Blood Bourbon

For a Moment

Daryl

Daryl hadn't expected anything more than to wake up alone in his bed. Didn't mean that it burned any less. The tenderness of the night had lulled his guard until, against logical reason, he thought maybe... just... maybe. Maybe what? They'd wake up together and Ryker would bruise his ego again in the cold light of day?

Daryl hadn't even performed exceptionally well, or maybe at all. There had been intimacy, he knew that much. But the moment his heart rate had spiked in climax, his brain had made the world spin in a jilted, halting sort of way that had left him scrambling for the toilet. Ryker had not known what to do. It was as if he had never seen someone get sick before, didn't fully understand what a concussion was.

The right time for the man to have walked out would have been once Daryl had made it back to bed after washing his mouth out. But the damned bastard had held him and given him a solid piece of truth against the unreliable reality, just by being there. He had fallen asleep with Ryker's arms around him, the man's lips pressed to the back of his neck, and a soft murmur that Daryl couldn't quite understand.

And Daryl had woken up as dawn creeped through the windows, to the sounds of vehicles on a dirt road, receding into the distance. Daryl had cursed himself a fool and slowly started to rise, taking it a tiny step at a time, as his injuries and broken head made sustained effort incredibly painful.

But he had been showered and dressed by the time his brother came up to find him.

Charlie hadn't pushed, though worry and some form of understanding was on his brother's features. He had merely helped him finish dressing before they climbed into the nicest of the farm's pick-ups, Daryl stretching out in the back.

The trip into the city had gone by in a whirr as Daryl struggled to remain fully cognizant of the world around him, pretending to nap to avoid the inevitable worry from the others.

Knight Corp didn't look like a hospital and the building had more security than a bank did, leaving Daryl extremely sceptical as they finally parked and found themselves approached by a couple people in scrubs, one of which was pushing a wheelchair.

"Mr. Martin? Come, we'll get you changed and into the examination rooms. The doctors are waiting for you." The woman pushing the chair offered him a smile.

Daryl scowled at her, feeling his skin crawl as he took in the oddity of the clinic. "I can walk."

"Daryl..." Charlie was never very good at glaring at him.

"We were going to bring out a whole gurney for you, sir. You do not look like you should be walking. And the increased symptoms overnight are a worrisome sign." The other woman said, offering a smile but giving him a firm look.

"The worsening...?" Mary rounded towards him, looking like she was about to knock him flat on his ass. "Sit it the fucking chair Daryl, or I'll be turning you into the vegetable you seem hell bent on becoming.."

"Yeah, we received an update report only an hour ago." The two... doctors, or nurses, or whatever they were, looked between the three of them for a moment.

Daryl did not want a chair, but he also felt the ground moving oddly under his feet in ways no one else seemed to acknowledge, so he nodded and sat down. "I got sick a couple of times."

Mary growled, though seemed unwilling to hit him, despite her threats.

Once in the building, Charlie and Mary were redirected as Daryl was hauled into an extremely technological looking room, where he had a hard battle convincing them that he could change himself. His two guards were a lot more forceful once they were out of sight of his family but finally they allowed him the decency to strip down and put on his own gown.

They had found him clinging to the side of the bed, throwing up into a garbage can that had been mercifully close by. All semblance of independence was gone after that, with the doctors putting him in a neck brace and him being ordered to lay down. When it made his head worse, they had become even more worried.

The day had turned into a blur as he was shuttled from test to test, answered endless questions, poked and prodded by several different people.

It was three days until they let him go home, thankfully without a neck brace. Oddly without any form of bill, though he was given a regime of medication and strict orders against any sort of use of his brain or body for at least a week.

His family took it so seriously that his apartment was stripped of books. He didn't own a computer and his television was broken anyways, but the lack of books had been a kick in the gut. His phone was left there, but he had thrown it in a drawer and let its battery die.

Two weeks of sleeping or staring at a wall. Daryl wished he could say it was torture, but he didn't remember a great deal of it. Or much of the next visit with the doctors, where he went through another round of tests.

It was only after another fortnight, where he found his grasp on things solidifying to the point that he was able to sit through a couple pages of a book at a time, that he realized how out of it he had been.

***

Ryker

Humans were too god damned breakable.

Ryker had no idea what to do when he realized that him taking Daryl to bed had been an awful idea. He had spent the night gripped with a helplessness that he had not experienced in a very long time, holding the man, desperately panicked and wondering if he should be calling in a medical evacuation.

The reaming out he had received from the medical staff over the phone had nearly made him turn his jeep around and drag Daryl out of bed and into a helicopter. It was only the doctors telling him that if Daryl was still alright now, he could wait a few more hours and that sleep was the most valuable thing at the moment, that kept him driving away from that ranch as fast as he could.

At some point during that night, it had stopped being about fun and started mattering.

Things weren't supposed to matter to Ryker. He did his job, because he believed in right and wrong and being on the side of right helped him from doing too much wrong. But beyond that, he wasn't supposed to care, he wasn't supposed to worry about the person he had left alone after a night far more intimate than any passion fuelled set of trysts could be.

Ryker had broken the human and needed to stay the fuck away.

Being hauled into the office upon returning to New Orleans and nearly murdered, first by the head doctor and then by Timothy had been a surprise. The doctors had told him Daryl would be fine. Apparently his appraisal of all the symptoms suffered by the human had been rather lacking.

Fucking Ryker strikes again.

Does a good job... nearly breaks a human being an idiot afterwards. The realization that he had nearly killed Daryl had scared him far more than the screaming. So much so that he had been silent as he was slammed into the wall by his boss. Vampire workplaces were far more violent than human ones were, but he had been numb through it.

The only thing he uttered that day was. "He's going to be okay?"

When the doctor had calmed down enough, she had explained that they thought so. That if the trial drugs they were using hadn't been there, the man probably would have been one slip and fall away from death for the rest of his life. But they had hope that the trial would work on the cowboy, as it had shown promise in other cases.

Ryker knew he didn't technically have clearance to do so but after that, he regularly accessed the medical data of his breakable human. He couldn't even explain to himself why he was doing it and half of the data was charts and long paragraphs that he didn't understand.

But he did finally see the "full reversal of symptoms expected."

Three months later.

Daryl wasn't even better yet, after three months. At least that meant the dumb cowboy wasn't back to getting his ass handed to him by cows.

Ryker stopped checking the file as often after that. Though to be honest, the twice a day obsessive checks for changes had been a bit excessive when doctor's appointments were only every couple of weeks.

Ryker just turned his attention to working. And drinking. And trying to fuck the memory of a broken cowboy in his arms away.