Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
The last time Sheldon Hawkes could remember being this tired, he had been a trauma surgeon in a Harlem E.R., elbow-deep in somebody else's mistakes. He'd clamped severed arteries and dug bullets from the abdominal and chest cavities of children not old enough to know better who now never would be. He'd reconstructed smashed occipital bones from accident victims and shuffled into the waiting room with blood on his gloved hands to tell terrified relatives that all the medical magic in the world hadn't been enough, so sorry. It was, he supposed, the weariness of Sisyphus.
It was why he'd left surgery for the cool, sterile cloister of the morgue. The noble intentions that had carried him through college and med school and a grueling, four-year internship had evaporated in the harsh reality of the emergency room and the blood that never stopped dripping from broken bodies onto his scrub-covered shoes. How could he hope to sustain it when evidence of futility rolled through the hospital doors daily in twos and fours and sixes? He'd worked miracles in the operating room only to see those miracles laid low by knifings and TEC-9s a week later.
So, he'd quit. When it had happened, it had felt like a snap decision, a bolt from the blue, but when he considered it later, he'd realized that it had been a long time coming, a steady erosion of hope that had made him not just bone-tired, but soul-tired.
Maybe the ending was seeded in the very beginning, the very first time you scrubbed in and unraveled another human being with your scalpel. It had all seemed so clean when you were dealing with possibilities, when the closest you got to disease and trauma was in the slides and videos of illnesses and their corrective procedures. Safe in the tidy halls of Princeton, malignant tumors and bone grafts held a perverse beauty. Science, your lofty professors, assured you, had tamed most of Death's most fearsome guises, and the rest were but a grant and a breakthrough away. And why shouldn't you believe them? These men had pioneered revolutionary procedures that stalled the obliterating menace of Alzheimer's and stole time for those dying from emphysema or COPD. In your lifetime, these white knights of modern medicine had eradicated smallpox and polio, and goiter was all but forgotten in the United States thanks to the surreptitious inclusion of iodine in table salt. Of course you'd conquer the world on the end of a syringe.
But the emergency room was a rude awakening to all your carefully nurtured presumptions about the reach and power of the profession you had chosen with such confidence. Medicine was messy and ugly and inexact, and there was nothing pretty about a malignant tumor perched atop someone's colon in wet, triumphant malevolence or skull fragments embedded in a sixteen-year-old girl's brain by her own windshield. Death was unconquerable, and only the most arrogant ass would believe otherwise.
Those differentials and diagnoses that were so clear-cut on the classroom blackboard got a whole hell of a lot more complex when you were standing underneath the hot lights of the operating room with somebody's whole world laid open on your table. You were a good doctor and an excellent surgeon. You knew it, and the hanks of lambskin on your apartment wall attested to it, but that didn't make for much comfort when the moment arrived and you sank your steel into unprotected, yielding flesh. If you made a mistake at Princeton, you got a lousy grade and heaping helping of condescension from the snooty prick who ran the class, but you also got another run at the bull, an opportunity to right the wrong.
But there were no second chances in the real world. If you were wrong or careless under the lights, people died. You were always acutely aware of that fact as you worked. It was your constant companion every time you gloved up, settled on your nape and in the small of your back with sharp, pearl-tipped claws. It reminded you of the wager you were taking with other people's lives. You were betting that you were smarter and that your hands were faster than God's, and it chided you for your hubris and whispered in your ear of those who would be left behind if you were wrong.
You have a host of them now. You've carried them with you for all these years, the faces of the people who you weren't fast enough or smart enough to save. Your professors at med school tried to prepare you for the eventuality that one day, God would be faster. They stood at the front of grand lecture halls in their pristine, white labcoats and cited the law of averages and statistics as if it were a comfort to know that only God never lost a roll of the dice.
But the law of averages was no comfort when you were gazing into the tear-stained face of a mother, grandmother, or wife and telling them that there was no hope, that their loved one had drifted beyond your reach despite all your frantic efforts. Losing was dirty and sorry, and more than once, you stood over a body, up to your elbows in blood and tissue, swearing between your teeth that you weren't losing this one. Sometimes you made good on your boast, but more often than not, you wound up in the doctors' locker room, peeling off bloody gloves and washing failure from your hands like Pilate.
It was Hannah Mitchum that drove you out of the emergency room and into the withered, barren womb of the autopsy room. She wasn't one of your patients, God forbid. In fact, it wouldn't surprise you in the least to learn that she was still out there on the streets of Harlem, bulling her way through the grey, wretched unfairness of the world with grim, jowly determination. She'd be older now, of course, and maybe white would have joined the strands of silver in her hair like Time's blighting kisses, but she would be fundamentally unchanged, obsidian and tempered steel beneath her clothes.
No, it was her children who were your patients-all three of them. You saw the first, Robert, in March 1999, strapped to a gurney with his brain peeking through his shattered skull like a timid mushroom. He'd been hit by a drunk driver as he was crossing the street. The impact had knocked him out of his beloved Air Jordans and thrown him thirty feet to the opposite curb. The driver was so hammered that he never even slowed, and he would later testify that he remembered nothing of the incident.
You don't, either, but you do remember the aftermath with hellish clarity. You remember that you were flirting with the day nurse on the E.R. before you started your post-op rounds. You were surreptitiously admiring the delicate, swan curve of her neck as you regaled her with the musical virtues of Miles Davis. You were moving in for the kill when the doors slid open and EMTs rushed Robert Mitchum, 22, inside.
You knew he was gone the moment you got a good look at him and saw his brain pulsing through the hole where skull had been. Skull fragments and spinal fluid stippled the sheets around his head, and the blood, red and pungent and terribly final against the white of the gurney pillow. You still remember the grizzled, old beat cop who trailed after the gurney with the kid's bloody shoes dangling from one hand like a talismanic fetish. He took them to the precinct, but not before you'd claimed them for your own in your mental menagerie, and later that night, long after Robert Mitchum went to his winding sheet on a coroner's slab, you saw them in your weary mind's eye, brilliant and vivid on the ends of the cop's grey fingers.
You cleaned up what you could in the operating room, but there was no sense of urgency to the procedure. Whoever Robert Mitchum had been was long gone, left on the asphalt of the unforgiving street. He might go on breathing; the human brain surrendered life grudgingly even under the direst of conditions, but he would never remember who he was breathing for. He was that rarest and saddest of breeds: The human vegetable.
It was a pragmatic thought supported by your years of medical training, but it was impossible to sustain in the face of Hannah Mitchum. She was waiting in the hallway when you emerged from the operating room, a squat, stolid woman dwarfed by the yawning narrowness of the corridor. Inevitability stretches things, have you noticed that? The hallway never seemed as long when you were delivering good news as it did when it was bad. Awareness of death is hard and fast, ruthless as a punch to the chest, but the instant before is endless, taffy pulled in the hands of a malicious child-god.
She had to have known the answer to the question before she asked it. It was in your haggard, bruised face and the heaviness of your crepe-soled step on the linoleum. But she had to ask. They all do. It's an autonomic response, like breathing or sweating, and all of them have the same desperate thought: Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm misreading the signals, and everything is going to be okay. But they're not and it isn't, and their misguided hope makes reality even crueler when the hammer comes down.
How's my baby? she said when she saw you, and she gripped her purse strap like it was the only thing keeping her upright.
What could you do? You took her by the elbow and led her to a chair and told her the truth. You watched the fragile hope gutter and die and heard it pass from her lips in an anguished death rattle. She fractured beneath the skin and sank into herself, arms folded around her quivering middle.
Oh, no. My baby, my baby, she moaned, and began to rock back and forth in the chair, as though she thought to soothe her absent child with her mother's telepathy.
You offered your sympathies for whatever they were worth and offered to take her to him. She leaned on you the whole way there, frail and faltering on the smooth linoleum, and when she got to his room, she just stood in the doorway and stared at the gauze and the tubes that were holding her son together.
That ain't my baby, she said softly into the stillness. Faint and disbelieving.
Yes, ma'am, I'm afraid it is, you answered just as softly, but the words were ground glass and bitter poison in your mouth, and you grimaced.
She stared as you like you were speaking in tongues, eyes bulging and clouded with tears, and then she tottered into the room. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, she moaned, and clutched the metal bedrails of her son's bed.
She sank into a chair beside the bed, slipped her hand through the metal rails, and held a hand that would never return her encouraging squeeze. You left her still arguing with God and went to wash her son's blood off your skin.
She was still sitting there three days later, but the argument with God was finished. She'd finally come to the truth you'd seen the minute you saw her son. The fight was over, and she was exhausted as she sat at his bedside and stroked cold, limp fingers. Her shoulders were slumped, and she looked smaller than she had before, as if grief were eroding her from the bottom up.
Hello, Dr. Hawkes, she said when you slipped into the room with chart in hand. She did not turn around or stop stroking her son's hand.
You started to draw up a chair to discuss a prognosis that was unchanged from the one you made three days ago, but she stopped you.
It's time to let him go, isn't it? she said, and began to cry.
You sat in the chair you'd pulled up with a graceless flop, and closed the chart. It was useless paperwork now. I can't make that decision for you, you told her.
But he's gone, isn't he? He's been gone a long time. Now she did look at you, eyes wide and wretched, daring you to give her a single shred of hope.
Yes, ma'am, you agreed. Three days.
A sob escaped her, but she nodded as though that was the answer she'd expected. Give me an hour, she said. Get your paperwork ready, and then you can- Her mouth worked for a moment. C'n do what you need to do, she finished. I just need…a little more time to say goodbye.
Of course. Take all the time you need, you replied, and took your leave to pull yourself together and gather the paperwork that reduced the snuffing of a human life to a painless, bloodless business transaction. There was no point in telling her that an hour wouldn't be enough time, that eternity wouldn't suffice to say goodbye. That was a truth the heart knew but would never understand.
It was two hours before the papers terminating his life support and donating his organs were signed and another hour before the hospital chaplain closed his Bible. You didn't want to be the one to choose the moment when life's tenacious spark was forever extinguished, but the only other person in the room with the authority to make that decision was Hannah Mitchum, and she couldn't do it. She knew what she had to do, but knowing the right thing to do and having the will to carry it out are two different things. She was haunted by the phantom possibility that she was wrong, that despite all evidence to the contrary, her son would open his eyes and see her selling his soul to Charon for the sake of her insurance deductible.
So it was you who gave the signal, a slow blink of your eyes and a somber inclination of your head. The nurse turned off the ventilator with a brisk press of a button, and stillness settled over the room like dust. Robert Mitchum's chest rose once, twice, and then stopped. Hannah Mitchum's own chest rose and fell, rose and fell, as though she had begun to breathe for her dead son, but then the sobs came, hard and wracking, and she finally let go of her hope and his wasted hand.
You left her in the well-meaning hands of the grief counselor and went to wash guilt and failure from your skin in the staff showers. You let the water scald you and scrubbed soap into your pores until they were chapped and raw, but you never felt clean, not that night. You bowed your head beneath the pounding spray and prayed that you'd never see Hannah Mitchum again.
But you did. In August 2000. Her daughter, Jasmine, contracted viral meningitis. Her mother thought it was the flu at first, and by the time she brought her to the E.R., it was too late. You tried anyway, because it wasn't fair that a mother should be asked to make another blood tithe to the universe so soon after the first. You admitted her to the ICU and pumped her full of antivirals, but it was a losing battle. The only mercy was that Hannah Mitchum did not have to decide the hour of her daughter's dying. Jasmine slipped away of her own accord on August 8th at 10:23PM.
Hannah Mitchum sat beside her daughter's bed and cried in a grim tableau of déjà vu. I should have come sooner, she croaked to no one in particular. I should've known. I was her mother. It was a title cast like indictment.
There was nothing more you could have done, you assured her, and to this day, you wonder who you really meant to comfort. You left the room with your doctor's cap crumpled in one hand and went to take a shower, Pontius Pilate once more.
You saw her for the last time in October 2001. It was her youngest son this time, caught in the crossfire of a robbery gone wrong. He had gone to the store to buy milk and a loaf of bread, and he had stopped at the counter to buy a package of licorice twists. That hesitation landed him in your E.R. with a sucking GSW to the chest. He died before he ever made it to the OR, lungs and shattered ribs exposed to the lights of the trauma room. You pronounced at 7:12 PM, and by 7:20, the orderlies were mopping his blood from the floor.
You didn't realize who he was until you saw Hannah Mitchum standing by the nurses' station, your albatross come one more time. You froze in the hallway, her son's chart clutched in one hand. She was strangely ephemeral in spite of her size, and you suspected that if you reached out, your fingers would pass through her. You opened your mouth to speak, but nothing would come out because your intended words lacked the requisite will to take form. You knew why and for whom she had come, but you didn't want the confirmation.
You didn't speak, but she knew anyway. A mother's intuition does not die when her children do. It remains as a constant reminder of what she has lost. She turned her head and saw you standing there, Death's herald in dirty, green scrubs.
Dr. Hawkes, she said. Is my son dead? Weary and matter-of-fact. Her anguish was all used up.
You still couldn't speak, so you nodded and studied the floor. It broke your heart to see the resignation in her face, as though she had expected you to fail her again. But why shouldn't she? You'd already lost two of her children, and now a third had been claimed under your watch. You wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, make her understand that you had truly done the best you could, but you didn't dare, lest her pointed teeth remind you that it wasn't good enough and never had been. You watched her shuffle to the nearest chair, purse dangling from one slack hand like the weight of her sorrow. You offered your condolences, which, after failing her thrice, tasted more like a curse, and retreated to the chemically-treated absolution of the shower stall.
You handed in your resignation the next shift. You were tired of watching youth die and the old wither beneath the scorching, hungry fever-heat of cancer, tired of postponing the inevitable, and you didn't want to find out if Hannah Mitchum had a fourth child. The chief of staff accepted the folded piece of paper without a word. He was tired, too, after all, so tired of the death and blood that he had retreated to his office and transformed uncomfortable lives into comfortable statistics.
You cleaned out your locker and told yourself that done was done, but you couldn't shake your jones for helping people, so when word got out that the City of New York was looking for a Chief Medical Examiner, you jumped in with both feet. You'd always loved medicine and surgery; it was the losing you couldn't handle. Being a coroner solved that problem because the question of life or death had already been answered and all that was left for you to do was find the why.
It was peaceful in the morgue, quiet and cool and private. Loved ones who thought nothing of lingering for weeks and months at a relative's beside to await the moment of death had no desire to see what came after. There were no pleading eyes to wonder what more you could have done, just Danny or Mac or Flack telling you to pull back the sheet or slide the body into the drawer again. There was no more unreasonable expectation of a miracle.
If you could not save them, then you would document the secrets of their demises with fanatical thoroughness. You threw yourself into your new cause with unbridled zeal. You were so smitten with the solemn comfort of the dead in their modern, steel crypt that you created a cozy enclave for yourself in its older stone recesses. A cot and a light to read by were all you needed, and more often that not, you spent the night with the stink of formaldehyde in your nostrils.
It was your vocation, your calling, and you should have been satisfied. You were-for a while. But you were always ambitious, even as a child. When you should have been enjoying Kick the Can and Tag with your friends in the park, you were impatiently awaiting adolescence, and when that came, you were already looking forward to adulthood and the patch of earth on which you'd stake your claim. You kissed girls and dreamed your dreams, but you don't remember them. They passed in a blur on your way to better things. You have two degrees on your wall from Princeton, but you cannot recall a single detail of that venerable old campus. It was just a waystation of sensible brick, and no more.
You felt the wayfarer's itch beneath your skin every time the coroner's assistants rolled another body into your morgue. You knew that whoever had made this offering to your slab wasn't your concern, but you were curious all the same. Your work was as meticulous and unimpeachable as ever, but you found yourself constructing the face of the killer in your mind as you noted contusions and abrasions on your anatomical charts. To know how someone had died was no longer sufficient. You wanted to know the whys and wherefores and how longs. You listened intently whenever the field CSIs discussed a case in your hearing, and you quietly began ordering forensics texts from the libraries and the Internet.
You should have stayed in the morgue, where death was not your fault, but merely your occupation. You know that now, but when Mac granted your application for fieldwork, you were elated. It was another feather in your well-bedecked cap of accomplishment, another challenge to be conquered. You were up two hours before the alarm on your first day of fieldwork, bright-eyed and skittish with anticipation.
And then it turned out that the vic was not yet dead, and all your long-suppressed instincts resurfaced. You vaulted over the turnstile and sprinted to the gurney being rolled toward the waiting ambulance. Latex met still-warm flesh, tantalizing with the possibility that life might yet be restored, and the monotonous, atonal hum of the cardiac monitor was the refrain of a song you had once known but had since forgotten. You rolled the dice against God one more time, and as usual, you lost.
You still remember the way Mac looked at you when you stripped off your gloves and tossed them into a trashcan with a snort of disgust. Curious and appraising as he crouched by his kit. It never gets any easier, you told him, and went to work like nothing had happened.
You should have stopped then, told Mac you wanted to go back to the morgue, but you didn't. You were too proud, and you didn't want to admit that you'd opened the Pandora's box God gifts every man at the hour of his birth. So you bulled onward, ever mindful of the fluttering moth at your shoulder. And then, one day, it landed on Aiden.
His fingers closed reflexively at the mention of Aiden's name, and he swore he could feel the thick, soapy cake of clay beneath his fingernails. He'd been thrilled to reconstruct the skull, almost giddy, and though he'd been well aware that the denuded face in his hand had once been a living soul, he'd viewed the task as a game, a puzzle to be assembled or a model to be glued together. He'd sat on his stool and tapped his feet to music only he could hear, had hummed as he drew the shavers and shapers through the moist clay. He could clearly remember humming "Who Are You?" as he molded clay over the cheekbones.
He had lost himself in the task, and the clay had felt wonderful beneath his hands, organic and elastic and inviting. He was a mortal invited to play God again for a few glorious hours, and he had not squandered the opportunity. Indeed, he had been reverent and meticulous, careful to document every curve and jut and facial characteristic. He had fussed and pinched and teased the clay until it was perfect, until the Creator inside him had been satisfied, and then he had rolled his stool back and stood to better appreciate the work of his hands.
He hadn't believed what he was seeing at first, who he was seeing. He'd cocked his head one way and then the other, blinked to clear his vision, but the face he had fashioned had stared lidlessly back at him, stark against the beige background of the workstation. He'd scrubbed his face with hands and smelled clay, clay that had suddenly gone sour and smelled of ash and smoke.
"No," he'd told the room. "Uh uh. No way." He'd even walked to another corner of the room, as though he'd thought a change of perspective would alter the truth, but no matter where in the room he'd stood, the fact remained that Aiden Burn's face-or a reasonable facsimile thereof-was staring back at him. He'd tottered back to his stool and sunk bonelessly onto it, and it was fifteen minutes before he'd trusted his feet to hold him.
He still hadn't wanted to believe, and so he'd gone to DNA and ordered tests done on the dental pulp of the teeth. Jane Parsons had worked quickly and efficiently, and when she handed him the results, he'd stared at them in stunned misery. DNA had removed all doubt. Aiden Burn was dead, and he had replaced the skin of her face with medical grade Play-doh.
It was Mac he'd gone to for reassurance. For once, he had wanted to be told that he was wrong, that he'd made a mistake, and if he had, Mac would give it to him straight. Mac had been in the AV lab when he brought him the paper, and he'd been pathetically relieved when Mac hadn't wanted to accept it, either. It meant he wasn't crazy for wishing. But whether he'd wanted to believe it or not, Mac hadn't told him he was wrong, and he'd understood then that there was no backing out of the truth.
He'd been all right until the lab computer had projected his handiwork onto the plasma projector screen at the head of the AV lab. Aiden's face had loomed over them like a macabre Macy's Day float, and he'd heard all the air leave Danny Messer's body.
There went whatever chance you had with Messer, Monroe, he'd thought with grim hysteria, and was disgusted with himself.
Danny had been the one to break the paralyzed silence of the room. He'd whirled abruptly on his heel and fled, jaw clenched and eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses. He'd wanted to leave, too; not to follow Danny, but to flee the scene of his crime that stared at him from the monitor, complete with Aiden's trademark cocksure smirk. But he couldn't. The eyes held him in thrall.
This is who I am, Hawkes. Are ya glad you solved the mystery?
Lindsay had been the next to leave, slipping out while Mac and Stella gazed at the screen with identical expressions of furious disbelief. They were a matched set in their grief, Mac at stiff-necked attention, and Stella jutting her chin in unconscious defiance of the science that had turned so unkindly against its guardians.
He hadn't stayed to find out who would be the next to leave. He'd forced his frozen, numb feet into motion and wandered into the hall, where the air was cooler on his skin. He'd made it to the bathroom, only to find Messer hunched over the sink with his glasses tossed haphazardly on the countertop. He'd looked so different without his glasses on, smaller and more vulnerable, twelve instead of twenty-nine. The water had been running in the sink, but Danny had hardly noticed; he was too busy squinting into the mirror and rubbing irritably at his eyes.
He hadn't known what to do or say, so he'd said nothing and stepped up to the next sink.
"Did you know it was her, Hawkes?" Danny had asked brusquely just as he'd turned the tap. "When you were makin' that face in there, did you know it was her?"
"No, Danny, I didn't," he'd answered with a mouth gone bone-dry, and passed his hands beneath the cold water.
Danny laughed, a harsh, brittle sound that echoed in the bathroom, and shrugged. "Naw. 'Course you didn't. I mean, how could you know? Right, Doc?"
He'd had no idea how to respond, but there had been a whiff of something rotten and dangerous in the question, and he'd thought it best to nod and agree with whatever Danny said. He'd concentrated on scrubbing water into his cuticles.
Danny had turned off the tap and groped for his glasses without bothering to dry his hands. He stabbed them onto his face and ran his damp hands through his hair. "Ain't that a bitch, Doc?" he'd murmured quietly, and patted him on the shoulder. "Ain't that a bitch?" Danny'd left without another word, and he'd scrubbed his hands until his fingers bled and prickled, convinced he could still feel clay underneath his nails.
Danny had been right, though. It had been a bitch, and it was a bigger bitch five days later, when he'd stood in front of Aiden's father in a suit he hadn't worn since a medical conference in San Francisco three years before and offered his condolences. Mr. Burn had been old and slumped in his suit, the veins in his face unforgiving, blue lines beneath parchment-paper skin. He'd been surrounded by the family he had left-cousins and sisters and nephews-and he'd stared at the box into which the mortician had poured his only daughter.
I'm the man who returned your daughter's face, he'd thought, but his mouth had said, "I'm Dr. Hawkes, and I worked with your daughter. She was a lovely woman, and I'm very sorry for your loss, sir."
Mr. Burn had muttered something incomprehensible and thrust out his hand. It was cold and bony when he shook it, and when he took his hand away, he was sure that he had left smears of clay behind like bits of slipping flesh. He was so repulsed by the illusion that he'd recoiled and curled his hand into a fist. Mr. Burn didn't take offense. In fact, he doubted he'd seen him at all. He had eyes only for his little girl, a Sleeping Beauty forever in her secret bed of wood and lacquer.
He'd wanted to leave, but he'd held his ground until Flack and Danny had hoisted her casket onto their shoulders and carried it down the steps of the church. That was too much, too final, and he'd scuttled away under the pretense of getting some air. He'd found that air in his own living room, and he'd spent the rest of the day listening to Count Basie without hearing him and scrubbing his fingers raw in the kitchen sink.
It was Danny the moth had landed on next, though to be fair, its shadow had fallen over him the same day that Aiden made one last appearance in their lab. Danny was already reeling from the loss of Aiden when Flack got word that Louie Messer was clinging to life in the back of an ambulance screaming towards Trinity, and that was the blow that had broken him. He'd heard the faultline snap as Danny had sprinted past him and out of the precinct, followed gamely by Flack, who had insisted on driving him. Adulthood was an illusion in which Danny had clumsily wrapped himself, and it was brutally, irrevocably gone.
He'd followed Danny to the hospital as soon as his shift was over. Danny had been rooted to his brother's bedside, hands dangling loosely between his knees and glasses off so that he wouldn't have to see the wreck that had been his older brother. The guise of adulthood had been reapplied, but not well. The seams had been clearly visible in the protective hunch of his shoulders and the bleak, lost wariness of his eyes. He had been thirty going on twelve again, just like that day in the bathroom, and he'd wondered stupidly if the glasses Danny wore on his face every day weren't imbued with dark and terrible fairy magic that allowed him to play dress-up in a grown-up's skin.
It had been an absurd thought, a stupid thought, but standing in the doorway of Louie Messer's room and watching Danny shrink with every shrill beep of the cardiac monitor, he hadn't been able to shake it. Besides, he'd told himself, it was no more absurd than believing that the moth from his Pandora's box had escaped and was spreading woe among his colleagues like plague. Not when he could see the outline of its wings reflected in the windowglass.
"I'm sorry, Danny," he'd said.
Danny had looked at him, eyes red and raw and pouched with exhaustion. "For what, Doc?" Grating and hopeless.
For opening the box. "I don't know," he'd answered, and it had sounded so hollow and false even to his own ears that he hadn't been surprised when Danny had dismissed him with a grunted admonition to go home and get some sleep. He'd left Danny to his watch and Flack to his and washed his hands in the hall water fountain on the way out.
Stella was next to feel wind from tainted wings. She'd shot Frankie Mala to death in her own apartment and passed out cold while his blood pooled and stiffened to tacky nap on the carpet. He'd never gotten the chance to apologize for that one; Flack had appointed himself the guardian of the way, and no one came unto Stella save by him, and anyway, they'd all been too busy working the evidence and praying that it was a good shoot.
It had been, of course, but the distinction between murder and justifiable homicide had been of little consolation to Stella. She had retreated into herself, cocooned herself in the hard, protective shell of her anger. She had been soft once, guts and feminine curves and vivacious smiles, but now she was hard, guts and hard angles and a lightless smile with too many teeth that reminded him of a leer. The last time he'd heard her laugh, it had sounded like the clittering rattle of bones in the back of her throat, and the skin of his forearms had crawled and puckered into hard knots of gooseflesh.
And now Flack had fallen victim. He wondered if Stella had passed it to him while he was keeping watch over her at Trinity. Maybe she passed dust from the moth's wings to him when he was hugging her, or maybe it had happened when he was helping her with her coat. It was a sly vector, the despair that the moth carried, and neither one of them would have known until it was too late. Until now.
He reminded you of Hannah Mitchum's youngest son when you first saw him lying in that bed. The wound was a little lower, but just as vicious, just as ugly. You didn't have to talk to his doctor to know he'd missed death by millimeters and a dirty shoelace. As it is, it's still going to be touch-and-go for the next twenty-four hours while you wait to see if infection's going to set in, and Mac did him no favors on that score by photographing his open abdominal wound sans mask.
You keep waiting for his mother to turn up in the hallway outside his room, wizened and dazed by the concussion of an explosion whose echoes extended farther than anyone imagined. You keep waiting to see her there, desperately clutching the sleeve of Dr. Singh's surgical smock and begging him for answers he cannot possibly give, but she never turns up. You've been back to check three times since you told Mac and Stella you were going to discuss Flack's immediate prognosis with the neurologist on duty, and there is no mother hovering in the hallway like the ghost of uneasy conscience. Just Mac sprawled in a chair outside the room and Stella in a chair inside it, her fingers curled steadfastly around Flack's pale hand.
There's no real reason for you to be here now. It's three in the morning, and you have to work tomorrow, but you can't bring yourself to leave. If you go home, you'll just sit on your couch or lie on your bed and listen for the flutter of tiny wings against the window. At least here, you can pretend to make a difference, go through the motions with the creaking tendons of muscle memory. You can play doctor, look at scans and charts that are technically none of your business and tell yourself that you'll get it right this time, that you won't lose this roll of the dice.
At least it was something. He was tired of watching his friends fall apart, tired of groping for the familiar angle of a shoulder only to find it sharp and cutting against his palm, twisted steel and shattered glass. He was tired of looking at Stella and seeing shadows and deep hollows; at Danny and seeing the distance in his eyes, of brushing against him and feeling the ragged-edged space where Aiden had been. He was tired of waiting for the next wingbeat and the next tragedy. He wanted to look at Mac or Lindsay or his own pinched reflection in the mirror and not think about which of them was next.
He had been a trauma surgeon once upon a time, and he had been able to wring miracles from shattered bone and pulped tissue, to breath stolen life into dying flesh by dint of his refusal to accept the circumstances set before him. He had fixed the unfixable. So why couldn't he fix his friends?
The thought weighed heavily on his mind as he trudged toward yet another meeting with Flack's neurologist, and along the way, he stopped to wash his hands in a nearby water fountain.
Just like Pontius, whispered a voice inside his head, and from behind him came the unmistakable flutter of wings.
