember nothing after that.

...

You landed this job because of your grandma. She didn't live at the nursing home herself—she'd dryly informed you that you'd have to take her out back and shoot her first if you ever intended to dump her in a place like that. But she did have friends there, bingo buddies, who with some coaxing turned into bowling buddies, and hiking buddies, and skeet shooting buddies, and mountain climbing buddies, much to the amusement of the daytime nurses and volunteers. You'd accompany her sometimes to the home after your classes at the community college, but after nearly a year of this you'd had no idea that the home doubled as an assisted living facility for disabled residents of any age. Not until your grandmother had formally introduced you, with a conspiratorial little smile, with the home's only non-senior disabled resident.

You had no idea that Hollywood's biggest up-and-coming producer had a younger brother at all, and Dirk had given you an odd smile and told you that most people didn't, that that was by design, and that it was going to make your prospective job as caretaker a whole lot easier. If it wasn't for Dave Strider's name on your paychecks every two weeks, you might not have believed it. Dirk never mentioned him.

The two nurses assigned to Dirk at the home, Jane and Roxy, were both lovely gals in their own right,

and were ecstatic at the prospect of Dirk finally getting to move back into his own apartment, to gain

back some of his autonomy after his illness. Meningitis, they'd told you, without elaboration.

"It's bad for him here," Jane had said sadly, cleaning her glasses on her sleeve and shaking her head. "He'll sit in his room for hours on end…doesn't want to come out of his room for meals, barely talks to anyone…"

"I found him once in there," Roxy had confided sometime later, and she still looked shaken by the memory. "He'd taken apart the computer in his room. And, well, he couldn't figure out how to put it back together, I guess. Didn't really matter because the thing was a dinosaur anyways, but…" She'd paused and averted her eyes. "He was just…sitting there, on the floor, with all these busted up computer parts scattered all over the place and he was in the middle of it all, and he looked…God, I don't even know. I got him out of there but it was awhile before he'd talk to us again."

It only took a day of living with him for you to realize that Dirk Strider was a bona fide genius. Although it was his brother paying you, you'd been informed beforehand that Dirk did in fact have a job. It took some prodding before he'd tell you anything besides "I told you, I sell my body on the streets, dude. You'd be shocked what some sickos will pay for the whole blind-and-helpless shtick."

Roxy had finally taken pity on you and explained that Dirk worked from home as an assistive technology developer and consultant for the American Foundation for the Blind. Suddenly the hours and hours he spent dictating mathematical formulas and long strings of binary code into computer mics and headsets made a lot more sense, his scrawling yet more equations and codes onto the giant dry-erase board in the living room and making you read and repeat it back to him over and over while he paces around the room, weaving effortlessly around the furniture.

He has two Master's degrees hanging framed in his bedroom. One in Engineering, and the second in Robotics, and you feel woefully inadequate in comparison. You're the same age as him, and yet you're an underwhelmingly average student, and still struggling to pay your way semester to semester through community college and until recently, living blessedly rent-free with your grandmother. You'd been desperate to make ends meet when you'd taken this job, taking the whole semester off in a luckless attempt to find work.

Dirk, meanwhile, doesn't even need the use of his eyes to be utterly brilliant, inventing and developing the technology for some of the most ingenious accessibility technology to date. Flawless text-to-speech programs, braille printers. Even prototypes for programs that would directly, digitally convert web pages and e-books into a readable braille surface without the need for a printer whatsoever.

That doesn't mean that Dirk doesn't use you as his preferred substitution for all this technology. He'll make you read to him for hours, web page after web page of technical jargon and then laugh at you when you can't pronounce half the words in them. He'll make you bring back armfuls of books from the public library, and he'll mock your reading voice but swear up and down that at least you're better than any of the shitty audiobooks available out there. He'll lay his head on your shoulder listening to you.

For the longest time you thought he was doing all this just to annoy you, because he's so fiercely self-reliant in so many ways. He dresses alone. Grooms alone. Fetches things around the apartment alone. And always, always walks alone. You hover at a reasonable distance, particularly at crosswalks, but he's proud and you can respect that.

Except when he's hitting on you. But even then, it's Dirk who has the upper hand, and it's you who's left the blushing, stammering fool.

He fell asleep on the couch once, a few weeks back. When you walked in from the kitchen after doing the dinner dishes, you'd nearly had an aneurysm at the sight of him—you could have sword for a moment he was lying there dead he was so still. Dirk is a chronic insomniac and a horribly restless sleeper. You could wake up at 3AM to find him in the living room in an agitated near-trance, tracing lines of binary into the couch cushion and muttering to himself until you can coax him back to bed. But now he was so, so still—breathing so deeply through slightly parted lips, and you were mesmerized. You'd hesitated, as though the slightest movement from you might break the spell, but then you'd slid the glasses down off the end of his nose. He didn't stir, but you'd held your breath. His eyelashes were pale, his face thin with a dusting of freckles over a long nose. Your heart had risen to your throat. This sight was sacred, somehow. Not meant for you. Not without his permission.

You'd watched him for hours. You never told him. You never will.

...

Whoosh. Hiss. Whoosh.

You hear it, but more than that, you feel it—you're moving with that sound, muscles pushed and pulled in and out—Whoosh. Hiss. Whoosh. Hiss.

It's warm now, and bright.

Somewhere, you can hear a slow beeping sound.

And someone's holding your hand.

Your fingers twitch. The beeping speeds up.

The hand suddenly tightens around yours.

Whoosh. Hiss. Whoosh.

"Jake?"

You open your eyes, try to breathe.

You can't.

To be continued-