Disclaimer: They're not mine - if they were, I would have kicked Deacon out of that car and made him get the bus.
His chair, the nurses call it.
They don't move it from the corner where he put it the night he was well enough - not really enough - to get up from his hospital bed and find her room. The doctors had tried to stop him, of course, something about broken ribs not healing so well when you're dragging the drip in your arm up and down sterile corridors, but he doesn't give a shit about his ribs even if he does feel them crack every time he breathes in. Rayna would have told him off if she'd been awake, told him he was being a stubborn idiot and he should listen to the people in the white coats. But she isn't awake, she hasn't been awake for two and a half weeks - seventeen days, he counts the hours of each one - and he would give anything to have her scold him, tell him he needs to go back to bed and stop giving the nurses more work to do. He stays with her at night times, when there is no one else in her room but doctors who write things on the chart at the end of her bed and the nurses who look pityingly at him and leave without a word. He stays to keep her company when it's dark outside and she's alone, and he stays because he cannot do anything but. His Chair, the man with sunken eyes in an ashen face who sits and looks at her like he is nothing more than the sum of his parts, and every one of those parts hurts like hell because she lies there and doesn't move. They all know who he is, they know who she is to him, and they don't ask questions. There's a cushion on His Chair when he goes to sit in it on the fifth night she doesn't wake up.
#
He doesn't hold her hand. He can't; a spider's thread is all that's holding him together and it would snap the moment he touched her and felt her cold skin. In life her hands are always busy - gripping a microphone, slicing ham and cheese sandwiches for her children, tracing the line of stubble on his chin. Her hands are gentle, delicate, warm, they can soothe a cut knee and rub an upset stomach better - his, often, in days gone by - but they can just as well change a tyre and wipe the oil on his jeans suggestively. Her hands have always been on his list of favourite things about her, but in this bed in this hospital that smells of cleaning fluid and fear they are empty and still. They lay at her side with nothing to do, nothing to keep them busy. So he doesn't hold her hand.
#
She's hooked up to machines, lots of machines, and the wires remind him of veins, reds and blues and strange clear tubes that pump things into her. He doesn't know what any of the machines do, only that they keep her alive, and for that he is grateful. Some of them beep, sometimes too quickly and he feels red hot fear shoot through him, but they slow and he calms. The hole in his side that is held together with stitches burns when that happens, and he's glad it does; he's sorry, so sorry. There are so many machines.
#
The nurses like him. They shouldn't let him sleep in her room, not really, he's not her next of kin - not on paper - and he's a patient too, so if they were playing by the rules they should send him packing to his uncomfortable bed under the clock on the wall that ticks too loudly. But rules don't count when your love is breathing through a tube and the bruises on her face are so bad they're almost black and when you are a broken man who might just stop breathing yourself if they make you move more than a few metres from her. And besides, the nurses like him. He heard them say so when he was pretending to be asleep one night, heard them call it romantic, his vigil. For a man to love you like that they said, doesn't it get you right there? The nurses have a soft spot for the man that nearly killed his love.
#
These walls have become familiar. There is a card on the side from her daughters, Daphne's carefully measured letters spelling out her name finished with a wonky love heart, Maddie's shaky scrawl professing her hope that their mother will be home with them soon. Flowers sit on every surface, sent by people she knows and people she doesn't, family, friends, fans. He wonders how many will die before she wakes. In the corner there is a bag of her things. He looked through it when he could no longer help himself, the urge to hold something that was her overwhelmingly strong. There had been clothes, a hopeful gesture that she would need them, a photograph of her with the girls, her favourite necklace. And there had been a paperback book with a piece of paper sticking out where she'd been up to. When he'd pulled it out to look at it, he'd seen that she'd been marking her page with a ticket stub from one of their shows, a small concert hall they'd played twenty years ago. His hands had shook as he'd zipped the bag back up.
#
He spends his nights breathing in time with her. Her chest rises and falls and he watches it; it is the only constant he has to grasp on to. He started doing it the first night he stayed in her room, realised by accident that he was mimicking her, her intakes of air an assurance of life, even if they are prompted mechanically. In and out, in and out, steady. It is of little comfort, but comfort all the same. He breathes with her to encourage her to join him, wills her to do it too.
#
The hospital gowns are itchy. He hates them. He'd tried to swap his for a flannel he'd gotten Scarlett to smuggle in but a nurse, the nice one with the really round hips, took it from him and locked it in a cupboard, and he hasn't been able to find the key. Not even in all the hours he's had with nothing to do during the days when Rayna has visitors who fill her room but never sit in His Chair and he can't bring himself to go near them because if he did he'd have to look them in the eye, the people she loves who nearly lost her. He has a daughter, he knows now, she comes to see her mother, brushes her hair and sings her lullabies. He listens outside the door, would try his best to give her some semblance of comfort if he didn't think she would puncture his other lung, if he didn't think she would punish him with all she has for what he has done. He knows that she knows, they all do, he's seen the newspapers on the reception as he passes, the ones the woman sat behind the desk tries to hide. And then comes the day he hears Maddie sing one of their songs to her, her sweet voice quiet and sad, the words almost lost, but he would know the melody anywhere. It is brandished in his memory, and when he hears it the grief wraps around him so tightly everything spins and a nurse finds him there, slumped against the wall. He isn't allowed to stay with Rayna that night.
#
It's been a week when he wakes to find a blanket tucked up to his chin. It's one of those cheap things, threadbare and washed in harsh detergent, used by countless people who have sat and fought off the chill of the ward while they wait and say prayers and try not to lose themselves in the desolation of it all.
'Mornin' Bertha,' he says, and his voice is scratchy from lack of use. He hasn't done much talking while he's been in here. He's done a lot of thinking, but not much talking. He wouldn't know what to say.
'It's the middle of the night sugar,' Bertha gently tells him, her standard issue shoes squeaking quietly on the floor tiles, 'and you're doing yourself no favours being wide awake.' She hands him a polystyrene cup full of the nasty vending machine coffee that Rayna secretly likes, and offers him a smile. It's small, but it's a smile, and there haven't been many of those coming his way lately. The coffee tastes better than anything he's put in his mouth since the whiskey that landed them there.
#
From the window in his room he can see the car park, comings and goings regular in the day, sirens and flurries of doctors racing to bring in a new casualty. He thinks about what it was like the night they brought him and Rayna in. Whether anyone was in this room then, stood by the window, watching. Wondering if they'd make it.
#
She doesn't wear one of the gowns. She did, but one night he opens the door and is stopped in his tracks by the image of her in the bed. The tubes have been removed from her throat, she breathes on her own, and she is in a nightgown he knows, one he's seen her in when they've been on tour and he's found her on the roof of their hotel staring out into nothing when her attempts at sleep have failed. It is dark blue and made of silk, and he allows himself the smallest touch, a little patch that lays across her shoulder. Her hair has been washed and brushed and it is fanned out on a pillow borrowed from her own bed. She looks like Rayna. He is still crying when Bertha comes in and makes him sit in His Chair and drink a glass of tap water.
#
He finds a card on his nightstand when they have been in the hospital for two weeks. It is white with a simple picture of a daisy, and it contains only one line. Get well soon Deacon, it reads, love Maddie. He puts it next to the one from his sister and looks at it so many times the words no longer make sense.
#
Coleman comes to see him every day. He comes to make sure he's not tipping the contents of a hipflask into the bitter orange juice they give him for breakfast, and he comes to make sure he's not hovering on a window ledge with his arse hanging out of his hospital gown. He brings him magazines to give him something to look at other than the hastily painted ceiling and Rayna's frozen face, and for a while he took to reading them, but he stopped the day he opened one at a paparazzi picture of the upturned wreck he used to drive to pick up groceries. Coleman also comes to tell him everything will be ok, she'll be ok, they'll be ok. He doesn't know if he believes him, but a part of him that is a little boy who is oh so lost clings on for dear life to hope. It is all he has.
#
On the seventeenth day he hears the machines beep from down the hall and he knows it's her room the panicked footsteps run towards.
