Chapter Two
Find chapter notes at the bottom. Rated T for swearing.
The rest of Leda's shift passed in agonising slow-motion. It was a rare, quiet night on the Queen Victoria Intensive Care Unit and due to the time, most of their patients were asleep. The only other sounds, other than the low talking and laughing from the nurses and the comforting repetitive beep the ward's many heart monitors, was the occasional low moaning that came from Bay Three. He had been in varying levels of pain since the day before when Leda had assisted in his hip surgery. Complications had arisen and if it wasn't for the morphine button that he could press whenever he wanted, Leda figured he'd be a lot louder than quiet moaning. Usually Leda would kill for a night like that one but the extended quiet just made her feel like Dr Morgan was going to come around the corner at any moment and out her to her colleagues.
"Dr Ackerman?" Susannah Birchwood, an F1 in the last quarter of her year in Emergency Medicine, appeared a Leda's elbow. Leda jumped slightly at the sudden appearance but was grateful for the distraction of thinking about all the ways Dr Morgan could fuck her life up.
"I have the patient files you requested." Requested? God, Susannah was so formal with her sometimes. Leda sighed and accepted the file with no comment. She flicked through it quickly, skimming over the annotations Susannah had made in her smooth, looping writing.
"Good work, newbie." Leda said, smiling wanly as she handed the file back. "And how many times have I told you to call me Leda?"
Susannah shrugged and smiled again by way of apology. Leda took a new file from a small pile in front of her and handed it to Susannah while she rubbed her eyes.
"Bed Two has an acute case of Penicillin Hypersensitivity." Leda said. "I gave her two hundred milligrams of Doxycycline at eleven last night so she should be due another dose in the next half hour. Can you check on her patch of cellulitis? Make sure to wake her up first, mind you. If she gets startled, she tends to swing first and asks questions later."
Leda touched her cheek, feeling the tender skin underneath from where Mrs Hitchon had accidentally hit her the hour before. Susannah, undeterred by the threat of violence, nodded eagerly and snatched the file from Leda's.
"Noted, Dr Ackerman. I will endeavour to assist to- I- I mean endeavour to complete the task- ah-" Susannah scrambled to reclaim the sentence she abandoned. A warm blush settled over her cheeks and, feeling bad for her, Leda offered another small smile although this time she tried to put a little more warmth into it.
"I'll uh- get right on it, Dr. Acker- er- I mean- Leda." Susannah finished lamely.
Instead of looking embarrassed, however, the perky F1 just took a deep breath, smiled widely and marched down the dim ward to her next task. Her blonde ponytail bobbed behind her, held in place by a loose pink bow she'd tied into her tresses. Leda admired her eagerness and the way she shrugged off her embarrassment at using the word endeavour in the twenty first century and almost pulled it off. Leda couldn't remember a time she had ever been able to shrug something off so easily. Her entire life had been shadowed by her father's legacy. And now, the one time she thought she was rid of it forever it was back to plague her in the form of Dr Morgan. Leda worried her lip and wiped a hand over her mouth. She hadn't listened to Dr Morgan for long enough to hear what he had to say, and she knew he'd be back. They always came back when it was to do with her dad.
"You ok, Leda?" Annette Fanning, the head of ICU, asked as she dropped into the empty desk chair and interrupted Leda's worrying. She was carrying a pile of messy patient folders that she promptly unloaded onto the desk, knocking Leda's pile of equally messy dune coloured folders askew.
"Yeah. Fine." Leda murmured with a tight smile. Annette shot her a concerned look as she logged onto the dated computer, but all Leda could think was the same question she had been thinking for the past hour and a half and that was: how did he find her?
She had been so careful. She had changed her name for Christ's sake! She shouldn't have been found. And especially not by some weird Professor of Geobiology, whatever the hell that was.
"Are you sure? You don't look too well." Annette said. She clicked her dull fingernails against the keyboard and the computer flashed to a pic of her and her husband George on their honeymoon in Zimbabwe.
"Yeah, I'm just…" Leda trailed off, sighing heavily and staring at the clock's hands seemingly not move. What she wanted to say was that she was just wondering how long it would take her to quit her job, get out of her flat contract and flee to Gibraltar all while leaving no trace of her ever being there.
Annette tapped away at her keyboard while Leda suffered through a potential breakdown.
"Just- just not feeling too great." Leda eventually settled on when the silence had stretched too long.
Annette stopped clicking at her keyboard and frowned, her eyes doing a quick sweep of Leda's slumped shoulders and general look of pale dejection.
"The morning shift will be here soon." Annette said and turned her swivel chair to face Leda, forgetting her computer for the moment. "And I can manage with the nurses. If you want to go a bit early that's fine by me and if you don't feel any better don't-"
"-Don't come in because of the risk of infection to the patients. I know. Thank you, Annette. You're a lifesaver." Leda said quickly. She stood and made her way to the other side of the station.
"You ok to do a handover for the earlies?" Leda asked but she was so eager to get out that she almost missed Annette's soft yeah drifting after her retreating back.
When she finally left, it took Leda all of five seconds to decide that spending money she didn't have, on a cab she didn't really want, was ultimately better than her usual lonely half-hour walk home.
The sky was just beginning to the bleed into light blue as the cab pulled up beside her flat. Her eyes swept the empty street for any signs of Dr Morgan before she threw a quick Bye! to the cab driver and scrambled out of the car.
Scuttling up her stairs Leda couldn't help but feel like she was being watched and it was with shaking hands that she unlocked her front door and slammed it shut behind her.
Leda closed her eyes and sucked in a long, heavy breath. Her feet were burning, and she knew she should take off her shoes or she'd have to surgically remove them herself due to all the swelling, but she couldn't bring herself to move just yet. She also knew that she would have to do something about Dr Morgan but just for one second, Leda wanted to lean against her front door in peace and try to forget about the fact that her life was most likely already ruined.
"Tough shift?"
Leda screamed and jumped. Her eyes flew open in shock and she dropped her handbag at her overnight bag at her feet. She blinked rapidly, to focus her gaze on a shadowy figure standing in her hallway. For a second, she saw the Professor and then worse, her father. But then both images bled away to show her less scary, mousy-haired flatmate Molly.
Molly blinked owlishly back at her. She was carrying Leda's blue bowl in her hand. Knowing Molly, it was probably just a bowl of full-fat milk.
"Jesus, Molly!" Leda breathed, hand coming to her chest to feel her racing heart beneath her ribs. "You scared the shit out of me!"
Molly blinked again. She nodded and then tilted her head to the side in contemplation.
"Yes. Yes…" She mused, trailing off. "I suppose I did scare you. I didn't mean to. I thought you saw me when you walked in. I've been standing here for a while. Why are you home so early?"
Leda groaned, feeling exhaustion creep into the corner of her eyes as the shock of Molly's appearance wore off. She shrugged, left her bag where it has dropped and shuffled past Molly into their small kitchen.
"I took a caa-A-aab." Leda said around another yawn, her wide mouth distorting her words. As she passed the counter on the way to the fridge, she saw her empty lunchbox, a few crumps left over from the ham, chicken and chorizo sandwich she had made for lunch the day before. Molly was edging around the room like the strange girl she was and ignored Leda trying to catch her eye.
"I'm not mad, Molly. Just, the next time you eat my lunch, can you please put the box in the dishwasher?" Leda said, reaching into the fridge and pulling out a pasta based ready-meal. At work she had to preach to her patients that a home cooked-low fat meal was healthier than anything else but at home? Leda was free to eat as badly as she wanted. And after the night she'd had? She deserved as many ready-meals as she could stomach.
"Yes, Leda." Molly said. When Leda turned around, ready meal in hand, Molly had set aside her bowl of -Leda peaked in and saw that it was, in-fact, a bowl of plain milk- and was currently doing squats in the middle of their cramped kitchen, right in front of the microwave.
Leda waited for a moment before clearing her throat. "Uh- Molly?" she gestured towards the off-white microwave nestled into the corner of their worn kitchen counter.
Molly rose out of one of her squats, shooting up like a reed. She blinked three times and then smiled toothily at Leda.
"Sorry, Leda." she said like she said everything else when Leda told her off. Like she was sorry she made Leda upset, but she wasn't entirely sure why she was in trouble.
Leda sighed and stuck the ready meal into the dated microwave, turning the deal to three and a half minutes. When she turned back to Molly the girl had a handful of cornflakes that she was one by one while intermittently taking sips from her bowl of milk.
Oh boy Leda thought, finally kicking off her shoes. She ignored the thuds as they dropped; for once she didn't care where they landed.
"Why are you up so early, Molly?" Leda asked absently while she thought about the new David Attenborough documentary she wanted to watch before bed. But first she had to figure out who the hell Dr Morgan was and what he wanted from her; or worse, what he wanted from her Dad.
"Mercury is in retrograde." she said, slurping at her milk while maintaining eye contact.
"Oh." Leda said, frowning like she hadn't thought about it. "Right. Of course. My bad."
Mercury was in what?
The microwave's sudden beeping saved Leda from asking Molly about whatever Mercury was up to and what that had to do with her being awake before her usual two pm. She pulled the meal out by the edge of plastic that didn't feel like it was on fire and loaded it and a bottle of water onto a tray.
"I'm off tomorrow." Leda said as she balanced her tray and side-stepped around Molly who had stopped drinking from the bowl of plain milk and was now instead chewing on some long green thing that protruded from the corner of her mouth.
Leda stopped by the front door to pick up her bag and quickly made her way to the room. Molly followed quietly and watched Leda push open her bedroom door.
"Ok, Leda." she said in her small voice. She was still carrying her bowl of milk and Leda saw a peak of orange cereal in her closed hand.
"I'm going to sleep until I feel like I can stand and then I'll sleep some more." Leda said, twisting to put her tray on her bed.
Molly's eyes darted around her figure into her dark room and she nodded, lifting the bowl to slurp more milk.
"Then do you wanna watch a movie?" Leda didn't know why she asked that. She was almost certain that she wouldn't have time to watch anything with Molly, but she was just so small and weird, slurping at her milk and poking her tongue into her tight fist to get a piece of dry cereal.
Molly smiled toothily. "Yes, Leda!" she nodded.
"Ok then." Leda nodded, smiling a little despite a sudden wave of exhaustion making her rub her eyes. "Night Molly. Have a good day, yeah?"
Molly nodded again and kept nodding until Leda awkwardly let her bedroom door close. Molly leaned her head to the side until it shut, unwillingly to let Leda out of her sight. Molly was weird, for sure. But she was also sweet and always paid rent on time and even though she ate Leda's lunches she always made up for it by- well, Leda wasn't really sure what she did to make up for it, but she could never be angry at Molly for very long. Molly hardly left the small flat but her bill money was always in Leda's account days before it had to be. Leda wasn't sure what the younger girl did for a living and Leda was always to scared of Molly prying back to enquire too deeply about what her weird flatmate did for cash. Leda just assumed she had rich parents, which was fine by her; rich parents always paid the bills on time.
Her blackout curtains were still shut from the day before and Leda sighed as she switched on her bedside lamp, the energy saving bulb slowly lighting her sparsely furnished room. At the bottom of the window was a homemade draft excluder; a pair of old tights stuffed with old holey socks. Beneath the window stood a plain white desk. The thin plastic bowed slightly in the middle from the weight of a second-hand desktop computer and a cracked mirror that had been her mother's. To the right of the room was a white chest of draws from Ikea that had been on sale and a clothes rack she had found in a charity shop. The only thing slightly personal in the room was a picture on her nightstand. She had been six and gap-toothed and was smiling with all her face, sandwiched between her mother who was sporting a new hair-cut that Leda could remember her hating and her father, who had clearer eyes than he had the last time she had seen him. She could remember how hot the day had been and how sticky her hands were as she set the camera's five second timer. But that was a lifetime ago now. Her Mum was long-gone and her Dad- well, he was pretty much all gone now, too.
It wasn't much. Just a pokey room in a pokey flat in a shit borough of London. But it was all she had, and it was hers. And that meant that Leda treasured every inch of it. She rubbed at her dry eyes again and sunk into her desk-chair. She booted up her slow computer and put thoughts of her tragic backstory out of her mind. No use in dwelling, the past is past and all that shit.
David Attenborough was calling to her, as was the ready meal growing rapidly cooler on her bed but as soon as she logged onto her PC, she pulled up a web browser instead of loading Netflix and typed in the name that she knew wouldn't let her relax and hit enter.
DR SAMUEL MORGAN, began the first result, PROFESSOR OF GEOBILOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, RELEASES FINDINGS ON EXCAVATED CAVE IN NORTHERN TIMBUKTU AT THE ALGERIAN MEGALITH SITE. HE AND HIS TEAM OF THIRTEEN ARCHAEOLOGISTS, WITH FUNDING FROM THE AETHER RESEARCH GROUP-
Leda shook her head and clicked the back button, she didn't care about his geological expeditions. She wanted to know who he was. She went back to main search page, clicking on the fifth result after skimming a promising summary.
It was a university page and the first thing she saw when the page finally loaded was the smiling face of the man at the hospital. He was dressed normally in the photo, jeans and a horrible plaid shirt that probably cost more than Leda made in a day.
DR SAMUEL MORGAN IS EUROPE'S LEADING SCIENTIST IN THE NEWLY FORMING FIELD OF GEOBIOLOGY. HE JOINED THE SCIENCE FACULTY IN 2016 AS COURSE DIRECTOR AND HAS HELPED ELEVATE OUR GEOBILOGY DEPARTMENT TO FIELD-LEADING STATUS. HE WAS PREVIOUSLY AN ARCHAEOLOGY PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. DR SAMUEL MORGAN IS ORIGINALLY FROM PEMBROKE-SHIRE AND IS DESCENDED FROM A LINE OF WORLD-CHANGING RESEARCHERS. HIS GRANDFATHER, LORD LOWRING MORGAN-
Leda stopped reading, and leaned back in her chair until it squeaked at the extreme angle, she had forced it into. The picture of the smiling Dr Morgan stared back at her and she sighed again. The expelled air tickled her chest.
So. He was who he said he was. Which was both comforting and frustrating. Either he was telling the truth, or he was extremely wealthy and had somehow bought or hacked into the internet to plant this information to trick her or anyone else who may look him up. But if he was telling the truth, then he was most likely one of her dad's followers and that just dug up a magnitude of other problems.
Leda's phone buzzed in her pocket and she blinked lazily, pulling it out of her back pocket. A text turned the notifications light cyan and she frowned, inputting her pin to see who it was.
MOLLY ROWAN popped up on her screen and Leda's frown deepened, wondering if the girl was in trouble. She clicked the message and let out a startled laugh.
Sweet dreams, Leda! :)
Leda grinned at her phone, feeling delirious with stress and exhaustion from her shift. She wasn't sure what the emoji Molly had sent was supposed to mean. Was it a smiley face with a party hat? A horn? It didn't really matter but it made Leda chuckle softly.
Thanks Molls x
She texted back, slipping the phone back into her pocket and glancing at the still smiling face of Dr Morgan. On a whim, she dug her phone back out, scrolling down her pitifully short contacts list. It consisted of a few people from work, Molly, and the Domino's a couple streets down. And then lastly, all by itself in its own section, a number she hadn't even looked at in months, let alone called.
THE EYRIE
Even its name was foreboding. She shivered involuntarily but her thumb slid her thumb across the screen, and she pulled the phone to her ear before she could even register what she was doing. She spied the time on her computer 9:25. Surely, they would be open.
Her stomach churned. Maybe she shouldn't bother. He probably didn't want to speak to her anymore than she wanted to speak to him. It probably wasn't even worth it. He wasn't well, and he hadn't been getting any better. She should hang up. She should definitely just hang u-
"-lo? Hello? Is someone there?" A pleasant voice was speaking softly into the phone and dragged her out of her internal panicking.
"Uh-hi- sorry. I- This is The Eyrie, isn't it?" Leda stammered. All her exhaustion fled, and she felt more awake than she had since leaving the hospital. Her heart was beating rapidly in her chest and the hand in her lap began to twitch.
"Yes. This is the Eyrie." The voice paused and added delicately: "Are you alright? Do you need assistance?"
"I-no-" Leda barely managed to keep a growl of frustration inside. "I mean- yes. I need help. I need to speak to a patient. I can't make visiting hours so I was wondering if I could just…call."
The person on the other line was silent for a moment before her cheery, sweet voice was back. "That's fine. Visiting hours have just started and, granted the patient has phone privileges, I can transfer you."
"Uh- great. Great." Leda muttered, tilting her head to hold her phone between her ear and shoulder to free her left hand.
"What is the patient name?" the woman from the Eyrie asked.
"Richard." Leda said and then added quickly. "Sorry- Richard Gauling."
She hadn't said his name out loud in over a year and hearing it in her small room made her already churning stomach cramp. She wrapped her hands around one another to comfort herself.
"And your name?" asked the voice.
"Leda. Leda A- Gauling. Leda Gauling. I'm his daughter."
"Alright, Ms Gauling. I'm going to call the ward. If they'll allow you to speak to your father, I'll transfer you. Hold the line."
"Oh- thanks. I appreci-"
Elevator music interrupted Leda's thank you and she sighed again, feeling itchy in her chair so she stood, beginning to pace back and forth in her tiny room which wasn't exactly easy given its size. She waited a good while and considered hanging up but then a voice stopped her pacing and shaking and threw her back in time to when things were worse but better. If that made any sense at all.
"Leda? Is that you?" Her father sounded old. Older of course, but also just…old. Tired.
Leda felt a wave of sadness wash over her and the hot tears prick her dry eyes. Her heart seemed to stop and then start again rapidly and skip a beat in between. Leda's mouth felt dry so she ran her tongue around it but it hardly helped.
"Hey, dad." She said, voice small. She hated how small she sounded. She wasn't the one in the wrong, here. "How are you?"
Her Dad didn't reply for so long that Leda opened her mouth to ask if he was still there but his words beat her to it.
"Did you know that Mercury is in retrograde?" he said.
Leda blinked and stared at her plain white walls in confusion. Here we go again, she thought, feeling the tiredness that had left earlier all come back at once.
This is way longer than I wanted it to be and I've edited it so much I can't bear to look at it again for a while. This is going to be a slow burn. I've got to set up some plot before Leda can get anywhere near Middle Earth, sorry about that!
Thank you for all the follows and hits! I'm very thankful that anyone is actually reading the drivel I write aha Hope you enjoy this chapter and please do let me know if there are any mistakes. I don't have a beta and I often miss these things. Thank you again for clicking on my story and for reading. Please leave a review if you liked it (or didn't!). Have a lovely rest of the week!
Aobh x