Title: Ecdysis
Rating: PG13 for injury, aftermath
Character(s): Deeks, Kensi, Sam, various paramedics
Disclaimer: Not mine. My Deeks would have been much scarier to Monica in "Parley."
Summary: The job was done, he'd done what she asked of him. And he went back to being still, to being nowhere, to waiting. She'd told him they'd be back to set him free. She'd promised. Her face had been grim and her voice had shaken and she had promised. Deeks' journey from non-rescue to hospital.
Sleeping upright in a chair really isn't restful. But then, unconsciousness brought on by pain isn't really sleep.
So he wasn't asleep in that chair, but he wasn't really awake either. He'd let himself slide into the nether world of half-waking, mostly-dreaming. His neck was stiff, his wrists throbbed where he'd yanked them against the straps that held him to the chair.
And his face. Oh, god, his face. The sharp, burning, intense pain had stopped when they finally put down the drill, but in its place was an insistent, constant, throb. It radiated up into his eyes and down into his chest. The pain in his head was like the glittering bits inside a snowglobe; any movement caused them to swirl into a mass of white-hot sparkling shards of hurt, but if he could get them to settle, he could almost pretend they weren't there.
If he kept everything very still, the pain was survivable. He could stay on top of it and not be reduced to writhing and groaning and crying with how much it hurt. And if he kept his mind very still, if he didn't think about what was going to happen when the Russians came back, then the panic and fear that kept bubbling up his chest was survivable too. He could stay on top of his thoughts and keep breathing, and not start hyperventilating in abject fear.
And so he breathed, and breathed, and drifted, and slept without sleeping, and imagined soft hands on the sides of his head, holding his temples and stroking the pain away. Pictured the smile he'd see when he was rescued - or better still, escaped somehow, the laugh at how he outwitted his captors. Heard her saying his name with warm affection.
When he felt someone touch him again, he jerked up, upsetting the carefully stilled snowglobe of pain, losing his control of the fear that the drilling would start again and would go on and on until he choked on blood or teeth or treachery. But the hands were soft, and warm. And the head in front of him, leaning over his chest, smelled like sun-warmed shampoo and sweat, and he realized it was her, and the fear faded.
He risked the pain of more movement to speak. "You gotta get me out of here." Now her hands were on his shoulders, opening his jacket, pressing warm against his chest, but she didn't speak to him. "You gotta cut me loose," he said, feeling the panic rise higher, so that he could hear it in his own voice, but he didn't care, because she was here, in front of him. But she wasn't smiling, she wasn't relieved. She wasn't releasing him, because she wasn't his rescuer.
"I can't," she said, and he froze. He searched her face for an explanation. "You have to stay here awhile longer," she said. And then she told him what he would have to do for her to be released from the nightmare.
He did it. He did it all. He did everything she told him he needed to do. He waited, quietly, without dissolving. He pulled himself upright and looked Michelle – Quinn, she had to be Quinn inside his head too – in the eye and he reached for that place he could go during an undercover where he just was someone else. He was FBI. He was David's handler. He heard his own voice settle into someone else's intonation. He felt the squibs popping as Quinn shot him and the effort of jerking his whole body with them made the pain roar back blindingly so that the groan he choked out was real, was his, not his cover's death rattle.
And then he waited some more. The job was done, he'd done what she asked of him. And he went back to being still, to being nowhere, to waiting. She'd told him they'd be back to set him free. She'd promised. Her face had been grim and her voice had shaken and she had promised.
Real rescue was noisy and confusing, full of people and equipment and yelling instructions and questions. People were touching him, examining him, needing him to move, which set off the pain whirlwind again. People were looking at him and there was horror in their eyes at what they saw. Sam shouted at him, accusing him of somehow slipping a betrayal between his screams of pain, as if Sam hadn't been a dour witness to every wretched but wordless noise he'd made.
And he answered, he tried to tell Sam, to tell everyone, that he'd kept faith, that he'd done what he always did for them – held their lives as equal with his own - but when he looked around at all the people in the room, all he saw was pity and revulsion. And she stood behind the paramedic, looking like she was going to cry for what he'd become, and he closed his eyes and let them lift him out of the chair and guide him to the stretcher.
At that point, he lost the plot for awhile. The safety belt at his ankles was tightened until it made his skin crawl with the confinement, and he tried to kick it off or roll away from it until someone said "Not so tight, not after..." and he felt it released to a token hold. Something was looped loosely across his chest and the stretcher began to rattle and jostle and suddenly everyone was moving around him and doors were opening. He braced himself and tried to return to the still place where he could keep the pain at bay and keep breathing.
The sun outside the body shop was blinding, and squinting against it caused the scabbing wounds on his face to stretch and burn again. In the ambulance the EMTs kept shining lights at him and touching him, and all the touches hurt. Someone placed a hand on the top of his head gently, and for a moment he relaxed into that one point of contact that seemed meant to soothe rather than diagnose. Then the strange stroking fingers tangled in a sweaty snarl of his hair, and he felt Sidorov's fingers knotting there, holding him still for the clamp and the drill, and he whimpered and cringed away as much as he could, until the hand withdrew.
As the ambulance crew wheeled him into the emergency room they started talking loudly over his head again, calling out statistics to people who he knew were waiting with more lights and clamps and needles. Turning, he could see that Sam's gurney was being rushed ahead of his, with Sam lying still and stoic on it. He wanted to be like that, strong and patient and cooperative, but his mouth was filling with blood again and every movement was a knife in his head, and it was all he could do not to sob with panic.
People closed in around him and the room was so cold and bright and there were trays of instruments and a syringe. The clank of metal against metal made his pulse pound in his neck like it was trying to crawl out of his chest. And she was at the door of the room with Granger, and just staring at him with her eyes full of hurt. Gloved hands were reaching for his face to open his mouth and use those instruments, and he knew if they did he'd not be able to keep hold of even one shred of the tatters of his dignity. He locked his jaw despite the pain, gritted out a "No," and slapped the outstretched hands away. The doctor reached again and spoke firmly, grabbed at his head, but next to him he heard Sam, telling them all to get away. Giving him time to pull himself together.
Sam knew the real him now. Sam knew that the person he'd been for the team for the last three years was just a fake face on top of the weak little boy who had cried when his father hit him and pleaded for it to stop. Sam knew he wasn't strong enough for this, not like Sam himself was. There was not enough time or space in this room to get himself together.
And Kensi would see that boy too before much longer. She held his hand, stroked his arm and told him so firmly that he had to listen to this doctor and do what he was told again, but she didn't understand that if just one more person touched his face to hurt him, he was going to shatter into a million screaming pieces and he wasn't sure he could ever find them all, let alone reassemble them. He heard his own breath through his clenched teeth, shallow and rapid with the effort of keeping himself whole, and he heard himself breathing "Oh, god, oh, god" and then Kensi turned away from him and walked away.
Sam was still watching him, eyes dark over the mask. Someone was holding his arm, and hands were gripping his head again and he felt the sting and burn of a needle, but it didn't matter on top of everything else.
And then finally, it mercifully all just stopped. The people and the voices and the touching, and he was left in the silence of his ragged breath and his pounding heart, and even that was slowing, and steadying, and calming, until he lost track of that as well.
He woke briefly in a dim room, shivery. A woman was tucking warm blankets around his legs and feet, and he felt drowsy and heavy, and more secure and protected than he had in hours, or was it days?She noticed his eyes open and smiled. "You're in recovery, Detective. You may feel chilled? Let me know if you feel nauseated, but don't try to talk." He attempted to open his mouth and felt the roughness of dental gauze against his tongue, but almost everything below his eyes felt numb and lifeless. She saw his realization and continued, "We'll get that out in a little while." She checked the readouts on his monitors, his IV, and then did something, and the fuzzy feeling returned.
He woke again in a plain hospital room, dim morning light coming in the window over the buildings across the street. He had no real memory of arriving there, and felt surprisingly little need to know why.
He felt shaky and fragile and new, like a freshly-hatched chick, or like a creature that had just shed its skin and was waiting for the new one to harden. He felt defenseless and open and raw. When he thought back over what had happened, and remembered all the horrified looks and the voices calling back and forth reiterating everything that had been done to him, it felt like his cover with the world had been blown and everything inside had been exposed.
The world knew who and what he was. So that was done. He was still there, despite it. That was true, too. He wondered where Sam was, where she and Callen and Granger were. He wasn't sure it mattered now.
So he stared out the window, and tried to go back to being still. And waited.
Author note: More than a drabble, less than a post-ep. There is so much going on, visually in those scenes, and so much is conveyed with facial expressions and tiny sounds. Notice how there is almost no physical comfort offered to Deeks in this episode, and how little eye contact he makes with anyone after Kensi leaves him there to wait for Michelle and Sidorov.