Whenever I'm alone with you
You make me feel like I am home again
Whenever I'm alone with you
You make me feel like I am home again...
However far away, I will always love you
However long I stay, I will always love you
Whatever words I say, I will always love you
-Adele
It had been a long time since they'd been this close to each other. Almost long enough for her to forget the cute way his jaw twitched and the smell of his shampoo and the transparency of his eyebrows. These were the types of things she couldn't glean through the television, when he was made up and poised and professional. She admired President Grant and his passion for bettering his country, but she felt a whole other set of feelings for Fitz. Despite his anger towards her the last time they had been together and her resolution to never see him again, Olivia knew that there would have to be some sort of tragedy to keep them apart forever.
Ironic, she thought bitterly, that it took a tragedy to bring them back together.
Even unconscious he made her heart leap. Every flutter of an eye or twitch of a finger; every time his breathing hitched she felt it in the pit of her stomach, a nauseating combination of hope and despair at the fragile state he was in. He was plugged up to a myriad of machines that beeped and pulsed, alternately controlling and recording his every breath, as his skin seemed to get paler and clammier with each passing moment.
She reached over and placed her hand on his, sliding her fingers in between his. She marveled, as she had that first night on the tour bus, at how perfect of a fit it was. Everything about each of them seemed to complete the other. Where her body swelled, his dipped, and vice versa, and where her personality was lacking, his was plentiful. He could complete her sentences and she could tell exactly how his day had progressed just by seeing his face. She wondered how she had ever considered leaving this man without so much as a backwards glance.
When he had been shot two weeks earlier, Olivia couldn't help feeling a bit guilty. She hadn't pulled the trigger that night but seeing his frail form on the crisp white sheets reminded her of how he had looked the night she told him they were really over. His eyes had flashed, briefly, a look of acute pain and then dulled to the emotionless eyes of a man who was dead inside. And now here he was, truly dying. Olivia also couldn't shake the feeling that the shooting had something to do with a certain Governor she had recently taken on as a client - then been screwed over by. With Reston acting as unstable as he was, Quinn's identity coming to light and the abrupt end to the trial and David poking around where he had no business, Olivia wasn't sure how much longer they could keep their dirty little secret. It was as if all the evidenced they had flushed away had backed up and was briskly rising back up all at once.
She'd lied and cheated and manipulated and had kept telling herself it was for the good of the country but all she had done was hurt Fitz over and over in the process. And now he was in a hospital bed because of her.
No matter how many times she had left him and told him to go away, she knew her feelings for him would never change. She was contrite that it took him getting shot for her to finally admit that to herself. She couldn't look into his eyes and tell him that: finally tell him that she absolutely wanted to be with him even if it meant throwing away all they had worked for, and forget Cyrus and Edison and the press and to hell with the opinion of the constituents. For the moment, though, she would have to be content to whisper to him at his bedside in the wee hours of the morning.
Just being by his side made some part of her feel at peace. He w a breathing, however shallowly, and the lock of hair that curled on his forehead was perfectly in place. He was alive and she liked to believe that he felt her presence - that maybe some part of him felt an electricity in the air when she was near and he knew she was still there for him, still in love with him.
"Do you remember our late night visits to the Rose Garden? You would always find some ridiculous new way to invite me out, like sending the confused interns with some cryptic message. I would get so upset with you for involving them but would show up anyway and yell at you for a few minutes and you'd just nod and stare at me. Then we'd laugh about it and I always forgave you. I know I say a lot of hurtful things and I get mad and I leave but I'll always forgive you. I can't live without you."
She noticed that she had begun to chatter but was cut off by a slight pressure on her hand. Olivia started down at where their hands were intertwined, praying her mind wasn't playing tricks on her. It felt like hours, though it was closer to fifteen minutes later, but this time she saw his finger gently struggle to grasp hers. Her eyes traveled up to his face, prepared for his eyes to fly open and shine with recognition like in the movies, but his face remained still, though his breathing seemed steadier to her. To anyone else, it would have appeared nothing medically significant had occurred and Fitz was just a brain damaged patient reacting to the distant sound of a voice, but Olivia knew he was aware of her presence, and that he felt the same way.