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He takes Vanessa home as soon as the hospital will allow it.
He probably should have come up with a more romantic way to ask her to move in with him than by declaring that he’s basically kidnapping her straight out of her hospital bed. Especially when she’s too exhausted to object much beyond a weak glare and the half-hearted threat of permanent bodily harm if he forgets to personally fetch her grandmother’s antique jewelry box from the nightstand in her bedroom.
The words don’t have much heat behind them though – and the soft look on Vanessa’s face belies her grouchy tone. He opens his mouth, intending to try and joke about the fact that she’s basically always at the penthouse already anyway, but what he says instead is simply, “Thank you.”
She doesn’t reply, but her fingers thread through his again, and squeeze. He hangs on to her for a long time, and she lets him, rubbing her thumb in slow circles over his knuckles. He can’t talk about it, and she doesn’t push.
After the fundraiser, after what happened to Wesley, he can’t bear the thought of Vanessa being anywhere further than an arm’s length away from him for any substantial length of time. Not right now.
And, quite frankly, the hospital scares him. It’s not rational, he realizes, but he can’t be rational about Vanessa, not about this.
He’s never had anything in his life he was this afraid to lose before.
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Vanessa refuses to let him carry her up to the penthouse. She insists she’s not an invalid, even though she’s leaning rather heavily against him as she walks. She glares at him when he offers a second time, but the effect is somewhat muted by the fact that she also looks as though she’s doing her best not to vomit on his shoes.
The elevator ride feels eternal, and Vanessa looks so miserable that it makes his chest clench. He did this to her, after all – he’s the reason she almost died, and now looks like she maybe wishes she had, right at this moment. She’s never complained; hasn’t even gotten angry about it yet (though he certainly deserves it).
He wraps an arm around Vanessa’s waist and presses a kiss to her temple. He doesn’t know how to tell her how sorry he is for all of this. Or that he would trade places with her in an instant, if he could. She whimpers, very quietly, against his shoulder, and he wants to make this better for her so badly it hurts.
“Please let me,” he says softly.
Vanessa nods infinitesimally, a begrudging admission of weakness that she clearly hates. She’s obviously feeling much worse than she’d originally let on, and he wishes he knew why it is apparently so important to her to be “fine” with all of this.
But a businessman doesn’t question when desired opportunities are given to him, so he just bends slightly and scoops her into his arms, as gently as possible. She buries her face against his neck, and makes a noise that’s caught somewhere between relief and pain.
Logically, he knows that Vanessa at this moment weighs exactly the same as she did the last time they did this – five or six days ago under much happier circumstances that had involved a bit too much wine and their usual inability to keep their hands off of each other – but she still feels so fragile in his arms. He supposes that this is because he is now hyperaware of just how close he’d come to losing her, how easily he could lose her in future.
Wilson had made sure that the bed had the softest possible sheets on it, and had sent some lackey of Francis’ out to buy more pillows and a fluffier duvet. Vanessa practically disappears in the pile of bedding, but the noise of satisfaction she makes is intensely gratifying.
Looking at her, Wilson feels something tight inside him unlock, just a bit. These have been several of the worst few days of his entire life, but he survived them. They survived them, and that has to count for something. Vanessa is safe, and whole, and actually seems to be okay with the prospect of living with him. He’s put a truly ridiculous amount of security personnel on every floor of their building, and for the first time in days he thinks he might actually sleep tonight.
He can do the rest of this too. He can protect her, and find Wesley’s killer, and destroy whoever it is who’s trying to push him out of his own damned business.
“You’re staring,” Vanessa says, bringing him back to himself.
“I’m just…very glad you’re home,” he replies, and swallows around a sudden tightness in his throat.
Vanessa doesn’t say anything, but holds a hand out to him. He takes it, and kisses it, and lets her tug him into bed next to her. She pulls his arm around her, and he goes willingly, doing his best not to jostle her too badly.
“Everything hurts,” she says after a while, sounding defeated. Her words slur a little bit, because she’s on the high-octane kind of painkillers. It would be cute if he didn’t have to think about the reasons for it.
“I know, sweetheart,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” she replies, and her voice is unexpectedly firm. “And I don’t blame you for any of this.”
Wilson doesn’t trust his voice to work right after that. So he noses gently behind Vanessa’s ear, and tries to regulate his breathing to something close to a normal human’s. Her fingers tighten on his.
They stay curled close like that for a long while, until Vanessa falls asleep.
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Wilson decides that there’s no time like the present to go fetch the requested items from Vanessa’s (old) apartment. He knows he won’t do anything besides sit and watch her sleep unless he gives himself a task with demonstrable results. And he’s trying his best not to fuss over her. Or at least, fuss a lot.
They’ve never spent that much time at Vanessa’s apartment – business concerns generally meant that he needed to be in and out of the penthouse at all hours and, to be honest, the lack of security measures in her building had basically terrified him whenever he thought about leaving her alone there.
The space is very her though, warm colors and soft fabrics and things that shouldn’t go together at all, but do. There’s art everywhere: actual framed paintings and un-matted sketches and tiny postcard drawings leaned up against books on the shelves.
It feels like a home and, despite the fact that the building’s virtually nonexistent security meant they could have been murdered in their sleep at virtually any moment, Wilson had felt safe there. Like he belonged. Though he supposes that’s true for any space where Vanessa is.
Maybe they’ll rent it out, once they’ve sorted out the moving logistics. Turn it into an AirBnB. He doesn’t want Vanessa to feel trapped in this devil’s bargain she’s made while she was too ill to really say no, so he plans to encourage her to keep this place in some form or other.
He not only retrieves the requested jewelry box, but her favorite throw blanket (it’s an obnoxiously bright pink, and he hates it) and the battered stuffed cat named Albert that she’s had since she was a child.
Most of her clothes have already made their way into his closet, her toiletries are already all over the bathroom, and the nightstand on her side of the bed is buried under books and an assortment of charging devices and adapters.
There’s not much left of significance to pack up, to be honest. He and Vanessa haven’t spent a night apart in months, not until she was in the hospital. He's not even sure that counts, really, because his back is still sore from trying to sleep in the horrible chair by her bed.
Most of her things seem to have somehow migrated over on their own already, and that makes him feel a bit less like a kidnapper, and more like someone who should probably have done this a long time ago.
He leaves Francis in charge of the rest of it.
The furniture and most of the artwork will have to go into storage until they can hire someone to re-do the penthouse, or until Vanessa herself feels up to it. He’s promised she can do whatever she likes to the place, which is a terrifying and also somehow incredibly comforting thought.
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Vanessa is still asleep when he gets home, and it’s something of an unexpected emotional jolt when he realizes it’s their home now. He slips Albert under her arm and gently kisses her forehead, trying not to worry (much) that her skin still feels so warm to the touch.
The doctors have given him a long list of things that he is allowed to freak out about, and things he’s going to have to live with for a bit, and the fact that Vanessa is likely to have a noticeable fever for a while is on the top of the latter one. He doesn’t like it, but thanks to whatever awful poison she’d ingested, it’s the way it’s going to be for a while.
It turns out that most people don’t usually survive whatever Vanessa was dosed with, so in terms of recovery, they’re all kind of flying a little blind here. And he can’t think about that too much, because he gets so angry that he frightens himself.
She wakes up an hour or so later and wanders in to the living room, where he’s keeping himself busy going through a stack of papers from Leland. It’s the sort of thing Wesley would have normally handled, and even trying to read his way through them feels overwhelming.
Vanessa’s still frighteningly pale, but the small, tired smile she gives him looks like a sunrise. She’s wearing his robe – or at least, it used to be his robe, until he finally got the hint and bought a new one – and it’s so huge on her that it swishes on the ground like a dress. She’s still holding Albert under one arm for some reason, and there are pillow creases on her face.
He looks at her, and thinks that he has never known it was possible to love another person this much.
She sinks down on to the couch next to him and tucks herself against his side. His arm automatically wraps around her, while his other hand fumbles with the horrible pink throw blanket he’d left on the other end of the sofa.
“Stop fussing,” she says, tugging the blanket out of his fingers and arranging it over her lap.
“I love you,” he says softly, into her hair. It surprises him, how easily this phrase falls out of his mouth now, but ever since Vanessa’s…accident, or whatever they’re calling it, he can’t seem to stop saying it.
She settles against him, her forehead tucked into the crook of his shoulder. She still feels too warm for his liking, but it’s better. A little.
“I love you, too,” she says, and it feels a bit like absolution.
“Thank you for this,” she adds softly, after a moment, and he doesn’t know whether she means the blanket, or Albert, or the apartment. He supposes it doesn’t matter. There is nothing that he wouldn’t do for her; nothing that he has that he wouldn’t give her, gladly.
He presses a kiss into her hair, and breathes, and ignores the stab of panic that seems to immediately appear whenever he considers the prospect of his life without Vanessa in it. But he doesn’t want to think about that – doesn’t want to think about any of this – so he slides the stack of papers out of the way, and fishes the TV remote out from under a cushion.
They end up watching The Princess Bride on Netflix, because it is one of Vanessa’s favorites, and what she always puts on when she’s not feeling well. He’s seen it at least a half dozen times now, but he doesn’t mind. He’s not really looking at the screen that much.
She ends up falling asleep again with her head in his lap, somewhere around the time that Fezzik and Inigo Montoya go to see Miracle Max. Wilson doesn’t move for over two hours after that, even when his leg goes numb. He figures that at the moment, Vanessa’s rest is probably more important than his circulation. And he doesn’t really have any place he needs to be.
Instead, he sits through the next movie that auto-queues, a children’s cartoon about colorful monsters who compete with one another at something called a “scare factory”. It is cute, and not terrible, though he finds it a bit unfair that the purple monster ends up banished from his home world forever.
When Vanessa stirs a bit later, the sun is setting outside their windows.
“How long was I asleep?” she asks, groggily.
“Couple of hours,” he replies, stroking his fingers gently through her hair.
“You should have woken me up,” she says, sounding irritable and struggling to sit up.
“Why? You looked very peaceful.”
“I don’t want to be a liability, Wilson.”
“Never,” he says softly, and he doesn’t think she’s talking about her nap anymore. He thought that they’d sort of been over this, after she woke up in the hospital, but maybe he hadn’t made himself clear.
“Vanessa… you are essential,” he explains quietly. “If I can see a life that means anything afterward – when all this is over – it is only because of you.”
“That sounds like a liability to me,” Vanessa says, and her voice shakes only a little.
“Ah,” Wilson replies, tugging her hand to his lips and kissing it. “I think it sounds a bit like being in love.”
Vanessa twists herself around enough to look at him, and stares at him for a long minute, her gaze roaming over his face. Whatever she sees there must satisfy her though, because she leans forward and kisses him gently. It’s not much – Vanessa can barely handle sitting upright on her own for long right now as it is – but it is, nevertheless, perfect.
And for the first time in days, Wilson thinks that maybe everything is actually really going to be okay.
“Come on,” he says. “Come keep me company in the kitchen – seated somewhere, preferably,” he adds as she sways a bit against his shoulder. “I’ll make you anything you think you can stand to keep down for dinner. I’ll even tell you everything that was in all that boring paperwork I read while you were asleep.”
“I’m not hungry,” she says immediately, and he doesn’t think she actually means it to sound quite so petulant, but it does, and it’s adorable.
“I’m fairly certain ‘regular meals’ were rather high on the list of things I had to agree to in order to get you out of the hospital. It’s either me or institutional Jell-O.”
She pulls a face, because the hospital food had been particularly revolting. Presumably more so for people who were fighting gastrointestinal-related distress already.
He suddenly feels ashamed of himself for teasing her. This is, after all, his fault.
“I know it’s difficult,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
Her hand slips into his, and holds on.
“Maybe ice cream?” she asks.
“Maybe ice cream,” he says, and he can see the rest of his life in her answering smile.