Despair
August 13 th , 2022
Oliver and Nate were still sitting next to each other in the waiting area, a thick tension lingering between them. Neither had said a word in over half an hour because there wasn’t much to say. Nate had made it very clear that he didn’t want the whole “she’s going to be fine” speech and Marta’s assuring words had only lasted for a couple minutes. Long enough to prevent him going completely insane, but not long enough for him to not be scared and concerned the entire time.
Marta was sitting on a chair on the wall in front of them, playing Candy Crush on her phone. It was already over five hours since they had last seen or heard from Lynn. Since the moment the door closed in front of Nate.
Five hours of fear and despair but also hope and praying.
Five hours since the moment nobody knew if Lynn would survive or not.
When the door to the hallway with the operating theaters opened, all three Agents jumped to their feet and looked at the man who entered with expectation written all over their faces.
“She’s alive,” Toby immediately said and could see the tension fall from their shoulders .
A single tear slid down Nate’s face and he let out the breath that he was holding.
“But…” the doctor started to continue before stopping again.
He needed to take a deep breath. It wasn’t easy for him either. Lynn was one of his best friends.
He’d known her way longer than the others although he had to admit that Nate was probably suffering the most out of all of them.
“She’s still not out of danger. She lost a lot of blood and she flatlined during the surgery.”
“What?” Nate croaked.
His skin turned pale and his legs started to tremble. Oliver saw it and, before Nate collapsed, he guided his best friend back to the chair so that he could sit down. Both of Nate’s hands were shaking like branches in a storm and Oliver alternated his gaze from Nate to Toby with furrowed brows.
The doctor cleared his throat and stepped towards the two Agents. Nate’s eyes were half closed and he had trouble staying conscious. This was all too much for his body.
Toby grabbed his wrist and quickly checked Nate’s pulse with a concerned frown on his face. The moment he touched the bruise on the outside of Nate’s hand, the Agent hissed in pain. Toby turned the hand around and looked at the swollen and bruised skin.
“What the hell happened to your hand?” he asked, shocked.
“Punched a wall,” Nate mumbled, his eyes now fully closed while he tried to focus on his breathing .
He was struggling to stay conscious and prevent the upcoming panic attack.
“We should take an x-ray. Maybe it’s broken,” Toby suggested and Oliver nodded at him. He had suspected that hours ago.
“Toby,” Nate hissed while opening his eyes and staring into Toby’s brown ones.
Anger was shining behind the ocean-blue eyes of the Agent and the doctor let go of his hand immediately.
“Stop talking about stuff that’s not important and let us know about Lynn,” Nate added.
“Ye- Yeah. I’m sorry. She flatlined during the surgery but we were able to get her back. Her body was so weak that I had to finish the surgery early. I’ve closed all three wounds. Two of them punctured her liver but thankfully missed the lung. I wasn’t sure of that because of the location of the wounds. I didn’t have time to check whether she had additional injuries. We need to give her body time to rest and monitor her closely.”
“Can I see her?” Tears brimmed in his eyes and Toby could see relief wash over Nate’s face the moment he nodded.
“Tia and Birdie are getting her to her room now. As soon as she’s settled, you can see her.”
“Thank you so much, Doc. I don’t know what would have happened if you weren’t here so fast,” Marta said and Toby turned around to look at her with a shy smile on his face.
The door behind them opened again and an exhausted looking Tia entered the area.
“She’s all settled,” she almost whispered .
Her eyes looked heavy and she was paler than usual. Toby smiled at her, before stepping in front of her and placing his palms on both of her upper arms.
“You and Birdie get some rest. You did an amazing job in there. I’ll look after her,” he said in a calming voice.
Tia was only able to nod before the door opened again and Birdie entered the room.
She looked as devastated as Tia.
“I’ll try to get 2-3 hours of sleep in and then I’ll be back so you can rest, too,” Tia responded with a smile on her lips as well.
Toby nodded at her before Tia grabbed Birdie’s arm and led her out of the med-bay.
“Ready to see your girl?” Toby said towards Nate, who was impatiently stepping from one leg onto the other.
As caring as the little talk between the doctor and the nurse had been, he was desperate to see Lynn. See that she was indeed still alive and hadn’t left him.
“Yes, more than ready,” Nate croaked.
It was hard for him to swallow, as if he had cotton balls stuck in his throat.
Before they could head towards Lynn’s room, Toby turned around to Marta and Oliver.
“She needs a lot of rest now. That’s why it’s better for her if only one person visits her at a time. As Butch is her boyfriend, he has the priority card here but you can see her tomorrow.”
“Understood. Say Hi to her from us,” Marta said towards Nate with a little smile on her face that Nate didn’t return .
Finally, after five hours of waiting, he was about to see his girlfriend again. The love of his life.
They entered the hallway to the patients rooms and came to a halt in front of one of them. The door was closed and it didn’t have a window in it..
“Butch,” Toby said while standing in front of the door, blocking Nate’s way.
“I really need to see her, Toby.” He almost pleaded.
“I know. Just listen to me real quick.”
“Okay.” Nate let out the loudest possible sigh.
“It will probably look very scary to you. Lynn is hooked up to different machines that are monitoring her vitals. I also needed to intubate her. She has a central venous catheter on her neck that we need to get all the drugs in her system,” Toby explained in a calm voice.
“She’s in a coma?” Nate’s face fell and there was sadness glimmering behind his puffy eyes.
He really wanted to hear her voice. He needed it.
“Yes. Her body needs to focus on healing. She lost so much blood and the damage to her liver was severe. We need to give her time.”
Nate turned his head to stare at the wall next to him. A few tears escaped his eyes and slid down his cheeks, although he had tried so hard to not cry again.
He wanted to be strong for Lynn.
He wanted to be her rock while trying to do everything he could so that she could recover as fast and best as possible but this situation was all too familiar. Almost twelve years ago he was the one laying in a coma. He was the one lying in the hospital bed, his best friend by his side, hoping and praying he would wake up.
Now Nate was standing here, in the same miserable situation as Oliver had been back then and hell, he had never been more useless than at this moment.
“Okay,” was the only thing he managed to say.
“Are you ready?” Toby asked while placing his hand on Nate’s upper arm.
The Agent flinched a little, then turned his head and nodded at Toby.
The moment Toby opened the door and revealed Lynn lying in the hospital bed, surrounded by machines and monitors, Nate’s heart shattered into million pieces. This was a moment that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Tia and Birdie had placed a chair next to the bed that looked so large in comparison to the small body of the brunette woman inside it. Nate halted in his movement and observed his girlfriend for a moment longer. Shock rose inside his chest and his heart weighed a tonne. He had trouble breathing, as if someone had wrapped a rope around his chest way too tight. The voices inside of his mind became louder.
This must be another nightmare.
This can’t be reality.
Maybe, if he tried really hard, he would just wake up and find Lynn peacefully sleeping next to him. He would grab her face and place hundreds of kisses over it, and he would tell her how much he loved her and that he never wanted to spend a single day without her .
It took Nate tremendous effort to get his body moving but the entered the room and walked straight towards the chair. His eyes never left Lynn’s pale face. He frowned when he noticed the tube coming out of her throat. He had known that it would be there but seeing it in reality hit differently.
Lynn didn’t look like a living human being. With tubes coming out of her throat, the catheter attached to her neck and another IV on her hand as well as dozens of cables that observed her vitals like heartbeat and oxygen saturation. If Nate hadn’t heard the steady beeping of the monitor next to Lynn’s head, he would have thought she was dead.
Maybe she was.
Only the machines kept her alive at the moment.
He stared at said machines around him before collapsing on the chair he was currently standing in front of. He hadn’t even noticed the tears that were streaming down his face. With trembling hands he reached out to grab Lynn’s small and fragile hand but he stopped before his fingertips touched the back of it. He turned his head to look at Toby, waiting for a silent permission that he was allowed to touch her.
That he wouldn’t break her.
Toby gave him a sad smile and a nod and Nate extended his hand again and finally touched Lynn’s.
Normally, when he touched her hand, the warmth of it crawled through his arm and directly to his heart. It had been like that since the first time she’d ever touched him and it hadn’t changed ever. Nate even felt addicted to the warmth that Lynn radiated and that was the main thing that calmed the demons in his mind .
Now her hand was cold. Too cold.
He gently brushed his thumb across her pale skin while he stared at her beautiful face. He would give anything to see her chestnut eyes again. To see her smile and reassure him that everything was going to be okay. He didn’t like it when Oliver and Marta said that to him earlier but he would do anything to hear those exact words out of Lynn’s mouth right now.
“Her vitals look good but I’m monitoring her very closely.” Toby’s voice was heard in the room, bringing Nate back to reality.
He didn’t want to, but Nate raised his head to fix his gaze on a still-smiling Toby.
“How long?” Nate asked.
“I can’t tell you. It depends how fast her body recovers. We’re trying to give her as much blood as possible to replace the pints that she lost but she still needs time. Maybe a day or two, maybe longer,” Toby sighed.
He didn’t like that either. He knew that every day in a coma meant a longer recovery. Muscle wastage was especially a risk.
“Toby?” Nate’s voice was barely louder than a whisper, the tone serious with a little tent of fear vibrating with it.
“Yes?”
“What is the likelihood that she survives and makes a full recovery?”
Toby needed to swallow. He’d expected that question, actually he’d expected it the moment he’d told Nate that Lynn still wasn’t out of danger .
“Butch…” he started, trying to avoid answering the question directly.
“What is the likelihood?” Nate repeated with a sterner voice this time.
His gaze bored into Toby while his hand still heldLynn’s.
“I can’t tell you,” Toby sighed.
“You can’t or you don’t want to?”
“I… both. The damage on the liver was severe but we were able to stop the bleeding just in time.”
“But?” Nate asked.
Toby didn’t answer right away so Nate repeated his question.
“Literally anything can happen right now. All we can do is monitor her as best as we can so that we can intervene if her condition worsens again.”
“I just want her to be fine again,” Nate sobbed and Toby noticed that he had started to cry again.
Properly this time. Not only tears streaming down his face. His body was shaken by waves of sadness while he pulled Lynn’s hand towards his face to place kisses on it. He was constantly sobbing between the kisses, his tears covering Lynn’s small hand.
Nate was falling apart and Toby’s eyes brimmed with tears as well. There was nothing they could do at that moment. All they could do was wait. And it drove them both nuts.
“I know, Butch. Me, too,” Toby said sadly.
After a few moments of silence and Toby checking the monitors as well as the syringe drivers, he excused himself and left the room .
Nate had realized it, although his eyes were closed and he held Lynn’s hand still in front of his face. From time to time he placed another gentle kiss on it, while he prayed for her to be fine again soon.
He took another deep breath and opened his eyes again. His legs were still weak from all the emotions that were overwhelming his body but he managed to stand and gently caress the back of his hand over Lynn’s cheek, careful not to nudge the tube coming out of her mouth.
“Hi darling,” he said with so much love in his tone.
His face relaxed and he forced himself to smile. He didn’t feel like smiling, especially because her cheeks felt cold too. They weren’t supposed to feel cold.
Nate had heard that people lying in a coma were possibly able to hear what he was saying and feel his presence. He hadn’t eleven years ago, but that didn’t mean that Lynn couldn’t.
Maybe she felt that he was there and for that he forced himself to smile at her. Comfort her. Make her feel better.
“You look awful,” he chuckled.
It was so out of place and he didn’t understand why he’d done it, but he chuckled.
“I’m just messing with you. You look beautiful as always,” he said before leaning over the bed and placing a tender but shy kiss on Lynn’s forehead.
He was so scared that he would break her even more.
She looked like a porcelain doll, ready to break at the smallest impact. He didn’t want to be the reason for that. He stilled in his movement, his face only inches apart from Lynn’s. He waited for the familiar peachy scent to reach his nostrils, but it never came.
All he smelled was disinfectant and that was worse than anything else before.
A tear slipped down his cheek and onto Lynn’s forehead. He quickly grabbed his thumb and swiped it away, careful to not disturb her peaceful sleep.
But was it a peaceful sleep?
Inside her body every cell fought a brutal war to keep her body alive. If he could listen closely enough, he’d be able to hear her organs scream at each other in frustration and despair. Her body was in shock from the traumatizing experience and had to do all the work to bring Lynn back to life. Yes, the coma might help to shut down every other function so that her body had enough power to fight against the injuries, but it was still a very tough time.
Nate took his place on the chair again and grabbed Lynn’s hand with both of his own.
“You need to fight for me, darling. This is the only thing you need to promise me. Fight,” he whispered towards her fingers before carefully placing a kiss on each one of them.
“These past five hours have been the worst in my entire life. I'd prefer another three months as az-Zawahiri’s hostage, including all the torture, but I never want to experience this again. Sitting and waiting. Helpless. I’ve never felt so helpless, darling,” he sobbed before he remembered he wanted to be her rock.
Well, he failed miserably at that.
For a moment he didn’t say a word and watched the line on the heart rate monitor, the only proof that Lynn was still alive. Seeing the constant up and down of the line in combination with the subtle beeping, let Nate slip into a trance.
He didn’t know how long he was zoned out, but with a few blinks he came back to reality just to realize that nothing had changed. He was still in this horrible place with the love of his life lying in front of him in a hospital bed.
“I’m scared,” he confessed, leaning back in his chair after placing Lynn’s hand back on the soft mattress.
“I’m scared to lose you because I can’t. I just can’t. You’re the light in my darkness, the reason I wake up every morning with a smile. I know I’ve been behaving like a dick over the past days and wasn’t exactly the best boyfriend but I promise you that this will change. All you have to do is wake up. Please, Lynn. You need to wake up.”
Nate brushed his own hand through his messy and slightly curly brown hair while watching Lynn’s face.
For a short moment he expected her to wake up. Like in every romance book or movie. Where the person sitting on the bedside confesses their love and the one in the coma suddenly awakens and tells them that they love them too. That’s how he wished it would have been now.
But Lynn didn’t wake up.
Actually even if she wanted, she wouldn’t have been able to. Toby had given her strong sedatives so it was physically impossible for her to wake up now, no matter how heartbreaking Nate’s words were.
He laughed when he realized how ridiculous it was to hope for her miracle awakening .
“I’m sorry, I got carried away. What I wanted to say is that I love you, Lynn Summers. I really do. And I hope you heard that I said this to you right before you went under because I want to be sure that in whatever state and place you are right now, you know that I love you.”
There were no tears anymore. Nate was convinced he had used them all. All the tears that were stored in his body, used within the last five and a half hours. He raised from his chair, leaned over Lynn again and placed a few tender kisses along her face to underline his previously said words.
“I’ll be back later, I promise. Need to let Toby check my hand. To be honest it hurts pretty badly and I think it might be broken. Of course I'd never tell Oliver that he was right, but I know you’d want me to get it checked, so I will. Because I want to be strong for you. I wish you could see me now. Getting medical treatment on my own free will. There’s a first for everything.”
He ended his monologue with a little chuckle. Obviously a mechanism to cope up with the lingering fear inside of his heart.
The heart that still felt like it was made out of concrete, because the only person that filled it with warmth and love wasn’t able to do that at the moment.
“I love you. Don’t forget that,” he whispered before placing a last kiss on her pale nose.
Nate made his way to the door, turned around once more, smiled a little, and left the room. On his way out of the med-bay he came across the doctor’s office.
Lynn’s office .
He knocked on the door with his good hand and heard a muffled voice from inside so he opened the door and found Toby sitting on Lynn’s desk, reading a patient’s file in front of him.
The doctor looked up and raised both of his eyebrows in confusion when he saw Nate standing in the doorframe.
“Butch. Is everything okay?” he asked.
“Yes, considering the circumstances.”
“Good. What can I do for you then?”
“I… Maybe we should do an x-ray of my hand. It hurts more than I like to admit,” he mumbled with an insecure frown on his face.
Nate didn’t like anything that came with the med-bay, but at least an x-ray wasn’t a needle and he knew that even if the hand was broken, he would be okay with getting a cast. After months of working on his fears with Lynn, he was okay with smaller stuff.
"I’m glad you came. Let’s get it over as quickly as possible. Follow me,” Toby said, rising from his position and walking past Nate.
He turned to his left and headed straight towards the radiology part of the med-bay that contained an x-ray machine as well as an MRI.
Ten minutes later Nate sat on the table in one of the examination rooms while Toby was zooming in and out on the iPad in his hands.
“And?” Nate asked with a mixture of concern, impatience and curiosity in his voice.
Toby sighed and turned on his swivel chair to face Nate .
“Congratulations, you broke your hand. It’s not a big fracture actually, only a small crack, but I still need to immobilize the hand with a cast so that it can heal properly.”
“Oh shit. Thankfully it’s the left hand, as I’m right-handed.”
“Yeah. At least that’s something…” Toby chuckled.
While Toby prepared the black cast on Nate’s left arm, he asked,
“Why did you punch the wall?”
Nate sighed heavily, his lips in a thin line and the jaw clenched. After some moments of silence, he mouthed,
“.”