Chapter Text
No thing defines a man like love that makes him soft.
—Noah Kahan
The humidity hung in the air like a veil, draped over every inch of skin and shrouding the air in a haze, tinted yellow by the fires burning hundreds of miles away. Bradley had always found it strange, how far the wind could carry something like smoke and ash and dust. He figured it was no different, though, than how far the wind could carry a jet, buoying it up in the air by the sheer weight of it against the wings.
He’d mostly quit smoking some five years ago, although he still indulged when he was drinking if someone had a pack of reds they were offering around. There weren’t many substances you could use in a career that had you pissing in cups every time you turned around, so it was hard not to take the ones you were allowed, especially when said career was always sending you home holding your breath with your life still flashing before your eyes. Even worse when the career was taken away from you.
For the first time in years, drinking and smokes up for offer had nothing to do with the cigarette pinched between his forefinger knuckles, tremoring there in his grasp as his other hand, clammy and tight, bent the pack of cigarettes out of shape. It was the doubling in his vision, the constant headache pinching between his eyes, the orange prescription bottles on his counter, the stack of papers on his desk that he couldn’t get his eyes to focus on long enough to properly read through and fill out to give back to the grimacing military admin workers who’d handed it over that morning.
Bradley couldn’t remember the last time he smoked in the light of day. There was something vulnerable about it; having to stare down the world in all its colors as you took deep inhales of a smoke you knew was killing you and was the only thing keeping your feet on the ground.
He took a deeper breath and dropped the stub of the cigarette, grinding the butt of it beneath his heel against the dirt. Humid or not, it was California, and he gave it a few extra twists of his foot to kill every last ember, thinking of the smoke in the air from the fires further east.
He stuffed the now half-empty pack of cigarettes into his back pocket and pulled out his phone instead. He’d been out here for hours, thinking about who he needed to tell he was done.
He’d settled on going for the group all at once. He didn’t envy what they’d feel when they read the message—all of them staring at it and hoping that someone else would say something wise and impactful first so that they could send a heart and offer to buy him a beer instead of having to come up with something good. And, fuck, that would be a kicker to tell them he couldn’t even drink for now.
Permanently grounded. Not fit to fly. Here he was, alive and breathing, and his flying career was dead and buried. No canopy opening too late, no bird strike, no G-LOC, no smoke in the air, just a slippery bathroom floor and a traumatic brain injury and he was a flightless bird after all.
He sent the text and put his phone on silent before putting it away again and tapping another cigarette out of the pack.
. . . . .
It was after the MRI that he’d known his career was over. Call it intuition, or the fact that he’d been in enough hospital rooms with his mom that he knew how doctors acted when they had bad news to deliver. Really, somewhere in him, he’d known the moment he’d stared up at the bathroom ceiling, trying to tell if there was one or two water stains, and thought that all he wanted to do was go to sleep.
The pipe under his sink had sprung a leak; the water dripping out and forming a puddle that stretched out into the middle of the room. He hadn’t even noticed. He wasn’t distracted—not on his phone, or even zoned out—he was just walking into the bathroom, headed for the sink to brush his teeth and wake himself up with a splash of cold water to the face.
He was so used to the swooping sensation in your stomach that came with falling that he didn’t quite register it at first. His bathroom had tile from the 1970s, so hideously fucking ugly that he’d thought about tearing them out and starting over about every time he’d taken a shit in there his entire adult life. But they still were there, an olive green inlaid with white patterns and gridded with grout that had seen better days. The funny thing was, he’d always thought that at least they weren’t too slippery.
He wasn’t sure how long he was unconscious, but he knew that when he blinked his eyes open and saw the ceiling doubling in his eyes that it couldn’t be good. Knew enough about concussions to know that the way he wanted to go back to sleep on his bathroom floor and that it seemed like a good idea was a very bad sign. His stomach was twisting with nausea, enough that he sat up and vomited, reaching for the toilet and missing by at least a foot, his arms not quite moving in his vision the way he expected them to. It was when he sank back to the wet floor, thinking again that he might just go to sleep here for a little while, that he saw the blood. He wasn’t sure if it was as much as it seemed, having diluted and spread into the water on the floor, but it was enough that even bleary and dizzy he reached for his phone where it lay cracked on the floor next to him, dropped there at some point in the fall.
It was early still—not even light outside—and looking back, Bradley shook his head wondering what he’d been thinking as he’d opened his contact list and dialed. The thing was, he thought, now that he could sometimes think intact thoughts, he actually hadn’t been completely irrational in his thought process, even with a head wound spilling blood down his neck. There was only one person he knew who was reliably awake at that early an hour, no matter the day or the circumstance.
He’d only been half-awake when the call clicked through, and he wasn’t sure what of the conversation was real and what he’d imagined in the deep dozing sleep he’d slipped into shortly thereafter.
To what do I owe the pleasure? the voice on the other side had said the moment the call connected. Bradley Bradshaw calling little ol’ me at the crack of dawn?
Bradley had tried to string words into sentences—I fell, I hit my head, there’s blood, I can’t see straight—but he wasn’t sure even at the time whether he’d done a good job. He was laying on his side now, his cheek smushed against his bicep, and had tried to hang up then, but the buttons on the screen of his phone swam in his vision and a dark spot was starting to grow in the middle of his sight until it was all dark for a moment, and he closed his eyes instead.
He woke, distant from his body, to a banging noise that smacked the pain into his head, finally triggering his nervous system to stop hiding the feeling from him and show him just how bad it felt.
He’d heard yelling; he’d heard a few moments later the crunch of wood and metal of a door being kicked in; and his eyes had slit open enough an instant or a minute later to see a golden, terrified face appearing above him. Hands sliding desperately onto his cheeks, holding him still; long tan legs kneeling in a puddle of blood and water.
He should’ve known then. He’d never seen Jake Seresin look so afraid.