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1.
He's weaker than either of them ever anticipated in the first days. They are both doctors and they know the human body inside out, yet somehow it manages to catch them by surprise, how frail a body can be.
And she knows he hates it so much sometimes she's afraid he thinks it would have been better not to make it out of the hospital alive.
In truth, she does not think he really believes that, but the man who sits in front of her is sometimes so mercurial and unpredictable she is floored by the contrast to the man who lives in her memory. It scares her how the smallest twist of fate can change everything.
But she knows, persistently, that this is part of what love is. The bad times, equal to the good. And that she loves him has not changed at all.
She doesn't truly think he has changed either, underneath his pain and confusion and frustration at this new world of physical limitations that were never there before. She still sees him, the heart of him, perennial underneath.
She also does not think his love for her has changed, although he no longer makes that an easy conviction to hold. For weeks, he has pushed her away, forced her to maintain so much distance from him that at times, she almost believes he really wants her to go.
"Just leave me alone, Claire," he snaps, after a bad fall that's left her shaken and his ego badly bruised. He refuses to be helped, and she is at her wits' end. "You're not helping."
It stings to hear him speak so harshly to her; she is only human and her feelings can only take so many hits. But she stays with him, and will stay, until he asks her to leave.
And this he does not do.
When he was discharged he tried telling her he would get someone else, Lim, probably, or a paid nurse, to help him with his recovery at home.
She still recoils from the memory of how much that hurt her; she did not understand his rejection at first at all, but she thinks she gets it now. Now she knows it was never about wanting someone else to be there more. He does not push her away because he loves her less; it is because he aches to give her more. He creates distance to keep her from witnessing his weakness, when he is so used to being strong.
It breaks her heart that he would think those things could change anything for her.
So she remains. She took time off in the beginning, and she's been here ever since through the painstaking days in which everything has got much, much worse, like a fever reaching its peak before anyone can even contemplate things getting better.
In the thick of it, he remains stubbornly closed off, unable or unwilling to let her in, or perhaps both at the same time.
"Here's the thing about love," she tells him steadily, as she pushes his wheelchair slowly across the living room to rest in a patch of pale sunlight, breaking through heavy clouds against the odds.
He is exhausted, wasted muscles slack and prone to spasm.
"It's not fickle. It's not looking for better options. It's sure as hell not about what you can do for me in return. The fact that I love you is not going to change."
And she can almost feel him tense in his chair like he's fielding an assault, and he doesn't say anything in reply. She wonders vaguely whether he's holding his breath.
But some things have to be said, and she does not regret making her position clear. For now, she turns away, and she lets him be; she knows well enough that these things take time.
And the fact that the two of them even have time is a blessing; she knows this better than most. Many people, she thinks, end their stories in the bad times. As long as they breathe, she has no intention of letting that happen to them.
2.
He loses the chair quickly through sheer force of will. In just a couple of weeks, he can walk short distances, slowly.
But beyond this point, recovery proves to be a painstaking process with more setbacks than she can keep track of.
He has trouble with concentration, and his fine motor skills are badly affected. He can't rely on his hands being steady enough to shave, or at least, that was her first assumption when he started to go longer and longer without.
But he's also letting his hair grow long and wild too, now, and she is beginning to think that this is not about whether he can deal with it himself, rather that he simply no longer cares to. He has refused her offers to drive him to a barber, or to anywhere really. He sees only her, and the handful of clinicians providing his aftercare.
Perhaps his increasingly dishevelled appearance is his way of telling her he has given up.
She despairs, briefly, then rallies. She doesn't know if and when his body will be strong enough to walk and run and operate like he used to again, and it's obvious those are the things he really mourns. The absence of those things is what keeps him bound in this dark place.
But she can no more give him those things than she can jump off the roof and fly.
She can, though, remind him that some lost ground, even if small, may still be regained.
"Want me to cut it?" she says, running her hands through his hair from behind where he sits on the couch. He sighs heavily.
"What's the point if I'm not going anywhere?" he answers waspishly, but she persists, her fingers tangling and gently smoothing the strands, these days liberally streaked with grey.
She thinks he loses some of his antagonistic air the longer she stands there and kneads the tension away beneath her fingers, and she feels a momentary relief at this fragile acceptance of her presence.
"At least let me take care of this," she says, bending forward so she can brush her cheek against the unruly stubble on his face. And she realises then that she has had such limited proximity to him since he was discharged that he seems startled by the feel of her skin so close to his. He seems unsure whether to pull away or to lean in even closer.
He sighs again, but he doesn't specifically refuse her, which she knows he would in no uncertain terms if that were his inclination. So she manages, after some cajoling, to get him to sit down in a chair in the bathroom with his head tilted back, while she fills the basin with warm water.
He's watching her, cautiously, and she can't read him very easily these days. But despite that, she doesn't think he seems unhappy with this unlikely turn of events.
It is a surprising act of intimacy, she finds, to roll up her sleeves and press a warm flannel to his jaw, to smooth white foam from chin to ear with fingers that have ached to touch him for so long but have so far always held back. At long last, he permits it; he doesn't withdraw from her and hold himself back.
On the contrary, under her touch he becomes the most relaxed she has seen him for weeks, his head resting back and his eyes half-lidded as he watches her wet the razor and place her fingers underneath his jaw.
"Ready?" she says, and he raises an eyebrow.
"Have you ever done this before?" he asks, and she gives a short laugh.
"How different to legs can it be?" she replies, and he makes a low sound of mock reproach before she dives right in and presses the razor edge to the side of his jaw.
The sound of the first stroke is oddly clear in the silence, oddly intimate a sound as her face hovers only inches from his.
She catches his eye, once, and finds an unfathomable depth to his expression; it almost throws her off with the sudden intensity the she feels shivering between them but she holds steady. She breathes in, and returns to her task with all the focus she would have working in the OR.
She works carefully, her hands steady and precise as she scrapes, rinses, moves on. She is not hurried, but instead takes her time, working the razor gently over one slow line at a time as the satisfying rasp reveals more of his skin underneath. His eyes have fully closed by the time she reaches the midpoint, and she is finally permitted the luxury of studying his face without disguise. She so rarely gets to look at him closely these days.
He is so tired, she thinks with a sudden sadness.
Her thumb barely resists brushing a caress down his jaw as she takes in the dark circles under his eyes, the deep mauve shadows reminding her just how hard everything has been for him in the weeks since he left his hospital bed.
His whole demeanour speaks of that unrelenting weariness, of the bad dreams and the multitude of physical pains that she knows keep him wide awake long into the night. His brush with death has not left him without his battle wounds.
She bites back words of sympathy she knows he won't want to hear and instead she concentrates on him, taking comfort in the fact that right now, he seems to be at least briefly at peace, the deep furrows in his brow softened as he rests his head back.
She can't help but think that this is likely the most anyone has touched him since the accident in a non-clinical way, and to her satisfaction he seems to welcome it, leaning into her fingers as she tilts his jaw. It surprises her a little that he's not holding himself back, but if he isn't then she certainly won't complain.
And when he opens his eyes as she completes the final stroke on his jaw she sees a warmth in them that she realises she hasn't seen there for so long.
"Not even a scratch," she murmurs with soft humour, and he responds with a tiny smile.
She dabs the last of the shaving foam from his face with the flannel and steps back to admire her handiwork, relishing in the reappearance of his smooth jawline, the expressiveness in the upward curve of his mouth.
"Not bad," he says, glancing in the mirror, then back at her. There's a hesitation about him, an indecision, but she doesn't know what it is until he slowly pulls himself out of the chair and reaches out, running his hand down her arm to take her hand.
Her heart almost stops in surprise, as he pulls her into him, the warmth and the scent of him suddenly all around her, and as she leans her head against his shoulder she remembers what all of this is for.
3.
Neither of them talks about the future much. It's not an easy subject to broach when the way forward is shrouded in uncertainty. But it's a question mark for her, exactly where this is leading.
She's been living at his house since the day he came out of hospital, but in the spare room down the hall from his.
It is not the way she ever envisaged moving in with him, but it is how things are, and this she has come to terms with. She only wishes she could see, somehow, where this will all end up. Neither of them ever mentions their strange status, and she doesn't mind it, though without a doubt she would be with him in a heartbeat if she thought he was ready for that to change. But she accepts without question that most of all he needs time and space, and that her role in his life at the moment is not so much lover as it is friend, and it must remain that way for now.
She knows he thinks about it though. About the almost, and the not quite. How they were on the cusp of something stunning, right before everything erupted into chaos. Time is always playing games with them.
"I don't expect you to stay," he says, without any lead in.
She's putting groceries away in the cupboards and her back is turned, so the sudden statement catches her by surprise. He has regained a lot of his balance and agility; she didn't hear him approach.
"You're free to go wherever you want. Be with whoever you want. You know that, don't you?"
She puts down the bag of flour she's holding and turns to look at him, thinking over her response.
"I do. And you know that I'm not going anywhere without you."
She means it. Being anywhere else doesn't even cross her mind; being with anyone else is a madness she will never entertain.
He looks at her with such an odd expression then. So caught between too many things. He is despair meeting relief, sorrow, amusement, love. Hope. She feels certain that when he looks at her there's hope, and it is that above all that she clings to.
"You deserve to be happy," he says, longingly this time, not stoic. It's an echo of what he's told her before, in their past life before the whole world caved in around them.
She just nods, and approaches him, cautiously, still afraid of breaking boundaries.
But he stands straight and does not stiffen as she slides her arms around him, and she feels his hands move up slowly to rest on her lower back in response, his chin finding her shoulder.
She breathes him in, not knowing when the next time she's this close to him will be.
"We have so much time for happy," she answers quietly, because she feels no need to falsely claim some great, unrelenting joy in all of this. The winding, unpredictable path they are on is a difficult one, and it is a long way from complete. "Right now you're healing. And that's okay. Where we are is okay. I promise."
He takes a deep, shuddering breath that she feels reverberate through her.
"Thank you," he says, the words almost lost in the way he's pressed into the curve of her neck, and in the small brush of his breath over her skin she feels the old spark of her longing for him stirring.
It's a feeling that she knows now will last through every storm the two of them are made to weather.
4.
She knows he has nightmares about the night of the earthquake.
She can never really know exactly what he sees but she knows that he tries to conceal them, that he absolutely hates the idea of her seeing him in the grip of terror. She is constantly torn between insisting on him letting her help and backing away so he can deal with this the way he wants.
In the end she goes for some halfway house where she avoids directly asking him about it, but she takes a keen interest in his physiotherapy and psych appointments, making sure he keeps to them each and every week. And she tries to get him out and about more, too.
She worries if he lets his world shrink to the walls of his apartment it will be too big a battle to ever push it out again.
As the days pass though, it becomes apparent that his nights are worse than the days. She has heard him moving around in the early hours, unable to sleep, and if she gets up to check on him he always sends her back to bed saying there is no point in them both being sleep deprived.
Those are never the worst nights, though. The worst nights are when she wakes up and hears him calling out incoherently down the hall, deep in the grip of a nightmare that has him thrashing and sweating in the tangled sheets.
She always goes to him on those nights, but when he comes around and recognises her he closes off immediately, like there's a physical wall that slams up around him and locks him inside himself. She knows he never goes back to sleep at all on those nights. She wishes desperately that he would let her be there, to comfort him, but it's not her right to push.
Claire jolts awake.
She fumbles to check her phone and sees it's just gone two in the morning; she's slept only an hour or so and she feels deeply groggy, but she knows instinctively what has woken her.
She climbs out of bed and walks down the hallway, and halfway down it she hears the sudden sound something shattering loudly. Alarmed, she breaks into a run and throws his door open, and finds him still asleep but with the sheets viciously tangled around his restlessly shifting limbs. The glass lamp that used to sit on his bedside table is now on the floor, smashed into a thousand sharp pieces.
She swallows, and carefully steps around the spray of shards so she can climb over him onto the other side of the bed. Waking him is a delicate process; she knows he will be disoriented and maybe even angry when he comes around. He has been in the past.
She places one hand cautiously on his bare shoulder. His skin is slick and feverish.
"Neil," she says, quiet but firm, trying to slowly lift him out of the depths of his subconscious. He's mumbling fitfully still. She rubs his shoulder carefully. "Hey, shh. Come back."
He jerks suddenly once more before he opens his eyes, gasping, uttering something she can't make sense of as he takes in huge, panicked breaths and tries to sit up. She catches him by the shoulder, her other hand making its way to brush the hair from his sweaty forehead as she hushes him, urging him to lie back against the pillows again.
"It's okay. I've got you," she says softly, her brow knotted as her fingers trail down to rest gently on his upper chest, seeking out his racing heartbeat. Some of the panic and confusion bleeds out of his expression as he locks eyes with her, but he still has that desperate, haunted look that makes her want to enclose him tightly in her arms and stay that way until the nightmares leave him alone.
"What-" He croaks, his throat dry and uncooperative. He glances to his bedside where a glass of water usually sits, but she sees now that it too is on the floor now, the pieces mixed in with the broken lamp.
"Wait here," she says quickly. "Don't get up, there's broken glass."
She steps carefully around the pieces again and hurries to the kitchen to get water. She shoves on her slippers so she doesn't have to worry about her feet and returns to the bedroom, handing him the glass before she takes up her spot on the unoccupied side of the bed. Distractedly, she picks up a pillow, sitting cross-legged and wondering if he's going to ask her to leave.
He takes uneven gulps of water and sets the glass down, rubbing his hand over his face before he turns his head to look at her.
"I'm-"
"If you say sorry I'll throw this pillow at you."
He looks startled, then lets out his breath in the ghost of a laugh, his tense grip on the sheets easing just a touch. She moves slowly, reaching her hand out to brush over the back of his.
"I'll just sweep up the glass and then I'll let you rest, okay?" she says softly, well acquainted with his need for space, but she is surprised when he turns his hand over and catches her fingers in his before she can rise.
"Stay," he says, tiredly. "We'll clean it up in the morning."
And she is taken aback. He has never before shown any desire for her to stay with him through the night, no matter how bad things have been, and she tries not to let her relief show in case it makes him think twice.
But he just shifts himself down slowly so he's lying flat again, breathing deeply with his eyes fixed up at the ceiling. She slides under the covers next to him, and tentatively shifts closer to his body until she can drape her arm over his abdomen, her head tucked in against his shoulder.
Slowly, he moves his arm under her so it's wrapped around her body, pulling her in closer, and she feels such a flood of fierce emotion surging up for him it brings sudden tears to her eyes. And for once, even if it's hours later, he drifts off again, and doesn't seem to stir. She stays awake as long as she can, watching over him until sleep finally overcomes her too.
These nights are so full of demons, but she'll spend a thousand sleepless nights keeping watch for him if that's what it takes to let him find peace.
5.
She usually meets him in the kitchen in the mornings.
He's awake before her every day, so there's always coffee waiting for her already, and most mornings there's him too, asking if she slept well as he passes her a mug.
It's only bad days, ones where he's not slept at all or he's in more pain than usual, when he doesn't come into the kitchen at all.
But today, she wakes up, and he is still in bed with her.
It's momentarily disorienting, blinking into consciousness and realising she's not in the bed down the hall that's been hers for the last few months. It's even more disorienting to turn her head and see him, lying on his back, his eyes wide open but his expression peaceful.
"Hey," she says, blinking away sleep.
She still feels tired but not painfully so, though the temptation to curl herself into him and sleep again is great. He turns his head and cracks a half smile; he seems tired too but his mood is not what she is used to seeing the night after a bad nightmare. In the past, he has been dark and churlish, unable to push the shadows away even when morning comes.
But today, he looks at her like a lover waking up to her, and it sends an unexpected jolt down her spine. Never mind that his body has still never been hers for the taking; when he looks at her like that she can't help but think it is only a matter of time.
"Morning," he says back, and she rolls into her side so she can watch him, though her eyelids are still dropping with the temptation of falling back asleep.
He laughs at her drowsiness, and unbidden, he reaches out to pull her closer into his body. Surprised, she gravitates into his warmth as she presses her face into the crook of his neck.
"We could sleep all day," she mumbles. "It's Saturday."
He runs his fingers over the forearm that's draped over his chest in idle patterns.
"I've got a psych appointment at eleven," he says, casually, and she cracks an eye open.
"Right," she says, wishing she hadn't forgotten that. She pauses for a moment, and lifts her head to look at him. "Is it helping?" she asks, cautious, because he never usually talks about it much.
He pauses for a while, then glances down at her. "Probably," he says. "I don't dream about people dying so much anymore."
It feels a bald admission hanging between them, like a little window into the tangled battlefield the accident has left inside his head. But his heartbeat under her fingers, shifting lightly over his bare chest, remains slow and steady. His shoulders seem to lack the tension they always used to carry on days like this.
"It's when I see you dying that I'm scared the most."
She turns her head to him again, caught off guard. Her greatest fear is losing him too.
She presses her face to his neck because she can't stop those nightmares from coming, can't guarantee that nothing will ever separate them. She knows that life doesn't always give out those longed for happy endings.
All she can give him these moments, pressed together in the half-light, holding each other against the odds.
"I'm right here," she murmurs, lips against his warm skin, and he exhales slowly under the contact in a way that hints at more than just a recalibration.
His hand finds hers and their fingers twine, and she just hopes to God that nothing else is going to threaten to separate them.
6.
As time goes by, it's clear he is not the only one facing tough times.
In a new and uncertain existence where the world doesn't look like it used to, Claire is frequently worn so thin she sometimes doesn't know if she has it in her to make it through the workday.
Let alone the nights.
She's been at loggerheads with Park and Shaun; she's been yelled at by Lim. And she misses Neil. Not only because she barely gets to see him while she's working endless shifts and supervising novices, but also because the time they used to spend working on cases together were some of the brightest spots of her career.
As the days go by without let up, she is filled with a disillusionment and weariness she no longer knows how to get through.
And yet, she always tries to keep the brunt of it from him. She is so afraid to add to the things he already has weighing on his mind, to add even more pressures he will be powerless to resolve.
She knows how being confined to his home is taking its toll on him, and so it feels wrong to complain about work when she knows he would like nothing better than the ability to go back. So instead, no matter what happens during the day, she is as bright and upbeat as she possibly can be, when she comes home to him.
Until, of course, she isn't.
Her week has been awful, misery caged in grief and death all around. Disease outbreak is a fact of life, of course, but this past month has been something else. Non critical surgeries are all on hold but that means putting people at risk of dying from something else; she hates the way they are being forced to choose.
Today, she had to choose between saving a grandmother or a teenage girl, and she doesn't doubt she will remember the dead woman's face for the rest of her life.
It is all at once far too much for one soul to carry.
She heads into the house as normal, her face neutral and her thoughts racing to compartmentalise, to leave the hospital behind so she can focus on being there for him. Calm, and centred.
She unbuttons her coat and sets her bag down.
What she can't do is prepare for the unexpected, visceral reaction the mere sight of his face will have on her as he comes into the hallway to say hello.
"Claire? What's wrong?"
And just like that he is all alarm and concern for her, striding over as fast as she has seen him move since he got back on his feet. When did he get so steady?
"Sorry," is all she can choke out, as he takes her in his arms and suddenly it feels like months ago, back in their old life, when he was always the one taking care of her. She blinks up at him around hot, uncontrollable tears.
"I had- a bad day-" she says around gulping breaths. And once the sobs start, they are a tidal wave she cannot hold back.
He doesn't ask any more questions, because he doesn't need to. Nobody understands the pressures of her life better than he does.
"I didn't want to- put it on you- with everything else-" she says around unsteady gasps buried into his shirt front, and he stills. He pulls back just enough so he can look at her, lifting her chin with the edge of one finger.
"Hey. This is a two way street. That's the deal," he says.
And somewhere through the fraught, overstretched emotions clouding her head, she starts to realise that maybe she's been doing this wrong. His arms around her are solid and capable; they're not those of someone who will crumble.
She's been wasting so much energy trying to hide things from him because she's afraid knowing will hurt him; in reality, she has only succeeded in hurting herself by giving him less credit than he is due.
Rookie mistake, she thinks, as she takes a big, shaky breath.
Slowly she releases the fistful of his shirt she's clinging to and looks up at him. He smiles down at her, pensive and quiet and unhurried, and she knows.
He's not going to break. He's not going anywhere.
And when he settles her on the couch, covered in a blanket and soothed by the feel of his hand resting on her calf, she looks over at him and he feels so much like himself it makes her tattered heart feel like it can survive anything.
7.
When she gets asked by a new intern about who Dr Melendez is, she is caught off guard.
She asks the kid (because yeah, he seems young enough to call him that) what he means, why he's even asking the question. She can't help but be sharp. The kid seems to realise quickly he's touched on a sensitive subject and tries to backtrack, but she still gets out of him that "Dr Reznick said you would be the best person to answer questions about him."
"He's the cardiothoracic surgeon here, but he was injured in the earthquake and he's on leave," she answers shortly, though the description is a feeble LinkedIn tagline compared to all that he really is. "What else did Dr Reznick say?"
"Oh, you know, nothing- just that you and he have-," says the intern nervously. "History."
"Right," Claire says, irritably. "You can tell Dr Reznick to keep her big mouth shut from me."
She stalks off, but on the inside she is rattled. Who else in this place gossips about them behind her back? It's not a secret, that she's living with him, but she hadn't even thought about what it looks like.
A resident playing nursemaid to her attending.
She feels angry and frustrated, and most of all, annoyed that the whispering of her colleagues should still get to her like it does. After everything they've been through, she can hardly be anything but immune to the salacious rumour mill. She shouldn't care that the whole hospital assumes they're sleeping together.
But she finds she does care that they assume that when it's not even true.
He picks up on her unsettled mood when she comes in that evening. He's shirtless, exercising on a yoga mat with a pair of weights that are noticeably heavier than they were a few weeks ago. He's on a complex regime of physio topped off with strength work, and in the absence of much else to do he's really thrown his whole self into completing it. She can't help but notice how easily he's put muscle back on.
"Hey," he says, setting the weights down. "You okay?"
"Yeah," she says.
She disappears briefly into the bedroom to strip off her work outfit and pull on her loosest pants and a sweater that is accidentally on purpose not her own. Then, she drops herself back down beside him, cross legged on the floor.
He looks at her, his expression expectant, but she feels suddenly exhausted, and tips herself forward to lie down and put her head in his lap, earning her a short laugh.
He tugs the braid out of her hair and runs a hand in through the loose strands, massaging her scalp gently, and she feels some of her agitation settle. His touch has always had a power over her that she can't fully explain.
"What going on?" he asks, and she turns slightly so she's looking right up at him.
"What am I to you?" she asks him, and he just looks down at her for a moment. But she knows he knows what she is asking, from the way his hand stills in her hair, and the pensive look in his eye.
She's not sure what she's bracing herself for him to say but she knows she is not in any way expecting him to bend, a little awkwardly because of the angle, so he can press his lips to hers.
But this is what he does.
She has waited so long for this moment, skirting around the edges of something more with him, she almost doesn't know what to do with it now it's here. For a moment she lies there, her lips parted to his but suddenly capable of little else; then, she regains her senses and she's tilting her head up to kiss him back.
She is grateful he's still shirtless; it doesn't take her long to move from lying in his lap to straddling it as her hands roam the bare skin that's been made so available to her, earning her tiny sounds of approval as her fingernails run down his chest.
He's just about to retaliate, his hands sliding underneath her - his - sweatshirt where he'll find nothing underneath, but for some reason she chooses that moment to wonder abruptly whether this is moving too far too fast.
She pulls back suddenly, her eyes roaming his face and her cheeks flushed with an undeniable longing for him. His eyes flick between hers, assessing her meaning in drawing back.
"Can we do this?" she says finally, and he quirks an eyebrow.
"Why not?" he says lightly, and she's struggling with the urge to lean in and kiss him again.
"We- I didn't know if you wanted... you've always held back," she says, and he tightens his hold around her waist.
"I wanted you to be sure you knew what you were getting into. If I never got better. It would have been worse for both of us if you didn't."
He is calm, but those words send a shiver down her spine.
"I would never-"
"I know," he says quickly. "But you deserved a chance to think about it."
"That's why we haven't?"
"Depends. Were you ready before? Are you now?"
She looks at him in surprise. She has assumed for a long time that the reason they have never taken things further than they have is because she was waiting for him; she has never really considered that maybe he's been waiting on her too. That maybe it was the right thing for her, too.
But she is sure of one thing.
"I'm ready."