Chapter Text
Bill bluffs his way in, feeling like a heel for using his badge for this, to get around not being listed as an emergency contact (and no one is, the nurse tells him, 'none listed') - and he remembers why he doesn't like hospitals when all that showing his badge and practically begging gains him is the barest scraps of information.
Agent Donnelly had come through the doors into the E.R. with no sinus rhythm, the nurse tells him, touching the keys on the keyboard with just the tips of her long nails, on the edge of hypovolemic shock and hypoxic. She keeps her information brief, impersonal, clinical. They had revived him in the E.R., and he had been responsive in the ambulance before he'd crashed - he was currently in surgery. All there was to do was wait.
So he folds himself into a chair that's a size and a half too small for his lanky, long-limbed frame and pushes the palm of his hand over his own scar underneath all the layers of clothing he's put over it, and tries to have an almost blind, idyllic faith in medical science while he has almost no actual information. Schrodinger's limbo.
A major automobile accident, a side-impact with one of the public works construction dump trucks T-boning an SUV, the first report had said. Szymanski runs back over it in his mind, remembering that it had mentioned involvement of a second car that was parked. And then, while Bill had listened to the call go out, sitting at his desk and waiting for whatever field work they deemed gentle enough for his recovering injuries, shots fired.
He'd put on his jacket, itching to at least get out and try to do something that mattered - everyone else had left the precinct, even Carter and Fusco were gone. Carter on special assignment after the Man in the Suit, and Bill kept his mouth as shut on that matter as he had since he'd pieced together what he remembered from just after he'd been shot.
A stranger being the first one she called to an active crime scene. A tall man in a dark suit that Bill had never seen before, and after that Carter had looked at Bill for a while, had measured him in silence when she visited him in the hospital until he put the thought of asking out of his head and decided he was going to have to figure it out on his own.
He had, eventually. Or, he had a suspicion, a working theory and no real desire to confirm it.
There was no premonition before he'd gotten to the scene, but the SUV was familiar, stereotypical for the government plates it toted. What were left of them on what was left of it, and Bill had frozen in his own car at the sight.
He'd already seen it though, the last four familiar numbers, he couldn't lead himself on. The SUV is upside-down, and it had rolled there, no part of it looks un-battered,a nd the passenger side in the front is staved halfway into the driver's seat. Half crushed beneath it is a second vehicle, the whole scene painted by the frantically whirling police lights of a half dozen cruisers closing down the streets around the accident.
Szymanski's phone shook in his pocket, but he hadn't registered the meaning, he'd gotten out of his undercover numbly, eyes locked on the empty seats, on the broken glass.
"Hey," a voice stopped him, the officer standing at the line of tape with his hat pulled low over his eyes and his collar turned up against the cold. "I need to at least pretend I'm checking credentials before I let people through."
Szymanski distractedly showed the man his badge, forgave his morbid attempt at humor, and got the nod through. His eyes never left the wreck, looking for - finding - the blood. His shoes crunched on broken glass almost a block away, where the original impact had taken place.
There was no one in the car, just crime scene boys collecting evidence and taking photos, officers standing out of the way before they could start collecting evidence.
There had been a lot of blood.
His phone had gone off again in his pocket, and that time, Bill had registered it. He hadn't bothered looking at the number.
"Detective Szymanski," the voice had been high and tight, and he thought the clicking sounds that accompanied it sounded like fast typing. "I don't have much time, but I thought-"
Bill hadn't recognized the voice, but he had identified with the tension in it, felt his heart rate speed in sympathetic response.
"Agent Donnelly is on his way to the Columbia Campus of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Detective."
He didn't ask who it was, didn't ask how the man knew what he knew, or why he was telling Szymanski this. He had turned on his heel, given a sudden purpose, and walked off the crime scene again heedless of the cop following his progress back out under the line of tape with an amused tilt to his head. Szymanski remembered it later - now, really - as he tried to sort events into logical order in absence of anything else to do in the waiting room.
"What happened?" he had asked, and the voice had gone quiet, then apologetic.
"Preliminary medical reports suggest - " then the sounds of tying had come again. "I believe he's been shot, Detective. I think you'll have an easier time getting the information on-site at the hospital."
He had thrown the phone in the back seat, put both hands on the wheel and wrenched his injury holding tight to the wheel as he broke the speed limit, made what was ethically questionable use of the MIRT and siren.
But when he'd got there, despite his racing mind and the spiraling fear that it would be too late, that he wouldn't make it, he had.
So now what?
Bill doesn't know, he's still trying to sort out what he'll say - if there's an opportunity. What he has to say, what it's going to take to convince him to let it go. Szymanski might be getting ahead of himself.
At some point they shift him out of the E.R. waiting room, when it become half full of the 'first thing in the morning' crowd, with bleary eyed children and sick adults clutching various ailments and they take him - a nurse ushering gently, but with no new information - into the waiting room by surgery.
It's otherwise unoccupied, and Bill feels okay to fold himself miserably in half, hands pushed into his hair and closing his eyes like that would shut out the hospital sounds, the antiseptic smell. The memories creep up in the dark of his palms against his eyes.
The room has one of those machines from the sixties that ejects a cup and then pisses coffee forcefully into it, and Bill allows himself to purchase one to have something to hold in his hands at least, and wonders, if Nick dies, if they'll remember him here. If they know he's waiting, and to come tell him.
Szymanski takes the small, forcedly optimistic steps of calling and waking his neighbor to feed Calvin today, calls in his shift when he realizes he'd walked off of it, and tells them it's an emergency, to replace him for a few days.
Either way, he'll need the time.
He holds his cup and looks hard at the clock, stares at the numbers and remembers how time had always passed in hospitals, by each agonizing drag of the clock hand. Hours crawl away while he worries, tries in vane to make some use or distraction of the bent and torn magazines, witnesses to the grief of any number of others.
He has gotten up, is walking the confines of the room and trying to work up the courage to check with the desk again when Carter appears in the doorway.
Her face is bruised, puffy, her arm slung up immobile and fingers bandaged.
He freezes. Bill had forgotten all about her, had never suspected she was in the car, and before he can ask, she's blocking his questions with her own.
"What-" she starts, before he can gather words, and her voice is tired. She's had a long night. "Detective, are you here for-?"
He nods mutely. He doesn't trust himself not to give too much away if he uses his voice. Bill doesn't trust Carter as much as he used to, and someone had already known what they shouldn't today.
"What happened?" he asks, feeding quarters into the coffee machine again while she sits down.
"I'm still trying to get it straight in my mind," she says, but her eyes slide away. "That truck hit us, and everything went to hell. We went over and over - just, it felt like forever.
Bill realizes that she's still in shock, that she was in no real condition to be here. That some guilt, some restless anxiety had compelled her to be. He pushes the paper cup into her hands, crouches at her feet, because Bill needs to know.
"It was him wasn't it?"
Her eyes tell him she doesn't want to give him the answer, and she pulls her lower lip between her teeth, uncharacteristically vulnerable. She glances toward the open door, the hallway beyond, indicating their exposure.
"Yes," Carter says finally, in a small voice. "It was about him. Agent Donnelly and I - we were just in the way."
It's painfully familiar.
"Is what he does worth it?" Bill asks, mildly, and Carter looks at him finally, looks like even now she might be trying to find a way to misinterpret, to avoid his questions yet again.
The strange thing is, he was never upset about it when the only one injured was himself. Now, however, now he wonders if he could have stopped this.
"I thought it was," Carter answers, and it's obvious she feels the weight of this. "I still think it might be, if we could just keep others out."
Szymanski sits back, shaking his head.
"Are you two waiting for Mr. Donnelly?" a voice slides in, soft, tired. A surgeon, looking like he's just showered to try and remove the last of his cobwebs, but he's been up all night. He gets his answer from their expression.
"He's out of the POCU," the surgeon explains, and then he checks the chart. "I'm not at liberty to disclose details of his operation, since neither of you are listed here, but we think he's got good chances. Someone was looking out for him - the dispatch got crossed somehow and an ambulance that was dispatched for another emergency got rerouted from two blocks away. The next one didn't make it for nearly ten minutes."
Standing up slowly, Bill feels the remains of his coffee cup crumple in his suddenly tight grip. "Can we see him?"
The surgeon glances down at the chart again.
"Please," Bill says, and he doesn't care what his voice is doing, doesn't care that Carter's standing next to him and tilting her head up with her eyebrows scrunched in like she's realizing something important. "We're-"
The surgeon looks up, and something in Szymanski's eyes and tone, something conveys to him what Bill means, and his face softens a little in pity. "He's in the ICU. You'll have to wash your hands, but you can go in for a few minutes. He may not regain consciousness for a couple of hours, and after that he may be really out of it for a while - anesthetics affect people differently."
Szymanski nods, and Carter's breathing sounds are hitching a little, like she's keeping something in check. Relief, he hopes, because it's flooding him. The scenery outside the waiting room seems -new, seems to almost wake his mind and he jams his hands into his pockets and follows the surgeon up the hall, through a set of double hinged doors.
Carter catches his wrist with her uninjured hand, tugs one hand out of his pocket again, and looks up at him. Bill realizes something has connected in her mind, and she gives his hand an apologetic squeeze, but there's no hint of judgment in her eyes.
"When?" she asks in an undertone, as they wash their hands, as the surgeon turns them over to a pleasant, if harried-looking nurse.
"A while. But not-" Bill isn't sure how he can really explain. There wasn't a real definition. "We hadn't seen each other in a few weeks."
Carter looks thoughtful, then nods again, like everything made sense. "There are worse circumstances for a reunion," Carter temporizes. At Bill's look, she clarifies, trying to find humor. "Like a funeral."
Bill isn't about to waste his chance when there was still a possibility that a funeral could be the outcome.
The ICU is efficiently packed with monitors and equipment. Each bed has its own hulking nest of wires and devices - lined up in a neat, curtain separated row. Each was occupied by a pair of arms, a central, blanket covered body and a tangle of lines descending from the surrounding machines toward the top.
"Here we are," the nurse says, with a soft brightness, double-checking the clipboard with Donnelly's chart at the end of the bed. "If you'll stay on his left side, please, and don't worry about the stuff running out of the drains - it's relieving pressure on his lungs."
Szymanski has about a hundred questions, but he knows that the answers might be worse than not knowing.
"Won't hurt to talk a little," the nurse assures him, while he stands awkwardly back from the bedside. She pats his shoulder encouragingly, turns to smile at Carter. "No way to know what they'll hear or remember."
Neither of them unfreezes, and the nurse has to squeeze by the two still forms at the foot of the bed, shaking her head a little on her way by.
Nick is pale and bruised, greens edging into purples on his face and neck. The thin green blanket is pulled carefully up and folded back to expose a clean wall of bandage where his chest should be on the right side, and two thin tubes protruding from underneath, drawing purple-brown fluid off Donnelly's lungs and heart to a destination Szymanski doesn't bother to seek out.
There's an oxygen mask, but they haven't intubated him at least. He's breathing on his own, and for some reason it's that which cements the fact that he's alive in Bill's mind.
He wraps both of his hands around Donnelly's, and even the backs of his knuckles are scraped bare, his palm cut, washed clean and clotted but still faintly tinted with the brown stains iodine. Lucky, the surgeon had said, but Bill knows that when Nick wakes, he'll feel anything but.
-
The first visit lasts a scant 15 minutes, during which nothing eventful happens but both Carter and Szymanski satisfy themselves that all the hours of surgery have left Donnelly more or less whole with no apparent amputations and no warnings of anything more dire. The nurse comes to collect him and Carter, and scolds Bill gently to go home when she catches him trying to settle into the waiting room again. He leaves his number and the urgent - perhaps desperate, if he's honest with himself - instruction to call him when Donnelly comes around.
Home, he puts himself on the couch instead of the bed after a tense few minutes in the shower with the phone never out of reach.
He is terrified he'll sleep so deeply if he surrenders that he might miss the call, because adrenaline has left him and now sleep claws at the corners of his eyes, sinks hooks behind his solar plexus and drags downward. Bill struggles through two pages of Nostromo, then he tosses and turns on the couch for three hours before Calvin joins him and crushes him into submission by jamming his paws into pressure points Bill didn't know he had every time he moves.
He sleeps two hours before waking and urgently checking his phone.
No missed calls, no messages. He allows a deep breath, takes his time getting dressed. He brings coffee in a big metal container - even if he can't share it with Donnelly, he's going to want it if he's there all day - and he doesn't lie to himself that he'll be practical and come home again. He feeds Calvin on his way out, and does exactly the speed limit on his way there.
Someone has edged a note onto Nick's record about him, and he is relieved when the nurses are nothing but kind, ushering him in and promising they'd keep his coffee at the desk for him.
There's not much change, except in some places Donnelly's color is better. In the bruised places it's worse, but-
"I don't think I've ever seen you sleep this long," Bill tells his inert form as he settles into the chair on Nick's left. "Fair trade, I slept lousy."
There's no sign of awareness or recognition, just the steady sounds of the machines around them, announcing life in recognizable patterns.
"Maybe vests should be mandatory in this town, huh?" Szymanski reaches out and touches Nick's hand, turns it over and looks at the palm - there's a neatly stitched cut. A long life-line. Okay.
The fingers twitch under his grip and he jerks back, apologizing, surprised. He looks up to see if Nick is coming around or just dreaming, and Donnelly's eyes blink dazedly. His hand - the one without the IV - lifts slowly, hesitates, then rubs his eyes, starts to push through his hair until he feels the dried blood and stitches in his scalp.
Szymanski unfreezes, reaches up to pull Nick's hand away gently.
"Hey, you with me?"
Fingers shift in his grip - toward the oxygen mask, as if to pull it free, and Donnelly's eyes focus darkly on Bill. Szymanski holds Nick's hand a little more firmly to keep him from clawing the mask off - it had been his first instinct, too. The deep circles that are always under the man's eyes from lack of sleep have deepened further, gone dark from bruising and possibly blackened - on top of everything else.
"You're at the hospital. Post-op," Bill prompts, and his voice has gone low and serious, half drowning in the air he's trying to pull into his lungs.
A pause, then what would pass for a nod. Nick's eyes close for a long moment - and Bill recognizes the way his eyebrows draw in a little - he's making an assessment.
Taking stock, trying to gather himself. Bill slides his chair closer, nudging his knees into the edge of the thin mattress, the metal frame digging in, but neither of them has to stretch. Nick's eyes open in response to the movement, asking.
"Your Cervantes must be really lousy," is all Bill can think to say, all his mind will give up in a huff of relief, in a rush of whispered words that gain him only a stern look and Bill laughs because it's all he can do. His mind finds a quote that does not ease the stormy look angled his direction. "Take care, sir. Those are not giants but windmills."
But he reaches up and soothes the frown lines out of Nick's forehead gently. "It's okay," he says, "I'll read it to you."
Someone that dedicated, even if - even if Szymanski had tried to warn him, even if he'd run too fast too far on his own - deserved a little dedication themselves. "I didn't mean to throw you out," Bill finds himself saying. "You just - went, and I didn't know how to ask you back."
He sits back, sighs, then leans forward and stops Nick from clawing the oxygen mask free to answer. "No I know, bad time to talk, but if you pull that off the nurses will come throw me out again. We're okay, right? We'll sort the rest later."
Another almost-nod, and Szymanski breathes a sigh, scrubs a hand over his own face and tries to figure out what to say next, but when he looks back up, Donnelly's asleep again, and a nurse passes by to flash him a wink and fill the IV line with painkillers, telling Bill he probably has a good two hours before there's even a chance of any signs of life.
He crawls out to the gift shop, finds what he's looking for, and sucks down two cups of coffee at the nurses' desk, feeling like they aren't out of the woods but at least now they have a light.
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