Where There is Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

Chapter 14: Night Watch

First rule of any partnership. Do not abandon your partner. Whether the enemy was a coked up manic whirling a chain over his head or the innocuous silence of a sterile hospital room, it was completely against protocol to leave your other half without backup. It was also dangerous, likely to get your ass suspended, and just... mean.

And O'Hara hadn't wasted three seconds to do just that; barely letting her comment about getting coffee cross her lips before the door had clicked shut in her wake. The damned thing was, Carlton couldn't even chase after her and demand she stay right where she was, dammit, because he'd promised Henry they wouldn't leave Shawn alone for an instant, barring expulsion by hospital staff.

So there he stood, clutching that ridiculous stuffed animal O'Hara had insisted he buy at the hospital gift shop. The insanely overpriced pot of flowers his partner had bought rested in his other hand; the light scent of the tiny blossoms taking some of the stink of medicated sickness from the air.

A few feet in front of him, Spencer slept. He was still feverish, but had begun to improve over the week to the point where talk of brain damage had stopped and conversation about recovery had begun. While the doctors were still guarded in passing around certainties, Henry had been damn near glowing with optimism when O'Hara had spoken to him on the phone earlier that day. It was the only reason he'd left the bedside of his son at all – need for a shower, sleep, and real food to a desperate level after so long away from home. Jumping at the chance to finally visit, O'Hara had dragged Carlton to the hospital with the excuse of giving the Spencers and Gus a break. He should have known there was sabotage hidden in the gesture.

He could still smell the blood.

The memory of it sent a tremor through his hands and he took three long steps to the shelf beneath the window to deposit his baggage before he ended up dropping it. It was so odd, seeing Spencer this way. Whole... more or less. The last time he'd seen him his skin, overlapping with bruises on damn near every patch of pale flesh, had been leeching to gray – ribs tenting the wasted body and soft ropes of raw intestine draped across his belly; wrists and ankles torn and ruined – mutilated. And the blood. Swaths of it across Spencer's chest and face; down his arms, belly, legs... Combined with the horror of destroyed bodies at that house, it had finally proven too much even for Carlton's steel lined stomach. He'd been making intimate acquaintance with a bottle of Pepto ever since, willing to brave the inevitable constipation to remove the chance of seeing his meals post digestion.

Spencer still looked a coughing fit away from becoming Saint Peter's brand new annoyance. Far too easy to picture the man tugging out feathers and playing frisbee golf with a handful of halos and a pearl bedecked set of gates. As long as it kept the ghostly menace from clanking a set of chains around Carlton's desk he was all for it.

The second the thought trudged across his gray matter he pressed his face in his hands. God help him if he ever spoke that aloud, alone or not. Whatever his beliefs about angels and demons and others of their ilk, the latter clogging up the cells on many an occasion, his mother had drilled in a hard lesson over a one sided dinner of Lifeboy. Never could stand that brand of soap forever afterward, the words stamped on his frontal lobe had never left him since that day. Speak a curse and you make it real. No verse he'd ever heard, it was none-the-less his mother's favorite go to for her foul mouthed offspring. That last time, suds foaming out his mouth like Kujo on a tear, was the last he'd ever allowed anything stronger than “fudge” to slip past his lips within mom's earshot.