There was an odd sense of peacefulness that came with pre-dawn hours. Everything seemed to slow down to an almost standstill and watch as the overwhelming darkness of night and the bright light of day mingled promiscuously to create something entirely new. A new day, a fresh new set of chances and hope.
It felt like the world itself paused to take a deep breath before plunging into another day.
The room was filled with mechanical sounds, tasteless music at its worst. The periodic whirl of the blood pressure cuff filling up and then deflating in gentle clicks; the sharp hiss of the ventilator, pushing oxygen inside; the digital monitor by the bed, its chirping beeps set to to the rhythm of the body's natural metronome, beat after beat, after beat.
It was, at the same time, reassuring and frightening. Because, as effortless and rhythmic as it sounded, it could also stop, just like that, snuffed out of existence. No more beats. No more hissing. No more life.
Malcolm's heart had stopped in the OR. Twice.
Edrisa was well aware that she shouldn't know that, but the file had been right there and she hadn't been able to help herself. She had looked. Read every detail, even past the point when the knowledge of how close she had come to kill Malcolm Bright left her covered in sweat and feeling nauseated.
She also shouldn't be there, inside that room, sitting by his side. But, being a medical professional had its perks and Edrisa knew her way around a hospital, even if she had never worked in that particular one. It hadn't been that hard for her to escape her room, grab a discarded lab coat from the laundry basket and make her way to the post-op cardio-thoracic recovery room.
She really shouldn't be there, but had to see him.
The last thing the medical examiner could remember with a certain degree of clarity was pushing the dial in the liquid CO2 container and experiencing a level of blinding pain like she had never felt before. After that, everything became a blur of snapshots and pieces of sound that did little to put her heart at ease or give her a full understanding of what was happening. Her hands, oddly enough, had stopped hurting altogether. She couldn't even feel if they were still attached at the bottom of her wrists. Shock was truly a wonderful thing.
She remembered the morgue suddenly filling with dozens of people, some faces that she knew from the precinct, some just a blurry human-shape with huge letters printed on their backs that should have been familiar to her, but made absolutely no sense at the time. EMT. CSU. BDU. MEO. A whole alphabet soup of jumbled nonsense.
Gil had been there, or maybe it was someone who could make one hell of a good impersonation of the Lieutenant's stern goatee and his concerned face.
She remembered someone raising a fuss because there had been only one ambulance and where was the second one because no one wanted to wait for it. It was only when Edrisa found herself in the back seat of Arroyo's car, flanked on each side by his detectives, did it clicked that the second ambulance they were freaking about had been meant for her. Gil had ended up driving her to the hospital, flashing angry red and cold blue lights all the way there.
In the midst of all that chaos, Edrisa had lost track of Bright.
The next coherent thought that she could recall had been hours after that, waking up in a hospital bed, her hands numb and stuffed inside bandages so thick that it looked like she was wearing white boxing gloves. The thought had made her giggle and vaguely wonder how large a dose of painkillers they had given her. Still, she couldn't get ride of Rocky's theme song playing inside her head.
Second degree burns on half of her right hand, mostly her index finger and thumb and multiple minor lesions on her left hand. She had been very lucky, as doctor Simms had told her very condescendingly -not even bothering to hide the fact that he thought she was a complete moron for handling dangerous substances without protective gear- because there had been no damage to the tendons in her hands, but some of her nerve endings, specially on those two fingers, could be compromised.
Edrisa had pretended to listen carefully, hadn't bothered to correct his assumptions on her lack of basic intelligence and had started planning her escape as soon as the annoying man had left the nurses' station.
Fortunately for her escape plans, someone had decided to dress her in a pair of white scrubs, rather than those horrible gowns that flashed more skin than they covered. One sharp pull with her teeth and the IV line in her arm was out, the boxing gloves coming in handy -ah, her first pun!- to stop the minor bleeding that issued.
None of the information he had provided her had been of any use whatsoever. She already knew that her hands had been burned; she had been aware of that fact even before opening the valve on that container. What she did not know was whether Malcolm was alive or dea-
The medical examiner had taken the absence of anyone from the team by her side as a good sign. If they weren't there, it was because they were still waiting on news from Bright. Of course, as she wasn't actually a part of the team, it could simply mean that they hadn't bothered to stand around waiting for her to wake up. But she wasn't going there yet.
Left on her own to find some answers, Edrisa did what she was good at: she set about to finish the puzzle. First, she had to get her hands on some inconspicuous clothes; then a computer.
Of course that, while clothes were easy enough to steal -borrow- computer databases related to patient information tended to be password protected in hospitals; Edrisa knew that because she had demanded the same for all the computers in the medical examiner's office. She also knew that there was always at least one person who didn't bother with memorizing the password and kept it close at hand, usually near the computer. For this one, it had been username a_medic, password iRule69. What a dick.
Typing using nothing more than the butt of a pen was painfully slow, but eventually she managed to do it, before losing her patience and ripping off her bandages. The computer screen lit up and information started to roll in front of her eyes.
Bright was still in surgery. Had been there for the past four hours. That was the last entry in his file.
Edrisa took a breath, feeling relief for the first time in that dreadful night. He was still alive, still fighting.
The medical examiner knew that she should have stopped there. That file was private, confidential and the fact that she was a doctor didn't meant that she could access random information about someone who was most definitely not her patient.
But she was also the person who had discharged a blast of ice cold liquid death inside Malcolm and she needed to know.
Like slowing down in the highway to catch a glimpse of the most gruesome accident, Edrisa scrolled down.
She had been right. The bullet had nicked Malcolm's left seventh rib, bouncing down to cause a small tear in the abdominal aorta before lodging itself in the liver.
And that was just the damage from the gunshot wound. The rest of it, was damage caused by her.
Abdominal muscle damage.
Third degree burn to the aortic wall and the liver's right lobe.
Second degree burns to the inferior vena cava.
Tear to the right diaphragmatic dome.
The small woman had no idea for how long she stood there in front of that computer, transfixed by the words on the screen, too horrified to move or even breathe. In her mind's eye, she could see in vivid detail every single piece of trauma that her actions had caused the profiler, the discoloration of damaged muscle, the blackness of dead tissue. If by any chance he managed to survive, she was sure Malcolm would never want to see her face ever again.
For some reason, the idea of not seeing that wide, innocent smile on Bright's face -the one that made his eyes sparkle with childlike wonder- whenever she presented him with a new and interesting case ever again, it somehow felt like tangible, physical pain.
The scroll of information on screen moved down on its own, signaling that new information had been added and Edrisa rushed up to read. She had mostly skimmed over the surgeon's notes -massive trauma, endovascular prosthesis, blood transfusion- before the need to actually see the profiler with her own eyes had made it impossible to read anything else and she had left to find him.
"He's a tough kid."
The male voice made the small woman almost jump through the ceiling, an explosion of multicolored stars filling her vision as she managed to smash her bandaged hand against the bed rail in the process. "Shit!"
"You shouldn't be here," Gil quietly informed Edrisa, coming to stand by her side. He sounded more tired than angry.
Edrisa shrunk into herself, blushing under the man's words. Everyone knew that Gil was a sort of parental figure for everyone around the precinct. In Malcolm's case, it just so happen that he had been doing it for longer, had probably been more of a father to the problematic profiler than the Surgeon had ever been. If he didn't want her near his son after what she had done, he had every right to kick her out. If he was pissed off enough, he could kick her out so hard that she could even lose her job.
"I'm sorry... I shouldn't have... so-sorry," the medical examiner stammered, bouncing to her feet. "Sorry. I'm going to-"
Gil frowned, a hand on her shoulder pressing her back into the chair. "I meant... that you should be resting in your own bed," he clarified, realizing that she wasn't quite getting the meaning of his words. "Everyone's been going crazy, looking for you downstairs."
Edrisa's eyes grew large behind her glasses. "Oh... I thought you meant-"
"You saved his life, you know that, right?" the older man asked, his dark, sharp eyes searching her face for an answer before she could open her mouth. "He'll tell you this himself as soon as he can, but for now I'll say it for him and for myself- thank you!"
Edrisa blinked. This was not what she had been expecting, at all. Were it not for the glint of unshed tears in the Lieutenant's eyes, she would assume that he was pulling her leg. As it was, she was sure he just didn't had the right information. "I read his medical file... I nearly killed him," she found herself confessing.
Arroyo's eyes had once again been pulled to the man on the hospital bed, a tight lipped smile on his face. "Shortly before he got into Harvard, Malcolm was dead set on getting himself a bike. His mother had been against the idea, complete forbid him from doing such a thing, saying that it was far too dangerous and that respectable young men should drive cars, not death-traps on two wheels."
"I love bikes," Edrisa let out with a heartfelt sigh. She had never actually worked up the nerve to buy one for herself, but ridding with someone else was just exhilarating. She would love to ride one with Bright.
"I... I've always had a hard time telling Malcolm no," he confessed, sending her an amused sideways glance. "So, I let him borrow mine, because he assured me that he could ride one safely," the Lieutenant went on, closing his eyes at the memory. It didn't look like a pleasant one, going from the lines of pain that flourished across the older man's face. "The accident wasn't even his fault. Just some kid who ran straight into heavy traffic. Malcolm drove head-on into a concrete wall to avoid hitting him."
Edrisa flinched. She'd had seen too many of those on her table, bodies mangled beyond recognition because of a split second decision gone bad. "Is that where he got the scars on his face?"
Because, of course she had noticed. The faint cracked line above his right eye and the thin white line that ran from his nose to the tip of his upper lip that Malcolm tried to hide under facial hair. Professional pride aside, because it was her job to notice these things, the medical examiner had always thought that it was the small imperfections that made the profiler's face all the more appealing.
Gil chuckled at that, the amount of years that had gone by finally allowing him to find the humor in the whole situation. "You know, he got a real nasty fracture to his arm in that accident, but what his mother never forgave me, was the fact that he got a couple of tiny scars on his face from crashing my bike."
"It wasn't your fault," Edrisa rushed to point out. Traffic accidents happened all the time, about eleven percent of them involved motorcycles.
"I know that... now," the Lieutenant agreed, looking pointedly at her, like this was the point he had been trying to make all along. "Malcolm still ended up buying himself a bike, much to his mother anger and dismay. He rode that damn thing for years without getting a single scratch, and then he got tired of it and put it away."
Edrisa closed her eyes, unable to bear looking at Bright's still figure, endotracheal tube stuffed past his lips and shoved all the way to the edge of his lungs, breathing for him, because she had damaged his diaphragm and he couldn't breathe on his own. "It's not the same. I... hurt him," she whispered, the tears that she had been refusing to shed finally streaming down her eyes. "I was... the scars will be my doing..."
The warmth of strong arms around her frail frame was more than Edrisa thought she deserved. By all rights, Lieutenant Arroyo should hate her for what she had done to Malcolm, and yet, there he was, comforting her.
"Like I said, he's a tough kid," he voiced into her hair, tucking her head against his shoulder. "And so are you."
….
"You coming with us?"
The question seemed innocuous, but the fact that Dani had troubled herself to come to Edrisa's office to ask spoke of how much planning had gone into it.
The medical examiner wasn't exactly officially back to work yet, as her burned hands were still healing, but staying away, locked up at home, was starting to do a serious number on her head. So she had decided to come and haunt her minions instead, busying herself with bureaucratic crap until she could get her hands dirty again. So to speak.
Walking back into the morgue after all that had happened had not been easy. Well, that was, of course, the understatement of the year. Walking barefoot on rusty nails would have been easier, but she had eventually managed.
It somehow helped to know that, thanks to them, the killer would not be hurting anyone else, ever again. The bomb that JT had managed to defused had led them to ten more people carrying bombs, potential victims that were now safe and sound with new insulin pumps inside of them, minus the explosives now, free to live the rest of their lives.
Sure, she still saw glimpses of Malcolm's body over various surfaces of the morgue and sometimes she would look down and see a puddle of gushing blood by her feet, but her therapist told her that was perfectly normal under the circumstances, even if he wasn't all that reassuring when it came to tell her exactly when that would stop happening. Or when would the bad dreams start to fade away.
Dani stood by the door, patiently waiting, hoping that today her answer would be different from the previous days.
The young detective and JT had been visiting Malcolm at the hospital almost everyday for the past week, always coming back with full reports on how much better he was doing, how he was starting to get antsy about getting out of the hospital, of how he kept asking about her.
Edrisa was grateful for them, for keeping her in the loop and calming her concerns about the profiler's recovery, but she had yet to work up the nerve to actually go see his progress for herself. Not with him awake and able to speak words to her.
Despite everyone's reassurances, she was still afraid that he might blame her for what she had done.
"I'm really busy right now?" Edrisa stated, even though it ended up sounding like a question. She had always been such a terrible liar. "Maybe tomorrow... tomorrow, for sure!" she added with a forced smile. She would have added two thumbs up, but the physical therapist told her that was still weeks away from happening.
"Come on, Edrisa. Don't you miss those big, blue, doe eyes of his?" the detective asked with a suggestive wiggle of her eyebrows. "Don't you have some weird, freakish death that you wanna geek-out with him? The poor guy is bored to tears... he would love the distraction."
Edrisa gave her a somewhat more genuine smile. There was actually a case that had arrived just the previous day, a woman strangled by her own hair during her sleep... "I... can't. Not today..."
Dani sighed, running a hand through her messy curls before stepping inside and closing the door behind her. "You're avoiding him," she pointed out. It wasn't a question or an accusation, just a stated fact.
The medical examiner deflated in her seat, letting her head fall to hit the desk in front of her. "That obvious, hum?" she mumbled.
Dani nodded. "He's a smart guy. He knew you were avoiding him the minute he opened his eyes and you weren't there along with the rest of us," the detective explained with a smile. "You know, he actually thinks that the reason you're doing it is because you're mad at him."
Edrisa's head popped back up with a jolt, like someone had poked her with a lightning bolt. "Wha—what? Why? Why would he think such a thing? Why would I-"
The detective actually blushed at the question, a reaction that did not escape the other woman's eye. "JT and I might have had something to do that..." she confessed. "And Gil... Gil definitely had something to do with that."
Edrisa blinked slowly, leaning back against her seat. Waiting.
Dani rolled her eyes, leaning back against the wall, unconsciously widening the distance between them. "We had a serious talk with him... a sort of intervention, " she started, nipping on her thumb nail. "He keeps throwing himself head-on into this dangerous situations, with zero regard for his own well-being," she spurted, darting a mortified look at the medical examiner as she realized how that might have sound. "I mean, we were more than relieved to see that you hadn't been hurt by that gunshot, and had JT or myself been closer to you, we'd probably have ended up doing exactly the same thing," she rushed to add. "But it's just that... he's al-"
"He always puts everyone else's safety ahead of his own," Edrisa finished, the sentiment echoing how she had felt in the night Malcolm had gotten hurt. "I hate that he does that," she confessed.
Dani blinked, listing her head to the side, as if the angle would give her a better perspective of Edrisa's meaning. "So... he's right? You're actually mad at him?"
"No! Of course not!" the medical examiner let out vehemently, her pale face drastically changing to red. "He saved my life, how could I possibly be mad at him?"
"Then why?"
Edrisa sighed, twisting her nose like the subject carried a foul smell. "I knew all too well what liquid CO2 does to exposed skin, and still I flooded his insides with the stuff," she said, her voice breaking until it was nothing more than a whisper. "I almost killed him."
The 'almost' in that sentence was not nearly enough to stop the pain that those words caused. One more minute of delay in reaching the hospital, a mere second of hesitating on part of the team that received the injured man, an microscopic error in Malcolm's surgery and he would've died. It had been so close that the mere fact that he was actually alive felt like a dream. Any minute now, Edrisa expected to wake up and find herself behind bars for involuntary manslaughter.
Dani closed the distance between the two of them, laying a hand on the smaller woman's shoulder, urging her to look up. When she did, the detective gave her a warm smile. "You saved his life... how could he possibly be mad at you?"
….
Her legs were shaking by the time Edrisa reached Bright's hospital room. Inside, she could see a dark haired woman sitting by his side, talking in hush tones. All she could see of the profiler was the shape of his legs under the bedcover, nervously bouncing against the mattress.
"Mother, I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself," Malcolm slightly raised voice broke the spell. "In my own apartment, lying in my own bed... there's absolutely no need to-"
JT cleared his throat rather dramatically, stopping the profiler on his tracks. He and Dani stood behind Edrisa, effectively cutting off any potential for escape.
A genuine smile spread across Malcolm's lips before reaching his eyes and Edrissa's legs shook for entirely different reasons.
"We can come back later?" Dani offered, even if she made no move to walk out of the room.
The older woman, Bright's mom, shook her head, taking a deep breath while closing her eyes shut. "No, my dear, don't bother... I was just on my way out," she let out after a moment, eyes wide open and a forced smile fresh upon her lips. While her tone was careless and her words carefully manicured, it was easy to see the heavy toll of deep concern and endless distress in the darkness beneath her eyes and the tight lines around her lips, signs that no amount of masterfully applied makeup could ever disguise. "Do see if you have better luck in shoveling some sense into my son's thick skull," she said all-too-sweetly, "and convince him that he's still no where near ready to go home this soon."
She left before anyone could actually say anything, a tornado of expensive perfume and raw frustration.
"JT, Dani... you've met my mother," he politely introduced, even though Jessica Whitly was long gone. "Charming, isn't she?"
"Don't be an idiot," JT let out without bite. "She's just worried about your sorry ass."
"Well, my sorry ass can recover just the same out of this place," he pointed out rather heatedly, moving to cross his arms over his chest before he thought better of it and let them drop to the mattress with a slight pout on his lips. "It's not like I'm doing much more than lying on it all day long..."
Dani hid a toothy smile behind her lips. "While we're on the subject of your ass..." she said, moving slightly aside before pushing Edrisa forward. Somehow, the smaller woman had managed to ninja her way to hide behind the two taller detectives. "I believe you two have some matters to discuss," she pressed on, giving JT a subtle nod towards the door.
Before Edrisa could offer any sort of protest, the door was already closing behind the sneaky detectives. Defeated, she took a deep breath before turning around and facing Malcolm.
He looked... alive.
It was such a generic thing to say about someone, but it meant the world to the medical examiner. The last couple of times she had seen him, Bright had been either bleeding to death on the floor of the morgue or hooked up to a ventilator after his surgery, looking for all intents and purpose like a human-size doll, just as devoid of life.
None of those images compared to the way he looked now. Conscious and aware of his surroundings, a sparkle to his eyes, some degree of color back on his skin and breathing easily on his own. "You're breathing," Edrisa let out, too marveled at the sight to stop the words from escaping her mouth.
Malcolm gave her an odd look. "I've been told its a necessity," he offered with a fleeting smile. His face turned all too serious as he let his gaze fall to his lap before adding a shy "I've missed you."
Edrisa finally summoned up the courage to approach his bed. "I'm really sorry I didn't come before," she rushed to say, hating to see that look on his face. "I was-"
"Avoiding me," he let out, his all too observant eyes traveling over her before stopping on her bandages hands. "They told me about- I'm sorry you got hurt," he let out. "Is it bad?"
The medical examiner shook her hands, regretting the action even before it started, dismissing the injury as nothing of importance. "Fine... I'm just fine," she assured him, wincing as she forced her hands still, feeling the dull throb long before they stopped moving.
Malcolm winced in sympathy, or maybe in real pain of his own, because Edrisa could see him trying to seat up straighter. "Stop moving, you'll tear up your stitches," she let out, jumping to grab the bed's remote control from where it hang over the bed-rail. One press of a button and the bed would do all the work for the profiler.
The damn thing, however, had tiny little buttons. Way too small for her fat, bandaged fingers to work. "Shit!"
A resounding laugh filled the room, sounding so out of place that it actually startled the medical examiner. It took her far too long to realize that the sound was coming from the man on the bed. Malcolm was clinging to his belly, obviously in pain but unable to stop laughing.
"What a pair we make," he finally managed to let out. "Au... that hurt!"
Despite it all, Edrisa couldn't help but smile. She had never heard the profiler laugh like that. It was kind of contagious. "So this is how my comedian career takes off," she huffed for effect, making the man smile even harder. She really should stop. There were tears leaking out the side of his eyes, and for a moment Edrisa wasn't sure if they were due to the pain or laughter. "I've missed you too," she found herself blurting out.
Malcolm stopped laughing then, even though his eyes were still alight with joy. "So... how angry are you at me?"
"That would depend on how angry you are at me," she asked in return, barely able to look at his face. When she did look, he appeared confused. "You know... for the almost killing you part."
Malcolm's left hand reached up, his fingers hesitant on where to touch without hurting her. He ended up settling for her wrist, his fingers brushing against her pulse, probably feeling how embarrassing fast her heart was beating.
But then again, she could see on the monitor beside the bed that his wasn't beating any slower.
"Edrisa," he called out, waiting until her eyes settled on his. "You saved my life," he let out, his heart pouring out from his mouth, the sentence so short and yet carrying so much that he left unsaid. "And that is something for which I will be forever grateful to you."
Edrisa's first reaction was to simply deny it, to dismiss his gratitude as misplaced and unfounded. But then she remembered the profiler shortly after they had met, barely even knowing her name. She remembered how he hadn't hesitated for a moment before placing himself at risk to save her from a deadly, poisonous snake at a crime scene. She would never forget the look on his face as he moved closer to her, closer to danger, drawing the snake in his direction and effectively saving her life. He had looked... happy. Confident and fulfilled. Because he was helping someone.
Because he was saving a life.
The medical examiner could almost see herself, fifteen years old and painfully awkward, telling her parents that she wanted to be a doctor so that she could help people. Because she wanted to save lives.
So much time had passed since she had done it that she had almost forgotten the feeling. It felt... good.
"It was my pleasure," she finally said, a warm smile on her lips, her bandaged hand moving to cover his. "Just don't make a habit out of it, will you?" she added with a playful wink.
Malcolm returned her smile, sinking deeper into his pillow. She could see that, despite all of his demands to go home, he was still too tired to keep himself awake for extended periods of time. Severe blood loss would do that to people.
"Not unless that's another one of your fantasies, in which case I wouldn't wanna ruin it," he added, eyes heavy with sleep, a coy smile playing upon his lips. "You know, rescuing me from the evil clutches of bad people... taking me home to nurse me back to health..."
Edrisa would be forever thankful that Bright fell asleep before he could actually see just how deeply she was blushing at his way too accurate words. How in the heavens had the blasted man found out about that one?