Fic: Came with a nightmare, left with a dream
WAY LATE Christmas fic for paladin24's prompt: There's no direction to my stare/No more flame burning in my heart anymore.
Author's notes: So I have a few December stocking prompts left and I decided it's probably time to actually finish them. For the background, this fic takes place in a post season 7 AU in which Jack is in PT recovering from the biotoxin. The prompt post for Christmas fic is here!. The title comes from an Amy Stroup song, Fell Like A Feather. Thanks, leigh57 for the read through, unyielding encouragement, and general badassery.
+++++
On the plane to LA, waiting for lift off, Jack squeezes the stress ball until he makes a temporary indentation in whatever the hell the sandy, cornstarchy stuff is inside.
The pads of his fingers tingle.
When he first met his physical therapist, Jack couldn’t hold the damn ball at all. Now, he watches the elastic encasement as it rises, reshaping itself with the pressure of science.
Stephen’s hooked him up at some fancy accelerated rehab center, close to their home.
3 days a week, Macer’s voice in his head: A few months there and you’ll be good as new.
Good as new.
He chuffs, taking one last look at his phone before the power-off announcement comes through on the intercom.
Renee hasn’t called him back, so.
Not everyone gets to be good as new.
+++++
His granddaughter thinks of him as her new friend, ‘Jack’, which starts out kind of funny, but turns less humorous as the days here stretch out.
As much as he’s enjoying getting to know her -- like discovering how she likes to watch Animal Planet for Kids at the crack of dawn while pretending to read to her doll, or that her favorite ice cream is strawberry, or that she has alligator-patterned pajamas with grippy feet so she doesn’t slide everywhere when she dances across the new oak floor -- he can’t help but feel guilty that he’s missed so much already.
He hasn’t been known to her as ‘Grandpa’ long enough to keep her mind from hitting up against the conflict every time she looks at him. When he watches her eyes, he witnesses her stumbling upon a missing familiarity that clashes with the concept of his title.
He’s the very definition of disorienting to her, a new relationship she can’t yet grasp, that she’s supposed to just accept at face value.
Because everyone who is older and bigger said to.
He missed her first words (apparently ‘Dad’ or ‘’dat’ -- no one is quite sure -- at the time she was pointing both in the general direction of Stephen and the treasured pacifier laying on the counter), her transition to “big people food”, her first steps. They’re moments he has to hear about in story form, the past tense chilling him like a cold front brewed in reality.
Sure, he would have been here had he known (Kim’s choice. Kim’s absolute right). But then, there are always factors that go into decision making, and those factors? Those he owns. He alone.
Those reasons are his fault.
When he’s alone in the guest bed at night, or surrounded by too many people at once, he starts to feel like a stranger to more than Teri, like someday Kim, too, might call him “Jack” instead of “Daddy.”
Even his reflection in the mirror seems nebulous.
It’s late at night in the prepared, quaint room when he realizes a current truth.
He misses a place he can’t name or describe. It’s not a location, but an elusive, secure frame-of-mind that he can’t quite access; he imagines the ability to do so when he closes his eyes.
He falls into a restless sleep wondering if this place ever existed, or if the remembered security is all a protective psychological product of a desperate imagination.
+++++
The day the AC breaks in the rehab facility is brutal beyond language, California heat and the stench of drying sweat. It reminds him of the reek of his high school locker room after the boys’ lacrosse team had stampeded through. It reminds him of that saying that says scent, of all the senses, has the strongest tie to memory. It reminds him that he’s low on laundry detergent.
He studies his torso and it looks pretty much the same as before. Maybe his skin’s a little thinner, a little more see-through.
But his muscles didn’t have time to atrophy. He wasn’t in ICU but a week (he’d told Kim she’s got superpower marrow; she laughed, loose and free, like a girl). He was on bed rest for another two, as they made sure all the toxins were out of his system. After that he was on a walker, focusing his attention on the word relearn and all that this concept entailed.
The point is, he looks as though he should be able to lift like before. All the muscles and bones are the same, mass and matter, but he has trouble calling them to action. He hears doctor Macer’s voice in his head again, something about neurotransmitters and compromised functionality and you’ll be good as new.
He has trouble not shaking.
Sweat drips off his body as though the water he’s downing is being filtered through him via a cheap coffee maker, seeping out his skin tainted and salty. The ten pound weight he’s struggling to lift slips right out of his hot hand and lands on his toe.
“Dammit,” he whispers, out loud, partly to prove to himself he exists at all.
When the biotoxins decided to do their job on him, wreaking havoc on everything about him that was actually strong, one of the side effects was decreased sensation.
Right now, Jack wonders why that can’t apply to pain, in all its forms.
+++++
Kim and Stephen have Teri’s bedtime ritual down to a schedule as exact and uncompromising as a television line-up. It’s bath time, then water-sipping, then teeth-brushing and Goodnight, Moon, followed by a windowside moment in which Teri literally says goodnight to the moon (whether visible or not). Jack’s heart gets quiet, every time; he’ll never forget that sound, that tiny intonation.
He plays her voice in his head during moments of insomnia: Go to sleep, moon. It’s time for bed.
The truth is, he feels out of place here, like a very welcome disruption in a practiced (yet private) routine. They have the grace to not treat him as a guest, no catering or serving, no special attention.
He does his own laundry, the dishes. As he’s gaining strength, he’s doing more.
He goes the full lap around their block now without stopping. Teri comes with him, her spry little legs bouncing like Tigger’s tail. She has no trouble with saying “Grandpa” anymore, none whatsoever.
When Stephen and Kim are out at a hospital banquet one night, he tucks Teri in, kissing her cheek and forehead and reveling in the new level of comfort that’s settled between them.
“Grandpa?” she says, as he’s about to flip her light switch and crack open her door.
“Yes?”
“Do you believe in The Sand Man?” she asks him, very serious, as though he’s the only person she trusts to be honest.
It’s such a creepy fairy tale, if he’s ever heard one. A boy that throws sand at you while you’re asleep, sand that’s supposed to account for the sleepies in your eyes when you awake?
“No, Teri,” he says, after some thought, hoping harder questions don’t follow, hoping Kim doesn’t have an attachment he can’t imagine her having to the idea of Teri believing in The Sand Man.
She pauses, as though factoring this new information into her perception of everything.
And after a moment, “Do you believe in the stars?”
“Yes, baby. I believe in the stars.”
+++++
When he’s sure Teri’s sleeping, he flips through a photo album lying under the coffee table, embroidered floral designs, white on white, the style of which can only mean wedding.
Sure enough, it’s the album of Kim and Stephen’s marriage.
He smiles.
There are only three faces he recognizes in the entire wedding party, two of which belong to his daughter and son-in-law, and the other is of Kim’s closest friend from high school. Margaret, he wants to say, but she went by Meg then, so he’s not positive.
She’s not even the maid of honor, but the third bridesmaid down.
Jack wonders what else he’s missed.
It’s in the candid shots, when no one knows a picture’s being snapped, that he sees it on Kim’s face, her expression the outward, physical display of the feeling he can’t name.
Maybe it’s comfort.
The last time he felt even close to it, he’d been expending his last reserve of energy trying to prepare Renee for what comes next.
He realized only later that he’d been saying goodbye to the first person he’s encountered who might understand the decisions he’s made, and the weight you carry around when you try to live with their consequences.
It’s not scent that’s most acute in his recollection, but the softness of her damp cheek on his thumb, a contrast with the rough material at the elbow of her jacket.
He swears she leaned into him, partial weight of her head against the slight tremble of his unsteady hand.
He remembers the sense of touch. It’s the last thing that wasn’t muted, that wasn’t filed under the category: decrease in sensation.
Since that day, the kind of connection that comes from mutual understanding (a concept so foreign to him, before, that he thought it to be impossible) has been as it always was: absent.
When he tries her number (one last try, he tells himself, one last try), he allows a little selfishness to come through in the message. It’s less, Are you okay? and more, I need to talk to you. I need to hear your voice.
It’s not that this route is his preferred road of access, but if she’s as similar to him as he thinks, feeling like she can help him (and she can, she would) is more likely to evoke a response.
+++++
He lifts fifty pounds above his head a week later, shaking wrists and gritted teeth.
It’s a milestone; one he’s not sure how to mark.
When he sets the dumbbell back on the bar, he hears applause coming from a few feet away. He turns around to see its source.
She’s wearing a grin that’s curving her freckles up to the ceiling.
But her eyes aren’t the same.
“Chloe told me where I could find you,” is the first thing she says.
Jack thinks of twelve different things to say: (Renee,, or You’re in LA, or It’s so good to see you.), but the words seem to suspend themselves unsaid in the space between them, uncomfortable and not quite correct, like a dangling modifier.
He can’t stop smiling.
What’s most important, at least according to his body (now moving toward her on mere instinct), is eliminating the space.
He’s wobbly, maybe, but determined.
He forgets he’s sweaty until the moment she’s in his arms and self-consciousness registers.
She hugs him anyway, her grip tighter and longer than he expects and her face almost buried in his neck.
Renee's hands feel good on his back, like all his nerve endings waking up, and when it gets hard to stand straight, he allows himself to lean.
Author's notes: So I have a few December stocking prompts left and I decided it's probably time to actually finish them. For the background, this fic takes place in a post season 7 AU in which Jack is in PT recovering from the biotoxin. The prompt post for Christmas fic is here!. The title comes from an Amy Stroup song, Fell Like A Feather. Thanks, leigh57 for the read through, unyielding encouragement, and general badassery.
+++++
On the plane to LA, waiting for lift off, Jack squeezes the stress ball until he makes a temporary indentation in whatever the hell the sandy, cornstarchy stuff is inside.
The pads of his fingers tingle.
When he first met his physical therapist, Jack couldn’t hold the damn ball at all. Now, he watches the elastic encasement as it rises, reshaping itself with the pressure of science.
Stephen’s hooked him up at some fancy accelerated rehab center, close to their home.
3 days a week, Macer’s voice in his head: A few months there and you’ll be good as new.
Good as new.
He chuffs, taking one last look at his phone before the power-off announcement comes through on the intercom.
Renee hasn’t called him back, so.
Not everyone gets to be good as new.
+++++
His granddaughter thinks of him as her new friend, ‘Jack’, which starts out kind of funny, but turns less humorous as the days here stretch out.
As much as he’s enjoying getting to know her -- like discovering how she likes to watch Animal Planet for Kids at the crack of dawn while pretending to read to her doll, or that her favorite ice cream is strawberry, or that she has alligator-patterned pajamas with grippy feet so she doesn’t slide everywhere when she dances across the new oak floor -- he can’t help but feel guilty that he’s missed so much already.
He hasn’t been known to her as ‘Grandpa’ long enough to keep her mind from hitting up against the conflict every time she looks at him. When he watches her eyes, he witnesses her stumbling upon a missing familiarity that clashes with the concept of his title.
He’s the very definition of disorienting to her, a new relationship she can’t yet grasp, that she’s supposed to just accept at face value.
Because everyone who is older and bigger said to.
He missed her first words (apparently ‘Dad’ or ‘’dat’ -- no one is quite sure -- at the time she was pointing both in the general direction of Stephen and the treasured pacifier laying on the counter), her transition to “big people food”, her first steps. They’re moments he has to hear about in story form, the past tense chilling him like a cold front brewed in reality.
Sure, he would have been here had he known (Kim’s choice. Kim’s absolute right). But then, there are always factors that go into decision making, and those factors? Those he owns. He alone.
Those reasons are his fault.
When he’s alone in the guest bed at night, or surrounded by too many people at once, he starts to feel like a stranger to more than Teri, like someday Kim, too, might call him “Jack” instead of “Daddy.”
Even his reflection in the mirror seems nebulous.
It’s late at night in the prepared, quaint room when he realizes a current truth.
He misses a place he can’t name or describe. It’s not a location, but an elusive, secure frame-of-mind that he can’t quite access; he imagines the ability to do so when he closes his eyes.
He falls into a restless sleep wondering if this place ever existed, or if the remembered security is all a protective psychological product of a desperate imagination.
+++++
The day the AC breaks in the rehab facility is brutal beyond language, California heat and the stench of drying sweat. It reminds him of the reek of his high school locker room after the boys’ lacrosse team had stampeded through. It reminds him of that saying that says scent, of all the senses, has the strongest tie to memory. It reminds him that he’s low on laundry detergent.
He studies his torso and it looks pretty much the same as before. Maybe his skin’s a little thinner, a little more see-through.
But his muscles didn’t have time to atrophy. He wasn’t in ICU but a week (he’d told Kim she’s got superpower marrow; she laughed, loose and free, like a girl). He was on bed rest for another two, as they made sure all the toxins were out of his system. After that he was on a walker, focusing his attention on the word relearn and all that this concept entailed.
The point is, he looks as though he should be able to lift like before. All the muscles and bones are the same, mass and matter, but he has trouble calling them to action. He hears doctor Macer’s voice in his head again, something about neurotransmitters and compromised functionality and you’ll be good as new.
He has trouble not shaking.
Sweat drips off his body as though the water he’s downing is being filtered through him via a cheap coffee maker, seeping out his skin tainted and salty. The ten pound weight he’s struggling to lift slips right out of his hot hand and lands on his toe.
“Dammit,” he whispers, out loud, partly to prove to himself he exists at all.
When the biotoxins decided to do their job on him, wreaking havoc on everything about him that was actually strong, one of the side effects was decreased sensation.
Right now, Jack wonders why that can’t apply to pain, in all its forms.
+++++
Kim and Stephen have Teri’s bedtime ritual down to a schedule as exact and uncompromising as a television line-up. It’s bath time, then water-sipping, then teeth-brushing and Goodnight, Moon, followed by a windowside moment in which Teri literally says goodnight to the moon (whether visible or not). Jack’s heart gets quiet, every time; he’ll never forget that sound, that tiny intonation.
He plays her voice in his head during moments of insomnia: Go to sleep, moon. It’s time for bed.
The truth is, he feels out of place here, like a very welcome disruption in a practiced (yet private) routine. They have the grace to not treat him as a guest, no catering or serving, no special attention.
He does his own laundry, the dishes. As he’s gaining strength, he’s doing more.
He goes the full lap around their block now without stopping. Teri comes with him, her spry little legs bouncing like Tigger’s tail. She has no trouble with saying “Grandpa” anymore, none whatsoever.
When Stephen and Kim are out at a hospital banquet one night, he tucks Teri in, kissing her cheek and forehead and reveling in the new level of comfort that’s settled between them.
“Grandpa?” she says, as he’s about to flip her light switch and crack open her door.
“Yes?”
“Do you believe in The Sand Man?” she asks him, very serious, as though he’s the only person she trusts to be honest.
It’s such a creepy fairy tale, if he’s ever heard one. A boy that throws sand at you while you’re asleep, sand that’s supposed to account for the sleepies in your eyes when you awake?
“No, Teri,” he says, after some thought, hoping harder questions don’t follow, hoping Kim doesn’t have an attachment he can’t imagine her having to the idea of Teri believing in The Sand Man.
She pauses, as though factoring this new information into her perception of everything.
And after a moment, “Do you believe in the stars?”
“Yes, baby. I believe in the stars.”
+++++
When he’s sure Teri’s sleeping, he flips through a photo album lying under the coffee table, embroidered floral designs, white on white, the style of which can only mean wedding.
Sure enough, it’s the album of Kim and Stephen’s marriage.
He smiles.
There are only three faces he recognizes in the entire wedding party, two of which belong to his daughter and son-in-law, and the other is of Kim’s closest friend from high school. Margaret, he wants to say, but she went by Meg then, so he’s not positive.
She’s not even the maid of honor, but the third bridesmaid down.
Jack wonders what else he’s missed.
It’s in the candid shots, when no one knows a picture’s being snapped, that he sees it on Kim’s face, her expression the outward, physical display of the feeling he can’t name.
Maybe it’s comfort.
The last time he felt even close to it, he’d been expending his last reserve of energy trying to prepare Renee for what comes next.
He realized only later that he’d been saying goodbye to the first person he’s encountered who might understand the decisions he’s made, and the weight you carry around when you try to live with their consequences.
It’s not scent that’s most acute in his recollection, but the softness of her damp cheek on his thumb, a contrast with the rough material at the elbow of her jacket.
He swears she leaned into him, partial weight of her head against the slight tremble of his unsteady hand.
He remembers the sense of touch. It’s the last thing that wasn’t muted, that wasn’t filed under the category: decrease in sensation.
Since that day, the kind of connection that comes from mutual understanding (a concept so foreign to him, before, that he thought it to be impossible) has been as it always was: absent.
When he tries her number (one last try, he tells himself, one last try), he allows a little selfishness to come through in the message. It’s less, Are you okay? and more, I need to talk to you. I need to hear your voice.
It’s not that this route is his preferred road of access, but if she’s as similar to him as he thinks, feeling like she can help him (and she can, she would) is more likely to evoke a response.
+++++
He lifts fifty pounds above his head a week later, shaking wrists and gritted teeth.
It’s a milestone; one he’s not sure how to mark.
When he sets the dumbbell back on the bar, he hears applause coming from a few feet away. He turns around to see its source.
She’s wearing a grin that’s curving her freckles up to the ceiling.
But her eyes aren’t the same.
“Chloe told me where I could find you,” is the first thing she says.
Jack thinks of twelve different things to say: (Renee,, or You’re in LA, or It’s so good to see you.), but the words seem to suspend themselves unsaid in the space between them, uncomfortable and not quite correct, like a dangling modifier.
He can’t stop smiling.
What’s most important, at least according to his body (now moving toward her on mere instinct), is eliminating the space.
He’s wobbly, maybe, but determined.
He forgets he’s sweaty until the moment she’s in his arms and self-consciousness registers.
She hugs him anyway, her grip tighter and longer than he expects and her face almost buried in his neck.
Renee's hands feel good on his back, like all his nerve endings waking up, and when it gets hard to stand straight, he allows himself to lean.