A Taste Of Ashes
This is a Fall Guy fanfic, a little over 500 words. Rated G. It's Colt's thoughts on Howie after the events of Notes On Courage.
It doesn't feel finished, but who knows when I will write more. Poke the muse, she might say more.
When Howie is tired or sick it's more noticeable. He drops things, stumbles, and his speech gets a little hard to understand.
"Clumsy." he says, embarrassment coloring his cheeks.
"You’re just tired, kid." I reply and make him go to bed.
He knows why and it makes him touchy, but I never mention it. I know he’s afraid that I’ll send him away if he can’t do the work any more and the job is the most important thing in the world to him. He doesn’t know that I would rather put a bullet through my own heart than turn him out.
I don’t think Jodi notices, if she does she’s one heck of an actress because she never shows any awareness of it, she just tucks him in with a kiss and says, “See ya in the mornin’ sleepyhead.”
I stay awake, listening for any signs of trouble. Try to banish the memories of the sound of alarms, his panicked cries and the dread in my heart. He's alive and mostly whole, I remind myself.
My sister's only son, he’s not even thirty years old yet, healthy, active and survivor of three strokes that caused irreparable damage. It was not his fault, nor mine, all the blame lays squarely on Osborne. Osborne caused the accident. Howie was in surgery for five hours when he was first admitted after the accident. The surgery a day later to insert a stent into the right carotid took less time but was no less dramatic.
I remember when he first showed up; he was pale and scrawny, pesky as a pup. Not much has changed since then, though he’s tanned from working outdoors and muscled from helping me set up gags for our stunt jobs. He’s still pesky. Not that I mind so much anymore, not when I think about how close I came to losing that pup forever.
Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can still see the truck, rolling along in a perfect two wheeled stunt and my imagination supplies the sound of the tire blowing, something that in reality I never heard. The tires goes and the truck flips, crashing into the parked cars and coming to rest with crushed passenger side door up. We tired everything we could think of to get them out but nothing worked. The ambulance arrived and a guy built like the incredible hulk casually ripped the door off. He pulled Jodi out, she was shaken up, slightly injured but Howie was motionless, held up by the safety harness. Multiple broken ribs the doctor had said when they got him out, adding something about his liver and how he wasn’t breathing properly.
I jump into Jodi’s car and tear out of the parking lot, hot after the ambulance. At the hospital, the doctor won’t tell me anything about Howie, won’t even give me his chances for survival and I fear that means it’s not likely. I was right there when he suffered the first two strokes; the second one was so bad that I honestly thought he was dying. The third was the worst, it was late in the night, and they called me to the hospital.