Title: "By Water, By Blood"
Rating: T for sensitive moments
Genre: drama, family
Character(s): Douglas and Tasha, with focus on Leo
Pairing(s): none
Summary: It was a choice that he would carry for a lifetime. Two-shot tag to You Posted What!?
Notes: I watched the episode and welp—this came about. Well, actually, this came about when the episode first aired, but then I put off writing it for a while. The conversation you would read in the first chapter is actually the one that started this all. It just kept replaying over and over again in my head! So, I had to write it down. The second chapter is inspired by a chat 88keys and I had. I hope you like how this turns out, and thanks again for letting me have a go at it. :)
I hope everybody enjoys this too!
Part I: Lighter Than Blood.
The boy is a dreamer. He views the world with a magnifying glass adjusted to an odd grade. To him, nearly everyone is worth saving. He utterly disregards how having that mentality can put him in harm's way. At the first sign of danger, his inclination is to protect. He owns the type of courage that flickers and consumes brightly, though mindlessly at times.
He also tends to forgive too easily. With that critical eye of his, it only takes one glint of something pure and sincere, and it sets him off to reconsider his previous suppositions no matter the others' opinions on it. He does not allow the possibility of redemption to be defiled by things in the past, which, as he sees it, has changed as it reached the present. Instead, he seems to welcome the opportunity of having an ally out of an old enemy gladly.
The boy must be deluded.
Still, oftentimes, Douglas has been led to wonder if that conclusion is colored by his own guilt.
He dismissed the kid as insignificant not too long ago. He had looked at him as an object whose life didn't matter, whose life was not an intricate puzzle that is gradually coming together into a unique work of art. His life was not a life then; his life was just a presence. The kid was something that could be easily subverted into non-existence, and the method to accomplish that did not even chip at his previously coarse conscience the slightest bit.
How cruel he was then, reducing the boy to a something and not even dignifying him by seeing him as a someone.
Perhaps it is a good thing that he's changed.
He won't admit it, but he finds the shifts within him—within his humanity, within his very core—to be fascinating, and the unexpected influences from whom it came about have become marvelous spectacles on their own that he cannot ignore. When he came back into his brother's and the three older children's lives, he had expected resistance, which he met. His older brother tried to be accommodating, and the three tried to be very friendly, but there was still the tar-like residue of what he had done to them clinging in the air whenever they're around each other that everything felt strained. He also saw how tightly linked the four of them were, how they stood unbreakable, that he was left feeling lonely and jealous.
He had reasoned that he deserved it for acting so foolishly. He deserved to drown in his loneliness and his jealousy. Actually, that was a merciful punishment, for his being so greedy and dim and murderous, and he had no right to ask for more than what they could offer.
Then that boy proved to him that no one willing to change merits the same kind of poison he once served. He was the first to forgive and the first to offer him a semblance of a friendship.
The boy really is a dreamer.
He can't deny, though, that somehow, sometime, he had formed a particular attachment to the kid. He supposes it was inevitable; the boy did follow him often. He still doesn't know down to this day if it was only because the boy's stepfather asked him to do so or because of his seemingly ingrained nature to tail whomever he found interesting, but he's secretly grateful because it had kept him from feeling alone. It quickly vanquished his loneliness too, but it was because the kid annoyed him often. The teenage boy has an insatiable, wide-eyed curiosity for everything, leading him to observe, ask, and form inferences around people who, at times, evidently don't want him around.
Oddly, throughout the weeks, the kid's constant presence at his side left him feeling accomplished (even if the only thing he had done in a day is fix the coffee maker, which the boy had watched with the utmost concentration like it was the only important thing in the world) and accepted ('Hey! You fixed the ancient coffee maker!' he had declared after the lights in the appliance turned on).
This is how he knows that the boy, among many other things, is a good person.
That's why it had been difficult to see him in pain. While he woke up with a sharp ache in his midsection after Krane had taken a shot at him, the boy had ended up having his right arm crushed by a tremendously heavy piece of concrete. He still can't explain the instinct that surged within him when he saw the boy's pitiable state. He tried to lift the weight off of him, but his own internal damages prevented him from doing so.
All he could do was ask for help—which came too close to being too late. When the firemen finally lifted up the beam, the boy wasn't screaming anymore. He was lying wordlessly but was breathing very heavily. His eyes wandered in confusion as beads of sweat formed on his temples. He was pale. He was cold. He had spilled too much of his life on the floor.
Douglas remembered enough of the lessons back in med school to recognize the symptoms: abnormal breathing, confusion, sweating, drop in internal temperature.
Hypovolemic shock.
Even as he sits there in the emergency room with injuries he needs to mind, all he can think about is the boy. He keeps remembering the look on his face as the EMTs hurried him inside the ambulance in a gurney. All the joy and sarcasm and curiosity were gone. All that was left was…was loneliness, as if the boy understood then that despite all the friends he had made in his life, he might just die alone.
The doctor steps in at that moment with images of his X-rays and a small smile on his face. He talks after his formalities.
Douglas doesn't listen. 'How is he?' he asks a minute into the doctor's nonsensical babbling.
The doctor wrinkles his eyebrows. 'Pardon?'
'Leo. How is he?'
The crease eases out from his temple. The smile doesn't come back. 'Stable. From the last I heard, he's under observation,' he says.
Douglas doesn't say anything, but he silently breathes out in relief before refocusing his eyes on the reddish taint left at the back of his fingers.
'Are you a good friend to your step-nephew?'
Douglas lifts his eyes up suddenly and stares suspiciously. 'Sure,' he answers.
The doctor nods. 'Good,' he says. ''Cause he's going to need one.'
His features slightly knit into a frown.
'His arm is too damaged,' the doctor begins. 'The accident crushed several of his bones, and though a few of them are salvageable and some could possibly be replaced, bottom line is that he won't be able to use it anymore.' He takes a breath and releases it. 'Dr. Sorvino is just waiting for his mother to inform her of the best option for him.'
'Best option?'
'They have to amputate his arm.'
Those words immediately send a shock through him. The doctor launches forth in an explanation about fractures and bone marrow leaking into bloodstream and how that could result into complications like respiratory failure, but he doesn't hear him. His mind is too preoccupied with the foreseeable future of the boy coming home, feeling less like a someone and more like a something.
He cannot let it happen. He will not watch the boy lose the courage and the curiosity and the confidence that characterized him because he was caught in an unfair situation. He will not watch him grapple with living a life filled with constant hospital visits and a toxic medley of pills that will kill him faster than his own hopelessness.
He will not watch him drown with no one to save him.
So, he acts as soon as the plan materializes in his mind. He sneaks out as soon as the doctor leaves then heads straight to the area where they keep the boy. On the way, he manages to steal an EMT personnel jacket hanging up on a hook inside a surprisingly empty lounge (borrow, he should say, because he's sure his newfound conscience will urge him to return it later) and use it as a disguise as he wheels in an empty gurney that has been blocking the hallways of the emergency room.
He finds the boy sleeping, secluded from the rest of the world behind the pulled curtains, his heavily bandaged arm tucked carefully on his side while machines beep and whir around him in their own version of a lullaby.
He silences the devices one by one, pulling them off before transferring the boy into the gurney carefully but quickly. The process is excruciating for him because of his ribs, but the brace helped in minimizing the pain. Once the boy is loaded and covered with white cloth, he moves out through the garage and into the parking lot where his recklessly parked car sits.
As he begins the process of repairing the kid three-fourths of an hour later, Douglas realizes how much everything can change in a course of a year. He recalls the command he had given Marcus just last summer as he watched the boy try to break into their home to free his family: Take care of him. For good. Now, as he meticulously wires him to an equipment that will prevent him from losing more blood, all the while helping him to generate more to make up what he lacks, he silently tells the unfeeling structure the same first four words but this time, without the hostility and numbness they once had.
He just wants him to live.
He continues on his task in this state of thinking, working tediously to erase the once bleak future for the kid and replacing it with something better, something stronger. As he does, he decides then that the kid should never, ever be helpless again.
So, he grants the kid his wish, his dream.
Nearly three hours later, Douglas finds himself readjusting the brace around him, after having to take it off to clean up due to the red smears that came from the procedure, and then resuming his search around the warehouse for something that would implicate the monster he had foolishly created.
A few minutes later, he hears a voice coming from the room outside. It starts weakly and quietly. Then, it magnifies into a scream.
Douglas stops what he is doing and hurries back into the room where he last leaves the boy. There, he finds him struggling against the restraint, his fear inciting him to ask for help that, in his rebuilt and best state yet, Douglas fully knows he will not need much of. Still, he tells him to calm down and provides the answers to the questions shot frantically towards him.
As this transpires, he finds relief in the evidences of his success. The kid is awake, unchanged and above all, he's alive.
He's alive.