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Tennessee Whiskey & You

Summary:

When Dirk dies after an aneyursm, Hal and Jake have difficulties coping. Jake drinks to forget, and eventually Hal can't handle drunk Jake and his own grief - so he turns that into anger.



“I’m not him, Jake! I can’t fucking- I can’t fix you. Dirk is gone and you don’t get to pretend he isn’t anymore. I can’t be Dirk, and every time you try to tell me I am it fucking hurts. There’s nothing left for you here. If Dirk was the only person that filled a void in you, there is nothing left to make you whole.”

Chapter 1: A Major (Disaster)

Chapter Text

The room is too white. It smells like bleach and artificial lemons. The beeping is steady, robotic, and it wouldn’t be half as comforting as it is if Dirk’s eyes were open. There’s a bandage over his left eyebrow, but other than that he seems unharmed. That is, obviously, not the case.

There’s a quick double tap at the door and a woman with dark, curly hair tied back in a ponytail pops her head into the room, “Hal Strider?”

Hal stands and shakes the doctors hand, “Yes, and you’re Doctor Montgomery?”

“Yes. I’d like to discuss your brother’s case, if you’re ready? We could go to the lounge if-”

“I appreciate that, but right here is fine. Dirk would- Dirk hates being left out of conversations, especially if they’re about him.”

Doctor Montgomery nods with a sympathetic smile, then pushes her glasses up higher on her nose. “I see. Well, from what we’ve treated, and from what we heard from the investigating officer as well as Dirk’s boyfriend - he fell. That fall triggered an aneurysm in his brain to burst and caused what we call a intracerebral hemorrhage.”

“A stroke?” Hal clarifies.

“You have a medical background?”

“No, just. Too much free time and the need to be an insufferable know-it-all during Jeopardy!” Hal looks over his shoulder at Dirk as he says this, making it very clear to the doctor that he’d been quoting Dirk.

“Well, then. Yes, a stroke. We didn’t have any papers on file for him upon his arrival. If he has one, we’d like a copy of his Advance Directive. If not-”

“Then you need me to fill out paperwork. DNR, life support limits, etcetera.”

She pauses a moment, “Yes. Does he have an Advance Directive?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll text our cousin and find out if they know. In the meantime, can I add some names to his visitation list?”

“Of course. I’ll have a nurse come in to take down the names in a few minutes. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“What are his odds, Doc? Be blunt.”

The doctor’s smile falls, but she tries to hide it. There’s a sad sort of look in her eyes when she meets Hal’s gaze again. “If he were conscious, or if he wakes up his odds will improve significantly. But there’s bleeding on his brain, and we can’t operate because we can’t see the location of the bleed. The aneurysm was too deep. If the bleeding slows, or stops we might be able to and that would increase-”

“Doctor Montgomery, I understand that your job is to try and keep the family and loved ones calm, and try to help them keep hope but I’d prefer if you gave me the straight facts. When I explain everything to Jake he’ll do enough hoping and positive thought keeping for both of us, and I’ll let him tell everyone else. But personally? I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than severely disappointed.”

There’s a long moment of silence, tense as the doctor tries to decide if tipping her hand is what needs to be done, but finally she breaks, “As Dirk’s condition is now, I’d suggest you get his affairs in order. If he regains consciousness, or the bleeding stops I’d say it would depend on how he heals. A ruptured aneurysm in the brain is fatal about half the time, and Dirk was bleeding for about half an hour before he was found. It doesn’t look good. I’m sorry.”

Hal is clenching his jaw, trying to reconcile this information with his world view. “Thank you, Doctor. I… I appreciate you being candid.”

The doctor nods, then turns and walks out the door. Hal makes his way back over to the chair by Dirk’s bed and lowers himself into it. He sighs and drags his hands through his hair, clasping both hands at the back of his neck. A few minutes or a few hours later a nurse comes in and asks after the names to add to the visitation list. Hal rattles off names without much thought - Jake, obviously. Roxy, Rose, Dave. Jane. He puts Jade and John down even though he’s not sure if they’d want to come, then thinks a moment and has Kanaya and Karkat added to the list too.

He’s not sure how much time passes after that. Hal sits there staring at Dirk. His eyes are closed, and his chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm. If it weren’t for the oxygen tube, or the IV, or the heart monitor it would be easy to think Dirk was just sleeping. As much as the hospital accouterments adds to it, there’s just as much missing to help a peaceful illusion along. Dirk’s eyes aren’t twitching beneath his eyelids. He isn’t doing the fitful twisting thing Hal knows he still does in his sleep. Not to mention Dirk isn’t curled up into the tightest ball he can manage, like an armadillo without the armor.

When a hand comes down on Hal’s shoulder, he jumps. Turning, he sees Jake’s sheepish smile and tear stains on his tanned face. “Sorry, mate,” he mutters before pulling the other chair up next to the bed and taking hold of Dirk’s hand gently. “How long have you been here?”

Hal sits back in his chair, back moving stiffly as he straightens up, and shrugs. “I haven’t left since I got here. Not really… sure how long that’s been?”

Jake nods, then seems to settle into his spot. Hal watches as Jake’s attention shifts, and he feels as though he has been dismissed. Jake is solely focused on Dirk. It must be unconscious, the way his thumb runs across the back of Dirk’s hand. It must be instinct, the way Jake reaches out and brushes hair off Dirk’s forehead.

Hal stands and his spine pops as he does. He makes his way out into the hallway, past the nurses station, and into the lobby. Without much thought Hal pulls out his phone and dials Roxy. They pick up on the second ring.
“Hey, Hal. How’s… everything?”

“Do you want the answer I’m supposed to give you, or the truth?”

“Hal-” Roxy sighs

“Too snippy, I know. Sorry, I’m just-”

“Stressed. We all are. Lay it out for me, babes. What do you need me to do?”

Hal pinches the bridge of his nose and groans, “Do you know if Dirk has an Advance Directive? A Will? Any sort of information about what to do if he’s real fucked up and someone else has to make medical decisions for him?”

Roxy inhales sharply, “It’s that bad?” they ask in a small voice.

“I’m not telling anyone else, but Rox. They can’t operate because of the bleeding, and it’s killing him. The aneurysm was deep, and they can’t see it because of the blood. If it doesn’t-”

“Okay, you can stop,” Roxy whispers over the line, and Hal can hear the start of tears in their voice. “I’ll um. I’ll check around his apartment, and I’ll call Janey. She has a tendency to know about all the legal whatchamacallits and shit. Are you sticking around the hospital?”

“Yeah,” he says without really thinking about the answer, “For a while yet. Jake is here, too. Everyone is on the visitation list, I think. You might wanna call around? Let everyone know they should get over here, but like. Try to do it without letting it slip how bad off he really is, I guess?”

“Ah- I think I’m just gonna call Rosie and let her pass it around. You know between the two of us she got all the tact.”

“And you got all the charm, Rox.”

They cackle, but it’s brittle, surprised and tired sounding. “I’m so tellin her you said that. She’ll kick your ass for it.”

Hal lets out a puff of air, a not-quite laugh. “Thanks for doing this, Roxy.”

“I’m here for you, babes. Call me if shit swings slantwise, okay? I’m gonna go look for those papers and get the phone train going. Love ya.”

“Yeah, you too, Rox.” And Hal hangs up the phone, immediately feeling lost without the grounding Roxy had been unwittingly providing. He looks around the lobby for a minute, but aside from the man at the information desk there is no one there. He lets his shoulders drop, wallowing in the overwhelming loneliness of the situation for a moment before he turns around and walks back to Dirk’s room.

Jake is still there. He’s mumbling quietly to Dirk, words that Hal can’t hear from the doorway, and he stops as Hal comes into the room. “Sticking around then, chum?”

Hal nods, slumping back into his seat across the bed from Jake. “Yeah. Roxy is poking around for some paperwork the doctor asked after. They’re gonna call Rose, see if she’d be okay calling everyone else and letting them know what’s going on. Maybe she’ll be able to get everyone to come home.”

“Is that necessary? Everyone is scattered to the four winds, after all.”

It’s that moment that Hal is faced with a decision. He can lie to Jake, keep him from leaving that warm hopeful bubble that he prefers to live in; or, he can tell the truth. Tell Jake what he already knows, what he told Roxy and what is going to quickly get passed in whispers through the group with only Roxy and Rose’s discretion as a life raft.

Hal does what he told the doctor he would do, of course. “I mean, probably not. But I’d like to have everyone home anyhow. Dirk’s looking at a long recovery. It’ll be better to have all hands on deck.”

Jake looks up and meets Hal’s eyes with a nervous smile, “Right, of course. Naive of me to think he’ll be peachy keen after such a bad fall.”

There’s an impulse in Hal that begs him to grab Jake and shake him until he understands, until he drops that stupid hopeful facade and comprehends. But he doesn’t do that. He plays along like he’s supposed to and dismisses Jake’s self depreciation, “Don’t worry about it, bro. You’re not a doctor or anything, right?”

“Right-o,” Jake agrees, and then it’s silent again. Time slips away alongside the beeping of the monitor, and it’s not until after the sun sets that either Hal or Jake move.

Roxy is the inciting stimulus which drags their attention away from Dirk, and even then it’s only for a brief moment. Just long enough to hand Hal the paperwork Jane had found in the bottom of a lockbox. Long enough to give Jake a one-armed hug and press a kiss to Dirk’s forehead with a sniffle and a mumbled, “Affection. Cope with it, Di-Stri.” And then Roxy is making their way back out of the hospital room.

Hal’s brain catches up a minute later. The paperwork. He flips through it half-assedly. No DNR, organ donation forms. Everything is sorted already. Of course Dirk would have planned for every inevitability and have the papers to back it up.

It’s fine. There’s nothing to be done about it now.

Hal takes the papers and drops them off with the Nurse’s station before he heads home for the night, without saying a word to Jake.


When Hal walks into Dirk’s hospital room and finds Jake already there for the fifth day in a row he considers the probability that Jake hasn’t left. When he asks Jake as much, he finds he isn’t surprised by the answer.
“No, I suppose I haven’t. Not for very long at least. Someone has to keep vigil, right friend?”

Without response Hal pulls the unoccupied chair in the corner up to Dirk’s bed, snagging the hospital chart as he does so. As he flips through the information in silence he is confronted once again by the fact that Jake likely doesn’t comprehend the severity of Dirk’s condition. He compounds that with the fact that the longer Dirk lays unconscious the slimmer his chances of recovery become, and he can’t help but start to spiral. 34.6% mortality rate. 22% survive with impairment. 38.6% have a so-called good outcome, and who’s to say what that really means? If he does somehow manage to come out of this- would Dirk even want to go through his recovery? Physical Therapy is expensive, and painful-

A knock at the doorway draws Hal’s attention away from himself, and he turns over his shoulder to see Doctor Montgomery standing there. “I know you’re in visitation right now, Mr. Strider, but I’m going off shift in an hour so I was wondering if right now would be a good time to go over Dirk’s CT scans?”

Hal stands, looks back at Dirk, then focuses in on Jake, “Hey, you gonna stick around a little longer, Jake?”

“Hm?” Jakes eyes are drawn slowly away from Dirk, but he seems to process the question as he meets Hal’s eyes through the shades. “Oh, yes. I’m not going anywhere until Janey’s flight gets in. That won’t be until near 10 tonight.”

“Alright. I’m- I’m going to step out and talk to the Doc for a minute, then.”

Jake nods, focus drifting back to Dirk, “Let me know if there’s anything new, hm?”

Hal walks out after the doctor without answering that one way or the other, uncertain if the information he’s about to learn would threaten that little bubble of innocent ignorance Jake is living in; the bubble Hal can’t help but feel he’s had a hand in crafting.

“So, the scans- well they aren’t great,” the doctor says after leading Hal into a smallish room he assumes might be an office or something, judging by the shelves of medical texts and the x-ray reading board she clips photos onto a backlit white board. “Do you see here, the big white area? That’s the hemorrhage, and it’s growing. We can’t see where Dirk is bleeding from, and because it’s covering the Medulla-”

“You can’t operate because damage to the Medulla would kill him faster than the bleed will. I got that. This isn’t news, Doctor. Why did you want to talk?”

She sighs, then reaches over and pulls open the desk drawer and pulls out a stack of pamphlets, “These cover everything from grief counseling to funeral homes in the area to financial assistance for hospital bills and everything after.”
Silently, Hal takes them.

“I’m not a fortune teller, and I can’t see the future. But, medically, there isn’t anything else we can do for Dirk at this-”

Doctor Montgomery is interrupted by the overhead speaker crackling to life, “Rapid response to room 2409. Doctor Montgomery and Rapid Response team to room 2409.”

Quickly, the doctor flees the office and darts down the hall to Dirk’s hospital room. Hal chases after and gets there just in time to see Jake being shoved out of the door. He’s pale, and shaking slightly, and there’s a scared look on his face.

“Jake.”

He turns to look at Hal, and Hal can tell. The bubble has burst. “H-Hal, he- Dirk…”

“Jake, hey, come on. Tell me what happened,” Hal prods, pulling Jake gently down the hallway back to the office which Doctor Montgomery had left him in. When he gets Jake into one of the chairs it takes some time, but he manages to get Jake to explain that Dirk had seized. At first it had seemed to Jake like perhaps he was coming to, when his eyes had snapped open. He’d already been leaning out of the door to fetch a nurse when the convulsions started.

There would be nothing left to do but wait for Doctor Montgomery to come back.

At this point, Hal is no longer aware of time passing outside his own head. He’s thinking, overthinking, reconsidering, reevaluating and all coming up to the certainty that it’s nearly over. Dirk isn’t going to wake up, and now he’s started having seizures. If there were a machine to unplug maybe Hal would even do it- but Dirk had been breathing on his own. Doctor Montgomery is certainly taking a long time, that can’t be-

Jake’s hand closes around Hal’s and presses a keychain into palm. It’s small, rubbery, and designed to look like an old Nintendo controller. When he pushes a button, Hal feels it click under his thumb but it makes no noise. “What is this, Jake?”

“It’s a little thing I bought for Dirk. Keep it on my keys so when- well when he starts picking at his nails like you were just a second ago. Gives him an alternative to tearing his cuticles off,” Jake shrugs, then sits back in his chair and picks a spot on the floor to stare blankly at while he nibbles his thumbnail.

The miniature controller clicks silently in Hal’s hand until Doctor Montgomery trudges back into the room. She lowers herself into the chair behind the desk, “Dirk is stable, but this does mean his condition has significantly worsened. Are you comfortable discussing the details of his condition with Jake present?”

Hal’s fingers continue to mindlessly click away on the fidget toy, “You might as well, Doc. I’d just have to tell him after, and I’d frankly prefer not to.”

As the doctor explains Jake is made to understand how hurt Dirk really is. He’d been thinking ahead- to Dirk’s recovery, to the time they’d still have to spend together, to the next date, the next milestone. To the future. And now Doctor Montgomery is talking about the remainder of Dirk’s life not in years, but in days. The tears start silently, and Jake isn’t fully aware of them until he tries to take in a deep breath and it arrives in shudders. Hal’s hand comes down on his wrist with a light squeeze. Doctor Montgomery is offering condolences and then leaving them the room.

Hal’s posture collapses, and he drags a hand along his hair with a groan. Jake watches numbly as he pulls out his cellphone, taps away at if for a few minutes, then slides it back into his pocket.

“I don’t know about you, but I think I need a drink,” Hal says, and Jake barely pauses before agreeing.