Chapter Text
He spent his first day in denial.
When he had told Dr. Cox that he believed comatose patients had some awareness of what was going on around them, this wasn’t what he’d had in mind. Snippets of conversation or physical stimuli, sure. But he hadn’t expected a literal haunting.
It was bizarre to walk around the hospital without anyone being able to see him, a blur of translucent white. His shirt was covered in dried blood, courtesy of the car crash that had thrown him into a coma. That had broken his bones and damaged his organs and reduced his body to an empty vessel.
That had turned him into a living poltergeist phenomenon.
Once he had gotten over his initial shock, JD had tried to make the best of it. He’d figured that his friends needed him more than his lifeless body.
Carla was the only one around, and so he spent his second day trailing after her, watching as she went through the motions, her eyes rimmed with red. Elliot didn’t look much better; JD had caught a glimpse of her earlier, had seen the black tearstains on her cheeks. JD supposed that she had gone home to get some rest, a reprieve from the pain and heartache.
On the third day of this purgatory, JD found a way to cheer up his best friend.
He had realized that he could move things – as long as they didn’t weigh too much, and only if he was aided by external factors. As such, he couldn’t take the Janitor’s water bucket and dump it over his head, but he could create a whirlwind of paperwork as long as there was an open window.
Which was exactly what he was doing whenever Turk was around, and there you go, JD thought as a reluctant smile tugged at his friend’s lips.
It wasn’t until his fifth day as Sacred Heart’s resident ghost that he caught sight of Dr. Cox. JD had been trying to send the muffin basket across the room (he didn’t feel hunger, but he could still begrudge Dr. Kelso his ninth muffin for the day) when he saw a blur of white lab coat and trendy sneakers duck into his room.
When JD followed him, he found Dr. Cox looking at his chart, his brows etched into a deep frown. Anyone who hadn’t studied Dr. Cox as religiously as he had over the past few years would have thought that he merely looked tired.
JD knew better though.
He’d seen the signs before: the tense set of his shoulders, the stubble, the darkness in his eyes. Dr. Cox was on the verge of another breakdown, and if JD’s background in medicine wasn’t enough to clue him in to the fact that things were looking dire, Dr. Cox’s disposition certainly was.
“Doesn’t look good, huh?” JD joked half-heartedly. “Guess I turned into one of your gomers.”
There was a strangled whine, not unlike that of a wounded animal, and JD turned to look at Dr. Cox. He was stock-still, pained eyes staring down at the lifeless body in front of them.
Without realizing what he was doing, JD reached out to pat his shoulder, to anchor him. But before his hand could make contact, Dr. Cox slammed the chart down. There was a loud clang as it hit the metal frame of the bed, the piercing sound almost obscene in the tense silence of the room.
“Damnit Newbie,” Dr. Cox growled, his voice strained. “You can’t-” He choked up, and JD wished he could comfort him, could lessen the ache.
“I can’t do this. You need to come back. This isn’t- It’s not-”
“Dr. Cox?”
JD turned around to find Carla standing in the door, a concerned expression on her face.
“Are you alright?”
JD watched as Dr. Cox cleared his throat, blinking once, twice, before he turned to Carla. For once, he seemed to be out of cutting remarks, uninterested in donning the mask of the uncaring, cold-hearted bastard.
“No, Carla,” he said in a low voice. “I’m not.”
Carla’s eyes softened.
“Come on,” she said, placing her hand on Dr. Cox’s shoulder and steering him out the door. “I’m buying you lunch. When’s the last time you ate something?”
JD hung back as they left. His chest felt heavy, as though it was housing a large void, a poisonous black hole that sucked and sucked and sucked.
He needed to go back. Needed to get back to the hospital, to his friends. To Dr. Cox.
Slowly, he turned back to the still body on the bed, hands reaching out, searching for something, a last spark of life, the remnant of the will to live. Something viable and vibrant, something hopeful and tentative, something like—
A twitch of his finger.