and it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time

He hasn't been sleeping well since he'd woken from his coma, and he still thinks that's kind of funny. Now that he's back to what he supposes he can call normal, as far as his brain is concerned, he feels a little more confident that he'll be okay; it's just that with the recovery in his head had come the memories of that night and that's a little trickier to deal with. He's managed to fake his way through the motions--he's become a master of slowing his breathing and pretending to be asleep until he can sense Kate drift off next to him because otherwise, he knows she'd just worry. He doesn't want her to worry. He just wants to be okay. It wasn't going to happen right away, he knows that, but nobody's been able to give him a solid time frame for when he's going to stop hurting or when he's going to stop thinking that every noise he hears from another room is that junkie back to finish the job, even though he knows the chances of that are incredibly slim, especially considering that Derek and Helen had taken care of the guy themselves.

"It's just going to take some time" is the generic answer he gets, from doctors and friends alike, and Newt's starting to question whether any of them actually know what they're talking about. They're not going through what he is, after all, right? How could they possibly know, how could they possibly understand what it's like? He's never lived with this kind of fear, never, he's never felt like there's anything holding him back and now he's finding that sometimes he's afraid of his own shadow. He's been doing well enough hiding it, he thinks. He still smiles and laughs at jokes and tells his own and people seem pretty convinced that he's moving on just fine. And it's not like he doesn't think he'll jump over this hurdle, he knows he will because he has to, there's no other option; he just doesn't know how long it's going to take and that uncertainty only contributes to his frustration.

He's in the bedroom now, even though it's just barely seven and he'd left Kate in the other room under the guise of needing a nap. He had tried, he's been trying for the last half hour, but it's just not happening. So he sits back up with a heavy sigh and blindly reaches for his crutches. It's taking less and less effort to getting them in the right place, which he's told is good, very good, it means he's healing the way he's supposed to and he should be happy. Happy. What makes him happy now is knowing that his friends are still there, that Kate is still there, and he hates the idea of being a burden to them even though he's pretty sure they'd all smack him in the head for even thinking that. He just can't seem to help it sometimes. Even so, he'd rather be next to her than be alone in here and he hasn't even had a proper conversation about her day since she'd gotten home from work. It takes a little bit of a struggle, but he ventures back out to the living room where she's got her feet propped up on the coffee table.

"Hey," he greets with a small smile, "anything exciting going on?"