Toby looked up from his horizontal perch on the couch when Ralph's voice, which had been ringing through the garage for almost an hour, stopped.
"Why'd you stop reading?"
"I only had two chapters to read."
"But you read four chapters. I thought you were going to keep going."
Ralph shrugged. "I read next class's reading, too. But I kind of got bored."
"Oh, come on. We're finally getting to the good part."
Walt rolled his eyes from his desk. "There's no good part of Pride and Prejudice, trust me."
Toby shot him a melodramatic glare. "Bite your tongue, Walt."
"Why are you even reading that book, Ralph?" Sylvester asked. "It's not exactly the kind of thing that's assigned in Robotics 101."
"My mom told me that, if I wanted to take more than two classes at college, I had to have to take an English class."
"Humanities are important," Paige called over. She was only half listening to the conversation; she was finally in the home stretch of the Toby-injury paperwork and was typing intently on her keyboard to finish the last form.
"Normally I'd disagree," Toby said. "But this class assigned you Pride and Prejudice - which, if you love me, you'll keep reading to me."
Ralph groaned. "But I'm so bored. Nothing interesting is happening. It's so predictable."
Toby's eyes widened. "Predictable? Did you really just call a book with one of the greatest plot twists in literary history predictable?"
A look of dubiousness took over Ralph's face. "Really? The greatest plot twist in literary history?"
"One of them, yeah. I mean, when you take the book in its historical context-"
"Okay, Toby," Happy interrupted. "There was a reason I never went to college. I don't think anyone wants to hear your analysis of a two-hundred-year-old book."
Toby opened his mouth to protest but Paige cut him off.
"Is anyone hungry for dinner yet?"
"Yes," Happy, Sylvester, and Ralph said in unison, more out of a desire to avoid Toby's pestering than anything else.
"Alright, then we'll get food."
Toby laid his head down on the throw pillow while Paige took everyone's dinner order - a rather unnecessary task, considering the fact that most of the team was coming with her.
He stayed there, eyes closed, listening while everyone left the garage. The vibrations from each person's footsteps rippled through the couch lightly, causing a tiny ache in his broken arm. Perhaps this was the start of the predicting-weather-via-his-bad-arm thing that his grandmother used to be able to do. Not that there was much weather to predict in Southern California, save blazing sun and unbearable heat. Still, it might be fun to be able to, on East-Coast missions, tell the team that it was going to rain a half hour before clouds darkened the sky.
Toby thought back to his anatomy professor at Harvard, who always wore the best ties. He had been wearing one with purple elephants on it on the day they discussed the effect of barometric changes on previously-injured bones. Toby allowed a slideshow of Professor Brown's best ties to run through his head, all saved by his nearly-perfect memory, despite the years that had passed since he was in med school. He was only two months into the semester when he felt himself softly falling asleep.
Toby groaned slightly. Walter looked up from his computer, ready to shout for Paige or Happy before remembering the rest of the team had left to pick up Kovalsky's for dinner. He thought back to what Paige had called out when she left, take care of Toby. It had been something of an afterthought; no one really expected him to be any good as a nurse, surely. Paige probably assumed Toby would be okay until she got back.
"Are you alright, Toby?" Walter asked, hoping his friend would shoot back some sarcastic comment as an affirmative answer.
"I'm fine, I'm fine," Toby said, his voice strained. "It's just that amoxicillin. It's making me nauseas."
Walter got up and walked over to the sofa, where Toby lay motionless.
"Can I get you anything? Soup? I've heard saltines can help…"
Toby smiled, his face looking slightly pale. "Why don't you leave the doctoring to the doctor, Walt? I'm good, really. It'll pass."
Walter furrowed his eyebrows. As a child, Megan had been occasionally afflicted with mysterious bouts of horrible nausea, which the doctors said might or might not be related to her MS diagnosis. Walter didn't want to watch his friend suffer the way his sister had.
"Something to get your mind off it, then." He sat down on the chair next to Toby's head.
"What did you have in mind? Wait, no, let me guess: analyzing computer algorithms? Figuring out which restaurants in Seattle have fermented fish with cod oil for the mission next week? Or have you managed to come up with something even more boring?"
Walter felt enough pity for Toby that he smiled at the sarcasm.
"I was thinking more along the lines of a trip to the roof. Megan used to love the fresh air when she was feeling nauseated. We could see who knows more constellations."
"No way, we both know you know way more constellations than me." But, even as Toby shook his head, he moved to sit up. Walter jumped forward to help him, placing a gentle, steadying hand on Toby's left shoulder.
It took a lot of time and assistance to get Toby up two sets of stairs on the way to the roof. Once he conquered the last step - a task his injured lungs found to be almost Herculean - he paused to lean on the roof's cement railing while Walter pulled up two chairs.
"Okay," Toby said as he sat down. "Because I'd be at a disadvantage even if I wasn't high on prescription-strength narcotics, I'm gonna claim the Big Dipper for myself. Toby one, Walter zero." The words sucked oxygen from his already-struggling lungs; he had to gulp for air when he finished.
Walter laughed. "If you're going to be like that, I'm taking the Little Dipper. One all."
"Scorpio." Toby pointed to the scorpion in the sky. Paige liked to say it was their team's mascot constellation.
"It's actually called Scorpius, technically."
"Correct my names all you want, Walt; it's just gonna give me an opportunity to get ahead of you. Hercules."
"Alright, fine, use the wrong names then. Draco."
They went on like that, continuing even after their teammates pulled up in Cabe's SUV, even after Paige found them on the roof, even after Happy brought up two bowls of soup and another amoxicillin tablet. They kept going until Happy, exhausted from spending two nights at the hospital worrying about her boyfriend, came up to the roof to ask Toby - more politely than she would've thought she had in her - to come downstairs so they could go home.
Toby leaned on Happy heavily as they stood in the elevator on the way up to their fourth-floor apartment. The movement upward caused him to get slightly light-headed, and Happy saw his eyes glaze over.
"Hey, hey," she said, shifting her weight to be able to better hold him up, "look alive, Curtis. You gotta stay on your feet, just for five more minutes."
"Mm." His eyelids were growing heavy. He blinked twice to try to wake himself up.
When the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened, Toby stumbled out; Happy lept to follow him. It was all she could do to keep him upright long enough to get him through their apartment door, down the hall, and into their bed.
Toby groaned as he lay down. Happy bit her lip.
"What's wrong? What's hurting?"
"Mm... Everything," Toby whispered, too tired to try to hide his pain from her.
"Everything?" Happy's voice was small. She hadn't really listened while the doctors went over the painkiller protocol; was it too soon to give him another oxycodone?
"Yeah... Just a little. Everything hurts a little. S'okay."
Happy placed a gentle hand on Toby's head, something she had seen Paige do to Ralph a hundred times. "I'm sorry, Toby, but I need to change the your gauze."
"Change the gauze... S'good. Don't want... infection." Toby, on the fanciful fringe between consciousness and sleep, was spouting medical half-nonsense.
Happy had to go back to her truck to retrieve Toby's satchel, which held the extra gauze. It was a long trip down to the parking lot, alone in the dark, left with nothing to keep her mind from dwelling on those awful moments in between when the building collapsed and when Toby's voice came scratchily through the coms, assuring the team that he was alive.
Happy shook her head to clear it and then started running through her Toby-to-do list to keep her mind occupied. She'd actually paid attention to the abrasion-management instructions, knowing the burden for the late-night and early-morning care would fall on her. Remembering the doctor's matter-of-fact words helped calm her, and, by the time she reached her apartment, she almost felt like she knew what she was doing.
Toby was snoring softly when she got back to their bedroom, so she shook the foot of his good leg - the only body part she could think of that was unbroken enough to shake - to wake him.
"Toby, you have to stay awake. I have to change your gauze, remember?"
"Gauze... Like a mummy?"
Happy chuckled; he wasn't even coherent enough to try to sound smart. It was nice to see him with his guard so far down, even if it was only because of a mix of extreme exhaustion and prescription pain medication.
Replacing the gauze twice a day prevents infection, the dark-haired doctor had said. Happy pulled the gauze packets out of Toby's satchel.
Wash your hands first, she remembered the doctor's telling her. She walked to the bathroom and turned the faucet on, taking her time rubbing the soap on her hands. This was a part of the process - the only part of the process, really - that she knew she could do correctly.
When she was done, she dried her hands carefully on a paper towel - paper, because cloth towels harbor bacteria - and went into the kitchen, careful not to touch anything. A cut the size of Toby's needed to be soaked in warm water twice a day. It was something to do with facilitating blood flow; Toby had played the Harvard-trained-physician bit enough in the hospital that his doctors didn't really explain the reasoning behind it, figuring he would know. But it was hard to submerge the forehead in water, so instead Happy was supposed to use a hot, wet hand towel.
"But you just said hand towels harbor bacteria."
"If you boil them, it kills all the bacteria."
"Boil them?"
But that's what she did. She got a clean towel from the hall closet - opening the door with her elbow to keep her hands clean - and placed it on the kitchen counter while she prepared a pot of boiling water. (She couldn't figure out how to get the pot out of the lazy Susan without using her hands, so she just gave up and said she'd wash them again afterwards.) Once the water reached a "rolling boil" - a phrase she'd read often enough on pasta boxes to be wary of a doctor using it when giving medical advice - she dropped the towel in and set a timer for two minutes.
"But won't the towel burn him?"
"You have to let it cool for two minutes."
"How? Won't it get dirty if I set it on the counter?"
"Set it on a clean paper towel."
The doctor had said those words almost with surprise, as if it was inconceivable that someone as medically-well-versed as Toby would end up with someone as incompetent as Happy. She frowned as she made a small bed of fresh paper towels for the hand towel, feeling more and more unsure of herself as she got further into the procedure.
Once the hand towel had cooled, she picked it up, careful to touch only the corner even though her hands were freshly washed, and brought it into the bedroom. Toby was asleep again, but he was on his back, forehead cut facing the ceiling, so she figured it was okay.
She carefully pulled at the medical tape holding the old gauze onto Toby's forehead until it came off. His cut glared at her, a crater of angry red and brown on an otherwise-smooth, pale face.
Miraculously, this cut was the only area of Toby's skin broken when the building collapsed. His clothes and shoes had probably protected all other parts of his body, the doctors said. But head wounds bleed a lot; even Happy knew that. So when the team finally found Toby, after an hour of searching through rubble and debris, he had looked nearly dead: there was blood all over his face. It mixed with sweat and dust until, in the dim light of the fires the firemen had yet to put out, it looked almost black, like oil leaking from a degraded engine gasket.
Happy jumped when she realized she had zoned out and inadvertently let the towel lose some of its circulation-encouraging heat. She gently put the fingers of her free hand on it. The cloth still felt hot - it was nearly burning the hand with which she held it. She made the executive decision - fueled only partially by the fact that she was exhausted - to not reboil it.
The hot-compress process wore on: hold the towel on the cut for five minutes; let the cut air-dry for ten minutes; replace the gauze, without touching the fabric that would touch the cut, and tape it back up. Happy followed the instructions to the letter, for once thankful for her near-perfect memory. By the time she finished, the bold green numbers on the nightstand clock read 12:17.
Toby hadn't brushed his teeth, but Happy figured the cavity risk wasn't worth dragging him out of bed now. She just untied his shoes and pulled them off before tossing them on the floor, far enough from the bed to not be a tripping hazard, but not really close enough to the closet to be considered "put away". Then she walked slowly to the bathroom, brushed her own teeth, and came back.
The leggings and tee shirt she was wearing were close enough to pajamas; she slipped off her shoes, crawled into bed beside Toby. She was awake just long enough to register the sound of Toby's even breathing, and then she fell asleep.