Disclaimer: They’re not mine

Spoilers: None past Season 10’s “Dear Abby”

Pairing: Luby

Rated: T or PG-13, to be safe.

Summary:Luby Set mid-season 10. Luka, sick with malaria, comes home.

Holy crap, I’m sorry. I can’t believe how long this has taken me and if any of you guys can actually still remember that this story exists, I’ll count myself very lucky. Why is it that I can suddenly reel out ten chapters of a CSI Grissom/Catherine story within a week and yet this chapter has been so crazily slow? I don’t know. It’s been a minor disaster, I think we’ll all agree.

I’d like to thank the last chapters reviewers, Peaky, HumanShield, AmYkYo, xEllax, Bianca, CarbyLivesOn, twinmuse and Real Dream Nirom in the hope that you’ll forgive me for all this waiting, and still enjoy – and remember – this. I will keep going with this. I promise, I will finish this. I will. But for now – Enjoy! Love LJ xXx

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Kisangani Dreams. Chapter Nine. A Collection Of Things I Didn’t Say Or Do

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“Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort.

No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.”

ARNOLD BENNETT

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Luka didn’t see Abby again after she left that day, he didn’t get quite so many visitors this time around. Luka supposed that pulling the malaria stunt and winding up back at County twice in one month got a bit old after a while; he wouldn’t have minded so much if Abby at least had turned up.

But she didn’t, not the next day, or the day after that – and Luka lay there, slowly getting better, slowly feeling worse. Dr. Petersen came back to him on the third day, a thin sheet of cheap printer paper in his hand with his blood work results from that morning. When he told Luka Kovac that he was well enough to be discharged that afternoon, and asked him how he felt, Luka lied and told him,

“Good. I feel good.”

And felt the words, hollow lies, sink stale inside him.

So Luka Kovac is sat on the edge of his bed, fully dressed in clothes that hang – baggy on his thinner frame. And he sits beside a packed duffel bag with clothes that Abby brought him the last time he saw her, waiting for the porter to come in with a wheelchair. It feels lonely. He’d never thought it were possible to feel lonely in a place like County General.

A knock on the door – thank God.

“There’s a cab waiting for you downstairs, Dr. Kovac,” the porter says with a small smile. Luka’s head rolls forwards and then backwards in a kind of nod on a weakened neck. The black wheelchair – “CG Floor 5” written across the back in adamant white-out – wheeled close to his bed, Luka exhausts himself transferring from the bed to the chair with frustratingly weaker limbs.

-

“Where do you wanna go, sir?” the cab driver glances at Luka in the mirror. Jesus – this guy looked sick – all hollowed and creepy. The cab driver hoped it wasn’t catching, whatever he had… That was the risk you ran when picking up people from County.

Luka stares, morose, out of the window for a while at a grey Chicago. Then he inches to the edge of the cab seat and gives the cab driver an address which, in his address book, is written very neatly under the name, “Abby Lockhart”.

-

Outside her apartment block, the driver watches Luka drag himself out of his seat and walk with painstaking slowness towards the sidewalk. After a moment, he winds down the window and, leaning out, calls to him.

“Hey – do you need a hand or something?”

Luka looks back and smiles slightly. “No, I’ll be fine,” he tells the cab driver confidently. The cab driver doesn’t look convinced but shrugs his shoulder and rolls the window up again.

“Whatever you say,” he mutters to himself inside the cab and drives away. Luka looks up the steps to her building and, finding strength from somewhere other than his wasted muscles, he pulls tightly on the duffel bag slung across his shoulder and begins to climb the steps to the lobby.

Luckily for him, when he reached the door to her building – one of her neighbours, leaving, held the door open for him with a bright smile as he stumbled inside. He didn’t know quite what he’d say to Abby yet and at least, he thinks, he’ll have time to find some words on the elevator ride upwards. A simple, “I love you,” would never be enough for Abby Lockhart – especially since she’d grown to mistrust those three words more than any others she’d heard in her lifetime. He had to be better than that.

He leans his head against the back of the elevator wall and shuts his eyes, thinking as he makes his steady ascent to Abby’s.

-

Abby is cleaning out her closet when Luka knocks on the door. In the past three days, she’d gone through all of her old letters and magazines, every expired food product in the kitchen, all of the out-of-date phone books that she’d just shoved underneath a shelf – and thrown it all out. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she knew that all of these were classic techniques for avoidance, but she never liked listening to that part of her mind anyway.

When Luka sees Abby’s front door finally swing open, there’s a bin bag full of papers in her hand and a surprised expression on her face.

“Luka – what are you doing here?” she asks.

The whole ride up in the elevator, and the best he could come up with was – “I got discharged today. I wanted to talk to you.”

Abby puts down the bag with a rustle and runs her fingers through her hair.

“Oh, Luka – you should be at home resting,” she tells him sadly. Luka winces slightly. ‘At home’ hadn’t failed to hurt.

“I know… I know,” he says. “But I wanted to talk to you. There are some things we need to go through.”

She sighs. “Luka, I don’t even think that I have the energy for this – I doubt that you do.”

“Okay,” he replies. “Okay, then we don’t have to talk. But can I at least come in? You can’t exactly turn down a recovering malaria patient who’s just walked up five flights of stairs to see you.”

Abby’s eyes widen at that and she looks horrified.

“Jesus, Luka!” she says and ushers him inside.

-

Once he’s sitting on her couch with a glass of water in his hand – once they’re sat together in a comfortable silence, Abby finally asks,

“Why did you take the stairs when we have an elevator?”

A smile crosses Luka’s lips for a second. “I didn’t really walk,” he says. “I just couldn’t think of another way to get you to listen to me.”

She opens her mouth, about to yell at him, but she notices the paleness of his skin and the gauntness of his face and decides to hold back this time. Instead, Abby sighs slightly and watches him stare into the bottom of his glass. Without looking at her, Luka continues.

“You’re probably going to say no, but I came here to ask you if I could stay with you. Just for a while?” Luka asks quietly. “Petersen keeps telling me I’m getting better, but I don’t feel any better. The last time I felt anything other than sick was with you.” He glanced at Abby then, to gauge her reaction and added, “I was never very good at holding onto what was good for me either – but I’m trying to improve.”

Abby looks at him closely and then shrugs her shoulders in an attempt to be nonchalant.

“That’s a good idea,” she says. “I think I’ll try it, too.”

And she offers him a small smile before reaching out to wrap her fingers around his hand, and hold it tightly. Luka breathes a laugh, without knowing what he’s laughing about, and lets his worn-out body collapse into the sofa. He closes his eyes and concentrates on the feel of her hand around his – like remembering something beautiful that he thought he’d forgotten a long time ago – and finally, exhausted with the day, falls asleep.

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