Three
The takeout arrived at the same time as a call from Lester - which said, surprisingly succinctly, 'we've got another one'.
"You going to be alright?" Nick asked as he deposited Stephen's half of the takeout on the coffee table for him, within easy reach.
"Yeah," Stephen said. "Food, books, TV. Lots to do."
"Just don't be an idiot," Nick said, "and get some bloody rest at some point. Give me a ring if you need anything."
"Right."
"I mean it," Nick warned, scowling at him, and Stephen gave him that funny half-grin that always made Nick feel doubly affectionate over him.
"Yes, Mum," he quipped. "Get going, or Lester'll eat you and I'll have to call Connor to help me. Which will end up killing me and maiming him, and then the team's down three people, not just one. Get out."
Nick didn't get back until very late: wet, frustrated, a little angry...and a little proud of himself.
She was really out there. Helen was real and alive and still just as beautiful and magnetic as she'd ever been...and he'd said no. He'd turned her down.
Nick still loved Helen, but not that woman he had seen today. He loved the passionate intellectual that he'd married...not the the extreme that she seemed to be reaching for now.
At the back of his mind through the entire encounter, he realised, had been Stephen's name.
That was what convinced him. She had seen him wounded and dying, and she should have helped him. The Helen Nick loved would have helped him. Helen had always liked Stephen; he'd been her student first. Nick remembered when Stephen had first come to the university, fresh back from a long trip in South America.
And he hadn't taken the whole post-trip three weeks dose of his anti-malarials, and had gone down with a nasty dose of South American malaria.
Helen had been furious with him. Nick hadn't been too pleased himself, but at the time, Stephen was still in the class of 'nice acquaintance' rather than 'friend' to Nick. But Helen had gone absolutely mad with him, screaming herself hoarse on their one and only visit to the student in the hospital. Nick was fairly sure that she was still banned from the tropical diseases wing, eight years and apparent death notwithstanding.
So for her to cross from that angry concern over Stephen's welfare, to leaving him to die in the dirty underbelly of London...something, somewhere, had gone horrendously wrong.
And Nick had turned her down.
He'd never really - not really - said no to Helen before. If she kept up the pressure, he'd always caved, but he'd never so surely and so irretrievably said no.
Maybe some good had come of Stephen's poisoning after all.
It was dark now, as he left himself into his house, shedding his coat and boots and running a hand through his slightly sticky hair. Dirty lakewater never did much for hair, even if it did then get a rinse in a clean prehistoric sea.
"Stephen?" he called quietly, flicking on a lamp.
Stephen had migrated from the wheelchair to the sofa, which Nick had folded out into its bed equivalent before he'd even picked Stephen up from the hospital that morning. He was deeply asleep - the fact he hadn't woken at his name being called testified to that - and the lines in his face smoothed out again in sleep.
The remnants of the takeout were on the kitchen table, the counters too high for Stephen to properly reach from the chair, and Nick frowned when he realised that Stephen hadn't eaten very much at all. He made a mental note to force breakfast down him in the morning before binning the remains and ferreting in the fridge for a cold can of beer.
Nick ended up sitting cross-legged on the living room floor watching Stephen breathe and thinking for some time, before deciding that he really needed a shower, some sleep, and preferably some enlightenment on what was really going on.
When Nick got downstairs the next morning, Stephen was sat up in the sofa bed and watching the news. Nick noted with amusement the stress ball that Stephen was slowly crushing and releasing in his left hand, wondered where it came from, then shrugged it off.
"The hospital physio wants you in this afternoon," he reminded him.
"Yeah," Stephen said, sounding very unenthusiastic.
"You still feeling sick?"
"Not really," he shrugged. "Not hungry, though."
"Nice try," Nick said. "You can be strange and healthy and have toast, or you can have a bacon butty."
There was a short silence, in which they tried a staring contest, but Stephen eventually backed down and plumped for the bacon. If nothing else, it would make him happy for all of twenty seconds.
They ended up sat side by side on the sofa bed, watching the news (muted) and Nick telling Stephen about the underwater anomaly and Helen.
"I don't think she quite knew what to say when I turned her down," he finished.
"I can't say I blame her," Stephen said, and if he didn't have such a masterful poker face, Nick suspected he would be giving him funny looks too. "You never said no to Helen."
"Doesn't mean I didn't want to," Nick shrugged. "She's changed, Stephen. She's not the same woman."
Stephen didn't say anything to that, so Nick changed the subject.
"Where'd the stress ball come from?"
"I've always had one. Got it out again last week."
"Why?"
"We met Connor," Stephen grimaced. "I could sense the impending doom and thought I might need some stress relief."
Nick laughed, which always made Stephen smile a bit.
"How's it going?" he asked.
"Okay," Stephen said. "Bit more finesse than yesterday."
"Any improvement on the legs?"
"No."
"Ah, physio'll get you going," Nick said. "Or I could smack your feet with the remote until you move them?"
"Nah, think I'll pass on that offer," Stephen said. "As I'm not going anywhere for a while, you might as well bring all that overdue marking in from the university. They're going to start thinking we've vanished."
"Stephen, I think you're missing my intentions," Nick said, changing the channel and trying to find something vaguely watchable at eight in the morning. "I'm trying to keep you alive, not kill you from boredom."
Nick left Stephen to the mercy of his physiotherapists to go in to the university and inform the appropriate people that Stephen was on sick leave from now until 'God knows when'. He also finally understood what Stephen meant about that dippy blonde girl in administration having a rather large crush on Stephen, and spent thirty minutes fending off her questions.
He also fetched a load of marking, as Stephen requested, and snuck in some grant request forms in the hope that the younger man would be bored enough to do those too. It was the one point at which their working relationship failed - they both loathed the things, and every year turned into a battle of wills as to who would do them.
He dropped by the flat and threw out the contents of Stephen's fridge that wouldn't keep, transcribed his phone messages, and stole a couple of the more weatherbeaten books off Stephen's shelves.
Nick didn't actually like Stephen's flat very much. It was cold and empty, and far too detached. It reminded Nick of how Stephen had been before he'd got to know him - the appearance that Stephen projected. He knew that Connor wasn't keen on Stephen because of his cool, almost aloof nature, and Nick hated that.
He scowled at the flat before he left, as if blaming it, and slammed the door out of spite.
Nick's relatively benign mood was destroyed when he got to the hospital to collect Stephen, though. The session had just finished as he walked into the room, and one of the physiotherapists - Julie, Judy, something like that - made a beeline for him.
"He's done well," she said breathlessly, "but he doesn't think so. He seems to be very fit..."
"He ran thirty miles a week before the accident," Nick said.
"Oh," she said, and sighed. "Well, Paul and I are hopeful that we can get him walking properly again, with time, but he's really struggling with this. His arms have visibly improved just with this session - he just needs to practice - but his hips and legs will take longer, and I don't..."
"I'll sort him out," Nick promised. He had a feeling that Stephen wouldn't have liked physiotherapy much.
He got Stephen out of the building and to the car before he stopped the chair and crouched in front of him. Stephen was staring off into space, crushing that stress ball again absently, but he didn't look like he was thinking happy thoughts at all.
"Stephen," Nick called, and he bit his lip when Stephen's blue eyes focused on his. After a second, Stephen's face crumpled in a way that Nick had never seen before, and never wanted to see again, and he sighed, leaning up to hug the younger man and let Stephen press his face into his shoulder.
For the first time in his life, Nick saw - or rather felt - Stephen cry. Even if he hadn't felt the dampness spreading in the shoulder of his T-shirt, the shuddering under his hands would have given Stephen away immediately, and Nick felt like crying himself, all of a sudden. He'd never seen Stephen cry. Stephen's usual method of showing that he was desperately, horribly upset was to hit something - usually his desk - and break a knuckle and make Nick take him to A&E, and bitch the whole way.
But he'd never cried before.
"It'll be alright," Nick promised uselessly, even though he couldn't do a damn thing about the situation. "It'll be alright. You'll get through it, Stephen. We'll get you through it."