Won't Let You Slip Away
Karen's eyes flicked open, her ears ringing and she inhaled what seemed like her first breath in days. Her lungs were filled with ash and dust but that only confirmed what she alive. Injured, leg probably broken judging from the pain and bruising covering her arms and face, everything was blurry and her head and chest hurt like nothing she had ever felt but the pain reminded her that she was alive. Her eyes fuzzed around her as she heaved herself into a sitting position.
She gingerly got to her feet ignoring the pain in her leg, hopefully just a sprain. She looked around the room. There was rubble, ash, the remains of a fire and several bodies littering the room. Her eyes flicked around the room looking at the piles of rubble before they focused on something that made her breath catch in her chest. A suited arm, sticking out from beneath a huge pile of rubble.
She hobbled as fast as her leg allowed her over to the arm, clutching her right arm to her chest. She placed her fingers against the remains of a wrist, frazzled and burnt. Both John and Sherlock had been wearing suits that evening and she could not feel a single beat in the destroyed arm. Her eyes settled on a leather strap circling the wrist. She knew who it belonged to.
Neither John nor Sherlock had been wearing a watch, and the last person she saw who had, had been holding her by the throat. She dropped the wrist and squirmed away from it. Moriarty.
Her ears were still ringing and her eyes were watering from the dust in the air. She closed her eyes and cleared her mind the way that she had seen Sherlock do so many times in their late night chats. Think about it, listen, watch, feel. Sherlock's words echoed in her head. What could she hear? Fire crackling, wood cracking from the furniture and...
There, suddenly a voice called out from the darkness. Her eyes flew open. She heard it again; it was coming from the main pile of rubble. Then a second voice and it appeared to be calling her name. Her heart soared as she hobbled over to it.
"KAREN! WHERE ARE YOU! KAREN!" two voices shouted, before coughing. Karen sobbed. Sherlock and John.
"I'm here! I'll get you out!" she screamed at the pile. The voice stopped and she heard scrabbling.
"KAREN?" the first voice yelled again. Karen nodded violently pulling at the rubble, even though she knew they couldn't see her. A sudden wave of nausea and tiredness passed over her and she stumbled. She fought through it, occasionally wiping blood from her nose and forehead determined to get them out of there.
Slowly but surely with her pulling from the outside and them scrabbling at the foundations, John appeared in the hole they had made. Gingerly balancing on one foot and ignoring the pain in the other, she grabbed his hand and with a slight grunt, John emerged dusty and coughing but otherwise unharmed.
Another face appeared in the hole and Karen sat backwards cradling her foot. Her right arm hung limply from her side, she appeared not to have even noticed it yet.
"Karen? You ok?" Sherlock called from the darkness. John looked over at her before reaching for his friend's hand.
"Think she's got a broken arm, Sherlock. And a slight concussion I would say, she was thrown pretty far from the explosion... something else wrong with her foot. Her head looks pretty banged up. It's not good Sherlock" he said as Sherlock emerged groaning from the pile. He immediately rushed to Karen whose eyelids where dropping as if she was tired.
He cupped her face in the same way he had the night before after her nightmare, both hands under her chin, forcing her to look up at him.
"Karen... come on look at me... KAREN!" he shrieked as her eyelids closed.
"No need to shout" she said slowly and quietly. Sherlock sighed in relief as she opened her eyes. He could practically see the pupils of her eyes focus on him and light up slightly as the brain cells recognised him.
"Sh... Why... why does my arm hurt" she said doopily. Sherlock looked at her arm and paled as he saw a misshaped lump sticking out of it, just beneath the elbow.
"Karen... don't look at your arm" he whispered not wanting to look himself. Blood from a dead creature (human or not) he could deal with, but seeing fresh blood leak from a real person, alive and bleeding, it made his stomach turn especially since it was someone he really cared about. Karen of course, being human looked and immediately screamed. Her eyes rolled backwards and she sunk into a faint, the last thing she remembered being, arms reaching out to catch her, him finally seeing the true extent of the damage to her head.
Sherlock screamed for help as the stretched as he and John smashed through the hospital doors, an unconscious and heavily bleeding Karen outstretched in his arms, one of his hands hanging limp and a pained expression on his face but a determined gleam in his eyes. His hand was on her forehead, the blood from the wound there now flowing freely through John's compressed fingers, leaking onto her eerily pale face and onto Sherlock's arm.
Doctors in the emergency room jumped into action, grabbing the nearest stretcher and gently removing the now still woman from Sherlock's arms.
"Paddles now! She's lost a lot of blood, we need a blood bag here!" the man who had taken charge yelled into the emergency room. He rounded on the two men, practically running backwards as Karen was rushed towards resuscitation.
"What type is she?" he yelled, looking directly at Sherlock. He faltered, his eyes widening. John interjected immediately, yelling Karen's blood type at the man. The Doctor screamed at them to stay there, pushing them towards a chair as he bolter through the double doors.
Sherlock screamed Karen's name, trying to force himself out of John's strong grip. He yelped in pain as John's hand enclosed over his right wrist, gritting his teeth he continued to struggle, yelling her name at the double doors.
The commotion attracted the attention of two burly male guards; one ran helping John who shrieked in warning as the man approached with a needle in his hand. He plunged the instrument into Sherlock's skin, pressing the plunger and releasing the drug into Sherlock's bloodstream.
He immediately slumped to the floor, his legs going weak beneath him. John pressed his bloodied hands to Sherlock's face as his eyes slid shut, his voice distorted as he yelled about Sherlock's history and how this would be a setback. The final thing that Sherlock heard before slipping into darkness was a call of how a heartbeat had been obtained