Felix had gotten into a routine in the past few months. Six days a week, he worked a dead-end warehouse gig, ate cheap ramen in the breakroom for lunch, finished his shift, and then went home to a shitty studio apartment to shower, scrounge up something for dinner, have a drink, and pass out to do it all again the next day.
The exception was Sundays, his only day off, and he spent it the same way every week.
By 8:50am, he was sat anxiously in the hospital waiting room, watching the clock, leg bouncing uncontrollably. The staff got to know him after just a couple weeks–he’d heard a few of them make sympathetic comments under their breath to each other when they thought he was out of earshot–but he didn’t care. He could only be there once a week; he had to be there right at 9:00 so he didn’t miss a single minute with her.
As the clock hands dragged over the hour, Felix locked eyes with the girl at the front desk and she knowingly motioned him over.
“Felix Estrada?” she confirmed, and he nodded, showing her his ID without being asked. She already had a sticky visitor’s badge made up for him, his initials written in large print in one corner, the room number in the other. “Visiting hours end at 9 PM. You know the drill.”
“Yeah, thanks.” Felix stuck the badge on the front of his hoodie, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and started down the familiar hallways.
He’d always hated hospitals. Something about the weird, sterile smell always put him on edge. The lights were too bright, the walls too clean–it all just felt wrong. Yet there he was, every week, for twelve hours straight. Finding her room was easy after all the times he’d made that walk, just like every time he opened her door, he felt relief flood his brain all over again when he saw her.
She was there. She was still breathing. He hadn’t lost her yet.
“Hey Chrissy, it’s just me.” Felix dragged a chair over to her bedside, collapsing into it and dropping his backpack on the ground.
He took a quiet minute just to look at her. She was lying on her side this week; Felix was all too familiar with the hospital staff moving her from time to time to help prevent bed sores, but it still made it feel a little more like she was just sleeping, like she’d wake up any minute and yell at him for being a weirdo watching her sleep instead of waking her up himself. Her dark hair was pulled back in the same two braids he’d painstakingly put in for her a few weeks earlier after he’d noticed how matted her hair was getting. He'd spent hours brushing it out and watching Youtube tutorials on how to do a simple braid until he managed to get them right. They were still kind of bad, but they kept her hair safe and pulled back from her pretty face. And she was really pretty. Even with the intubation and all the other medical shit she was hooked up to, she still looked beautiful.
He promised himself silently that if she ever woke up, he was going to tell her that.
When, he corrected himself. When she woke up.
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New funnybunny fic posted to AO3! Full first chapter linked below!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
