Calais, August 2017

Dylan couldn't sleep. This time, however, his sleeplessness had little to do with his OCD, which had been fairly quiet of late, and everything to do with his moral compass. A moral compass, which after what he had seen tonight was spinning wildly out of control.

He knew that he would not easily forget the screams he had heard not the trauma he had witnessed. The crunching metal of the container full of refugees — the sound was clear in his mind as if she still stood beneath it. Although he was in a sleeping bag, he shivered violently as another mental image surfaced and refused to budge. Mariam's glassy eyes as her life ebbed away. She had only wanted the best for her little brother, and look where it had got her. Dylan also had Sanosi's traumatised expression etched in his brain. 3000 miles from home, that little boy was now totally alone in the world.

It was disconcerting to have so many thoughts fighting for front and centre in his mind.

He stared at the ceiling of the tiny room he had shared with David throughout this trip. The nurse was bundled up in many layers of clothing and a sleeping bag, so that only his face showed. He had been fast asleep for hours, following sadness-fuelled silence during which neither of them had spoken. Neither had been able. There was nothing to say. David snored gently, less an intrusive sound and more a slight snuffle, a reminder that Dylan was not alone. David had such a skill in always making Dylan feel less alone, no matter what scenario they found themselves in. They had an almost unbreakable bond, after Dylan's successful effort not to be the consultant who let a nurse be sectioned in his resus, and his subsequent explanation that he too understood losing control of one's brain.

Almost unbreakable.

'Almost' because kind-hearted, just, morally sound David would never speak to Dylan again after tomorrow. Dylan's mind was made up: there may have been several more official days of Cal's Mercy Mission, but tomorrow, he would set off for the UK, with Sanosi. He had three reasons for leaving so soon.

1. The longer he stayed, the more chance there was of the others finding out, and they would never in a million years let him do it.

2. If he waited until the scheduled return date, the others would become implicated in the smuggling, whether they were aware of his intentions or not. While he was not considering his own career at this point, he would not allow his actions to impact on others.

3. With every passing hour, his manic brain was trying to war with itself. A constant stream of pros and cons was all he could hear in his mind. The longer he stayed on French soil, weighing up his decision, the weaker his conviction would become.

But he had to do this. He had been the weak link, the final contributing factor that had led to Sanosi being alone in the first place. Getting him into the UK safely might begin to silence the internal criticism that Dylan was at the mercy of.

You know what would help you sleep.

The thought was comedically intrusive, so clear that it may as well have been spoken by the metaphorical devil on his shoulder. Dylan had sincerely hoped that this thought might never come. Because he did know exactly what would 'help' him, what would silence the internal monologue: the small bottle of very strong French alcohol, buried inside three pairs of socks and covered by spare t-shirts in the bottom of his rucksack. His French was not what it once was (especially with a brain focusing on everything except the language of the country he was currently in) but it did not tale a linguist to read percentages.

He curled up in his sleeping bag, facing the wall and trying to tell the thought no.

There was another thought too. It was a niggling doubt at first, crawling into his brain and taking root. It grew until it took up nearly all of his empty space.

It had been a while, but the OCD was definitely coming back.

The alcohol was strong, and it burned, but it didn't make his eyes water as much as the entire bottle of mouthwash he used after brushing his teeth three times. When he got back to his sleeping bag, his entire mouth stung.

Holby City Hospital, December 2017

The flourishing friendship between Dylan and Lily was unconventional but somehow exactly what they each needed. Sometimes a friendly face was just enough to offset everything happening around the usual stress of a shift.

And sometimes, it wasn't.

One morning, Lily asked him a question which threw him entirely. "Are you alright?" she said when he walked into the staffroom. She was tying up her hair and hanging her stethoscope around her neck.

Dylan, who had entered the room to deposit his belongings in his locker, was mildly hungover and had not expected such a difficult question first thing in the morning, did not say anything at first. He took off his jacket, put it into his locker and stood, hands on hips, looking at Lily. "I don't know how to answer that question." How could he possibly explain that he was still hungover from off-the-scale drinking the night before last? And this without the fact that she seemed to honestly care whether he was mentally stable today. This was of course the motivation behind her question, not his alcoholism, which she, thank god, did not know about.

Lily almost smiled. "Are you deliberately avoiding my question, or just being typically abrasive?"

If he'd been different, he might have smiled back. If Zoe had been the one to say that, he would have had a smart-mouthed comeback at the ready. "Neither," he replied. "I really do not know how to answer that question, when it has been asked by someone who genuinely cares about my response. It's been a long time."

There was something so real about the way she had asked him how he was feeling. It was a long way removed from the frequent 'alright?' that was carelessly tossed around like confetti by way of normal greeting in the ED. The last person to ask him, and mean it, had been Zoe, eighteen months ago. And before that, Sam.

"Ah," Lily said, embarrassment glowing on her cheeks.

She considered him for a moment. He didn't look particularly alright, despite his obvious efforts to do so. Sleeves rolled perfectly, exactly as always, shirt tucked in precisely, hair neat and no different to any other day. But although he stood with hands on hips, as only he could, he didn't seem himself. He didn't stand so tall, he squinted against the bright fluorescent lights and if his hands hadn't been planted squarely on his hips, she was sure they would have been visibly unsteady. If he had been somebody else, she might have wondered if he was hungover. But she'd never seen Dylan go into the pub, much less order a drink. And more to the point, he smelled of mouthwash, not alcohol.

"If you're not okay, you shouldn't be in work," she said simply, referring to the statistically far more likely possibility that it was not a good OCD-day.

Dylan mentally bit his tongue, wanting to say that it must be nice to be a carefree registrar at liberty to take 'sick' days on a whim. He knew that if he had been stone cold sober, the inclination to say that would have never surfaced, held back by the knowledge that snapping at Lily at the present time would be vastly unfair. Drunk Dylan was far more facetious and mean than sober Dylan. It might have been nice not to know the difference with so little effort. "I am fit to work," he said, without further elaboration.

Lily seized her chance, knowing that they were alone and unlikely to be disturbed. "You don't have to answer this, and I won't be offended if you choose not to. But that… compulsion, last week… Why did you have to wash whiskey from the mugs? Obviously there was no way there would be anything like that in them. This is going to sound so crass, I'm sorry, I just don't know a better way to put it — is it an OCD thing, to believe things that aren't true?"

He should have expected her to ask that at some point. All he had to do was answer the question well-enough to disguise the truth. At least, to disguise the whole truth. Because there were parts that she could know, that weren't so terrible that he'd rather keep them locked away. "Um. It is, and it isn't. There… tends to be an element of truth, which the OCD then gets hold of and twists beyond all recognition."

She knew, or thought she knew, that he was holding something back. Lily decided not to push her luck.

"I realise that I sound as though I'm talking in riddles, but the rest of the answer… that's one thing that I am not comfortable to share." He saw an intricate change in Lily's face, and felt a pang of guilt. "It's not personal. It's not because I don't like you."

Hearing him admit that he didn't dislike her felt as though she had won the lottery. Lily stood up from where she had been sitting and pushed up her sleeves, ready to get to work. "No, I understand that. As long you're alright."

"Just fine, I'm sure. And you?"

There was more than an intricate change in Lily's face this time. "Yes, excellent," she said, with very little expression to match her positive affirmation.

This was such a patent lie, but very telling. Even Dylan, with all his lacking emotional wisdom, could see that she was still not back to normal. The situation with Sam, while perhaps not getting worse, obviously wasn't getting better, either. And the constant grating had Lily still extremely upset. She seemed to be right on the edge; one little thing could tip her back to tears.

Sam stood outside the ED later that morning, holding two cups of coffee. Steam billowed out of the small hole in each lid, floating in the crisp wintry air. She rolled her eyes to nobody in particular: Iain had said he would be 'two minutes', over five minutes ago. She heard the automatic doors slide open, and expected to see his green uniform emerge, but instead her eyes fell on Dylan coming out of the department. His shirt, although tucked in, was creased messily. Her first assumption was that he'd been in resus, moving around a lot, et cetera. But as he walked towards her, she got a better look at him. It was as though his shirt had never been ironed at all.

Wait, he was walking towards her?

"You always were about as subtle as a philharmonic orchestra," he said abruptly, standing a few feet from her and putting his hands on his hips, frowning.

"Excuse me?" Sam replied, taking half a step back. "Good morning, Dylan," she added, pointedly. It was petty and meaningless, but if he was going to be uncivil, then so was she.

Dylan was having none of it; he did not fall for the bait. "Do you not see what you've done, barrelling back in here as though nothing has changed?!"

"I don't think that's fair," she countered. "I'm smarter than you give me credit for -"

"Don't you think I know that?" Dylan regretted these words the second they had escaped his lips. He wished he could take them back. Of course he knew that Sam was incredibly intelligent: for goodness' sake, it was part of what had made him fall in love with her, and what made it so damned difficult to forget her. "Why have you done this, burst back into Holby like we're still in 2009?" It was a low blow, he knew, to suggest that the last time they were on good terms was six years previously. "You're like a bull in a china shop, re-patching whatever you've got with Iain, which has totally destroyed Lily! Why couldn't you leave us -" He pulled himself up smartly. "Why couldn't you leave her out of this?"

Sam bristled at the accusation that she was the only one at fault in whatever dysfunctional relationship there was left between them. She could have quite easily crushed one or both of the coffee cups she was holding. "I'm only coarse and unrefined because you made me that way." He face was twisted into an expression of disgust. "That was the only way I could get through to you, so I'm sorry if that's had a lasting impact on the way I am now!"

He sighed, letting out a long breath in an attempt to drag his temper back under control. He didn't want to accept that all of this was his fault. "You are infuriating, Sam. Completely, utterly, unbelievable."

His words were sharp, disjointed. Sam realised at that moment that Dylan smelled strongly of alcohol. He had clearly taken steps to mask it, but there was no hiding it from someone who knew him as well as she did. Or, once did. Still, the scent of someone disguising alcohol with mouthwash was not an easy thing to forget. She wanted to shout and scream, be furious with him for being so weak as to fall back on that spineless coping strategy, and for being so stupid as to come to work still suffering its ill effects. At that moment, she felt as though they were back in the house in Oxford, that nothing had moved on since then. And how far had they moved on, if they had stumbled back into this position of Dylan's alcoholism being laid bare in front of her, all over again? Her first thought was that he was on duty — if anyone found out that he was hungover, or potentially still drunk, because she had a rough idea of how much he could put away, he could be reported. It was a safe bet that he didn't have a sparkling record; something like this could get him struck off. While she had so many complicated feelings about him, she didn't want him to lose the biggest identifying part of him. Sure, he was brisk, sometimes a little mean, obsessive and unceremoniously sarcastic, but he didn't deserve to lose his identity.

The only way to save him, and she had an incredible, unexplainable sense of duty to do so, was to somehow convince Ethan to give Dylan leave, and ensure that this was recorded as vaguely as possible.

She knocked on the door of Ethan's office, having thrust the coffees into Iain's care the split-second he returned to the ambulance. There wasn't much time: if there was another call-out, she'd have to abandon this conversation altogether, which considering Dylan's current state, could spell disaster. It was a relief when Ethan gestured for her to come in straight away. There was a line in his forehead from frowning too much. Just what the department needed, a stressed-out Clinical Lead.

Ethan felt immediately guilty for being brisk with Sam. Nothing going on inside the hospital was her fault, after all. But her request certainly wouldn't make things any easier.

"You need to put Dylan on leave. Ill-health, unfit to work, whatever you want to call it, he can't be here."

"Sam, I'm sure you mean well, but I can't just sign off a consultant, on someone else's authority -" He stopped, wilting under Sam's glare and single raised eyebrow. "If he's not ill, I can't do anything."

Sam's glare turned steely. "It's staring you right in the face, if only you'd step out of your office to see it! He reeks of whiskey, Ethan. Have you ever known him, even once, to set foot into the pub out there? Have you even seen him drink?"

There was an awful silence. It dawned on Ethan what she was getting at. And if she was telling the truth, he was in way over his head. Since walking in on the staff room incident between Lily and Dylan, he had tried to keep an eye on Dylan's behaviour. While he had tried to see anything that matched Lily's assessment of an OCD relapse, he certainly hadn't noticed anything to suggest excessive drinking instead.

"You just don't understand," she said firmly, hoping that she'd be able to keep a lid on her feelings if Ethan wouldn't listen to her.

"And I suppose you do?" Ethan didn't want to believe that he had missed something so important in one of his team. He didn't want to be the Clinical Lead that failed a consultant this badly. It was beside the point, but he barely wanted to be Clinical Lead at all.

"Yes!" Sam said, raising her voice a little more than she ought to have done. "I was married to him, and I still-" She faltered, long enough to regroup and control what she was saying, veto her unconscious impulse. "I still care enough about him to spot that he's falling, fast. I've seen him spiral down into alcoholism before. I know what I'm looking for." It was a careful, neat omission, that the last time he had spiralled down, she hadn't actually seen him fall. She'd been on tour, and had returned to find a drunken nightmare in place of the husband she loved so much. Maybe she knew what to look for now, but only because last time, she had simply walked away when she couldn't fix him. "Alarm bells are ringing, and you're just not listening."

In the end, Ethan, now sinking under the added pressure of being one consultant down, agreed that Dylan would be given three weeks of compassionate leave. This was the easiest way to get him out of the department without questions from upstairs. Perhaps unwisely, he wasn't sure, he allowed Sam to take over. She couldn't possibly do a worse job than anyone else; she obviously knew him better than most people ever would, despite their estrangement.

But Ethan was acting under the assumption that Sam knew about the OCD. It didn't occur to him that she would be oblivious to it; having been married to Dylan and having lived in close quarters with him, how could she possibly not have known?

Alone in his office again, Ethan opened his email inbox with baited breath. The now-normal stream of journalists littered his computer screen, unopened and remaining so. One email which would not stay untouched, however, had automatically been moved to the top of his inbox, marked with a little red flag and a subject line of 'URGENT: Rage in Resus'.

Sam found Dylan quickly, knowing she was on borrowed time now before another call-out came through.

"Dylan," she said desperately. She didn't want to embarrass him, but she wasn't sure that he would listen to her.

He glowered at her. "What?"

There was no denying it: there was alcohol on his breath. Although his tone had been cutting, Sam stayed strong. She returned him a glare. "You need to go home," she said steadfastly.

He smirked. "Who put you in charge?" He rolled his eyes. "In case it's escaped your notice, this place is bursting at the seams. I have to stay."

"No, you really do not," Sam said. She pulled him well out of earshot of anyone nearby, and lowered her voice. "Not when the mouthwash trick isn't working anymore."

Dylan's face fell, his cheeks colouring. "How many people have you told?" His tone was clipped, half-disguising deep hurt. To be rumbled, in public, by Sam, who simultaneously knew so much and so little, was damning.

"None," Sam replied quickly. "I'm not that much of a monster. Well, only Ethan, to convince him to sign you off for a while. Three weeks. Sober yourself up, Dylan; this place deserves your best, and this isn't it."

Her words rang in his ears as he returned to the staff room to collect his belongings. Had she really paid him a compliment, cloaked in condemnation?

It didn't improve his day, when he realised that Lily had spotted him leaving the department. This wasn't what he needed, to have to finally explain himself to her.

"Where are you going?" she asked warily, eyeing him up as he hurried towards the doors.

At first, Dylan kept walking, trying to just get away. He wasn't in the mood for idle chatter. But he could hear Lily's footsteps just behind him, so the best he could do was lead her outside so that no-one would hear their conversation, which he aimed to keep as brief as possible.

"Dylan, what's going on?" she persisted, looking worried as he finally came to a stop just outside the doors. She folded her arms across her chest: it was icily cold without any protection from the elements. The sky was steely grey, the weather forecast threatening sleet or perhaps even snow later that afternoon.

He knew full well that he was being unfair, that his frustration with Sam and himself was morphing into unjust impatience with Lily. "I'm going home. Not of my own volition, but because of what I've done to myself."

She looked appalled. Her immediate assumption was that Ethan had stepped in and drawn the line at Dylan's increasingly obsessive behaviour, something which lit a fire in her and prepared her to go and fight Dylan's case at once.

"Stop looking at me like that," Dylan spat. "I'm an alcoholic, Lily, not a charity case."

He walked away, leaving Lily wide-eyed and open-mouthed in the cold.

The pressure on Ethan to solve the mystery of Rage in Resus was building. The angry-looking email had turned out to be exactly that: Jac Naylor venting fury at the hospital being dragged through the mud. It was true that the media furore around the Emergency Department's day-to-day troubles was not dying down at all. In fact, it seemed to be intensifying.

Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut for a second. He didn't want to spend any more time examining that website, and reading someone's very clear criticism of him. But reading it was the only way to find out whose words were poisoning the department with each added blog entry. He opened it, hardly daring to look. His shoulders sagged when he saw that there was another entry at the top of the page. Sitting back in his chair and sighing, he started to scroll, reading the blog as fast as possible to avoid prolonging the pain. Like ripping off a plaster, he sped through the entry to try and look for identifying details.

In a moment of exhausted madness, he wondered if it might have been written by Lily. The observation was needle-sharp. Eloquent description of life in the hectic ED was effortlessly interwoven with a piercing attack on how things were run. He stopped this thought in its tracks: she wouldn't do this to him. She couldn't. She was too intrinsically good to attack him, or the department, like this. But he couldn't shake the thought. The only way to settle his mind for sure would be to check all the cases she'd been involved in, since the blog first went live, to see whether anything else matched up. He hated himself for suspecting her, but could not help himself from carrying on.

It was with great guilt that he began to check her recent work, cross-referencing it with the blog entries.

Worse though, was later in the shift, when she came to his door, checking if he was okay, as she often did, and he found himself being cold and distant with her because he just couldn't be sure. It wasn't until she'd gone, and he'd read two more cases, that he realised he never should have doubted his initial judgement.

Of course, Lily had nothing to do with Rage in Resus.