A/N: thank you to everyone who's left comments on this here thing. i'm struggling at the moment and haven't been able to reply, but i do appreciate you taking the time.


False dawn light is staining the sky by the time he convinces Vic to go to the hospital. She'd refused to leave Chance's compound until he did, so in the end Walt drives her himself. He is privately, selfishly glad for every minute of her presence and the tangible proof she's alive.

They arrive at Durant Regional to find that Ferg has already recorded Sean's statement and photographed his injuries for the file. Sean himself has been released and gone home.

Walt's taken aback by the news but Vic receives it with the same eerie calm she's shown all night. She even submits to an examination of her wounds and a CT scan without complaint. The first tear in her composure doesn't come until Doc Weston suggests that one of the female nurses be assigned to take her evidence photos.

"No," she says in a panicked voice. Walt feels his stomach lurch at the fear in her eyes when she looks at him. "Can't you do it?"

There's no reason why not. While it's a task he usually delegates, photographing a victim's injuries is certainly within the scope of his duties as sheriff. He's done it many times.

But this is Vic.

In those first moments after she'd driven back, when she slid, stumbling, from the Bronco, Walt had wanted to sink to his knees and press his face against her stomach, to take in deep lungfuls of her stale sweat-and-copper smell. He'd been so fervently, recklessly grateful.

Now it's hours later and he's no less grateful, but that overwhelming fever of relief has cooled and he's once again conscious of what they are — and are not — to each other.

Vic is his deputy. Vic is another man's wife.

"Sheriff?" Doc Weston prompts.

Walt glances at him and then back at Vic.

He's not sure he's strong enough for this.

"If that's what you want."

He leaves her to undress in privacy and takes his time finding Ferg and the camera. When he returns to the exam room, he knocks twice before slowly opening the door. Vic is sitting on the edge of the exam table with her arms wrapped around herself. She's removed everything except her underwear and bra.

What he can see of her pale skin is covered in bruises. The raw wounds on her wrist stand out starkly in the florescent light.

It takes a few seconds to gather himself before he trusts his voice.

"Ready?"

She nods and stands up, holding herself with a brittle poise that makes him feel as though his own bones are splintered.

As quickly and impersonally as he can, he begins documenting her injuries.

They don't speak. Vic hardly even seems to be breathing. The room has taken on a greenish hue and the noise of the world on the other side of the door is muted. Walt has the sense of being underwater, that he's moving through an atmosphere more dense than air. The camera feels heavy in his hands and his flesh feels heavy in his skin. They could be standing on the silty bottom of a pond, with its strangely distorted sound, and its filtered and diffuse light. The hush they inhabit feels church-like, funereal. Time seems to be slowing.

Each photograph he takes is narrow in focus: one bruise, one cut. These isolated glimpses seem less of a violation than if he were looking at Vic as a whole. So he works like a cartographer mapping sections of an unknown landscape. The jutting crescent of her hip and the strong muscles of her thigh, the supple dip and flare of her waist and the shallow inlets between her ribs: these are islands in the archipelago of her body. He describes them one at a time.

When he reaches the red welt bisecting her windpipe, Walt feels his own throat close.

"He choked you?"

"Not Chance. One of the others," Vic answers flatly, as if she's reciting from a report.

No, he thinks, even then her voice has more expression than that.

Her face is equally blank when he straightens. It's not until she meets his eyes that he sees the great effort she's making not to crumble; he sees the struggle between shame and a despairing kind of pride. She has the look of the weary victor after a relentless battle, still standing though the decimation of her army is only marginally less complete than her foe's.

"Okay," he tells her when he's done.

She lets out a shaky breath and nods. Some of the rigidity in her posture softens.

"The nurse left you some clean scrubs to change into if you want."

"No thanks," Vic says and begins to pull on her stained clothes.

"Do you want me to, uh..." He motions to the door.

A flash of alarm crosses her face, quickly suppressed. "No."

Walt nods and feigns interest in a sign detailing proper hand washing technique.

The need to offer her comfort is a yearning in his muscles like the cramp of a phantom limb. It used to be that his domain was the opposite of violence — if not mending then making amends — but right now he doesn't even know how he'd begin.

Sean's injuries had been less extensive and severe than Vic's. Chance and his confederates hurt her more because she fought them; they'd punished her for her own defense. Walt wonders how many of them it had taken to subdue her.

He thinks of Gorski's scorn at Sean's lack of action. Mr Milquetoast, he'd called him. Walt had meant what he'd said to Gorski. Not everybody can be a cop. Most people are far better off if they submit without a struggle when confronted with violence.

And yet he can't help the caustic trickle of thought that plagues him. Had he been the one on the road with Vic things would have turned out differently. While he's never liked Sean or the way he treats Vic, Walt has always respected the fact that the man is her husband. Now though, he's seized by an unwilling but fierce contempt.

Walt is angry.

He's angry that Vic is here with serious head trauma and her husband has gone home without even knowing how she is. He's angry that Sean's careless actions are what put her in danger in the first place.

It's a swift, wild, bodily anger. It burns across his face and down his chest like the hot blast from an open oven.

"Walt?"

Vic's quiet voice is a splash of cool water on his skin.

He looks up to find her fully dressed. Like a visitation, she's surrounded by a nimbus of coruscating light. For a dizzying moment she's Victoria, patron saint of the imprisoned, just as worthy of being immortalized in mosaic at the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo as her namesake.

"Are you all right?" she asks.

Walt blinks and the vision scatters. Sunlight leaks through the closed blinds of the window behind her.

"Yeah," he says. "Let's get you home."

"What about your arm?"

"It's fine."

"You need stitches."

"I'll come back and get them after I take you home."

She looks at him with those haunted eyes that make him wish he'd shot to kill Chance Gilbert. "No you won't."

"Vic, you need to rest."

"So I'll rest while your arm is stitched up."

The shadow of her customary stubbornness eases a fraction of the worry Walt's been carrying. He nods as he opens the exam room door. "All right."

...

When it's all over, he drives to the station with no particular purpose in mind, just reluctant, for some reason, to go home.

Ruby frowns when he walks in.

"Walter, why are you here? You should be resting."

"I'm fine, Ruby."

Lips pursed in disapproval, she shakes her head but says nothing further. Walt takes a moment to wonder why the women in his life seem intent on chastising him like he's a little boy.

After a desultory check-in with Ferg, he wanders into his office and shuts the door. Everything in the room is as familiar to him as his own face in the mirror and yet all of it seems strange. His head feels cottony and muffled, as though the world exists at a distant remove through warped and thickened glass. He sits at his desk and leans forward on his elbows, letting them take his weight. The stitches in his arm tug whenever he moves, like nudges to his memory.

He sees Vic every time he closes his gritty eyes.

For the last thirty-six hours she's been his cynosure, the single reason for all his striving. But she's at home now, safe, and Walt feels a vague but pervasive sense of loss. It's like waking from a dream that first bloomed as a nightmare. And though its thorns smoothed their way to something softer, there's still a lingering unease pulsing through all four chambers of his beating heart.

He hadn't wanted to let her go.

But he'd taken her home, to be with her husband. To be with Sean. Who'd left the hospital without seeing her. Who hadn't mustered up enough consideration for his wife to even call.

A whisper slithers under Walt's breastbone, the devil in the cage of his ribs. If it was me...

He pushes it away, literally pushes himself violently away from the desk and strides to the window, as though physical distance can separate him from the betrayal of his thoughts. He stares unseeing out at the center of Durant, sickened by himself.

Shame coats his insides and beats a current through his veins. He feels monstrous.

Vic is not his wife.

Think of Martha, Walt orders himself. Think of Denver.

Don't think of Vic crying as he held her; don't think of her asking him to stay. Don't think of her face as Ed drove them to safety. Don't think about why she came back.

Don't think about it.

Don't.


note: there's actually no patron saint of the imprisoned (or prisoners or hostages), at least not that i can find. there are several saints named victoria, but none of them are patron saints of anything. the one i've referenced was a roman noblewoman who refused an arranged marriage, was imprisoned (by the dude), and was ultimately released; i thought she sounded like a pretty good parallel for vic. (apart from her being a virgin and eventually martyred by the sword, that is. you can't have everything.)