Chapter Text
Once again hunched into a waiting room chair at Cedars-Sinai, Andy’s heart thumps in his chest.
In light mid-day traffic — and given a few liberties taken with speed limits and yellow lights — they’d made it from home to the hospital in twenty minutes. A flock of nurses shuffled Sharon away from him as soon as they got through the door, disappearing her back into the maze of hallways that make up the emergency department. They left him holding the bag, literally, along with a stack of forms he can’t believe he’s supposed to fill out again.
Now — almost an hour later — Andy can’t duck away from a pounding flow of reasons why the drive might not have been fast enough. A mocking argument runs through him, all the justifications he could’ve used to flip on the lights and siren in his Explorer, no matter how much Sharon would’ve complained. The trip could have rung in ten minutes quicker, even with her aiming dark glares and sharp comments at him over the console.
That’s if she could’ve mustered it. She was woozy, clammy and pale, leaned against the door panel like a rag doll, jostling with every bump and pothole in the road. Earlier, she’d been a shell of her normal self, confused and listless in bed, surrounded by snotty tissues. How long she’d kept herself there, God only knows.
Her form was so still, curled under the covers when Andy had first walked into the bedroom...
A wave of nausea joins the worry stomping on his gut. He should’ve gone home as soon as she didn’t pick up his first call this morning. Yeah, it would’ve pissed her off if she’d turned out to be fine, but at least he would’ve known. And she maybe would’ve figured out her lack of response was concerning him, maybe accepted she needed to answer her damned phone.
But she couldn’t answer the phone, he remembers, because she didn’t even know where it was.
It’s indescribable, how unlike Sharon — his Sharon, the woman who triple-checks for her keys, phone, and wallet every time she walks out of the condo — it is for her to crawl into bed without a care and stay there for what looked like days. That, more than her physical state, leaves his throat tightening.
It must be bad.
It has to be really, really bad.
He could punch something. Better yet, someone. This was supposed to be over. After everything, Sharon should be in the clear. She doesn’t deserve this, not ever, not even when she’s hanging onto some vague sense of anger toward him.
In fact, Andy would take her hazy annoyance directed his way every day for the rest of his life, as long as it meant she was still with him.
When his phone sets to vibrating, his punching impulse doubles. The last thing he wants right now is to talk. To anyone other than Sharon, anyway, about anything other than what the hell she was thinking. He plans to abandon the call to voicemail, but the creep of guilt returns at the chance of one of the kids reaching out for an update.
Pawing through his discarded jacket, he finds the phone on its fourth and final ring. He scowls at the name on its screen, but swipes to answer.
“What?”
“Flynn, where the hell are you?” The greeting is a hiss, as if Provenza’s trying to stay quiet. “I thought you were just going home to—”
“I’m at Cedars,” he grits.
Silence stretches across the line for several seconds. “Please,” Provenza’s voice is strangely pleading and half-distant, like he’s ducked away from the receiver, “tell me that’s the name of some new overpriced brunch place.”
“No, you moron, it’s the fucking hospital!” This pulls a series of surprised and irritated stares from Andy’s fellow waiting room residents.
Rather than have an audience to the rest of his probably loud and profane side of the conversation, he strides down the too-familiar hallways and out into the parking lot. The bright, cloudless day feels like a slap in the face as Provenza’s sigh rustles across the line. “What happened?”
“When I got home, Sharon was—” Andy swallows against the memory of her lying stone-still under the covers, beats back the urge to yell, I thought she was gone!
Instead, he says, “She was completely out of it, burning up.” With panic pressing at his windpipe, crushing his voice into a croak, he forces his most distilled fear into the conversation. “She’s really sick. I’m worried it might be rejection.”
“Shit.” A fainter, rantier sound rises behind, what seems like Williams’ typical grouching in the background. “Yeah, yeah,” Provenza’s dropped the phone again, this time no doubt directing the smoothing words toward their boss. His voice returns in full force. “So you’ll be on leave for the rest of the day, I’m assuming.”
“Yeah. I’ll be back in...whenever.” Andy runs his hand over his hair. “I don’t even know.”
Williams’ voice reaches the line again, still too unclear to make out what he’s saying. But the sound is enough to send anger surging back into Andy’s chest. “You wanna just hand him the fucking phone? It’ll get this over quicker, and I have a few things—”
“Now that’s a damned stupid idea, and you know it.” Provenza grumbles. “Your wife will kick my ass if I let you get fired over this, and I fear her wrath much more than I fear yours.”
Andy doesn’t have the words to tell him that Sharon isn’t in an ass-kicking place right now. Instead he says, “You know I’ll drop the job in a second, if I have to choose.”
“Yeah,” the answer carries on a sigh. “I know.”
As he faces the hospital, the rows of windows that’ll be his home for the foreseeable future, exhaustion saps the force from his voice. “Can you just...keep him off my back?”
“Of course, Flynn.” The assurance carries on a surprising, solid sincerity. “That is my specialty, after all.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Provenza clears his throat. “And you’ll let us know what’s going on with Sharon, when you find out?”
He’ll never admit he’s grown a soft spot for her. “Yeah. I’ll keep you posted.”
Andy trudges back inside, fending off offers of delivered food and Patrice’s company. He doesn’t bother explaining the truth, which is that his attention spans wide enough to hold one person, at the moment, and his capacity for calm is even narrower. As if to demonstrate the first point, his return to the waiting room finds the duffel he’d stuffed together at home mocking him from below his claimed chair. He inwardly curses himself for leaving the bag — holding, in part, Sharon’s wallet and her charging phone — unattended. Given the way he left, he’s lucky the bomb squad isn’t surrounding it, with it having been See-Something-Say-Somethinged.
A quick inventory back at his seat finds their stuff untouched. But his check of the phone’s battery level also shows a new email alert on the display. As he taps Sharon’s PIN onto the screen, Andy steels himself for some bill notification or calendar update he’ll have to remember to tackle in the next few days.
Instead, he finds a surprise.
Commander, the message begins, and despite Andy’s distant sense telling him to drop it, that he has no right to read an email addressed to Sharon, he scrolls onward.
I understand your concern over Neil Williams. With that in mind, you should recognize why most of us have chosen to put him in the past, out of regard for our careers and our families. I ask that you not contact me again about this matter.
The signature block following the message says it’s from a ‘Lieutenant A. Masuki, Pacific Division.’ Against the continued twinge of principle, he pulls the screen further down, to Sharon’s first email and the follow-up that had prompted Masuki’s response. She’d spelled out her long IA career and skimmed over some of the dirt she’s swept up on Williams so far, then asked for any specifics the Lieutenant might be able to pass along.
Andy sets the message to appear unread before dropping the phone back into the bag. This Masuki… the information Sharon already has on Williams… it’s a mess reaching deeper than he expected. It’s the kind of stress her retirement was meant to end.
And under the circumstances, one question blares over the rest:
Is exposing Williams worth this?
When a familiar face appears in a doorway across the room, Andy settles on a certain answer: No. He doubles down at the unfamiliar line etched between Alonzo’s brows as he approaches. Nothing is worth this.
“Mr. Flynn, how’re you doing out here?”
“That depends on what you’re about to tell me.”
He offers a slow nod. “You should be fine, then.” With an arm extended to the door he’d just passed through, he says, “C’mon, Sharon is all settled in a room.”
Andy shoulders the bag as he stands. “So she’s okay, then?”
The question earns him a sidelong look as they step into the hall. “Not exactly.” He draws to a stop at a bank of elevators, pressing the upward arrow. “If she was okay you wouldn’t have brought her here. We’ve got her on an IV for dehydration and a cough suppressant, for starters.” An arriving elevator leaves him pausing, then picking up with a jab of the “3” button inside. “The ibuprofen seems to be helping with the fever.”
“You think it’s a cold?”
“Well,” Alonzo sighs, “it probably started as a cold. But in anyone with a curbed immune system, like Sharon’s, a simple cold can run crazy. We haven’t nailed down the specifics quite yet, but we’ll get it under control.”
Andy’s vision goes tunnel-like at the idea of ‘it started as a cold.’ All of this started with a cold, last October. A cold is what ended up attacking Sharon’s original heart, left it battered to the point of failure, brought her to the brink of death.
As the elevator dings onto the third floor, Alonzo squeezes his shoulder, breaking him out of his downward spiraling thoughts. “For now, she’s stable and resting.” He sets off down the rightward hallway. “Her temp is dropping, and we’ll keep a close eye on her to make sure she keeps getting better.”
“Of course.”
They draw to a stop outside a nondescript room in an unfamiliar corridor. “We can’t have Sharon on the transplant ward with whatever it is she’s battling,” Alonzo explains, as he nods to the door. “But we got her as close as we could. Her doctors and nurses will know to keep me up-to-date on her condition.”
“Thanks Alonzo.” Andy shakes the nurse’s hand. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
“Oh,” he smirks as he sets to backing down the hallway, “count on it.”
From the over-bright hall, Sharon’s assigned space is mostly dark. The nagging, antiseptic stink of the hospital crawls into Andy’s nose, doing nothing to ease the tension across his shoulders as he steps through the door. The tight room is half-filled with cryptic machines, the stiff, wide bed, a chair and some pillows in a show of institutional attempts toward comfort.
Sharon is out cold, curled into a delicate coil with her IVed hand draped over her hip. The sight is all too familiar, stirring up the worst kind of nostalgia. Andy spent day after day in rooms like this, since December, nursing an optimism he thought he’d perfected. Now, as he settles into his designated spot, he isn’t sure he can raise it up again. In its place, he mutters the one question spinning through him:
“How the hell’d we end up back here?”