This is set around four weeks in the future and is hopefully ok :) It's partly inspired by the P!nk song Just Give Me A Reason
If somebody pressed a stethoscope to my chest, I wonder what they would hear. I always used to wonder if I had a heart, if I could feel, if I could love. Now I know that I used to have one. I know that it beat warm and alive inside of me. I know that it felt love and that I knew what I felt like to be loved. I know that my heart beat faster and became more alive in response to a man.
Now I'm not sure that you'd hear anything. My heart was stolen. Given up to someone I thought I loved. Given away fearfully but knowingly. I let him take my heart. I let him take my heart and I let him hurt me.
I know the structure of the heart perfectly. I've held it in my hand, still but still warm. I've watched it beat in someone's chest and I've watched it stop. I've watched it flicker on a screen. I've seen heartstrings, felt them beneath my fingers.
I've felt the tugging at my own. I've felt pain deep within my heart as the knife slips inside. As that same knife twists and tugs, scarring the organ but not quite destroying it. That's my heart. The heart he owns. Scarred, damaged, bleeding but still trying to beat. Still causing me pain. Slowly but surely killing me. Destroying me with each beat, each twist, each tug.
Jac Naylor closed her eyes for a second and rested her head on her arms. This day felt like it was never going to end. At the start of her shift, the ward had seemed like such a nice place; the patients were, for the most part, stable and doing well. Since then everything seemed to have gone downhill. If she never heard another emergency bell go off it may have been too soon, nor did she think she could cope if yet another of her patients developed some obscure complication that hadn't even seemed like a possibility beforehand. It was like the ward had some sort of conspiracy against her.
Behind her, she could hear Jonny and Mo laughing and joking. She wasn't entirely sure how they could act in such a way when they too were working the shift from hell nor was Jac sure how Jonny could act like life was completely normal when she still felt the pain acutely.
She hated the pain. At least with physical pain, she could take pain killers and the like. The emotional pain was so much harder to deal with. It stole her breath and caused her eyes to burn as she tried to act like the ice queen as people expected. She had to keep up appearance no matter how much it took; no matter that it left her utterly exhausted at the end of each day.
The sound of laughter seemed to be rebounding of every surface, tormenting her. She squeezed her eyes just that little bit tighter in the hopes of blocking it out. She wondered for a second, if he knew how much it was killing her.
She hated herself for feeling this way. She should have been able to bounce back from him. It shouldn't still hurt almost a month after the fact. She shouldn't still hear his words in her head, taunting and tormenting her. Had he realised how much those words had destroyed her? Did he even remember what he'd said? She knew that nothing would remove those words from her head. The idea that she was so inherently evil and corrupt that it could infiltrate even the innocent potential life of her child. A child that would never exist.
Perhaps he was right that was the reason for her condition. To prevent the evil. To prevent a mother unable to love spawning a child unable to feel. But the tug deep within told her something different. Babies liked her. Babies settled in her arms, melted against her, became a part of her. Babies were uncomfortable with her; and she wasn't uncomfortable with them.
She swallowed hard, trying desperately to push these thoughts away. She couldn't let them get to her here. She couldn't afford to let herself break. She'd been trying for so long not to let herself feel. But she was low and tired. Her body and soul bending under the weight of the shadow which had settled over her. It was all becoming too much for her – and he was acting like normal.
He was like a criminal. He'd stolen everything from her, a thief. And now she was the willing victim paying for his crime while he got to live his life as before.
She took a slow deep breath and pushed herself up and walked away from the desk, feeling the unfamiliar prickling of tears behind her eyes. She frowned and slipped in to the supply cupboard where she hoped she'd get a few quiet moments hidden away in the darkness.