watched over Ken as he got stronger. Ken didn't need round-the-clock nursing care anymore, so he was able to be at home, but he wasn't up to long periods of time at a desk or spending much time in bright light for a while. He tried to beg off and get sent back to work early, but Dave lived with him day in and day out and was having none of it.

 

He saw too much. He knew exactly what was going on with his beloved at any given time, and he didn't miss all of the little winces. Ken pinched the bridge of his nose a lot too. The meningitis hadn't killed him and it hadn't left him with long-term consequences, but it hadn't left him yet.

 

Over the next few weeks, however, the wincing decreased. When Ken finally seemed to be free of pain, Dave brought him back to the hospital for another lumbar puncture. When that came back clear, they celebrated. Ken was healthy again, and could go back to work.

 

Dave, of course, was still in the thick of things at work too. He still had plenty of patients who hadn't recovered as quickly, although plenty had gone home after a couple of weeks in the hospital. Some had gone septic, and were still fighting for their lives. Some were suffering from other, equally life-altering issues. Many would stay in the hospital for a good long time.

 

But the immediate need for Dave to act, for him to be there at all hours, abated. He went back to a routine of rounds and new patients. Cruise ship passengers coming down with norovirus were common, followed by STIs and food-borne illnesses. As winter stretched toward spring and Dave's belly became more obviously pregnant, he spearheaded Silver Oak's participation in a county-wide awareness campaign about tick-borne illness. He pulled back his hours until he was once again in the healthy range.

 

It was in those middle April months, just as the new administration from Cleveland was starting to move into their roles, that Ken turned to Dave with a little smile on his face. It was a Saturday afternoon and they'd both decided to stay home, given the driving rain outside. "You know what?"

 

Dave smiled at him. "What?"

 

"It's been a while. I know I haven't gotten to the gym in a little while, but do you think that maybe…?"

 

It took Dave a few seconds to figure out what his lover was suggesting. "I think you're gorgeous, Ken. Do you feel up to anything?"

 

"Are you kidding?" Ken huffed out a little laugh. "I've been raring to go for a couple of weeks now." He blushed. "I just wasn't sure how to bring it up. I'm not sure there's ever a good time to say things like 'Hey, I know you watched me burn with fever and I know I almost died, but do you think we could maybe make love?'"

 

Dave wrapped Ken's mouth with his tongue. "There's never going to be a bad time to ask. There might be times when I have to say no, because it's not safe or because I'm not feeling up to it, but there's never a bad time to ask. And you're always going to be beautiful to me."

 

Ken sat up a little. "Really?"

 

"Oh yeah. Even after four days' worth of fever sweat." He laughed and took off his pull-over paternity shirt. "I'm a little worried about being too swollen for you, but that's a different matter entirely."

 

"Don't be silly." Ken put his callused hand on Dave's belly. Dave didn't technically have a baby bump yet, but his normally thin frame had developed a noticeably larger belly. He knew it was just because he was having twins—because he was a thin guy having twins—but it still didn't quite sit right with him.

 

When Ken put his hand there, however, he felt beautiful.

 

He climbed up so he was straddling Ken's hips. Ken let out a little groaning sound and rocked his hips up, grinding his hard cock into Dave. Dave guessed he really had been raring to go. As he bent down to lick his way into Ken's mouth again, he made sure to rock gently from his seated position. Ken definitely seemed to like it and the friction did nice things for Dave too.

 

Ken ran his hands along Dave's bare skin. Intellectually, Dave knew he shouldn't get goosebumps when he felt so hot. Intellect didn't have much place in what was going on between them and Dave hissed as Ken ran his fingers over Dave's oversensitive nipples.

 

It didn't take long before he needed to free himself from his jeans. He took a moment to get Ken naked too and to find the lube. He didn't want to have to worry about digging for it later. Then he met Ken's eyes and climbed back into position.

 

Ken's eyes widened and he adjusted his position so he was back where he wanted to be. He let Dave guide his fingers to where they needed to be and let Dave pass him the lube.

 

Dave didn't usually like this position. He liked to be on the bottom. He liked to feel safe and sheltered from everything going on in the world outside, and he loved the feeling of being sheltered by his man. Right now though, Ken was still recovering from his bout with meningitis. He might be doing better, but Dave could give him this, could make it easier for him.

 

He made sure to vocalize when Ken got something right as he stretched Dave open. He moaned as he felt himself relaxing and adjusting to the intrusion. It hadn't only been Ken who'd been raring to go, after all. Dave had wanted it too. Only concern for Ken's health had kept him silent.

 

"I'm ready," he told his lover, when he knew he could wait no longer.

 

Ken took him at his word. He slicked himself up and lined himself up at Dave's entrance. Dave was in control now, and he sank himself down on Ken's cock so slowly that he moaned with need.

 

He gave himself a moment to adjust. It wasn't just a physical adjustment. He needed time to appreciate that feeling of fullness; of completion. Right here and right now, everything was perfect. He was full with Ken and had his babies growing inside of him. Ken's strong hands rested on his hips, waiting for Dave to be ready to move. His scent filled the air, and his soft brown eyes bored into Dave's own.

 

"Perfect," he whispered.

 

Then Ken moved.

 

Dave rocked with him. He could feel, by the strength of Ken's thrusts, just how little stamina Ken had lost. He felt amazing as he thrusted into Dave's body, rising to meet him again and again. Dave reached down to give himself some badly needed friction and jerked in time to the rhythm of Ken's thrusts.

 

His climax was almost secondary. For Dave, seeing Ken in that position, watching him take his pleasure and enjoy it, had been enough.

 

When Ken finished, a few moments later, Dave dismounted gently and cleaned them both with a damp washcloth from the bathroom. Then he came back to bed and stretched out beside his lover. "Are you okay?"

 

"Better than okay." Ken kissed him and took him into his arms. "Thanks. I needed that."

 

"Me too." And Dave fell asleep.

 

They woke up when Ken's mother, Katherine, showed up unannounced. That caused a few awkward seconds, but they'd both spent enough years on call that they knew how to get dressed and presentable in seconds. 

 

She'd brought them gifts—stews and casseroles, heavier than Dave was used to but full of the cheeses that the babies loved. He accepted them and ushered her into the apartment, which she took in with an odd set to her jaw. "This doesn't look like the most child-friendly set up," she said, after a moment.

 

Dave bristled a little, but he kept his resentment to himself. "I'll admit I wasn't exactly thinking about that when I got the place." He looked around. "Schools aren't the best either."

 

Ken sat up a little straighter. "I'd have figured you'd be into private school."

 

Dave huffed out a little laugh. "Well, you know what you do when you assume, right?" He shook his head. "It's an option, I guess, but there aren't exactly a lot of private schools in the area to choose from. We could move away, back to Manhattan or to Virginia I guess, but we both have lives here. I can't imagine what it would be like to pick up stakes and move someplace else while trying to start a family." He shuddered. "I'm willing to look for a place outside the city, I guess." He sighed and looked around the apartment. "Yeah, I loved this place. But it doesn't fit our needs."

 

His face warmed when Ken reached out and took his hand. "We'll find someplace together."

 

Dave beamed. They would find someplace together, someplace that suited both of them. It might not be easy, but it would be worth it.

 

***

It took until Memorial Day for the last of the meningitis patients to clear out of the hospital. The new administration at Silver Oak, put in place by the new corporate ownership at Regent Healthcare, had taken over by that point and had completely failed to impress any of the medical staff at Silver Oak. Ken didn't meet the new CEO. After hearing Dave's description, he didn't want to. "Self-important fashion victim who sold his soul to Neiman Marcus, tries to put a price tag on human lives and hasn't ever smiled a single day in his life."

 

Ken worked with enough people like that on the job. He didn't want to have to deal with them socially too.

 

One good thing Finn Riley did after coming on board at Silver Oak was to take a look at the aftermath of the outbreaks. He called Dave into his office, along with Rick Wade since Wade was his supervisor. "You know," he said, in that icy drawl his staff had already come to hate, "I understand the need for our hospitals to be involved with public health initiatives. And to the extent that disease outbreaks occur in nature, I'm forced to accept that there will be some patients we're forced to treat for free." He shuddered with his whole body.

 

"This outbreak, however, was not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Someone did this to the city. A quick investigation proves that this individual comes from money. And I have to say, it seems that Baldwin House is at fault to some degree too." He picked up a stack of papers and glanced at it, like the papers were supposed to intimidate them or something.

 

Neither Wade nor Dave was the type to be easily intimidated and few doctors are going to be frightened off by a stack of paper. "You're not going to get an argument from me," Dave told him, with a typical New Yorker's respect for authority. "I'm having trouble seeing the relevance here."

 

Riley narrowed his eyes at them. "Are all doctors here this insubordinate? The relevance here, Dr. Stanek, is that it's my intention to have our very adept legal department go after the perpetrators in order to recover costs we can't recover from insurance or Medicare."

 

Dave and Rick exchanged glances. "This seems reasonable," Wade told him, after a moment. "It spares those victims who can't afford to pay from having to shell out for their own victimization."

 

Riley was unmoved. "Then there's the fact that they are unable to pay. Chasing down blood from a stone isn't going to be a very effective use of anyone's time, doctors." He shifted his papers. "Now. We've had a request from the County Department of Public Health. They're asking for assistance in handling outbreaks at institutions—such as at Baldwin House or at the Justice Center. Apparently someone, who was unnamed in this report but whose identity I can probably guess, contacted federal authorities about their 'pathetic failure to ensure inmate or resident health and safety under the most basic of pretenses.'"

 

Dave didn't own up to it, but he shrugged. "Well, it was a pathetic failure. Did you see it? They couldn't even live up to the most basic expectation."

 

"Be that as it may." Riley cleared his throat and pretended he couldn't see Wade's sniggering. "They've asked for help in dealing with infectious diseases on an institutional level. I've agreed to assign you, Dr. Stanek, to that task in your capacity as the chief of our Infectious Disease Unit. Unfortunately, union rules state that I'm required to give you a raise to compensate for the increased workload." He made a face.

 

"So you get to just reassign my staff like that?" Rick's face darkened. "You know we do have a need for him in the ER. That's why he works in the ER. And reports to me."

 

"As a matter of fact, yes. I am going to assign him additional duties, just like that. Silver Oak doesn't exist in a vacuum. If the community needs help fighting infectious disease, and there happens to already be a local hero associated with the hospital, then yes. I want that hero out there putting our name in people's minds as trustworthy and community oriented. He's still going to work for you, and with you. You have no reason to feel threatened." He sat back in his chair. "You're dismissed."

 

Ken didn't mind the extra income for their family, but he did worry about the extra strain on Dave. Dave and Rick worked things out though. They found a way to make sure Dave could have his rest, and eventually his family time.

 

His appointment to the Committee on Institutional Health didn't come a moment too soon. The owners of Baldwin House filed suit against the City to try and re-open the facility. Ken didn't know much about running a healthcare facility, but even he knew that residents had suffered because of management's policies. Now it was up to Dave, and a few others, to prove it.

 

Dave went after Baldwin House with the tenacity of a bulldog. He documented every underlying complication that had come into his emergency room when the meningitis plague struck. He showed infected bedsores. He showed patients with preventable infections such as strep that had spread like wildfire around the day rooms, and then gone untreated. He showed patients with viral pneumonia, with listeria, with norovirus and influenza.

 

Patients with syphilis showed up more often than Ken expected as well. Apparently that one spread like faster than strep. They'd all played a role in how meningitis had affected those patients, and they'd all been contracted since entering Baldwin House.

 

In the end, the Department of Health opted to shut down Baldwin House permanently. This did create additional pressure on some of the other skilled nursing facilities in the area, and some patients had to find beds as far away as Oswego or Rome. Most, however, settled into new communities in Syracuse.

 

The moves were difficult for the patients affected. That was only natural. Some of them couldn't understand what was happening, and some of them just didn't want to lose whatever community they'd built up over the years. In the end though, the only true winners were the lawyers, who made out like bandits as the litigation spun itself out over years.

 

Ken, of course, was more involved with the legal side. Tony Whalen went to trial in July. He was charged with fifty-four counts of murder, two hundred counts of attempted murder, seventeen counts of mayhem, one charge of terrorism and one charge of breaking and entering.

 

He pleaded not guilty. Ken thought that was pretty ballsy, considering that he'd confessed on tape and been caught with the bacteria on him.

 

His attorney, who had to be as deluded as Whalen was if he thought this defense was ever going to fly, successfully got the trial moved to Albany on the grounds that he couldn't get a fair trial in Syracuse. Ken figured that wasn't unreasonable.

 

The trial got a lot of coverage. Any trial of a mass murderer would, especially with such a lack of personal responsibility. The prosecutor laid out the evidence very carefully. She explained the conversations that Whalen had with Dave around the outbreaks, playing the taped confession for the jury and called Dave to the stand. She called Ken to the stand too, and Don Arena. She presented evidence about the items he'd been found with, and the entire shelf of meningococcal bacteria that had been found in Whalen's beer fridge.

 

Whalen's defense attorney countered with the idea of intent. It was never Whalen's intent to hurt anyone. He'd simply been trying to draw public attention to the issue of meningitis, in order to direct more research dollars in that direction.

 

It wasn't his fault that people had died. If Dr. Stanek had managed to find a way to cure meningitis before it killed people, before it maimed them for life, they wouldn't be talking about Whalen as a killer. They would be talking about Stanek as a hero, maybe even for the Nobel Prize. Instead, Stanek had disappointed everyone. That couldn't be blamed on Tony Whalen.

 

No, Whalen was simply a father grieving for his lost son. Apparently he'd had a son, illegitimate of course. His parents had demanded the mother abort, but she'd refused. Whalen had adored the child, and secretly kept up with the mother and supported his son as best he could. The baby had caught meningitis at day care and had died from the disease. He'd been desperate to find a cure ever since, and this was his way of forcing the rest of the world to help him.

 

Not murder. A cry for help.

 

The prosecutor got up to do her cross examination. "Mr. Whalen. Your attorney tells me that you're simply a father grieving your lost son. I'm sure no one in this room would wish that kind of pain on anyone."

 

Whalen hung his head. "It's the worst kind of agony."

 

"And yet you inflicted it on the parents of Noa Linton, age one. You inflicted that pain on the parents on the parents of Honorine Vann, age three. You inflicted that pain on the parents of Eddie Albertson, age seventeen. How do you justify forcing this pain onto other parents, when you know how terrible it is?"

 

Whalen blinked. "Look, it's Stanek's fault he didn't save them. And it's not like I released that bacteria where there were people who were going to do anything in the world, right? I released it where it would do the least harm."

 

"The least harm was where it would kill children and old people. People who couldn't choose to get away. And people who were incarcerated, some of whom hadn't been convicted of any crime yet." The prosecutor curled her lip. "You taught at that prison. You knew some of those men. You personally knew Eddie Albertson."

 

"Look, Eddie was a sweet kid, but he wasn't going anywhere. It's too bad that he had to die, but he died so other people could live."

 

The prosecutor let those words hang in the air. "Mr. Whalen, does Dr. Stanek work in a research facility?"

 

"No, but he could."

 

"Is there a research facility of the type you envision in Central New York?"

 

"Well, no. But he could build one."

 

"Assuming he could have gotten funding, which isn't certain by any means, would he have been able to get a research facility built, developed a new miracle drug, seen it through clinical trials, and then through FDA approval before you attacked the nursing home?"

 

Whalen rose in the witness box and pointed at the prosecutor. "You're not seeing the big picture here! Meningitis is a killer!"

 

"And you, Mr. Whalen, introduced that killer to hundreds of people." She turned to face the judge. "No further questions, your Honor."

 

The jury took twenty minutes to convict. An interview with the jury foreman revealed that it only took that long because there were three smokers on the jury, and they needed a fix.

 

Don Arena didn't stay in Syracuse. He stopped by after the trial ended to take his leave of his favorite local "celebrities." He'd been given an opportunity to write for a bigger publication in Miami; one with an editorial board and a staff and actual press passes. It was a dream come true for him, plus he'd never have to deal with snow again.

 

Dave and Ken wished him well. Somehow Ken doubted the blogger would succeed in a role where he had to interact nicely with other human beings, but who knew? Maybe things would work out for him. If they did, he'd be able to stay far away from Ken and Dave.

 

As the seasons wound down toward winter, Dave got bigger. And then he got bigger still. That was no mean feat for a small guy like him, and the effort wore him out. They abandoned their efforts to find a new home until after the twins were born, and Dave wound up having to cut his hours back. He slept a lot and tried not to move around more than he had to.

 

Given his size, the narrowness of his hips and the size of the twins, Dr. Idoni wasn't a big fan of the idea of natural childbirth. "Most guys can handle it," he said. "Your body isn't built for it, and I'm reluctant to risk you or the babies. It's your call, but that's my advice."

 

Dave didn't fight it. Ken kind of wished he would at least try to go natural, if only because the healing time was so much faster, but he'd learned his lesson before. These guys were doctors, they knew what they were about.

 

Cecelia was born first, nineteen inches long and eight pounds exactly. Joseph was born five minutes later, eighteen inches long and one ounce heavier than his sister. As far as Ken was concerned, they looked identical except for their bits, but as far as Ken was concerned all newborns looked the same so that wasn't saying much.

 

They spent four days in the hospital, all together in one room. It wasn't necessarily a comfortable fit, but Ken didn't care. He had his family together, all four in one place. As an alpha, there was nothing more in life for him to want. Even though the babies cried every hour and a half to two hours, he could sleep more peacefully than ever before.

 

 

 

<<<<>>>>