SIDE EFFECT

Content warnings: heavy discussion of illness and medical things, unhealthy coping mechanisms, minor ableism, mentions of death, car accidents.

So, it went like this. The patient was doing fine, and then all of a sudden they weren’t, and the intro played with dramatic music over it. Smash cut to the hospital. Interpersonal drama, then the initial interview. The doctors think it’s one thing, they ran tests, they started the patient on meds, they talked dramatically. The patient got worse so they stopped the medicine. More interpersonal drama, just in time for a commercial break. Then blah blah blah, more tests, the patient had a teary-eyed monologue with someone close to them, which spurred on more drama and a huge realization, and then they were cured.

At least, that was how it had gone in all four episodes of the medical drama Lane had watched in the waiting room. They really should have changed the channel. Bad form to play TV about people getting sick and dying when the TV in question was in the ER.

He sat back in the shitty fucking vinyl chair, leaning his head back against the wall.

God, he hated hospitals.

He wasn’t scared or anything like that. Augur would be fine, it wasn’t any big deal. It was just the flickery fluorescent lights and the plastic-plus-vomit smell. And the screaming kid sitting in the chair next to him.

She’d been there for the last half an hour and was screaming about how bad her ear hurt. Which, sucked for her, but Lane had been there for a little over a day. If she wanted to get her ear checked so bad she was just going to have to wait like the rest of them.

“I’m sorry about her,” said the woman holding the screaming child, who had now progressed to crying her eyes out. This was at least quieter. “She just got over an ear infection and now it looks like it’s back. You understand.”

“Eh. Not her fault she’s screaming. When it hurts, it hurts.”

The woman did a little laugh-sigh of relief. “So, why are you here, then? If it’s not too personal, I mean.”

“Roommate’s sick. I’m waiting for him to be not passed out before I go talk to him and tell him how astronomical the bill’s gonna be.”

She winced sympathetically. “Mm. Is he going to be okay?”

“Sure hope so.”

He was. Going to be okay, of course. It wasn’t as bad as it could be. Three kinds of nutritional deficiency and severe arthritis flare-ups were just normal. Probably.

The doctor had said he was going to be fine. They had him on one of those really fancy IV bags full of nutrient water or whatever, and they were letting him rest up. Once he was un-passed out and had eaten some preferably gluten-free food, he would be better.

At least they hadn’t asked a billion questions about why Lane looked like he’d just got back from the costume ball. He’d had the good sense to put Augur into a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie before he drove them to the hospital, back when he was still semi-conscious and could cooperate, but figured it was probably too big of a risk to wait long enough to change his own clothes.

The doctors had given him a whole bunch of paperwork—thankfully, most of the stuff he needed to fill out was on the medication sheet that Augur had told him to grab before they left—and then told him to wait in the waiting room until they called him in.

So he did.

For thirty-six hours.

Most of the day and a half he’d spent in here was just kind of boring. He’d read the outdated magazines on the end tables, watched the TV shows they were playing. Once or twice he’d closed his eyes and pretended to sleep, not because he actually needed to but because if he was “sleeping”, people wouldn’t annoy him. He’d gotten a little bit hungry, but there wasn’t much he could do here. He was so going to sneak down to the morgue and steal a snack once Augur was better.

Every so often a doctor would come in and update him. Every time the update was the same. He was still sleeping a lot, and not very coherent when he woke up. They needed to keep him under observation to recover a little more. Could Lane wait a few more hours.

And of course, he could.

The waiting room was mostly empty right now. The few people here were quiet—some patients, some families. He was by himself in the little area he was sitting in, just him and his little stack of old-ass magazines.

There really wasn’t anything else to do except wait. He would have left, gone to break into the morgue or gone home for a snack or to look for clothes, but what if Augur woke up while he was gone? Lane sighed and slid down in the chair until he was facing the ceiling and was probably a tripping hazard for anyone not looking where they were going.

It wasn’t a very interesting ceiling, as ceilings went. Those asbestos tiles with the little dots on them. These didn’t have as much water damage as the other ones he’d seen. He let his eyes unfocus and zoned out, looking up at the little dots until they all blurred together into a fog of gray.

After he’d almost gotten bored of staring at nothing, someone sat down next to him. He could tell from the musty-ass mothball smell of the dress that it was Verity.

“I gained the memory of your visit four days ago. Your friend said you would be here when you returned, and so I waited four days and I came. Perhaps I should have come sooner.”

“Well, considering we were kinda reeling from all the time travel shit, what’s one day?”

“Is he well?”

Lane shrugged. “Condition’s improving, the nurse said. But he’s really sick.” Not that he was ever not really sick, he finished in his head.

“Hm. I see.” Verity straightened up, her severe black dress even more severe in this beige fucking waiting room. She looked like the world’s most insensitive goth. “I could—”

“No.”

“If it’s a matter of personal health, I assure you, one drink of anemic blood certainly won’t kill me.”

“’S not that. He wouldn’t want you to. Be so fuckin’ pissed that you made him immortal before he had the chance to do it himself.” He laughed, under his breath. “Honestly, it’d be funny. Just to see his reaction.”

“It’s affecting you, isn’t it?”

“Obviously it’s affecting me, fucking—he’s my goddamn roommate.” Lane shook his head. “Living in a coffin isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, no offense.”

“And he’s your friend.”

Lane scoffed. “Yeah, right.”

“Isn’t he? Or have you just been freeloading this entire time.”

“Is someone here for the last name Moreno?” someone asked, giving Lane a wonderful out to this very deeply uncomfortable conversation.

The nurse, who was wearing kind of ridiculous cat-patterned scrubs, led him through the blandly wallpapered hallways into a small room.

Hospital rooms were always so… gross-feeling. Even just stepping into them. There was the plastic-plus-vomit smell of everything in them, and the off-color pastel of all the fabrics. Then there were all the beeping machines and the needles—

He didn’t really want to think about it, so he just focused on the nurse pulling back the curtain.

Augur, sitting propped up by the foldy hospital bed he was in, looked like hot fucking garbage. They had him in one of those hospital gowns that were the texture of paper towels, and it was a little too big on him, so it was kind of wrinkled, which wasn’t doing any favors to the already awful look. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, which gave Lane a full view of his bruise-colored eye sockets and weird pallor. He was kind of sweaty—gross—and his hair hadn’t been washed in almost six days—also gross. But he was very much not dead.

He opened his eyes. It took a minute for him to focus on Lane, which totally wasn’t worrying. When he did manage to get a good look at him, he took a breath.

Lane prepared himself for a “thank you” or a “sorry” or a “I appreciate you dragging my sorry ass to the hospital when I passed out on the floor”.

“You didn’t remember to actually get my medications.”

Of course. First words out of Augur’s mouth couldn’t be nice. That would just be weird.

“Sorry for thinking that because we’re in a hospital, we could just get the meds here. What a fuckin’ crazy idea.”

Augur coughed and sat up a little more. “If I’m not taking my own medication, it gets billed. I’ve been here for… how long? Probably more than a day. We’re going to need to pay this off somehow, and I don’t—”

He sighed. “Since we don’t both work, it’ll take longer.”

Eugh. Right. God, with the amount of meds Augur went through every month, it must have cost him a fortune trying to maintain himself. Lane felt kind of bad for his total freeloading at this point.

Augur coughed a couple times and pushed the button to get himself to lay flat on the bed. With the IV needles in him and the hospital bracelet on his wrist, he looked deeply pathetic. Lane was caught somewhere between disgust and pity.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like Augur. It was just that, well, it was kind of weird when he got sick. When Augur felt bad, he felt bad too. He knew it wasn’t his fault, obviously, that wasn’t how being sick worked, it was just…

Well. It just wasn’t fun. For anybody involved.

“I’ll be back in an hour to check on your vitals. Call us if you need anything,” said the nurse with the cat scrubs, and she left them alone in the deeply clean, deeply disgusting room.

“You look worse than I do,” Augur said, his voice all croaky and weird.

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “Don’t really like hospitals.”

“Did you die in one?”

“Nah. Car wreck. That’s where I got that rib fracture you love poking whenever you cut me open.” Augur grimaced, but nodded. “My mom. When I was little. Maybe eleven or twelve. Complications from appendicitis. They have fancy new surgeries now, but back then the only option was cutting ’er open and just doing it. She got an infection of some kind, I don’t really know the details. Died a week or so after the surgery.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well.” Lane sat down in the little chair next to the hospital bed. “Sucked.”

“Is she buried in the same cemetery as you? I haven’t seen anyone with your last name there.”

He nodded. “Haven’t really visited. I don’t know why.”

“We should. Someday.”

“We? Damn, you want me to take you to meet my parents?” Lane cracked a wide, crooked smile.

Augur rolled his eyes. “Fine. Don’t. I just thought you might like to.”

They fell into a long silence, occasionally broken by the sound of nurses walking by and the even beeping of Augur’s heart monitor. He felt a little guilty for brushing Augur off like that, especially after the guy had had some kind of near-death experience or whatever. Dying wasn’t fun. He would know.

He wasn’t sure why he was being so obstinate. He just didn’t really feel like talking about it. Especially not while they were still here. It wasn’t like he and Augur were real friends anyway, no matter how much he insisted on acting like they were. He was just some guy. And Augur was just some guy.

But Augur was being nice to him. And he hadn’t kicked him out after the whole ‘reading his journal’ incident, which was unusually nice, for anyone, especially Augur.

Whatever. Friends was a long shot. And he had better things to do than worry about the power of friendship or whatever the hell.

Augur leaned back on the bed, closing his eyes and letting out a long breath. God, he looked like a fucking mess. Maybe this was just what happened when a person didn’t take their meds for four days straight. Or maybe it was the lead and the arsenic and whatever else was in the olden times.

“Are you going to stay in the room tonight?” Lane asked.

“I can probably go home after they decide I’m no longer too sick to function. Which will be soon, I can’t stand emergency rooms either.”

“Yeah, you and everyone else on the planet. You’re so special, wow.”

“I almost died, and the only thing you can think to say is that everyone hates hospitals. Lane, please, I’m too tired to fight with you on this.”

Lane sighed, leaning back in the chair a little further. He didn’t really care if he was being insensitive. That was part of life. Augur didn’t deserve that, but no one did, and they still had it happen anyway. There wasn’t a way around that, especially not in a situation like this. No one was happy here, and no one should have to act like it.

The curtain in front of Augur’s bedside slid back, revealing a tired-looking nurse in less kitschy scrubs than the last one. “Um—”

“Can I go home yet?”

“Uh, yes, you can. All your blood work looks clean. Stay on top of your medication from now on, eat bigger portions, and here’s your new medication. Thirty days’ worth, get your refill set up with the nurses in a few days, okay?”

“Fine by me. Where are my clothes?”

Lane made the executive decision to leave while Augur was getting naked—he’d seen that once, and that was enough for a lifetime—and instead wasted that time very productively trying to play guessing games with the lobby guests. He got through guessing about five reasons for being there when Augur came out, leaning heavily on a pair of crutches and looking significantly more… gross and pallor-y than he had before.

“So. New meds, huh,” Lane said as they walked out of the hospital. “What do they have you on?”

“...you’ll snoop even if I hide them, no use in not telling you. They’re psychiatric.”

“Damn, probably shouldn’t have told them about the time travel then.”

Augur sighed so loudly that Lane almost thought it was a cry of pain. “Can you not treat another person normally for ten minutes? I almost died, and you can’t stop being a goddamn insensitive prick for long enough to tell me that you’re glad I’m alive? What is wrong with you?”

“I’m not—”

“You’re not being insensitive? Listen to yourself! You’ve brushed me off every time I’ve tried to talk to you. You looked through my personal stuff without asking me, you don’t seem to want me around, you just like seeing me crash and burn. That’s the only reason you even stuck around in this hospital.” He started off again, not leaning on the crutches this time. “Get your own way home, Lane.”

“Augur—”

“We’re going to be fine. You can pretend things are normal once we’re home, just give me time to—”

“I’m sorry. Look, you’re right, it’s not—I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Well, you did. And you thought they were appropriate, like I would find comfort in you saying things like that—”

“Wasn’t for you. It’s for me.” He swallowed hard. God, this was fucking humiliating. He barely even knew Augur, five months of living together was nothing. But the idea of losing this whole housing gig was more painful than he’d expected it to be, and he kept talking. “I don’t—like being in a situation where it’s not easy to fix things. And if I can’t make it actually better, then, then it’s easier to just try and make it less serious. Then I don’t have to worry so much.”

Augur’s face was still stormy. It was like he hadn’t even heard Lane at all. The only sign of response in the slightest was the rapid movement of his eyes.

“I can… try to stop,” he said. It felt like gnawing on bone. “If it makes you that uncomfortable.”

For a moment, Augur didn’t say anything. Lane was afraid he was going to drive off on his own and leave him there, because he didn’t want to be stranded in the parking lot and also because he didn’t want Augur driving by himself. He didn’t know what order those priorities were in.

And then he pulled the car keys out of his pocket, and said “Get in the goddamn passenger’s seat before I think about putting you back in your grave,” and Lane knew it was probably going to be alright.