Do You Find It Happens All The Time?

When Howard falls ill, Vince is at first bewildered, then forced to cope with different feelings towards his best friend, which may be deeper than he at first suspected.

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1: Emotion

1: Emotion

It was a small, pale blue room that they were in; Vince was sitting in an uncomfortable, moulded plastic chair while Howard occupied the only bed. Vince was dressed in clothes that may have once been flashy and glittering, but were now crumpled and stained. His hair was messy and greasy and his pale face looked hollow and bleached out.

He was sleeping, but it was a fitful sleep; the kind that one fell into once there’s no energy reserves left; the kind that gave just enough respite to keep on functioning at some level, but not enough to really be called rest. His brows were furrowed and his mouth, always so mobile, was stretched in a thin foreboding line. He was dreaming, and it wasn’t a good dream.

Vince woke out of it soon enough, his legs jerking so violently that he nearly fell out of the chair; it was only because he had fairly good reflexes that he caught himself before he hit the floor. Although he was in the right place in case he did get injured, he didn’t quite fancy sitting around in casualty for most of the night to get his wounds looked at.

Vince pushed those thoughts away and instead glanced at Howard’s still figure on the bed beside him. Logically, he knew that nothing would have changed from the time he had sat down in that chair to the time that he had woken up from his sleep. Vince’s eyes darkened to a deeper blue as he took in the sight of a comatose Howard and his face fell into a mask of bewilderment and sorrow once again.

Vince still couldn’t figure out how everything had ended up like this; he had gone over the events over and over again, but they didn’t seem to yield up any clue or answer. He asked the doctors and the nurses and even they weren’t quite sure what the sequence of events should have been. All they knew was that Howard had meningitis and it had to run its course. And even then, things were going to be uncertain. It was too soon to tell and Howard’s own lack of self-awareness about his health was another factor that added to the unknown variables. Although the doctors themselves didn’t say as much, Vince did pick up enough from the last conversation he had with the head of the ward.

“He’s lucky, that it was caught relatively early,” the doctor had told Vince after coming out of Howard’s room. Although the hospital staff were sure it wasn’t likely that Vince and Naboo would be infected with meningitis, they weren’t going to let the two of them in Howard’s room for at least a day to make sure it really was safe.

“Wait… what do you mean ‘relatively’? We got him to the hospital as fast as we could!” Vince protested. He would have voiced more complaints if it hadn’t been for Naboo grabbing his arm and shaking his head. Although it had galled him, Vince had complied and had clamped his mouth shut.

“What I mean is that Mr. Moon probably had the symptoms a few days before they were bad enough for him or for you to notice. He probably had a bad headache and didn’t think much of it. He probably did the same with neck stiffness.” The doctor commented casually as he flipped through the chart he was carrying to consult the details that had been given during the admittance procedure.

Vince and Naboo looked at each other and Vince swallowed hard. It was true that Howard had been wincing more and taking more pain-killers in the past while. He had also been favouring his neck, but Vince had simply dismissed it as a sign of Howard’s imminent old age creeping up. He hadn’t wanted to ask if Howard was fine because he didn’t want to get sniped at, or drawn into another pointless argument. So he had simply gone his way and let Howard do his own thing until…

Vince closed his eyes and willed those memories to the back of his mind. Instead, he looked down at his hands and frowned when he noticed the chipped varnish. He focused on the uneven and flaked varnish as he examined all of the angles of the situation, wondering if there was simply something he could have done to change the outcome. Maybe if he hadn’t been so self-absorbed and had taken a chance, Howard wouldn’t have ended up quite so ill and in the hospital.

“Maybe if you had been the adult for once, this wouldn’t have happened.” Naboo had told him flatly when Vince angrily dashed tears of frustration and helplessness away, when the doctor hadn’t been so quick to assure them that Howard would be out of the hospital in no time.

Vince wanted to snap back at that and had opened his mouth to do so, but he knew that whatever he said would be nothing more than a weak excuse. Naboo was right. If he had even tried to meet Howard half-way, then maybe, just maybe their friendship wouldn’t have suffered as badly. And maybe, they would have caught the illness sooner and the outcome of Howard’s life wouldn’t have been under such doubt.

He knew that if Howard… Vince shook his head as if by the motion he could dispel those thoughts and make them fly away into the ether. He wished it were the case, but he knew that they were still there, like black shadows patiently waiting for their turn to spread.

He bit his lip as he let his gaze linger on Howard’s pale, clammy looking face. Howard’s hair was plastered damply across his forehead and his eyes were mere lines above his now jutting cheekbones. His clavicles poked out of the loose blue gown they have put him in and his arms were still on the coverlet, the intravenous lines snaking into the white, almost translucent looking skin of his wrist and elbow. He’d only been in the hospital for a few days, but already the illness was showing its ravages on Howard’s body. Plastic tubes snaked into his nose and mouth, the respirator that they were attached to making an eerie sound that Vince had managed to relegate into the background before. But now was begun to register in his mind again. He didn’t like the rhythmic whooshing. It was too… mechanical. It also brought home how ill Howard really was. And that thought made him want to cry. Or run.

He did run for a bit. But the idea of Howard lying there, unconscious and alone brought him right back to the hospital. The idea of Howard dying alone scared Vince. Despite them both being idiots to each other, there were always deep bonds of loyalty between them. No matter how strained their friendship would get, it was still there.

Vince sighed as he got out of the chair and walked over to the window to work out the kinks in his legs and back. He didn’t go too far from the bed though. Although he knew that Howard wasn’t going to suddenly wake up and leap out of bed, part of him didn’t want to let him out of his sight, in case he missed some glimmer of awareness to prove that everything would be fine and back to normal quickly. He thought that was what bothered him the most. The unasked and uninvited interruption of a routine that although rocky, was comfortable and predictable at the same time.

“Howard…” he breathed out the name, as a plea, or a prayer. He wasn’t sure. He did it almost unconsciously, but in the end, it didn’t matter. Howard was still. Vince forced his lips to form a wobbly smile, but he wasn’t sure why he even bothered. Howard couldn’t see it and he himself didn’t believe it.

When that thought hit him, Vince moved towards the bed and quickly gave Howard’s limp hand a small squeeze before heading back to the empty feeling shop and to his empty feeling life.