"I lived with my mother's sister until I went to university. Everyone thought it was wonderful of her to take me in, she was barely more than a kid herself, but she made it clear that all she was giving me was a place to stay. I wasn't to come to her for anything unless I was on death's door, and maybe not even then. She had her life and I wasn't going to wreck it, but my mother had always protected her so she settled the debt she'd never repaid while her sister was alive by keeping me out of foster care."

Sam knew as soon as the story had emerged from her bruised, cracked lips that her mind was closing down. Because she had never even told Dylan. When the subject of her parents had inevitably come up she'd dismissed his grumbles that he should probably meet them before marrying their daughter with a harsh, closed off statement that they were both dead. He had never asked for the details, and it was one of the reasons she said yes to begin with. He would not insist on knowing everything about her.

And there in the dark she'd grown so used to, the threads of the story finally weaved themselves into the mind of another. One she barely knew and whose face she had still not seen in the shimmering light of the midday sun, or stood beside in the sprinkling shower of dust that bathed the roads. And yet he knew the darkest crevice of her mind: the story of Sammy's death. No one had called her that after the name had been burned with the breath of a demon. Anyone who tried only did once.

Almost anyone.

"My wife and I," Leo replied, "had four other babies before our son and daughters. The first two we lost at nine weeks. The third was at twenty eight. The fourth was an ectopic. Finally, we adopted our eldest and then my wife fell pregnant with the twins. She told me in one quick breath over breakfast on the morning of her twelfth week and I went with her to the first scan that day. Other than doctor's appointments, the pregnancy was not acknowledged. We didn't tell anyone, we didn't discuss names or buy cots and clothes, we didn't even brush our hands across her stomach as we had done with the others. We thought it we didn't mention it, then it wasn't real and what wasn't real couldn't be taken."

It was far from a comforting story, but the muscles that had tensed into a stone sculpture loosened. It relaxed her, as Leo knew it would. Not because she wasn't alone in her suffering, but because she no longer had to be ashamed of giving him that part of herself that she allowed no one else to even glimpse. She didn't have to shy away from his gaze after stripping herself down and turning on all the lights so it blazed on every paw of her exposed body, because now he stood beside her in the same state.

"And now you have your family," she murmured to the ceiling, but the words didn't cast the spell of hope that they were supposed to. The problem, much like with Leo's wife, was inside her. Leo had struggled to find his because of a medical problem; a medical problem that had a solution. There wasn't a drug to take or a form to fill that was going to give her what she'd never had. There was a badness that lived in her, one that had been traced beneath her skin with the gentle caresses of a father that could turn into violent thumps with a single gleam.

But the map her father had drawn in her mother's blood had ended when he stopped shedding it. And it was her who had continued to walk without cleaning the souls of her feet. It was her who had let the trail stalk her through the bends of her own map, it was her who had left it so long that the blood had stained her skin.

Becoming a doctor had been an easy decision, made ever since her sixth birthday when her father had thrown the glass plate that had held her cake at his beaming daughter. The nurse at the hospital had cleaned the blood away and picked out the shards and stitched it with a smile and Sam had watched in awe as the jagged edges of the wound knitted together and the scar faded in time until the skin was smooth and the colour blended with the rest of her as if it had never been there at all.

Zoe sighed and buried her head in her hands, allowing her hair to fall forwards and shield them from the eyes of her staff. She didn't need them to know that their clinical lead was letting a few rude patients and a bad day in Resus get to her. But a young boy who had been jumped by a gang of bullies had been rushed in and she hadn't been able to look at his battered body without imagining his injuries on her once colleague. She knew she shouldn't, but how did you stop yourself from getting emotionally attached when any number of the horrific injuries she saw each day could be being inflicted upon her friend at that very moment?

But Sam had been gone for more than three months and missing for thirty seven days, and no one even seemed to remember that she had existed at all. Tom had forgotten he once lolled on the sofa while she made herself coffee and cheekily demanded that 'his woman' make him one too. Jeff had forgotten how he'd flung his arm around her and called her 'princess' in an attempt to charm her to the pub across the road and Dixie, too, had forgotten the bossy, arrogant woman who had grinned as she climbed out of the wreckage of the ambulance before she'd even officially started on the job.

Or at least they never spoke of her. But what was there to say other than cruel speculation? Not one of them dared to ask Dylan if he had heard anything. For over a month he had barricaded himself in CDU, working until Zoe sent him home under the threat of suspension and then returning again just a few hours later with rings under his eyes and crumpled clothes that no longer fit. She could be sure at least that he wasn't drinking again, making excuses to speak to him each day so she could sniff out any traces.

With another sigh, Zoe took her head out of her hands and returned her focus to the medical records of the beaten boy in Resus. He'd been in before, she saw, for a fractured distal radius. School yard fight, it seemed. She'd have to address the parents about the clear bullying issue their son was having. That was if they were willing to listen. It was alarming how many parents were more than willing to dress up their child's suffering as 'kids being kids', too afraid to admit what they had been missing for so long.

She flicked the folder shut and left it on the desk, heading towards the exit for a much needed smoke. She passed a small huddle of nurses on their break, laughing over something Zoe had missed, the kind of free, helpless laughter of someone without anything to stop it. Sam had talked one of them through a bad break up, even inviting her out for after work drinks, despite none of the others having ever spoken to her.

The outside of the hospital was as busy as ever, anxious relatives, furious spouses, incoming ambulances, paramedics trying to take a break, stray patients all milled around the grounds. It looked like a very strange day care centre. But one person who looked as out of place as she felt was the lone, hunched shape on the only bench in the little patch of garden designed for grieving patients and she almost smiled. There was at least one person who hadn't forgotten about Sam.

Zoe sat down in the space beside Dylan as she exhaled the first puff of smoke, but apart from a slight flicker of eyes in her direction, he did not acknowledge her presence. For once she didn't mind his silence. Everyone else was so loud with their laughter and banter, their unwarranted panics about missing files and a too busy waiting room.

"I shouted at her," she admitted, surprised when the tiredness that she felt was present in her tone She thought she'd mastered the trick of keeping it out. "On her last day, we argued."

Dylan didn't ask who Zoe was talking about, as if saying her name would curse it and seal her fate. "So? I shouted at her too, I find it's difficult not to." Far more reassuringly in character, Zoe noted, Dylan's tone expressed not a note of regret at one of his final exchanges with his ex-wife. She wished she could have the same flippant attitude, but her last words to the girl just would not stop replying themselves, resounding like her mother's voice nagging her again and again that if she didn't take her coat off she wouldn't feel the benefit of it when she went outside.

"I know," she sighed, gazing at the leaves woven around the tiny wooden fence. "We used to argue all the time, but she didn't deserve it. I was frustrated and took it out on her. I meant to find her and apologise, but she'd already left and didn't answer when I phoned her. I knew I wouldn't see her for a while because she was going back to Afghanistan, but I always thought we'd get her back."

"We will!" Dylan's voice was sharper suddenly, angry and Zoe recoiled slightly, startled. "Sam is many things. She's reckless and irresponsible and often downright foolish, but she's also very resilient. Whatever-" there was the smallest break in his voice, like a hairline crack in a china mug, "whatever they're doing to her, she will fight it."

He didn't voice the other niggling thought in his mind. That she'd fight too hard, do something stupid and reckless. He could only pray that her survival instincts were stronger than her need for a kick.

By the third time Sam was dragged upstairs to the room with the boy whose name she did not ask for, they had set into a rhythm. She would hit at the walls and floor, shout out, maybe even cry a bit while he kept his distance and did his best to mentally distract himself. Each time they did it, he looked less and less distressed by her cries that eased every time. If it were real, she would have learned by then that no one would come if she pleaded.

The breaks between water were too long and the ones between food dragged further. But it was enough, just about enough, to keep them alive. Alert enough to answer questions, but too weak to fight. But she grew used to the constant pounding in her head that was a mixture of the blows it took and the deprivation of water. She grew used to the grime that coated her and stopped being tempted to use to little drink they received to wash. She even grew used to the dark, because it was when it surrounded her that she was safe with Leo and the entire series of Harry Potter tucked into his memory.

But what she couldn't grow used to was the helplessness. She was used to doing something. Action Sam. But when they came, there were so many of them, and she was too weak. Too weak, and too pathetic; just like she had been when she'd cowered behind the sofa as her mother was murdered just feet away.

She'd fought in the beginning. She'd broken one of her captor's noses with the palm of her hand as he bundled her into a truck. She'd spat at the man who'd tried to turn her into his whore. She'd raised her hand to the mysterious figure flung into the cell with her who became a friend. But she had not done enough. She had failed to save either one of them, while the body count in her name grew into a mounting sea that would soon drown her.

I think I'm spending too much time alone writing. There's a spider on my wall and I've named it Hodgins.

So that was the first proper trip to the ED. I shan't be doing a lot of them and only if I actually think of something to happen. And it's not that everyone's forgotten all about Sam, more that there's nothing they can do about it so they have to carry on and do their jobs.

I love hearing what you all think and I appreciate all the anon reviews too, even if I can't reply to those.