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It's only by sheer coincidence that Peter finds his former student. A glimpse of a Jeep's blue paintwork as he wanders to his own car after a long, gruelling shift, and a fleeting curiosity that draws him closer. He hasn't spoken to the boy outside of tight trauma situations in… weeks. Maybe even months. There's no harm, he thinks, in checking the car out, seeing what the inside of a very rich boy's vehicle looks like (if this is indeed Carter's Jeep, as he suspects it is).
As he approaches, however, shivering against the chill (it's been a freezing few days and the weather shows no signs of abating), something gives him pause. A slight movement, perhaps, in the back seat of the car.
His brow furrows.
It's late, and the darkness must be playing tricks on him. He stands still for a moment, hot breaths sending puffs of steam into the air, and it happens again. Another tiny movement.
So he leans closer, and his stomach lurches.
There's somebody in the car.
No, not just somebody.
Carter.
He's curled up across the back seats with a blanket around his shoulders and a small, deflated pillow beneath his head. His hair is longer than it was when Peter last saw him, but it's unmistakeable all the same, as is the slope of his nose. His skin, though, has never looked so pale, nor his cheeks so gaunt. It's frightening.
And- oh God, his lips are tinged blue.
Of course they are. Of course. He's in the back of an unheated car in the middle of Chicago's most unforgiving seasons, with only a blanket to protect him from the chill. Peter's confusion at these circumstances is overridden by panic. Hypothermia is deadly. He has to get Carter out, now.
He raps a knuckle insistently on the window pane, hoping it will rouse the boy within and alert him to the danger of his situation, but there's no response. Not a good sign. He tries again, using his whole fist to slam against the glass now. The volume should startle Carter at once, and the fact that it doesn't means Peter's suspicions of hypothermia are all but confirmed. There's no time. He isn't going to stand out here patiently waiting for the boy to wake up. He has to take more drastic measures.
Stepping back, he raises his leg and kicks against the glass with the heel of his boot as hard as possible. It doesn't budge, so he tries again. Again.
"Come on, come on!"
Once more. Again.
Until-
The window shatters, a few shards raining down onto the concrete, the rest scattered across the backseat of the car. Any guilt that arises from endangering Carter with the glass fragments disappears when Peter steps forward, brushing away the tiny crystals from the leather, and places a hand on the boy's cheek. It feels like ice.
Shit.
"Carter? Hey, come on, man, wake up." He taps, at first gently and then with more force, but it's no use. Carter isn't going to wake up and make his job any easier.
"Alright," Peter murmurs, slipping one hand underneath the boy's shoulders, leaning forward to ease the other beneath his knees. "I got you, Carter. I got you."
He lifts, and Carter comes willingly, a total dead weight in his arms. The blanket does too, so Peter makes sure to adjust it so it's wrapped as snugly around his former student as possible. In a cruel moment, his mind conjures memories of the same action performed with a tiny, sleeping Reese: of drawing him carefully from the back seat and conveying him all the way to his bedroom. He swallows back nausea and shifts, Carter's head lolling against his shoulder.
"It's alright," he whispers again, and he's not entirely sure who he's speaking to this time.
At the sight of Peter carrying an unconscious Carter through the ambulance bay doors, the ER erupts into chaos. The surgeon can hardly hear his own voice as he shouts for assistance, swallowed up as it is by the immediate cacophony of similar panicked exclamations.
By the time he sets Carter down onto a gurney in the trauma room, a whole team have assembled to assist him. The blanket falls away to reveal a boy far skinnier than Peter expects, and far sicker, too. On top of the already evident hypothermia, he's dehydrated and malnourished. His ribs jut out unnaturally. His collarbone too. When EKG stickers are placed upon his barely moving chest, they reveal severe bradycardia.
"We need a temp," Mark announces, and together, they roll him onto his side. Haleh sets to work with the thermometer. Moments later, her expression melts like wax into one of horror.
"84."
"Are you sure?"
She turns the display around, and the numbers flash up just as she reported them. The pace in the room somehow grows even more rapid. Amidst the heating pads and piles of blankets, IV lines are established to pump heated saline into Carter's veins, and heated humidified O2 is administered by mask. Throughout it all Carter is still. Pale and cold and still. If it weren't for the continual sluggish beeping of the monitor, Peter could easily believe him dead.
Slowly but surely, however, his vitals begin to creep up and his risk of cardiac arrest drops. Peter's panic subsides enough for the questions of before to arise in his mind again: why was Carter out there in the first place? Why is he so skinny, so sick?
When at last he voices these, it's one of the newer staff members, a Doctor Del Amico, who explains her suspicions, shaking her head and never once lifting her gaze from their unconscious patient.
"He said he was having family troubles," She murmurs. "I didn't- I didn't realise. If I'd known…"
Later, when Carter is stabilised and moved to a nearby exam room for monitoring, she tells Peter about the strains of family gossip she's heard from him, many in easily-ignorable offhand comments. Something about him not meeting the needs of the family. Threats of disinheritance. She confesses (as though she's talking to a priest, not a fellow sinner) that she didn't pay these much heed, because she saw firsthand the accoutrements of his wealth, and had wondered a little bitterly whether the 'threats' were an attempt from Carter to even the playing field between them. See? They weren't too different after all. He was experiencing a tough time too.
"I was wrong," she grits out, stroking the tufts of hair that refuse to lay flat on Carter's head. "I should've listened."
Peter says nothing. He sits with his hands limp in his lap and watches the shell of his former student breathe and breathe and breathe, knowing that if he'd ignored Carter tonight like he has for so many months before now, those breaths may well have ceased entirely.
When Anna leaves, he places a hand atop the blankets over Carter's chest.
Feels the unsteady thumping of his heart.
And stays.