This chapter directly follows on from the last, and is from PC Cumming's third person point of view, because he's both intelligent and perceptive for his age. There's quite a bit of hurt John, I'm afraid, and a very worried Sherlock.
Trauma centres in London are those with 24-hour access to an A&E consultant (or ER attending, for those of you across the Pond). The hospitals below actually are the major trauma centres for the city as detailed by the citywide Trauma Office. The chapter after this one follows on from it, and is where this story arc ends. It's probably not exactly usual to segue from one set of chapters to another, but it seemed to work together, and I thought I had better write them all in one in case my muse deserts me tomorrow.
As they crossed over the threshold into St Mary's (the worst casualties having been red-lined to King's College, St George's or the London, and the minors to smaller local hospitals), Blair could see the energy draining out of John as though someone had taken out the Energiser bunny's batteries. A brief spasm of pain crossed his face as he turned to the consultant on call to tell him that all the casualties had been directed to the other major trauma centres.
Nelson had insisted that they, as part of the incident themselves, had been driven over to that particular hospital in case they themselves required emergency treatment. John's poker face remained intact as he talked through the incident, mentioning any injuries to Sherlock and Blair that he thought might need attention. He was as straight-backed and attentive as ever, nodding calmly as the other man indicated the curtained bays through the left-hand set of double doors.
As he turned back to his friends, Blair noticed John's eyes sliding out of focus. On instinct, the young man started forward, flanked by Sherlock and closely followed by the consultant, as John slowly and gracefully slid to the floor. The full paleness of his face became visible under the harsh fluorescent lights as they surrounded him. Taking John's pulse at his carotid, Mr Evender yelled over his shoulder for a trauma team before peering worriedly at the army doctor's chest, which was already stuttering with the effort of drawing a deep breath. "PC Cumming, can you keep a check on his breathing, please?"
Nodding, Blair took hold of John's left hand, focusing intently on the staccato rise and fall, before stepping back as doctors and nurses descended, scooping their patient up onto a trolley and whisking him into the Resuscitation Room. The three of them followed in an anxious, silent huddle. Sherlock shrank into his coat, Greg putting a fatherly hand on his shoulder. As they ran the scissors through his shirt, the removal of the fabric revealed a set of dog tags, a bizarrely handsome chartreuse scar webbed over his left shoulder, and an ominous bruise over John's sternum. Blair sucked in a breath as the heart monitor placed over the doctor's arched torso bleeped out a clearly unhealthy rhythm.
At that moment, John stirred, bringing his right hand up to swipe at the oxygen mask covering his mouth and nose. Edging closer, the three men caught a breathless report from him as he gritted his teeth against the pain in his chest.
He panted, "Cardiac tamponade...front...gate...part of it...caught me in the...chest. O neg, no history of CT...problems apart from asthma...fentanyl's...better for me than...morphine. Morphine...doesn't...touch it."
Nodding, the consultant bent over John as a slight nurse proffered a green surgical sheet. Blair watched, sick with worry, as John dragged his head up to look Sherlock in the eyes, then DI Lestrade. When the doctor's eyes locked on him, he got the message loud and clear.
Don't blame yourself. I chose to keep treating people and you couldn't have stopped me if you tried.
Nodding, Blair took one last look over his shoulder as they were ushered out into the family room. The consultant was gently sliding a frighteningly large needle into John's chest, filling a syringe with shockingly scarlet blood and siphoning it off into a drain attached to the side of the bed. As the doors swung closed, he saw John's fingers twitch just once, then still as the sedation overtook him.
Stepping lightly into the surgical theatres family room eight hours later, clutching another black coffee, two sugars, and an espresso, Blair was conscious that Sherlock was suspiciously quiet. He was folded into his chair, chin resting on his bony knees as he stared ahead, eyes brighter than normal. Regarding him with melancholy eyes, the young policeman was struck by the strength of the bond between the detective and the doctor. Sergeant Donovan had been wrong, then. Sherlock Holmes wasn't a sociopath, just a very smart man who had no patience for anything that didn't sate his great big brain or provide him with stimulation. John was his dynamo, and without his long-suffering flatmate, he just appeared to stop.
The cardiothoracic consultant chose that moment to poke his head 'round the door.
Holmes's head snapped up, all his attention focussed on the white-haired man in scrubs and an offensively bright yellow bandana.
"How is John? Will he be alright?"
Peering down his glasses at the suddenly animated man, the consultant was softly spoken, and had to strain to make himself heard as Sherlock demanded an answer again.
"Doctor Watson's condition is critical at the moment. He's strong and fit, but the nature of cardiac tamponade is idiosyncratic, and his previous injury has complicated the blood vessel structure on the left hand side somewhat. We're hoping to be able to give you good news at some point, but it's very much a waiting game, Mr Holmes. If he makes it through the next twelve hours, his chances of survival will improve with each six-hour window that passes."
"I know all that! What are his chances now?"
Looking over his specs apologetically, the doctor fixed them all with a solemn look.
"Less than forty percent, I'm afraid. If I were you, I would go and sit with him just in case. You may need to prepare yourselves. Mr Holmes, you have his power of attorney-may I have a word, please?"
As Sherlock swept from the room, Greg and Blair looked from each other to their shoes. A thick pall of silence covered them, sticking in their mouths like cotton wool and making the quiet of the family room seem oppressive. Sherlock loomed over them then, a positively murderous expression darkening his face as he glowered at the consultant's retreating back.
"John's living will states that if his condition becomes unrecoverable, he should be taken off life support. When the consultant indicated that might be a possibility, I told him exactly what John has already survived and invited him to say that again. We're being taken to see John now, anyway."
The three men trooped out to the waiting nurse. Blair noted that neither of the older ones had asked him what he was still doing here, following the others down the corridor into the Intensive Care Unit. Greg quickly looked away, Sherlock striding straight through the doors to John's bedside as the teenager gazed through the observation window. The doctor looked small and frail, covered in trailing wires and cloaked in gauze, with a rigid plastic tube leading from his mouth to the life support machines. John's blonde hair was rumpled, his expression almost unbearably peaceful.
Blair decided that this unnaturally relaxed, boyish figure was an ersatz John Watson, a pale imitation of the strong, authoritative man whose ability to stay calm under pressure had saved he didn't know how many lives including Cammy's, and his own.
The slur of John's mouth around the ventilator and the stillness of his lashes was a million, billion worlds away from that brilliant, amazing, terrifying poker face.
A/N II: A cardiac tamponade is a bleed in the pericardium, the area the heart lives in. It's very serious, and sometimes results from blunt force trauma to the chest, like part of a wooden front gate whacking into your sternum at high velocity... Eventually, a person might well need open heart surgery to fix the cause of the bleeding, but I am not a medic so I have no idea how long it would take or what the survival rates are. The procedure that the A&E consultant performs is called a pericardiocentesis, and is the first stage of treatment.
John would have known what was happening and probably have felt absolutely awful, so for him to keep going would require a phenomenal poker face. I liked the idea of writing this from Blair's POV because it's not a great leap of logic for us to assume that other people will be impressed by the fact that John is so good at so many things.
PS: Bonus points if anyone can tell me where the black coffee, two sugars, and the yellow bandana come from. The bandana is from something that is definitely *not* Sherlock...