Chapter Text
There’s a bit of twisted irony in the whole situation, Schlatt thinks as he slams his foot on the brake just before it collides with the damp wall of the hospital’s parking garage. Any other day, he'd give a little grimace at the screech of machinery, but his mind is far too fixated on the absolute comedy of his life's latest tragedy. It’s a bit like the laws of inevitability, something about the British putting a bounty on cobra heads in India until the townspeople started breeding the snakes for profit. Once the government caught on, the bounty was quick to disappear— so the citizens let the snakes go, ending with more snakes slithering around the streets, there's snakes in the churches and the toilets and the churches' toilets and holy fucking shit is he getting bit in the ass right about now.
An attempt at a deep breath turns to rigidly holding it as the familiar, upbeat sound of a ringtone sounds off beside him. His outstretched hand pauses just above the device in hesitation, until its frantic vibration in the cupholder sends it brushing just against his fingertips. Schlatt swallows a jolt of nausea as he answers the call, his free hand fumbling with his seatbelt and door handle, all while he struggles to at last croak out, “Hello?”
“Mr. Schlatt?” replies the man on the other end.
Resisting the urge to say something back about ‘don’t you know who I am?’ and ‘what’s it to you?’ to alleviate the tension running him raw, Schlatt instead says, “Yes- yeah. That’s me.” Pouring rain and concrete walls distort the quality, but he can just hear the thoughtful pause on the other end of the line. He ignores his own mounting frustration as he hurries down the slope of the garage, carelessly stepping in puddles and fucking up those nice shoes he’d wasted the amount of “somebody else’s fortune” on. Just before his impatient temper skyrockets and he shouts something into the mic, the man on the other end speaks again.
“Regarding your son’s condition, it would be better if you could come to the hospital t-”
“I’m here, outside- oh, my god, is he fucking dead? Are you going to tell me he’s fucking dead? I thought the whole thing was a joke when you first called me, how was I supposed to know it was serious? I would’ve been here sooner if I’d known that he was- whatever, is he alive?”
“No, sir. Well, I mean, yes, uh, forget the question I’m answering- yes, he’s expected to recover, physically. But it would be-”
“I can’t tell you how great it would be if you’d stop being a vague prick about all of this and just tell me what the hell’s going on!” Schlatt yells unabashedly just as he pushes open the glass door of the hospital with his shoulder. In his frustration, he’s still gesturing wildly with his free hand as his audience goes from nobody at all to sets of eyes in the waiting room that stare at him like he’s a rat in the restaurant kitchen. And that’s probably about as good as he looks now, too; half-drowned and bordering on feral as his heart threatens to seize in the wake of his panic.
Before the doctor can even manage to respond, a soft voice to his left calls out, “Sir? Mr. Schlatt?”
The way that he whips to the side and glares at the nice lady with a clipboard isn’t intentional, but she jumps nonetheless and her wide eyes dart around his figure as they struggle to find where to focus. As he stares her down, expectation written across his tense form, she extends one slightly-shaky hand towards the hallway. The other holds out the clipboard that she’d been clutching to her chest, with a little pen on a string tied to the top. “Your son is stabilizing, but we need this information filled out in order to continue the treatment, so if you wouldn’t mind taking the time to… cover the blanks...” she trails off, seeming to realize that he’d stopped listening the moment she’d pointed at the hallway. “The room is 110. Please remember we have other patients that are trying to recover, and causing a scene can be disruptive to their-”
“110?” Schlatt repeats, and the second she nods curtly in response, he’s snatching the stupid clipboard away skittering down the hall with his squeaky, wet shoes. Everything about the place is unnerving, from its bright white lights contrasted against the empty black of a rainy night sky in the windows. Hospitals had always made Schlatt nervous. In fact, he’d done a great job of avoiding setting foot in a single one since fifteen years ago when his child had been born. Another sick feeling washes over him as he considers the possibility of this ugly white block of a building being the first and last place he’d see the kid alive.
Forcing his momentum to a screeching halt by grabbing onto the doorframe of the room labeled “110” in curly, stainless steel numbers, he locks his eyes on the child in the bed.
Looking as pallid as a corpse, the only thing that assures Schlatt the boy isn’t one is the unsteady rise-and-fall of his chest. There’s bloody gauze and bandages all on one side of his neck, and tubes sprawling out from his hands, his chest; an absence of details over the phone leaves Schlatt to fill in the blanks as he hesitantly steps closer to him. All of his anger has withdrawn to leave behind an ache, something like grief and guilt combined in the optimal form to make his pounding heart twist. He’s washed out by the pale blue of a hospital gown, even his freckled nose and cheeks a void of color as Schlatt studies his sleeping face. Brow furrowed together, clearly restless even as narcotics keep him under, he looks so much like her that the sobs he’d been holding back manage to wrench free. He’s barely breathing as his chest convulses, heavy tears slipping down his face and landing on the too-white bedsheets.
Taking one of those ghostly hands in his own, Schlatt grips his son’s long fingers so he doesn’t disturb any of the devices hooked up to the rest of him, and lets himself be swept away in the memory of how impossibly small that hand used to be. The gap of years there is so immense that he almost doesn’t believe it’s the same person; but he knows that it is, from that thick brown hair with its almost-wavy ends and the birthmark like a jagged burst of flame on the left side of his face.
In the last hour, Schlatt has learned more about this kid than he’s known in twelve years. He has a different name, he goes to school on the other side of town these days, and tonight, he watched some rabid lunatic tear his mother’s neck open to try to drink her blood.
Schlatt holds his hand a little tighter, eyes flicking to the bandages on his son’s neck and shoulder. One of those tubes he’s hooked up to is draining someone else’s blood back into his system, but he can’t imagine how much he lost if that man had gone for him with the same brutality he’d attacked Little Minx- or Becca, rather-
God, why had he never called? Schlatt had never bothered, the burns of that wildfire disaster of a marriage leaving him numb, indifferent; until tonight, that is, when a raving freak’s teeth tore the scars open again and found the fresh nerves deep beneath the surface that still felt something. Hours have passed since he’s gotten here, he thinks, and no nurse or doctor has ever come to check up on the two of them in this ugly white room. A quick glance at his phone proves him wrong; it’s only been a few minutes, and there’s a missed call from the number he’s come to associate with the doctor that he didn’t even realize he’d hung up on. When had that happened? How lost had he been in the sight of this unfamiliar-familiar person that he hadn’t even heard it ring?
Knees weakened, he slumps into the chair that had been conveniently set up right next to the bed and tries to catch his breath. He steeples his fingers around his nose, mouth hidden behind them as he keeps his thumbs tucked right under his chin. Breath doesn’t come easy, but he thinks he’s beginning to catch it as he tries to fold in on himself, elbows on his knees and shoulders rolling in, in, in, until he’s curled up as much as he can be on the chair.
Until there’s a knock on the door, and he’s looking at the doctor whose photograph he’d seen online. After the first call, when he still thought it was someone’s idea of a sick joke to tell him his wife and son had been involved in an “incident”, he’d looked his name up online to see if it was even a real doctor’s name; Schlatt should have thought himself lucky that he decided to call a second time, but there was nothing about this that he could call the slightest bit lucky.
“Mr. Schlatt, I’m glad you were able to make it under such… short notice,” the doctor, “Ponk” as he’d called himself over the phone, comments. “Has anyone told you what’s going on? Any more than I’ve said, at least,” he adds with a completely humorless chuckle.
“...cops let me know, a bit,” Schlatt replies, avoiding his gaze as if he can make the situation any less real by not looking him in the eyes. He rubs the sleeve of his suit jacket over his face to wick up the sticky tears trailing down his skin.
“What do you know about your wife?” he prompts.
“Ex-wife,” Schlatt interjects, heaving a sigh. “We were still married, technically, but—hah, I guess that legal shit doesn’t matter anymore once she’s dead, huh?”
Dr. Ponk must have humor dark enough that he finds it funny enough to give a little laugh while he’s watching this strange, distant part of Schlatt’s life fall apart. In a way, he’s almost glad he laughed; it’s better than imagining the silence that could have filled the space instead. Not that there’s any silence, between the monitors beeping and his own stuttering breaths. “I guess,” he agrees, leaning against the doorframe lightly. Apparently, a bit of professional decorum can go when the patient’s father starts joking about his dead wife.
“So is he going to be okay? Like, you know, the… the bite, and all,” he says, grimacing at just the thought of blunt human teeth tearing through his skin.
“It’s hard to say; human bites are… gnarly, for lack of a better word. The risk of infection is really high. The wound should heal, but there’s other factors; he’ll have to stay a while to be certain.” The bluntness is appreciated, as compared to that vagueness over the phone; he’d almost like to apologize for yelling at him, yet Schlatt can’t help but think he was in the right for that, anyway.
“Right…” he breathes, slumping back in the chair again. The room falls quiet again and Schlatt loses himself to thoughts serenaded by the machines until the sound of a low groan and movement beneath the blankets has him refocusing right on Tubbo. With a start, he lurches forward and grips his hand again.
Schlatt watches as his eyes flicker open, those clear blues that he’d gotten from his mother looking dull. His tired gaze moves around the room, lingering on Ponk for a moment before he turns it to his father. Even though the morphine high, shock reads plain across his face. Tears spring forward as he registers what’s going on and his one-slow assessment on the room becomes frantic, darting around as he sits right up. It’s clear he regrets it, eyes rolling back as the change in blood pressure almost has him fainting, but he doesn’t cave even then.
“Mum,” he wheezes, jerking his hand away from Schlatt to the best of his ability in his weak state. His voice sounds impossibly raw, like that single word had to claw its way straight out of his throat. “Where’s- m- my mum-” Tubbo stammers, finishing his sentence with a wet gag. Defeated, he slumps back down onto the bed and turns away from Schlatt, drawing his knees up to his chest. His breaths are ragged, sniffles and sobs coming easily as he lays there, desperately gripping the blanket around his shoulders as he seeks out a modicum of comfort in his despair.
Schlatt tries to touch him, to rest a comforting hand on his shoulder, but the reaction he gets is a glare and a sound almost like a snarl as Tubbo grits out, “Go away.”
Turning his pleading gaze to Ponk, all he gets from the doctor is a little shrug. There will be more wounds, Schlatt realizes— and no duration of hospital stay will do the work that he, for once, has to do himself.