A/N: It never occurred to me that this might seem like the ending - in my own mind there are still a number of loose ends that need tying. Thank you, Kitty, for the head's up. There are at least three more sections to go, and I will post notice for the conclusion. Thanks!

Chapter 18

A faint rattling noise, fading in, then fading out. A squeak of rubber on linoleum. A faraway voice, echoing faintly over a PA system. Distant chatter, words indistinguishable, rising, then receding. Steve swallowed carefully, wetting his dry throat, but didn't bother to open his eyes. He didn't have to. Oh, hell. Not again.

He thought about not opening his eyes at all, about sinking back into the heavy lassitude that was dragging at him, but a voice quietly called his name and he surrendered to the inevitable and carefully lifted his lashes to peek. The glare hammered his retinas and he dropped them again hastily, reaching up automatically to rub at his lids, found he was batting them with a club of gauze instead and stopped, trying to get a better look at the white blobs his hands had turned into. After a second he gave up and let one rest instead on top of his eyes to shield them from the brightness.

"Um - don't suppose I dreamt that I was here before?" His voice sounded scratchy and faint and unfamiliar.

"Oh, no - you were here."

"Don't suppose I dreamt about getting out and this is really part of the same visit?"

"Nope - this is a whole new trip."

Steve nodded slightly. "Was afraid of that." He lay quietly for a moment, painstakingly sorting the pieces into context. "What's with my hands, anyway?"

"You left a nice chunk of them on the parking lot pavement."

"Oh. Yeah." He thought there was something important that he should ask, but he was having trouble getting his mind around it. "When'd I get here?"

"Little over twenty-four hours ago."

"What?" That cut abruptly through the haze and he dropped his hand and stared, blinking. "How - ?"

"You've been out pretty much the whole time. Don't think you were quite ready for that car chase. The body will have its revenge."

Car chase. Oh, yeah…pictures were rushing into his head now, like a slide show on hyper-speed. "Yeah, I remember…" Something about that phrase pricked at his mind, and he repeated more slowly, "I remember."

"Everything?"

He hesitated, considering. "I think. Almost."

"Before or after you went to South Beach Mall?"

"After." The look Steve tossed him was mildly annoyed. "You don't think I would have gone without backup if I'd remembered before."

"Well, I hope you wouldn't." Mark leaned forward and pressed a hand experimentally against Steve's cheek.

Steve turned his head away wearily. "Dad, I told you - I don't - " he paused, because now that he thought about it, there was a suspicious sensation of heat trapped underneath his skin. He pinched his brows together, focusing on it. "I do," he corrected himself, taken aback. "What's going on?"

"You picked up a little infection. A little intravenous broad spectrum antibiotic and it should be under control in no time. You know, we almost never recommend dumpsters to our patients with open wounds. Tons of bacteria."

"Yeah, well…" Steve shifted, trying to get comfortable. "You should have seen the alternative."

"Oh, I did. Or, heard some colorful reenactments from bystanders, anyway. And then, of course, we could follow your trail."

"We?"

"Me and Cheryl and Jesse."

"Oh." Steve nodded. "Okay. I think I remember that - pretty blurry, though."

"I can imagine."

"Well, Sleeping Beauty! Awake at last!"

Steve glanced up at the doorway warily. Both Jesse's tone and his Cheshire cat grin warned him what was coming and he countered quickly, "Don't even start, or I'll remind you of all the times I told you to stay away from a crime scene and you ignored me."

Jesse's grin slipped a little. "True," he admitted grudgingly. He brightened again. "But nothing ever stopped you from lecturing me about it either."

Steve smiled sweetly. "And nothing is ever going to. It's dangerous. You should listen to me."

Jesse frowned. "Look, all I've ever done - "he started, then broke off indignantly. "Hey, how did this get turned around to me? I came here to lecture you! And speaking of dangerous - "

Steve held up his hands to stop the flow of words, blinked a little at the sight of the shapeless gauze wads. "I was a model patient!" he protested firmly. "There was nothing on that list about visiting a material witness - I checked."

"Yeah, well, wait till you see the next list. I've added that, I've added dumpsters…" Jesse flipped through the pages of Steve's chart. "Vitals are certainly better. How's the leg feel?"

Steve looked down at the lump his legs made under the covers, a little surprised to see the right one made a bigger bump than the left one and was elevated. "I - hadn't noticed it." He peered beneath the blanket, checking for any sign of a cast. "What's wrong with it?"

"Bone bruise," Mark broke in. "And another place you're missing a heck of a lot of skin. Not broken - painful, though."

"Probably from when the car hit you 'a little'," Jesse suggested.

"It was just a glancing blow," Steve insisted, testing the leg gingerly for mobility. "Just grazed me. I probably injured it when I - " he saw both Jesse's and his father's eyes on him and realized this wasn't going to sound quite as innocuous as he'd hoped. "…landed…" he finished in a hasty undertone.

"What was that?" Jesse pressed.

Steve glared at him. "Injured it on the pavement."

Jesse smiled hugely. "It sounded like you said 'landed'," he enunciated the last word carefully.

Steve's glare hardened. "Right. On the pavement. After the car bumped me. A little."

"Hm," Jesse nodded, perching on the arm of the visitor's chair and folding his hands. "And did any of this 'landing' ," he dragged the syllables out lovingly, "involve time spent flying through the air?"

Steve held Jesse eyes and smiled a tight smile. "I don't remember."

"You told me that you remembered now," Mark objected.

"I told you some things were blurry."

"Convenient," Jesse suggested pleasantly. Steve folded his arms over his chest and gave him a challenging smile. Jesse glanced at the chart again. "How's the back?" Steve looked perplexed, then made a move to push himself into sitting position to check. "Don't - " Jesse leaned forward and pressed a hand against his chest to stop him. He handed Steve the bed controls. "Let the bed do it. You got two cracked ribs back there. I gave you a block for the pain to help your breathing, but don't push it."

Steve stared at the bed controls, then at his hands, trying to find a finger with minimum wrapping to push the button. "I don't feel it," he admitted, finally settling on his left forefinger as the center of operations. "It's like pieces of my body are missing."

"Well, don't wish them back in a hurry, because they probably aren't going to feel too good. Head?"

Steve automatically gauged his equilibrium as the bed rose. "You know, I think it's better?"

"Yeah, in spite of all the excitement, I think the extended nap did you a lot of good." Jesse whipped out his flashlight and Steve groaned and lifted one misshapen hand.

"Jess - "

"Just hold still…" Jesse flicked the light at one eye, then the next. "Hm. So. Seriously. Your memory's back?"

Steve lost his smile, casting his eyes surreptitiously around the corners of the room, just in case. Nothing there. "Yeah. I think so." The heat prickling at his skin made him restless and uncomfortable all of sudden. "Where's Brian? Juvie?"

"For now."

Mark offered him the plastic cup from the bedside table and Steve eyed it suspiciously. "That's not something new from the pre-school menu, is it? Because I don't think I can look another juice box in the face."

Mark smiled faintly. "It's water."

Steve managed to take the cup between his bandaged palms, making a small sound of disgust at his clumsiness, and maneuvered it until he could reach the straw.

Mark watched, but didn't comment. "Dr. Locksley is trying to arrange to have him transferred to Cliffside."

Steve lowered the cup. "Who's Dr. Locksley and what's Cliffside?"

"Now, if you'd waited for your partner to return before you took off, you'd know that."

"If I'd waited for my partner to return, Brian Fuller could have disappeared again. I couldn't take that chance."

"You took a pretty big chance of a different kind."

"In twenty-twenty hindsight, maybe. At the time it was just a baby-sitting job." He looked around for a place to put the cup down.

Mark reached for it. "Dr. Locksley is the woman Cheryl went to see. She's a prominent behavioral psychologist. Runs a clinic called Cliffside. Is doing some wonderful work with behavioral disorders."

Steve paused. That was the piece he'd been missing, all right. "Like Brian Fuller."

"That's right."

Steve shook his head. "There wasn't anything in his records."

"No. Apparently his mother was trying to keep it a secret. His father was trying to seek treatment for him."

Steve turned that over in his mind. "And so he killed him?"

Mark grimaced. "Probably not. Brian Fuller has schizophrenia, and while schizophrenics aren't generally violent, they can suffer from extreme paranoia. If they also suffer from psychotic episodes, the combination can be dangerous. Brian honestly believed that his father presented a very real danger - that he was saving his own life and his mother's by killing him. In his own mind, it's not only justified, it's self defense."

"And he saw me the same way."

"That's right. Of course, the difference is that you actually were a threat to him. And his mother."

Steve nodded, scratching absently at the tape that bound his ribs under the hospital gown. "Was he afraid of treatment? Is that why he saw his father as a threat?"

Mark hesitated. "It's probably not as simple as that. Possibly the discord between his parents fed into it, but schizophrenics suffer from what we call 'disorganized thinking' - their reasoning is often only comprehensible to them. On the other hand, it also makes a kind of sense sometimes - I remember a case where a schizophrenic repeatedly tried to kill himself and when he continually failed, eventually murdered a storekeeper and his wife, reasoning that he'd get the death penalty and the state would succeed in killing him instead."

Jesse made a face. "Wow."

Steve studied a point somewhere at the foot of his bed. "Are you saying that if he had received treatment, he never would have killed anyone?"

"It's impossible to know that, Steve." Mark's voice was quiet. "Treatments are improving, but they're a long way from comprehensive. It's a very tricky illness."

"So Madge Fuller confessed to protect Brian," Jesse put in.

Mark nodded. "That's what it looks like."

"She sure spent a lot of time trying to divert attention from him." Steve tried to flex his hands and frowned. This was going to be more than a little inconvenient.

Mark shrugged. "She probably felt she owed it to him. That it really was her fault."

Jesse nodded. "In a way, she was right."

"I don't know," Steve fussed with the bed controls, fumbling to operate them, hoping to find a more comfortable position. "She must have really been in some kind of denial. If anything, her husband's death should have convinced her that Brian needed help. And if that wasn't enough to bring it home, then when he attacked me she should have realized that he couldn't be left wandering around without some kind of treatment or care - not just for his sake, but for everybody's."

"Well, you would think so." Mark sighed. "And from an outsider's perspective all that's very clear, of course. But parents can be surprisingly dense where their children are concerned." The look he gave Steve was so brooding that Steve furrowed his forehead in surprise.

Jesse jumped in quickly. "So, Brian killed his father and tried to kill Steve because he thought he was protecting himself and his mother. Madge Fuller confessed because she thought she was protecting Brian. So, does that make you a witness now, Steve? Do you actually remember him doing it?"

"Kind of." Steve gave up on the bed and pushed the controls aside. Probably should forget about being comfortable for some time to come anyway. "I had a sort of flash of memory when he aimed the car at me - don't know if that would hold up in court. I actually put it together a couple of minutes before that." He shook his head at the memory. "Talk about bad timing."

Jesse waited a minute, then when Steve seemed disinclined to continue prompted impatiently, "Well?"

Steve shook himself. "Oh. Initially Brian Fuller was never seriously considered as a suspect - he was right-handed, and we couldn't place him at the scene, so we probably didn't dig into his background like we should have. Might have got there sooner if we had talked to a few people about him. In fact, unless Cheryl's come up with some new physical evidence or Madge or Brian have admitted he was there, we're still pretty circumstantial." He chewed his lower lip thoughtfully.

Jesse jogged his elbow. "I bet Cheryl's got it covered. How'd you put it together? If you didn't remember, I mean?"

"Oh. Yeah." Steve glanced at Mark. "You remember Tommy Ridge?"

"Tommy Ridge?" Mark raised his eyebrows. "I don't think so - should I?"

"Maybe not. He played with me in that summer baseball league I was in during High School. Anyway, I remember him mostly because we both always had to bring our own gloves and batting helmets - you can never be sure there will be enough equipment available for left-handed players. Or I guess I really remember him because Tommy wasn't actually left-handed - he wrote with his right hand, and it was his dominant hand for most things - there were just a couple of oddball things where his left hand functioned as his dominant hand."

Mark's eyebrows jumped. "Like batting?"

Steve nodded. "Right. He was the first person I ever met like that. Of course, as I got older I found out it wasn't all that uncommon - I think maybe you notice it more if you're used to not fitting the right handed mold yourself."

"So you figured that Brian Fuller could be the same way?"

Steve shook his head slowly. "I must have looked at those baseball pictures a hundred times. I knew something about them was bothering me, but I couldn't put my finger on what. I thought it was just because it reminded me so much of my own family, but when I started to put it together, I could see Brian, clear as day, standing on the right side of the plate, batting southpaw. Don't know why it didn't strike me sooner - whether my head kept automatically placing him on the other side of the plate, or whether it just looked natural to me because that's how I bat." He sighed before he could stop himself. A lot of things might have been different if it hadn't taken him so long to work out that particular bit of information. "Anyway - we hadn't actually placed Brian at the scene, but there were enough things about the physical evidence that we couldn't explain and enough holes in his alibis for the times of both scenes that made him worth at least taking a look at. No motive, of course, but I guess Dr. Locksley supplied that. And a weapon sure would be nice…did Cheryl stop by?"

"She stopped by yesterday while you were dead to the world. I'm sure she'll stop by today, too, but it wouldn't hurt you to take a day off, you know. You ARE in the hospital and I don't think you've really taken a break from this case since you were hurt. Hurt the first time, I mean."

Steve turned to eye his father, a little surprised by the edge of asperity in his tone. He looked tired, he decided. Not to mention rumpled. "You told me I took yesterday off," he suggested, hoping to provoke a smile. The look he got in return told him Mark was not amused - something had definitely ruffled his father's customary unflappable good humor. Probably a bad tactical moment to ask when he could expect to be released, then. "Have you been home at all?" he finally ventured.

"No," Jesse answered for him.

"Dad, I'm fine." Steve was honestly surprised. "Nothing worse than I'd get from a bad slide into home plate."

Jesse looked skeptical. "Maybe if home plate was a bulldozer…"

Mark took a deep breath. "When you have a head injury, you need to be careful to avoid a second head injury - "

"Because a second injury can result in brain damage or even death," Steve finished for him. "Dad, I know - you've been telling me that since I started playing football."

"Oh, and at some point do you think you're actually going to start listening to me?"

"I do listen to you! I didn't get a second head injury - maybe I've got one about everywhere else…" he reflected, ruefully taking stock. He saw Jesse out of the corner of his eye making covert gestures toward his chin and frowned, trying to follow his meaning. Mark caught his movement and looked too; Jesse dropped his eyes and scratched his jaw instead. Steve finally caught on and felt under his own chin, trying to find a finger to use that wasn't buried in gauze. "Oh." Yeah, he remembered that now. "I did hit my chin - "

"Split - " Jesse offered out of the side of his mouth.

"Split?" Steve tried touching it with his wrist instead. "Really?" Jesse made a face and nodded. "Well, either way, that doesn't count as a - " He saw Jesse raise an eyebrow and stopped again. "It does?"

"It does," Mark interjected firmly.

Jesse cleared his throat. "Well, technically, it's a maxiofacial…" he trailed off when he saw both Sloans staring at him.

Steve waved impatiently. "Whatever it's called, the point is that I'm not dead and I'm not braind - " He heard the sound Jesse made in his throat and couldn't help grinning, then wincing, as the movement pulled on the chin he was suddenly very aware of. "Don't start."

"This is not something to make light of!" Mark's tone was stern but a reluctant twinkle was stealing into his eyes. "You were very lucky. You may not always be lucky. You need to not take so many chances."

Steve decided it was pointless to repeat that it hadn't seemed like he was taking any chances when he'd headed out - there was something else going on with his father and reasonable explanations weren't going to work for now. Maybe he just needed a little sleep. "Fine. But you can see everything is all right now, so why don't you go get some sleep in a real bed? I really feel better than I have in days."

"Wait'll the meds wear off," Jesse murmured. Steve gave him his best "you're not helping" glare, and he subsided into silence.

Mark rubbed his eyes. "Maybe you're right," he admitted. "A shower would be nice, anyway."

"Good idea."

"I have one question," Jesse offered hesitantly. "If Brian is guilty, what happens to Madge Fuller?"

"Depends," Steve's frown returned. "That's why I'd like to talk to - " He glanced at Mark speculatively, then stopped and started again. "She's still guilty of perjury, misleading an investigation - any number of things the DA may decide to throw at her. Will probably use the charges against her as leverage to get her to come clean about Brian."

Jesse pushed his eyebrows together. "Do you think she will?"

Steve shrugged. His strength seemed to abandon him in a rush. "Hard to say. She fought so hard to protect him so far. Or thought she was anyway."

"Yeah," Jesse shook his head. "Was kind of crazy, when you think about it. The worst he would have gotten was some time in a mental health facility - which he needed anyway. I mean, he's a minor - even his records would be sealed. She could have faced the death penalty. Why take such a risk?"

"To protect him. Keep him from going through the publicity…due process…time in Juvenile Hall. To try to keep him young and a kid, I guess."

"And she was gonna risk her life for that?" Jesse shook his head again. "Just doesn't make any sense to me."

"Funny," Steve glanced over at his father and smiled a little. "That's one connection I didn't have any trouble making at all."