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The bus slowed to a rickety stop along the curb, the idling engine humming angrily like an overgrown fly. No one looked up from their books or their iPods, or turned their gaze from the window. After all, they hadn’t been the one to pull for a stop. Only one person on the bus cared about the momentary pause: a pale man with a mess of dark hair and a smudge of something rusty brown across one cheek.
Adam took a deep breath, bracing himself against the seat in front of him, and yanked himself up into a standing position. He let out a quiet hiss of pain, forcing himself not to fall back down into the seat he’d just risen feom. There was an instinct to sit back down, to curl up and stay there - something animal that cried to clutch at wounds and lick them, safe to die curled in your own blood.
But this wasn’t the time to be an animal. Not on the public bus, the floor of which was covered in god only knows what. Instead Adam forced the instinct down, stumbling down the aisle of the bus towards the door.
It was a struggle to make his way even that far without losing his balance. His vision was dark around the edges, little specs floating and flickering in his view like a bad film reel moments away from burning up. The worst of the darkness cleared after a few steps, and he let the relief flood through him at the reassurance that he wasn’t about to lose consciousness just yet.
Breathing in an erratic rhythm of pained hiss followed by measured exhale, Adam half-fell, half-stepped down onto the exit level of the floor and pushed on the door to open it. For the briefest moment, he realized that his hands were smeared in a hue that almost perfectly matched the brick of the building visible by lamplight just outside of the bus. He hadn’t been aware of it until then; no one else seemed to have been, either, if the lack of eyes on him was anything to go by. Then the doors opened, and the awareness was lost as Adam stepped out onto the sidewalk.
It was hot out despite being after dusk, sticky in the way that meant rain would be gracing the city in the next few hours. Until it did, the weight of the air would stay oppressive and thick. Adam sucked it down in panicked, uneven gulps as he willed himself down the sidewalk. He could taste the smog in the air, the dirt and grime layering itself in his lungs like a new layer of paint. The more he thought about it, the harder to breathe it became. Adam tried not to think about it.
He walked as quickly as he could down the block, mumbling to himself. Nothing sensical; it was mostly just a string of profanity and self deprecation.
Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck, so fucking stupid. Shit. Ow. God, what the fuck was that. Shit.
Adam became aware of the black at the edges of his vision encroaching again, flickering like smoke just out of sight. He turned the corner and saw, gratefully, what he had dragged himself out of his apartment, across the street, onto the bus, and this far down the block for: the looming form of Angel of Mercy Hospital.
If there was a rush of relief to be felt, it was drowned under a sudden crush of dizziness. Adam stumbled further into the parking lot, one hand encircling the opposite wrist like a vice. Like a shackle. Like —
He coughed, the product of a half laugh that got became in his panicked throat. Leave it to him to circle back to that. Always back to that, to the stupid fucking tiles and grime and blood and metal and the burning, phantom pain that was slowly leeching its way through his right shoulder.
As another wave of nausea passed over him and the black on the edges of his vision crushed in, it occurred to Adam that he had not eaten in several days. It was what - after midnight, he assumed, so that made it…Tuesday? He couldn’t remember when the last time he’d had a meal was. Money was even harder to come by now, without even his crappy late night photography to pay the bills, and he just didn’t find himself wanting to eat much anymore. He felt sick most times when he managed to choke anything down, and didn’t feel comfortable until his stomach was empty again. It was like his body had checked out, used up all of its fundamental survival instinct in that bathroom and forgotten what it was supposed to want in the months since.
On top of that, each day seemed to blur together, now more than ever; days and nights mattered very little when you didn’t have a job or friends to visit or a reason to leave your shitty apartment. Not to mention his complete lack of a sleep schedule - he could go days with only an hour or two of rest, terrified of every sound and jolting out of any short reprieve covered in sweat and breathing heavily, the phantom weight of a chain around his ankle. Without any kind of scheduled normalcy in his life, he wasn’t exactly sitting down for three square meals a day.
Adam was closing in on the door of the hospital, but it was a race against the dark haziness encroaching on his senses. He tried to breathe steadily, hoping he could fight his way through the threat of unconsciousness if he focused his mind. What had he been trying to remember? Right. Food. When had that happened last?
There had been Chinese takeout at some point in the past four or five days, certainly, although even that had gone largely uneaten and was sitting in his mostly empty fridge at home. His stomach grumbled in complaint.
His arm was throbbing at a steady beat, and Adam could feel that the sleeve of his hoodie was damp. If he loosed his vice grip and inspected the palm of his right hand, he was sure that it would be a rusty, sickening red. Adam was also sure that he shouldn’t check to find out.
He let go and looked.
“Oh, fuck,” Adam groaned. It was worse than he’d expected, little rivulets of blood filling the creases of his palm like tiny crimson streams. He felt his stomach jolt, the familiar hot flood of saliva filling his mouth.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, the words “bad idea” whispered softly, but he was already pitching forward to retch. He had barely spat out the bile that burned its way up his throat when the blood rush from tipping upside down caught up with him, and his sight began to gray out.
There wasn’t even time to mutter an “Oh, shit” before his vision went dark and he fell in a heap on the pavement, only a few feet from the hospital doors.
Adam came to slowly, the persistent beeping of some kind of monitor dragging him painfully back to consciousness. He blinked heavily a few times, trying to make sense of where he was.
The initial panic response to passing out and waking up groggy in an unfamiliar location (What the fuck is going on? Where am I?) subsided as he catalogued his surroundings. Hospital room. IV drip. At least a scrub top, which he cringed at. Aside from the embarrassment of someone undressing him, they’d probably cut his hoodie off of him. Damn. It had been his favorite; he only had two. One now, he guessed.
Looking down at his bare arms, he could tell that he hadn’t been out long - just long enough for them to get him in and hooked up to whatever they were dripping into him, and out of his bloody clothes. There was a growing stain of red against the white of the hospital bed sheets under his left forearm and a few handfuls of blood gauze scattered around the side of the bed. He flexed his fingers and cringed at the steady beats of blood that dripped down and around his wrist to soak into the already saturated sheets. The gashes and surrounding skin had clearly been cleaned up at some point, but it was a fruitless effort.
As he watched the blood ooze persistently across his skin, Adam was struck with a swift wave of deja vu. This was all achingly familiar, right down to the steady beep of the machines to his right and the feeling that he hadn’t had any water in days. It had all happened this way months ago, except that time, he’d been delirious with a sepsis fueled fever and severe blood loss, and there had been a horrible, burning hot pain in his shoulder, not a throbbing ache in his arm. Unlike the quickly resolidifying memory of his unsuccessful trek to the hospital’s automatic doors, the last thing he’d remembered on that occasion was much less quotidian than bile on pavement.
It was still deeply blurry in his memory, even more so after several months had done their work repressing and dulling the trauma. What Adam could remember was horrible pain, cold sweats and sickness, tears until there weren’t any left and screaming until he lost his voice, and a pounding headache as a reward for both. He could remember his pulse in his shoulder like a burning drumbeat, his right arm slowly becoming useless. There was a bone deep exhaustion, a desire to sleep and never get up, a horrible terror of doing just that.
And of course, the darkness. Endlessly dark, once the X had disappeared and the lighter had run out. Just the dark and the pain and the desperate, childish hope that Lawrence would keep his word.
He’d fallen asleep eventually, blissfully and terrifyingly. Adam had no way of knowing how long he’d fought it before he slipped off, no idea how many hours he’d spent screaming, crying, begging, waiting. There was only so much the body could handle, and even his spite and adrenaline couldn’t keep the infection from knocking him into a feverish unconsciousness.
After that it became hazy, even more so. There were moments, Adam could recall, where he must have awoken in the darkness, but it was hard to tell. There wasn’t much of a difference between unconsciousness and being awake in a pitch black room, too exhausted to move.
But one stint of unconsciousness had been broken up with light, blinding and glorious, spilling in from the open door, sweeping over him. There had been someone there - someone had moved him. Spoken to him. All Adam could remember was hearing his name said softly, as if to wake him from a nap. Sometimes in his dreams, short and infrequent as they were, he could hear a voice saying they were going to help him. It sounded like her, whoever it was that had stirred him from the dark.
There had been the voice, a gentle hand tilting his bloody, infection muddied head out of the way, and then a pinch and a flush of blackness.
The next time he’d been conscious, it had been blindingly bright. He could still remember the panic, dulled through a haze of medication and fever. Confusion and disorientation had given way, eventually, to the realization that he was in a hospital.
The time between was blank, completely stolen from Adam’s mind. Between the fever and the medication, he could barely remember anything about those first few days at the hospital, either. Only brief moments of alertness remained in his memory, snatches of consciousness with no substance outside of light and sound and pain. He’d lost nearly a week to the game, he would eventually learn, before he was unceremoniously dumped on a street corner and left there.
The police told him that they’d received an anonymous call late at night, reporting someone injured in an alley a few blocks from the hospital. He’d been brought in completely unconscious with a burning fever, a careful set of nearly professional bandaging on his bullet wound, and a jigsaw piece drawn in permanent marker on his ribcage, where one might point to one’s kidney. They’d also found an envelope in his pocket when they undressed him, although its presence had been news to Adam. It was the very same one he’d torn open days ago, now containing a key and a scribbled note reading, “This is your second chance.” The key had become a permanent resident of Adam’s pockets in the months since - once it was returned from the police, after much bitching and moaning on Adam’s part.
Finally lucid and back in the present, Adam felt his breath hitch. He patted his pants - scratchy, blue scrubs. No key. Fuck.
This had been a mistake. Obviously, having to go to the hospital hadn’t been the intent - Adam had always fucking hated hospitals, even before he spent weeks in one, navigating unconsciousness, delirium, and trauma all under the watchful eye of a handful of absolutely useless police. But being there…it was too much. Adam felt sick. His shoulder ached, his heart pounding a horrible, frantic beat in his ears.
There was an awful moment where unreality crept in, where past and present blurred together in a terrifying, bloody mess. White tile of the hospital blurred with white tile of the bathroom; bloody sheets under his arm became blood covered floors became the crumpled remnants of his t-shirt cut away from his bruised frame to treat his horrifically infected shoulder wound; the sharp smell of disinfectant and blood mixed with shit and rot and desperation, making him gag.
Adam’s chest felt tight, his mind foggy. He wanted to leave. He needed to. The idea of his shitty apartment had only been as appealing as this once before in his horribly unlucky life, and this time there was only the thin tubing of the IV keeping him in place.
“Hey,” he tried, voice dying on his dry tongue.
There was a window on the left of the room behind which sat a nurse, looking at something Adam couldn’t see.
“Hey! Hey!”
Reality continued to blur with memory; somewhere in the back of his mind, the voice of his shrink explained that this was a “post traumatic stress episode”. Much closer to the forefront of his mind, the voice of Jigsaw told him he was in the room he would die in.
“—anheight, please, you need to calm down,” came another voice, chipping through the haze of his memories to drag him back to the present. There were hands on him and he thrashed violently against them, not caring or remembering about the wounds on his arm. He could hear someone - a terrified, desperate someone - screaming threats and pleas and profanity in the hospital room. A moment of lucidity informed him that it was, in fact, him doing the screaming. He hadn’t even been aware that he’d begun yelling, but the nurse was trying to coax him into both silence and stillness with a frenzied desperation that clearly indicated that had been what got her attention in the first place.
“Mister Stanheight, please - if you can’t calm down, for your safety, we’ll have to sedate you,” the nurse said, another set of hands arriving to help her keep Adam’s angry fists down against the bed.
It was unnecessary; the threat of sedation shot through the haze and flooded Adam’s body with cold terror. No needles. No sedation. No more stolen hours, minutes, please god no more, not now not ever. He deflated like a punctured balloon, coming back to the buzz and beeps of the hospital room, back to the present with a gasp like a man surfacing from the depths.
“No,” he said, voice finally lowered from a scream. “No, no, I’m sorry. I’m - okay, I’m sorry.”
Adam was breathing heavy, head still fuzzy and fresh panic coursing through his veins. The nurse seemed skeptical, and he tried to give her a smile, as though to signal that the whole thing had been a silly mistake and they were both in on the joke. It looked more like a pained grimace, but she seemed satisfied that he wasn’t going to try to swing at her or the other nurse in the room.
“Alright,” she replied, uncertain. She let go of his arm and shoulder, the other nurse doing the same. She gave the second nurse a thankful nod, dismissing the backup to wherever it was he had come from. Adam didn’t watch him go; he was too busy observing the way his freshly agitated wounds had begun to bubble and spurt in earnest, little heartbeat paced sprays of blood that soaked into the now far more stained sheets.
If he’d had anything in his stomach, Adam would have thrown up. As it was, he watched with morbid fascination and a strange detachment as the tiny streams continued to squirt from his aching arm. Ba bum. Ba bum. Ba bum.
He realized after a few moments that he was being addressed, and he dragged his tired gaze away from the fountain display to acknowledge the nurse.
“I’ll be staying in here,” she said slowly, with a tone that indicated she was repeating herself. “The doctor should be in to examine those in a minute, just another minute or so, and then another nurse will come in to stitch them up. We’ll have you out of this bed as soon as we can, alright?”
“Alright. Thank you. Sorry,” he added, almost sheepish. It was embarrassing enough to be at the hospital for a stupid screw up like this, but he’d had some sort of panic attack, trauma episode on top of that. He hoped he hadn’t landed any solid hits on this nice woman, who was just trying to do her job. It was a small mercy that he couldn’t remember those few minutes clearly.
She gave him a tight, tired smile.
“I’ll be right in that chair,” she said, then turned away.
Adam breathed deeply, closing his eyes. His pulse was pounding an erratic drumbeat in his ears, panic slipping into exhaustion. He didn’t look at his arm, but he could feel the evenly timed pulses of blood. There was an ache in the back of his head and his empty stomach began to threaten mutiny. Fuck. He could use a cigarette.
Instead, he kept his eyes closed and tried to focus on his breathing. Whatever bullshit exercises the shrink had given him sometimes helped, so he counted in and out, nose and mouth, trying to come down from the episode.
He didn’t know how many minutes had passed before he heard the sound of the curtain which closed his hospital room off from the rest of the floor being pulled aside. Not long, as promised by his frenzied nurse; this must be whatever doctor was going to tell him what he already knew, and then pawn the work off on some run down ICU nurse. Adam kept his eyes closed. Not like he needed to do anything at this point except stay still, avoid any further panic, and not try to deck the doctor. Simple enough.
“Adam?”
The new voice was too familiar to be a coincidence, too strange to be something his mind had invented. It had sounded like —
Adam’s eye flew open, and his suspicions confirmed: there was Lawrence Gordon, whole and standing in front of him in a pristine white coat. Standing - how miraculous was that? The last time Adam had seen him he’d been dragging himself along the ground, freshly down one foot, leaving a horrible rust colored smear on the tile behind him. Pale as a ghost. Dying.
But the man in front of Adam now was healthy, almost like a completely new person. He looked better than Adam had ever seen him; even before the worst of it, being drugged and left in a bathroom for who knows how many hours had done him no favors. There had been bruises and dirt and sweat, scrapes on cheeks and hair grimy and out of place. Now he looked clean, glowing almost under the hospital lights. His blond hair was neat and orderly, his face not the pale bloodless white of a walking corpse but the slightly pink, warm hue of a perfectly healthy man - albeit one who still spent most of his days out of the sun. If it hadn’t been for the cane that the doctor leaned on and the way his face had stuck in look somewhere between shock and recognition, Adam could almost have believed he was a different man entirely. If it hadn’t been for the nurse from earlier standing up at his entrance, Adam could almost had believed he’d hallucinated the long promised return of the man before him entirely.
All of these observations happened in the span of just a moment, a single breath. There was no simple way to describe the feeling of seeing Lawrence looking so well and put together after months - months - of low burning fear and avoidance. To say Adam was shocked would have been an understatement, but he should have expected this cruelly ironic second meeting. He’d always had shitty luck.
The moment stretched on for another second, teetering on the edge of too long. At least the good doctor seemed to be as caught off guard as Adam himself, although Adam was once again at a disadvantage, being stuck in a hospital bed. He wondered briefly about their meetings only ever being tinged with blood, and let the thought go. No time for that; it began to look like Lawrence was about to speak, and Adam would be lying if he said he didnt feel a bit like a trapped animal. He needed the upper hand, despite the very clear power imbalance in the situation, so he did what he always did when he felt backed into a corner. In the span of those long seconds, before Lawrence Gordon could speak, Adam decided he would be an asshole about this.
“What’s up, doc?”
Adam hoped that his voice only sounded that weak to his own ears, and that the little grin he pasted on looked casual instead of like the awkward pull of muscles that he felt it as.
“Adam,” Lawrence repeated, blinking down at him. His face shifted, finally, from that shock of impact to something else - concern, maybe, or just his standard doctoral response.
Adam tried not to squirm under the scrutinizing gaze as it shifted over him. There was something almost akin to disbelief in Lawrence’s eyes, as though it were the tooth fairy who was laid up in the hospital bed, and not just some asshole twenty-something bleeding onto the sheets. Like it was a miracle to see Adam there, mostly in one piece. Like it was a ghost sighting. He had one hand held out slightly in the space between them, as though he’d been halfway to reaching to test if Adam was real - or maybe just to treat him, like any other patient. But the look on Lawrence’s face didn’t read like Adam was just another patient, and that realization made his stomach twist uncomfortably. Adam wondered briefly if the shock he had experienced at seeing Lawrence and the momentary belief that his brain had just conjured his image out of thin air was a shared experience that ran the other way, too.
“What the hell happened?”
Adam blinked, caught off guard by the tone of Lawrence’s question. It was much more strained, much harsher than his disbelieving expression had made Adam expect. There was a slight frown on Lawrence’s face, weighed down by a combination of both medical and personal concern. It was uncomfortable; couldn’t this have been any other fucking doctor? Why did it have to be him?
As always when faced with the danger of care or vulnerability, Adam doubled down on being defensive.
“Damn, is this how rude you are to all your patients, or am I just special? C’mon, doctor,” Adam said, the title coming out less sharp than he’d intended. He swallowed and pulled deeper from the well of sarcasm at his disposal. “I’m sure a smart guy like you can figure it out.”
Lawrence huffed, then stepped closer. He leaned his cane against the bed and Adam felt a single burst of fear as he approached, once again trapped. Despite his obvious irritation, Lawrence’s touch was gentle when he reached for Adam’s injured arm.
“Jesus, Adam,” Lawrence mumbled quietly. “What did you do?”
Adam looked at his arm as though seeing it for the first time, and his barbed quip about bedside manner died on his tongue. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually looked at his body and seen what it had become; he avoided mirrors, covered up with hoodies and layers, tried to keep from seeing himself at any cost. Looking now, it was as though he was seeing himself through the doctor’s fresh eyes: bloody and pale and covered in myriad evidence that this was far from the first time he’d been hurt and bleeding.
The wounds on his arm had once again coagulated enough that the worst of them, previously spurting little crimson streams like pinholes in a water balloon, now pulsed slow, lazy rivulets around his wrist. The blood was thick and red, stark against the sheets and Adam’s own pale skin. There were a handful of gashes, running parallel to one another and to dozens of others that had already healed. Lines of white and pink and red were scattered across his forearm, wrapping around to the other side of his arm and climbing up to vanish under the blue sleeve of the hospital scrubs. There were burns, too, although none of them were as fresh - little circles of scarred skin from cigarette butts had eventually given way to the distinctive, half moon smiley faces of hot metal lighters pressed against skin.
It was, in a word, gruesome.
Lawrence lifted Adam’s arm from the bed, and Adam allowed it, fist clenched.
“What were you thinking?” Lawrence demanded, looking away from the offending appendage and back up at Adam.
Adam rolled his eyes despite his discomfort with the weight of the doctor’s gaze. What a stupid fucking question. I was thinking that I got fucking kidnapped and almost died, doctor. I was thinking about my own blood on my hands and about the weight of a toilet tank lid and the sound of a man dying. I was thinking about the fact that I live like a fucking ghost and half the time I think I’m dead, and this is all just some sick joke of an afterlife, a game that never fucking ends. I was thinking that I better make sure there’s still blood pumping under there, because god fucking knows I don’t feel real anymore.
“Thought it was my fuckin’ life to make the most of now. This is the most,” he said instead, shrugging. It was pathetically true. “Hadn’t seen my own blood on the floor in a while—“
“You could have died,” Lawrence interrupted Adam’s glib reply, his grip tightening slightly on Adam’s arm. He sounded genuinely upset, if slightly brusque. Laying Adam’s arm back on the bed, he reached for some gauze pads. “I’m going to clean away some of the blood, so I can examine how deep the wounds go, and how many stitches you’ll need,” he added mindlessly, tone entirely devoid of the previous concern. It was strange, to watch him flip between the two states of response: personal and professional, shocked and empty.
It made Adam uncomfortable. He needed to push back, redirect.
“Yeah, well. Someone was supposed to finish me off,” he said, allowing a lazy grin to slip onto his face, “but they couldn’t do it. Figured I could just pick up where they left off.”
This wasn’t entirely true - Adam hadn’t been aiming for an end-all wound, although he’d thought about it more than once - but it hit home. Lawrence froze and Adam felt a sick sense of satisfaction at the momentary shadow of guilt that flashed across his face. If he was going to be wounded there, bloody and disadvantaged, the least he could do was defensively draw some blood himself.
“Don’t say that,” was what Lawrence eventually replied. He pushed a handful of gauze against the wounds, making Adam suck air in through his teeth.
“Why not?” Adam asked petulantly. “It’s true, isn’t it? I’m on stolen time. It’s the rules,” he intoned, mocking. The words rolled off his tongue with a bitter taste, too close to the truth to slip out of his lips without leaving them bleeding. The cost of this particular defensive performance - the hard shell, the glib jokes, the gallows humor - was a great one; it left him feeling hollow and aching, but he was more than willing to bleed if it meant he could strike a few blows of his own.
And he had. Lawrence flinched again, then darkened.
“And if he’d taken you again?”
Adam blinked.
“What?”
“And if he,” Lawrence repeated, gaze focused on the wounds he was dabbing at, “had tested you again, for being so - careless, and ungrateful for your life,” he asked, punctuating every few words with a painful press of bloody gauze against flesh, “then what?”
“He’s done it before,” Lawrence added, clipped and angry, something animal and hurt underneath it. “He could do it to you. Again. Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
He pressed a fresh stack of cotton against the wounds and Adam breathed in sharply at both the pain and his question. Of the many things he had expected when he thought about the possibility of meeting Lawrence Gordon again - not that Adam had though about it, of course. Fuck that guy and fuck the bathroom and fuck the whole stupid Jigsaw puzzle - this wasn’t a response he’d anticipated. The combination of crude care and anger and fear, definitely, was a little shocking.
“What, are you gonna tell on me, Larry?” Adam shot back, trying to keep up the defense. Switching from “doctor” to “Larry” seemed to have been the right call, if the slight tensing of Lawrence’s shoulders was anything to go by. Another blow landed; Adam felt marginally more in control of the situation.
“I wouldn’t need to.”
Adam swallowed hard. The fear of being watched hadn’t eased in the months since the game, and apparently Lawrence was no stranger to it.
“Yeah. Well,” Adam said, then stopped. He watched Lawrence remove the gauze and poke gently at the momentarily clean wounds. “What would you care, anyways? Not like we exactly skipped out of that bathroom holding hands,” he mumbled, the defense melting into genuine hurt for just a second.
But it was a second long enough, and Lawrence stilled, his hands on Adam’s arm.
“What are you talking about?”
Adam huffed a laugh. God, always with the bullshit.
“You fuckin - you shot me, in case you forgot. And yeah, whatever, you had no choice - I get it. I would’ve shot me too! But you fuckin’ - you left. You promised me you’d come back and then you crawled out and you didn’t, and I was just fucking stuck there.”
He wanted to shut up, but this had apparently been a long time coming in the months of silence between the two of them.
“I thought you must’ve died,” Adam admitted. “Bled out somewhere in the dark while I was doing the same. But then I wake up and - eventually - some fuckin’ cop tells me oh no, Doctor Gordon made it! He just didn’t tell us where he came from or what happened or that he left some asshole with a bullet wound bleeding to death. Guess it slipped his mind!” There was real venom dripping from each word. Adam didn’t blame Lawrence, exactly; he’d been stalking the guy for pay, pushing his buttons every moment in that bathroom, arguing with him like a child. Adam would’ve hated Adam too, if he’d been Lawrence. But he’d spent days screaming, praying, begging for Lawrence to keep his promise, and nothing had come of it. To have put his trust in someone - out of desperation, admittedly - only to be lied to and left to wonder just how far the other had gotten before giving in to blood loss and dying, or worse, if he’d lived, what had made him decide that Adam deserved his fate…it had been unbearable.
Lawrence was still, his face looking suddenly paler, more tired. Less pristine than earlier, like the old mask was slipping slightly askew.
“I didn’t even see you, man. I thought you’d fucking died,” Adam said, voice small. He didn’t want to care, because clearly that was a one way street, but it was difficult not to when he’d spent so many days hoping to god that Lawrence had lived and would make good on his word. That he would actually choose to help Adam, to save him - as though anyone ever fucking chose to do anything for Adam. But despite promising to come back for him, it had been some faceless second-thoughts-having kidnapper who had ultimately freed Adam, not Lawrence. And then it had been months of silence - no contact, no visits - and he had accepted that Lawrence had realized, like everyone else, that Adam wasn’t even worth the breath to send the cops in to get him, let alone any further contact.
“So don’t act like you get a say in what I’m doing, or like you’d give a shit if the next time you saw me was on the news as Jigsaw’s next victim,” Adam continued, trying to recover from the momentary vulnerability in his voice. “Just give me the fucking diagnosis and move on to the next sorry shit in this place, Doctor Gordon.”
At some point, the observing nurse had left the room - off to keep some other poor son of a bitch from offing himself with a paper cup while unattended, Adam assumed - and it was just the two of them.
The silence stretched on uncomfortably, only the steady beep of the monitors and the sounds of the hospital floor keeping them from complete silence.
“If you think,” Lawrence said carefully, hurt and anger kept laced tightly within his clipped tone, “that I didn’t want to find you, you’re wrong.”
Adam exhaled, shaky. He wanted to bite back, to say something edgy and insulting that could push away the slowly growing pressure behind his eyes, but nothing came out.
“You thought I was dead?” Lawrence continued, gaze still tilted away from Adam. “I thought you had died. I didn’t know - I didn’t know where we had been kept, or your last name, or anything at all, but I tried, Adam.”
He looked up then, pride wiped away in his earnest need to make Adam understand that although he’d failed to make good on his word, he’d never abandoned Adam completely. Adam wanted to hide from the look, which was full of concern he knew he didn’t deserve. To hear the admission that Lawrence had wanted to get Adam out hurt more than he would have possibly expected it to.
“And then they didn’t tell me for a week or two that they’d found you at all,” Lawrence said, frustration seeping into his voice. “Our stories aligned closely enough to corroborate your claims without needing me to identify you, I guess. I don’t know if they though you wouldn’t be safe if I knew you were alive - after all, I did shoot you,” he added darkly, “but by the time I knew, you were already out of the hospital. I was strongly discouraged from trying to find you, as it could potentially complicate legal matters regarding our circumstances.”
He was clearly quoting someone - someone he didn’t particularly agree with, if his tone was anything to go by.
“Oh,” Adam said, all snark drained in the face of this crushing moment of honesty.
“Yes,” Lawrence replied, sounding marginally more like his usual smug self, “Oh. So don’t - don’t think that I didn’t try, Adam. I’m glad to see you,” he added, awkwardly. Adam didn’t know what to say.
“Not glad to see this, though,” Lawrence added, and the moment was over. “Really, have you completely lost your mind? After everything?”
Adam was almost relieved to go back to arguing; the confessing had made his skin feel too tight, like he’d been scraped raw and made to fill an empty shell that was one size too small. This Lawrence - a bit of an asshole, rough around the edges, more than a little bit smug and condescending - was far more familiar territory than the cracked open earnest Lawrence of moments before. Adam suspected that he hadn’t seen the last of the latter, but for now, this rapport was easy to slip into.
“Maybe,” he said, and although his voice sounded uneven, it didn’t crack. “My shrink would probably say so.”
Lawrence breathed what might have been a laugh, under better circumstances, and Adam grinned in triumph.
“That’s good,” Lawrence said, quietly. “That you’re seeing someone about all this,” he clarified, attention back on Adam’s wounds.
Adam shifted uncomfortably.
“Well,” he said, letting the word trail off slowly. “I was.”
“You...were?”
“Yeah, I mean - it’s been months! I’m good now,” Adam clarified, defensive. There was something so admonishing in Lawrence’s tone; Adam felt a bit like he’d been caught passing notes in class.
“…clearly,” Lawrence said, gently lifting up Adam’s arm for emphasis.
“Look, man,” Adam said, flushing slightly. “I know I’m fucked, alright? I don’t need some random guy to tell me that I have nightmares and I can’t sleep and I keep all the lights on because of what happened, like, yeah, no shit, Sherlock! And it’s so fucking expensive,” he finished, gaze directed downward.
The truth was that Adam was still struggling with the debt from his initial hospital stay (he tried to ignore the fact that today would leave him ever deeper in the hole). He could barely afford to pay rent, even though his landlord was being shockingly understanding about the whole “I almost died in a murder game - yes, it was that guy you heard about on the news - and the cops took all my shit, and also I can barely go outside” thing. Although he had most of his things back, his cameras went entirely untouched; he couldn’t even handle taking shots of his apartment, let alone the idea of going back out to his usual work. Adam had been half heartedly looking for a job, but so far nothing had come of it. As it was, he was just working his way through his desperately small savings and pretending like everything was fine.
Therapy had been one of the first things to get cut - he didn’t exactly have a stellar health insurance plan from his under the table stalking-for-pay work, so it had to go. Adam couldn’t say he missed it. Crying in front of a complete stranger didn’t make his top ten list of favorite pastimes, to be sure, and it was a lot cheaper and easier to just avoid thinking about it altogether. Clearly, he thought, grimacing at a jolt of pain in his arm, it worked well.
The look Lawrence was giving him was the perfect image of “not mad, just disappointed”. There was also pity in it, which Adam hated.
“Besides,” Adam added hotly, trying to push past the embarrassing truth of his financial situation, “it’s not like he could fucking understand what happened. No one does.”
Lawrence hummed quietly, thinking.
“No,” he said eventually, “but I do.”
Adam started slightly, lips parting way for some as yet unplanned quip, but Lawrence cut him off.
“You’re clearly not doing well,” Lawrence said, as straightforward as if he was talking about the weather. It seemed suddenly relevant to Adam that Jigsaw had criticized Lawrence’s lack of sympathy at the hospital; the sure, crude way he poked holes in Adam’s defensive performance made Adam feel hot and uncomfortable. “I think it would be good for you to talk to someone - I know,” he cut Adam off before he could even utter a sound. “You bullheadedly don’t think therapy will help you, and you don’t want to do it.”
He paused, reaching for the box of cotton gauze on the bedside table.
“No one else will understand what we went through, not really. They can’t,” Lawrence continued, and Adam could hear some deeply familiar loneliness under his professionalism. He wondered, briefly, if Lawrence was in therapy himself, or if he felt just as hopelessly misunderstood and alone in the wake of the horrors they’d been forced to live through, and he was just better at hiding it. “But we know what it was like in there, you and I.”
He pressed another clean stack of gauze against the wounds on Adam’s arm.
“Hold these down,” he said, slipping comfortably back into his empty doctoral tone. Adam obliged without comment.
“I’m sorry it took this long for us to see each other again.” Lawrence stood up, rolling his shoulders slightly. “I wanted - you’re not putting enough pressure on that —“ he pressed his own hand over Adam’s, pushing the gauze more firmly against the oozing cuts. “I wanted to see you sooner, but…we can help each other, I think. Like you said,” he added, an almost conspiratorial half smile slipping onto his face as though they were sharing an inside joke and not a near death experience, “no one else will understand.”
Adam watched him closely, keeping pressure on his arm. This wasn’t the response he had been expecting at all, but he’d be lying if he said it wasn’t relieving to know that Lawrence hadn’t entirely just given up on him. It hurt worse, in a way, to know that he’d been deliriously trying to help Adam at the same time Adam had been praying to anyone listening that Lawrence would come back for him. He didn’t entirely understand why Lawrence gave a shit; maybe it was some sort of fucked up charity case thing, or maybe he was just so caught up in his doctor mode that he saw Adam as a patient in need of a particular kind of care. Or - the most concerning and disorienting possibility - Lawrence was just as fucked up about it all as Adam was, and the trauma they’d been through trumped the literal blood between them. Maybe they were just something awkward between friends and trauma survivors, something that didn’t have a name but did have the potential to be both haunting and comforting.
As though Lawrence could sense Adam’s hesitation, he sighed.
“Look. I’ll - leave a card, alright?”
Adam rolled his eyes - of course he had a card, the pretentious fuck - but Lawrence ignored that in favor of continuing his offer
“You need to do better,” he admonished, glancing down at Adam’s arm. “Talking to someone who understands would help. It would help both of us. It doesn’t have to be here,” he added, looking around the hospital room with vague dislike. Adam thought that Lawrence might see some of that white tiled double imagery, too.
“Besides, I did shoot you,” Lawrence said, giving a short exhale that sounded almost like a laugh. “I owe you at least a coffee.”
“Yeah, alright,” Adam said, and he was surprised to find that he meant it.
“Alright,” Lawrence echoed, a warmth contained in the singular word. He fixed Adam with a tired smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes - more of an attempt at the action than the genuine act itself. Adam could understand that feeling, and he offered his own ghost of a grin in return. They were both bullshitters, to be sure, but at least they understood each other.
The moment was interrupted when another nurse came bustling in, looking frazzled. Adam watched as the warmth flooded out of Lawrence’s face and he was once again the blank, solid professional that his job required. It was almost dizzying, the ease with which he switched from talking about the trauma they had both incurred to brusquely informing the nurse that Adam would need, he’d decided, stitches on the lower two incisions, and then tape to hold the rest in place. She nodded and went to open a cabinet, presumably to get whatever she needed to stitch up the wounds. Adam barely cared; what were a few stitches compared to what was already there? Compared to a bullet wound? At least these needles would be clean, he thought, remembering his disastrous attempt to pierce his own lip as a teenager.
A coldness had wormed its way beneath Adam’s skin - shock, maybe, or an aftereffect of the violent episode he’d had minutes earlier. There was a sick weight in his stomach, spreading out from his core like a black hole. His arm pulsed. His shoulder itched. His mouth felt dry, his eyes heavy.
Through the settling haze, Adam watched as Lawrence conferred with the nurse. He spoke low enough that it was difficult to make out any specifics, but he seemed to be perfectly in his element. There were no traces of that loneliness, that pain, that gallows humor or desperation that Adam knew resided below the surface. He was a better actor than Adam had given him credit for; it was a little disorienting.
The two finished their conversation with the nurse giving a short nod, reaching for another drawer. Lawrence turned to leave and Adam watched, his neat blond hair shining under the sickening hue of the hospital lights. Seeming to stop himself from leaving at the last moment, Lawrence reached into his pocket and patted around for a pen, then scribbled something hastily.
Right. His “card”. Adam was almost surprised that he’s remembered, given how distinct this Doctor Gordon seemed from the Lawrence who’d admitted to needing help himself just before. Nevertheless, Lawrence slipped the card onto Adam’s table and looked back up at him, that professional mask melting away for just a moment as his eyes took Adam in: alive and largely intact after months of nerves and silence.
For the first time in as many months, Adam almost wished he had his camera so he could capture the fact of Lawrence’s survival and miraculous return to normalcy and keep it in his pocket. If he took Lawrence up on his offer to get coffee, though, Adam figured he could have better than just a photo to remind himself that Lawrence had survived.
Apparently satisfied with his final once-over of Adam, Lawrence gave a small nod. The mask dropped back into place, cool and detached as he straightened up and tucked the pen into his coat pocket.
“Alright,” he said, mindlessly and to no one.
“Be careful,” he added, aimed at Adam. His tone was half demand and half goodbye, and the unspoken order not to do anything else as stupid as what had landed Adam there in the first place was clear.
Adam just nodded at him, exhausted.
After one final look, Lawrence turned away. He grabbed his cane from where it leaned against the bed and pulled aside the curtain, moving at a smooth pace. Adam watched him go, once again, reminding himself that this wasn’t a permanent departure. Not if he didn’t want it to be.
He looked at the card on the table as though it might have vanished in the last few moments, but there it was: a stark white rectangle on the chipped resin surface of the hospital table. A number was written on it in a messy scrawl of blue ink, like a promise.
Coffee could be nice.