CW: The first part is pure fluff with a couple underage drinking references/jokes. Second part references the events of Chris getting appendicitis (One, Two, Three, Four) and takes place while he is healing from surgery. Includes surgery references, whumpee rejecting medication, medical trauma references
Sometimes, you just want bittersweet fluff lined with angst.
-
“You gotta help me out,” Tristan sings along with the radio as they wait at a red light, Ronnie furtively checking her phone. “It’s all a blur last ni-eee-eye-ee-ight…”
One message from Paul, just now out of bed after a longer-than-usual workday had fully wiped him out, thanking her for leaving some food in the fridge. She smiles, faintly, at the sight of the little heart emojis he leaves after every single text.
He’s not much for showing emotion in his face, not like Tristan wears his own feelings on his sleeve, but he knows how to make sure Ronnie feels loved. He always has.
The light turns green, and she taps on the gas, then lets her foot slowly press down. Next to her, Tristan dances in his seat, totally unselfconscious, rocking back and forth.
“We need a taxi, ‘cause you’re hungover and I’m broke…”
Ronnie starts laughing, one hand over her mouth, the other still on the wheel.
He blinks, turning to look at her. They just clipped his hair short last week, getting him ready for the next competition coming up. She never expected to be a Gymnastics Mom, not once, but here she is, chaperoning her teenage son to the gym on a Saturday afternoon, where he more or less lives these days. “What?”
“I just. It’s something else to listen to your teenage son sing about being hungover, Tris. That’s all. You’re way too young for this song. And probably just for Katy Perry in general, not that anyone should listen to-”
“Mom.” Tristan rolls his eyes, leaning over and pointedly turning the volume up on the radio. “I like Katy Perry. And I, I, I know what hungover is. I’m not, not, not, not-... not-not four years old. I’m fifteen.”
“Fair enough, but I don’t think my fifteen-year-old should know about being hungover, either.” She takes a turn, the radio cheerfully blaring that’s what you get for waking up in Vegas and she wonders why she keeps letting Tris pick the radio station, exactly, when they could be listening to some perfectly fine soft rock right about now. “What do you get up to at Aki’s, huh? Maybe I need to speak to Aimi. Ask if you’re having wild parties as soon as I leave.”
“Oh my god, Mom.” Tristan turns bright red, and she tries not to enjoy how much he’s his father’s son - always but especially when he blushes, the red seeming to make the scattering of pale freckles stand out even more, not less, when he does. “You are, are not going to-... we don’t drink, Mom. We just, just watch shows and… hang out.”
“I know, baby,” Ronnie says, laughter still edging her voice. “I’m teasing you, that’s all.”
He glares out the windshield where he sits next to her, running his fingers up and down the smooth seatbelt, along its edge. Back and forth, enjoying the mix of silk and rough in the texture, she thinks.
“I’m not a, a, a, a baby,” He mumbles, all teenage resentment and irritation.
“Oh, honey. That’s the downside of having parents,” Ronnie says, gentling her voice down to affection, taking another turn. She can see the gym now, down at the end of the street. Aimi will probably already be here with Aki, she figures, and maybe they can make a coffee run while the boys practice. “It doesn’t matter how old you get. You could be fifty and I could be sixty-seven and I’d still see you wrapped in that hospital blanket looking up at me with big eyes. Even when we’re both old, you’ll still be my baby.”
He rolls his eyes again, but this time she catches the hint of a smile he’s trying to hide pulling at one side of his mouth. Tristan leans forward and switches the radio station over to Ronnie’s favorite, then falls back into his seat, focusing on the seatbelt again.
Sometimes, like his father, he doesn’t know how to say he loves her, but he always knows how to show it.
-
Two and a half years later
Nat came down for a glass of water, only to find Chris wide awake on the couch at 3 am, top teeth biting down so hard on his bottom lip she was afraid he’d draw blood, making his slow, careful, shuffling way towards the stairs.
She’d managed to convince him to go back to the couch, or really more or less command him, but the trade-off was promising she’d stay downstairs with him for a while.
Now, instead of water she has a mug of hot tea steaming gently on the side table, instead of her warm bed she has Chris’s head resting on a pillow in her lap while she runs fingers slowly through his hair - dark red in the night, lit with a hint of silver by the reflected light coming off the television - and instead of dreams, she has reruns of Frasier.
“You palmed your pain medication earlier, didn’t you?” She asks the question as gently as she can, without judgement.
He doesn’t answer, green eyes locked on the television, where the main character’s younger brother is preparing for a date and managing to set an ironing board on fire in the process. It’s probably one of the best scenes in television history, but Nat can’t even begin to pay attention to it. Worry has her all twisted up, heart beating a little too fast, as she picks up her mug and takes a sip, honey and lemon and yes, a little bit of whiskey in her tea all settling over her tongue.
“Chris,” She says, softly. “I asked you a question.”
“Mmmhmm,” is all he says, and he doesn’t move. His head is a soft weight against her leg, and his hair runs like silk through her fingers. He’s pale not just from the darkness and the late-night TV, but from the pain he must be in, must be holding back.
Of course, there’s no one who has come through her house who hasn’t been pretty good at hiding pain, after a while. Once you’re drowned in it, once it’s your everyday truth, you learn not so much to actually hide it as simply to go on living with it.
No one Chris’s age should already be so good at this.
“You have to take those, or you’re going to hurt like this all the time for a while,” Nat says, trying to keep from lecturing him. His freckles stand out more, lit by the cool blue-tinged light of TV. She watches him smile, just a little, at the slapstick comedy going on. “It’ll take longer for your incision to heal if you-”
“Don’t, don’t like pills,” Chris whispers, and she watches one of his hands, palm flat, running up and down the heavy weighted blanket she’s laid over him. It’s soft as rabbit fur, and he starts to hum, nearly a whisper, as he touches it. “Jake’s gone. Out. Didn’t… didn’t want them.”
Nat takes a deep breath, closing her eyes briefly. “Chris, you can’t only take pills when Jake is here to give them to you. He can’t always be here, he has things he does outside of this house-”
“I know. But… I didn’t want them. I, I, I don’t mind hurting a little.”
The funny thing is, it’s not bluster. He really doesn’t. Chris would really rather lay here, awake in the middle of the night, in terrible pain than simply put two pills into his mouth and wash them down with water. There’s been too much done to him with drugs, and he’s not the only one she’s had to help recover the idea of medicine as something other than torture.
He’ll get there.
She hopes.
“Okay, well… where did you put them?”
There’s silence, again, but this time he shifts a little, a flash of his hurt and discomfort across his expression. “In, in the couch cushions.”
“Do you have any of your other doses in there?”
“... mmhmm.”
“Chris…” She sighs, putting her hand up to her forehead, rubbing her fingers just above the bridge of her nose as the tension starts to build behind her eyes. Oh, her head’s going to hurt soon. She can’t just be up at night like she used to without paying for it the next day. “How many have you skipped? Huh?”
“... four.”
“Four. Four times-... okay.” She exhales, slowly - he’s tense under her hand, now, and she can feel the worry in him. Knows he’s trying to figure out if he’ll be in trouble, get punished. Disciplined for the ways he’s learned to live with what happened to him.
A different kind of test than what he’s tried on Jake, but it’s still a test.
“Chris. I can’t tell you how much I don’t want to have to sit here and watch you and see you swallow them. I know that it’s hard for you, I do, and I’m so sorry that we have to do this, but I have to take care of you. I want to take care of you. And part of that is making sure you know how to care for yourself. When you’re recovering from serious surgery-”
“The, the, the, the cut’s not even that big,” He mutters, a hint of irritation.
Nat feels a surge of affection for him that, if she were standing, would nearly knock her off her feet. Chris interrupting her, Chris being pouty and sulky and every inch a seventeen-year-old boy, is a new thing. She doesn’t take it for granted.
It’s just… a little inconvenient right now.
“It doesn’t matter how big it is. It went all the way inside your stomach, and it was a pretty serious surgery. You need these pills or you are going to hurt like hell for so much longer than if you take them and get better. You got it?”
He sighs, but relaxes against her again, and she starts running fingers through his hair again, simple and maternal. “Yeah. I, I do.”
“Okay. Let’s watch the show and see if maybe you’re up for taking your dose and heading back to sleep in a bit, huh?”
“Will you, you, you stay? Even if I-... even if I do, and fall asleep?” He twists a little to look up her and winces as it pulls the still-tender muscles in his abdomen. “Will you stay?”
Nat thinks about how badly her back’s going to hurt in the morning. The headache already trying to sneak its way in around the edges. How she’s going to end up napping half the day away and not getting a damn thing done she had planned.
Then she just smiles down at him, at his wide green eyes in his narrow face and the heavy blanket hiding every other inch of him in softness and warmth. “Yeah, okay. I’ll stay right here with you, ‘til Ant’s up in the morning. How’s that sound?”
“Good. See if you can get comfortable for a bit.”
The two of them fall back into an easy silence, broken only by the low-volume of the TV show, and get through two more episodes of Frasier before Nat’s tea is gone and she and Chris are both half-asleep on the couch, her hand simply resting on his hair, now, light but ever-present.
Eyes closed, the television’s cool blue still dancing against the inside of her eyelids, she hears Chris mumble, “Night, Nat,” in a sleep-slurred voice. It’s got to be four in the morning, there’s not much night left.
“Night, baby,” Nat murmurs.
“Not a, a baby, Mom,” Chris whispers, but both of them are too close to sleep to notice.
CW: Medical whump, sick whumpee, hospital whump, brief references to past child abuse and resulting traumatic association
Immediately follows Infection and Disorientation
Chris wakes up in the middle of a sentence.
Or rather, when his brain switches back on and he is conscious on a level he can participate in, he’s already talking, and the first thing he is aware of is a woman’s face, brown-skinned and with a slightly dry smile, watching him as he is saying, “-and, and, and then I saw, um, saw towels and the, the, the colors were all wrong, so, so I fixed them.”
“Oh, did you,” The woman replies, and there is a guarded kindness in her. “That was very kind of you.” He blinks at her, his vision slowly coming into focus. Chris takes a deep breath only to wince as a hazy sort of pain ripples up his right side. She leans over, a little closer. Her hair, black and full of tightly-wound curls slips over her shoulders and forwards, just brushing her cheeks. “Are you back with us? Don’t breathe so deep yet, okay?” She tilts her head, putting a hand up to push some hair back from his face. Jake does that sometimes, and Chris turns his head to encourage the affection, closing his eyes again.
Eyes closed feels better.
In the clinic they’re always kinder to trainees, if still brusque, businesslike, getting them in and out with bandages applied, fevers broken, internal injuries healed with rest and whatever drips down the IV to make them sleep when they have done nothing but beg for sleep since they lost themselves to the Drip.
The nurses are nicer than the handlers, and this one is talking to him and touching him but only where he wants her to, and that makes her the nicest of all.
The way the world is spinning begins to settle when his eyes are closed and she lays her hand briefly against the side of his face, and he breathes a little more easily. He must not be in trouble, if she’s allowed to be so nice.
There’s something beeping nearby, and he doesn’t like the flat white light coming from the fluorescents in the ceiling laying on exposed skin - he can feel its weight on his arms where they lay on top of the scratchy rough blanket - but at least it isn’t a cold light.
He shivers, opening his eyes to look down at himself, blinking. There are blankets pulled up to just under his arms, pale blue and sort of rough and soft, both at once, pilling so badly he can pick the little balls of fabric off bit by bit with one hand. Normally trainees don’t get blankets in the clinic, they’re supposed to freeze here, too.
He must have been very good but hurt anyway. Sometimes the handlers just want to hurt you, even when you’re good, because your tears are beautiful, too.
Besides, 499, you wanted this - you signed up so we would make you cry, right? Give me your arm, a little half-dose of purple should get you nice and worked up for us.
He tries to obey, rolling his left arm slowly over to expose the marked-up space at the inside of his left elbow - bandages wrapped around his left wrist over his barcode crinkling - and then realizes something is on - is in - his left arm. There’s… there’s a needle in his arm already, with a thin tube that runs up to a stand on wheels with multiple bags hooked onto it, and he thinks there’s something down below his waist, too. A catheter.
He’s been bad, then. There’s only one reason to have a needle in his elbow and a catheter in, but when he tries to panic, he’s… he’s too tired, and too dizzy, and too foggy, to feel very scared at all. Even if they are going to take him away again, it’s too late. The Drip is already in his veins and there he goes, all of him, wiped clean all over again.
The soft throb of pain along his right side, wrapped up in the gentle blanket that covers his mind, makes it clear he’s not going anywhere very fast, not today. The handlers will have to leave him alone, and that’s good, but if he’s here and on the Drip, it means he’s back again.
Back in the Facility, here to be wiped, refurbished, and sent back to Sir or to someone new… and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
He feels his throat closing against helplessness - no, he was rescued, he was rescued and they said he’d never go back… they swore, they promised, Jake and Nat promised they wouldn’t let him go back, Jake would have fought them, he would have done something-
Tears flood Chris’s eyes and he hitches in a breath on a whimper. Jake must have gotten too hurt to save him. He must have, he might even be dead-
If it weren’t for you, she’d still be alive-
“Hey, hey, come on now.” The soft female voice is closer now, and her hand is back on his face, up to run back through his hair as he sniffles, coughs, winces as the dull pain sharpens briefly and then fades again. “It’s okay, you’re okay. It’s just the hospital, yeah? Your appendix ruptured, you had to come here in an ambulance, had some pretty serious surgery. Can you remember that?”
His eyes manage to open, blurred through his tears, and he looks at her. She’s not wearing the uniforms that handlers or even the nurses wear, but a softly floral scrub top and plain navy pants. Her smile is different than any nurse’s in the clinic that he’s ever seen. She’s looking at him, not through him.
“I d-don’t know where, where, where I am,” He whispers, and she nods, her smile still in place.
“I know. That’s why I’m the one sitting here with you right now. You’re in the county hospital. You’re okay, Chris.”
Not 223499, but Chris.
He reaches back into his own mind and finds the train track that Jake and Nat are on, remembers their faces, their names, the way it feels when they hold him. He brings up the memory of Jake pulling his shirt off, handing it to Chris, whispering, I’ll come back, I promise.
He remembers Jake carrying him up the stairs three days later.
Chris holds, for a moment, the memory of Jake looking at him as they loaded him onto the plastic-backed bed-thing in the ambulance. He can remember, clearly, Jake's voice. We’ll be right behind you, Chris. I swear to God I’ll be there. I promise you, buddy, we’ll bring you back home.
He’s awake.
Jake isn’t here.
“Um, J-Jake, my, my… my…” Chris shakes his head, like a dog shaking off water. What had Nat been saying, before the ambulance came? Talking to Jake, the two of them, going over their story. His name is Christopher Stanton. He’s my little brother, and he’s autistic. “My, my, my my my brother, my-... he p-promised, where’s-... need my, my, my brother-”
“I texted Yoder when you started talking,” The woman says gently. “They’ll be up to see you in just a minute, okay?”
He tries to believe her.
There’s a fog in his thoughts and the trains are all running, but slow, finding their way, winding around the gray clouds in his head. “I, I was talking already,” Chris whispers. “Even… though I wasn’t, um, awake.”
His throat feels a little scratchy and rough, like someone shoved something down there, but the agonizing pain he’d been in - the sharp ache that had been a knife shredding him to nothing again and again and again - is gone. In its place there’s a duller throb, and the sense of floating inside a very nice fog. Like the fog he hates, but… better, somehow, too.
“I was… was asleep, and now… ‘m talking, but, but I was still, um, asleep, and… and and and… and talking…”
“Yes, that happens. It’s coming out of sedation, you kind of wake up before you really wake up, you know? I’ve done this before, and you know, I had someone once who… came back to himself in the middle of telling me about a margarita recipe he used to make for his girlfriend. He didn’t remember it any longer when he was awake. That’s the fun of recovery, I hear all kinds of things when I’m with someone. My wife proposed to me in recovery from her own surgery, you know. She doesn’t remember it at all.”
“You… you you you said yes?” Chris looks back at her. He can focus his eyes again, and the look of her is nice. Soft, but like she’s had to be hard before. Like Nat looks, sometimes, only Nat doesn’t have a wife, or anyone at all but… but Jake, just like everyone else has Jake to help.
He moves his right hand, gingerly - he can feel the thick bandage wrapped around his left, and is never less than terribly aware of the needle in his elbow - and she takes it in both of hers.
Her hands are cool, and dry. He smiles, faintly, and lets his head fall back against a flat pillow behind him. There’s a window to his left, three panes of glass, and outside, when he turns his head, he can see some trees, a courtyard. Birds hopping around the branches, but he can’t quite see what kind they are.
The woman squeezes his hand lightly. Chris takes a breath. This isn’t the clinic, because there are no windows at WRU. You’re never allowed to see outside, not until your owner is ready for you, not until you are good enough to go home.
Going outside is a privilege a pet has to earn.
This… this must be what an actual hospital looks like. He’s seen them on TV, sometimes. The TV ones didn’t really look much like this.
The woman keeps his hand in one of hers and uses the other to check her phone. “Oh, I made her ask again when she was all the way conscious, but yes.”
“That’s, that’s that’s nice. I’m Chris.” His voice is low, and shy, and he doesn’t see her nod - he doesn’t want to stop looking out the window at the clear morning sky - but he can kind of feel it, anyway.
“I know, sweetheart. Your family will be here any second, but they wanted you to have someone when you woke up, so I’m kind of sitting in for them for a bit. Don’t worry, they’re on their way.”
“Jake-”
“Yes, I’m told there’s a man named Jake and, you know, I know Yoder pretty well by now.”
“Why… why, why why why do y’call… Nat? Yoder?”
“Hm? Oh, I don’t know. Just always have. Used to be we weren’t allowed to know each other’s first names, so I guess the habit stuck. How are you feeling?”
“Um. Weird. Am, am, am I… give m’drugs?” Fear hits, again, but it’s faded, a shadow of itself. He shifts his left arm and feels tape pull against the skin inside his elbow, looks at the tubing that runs from the needle up to a bag hanging on a metal stand. There’s a machine, too, that shows numbers he doesn’t understand. His eyebrows furrow. “Was I… bad?”
“No, sweetie, no. No. You just had to have surgery, and you have to be knocked out for that.” The woman pats his hand again, and Chris tries to relax himself. There’s a window, and if there’s a window, he’s not going back. He recites the differences like an incantation. Like a chant. Like a prayer, to keep him safe, as long as he does everything just right.
There’s a window, and so he can’t be going back. He can see outside, the sky and the sun, and so he’s not going back. There’s kindness here, compassion and warmth, and so he isn’t going back. His wrists and ankles aren’t strapped down to the bed, so he’s not going back. Her hand holds his but it doesn’t touch him anywhere he doesn’t want, so he’s not going back. “Do you know what an appendix is, Christopher?”
Chris looks back at her. She has a nice face, and warm eyes, and calls him a name and not a number, so he’s not going back.
He can remember Jake, so he’s not going back.
Jake will come find him, and he’s not going back.
“No, ma’am,” He says, softly.
She laughs, and he likes the sound of her laughing, shaking her head, her curls moving with her. “Not a ma’am, thanks. I appreciate the politeness, though. I just don’t like being ‘ma’am’d, I’m not quite that old yet, now am I?”
“Where… where, where where where Jake is from, you c-call… everybody sir or, or ma’am, if you’re… if you’re raised right.” He tries to put the hint of sarcasm, dry and cynical, that Jake always has when he says it, but it doesn’t work for him. He can tell it doesn’t quite sound the same. He is floating, in this warmly lit room, watching the sky change from grayish-pink to purplish and finally to a pale blue, going cooler and deeper at the top.
The sun is rising, warm, to wash away the cold light.
“Well, that’s not where I’m from. In any case, your appendix is this little doohickey right there along your right side, and yours got infected. So Yoder-... well, Nat, I guess - called a mutual friend of ours-”
“Am-... ambulance,” Chris whispers, thinking of the two people, moving around him. His memories are faded and terrified and full of pain, but he thinks of the gloved hand on his shoulder, the hint of a brusque, calm reassurance, cool focused expression and clear brown eyes. “Finn.”
“Right. That’d be my friend. Then you weren’t feeling super great when we got you here, your appendix burst and you sure gave Mandela a job to do cleaning out that infection, huh? Finn stuck around to help out with that, they trained as an Army medic. Did they tell you that?”
Chris just blinks at her, and slowly shakes his head.
“Yeah, way back. Signed up right out of high school, dealt with some scary shit when things got tense at the Canadian border when Canada started taking runaways… anyway, they’re good in a pinch, but so am I, I guess.” She shrugs. “We can’t trust everybody, so… they helped us get you stable, and then we got you in and out of that OR. Just between us, though? Can you keep a secret?”
Chris blinks twice, then slowly nods.
“Good. Just between us, I think they stuck around because they took a shine to you. Anyway, now you’re hooked up-... let’s see, they said you wouldn’t like the IVs, so let me tell you, it’s something for your pain and a literal ton of antibiotics, that’s all.”
“An, antibiotics-... for the, um, the the infection?”
“Right. That’s all it is, I promise, antibiotics and something to make sure your incision doesn’t hurt too badly. Mandela knows her work, you should be able to leave in the next few days. Mandela’s kind of an arrogant blowhard, but she’s also maybe the second-best surgeon I’ve ever met and she’s, you know, safe… for you. Lucky for us she was meeting someone at that Starbucks across from the hospital, huh?”
“... lucky, lucky for us,” Chris repeats, just to show he’s listening, but he doesn’t quite understand what he’s being told. He could, he thinks, if he could just wake all the way up, but the hint of fog makes the connections a little more difficult, more of a struggle. “Um, can, can I, can I ask-... are you… Tori?”
The woman blinks, and then laughs again, and Chris smiles faintly in return. He wants her to laugh again and again, it’s a nice laugh, it changes the light inside the hospital room when she laughs like that. Makes it brighter, more like sunshine and less like a cold white room with a door he can’t open.
He wonders if her wife makes her laugh.
“Oh, Finn got chatty in the ambulance, hm? Well-”
There are footsteps, and the woman turns before she can answer his question.
“Let’s see… 210, 212… 214… here it is, 216, this should be it. Jake, damn it, knock first-”
The door opens with a hard jerk of the knob, and Chris looks to the doorway. He knows the bit of blond hair before he sees the face it belongs to. The fog inside his head is familiar, but it hasn’t taken anything away from him.
They didn’t take Jake away.
He lets go of the woman and a smile stretches across his face. The throb of pain is gone, it can’t hold together under the weight of the warmth inside him. “Jake!”
Jake moves through the doorway, eyes on Chris, the bright blue focused and intense, shadowed from lack of sleep. His hair mussed, and he’s still wearing the clothing Chris saw him in last, rumpled. He drops a backpack on the floor as he moves, and he doesn’t even seem to realize he’s done it. Nat appears behind him, her braid half-undone, circles under her eyes dug in even more deeply than the ones under Jake’s.
Jake leans over him, one knee up on the bed. “Hey, buddy.”
“Hi, hi, hi, um, hi-... h-hi, Jake.” He holds out one hand. “Um, can you, could, could you please-”
“Oh, Christ, be careful, he just had surgery!”
The woman’s warning is lost, because Jake is already hugging him.
Warm, strong arms around him, and he tucks his head right under Jake’s chin and breathes in the familiar smell of him, deodorant and cologne and the laundry-smell from his shirt, the skin-smell of Jake underneath all of it. The simplest way to anchor himself, the greatest certainty he has that he isn’t going back, because Jake is here, and Jake would never let anyone take him away, not ever again.
“There were people having a fucking pizza party in the ER waiting area while you were in surgery, I thought I’d kill them with my bare hands if I had to listen to it any longer. Who the fuck orders fucking delivery pizza at the ER?” Jake’s voice is cracking, and Chris hums, twisting his right hand into Jake’s shirt, twist-and-release, then finger-twist-tap-tap-tap, and it’s solid and real and the sun is so pretty outside the window.
“Sorry I, I, I, I didn’t tell you I was, um, was sick,” Chris whispers.
“Sorry I didn’t know without you having to tell me,” Jake whispers back. “I hate hospitals, little man, you have no idea how much I hate having to tell lies in a hospital again. Fuck, I hate hospitals so fucking much.”
“Me, me, me me me, me too, but, um, but it’s okay with you here. It’s okay. It’s, it’s not-”
“It’s not the same,” Jake says softly.
“Right. Not, not, not the same. I’m, I’m, I’m not, not, not, um, not going… going back.”
“Never, Chris. Not ever. Letting you go in that ambulance without me is the second-hardest thing I’ve ever fucking done,” Jake whispers, and tears build in Chris’s eyes as he buries himself against Jake’s neck, his hands making short, jerky little flapping motions as he struggles to keep the feelings inside him from overwhelming his ability to speak.
Also boxboysandotherwhump again with a cute idea for you maybe^^ I think it would really be super cute to have Chris take care of laken post op and be all happy with them but also a bit worried as he waits for them to wake up from the anesthetics? Just happy doting Chris and laken shuffling through the hospital floors only in sweatpants please (that's what I and the other trans people did when we were in the hospital. No one wore shirts on that ward 😂)
Chris struggles heavily with hospitals - too much white, the lights are too flat and not warm, they tend to be cold, it all pricks at his worst memories and drags them to the surface. But he would make an exception for this and show up with like a giant bag of all of Laken’s favorite foods and some flowers and stuff because he panicked and Jake had given him some money so he just bought everything he thought Laken might like and then got an extra blanket too because it’s cold in white rooms and you should have more blankets right? Right?? Is anyone else freezing? Chris is freezing. Can he please sit where he can see the light switch, please, can he just - can he just turn the lights off and on again like three times just to know he can please-
and Laken is just like, make it a light switch rave, baby, I don’t care
Can you donate your boobs to someone else? It seems like such a waste to just scoop them out and throw them away when there’s other people out there who could use them.
