Still alive for you, love

If the last forty-eight hours have been a roller coaster, this is one of the troughs. He's ready for that slow climb back up again, the one that could lead to another plunge down, but for now he's just breathing.

Just breathing. Just listening to Neil breathe, head pillowed in his arms on the side of Neil's bed.

Somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, on one of those spiraling plunges down, he's turned a year older. He's only dimly aware of it; time is still a little fuzzy as far as his internal age goes. But he knows what day it is. And he also knows that the only truly important thing about it is that Neil's going to live.

A few hours ago they finally let him in--thankfully no one seems to have taken much issue with his breaking out of quarantine, now that they've found a cure--and for a long time he had just stood in the doorway, watching. Watching the monitor blips, watching Neil's chest rise and fall.

That was morning. It's early afternoon now and he doesn't know when he last slept, he's exhausted beyond what he can remember, but he can't sleep. He won't let himself. He wants to be here and awake for every one of those heartbeat blips, every one of these breaths.

There are a lot of things that he understands more clearly now. It just sucks what it's taken to get him here.