FF: Something Else We Can Never Have
Title: Something Else We Can Never Have
Author: Ellie elliestories
Rating: R
Peter/Olivia, Angst
Spoilers: Set during the future seen in "The Day We Died" (3.22)
Summary: They'd discussed it, of course, before getting married three years ago. In other circumstances, there would probably already be a child.
****
He was in the kitchen, dicing a tomato, when he heard her come through the front door. It shut heavily, and he didn't hear the usual thunk of her leather briefcase on the hardwood floor, just the steady click of heels back to their room. He continued with dinner preparations, keeping one ear cocked for her, and hearing nothing, not even the shower, which caused worry to start nagging at the edge of his mind as he rattled pots and skillets and wooden spoons. No matter how rough her day had been, she'd always come and bitched to him about it, usually over a glass of wine. Unless she was angry with him; he did a mental rundown of stupid things he'd done lately, at work and at home, and couldn't think of anything, except possibly the incident last week with the copy machine. But he hadn't actually broken it, and he'd done worse with little more than a glare and eye-roll from her.
Setting the stove to a low simmer, he wiped off his hands and headed back the hallway. "Olivia?" he called as he stepped through the open bedroom door, noting the abandoned heels beside the closet door and briefcase open on the chair. He glanced inside, and didn't notice anything more than the usual stack of files. But he also noticed the closed bathroom door, and tapped on it gently. "Honey? You all right?"
There wasn't quite a response, but he heard something from inside, a shifting of fabric and something that could have been a cough, or could have been a sob. He didn't take the time to figure it out, just opened the door slowly. The bathroom was cool and echoed with the creak of the still-new door. Olivia sat on the tile floor, her back against the side of the tub, arms wrapped around her knees, face the horrible blank she assumed when something truly terrible had happened. After seeing that she wasn't in immediate distress, his gaze swept the room for clues to the problem; it took less than five seconds to see the piece of white plastic on the counter. He looked down at it as he passed, and did his best to maintain a poker face as he sat down close beside her, one arm falling across her hunched shoulders.
She didn't say anything immediately, just heaved a great gasping sigh as the weight of his arm settled around her and leaned into him, just a bit. When she was quiet for a few more minutes, he ventured, "I guess this isn't about what I did to the copier."
A short bark of laughter escaped her then, and she shook her head, finally looking at him out of the corner of her eye. "No. Peter...I'm...we're...." One hand flew free from where it had been clasped around herself, and gestured at the counter.
"Pregnant." At his two hushed syllables, her face crumpled, and she looked close to tears. He pulled her closer then, almost into his lap, and let her bury her face in his shoulder, where she would be unable to see the flurry of emotions he couldn't quite keep from his face.
They'd discussed it, of course, before getting married three years ago. In other circumstances, there would probably already be a child, but with two high-risk careers at the locus of a collapsing universe, birth control had seemed a wiser option. He wondered where that had failed; admittedly, they didn't always remember the condom, but she was on the pill, too. He thought of those two days when she'd been held captive, when he'd almost gotten himself ambered getting her and the two other agents out, and they'd ended up unable to pull themselves apart in the back of an Expedition, tinted windows and their silence the only thing keeping the swirl of emergency personnel from noticing. He cleared his throat.
She pulled back a little and looked at him with watery eyes, tears not quite falling, though there was an edge of panic in her voice. "I drink coffee all day, and we drink with dinner. I eat like crap except when you cook. We don't know yet what that gas was at the Lauriol incident last week. I went through the floor at that warehouse in Pittsburgh. And the cortexiphan--"
"Hey, hey." His embrace tightened around her, and he kissed her softly, silencing her litany of worries. As she quietly got herself back under control, he allowed the first faint hint of a smile. However troubled she was, she was troubled for the child's future well-being, not over whether she should keep it, saving him from having to broach that subject. When she seemed a bit calmer, he kissed her forehead. "Why don't you come have some dinner, and we can talk."
She let him help her up, and hugged him close when they stood, arms crushingly tight around his ribs. "Can I have a minute?"
"Of course." His thumb brushed her cheek, and she looked calmer, if not quite happy.
By the time she joined him at the table, however, there was a thin smile on her face, which grew when he sat down a heaping plate of paella and a tall glass of milk in front of her. "Milk?"
"Figured that went better than OJ." Their grocery list would need some revising, he thought, as he settled down with his own plate and concessionary glass of water. They ate quietly for a few minutes before he asked, "What made you realize?"
She took a long drink of milk before answering him. "The pill I'm on only has quarterly periods. I was due for one last week."
"Ah." He should have known that, should have noticed that, at some point in the last few years, but they were apart as often as they were together. And when they were together, he was never particularly bothered by it. She'd been gone much of last week, and had come back from Richmond looking stressed, but he'd just attributed it to the case, and the duties she'd taken on as acting head of the division.
"So I could be anywhere from two weeks to three months along." Her gaze dropped down to her lap, as if examining herself would provide an answer. "I guess I should call and make an appointment with Dr. Cameron. See when we can run some tests and find out what's going on."
He nodded and took two bites before venturing, "You know, we have a portable ultrasound machine in the lab."
She put down her fork and stared at the tines for a moment, seemingly weighing his offer. He knew her well enough to know that part of her desperately wanted to know, to have it just be the two of them figuring it out, almost as much as she'd want to go alone and figure out what to tell him once she had all the facts. Eventually she looked up at him, face inscrutable. "Can you bring it home tomorrow?"
"I'll go get it tonight if you want me to." At her sharp nod, he smiled, and surveyed what was left of the meal on his plate. "If you clean up, I can be back by nine."
*
She hadn't particularly wanted the supervisory position, but she was the most experienced, and given her current condition, it made the most sense. Instead of being on the front lines of events, she was there after the fact, was at less risk but still in the loop, knew better than anyone except perhaps Peter what decisions needed to be made to try and salvage their world. Though this week, things in the main office had been slow, and while Peter was off with his team dealing with a vortex in the Chesapeake Bay, she was at her desk working on annual reviews. This was the part of the job she hadn't wanted. She tapped one finger on the edge of her keyboard and tried to think of a constructive way to tell Agent Kahn his marksmanship was subpar.
Gradually, she became aware of a pressure in her lower abdomen and she sat back, settling her hand on top of it. Fourteen weeks was a bit earlier than she was supposed to feel the baby moving, but this was definitely a new sensation. She took a few deep breaths, probing gently with her fingers and wishing Peter was just downstairs in the lab so she could call him, rather than in the middle of a body of water with vortex-distorted reception. After a few moments, the feeling seemed to fade, and she turned her attention back to the reviews.
A few minutes later, however, the feeling returned, clearer than before and focusing into something sharp and excruciating, burning. She felt suddenly light-headed, the world fading around her into something black-and-white, the bright white of the blank word processing page on the monitor before her seeming to flare. Fumbling across the desk in the direction of her phone, the glass desktop seemed icy and slick, and she couldn't quite make her fingers grip the phone. Trying to draw a lungful of air, she called out for her assistant, as loudly as she could, but she wasn't sure anyone had heard her before the world around her faded to black.
When she woke, it was to the steady weight of a warm hand on her knee, and a mild haze of painkillers. Blinking, she saw it was Peter attached to the hand, squeezing her knee a bit and smiling at her, though it was obvious from his eyes he'd been crying. She knew without asking why, or what had happened, and began to shake her head, trying to sit up. Her emotions had been all over the place in the last couple of weeks, not entirely due to hormones, but she'd finally settled on being happy. Now, though, she wasn't sure if she could cope with the emotional whiplash, and tears threatened; if she weren't in a hospital, she might have let them fall. "I want to go home."
The smile remained on his face, but didn't reach his eyes, which were crinkled with worry. "They want to keep you overnight. You lost a lot of blood...." He looked away from her then, didn't spell out what she'd known with one look at his face.
"I want to go home," she reiterated, fumbled for his hand with her own, squeezed desperately. If he'd had time to get back here, she'd been here for hours already, and a few more hours until morning wouldn't tell them anything that wasn't immediately obvious to her. And he knew how much she hated hospitals.
Peter sighed, and met her eyes again. She knew how happy he'd been, from the moment she'd told him, and the depth of pain in his face now was almost unbearable, if it hadn't been a reflection of her own. "Let me get the doctor, all right?" He squeezed her knee again, though the scratchy sheets, and disappeared out the door.
Alone, she took a few deep, gasping breaths, one hand pressed to her lips, the other falling down to her lap, over recently-formed swell of her abdomen. She wanted to go home and forget this had ever happened, to go back to where they'd been two months ago, when they'd been content in their decision that not having children was the only responsible thing. But she wanted to see her chart, know what had gone wrong, if it was something wrong with her, if they ever could. Outside the door, she heard the raised voices, muffled by the solid wood, of Peter and Dr. Cameron, urgent and insistent. Much as he might disagree with her, he'd take her home if that was what she wanted, whether the doctor wanted her to go or not.
There was a hush, and she did her best to compose herself in the beat before the door swung open to admit the physician and Peter, his arms crossed over his chest and looking sullen and stony faced.
"I understand you want to be discharged, Olivia?" Dr. Cameron's tone was meant to be placating, but rankled Olivia's already jagged nerves.
"I'd like to go home. With a copy of my chart." She did her best to sound firm. It was difficult, when what she really wanted was to curl up in her own bed, and either weep or sleep.
The OBGYN exchanged a glance with Peter, only to be met with a glower, before she responded to Olivia's directive. "It's against my better medical judgment. You've had a physically and psychologically traumatizing six hours. I know you think you've dealt with those sorts of things in your line of work, but this is--"
"Can I go home or not?" On a good day, she had little tolerance for mollycoddling, and wanted none of it now. She wanted to go hide, heal her wounds in private, not under these fluorescent lights and watchful eyes.
Dr. Cameron nodded cautiously. "I'm going to let you leave, so long as you go home, stay in bed for at least twenty-four more hours, take it easy through the weekend, and let your husband keep an eye on you. You can read your chart, and call me if you have any problems, or any questions. I want to see you for a followup on Monday, first thing. Okay?"
"Okay." That gave her four days to process things before she had to face anyone besides Peter. It was acceptable. She could have herself appearing normal by then.
So relieved was she to be leaving that she had barely protested Peter's insistence on a wheelchair to the exit, and he'd practically picked her up and put her in the passenger seat. Before he was in the driver's seat, she had opened the manila envelope with her copy of the medical records, and was reading.
"Olivia--" Peter's husky voice caught, and hung in the air of the car, carrying almost as much concern as his eyes in the dim light. She tried to nod, to say anything to him, but her chin wobbled and the tears she'd suppressed inside the hospital now welled back up in force. His arms were around her then, awkward in the seats of the SUV, but exactly what she needed as she buried her forehead against the curve of his neck. "Let's go home," she barely heard him whisper into her hair, but she was able to nod then, wanting nothing so much at that moment.
On the way, in spite of his furtive glances over at her at the traffic lights, she did her best to focus and understand the documents before her, instead of the ache radiating through her body. Over the years, she'd had enough experience that she could understand the terminology, and she did her best to distance herself as patient from what she was reading, tried to look at it objectively and understand. She needed to understand. As she read, her bottom lip was drawn deeper between her teeth, gnawing, until the coppery tang of blood assaulted her suddenly. She looked up from the papers and over at Peter, apparently concentrating deeply on navigating his way through their dark neighborhood.
"You already saw this." It wasn't a question, but she had questions, and hoped with his deeper scientific knowledge, he might have answers.
"I talked with the doctors. I think they told me everything that's in there." His voice was so neutral that she knew this was dangerous territory that she should probably leave alone while he was behind the wheel. But she couldn't wait.
"They told you what happened to...her." They hadn't known yet that it was a girl, had had an appointment for Tuesday to find that out.
He didn't look at her as he made the turn onto their street, but he nodded, once.
"Am I reading this right? Because it seems like, based on our prior experiences, that maybe...she crossed...."
"Yeah." His voice was tight, clipped, and his fingers gripping the steering wheel were white in the darkness. "The doctors couldn't understand it, but as soon as they started explaining...."
The turn up the driveway was sharp, and she couldn't contain a little gasp as it rattled her, feeling the seatbelt constrict across her lap. "I'm sorry." His voice barely reached her through her own haze of pain, but she looked over at him, still behind the wheel of the unmoving vehicle, and saw the tears rolling down his cheeks. One hand finally left the wheel and swiped at them before reaching across for her, clasping her hand like a lifeline. "I'm sorry." It wasn't, she knew, an apology for his driving.
There was no way to answer him, not in the least because she wasn't quite sure she was capable of forming words at this point. Instead, she tugged at his hand, pulling it up to her lips to graze a kiss across his knuckles. Her eyes closed, and she held their entwined hands to her cheek as she tried to get the pain and her emotions under control. Finally, after a wave of vertigo crashed through her and began to ebb, she managed, "I...I need to go lay down."
His grip on her hand relaxed, and he cupped her cheek for a second, before disengaging and slipping out of the driver's seat. He was around to her door before she had her seatbelt unbuckled, and seemed ready to carry her inside, but allowed her to to slide to the driveway on her own two feet, his arm sweeping around her waist as she did. Her hand dropped to rest over his where it sat on her hip, wanting him to know how grateful she was, but unable find the words. He held her just a bit closer, and she rested her cheek against his shoulder as he unlocked the front door.
She made a small noise of protest as he did pick her up inside the door, but he shushed her, kissing her temple gently, and carried her back to bed. When she was placed on its familiar, soft blankets, she realized how drained she truly was, and let her head fall back into the pillows, eyes flickering open just enough to watch Peter as he tenderly undressed her, moving her as little as possible as he traded her clothes for her favorite old t-shirt and sweats. She tried not to think of how good he would have been with a child as he tucked the covers up around her and kissed her forehead.
"Do you need anything?" His voice was a scratchy whisper.
She shook her head, burrowing deeper into the pillows and welcoming, soft sheets and curling onto her side. His hand kneaded gently across her shoulder before rising from the bed. There was something reassuringly normal about hearing him moving around the house, locking up and getting water in the kitchen, that lulled her to a place near sleep. When he returned to bed, it was habit and instinct that led her to roll towards him, until the twisting left her once more wide awake and near tears.
Peter gathered her close, shifting her gently into his embrace, and she gave in to her tears as his arms surrounded her. Hearing the hitch in his breathing as his chest rose and fell under her cheek, she knew he must be crying, too. Her fingers tangled in his t-shirt, as she felt his twining through her hair, snagging in the tangles.
After long silence, she pulled back a bit, enough to look up at him in the bedroom's darkness. "When I realized, I wasn't even sure I wanted it. But now, God, Peter...."
She saw his eyes flicker shut, felt his heavy exhalation, and his arms tighten just a bit around her. "I didn't realize how much I wanted it, either, until you told me," he whispered across the pillow, voice catching just a bit. She tucked herself back against him, curling her head into the hollow of his throat, listening to the steady beat of his heart.
"And now it's something else that we can never have." The melancholy thought slipped out, almost before it was fully formed, so quietly she wasn't sure it hadn't been mere thought.
"No," he countered, quietly but firmly, the stubble of his chin catching in her hair as he shook his head. "It's something else for us to work toward figuring out. Save the universe, then have a baby. Just like everyone else's life plan."
She managed a little huff of laughter at that, more because she knew she should than that she found it funny. Odds of either of those things coming to pass felt so astronomically small right now that they might as well be impossible. Closing her eyes, she tried to slow her breathing and concentrate on Peter's warm, strong arms around her. Neither were strangers to long dark nights, and through this one, they quietly held tight to one another.
Author: Ellie elliestories
Rating: R
Peter/Olivia, Angst
Spoilers: Set during the future seen in "The Day We Died" (3.22)
Summary: They'd discussed it, of course, before getting married three years ago. In other circumstances, there would probably already be a child.
****
He was in the kitchen, dicing a tomato, when he heard her come through the front door. It shut heavily, and he didn't hear the usual thunk of her leather briefcase on the hardwood floor, just the steady click of heels back to their room. He continued with dinner preparations, keeping one ear cocked for her, and hearing nothing, not even the shower, which caused worry to start nagging at the edge of his mind as he rattled pots and skillets and wooden spoons. No matter how rough her day had been, she'd always come and bitched to him about it, usually over a glass of wine. Unless she was angry with him; he did a mental rundown of stupid things he'd done lately, at work and at home, and couldn't think of anything, except possibly the incident last week with the copy machine. But he hadn't actually broken it, and he'd done worse with little more than a glare and eye-roll from her.
Setting the stove to a low simmer, he wiped off his hands and headed back the hallway. "Olivia?" he called as he stepped through the open bedroom door, noting the abandoned heels beside the closet door and briefcase open on the chair. He glanced inside, and didn't notice anything more than the usual stack of files. But he also noticed the closed bathroom door, and tapped on it gently. "Honey? You all right?"
There wasn't quite a response, but he heard something from inside, a shifting of fabric and something that could have been a cough, or could have been a sob. He didn't take the time to figure it out, just opened the door slowly. The bathroom was cool and echoed with the creak of the still-new door. Olivia sat on the tile floor, her back against the side of the tub, arms wrapped around her knees, face the horrible blank she assumed when something truly terrible had happened. After seeing that she wasn't in immediate distress, his gaze swept the room for clues to the problem; it took less than five seconds to see the piece of white plastic on the counter. He looked down at it as he passed, and did his best to maintain a poker face as he sat down close beside her, one arm falling across her hunched shoulders.
She didn't say anything immediately, just heaved a great gasping sigh as the weight of his arm settled around her and leaned into him, just a bit. When she was quiet for a few more minutes, he ventured, "I guess this isn't about what I did to the copier."
A short bark of laughter escaped her then, and she shook her head, finally looking at him out of the corner of her eye. "No. Peter...I'm...we're...." One hand flew free from where it had been clasped around herself, and gestured at the counter.
"Pregnant." At his two hushed syllables, her face crumpled, and she looked close to tears. He pulled her closer then, almost into his lap, and let her bury her face in his shoulder, where she would be unable to see the flurry of emotions he couldn't quite keep from his face.
They'd discussed it, of course, before getting married three years ago. In other circumstances, there would probably already be a child, but with two high-risk careers at the locus of a collapsing universe, birth control had seemed a wiser option. He wondered where that had failed; admittedly, they didn't always remember the condom, but she was on the pill, too. He thought of those two days when she'd been held captive, when he'd almost gotten himself ambered getting her and the two other agents out, and they'd ended up unable to pull themselves apart in the back of an Expedition, tinted windows and their silence the only thing keeping the swirl of emergency personnel from noticing. He cleared his throat.
She pulled back a little and looked at him with watery eyes, tears not quite falling, though there was an edge of panic in her voice. "I drink coffee all day, and we drink with dinner. I eat like crap except when you cook. We don't know yet what that gas was at the Lauriol incident last week. I went through the floor at that warehouse in Pittsburgh. And the cortexiphan--"
"Hey, hey." His embrace tightened around her, and he kissed her softly, silencing her litany of worries. As she quietly got herself back under control, he allowed the first faint hint of a smile. However troubled she was, she was troubled for the child's future well-being, not over whether she should keep it, saving him from having to broach that subject. When she seemed a bit calmer, he kissed her forehead. "Why don't you come have some dinner, and we can talk."
She let him help her up, and hugged him close when they stood, arms crushingly tight around his ribs. "Can I have a minute?"
"Of course." His thumb brushed her cheek, and she looked calmer, if not quite happy.
By the time she joined him at the table, however, there was a thin smile on her face, which grew when he sat down a heaping plate of paella and a tall glass of milk in front of her. "Milk?"
"Figured that went better than OJ." Their grocery list would need some revising, he thought, as he settled down with his own plate and concessionary glass of water. They ate quietly for a few minutes before he asked, "What made you realize?"
She took a long drink of milk before answering him. "The pill I'm on only has quarterly periods. I was due for one last week."
"Ah." He should have known that, should have noticed that, at some point in the last few years, but they were apart as often as they were together. And when they were together, he was never particularly bothered by it. She'd been gone much of last week, and had come back from Richmond looking stressed, but he'd just attributed it to the case, and the duties she'd taken on as acting head of the division.
"So I could be anywhere from two weeks to three months along." Her gaze dropped down to her lap, as if examining herself would provide an answer. "I guess I should call and make an appointment with Dr. Cameron. See when we can run some tests and find out what's going on."
He nodded and took two bites before venturing, "You know, we have a portable ultrasound machine in the lab."
She put down her fork and stared at the tines for a moment, seemingly weighing his offer. He knew her well enough to know that part of her desperately wanted to know, to have it just be the two of them figuring it out, almost as much as she'd want to go alone and figure out what to tell him once she had all the facts. Eventually she looked up at him, face inscrutable. "Can you bring it home tomorrow?"
"I'll go get it tonight if you want me to." At her sharp nod, he smiled, and surveyed what was left of the meal on his plate. "If you clean up, I can be back by nine."
*
She hadn't particularly wanted the supervisory position, but she was the most experienced, and given her current condition, it made the most sense. Instead of being on the front lines of events, she was there after the fact, was at less risk but still in the loop, knew better than anyone except perhaps Peter what decisions needed to be made to try and salvage their world. Though this week, things in the main office had been slow, and while Peter was off with his team dealing with a vortex in the Chesapeake Bay, she was at her desk working on annual reviews. This was the part of the job she hadn't wanted. She tapped one finger on the edge of her keyboard and tried to think of a constructive way to tell Agent Kahn his marksmanship was subpar.
Gradually, she became aware of a pressure in her lower abdomen and she sat back, settling her hand on top of it. Fourteen weeks was a bit earlier than she was supposed to feel the baby moving, but this was definitely a new sensation. She took a few deep breaths, probing gently with her fingers and wishing Peter was just downstairs in the lab so she could call him, rather than in the middle of a body of water with vortex-distorted reception. After a few moments, the feeling seemed to fade, and she turned her attention back to the reviews.
A few minutes later, however, the feeling returned, clearer than before and focusing into something sharp and excruciating, burning. She felt suddenly light-headed, the world fading around her into something black-and-white, the bright white of the blank word processing page on the monitor before her seeming to flare. Fumbling across the desk in the direction of her phone, the glass desktop seemed icy and slick, and she couldn't quite make her fingers grip the phone. Trying to draw a lungful of air, she called out for her assistant, as loudly as she could, but she wasn't sure anyone had heard her before the world around her faded to black.
When she woke, it was to the steady weight of a warm hand on her knee, and a mild haze of painkillers. Blinking, she saw it was Peter attached to the hand, squeezing her knee a bit and smiling at her, though it was obvious from his eyes he'd been crying. She knew without asking why, or what had happened, and began to shake her head, trying to sit up. Her emotions had been all over the place in the last couple of weeks, not entirely due to hormones, but she'd finally settled on being happy. Now, though, she wasn't sure if she could cope with the emotional whiplash, and tears threatened; if she weren't in a hospital, she might have let them fall. "I want to go home."
The smile remained on his face, but didn't reach his eyes, which were crinkled with worry. "They want to keep you overnight. You lost a lot of blood...." He looked away from her then, didn't spell out what she'd known with one look at his face.
"I want to go home," she reiterated, fumbled for his hand with her own, squeezed desperately. If he'd had time to get back here, she'd been here for hours already, and a few more hours until morning wouldn't tell them anything that wasn't immediately obvious to her. And he knew how much she hated hospitals.
Peter sighed, and met her eyes again. She knew how happy he'd been, from the moment she'd told him, and the depth of pain in his face now was almost unbearable, if it hadn't been a reflection of her own. "Let me get the doctor, all right?" He squeezed her knee again, though the scratchy sheets, and disappeared out the door.
Alone, she took a few deep, gasping breaths, one hand pressed to her lips, the other falling down to her lap, over recently-formed swell of her abdomen. She wanted to go home and forget this had ever happened, to go back to where they'd been two months ago, when they'd been content in their decision that not having children was the only responsible thing. But she wanted to see her chart, know what had gone wrong, if it was something wrong with her, if they ever could. Outside the door, she heard the raised voices, muffled by the solid wood, of Peter and Dr. Cameron, urgent and insistent. Much as he might disagree with her, he'd take her home if that was what she wanted, whether the doctor wanted her to go or not.
There was a hush, and she did her best to compose herself in the beat before the door swung open to admit the physician and Peter, his arms crossed over his chest and looking sullen and stony faced.
"I understand you want to be discharged, Olivia?" Dr. Cameron's tone was meant to be placating, but rankled Olivia's already jagged nerves.
"I'd like to go home. With a copy of my chart." She did her best to sound firm. It was difficult, when what she really wanted was to curl up in her own bed, and either weep or sleep.
The OBGYN exchanged a glance with Peter, only to be met with a glower, before she responded to Olivia's directive. "It's against my better medical judgment. You've had a physically and psychologically traumatizing six hours. I know you think you've dealt with those sorts of things in your line of work, but this is--"
"Can I go home or not?" On a good day, she had little tolerance for mollycoddling, and wanted none of it now. She wanted to go hide, heal her wounds in private, not under these fluorescent lights and watchful eyes.
Dr. Cameron nodded cautiously. "I'm going to let you leave, so long as you go home, stay in bed for at least twenty-four more hours, take it easy through the weekend, and let your husband keep an eye on you. You can read your chart, and call me if you have any problems, or any questions. I want to see you for a followup on Monday, first thing. Okay?"
"Okay." That gave her four days to process things before she had to face anyone besides Peter. It was acceptable. She could have herself appearing normal by then.
So relieved was she to be leaving that she had barely protested Peter's insistence on a wheelchair to the exit, and he'd practically picked her up and put her in the passenger seat. Before he was in the driver's seat, she had opened the manila envelope with her copy of the medical records, and was reading.
"Olivia--" Peter's husky voice caught, and hung in the air of the car, carrying almost as much concern as his eyes in the dim light. She tried to nod, to say anything to him, but her chin wobbled and the tears she'd suppressed inside the hospital now welled back up in force. His arms were around her then, awkward in the seats of the SUV, but exactly what she needed as she buried her forehead against the curve of his neck. "Let's go home," she barely heard him whisper into her hair, but she was able to nod then, wanting nothing so much at that moment.
On the way, in spite of his furtive glances over at her at the traffic lights, she did her best to focus and understand the documents before her, instead of the ache radiating through her body. Over the years, she'd had enough experience that she could understand the terminology, and she did her best to distance herself as patient from what she was reading, tried to look at it objectively and understand. She needed to understand. As she read, her bottom lip was drawn deeper between her teeth, gnawing, until the coppery tang of blood assaulted her suddenly. She looked up from the papers and over at Peter, apparently concentrating deeply on navigating his way through their dark neighborhood.
"You already saw this." It wasn't a question, but she had questions, and hoped with his deeper scientific knowledge, he might have answers.
"I talked with the doctors. I think they told me everything that's in there." His voice was so neutral that she knew this was dangerous territory that she should probably leave alone while he was behind the wheel. But she couldn't wait.
"They told you what happened to...her." They hadn't known yet that it was a girl, had had an appointment for Tuesday to find that out.
He didn't look at her as he made the turn onto their street, but he nodded, once.
"Am I reading this right? Because it seems like, based on our prior experiences, that maybe...she crossed...."
"Yeah." His voice was tight, clipped, and his fingers gripping the steering wheel were white in the darkness. "The doctors couldn't understand it, but as soon as they started explaining...."
The turn up the driveway was sharp, and she couldn't contain a little gasp as it rattled her, feeling the seatbelt constrict across her lap. "I'm sorry." His voice barely reached her through her own haze of pain, but she looked over at him, still behind the wheel of the unmoving vehicle, and saw the tears rolling down his cheeks. One hand finally left the wheel and swiped at them before reaching across for her, clasping her hand like a lifeline. "I'm sorry." It wasn't, she knew, an apology for his driving.
There was no way to answer him, not in the least because she wasn't quite sure she was capable of forming words at this point. Instead, she tugged at his hand, pulling it up to her lips to graze a kiss across his knuckles. Her eyes closed, and she held their entwined hands to her cheek as she tried to get the pain and her emotions under control. Finally, after a wave of vertigo crashed through her and began to ebb, she managed, "I...I need to go lay down."
His grip on her hand relaxed, and he cupped her cheek for a second, before disengaging and slipping out of the driver's seat. He was around to her door before she had her seatbelt unbuckled, and seemed ready to carry her inside, but allowed her to to slide to the driveway on her own two feet, his arm sweeping around her waist as she did. Her hand dropped to rest over his where it sat on her hip, wanting him to know how grateful she was, but unable find the words. He held her just a bit closer, and she rested her cheek against his shoulder as he unlocked the front door.
She made a small noise of protest as he did pick her up inside the door, but he shushed her, kissing her temple gently, and carried her back to bed. When she was placed on its familiar, soft blankets, she realized how drained she truly was, and let her head fall back into the pillows, eyes flickering open just enough to watch Peter as he tenderly undressed her, moving her as little as possible as he traded her clothes for her favorite old t-shirt and sweats. She tried not to think of how good he would have been with a child as he tucked the covers up around her and kissed her forehead.
"Do you need anything?" His voice was a scratchy whisper.
She shook her head, burrowing deeper into the pillows and welcoming, soft sheets and curling onto her side. His hand kneaded gently across her shoulder before rising from the bed. There was something reassuringly normal about hearing him moving around the house, locking up and getting water in the kitchen, that lulled her to a place near sleep. When he returned to bed, it was habit and instinct that led her to roll towards him, until the twisting left her once more wide awake and near tears.
Peter gathered her close, shifting her gently into his embrace, and she gave in to her tears as his arms surrounded her. Hearing the hitch in his breathing as his chest rose and fell under her cheek, she knew he must be crying, too. Her fingers tangled in his t-shirt, as she felt his twining through her hair, snagging in the tangles.
After long silence, she pulled back a bit, enough to look up at him in the bedroom's darkness. "When I realized, I wasn't even sure I wanted it. But now, God, Peter...."
She saw his eyes flicker shut, felt his heavy exhalation, and his arms tighten just a bit around her. "I didn't realize how much I wanted it, either, until you told me," he whispered across the pillow, voice catching just a bit. She tucked herself back against him, curling her head into the hollow of his throat, listening to the steady beat of his heart.
"And now it's something else that we can never have." The melancholy thought slipped out, almost before it was fully formed, so quietly she wasn't sure it hadn't been mere thought.
"No," he countered, quietly but firmly, the stubble of his chin catching in her hair as he shook his head. "It's something else for us to work toward figuring out. Save the universe, then have a baby. Just like everyone else's life plan."
She managed a little huff of laughter at that, more because she knew she should than that she found it funny. Odds of either of those things coming to pass felt so astronomically small right now that they might as well be impossible. Closing her eyes, she tried to slow her breathing and concentrate on Peter's warm, strong arms around her. Neither were strangers to long dark nights, and through this one, they quietly held tight to one another.