Somehow, this is a bad attempt at SamDylan, so please don't judge it too harshly! Set vaguely within the parameters of S32, though it goes a bit AU towards the end...

.i.

He saves her job – again – and she hugs him outside of the ambulance, in full view for all to see. Not, Dylan swiftly realises, that most people will recognise what this means: to most people, she's a new paramedic who either has a strange desire to randomly hug people, or has a previous connection with Dylan Keogh.

"Thank you," she whispers into his ear, and just these two words has Dylan wanting to melt. To let the stoic persona break down for a moment, to let her see that the man she fell in love with all those years ago is still there – just hidden. Hidden by her betrayal, by her absence, his obsession to keep everything locked away, to try and be a hero without thinking about the consequences to himself.

He doesn't reply; instead, he gently places his hands on the small of her back, resisting the urge for his brain to take him back to the first time they did this. Except, then, he was a registrar training to be a G.P with a secret drinking problem that she hadn't found out about then, and she was a med student with ambitions greater than anyone he'd ever seen.

"I owe you," she adds, as their embrace ends, and the cold September air flushes his face.

"It doesn't matter," he says gruffly, letting his arms drop to his sides once again. "Good luck, Sam."

It's the first time he's used her name in years. Immediately, the name loses the negative connotations – of betrayal, of incompetent leadership, of Sam Strachan – and instead, takes on a revived sense of meaning. It feels strange on his tongue, to not be barking the name, and it'll take him months to get used to saying it again.

But then he snaps back to his senses. He remembers he's got a Sudanese refugee hiding in his houseboat, that this is a woman who left him not once but twice, and he isn't ready for any form of commitment. That he doesn't think he ever was.

And the name Sam Nicholls goes back to where it was before – locked away in a section of his mind that only alcohol would ever consider opening.

.ii.

She doesn't talk about Dylan with Iain Dean, just as they don't talk about Lily after she leaves. They're poison to each other's love lives, just as they're poised to destroy each other if they ever contemplate taking their relationship to a different level to this.

But that doesn't mean that she doesn't watch her ex-husband. It's different, seeing a consultant (and a consultant like Dylan) from the perspective of a paramedic. He always seems so sure of himself.

She knows she'd be comfortable if she was in his hands.

"You alright, Sam?" Robyn asks, leaning over the team workstation towards the paramedic. Ah, Robyn. Sam remembers fondly the old days – days that, no matter how hard she tries, won't come back. Because Robyn has a baby now and she's essentially verbatim to any hospital in England. But that doesn't mean that, for one moment, Sam can't pretend that she's back in the good old days.

Dragging her attention away from Dylan and towards the nurse, Sam smiles. "Yeah, fine…just thinking about a patient. Anyway, how's Charlotte?"

"Ah she's good, thanks!" Robyn replies, in the way that only Robyn Miller can respond. And, just like that, it's as if the four years never happened and Sam's been here all along. "She's really growing up. I mean, it's totally up to you and everything…but if you fancy dinner some time…catch up on the last few years and stuff?"

A flash of colour – Dylan's colour – catches her attention briefly, and Sam has to fight her instinct to keep her attention on Robyn.

"You know what, Robyn, that sounds great," Sam says, and she thinks that it's the first genuine thing she's said to a former colleague in weeks.

As she prepares to leave the ED, she manages to find him again. He's in control, as usual, but she's certain that there's something in him that's different. Something that threatens to destroy him – something that, like before, could wreck whatever he's built in the years since she left.

But then she shakes her head, and sends herself back out to Ambulance 6044, determined to keep her nose out of it. Every time she tries to get involved in Dylan's life – or anyone she cares about, really – she manages to make things a hundred times worse, and get hurt in the process.

She just needs to watch him from afar…and hope that he has someone.

(She doubts that he does.)

(He doesn't know that he's always had her.)

.iii.

He can smell alcohol on his breath as he makes his departure from Holby City Emergency Department for a month's leave, and he wants to vomit. There's never been enjoyment in the consumption of alcohol; it's simply been a way to forget his many troubles and transgressions in life, to forget the mistakes that he's made and opportunities he's missed because of his constant desire to overcomplicate everything in his life.

There's something about alcohol – or, rather, drinking in secret – that reminds him of Sam. He tries to make himself forget about his ex-wife, but there's something about the whisky which brings her into his head and doesn't let her leave. It's probably something to do with the way he used to stash empty bottles in the space where his spare wheel should go so that she didn't know he'd gone off on a bender when she was deployed with the army, or the no-nonsense attitude she had when she came home and could just tell that he'd slipped.

And so, nowadays, he drinks even more because of Sam Nicholls. Well, that's not exactly true, he corrects himself as he sits on his houseboat, alone, listening to the waves lapping against the marina and watching the precise movement of his whisky in his glass. He drinks because he wants to forget about the way that he's managed to screw up everything in his life, as usual – as well as a little boy's life. He should have left Sanosi. He would have been better if he'd stayed in that camp, with people who knew how to look after him. With people who would do their very best for him.

Rather than dropping him off at a police station when they were meant to be getting on a ferry to Ireland.

He's stayed away from Sam since her return. That was a moment of weakness, hugging her, he's decided. He can't dare get close to her, get close to anyone, for fear of destroying them, for bringing them down with him. He's on an unstoppable spiral of decline, descending further and further into the mayhem and disordered chaos that forms the majority of his life. Allowing anyone to get close to that – to get swept up in the havoc he wreaks – would not only be unfair, it would be unjust. It would destroy them – and him in the process.

More than that, he doesn't need her. He doesn't need the woman who helped to destroy him, just as he doesn't need a reminder of the best days of his life. With her. He doesn't need her to know about him and his developments – about Brian and his new half-sister, about the OCD or the drinking or even the fact that he cares about other people enough to smuggle in an illegal refugee from a camp in Calais. Hell, she doesn't even need to know he went to Calais.

As he sits, contemplating the meaning of life and the effectiveness of self-destruction, his phone buzzes.

He ignores the first time, and the second, but by the third, he can't bring himself to do it anymore.

If only to see who cares about him enough to message him three times, he opens his phone and looks at the screen.

It's someone he doesn't know – according to his phone, anyway.

Because he'd know this person anywhere. No matter how many times he's pushed her away – or she's pushed him – she's come back. As they always do.

I hear you've gone.

I hope you're back soon.

I miss you. X

With great restraint, Dylan resists throwing his phone into the fireplace. Instead, he looks down at the glass trapped between his fingers, the amber liquid leaving barely a trace on the sides of the glass as he twirls it around and around, the pattern more interesting than the drink.

Then he throws the drink, glass and all, into the fire, and watches it burn.

(The following morning, he removes every single trace of alcohol from the boat, showers for the first time in three days, and uses the unreliable internet dongle to confirm that he needs to go to St Stephen's Church for the AA meeting at 9am that morning.)

.iv.

"You're back," are the first words out of her mouth upon seeing Dylan Keogh outside of the Emergency Department one rainy Tuesday morning, and she can't hide the glee in her voice. It's taken his absence for her to recognise how much she needs him in her life – more than she's willing to admit.

Her return to Holby was more to do with him than she had previously realised. He's her safe haven, the place where she knows she'll feel safe regardless of their arguments and mistrust and her spiral of despair.

He grunts in response, and side steps her on his way into the ED.

"Aren't you even going to say hello?" Sam presses, her tone firm. She's about to ask him why he didn't reply to her messages, before she remembers that he doesn't have her number and she probably shouldn't be texting him anyway.

She certainly shouldn't tell him how she got his number.

Pausing briefly, Dylan turns her way and meets her gaze for the first time since she returned to Holby. "Hello," he says curtly, though there's a hint of something else in his tone. As if he's trying to be restrained, though why, Sam has no idea.

"How have you been?" she presses, a smile slipping onto her lips. It's effortless, to speak to Dylan, even more so than working with Iain. She can be someone that, to the rest of the world, doesn't exist. "How's the time off been?"

He grunts again, and she realises that that was the wrong question to ask.

"Busy," he replies, and this time it's clear that he just wants the conversation to be over. "Is there something you want, S…?" He doesn't quite finish her name, and she isn't sure why. But there's no point pressing him when he's in this mood.

"Nothing," she admits, taking a step back. Nothing more than to speak to you. "I'll let you get on. Have a nice day."

.v.

She knows where he's been, what he's been doing, in his time off; he can see it in her face. The pity – the interest in his life – he's seen it all before.

She always starts out supportive, he thinks to himself bitterly as he shoves his briefcase and coat into his locker. She urges him to carry on doing it, to get the next chip, to talk about his feelings.

Then she disappears on a three month long tour of Afghanistan or Iraq or somewhere, he loses hope, and she doesn't answer the long-range satellite phonecalls he makes once a week. Then he spirals, and the chips disappear: she returns, kicks off at his lack of progress, and the cycle starts again, albeit less friendly.

Shaking his head, Dylan groans and rubs his eyes. That was before. That was the old Sam and the old Dylan. Now they're just two people who happen to work in the same place and have a general interest in the same things. And she can't read him as easily as he suspects – there's no way she'd know about the alcohol.

There's no way she'd know about anything.

With a sigh, Dylan attaches his name badge to his shirt and emerges from the staffroom, determined to put Sam Nicholls out of his mind for at least the duration of his shift.

.vi.

Three weeks later there's a major event and, somehow, Sam manages to convince Connie Beauchamp to reinstate her medical insurance at Holby City.

Well, she has a sneaking suspicion that she has a guardian angel consultant on her side, but she doesn't voice that opinion.

For twelve hours straight, she treats patient after patient, bandaging cuts and bruises, removing debris and bits of glass from wounds, doing her part in getting the people of Holby together again. She works and she works, moving from one patient to the next, ignoring the images of blood stains across the entrance to the ED, the constant flow of patients enough to numb her mind to anything other than medicine.

Then the minors are generally cleared and there's another explosion – a biscuit factory with a faulty conveyer belt, someone mentions from the red emergency phone – and she's being called into resus. F1s are sent to take over her minors, and Sam Nicholls is Doctor Sam Nicholls again, albeit temporarily, as she's directed down to the front doors to collect a patient.

She runs back and forth, all over resus, getting swabs and adrenaline and anything she can to stop her patient bleeding out on the trolley. There's too much at stake to even remove them from the paramedics' trolley, so she has to support the patient's weight as she tries to suture up a vein in their midriff, to get them stable enough to go to theatre.

"Sam." She can hear her name from across the other side of resus, a minor distraction in the back of her mind. "Sam, just relax. You can do it."

It's Dylan.

And she finally manages to get the suture in. It's not perfect – a far cry from what she could do in the old days – but the patient finally stabilises enough for her to transfer him onto the bed.

Once he's stable and ready to go to Keller, she's ready for the next patient. And the next. And the hours continue to add up, until she realises that there are no patients left to see, she's famished, and she doesn't know what to do.

She doesn't know what to feel.

Looking down briefly at herself, she sees her forearms are covered in blood, her borrowed scrubs are a multitude of shades of red and brown and maybe a dash of black somehow, and her hair is everywhere.

She's no longer Sam Nicholls, doctor. Instead, she's Sam Nicholls, someone who's been awake for more than a day straight and just really needs to cry.

.

She goes to the place she always used to go – a back corner of the disused office upstairs near the conference room. It's never locked and, she's pleased to see, seems to be as disused as ever, except for a couple of additional blood letting chairs in there.

Sinking down to her knees in the corner, Sam finally lets out the sob that she's been holding in for most of the day. She's saved patients, of course she has, but there have been so many that she saw and couldn't quite grasp. So many that she couldn't save, despite her efforts, despite the fact that she wanted nothing more than to give them life back again, to let them live to fight another day.

It's the best and worst day combined, and she just stares at her knees and then her hands, looking at the blood of those she couldn't quite manage to save.

The door opens, but Sam doesn't quite register it, her attention focused on the faraway point in the back of her mind questioning whether this was the right decision, whether she should have come back into the hospital.

"Sam," a voice says – the same voice as before, supporting her – but she can't quite place it. Who knows that she comes here? Who knows that she needs someone? "Sam. It's me. You need to drink this."

Without knowing who it is giving her a drink or what it is, Sam reaches out automatically to take it, shotting it into her mouth.

Then she gags.

Brandy. Or whisky. Which can only mean…

She forces herself to look up and, again, makes eye contact with Dylan. He's more open than she thinks she's seen him since the early days of their marriage, when she would ask a question and he would tell her the whole truth without hesitation.

"Dylan," she whispers, her voice barely audible.

"Sam," he says back, stating her name. "Sam," he repeats, and she gets the strangest feeling that he's practicing saying her name. "Breathe. You did incredibly today."

As soon as he speaks, the tears start to form in the corners of her eyes, and she can't help but break down. Usually, she was the strong one: he was the one who needed her. But, this time, she needs him more than she's ever needed him before.

Without hesitation, he pulls her into his arms, and she encounters his familiar smell. It overpowers everything else in there, the sweat, the blood, the desire for the day to be over – all she can smell is Dylan.

"How did you know I was here?" Sam whispers.

"Because I know you," he replies simply. "Today, you've saved more lives than I can count. You were a hero, Sam."

"But I didn't save them all," she protests. "I couldn't."

"Nobody could."

"You could."

He smiles softly; she can feel his cheek move against hers, and she tightens her embrace of him. If this is the last time that she will hug him – if he pushes her away again – she wants to remember every part of it.

"I don't know how good you think I am, Sam, but I'm certainly not that good."

"You are," she insists, closing her eyes and, for a moment, imagining that it's ten years before and she's turning down another tour of duty. "Never forget how good a man you are, Dylan Keogh. Never forget."

Let me know what you think - and if you have any other fic ideas, share them here or on tumblr at conniebaechamp!