The next chapter will probably be the last. Sorry for the wait on this one, I moved house.
"Sam?"
A bodiless voice fell between her memories, soon attached to a hand shaking her free from the tangles of images.
She kept her eyes closed, her muscles seizing with automatic terror. She forced herself not to shrink away, clinging hopelessly to the one last element of control she had. Her eyes shut tighter, as if she could will them away if she just refused to see them. But the person was persistent, shaking her harder still and hissing her name like a snake that coiled around her throat until she could hardly breathe.
Then there were more voices.
The roars of giants.
A shower of gunshots.
Without meaning to, Sam scrunched herself into a ball, hating herself with every inch smaller she became. She was trained to run into combat, not from it. But unarmed and only half alive, her only chance was in praying she wouldn't be seen. She tried to roll further into the shadows, feeling rather than seeing the bathing glow of light that had crept across the dust, but the hand on her shoulder held her to the floor.
"It's okay," said a voice made from velvet, "it's just the team."
His tone was gentle, but if hit her harder than the roars. She was not used to kindness. Not from them, hardly from anyone. When her father had been kind to her, it had been to pry out a lie her mother had told him. She'd hear the thud of his boot cracking down on her from her bedroom, where her mother thought she was safe. But no matter how hard she'd clung to her toy rabbit or the pressure she put on her ears, he always came for her in the end.
Her fingers scrambled blindly against the dirt, searching for something to use in her defence. She couldn't fight, but she was not going to lie on the floor helpless; but they only grappled with empty space and the filth that burrowed beneath her nails. Then another hand filled hers. Fingers entwined between the gaps of her own, warmth wrapping itself around skin that had been so cold.
She knew that touch.
It was one she both wanted to curl into and wrench away from. When the black creature of despair had threatened to drag her down to hell, it had held her on the right side.
But at the cost of snatching her away from the faltering grip of her husband.
She clung to it anyway, the familiarity better than even the dwindling supply of water left rolling in the dirt for her. She didn't trust it, but she'd take the comfort while it was there, even if it was nothing but a hallucination. Her training had warned her about them, but she'd barely listened, never thinking she'd be in the situation herself. She was a doctor after all, not a soldier. She was rarely in the direct line of fire. Almost never the target.
"Iain," she confirmed, opening her eyes to surprising brightness.
"All right Sam?" he grinned, like they'd done no more than brush past one another at base.
"Not real," she mumbled, but clung to his hand tighter still, wishing he was. She was tired, she was always tired, but if she slept there was a chance he wouldn't be there when she woke up again. His fingers were squeezing back, ironically pulling her from the fringes of her sanity to a world that felt sturdier, safer. "Stop stroking me," she protested, "I'm not a dog."
Iain laughed and pulled back the hand running through her hair. "And here was me thinking you might not be you anymore." He said something else, too, but it was just a noise as spots started to pattern and grow over his relaxed grin.
"None of that now, we've got some escaping to do." He tugged on the hand he was holding and Sam blinked away the patterns. Escaping? If he was a hallucination, they wouldn't be able to. The doors would still be in-tact, the men right outside.
He flung her arm around his neck and bent to sweep the other one under her legs, but she pushed him feebly away, her hand cold from his sudden absence. "I wanna walk," she told him, stubbornly, and saw him roll his eyes through the blurred brightness that scrunched her eyes. He lifted her to her feet and it was then that she saw the voices had not been bodiless, but they belonged to more men in uniform, a woman. And the boy who had bought her food with a gun trained to his chest. His hands were flung in the air and he gaped at the barrel, the colour sucked from his skin.
It was a hell of a lot to hallucinate.
But she didn't have time to wonder. Iain was half dragging her across the dust, leaving a trail from the tips of her bare feet behind them like the scattered trail of bread left so Hansel and Gretel could find their way home again. She stumbled all the way to the battered front door that had held her completely captive in its darkest depths for an age void of time. She wanted to ask Ian how long it had been, but then they were through it and the scorching, sky splitting sun burnt fires in her eyes. She twisted her face into his jacket to put them out and felt herself being lifted right into the cradle of his arms before she could protest.
It was not like she could walk without her eyes anyway.
He carried her higher and then the journey was less bumpy and doors were closing. His arms were leaving her and she didn't protest. She twisted her feet and hands to make sure she still could, squinting through the harsh flames to see the closed walls of a van around her.
She wanted to fight, scream and run, because they had taken her in the back of a van too, but she was tired and her eyes were refusing to stay open. She heard Iain's voice, fluttering with false cheer before the last of her senses left her and she was staring once again into the void of darkness.
…
Sam pressed her back harder into the stone wall, a tinge of relief fluttering feebly through her heart as she felt the cold soak through her shirt. She stared at her crimson streaked hands until the edges blurred and then they fell out of focus altogether, flashes and snatches of scenes falling into her vision instead.
The smoking rubble that had been a school brimming with jittering excitement. It had only just opened. The first one for almost thirty miles, but the shouts of laughter had become wails of grief and terror as the longed for building collapsed around them. Sam had crawled through the gaps in the rubble to answer the cries of a seven year old child, ignoring the protests of the officer behind her. She'd found the child amongst the broken bodies of her classmates and the little girl she had promised life had spent the last seconds of it in the arms of the doctor who had failed her.
They'd saved the teacher and one child, who looked to lose his leg on top of every one of his friends.
No, her team had.
She hadn't saved anyone.
She carried herself on shaking, stumbling legs to the base phone, barely able to dial the numbers with the force of the tremble in her hand, but finally she tapped in the last one and the rings began in her ear, screaming as loud and ugly as the sobs of a child, begging Sam to save her.
He didn't pick up until the ninth ring, when the hope Sam clung to was slipping between the pieces of herself. Then it rose and fell in the same breath. "Hello?" her husband snapped, as if she'd interrupted a life-saving procedure.
"Dylan," she choked out, her voice strangled as the hand of the dead child closed around her throat.
"What is it, Samantha? I have a shift in ten minutes."
She pressed her lips together, burying her teeth into them until her eyes watered with pain. It was better than them stinging with tears. She opened her mouth, let out a little gasp, closed it again. There was nothing to say, no words to explain and nothing that he wanted to hear.
"I haven't got time for this," he snarled, confirming it, and then she only heard the constant whine of the dial tone that coiled itself around her heart and squeezed until the life and breath were seeping from her in shuddering gasps without tears. There wasn't enough left in her to cry. Despite the awful, dreadful day, she longed for another call out, more bodies to retrieve, more limbs to literally hold on with her hands as she struggled to stop the blood. She needed a bomb scare to throw herself into the centre of, a sniper's gun to stare down.
She needed something, anything, for the high of adrenaline.
Dylan thought she did it to punish him. It wasn't about revenge. When he snapped so viciously, when their arguments ended in bitter anger that she didn't deserve, putting herself in danger wasn't to hurt him. It was to prove she still could.
Sometimes, she did it without believing she'd see the spark of worry jolt through his cold eyes, but it was what she needed to see. To hear through his screaming at the thought of losing her that he still cared.
The other reason was the high.
Then the hand she'd longed for was on her shoulder, massaging gently where it hurt most. She closed her eyes, knowing it wasn't, it couldn't be, but imagining her husband all the same. "Sam?" It was Iain Dean, the buddy who always had her back, the one who had lifted the child's body from her arms and gently coaxed her from the rubble.
She turned to him with crystals in her eyelashes and a soft half-smile on her lips. "I'd never hang up on you," he vowed.
That was the first time that Sam considered that there was more than one way for Dylan to lose her.
I wrote the first half of this before last night's episode aired, but the episode was useful for giving Iain a little more characterisation. I'm also not sure about Iain strictly being able to be a part of Sam's rescuse team so I'm gonna claim artistic license because I've wanted him to be since like half way through this story.