It was getting very late on a Tuesday night.  The boys came home later than normal, once again.  Sadly, I was almost getting used to Tristan helping Erik walk down the hallway.  This time though, I was caught off guard by the sound of Erik screaming.  As he was wailing in pain, I decided that enough was enough and called 9-1-1.  I hated to do it to them, but I was genuinely worried about his wellbeing.

I had my cell phone to my ear as I walked down the hallway.  As I was giving the dispatcher my address, I found the boys just inside the front door.  Erik was laying on the floor with Tristan hovering over him in tears.  When I finally got close enough to see Erik up close, I took a step back into the wall.  His face was covered in blood and already beginning to swell.  The black shirt that wore had cuts all over his torso with blood coming out of the slits in the fabric.  Plus, his hands looked like he was punching a concrete wall.  He was holding his side as he groaned in pain on the floor.

Poor Tristan looked helpless as he held his lover's head in his lap.  Tears were rolling down his face while he tried to comfort Erik.  Tristan looked like he didn't get away completely unscathed either.  There were a couple of spots on his face that were starting to bruise.  Plus some cuts on his hands and arms.  It definitely looked like Erik took the bulk of the beating though.

After I finished answering the questions that the dispatcher asked me, I hung up the phone.  I knelt down beside Erik and gently rubbed his leg.  I was hoping that the ambulance got here quick, he really didn't look good.  It was taking all that I had not to pull his shirt up and look at where he was holding his side.  With all of the other trauma to his thin body, if he was just holding his side than it had to be bad.

It seemed like forever before there was a knock on the door.  By New York City standards, this was actually pretty quick for an ambulance to show up.  When the knock on the door finally came, I got up and rushed to open it.  Of course, the paramedics were a couple of dickheads and just threw Erik on the stretcher.  They strapped him in and took him out of our apartment.  Tristan and I followed them down the hallway where they took him down the elevator.  Since it was only a few floors, we just took the stairs and met them in the lobby.  They didn't really seem too thrilled about letting us ride in the back with him, but Tristan was throwing a fit about how he couldn't be without him.  The paramedics gave in and let us ride in the back of the ambulance with Erik.

The ride to the closest hospital was relatively short, especially since the ambulance was blowing through all the red lights.  As soon as we got there, they took the stretcher out of the back and wheeled Erik into the ER.  Once he passed through the door to triage, we weren't allowed to go back with him.  All that we could do was sit in the waiting room and hope that we heard something soon.  Tristan was still crying as I pulled him into my side.  I ran my hand through his hair as we patiently waited for some news about Erik.

Shortly after sitting down, a woman approached us and handed me a stack of papers on a clipboard to fill out.  As I began to fill out Erik's basic information, I started to realize that there was still a lot about the two that I didn't know.  All that I really did know was, they both came from families that didn't except them for who they were.  Tristan ran away from home at the age of sixteen.  Erik was beaten by his father for his choice in lifestyle and ended up running away at seventeen.  Other than that, I knew both of their birthdays and their current address.  So, I filled out the questioners as best as I could under the circumstances and sat the clipboard on the chair beside me.  Which is where it sat until the woman from the desk came back over to get it from me.

...       

We had been waiting for about an hour when a nurse finally came out to see us.

"The family for McAleer," she blandly asked?

"That's us," I responded getting up, pulling Tristan up with me.

She looked both of us over before saying, "I'm sorry to say that he has a ruptured spleen and broken occipital bone.  They took him up for emergency surgery.  There's a waiting room on the fourth floor where you guys can wait.  The doctor will come out there with the prognosis."

"Okay, thank you."

Still holding Tristan by my side, we walked down the hallway to the elevators and I pushed the 'up' button. The short ride up the empty elevator led us to a waiting room with only a few people waiting in.  Now, I wasn't one for stereotyping people, but most of these folks looked like they were waiting for gunshot victims to get out of surgery.  I led Tristan to a spot away from anyone else and sat us both down on two chairs by the wall.  He buried his face in my chest once again and kept crying.  I had known that Tristan and Erik deeply loved each other, but I had never seen either one of them this emotional before.  All that I could do was hold his head against my chest and run my fingers through his freshly dyed jet-black hair.

We sat like that for a while, watching a doctor come out into the waiting room occasionally, and talking to someone in the waiting room.  Some got the news that they wanted to hear.  While a few others heard their worst nightmares come to fruition.  I hoped for Tristan's sake, when the time came for us to hear the outcome, that it would be good news.

Before too much longer, we were the only two left in the waiting room.  I really wanted to get up and grab a cup of coffee, but Tristan was clenching onto my shirt as if his life depended on it.  He had stopped crying; however, he was making no attempts to remove his head from my chest.  There was no way that I could have gotten up and left him alone in this dingy waiting room.

I was just starting to doze off when I heard the automatic door open and two sets of footsteps approaching us.  I looked up to find a middle-aged man wearing green scrubs and a woman in a black dress.  I think that I had seen here before tonight if my sleepy eyes weren't mistaken and those occurrences hadn't ended well.  Since we were the only ones in the waiting room, they walked right over to us.