Descriptions regarding suicide, suicidal thoughts, insomnia.

It's an emotional one, folks. Grab your tissues ;_;

— Chapter 72 —

=||=||=

"We did everything we could... your friend lost a lot of blood... he's still unconscious... but stable... you can you see him now."

According to the nurses, that was two days ago.

Two days spent in limbo as a world of blue scrubs and frantic people passed us by. Police officers brimming the hospital halls, a flock of vultures on a decaying corpse. Doctors with their clipboards. Caffeine-powered paramedics marathoning for fresh coffee between calls. Restless individuals caught in waiting rooms and murmuring in hushed voices. Wounded people moaning in pain as they rushed past on gurneys. Busy nurses dashing from room to room, visibly exhausted but never standing still long enough to let themselves feel it.

The endless droning of voices over intercoms, clacking keyboards, sliding doors and hacking coughs left me dulled and unresponsive, a prisoner to the passing of time. My surroundings had lost their shape. Everything reeked of bleach and antiseptics—a cocktail topped off by an overwhelming and inescapable kind of metallic smell.

All of it was a blur, an overstimulating mess quickly devoured by blank spaces in my memory. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't think. I could hardly breathe. My body was just going through the motions.

The hour that Chains spent in the operating room was hell in itself. Angela, doing everything she could to help, rushed with the paramedics to get him into the ICU—or as far as they would let her go. Soaked to her elbows in blood, the young nurse was a gruesome sight as she did her best to communicate with the doctors around her—what'd happened, where Chains had been shot, how long he'd been bleeding out for. I envied her ability to push past the shock in her veins. She was a better fighter than I was.

I'd never felt so helpless.

Police came and went, bombarding us with questions only to leave empty-handed as the nurses shooed them away. Caught in the waiting room, Elliot never left my side, trying his best to put on a brave face. He didn't meet my eyes and he didn't speak a word. He didn't have to. All we needed from each other was a hand—something to hold on to; something to keep us grounded while we sat in wait.

Chains was moved to a bed in the high-dependency unit a few hours after his surgery. Angela and I were the first to see him. Elliot chose to stay out in the hall and seated himself by the door.

The silence of the room, broken only by the intermittent beeping of a patient monitor, came as a blissful relief from the commotion outside. A silvery-grey curtain separated two beds in the room—one unoccupied, the other guarded by machines and an IV pump working to keep a resting Chains alive.

I'd collapsed in the chair by his bedside and hadn't gotten up since.

"Detectives of the Boston Police Department are still investigating the brutal murder of a 62-year-old man on Saturday night," spoke a newswoman over the TV in the corner of the room. "Christopher "the Chief" Black, a well-known community member and President of the reformed Stray Dogs Motorcycle Club, was shot to death in Joe's Bar by an unknown attacker. Detectives have not ruled out armed robbery as a possible motive, but have yet to question a key witness who was left in critical condition at Massachusetts General Hospital with a gunshot wound to the thigh. 24-year-old biker, Samuel "Chains" Cordray, remains—"

Turning the TV off, the pads of my fingers found my temples. I'd been clenching my jaw for hours. Sitting forward, I buried my elbows into my knees and drew in a long inhale. An exhale. And again.

Two days, alone with my own thoughts.

Look at him, they cursed, prompting my focus to the man sleeping beneath a hoard of paper-thin, white blankets.

Cushioned in several pillows, Chains had his face to the window, where golden sun fluttered down onto his milky skin. The disheveled strands of his ivory hair were threads of shimmering silk in the daylight. His eyelids would twitch occasionally; dark shadows cast themselves beneath his eyelashes. His pale lips were bone-dry. A mass of bandages curved around his right thigh. Chains is in this position because of you.

Elliot could have died because of you.

Chief is dead because of you.

If I didn't feel so nauseous standing on my own two feet, I would have gone to cough up my guts over a toilet seat. Everything was hitting me at conflicting extremes—the freezing temperature of the morning air, harsh against my red-hot skin, sweltering with heat. The unbridled silence around me, wasted beneath the million voices yelling over the top of each other in my head. And my own hypervigilance—constantly alert, constantly on edge, constantly waiting for a disaster to strike, even in a room so mind-numbingly boring as the one I was sitting in.

The noose around my neck was burning. I was suffocating and I couldn't save myself.

Murdered.

Gone. Forever.

Bleeding. Decaying. Lifeless.

Why him? another voice howled. Why not you?

My fingers subconsciously grasped the silver chain at my collarbones. More specifically, the ring—my father's ring. My father's bad omen. A reminder of the price I should have paid a long time ago.

A life for a life. A soul for a soul.

I'd die for my father's death—and Han would pay for my uncle's soul in blood.

A hoarse cough shot through the room, overloading my system with adrenaline. My focus jerked to Chains. Grimacing against his pain, the biker blinked against the light in the room and slowly absorbed his surroundings. Sitting up cautiously, he scratched at his IV, grey-blue eyes slowly coming to rest on me.

"Jesus fuck," he said, voice gravelly. "You look like you got hit by a train."

Still processing, I blurted, "You're awake." Yeah—no shit, Sherlock.

"Well, it's either that or I'm dead," Chains prattled on as I went to pour him some water, "and this heaven—in which case I think I'm due for my yearly existential crisis. I mean, where're the pearly gates? The naked babies with the arrows and shit?" Holding the cup to his lips, he remarked, "Personally, I think I deserve better than whatever this is. No offense."

He chugged the water down to the last drop and shoved the plastic cup at me, swallowing with dramatic emphasis. I couldn't even find it in myself to smile at his joke.

"Welcome back, Chains," I murmured.

"How long was I out?"

"Two days."

"Fuuuck," he groaned. "And Chief? Where is he?"

My mouth ran dry at the question, voice catching somewhere in my throat. Where's Chief? Frozen to my place, legs bolted to the floor, I met Chains' stare with a look of fractured guilt.

He doesn't remember.

"Hey, are you listening to me or what? Where's your uncle?"

My hands reached for the frame of his bed, desperate for anything that would help me stay upright. Especially as the ground beneath me started to cave away.

"The doctors..." I began, but the words were only a breath. "They said the bullet severed his spinal cord. He was DOA—there was nothing they could do." My fingers gripped the metal; my head hung low from sunken shoulders. "I'm sorry, Chains. He... he didn't make it."

The inner corners of his brows knitted together.

"What?" he rasped incredulously. "Come on, man. That's not funny."

My teeth found my trembling bottom lip. I skipped a breath. Forcing my gaze to meet his, I let a solemn expression replace my miserable silence. His eyes slowly widened.

"That's not funny, Edge," he echoed. But it wasn't a statement anymore—he was begging. Pleading for a different truth. "That's... that's not fucking funny. Where is he?"

"I'm sorry."

I watched his expression fall further as he found it in himself to remember, reality rushing over him in a merciless flood. And, like a beaten dam, the pressure became too much to handle. He broke.

"No. No, that's not—that's not funny." He shook his head relentlessly, stray tears carving paths down his cheeks. My arms went to hold him, tangling around his shoulders as he beat his fists against my stomach. "That's not funny!"

"I know," I whispered, blinking up at the ceiling. "I know. I'm sorry."

He cried. He cried and cried until he didn't have the strength to keep hitting me anymore, at which point he grabbed fistfuls of my suit shirt and stained the fabric with his tears. Sobbing, shouting... Chains, infamously the most iron-willed and unshakable of all the Stray Dogs, finally allowing himself the freedom to lower his defenses.

"I saw his eyes," he'd croaked out at some point. "He was looking right at me. I saw him die. I watched... I watched him die."

He didn't let me go until he didn't have any tears left. Even then, his dry sobs continued.

Chains is suffering because of you, my thoughts cursed, seeping in from the corners of the room. He has to live with those memories, because of you. And you had the nerve to doubt his loyalty.

You ruin everything you touch.

They're all safer without you standing in the way.

I called for a nurse once Chains was comfortable enough to be seen. He wiped the moisture from his cheeks and composed himself in the time it took for anyone to arrive. When they did, it was Angela in her navy scrubs, following in behind a tall doctor—probably Angela's supervisor.

"My name is Dr. Cara Grayson," greeted the middle-aged woman in a smoky voice, adorned in a crisp-white coat and clasping a teal clipboard in her hands. "I'm the doctor in charge of your care here at Massachusetts General. You recently underwent surgery to remove the bullet in your thigh—how are you feeling?"

Chains mussed his hair and nodded my way. "About as bad as he looks."

The doctor smiled with her eyes, faint wrinkles creasing her ash-brown skin. "I'm sure your friend was very worried about you."

"Hah! He should worry more about this five o'clock shadow he's got going on." He emphasized, "Seriously, dude. You look a mess."

I cleared my throat and shot him a glance, unamused.

"And you're still sick, too?" he cursed. "Man—I pass out for two days and everything falls apart. It's a mystery how you manage to function without me. Clearly I'm the glue that holds your lives together." He waved his hand at Angela and sighed. "It's a thankless job, you know."

"I see you still have a sense of humor," said Dr. Grayson. "That's a good sign."

"Thanks, it's the trauma." Chains noticed the doctor's raised brow then quickly corrected, "That was a joke. I am of sound mental health."

But I knew him better than that. He'd wait until we were all gone and break down where nobody could bear witness. Humour could only go so far as a coping mechanism.

It's all your fault.

"Alright then," Dr. Grayson decided. "If it's okay with you, I'm just going to ask a few questions and run through some basic tests while I'm here, just to gauge where you're at and decide how we're going to progress with your care. We understand the importance of your privacy, so are you comfortable having your friend in the room?"

Chains rested a comforting glance on my figure slumped over in the chair. He slowly nodded.

"He's family, Doc."

With that approval, the doctor started to progress through her assessment. I listened for the most part as Chains answered her questions, but I couldn't stop my mind from wandering absently. From the fuzz on his pillows to the squeaky polished on the floor, my attention roamed until it spotted something scratched into the wall behind the frame of Chains' bed, within arm's reach.

Dr. Grayson spoke, "Okay, Mr. Cor—"

The biker quickly corrected, "Just Chains."

"Alright. Chains." The doctor asked, "Can you wiggle your toes for me?"

Chains complied with the doctor, moving the toes of his wounded leg without trouble. I kept my stare trained on the marks I'd spotted. Probably done with a safety pin, they were old carvings shaped into things like smiley faces, starships, and tally marks—probably just vandalism from a bored teenager. Couldn't blame them.

"Good," Dr. Grayson affirmed to her patient. "I'm going to press a few points on your foot with the back of my pen. Just tell me when you feel something, okay?"

"Uh-huh."

Only, when the pen started to trace the muscles of his foot, Chains had a knee-jerk reaction. He grimaced and chuckled awkwardly as the pen backed away. "Christ, Doc, that freakin' tickled."

I asked the doctor, "Is he going to be okay?"

She tucked the pen into the pocket of her coat. "I'd say he should count himself very lucky."

"Yeah?" said Chains. "Why's that?"

Dr. Grayson nodded to his leg. "Well, from what I understand, you were shot with a standard-issue handgun at close range. A high-velocity bullet like that would cause mass tissue damage as it travels through and exits the body, usually hitting veins or nerves along the way."

"So... what? I might never walk again?"

"I didn't say that," answered the doctor, shaking her head. "The opposite, in fact. You survived largely because the bullet missed your femoral artery by a hair—quite literally. Our records state that you're also a mild hemophiliac, which didn't help your chances either."

Chains frowned. "Say what?"

"Hemophilia B," clarified Angela. "In a nutshell, your blood doesn't clot properly."

I overstated, "A paper cut could kill you."

Dr. Grayson scoffed lightly at the comment. "Well, certainly not to that extreme, but it did require attention in the operating room. We gave you a factor replacement dose to be on the safe side."

He could have died, my thoughts reminded me.

The doctor checked her clipboard, then added, "Our concern was the pressure that the bullet put on your sciatic nerve. We still have to do more tests, but for now it looks like neuropraxia. Mild nerve damage. The fact that you still have feeling in your leg is a good sign, but I strongly recommend you keep weight off it for now. If all goes according to plan, you should be making a full recovery in the next several weeks."

"Oh joy," Chains said, expression flat with brief sarcasm. "Long as I'm still good to ride, you have my full cooperation."

He could have been crippled.

"Don't hesitate to let me or the nurses know if you start feeling any cramping, pain or numbness," Dr. Grayson mentioned. "I'll come by later today to do some follow-ups."

"To be honest, Doc, I'm starting to think you should've just amputated it. I might need to sell a limb to pay off these medical bills." He gestured to his leg. "I mean—this is a premium cut of meat, you know. Like wagyu. How much do you think a human leg goes for on the black market nowadays, anyway?"

I didn't answer.

"Hm." The doctor glanced at her clipboard again. "Might need to make a note to lower your painkillers while I'm at it."

Chain chuckled breathily. "Ha-ha. Funny." But Dr. Grayson's straight-faced expression didn't change, so he checked, "You... you are kidding, right?"

The doctor didn't get her opportunity to answer as I turned up to Angela, daring to meet her eyes. When I spoke, the words were rough, like brittle ceramic cracking into jagged pieces.

"Have you seen Elliot?"

She tilted her head to remember. "Um, he was sitting by the door up until a half-hour ago, I think? James came by and finally convinced him to go eat something."

Chains frowned.

"He's been outside the whole time? For two days?" the biker exasperated. "Christ, why wouldn't you just let him in?"

"Elliot Taylor, right?" Dr. Grayson asked us.

I tried not to sound so surprised. "You know him?"

"How could I not?" She shrugged. "He used to spend every day here with his mother. She was a good friend." A heavy breath escaped her nose. "It was surreal, seeing him sleeping by your door. Poor thing. This all must be so difficult for him."

"What do you mean?"

Dr Grayson's hugged her arms around herself, pity in her lowered gaze. "He hasn't been in this room since she passed away."

My focus flicked to the carvings on the wall, tucked behind Chains' bedframe.

Of course. As if I were seeing it again for the first time, I focused on every groove that showed there, every sharp rift carved into the cream-colored paint, taking the form of a little alien staring right back at me. Elliot's tag. So obvious, yet I hadn't even registered it.

A sobering realization struck me as my fingers reached out to graze the markings. His mom died in this room.

About to leave, Dr. Grayson told Chains, "You should be very grateful Angela was there. Her quick thinking was invaluable in that situation. Had she not managed to apply the necessary pressure and slow the bleeding, you'd most certainly be dead."

Chains' blue-grey irises shone with nothing but pride for the benevolent nurse standing at the foot of his bed. "Trust me, Doc," he promised. "I am."

"Aw," Angela hummed.

Dr. Grayson offered a kind smile before she left the room. Once the doctor had turned the corner by the blind-covered windows, Angela clapped her hands together. Excitement broke through her in the form of a toothy smile that spread from ear to ear.

"Did you hear that?" she giggled, bouncing on her toes. "I'm invaluable, assholes!"

I looked at her, confused at all the fuss. "And... that's a good thing?"

"Course it's a good thing!" Angela claimed. "I've been trying to impress Dr. Grayson for months. Competition is hot, boys. If there's any chance of me landing a full-time job here after I graduate, she's the doctor I need vouching for me."

"Well," Chains remarked, "I'm glad my near-death injury benefits you, at least."

She nodded. "I seriously owe you one."

He itched at his IV again and examined his surroundings with a drained stare. "Well, you literally saved my life, but... great. How would you feel about moving me to another room?"

The answer attracted my full attention.

"You want to be moved?" Angela questioned, slightly surprised. "What for?"

Chains gestured to the door. "Times are tough enough as it is, and Elliot's been sitting out there for two days because he can't bring himself to come in here." He drew in a breath. "Look, I feel for the guy, alright? We might as well move somewhere he can be comfortable too."

A comment escaped my lips thoughtlessly. "Softie."

"Piss off," he huffed in reply, jutting his lower lip. "I'm not a softie for wanting family to stick together."

Angela considered the idea.

"I'll see what I can do," she agreed. "But the hospital hasn't been this busy in years. We've got this new wave of substance abusers that we've been struggling to take care of, and patients coming in every other night with injuries from street races. I'm still only a practicing nurse. I can't make you any promises, but I'll try."

"Good enough for me."

Angela nodded and left the room. But as a police officer walked past the window whilst she was leaving, Chains quickly turned his attention my way.

"Fucking hell," he said. "There're cops out there, too?"