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Devon looked down at the tablet in his hands again, for what had to be the thousandth time that day, as he tried to listen to what the patient was telling him without rolling his eyes about it. It was another one of their frequent flyers, an accident prone man that blew his problems up from a goose-egg bump on his head to a full blown brain bleed. He knew that the fear was very real to the patient, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with when it was the fourth time that week that they’d had a visit from him.
He turned around when he heard the doors to the ambulance bay hiss open. Most of the time it was just someone coming through that entrance instead of the main one with patients. Despite that, he had been trained to check it every time just in case it did happen to be someone in grave need of their assistance. He was glad that he had looked this time, because what he saw on the gurney that the EMTs were pushing towards the trauma room that Hundley had just pointed them towards.
Bradley was splayed out over the white sheet covering the thin pad on the stretcher. He was laying on his left side, his eyes glazed over and unfocused. They had done an IV when they were in the ambulance, based on the blue gloved hand that was holding a back of some clear liquid above his head. His skin was sallow and sickly, but there wasn’t a spot of blood on him despite the blooming purple bruise on his forehead.
Suddenly, the tablet that he had been holding in his hands didn’t matter anymore. He dumped it down onto the medical cabinet that was beside the patient bed and took through the ER to the other wall with his heart beating up in his throat and blood swirling around in his ears. “Bradley?” he shouted, his voice barely even able to make it out of his mouth and towards his beloved.
Before he got through the door to the room, someone placed their hands up so that they were blocking the entire frame. “You know the rules, Pravesh. I can’t let family in here when we’re working,” Irving said. His eyes held a kind of apologetic firmness, like he knew that this was going to gut his friend but also wasn’t able to budge on the rules of the hospital.
Devon wanted to object, wanted to push past him and cling to Bradley like he had after his last surgery had finished. He wasn’t up to getting yelled at by his friends or boss, though, so he just ran a hand through his hair and took a step back. “Let me… let me know what’s wrong as soon as you can, okay? I should still be his emergency contact and medical proxy.”
“I know that you are, Devon. I promise that we will find out and tell you what’s going on as soon as we know more,” Irving promised. He placed his hand, devoid of a rubber glove for the present moment, down on Devon’s shoulder as a way to try and ground his friend.
It didn’t work very well. Devon’s mind was racing with the memories of what his last interaction with his boyfriend had been like. Bradley had mentioned being increasingly worried about the presentation that he was giving to the QuoVadis executives, having a headache, and generally being lightheaded when they had gotten up that morning. Devon had brushed it off as nerves since Bradley had a panic attack the night before and had to take some of his medication to soothe the rapid beating of his heart. He had listened to the organ to try and prove that it was still in working condition as well, though they had gotten distracted about four beats in and ended up kissing in bed well into the half hour they had set out to get dressed.
He walked slowly back over to the patient that he had been helping before while his thoughts swirled with what might be wrong with his partner. The symptoms that he had been experiencing recently were all incredibly discontented and confusing, none of them lining up into exactly what he needed them to be. Anything that he came up with was terrifying, right before he remembered that there was a crucial detail missing that prevented it from being the case.
He worked through the last brief patients in the ER and helped the residents below him with the tasks that they had been assigned. The entire time, he kept glancing back towards the trauma room where they had taken his boyfriend in the hopes that he would spot something that could help him figure out what was going on. They had obviously known that he was going to try that as they had drawn the blinds shut so that the only thing he could spot was a shadow every once in a while.
The longest twenty minutes of Devon’s life had passed by the time he stuck his tablet down into the charging station near the nurse’s desk and then retreated back to one of the on-call rooms. He sat heavily down on the shitty, thin mattress as his hands flew up to his hair. He fell back with an obnoxiously loud noise while staring at the bunk above him.
Devon was barely aware of what was happening around him when the door to the on-call room was kicked open and someone joined him on the bed. “Do you want to white-board this out? Like we did for your intern test,” Conrad suggested, his voice light despite the heavy situation that they were both in.
“I had more information in my intern test than I do right now,” Devon almost spat. He was so anxious that it had turned into a mild form of anger, spiky and dangerous.
Conrad put his hands up in a defensive white flag position, before he dropped them down between his knees. “I know that the two of you are together and were best friends before that, but we all care about him too. He’s one of us, even if he decided that he was going to leave and join the enemy.”
“I don’t want to joke about his employer right now,” Devon mumbled. “Part of my is convinced that the stress of this stupid fucking meeting was what made him pass out in the first place. What if his heart couldn’t take it and he had another incident? I trust the Raptor was able to seal him back up properly, but that doesn’t make the organ healthy just because we put a stopper in a single valve.”
“Don’t overthink it too much. Try to reason through other things that have been going on with him since he got the replacement valve or something,” Conrad tried. “Has he been experiencing any headaches or nausea or drowsiness?”
“I mean, of course he has. He got headaches before and he still sometimes has withdrawal symptoms from the amount of caffeine that he was consuming before. The nausea… I don’t know, we never really had an explanation for that other than his diet changing when he wasn’t an intern anymore. Drowsiness came from his changing sleep habits and the time that he stayed up for me to come home after a double shift,” Devon explained. The panicking dread that had been trying to drag him down into the depths of the abyss was beginning to let up now that he was being walked through the diagnosis process alongside Conrad, just as they did every day when they were working together.
“Do you think that combined those things could have actually meant something else?” Conrad pressed further.
“Like what? A tumor? Cancer?” Devon asked, once again becoming afraid.
“No,” the older shook his head. There was a long silence that stretched between them then before Conrad asked, “Do you guys use protection when you have sex?”
“Wh- I- Excuse me?” Devon asked. He had jumped up from the bed when he was thinking earlier and now whirled around to face his mentor. His arms were folded over his chest in a protective stance and his eyes narrowing. “I already told you that I didn’t want to joke right now!”
“I’m not joking, I’m trying to get more information,” Conrad sighed. He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and waved his hand. “What do nausea, sleepiness, and headaches have in common in someone that is sexually active with a provider?”
Cold water was drenching the back of Devon’s mind all of a sudden. He felt his eyes go wide when he slowly, achingly so, sank back down onto the bed. “Shit,” he whispered. “He’s pregnant.”
Conrad only nodded beside him, but it was all the confirmation that he needed to burst into a loud sob. He buried his face down into his hands to try and hide from the world around him, as if the small action would be enough to rid him of the oppressive weight of everything around him. He felt his shoulders shaking with his body’s desperation to take in a single breath of air and yet it felt like his throat was constricting too much around nothing for anything substantial to happen.
A steady hand dropped down onto his shoulder like Irving had done earlier when Bradley was first brought it. The warmth of the person beside him moved to his upper shoulder blades, back and forth in soothing motions that grounded him. It wasn’t the same as when Bradley found him worked up about some case or another and was able to wrap him up in a hug, squeezing the anxiety from him and resetting his nervous system harder than anything else could. It wasn’t the same as having his boyfriend present and steady before him, a heartbeat repetitive and strong. It was the presence of a friend that brought him back down to earth, and when it was over he felt as though he had been staked with ropes instead of truly landing back on the soil of the earth.
“We’re going to do everything that we can to make sure that he comes out the other side of this. But I think that it’d be best if we took you off the schedule for the rest of the day. We suspected that the two of you didn’t know about the pregnancy, but we didn’t know for sure until… that,” Conrad gestured his hand out to Devon vaguely. The veteran had never been good with emotion and that apparently extended to when he was dealing with friends that turned into patients.
Devon let out a gasping laugh, because what was said wasn’t really funny but he felt strung out enough that it kind of turned into that anyway. “I don’t think that I’m going to be able to think about anything other than him right now. Can you give me an update on him? Is he okay? Is he awake? What happened?” the questions came tumbling out of him all at once, almost on top of each other in their rush to be spoken.
Conrad held up a hand to calm him as he explained, “Apparently he had a seizure when he was trying to give the presentation today. Bell was able to give him first aid on the scene before the EMTs showed up and it didn’t last for all that long, but we’re waiting for another one to come. He’s got IV access right now so we can administer medication if necessary. I think that a seizure while pregnant points mostly to eclampsia, especially with how high his blood pressure was when we took it.”
“Fuck. Do you think that it’s turned into HELLP yet?” Devon asked.
“I think that it’s too early to tell. We’ve already sent some blood off to the lab so that we can tell if he does have elevated liver enzymes. It doesn’t seem like he has jaundice, just the seizures and high blood pressure. What do you think that he would want done?” Conrad asked.
Devon looked at him with furrowed brows. He couldn’t quite figure out why his mentor had come to the on-call room that he had found to hide in just to make him come to his own independent conclusions about what was wrong with his boyfriend. Conrad worked in strange and mysterious ways that none of them in the hospital really understood, though, so it wasn’t clicking until that moment that something could possibly be up. Devon ran a hand down his face as he sank down into the seat where he had been before, his mind whirling with all the information he had just been given and trying to adjust to the new line of questioning that they were on.
Eventually, he settled on, “What?”
“Bradley. He’s pregnant and has eclampsia. We’re watching his heart right now, but it’s possible that a pregnancy that wasn’t monitored before with high blood pressure is going to cause further problems with his valve. You’re his partner and his emergency contact, so since he’s still out of it we need you to be the one making the decisions about his medical treatments," Conrad explained slowly. He was using that almost-condescending tone that he did with family he really didn’t like at the hospital.
“Uh, we never really talked about having kids,” Devon ran a hand through his hair. It didn’t take long for him to realize what the answer was, though. Bradley had always been really great when they had child patients in the hospital and had even considered becoming a general pediatric surgeon instead of sticking with adults like he had originally chosen. He was fairly certain that if his partner hadn’t been on the precipice of having a seizure or another breakdown of his heart, he would want to pursue the pregnancy and protect the baby. “How far along is the pregnancy?” he asked. He couldn’t make a proper choice without all the information.
Conrad opened his mouth like he was going to argue or something, but then he snapped his jaw closed so tightly that it made his teeth click. “I guess I didn’t ask that yet. Come on, let’s go find out.”
The younger resident sprang to his feet and followed after the other man as quickly as he could. He didn’t know if Conrad was going to change his mind about him seeing his partner before the medical situation was resolved, but he wasn’t going to do anything that might make him change his mind easier like hanging back. He was almost flat-tiring Conrad as they walked through the ER to some of the intake rooms a hall over, and then stepped through the door so that Devon and Bradley were in the same space since earlier that morning when this all started.
It felt like the entire world was crashing down on Devon in that moment. He had seen more family members than he could count come into the hospital and see their loved one hooked up to the monitors and looking rather sickly in the bed. He had comforted them by reassuring them that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, that they just needed as much information as they could get. All those words felt like lies on his tongue now that he was looking at Bradley in the same place that all his patients had been.
The redhead was sleeping, or at least his eyes were closed, and his head was tilted slightly to one side. He had a nasal cannula to give him more oxygen, an IV port in his arm to give him quick-access medications and fluids, and all the monitors that a pregnant person would have wrapped around his body. Somehow, despite his tall stature and broad shoulders, he looked tiny in the hospital bed. The contraption always seemed to have that ability, to turn even the most intimidating of people into a dwarfed nothingness amongst white sheets.
“Hi,” Devon whispered, despite not knowing if his partner could actually hear him. He sank down into the chair beside the bed and took the hand that had the pulse-ox so that he wasn’t disturbing the IV on the other line. He pressed a kiss to the back of Bradley’s hand as he tried to keep the tears that were forming in the back of his eyes away.
His gaze eventually drifted down to his boyfriend’s stomach, where their child had apparently been growing for the last several months. They’d had no idea that he was pregnant, would have definitely taken precautions and brought Bradley to the doctor if they had. Devon had heard of cryptic pregnancies before and knew that they were more common in carriers, but it was still so strange to him that there had been three of them in the house, occupying the space and living their lives, and he had been none the wiser.
He stayed exactly where he was as Conrad began to move around him. They lifted Bradley’s shirt up and moved some of the fetal monitors out of the way so that they could perform the ultrasound. Devon only looked away from his boyfriend’s unconscious face when he knew that the grainy black and white images on the screen were going to transform into something that he actually wanted to see.
His breath was stolen from his lungs when he saw it. Part of him had been expecting for it to be nothing but a black empty space where the amniotic fluid was and a dot of white that made up the placenta or baby. Bradley was barely showing, his belly slightly pudgy or soft but otherwise just as it had been the entire time they had known each other. Instead, amongst the black of the amniotic fluid and the more-solid white shapes of organs in the background, was the figure of a well developed baby. His mind was reeling too much to be able to identify just how far along his boyfriend was, all he could tell was that this pregnancy was a lot more advanced than he had thought it would be.
He ripped his eyes away from the screen when he felt Bradley begin to stir. “Baby? You awake?” he asked worried as he reached out and brushed some of the redhead’s hair back away from his forehead.
“What’s going on?” Bradley slurred. It reminded Devon too much of when he’d had his first episode with his heart and had gone tumbling over the edge of a safety railing right through the skylight of the board offices. That wasn’t a memory that he ever wanted to relive and yet it seemed like Bradley was dedicated to making sure that he never forgot what this feeling was like.
“You’re in the hospital again,” Devon said softly. “You had a seizure when you were giving your presentation and now we’re trying to figure out why.”
“Not my heart?” Bradley asked, opening his eyes slowly so that he could look at his partner. He squirmed uncomfortably as he apparently began to realize that quite a few things were connected to his tired body. He turned his head to the side and finally picked up on the screen that Conrad was staring at, which made his eyes go far wider. “What is that?”
“Don’t panic. There is some concerning slow down in your heart and we don’t want you to be too stressed out. AJ thinks that we should replace the valve in your heart,” Conrad said quickly.
“Yeah, because hearing that my mechanical heart might stop like my real one did doesn’t make me want to panic or anything,” Bradley said sarcastically. He was doing a remarkably good job of laying back against the pillows and breathing evenly to prevent his bod from having a full on panic attack.
Devon had been sitting beside him, hand in hand with his boyfriend, the entire time that the other two sniped at each other. Eventually, his mind snapped and the words spilled from him without his permission, “Did you know that you were pregnant?”
“I’m pregnant?” Bradley asked. His head whipped over to his partner and the heart monitor connected to his finger picked up on the swift uptick in beats per minute.
“Pravesh, come on,” Conrad sighed.
“It’s the reason that you had a seizure. We think that the high blood pressure might be contributing to the wear on your heart,” Devon said. He had only just put it together, his mind firing a million miles a second as he tried to process everything that was happening around him.
“Holy fucking shit,” Bradley let his eyes fall shut. “So what’s going to happen now?”
“Well, you’re about twenty nine weeks alone. That’s earlier than we would like to deliver, but given that you’ve already had a seizure, I think that we need to go ahead with an emergency C-section,” Conrad explained. He wiped some of the lube off of Bradley’s stomach after he had placed the wand back up against the machine.
“Twenty nine weeks is barely viable!” Devon immediately argued. He wanted this situation to resolve itself, he didn’t want to have to make these decisions. He wanted this baby with his partner so badly, more than he had thought that he ever would have given that he hadn’t known about it an hour ago.
“We can give the baby some steroids to develop their lungs further, which can help with the prognosis. It’s true that there will be quite a lot of complications that come with a baby being delivered this early, but it’s kind of our only option right now,” Conrad explained.
Devon opened his mouth to argue again, wanting to fight for his mentor to find another way. He wanted there to be an option that resulted in his boyfriend and their child having a better prognosis, but part of him knew that wasn’t what was going to happen.
“Let’s do it. Give me the steroids now, I want the baby to develop as much as they can before I have to go into surgery,” Bradley said. He reached out and grabbed Devon’s hand so that their fingers were woven together. Devon could feel the way that he was trembling ever so slightly, his breath catching in his throat due to the anxiety that the situation was causing him.
Suddenly, nothing else in the world mattered. Devon had known that it would be difficult for Bradley to be back in the hospital given that he’d had such a traumatic experience there when he had fallen through the skylight and had to go through heart surgery not two months after that, but it hadn’t occurred to him in that very moment. All that mattered then, after that split second, was making sure that his partner felt assured and comforted.
Conrad nodded his head in affirmation that he agreed with the plan and then left the room so that he could get the specialist that would help them navigate the complicated situation. Devon got up on the bed beside his partner, shifting Bradley over just enough that he could fit between his boyfriend and the plastic handle of the bed. He leaned over and gently pressed a kiss to the other man’s forehead in reassurance that he was there and that it would be alright.
“I promise that I didn’t know,” Bradley whispered. He gave his head a small, minute shake. “I would have told you if I did, would have asked you to check my heart more often to make sure that I could handle a pregnancy at all.”
“I know, I know,” Devon immediately soothed. “You’re going to be okay, Bradley. I promise that we’ll figure this out together.”
“What if we don’t manage to figure it out? What if more goes wrong and you’re left all alone?” Bradley asked. His eyes were shimmering with unshed tears, looking as though a lake had gone entirely still despite the monsters swirling within the depths.
“That’s not going to happen. Don’t even think like that, because I won’t let it happen. You know that everyone here loves us and is willing to fight until they quite literally can’t to make sure that we’re going to be okay,” Devon blabbered. He wasn’t even entirely sure of what he was saying, the words were pouring out of him at an extreme rate and it made him feel as though he were losing his mind. He knew that the hospital had formed a family of sorts within the workers, and that he and Bradley were part of that family. Family fought for each other when one of them was in danger and this was one of those situations, so he was sure that their family would do everything that they could to make the situation have a good ending.
Neither of them had a chance to say anything else as things around them began to move very quickly. The baby had the steroids administered to it so that their lungs could be able to develop at least a bit quicker. Bradley was the moved up to the maternity wing of the hospital and had some blood taken so that they could run some more tests.
Time felt like it dragged by at a snail’s pace and whirred by as quickly as it could at the same time. It was impossible to keep track of everyone that was on Bradley’s medical team and who was just stopping by so that they could congratulate him on the pregnancy or wish him well in his upcoming surgery.
By the time that the C-section was coming around, Devon felt as though he had lived through several lifetimes. A glance at the clock while he scrubbed in for the surgery, not to perform by to support Bradley from the sidelines, confirmed that it had only been about two horus. Devon wasn’t entirely sure if the steroids would have worked for the baby in that amount of time, but Bradley was dangerously close to having HELLP syndrome and if they wanted both carrier and baby to have a chance to survive, they had to push through and get it done with sooner rather than later.
“Ready to meet this baby?” Nic asked with a compassionate smile to Bradley. She had asked to be changed from her normal ER shift to work with the maternity floor that day so that she could be the one that helped Devon and Bradley through this entire mess. Devon was grateful for it, he knew that she would be more understanding and compassionate than a lot of the nurses might be.
“I think we have to be ready, there’s not really another option,” Bradley said awkwardly. His face was pale as they stretched his arm out onto the table set up next to him. He was topless with a small blanket draped over his form to keep him somewhat warm in the cold, sterile environment of the medical suite.
Another compassionate look crossed over Nic’s face. “I guess that’s true. You two have both been so strong today, I can’t imagine how hard it was to wake up this morning thinking that you were going to get a deal and then realize that instead, you were going to have a baby. But these things have a way of working out and we’re going to make sure that happens, at least to the best of our abilities.”
“We know that you will, Nic,” Devon nodded his head. He sat down on the other side of Bradley’s head from where the team needed to do their work. It was easier to be in the OR for him than it would have been for any other expectant father, but more difficult at the same time. While he didn’t have to be directed around nearly as much as a non-doctor would have, he had also seen more than his fair share of surgeries go wrong and knew the complications that they would be fighting off.
Despite his anxiety and the chaos of the entire situation, the world continued on. Dr. Chu was preparing the anesthetic that would put Bradley out for the surgery. Usually, C-sections were performed somewhat awake so that the baby wouldn’t have some of the chemical in their own system. Given that Bradley’s heart appeared to be on the fritz, they all thought that it was better for them to put him to sleep so that he couldn’t stress himself out when the procedure was going down.
Bradley turned his head towards Devon, “Watch out for them, okay? Trust that the medical team has me and make sure our baby doesn’t feel lonely.”
“I’ll try,” Devon nodded his head. He reached out and broke his own sterility to pet his partner’s hair affectionately. They both needed the small touch, the one thing that could ground them and keep them tied to the earth. It felt like the riptide of panic was pulling harder and harder at their legs with everything that they did, desperately trying to destroy every bit of peace that they had made for themselves.
He watched as Bradley’s eyes grew heavy and then slipped shut, sending him off to the dreamland that he had to be in while this was all happening. Devon then stepped to the side so that he was out of the way and wouldn’t interfere with the sterility of the procedure. He could feel his breath catching in his throat as he watched the silver, glinting scalpel lower towards his partner’s stomach and then slice into his scarred stomach.
It took two clamps, another fresh scalpel in another size, and the doctor reaching her entire arm into Bradley before the baby was rendered into the world. “Congratulations, you both have a little boy!” the doctor said.
Devon felt a smile creep across his face when the moment of joy about knowing more about his baby finally seeped into him. It was immediately replaced with the thoughts of everything that could be going wrong because of the severely premature delivery and complications that had happened with the pregnancy. As soon as the shock of good news had rushed through him, the dread replaced it and filled him to the point where he felt like his entire body was going to shatter with it.
The medical staff on the other side of the bed were rushing around as quickly as they could. The OB was focused on finishing up the surgery on Bradley while the peds team was now focusing on the baby. Devon hadn’t been able to cut the cord or do any of the things that a father would normally get to do when their child was delivered, the situation at hand far too risky for anything like that.
Devon stayed rooted where he had been before as he watched it all go down. The baby was whisked over to the oxygen concentrator hooked up to the incubator and that was where the bathing and checking happened. Bradley had the placenta delivered and then was stitched back together. Just as the last pull of the thread came to a finish, something on the monitor dragged Devon’s eyes away from where he had been watching the quick work. He stared at the heartline for a second before he finally processed that Bradley’s artificial heart had broken.
Within seconds, he was pushed into the scrub room while someone jumped up so that they could begin chest compressions while AJ jumped into action. Before this had all started, Devon had felt like having the heart surgeon in the room during the operation was begging for something bad to happen. Now, he was fairly certain that it would have happened regardless and he was relieved that they could work so quickly.
He sat outside of the OR for as long as he could muster it, allowing the seconds to tick by noisily in his ear from the watch that he always wore on his wrist. All he could see was Bradley’s blood leaking from the table and flashes of what it had been like when he had fallen through the ceiling onto the board room table. He couldn’t get the idea that he was moments away from losing the love of his life out of his mind, and it killed him.
“Devon?” Jessica called from down the hall. Her voice was kind and compassionate, her steps hesitant. She was approaching him like he was some kind of wild or feral animal, and if he was being honest he currently felt like he was. His bones twitched in his skin like his muscles were keeping them hostage, his ligaments stretched too much and the sinew of his flesh decaying the longer that he stayed still.
“Hey,” she whispered. She slid down the wall so that she was sitting beside him on the grimy floor of the hospital. One of her hands came up to his back and began to rub soothing circles into his shoulder. He easily tilted to the side and leaned into her so that he could get some more comfort from his friend. He wasn’t sure if he had ever felt this fragile before, even when he had moved away from his parents for the first time in his life to an entirely new state for college.
“What if I lose one of them?” Devon whispered. He ran his hands through his hair and pulled them away with some of the pomade that he had used after waking up that morning still sticking to his fingers. He only noticed then that he was shaking, his body trembling delicately.
Jessica leaned her head against him and he felt his shoulders sink, releasing some of the tension that he had been holding. She had always been so good about bringing a calm air about her and pushing it onto other people. She was like if a weighted blanket was a human, and that was what made her such a good nurse in the area that she worked on. Her hand continued moving on his back as she spoke, “Then you’ll have your family and friends to support you. But Devon, you can’t think that way. You have to put out the good juice that the universe needs to bring you down the path that you actually want. You have a beautiful son and a partner that has fought so hard to be here for you already.”
“I… I guess that’s true,” Devon nodded his head. “I just don’t want this to turn out to be too much for Bradley’s body to handle. I don’t know what I would do if it turned out that I lost him and had to raise a kid alone. Or if he woke up and I had to tell him that the baby was born too small and we’ve lost him. We… we didn’t even know that he was in there this morning and now the idea of losing him makes me feel like I’m going to puke.”
“Sometimes you don’t know how much you want a future until it’s presented to you,” Jessica nodded her head wisely. “But I think that you should start living in your present instead of looking only towards the future.”
“How do I do that?” Devon asked, his voice breaking in his throat.
“By seeing the baby. He’s already set up in the NICU and I’m sure that he would love to meet you properly. Bradley is going to be in surgery with Austin and Mina for a while, so you don’t have to worry about him waking up without you.”
Devon nodded. She was right, he knew that he could trust the health and safety of the man that he loved more than anything in the world to the people that she had mentioned. The medical staff at the hospital had saved him twice before and they could do it again, they pulled miracles off every day and knew that they had to fight as hard as they could for Bradley.
Slowly, he yanked himself off of the ground. He trailed behind Jessica like some kind of shambling zombie instead of the new father that he was supposed to be. His mind felt as though it were stuck in a cloud of fog, all of his thoughts rolling slowly in and out of his vision before he could identify any of them and bring them up for discussion. It was the kind of thing that made him feel listless and sleepy, but he pushed that feeling away as quickly as he could. He had to be present and okay so that he could take care of the people that he loved that needed him so badly.
They walked into the NICU after what felt like too little time. Devon was led through the steps that every new parent was, a gown put over his clothes and sanitizer spread over his arms and hands so that he didn’t bring any germs into the systems of the vulnerable little ones. Jessica handed him over to a very kind nurse who walked him past all the isolettes to where his own baby was laying.
He wasn’t the smallest newborn out of all of them, but he was significantly smaller and redder than the others were. Dozens of machines seemed to be crowded around his incubator alone and even more wires and tubes were connected to his little body. He listened to the nurse as she rattled off the complications that he had from being far too early and what they were doing to try to help him. The steroids were apparently still in his system and going to help continue to develop his lungs, but they were underdeveloped enough that he was struggling to get enough oxygen to circulate through his body.
Devon slowly collapsed down into the seat beside his baby, his eyes never once leaving the small, heaving chest in front of him. He could feel his hands sweating and shaking as he rubbed them up and down the thin gown that he had placed over his scrubs. It was a self-soothing gesture as he tried to process the fact that he had become a father without even knowing that it was coming that morning, and that his baby was in such grave shape.
He eventually leaned his head against the plastic of the isolette so that he could be as close to his baby as possible. He didn’t want to reach in and risk hurting the little one, but wanted him to know that his parent was at least somewhat close.
“We’re gonna be okay, aren’t we, little one?” Devon asked softly. He wanted him to hear his parent’s voice, even if they weren’t entirely sure what the baby’s sight or hearing were going to be like once he had come out of the incubator. Even if his baby did turn out to be deaf, he was sure that the little one would be able to feel the vibrations of his voice against the plastic and know that he wasn’t quite as alone as he likely felt.
He stayed there for what had to be hours, the time clicking by as slowly as it could. He didn’t mind, not in the way that he would have if this hadn’t been the outcome of the surgery. He would have been pacing up and down the hallway outside of the ORs while waiting for Bradley to be announced dead or alive, wringing his hands in front of his sternum until they felt rubbed raw and Nic had to persuade him into using that foul smelling lotion again. But now he had someone to keep him company, someone that would want Bradley to survive just as much, if not more, as he did.
He jerked when he felt a hand drop down onto his shoulder and then turned around to see that it was Jessica again. She had gone so that she could scrub in and assist with the procedure that they were doing to replace the valve in Bradley’s heart, since she knew that Devon trusted her above all the other nurses in the hospital, and so her presence assured him that it was done.
“Is he okay?” Devon asked. At some point, when he had been sitting with his son, tears had begun to flow from his eyes and his breathing had become ragged with emotion. It had cleared up and turned to nothing more than an annoying film in his vision now, but the remnants of it stuck to his throat.
“He’s fine,” Jessica nodded. “We have some concerns about the valves that QuoVadis has us using, but AJ managed to find another one by pitching the biggest fit that I have ever seen. May have used the baby as leverage too,” she chuckled. “Do you want to come and see him?”
“Yes,” Devon responded immediately. As soon as he stood, already jerking towards the doors that would lead him to another part of the hospital where his partner was staying, he paused. He turned his head back to the isolette where his baby was staying. “Do you think that he’ll be upset that I left him?”
“I think that he’s sleeping, Devon. And he probably wants his papa to go check on his daddy,” she joked. She wrapped an arm around one of his so that she could drag him past all the other patients and healthcare workers in the NICU. He stumbled to keep up with her since his entire body felt dead tired from the earlier adrenaline and no-sleep shift before it had all happened.
Everything immediately perked up the moment that he reached the ICU and was able to see his partner. He cleaned himself off to avoid getting his boyfriend sick with anything that he might have picked up in his trek across the hospital and collapsed down next to Bradley. He picked his lover’s hand up and began to babble basically nonsensical words into the back of his palm. He told Bradley all about how terrified he had been with every individual thing that had gone wrong, how wonderful it had been to see their baby both times it had happened, and how relieved he was that his partner’s heart had started back up properly.
When he ran out of things to say concerning the present, he began to speak of the future. He tried out names that he liked, both traditional American and ones that were more inspired by his Indian culture like his brother’s name had been, spoke of where they were going to put the bassinet in their room, and if they had to put off getting the cat that Bradley had wanted.
His voice was more hoarse than it had been when Jessica had come to get him by the time that he felt the palm in his hand twitch with wakefulness. He looked up and saw Bradley’s gentle eyes smiling down at him, “Good to know that you’re so excited to be a father. You’re going to be doing most of the heavy lifting after everything I’ve been through.”
Devon knew that he was joking, they both worked equally around the house and shared in the burden of everything in their lives. It was enough to make a laugh sound from around his sobs. He quickly wrapped his arms around Bradley and hugged him as tightly as he dared with the fractured ribs and stitches on his chest and belly. This had been the worst day of both of their lives, and also the start of something absolutely wonderful.