Clay wakes up in a hospital bed.
He feels … okay, mostly. Better than expected. There are a lot of aches, but they're muted, in a cottony sort of way that probably means pain meds. He's a little short of breath and there's an oxygen mask over his face, but the spearpoint agony he remembers in his lung is more or less gone.
When he shifts experimentally, Trent says softly from somewhere to his right, "Hey, Clay. You awake?"
He manages to turn his head, nod. Trent gives him a tired smile. "Welcome back. I'm gonna get Jason real quick, okay?"
Clay isn't sure why Trent would need to get Jason, but he's having trouble putting a lot of things together. He knows he was captured and it sucked, and he remembers having a fever and his chest hurting a lot, but he's not quite certain how he got from there to here.
Trent comes back in a minute later, followed by Jason, who says, "Hey." His voice is uncharacteristically soft, and when he moves, it's slowly, keeping his hands visible. "Is it okay if I sit down here?"
Clay blinks a few times and stares in fuzzy confusion for long enough that Hayes starts to look worried.
Clay's team leader is asking him for permission to sit?
When it becomes clear that Jason really is going to wait for a response, Clay attempts a 'yeah' that disappears into an indistinct mumble behind the oxygen mask. Finally he just nods, and Jason sits, still moving slowly and deliberately.
Clay's heart rate goes up a little. Is Jason hurt? He doesn't remember him being hurt, but granted, he's pretty sure there's a lot he's not remembering. What about the rest of the team? Sonny, Brock, Ray?
Clay tries to reach up to take off the oxygen mask, only to pull up when he realizes he can't really move some of his fingers. When he glances down, he sees splints; bandages where fingernails should be.
Oh. Yeah. That's gonna suck for a while.
He decides he can still get the oxygen mask off, so he reaches up again. Jason starts to lean forward to stop him, only to freeze in place with a vaguely guilty expression.
Okay, something is going on, and Clay needs to know what the hell it is. He clumsily removes the mask, coughs a wet cough that cuts through his chest like a saw blade - ah, there's the pain he remembered - and then whispers, "You okay?"
Hayes's eyebrows shoot up. "Am I okay?"
"Yeah." Clay coughs again. "Acting … weird."
Jason exchanges a glance with Trent. "Oh. Yeah, I'm fine."
Clay doesn't really believe him, but doesn't have the breath to argue. "Team?" He croaks.
"They're all okay. Brock got winged a little while back, but he's gonna be fine. No harm to anybody else."
Clay nods. He tries to lift the oxygen mask back to his face, but it slips from his splinted fingers.
Hayes leans forward, very carefully, and watches Clay's expression while gently securing the mask back in place. That's when the odd behavior finally begins to make sense, and Clay's cheeks start to burn as though his fever has come back.
His hardass team leader is trying not to scare him.
Something must have happened after they found him. Whatever it was, he's pretty sure it was embarrassing; judging by the way Jason is acting, probably embarrassing to a degree that Clay is never going to live down.
He decides to avoid the whole situation by going back to sleep. When he wakes up again, an unknown time later, it's Sonny in the room with him.
Seeing that Clay's eyes are open, the Texan goes so still that even his toothpick-gnawing ceases. "Hey, Blondie," he drawls softly. "You with me?"
Clay coughs, pressing his casted arm against his ribs for support. "Yeah," he mumbles, noticing then that the oxygen mask has been replaced by a nasal cannula, which must indicate at least some improvement.
Sonny's grin lights up his whole face. He starts to say something, but is interrupted when the door opens and a nurse comes in, carrying a syringe. She looks immediately at Sonny, who gets to his feet and nods slightly, and then she turns to smile at Clay. She's middle-aged, with graying hair and kind eyes.
Everything goes fine until she gets close, and Clay notices the way the light glints off the needle on the syringe, and it's like a ratchet strap tightens down around his chest. He breathes through his nose, consciously trying to force himself to relax.
It's stupid. She's not gonna hurt him. He knows that.
The nurse asks him a question. Running on autopilot, all his focus taken up by trying to tamp down the sudden, irrational anxiety, Clay answers her in French.
The reaction is instantaneous. The nurse takes a quick step back at exactly the same time Sonny moves forward to sweep her behind him. It's a fluid, practiced motion, like the steps to a dance Clay doesn't know.
He looks at the nurse. At the syringe. Beyond it, to the fading bruising on her wrist.
Oh, goddammit.
"I do that?" Clay asks, managing English this time.
Some of the tension bleeds from Sonny's stance. His eyes also go shifty, which means yes. "You were real out of it," he says. "Didn't know where you were."
Clay ignores him, scrunching down in the bed and resolutely closing his eyes.
"Hey, Clay," the nurse says softly. "Is it okay if I give you your antibiotics real quick?"
Without opening his eyes, he nods, then realizes that might not be enough to reassure her and says clearly in English, "Yes."
As soon as he feels her move into his space, the tension ratchets back up again. Jesus, what is wrong with him?
"You shouldn't feel bad about the wrist," the nurse says conversationally. "My fault. I knew better than to startle you like that. Also, I've hurt myself worse emptying bedpans."
He cracks his eyes open to give her a skeptical look.
She grins, casting smile lines around her eyes. "Dropped one of the stainless steel ones on my toe one time. Hurt like a motherfucker. No offense, but this little bruise just doesn't compare."
Clay makes a valiant attempt to hang onto the nice pity party he just got done scheduling for himself, but despite his best efforts, her briskly cheerful tone does kind of make him feel better.
After she leaves, and after Sonny gives him a cup of water that vastly improves the state of his throat, Clay thinks through things, mulls over the way his injuries don't hurt as much as expected, and finally asks a question that probably should have occurred to him before. "How long have I been here?"
Sonny, who has returned to his seat, shifts a little. "Ah, almost five days."
Clay blinks. "Five days?"
"Yeah. You don't remember any of it?"
He shakes his head.
"What's the last thing you do remember?"
That's a surprisingly hard question to answer. There are a lot of scattered fragments, none of them especially pleasant, and fitting them into any kind of chronological order feels like putting together a puzzle with half the pieces missing. He finally guesses, "Uh, I think being in the mountains? It was hot. My chest hurt."
"Yeah, it was hotter than hell, and you also had a fever that like to have fried your brain. Trent said-"
A flash of memory jolts to the surface. Clay interrupts, "Wait. Shit. Did I go after Trent?"
Sonny clears his throat. "Ah. Yeah, you kind of maybe tried to strangle him a little." At the look on Clay's face, he quickly adds, "You didn't hurt him none. Jason got you off him before you could."
Still, though, it's the principle of the thing. Clay definitely owes Trent an apology. And a bottle of whiskey. The good stuff.
Then Sonny continues, "Well, you did knock the wind out of him when you kicked him in the chest, but-"
"Wait, I kicked him in the chest?"
"Yeah. That was the second time."
Two bottles of whiskey. At least.
Honestly, from the way everyone has been acting around him, he probably owes their respective favorite drinks to the rest of his team too.
Clay doesn't realize that he and Sonny have been performing a silent guilt duet until Sonny says morosely, while staring down at his hands, "I'm sorry."
There's a depth of emotion in his teammate's voice that catches Clay off guard. All he can think to say is, "Why?"
That seems to make Sonny feel even worse. He curls forward a little, shoulders hunched, and takes an unsteady breath. "Clay, those bastards had you for eight days."
Huh. So his guess of a week had been surprisingly accurate.
"Eight days. And we weren't there." Sonny's voice breaks. "And I'm sorry for that."
"Sonny, look, it's…" He trails off, not sure what to say.
It wasn't like there was a specific moment or even a particular day when he realized they weren't gonna show up and rescue him. It was gradual, and even after it sank in, he never let go of the simple bedrock truth that he believed in above all else: If Bravo could come for him, they would.
The fact that they didn't meant that they couldn't. It was the only possible explanation. From there, it was logical to assume that they couldn't find him, which meant he had to make sure they could. That was how he would survive. The only way.
He would call for them, and they would be there.
That certainty is the only reason he's not dead. He's busted up and an absolute mess in about a dozen different ways, but he's alive because he knew they would come if he called.
Now he just needs to figure out a way to make them understand that … preferably without admitting just how shamefully close he came to giving up.
Coming up in chapter 10: Cerberus the unofficial therapy dog!