A/N: Thank you so much for reviewing, following, favouriting ... and sticking with this story despite the sporadic updates. It's slowly coming to an end, just three or four more chapters after this.
This chapter is set in and after 3x10 The Devil's Share, an episode so complex and many-faceted that every time I watch it, I discover new overtones and undercurrents.
Disclaimer: I only own my little family of OCs; the rest belongs to the writers of this fantastic show and the respective copyright owners. Direct quotes from the episode are indicated such.
Warnings and a personal remark:
Although I had this chapter mapped out in my brain for a while now, it was hard to write in a realistic voice, that is, without being melodramatic or trite. It deals with serious matters including grief, severe depression and an attempt of one character to take their own life, so consider yourself warned and please avoid if this presents a trigger for you.
I am not making light of either of these issues. I've been there, and it's nothing you can just shrug off. Words can never do justice to the agony of grief and depression. I've heard it said that "If you're depressed or suicidal, get help!", but that's easier said than done; it can be downright impossible. So if you have someone in your life you suspect might suffer from depression or worse, please reach out to them, however awkward it may get.
This chapter is dedicated to the people who, by the grace of God, were there to reach out to me: S., L., W., D., and R. Thank you.
Chapter 24: Dark Night Pt. 2
If Lionel Fusco was surprised to see Hannah and Ben at the funeral, he didn't show it. They were just sitting down in the back row when he arrived, and he shared a look and a quiet nod with them before taking his own seat. At the end of the ceremony, as everyone was filing past the closed coffin to pay their very last respects, Lionel found a place under a nearby tree to wait for the couple. With a heavy heart he watched as Hannah, with a tear-stained face and shaking hands, placed a slender, unassuming arrangement of jasmine twigs on the polished wood, moving her lips in quiet parting words. Ben looked more composed but deeply grieved nonetheless. After a moment, he put a comforting arm around Hannah's waist and gently led her away, towards the spot where Lionel was standing.
"I'm so sorry for your loss, Lionel," Hannah whispered when they reached the detective, surprising him with a brief but heartfelt hug.
"Thank you," he replied, giving her hands a grateful squeeze before letting go. "So," he asked, "how's John holding up?"
John. Not Wonder Boy or any of the other nicknames Ben and Hannah had heard from the sturdy detective over time.
"His injuries are extensive, but he's healing all right so far," Ben replied, purposely answering only part of the question. Before anything else could be said, he continued: "So are you any closer to catching the man who did this?"
Lionel looked a little dejected. "Not yet. It's like he vanished from the face of the earth."
Hannah's eyes took on that steely look Lionel only knew all too well. "You'd better find him soon, or I swear John will go after him. And we all know what'll happen if he does."
The detective straightened his shoulders and looked Hannah straight in the eyes. "No worries. I'm sure we'll have him under lock and key by the time John is in any state to go after him."
As if on cue, Ben's mobile vibrated audibly with an incoming message. A deep frown appeared on the doctor's face when he read the text on the screen. "You better hurry, Detective. It seems John just gave us the slip."
*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*
Hannah couldn't decide whether to be furious or worried about her brother when they returned to the safe house and found a slightly groggy and highly embarrassed Dr Madhani trying to shake off the aftereffects of the sedation John had administered to him. Apparently they had all been mistaken in thinking John was too weak to get out of bed, let alone out of the house under his own steam. In reality, he had injected Dr Madhani with a sedative he had found on the medication tray before getting dressed (and of course he kept a few changes of clothes in the safe house) and slipping out the door, away from the cameras.
Ben wasn't surprised but very concerned. The last readings of the monitoring equipment before John had disconnected everything weren't exactly cause for optimism. Even the slight exertion of probably sitting up and moving around a little hadn't done him good, and all three doctors wondered how the patient ever managed to get even as far as the door.
"This is suicide," Dr Madhani murmured, sipping at the strong coffee Ben had brought him.
"That might just be what he's intending," Hannah ground out. Finding the pain of this thought unbearable, she fell back on anger. "We should have taken him to Jersey and put him on suicide watch right away."
"We couldn't have known," Ben replied quietly. "The most important thing now is to find him and provide the medical care he needs."
"So, what's the worst case scenario injury-wise?" His wife forcibly shook herself out of her dark thoughts and focussed on being a doctor, not a sister.
"Last time I checked, he was running a slight temperature and his lungs sounded a little congested," Dr Madhani reported. "Probably the beginning of a chest infection."
"And I bet he'll tear most of his stitches, running around like that," Ben added. "We'll need a proper OR to patch him up again."
Hannah nodded. "I'll call mum and dad, have them on standby at the surgery and let them know we'll need antibiotics and a few units of blood." She started to pull out her mobile phone but paused mid-move. "Farouk, I'm so sorry for what John did. I had no idea he'd attempt something like that, or I'd never let him out of my sight."
The Iraqi doctor shook his head. "Don't worry about it," he replied with a dismissive wave. "It was just a little Versed, no harm done. And he didn't hurt me. He obviously knew what he was doing."
"Just for the record: I didn't teach him that!" Hannah grumbled.
Dr Madhani smiled a little. "He actually apologised when he injected me with the sedative."
"Well, that makes it better!" his young female colleague snorted sarcastically. After a moment she drew a deep breath and her features softened again. "All the same: thank you for looking after him. Will you get home all right if we call you a taxi?"
"Yes, sure. I'm fine, just a little groggy." He paused, then added: "I'm worried about him. He seemed to be in a ... what do you call it ... bad frame of mind? Like he didn't care what happened to him. I hope you find him in time."
*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*
Everyone was in place. Finch, Fusco, Shaw and that strange Root woman were about to enter the building where they suspected John was. Hannah and her parents were at the Silversteins' surgery, preparing for whatever state John might be in when he arrived. And after only minimal protest, Harold had agreed to take Ben along, mainly to increase John's chances of survival, but also to have some emergency backup for talking John down from whatever ledge he might be teetering on. So here he was, sitting in the driver's seat of the "getaway car", as he had mentally dubbed it, although he knew very well they were here to prevent a crime, not commit one. He had been left behind to ensure a quick exit should the need arise, but Harold had put him on speaker so he could follow the team's every sound and word.
For a while, tense discussions and gunfire was all he could hear. Then there were hurried footsteps and finally the sound of a door opening.
"Mr Reese ..."
Ben held his breath, turning up the speaker volume on his phone and listening intently to each and every sound coming over the line.
"... you know what Joss sacrificed ..."
Struggling to stay focussed on the here and now, Ben closed his eyes against the memories of three nights ago that threatened to pull him under.
"Everything."
If the term desolation had a sound attached to it, this was it – the tone of John's voice in speaking this one word.
"We should have killed him in the first place. Why didn't we, Finch?"
Desolation turned into despair, followed by the unmistakeable sound of a human body collapsing. Immediately, the doctor was on high alert. John's laboured breathing was alarming, like it hurt to draw a breath ... which it probably did, considering his injuries.
"You're dying, John."
There was a strange pause that made Ben wonder what was going on, but then the older man continued.
"Let us help you."
When Ben heard the tears in Harold's voice on the last two words, he felt something in his heart give. He had to fight hard to stay put and not rush in to get to his best friend.
There was the empty click of a trigger being pulled on a useless gun, once, twice, three times. Something had gone wrong ... or right. Ben heard the clatter of a handgun falling and being caught, and then Fusco's voice:
"Get him out of here."
That was his cue. He started the car to pull up at the back of the building. "Talk to me, Harold!"
"We're coming out, but it's bad."
Ben shifted the car into park and jumped out as soon as he caught a glimpse of the trio at the door. Finch and Shaw were doing their best to support John and move him forward, but the much taller man was hanging almost limply between them, dead weight on legs that were buckling more than carrying him.
With a few long steps, the doctor closed the distance between them, catching his friend mid-collapse. "Easy," he breathed. "I've got you." He wasn't even sure the man could hear him, but then Ben felt John's arms tighten ever so slightly around him in a pathetic attempt to pull himself up. "Easy," he repeated. "Let me do all the work." And with a few practised movements he manoeuvred the half-unconscious man into the back of the car.
A quick examination in the dim light made it clear that Finch had been right. It was bad. Apparently none of the sutures had survived John's little field trip; all of his wounds were bleeding sluggishly and had probably done so for the better part of the day. The feverish flush that streaked his cheekbones stood out alarmingly on his otherwise deathly pale face. He was covered in cold sweat, every laboured breath he drew rattled ominously in his lungs, and his pulse was thready at best.
It was hard to find a vein to place an IV, but Sameen and Ben finally managed to start John on some fluids, antibiotics, and painkillers. To Root's credit it had to be said that while driving as fast as she dared, she managed to hold the car fairly steady so the two medics in the back could work safely on their patient.
"How is he doing?" Harold's timid voice broke the silence in the car.
For a long moment, Ben didn't answer. He was bracing John carefully but firmly with his own body to keep him from being bounced around in the moving car, so he could feel the fever raging in the other man, as well as the intermittent chills that had him shaking like a leaf. His breathing was getting more and more shallow and his pulse didn't improve despite the liquids being pumped into him. All this in itself wouldn't have been too much cause for concern, though, if Ben hadn't seen the look in John's eyes right before he passed out. It was a look he had seen all too often in his time as an army doctor: the look of a soldier who had failed in his mission. For too many of them, it had been the beginning of the end.
"Ben?" Harold repeated when the doctor didn't respond.
In an almost subconscious gesture born out of deep friendship, Ben smoothed his hand down the side of John's head before resting his fingers against the pulse point over the carotid artery. "You might want to start praying," he whispered.
*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*
After three hours of an intricate but familiar surgical choreography, it seemed there was nothing more to do, let alone say. Words failed the four doctors as they stood around John's bed, each of them dwelling on their own dismal thoughts. In medical terms, all of them had seen much worse over the course of their professional lives. Still, the past hours had been harrowing. Nothing dramatic had happened – no flat-lining, no sudden drops or spikes in temperature, blood pressure or pulse, nothing of the kind. It had been an almost ordinary clean-up-and-patch-up job. Nevertheless, John's condition continued to deteriorate for no apparent medical reason.
"Is there anything else we can try to avert pneumonia?" Rachel asked after a long, gloomy silence, although she already knew the answer.
"Nothing I can think of", her husband replied with a superfluous glance at the lab results. "The infection is too far gone, and he's in too bad of a condition to help fight it off. We'll just have to wait for the antibiotics to gain ground."
Half ignoring her parents, Hannah reached out and gently dried her brother's sweat-streaked face with a soft towel. The two male doctors had very thoroughly cleaned away all the blood and dirt from John's body and dressed him in a fresh hospital gown. Now he lay in this bed looking more fragile and vulnerable than Hannah had ever seen him.
All anger she might have felt at John's vanishing act had dissipated the moment Ben had carried him through the door. Both of them were covered in blood, and although she could see that her brother was still alive, something about the unconscious man told her that whatever had transpired had been disastrous. He looked ... defeated.
"He can't stay here," Ben said in a low voice. "It's not safe. We need to stabilise him enough for transport to the therapy centre."
His father-in-law gave him a long, scrutinising look and didn't answer long enough for Hannah to turn around to see what was going on between them. "Dad?" she asked in a small voice.
Ethan fought hard to not say everything that was going through his head at that moment. Can't stay here ... not safe ... relocate ... witness protection ... new identities. He'd heard it all before – he'd lived through it all before, and an irrational fear of having to do it all over again swept over him like a wave of icy water. His daughter seemed to read it in his eyes, because she pulled him into a firm hug and said gently: "We're not in danger, I promise, but John may be. We just need to give him a safe place to recover."
The tension in Ben's posture bled away as soon as he realised what this was all about. "She's right, Ethan," he confirmed. "And the therapy centre is the perfect place for him. We have so many soldiers there whom this country owes big time, no-one would dare and stir things up unless they want a scandal of national proportions. John will be quite safe there. After all, he is a traumatised soldier."
With a small smile, Ethan kissed his daughter's cheek and released her after another firm squeeze. "Never a dull moment in this family, is there?" Then he picked up John's chart again, scanning the data once more with the critical eye of the seasoned surgeon he was. "I'm not sure," he sighed after a moment. "Under normal circumstances I'd advise against it. At this point, I'd rather put him in ICU than anything else."
This wasn't news; one look at John told them everything they didn't want to think about.
"What's our time limit?" Rachel asked, stepping closer to the bed and pulling the blanket a little higher over John's shoulder when she saw him shiver with another bout of chills. He looked so miserable, it tugged on her motherly heartstrings. She ran a soothing hand over his head, carding her fingers through his short, sweat-soaked hair and smiling sadly when he leaned into the tender touch.
Ben glanced at his watch, then at John. "It's just past midnight. If we want to avoid unwelcome attention, we should be out of here by five. We'll have a critical care ambulance at our disposal for transport, so that's a plus."
"Five hours ... not a lot of time, but at least something we can work with. And I'm not going to ask how you managed to get your hands on a critical care ambulance, but it makes me feel a lot better about this," Ethan replied.
"I'm more worried about what will happen after he wakes up," Hannah said quietly.
She was right to be.
*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*
As predicted, the chest infection escalated into pneumonia over the next hours. Although the transfer to the therapy centre went smoothly and John's overall condition started to stabilise somewhat, he was far from out of the woods. The fact that he hadn't regained consciousness yet was not entirely unexpected but still cause for concern.
The most troubling thing of all was the fever that just wouldn't abate, no matter what they tried. With John's system so overtaxed and weakened, sepsis was a prominent danger. Here at the therapy centre with its tight security and all necessary equipment at hand, monitoring his condition was a little less stressful; nevertheless Ben and Hannah were well aware that they were in for a long forty-eight hours.
They were also well aware that their own energy reserves were quickly depleting considering the events of the past five days, so they were very grateful when Hannah's parents as well as Dr Madhani and even Sameen Shaw offered to take turns in taking care of John.
Things hovered at a strange equilibrium, just a little too good to call them life-threatening, yet far too bad to be optimistic. Any treatment measures taken sort of did their job, but just enough to keep him stable. It was unsettling to see that no matter what they did, it failed to bring about improvement.
"He's not fighting." It was Dr Madhani who eventually gave voice to what everyone thought but didn't dare to say out loud.
"I can't blame him," Ben added quietly. "I wouldn't either if I was in his place."
*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*
John woke up disoriented and feeling sicker than he ever had. He tried to figure out what had pulled him out of the blackness when he heard something. Someone was talking to him in an urgent voice. Harold. "You're dying, John."
He certainly felt that way. If only he could get it over with already.
"You're dying, John."
No, wait. That was wrong. Everything was wrong. Maybe he was already dead? Was being dead supposed to be this painful?
"You're dying, John."
Harold's voice was very close. If he was dead, why was Harold here?
In an effort to get an idea of what was going on, John peeled his eyes open a few millimetres. Sure enough, there was Harold sitting by his bed, talking to him.
"You should be fighting, John." Now that made more sense. However, it could mean only one thing: he was, in fact, not dead.
Disappointment and despair came crashing down on him even before he processed the why. He was still alive and in all likelihood forced to keep living.
"Do you hear me, John? You need to fight!"
No. I'm done fighting.
*POI*POI*POI*POI*POI*
Harold had come bearing gifts, and the team of five doctors and one doctor-turned-government-assassin-turned-grumbling-guardian-angel ravenously descended on the table loaded with the finest Middle Eastern food New York City had to offer. When Hannah proceeded to fall asleep on her husband's shoulder, he carried her off to their house with a sad but fond expression on his face, leaving her parents to exchange a meaningful look, Dr Madhani to smile enigmatically and Shaw to groan in mock disgust.
As Ben carefully lowered Hannah onto the bed, she made an indistinct sound, wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down next to her. "Sleep," she mumbled without opening her eyes, dragging the blankets over both of them.
Ben chuckled, placed a tender kiss on her forehead, curled up around her and was out like a light.
Next thing they knew, their pagers and their mobile phones went off in a deafening cacophony of alarms. Conditioned by years of training and working round-the-clock shifts, both of them were up and running towards the hospital wing of the therapy centre less than a minute later. A glance at the clock on the wall over the nurses' station told them they had managed to catch a full two hours of sleep – long enough to feel a little more human now, but apparently also long enough for something to go seriously sideways.
They didn't even have to ask where they needed to go; the small crowd of distressed-looking doctors in the hallway told them more than they wanted to know.
As they approached, John's voice, which should have been such a welcome sound after so many days of total silence, rose hauntingly above the low hum of the hospital.
"You said I was dying, Harold ... so why am I not dead? ... Why didn't I die? ... Why couldn't you just ... let me die?"
Without thinking, Hannah pushed through the small crowd into John's room, taking in the disaster with one single glance. Harold and Shaw were standing between the bed and the window, hands slightly raised, palms up, in a de-escalating gesture. John was standing beside the bed, gun in hand (probably nicked from Shaw, Hannah's mind helpfully supplied), trying with a trembling arm to turn the weapon on himself.
If Shaw hadn't made an attempt to disarm him, the only logical conclusion was that the safety catch on the gun was off.
"You should have just ... let me die," John repeated in a tone of voice none of them ever wanted to hear again. In a desperate effort he seemed to gather all of his remaining energy to bring the gun up to his head – and Hannah just moved.
In two long strides she was beside her brother, simultaneously catching him around the waist and removing the weapon from his grip. "I couldn't, John," she said, letting the tears fall from her eyes. "You can't die. I need you!"
With an expression of utter helplessness and confusion John looked at her, his breathing laboured and audibly rattling in his chest. Hannah could see clearly that he had no idea what was happening to him. He was burning with fever, his heart was pounding against his ribcage and he was shaking all over.
"Hannah ..." he breathed, fingers trying and failing to hold onto her when he felt his legs give out. "Hannah ... please ..." He didn't even know what he was asking of her. "H-Hannah ..." It was a desperate plea, a cry for help, begging her not to leave him alone in the dark night of confusion and pain.
She sensed the imminent collapse and braced herself for the added strain on her muscles. Gently she lowered both of them down to the ground, pulling John flush against her in the process. Someone had taken the gun from her hand when she had held it out; someone else covered her brother's trembling form with a soft blanket.
He was still talking, probably to her, but whatever he was trying to say was rendered unintelligible and incoherent by the fever messing with his brain, the compromised state of his lungs, and the desperate sobbing that tore through his body.
Hannah pulled him impossibly closer and buried her tear-stained face in his hair. "It's okay," she whispered. "You don't need to fight anymore."