5 and 1 with Ash and Evvy
(Psst, prompts are from this Two-Part Drabble Game)
Situation #5: Home after the hospital
Sentences #1: "You didn't have to scare me like that."
Ash is still shaking a little bit when she gets Evan to sit down on the couch. Her eyes keep catching on the admission bracelet peeking from beneath his long sleeves, and her breath catches in her lungs all over again.
The silence between them is oppressive ― a far cry from the usual comfortable quiet. She wants to say something, but she's not sure what there is to say. Evan doesn't meet her eyes as she watches his face.
He settles in with a minor wince, breath hardly catching at the pain.
She wonders, maybe for the first time, she isn't sure if it is, how much pain he's gone through in his life that he can shrug this off without so much as a hiss or squeezing his eyes shut. That he can sit down anywhere, lean against anything, with three broken ribs and not even whimper.
She's been through plenty herself, but she still has to grit her teeth through every injury worse than a papercut ― forget broken ribs, she'd cry if she so much as bruised one too badly.
But Evan hadn't really even batted an eyelash at it, not even when he was told there was not one broken rib, but three of them. He hadn't seemed surprised, or bothered.
She knows Lochy can heal him when she gets home from work if he wants her to. She knows he'll be okay in the end.
She's not even sure what the exact reasons are at this point.
She's scared because he got hurt, she knows that. She's scared because he's hardly even reacting to something that would probably be debilitating to anyone else. But there's so much else and she can't parse any of it out.
What comes out of her mouth after several moments of thick, suffocating silence is, "You didn't have to scare me like that."
She regrets it immediately, because after everything today that's what makes Evan flinch like he's been struck.
She shouldn't have said it anyway ― shouldn't guilt him for something that isn't his fault. She wants to apologize.
She's hardly opened her mouth to do so when Evan says, small and still not meeting her eyes, "I'm sorry."
"No," She says, too forcefully, and both of them flinch. She tries again, gentler but no less earnest, "No, no, Evvy baby, don't be sorry. I'm sorry. I just ― you scared me. You're hurt and that's... You never get hurt."
He sits there and worries his bottom lip between his teeth, eyes glued to the carpet somewhere far off to her right. She swallows and she watches him and she bites her own lip.
"Does it hurt?" She finally asks.
"No worse than the first time did," He says, a little absently, and she gasps just before his eyes go wide and he clamps his mouth shut and flinches.
"The first time?" She asks, horrified.
She didn't know he'd had broken ribs before. It had to have happened before they ran away together, or she would have known. It had to have happened while he lived with his dad.
The fear drains out of her all at once, replaced with a seething protective rage she imagines isn't unlike how he feels whenever she's threatened or hurt.
As if what she already knew about that piece of human garbage had done hadn't made her hate him enough, the very idea of him actually physically hurting Evan makes her want to track him down and personally put him through something so much worse. But she grits her teeth and takes a slow breath and tells herself, not now.
There's a time and a place for full-blown homicidal rage.
"Evvy," She says, when he doesn't answer for a long moment, "When was the first time?"
She can tell he doesn't want to talk about it ― if he doesn't say anything, she'll drop it. But she needs to know. She needs to.
Evan takes a breath, stunted and short, and he flinches just a little bit. She flinches in response. She hates seeing him in pain.
He shrugs, finally, and says, "I was fourteen."
She sees red and has to clench her fists and dig her nails into her palms to keep from doing anything. She takes a few deep breaths and swallows. Keep calm. Keep control.
After a moment, while she's still trying to calm herself down so she doesn't do anything stupid and scare him, he adds, "I guess I forgot I never told you."
Which is Evan-speak for "the experience was deeply traumatic and I've been keeping it locked up in the back of my head this whole time".
"It's okay," She tells him, as gently as she can, "You don't have to talk about it."
He seems to relax a little, closing his eyes. "Okay."
She takes another breath. She sits down next to him. She lays a hand on his thigh and he covers her hand with his own almost immediately. They twine their fingers together.
She'll figure something out for the bastard who broke his ribs this time later. And she'll try to put wondering what happened the first time as far out of her mind as possible.
"Do you want me to get you some pain meds?"
They didn't get the ones he was prescribed ― they both knew the likelihood they'd be used was low. But they have some left over from the last time one of them went in with a bad enough injury to warrant a hospital visit.
"No," He says, like it's obvious.
Coming from Evan, she guesses it probably is a given that he wouldn't want any. He hates taking pain medication.
"Okay," She says, "Lochy should be home soon."
