Chapter 3
The brachial artery repair goes relatively well, all things considered.
Ethan does well.
Alicia settles down after they give her another line of morphine, still dazed, a little incoherent, but less so; she fills Connie with hope that her reduced consciousness and her tachycardia upon arrival in resus was a result of shock and high levels of pain, not a head injury as first suspected by the paramedics. She still wants her straight to CT after they finish up with primary survey in resus, just to be safe, but Alicia put up enough of a fight when Ethan first attempted to hook her up to the nasal cannula and begin artery repair before the morphine kicked in and between them they managed to hold her still, that Connie is reasonably satisfied there's no spinal injury, either.
Her arm will be fine. It's a nasty injury, not helped by the time wasted trapped in the ambulance at the RTC, and Connie doesn't want to see Alicia back at work for a good few weeks yet. It's a nasty injury for anyone, but particularly for a registrar in emergency medicine; Connie will not be allowing her anywhere near patients until she's satisfied she's fully healed, will not have a potential surgical career sabotaged by a bad injury inappropriately rested and healed.
"Okay," Ethan says at last, finishing bandaging Alicia's arm. "Okay, I'm happy with that. We need to start her on the transfusion, can I have the bag, please? Right… right, let's get her cleaned up, we'll get the glass out of her hands and then I want her set up for transfusion and we'll get her to CT. Alicia? Alicia, we're nearly finished. You still with us?"
Alicia squeezes her eyes shut tighter in response, nods ever so slightly.
Connie knows now is the moment to take control.
"Right, Dr Hardy, you go and get her booked in with CT," she instructs. "Tell them I want her through before the next crews arrive from the RTC. Dr Masum, find her a bed upstairs, please."
Ethan hesitates, his face an open book of emotions, so clearly reluctant to leave Alicia. "We're not done here, her hands are filled with glass, we need to…"
"I'll see to that for now," Connie tells him firmly. "CT, bed, now, please. Both of you, go."
They exchange glances, evidently suspicious that Connie is taking on a responsibility usually well below her, although neither of them argue.
Connie is perfectly aware as they disappear off together that Ethan will be grilling Dr Masum for information, that whatever he's managed to gather from the police will no longer be confidential by the time they both return to resus.
She knows it only too well, and it isn't ideal, not what she would have wanted for Alicia. But it's a small price to pay for privacy for her, privacy for the part that has to come next.
"I want you out now, please," she instructs the nurses still huddled around the resus bay. "I'll need you back in here to assist with this glass extraction and prep her for CT in a moment, you understand? Don't go anywhere."
She waits until they've left the bay before she turns back to her injured registrar on the resus bed.
"Alicia?" she begins gently. "Alicia, listen to me for a moment, I need you to concentrate. Can you do that?"
Alicia whimpers, shakes her head. "Want… sleep… please…"
"I know, I know, you can sleep once we've got you through CT. I can't let you sleep now, Alicia, you know that. Not with a suspected head injury."
Alicia shakes her head again, more adamantly this time. "M'fine, it's not that… just hurts…"
"Okay, okay, but I want to let the CT be the judge of that. Alicia, listen to me. I had a call from the police earlier…"
"No, no…"
"It's alright. It's alright, hear me out. Iain called the police after he and Ruby picked you up, do you remember?"
Alicia nods weakly.
"Good." She's glad; that Alicia remembers the phone call makes this part a little easier. "I'm going to tell you what happens next, okay? Dr McAlister was already suspended for the course of the police investigation. That doesn't change. Whatever happens, I will make sure that he never sets foot in this hospital again, let alone this department, as long as you work here. I'm signing you off on open ended sick leave, full pay, and I don't want to see you at work until you're fully recovered, you understand? I mean it. We'll go through this again later, it's alright. Now, for now…" Connie pauses, gentle, and just a little apprehensive. "Alicia? You still with me?"
Slowly, Alicia nods.
"Okay. I have a forensics nurse waiting outside resus. She'll be discrete, I promise. No one else will need to know. With your consent, the police would like your injuries to be documented, alright? It would be brief, they'll be plenty of time to complete the process before Dr Hardy and Dr Masum return. How do you feel about that?"
Alicia is silent for a moment. The sounds she's made have been closer to whimpers than cries until this point, but now there's a thin trail of tears mixed in with the blood across her cheeks that Connie doesn't recall noticing before, and in that moment, she's so sure Alicia is going to refuse.
And then she blinks, just for a moment, squeezes her eyes tightly closed again as though the bright lights of resus are too much for her to bear.
"What do I have to do?"
"Photographic evidence," Connie explains gently. "It will be brief. If you consent, we'll need to get that done now and then we'll get you cleaned up and down to CT. If… if it's needed, we'll need to take swabs…"
Alicia shakes her head firmly. "No. No, it's not."
Connie sighs softly. "Are you sure, Alicia? If you have any doubts, it might be best…"
She shakes her head again. "No… I'm sure. He didn't… not this time, he just.. .he pushed…" She shudders. "He didn't. Not tonight. From… from that night, it's too late, it'll be gone…"
That's something, Connie tells herself. At least that's something.
"Alright. Alright, so Francesca- the forensics nurse- I'll bring Francesca in now and we'll complete the photographic evidence, if you consent."
"Okay." Alicia's reply is shaky.
"I'll tell her we're ready for her. You'll need to make a statement, they'll be time for that later." They'll be more, of course, there's still more she needs to talk to Alicia about, but it isn't urgent, not just yet, and now isn't the time to be attempting to win her over any further. "And then we'll get you cleaned up, we need to get a CT scan done and by then Dr Masum should have found you a bed for the time being. I'll get onto Hansen once we've dealt with the RTC, he owes me a favour, I'll sort you out a private room…"
"I don't want… special treatment." Alicia flushes, embarrassed.
"It's not special treatment," Connie tells her, beckoning the forensic nurse into the resus bay. She's already thought this through, suspecting it may be what Alicia needs to hear. "It's for this afternoon."
Alicia frowns, pained. "What?"
"Cat Barling. The burns patient. I meant what I said, you did very well today." She smiles sympathetically as the forensics nurse arrives. "Alicia, this is Francesca. I'll leave you in her capable hands."
Ethan's heart is racing by the time he finally returns to resus.
So much so, in fact, that at risk of sounding terribly melodramatic, he has little doubt that were he to hook himself up to the heartrate monitors and the blood pressure machine, he would fail rather spectacularly.
He can't quite process the information Rash has just provided him with, the missing pieces in the baffling puzzle that has been Alicia's behaviour over the past couple of months that he never imagined.
He knew there was something wrong. That much has been painfully clear for some time now, and he's tried, not hard enough, Ethan appreciates, but he's tried, should have pushed harder but she had made it so abundantly clear she didn't want to confide in him, had pushed him away well and truly after his spectacular fuck up telling her about Scott Ellison, clearing his conscience, offloading onto her when he realises now she had most likely been trying to confide in him, to finally share the horrors she had endured, seek help, support, and he had blown it, made it all about him when she so desperately needed him.
He knew there was something wrong, but he never pushed it, not properly, and certainly not after that.
Needless to say, Ethan regrets it now.
There isn't a word strong enough to adequately express just how greatly he regrets it.
It had taken Ethan approximately thirty seconds to extract the whole story from Rash- or the whole story as he knew it, at least. They had been ordered out of resus together by Mrs Beauchamp the moment the artery repair was complete and they had assessed Alicia as stable; even ordered doesn't seem to quite describe it, not when she had practically pushed them out of the door.
She hadn't said as much, but Ethan isn't stupid. He hardly failed to notice the presence of the forensics nurse right outside resus upon their departure, recognised her from the unmistakable box of equipment, the camera and the sympathetically grim expression, a seasoned solider heading over the trenches once again.
In the end, Rash had put up a brief, incredibly weak resistance. At first, he had blurted out something incomprehensible along the lines of patient confidentiality (to which Ethan had pointed out that patient confidentiality had quite blatantly been the furthest thing from his mind when he had voiced his fears in resus earlier, not only in front of Alicia, talking about her so carelessly as though she wasn't there at all, but also in front of him, Mrs Beauchamp, the nurses as whoever else might have been close enough to hear), but after limited persuasion he had been only too willing to offload.
It's painfully clear to Ethan that this is a terrible secret that Rash has been struggling with ever since he witnessed Eddie's arrest earlier in his shift. He was so sure Alicia had made it all up, Rash had despaired to Ethan outside resus. Eddie was his friend, he had been so certain, he had been called in for an interview with the police at the end of his shift, having been identified by Eddie as a witness, as someone who had seen Alicia flirting with him in the pub that night, someone who could help his case, prove to the police that this was all Alicia, Alicia blowing it all out of proportion, Alicia being uptight, cold, professional, Alicia with some kind of twisted vendetta, and Rash had gone along with it all in his police interview, backed Eddie up all the way.
It was only after seeing Alicia arrive in resus, after putting the pieces together and realising that Alicia had been the patient involved in the RTC from the back of an ambulance and that the chances of the brachial artery laceration being a result of that second incident were so, so minute, most likely connected to the window fall, instead, that it had finally clicked in Rash's mind.
"They said… the police… there's no easy way to say this. They said he raped Alicia."
And with those words, in just that one moment, everything in Ethan's world had changed.
He should have been on shift. He was never scheduled to be on shift, of course, it's ridiculous to blame himself now for not having been on shift earlier, but that's the first thought that comes into Ethan's mind. He should have been on shift, he should have been here. He knows now, having heard the whole tragic tale from Rash, that Eddie was arrested earlier today, that he and Alicia had both been at the police station making statements, reviewing evidence, that Eddie had been released on bail and then promptly called into Mrs Beauchamp's office upon his return to the ED, that Alicia had appeared at some point during all this on her day off and been called in to assist in resus before vanishing off with Mrs Beauchamp and all of a sudden being crossed off the rota on sick leave.
He should have been on duty. It's so painfully clear that despite Mrs Beauchamp's best efforts, gossip has been circling the ED all day, and of course Alicia hasn't been in to defend herself save for that brief visit in which she had been whisked into resus and whisked away again.
He should have been here. He could have put a stop to the rumours, he could have shut them all up and made them see that Alicia hasn't been right for weeks, that it's so painfully clear in light of these latest developments why her behaviour has been so aggressive and erratic (because if Rash is anything to go by, Ethan doesn't trust that it's the conclusion the rest of the ED who overheard Eddie's arrest has come to at all). He could have supported her, he could have made sure she got straight in to see Mrs Beauchamp and bypassed resus, he could have gotten her home safely, he could have been there when Eddie arrived, if that's how it did happen, he could have protected her…
Screw that, he should have been there that night, the night it happened. He has the date from Rash and his blood ran cold instantly, because Ethan didn't need to consult his diary to put the pieces together.
The night it happened, the night Eddie… no, he can't say it… the night it happened was the same night he had stood Alicia up at the last minute for Leigh-Anne.
And once he's come to that realisation, it's painfully, painfully obvious to Ethan why Alicia ended up with Eddie that night.
It's his fault.
It's all his fault, and Alicia is never going to forgive him.
He had booked Alicia's CT with his mind a total blur, going through the motions, hardly able to focus at all.
It seems so pointless.
She needs the CT, of course, Ethan knows that. That part isn't pointless. His concerns for her mobility, the possibility of spinal damage, have more or less faded now, but she was still so incoherent when he left her, and she's been through so much that it's not beyond the realms of possibility that she's just overly distressed, shocked, but at the same time it's a suspected head injury, it could be so much worse…
But what's the point of it all? What's the point of any of it, anything that can be done for Alicia in this hospital with all the resources and the expertise of modern medicine, if nothing can take all of her pain and suffering away?
Alicia…
It's with a distinct feeling of dread that Ethan heads back into resus, CT slot finally secured. He doesn't know how to look at her now, doesn't know how to talk to her, to treat her… his mind is frozen with the fear of making it all worse for her, doing something wrong, saying something wrong, upsetting her, hurting her, bringing it all back…
He can't imagine it.
Ethan simply can't imagine it, and that makes knowing how to help her all the more impossible.
Mrs Beauchamp is on his case the moment he steps back into the resus bay. It's as though she knows, Ethan realises; it's as though she already knows, or has guessed at least, that Rash will have told him everything he knows, that Ethan will be arriving back into her resus forever changed.
Alicia.
Alicia needs him, and he can't pull himself together.
"Dr Hardy, I trust you've booked CT?"
"Right… yes, Alicia's booked in…" Ethan's mind is too much of a mess for him to think straight, and it takes a moment for him to fully process that the scene before him now is not the one he expected to find waiting for him upon his return to resus. "I thought… I thought you wanted to rush her down as soon as she was booked…"
"Well, yes, but in your absence, there's been a slight complication."
Alicia lies on her side across the resus bed, recovery position, though the oxygen mask has been removed. Her blood-soaked clothes are gone, replaced by a hospital gown that's been draped over her awkwardly.
It's with a start that Ethan realises he's stepped through the resus bay's curtains to reach them, curtains that weren't pulled when he left.
God, he needs to get a grip.
It's worse for Alicia. It's a thousand times worse for Alicia than it is for him, of course it is, and yet despite her injuries and her confusion and her emotional stress, right now she's holding it together a whole lot better than he is.
"There's rather more glass than we anticipated," Mrs Beauchamp explains. "It seems the paramedics picked her up from the middle of the window remains, she'd been lying on broken glass until they arrived. No major damage, removal is just taking a little longer than we might have hoped. We'll get her up to CT an awful lot faster if you could assist us, please."
All he can see is Alicia; Alicia eyes clenched tightly shut, Alicia refusing to acknowledge his presence- or any of them, in fact, as though she's trying to block it all out.
"Right… yes… of course…" He reaches for the equipment tray, bends over Alicia, frowns. "Her resps are back up, they'd dropped down before…"
"Alicia is refusing the nasal cannula," Mrs Beauchamp explains swiftly, not looking up from extracting glass from Alicia's side. "I've told her if her resps rise by as much as one count further from here she's straight back on oxygen and it's no longer negotiable."
There's so much Ethan wants to say in that moment. He wants to ask Mrs Beauchamp why on earth she agreed to go along with Alicia's wishes when her resps have climbed straight back up again, when they know her cognitive function could be compromised after the head injury, when they know at the very least she's been through something incredibly traumatic for the second time in a matter of months, when she can't be thinking straight, can't be allowed to make decisions that could impact on her treatment when they have every reason to fear she isn't of mind sound enough to make them.
He wants to say that it's all going to be alright, to sit beside Alicia and brush the bloody mess of hair from her face and comfort her, somehow, because there must be something, there must be something he can do to make this all go away for her, he just needs to think, regain his composure and think, Alicia needs him to think…
He wants to hold Alicia close and tell her how much she means to him, promise her that he will never let anyone hurt her like this again. He wants to speak to her the words he should have said so many times before and always manages to choke upon, but that would be too much for her right now, it would be completely inappropriate, he can't add to her torment when she needs him to be there for her, whatever being there for her bloody means in this situation, whatever it is he's supposed to do…
There's so much Ethan wants to say, and yet he just can't find the words.
And so he bends over Alicia, assesses, takes a moment to composes himself and then when he speaks to her at last it's as her doctor, as a professional, because that's what she needs from him right now, and he might have proven himself to her to be a lost cause so far when it comes to emotions and expressing them but he will not fail her as her doctor.
"Alicia?" It feels so wrong to be tending to her as though she's unconscious, whether she wants to acknowledge them or not. "Alicia, it's Ethan. I'm just going to take your hands and get this glass out, okay? Alicia, we need you to stay awake until we can get you to CT, okay?"
"M'awake," she mumbles weakly, shifts her right hand out towards him a little in consent. "Just can't…"
"Hey, it's okay. I know. It won't be much longer, we'll get you to CT as soon as we can and then you can sleep."
Her hands aren't as bad as he had feared, Ethan realises with relief. She won't need stitches; not in her hands, at least, one glance at Mrs Beauchamp's equipment tray tells him she's already resorted to stitches to deal with the worse of Alicia's glass wounds. But at least her hands will heal quickly, at least he hasn't had to stitch her hands…
"If you're finished, Dr Hardy, you can take Alicia's bloods down to phlebotomy, please," Mrs Beauchamp instructs. "Tell them it's a priority case, please. I'm almost finished. You should be able to take her straight for CT once you're back."
"Okay." He's reluctant to leave her again, reluctant to let go of Alicia's cold hands, but if dropping her bloods off for analysis is the final hurdle between him and taking Alicia down to CT personally, Ethan can live with that. "Okay, I'll be as quick as I can."
He grabs Alicia's blood sample and practically bolts out of resus, determined that whatever it is, whatever Mrs Beauchamp has decided she needs in the time he's been gone (because the group and save and the Us and Es are completed, had to be rushed through in order for Alicia to receive the blood transfusion, so this is new, this is a new discovery, something new Mrs Beauchamp has decided upon but hasn't thought to share with him, not yet…
But then Ethan glances down at the paperwork alongside Alicia's blood sample, takes in the particular tests Mrs Beauchamp wants bloods to run, and all of a sudden, his heart floods with horror and disgust.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit, Alicia…
Alicia…
Again, please know I am so, so grateful and overwhelmed by your wonderful, kind reviews. Thank you so much every single one of you who has followed or favourited this, and a particular huge thank you to my incredible reviewers, you guys honestly inspire me to keep writing- and this is the most proper writing I have managed in nearly a year. And I'm so glad I have managed to fill the Ethan/Alicia void a little for some of you- how disappointing was Saturday's episode on that front? :(
To my guest reviewer who requested Elle finding out about Alicia's rape, I actually had something along these lines planned for either the next chapter or the chapter after, watch this space :)
Please do let me know what you think of this one, your reviews are everything. And a quick question for you- do you prefer longer chapters like this one or shorter ones like chapter 1?
-IseultLaBelle