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peachy-panic · 1 year

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Déjà-Vu

Part of Fifty-Eight Days. Takes place after this chapter.

ALSO, if you have not yet read the BEAUTIFUL, BRILLIANT fanfic of these two by @writereleaserepeat, do yourself a favor and click this link.

WARNINGS: Suicide attempt & aftermath, talk of mood stabilizing medication, post-capitivity, implied/referenced past sexual assault, severe PTSD, panic attacks, med whump, needles.

The sense of deja vu didn’t escape him. Grayson and Elijah had been here before; a lifetime ago, somehow squeezed into the same calendar year, in a hospital room thousands of miles away.

Back then, Grayson was the one in the chair, Elijah in the bed—tangled in wires, freshly broken, and medicated after nearly dislodging his IV in an effort to evade the doctor’s touch. Grayson didn’t know at the time—couldn’t have known—that it would be one of the last times he saw Elijah in the following months. That once they were separated, he wouldn’t see him again until he showed up in the doorway of Grayson’s hospital room last night like a ghost from a dream.

Now, Grayson was wide awake while Elijah dozed in the chair beside him, camped out in the spot he hadn’t left all day. His arms, sheathed in a dark zip-up, were crossed tightly over his stomach. Something broke inside Grayson to see he still slept in the same position he’d witnessed in captivity—defensive even in rest.

Watching him from across the room, Grayson found himself re-memorizing every inch of him. From the black hair that had grown out, strands slipping free from the bun at the nape of his neck, to the pale ridges of his knuckles grasping at the material of his sweatshirt. And all he could think was how much he did not deserve this. Did not deserve him.

He forced himself to look away.

Grayson was still trying to wrap his head around his parents reaching out to Elijah in the first place. Guilt coursed through him—a never ending stream since the moment his eyes opened to the realization of what he’d attempted and failed—at the thought of what that phone call must have been like. For Elijah to receive. For his parents to make.

They had never been shy about their feelings—if not precisely toward Elijah personally, then at least about Grayson’s proximity to him. They thought being around him once they returned to the States would only drag Grayson back into the darkness he was trying so desperately to escape. They didn’t understand that Elijah was the only other person who knew how to navigate that darkness.

Their resistance was a moot point, anyway.

In those first weeks back on American soil, Grayson tore himself apart in the battle between reaching out to Elijah and giving him space. He yearned for him so deeply, especially in the immediate aftermath. He would wake in the middle of the night, screaming, clawing his bed apart in a desperate, bone-deep panic to find him find him find him. He would bury his sobs into a pillow for hours after, remembering that, maybe, Elijah didn’t want to be found.

Not by him.

On the night Grayson decided to empty the rest of his sleeping pill prescription into his throat, he was drowning in the memory of that last day in the hospital a thousand miles away. Elijah’s haunted eyes were the vision that led him into the light.

-- -- --

They finally succeeded in separating them once they reached the hospital. Grayson fought them tooth and nail, clinging to the railing of Elijah’s gurney as they pulled him out of the ambulance and through the bay doors. But he was weak. It’d been days since he had anything to eat, and his energy was depleted from the horror and chaos of the last few hours. In the end, it didn’t take more than two nurses to bodily pull him away from Elijah’s side.

Logic largely evaded him in the moment, but even still, some part of him knew it was necessary. Elijah was hurt. Even in the ambulance, blood continued to seep from the wound on his head, darkening the fresh, white bandage they placed over it. And he didn’t even want to think about what was happening internally after seeing those bruises on his ribs, watching those kicks to the stomach, after—

He needed help, and, as proven, Grayson was the last person qualified to give him that. So he let himself be moved, pulled, prodded in whatever direction the hands took him.

Something shut off inside him when Elijah left his line of sight. Everything that happened from that point on existed inside a fog.

Distantly, he felt a bed beneath his weight and let himself be guided backward until he was staring up at the ceiling. Everything was too bright, too technicolor after so long in the gray of the basement. He closed his eyes.

Just a pinch, he heard a voice say distantly. When he opened his eyes again, there was a needle in his arm, but he hadn’t felt it break skin. He stared at the point where the tip disappeared under his flesh, then traced his gaze up the line that connected him to a clear hanging bag.

He let his eyes fall shut again.

Your parents will be here tonight, someone said from a distant spot above him.

The embassy sent a social worker, said another.

One after another, their words and questions and touches piled onto each other.

Can I help you into the gown?

I’m going to listen to your lungs.

This might be cold.

Breathe in for me.

Breathe out.

Are you experiencing any pain?

Are you hurt anywhere else?

Were you raped?

By the time they were done with their examination, Grayson was holding on by a thread—both to consciousness and his composure. Several times throughout the process, he had inexplicably dissolved into tears and gasping breaths, and they would have to pause long enough for the social worker to talk him down before continuing.

He was still in shock, they told him. Grayson mostly just felt tired.

His eyelids were drooping before he could ask to be taken to Elijah again.

The needle, he realized. They must have put something in his IV, because the fight was waning in his arms and legs, his head growing heavy against the pillow.

The last thing he saw before the darkness took him was the sullen look on the social worker’s face as she said something to the nurse that he couldn’t hear.

When he next woke, the sun had dimmed outside the small window of his hospital room. A nurse was there to greet him when he opened his eyes, but there was only one word on Grayson’s lips.

“Elijah.”

They finally caved. She insisted on a wheelchair while the drugs were still fading from his system, but Grayson tried to abandon it the second he reached the doorway at the end of a hall.

Because Elijah was there. Alive, but fast asleep in a hospital bed.

He was safe.

“How long has he been asleep?”

“Just a few hours,” the nurse said.

Grayson took a tentative step forward, then, at the disapproving sound of the nurse behind him, consented to using the chair. She wheeled him to Elijah’s bedside, bringing him close enough that Grayson could reach out and touch, but he didn’t dare.

“Can I stay here?” Grayson asked without looking away from him. “I want… I want to be here when he wakes up.”

She glanced up at him as she jotted down a number from one of the monitors in his chart. “Just for a little while,” she finally conceded. “Then you should go back to bed.”

He nodded gratefully, and when she was gone, he leaned forward in his wheelchair so that his eyes were level with the bedrail. His eyes flitted to Elijah’s hand but ultimately kept his own in his lap. For a long time, Grayson just sat and watched the steady rise and fall of Elijah’s chest, soaking in the proof that they had made it out of that compound. Out of that basement. Out of that bedroom.

Over an hour passed before Elijah began to stir. It started with a small twitch in his fingers. Then the sounds. Grayson would know those sounds anywhere, and knew what they meant.

“Hey,” he said, leaning closer. “You’re safe now. It’s just a dream.”

The twitch in his fingers turned into a jerk of his arm, knocking his elbow into the metal rail. The impact startled him awake. Grayson made a small noise of relief, and Elijah’s head snapped toward him.

Their gazes locked, but it was as if Elijah wasn’t seeing him. His eyes were wide and glassy, caught somewhere between a nightmare and awareness.

“Elijah?” Grayson said, but his voice only seemed to stir something beneath the still waters of Elijah's guarded expression.

The beeping monitor at his bedside began to pick up, betraying a steep uptick in his heart rate.

“Elijah,” he tried again. Following some blind instinct screaming inside of him, he reached out a hand and—

Elijah flinched.

They stared at each other with twin expressions of horror for an eternity encapsulated inside a few passing seconds, then something seemed to collapse inside Elijah. He dropped his face into his hands and turned his body, angling himself as far from Grayson as he could inside the confines of his bed. The sharp left turn into hysteria was abrupt and crushing.

For a long moment—too long—Grayson just sat there, stunned and helpless, as Elijah’s frantic sobs turned to wails that bounced off the walls and pierced into his skin like a thousand tiny knives.

A nurse rushed past him, alerted by the alarm of his monitor. The movement jolted Grayson back into his body. He shot up from his wheelchair, nearly falling backwards in his haste to scramble away from the bed.

“I’ll go,” Grayson whispered, the small sound lost to the chaos of the room. “I’ll go. I’m sorry.”

He stumbled back through the door, not even registering the pain as his shoulder blade clipped the frame. The nurse tried to stop him, or to… to keep him upright, maybe, but Grayson hit his knees halfway down the hall. A bin was thrust under his face just in time to catch the bile.

The sounds of Elijah’s panic followed him into the hallway, tapering off slowly as the sedative took effect.

“It’s alright,” she told him, rubbing a hand over his back that Grayson didn’t have the energy to flinch away from. “Your friend is okay. He is just afraid right now. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

But she didn’t see. She wasn’t there. She didn’t know how much wrong Grayson had done.

-- -- --

They kept Grayson dosed around the clock on what Elijah assumed were some kind of benzodiazepines. He had his own experience with those. Whatever they were, they made him sleep a lot and waver in lucidity between naps. He was only awake for a handful of the hours that Elijah spent by his side. He was just glad he was getting some rest.

He knew the end of visiting hours was fast approaching and that he would be forced to leave. The countdown hung over him like a guillotine’s blade. Every few minutes, he had to beat back the paranoid fear that leaving this room would mean another months-long stretch of silence. Or worse, that he would never see Grayson again.

He tried to kill himself. Grayson had tried to kill himself.

There was a lot to contend with between the two of them. A lot of dark waters Elijah wasn’t sure either one of them were ready to wade into again, especially not with Grayson in this state. A part of him was terrified he would turn over this rock and find something he didn’t want to see. All of his worst fears had rushed to the surface the moment his mother got the call: that this was all Elijah’s fault.

The way he’d unknowingly lured Grayson into the compound. The way his failed escape attempt had subjected Grayson to the horrors he tried so hard to protect him from.

The way Elijah handled it in the aftermath.

Those first couple weeks were hazy. Elijah was all over the place; hysterical one minute and catatonic the next. They had him on a constant rotation of pills just to get him to a semi-functioning state, and then he just slept. A lot.

For all that he had bottled his emotions inside Myles Voss’s prison, something about the sudden freedom from it shook everything loose. He couldn’t control it. He hated it.

His therapist told him that was common. That his mind had been in survival mode and couldn’t fully process the trauma while he still lived inside of it. She told him that processing it now was the first step toward healing, but Elijah had only felt more broken than ever.

There was always some small part of him that knew there was a possibility of Grayson blaming himself for their distance, but at the time it was too big a mountain to climb. Elijah could barely get out of bed long enough to use the bathroom in those first few weeks. The thought of reaching back through the darkness to find Grayson again was insurmountable.

Because there was the bigger part of him that believed Grayson was avoiding him on purpose. And it was both easier and much, much harder to accept that. So Elijah let the days turn to weeks turn to months, and he avoided him because he was scared and he was ashamed, and now they were here. And all this time, Elijah had no idea Grayson was hurting this deeply.

He refused to let it go unnoticed again, and that meant being here. If that was what Grayson wanted, Elijah would be here now.

The rustle of bedclothes had Elijah’s focus narrowing in on his sleeping companion again. He didn’t usually stay awake or aware for long when he roused, but Elijah tried to be a comforting presence every time nonetheless. He slid his chair closer and reached for Grayson’s hand.

Elijah had finally won the fight against the doctor’s restraints. After so many times of him freeing Grayson’s wrist the second they left the room, unable to stand the sight of his mobility taken from him, they agreed to leave his arm free as long as someone was in the room with him.

It probably helped that Grayson’s parents had backed him up.

He had always gotten the sense that they didn’t like him. Even before… Even when things were normal, they were the kind of people who cast sideways glances when his mom showed up to Sunday service fresh off a graveyard shift, still dressed in her waitress uniform. Exactly the kind of church people that made Elijah resistant to attending with his mom even on the rare occasions he agreed.

Elijah hadn’t seen those people since he showed up at the hospital. The people he met today had vacant eyes that shifted not out of judgment, but with the desperation of someone lost and groping for direction. Their state of disarray was completely unfamiliar to the image Elijah had of them in his head. They looked exactly like two people who had nearly lost their son.

The three of them hadn’t interacted much since Elijah arrived, and what little they had was stilted and awkward. But they had called him. They had let him stay by Grayson’s side. And that wasn’t nothing.

Grayson’s head lulled toward him on the pillow, lips parting and then pressing together as if trying to form words.

“Hey,” Elijah whispered. “You with me?”

“You… Y’r still here.”

“Yeah. I’m here.”

“‘S Okay,” Grayson slurred back at him, his eyes cracking for only a brief flash. “We’re g’na geddouta here. We’re gonna…”

Elijah bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. “We’re out,” he said, barely a whisper. “We’re safe now, Grayson.”

His eyes peeled open again, and he gave a few bleary blinks up at him. “‘M so sorry.”

“No.” Elijah said firmly, shaking his head even though Grayson’s eyes were already closing again. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

“‘M sorry.”

Elijah lifted the back of his sleeve to swipe at the escaping tears, then held onto Grayson with both hands.

“I’m sorry, too.”

-- -- --

TAG LIST: @mylifeisonthebookshelf @hold-him-down @distinctlywhumpthing @diyalogues @finder-of-rings @dont-touch-my-soup @wicked-whump @scp-1296 @whump-for-all-and-all-for-whump @melancholy-in-the-morning @whumpcereal @reflected-pain @pigeonwhumps @canislycaon24 @flowersarefreetherapy

#fifty eight days: grayson and elijah #fifty-eight days: grayson & elijah #whump #whumplr #whump writing #captivity whump #med whump #i've been particularly inspired to write for these two lately #probably partially due to that aforementioned fanfic #and partially because i saw a play yesterday where one of the actors looked just like elijah #anyway here you go enjoy the fruits of my problem daydreaming

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