AN: Set pre-series so doesn't actually have much to do with the show... just an idea I couldn't get out of my head. Please review!
Caitlin is five the day her mother dies. It should have been a momentous occasion, something terrible and poetic that she remembers forever, but all she feels is confusion. Her mother died around noon. She was racing home in a horse-drawn carriage to be with her daughter when it overturned and she was just… gone. The servants got the news barely an hour later, but the master wasn't there, all they had was a small little girl who stared at them with wide eyes and didn't seem to realise something was wrong.
They shooed her away, sent her to a back room with one of the maids. She asked after her parents. The maid sat tight lipped and silent, head bent over her knitting and didn't tell the little girl a thing.
The hours dragged by and Caitlin found ways to assume herself with the old sewing basket shoved in the corner of the room. She was quite happily playing with a doll she'd fashioned from bits of cloth when the housekeeper walked in and had a fit at seeing her so joyful.
"Don't you have any sense of decency?!" the woman screamed. Caitlin was confused, but didn't say so. "After what's happened… at least try and act like you care!"
"What has happened?" wondered Caitlin, but the woman was already gone.
She realised that something was definitely wrong when her bedtime came and went without incident. The maid who was meant to be looking after her still hadn't spoken and no-one came to retrieve her even after the sun had long since disappeared. She asked, hesitantly, what was going on, but was met with a startled look and continued silence. Perhaps mother and father wish to treat me, she thought, although she wasn't too hopeful. Something felt wrong.
When her father finally came home, sometime after midnight, he looked tired and worn down. Something in his eyes was dull and listless and he gathered her into his arms without saying a thing.
"What's going on, daddy?" Caitlin asked. Her father did not reply. She shifted slightly in his arms, beginning to feel uncomfortable, but he just held her tighter. "Where's mummy?" At this her father released her and looked into her eyes with something that could only be described as sorrow.
"Oh, my child… your mother is… gone. I'm sorry."
"Where's she gone? When's she coming back?" the little girl asked, but nobody would reply. In fact it wasn't until several years later that she realised what had happened, when she saw the mice that the dogs had brought home laid out cold and unmoving and had a sudden jolt of fear that it could happened to humans as well. She'd turned with wide, frightened eyes to her maid and asked if her mother was dead. The maid had frowned and replied that yes, her mother was dead; she'd been dead for years, surely Miss had known?
After that day, a pit opened up in Caitlin and she was never quite the same. She thought for a long time that she would never feel complete again and it was only much later with the arrival of a certain surgeon in her life that she allowed herself to stop mourning a mother she barely knew.