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justjessame · 4 years ago

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Babysitting Butcher Chapter 39

I’d watched the videos, Billy had made more peace with Becca and her choices, but I still had some things in the back of my head that were fighting to surface but hadn’t pushed free yet. While I worked to figure out how to force the issues to the forefront so I could work on those next, Mallory and Billy found a way to contact my parents to let them know that I was fine, but that both Billy and I were going to have to stay off the grid for now. My mom let us know that our house was OURS, since she knew that we’d both fallen in love with it, after a call we shared before our light from Vought.

Knowing that, should my little problem be solved, we had a home far from the office and the prying eyes of every single thing that we currently were dealing with helped, somewhat. Hearing from the doctor that I was now thinking of as the lead in my treatment that she felt confident that we’d be ready to try antidotes soon gave me another push toward feeling optimistic.

If only, I thought, as Billy and I turned in for another night in a zinc lined building in the middle of God knew where, I could put my finger on what precisely had the hairs on the back of my neck tingling. Even with Frenchie’s surprise, and the extra layers of precaution that I knew about, there was SOMETHING that still made my skin crawl with worry, I just wished I could pinpoint it so I could force it into the open and deal with it.

The first trial for a cure, or antidote, came a few weeks after we learned how long it took to separate the Highlander special sauce from my genetic makeup. With that knowledge under the lab gurus belts, they put their egg heads together and came up with A1. As the doctor stood in front of us rattling off the reasons she felt that the trial was worth the risk of actually giving it a try, Billy’s hand was cradling mine and his arm was wrapped around me protectively. I knew that the physical contact was two-fold. Not only was it to comfort me, but it helped distract him from his fear that I’d be harmed, or worse. And Billy Butcher’s favorite distraction, when I was close by, was touching me.

The vial of A1 was tiny. So tiny that I wondered at its potential and its possible dangers. How could something so small really fix or harm me? Then again, I sighed, hadn’t a very small syringe of shit fucked me sideways to this point?

“I’ll be injecting this into your port,” my port, another word for the entry point of the dialysis. “Monitoring will be continuous, Dr. Taylor, and I have to insist that you inform us of ANY changes.” I nodded, of course, that was both normal and expected. She took a deep breath and approached with a glance at Billy. I squeezed his hand and he sighed too.

“Go on then, Doc,” he moved our joined hands so she had a clear path.

I sat still, watching as she filled a syringe and then inserted it carefully and injected this first trial at curing what ailed me. At first, since the machine that normally cycled constantly in the background had been shut off, the only sound aside from our breathing was the steady rhythm of my heartbeat monitor. As the minutes ticked by, and my sarcastic retorts were building, a burning sensation started to sting in my abdomen. First a tingle, then a sting, then a full raging inferno.

I hissed out a breath and I could barely hear Billy over the screaming of my heart monitor. “What the fuck?!” I was prone and the burning raged throughout my body, and as I searched for his face, finding it finally above mine, seeing his mouth moving but hearing not a word, I let the flames flicker over me, thinking that finally Homelander might have fucking won.

Homelander didn’t win. At least not this round. Although, I did feel like a fucking house fell on me, when I woke up and looked around I sighed loudly at the knowledge that once again I was hooked up to more machines than when I started out. Another feeding tube. An IV. I stopped counting or trying to count them when one of the monitors drew Billy’s attention and he was hovering over me.

“There you are,” he was trying to sound flippant and it wasn’t working. “Scared the fucking shite out of me, again, Ronnie.”

“New habits die hard,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. “Guess A1 is a fucking dud.” I shook my head. “How bad is it this time?”

“Bout the same,” he shrugged, pulling his chair closer and sitting down while cupping my cheek in one huge paw of a hand. “Not steaming, but the whirling machine of blood stirring is up and on again.” I nodded. “Been out for a week and no one wanted to guess how long you’d be out, so the feeding tube was a necessity, same for the IV.” Another nod. “You were bleeding again, a lot.” Shit, that’s the burning then. “Not just in the stomach, it-” Billy looked away, down and bit his cheek and I knew it had been bad, really bad. “They weren’t sure what made it go so far and hard, Ronnie, but it was like your veins exploded.”

“How did they fix it?” His eyes met mine and I swallowed so hard that I thought I had a rock inside my throat. “Billy, tell me they didn’t give me V.”

“Not a 100% dose, Ronnie, but they had to do something-” I blinked at him, feeling like my entire world was coming apart at the seams. “It isn’t enough to-” He took my hand that wasn’t filled with a needle or hooked up to a lead. “There’s a reason you’re hooked up to all this shit, Ronnie, if it was enough to supe you up, you wouldn’t need any of it, so think about that and calm down.”

I hadn’t realized that my heart monitor was spiking, but the sound was starting to break through the fear. He was right, if it was the same strength that the files we had gone through had gotten then I’d be off all this shit and running circles outside. Closing my eyes, I let the feeling of his calloused fingertips on my skin calm me further.

“What now?” When I opened my eyes, I found that he had moved closer, his nose inches from my own, his eyes locked on mine. “What happens next?”

“Well,” he let go of my cheek long enough to brush my hair from my face. “First of all, you rest and let your body heal. That A1 crap did damage, the V they gave you was a very light dosage, enough to stop you hemorrhaging, but not enough to fix shit. Once you feel up to snuff, or more snuff, we try again.” I shook my head, wondering what else could possibly go fucking wrong? “It’ll happen, Veronica, you’ll come out of this and you’ll be ready to take on the world again.”

“Never wanted to take on the world,” I muttered, and he smiled, leaning closer and brushing my lips with his. “I’d settled for just having our lives back.”

“Then we’ll do that.” He promised.

#Billy Butcher x ofc #the boys #fluff #medical crisis #angst

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