Disclaimer: None of the Savant World/the Benedicts belong to me – all rights to Joss Stirling.
Chapter Twenty-One – Xav's POV
361,481. That is the number of babies born every day. That makes 251 babies born every minute, approximately four babies every second. And I have no idea whether ours is alive. Crystal once told me that the worst part of me being in hospital after that Savant attack was the waiting, the not knowing. She was right. It is torture. I've worked in this hospital for three years now and never have I actually spent any time in the waiting room. As I study the faces of family and friends, I notice that one pattern is always recurring. Hope and pain. Not physical pain, just pure emotional pain. One elderly lady looks up, meets my eyes and nods. She can see it on my face, too.
Crystal has been gone for over an hour, longer than a usual C-section. I've called both sides of the family who will be coming over as soon as possible. The clock arms move closer to midnight and I decide I can't wait any longer. After years of walking these halls, I have no problem finding the way to the operating theatre. I deliberately decided not to watch. Standing helplessly behind a glass wall, watching how my colleagues and friends pull our child out of our wife's abdomen while trying to keep her heart beating would just have me pounding on the glass, screaming orders and begging Crystal.
But now, as I stand there watching the doctors work on my soulfinder, a memory pops up in my brain. The day we found out that Crystal had pre-eclampsia, she didn't want to talk to me. She felt guilty for not being able to give me a child, I felt guilty for actually considering accepting her apology, as if she'd really done something wrong. That same night, she and I talked. She was very adamant about doing what the doctor said, even though I could see she wasn't thrilled by the prospect of working from home and eventually, not being able to work at all for a while. She wanted to have this baby so bad, she wanted me to have this baby so bad, she did everything to keep it. She ate healthy (something she very rarely did before her pregnancy), she kept herself fit though without raising her blood pressure too much, she looked after herself. She wanted me to have this baby so bad, she gave up everything.
Don't you dare give up, Cupcake!
I know it's useless as my order bounces off an invisible wall.
Keep breathing! Keep that wonderful, kind heart of yours beating so we can see our child together! Keep your –
Just as a beautiful cry cuts through the sounds of the operating theatre, the ECG emits that heart-stopping, dreaded, endless beep.
"Crystal!" I don't think as I pound my fist on the glass. Anything to keep her heart beating.
"She's crashing!" The doctor quickly passes the baby, our gorgeous little child, to a nurse who nods up at me and gestures something though I have no idea what she wants to say.
At once, the surgeon brings out the defibrillator paddles and begins with the resuscitation.
Please, please, please. Come on, Crystal! Keep your heart beating! You have a baby, a child that needs you, I need you.
I don't do anything to stop the tears from falling and the sobs from coming out as my fist gives up on the glass.
"Come on! Crystal! Please keep breathing!"
Then it's there, that beat, that heart that I love so much, belonging to the woman I couldn't bear to lose. A sob and sigh of relief escapes my mouth as I let my head fall against the glass, now that my heart has started up again as well.
"Xav?" I turn around to see Ellie, a good friend of Crystal and mine and a colleague, standing there in scrubs and blood-covered gloves. Crystal's blood. Ellie quickly disposes of the gloves and pulls me into a hug.
"Come with me." She says and starts pulling me towards a room I've never been in in my three years at the hospital.
"Congratulations, Xav. It's a boy."
I don't know how long I kneel beside my son's incubator. My son. Crystal was right after all.
"Listen, buddy" I start to whisper as another woman enters the room and kneels down in front of an incubator close to the door. "You need to be tough now. Your mom's a fighter, alright? And I know that you're gonna take after her, okay? So I just need you to keep fighting. Just keep fighting because your mom is Crystal Benedict and her strength –"
My voice breaks and I know that I won't be able to say much more so I press a kiss against his tiny fingers before closing the incubator and getting to my feet.
The doctors say that they have no idea when Crystal's going to wake up and for once, I feel the need to thank them for their honesty. They say that throughout the whole seven and a half months, Crystal's physical strength slowly deteriorated, her body growing weaker and weaker. They say it could take hours or weeks. Nobody knows.
"Hey, Cupcake." I say on the sixth night. As a doctor myself, I have the privilege of visiting outside of the usual hours, so I sleep during the day while the family stays with her, and then at night, I come here and spend the night with her.
"How're you doing?"
Silence. It is the same every night but I refuse to give up asking that question. I run a hand across my face, wincing when my finger flits over the cut I got while shaving. Diamond has been forcing me to shave, always saying 'You don't want to be looking scruffy when she wakes up, do you?', always laced with a touch of false optimism.
"So my brother has finally knocked up your sister. About time you'd think, they've been married for five years." I let out a shaky laugh and take Crystal's icy hand in mine.
"Listen, darlin'. I need you to wake up."
Silence.
"Our little boy is doing fine. He's growing normally, he's putting on a solid amount of weight. He's fighting, so you have to do the same, alright?"
Nothing.
"We don't even have a name yet. You said no to all of my suggestions, I said no to all of your suggestions so we're kinda screwed, aren't we?"
Only the (thankfully insistent) beeping of the heart rate monitor.
"We can't keep calling him 'little boy' or 'buddy'. I can't keep calling him that. We need you, Crystal. Your son needs you, your soulfinder needs you. If you don't wake –"
I refuse to let my mind go there. She will wake up. She has to.
"I know there is one name both of us agreed on, but I can't for the love of God remember it." I press kiss after kiss on her cold forehead and try to recall that argument we had.
"I just need you to wake up and tell me that name, okay?"
Just wake up and tell me the name. I whisper before I settle my head on our clasped hands and let the tiredness take over.
The first indications of dawn tug me back into the land of the living again and as I glance outside the window, I can tell that it's going to be sunny today. It's going to be sunny and warm on the outside and still grey and bleak on the in-
"Caleb"
My head whips around so fast I swear I can hear something crack but I don't care. Lying on that hospital bed, is my beautiful soulfinder with greasy hair, pale skin and chapped lips and I can finally look into her eyes. Her wonderful, lively eyes that look at me with so much love that I keep mine open as I kiss her, so that I can look into them a bit longer.
"Caleb Charles Benedict" Crystal croaks again and manages to pull her lips into a smile before slowly reaching up to give me another kiss.
"Crystal Benedict, you scared the shit out of me. Don't ever do that again!" I gasp laughing and lean my forehead against hers.
"You said I had to wake up and tell you the name. So I did." She shrugs her shoulders, another little thing that I've missed so much over the last week and I can't keep the relieved laughter in any longer.
"And don't you dare go back to sleep again, Mrs Benedict. You have a son to meet."
Is he okay?
Hearing my soulfinder's voice in my mind after such a long time is like heaven on earth. My world has been sent turning again and I couldn't be more grateful.
He's fine. Premature, still in an incubator but he's fine. He's looking forward to meeting his mom.
"Can I see him now?"
"I'll first get a doctor to do some tests and then I'll organise a wheelchair to bring you to him."
At the first mention of wheelchair, Crystal's face forms into that adorable pout and she says defiantly, "I can walk."
"You were unconscious for six days after a C-section. You can't walk, trust me."
Without saying a word, she pulls me in for another mind-blowing kiss before answering.
I trust you with my life, Xav Benedict. That's why I decided to wake up.
So, here it is :) This story is going to have four more chapters – with quite large time jumps in between… After this, I'm either going to start on something similar (One-Shot collection) for Yves and Phoenix ('Band of Thieves') or do Caleb's story about finding his soulfinder. I did a lot of reading on eclampsia and premature births and C-sections but if I got anything majorly wrong, feel free to tell me. The number of babies born every day is from the United States Census Bureau 2010 so the number isn't exactly correct though close, I guess.
The thing with watching an operation I got from American TV series such as One Tree Hill so they may not be quite correct, I apologize if not.
Caleb was suggested to me by a very lovely reader ages ago who has also given me the name for their second child which I will definitely use. If I remember correctly, Charles was Crystal's father's name so I thought it appropriate to be Caleb's middle name.
My soundtrack for writing this chapter was exactly one song – Open Your Eyes by Andrew Belle :)
Please review, it means a lot :)