"Never anticipate tomorrow's sorrow;
Live always in this paradisal Now."
— The Rubaiyyat
Neal can barely keep his eyes open.
No, scratch that — he can barely get his eyes open. He tries, but all he manages is a weak fluttering of lashes and the occasional sliver of white, sometimes blue.
"It's okay," Peter murmurs, smoothing his hair back. "It's okay, just sleep."
Neal's always said that he can make anything look good, and Peter's always pretty much believed him. Grudgingly, sure, irritably, sure, but he's never seen any evidence to the contrary.
He should have realized that, if nothing else, there would have to be an exception to prove the rule. Should have realized that, for all his years of research and hunting and working together, he had not, in fact, seen Neal Caffrey in each of the full spread of possible situations.
He knows better now.
Neal doesn't make hospital gowns look good. He doesn't make hospital beds look good. He doesn't make IVs or oxygen tubes or chest drains or a fever of a hundred and four look good, in any way, and Peter hates himself for ever even jokingly considering that he would.
He used to think that he would not be one single bit surprised if Neal dragged into work one day with tuberculosis still looking like a model, and there is nothing at all satisfying in learning that Neal, when sick (so sick, so very sick) looks just as horrible as anyone else. He won't say it's worse, because that's incorrect and wrong, but. It's worse.
Neal doesn't know where he is. Probably doesn't know Peter's there with him. Definitely doesn't know that El had brought a blue foil "get well" balloon and a pot of pink and purple hyacinths, or that the yellow afghan from their couch is currently spread over the thin grey hospital blankets.
He's delirious, somewhere between sleep and confusion, and if he weren't attached to so many goddamn things, Peter would climb into the bed with him and hold him. Orient him. Ground him. But he is attached to so many goddamn things, important things, things like medicines and saline and air (and did he mention the chest drain), and so instead Peter tries to reach him with words and gentle touches.
A year ago, it would have been awkward and stilted. A month ago, maybe. A week ago Neal had already gone missing, but a week ago Peter hadn't yet found him, literally stumbled over his body—
Neal stirs, restless with fever and malaise. His head nods forward and one shoulder lifts slightly from the pillow in what Peter can only assume is a pitiful attempt at sitting up.
Peter presses him back as gently as he can. "Easy, Neal. Come on, lie back. That's it."
Neal's already more or less upright, the head of the bed tilted up in deference to his broken ribs, so it's a little too easy to list forward the way he's doing right now. Eventually Peter gives in and presses the recline button, just enough for the effort of sitting up to exceed the ease of falling forward. Neal gives a small sigh, too weak to be a groan, and sinks back into the pillows.
"That's it," Peter murmurs again, and once Neal appears to be settled he goes to the tiny bathroom and wets a paper towel to lay across his forehead.
Before, it would have been hard for him to sit quietly in a hospital room and come up with platitudes and appeasements, especially when the person in the bed has no idea he's there. It's not like it's fucking easy, now, but it's not uncomfortable. It's not stuck in a meeting, dealing with crying children, or saying something stupid; it's painful. It's agonizing. It's worry and anger pulling at his heart, a sudden, terrible distrust of everything and everyone, an excruciating sense of wrongness, like the ground isn't really under him and the sun doesn't always rise.
He hasn't felt this way since El was kidnapped, and the implications of that are.
Are something to be addressed later, because right now all he needs to know is that Neal's been in the hospital for two days and he isn't getting better and he's coming dangerously close to breaking Peter's heart.
El comes in that evening with comfort food and a worry as raw as Peter's own. Chicken soup from home, heated and carried in the containers she'd kept the last time someone got takeout won-ton soup, and another blanket (blue) from their house.
"I think he has enough blankets," Peter says. For some reason, the sight of the cheerful colors in the otherwise dull room strikes him as unspeakably sad.
"Hush," is El's response, then she's smoothing the thick fabric over the blanket lumps of Neal's legs and bending down to press a kiss to Neal's forehead. "Hi, sweetie," she says quietly. He's out, has been all afternoon, limp and exhausted and not Neal at all, but she gives him a smile and asks how he's doing while she straightens the rumpled sheets and brushes back any wandering strands of hair. The smile is still on her face when she turns back to Peter, but her eyes are too bright.
"Well," she says. "Dinner?"
Neal wakes up a little in the morning. His eyes aren't quite focused and his voice is slow and hoarse, but the slurred, "Peter?" is clear enough.
"Neal," Peter breathes, relief driving him out of the chair and sending him directly up against the bed rail. "Hey, buddy. How're you doing?"
"What," Neal says thickly, and reaches with obvious confusion for the oxygen tube snaked under his nose. The hand he lifts to explore it is the one with a needle taped to the back of it, and Peter can practically see the slow-turning gears in his head grind to a halt. He blinks once and then his eyes stay wide and glassy, staring intently at the white tape and the slender tube emerging from it.
Peter takes the hand and lowers it back to the mattress before he can do anything inadvisable. "Don't mess with that stuff, okay? You're in the hospital; let it do its job."
Dark eyebrows lower in confusion. "Why'm I…"
Neal's hand is warm and relaxed under his, so Peter lets himself squeeze it carefully, mindful of the IV. "You're sick. You have a… a lung infection, but you're gonna be fine."
"Is…" A deep breath, and a wince. "Chest hurts." It's not quite a question, but it's more than a statement.
"Yeah," Peter answers anyway. "That's why your chest hurts. We'll do details later, okay? Just rest, for now. Just try to relax."
Neal takes his advice, sort of. He's asleep again by the time El comes back with breakfast, and he doesn't wake up again for the rest of the day. He shifts around aimlessly, unable to keep still, dry lips half-shaping words he doesn't give voice to.
On Monday, Peter gives serious thought to taking a personal day but manages to talk himself out of it. El promises to call if anything happens at the hospital, so he does his best to let the work distract him. They're still working the case that landed them in this mess, though — every name and photo he sees conjures up images he's trying to forget, and his phone feels about four times heavier than normal in his pocket.
"How's Caffrey?" Diana asks him on his second trip to the coffee pot.
"Delirious and breathing out of a machine," Peter says evenly (he'd been thinking it all morning), and turns to go back to his office. In his peripherals, Diana swears and nearly drops her coffee, but she catches up quickly.
"Peter, if he's that bad—"
"I'll only be in the way." He'd been convincing himself of this since he decided to come in. "Besides, there's nothing I can do for him there."
"But someone's with him?" Diana presses.
"We have security on the room, but I highly doubt—"
"You know what I mean." No one can do supremely unimpressed quite like Diana can. Peter respects that. Deserves it, too.
"Yeah," he admits softly. "El's staying. She took the day off. We're trying to work something out, but… I don't know. I just don't want him to be alone, not after everything."
"You have a team," Diana reminds him pointedly. "Neal has a team. I'd say the least we owe him is some of our time off the clock." He nods, but he has no intention of asking anyone else to take his place.
The rest of the day passes as he should have expected: tense and terse, and instead of distracting him from the thought of Neal in the hospital, it's the other way around. Hughes slips into his office a little after two o'clock and shuts the door.
"You shouldn't be on this case, Peter," he says, quiet despite the soundproof walls. "It's gotten too personal."
"Damn right it has," Peter mutters. He'd thought that his anger would drive him to a quick and vicious closure, or at least keep him focused. He'd spent the weekend suspended between fury and fear, the only common ground between them a worry so keen it hurt, but here, where that fury would actually help, he can't seem to find it. It was different when Neal had been missing, because then he'd existed somewhere on a spectrum of fine to dead, and the thought of fine kept Peter sane while the thought of dead made him sharp. His actions had had the power to ensure the fine and prevent the dead.
It's not like that now. Nothing Peter does will make Neal any more fine, and his being distracted by that thought isn't going to make Neal any more dead. Peter knows exactly where Neal lies on that spectrum, and he hates it but he's powerless to change it. In retrospect, this is making focusing more difficult than it should be.
Hughes is quiet for several moments, just nodding. "How is he?" he asks at last.
Peter huffs out a laugh. "You want the nice answer or the real answer?"
"I have the reports, Peter. I know the real answer. I want your answer."
"Sick," Peter tells him. "Really fucking sick."
He's back in the hospital less than an hour later.
"You're here early," El observes, rising to give him a kiss. "You sneak out?"
"Hughes sent me home," he admits. "Told me to take a few days off, unofficially."
"Oh." She tips her head, considering. "Does that upset you?" Behind her, Neal is a study in contrast, dark hair and shadowed eyes standing out sharply against the white sheets, faded gown, and pale skin.
"No. No, this is where I need to be right now."
The next day, Peter stays with Neal while El goes home and lives her life a little bit. She calls to check in a couple of times, then shows up to make him eat something and fuss over Neal, but she doesn't seem to be having the same problems he was having yesterday.
Then again, hers isn't the life that landed her CI in the hospital.
Tuesday morning with Neal is quiet. He just sleeps, leaving Peter to listen to the soft hiss-click of the oxygen and watch the shallow rise and fall of his chest. Shortly after noon, there's a knock at the door, and Neal's ER doctor pokes her head in.
"Hi," she says, half-volume. "I didn't mean to intrude, but I was hoping to see how Neal's doing. Mind if I come in?"
He doesn't, and Neal certainly won't, and the two of them end up having a very pleasant but serious conversation. Peter liked Dr. Stahi when they first met — a firm, quick handshake in the ER followed by what was probably the best post-trauma medical run-down he'd ever heard — and his opinion of her only rises. She's kind, extremely well-versed in her field, and treats both Peter and Neal with an easy respect. "I like to follow up with my patients," she says, with the light sincerity of the truly dedicated, "and Neal's been at the back of my mind for a while now."
They talk about diagnoses and prognoses, treatment options and possible post-discharge plans, and by the time she has to leave Peter feels his hold on the situation isn't quite so precarious.
"El just went for lunch," rasps an unexpected voice on Wednesday, and Peter nearly goes for the weapon he isn't carrying before his brain catches up to the rest of him and processes the tired blue eyes watching him from the bed.
"Jesus, Neal," he hisses, stepping inside and closing the door behind him. Then, "Sorry, I thought you'd still be asleep."
Neal shrugs — a loose, liquid movement in the soft gown. "The novelty kinda wore off."
Peter's lips quirk up into a smile. "I'll bet. How are you feeling?"
"Shitty." Neal's eyes fall closed, bruise-like smudges in an otherwise pale face. "But not delirious, so that's nice."
Peter closes the distance between them, takes a seat in the chair, and has to fight off a frown. Neal is clean-shaven again after several days of slowly accumulating scruff, and it's taken the edge off of the unkempt, too-sick-to-function vibe but he still looks awful. "You want me to get a nurse?"
"Nah, one was just in." He clears his throat, then closes his eyes in a wince and goes even paler.
"Ribs?" And the drain, probably.
"Mm." Deep furrows appear between his eyebrows, and Peter reaches without thinking to smooth them out. Neal's skin is too warm, but it isn't the heartwrenchingly worrying heat of before.
"Fever's finally coming down, feels like."
Neal hums in assent and relaxes under his touch. Peter moves his hand to Neal's hair, finding it soft, freshly washed. That nurse must have been busy. Or El, he realizes, though that would have been a pretty big step for Neal.
"Neal," Peter starts, because there are things he has to say now that Neal is finally lucid, but Neal shakes his head under Peter's hand.
"Nope. No apology voice. I don't wanna deal with that right now."
"You don't want to deal with it at all," Peter points out, hoping to get at least a little bit of a rise out of him. He's always trying to get Peter to admit he messed up.
Neal just sighs. "It's not necessary."
"No, it really kind of is. But I'll wait. We'll do the whole song and dance once you're out of here. Which is. . . ?
"Sometime next week. You'll have to ask El for the details."
Neal's hair is damn soft, longer and a bit curlier without all the styling shit in it. It's like petting a very sleepy Satchmo. "What, you sleep through your doctor's appointment?"
"Maybe a little," Neal says, but he's smiling. A small, faded smile, but it's real.
The chest drain comes out that afternoon. It's a minor procedure, but they do it in the OR just in case.
Neal's beat by the time he gets back but takes it with good grace when the room he returns to holds June as well as Peter and El.
"I brought your pillow," June confides, like it's a secret, and Neal moans in exaggerated ecstasy.
"You're an angel," he rasps, and the thick pillow in its luxurious pillowcase joins the Burkes' blankets on the bed.
"Nothing quite compares to the comforts of home," June demurs. "Speaking of which, Elizabeth, do I detect your touch in all of this?" Today, the bright colors don't look like they're trying too hard. Instead, they actually succeed: the room is cheerful, and the heady scent of the hyacinths has made the smell of disinfectant ignorable.
The plan is to monitor Neal tonight, make sure no more fluid tries to creep into the space around his lungs, and if all goes well he'll be off supplemental oxygen in the morning. It feels like a victory.
"Neal Caffrey one, pleural effusion zero," Peter quips, spirits bolstered beyond what's really called for.
June stays, and when Neal wakes up from his nap, the four of them eat dinner together. Neal doesn't have much of an appetite yet, but June's cook made him Polish chicken soup, hearty and savory, so he does what he can.
Afterwards, June takes Peter home; he has to go back to work in the morning and needs to get some paperwork (and his life) in order before he does. El will stay until she gets kicked out (which may or may not actually happen: Peter never had been, but he wasn't sure if that was a next-of-kin thing or an FBI thing), and Mozzie will probably break in again tonight despite the fact that Neal's going to be checked on every couple of hours.
Then again, if a supposedly-sleeping Fed hadn't kept him away, the hospital staff won't merit a second thought.
Four days later, Neal is released with a thick packet of discharge instructions that basically boil down to, "don't do anything stupid, but call us if you do." Bed rest and home care for a week, no physical exertion for another three, and extreme vigilance regarding recurring infection or another effusion.
Hospitals kick out their patients once they can survive on their own, more or less, and Peter gets it, he really does, but the thought of a second effusion — of having to go through all of that again, of Neal having to go through all of that again — makes him twitchy. Neal doesn't seem to care. He's still getting over the first one, after all, and is happy enough to let El tuck him into the guest bed with his pillow and designated blankets.
"If you think something's wrong, tell me," Peter stresses once he's gotten settled. They've stacked up the other pillows behind him to keep his ribs from getting too unhappy, and it's got to be much more comfortable than the hospital bed; there's more room, for one thing, even with Peter and El sitting on either side of him. "Even if you think it's not important, I want to know about it."
Neal yawns. "You got it."
"Promise."
Neal blinks up at him; like riffling a deck of cards, in the space of a sigh he becomes someone new. Peter's seen this before, this smooth juggling of masks, but this time the masks just. . . fall away. This Neal is ragged, not carefully rumpled or gracefully tired, and the barely present lines that mar the space above his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth speak of a pain that isn't there for show. But he's smiling a soft little smile and his eyes hold a heavy-lidded warmth. He blinks again, slow like a cat, and the only word Peter can come up with is fond.
"I promise," he murmurs, and Peter believes him.
H/C and angst, as per my usual, with not a trace of plot. (Well, maybe a few poorly alluded-to hints of plot, but I wouldn't worry about those too much. I didn't intend this to fit into any particular part of the series, so read into it what you will.)
But hey, I'm slowly working my way up the character count. Six people had lines! Incredible.
As always, please feel free to leave any feedback you'd like to.
(ETA: I keep finding and fixing typos, but if there's anything that stood out to you, please let me know! If you'd prefer to do it in a pm, that's totally fine as well.)