So... I've kind of fully moved to Ao3. But I figured I'd drop in here to work on finish this little piece up.
From open comms, his younger brother's voice was urgent, breathless in his sudden movement to the space elevator and laced with worry. Scott isn't answering. Virgil's breath catches in his throat. He turns, drops his palette to the floor with a messy, wooden thud, and curses.
He's been here the whole goddamn time.
He'd chosen to paint in the lounge to keep Scott company. To keep an eye on him really since Scott didn't seem to notice. Seemed to go around these days. That's what he gets, he supposes, for fixating so much on the perspective hell hole. Stupid freaking cityscapes – the challenge appealed to his inner engineer and made the artist in him revolt in frustration. He'd been conjuring music in his head to help… translate.
And he'd missed all of it, until John's voice echoed across the lounge from both his and Scott's watches with fear and resolve.
One last curse.
Scott would kill him if he'd seen, but there was taking the steps two at a time and then there was getting there quickly. He made an executive decision on the latter. They were International Rescue. So what if he parkoured from the upper balcony of the lounge to the bottom, hanging a moment on the floor of the top level before catching the jump in his knees? He rolled and slid next to Scott's slumped form at the base of the desk.
John is still trying to raise him on communications.
"I'm here, John," he says, flicking off the sound from Scott's watch. "I've got him."
"F-A-B," he answers from Virgil's wrist. "15 minutes out."
Virgil presses two fingers to the pulse point in Scott's neck, breathing a sigh of relief at the steady thumping of his brother's heart. He brushes the hair back from Scott's face where the skin felt clammy, but not hot. Scott had fallen to an awkward slump, the chair a foot or so away where it slid out from under him.
His brother is light as he tugs him into a recovery position with his head in Virgil's lap for support.
Gently, he tapped on Scott's cheekbone. "Come on, Scott. You made the space case worry. Time to wake up."
For a moment, there's nothing.
Then, Scott's nose twitches.
His face itches.
His hands don't feel like working. So he wrinkles his nose and thinks of Bewitched - tries to move the muscles in his face in a way that will alleviate the urge to scratch, and if that doesn't work, the magic will.
It doesn't work. Probably because magic isn't real.
It's his cheekbone that itches. It's less an itch. More… an annoying tapping.
He's never watched Bewitched. Mom did.
Eyes blink, fuzzy.
And he's surrounded by flannel.
There's something special about waking slow.
He can't quite put his finger on why it feels so different to him, but his body tells him it knows urgent alarms and gasping breaths better than it knows the gentle flutter of lashes into gradual awareness. He feels lethargic and heavy and muted –
It all means something.
His dreams usually flitter away before he has a chance to remember them, but he tends to at least knows they were there based on the way his heart races. There's generally no real rest in his mind while he slept.
If he slept.
Maybe that was the something. Maybe he wasn't really sleeping because he doesn't remember having dreamed.
What he does remember -
There was flannel, and before that was –
A hand brushes over his hair, soothing and light.
"Mom?" His voice cracks.
"No, bluebird, it's your Grandma."
Sally remembers when Lucy and Jeff found out they were pregnant with their first child. They'd chosen the name Scott long before the boy came into the world, and so the name Scooter existed before Scott was peanut sized.
But 'bluebird' was hers and hers alone, declared on one fine spring morning when Scott was just learning to babble, when he first started noticing his surroundings and the movement of the sky. His eyes never darkened from his baby blues.
They are even bluer than she remembers, glazed as they are, and he blinks in confusion, the lines near his eyes pinching as he reaches up towards his face.
The IV line stops him, and Sally encourages him to relax and rest.
"What's happened?" But it comes out missing a few syllables, but Sally knows the language of the injured and ill.
Exhaustion, dehydration, under-nourishment. They found ulcers in his stomach. "You hit burn out, kid," she says instead because it's the truth. "You collapsed at the work desk. Gave Virgil and John both a scare."
He remembers the flannel. He felt so sluggish, but he remembers the warm, cozy red all around him. "S'rry."
He blinks, and her outfit is so sharply purple against the clean stark white of their infirmary.
"None of that right now, bluebird." Sally watches as he fights to stay awake, his eyes closing even as he tries to speak more words that garble into mumbles. "You sleep. Rest. It's what your body needs."