Repercussions: Chapter 21 (the World's Longest Oneshot)
Author: FraidyCat
Disclaimer: Whilst FraidyCat has taken every possible care in the compilation, preparation and presentation of the information published in this work of fiction, no liability whatsoever can be accepted for the contents or their accuracy. The materials in this heretofore mentioned work of fiction could include technical inaccuracies or typographical errors and are provided "as is" and without warranties of any kind either expressed or implied, to the fullest extent permissible pursuant to applicable law. FraidyCat does not warrant that the functions contained in the materials will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that defects will be corrected. FraidyCat does not warrant or make any representations regarding the use of or the results of the use of the plot twists in this work of fiction in terms of their correctness, accuracy, reliability, or otherwise. FraidyCat makes no commitment to update the materials on this site. nor does The Cat claim legal or imaginary credit for existing characters.
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Amita had stayed awake until the 1 a.m. visit, which she found very disturbing. Charlie had been in obvious pain, mumbling something about 'the Stargate'. She had been unable to comfort him, and for the first time in several hours he had not been able to rise above it enough to even make eye contact with her, let alone speak to her. The visit had brought tears to her eyes, and she was almost weak with relief when a nurse came into the room when there was only one minute to go. The woman smiled kindly and stuck a needle in the IV port. "He's due for some morphine," she had whispered, and Amita sighed heavily.
"Thank God," she responded, clutching two of Charlie's fingers. The nurse had let her stay an extra few minutes while the drug took affect. When Amita left, she still wasn't happy, but the settling of her restless lover had calmed her down, at least. She briefly considered sneaking down to see Don, but quickly decided against it. He should be sleeping himself. Besides, the last thing she wanted to report to him was this last visit. Returning to a corner of the lounge, Amita passed another worried family member sleeping in a chair. While the man did not look particularly comfortable, the idea of closing her eyes for just a few minutes appealed to her, and Amita placed her laptop on the table in front of the chair where she had spent the better part of the afternoon, and sat down wearily.
Just for a few minutes.
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Don was restless. He had fallen into a deep sleep around the time his father left, and if anybody had come to see him since, they had let him sleep. Considering that was eight hours ago, he tried to reason, it was probably his own fault that he was now wide awake at 2 in the morning.
He nervously fingered the sheet and told himself that it had nothing to do with Charlie.
After just a few seconds, he gave up and turned on the light. Bringing a hand up to shield his eyes immediately, he blinked furiously for a moment and waited for the watering to stop and his vision to adjust. Finally he lowered his hand and groped for the unit that would allow him to call the nurse. He couldn't find it right away and couldn't be bothered trying very long. "Ah, the hell with it," he muttered, pushing painfully against the bed until he was in a sitting position. "Been walking all day anyway. I can do this." Don firmly gripped his IV stand and started to pull himself up, remembering to use his biceps and not his abdominals.
"Don't...ugh...need...umph..me...shit...no...woah...stinkin'...dammit...nurse...", he grunted, and when he had achieved an approximate 45-degree angle he began pushing the IV stand across the floor toward the bathroom. He was still gripping it with both hands, bent over like an old man over a walker, and his progress was excrutiatingly slow. Now that he was more or less upright, though, his breathing was easier. "Gonna piss on the damn floor before I get there," he informed the bag of saline.
His dire prediction proved false, however, and soon he experienced the blessed relief that only certain physical functions offer a man. He was even able to park the IV stand and let go for a while, so that he could...hold something else. His immediate need attended to, Don shuffled a slow circle in the bathroom and paused at the sink to wash his hands. While the warm water ran over them, he looked at himself desolately in the mirror and met his own worried eyes. He studied his lined face for a long time, and then began speaking to his own reflection. "I know," he admitted. "I feel it too. I feel... I feel Charlie. Like at the house, earlier."
On the way back to the bed, a trip that transpired with only one hand on the IV stand and in less that half the time it had taken him to get to the bathroom in the first place, Don decided he would look again for the remote. He was calling the nurse, and sending her to find out about his brother.
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Her nap was brief, Amita discovered when she awoke with a start and checked her watch. Still, she saw with dismay that she had missed the 2 a.m. window. It was 20 minutes after the hour, already. Briefly undecided, she looked at her still-sleeping lounge-mate, and then quietly picked up her laptop. She didn't intend to give up the 3 a.m. visit, but maybe the nurse would just let her look through the window for a minute. She patted the front pocket of her jeans, assuring herself that her keys were in there, and then clutched the laptop to her chest like a blanket, wrapping both arms around it. Careful not to make any noise, she ventured cautiously into the hall and toward Charlie's room.
She was surprised to see that the nurses' desk just outside of it was empty, and a little worried to look through the observation window and see that the curtain was drawn around Charlie's bed. They hadn't even done that in the daytime. Had he taken a turn for the worse? She gripped the laptop tighter, chewed on her bottom lip and waited for whoever was back there with Charlie to come out and talk to her. She could see a pair of legs standing near what she knew was the head of Charlie's bed. She didn't think it was the nurse. Much as Charlie's did, Amita's mind trapped details, and she remembered that the nurse was wearing a different color of scrubs when she saw her at 1. Besides, those were definitely men's shoes.
It wasn't finally registering the hard-soled and polished shoes as out of place that suddenly propelled Amita into the room. It was the fact that she could see shoes at all. Everyone in ICU was required to wear paper shoe coverings -- like the green ones on her own feet right now. They made her slip a little as she rushed around the end of the curtain. She put out one hand for balance in a gesture that was an odd copy of the extended arms that held a pillow over Charlie's face.
Santino looked up, shocked, as Amita careened around the corner. Where the hell had this come from? He released the pillow and took a step in her direction, wincing as she screamed at the top of her lungs. "MURDERRRRR! HELP!" The apparition continued to shriek and lunged away from his grasp. For the first time in his career, Santino had been caught unaware, and he was completely unprepared. Even a few weeks off had dulled his normal quick reactions. He should have just run before her screams brought someone. He realized that later. He shouldn't have bothered trying to grab her again to quickly break her neck. Instead, as he made another forward move toward her, she suddenly came at him as well, arms swinging the laptop as if it were a baseball bat. The hard case caught him over the eye and then shattered his cheekbone, and Santino opened his mouth to roar. Instead, several teeth popped out as the woman completed her follow-thru. Santino staggered to his knees as the curtain was whipped back, revealing a hospital security guard and at least two nurses, including the one he had sent for coffee. The guard and a large male nurse pushed down on his shoulders and back until he was prone on the floor, while the other nurse hurried to Charlie's bed. That left no-one to control Amita, who kept screaming, kicked at him twice and finally bent over to crash the laptop onto his head.
Santino would not remember much, after that, for quite some time.
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Alan was back at the hospital by 3:15, having been brought out of a sound sleep by a phone call from a nurse. God, how he hated phone calls from the hospital. They were never good -- especially at 2:30 in the morning. He had rushed from the house, still pulling on his shoes, only to remember that Megan had driven him home. Loathe to wait for a cab, he rushed back in and grabbed the first set of keys he saw on the neat set of hooks next to the kitchen door. They happened to be for Charlie's car. On the interminable trip, he wondered if Don knew that there was some problem with Charlie. Would they wake him up and tell him? They had said it was a 'security breach', whatever the hell that meant. If hospital security had let something happen to Charlie somehow, God help them all when Don found out.
Alan was disheartened to find parking at the hospital as impossible as ever at 3 in the morning. The shuttle ran 24-hours-a-day between the parking garages and the hospital proper, and he managed to spare a sympathetic thought for the others riding with him. Most nights of his life, he snored away, and it never occurred to him that all over the city -- every day, and every night -- phone calls like the one he had received changed people's lives forever.
A hospital security employee was waiting for him in the lobby, and Alan's thoughts came crashing back to his own problems. This could not, simply could not, be a good sign. Despite the almost reverent hush of night in the hospital, Alan protested mightily when the guard began to lead him in a direction that was not the ICU. "Whatever your security issue is, let me deal with that later. I need to see my son." The guard kept walking and murmured something Alan could not hear clearly, so the oldest Eppes planted his feet shoulder-width apart on the linoleum and raised his voice. "I will stand here and bellow like a bull elk in heat until you take me to my son!" He opened his mouth to make good on his promise, but let it gape open as Megan materialized before him. His eyes widened. "Megan? This is an F.B.I.-level security problem? They won't let me see Charlie!"
She smiled grimly and grabbed his upper arm, dragging him to the side of the hallway. Then she placed both hands on his face. "Charlie is fine. Charlie slept through the whole thing. I made them call you anyway because I knew you'd kill us all if you came back tomorrow -- well, later today -- and heard about this. Besides, I'm hoping you can help me calm down Amita."
Alan sagged in relief and she dropped her hands, which he immediately grabbed with his own. "Charlie's all right? Slept through what? And why is Amita still here, anyway? Why is she upset?"
Megan grinned more genuinely at the rapid-fire questions. To Alan's surprise, she winked. "Well. Seems this is the first time she's beaten-up a hit man."
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The nurse he had dispatched had not come back with an update about his brother, and Don had passed worried half-an-hour ago. He had used the intercom to order another nurse to get information after the first wasn't fast enough, and then he had actually staggered down the hallway with his IV stand to the desk to demand action. All he got for his trouble was the threat of a sedative and a wheelchair ride back to his room. Don had rested for a few minutes, and decided that this time he would go the opposite way down the hall, and breach the ICU himself. It would be a long trip, and he was dangling his legs off the side of the bed considering using the wheelchair when his door swung open, admitting his father, Megan, and a pissed-off-looking Amita. Don hadn't seen her look like that since Charlie forgot her birthday. As the thought ran through his mind, the blood froze in his veins and he almost slipped off the edge of the bed into a puddle of misery on the floor. 4 a.m. was not included in normal visiting hours. If they were all here, Charlie must be dead. "Oh, God," he moaned, clutching his arms around his stomach. "Please. Please. Please."
Alan pushed ahead of the women and scurried across the room. Gently he embraced his son and held his head against his chest. He could feel tears soaking into his shirt and felt horrible. They had thought Don would be asleep, so they had not taken enough care coming in. "Hush, Donnie, hush. Charlie's fine. He's fine. I just came from ICU and saw for myself. The nurses said you were upset earlier, so they let me come in as long as I was here. Take it easy, son, take a breath. He's fine. He's fine."
Don groaned and tilted his head back a little, searching his father's eyes for truth. "You sure?"
Alan smiled and rubbed soothing circles on his back. "Yes. Yes, son. Now. Since you're awake anyway, lie back and put your feet up." He turned slightly and used his other hand to indicate Amita. "I believe The Terminator here has a little bedtime story for you."