It's been a long time since I updated, oops! I've spent too long procrastinating this chapter - it's been in mind since I first had the idea for this fic, so I really wanted to get it right. Leave me a review, let me know what you think x

Holby, December 2017

There was a strange silence between Dylan and Sam as they sat on the same sofa (with space between them), both staring into their steaming cups. They had made their own drinks, in the end, although it had pleased Dylan greatly that he could still recall how she took her coffee. Hers was stronger but had two sugars, whereas he had more milk but no sugar at all. He could remember a time when she'd become sugar-conscious and cut down to a single spoonful, but the stress of King's had meant that didn't last long.

For a little while, both were at a loss for what to say.

Sam cleared her throat uncertainly. "How long have you known?" It seemed a logical place to start, although she realised a little late that perhaps he didn't know; mental health was rarely cut and dry.

Dylan, who had both hands wrapped around his mug, let out a slow breath. It was a relief, to finally break this immense secret to Sam, but it was by no means easy to do so in the detail that she deserved. And he suspected she might be somewhat offended by the whole truth. "A long time," he began. It was true enough, but there was more to say, of course. "I think my brain has always been wired differently. But I can't tell you exactly when all of this started."

"That's okay." Sam pressed her lips tightly together before going on. "It was a bit of an unfair question, really."

"No, it wasn't. I —" There was a serious stumbling block: the revelation of the whole truth was most likely going to hurt her. He sighed. "As far back as King's, when I was your mentor, I think I was displaying compulsions. Not usually publicly, of course, but they were there." He winced as Sam flinched beside him. He couldn't look at her now. "And… and rather a lot, after that, as well."

Sam couldn't take all of this in. He'd had diagnosable OCD for the entirety of the time that she had known him, the entirety of their unconventionally happy relationship, and the entirety of their all-too-brief, quickly souring marriage. And she had never realised.

Although, at times, she had wondered why he was so particular. Back at King's, his perfectionism had been grating at times, and had earned him one hell of a reputation in the hospital, not just in the ED. His careful checking of all his students' work had shown him to never let even the smallest thing slide. It turned Sam's stomach now, to think that perhaps this had been something he had not been able to control. The fact was, she'd always seen (and mentally labelled) it as 'obsessive' and had still thought it was just another of Dylan's quirks. How much of the Dylan she knew was inextricably linked to his OCD? She was stunned. She had learned that Dylan's word was to be trusted: his sometimes downright painful honesty had seen to that. In return she had implicitly trusted him. How different might things have been if she'd pushed a little harder? It was uncomfortable for her memory of the past to warp and change as she examined it under this new lens.

"I think you should list it all," Dylan said. He swallowed nervously, trying and failing to maintain his normal tone.

"What?"

"List the things that seem like red flags, now that you know. That's what you're trying to work out, isn't it?" He hoped that his assumption had been correct. Once upon a time, he and Sam had been on a very similar wavelength, and it had been far easier to know what she was thinking.

There wasn't the time to question how, after all this time, he could still read her like a book. More pressing was his ridiculous proposal. "I don't want to do that, it's not fair on you."

"It was not fair on you for me to hide my OCD and make you think that I was purely a loathsome husband."

Sam rolled her eyes. "You were not a loathsome husband. Not always." The last two words, she hoped, cushioned the impact of her admittance that things had not been all that terrible between them. Better to throw in a caveat, to remind them both that there was not a 'them' anymore. She met his eye although it seemed that he didn't want to. There was a tiny spark of something between their glances.

"Just list them, Sam."

"No."

"Yes."

"No." This was more like them, she thought. Petty, back-and-forth disputing.

"But you want to know!" Dylan knew he would win this, and despite how awful it would be to finally admit to everything that he had never told her, he wanted to get it out in the open. "I know you, you like to know things and to be in control." This was exactly what he had robbed her of, all those years ago. The loss of that control had contributed massively to the freefall of their marriage, he knew. She had seen him drink to kingdom come, again and again in his own sick quest for control, with no idea why. He hadn't even reached the role of alcohol in all of this, yet — that really would be a painful confession.

Dylan leaned forward and put his mug down on the table in front of them. When he sat back, he linked his hands on his knees. They were tingling with pins and needles: somewhere along the line his anxiety had risen considerably and he must have started gradually hyperventilating. At least this was something that Sam could not see, while his rough wringing of his hands was an all-too-visible marker of his mental state.

Sam put her mug down too. At least in doing so, she could not see his mental distress becoming more apparent. She stared at the mug, white with red stripes, deep in thought. They were yin and yang once more: she had all the questions while he held all the answers. Whether she wanted to know all the answers was something else entirely. But with the small amount of knowledge she had gained so far, it seemed that most of their time acquainted was now one massive question.

She gave in to her curiosity. Everything that she named, he nodded. It all made so much sickening sense now. The tapping, the checking, the symmetry. The obsessively tidy house when she returned from deployment. There were others that she was more cautious to ask about, but she knew that she had to.

"Every time I was about to deploy, you would never sleep," she said carefully.

Dylan hummed in agreement.

"You always said it was the coffee, you always blamed it on something else. Was that…"

"Yes." He bit the edge of his lip, nearly at the corner of his mouth. "I couldn't sleep, because… it sounds rather feeble, but because my brain was too loud. I don't know how much you know of OCD, but I would have… thoughts. About you, not coming home, and it being my fault."

"Dylan," said Sam, "if anything had happened to me out there, it would have been nothing to do with you. You couldn't have changed it, or done anything to affect the outcome."

"I know that," Dylan countered. "I know that I had no control. I know that it was irrational and ridiculous, and whatever other adjectives you want to attach to it. Rationality is not a major symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder." It came out quite bitterly, and he wondered whether he should apologise. He had asked her here to help, perhaps he should not belittle and criticise her. It was a lot of information to give her and expect her to assimilate, all in one go.

Sam persevered, although her next question was an even more uncomfortable one. "When I left the house in Oxford, I spent a long time packing a bag. In the very back of my wardrobe, there was a box of things, and they made me so angry because they just seemed so significant, and you'd hidden them all away. Why did you keep them at all? There was nothing left of us."

Dylan's breath caught in his throat. His mouth was suddenly very dry: it was hard to form words and push them out, nearly impossible. He swallowed with great effort. "I tried so many times to get rid of it. You don't understand —"

"— I'm trying to!"

"Right." Dylan looked down at his hands, opening and closing them in tight fists, attempting to get his circulation moving better and ease the pins and needles. "I just couldn't. I tried, I really did."

Sam could tell that he was holding back, and she wished that he could just be brave enough to say exactly what was on his mind. Granted, it had been a long time, but she suspected that some things were exactly as relevant as they had been in 2011. If he had been in so much mental turmoil for all this time, why had she never noticed?

She sighed, sitting back on the sofa and staring up at the ceiling before looking back at Dylan. "I'm sorry," she said as she looked at him sadly. "All of this, that you're now telling me is your OCD (and I believe you, because if nothing else I still trust your word, rightly or wrongly), I just thought that all of that was the way you were."

"Well, in a way, it was. Is. I am like that. It just happens to be because of that, too."

"It doesn't excuse that fact that I never asked."

"I don't think I would have said anything, even if you had," Dylan said. "I don't think I knew how. I barely know now, this is all such a stab in the pitch black darkness. Like I said, I think I've always had it; nothing ever made it go away."

"For someone who doesn't know what to say, you're doing quite well at explaining it to me," said Sam. For now, she strategically ignored his comment that 'nothing' made the OCD less intense. She didn't yet know how to question the significance of the whiskey bottle on the kitchen table, that he clearly thought she couldn't see his stolen glances towards. "I'm —" She didn't want this to come out wrong, there was potential for her to sound far too flippant. "I'm glad that you called me tonight — not glad that you feel like this, obviously. I'm not a monster, as much as I may have acted like one previously. I'm just… I'm trying to say that I'm pleased you still trust me."

Dylan shifted uncomfortably. Perhaps it had been subconscious trust that had made him call her: there was certainly a depth of history between them which had eliminated a need for some elements of explanation. But more pressing, this evening, had been desperation, a knowledge that he had no-one else to call.

A possible truth suddenly dawned on Sam, that made her blood run cold. "How many people know about this?" she asked, fearful of his answer. "Please, don't tell me that you've fought your mental health for this long, by yourself."

It was interesting to Dylan, that she chose to call it a fight. She wasn't wrong, but it was weirdly as though she spoke from a position of experience. He was distracted from pursuing this line of thought, however, by the unpleasant tingling in his palms and cheeks becoming more intense. This was accompanied by his mouth beginning to feel heavy: speech was becoming more laborious and difficult. It had been a long time since Dylan had suffered a panic attack; he hoped strongly that he wasn't heading for another one, now. He tried to force his mind away from the inundation of dread, although recalling the select number of people who were in the know about his OCD was not an altogether sunnier picture.

"Lily knows. That was coincidental, really — she was one of many who saw things go very wrong, a while back, and she happened to be present more recently, when…" He broke off, and bit the skin around his left thumbnail although it was already ragged. "When I nearly acted on a particularly unsafe compulsion." He shuddered as he remembered it in sharp focus. The strong citrus washing up liquid, the scaldingly hot running water, Lily pushing herself past him in her need to save him from himself. "Um, you've met David, haven't you?" Dylan went on. "Nurse, very very quiet, saviour of lost souls. He… is aware. But I did something exceeding the far reaches of stupid, and pushed him away."

Sam coughed, roughly clearing her throat to block her urge to tell Dylan that he was good at pushing people away. Already, it was becoming clear that Dylan didn't have a proper, or any, support system around him. No wonder, then, that he had resorted to calling her, when he had no-one else to catch him when he fell. "Anyone else?"

His third and final person was one whose knowledge of this situation was better than anyone else's. Dylan wasn't entirely sure whether disclosing her name to Sam would be yet another possible offence. But, he supposed, Sam had taken everything else fairly well, there was no reason to believe that this would be the straw that broke the camel's back. Briefly, there had been a strange, uncomfortable dynamic between the three of them, Sam and Zoe particularly, but it had eventually faded. And of course, after he had departed Holby the first time, Sam had stayed and he had it on fair authority that they had got on like a house on fire.

"Zoe knew," he said at last. "She was there, and there for me, the last time I went crazy." He had to look away from Sam at that point; there was no way she would approve of his choice of words. Whether she approved of his choice of confidante was a moot point now.

But it wasn't Dylan's frank assessment of what sounded like a breakdown, which bothered Sam. He had never been one to mince words so it did not shock her that he chose to use the word 'crazy.' What did shock her was the knowledge that he would not say something that he didn't mean. She trusted his word, so whatever had happened, it must have been bad. Still, she couldn't help herself trying to negate it, until he tilted his chin down, momentarily closed his eyes, and then looked seriously back up at her. "I don't think you - oh…" He wouldn't want to tell her, but she had to ask. "How bad was it?"

Only a little worse than right now, Dylan's internal monologue said loudly. His palms had clammed up now too, and he had to swallow a few times to free up his chokingly dry mouth. But outwardly, he shrugged. "Bad enough," he said gruffly, not wishing to dwell too heavily upon it. He picked up his mug and drank some more coffee.

The effect on his brain was immediate. Much like a science experiment in which too many batteries make a light bulb first glow too brightly, then promptly blow, his level of panic increased under the fuel of caffeine. He tried to breathe levelly to stave off an explosion, although his shoulders started heaving with the effort.

"Dylan, are you okay?" It was a stupid question. Obviously, he was not okay. "Look, we don't have to talk about all of this now. I don't want to patronise you and say that you've done well to get this far, but —"

"I'm fine," Dylan said firmly, pushing out a long breath in one last-ditch attempt to claw back control. Everything still felt erratic and unstable, but he had to spit out his last few words, she had to know that the very worst of him during their marriage had not been all her fault. "I called you tonight and you probably thought I was drunk already — I know you thought I was drunk when I swore — but it's been years and I have to finally tell you the truth about the elephant in the room."

Sam frowned; he was not fine, and with each word that tumbled helter-skelter from his lips it was becoming more and more clear. "We really do not have to do this tonight. I think you've gone far enough, I can live one more night without knowing this, when it's obviously tearing you apart."

"Forgive me, but it's been tearing me apart for about ten years, and you might be able to live one more night but I don't think I can! I've lost control, Sam, and I didn't want to be that blunt with you because I still—" He stopped himself short of admitting quite what he felt. "I don't want to hurt you and I didn't want to suddenly up-end everything that you thought about what happened to us. But if I don't get this out of my head tonight, I don't trust myself not to go over the edge and drink — drink so far to oblivion that — that —"

"Alright, don't say it," Sam said, trying to keep herself calm. Her heart was beating faster now, in part from his declaration that he still cared and in larger part due to his agitation escalating.

Dylan put his hands on either side of his face, blinkering his view to a narrowed tunnel. "I suppose you thought that I drank because I couldn't cope with you being away. And I couldn't, it never got easier and I never stopped missing you, but the drinking wasn't directly linked to that. It started as something c-conscious, a clear decision because I knew I could use it to block out whatever thoughts were so loud in my brain that I couldn't stop myself following their lead. And then I couldn't stop, it was too regular, I needed it too much. For a while I was okay: when we were back in Holby together, I was fine, more or less. I wasn't drinking. When I first came back here again, with Zoe, I really was fine. I thought I had kicked it all. The OCD came back properly a couple of years ago, and at the start of this summer, I couldn't cope. There was a doctor killed here, outside the hospital —"

"Caleb Knight," they said together. Dylan looked at Sam in surprise, the first time he'd been able to look her in the eye since his messy speech had begun.

"I do watch the news, Dylan. He was everywhere."

Dylan looked back down at his unsteady hands. "I found him, bleeding out in the rain. I told him I wouldn't let him die! I let him down; it was my fault. He had a brother, he was Ethan's brother, and I couldn't even keep him alive long enough for him to say goodbye. It was my fault," he repeated, standing up with his hands on the back of his neck. "I couldn't control what was happening outside or inside my head, and then I couldn't control how much I was drinking to try and blank it all out."

Sam stood up too, although she did so calmly and carefully. Knowing that Dylan's eyes were on her, she walked across to the kitchen table and picked up the bottle.

"I'm going to put this outside the door," she said measuredly. "You can decide how we deal with it, later, but right now you do not need the added pressure of looking at it and knowing that it's right there."

She did as she said she would, standing the bottle on the doorstep so that it was out of sight. The cold draught that slipped around the door was bitter.

"You should sit down," she said, walking back to him. He did not sit. "You don't have to deal with this on your own, you know? I'm here. I think you should… I want you to talk to someone better than me, get some help for everything that's bothering you. There are ways to make it stop."

Once again, Dylan wondered why she could say with such confidence that there was a way to make it stop. But he couldn't focus on that when out of the blue, he was furious with her for the very suggestion. "Oh, you want me to get 'help'? No. If I talk, I'll be arrested and struck off, not necessarily in that order. I don't know anymore, which one bothers me most, but I deserve both of them!" He shivered, the after-effect of the cold draught from outside, even though his blood was being boiled by blind panic. An elevated heartbeat was pushing the adrenaline around his body faster and faster.

"You don't deserve either, good god, Dylan! No-one's going to arrest you and haul you up in front of the GMC for having OCD!"

"But they might, for me being an alcoholic doctor who has drunk alcohol not only on hospital premises but while on shift! And what… about smuggling a refugee child into the country? That's — firmly in — arrest — territory — isn't — it?" That was it. It was all out now, and his words were stilted and painful to hear and say. His breaths were sharp and he could see flickering stars in the corners of his vision.

Collapsing inwards. That was how the panic felt, and how Dylan felt as he stumbled away from Sam until he was behind the bathroom door, sitting against it so he couldn't be disturbed. He was breathing with intense force, but each shallow breath just made his head spin more. He'd said to Sam that he had lost control of his drinking, which was true, but now he had lost control of everything else too. There was little more symbolic of defeat than a grown adult sitting on the floor, hugging knees tightly to chest, wishing everything would just stop.

"Dylan?"

Her voice was slightly muffled by the door, but she was there, right outside. He had thought that her presence in this situation could only serve to make it worse, but it was so bad anyway that she couldn't make it any worse. If anything, knowing that Sam was there, of all people, made it a little easier. But he couldn't tell her that. He couldn't tell her anything, because the part of his brain which controlled speech was burning with the fiery anguish of panic.

"Are you okay?"

She sounded uncertain, even a little worried. He didn't like that he was doing this to her, after all that had been said, with such deep-running trust, this evening. But his mouth was dry and completely paralysed by irrational fear. He couldn't say a word. He tried to concentrate on making his breaths out a little longer, but with the panic wave still cresting, this was difficult.

"Alright," she said, the sound of her voice coming closer to him as though she was sitting on the other side of the door, level with him. "Dylan, I don't know what to say. Just… if you're not going to speak — if you can't — just tap on the door or something, so I at least know you're conscious!"

At the mercy of his heaving breaths, Dylan lifted his right hand and tapped his knuckles on the door, just above the top of his head.

On the other side of the door, Sam breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you," she said, lifting her head and sitting with a straight back against the door. "I'm not going anywhere." She strained her ears and caught the sound of breaths, too shallow and too close. Sam winced. She had seen panic attacks before, obviously. But to imagine Dylan suffering like that… she didn't like it one bit.

And at last, she realised why she disliked it so much. Even after everything that had happened, he was still her Dylan. Even in the icy grip of panic and addiction, he was still himself. She had loved him for all of that gruffness and dark humour, once.

On Dylan's side of the door, the wave of panic was subsiding. He was still weak, his heart was still beating too quickly, but the fear had given way to pins and needles again. They were in his face and hands (the remnant of hyperventilation) but in his brain too, a sensation which he knew he'd never be able to explain.

"Are you still there?" he asked, hoping his voice was strong enough to permeate the closed door. He was glad that he was not prone to showing embarrassment through the colouring of his cheeks, but this meant that he felt the internal shame more intensely.

"Of course I am," came her reply. "Will you come out, now?" Sam stood up, and took a step backwards, away from the door. She heard no response, and wondered if she had any soothing words left which might coax him out. But just when she'd turned to head back and wait for him on the sofa, she heard the door click and open.

Looking at Dylan now was like looking at a person she didn't recognise. He looked pale and worn out; panic could do that to a person, she knew, but that knowledge didn't make it easier to see Dylan like this. He leaned on the doorframe.

"I can't go on like this, Sam," he said, deeply upset.

Sam's eyebrows furrowed in concern. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I can't go on like this. There's too much in my head, even now, and I can't handle it anymore."

She clasped her hands in front of her. She had thought that they were done, that his panic was just a reaction to everything finally spilling out into the open. How could there possibly be more? Unless… All of her assumptions about him had been proved wrong this evening, so perhaps there was room left for another.

He followed her back towards the sofa but didn't sit, while she did. He looked down at her and took a breath. "You've been…" He closed his eyes. "You've been very kind to me tonight, and I appreciate it a lot. It's almost like… old times." He opened his eyes; that was far harder to say than what he was about to. "I just can't… accept it, that's all. I've known for so long that you hate me, you've not been able to stand the sight of me, since I stupidly said that everything was going to be okay. I mean when you were — when we —"

"The miscarriage," Sam said quietly. She thought about it often, but she hadn't thought of the specific moment that was tormenting Dylan, in years. At one time, she really had despised his words and his reaction to the whole ordeal. But while time had not healed the trauma of losing their baby, it certainly had changed her thoughts about her ex-husband. "Dylan, please sit down. I can't fix much tonight, but I can fix this. Please let me."

He sat down where he had before, and froze when she shuffled closer to him. He looked down at his lap, where his hands were wringing once more. "You hated me."

"Yes," said Sam, deciding the bluntness was necessary and would get through to him better than being overly careful. "I did. Past tense. I couldn't stand it, at the time, that you'd had the gall to look me in the eye when —" She paused, the raw words momentarily drying up. She pressed the palms of her hands to the tops of her knees. "When you knew that our baby was dying inside me, and you could tell me that it was going to be alright. But I don't hold it against you anymore. What else could you have said? You said what you had to, to make me feel a little less terrified. I was young, and I'd never felt so lost." She looked at his hands, then reached for them with her own. She held his hands apart from each other, getting his attention as well as interrupting the anxious action. "I promise you, I had bigger things on my mind. I've long since forgiven you for that."

"Can you forgive me for it being my fault?" The words were out before he could stop them. Maybe he should have followed them with some kind of explanation, that part of him didn't really believe that he had caused it. But a far larger part still blamed himself, so his declaration of guilt was not inaccurate.

"None of it was your fault, Dylan. You didn't make it happen. I hope there's a bit of you left that sees the absolute untruths that your OCD tries to make you believe. You've got to find a way to move past this assumption that you're an all-powerful entity."

He made a non-committal sound, and she wished he would truly hear what she was saying.

"What chance did I have, of a viable pregnancy, with all the stress of being in Afghanistan?"

Dylan's shoulders sagged. There was a part of him which wanted to drag his hands free of Sam's and press his knuckles into his eyes. But instead, he tightly held her hands, feeling the proximity which they hadn't had in years. A kind of energy was flowing between them with finally sharing how they felt about everything that had happened. Their relationship had been in black and white for so long, but now it was flooded with colour once more. "How many times did you have to say that to yourself, before you believed it?" he asked hollowly.

Sam let out an uneven sigh, upset because it was all so messy. "Every day, for about three years. Sometimes more than once a day. I still have to remind myself, sometimes."

"Will I believe it too, do you think?"

Silence. And then Sam erased any space left between them: she turned slightly, until her left knee touched his right, and held his hands delicately, half expecting him to shake her off. But he didn't, and somehow in an instant they were confronting a grief that neither of them had tackled since before the breakdown of their marriage. Their foreheads were touching with their hands tenderly clasped together. They both wanted things to be so different.

"I hope so, Grumpy. For your sake and mine, I really hope so."

It had been almost eight years. Over two and half thousand days. Everything had changed, and yes some things were exactly the same.