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On good days, Frank wakes up.
For the first time since she's known him, he looks old lying there, eyes closed, finger pinched by a monitoring device, chest barely rising and falling with each breath. He looks gray and weary, his age finally unobscured by the intensity of his insight and the brilliance of his smile.
Fuck, she hates hospitals.
She's watched both of her parents die in hospital beds just like this, wither away before her eyes from cancer and heart disease. Frank has had two bullets in him, neck and chest. An inch either way, and he'd be dead. Perhaps the only reason he's still alive is that Trinity had assumed he was. He'd damn near convinced her, too, eyes blindly staring, shallow breaths stuttering and sputtering out.
Oxygen deprivation. Blood loss. Shock. No doctor in the world can tell her whether he'll be okay and, if he's okay, if he'll be Frank. He might just slip away in the night. Might be a vegetable. Might never wake up.
And if he does? The doctors have mentioned "partial memory loss" as if it's a minor thing, a relatively positive option. Sure, right, better than if he's blind or retarded or dead. But. Fuck. She needs him to remember: not only who had shot them both, but that last night they'd spent together at the hotel, making love on a cramped and creaky bed, surrounded by crime scene photos.
"I am so fucking selfish," she mutters to a room that might as well be empty. It has been two days since they almost died, two days since the parking lot. She's supposed to be in bed herself, a door or two away. Pain in her side notwithstanding, she's fine. No major blood loss. No organs hit. Nothing to see here, people, move along.
Where Frank's concerned, though, she's afraid just to read his chart. So she sits by his bed – the nurses have long since given up on chasing her out – in her fetching hospital gown, holds his hand, and hopes.
I love you. She's almost said it so many times, from the moment she knew he was leaving for Oregon until their last night together, when she'd told him with a kiss - several kisses - that she'd chosen him, and he'd fucking well better not leave again. But he doesn't know it. No one knows it. Frank's daughter has flown down from Washington to see him, a woman only a couple of years younger than Deb herself, and she'd explained her relationship to him in purely professional terms. "We work together." Right. Yeah. In the brief moments your father doesn't have his cock in me.
Fuck.
She wipes tears from her eyes, rebukes her internal monologue, and starts at feeling Frank's thumb stroke over the back of her hand. Only a tiny flicker of movement, but… She leans forward, wincing a little at the pain. "Frank?"
His eyes open gradually, blinking and squinting at the light, and he looks at her. His lips move: Debra.
Well that's a good sign. Right? She squeezes his hand tightly. "You're going to be fine. You're in the hospital."
He can somehow convey "no shit, Sherlock" without even speaking. Clearly, she thinks with a relieved smile, he must be fine. Slowly, he licks his lips. "Are you all right?"
"Course I'm all right. I'm not the one looking like an Egyptian fuckin' mummy…" She touches his face, unable to resist, as she realizes that the last thing he had seen must have been blood pouring from her side. "Do you… do you remember? The parking lot?"
"I love you," he says, when she had been expecting him to ask about Trinity, to demand to see the evidence, to be Frank Lundy, Special Agent Rock Star, even from a hospital bed. "I should have told you..."
"God, fuck, Frank…" She should probably be hollering for a doctor now, for Batista, for Frank's daughter. But she's really too caught up in kissing him to think of that. "I love you too. So much."
She just about stops herself from hugging him as tightly as she wants to, multiple bullet wounds and all. "I, um. I'm going to get a doctor. So don't slip into a coma or anything, okay?"
His expression is tired, but amused. "Wouldn't dare."
It takes her two weeks to get him out of the hospital and into Dexter's old apartment. There had been some drama about the place between Dex and Rita, but she's been too busy with Frank and Trinity and figuring out a good way to transfer her stuff from Anton's apartment to worry about any of it.
Frank's weak and – she guesses – still in considerable pain, but his eyes light up when they discuss the case. LaGuerta isn't happy with either of them working on anything resembling the Trinity case, and the official status of the shooting is still up in the air… but Deb knows all too well that this, and maybe only this, is going to help him get better.
His daughter had left for DC again after he was officially declared to be out of danger – no brain damage, no risk of falling prey to an opportunistic infection. She has a job and a boyfriend of her own, and Frank had insisted that his "partner" was going to take very good care of him.
"Partner?" she'd asked. "I feel like I'm in the Wild West."
Frank laid back and just looked at her, as if contemplating something. "I've always assumed that, on the relationship scale, it's somewhere between 'girlfriend' and 'fiancée'. Also, I suspect if I'm to be your boyfriend I might have to be at least twenty years younger."
Fiancée. After all they've been through, she's tempted to drop to one knee and propose, because fuck, either one of them could die at any moment, and he is the one she wants to be with. No way is she letting him leave again. She wants to eat his cooking and get him to teach her how to fish, and wake up to him every morning. But the last time she was engaged it was to a serial killer, and he's been married to the absolute love of his life. How could marriage be anything but a trauma or a betrayal for them?
"Right. Sixty. Practically dead and buried." Somehow, all of their usual jokes about his venerable age have become much less amusing in the past few weeks.
They have the worst sex ever in Dexter's old bed, thwarted by pain and bandages and guilt. But he takes her in his arms, quieting her tears of frustration, her whispered insistence that none of this would have happened if she'd never come to his hotel room, if she'd just stayed with him until morning, if… "I love you," he tells her, firm and clear. "And I'd prefer this, painkillers and scars and all, to still being alone in that hotel room, wanting you so very badly."
It's still not easy, later, but the absolute, blissful relief she feels to have him inside her again is worth any discomfort. This time they truly do take it slowly, the desperation of their night at the hotel having dissipated into something approaching security. They have all night. And the rest of their lives.
In a month, their wounds only scars, Frank is strong and vital and smiling again. They sit down to Thanksgiving dinner surrounded by family and friends, and are thankful for each other. For lives spared by inches. For second chances.
And in six months? A year? Perhaps a marriage proposal neither of them would flinch at, a house by the beach, vacations with family, a happily ever after?
On the bad days, he's nothing more than an autopsy report stashed in her desk, and an FBI badge she'll never give up. But on the good days, Deb kicks back in an office chair and dreams of seeing those eyes, one just a shade darker than the other, gazing at her lovingly again.