If it were up to Sonny, Jason is pretty sure the Texan would be a permanent fixture in Clay's room. The aftermath of nearly bleeding out has left Quinn perpetually exhausted, though, and he has to spend a lot of time sleeping, whether he wants to or not.
The others take up the slack, making sure Spenser is never left alone for long. Ray isn't allowed out of bed yet, but everyone else - including Brock, who still has to use a wheelchair for the time being - switches off staying at Clay's bedside.
The morning after Spenser was successfully weaned off the ventilator, Jason relieves Blackburn just before dawn. They've been staying with Clay around the clock to try to make sure someone familiar will be with him when he wakes up. Jason is awake anyway, so he figures Blackburn should be freed up to go get some sleep after staying up half the night.
Spenser is breathing on his own and is no longer under sedation, which is good. He has shown zero signs of waking up, which isn't.
The doctors say it's not surprising, that they need to give Clay some time, but patience has never really been Jason's strong suit.
Settling in the chair beside the bed, he gently nudges Spenser's arm. "Wake up," he tells him. "I need to yell at you."
He doesn't mean it, not really. He probably should yell at Spenser about not giving them a heads-up that Hey, my lung is collapsing and I may have a light case of respiratory failure, but Jason just doesn't have the energy to be angry about it. Maybe he'll delegate to Ray, who has a gift for reasonably explaining things, without raising his voice at all, in a way that makes you come out of the discussion desperately wanting to never disappoint him ever again.
It's disorienting to realize that the whole stair incident happened less than two weeks ago. It feels like it's been half a lifetime since Jason's biggest worry about his team was Sonny's cracked rib and how to get Clay to stop sulking like a damn child.
Shortly after Jason watches the sun rise through the east window, Clay's doctor arrives to check up on him. After evaluating vitals and machine readouts, she peels back Spenser's eyelids to shine a light in his eyes. He flinches slightly and emits a barely audible groan, which is the most response he's shown to anything in days.
Bracing his arm against his broken ribs, Jason sits forward hopefully, but Spenser lapses back into stillness and silence as soon as the light is gone.
"Well?" Jason asks, once the doctor seems to be done and has stepped back to scribble some notes in Clay's chart.
She responds, so predictably that Jason can practically mouth the words along with her, "Well, there's a lot that we won't know for sure until he wakes up." Then she adds, "I'm optimistic, though. His brain activity looks good. Your medic did one hell of a job, considering the situation."
"Yeah," Jason says quietly. "Yeah, he does that."
The doctor looks up from the chart. "I wouldn't mind meeting him, actually."
Jason huffs a rueful laugh. "Well, you can. He's right down the hall. Took a bullet saving my life."
She smiles back. "Sounds like it's a good thing you have him on your team."
"You've got no idea. We'd probably all be dead by now if it weren't for him."
Maybe half an hour after the doctor leaves, Spenser shows some more signs of life. His fingers wiggle, like they're searching for something to hold onto. He makes that faint noise again. Eventually, his eyes crack open a little, but with no real focus. He smacks his lips, tries to swallow, and makes the universal expression for 'something has died in my mouth.'
Jason hits the call button, hoping to get some ice chips. Moving carefully so as to not anger the ever-present fire in his side, he leans over the bed. "Clay? You in there, buddy?"
Spenser's brow furrows. He closes his eyes, then opens them again, but doesn't seem capable of focusing on Jason's face or voice. By the time the nurse gets there, he's already back out.
The nurse, sensing Jason's agitation, urges patience, but Jason doesn't like it. He wants an answer. He needs to know that Clay Spenser still knows his name, his team, how to tie his shoes. That he can still talk and count and operate.
Fully aware that he's gonna be antsy as hell until he gets some kind of resolution, Jason digs up something to fiddle with to keep himself from peeling off his own cuticles out of sheer anxiety.
Later, with mid-morning sunlight pouring in through the windows, Spenser stirs again. This time he makes an effort to track Jason's voice, and his eyes, though glazed, eventually find his way to his team leader's face.
"Boss?" The kid croaks, almost inaudible behind the oxygen mask. The hospital staff did warn that being on the ventilator might have messed up his throat.
Jason, light-headed with relief, gives him some melting ice chips and warns him not to try to talk too much. While Clay swallows and makes pained faces, Jason gives him the basic rundown: You're in the hospital; everybody's okay; you're going to be just fine too.
Finished with the ice chips, Spenser moves the mask aside again to whisper, "Bryson?"
Shit. Of course that's the first thing on his mind when he wakes up.
Jason is caught between relief, because Clay pretty clearly remembers the last thing that was happening and that seems like a good sign as far as potential brain damage is concerned, and uncertainty, because he wasn't expecting to have this conversation so soon and isn't quite sure how to handle it.
He takes a deep breath and says levelly, "Bryson didn't make it. That is not your fault."
Spenser swallows, winces, and squeezes his eyes shut. Jason pretends not to notice the tear that trickles down the kid's cheek. He knows from experience that being this badly injured can wreak havoc on your emotional state.
At some point, the team is going to have to answer for how their protectee, a man with friends in high places, ended up dead while all of Bravo survived. Jason has every intention of placing the responsibility on himself, emphasizing his choice to send Spenser and Bryson into the building alone, his hesitation in following them.
He can handle the heat. Spenser maybe could too, but he doesn't need to. Not right now. Not with the harm he took from this mission and everything that came before it.
Thinking about what came before, it occurs to Jason for the first time that Sonny's cracked rib was almost certainly the only thing that prevented Mandy Ellis from dying a slow, horrible death at the hands of the cartel.
It's funny how things sometimes work themselves out - even things that start with people who should know better behaving like drunken idiots.
Clay's doctor turns back up, checks responses and reflexes, confirms that the kid can talk and his memory is intact, and proclaims him well on his way to recovery.
Once the doctor has left, the first person Jason sends for is Sonny. Quinn needs this. Hell, he and Clay probably both do.
When Sonny sees Spenser, his entire face lights up. Clay starts to smile in return before apparently remembering he's supposed to feel guilty and reverting to the hangdog look - which Sonny completely ignores, going in for a careful but enthusiastic hug.
Spenser tries to whisper some kind of apology. Sonny barrels right over it without letting him finish, asking, "What the hell are you sorry for? Scaring us by damn near dying? 'Cause you're forgiven, long as you don't do it again."
Jason sits back and listens as Sonny chatters on about the hospital and the nurses, about his little 'adventure' in Santa Clotilda with Mandy. He watches as the haunted look gradually fades from the kid's face. By the time Clay falls back asleep, he's wearing a faint smile.
Yeah. He'll be okay.
Once Spenser and Ray are stable enough to be moved, the team gets sent back stateside to recover. It takes time, for all of them. Ray deals with residual numbness and nerve pain. Mandy suffers headaches and nightmares. Trent's arm has some muscle damage; so does Brock's leg. Clay has to go through therapy to get his lungs working right again, and for a while he acts paranoid every time he drops something or forgets a word, like he's afraid he actually does have brain damage and everybody is still trying to figure out how to tell him so.
Jason faces down the cake-eaters and answers for Bryson's death. He takes as much heat as expected, and it sucks, but he comes through with his career intact. It helps that Blackburn and Harrington both have his back all the way.
The team straggles back, in ones and twos. For a while, the first few to return just spin up with Alpha or other teams, until enough of them are back to operate as Bravo again.
After their first mission briefing with the entire team, Jason waits until Mandy is deep in conversation with Ray, and then he slides something into the pocket of one of her folders.
It's a tiny soapstone figurine of a woman with upswept hair and downturned eyes, her delicate lashes resting on her cheeks. Jason picked it up on one of his missions with Alpha, has been waiting for the right time to give it to her.
He knows it's not the first gift she's been given. Clay has been leaving slim volumes of poetry on her desk. Trent gave her two new sets of tiny gold earrings, plus a handwritten plan for coping with the nightmares. Ray leaves handmade tissue paper roses, one at a time. Brock, with his gift for metalwork, gave her a filigree hair clip. Sonny leaves scarves to replace the one he bled all over.
By going back even though she'd been told not to, Mandy saved the life of one of their own. Men like them, they don't forget that. Ever.
Later, after the mission, Jason drops by Mandy's desk and finds the figurine sitting next to her vase of tissue paper roses and a book of poetry she has marked her place in with a playing card.
When Mandy looks up, she's rubbing her neck, the way she does when she's got a headache. "You okay?" He asks her.
"Of course. You?"
"Always," he says.
They smile at each other, and life goes on.
That's all, folks! Thanks for reading.
Before I go, a couple notes:
1) I had several people, in comments/reviews for this story, mention things they'd like to see me write about in the future. I love it when y'all do that! I can't guarantee that prompts/requests will always get filled, but please feel free to share them with me. More ideas are always good. :) In fact, my likely next story, Ask to Be Unbroken, is based on a prompt given to me by bcblueeyes.
2) I did the math and found that, since late March, I've written somewhere around 77,000 words of SEAL Team fic. That's a lot. I'm getting a little bit burnt out on writing the longer stories, and I wouldn't be surprised if y'all are also getting a bit burnt out on reading them. While I don't plan to stop writing, I will probably do some shorter one- and two-shot type stuff for a while.