I Will Write You A Lullaby

Post 6x11. It had to be written.

She hears him before she can see him, his frantic voice carrying through the noisy hallways of the emergency room. He pounds on the counter of the nurses station, repeating her name, his urgency increasing every time he's forced to repeat himself. Then finally she hears his heavy footsteps rushing towards her, before the thin curtain circling her bed is pulled back, revealing his panicked face.

He crosses the room at break-neck pace, and buries his face in the spot nearest her heart, holding tightly enough to her shoulders that his knuckles turn a ghostly shade of white. "I'm ok, Luke." She whispers into wisps of his hair. "I'm ok."

When he pulls away she notices the redness around his eyes, the slight hint of tears before he wipes them away with the back of his hand. "Babe," she whispers, stroking her fingers across his damp cheeks, "I'm sorry for scaring you."

"You died." He says slowly. "In the dream I had, you died. And then I got a call from the hospital, and I thought that I was going to lose you for real."

"I'm sorry for scaring you. I'm so sorry." She leans forward slowly, being careful not to disturb the iv taped securely to the back of her hand, and kisses his forehead, the bridge of his nose, and the trembling corners of his mouth. "I love you."

"What happened?" He whispers. "The doctor said you collapsed."

"I'm pregnant." She says softly, just barely above a whisper. She watches his eyes change, his mouth drop open, but before he can speak her doctor walks in, her chart in hand.

"Alright Miss Sawyer, the good news is that you can go home tonight." The older man flips through her charts, nodding at the clipboard, making notes with an ink pen while he speaks. "The bad news is that I'm going to have to put you on bed rest for the time being. Due to your slight build and the stress you've already been under in the first few months of your pregnancy, I'm afraid without it you may have a hard time carrying this baby to term."

It's her turn to panic as the doctor's words set in, the sudden realization that nothing is guaranteed, and that for the last thirty minutes she's been thinking of baby names and turning Karen's old room into a nursery, when there is a possibility that this baby might not even become a reality for them. The look on his face tells her that he is thinking the same thing.

*

He practically carries her from the car into their bedroom, walking at a snail's pace, his arm looped around her waist. She wants to tell him she can handle a walk to their bedroom, that she would like to relish her last moments of freedom before she's confined to their bed for at least the next two months, but she sees the look of careful determination on his face and she relents.

He gets her into bed, a carefully constructed tower of pillows against her back, and then he becomes a blur of frantic activity, pulling the tv closer to the bed, piling books and magazines and bottles of water on her nightstand, clearing her a path to the bathroom amidst the dirty laundry that is scattered across the floor. He stops for a moment to catch his breath, and he notices her watching him, as amused look on her face.

"Will you lay with me for just a minute?" She asks, pulling back the blanket on his side of the bed.

He climbs in next to her, resting his head near hers on the tower of pillows. Her fingers trail across his chin. "You've been pretty quiet since the hospital, I'm just wondering how you're feeling about all of this. I know it's kind of unexpected, we haven't really talked about kids."

"I'm scared." He finally admits. "This is all just happening so fast. It's not exactly the way I thought starting a family would happen, you on bed rest, and the baby at risk. I'm just scared for you, for the baby. If anything happens to you..." His voice trails off, unable or unwilling to finish his thought, to go to that place.

She can't move from her upright position per the half inch thick packet of information the doctor sent home, so she reaches for his hand and holds it firmly against her chest. "Luke, I promise you that nothing is going to happen to me, or this baby. And I will do everything in my power to keep that promise to you. Let's just be happy about this for right now, anything else that happens we'll handle together if and when the time comes."

"I really am happy about this, about being a dad." He says, and the smile that crosses his face makes her heart melt. His hand makes its way down to her stomach, and slips under the hem of her shirt, roaming the expanse of the gentle sloping of her belly that had gone unnoticed for the last month, as their lives together and apart had become more hectic. He whispers something against her skin, "How far along are we?"

"Almost three months. Everything has been so crazy lately, I never noticed the missed periods."

"Vegas." He smiles. "We could have made this baby our first night back together."

He shifts himself in bed, angling his body so his head can rest lightly against her ribs, his breath tickling the bare skin of her exposed stomach. She runs her fingers through his hair, and listens to him whisper indiscernible things against her belly.

*

The first week passes slowly.

She wakes in the mornings, her back tight and cramped from spending hours in the same position, and she's reminded of the very small baby keeping her prisoner in a very tiny cell. Then she takes a deep breath, and feels his body tight against hers, his hand on her stomach, the tips of his fingers slipping under the band of her briefs, and she decides against holding a grudge.

It only takes him a few days before she starts calling him the helicopter, given his sudden inclination towards hovering. He has her on a schedule after the first night, vitamins with breakfast, a nap after lunch, an hour of work a day from her laptop, and a status check every five minutes. She finds his protectiveness endearing, and typical considering their history together, if not slightly threatening to her independence. She doesn't complain, as it's the most time they've spent alone together since their self-imposed house arrest and Vegas combined. He puts off meetings, ignores the accumulating voicemails on his cell phone, and they spend aimless hours in bed. He reads aloud, the soft hum of his voice never failing to lull her into a nap. They listen to music, and spend too much time trying to decide which evil twin will come back to life on the trashy soap opera they quickly become addicted to.

But life eventually tracks him down.

She wakes one afternoon to raised voices coming from the kitchen. She can make out Luke's voice, then eventually Julian's, and she knows they're fighting about his missed meetings in LA with the potential director of his movie. She hears Julian tell Luke to fly out the next morning or he's off the movie, that they can't afford anymore setbacks. Then she hears the back door slam, and his footsteps echoing down the hallway towards their bedroom.

"Hey." He whispers, leaning against the doorframe. "I thought you were sleeping."

"You need to go to LA, Luke."

"Nah, Julian's just being an asshole, trying to throw his weight around. He can't take me off this movie." He crosses their bedroom and lays down on the bed, stretching his limbs out across the limited space available to him.

"Babe, you need to go. It'll only be a few days, and I can have Brooke stop by during the day to check up on me. It'll be fine, I promise."

"I don't want to leave you."

"And I don't want you to lose this chance. Besides, we're gonna need that fat movie paycheck to send this kid to college one day."

"You know I'm going to worry about you the entire time."

"Yes, I know that. I'll keep my cell on the entire time and you can call it as many times as you want. I won't leave this bed for any reason other than a very short, very slow-moving trip to the bathroom, and I promise to take my vitamins every morning and a two hour nap in the afternoon. Scout's honor."

"Peyton." He says, his voice full of hesitation.

"Look, if you start packing now, you can spend the rest of the day in bed with me, and while there will be no funny stuff going on under the covers for a while, there will be a Humphrey Bogart marathon on tv and the chance to spend yet another day lying in bed with me, watching television, before you have to leave."

He sighs loudly, glaring at her with his arms folded across his chest. She looks over at him and smiles, and he relents. He fills a suitcase with clothes before slipping off his shoes and climbing into bed next to her, his hand taking residence over the slight bump of her belly, while The Maltese Falcon starts in the background.

*

He leaves for LA early in the morning, just as the slightest sliver of sun begins to peek above the horizon. He kisses her forehead, and pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulders. She wakes just enough to grab hold of his jacket and pull him closer for a kiss, her eyes remain closed and her voice full of sleep as she whispers that she loves him against his lips.

She's dreaming about tropical beaches and drinks with sliced fruit when she's woken by a gentle hand nudging her shoulder. "Shouldn't you be on a plane?" She groans without opening her eyes.

"Nope, I'm supposed to be here, making sure you take this handful of vitamins." Peyton recognizes the raspy voice, and the irritable tone that comes from her best friend having to be up so early in the morning.

She opens her eyes to Brooke standing over her, a palmful of vitamins extended towards her. "Hey mama, I brought you some juice."

"What are you doing here, I thought you were just going to stop by after work?"

"I was, until Luke called late last night to ask me to come over and stay with you during the day because he knew you'd try to escape if left alone long enough."

Peyton scoffs then swallows the pills. "I feel bad that you have to stay here cooped up in this room with me all day."

"Don't worry, I only have the morning shift." Off Peyton's look Brooke reaches down near her feet and comes back with a large desk calender. The remaining days of the month are color-coded with fluorescent markers, doctor's appointments circled in red ink, and random post-it notes.

"What the hell is that?"

"Our group schedule." Brooke says. "My shifts are in pink, Nathan has blue, Haley is red, and Skills has yellow."

"Oh my god. He's a lunatic."

"Nah." Brooks drops the calender near her feet. "He's just a little overprotective. Luckily, we know how he can be, which is why we all volunteered to take shifts so even when Lucas is back he can be out of the house, and you won't eventually want to kill him."

"That's very sweet of you guys, but you don't have to do this."

"No, but we want to. Now take your pills please, we're already ten minutes off schedule." She reaches into her bag and pulls out a stack off fashion magazines before climbing into the empty spot on the bed.

*

The changing of the guard happens while she's asleep. She wakes to find a boy and a bunny sitting on the edge of her bed, watching cartoons while his mother grades papers at Lucas' desk. Haley's deep in thought with a pen clenched between her teeth as she flips through a stack of term papers when Peyton clears her throat and waves.

"Hey. Jamie didn't wake you, did he? He keeps sneaking the volume up when I'm not paying attention."

Peyton shakes her head. "He's fine."

"How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine."

Haley crosses the room, grabs the remote control from Jamie and tells him to take Chester and watch cartoons in the living room for a while. After he's gone, Haley grabs a book from the desk and sits in the chair next to Peyton's bed.

"Here, I brought you this." She hands Peyton a large book. "Karen gave it to me when I was pregnant with Jamie. It helps a lot, I think she'd want you to have it."

"Thanks." She flips idly through the pages of the book, stopping to look up at Haley when she feels her staring. "What's up Haley"

"I'm really sorry about the way I acted towards you this past year. There were things going on in my life that I couldn't handle and I deflected that onto you."

"Haley, it's ok."

"No, it's not. I knew that Lucas wasn't in love with Lindsey the way that he had always loved you, and I never said anything until it was too late. I blamed you for all his doubt, and I'm so sorry for that Peyton. I really am." Haley says. "And I'm so happy for you, that everything is happening for you now, with you and Lucas getting married and now this baby. If anyone deserves this kind of happiness, it's you."

"Thank you Haley." She whispers, her voice catching softy in the back of her throat. It isn't in her nature to hold a grudge, to deny anyone forgiveness or peace of mind, and so she gives Haley the absolution that she needs. And they both move forward.

*

She's thirty minutes into a repeat of Behind the Music when she hears a car pull into the driveway. She looks at the calender and sees the rest of the day filled in with blue, Nathan's shift, and then Lucas walks through the back door, suitcase in hand, home a day early.

He looks exhausted, dark circles occupying the spaces beneath his eyes. He drops his bags near the door, and sheds his jacket, letting it drop onto the ground beneath his feet before climbing in bed next to her.

"So the meeting went well?" She asks, running her fingers over his scalp.

"The director Julian wanted me to meet with snorted coke off of my screenplay and then wanted me to kill off Haley, Brooke, and you in no particular order." He rubs a hand across his face. "There was no way I was going to ok him to direct."

"So what happens now?"

"We meet with another director, which means another trip to LA in a few weeks."

"Well, it's a good thing you already have that calender all made up." She looks down at him and he smirks at her, one corner of his mouth rising slightly higher than the other, his classic tell. He's caught.

"So I'm a little overprotective." He shrugs, folding his arms across his chest.

"I like that you are." She says, her voice low in her throat. "It's kind of sexy."

He perks up then, rolling onto his side, against her body, and kisses her. His hands trail up her arms and across her chest, coming to rest lightly against her neck, his fingertips pressing into her skin. She's missed him, in this way. Two weeks without this kind of touch, without his breath on her neck, his hands on her body. She'd gone four years before, but now two weeks of forced celibacy seems cruel and unusual. She wants to bend the rules, to break them just once, but his hand brushes her stomach and she knows that nothing is worth the risk.

She grabs his face with both hands and pulls him away, kissing him once more, his breath hurried on her lips. "Don't start anything we aren't allowed to finish."

"I hate bed rest." He breathes into the crook of her neck.

"You and me both, baby."

"You know the second we get the ok..." He grunts into her skin, his teeth clenched in frustrated restraint.

"I'm right there with you." She kisses him once more.

He stands from the bed slowly, stretching his back and the muscles in his leg. "I'm gonna take a shower." He glances over at her and sighs loudly for dramatic effect. "A really cold shower."

*

The third week passes slowly, as if time is dragging its proverbial feet. There is a feeling of restlessness brewing slowly in the back of her brain. She tries to push it away, and it works for a while, the irresistible urge to leave the bed and run for the hills, becoming resistible once again.

Lucas is gone again, spending three days in LA picking a new director and attempting not to strangle Julian. Nathan draws the short straw and gets a day long shift with Peyton. He spends most of the time asleep in the chair next to her bed, head titled back, mouth open wide, SportsCenter playing in the background. Peyton spends an hour tossing cheerios towards his open mouth, remembering what Lucas taught her about arc and follow through, until she finally makes a basket, leaving Nathan sitting upright and choking on breakfast cereal.

"You are a really bad babysitter." She says. "I could have left this room ten different times in the span of your three hour nap."

"Yeah, but you didn't." When he sits up, a confetti of cereal falls from his shirt onto the floor, and he glances over at her with a stern look he must reserve for a misbehaving Jamie and finishes brushing away the crumbs.

"So, this whole raising a kid thing? Is it as hard as they make it sound?"

"Harder." He says, clicking off the television. "You're going to look at that kid every day and worry about screwing them up, or that you won't be able to protect them, or give them everything they need to be happy and healthy. But on the bright side you're going to have this little person who loves you unconditionally and it'll be the greatest thing that will ever happen to you."

"Nathan Scott, you big softie." She smiles.

"Yeah yeah." He switches the television back on. "The Duke game's on."

*

They begin a nightly ritual when life finally settles down. When he crawls into bed at the end of the day, he pulls back her shirt enough to expose the skin of her abdomen, and with his mouth close to her belly he starts to read. Some nights it's classic American literature: Steinbeck, Hemingway, or sometimes Faulkner until she begs him to stop. Other nights it's Goodnight Moon or The Velveteen Rabbit from a box he found in the attic filled with things his mother saved from when he was a baby. He wants the baby to love books and words the way he does, and she feels the same way about music. They play music from her iPod, the earbuds pressed to her skin while Ray LaMontagne or The Shins float softly into the walls of her belly. It becomes her favorite time of day, when everything in their world feels at peace, and she can forget for a little while that she's stuck in bed.

With time, her belly starts to grow, and his actions become sweeter. He's always been loving, gentle, but there is the slightest change in him. His words become softer, his smile wider, the kind that crinkles the edges of his eyes and exposes the soft dimples in his cheeks. He presses his lips to her forehead and her temples in a succession of soft kisses. There are times throughout the day when he glances up from his book or the open document on his laptop and smiles at her with a sudden look of adoration, and whispers that her loves her. It never fails to make her heart race.

It's during these moments when life feels unbelievably good.

*

Then, there are times when it doesn't.

At five weeks, time stops passing altogether. The restlessness becomes overwhelming, the agitation all consuming. She snaps at Lucas, at Brooke, and then at Skills when he asks her for relationship advice about her ex-boyfriend's mother.

She's tired of living in pajamas, and having people fetch things for her. She's jealous of Luke's freedom, his ability to walk outside, to drive his car, to walk to the bathroom unassisted. She wants out of the bed more than anything. She's tired of being tired, and of taking mandatory naps, and reading the same magazine thirteen times. Peyton Sawyer is not happy.

Lucas starts to spend more time at his office in the gym, writing on his laptop and attempting to avoid setting off Peyton in a new and dangerous way. Everyone else avoids her room, spending their shifts in the living room. When it gets really bad, they send in their secret weapon.

She wakes from a nap to find Jamie sitting on the edge of her bed, the little boy flipping idly through a sports magazine. She glances over at the night stand and finds a note scrawled in Brooke's handwriting telling her that her regularly scheduled babysitters have taken the day off, and that she wouldn't dare be a bitch to their replacement.

"How much are they paying you to babysit?"

Jamie looks up at her, an innocent expression painted over his face. "Aunt Brooke said she would buy me a new toy."

"How about I give you twenty dollars if you let me leave this bed and walk to the kitchen." She scoffs as they boy shakes his head. "Ok, fifty dollars if you just let me leave the room. Ten minutes top, I forgot what the hallway looked like."

"Mama told me not to take bribes from you."

Peyton stares at him, narrowing her eyes in a shameless attempt to intimidate a young boy, but she can't break him. He looks back at her with a big, goofy, innocent smile and shrugs his shoulders.

"Alright, two can play at that game." She tosses him the tv remote. "For being such an upstanding little kid, you can watch all the cartoons you want, and there is a brand new bag of cookies in the pantry with your name on it buddy. Go party. Oh, and Jamie? Don't tell your uncle that I tried to bribe you. I know where you live and I will seek revenge."

Lucas comes home two hours later, his laptop bag slung over his shoulder and a cautious look on his face. She watches him take in the scene, Jamie asleep near her feet, one hand still in the bag of cookies near his side. She folds her arms across her chest.

"Next time you send over a babysitter it would probably be better if they didn't require naps and juice boxes."

"I shouldn't have to send over a five year to make sure you stay in bed, but you've scared off everyone else with your winning personality, and I knew you wouldn't treat a little boy like that." He drops his bag near the bed, and scoops up the bag of cookies.

"You're right, I wouldn't. In fact Jamie and I had a really good time, he watched cartoons and I watched him devour half a bag of cookies and then crash from a sugar high."

"You're being immature. I get that this sucks for you. You're angry and frustrated because you lost your independence and you're stuck in this bed, but this isn't about you Peyt, it's about our baby. You have three weeks left. You need to deal." He scoops up a still-sleeping Jamie in his arms and carries him towards the door. "I'm taking Jamie home. You can sulk by yourself. Don't get out of bed."

Lucas slams the door and Peyton continues to pout long after he's gone. She tries watching television and reading a book. Eventually she gives up trying to remain distracted, and chooses to sulk in silence, her arms folded across her chest, until she feels it. A gentle shift low in her belly, like a literal interpretation of butterflies in her stomach. Her hand moves automatically to her stomach, and though the movement is barely felt beneath her fingertips, it's there. And it takes her breath away.

Lucas comes home an hour later, leaning against the doorframe, his hands hiding something behind his back.

"I brought you a peace offering." He says, propelling himself from the door towards the bed, handing her over a small package wrapped in brown paper, as he shifts her over just slightly so he can sit on the edge of the bed hear her.

"You didn't have to." She says.

"I know, but I wanted to." He smiles. "Open it."

She tears at the paper with great care, revealing a soft yellow baby blanket, the edges of which are trimmed with soft silk and an embroidered trail of dancing baby giraffes. She runs her fingers over the silken edge of the blanket, and smiles softly up at him.

"I felt the baby." She smiles. "While you were gone, I felt the baby move for the first time. It was just a gentle shift, but it was there Luke. And it was like some crazy epiphany, that our love made this life. This is you and me babe, right here."

He beams at her, and his hands move to her shirt as they push away the fabric and come to rest on the bare skin of her belly. He stares for a while, as if trying to will the baby to move again, and when it doesn't he leans down and presses a gentle succession of kisses to her stomach while she runs her fingers through his hair.

"These last weeks of bed rest are going to be better." She says. "I promise."

"And I'll be right here with you. We'll do this together. Whatever you need."

"Lay with me for a while." She says, as he stretches out along her side, resting his head on her chest. She grabs his hand and holds it onto her belly. "Let's see if we can get this baby to move for daddy."

*

Four months later she's laid up in a different bed, in a different place, where a scratchy intercom summons doctors to emergency rooms, and a tiny baby sleeps peacefully in her mother's arms, swaddled in a soft yellow blanket trimmed with dancing giraffes. Peyton holds her close, breathing in the delicate smell of her skin while Lucas runs a finger over her hand, working her tiny fist until it opens just enough to grab hold of the end of his outstretched finger. His laugh catches in his throat, and she looks over at him, his eyes filling with unshed tears as she leans up and kisses his temple.

"She's beautiful. Just like her mama." He whispers softly, his lips brushing the soft skin of Audrey's head, before leaning up to kiss Peyton sweetly on the lips. "You did good, babe."

"We did good." She corrects, trailing a gentle finger along Audrey's cheek. Eventually her tiny eyes flutter open, exposing the softest color of blue Peyton has ever seen. Peyton stares down at her, and feels her own breath hitch sharply in her throat. "I'm so in love with her."

"I know the feeling." He smiles, looking down at her, admiring the way she admires their daughter.

The waiting room is full of eager family, friends, but for now it's just them, tucked together on a single hospital bed, Audrey Grace Scott nestled perfectly in between, relishing the start of something bigger than all of them. That after everything that has threatened this inevitable future, time and distance, ill-timed proposals and almost-weddings, they have at long last found what they've always desired, a family, with each other.