AN: A continuation. Thanks to Asha710 for betaing.
-Ari
Chapter 2: God lives for small favors
It is late when Olivia startles awake, the sensation of falling shaking her from her painfully light slumber. She had fallen asleep in a hard-backed chair next to Peter's hospital bed, her inherent guilt keeping her here late most nights. But it's the rustling of sheets that brings her back to full attention. Peter's whole body is moving, twitching and jerking. His head rolls, side to side, 180 degrees. His fingers flex open and closed near his thighs and his small kicks are creating ripples in the blanket that covers his lower half. She's up in a second and at his side, gripping the edge of the bed.
He's clenching his teeth and grunting like he's in pain. Two instincts, elation to see him move after weeks of lifelessness and anxiety at his apparent anguish, grapple in her chest, She reaches out to touch his shoulder, her fingers so unsure that she might not even be touching him at all.
"Peter?" she whispers. "Peter, can you open your eyes?"
And she's pretty sure her heart might give out when he actually does. There is a blindness in his eyes, a hazy membrane separating his consciousness from the Peter Bishop that she is trying to reach, trapped somewhere under this comatose cocoon. She finds herself begging some higher power for him to see her, to know that she is here and to feel her unrelenting remorse.
"Peter? Can you hear me?"
"Liv?"
His voice is strained and soft and injured, but he's here somewhere and Olivia's heart thuds in her throat as she hears Walter's loud upheaval from his own slumber.
"Liv? Where is dad?"
Walter joins them on Peter's other side.
"Here, son. I am here, you beautiful boy! I am here!"
Peter's head jerks towards Walter and his eyes widen and his heart rate pushes the monitor to beep erratically. He looks back Olivia and she aches.
"Liv. Scared. I'm scared."
His eyelids slide back over their sockets and his body stills. Olivia's heart swells a thousand times its natural size before it sinks to the pit of her stomach, as Walter runs and yells into the hallway before dropping to his knees.
"My son. My son!"
Peter had been responding to stimuli for weeks - a squeeze of Olivia's hand or contracting eyelids when Walter would sing him lullabies - before he finally began to wake up. It had taken several days, several heart-achingly long days as Peter fell and rose out of his coma again and again. It felt like a purgatorial sequence every time he opened his eyes, an endless reprise of hope and doubt as he would begin to speak in fragments and incomplete thoughts, then fall under again. He was scared, he would tell her. He didn't understand. Where was he? Help him. Please.
It was all she could do to squeeze his hand, whisper comforting ideas and keep herself from sobbing uncontrollably from the sheer frustration from the omnipotence of this pain. I'm here, I'm here. You're doing so good, Peter. Come back to us. We miss you. We want you. We need you.
It was an endless mantra, and she would say it until he walked out of this god-forsaken place. She felt a little selfish as she realized that she was here just as much for herself as she was for him. The realization was more frightening than anything she'd seen during her day job.
At first, he hardly resembled the man she had come to know and reluctantly appreciate, and she hated herself for her impatience. But as the days ticked by, his memory and his character slowly trickled back from wherever his genius brain stored his reserve of sarcasm and wit. Walter was daily in his impetuous demands for Peter's release so that he could run his own tests and ensure longevity in his wellness, but the doctors continually refused, sharing ominously condescending looks behind the mad scientist's back. Olivia mused that she would sympathize for Walter, maybe even defend his honor like the perverse version of a white knight she has forced herself to become. But not today and not tomorrow. She couldn't find the energy with all her reserves spent on Peter and wondering if she will ever stop hating herself this much.
After about a week, the only thing out of the ordinary was Peter's constant fatigue and his absence from the job. It was a frightening realization when she finally admitted to herself that she missed seeing his face break into that lopsided smirk that used to irk her so and craved to hear him chuckling at her for no reason at all. Where she used to squirm under his laser-like focus, she suddenly coveted the past intensity of their interactions. Peter was usually sleeping by the time she would get off work from a double shift to take care of the increased caseload, two geniuses short from the team. Walter was often vacant and listless during his time in the lab, which was abbreviated while Peter was in the hospital. He insisted on sleeping at the hospital.
So it was hardly unusual when Peter was sleeping when she finally made it to the hospital at dusk after a day of wrangling witness statements about a goo bomb in an airport that killed 12 people. She smelled like formaldehyde and she felt and probably looked like hell, but she drank in the calmness she felt here, knowing that Peter was finally healing. She could normally hear Walter snoring on the couch when she visited, but he was nowhere to be found. It was still, like it had been years since any movement had disturbed the atomic particles that made up the room's mass. She approached Peter noiselessly and sat on the edge of the bed near his hip, feeling a little bold in the silence of the room. This felt oddly intimate, and with no intruding eyes and minds, she finally let herself take comfort in it, whatever "it" was. She felt an odd surge of anxiety at his motionlessness and the tomb-like inertia of the room, putting a cool hand on his warm neck and finding his pulse. A living rhythm that flooded her with something oddly akin to hope.
She could feel his consciousness stirring before she saw it. A gentle hand curled around her wrist as she felt his heartbeat crescendo beneath her fingers as his eyes flickered open, and his stare stretched over a chasm in her universe: one where she could imagine life and the job without Peter, and one where she did not want to.
"Do you make it a habit to check the vitals of all the patients?" he said, his voice coated in rasp from lack of use, but spirited.
"I've seen you pull out that shit-eating grin with unspeakable weapons pointed at your face that could rip you apart the molecular level," she couldn't miss the chance to chide him, and it was comforting in some perverse way when that smirk appeared that she used to detest so much. "I'm surprised you let a little brain trauma stop you."
He pushed a chuckle through his dry throat, and Olivia felt a weird anxiety roll in her chest. She couldn't find it in herself to move her hand from his warm skin and he wasn't releasing her from his gentle grip on her wrist, and it was painfully gratifying to touch him. She must have been smiling at him, because his eyes were soft as they searched for something in her own.
"They only thing that's been stopping me is a blonde hardass with a common-sense problem," he said, meaning it in jest, but the softness in his voice was tugging at something deep in her that she had long ago thought dead, something she was still trying to bury. "I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm a little self-destructive."
This time, she laughed, her eyes crinkling against a well of unease and relief.
"Aren't we all?"
His smile was slow and easy, and like always, he stared at her for too long, squeezing her wrist in solidarity and something else that Olivia still couldn't bring herself to ask him about. She began mindlessly running her thumb along his jawline as his massaged her palm, still not ready to release him.
"I talked to the doctor on duty tonight," she said. "She said we can probably take you home tomorrow."
He paused, his eyes dropping to his hand as he traced Olivia's arm with his fingers, goosebumps rolling up her skin, until he finally mirrored her and cradled her chin.
"I think I'd rather stay right here."
