Thank you to everyone for your reviews of chapter 5 and to my lovely fanfic buddies (you know who you are), thank you for your support as ever with this fic and all my writing.

Here is chapter 6. I hope you enjoy it.

To look out for you

The definition of stubborn

Stubborn: adjective; having or showing dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something, especially in spite of having good reasons to do so

Sam Nicholls

Sam leant back against the staffroom kitchen counter and took some deep breaths to control her exhaustion and steady her nerve. Every single one of her muscles, even the ones that hadn't been caught in the tirade of blows the previous day, were aching deep inside her and having spent the entire day holding herself together she had created the unwelcome effect of stiffening her body up to the point where she wasn't sure how much she was actually in control of her own limbs anymore.

It had already been an incredibly busy shift and despite the fact that it was far from over she had been forced into taking a break at Mr Jordan's insistence. She hated that the day was taking such a toll on her, with her only main comfort coming on that score coming from Zoe commenting on the relentless and ever increasing workload that had poured into the E.D. already that shift. She couldn't help but smile to herself knowing that she wasn't the only one finding the day tougher than normal and unlike herself, Dr Hanna didn't even have the excuse of being injured.

Sam hoped that her colleagues hadn't picked up on how much pain and discomfort she had been in. It felt bad enough that she had already opened up to Mr Jordan and allowed him to see her weakness, but she credited him with enough sensitivity, discretion and reassuringly enough protectiveness to keep her confidence. Trusting people had never come easy to her, with only Dylan ever having previously earned the right to be someone she could open herself up to, although she had to admit he had never welcomed such frank disclosures. It had been that moment in Mr Jordan's office where he had asked her to let him help that she had decided she could trust him, a decision she had a feeling she would not regret despite her initial concerns. Something about her Clinical Lead gave her the feeling that he had her best interests at heart and that for some reason, he appeared quite happy to let her lean on him. She only hoped that he wouldn't tire of her current vulnerability, because as much as it pained her to admit it even to herself, she really needed someone in her corner right now.

Sam recalled how she had strangely dropped her barriers down around him and allowed him to fuss over her slightly despite her usual wish to be independent and wholly self-sufficient. He had made his efforts to help her appear almost over the top and comical, ordering their colleagues to pick up the slack physically from her and eliciting an eye roll from her in return. She hadn't realised until he had tipped her the wink but Mr Jordan's humour in dealing with her inability to undertake full duties at that particular time had drawn attention away from how awful she was feeling and as it turned out the chance to spend one-to-one time with him in such a pressured environment meant she had actually learned a great deal from him already that day, which she was always going to be much appreciative of.

Sam reflected that she would have found it unbearable if her colleagues had seen how much she was hurting, but she was reasonably confident that she had covered it well enough to fool them, given how little most of them knew her to start with. She realised people had been surprised to see her in the department at all and given the never ending stream of patients in and out of resus Sam recalled she had had the misfortune of crossing paths with nearly the entire staff group throughout the day, meaning her fake smile and utterings of "I'm fine" had been irritatingly present almost constantly.

Dixie and Jeff had been the first to nearly crack her resolve to stay strong. Their concern for her welfare had been well-placed given the state she knew she looked when they had left her merely twelve hours before, yet she had managed to accept their warm hugs and Jeff's parting remark of "Take care of yourself princess", without allowing the tears prickling in her eyes to start falling.

They had been the first in a long line of people who had almost queued up alongside her throughout the shift to wish her well, everyone from Big Mac and Noel to technicians she had barely even been aware existed prior to that point. Even surgeons from other departments, those from wards like Darwin, Keller and AAU who rarely lowered themselves to make the apparently short journey from their part of the hospital to the E.D. had deigned to speak to her and offer their support when they had come to assess patients. Sam knew she came across as confident, a skill she had honed through years of being embedded with the army, but she had definitely felt uncomfortable under the gaze of so many people.

In fact by the time she had been in the department a few hours Sam had only picked up on two people from her team that she had yet to speak to. One of them was obviously avoiding her, for reasons she was learning to sympathise with given their complicated personal circumstances but it still burned nonetheless. According to the earlier conversation she had overheard between Linda and Lenny, Dr Keogh had all but insisted he would run cubicles and CDU to free up the other doctors to help out in resus. Sam found this apparent act of generosity unbecoming of him, especially when she was well aware he would have recognised that it would appear to be a defiant act of avoidance in her eyes.

She had managed to push thoughts of Dylan to the back of her mind for the majority of the shift, partially due to how busy she had been but just as equally due to the constant haze of pain that had been clouding her mind. Sam smiled to herself in the staffroom, knowing that there was a strange perversion in the fact that only near all-consuming agony could keep her from thinking about her husband. It was only that she had been used to living in silence with Dylan for a great deal of their marriage, however comfortable or not that silence had been, which had prevented her from cornering him in CDU and physically forcing him to talk to her.

Sam remembered that she hadn't really given the second person who had been avoiding her any choice in whether or not to face up to that, as she had cornered Scarlett in resus, cursing the younger nurse as she did for the discomfort caused by the near impossible speed which had been required to cut off her escape route. She had confronted Nurse Conway over her lack of communication and listened with confusion as the poor girl had muttered something almost incomprehensible about the assault being all her fault. Sam recalled being utterly bemused and at a complete loss as to why everyone wanted to take responsibility for an attack that had been no-one's fault except her own yet she had reassured Scarlett regardless that she was not responsible. Their subsequent discussion had been eye-opening for Sam, listening to her colleague's shock and horror at having found her collapsed on the floor and she had realised with interest that Scarlett had very little life experience prior to her placement at Holby City E.D.. Sam had always known that her army experiences set her apart from most medics in terms of her coping strategies for difficult situations, but this girl in front of her had been quite innocent to the challenging days ahead of her in a nursing career. Sam had allowed herself to briefly consider taking on the task of toughening Scarlett up but before she had even given it more than a passing thought she remembered her imminent departure, a departure she knew was now dependant on the speed of her recovery.

Sam had known she would require an updated medical prior to her posting out to Afghanistan and she could only hope that her expected recall to hell was not delayed too greatly by the injuries she had received. A wounded army medic would be next to useless in a warzone when she would have thousands of service personnel relying on her to be fit enough to save their lives, nevertheless the last thing she wanted to do was to remain stuck in Holby with her husband for the foreseeable future. If it came down to it, she was reasonably sure she could rely on Mr Jordan to give her a positive medical and to be honest, even if he wouldn't she was pretty certain Zoe could be persuaded of the benefits of helping remove her from the country, especially if it meant Dylan would then be free of any ties to her for at least nine months. If it hadn't been completely unethical and against every rule in his book she would have asked her husband to do the damn medical in the first place, because he was the one person she knew would want to be rid of her and the impact she had on his life like a shot.

Standing in the empty staffroom, Sam couldn't help but consider if any of her colleagues would actually miss her when she was gone. A small part of her did feel like she had slightly become part of their team in recent times, but still detached from them all the same. She contemplated that aside from Mr Jordan, and the ever approachable paramedics, there weren't many people in the department who she actually thought would be particularly bothered by her absence, thoughts of her husband's own erratic and stunted emotional responses notwithstanding.

Sam did wonder whether she would ever have become friends with any of the team if she hadn't been due to leave them so suddenly and when she thought through the various options she only came up with two that would ever have been viable. Dr Hanna could have been a great ally of hers, someone Sam knew she could have learned a lot from, yet that possible friendship had been shattered the moment she had picked up on Zoe's interest in her own husband. That therefore left Tom as the one person she felt she could have built some sort of personal connection with, his mixture of humour, strong ethics and an ability to bend the rules slightly when required appealing to her like no one else had in a long time. Sam knew she had never been very good at being friends, but Tom really did seem to meet any criteria she had for awarding someone that status.

She had bumped into him a number of times during the shift as he dealt with the paediatric cases that had been stacking up just as quickly as the adults. She recalled appreciating how he had joked with her about the chaos reigning down around them as they both wrote notes up and checked patient details at the reception desk, causing her to replace the "I'm fine" smile with a slightly more genuine one for the first time in hours. She might not be staying long enough to become friends, but Sam was quite happy to spend her remaining time in the company of someone she knew who could improve her mood and given how blatantly obvious it was to her that Dylan was not prepared to be that person for her any longer, she was quite willing to get to know Tom a little better instead.

"It's nice to see you smile," a female voice sounded close to her, breaking Sam's trail of thought as she realised she was no longer alone. Zoe appeared by her side, her open locker testament to her having been in the room for a little while already despite Sam not having picked up on this until she had spoken.

"Would you like a coffee?" Zoe questioned, gesturing at the various coffee making implements Sam had collected on the counter behind her before she had lost herself in memories some time before.

Sam considered rebuffing the offer and insisting that she was more than capable of making her own hot drink, yet the overwhelming sense of tiredness that had long since descended weakened her resolve and she just nodded in response. She moved away from the work surface to give Zoe access to the kettle and winced at the movement of her extremely stiffened muscles as she did so. Dr Hanna caught her eye briefly, visibly concerned but Sam dismissed her worry with what she hoped was a reassuring half-smile. She knew that she was being nothing more than obstinate, but she refused to give in to the pain that she was feeling, especially in front of Zoe.

Sam felt that the older doctor had been something of an ever present force over her the past few weeks, always watching her with interest, almost as if to see how she measured up. Sam knew that she was many things, incredibly stubborn being one of them, but as she took the much wanted coffee, she realised sadly she had begun to accept that when it came to Dylan, she wasn't even on the same scale as Zoe Hanna.

Zoe Hanna

Zoe watched her younger colleague gratefully take the steaming mug of drink from her hands, a vaguely reflective and desolate look passing across her face as she began to sip at the liquid, and half wished that she hadn't disturbed the girl from her thoughts. It was abundantly clear to her that Sam was in a great deal of pain, despite the almost Oscar winning performance she had put in trying to convince them all that this was far from the case all shift. She couldn't begin to understand why Nick had even allowed Dr Nicholls to work in the first place, given the obvious discomfort she was in, yet despite thinking Sam a little crazy for coming in to the E.D. in the first place given her injuries, Zoe couldn't help but feel impressed by the woman's unwavering determination to carry on regardless.

Zoe knew appearing unfit seemed to be a touchy subject for Sam, a fact she herself had learned to her cost on confronting the girl over being at work earlier in the day. Dr Nicholls' response had been unnecessarily snappy to say the least, but Zoe had forgiven her for the harsh words upon witnessing her subsequent disagreement with Dylan. She wondered if Sam's apparent inability to appear vulnerable in front of anyone was down to her army training and she again considered how much respect she had for her colleague for the role she played out in the warzone. Zoe reflected on how much she loved her creature comforts, having a safe place to call home and that she could kick back with a glass of something sweet in a wine bar of an evening, things she knew Sam rarely would have the opportunity to appreciate, not that in Zoe's opinion Sam appeared to be a wine bar type of girl in any sense.

Zoe watched as her younger colleague gently lowered herself into one of the chairs in the corner, almost expertly covering the grimace that briefly passed across her with a blank expression. She had been watching her with interest throughout the shift, both trying to keep an eye out for her given the abject mess the girl had been in the previous day and also out of a strange sense of curiosity. She knew Sam was very much a private person and appeared, just like Dylan, to be cut off from the majority of the team socially speaking but in her current condition she had practically been the centre of attention all day, a position Zoe predicted hadn't given Dr Nicholls any pleasure at all.

She had overheard Sam's somewhat disparaging dismissals of almost everyone who questioned her fitness with interest, seeing how she interacted with different people and how much of a distance she kept them at. Zoe smiled to herself as she watched the younger woman sitting deep in thought, coffee mug in hand, and realised with some amusement that studying Sam had become quite a habit for her in recent weeks. Her own connection with Dylan had become increasingly strengthened over time and at first she had considered her interest in his wife purely self-serving, a way of getting to know Dr Keogh better. However when she had been crashed out at home the previous night, thoughts of her battered colleague never far from her mind, she had realised that actually she cared about Sam independently of who her husband was and couldn't help but wonder whether the two of them would be able to move past this issue with Dylan and become friends. Zoe was well aware that Nick had offered both Sam and the army the chance to extend her secondment at Holby and a part of her was definitely hoping that Dr Nicholls had accepted the offer, even if it just gave her the chance to extend the olive branch to the girl and regardless of Dylan's opinion on the matter.

Zoe had seen Sam had the capability to be friends with someone through her connection with Dixie and Jeff, the simple act of her allowing them to both comfort her and scald her in equal measure that day without so much as a comeback testament in Zoe's eyes to the fact that Sam obviously knew they cared. She recalled seeing how Sam's entire face had lit up momentarily the previous day when she knew the paramedics would be the ones taking her home and how comfortable she had looked in their company as they had escorted her from the department to their waiting car.

The only other person Zoe ever recalled seeing Sam make any form of effort with was Nick, but she knew there was more to it than the younger doctor just trying to impress her Clinical Lead. Dr Hanna had spied that their relationship was a definite two-way street from a while back, but she had spotted Nick's obvious protective attitude towards the younger doctor throughout the day. She had heard him ordering people around much more than normal and at first she had been intrigued by his overly strict attitude, despite his joking tone, yet she had soon realised that Nick had been somewhat ingeniously engineering the staffing situation in resus both so that Sam had never been left to treat a patient alone, because no doubt she would have tried to take on too much physical strain, but also so that she had been forced to work alongside pretty much every staff member, herself and Dylan excluded.

Zoe recalled being initially perplexed by Nick's reasons for the almost constant resus staff shuffle, but upon watching him work with Dr Nicholls she happened upon him wanting to expose Sam to her colleagues in a controlled setting, rather than allow her to shy away from their friendly concern as a possible reason for his odd behaviour. She had identified that this appeared to be more of a fatherly concern that normal management relations, as if Nick was supervising the social introduction of his vulnerable daughter. In fact, she remembered that it had been Mr Jordan himself who had insisted that she herself took a break from the chaos in the department and ordered her to staffroom, when he must have known Sam would still be present and obviously therefore had wanted her to check up on the battered young woman.

Zoe knew that she would eventually need to tackle Nick over his preferential treatment of Sam, especially before one of the other junior doctors took offence at it. However not only was she not keen on removing Sam's safety net from underneath her quite yet, Zoe also had more pressing concerns of her own to address, most notably being the incredibly obtuse Dr Keogh. She had completely despaired of Dylan ever since the shift had started as he had once again barricaded himself in CDU, refusing to engage with her for anything other than professional discourse.

However Zoe couldn't help but feel grateful that she hadn't been in Tom's shoes that day, because on the few occasions she had witnessed him cross paths with Dr Keogh, Dylan had practically growled at him. Zoe had yet to identify any particular reason why Dr Kent was the object of Dylan's rage, but she felt it had been fortuitous that Tom was a fairly affable guy and therefore had reacted more with amusement than annoyance to the unacceptable level of anger he had received from his colleague.

Zoe recalled watching as most of the team scattered the moment Dylan entered their area of the department; such was the ferocity of his bad attitude. She knew that it stemmed completely from his much earlier animated conversation with his ex-wife, but in truth she had been more concerned about Sam's lack of reaction to Dylan's harsh words than she had been at what he had actually said. Zoe remembered trying to defuse the situation by offering to make them both a drink, but her attempt at extending the hand of friendship and brokering a peace had been swept away by Sam's complete failure to respond. Zoe knew she had tried again to resolve the tension by speaking to Dylan as they made drinks, but she had been well aware that her quiet berating of him for his treatment of his wife had fallen on deaf ears and Dr Keogh had refused to listen to her pleas for him to make an effort to comfort the traumatised woman. Not that Sam would ever have admitted to being traumatised Zoe had been forced to concede.

She knew that it wasn't as if Dylan didn't care about his wife, as it was Zoe had caught him watching her from across the department on a number of occasions throughout the day. He had always positioned himself just out of sight enough that Sam would have been wholly unaware of his presence and if she hadn't thought it would have distressed the younger woman further, Zoe would have been highly tempted to shout out across the department at her that if she just turned around, Dylan was right there for her. As it was, she knew that Sam was obliviously suffering from not having her ex-husband's support, when in actual fact it appeared to Zoe that if anything, Dylan cared too much for his own good. Quite where that left her and her own relationship with the man she had grown to have feelings for, she was yet to ascertain but she knew with a significant degree of certainty that Dylan did still have feelings for his wife.

Across the staffroom, Sam stood up abruptly and Zoe caught the look of horror that filled her eyes as she must have felt a sharp pain at the sudden movement. She watched in silence as the brave young doctor strode over to the kitchen area and placed her cup in the dishwasher. If Zoe hadn't been witness to the state Sam had been in the previous day, she knew it would have been easy to assume that there was nothing wrong with her, a fact which elicited both respect and fear from Zoe about the state of mind of her colleague.

There was no doubt in her mind that Sam was stubborn, a quality that Zoe had come to admire and find endearing in the woman's husband but normally irritated her in Dr Nicholls herself, as she had a tendency to rub her up the wrong way with her unwillingness to relent or follow instructions. However as she watched Sam exit the staffroom without so much as a backward glance, Zoe realised that today it was actually Dylan's behaviour and his complete inability to deal with anything vaguely emotional that annoyed her beyond belief. However it had also proved to just how alike Mr and Mrs Keogh really were, even if they appeared to be in complete blissful ignorance of this. They were both as stubborn as each other, than much was Zoe could be sure of without question.

Thank you for reading as always and reviews will definitely be welcome.

The next update is due on Thursday (maybe before!).

Thanks, Callie