This chapter took so long to write, sorry! Enjoy, and please leave me a review if you're that way inclined :D
The next time Lily woke up, it was morning. Ethan had taken the chair beside her bed, but his watery eyes were outlined in red, staring into space, and his hair was messy from having his hands run through it. He was holding a cardboard cup of tea with both hands; his long fingers were wrapped all the way around the cup to link at the side furthest from him.
Lily cleared her throat, and her husband's focus came back to the present. "Did you manage to sleep at all?" she asked, knowing that there was so much more that she wanted to ask, and so much that she should be asking. He barely answered anyway, just shaking his head. She wriggled the fingers of her right hand, testing them (they were stiff but not really sore) before reaching out for Ethan to take her hand, which, thankfully, he did.
It took a few moments, but eventually Ethan managed to swallow the present wave of grief enough to speak, his voice hollow. "Trust you, Mrs Hardy, to be looking out for me first, when you're the one lying in a hospital bed." He rested his forehead on their entwined hands. Upon doing this, tears began to leak from his eyes again. As his shoulders shuddered, Lily stroked the back of his head, feeling his emotions bring out her own.
"It's alright," she said. "I'm here."
"It's not alright!" Ethan's words were muffled by his crying, but his meaning was clear. "It's not alright, my brother is gone and he's not coming back. It's not supposed to be like this!"
Lily looked up at the ceiling, although her neck protested with pain. "I know it's not, I'm sorry." She squeezed his hands, although the tension in her wrist made it throb. She didn't want to allow herself to cry. Not least because she needed to be strong for her husband, but she strongly suspected that it would probably hurt an awful lot to cry.
It took a long time for Ethan to feel as though he had cried enough to start feeling better. His head pounding from extended sobbing, he finally crawled into the hospital bed beside Lily. He took the greatest care not to disturb her injuries, although it would have been easy to forget them all and pretend it was just another day. It would have been easy to curl against her and use her as a protective barrier against the world. But today was not just another day. He was grieving, but he had to be strong for his recovering wife and for his children. It was thinking of them which pulled him out of his own head.
"If you're feeling up to it," he said quietly into Lily's shoulder, "then I can bring Will and Lizzie up. I know Lizzie's too little to understand, but Will was a bit upset last night when you were brought in – I didn't explain all of this to him, but he was worried about you when I said you'd had to come to hospital as a patient, not for work." He slipped an arm across her in a gentle hug, and felt her whole body tense. Quickly, he let go. "Everything okay? I didn't hurt you, did I?"
"No, you didn't, don't worry. I'm fine, just – where have they been all night? None of this should have happened; I shouldn't have gone after Gem and Cal should still be alive. And we should have had a normal night." She closed her eyes for a moment, frowning.
"I know, I know," Ethan said, replacing his arm across his wife to gently hold her close. If had been any other night, he would have been able to say something kind to make Lily feel better. But everything was so dark right now, nothing had gone right and it hadn't been a normal night. "You don't have to worry about Will and Lizzie, they're just fine, okay? They fell asleep before…" Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose. "Before Cal was even brought in. Charlie and Duffy were looking after them, in Charlie's office I think."
Ethan felt like every person he passed, on his way down to the E.D, turned to look at him with a mix of sympathy and sadness. He knew Cal had been popular (he always had been, even in school) but it took him by surprise, just how many people had tears in their eyes as he walked by them. He supposed they were trying to show some solidarity, show him that his brother had been loved widely throughout the hospital, but it only made him feel more alone. Which was ridiculous: he had Lily and he had his children, but it still didn't sit well with him that he was the last of his family left on earth. His adoptive mother, his real mother, and now Cal, all gone.
It was Fletch's hand on his shoulder which broke through the wall of silent grief.
"I won't ask you if you're alright, mate," he said, looking at Ethan's stunned expression.
"Thanks, I think," Ethan replied. He rubbed his eyes, sore from hours of openness.
"Look, I'm sorry about Cal, I really am. Top bloke." Fletch paused, rubbing his fingertips first across his lips and then across the back of his neck. "If there's anything I can do for you, or Lily, you let me know, okay?"
Ethan looked down at the floor, blinking hard before speaking. "Just… just make time go backwards, Fletch, make it all different. Because tonight shouldn't have been like this, not a single bit of it." He slouched, allowing his shoulders to round themselves as though they were a shield. "If you can't do that for us, then there's nothing. We don't need anything more than that."
Fletch didn't allow himself to be hurt by Ethan's hard words, no matter how unlike his normal demeanour they were. It was easier to push people away when you were grieving, he knew, easier than trying to explain what it felt like.
"You know where we are, Ethan, yeah? If anything at all comes to mind."
There wasn't anything to be said that would take away how awful Ethan felt, Fletch knew. He wouldn't be interested in hearing someone else tell him that the crushing sensation of loss would not last forever. The doctor didn't want to hear that it would get easier, that one day he might forget the pain so that the only things remaining would be memories of happy times shared with his brother.
Dylan was the first member of the E.D team that Ethan saw when he finally got downstairs.
"How are you still here?" Ethan asked, looking at Dylan's tired face to avoid looking at his blood-stained shirt. "You really need to go home and get some rest."
"I had to wait and talk to the police, and sort some paperwork, so it didn't seem worth going home, just to be called back here at the drop of a hat." Dylan's voice was tired, but this didn't mask his empty tone.
"You… you had to speak to the police? Were you with him – did you find Cal, out there?" Ethan felt his hands start to shake, and he stepped backwards into the wall. He supposed this was a good thing: he might have tripped or just collapsed instead.
Dylan nodded sadly, unable to meet Ethan's eyes. "I did, I should have come and found you earlier. I treated him as best I could in here, but I found him outside, unconscious. He was virtually unresponsive from the start, I'm sorry."
Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's not alright, I can't say that it is."
"No, I know that."
"But I'm glad it was you, thank you for being with him, until the end."
Dylan's heart rate picked up in his chest as his lie caused a spike in his anxiety level. Why was he doing this? Why couldn't he just tell Ethan the truth?
Will sprang up from where was sitting when he saw his father at the door of Charlie's office. Ethan knelt on the floor to hug him as he came running across the small room.
"Have you been causing trouble, young man?" he asked wearily, looking over Will's shoulder to Duffy, who was giving Lizzie a bottle. Ethan felt his son's head shake swiftly.
"No, Daddy! Charlie read us a story, even though Lizzie wasn't listening, and I went to sleep, only a bit after her."
Ethan mouthed a silent 'thank you' to Duffy, who nodded slightly. He was very grateful that she asked how Lily was doing, rather than how Ethan himself was holding up, because he didn't know how he would have answered her. He concentrated on showing his gratitude to both Charlie and Duffy, and then on keeping an eye on Will as he carried Lizzie upstairs, so that he didn't have to think about himself.
As they got closer to Lily's room, he quickly stopped Will. "Now, remember what I said last night? Mummy will be okay, but we have to be very careful with her at the moment, okay? She's still going to be achy and sore for a little while."
Will nodded, although Ethan could tell there was something else on his mind. The look in his son's eyes told him that a tenuously linked comment would shortly follow. "Daddy, we should have flowers. People in hospital, you're supposed to bring flowers. And you bring flowers home all the time. They make Mummy happy."
And despite the dull ache of grief in his chest, Ethan couldn't help a small laugh escaping. "I think Mummy will forgive you not bringing her any flowers this morning, William. I have a sneaking suspicion that seeing you might be enough to cheer her up, all by yourself." He watched Will draw himself up proudly, having heard how pivotal his role was today.
Ethan wasn't wrong; a warm smile erupted from Lily's bruised face on seeing her husband return with her two children.
"Did you behave for Charlie and Duffy?" she asked Will, taking an identical approach to the one Ethan had, a few minutes before. Her son nodded as if she should have known this already.
"Are you okay?" he asked uncertainly, coming up to the side of the bed and looking at her with deep concentration.
Lily thought for a moment before answering. "I'm bruised, and some of my bones are broken so I'm very sore, but I will mend. I'll be fine." She said those last three words with great conviction so as to reassure him, but also to convince Ethan that she was more concerned for his wellbeing than for her own.
"Daddy, do you have your stethoscope?" Will asked, turning around.
Ethan reflexively went to pull it from around his neck, because it was always there when he was in the hospital under normal circumstances, before remembering. "I haven't, sorry. It's down in my locker, because I wasn't in work yesterday."
Lily watched her son's face fall in disappointment. She thought she knew his plan. "William, I was wearing my stethoscope last night before the accident, it should be in the bedside drawer. Try the top one."
When Will had retrieved his mum's stethoscope, Ethan lifted him so he was at the right height to listen to Lily's heartbeat, without leaning on any of her injuries. The little boy giggled as he listened intently to the rhythm.
"What's your diagnosis then, Dr Hardy?" Ethan asked him after setting him down so that he was seated on the side of the bed. "Does this lady have a heart?"
"Of course she does!" Will replied quickly, wearing a wide smile.
"I should hope someone might have noticed by now, if I didn't," Lily said. She saw Ethan's smile become rather fixed, and a rather unpleasant memory suddenly surfaced.
"That's your problem Lily, you're just heartless, you don't care about patients. It's just all about you," Cal said, not allowing Lily time to respond before he marched off to rejoin the strike.
Lily's breath caught in her throat. Cal wasn't voicing an unpopular opinion, in fact it was one shared by many this afternoon, but why couldn't anyone see that she wasn't joining the strike for her own gains in the department? She couldn't allow herself to walk away from the E.D, not when it had saved her life once before and she'd spent so long away from it, recovering. She was continuing to work to stop the whole department grinding to a halt. Sure, maybe this would prevent further cuts to staff, but it would also bring widespread press criticism, and how many lives might be risked in the process? She understood why so many people were striking, and she took their point, but there had to be a better way than to put a stop to the E.D's smooth running. She was refusing to strike because she cared about patients. She turned her back on it all and returned to work with red cheeks and watery eyes.
"That is enough, Caleb, leave Lily out of this," Ethan said. "There's no need to make an example out of her in order to prove to yourself that you're on the moral high ground. Because picking on people doesn't put you up there at all."
The tension between the two brothers had been simmering and palpable for as long as Lily had known them both. She hated that its end had to come with the demise of Cal, because as much as Ethan sometimes hated his brother, and vice versa too, they had still always needed each other.
Lily wished that things were different.