(no subject)
Title: Mistakes (2/3)
Author: me
Rating: R
Disclaimer: i own nothing
Author's Notes: so in case no one noticed this has been changed to 3 parts. in the midst of writing part 2 i realized oh FML, this won't fit into 2 parts. so it's gonna be three. thanks so much to all the lovely comments on part 1. i can only hope for that many more on this part. it's a little image heavy i guess you could say, but it explains some things, sorta. yeah. lol. so, comments are greatly appreciated. enjoy :)
Part 1: http://community.livejournal.com/kradam_ai/353692.html#cutid1
Adam has made his fair share of mistakes in life. From small ones like fumbling through major lines in a play, to big ones like falling in love and getting his heart broken in the end. Yet he’s pretty sure not wearing his seatbelt in L.A. traffic tops them all. He’s aware of the fact that he’s not awake, but he’s dreaming. It’s hazy and fuzzy around the edges. He knows he’s in the hospital, or he hopes he’s in the hospital.
As if someone’s out to get him the images morph into L.A. traffic. Rain clouds shooting glitter change into cars surrounding him outside the airport. The sun is beaming through the windshield and finally the street light turns green. He fumbles with his iPod hooked up to the speaker system as he drives along, traffic slowly dwindling to just a few cars once he gets into a familiar neighborhood area.
He glances up, sees the intersection, the next street light. It’s red but flashes green before he has to stop. One glance down at his iPod to see what song is next in line and he hears the screeching of tires and a horn blowing. He can’t stop in time. Metal clips metal and the next few seconds are a literal blur of motion.
He hears the screams of people telling someone to call an ambulance. Cameras are already going off but he can’t seem to open his eyes or make his mouth work so he can tell them to just fuck off already. He tries to move, tries to get some semblance of feeling in his body. Yet he can’t find it. So he lays slumped against the deflated airbag and steering wheel, breathing slowly, eyes still shut. It’s not until someone’s yanking the car door open that he realizes the ambulance is there. He didn’t even hear the sirens.
He can vaguely feel his arms and his face. He knows that someone’s hands are clasped just under his ribs, a set of arms wrapped around him from underneath his armpits. Groaning, he lets himself be pulled out of the car. He finally opens his eyes. The first thing he sees is the hood of his rental car bent up and smashed against a pole. Smoke rises in little wisps of gray. The windshield is smashed and the airbag is dangling from the wheel, a few streams of red dripping from the fabric.
Suddenly all numbness is gone. He can feel the pain in one of his arms, the constricting pain in his torso, the throbbing somewhere deep in his gut. When he’s on the stretcher an uncomfortable sharpness hits him, starting from the waist up and settling in his abdomen. It has him gasping….
Adam’s eyes snap open.
For a second he panics, breathes too fast through a tube shoved down his nose. He feels weighed down. Pain is only a barely-there thrum through his veins and his torso feels strangely numb but almost like he's been stretched wide open and put back together.
Then relief washes over him when he realizes he’s in the hospital bed, he’s just not completely sure of the why or the how. He wiggles all ten fingers: check; then all ten toes: check. His eyes focus and the too-white ceiling greets his throbbing headache. A strangled moan escapes past his lips and then he hears that someone else is in the room.
“Adam!”
It’s his mom.
“Oh god, Adam! You’re awake,” she cries and takes his hand in her smaller one. Adam looks confused for a second but then she’s kissing the top of his hand and he sees the IV needle pushed through his skin. White bandages litter his forearm and fingers and his eyes widen. “Let me call the nurse!” She pushes the red button on the end of the cord hanging off the bed a few times before turning back to him.
“Mom?” he mumbles. He doesn’t like how scratchy his voice sounds or how much of a little kid he’s being. It reminds him of the time when he was seven and his dad gave him a scooter for his birthday. He loved that scooter until the day he went too fast down the hill of their neighbor’s driveway and crash-landed into a bush. He was scratched up all over his arms and his elbows and knees resembled something from a horror movie. He didn’t cry but he was scared when his mom took him to the hospital.
Only this time he doesn’t remember much of how he got the cuts. He only remembers the nauseating spinning and the numbness that had settled in most of his body. This time when he flexes his fingers the stinging starts. His hand slips from his mother’s and he yanks the thin blanket out of the way, eyes wide and searching. His right arm is in a cast from the wrist up to his bicep. White strips of gauze are wrapped all the way around his ribs and stomach.
Adam’s breathing picks up at a faster rate and he squeezes his eyes shut. A machine monitoring his vitals begins to beep louder and faster. “Adam, calm down. The nurse is coming.” His mother’s words don’t help much at all. He knows he’s on the verge of a panic attack, can already feel his chest tightening. “Do you remember what happened?”
“Um….” he forces out and takes a deep breath, “I remember the wreck, but…Mom how bad is it?” The panic rises and he’s blinking away tears.
“Someone pulled out in front of you, honey. You weren’t wearing your seatbelt a-“
“Yeah, I know!” he snaps and rubs at his eyes. “It’s the in-between that’s fuzzy.” He swallows hard around the lump in his throat and lets out a shuddering breath. The panic has settled, if not for a little while.
“What do you remember, baby? Huh? Tell me,” she urges softly as she smoothes back his bangs flopping in his face. He flinches when his head throbs. He wonders briefly if his skull would split open from all the pounding and what not going on up there. Just then the nurse walks in with a clipboard. She’s smiling and she immediately comes to his side to start checking vitals and other various things. He turns his attention back to his mom. She’s still waiting for him to answer her.
“Uh, I…I remember hitting the other car and spinning, but not really the crash. I kept my eyes closed, so I didn’t see anything until after they got me out of there.” He looks up at his mother, his eyes wider and filling with more panic. “What happened?”
She sighs heavily and takes his hand back. She runs a nail along the band-aid covering his index finger. “Adam, you crashed into a pole. Your airbag deployed late, the windshield busted. You have a broken arm, a couple of broken ribs, several cuts as you’ve already seen. And…” She stops and he can see the tears filling her eyes.
The nurse tinkers with a few things attached to his skin in the form of needles and medical tape. He flinches, but keeps his eyes focused on his mom. He silently urges the nurse to hurry it up so he can get to the bottom of this…this situation. The nurse finally instructs him on the dos and don’ts but he ignores her.
“What, Mom? And what?” he asks once the nurse is out of the room.
“You’re so lucky right now. It took them over two hours to get you stable and out of surgery. Your spleen ruptured and for a few minutes they couldn’t get the bleeding to stop, and…Adam, you scared the shit out of us!”
Adam stares at his clearly upset mother. She’s crying and kissing the top of his hand and keeps reaching up to push his hair back. He feels like a little kid. But he can feel the panic settling back in his chest and he’s realizes just how tingly his torso really is; like he’s just getting feeling back. His ribs are starting to ache and his arm is itchy underneath the cast.
“Honey?”
Adam flicks his eyes to his mom’s and she’s staring at him worriedly. “Sorry. Just…just trying to process it all,” he admits and sort of lies at the same time. He’d rather not process it but he can’t help it. Then it hits him that he doesn’t know what day it is. He can’t remember the last day he was actually awake. “What day is it?”
Her eyes go wide for a second, and then she’s forcing a smile on her face. “It’s Friday. You’ve been asleep for two days, Adam.” She starts to rub small circles with her thumb on the palm of his hand.
“Really? I-it was that serious?” She nods and the tears fill her eyes again. “Fuck,” he breathes. “Can I go home? I don’t want to be here. Can I go home?” He inwardly cringes at how raspy and broken his voice sounds but he doesn’t care: he wants out of this place.
“They’re still monitoring you, Adam. They’re afraid that if you go home right now something could pull the stitches and the bleeding could start again. Don’t you want to get better?” She’s desperate for him to calm down, but she knows her son better than anybody and a few simple words spoken reasonably and calmly won’t help much. It’s worth a try, though.
“NO. I want to go home,” he says stubbornly. She sighs and shakes her head.
“I can’t do anything about that, baby, but right now you need to calm down. Panicking won’t help you heal any faster.” She squeezes his hand quickly and his pulse starts to slow down some underneath her thumb. “Do you want some visitors?”
Adam blinks once, takes another deep breath, and nods. “Who?”
“Your dad and Neil. Drake and Kris are here, too,” she says cheerfully. His eyes brighten up a little and he smiles.
Adam closes his eyes when his mom’s hand is gone from his and he waits for the door to open and footsteps to reach his ears. Finally it does. His dad sits, Neil stands on the other side of the bed, and Adam smiles. Even though the pain is starting to surface through the fading tingles, he pushes through the visiting. Eventually the two of them leave and it’s silent in the room for about ten minutes.
“Adam?”
Adam would recognize that Louisiana accent anywhere. He smiles briefly at Drake and tells him to come in. Drake steps inside, Adam can sense the hesitance, but he ignores it. He watches Drake flutter around the room, grab a chair then put it back against the wall, mess with a balloon hanging half-way to the floor.
“What’s wrong?” Adam finally asks and clears his throat. After a while of talking it was starting to get scratchier and was even beginning to hurt. For someone who likes to talk so much, he was getting a kind of tired of it.
“Are you okay?” Drake wonders, hands shoved into the pockets of a pair of khaki shorts, eyes uncertain.
“I feel fine right now.” Adam raises an eyebrow. Sighing, he manages to push himself into a sitting position against the pillows with his good arm. The cuts stretch some and he winces, but makes himself ignore the stinging. “Why’d you come back?” He feels stupid for asking the moment he sees the hurt flash in Drake’s eyes.
“Well, fuck, Adam! Right after you drop me off at the airport you’re in a wreck and being sent `asleep for two fucking days! Excuse me for coming back to make sure you’re fucking okay!” Drake’s voice is low and Adam cringes away from the sound.
“Sorry, sorry.” Adam scratches a spot below his eye; another cut. He keeps staring at Drake, who’s pacing now. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Drake shoots back and stops burning a hole in the floor. Adam rolls his eyes and wishes he could cross his arms like a spoiled diva but the cast prevents it. So he settles for huffing like a teenager instead. “I’ll be back to check on you later. I need sleep.” Drake comes over to the bed, kisses Adam’s cheek, then hurries out of the room.
Adam groans as he flops back on the pillows, slaps a hand over his eyes. A couple of minutes pass as he sits propped on the pillows and thinks. Things between him and Drake were good. Weren’t they? He thought the whole dating and being in an open relationship thing would work out just fine. He’s beginning to see, though, that maybe it isn’t working out so well.
He decides to forget about it for now. He doesn’t need added stress on top of the pin-pricks of pain that are radiating throughout his body at the moment. Just as he reaches for the red button the door opens again. He pushes the button before glancing up and seeing Kris rushing through the door.
Adam stares. Kris stands there shuffling his feet, and Adam can tell he’s nervous about being in here. “Kris?” he questions. Then it’s like some kind of tension Adam wasn’t aware of breaks between them and Kris is suddenly at Adam’s bedside in the chair, holding Adam’s hand with one of his own, while Kris’ free hand flutters over Adam’s body. “Kris!”
Kris takes in a gasping breath and it’s then that Adam realizes Kris is crying.