Work Text:
Sonny doesn’t show up to work on Tuesday. It’s two weeks before the month-long break between the Belgian and Dutch Grand Prix finishes up, and there’s not one sign of APX’s resident strategy informant as the clock ticks over to ten in the morning. Almost everyone else is there, with the exception of Kaspar, who had booked the day off––for his daughter’s birthday––well in advance. That’s the policy, that’s almost everyone’s policy: to book off in advance. And not coming into work is one thing, but Sonny not coming into work is another thing entirely.
He’d never once been late when he was driving for Ruben, and he hasn’t been late so far this season either, even though he’s out of the car. Most days he’s there before Ruben, but now he’s almost an hour late, and hasn’t called, texted, or even emailed to explain why. People aren’t starting to notice, but that’s because they already had. Luca Cortez has been shooting Ruben looks like he’s telepathically trying to ask where his advisor is, and Joshua’s come straight out and asked him about it.
Ruben had needed to say that he didn’t know. Then he’d walked none too quickly over to the quietest corner he could find on such short notice and called Sonny. He’s the first contact that comes up in Ruben’s phone because he’s the last person Ruben had texted––or, Sonny had texted him about three paragraphs on drag reduction, and then Ruben had told him to take it up with Kate. Sonny answers his phone within three rings, which is surprising. Calling had been a formality at best, a reason for Ruben to get in his own car and drive over to the cottage rented for Sonny on APX’s dime, so Ruben takes a couple of seconds to stare at the fact that Sonny has actually picked up a phone call before he puts it up to his ear.
“Sonny?”
“Why d’you sound so su’prised?” Sonny asks. “Y’called, didn’t you?”
“You’re late for work,” Ruben tells him.
“Overslept.” There’s something odd in Sonny’s voice that Ruben doesn’t quite like. Something just ever so slightly off.
“You’re still coming in?”
“Uhh,” Sonny trails off. Ruben can hear shuffling on the other end of the line. “No can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“‘M callin’ in sick.”
“You’re sick?”
“Somethin’ like that.” The slur to Sonny’s words makes Ruben think he sounds closer to drunk, but he doesn’t say that. Sonny’s had his problems with alcohol before, but making himself sick from it at ten in the morning doesn’t sound right, at least for the last five or so years. Sonny’s been sick before, back in February he’d had an awful flu, but he’d dragged himself into work anyway, sat in the corner and coughed into his elbow for the better part of a week, but he’d been there every morning at least ten minutes before the day had really started. “Bye,” Sonny tells Ruben before Ruben has a chance to say anything, and then he’s stuck holding the dead line, which he promptly sticks in his pocket with a huff. Sonny never makes anything easy, even if he tries.
When Ruben turns around to look back at the rest of the room, Joshua's staring at him with his arms crossed and a pensive expression on his face. “Well?” He asks.
“He says he’s sick,” Ruben replies.
“He’s still coming in, right?”
Ruben shakes his head. He resists the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. Between Sonny’s absence and Joshua’s insistence that Sonny not be absent, one of them is going to end up giving him a headache. “I’m going to check on him,” he tells Joshua, which does not seem to do a thing to relax him. His expression turns from pensive to slightly worried.
“That bad?”
Ruben just shrugs and tells Joshua to try a couple of laps on the sim. People who aren’t Sonny are indeed capable of giving feedback, which is something that his drivers seem to have both forgotten. Their development driver, on the other hand, seems unfazed by the whole thing as she talks to Rico. Ruben finds it refreshing as he walks past her and everyone else to get himself out of the building. He doesn’t drive quickly, but only because he’s busy checking his speed so that he doesn’t speed. On the chance something isn’t wrong, he doesn’t want Sonny laughing at him for driving over so fast.
By the time Ruben gets inside Sonny’s house, he’s starting to think that he should have driven just a little faster. It’s dark inside, everything clean and pristine like it had been when Ruben had rented it. If he didn’t know better, he wouldn’t think anyone lived here. The kitchen is all but empty, and there’s not so much as a book or a stray pen out in the living room. It’s almost eerie, and makes Ruben frown as he heads up the stairs to where he knows the master bedroom is. If Sonny’s anywhere, he’ll probably be there.
The door is shut tight when Ruben gets there. No sunlight spills out from under it, no light at all. From the outside, it looks just as abandoned as anything else. Ruben raises his hand to knock. When that doesn’t get a response, he calls Sonny’s name a couple of times. After that, he can hear movement from inside the room. The rustling of blankets either being pulled up or pushed off, he can’t quite tell.
“Sonny?”
“‘M okay,” comes the weak response. It’s so quiet that Ruben can barely hear it, so slurred that he can barely understand. It’s anything but okay, no matter what Sonny says.
“I’m coming in,” Ruben tells him. He thinks Sonny might say something, probably no, but it’s muffled by the sound of the door swinging open. Ruben considers himself, and maybe both of them, very fortunate that Sonny hadn’t locked it.
The bedroom looks slightly more lived in than the rest of the house. Sonny’s clothes are piled on top of the dresser rather than inside it, and Ruben can see tennis balls gathered in the corner of one room. Papers related to APX’s car and drivers sit in a couple of piles on Sonny’s side table. An orange prescription bottle sits on top of one of them, the top popped off.
Sonny’s in bed, blankets pulled up around him, his head on a pillow, and Ruben can hear his breathing from here. It’s labored, a kind of awful thing, and his mouth is open to help force air in. His eyes are glassy, and one of his hands is gripping the corner of his pillow. There’s a pallor to him, shadows under his eyes like he hasn’t slept––that makes sense, Sonny’s always been something of an insomniac––but he doesn’t look sick. Something is wrong, very, viscerally wrong, there’s no doubt about it, but this isn’t the flu.
Ruben’s eyes flicker back over to the little pill bottle on Sonny’s table. For the first time, he notices it’s empty, and something in his gut drops.
“Sonny?”
Sonny makes a noise that Ruben doesn’t think can be qualified as a word. It’s not panicked, nothing like that, just a quiet acknowledgement of Ruben’s presence. “You can go,” he mumbles. Ruben doesn’t even entertain the idea. Instead, he moves closer, crouches down at Sonny’s bedside until they’re eye to eye. Well, his eyes to Sonny’s. Sonny doesn’t seem particularly preoccupied with looking back at him, or at much of anything for that matter.
“You’re not sick,” Ruben says. “You––” He looks back to the pill bottle and has that awful sinking feeling in his stomach again. “Sonny, did you take too much of something?”
Sonny squints at him, then shuts his eyes. “Nope.” As he speaks, Ruben grabs the bottle from Sonny’s table. It’s percocet, enough for a couple of months, issued about three weeks ago. Even without running the exact numbers in his head, Ruben knows that doesn’t come out to anything good.
“Then why are your painkillers gone?” Ruben asks.
Sonny doesn’t answer. He just breathes, so slow and so shallow, and Ruben grabs Sonny’s face, pulls one of his eyes open to make him look. Sonny weakly tries to bat Ruben’s hand away with cold fingers, and Ruben lets him. He scrambles to his feet as quickly as he can, then back out to his car. He knows he has something in there, some kind of spray for overdoses, in the glovebox, he thinks. He can’t remember who had put it there, some assistant or something similar. Ruben hadn’t laughed at the time, but he vaguely remembers thinking that he’d never have to use it.
Now, he can barely remember where it is. He runs all the way to the car and opens the glove compartment so aggressively that it sends half of its contents to the floor of the car. The little box that holds the spray sits in the back of the compartment, and Ruben grabs is as quickly as he sees it. He runs back toward the house without bothering to close the car’s door, or the door to the house for that matter. He almost trips as he tries to go up the stairs and open the cardboard box at the same time, but by the time he’s reached Sonny’s bedroom the box is on the floor and he has the small spray bottle in his right hand.
Sonny’s in almost exactly the same place as Ruben had left him. His hand is slack on the pillow now, and he’s almost entirely still. For a second, Ruben thinks he’s dead already. He says Sonny’s name a couple of times, but that doesn’t inspire much movement at all from Sonny.
“‘M fine,” he tells Ruben. “Feel fine,” he mumbles.
“You’re not fine,” Ruben tells him, though he’s sure that Sonny knows that already. There’s no way he took half a bottle of percocet by accident, absolutely no way he didn’t know what he was doing. He clambors into the bed and does his best to roll Sonny onto his back.
“Hey,” Sonny mumbles. “Ru’en, my back.” His eyes open then, ever so slightly. “Fuckin’ hurts,” he says grumpily, like he won’t have to worry about his heart stopping in the next few minutes. His body is stiff, back uncooperative, but Ruben manages to get Sonny laying flat after a minute. “What’re you––” Sonny’s eyes open a little wider when he seems to notice the spray in Ruben’s hand. “Wha’s’at?”
“It’s going to help,” Ruben tells him. Sonny tries to move then, maybe to sit up and get away, but Ruben has him pinned, his unoccupied hand pressing against Sonny’s shoulder. Sonny’s eyebrows lift nervously.
“‘S’at Narcan?”
“Yes,” Ruben tells him. It’s all a blur, but he thinks that was the name on the pink box. He doesn’t know what else it would have been. He moves in to use it, but Sonny twists his head to the side to try and stop Ruben.
“No,” Sonny says. It comes out almost like a plea. “No, no, Ru’en, no,” he begs. Ruben shifts so it’s his elbow holding Sonny, and uses his hand to grab Sonny’s jaw and hold him still, hold his head straight. Sonny tries to hit him in response, but he barely succeeds in lifting his arm at all.
“I’m sorry,” Ruben tells Sonny, though he’s not quite sure exactly what he’s apologizing for: doing this to Sonny, or the fact that Sonny felt the need to take all of his pills in the first place. He holds Sonny still as best he can, and shoves the nozzle of the bottle into Sonny’s nose to administer the spray while Sonny makes a sound like he’s been shot. Then he starts shuddering, and for one brief moment Ruben is worried he’s been too late, but then he realizes that Sonny’s crying. Tears are collecting in the corners of his eyes as he wheezes awful sobs in and out. He’s not trying to fight anymore, it seems like it’s enough of a struggle to breathe.
Ruben takes that moment to pull his phone out of his pocket and dials 999. He relays the information to the operator as quickly as he can, where they are and what’s wrong with Sonny, and stays on the line when she asks him to. The phone goes on the side table. As Ruben sets it down, his hand brushes the pill bottle, and a wave of revulsion sweeps through him. He looks back at Sonny.
“We have to do that again,” he tells Sonny, though he’s not sure if Sonny’s listening right now, if he’s in a state to understand anything at all. “Try to stay still,” he continues. Sonny does, doesn’t move a muscle as Ruben gives him another dose, but Ruben would attribute that more to him not being able to move than any actual cooperation on Sonny’s part.
He keeps a hand laid on Sonny’s chest after he’s done with the Narcan and feels the way Sonny breathes: shallow and sluggish, but not getting any more so. His heart beats slowly too, but it's at least somewhat steady, and that’s all Ruben can ask for.
“Sonny?” He asks. “Can you hear me?”
Sonny makes noise that makes it sound like he’s not quite done crying yet. It’s miserable, not pained––Ruben doesn’t know how it possible could be, with the pharmacy that Sonny had swallowed––but there’s something terrible in it.
“I didn’ mean to,” he mumbles after a second. His eyes vaguely rest on Ruben, as he speaks, all glassy, not quite seeing the way they’re supposed to.
“It was the whole bottle of pills,” Ruben tells him. Unless you’re a dog, it’s the kind of thing that’s difficult to make into an accident.
“Y’ weren’t––fuck.” Sonny moves a little, shifts a little like his limbs are weighted down with sandbags. One of his hands comes up and grabs Ruben’s, squeezes it so weakly that it hurts something in Ruben’s heart. “You need’a go,” he tells Ruben, completely earnest. “Please.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Ruben says firmly. Sonny makes another one of those wet sounds, miserable and confused and everything that Ruben doesn’t want him to be. Of course, if it’s between this and dead—Ruben doesn’t care what Sonny has to say—he’d rather see Sonny alive any day of the week.
He will, he tells himself as he listens to Sonny breathe, as he listens for the alarm of an approaching ambulance and prays that he’ll be able to see Sonny through tomorrow, through tonight, forget the rest of the week. Right now, all Sonny needs to do is breathe, and all Ruben needs to do is keep himself together until help arrives.
The way things are looking right now, Ruben’s not sure either of those things are going to happen.