She sees the blood, pooling dark red on the cement, and thinks randomly that it doesn‘t look the same as it does on TV. She sees Chris Hobbes, crawling away, grime mired onto his tuxedo, moaning incoherently. She sees the flashing lights reflecting on the sheen of the cars, and the back and forth rush of the EMS techs, and Brian, dazed, his mouth moving as he answers questions that she can’t hear.

She doesn’t remember hunching over, doesn’t remember losing her dinner of roast beef and scalloped potatoes and creamed carrots behind one of the parked cars, doesn’t remember shaking or crying or being escorted away from the crime scene. She doesn’t know why they are calling it a crime scene anyway, since Justin must have fallen, or tripped, or something.

It’s not until four hours later, when her parents finally take her to the hospital, when they realize that she will not “calm down” and that she is not going to believe that “everything will be all right”… it’s not until then that she truly understands what happened in the parking garage.

Then, her mind puts everything together. And then she only wishes that she’d had the sense to pick up the bat and finish what Brian had started.

Daphne thinks she is holding together pretty well.

Justin has been in surgery for three hours before she escapes to the bathroom to have a breakdown in relative peace. She thinks she’s going to throw up, can feel the bile rising in her throat, but she closes her eyes and only dry heaves into the toilet as red sparks, blood-red sparks god, fly behind her eyelids. She huddles between the toilet and the wall, draws her legs up to her chest, and is amazed that she’s still in her party dress, orange organza and she really doesn’t know what she was thinking when she chose that.

She fingers the material and remembers seeing Justin walking up the sidewalk to pick her up, and how her breath caught in her throat, because even though the weirdness is over, has to be over, she still loves him.

Daphne leans over the toilet, and this time she is sick.

They say that sometimes people who are in a coma can hear what their visitors are saying. Daphne is used to Justin talking a mile a minute, and cutting her off whenever she wants to speak. She misses his interruptions.

And it’s just... unnatural. Talking without expecting a response.

“So,” she says, dropping her backpack beside the bed. She doesn’t know why she’s still dragging the backpack around, anyway. Habit.

“I guess your mom already told you about grad,” she says. “I wanted to stop off last night after the ceremony, but my mom and dad gave me a big hassle about how we were supposed to go to some lame dinner to celebrate my achievement. Please. It’s just high school. It’s not like I actually accomplished something.

“Anyway, you didn’t miss much. A bunch of boring speeches. Oh, and you were mentioned. Everybody got together and raised money for--” Daphne frowns, and cuts herself off, because mentioning the cash raised for victims of brain trauma is probably not the best thing to do when one of the victims is still in a coma. “Uh. So the entire thing was just as pointless as we thought it would be.”

She shivers, and blames the hospital and it’s over-exuberant air conditioning system. She leans forward and adjusts Justin’s blanket, and lets her fingers linger on his cheek. He feels cold.

He always feels cold.

She feels the tears hovering behind her eyes, and blinks them determinedly away. The doctors have said to be positive.

Daphne slaps a smile on her face. “Hey, remember when you said that you’d streak through the valedictorian speech?”

Her only answer is the hiss of the ventilator.

Daphne is sitting at the edge of the pool with her legs dangling in the water, wishing for a cigarette or something stronger, but Justin is the one who always got the best weed, and Justin is still in the hospital, still comatose, and she has come to hate that word. Just as she hates all the words and phrases that go along with it, like hopeful and guarded optimism and the mother of them all, all things considered.

She would like to stick her foot up the doctor’s ass, all things considered.

So at first she doesn’t hear her mother’s voice. Then she swivels in place, and her mother is standing at the door, smiling, and holding the cordless phone against her chest. Smiling so wide and delighted that Daphne thinks it’s unfair that anyone can be that happy right now.

And then what her mother is saying finally registers. And Daphne moves so fast that she is through the house and out the front door before she even realizes that she has moved, and she is standing at the car still clad only in her bikini top and a wrap, shuffling side to side, not sure where she’s put her keys, and her mother is calling her back into the house, laughing, telling her that she has to put some decent clothes on before she can go to the hospital.

Changing into a tank-top and jeans never seemed to take so long as the day that Justin woke up.

“I can’t believe he won’t even come to see me,” Justin says, staring vaguely over her left shoulder. In the same direction as the door, as though even now, days after waking up, he still expects Brian to walk in at any moment.

“That’s shitty,” Daphne says.

Shitty doesn’t really sum up what she thinks of Brian Kinney at this moment, but she’s trying to be diplomatic.

Jen wouldn’t tell her much when she arrived at the hospital that day, the day that Justin came out of the coma. She was smiling, tears glistening in her eyes, but tight-lipped and tense, and Daphne feared that something else had gone wrong. “Brain damage” flashed in giant neon letters in her head, but she couldn’t bear to ask. And the doctors wouldn’t tell her anything, not even if she was going pre-med in the fall.

But when she finally got inside to see him, after waiting hours and hours... he was fine.

It was Michael, filtered through Debbie from Jennifer, who told her that “Brian” was the first thing he said when he woke up.

“You’d think he’d at least want to know I’m okay,” Justin says, and his voice sounds as weak as he looks.

He shifts on the bed, his complexion still as pale as the sheets, dark circles around his eyes. The intravenous line has bruised his skin. The catheter snakes against Daphne’s leg as she leans forward to brush her hand against his.

This is not the Justin she knows and loves.

Daphne decides that she wants her Justin back.

“So,” she says, “get out of here and go get him back.”

Justin’s fingers clutch at the covers, but he says nothing.

“You are the one who kept going after him and wouldn’t give up,” Daphne points out. “But if you think you can’t do it again...”

Daphne leans back in the uncomfortable hospital chair, and is successful at hiding her smirk. And when Justin starts griping about the bad hospital food, she lets him.

A week later, Daphne overhears Jennifer telling Debbie that she thinks Justin is pushing himself too hard. He wants out of the hospital so desperately.

Daphne congratulates herself on a job well done.

Daphne had let Justin drive her car to the Wyndham Garden hotel on prom night. She was probably losing points on her feminist card by doing so, but she also didn’t want to mess up the lines of her dress. St. James Academy might be a fascist hellhole, and most of the students there were scum-sucking homophobic pigs, but she still wanted to make a good final impression.

She was quite aware of the incongruity.

Justin had parked in the underground garage, and had actually gotten out and opened the door for her -- another strike against her feminist learners permit, but it felt nice -- and they walked together, close but not quite touching, toward the elevators, and Justin had pulled a cigarette from somewhere, the smoke climbing in a haze toward the ceiling, and she felt happy and weightless.

“Look Daph,” he’d said, “I know that lots of people say that they’ll stay in touch when high school ends. They do that whole best friends forever thing, and then shit happens and they... well, they just don’t. But I just want you to know that I’ll always be there for you. You know? I don’t want us to lose touch.”

“We won’t,” she’d vowed, and plucked the cigarette from his fingers. “I’ll always be there for you, too.”

Daphne remembers those words now, as she pulls up along the side street of Jennifer’s new condo and sits, car in idle, waiting for Justin to sneak out of the house.

He’s chafing under the media scrutiny, and thoughts of the upcoming trial, and his mother’s constant watch dogging. Daphne knows this. But she’s also seen the way he shies away from contact. The way he cradles his disabled hand against his chest. The way he fails to meet her eyes when he tells her that he wants, needs, to do this.

But she’ll take him to Liberty Avenue. Because she has seen the way he acts with Brian. Because she’s seen the way Brian looks at him when he thinks no one is watching. And because she is a romantic, when it comes right down to it, and though Brian might be acting like a first class asshole at the moment, if Justin can just talk to him, things will be better.