The moment she’d gotten the call, Michewa had been in her car and on the road — a damn sight worse for the wear than her future vehicle but serviceable enough to get the job done — no matter how crowded the airport, expensive the ticket, or the commute to get to an airport willing to fly out, she was going. She had BEEN there since.
She’d meander off, quietly and contemplatively, to get a coffee or water, use the restroom, or, at the behest of nurses, eat something. But she had refused to leave his side otherwise.
Her husband had wanted to come, wanting to check on Atticus, but he had to work — his wife had the luxury of putting someone else in charge for a while and while he might be able to do that it wouldn’t work for long as people come to his shop for HIS tattoo work — and watch over their current kids. Michewa had never faltered in her insistence on flying out.
The moment she heard a rustle she’d already been on her feet, so poised on the edge of her seat for the last few days that she’d become accustomed to the other noises that exist in a hospital, but more in tune with the sounds that Atticus made when he was recovering from an episode than any one person had any right to be.
It took no time for her to move across, settle on the edge of the bed, and fold him up into her arms, lips immediately dropping to settle against his hair for a moment. The hug was firm, arms tight against him, but not so much so as to restrict him; the last thing he’d want is to feel trapped in this situation, so she let him set the pace, the one, the urgency of everything.
One hand smoothed his hair as she kissed his crown, fingertips drawing down gently across the nape of his neck and along his back. She slowly stroked with her fingertips in patterns on his back, familiar shapes and imagery to illicit memories of better things, all while her lips hushed into his hair, “Nothing could have kept me away, my darling.”
A woman who had, only recently mind you, become more in tune with the side of her given to nurture. Her life was a whirlwind of observations (and, at times, bloodied hands and lives silenced), a cog in a machine that worked because she didn’t feel anything — or at least that was the idea. Her husband had smashed through that wall with a romantic love that had started a fire in her, but… Atticus arriving on their doorstep after what she’d seen online about what happens to boys like him. That was something else.
The fire a blaze now, the fallout of which was encompassing everything dear to her in life. Atticus had changed her life when he’d shown up in ways he couldn’t imagine, and she knew, without question, that she would do anything to protect him. It didn’t matter how much older he’d gotten. It didn’t matter if he had his own life now.
When Atticus needed her, she was there. Because he needed her more than anyone else when it came to those moments. Her husband loved her, her kids loved her, they all needed her but… they could survive in spans of heart beats without her, but Atticus would…
She didn’t like to think about it, and as the thought was dashed from her mind she continued to trace shapes on his back, not pulling back to look down at him (she could sense that he needed time to adjust) but instead talking softly against the top of his head and holding him to her as much as he wanted. Tears were wetting the cozy sweater she was wearing — cable knit and frayed, but somehow still fashionable — and likely other things, but she didn’t notice.
“I know, baby. It’s okay. It’ll all be okay. Things get noisy for all of us.” A pause, thinking for a moment, fingers tracing a heart along his back, “Do you remember what happened? It’s okay if you don’t.”
There were a series of questions she’d ask to try and get a feel for what had happened in detail. She’d learned over the years… directly at first so that he could have agency should he actually remember clearly, then softer questions about smells, things he felt, things he might have seen even if they weren’t important.
The hand at his back abandoned for a moment to reach and pull over the water she’d had, knowing full well he wouldn’t mind drinking after her and held it between them, kissing his forehead now but still not forcing him to look at her if he didn’t want to and keeping her voice the soft measure it had always been for Atticus, “Drink a moment, my darling. Take a deep breath and hold it for two beats, then let it out like this moment is the first moment of the rest of your life…”
She didn’t dare ring for a nurse. They couldn’t help him right now. He needed water, he needed his mom, and he needed to feel like the world was not equal parts exploding outwards and imploding in his chest. They could run tests later, if she allowed them.
Atticus was a sick baby. Retrospectively, those were flashing red lights that someone would descry as a train sped down the tracks — he was brought into the world with a blue face and destined to be without breaths. Not long after he learned how to walk, his feet and ankles swelled as if he were stung by a thousand bees. Having a child prone to illness, alongside his sisters, was the perfect anecdote for the attention his father wanted, and it wasn’t until he held his brother’s hand during an appointment when they arrived in Manchester that it was not peanut butter he was allergic to — rather, his body was a cesspool for draining his lymphatic into his lower appendages.
For the longest time, he’d pertinaciously deemed it was just a fickle nuisance to live with. The artisan would have been none the wiser that it was the rabbit that ran and hid in the brush, congestive heart failure to rear its ugly head. How was he supposed to know, he’d implore the one whose faith he’d abandoned, with a biological mother whom he’d learned the name of too little, too late to muster the care? The baby boy she met was the one who wore an ugly face to sedate the malicious intent haunting the soul of his father.
Michewa never behaved as if he inconvenienced her — Michael, either, though he’d given them every right to. Atticus didn’t misbehave, in spite of failing marks on report cards due to falling asleep in class and suffering from adapting to a fast-paced English-speaking environment with a scarce two years under his belt. However, most parents wouldn’t be able to handle the dozens of times they’d walk through the mall or the grocery store and the creeping sensation of a thousand eyes burning into his skull and alighting it, gasoline to oil, threw him into a fit. Twelve year olds didn’t typically run to their parents in the middle of the night, in tears, and still asking to nestle up to them because of the monsters under the bed.
The whimper in his throat puerile, staring at the back of his eyelids as she cocooned him within her arms. Fingers tremulously rested in the wrinkles of her sweater, shallow breaths pervading the room beneath the hamper of a chorus line of machines chained up to him for the time being. If he didn’t open his eyes, he could persuade himself that it was another nightmare. The scent radiating off her sweater brought him back to baking sheets of pre-made cookies and cinnamon apple butter, autumn evenings in Anchorage trekking through snow-kissed parks and feeding the last of the ducks stale bread before winter.
Like dough being kneaded in a breadmaker, he held tight to her, wontedly rocking himself to soothe the capsized thoughts tormenting his mind. Reality was apt to set in, and it came down like an anvil to shatter the glass that he’d been keeping between himself and confronting the course of his own actions. “I could die,” he croaked, sniffling, “I could die on the table or…” He’d been reading the studies Micah had in her purse when she wasn’t in the room. Survival rates hadn’t exactly budged in twenty years, that perpetual fuzzy feeling of being stuck in place — eighty percent for the first, crucial year was good odds for the outsider, what about the horse running the race?
Petite palms slid down when a hand wormed between them, watery eyes glancing to her face and back to the cup. The infallible paranoid thoughts about poison were nonexistent, taking the cup in his hands and lifting the rim to his lips at her instruction. When he swallowed, he inhaled slowly, the twinging hyperawareness of the cannula flickering into his cognizance until he let it out. And another, to clear his head from the blind fear and consider her earlier query. Slowly, he shook his head. Looking down at the rumpled sheets and blanket mussed on the bed, he pressed his lips together. A sharp pain striking his chest prompted him to offer the cup back to her so he could ease against the pillows again, speaking up hoarsely, “I blacked out. I know that in the right state of mind, I wouldn’t have…” Done it. “It’s my fault for going off the meds. Micah…” The francophile paused, glancing to the door warily, grey hues tracking back to his mother’s face. “She paid… so the transplant committee would look the other way.” And she was paying even more to usher the search for a new heart with his rare blood type. He was lucky — she’d move a heaven he didn’t believe in for him. “Where is she…?”
As much as she had aided Atticus in his becoming a person capable of being exactly who he was — beautiful and capable — he had helped her delve into the parts of herself dormant for so long and left in cobwebs and broken dreams; a shattered husk huddled in a corner and whispering to itself that nothing felt better than anything while digging its nails into its own palms and bleeding rivulets down its front; the lies she told herself when memories surfaced she knew didn't feel familiar or warm but instead felt mechanical and looked like a grainy, half-lit home movie of someone else's life.
With Michael — and her biological son, Felix — her heart had been thawed, awakening a tingling in her body that left her synapses on fire and her soul wanting more. She loved them, completely and absolutely, but it wasn't until she met Atticus and beheld the parts of him that he kept hidden inside — held together by scotch tape and spit and the will to keep something together at least — that she felt someone who actually needed her more than anything.
To be needed by someone with damage that felt, if not exact, at least similar to one's own was something else entirely. It happened to normal people all the time, she'd imagine, but for her there were parts of her that were so misshapen she never held out hope that someone would come along to fill them. Atticus had, and she immediately wanted to fill the empty caverns in his own soul.
His wife had done so much after Michewa let him go — only in the sense of him taking his own life into his hands and moving forward — and was probably as beloved by Michewa as anyone else in her family. She knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing bad could happen to Atticus as long as Micah was around. A mother bear, tiger mom, and fiercely protective of her son it wasn’t taken lightly that she trusted the woman with her baby and it spoke to their bond.
It was hard for her to fully understand what Atticus was going through, but on some levels no one could understand better; she'd been in this from the get go (as much of the get go as she was allowed to be in it, and sometimes the darker parts of herself crave violence against those who hurt him before she could get there) and had learned his moods, his shifts, the way his body worked; if he so much as hitched a breath differently she'd know the exact meaning of that particularly breath. Some people didn't understand the way they were together — symbiotic in the direst instances but really just two people who love each other and are very close — but that didn't matter to either of them.
What mattered was that they were a part of each other.
A hand shifts the water away, not deigning to force further on him now knowing that he was not going to be totally without hydration. Her head tips to look down at him, both arms once again encircling him, safe but not suffocating, and she pressed her lips to his brown gently, "She's dealing with the doctors and nurses. She's been hard at it since I came. She didn't want to leave your side but she understood how important this all was... Atti, you've got a good wife. She will make this right. There is absolutely nothing she won't do, and don't you dare think otherwise about how she feels about you and the lengths she's willing to go. That girl is a force to be reckoned with and is tough enough to handle anything."
Except losing him. Exactly like Michewa. But she couldn't say that, it would spiral him right back into doubt and numbers and statistics and...
She knew of his fear, and the thought that Micah was missing in that moment had probably set him back a few paces from the steps towards recovery he had found.
Now Michewa settled her lips full against his forehead, murmuring the next words gently, "Neither of us would let anything bad happen to you, I promise. Survival rates are nothing to you and I. We transcend and survive, that is what we do. You cannot be toppled, you have come through so much and will continue to thrive in a world that wants nothing more than to see you dead. You are steel to their wood, and no matter how much death tries to throw himself against you you will ALWAYS rise above." a pause, each word spoken with such conviction, and now even softer, just for him, "breathe, baby. You have to let it out of you. Dash the thoughts with others. Tell me about your wedding day again... tell me about how she looked."
