That crazy thing they call love.
I loved Sam/Tom until their relationship provided Dylan with an excuse to leave and that made me sad, but there was something about that scene in Broken Heart Syndrome that made me smile despite the tears that were rolling slowly down my face because of Nick and Yvonne and Zoe and I wrote this. I might continue it if the mood takes me, I've been struggling with a chapter in my main fanfiction and my creativity seems to be procrastinating too. Please comment, this is the first "Tam" (still think that they should be renamed as a sort of mixture between their surnames that makes 'knickers' but whatever please kick me if I ramble like this for much longer) that I've ever written and I'd like to know if you think I've got their characters right. Thanks for reading, as ever, E.
Neither Tom nor Sam had much experience with "love" as they grew up. Tom had a pushy father and although he was sure that his dad loved the idea of his son, he never really felt that his dad knew, or wanted to know, the person that Tom grew up to be. And Sam had an absent father who loved his other family much more often than he loved his daughter, and a mother who only really loved her if she nicked a bottle of vodka for her on the way home from school. But neither of them let themselves dwell on this, they had accepted that love wasn't always guaranteed a long time ago.
It wasn't as if they were both amateurs when it came to this much aforementioned concept. Sam had found a kind of love with Dylan and even though it had faded over long tours in Afghanistan and through arguments and sustained silences. And for a while she gave up on the idea of loving someone again, perhaps some part of her was left in that marriage, back with Dylan. Safe, dependable Dylan. And she didn't get that part back until she took that job at Holby City Emergency Department. To feel safe again to reconcile herself with her (ex)husband and to meet Tom.
And Tom had often thought he had found love through the string of girlfriends he had sustained through college, university right up until the age of 30 when he realised that he wasn't getting any closer to this mysterious thing that everyone talked about so much. But he knew what love wasn't. And then he met Sam.
And they hadn't thought much of each other when they met. There were no fireworks, electric touches or sudden realisations of fate falling from the sky. She was just another doctor, he was just another doctor. And then they became friends. And she discovered that he was funny and caring and protective and so completely not-her-type that she was prepared to dismiss him forever. But the laughter and warm feeling that accompanied the tall, handsome, charming paeds doctor became more and more difficult to deny, until that day, the festival, when that paramedic Tamzin had asked her if he was single. And the surge of jealousy and possessiveness that surged through her, although it was easy to suppress, also frightened her. Because she didn't feel that way about him, did she? And when he said "never at work" did her heart really drop in teenage disappointment? It did and she knew it did, it would just take her a little longer to work out why.
"Never at work", that little known eleventh commandment, why did he say that? He had been trying to be funny, as always, the funny guy who befriends the beautiful girl and makes her laugh while she wonders what to do with her grumpy ex-husband. Her ex-husband who happens to be a friend and colleague. Just one look at her frowning at an X ray board, or arguing her case with a patient, or even just smiling was enough to make him consider breaking all the rules. But whose rules where they? And who was he to follow them?