Written because I am sitting alone in my uni room doing a whole lot of nothing and there are late fireworks blasting outside my bedroom window.
Sam hated November. It was the time of the year when the promise of Christmas was beginning to creep into the ED, putting a slightly brighter smile on everyone's faces as they dragged themselves in for another shift after so little sleep. It was a time when the air grew crisp and winter set in properly, meaning gloved hands wrapped around paper cups of hot chocolate and steaming coffee and coats drawn tight around scrubs, fashion forgotten with the very top button done up to their necks. It was a time when Dylan grew all the more sarcastic, sneering at the too early festive cheer and the staff wound him up more than ever. Sam dreaded it.
She dreaded those first few days, and especially the ones following when the month had properly begun and she dared to think it was over, because then it came as a shock. Each year she let her guard down, finally, and then they were back, one late party starter joining when she hoped the celebrations were over. She dreaded them especially since Dylan had left and she had to endure the most part curled alone on the sofa, the TV turned up loud enough to drown out the sounds and get her complaints from the neighbours.
But at work, it was different. She fell into her rank as a doctor and focused on the job and only the job, forgetting to expect the sounds, forgetting to tense when the sun went down, forgetting even to make sure the curtains were drawn over windows so she could not see the flashes. In November, she covered more shifts than anyone, and the staff were too grateful to question it. The hospital was always busy in the early days of that month, bursting with burn victims and singed fingers.
The first bang came when she had a knife to a patient's ribcage, carefully drawing and incision that sliced deeper than it was supposed to when she jumped. She inwardly cursed herself, the harsh ever present voice in her head snapped at her to focus. She was an army doctor, she had worked to save blown off limbs while explosions ripped barely one hundred metres away and could not let herself be distracted by one measly noise. She focused all her attention on the knife in her hand, trying desperately to block the sounds outside with her concentration.
Another bang came and her hand jolted again. It didn't matter that she had almost expected it. She was immediately pulled away and someone else took over the task, angry words muttered in her ear, but Sam barely noticed. Her eyes darted around the room, searching for the danger that did not exist before she was pulled from her trance by the theatre doors bursting open, a trolley baring a writhing body, screeching in pain. Another firework blasted outside.
A sudden explosion of gunfire jerking them from a drifting slumber, terror gripping each heart as they realise what it means, each thought frantic- it could be their last. Hands reach for weapons, arming themselves against an unbeatable enemy.
"23 year old female, Brianna Way. Severe burns to the right arm and fingers lost in an explosion…" The noise around her seemed to fade as her gaze fell to focus on the woman on the bed. Blood, was the first thing she saw. It soaked the white sheets, the crimson stain finding every clean surface. Then the blistering skin, the gaping holes in her hand and the smell of burning flesh hit her, dragging her where she could not, would not go. Another bang. Chaos around her, instructions shouted one after another, important voices drowning each other out.
"Dr. Nicholls, look alive," one of them snapped, vaguely familiar, but transforming quickly.
"Look alive! On your feet! Go, go, go!" A silent prayer, soldiers that bickered reaching out to one another, hands entwined, eyes exchanging one last look of encouraging warmth. They may never see one another again.
"Sam!" She couldn't breathe. Choking, suffocating terror had a stone grip on her heart. She gasped, but the air stuck in her throat. A quick succession of bangs sounded from outside, one after another, pandemonium erupted around her and there was the lingering, ever present smell of burning flesh, a gaping hole where bones should have been. More bangs.
She was going to die. They were all going to die. Her friends, the people she loved most in the world were going to get shot down at her side, and there was nothing she could do. Crippling helplessness crushed her, fear tangling like a thorny vine around her heart, stabbing and gripping so tight she knew she'd never be free of it. She was dying already. There was no breath left. Black spots were dancing in front of her eyes, taunting her for the life that was seeping away.
Another bang. Burning flesh. One down.
She hit something, stumbling. A whole body, a limb, rubble, a discarded weapon. There was no telling as the spots merged into one another and she was falling. Her landing was softer than she expected. Warmer. Someone not long dead. A friend.
"Sam! Samantha, can you hear me?" Dylan. He shouldn't be there. Now he was going to die too, chasing her. She tried to tell him to go, leave her, but all that came out was a faint moan. She felt herself being moved. Lifted. Her hands scrambled feebly against his chest, trying to force him away. He needed to run. Fight. Arm himself. She was already gone.
And they had lost so much time fighting. They had barely been able to be in the same room without bickering, saying harsh things purely to hurt the other. All along they had been fighting the wrong person. If she'd focused on what had to be done, maybe she wouldn't be dying now. Maybe she would have been able to save her friends.
"I love you," she mumbled, finally telling him the truth but far too late as the last light blinked out.
…
Dylan knew Sam hated November. It was the fireworks. The bangs reminded her of Afghanistan and they went on for so long. People couldn't just stick to the holiday and there were fireworks for almost the entire first half of the month. And then there were the blood red poppies splashed wherever she went. She was always so glad when the last of the bangs were set off and she was free from the permanent jumpiness for another entire year. But the month always came around again, and each year, she got worse.
His gaze jumped to her immediately when he heard the first explosion, just in time to see her hand slip on the incision. Nick pulled her away and continued the job himself, muttering under his breath, but Sam hardly even seemed to notice she wasn't holding the knife. Her eyes were wide and alert, darting around the room. Her hand automatically slipped to her waist for a weapon.
Then, just for a moment she seemed to come back to herself. She blinked and stared around, her eyes more focused. Her hand dropped to swing by her side and Dylan dared to breathe a sigh of relief. She was back with him. But then the doors crashed open and one look at the woman on the trolley set his own heart racing in fear for his ex-wife. It was not just the screams of pain, or the sight of her burned away skin, the stumps where her fingers should have been, but the erupting chaos around them, the continuous stream of barked orders and the lingering scent of burning flesh.
One look at Sam told him she was losing it. Her eyes were fixed on the young woman on the bed, the terror he had grown used to glimpsing alight and flaming. But there was something else too. A helplessness that he would never associate with her. She always jumped right in, put her own safety last in every situation, which both impressed and terrified him. But now she was just staring, no signs of movement except the rapid falling of her chest.
Another bang and he saw the explosion in the fire of her eyes. She heard gunshots, saw a war wound and soldiers dropping around her, friends dying.
"Dr. Nicholls, look alive," snapped Nick, glaring at her furiously. No one seemed to notice she was not just startled. No one seemed to realise Dr. Nicholls was no longer in the room with them, she was miles across the earth amidst a horror that not even they, who saw death every day, could comprehend.
"Sam!" Nick definitely sounded angry now. Fireworks erupted, one after another with no break in between and almost at the same moment as she began to sway, Dylan rushed forwards to catch her. She stumbled, falling into his arms and sinking. He lowered her carefully, the screaming patient forgotten. There were plenty of others to deal with her, only he really knew what was happening to Sam.
"Sam! Samantha, can you hear me?" Her eyes were open and they flickered in recognition, but she didn't answer him. She gave several, struggling gasps, a small moan. She couldn't breathe.
He tore his eyes away from her, searching for an oxygen mask only to find one was already being handed to him, Sam's state finally noticed now she was on the floor. He slipped the mask over her face, but she barely appeared to notice it. Her eyes were still open and she was watching him. He thought she was trying to tell him something, but the terror in her eyes was too strong. It overrode everything else.
"Is she all right?" He heard Zoe's voice, concerned but distracted, and then Nick, dismissively demanding that Dylan put her in the spare bed at the other end of the room. But he knew that was not what she needed. Being in that room was only going to push her further into the darkest depths of her own head.
With one sweep, he lifted her off the floor, her head falling against his chest. Her hands came to rest there too, struggling feebly against him, begging to be let go, but he held fast. He'd let her push him away too many times when she returned from war, too afraid of emotions himself and simply not knowing the right thing to say. He had almost been relieved when she dismissed him with a smile. He was a doctor, but did not have the faintest clue how to save his own wife.
"I've got to take her out of here. I trust you lot can cope without me for five whole minutes." He didn't give them time to answer as he stormed through the double doors with Sam in his arms, and thought he heard her voice, weak and breathless, telling him as if for the last time, that she loved him.
…
When Sam's eyes flickered open to be met with the staff room, she swore under her breath, immediately assuming she had fallen asleep in the middle of her shift, but her annoyance almost instantly morphed into confusion as she realised she had no memory of even deciding to come in there. She tried to sit up but felt a pressure on her shoulder, forcing her down and she complied without a fight, feeling a strong wave of dizziness hit her as she moved.
She let her eyes flutter and after a few seconds, opened them again and slowly the sharper details of the staff room swam into view, including a steaming mug on the table beside her, and her surly looking ex-husband. She fumbled with the mask on her face, struggling to pull it off and over her head where she lie, embarrassed that she may need it. "Leave it on," said Dylan, sharply, but Sam shook her head, feeling a stab of frustration at the weakness of the movement.
As soon as it was off, she felt why she had needed it in the first place as her breath immediately quickened, but she refused to give in, struggling into a sitting position, deaf to Dylan's protests. He sighed. "Will you at least drink the tea?" He snapped, gesturing to the steaming mug. Sam hesitated. In the army, there had been no time for sweet tea. They had just had to get on with it with explosions erupting around them, friends dying before their eyes. She didn't need it.
"What's going on?" She asked to avoid it.
"You fainted," he told her. "Panic attack."
Sam stared at him. "What? No, it was just hot in there. There was nothing to be afraid of, certainly nothing that could have triggered such an extensive reaction." But she remembered the gun shots. The stench of burning flesh. Her own Sargent dying with blood pouring from his lost limb, his clothes burning, skin on fire…and she had been dying too.
"I know you're scared of the fireworks, Samantha." She stared at him, startled. He didn't know. He couldn't know. He was completely oblivious to all emotion, he hadn't even noticed when she'd come back from Afghanistan, eyes as empty as the dead woman's who Sam had held as her life faded. Gemma. Her best friend. He had never seen the guilt she'd carried, so heavy and constant or the weight of one thousand dead soldiers, innocent civilians that she had failed. "And then there was the unfortunate timing of the patient, and the resulting chaos. I shouldn't imagine any of that aided the situation."
"I was fine, Dylan," Sam insisted through her teeth. "I am trained to work under much more extreme pressure than the distraction of fireworks." She picked up the mug, wrapping it in her hands for something to do with them. And although he was irritating her she couldn't help the pull that enticed her to drink it purely because he had made it for her.
"Yes, you were just peachy when I had to catch you before you cracked your head open on Resus floor."
"Don't act like you're an expert on the way other people feel. You wouldn't recognise a human emotion if it was scrawled across the person's forehead. It was too hot in there. I passed out, there was nothing more to it."
"I'm a doctor, Sam, I know what a panic attack looks like and you were having one. Look, you can expect to be in the situation that you were and for it to have no effect on you. You saw horrific things and that-"
"Just drop it." In a flash, Sam was on her feet, the mug slammed down onto the table without a drop taken from it and an instant rush of dizziness swarming her swimming head. "You never had one hint of concern for the way I felt when I came home, not even when it was your business to care, so when I tell you I am fine now you will believe that and back off."
She could not explain truly why she felt so impossibly angry at his prying. It was beyond the usual annoyance when someone tried to force her to open up, it was a cold, burning anger that made her want to get him as far away from her as possible. He didn't have the right to care about her when he had gone for so long ignoring her pain. But it was more than that, too. It was something that went deeper than what she could see, and all she knew was she wanted him away from her.
Without another glance at her ex-husband, Sam stormed from the staff room, ignoring that stabbing pains in her tight chest and the still present dizziness that threatened to drag her to the floor again. She couldn't afford to show any more weakness, not that day, not ever. She'd watched friends be torn apart by bombs. She'd crushed herself into impossibly small spaces, so sure of her own impending death and seen women no older than herself, children who'd strayed into the warzone, die right at her hands as everything she knew failed her so devastatingly. Something as relatively unthreatening as fireworks could not destroy her.
…
As soon as the door slammed behind his ex-wife, Dylan lashed viciously out at the lockers with his foot, causing a large dent in the very centre of Zoe's, something he knew she'd notice immediately, but he couldn't bring himself to care. He was so incredibly angry: at Sam for seeking someone else's arms to hold her and bring her the comfort she had so desperately needed rather than just talking to him, at himself for being so unapproachable and short with her that she'd felt like she never could and at Sam's father, whose harsh upbringing had pushed her towards such a dangerous and damaging career in the first place.
He swiped up her untouched mug of tea, clenching it hard in his fist with the intention of hurling it against the wall, but at the last moment something he could not pinpoint convinced him to lower it into the sink, the contents still unspoilt. "Wise move," came a familiar voice from behind him. "The cleaners would have joined your ever growing fan group if you'd given them that extra stain to shift."
Dylan gritted his teeth together to stop the biting words escaping, having a rare moment of compassion as he considered just how much he would regret all the things he was capable of saying in his current state of anger. "Is Sam okay to be storming through the ED? Only barely five minutes ago she wasn't even conscious."
"Probably not," Dylan all but growled. "But Samantha does what she wants and darn the consequences to anyone else, herself included."
Zoe didn't say anything else for a long time, maybe because of his anger, or maybe she just didn't want to get in the middle of their tattered relationship, never mind that she already was just by the feelings she'd had, maybe still had, for Dylan himself. He paced around the staff room in the silence, his fists planted firmly on his hips with his eyes trained to the floor as he struggled to keep his anger in check and not chase after his ex-wife and force her to speak to him, to someone.
And then, finally, Zoe said the last thing he had been expecting. "I saw what happened in there, Dylan. Those fireworks really scared her." She paused, as if she didn't quite know how to put the next bit into words. "She needs your support, as much as I know where things stand with the two of you, she's struggling so much more than she lets anyone see and you might be the only person she'd be willing to open up to." Dylan looked at her, his head snapping in her direction so suddenly that she jumped.
"No." Zoe winced at the abruptness in his voice. "She made it quite clear that I am the last person she wants to speak too and to be quite honest, I am happy with that as it stands. She's no longer my wife or my responsibility. Sam was never anyone's responsibility but her own, and it was her who made the decision to go to Afghanistan. Anyway, I am sure Dr Kent will have no hesitations in providing her with the necessary solace she seeks."
"I also heard what she said to you when you carried her out of there," Zoe said as if he hadn't even spoken. That time he stayed staring without speaking and she raised an eyebrow as if to say I told you so.
"Yes, well she was completely out of it," he mumbled after a long pause. Sam had had no idea what she was saying then. She couldn't have done. She had barely admitted any feelings to him even in the time they were married, a favour which he had returned and since their separation, most of their exchanged had been bitter or angry. Rarely there was a moment of peace between them, or a shared smile, so she could not bounce so quickly to such an open declaration of her feelings in the short seconds he held her in his arms.
"She was having a flashback," Zoe commented, as it if was the root of all knowledge. "She probably thought she was going to die."
"Yes, exactly." Dylan pounced on the excuse for his ex-wife's confession like he wanted nothing more for it to be false, but in reality he just knew he could not take leading himself to believe there had been any truth in what she had said only to find out she had been talking to the same man she had used to rip apart their marriage.
Zoe smiled, sly and discreet and bent her head forwards slightly so her chin length hair covered it from Dylan's view. "Which means she probably never meant anything more in her entire life."
Dylan watched as a woman walked out on him for the second time in less than five minutes, but that time it was with very different emotions. The anger had left him, seeping away as soon as Zoe had pointed out how honest Sam would be had she been truly convinced of her own last few seconds of life, replaced by the hope he had sworn to himself he would not feel.
…
Sam huddled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms tightly around them for the comfort as much as the warmth. The sharp November wind was biting, piercing her face and exposed lower arms with blades of cold. She shivered and drew herself closer, wishing she'd thought to bring a jacket, but she had been in such a hurry to escape Dylan and the questioning eyes of the rest of the ED staff as she'd fled that the notion had not even crossed her mind. She would probably have dismissed it anyway, insisting to herself that if she could survive an army base for six months, a little frosty weather would not get the better of her.
She felt safer out there, watching her colleagues rush in and out of the hospital on snatched breaks and Jeff, Dixie and the other paramedics hurry through the doors with the latest treat for the ED, but drawn far enough away from the chaos so she could not be seen herself. Far safer, somehow, than being in the crowded hospital where there was little aside from the occasional violent patient to come to her in the way of harm. But it was that time of the year when the closed walls of the place she worked and the bellowed instructions and panic that often erupted around her was enough to send her back to a warzone.
A headache was throbbing at the centre of her forehead, creeping along the sides to rest and stab painfully at her temples too and she massaged it gently, preferring that to caving to pills when the pain was a welcome distraction. She knew she had to get back to her shift. They were understaffed and bonfire night meant more patients than almost any other night of the year, but she couldn't bring herself to leave the safe comfort of the hard wood and she hated herself for it. She had never been one to shy away from what scared her, or run just for that reason.
With that in mind, Sam dropped her knees from the protective position across her chest and jumped to her feet almost eagerly, feeling none of the emotion that went with the movement but needing to display it anyway to give her the encouragement she needed to walk back through the doors of the hospital. But before she could take so much as a step towards the doors, she found her path blocked by the very man she was out there to avoid and dreading running into the most.
She sighed and tried to step past him, but in one quick move he was blocking her path again. "What are you doing?" She snapped, wincing at her own harsh tone, hating it now she'd had a moment to calm down. "Dylan, I have work to do," she said more calmly once she'd had a moment to push her emotions back down.
"I'm aware of that, but I also have something to say and it- well it can't really wait." He had that air of awkward nervousness about him that Sam remembered enough about to know she was either going to really hate what he was about to say, or it was something she wanted to hear. Either way, it involved emotion, either in content or response and she was no in the mood to deal with it. But as if he'd read on her expression what she planned to do, his hand closed around her arm suddenly, not forcefully holding her in place, but Sam was surprised to find it was a comforting enough gesture that the pull to leave eased slightly. Enough to keep her grounded of her own free will.
"Look, I know I was distant when you came home. I wasn't there like you might have needed me to be and I'm- I'm sorry, but it's not too late, however you attempt to convince me otherwise."
Sam gave him a gentle, almost real, smile. She could see the fear in his eyes, of both rejection and acceptance and he had done that for her, just as she had longed for in the few short days she'd had at home during her tours of duty. But he was wrong. She hadn't meant it was too late for them, that he no longer had a place in her heart of her life, but that it was too late for her. She was stuck in a life that it was beyond saving her from.
"Just tonight, when it's going to be the worst. Let me come over with the non-alcoholic wine and I will attempt to cook without destroying all of your worldly possessions. You don't even have to talk to me, we never were very good at that. Just let me be there."
His grip had gotten tighter and although every defence she had built was screaming at her to say no, the temptation of comfort, of companionship, was too much for her to resist and silencing the protests inside her, she finally nodded.
"Right, um, okay," Dylan stammered, as if he had not expected that response at all. "I'll let you get back to your work then, there's a very drunk looking man in cubicle three who could use your excellent people skills." Sam smiled at him again, that time very sarcastically, but it lingered on her lips as she walked past him and headed at last towards the hospital, turning quickly into the first real one she had worn in what felt like too many lifetimes to count.