Chapter 3
Ambrose:
You're briefly aware of the knowlege that literally every inch of your body hurts. Then a band of fire clamps down around your throat again, and something that weighs roughly as much as the whole goddamn world settles on your chest, and you're not aware of anything anymore.
For your second try at consciousness, everything still hurts. This is fuckin' bullshit, honestly. The way you can barely get a breath in around the weird tightness in your chest is also bullshit, but the scary kind—you can't fuckin' breathe right, you can just barely hear familiar voices around the dull irregular sound of your own heartbeat. For a couple seconds you can't even remember how to open your eyes.
Then you finally figure it out. Part of the problem was probably the stickiness of the half-dry blood on your face, to be honest—what the fuck happened? Your current view doesn't help at-fucking-all; the sky looks pretty much the same wherever you are and whatever happened. Lil' bit blurrier than usual, but then again you're guessing you hit your head, right? Why else would there be blood on your face, assuming it's not somebody else's—
Shit. Dave. You still can't totally remember what the fuck happened, but he was in the car, he was with you, where—
"Ambrose, stay down." That's Hal, somewhere just out of your line of vision. Kid sounds not totally calm, which is kind of a bad sign. His advice is solid, but you ain't planning on taking it. "Hey—fuck, you're still not hearing me, are you—"
Yeah, you're hearing him. You're hearing him just fine, but you're the adult here, you can do what you fuckin' need to.
Except you can't, apparently, because even the beginning of your attempt to sit up sends everything spinning and tightens the clamp around your chest. Even if the kid didn't lean in to pin you down with a hand on each shoulder, you'd probably end up flat on your back again anyway. Flat on your back seems like a decent spot to be in. Definitely. For another minute at least...assuming your heart doesn't just toss in the towel. Which it won't. Which it shouldn't, especially if you lie still.
But.
"Dave." Ah fuck that hurts. There's probably an explanation for why the fuck your throat feels like you aspirated some battery acid, but fuck if you can think of it right now. Shit, you need to not even try, but your focus is fragmented as fuck right now. "Le' me up—"
"Look, you shouldn't even be conscious right now, let's not move on to being vertical yet, okay?" He hesitates for a moment, then adds, "Do you remember what happened?"
"Uh." Shit. Think. (You can't think. Closing your eyes leaves you dizzier and no more able to remember shit, and you open them again in one hell of a hurry.) "Dave. The fuck is he?"
Oh, you don't like the look on the kid's face. Hal's less likely to just cover up every ounce of emotion than Dirk is, but he masks shit, of course he fuckin' masks shit, at this point you're pretty sure that's hardwired into Strider genes. Or something. Maybe it's just that all y'all have had horrible, horrible luck with avoiding traumatic shit in the course of your lives. God fucking dammit you're distracted again, distracted and in pain and fucking terrified at the way that Hal winces and struggles for a half-second to get his face under enough control that he'll be able to tell you a lie instead of the answer to your god damn question.
"Dave's fine. Stay down."
Yeah, sure he is. "Fuckin' liar. How bad?"
"...we're not sure."
"Hal—"
"I'm serious—I don't know, okay?" Ah, god, you never wanted to see your nephew's face twist up with that much fear and worry. You never wanted to see him swallow hard and take one hand off your shoulder for just long enough to rake through his spiky white hair, composing himself enough that he can keep talking. Maybe he can keep talking. "We—Dirk, Dirk's going to track his phone. As soon as he gets the signal—it'll be fine. It'll be fine."
The electric registers buzzing around the emphasis he's putting on words is a big tipoff that it ain't gonna be fine.
Shit.
Shit.
You should be forcing yourself to talk Hal into letting you up right about now. Instead, you just...groan and let your head thump back down against the ground and close your eyes, and never mind if the darkness inside your head is both painful and nasueating.
Dirk:
Hal moves quick and silent, careful to stay out of your peripheral vision. You still feel when he steps up behind you; even with most of your attention laser-focused in on the screen of the computer you have balanced on what's left of the car Dave, Ambrose, and the driver whose name you never did get left in, his proximity tugs at you like current through wires too thin to really carry it, like he's rearranging the filaments of your mind into something more orderly, more efficient.
God, you wish he could actually do that. It'd probably help with the panic.
But Hal can't calm you, and you have no idea how to calm him other than the obvious (and useless) option: acting like nothing is wrong. Giving him a status report. Except you can't do that either; what comes out of your mouth is the exact opposite. "How is he?"
"Better. Breathing." (Because when you came out of Roxy's portal, Ambrose was very much not doing that.) "I think he passed out again. I'm monitoring his heart rate—it's evening out from the last two times he woke up."
"Is he any more coherent?" You had to walk away after the second time your uncle opened his eyes and struggled to ask you questions that you could only guess at the meaning of, let alone the answers to. Ostensibly, it was because you needed to coordinate Roxy's third jump—back from the hospital she'd taken the driver to, in that two-minute interval where Ambrose wasn't breathing, didn't have a heartbeat that you or Hal or the smartwatch around his wrist could discern, in those two minutes when you were sure he was dead from the repeated shocks the collar (the collar you designed, and never mind that you don't understand how it could malfunction this badly) delivered too close to his spinal cord, the base of his brain—but if you're being honest?
You were panicking. You are panicking. You can't be panicking.
You need to hear Hal tell you that Ambrose remembered something.
"He's talking," your brother says, which is good, that's good, and "He doesn't remember anything."
Fuck. That's not good.
"Dirk?"
"Yeah."
"He asked about—"
"Yeah. Dave." No, you didn't hear anything Ambrose said—technically he's within earshot, but when you're concentrating everything else fades away—but really, is there anything else he's going to ask about? "I'm working on it."
Behind you, Hal sighs, and you can't help but flinch as he leans over you, chin brushing your shoulder. The fact that a spark of electricity arcs between the two of you is his fault. His. You can't be panicking badly enough for that. You can't. "...'working on it.'"
It's not an accusation. You have to stop and remind yourself of that before you open your mouth.
"I can't track his phone."
"What do you mean you can't track his—"
"Stop." You understand why he's asking, you understand the tone—the two of you have bugged literally every piece of electronics that's passed through the house in the last three years (including Wade's, although so far he's neutralized every tracker you've put in his shit within a week of it being planted. Either that, or he changes phones that often.) "I'm getting a ping every three minutes, forty-seven seconds."
"Just one?"
"Yeah. His phone's—"
"Rebooting. Why the fuck is it doing that? How many—"
"Rounds are we on?" You tap the corner of your screen not occupied by the map with possible courses plotted in red. "Nine and counting. He's still moving, but even if he wasn't—"
"I can't phase into his phone when it's continuously rebooting." Hal pulls away from your shoulder abruptly enough that you force yourself to pull your eyes away from your screen and make sure he's all right. From the look on his face and the way he's tugging at his hair with one hand, he really isn't, but you don't know how to fix it. "Dirk."
You know what he needs to hear. "It'll be okay. We'll get him back."
And he knows what you need to hear, because he nods and repeats it back to you. "It'll be okay. We'll get him back...I'm calling Roxy to bring D."
"Yeah. I'm...going to keep working on this." You flip a hand at him, turn back to your laptop, and start repeating those seven words under your breath.
It'll be okay. We'll get Dave back.
God, you wish you believed it.