Blink

Breathe

It smells...good? Comforting and secure, anyway. It takes Scott a while to figure out it's because he can smell the familiar combination of his mom's moisturizer and hairspray, with a dash of coffee thrown in.

"Rick, I think he's waking up," she says. There's the scrape of a chair on a hard floor and then fingers are smoothing through his hair and a hand is cupping his right cheek. "C'mon, Scott, honey. Show me those beautiful eyes of yours. Wake up, sweetheart."

It's hard. He feels like he's swimming through mud and his eyes just don't want to cooperate. He finally manages it, blinking and squinting into the too-bright light.

Ow. Headache.

"Here," his dad says, and the lights thankfully dim.

It lets Scott focus on his mom's face. He's propped sitting up, so he's pretty much even with her while she's standing beside his bed. She's trying and failing to hide a wince at first, but then she's smiling at him, watery and real. Her hair's as immaculate as ever, but her clothes are a bit wrinkled and her eyes are red. Like she's been crying.

He hates it when she cries. "S'okay, Mom."

Wow. He usually has to make a substantial effort for his voice to come out that gravelly. Or, y'know, lose it right before the final day of competition on national television and then belt for his life anyway.

"There you are," she says, her thumb gently rubbing back and forth across his cheekbone. "You had us so worried."

His dad comes up behind her, putting an arm around her and leaning so Scott can see him better. He places a big hand over Scott's, warm and dry and as comforting as when he was a little kid with a scraped knee. "It's good to see you awake, Scotty." He squeezes Scott's hand and then presses something into his palm. "It's a PCA pump. It's giving you a constant supply of pain medication, but it lets you control how much extra you get. They said to keep on top of it and that it's programmed to prevent overdose, so if you're hurting you press it, you hear me?" He smiles and pats Scott's forearm. "I need to tell the nurse you're awake."

Scott's a bit confused. He's in a hospital, obviously. With a drug pump thing, something he's never been injured enough to need before, even the few times he's landed himself in the ER. Does he push it to deal with his headache, or is that more of an ask-for-an-Advil sort of thing? He has to admit it's pretty much the worst headache he's ever had, including the morning after he, Mitch, Kirstie, and Will polished off an entire bottle of Jack Daniel's during junior year of high school. And it's lopsided, spread across most of the left side of his face instead of behind his eyes or across his forehead.  So he caves and pushes the button.

Which is when he notices he's got a tube running under his nose. One of those oxygen things he's seen in hospital dramas with unrealistically hot doctors or those weird-ass medical mystery documentaries Mitch sometimes convinces him to watch. There's another tube running into the back of his right arm. He follows one fork of it up to a grey machine with numbers on it—that'd be the PCA thing, right?—and the other to a hanging bag of clear liquid.

That can't be good.

His mom is watching him, still looking weirdly caught between smiling and sobbing. He's pretty sure she's supposed to be in Arlington right now. He can't remember them talking about visiting and it's not like them to come to LA without giving him a heads up first.

"What are y'all doing here?" he asks. It's possible his voice sounds even worse this time around.

She reaches for the jug and cup sitting on a nearby side table. But the incredulous look she has on her face just before she turns has him wondering what he's said that's so stupid.