The Blame Game
Despite the medication she had given Bobby to help calm him down, Nurse Katie Jennings stayed glued to the eight-year-old's side until his anxiety wore him out. Her caring nature aside, she had to admit his terror made her curious as to what could be so awful about the boy's father. Even in a drug-induced sleep, there was a troubled air about the child's face, and something about him stirred a protective instinct in her. Bobby's pleas to not let the man he so visibly feared near his mother were still tugging at the kindly nurse's heartstrings when one of her colleagues peeked into the darkened room. "Katie, there's family here to talk about the kid. Can you take this?"
"Bobby," she corrected her co-worker tersely, watching the boy's uninjured fingers twitch uneasily in his sleep. "Yeah, I'll be right there."
Determined to help the little boy, Nurse Jennings swept out into the hallway wondering if she was about to meet the police officer Bobby so feared or the aunt he believed was his last hope. The answer, it turned out, was both at once. Just outside Bobby's room, a dark-haired detective resembling the boy and a shorter but no less intimidating brunette were glaring daggers at each other. Nurse Katie pressed herself against the wall when the furious duo failed to notice her and just watched the power struggle that Bobby had warned her about unfold.
"What the fuck are you doing here, you crazy bitch?" the man snarled, and his tone made Nurse Jennings shiver, but Bobby's aunt held his icy glare with equal ferocity. "Shouldn't you be going back to the loony bin where you belong?"
"Me?" Katie's enraged scowl was full of loathing as she stared the detective down. "That's really rich, Riley. You should seriously try that place out sometime. No sane person would treat their family the way you treat my sister. This is the last straw, do you hear me? If you ever hurt her again, I'll…"
"You'll what?" said Kevin mockingly. "You've already got the obsessive stalker shooting strike against you, Katie-Cat. Anything you do will put you away for good, and you know it. I look forward to that day; we don't need your crazy in this family. It's your fault Lissa was on the road today, and you know it!"
"You don't give a shit about her, you bastard," Katie hissed, but Nurse Jennings had seen the fire in her deep blue eyes dim at the detective's last accusation. "She has always deserved so much better than you!"
"She's my wife," Kevin sneered; "You'd be welcome to take the little brat off our hands if she didn't love him so much. Then again, nobody would let a nutcase like you keep a kid anyway, would they?"
"Shut up," she snapped; "Shut up, shut up!" Katie whipped around and covered her eyes, desperate not to let the man she hated most in the world see her cry.
"With pleasure, now that's settled, I'm going to sit with my wife," said Kevin smugly and walked away with a triumphant grimace. Nurse Jennings watched the brunette's fists shuddering at her sides, a painful combination of rage and defeat colliding in her eyes. When she stepped towards the trembling woman, the pediatric nurse had a strange feeling that this Katie, who her patient had spoken so highly of, was facing massive demons of her own.
September 2005 – Thirteen Years Earlier
Seventeen-year-old Katie could feel the judgmental glances being thrown her way by the passing nursing staff and families of the patients. The occasional one would be sympathetic, but the young brunette couldn't bring herself to care either way. The gauze pad stemming the flow of blood from a cut on her cheek was itchy, and Katie forced herself to focus on the beat of her tennis ball thudding against the pristine tiled floors instead. Logically she knew that her father's anger towards her stemmed from fear for her mother's life, but the suffocating guilt made it hard to believe. Her shaking fist clenched tighter around the sturdy ball as she tried to will the fury in his hazel eyes from her mind.
"Kate!" A terrified voice wrenched Katie from her thoughts and still squeezing her tennis ball hard, the teenager looked up to see her older sister Melissa hurtling towards her. The twenty-year-old was attending an art college in Savannah, and though Katie had lost all track of time, she guessed her sister had made the journey home as soon as the bad news reached her. "What happened?" Her sister sounded frantic, but for a moment, Katie could only draw on the love and concern in the eyes just like their father's.
As a little girl, Katie's hair had been strawberry-blonde like their mother's and with deep blue eyes to boot she had by all accounts been Lisa Ryan's mini-clone. Her wavy locks had darkened with age, but in many ways, she was still a lot like her mother. That thought, combined with the guilt forced out words Katie hadn't planned when Melissa sat down beside her against the sickly-green painted wall. "Dad hates me…this is my fault."
"Did Mom crash?" asked her sister faintly, and Katie gave a shuddering nod and pressed her head against Melissa's shoulder. "Oh, God, no."
"I was fighting with her," said the teenager in a muffled voice. "I wanted new tennis shoes, and she was getting impatient and didn't see the red light. Dad's right, this is completely my fault!"
"No," repeated Melissa under her breath, and Katie couldn't tell if she was in denial or disagreeing with the guilt trip. She got her answer when her sister forced her to look up, and tormented blue eyes met warm hazel ones. "Kate, Dad's probably just really freaked out right now. It's gonna be okay."
"You don't know that," Katie mumbled doubtfully. "Mel, you can't leave me alone with him again! Dad's only looked at me once since we got here, and even then, it was with so much rage. You didn't see how awful it was!" Melissa clutched her sister's shaking hand tightly, taking in every chip in the pearly pink polish on her rounded fingernails.
"I have to go back to college eventually, sweetie," she said softly, and even though it was just a fact, she found herself wishing there was another way. "I love you, Katie-Cat. I'm always, always on your side, okay? I'll make sure I can stay until Dad calms down if I have to." No longer trusting herself to speak at the sound of her mother's favorite nickname for her, Katie curled desperately into her sister's embrace. The pair only looked up when their father emerged from somewhere down the hall, having just spoken to the surgeon on Lisa's case.
Katie shivered at the ill-disguised anger, still glinting in his eyes. She was glad when Melissa spoke up, sounding more scared too, despite her optimistic speech. "Daddy, what's going on?"
"You," Robert Ryan spluttered, looking very tall and intimidating to Katie as she cowered on the floor. "You just killed your mother!"
"Dad," Melissa began reproachfully, but her father had already turned back towards the room where the doctors had taken their mother's body. He walked away, leaving a cloud of dense grief in his wake, and in her horrified daze, Melissa barely felt Katie's hand slip from her grasp. By the time she scrambled to her feet, the sobbing teenager had gone running in the opposite direction. The moment Lisa's heart stopped beating, an irreparable rift was created in their family, and it would only grow with time.
Katie flinched when a gentle hand squeezed her shoulder and took a deep breath before turning around. "Excuse me, are you Katie Ryan?" She found herself face to face with a worried-looking nurse and nodded stiffly. "I'm Nurse Jennings; I've been taking care of Bobby. He's been talking about you for ages. I feel like we know each other already."
As if her nephew's name was some kind of magic word, the dazed misery on Katie's face transformed instantly into a fully alert expression of urgency. "How is he?" she demanded. "Kevin's not going to let me anywhere near my sister as long as he's here. I can't let him hurt Bobby again!"
"He's pretty terrified," said Nurse Jennings honestly. "I was only watching your little showdown with his father for a few minutes, but it was enough to understand why." She shook her head in disgust; "Some people should not be parents, and I'm not talking about you, believe me."
"Thank you for protecting him," said Katie seriously. "If I had just listened to my sister when she asked me for help, neither of them would be here right now."
Nurse Jennings put a firm arm around her trembling shoulders. "There's no point at all in feeling guilty about the past now. Why don't you just come with me and sit with him? I'm sure it'll help when he wakes up to find you there; he seems to worship you from what I've heard. At one point, he calmed down just because he saw that my name is Katie too. The most extreme reaction I've ever had, I can tell you that much."
"Wait," said Katie, pulling the nurse to a sudden halt at the door of Bobby's room. She stared urgently into the medical professional's piercing green eyes. "Will you try and find out how my sister is, please? I didn't want to bring that up in front of Bobby, just in case…" she trailed off, shivering in dread and Nurse Jennings understood. "Melissa and I lost our Mom in a car crash when I was seventeen, and my Dad never stopped blaming me for the rest of his life." Katie turned away and squeezed the doorknob to stop her hand trembling. "I know I promised her I could keep Bobby safe, but I need her! That's the truth; I need her to be okay."
"It's hard to call Bobby particularly lucky right now, but I do think he's fortunate to have you," the nurse said soothingly. Instinct told her it was what Katie needed to hear before the force of Kevin's hatred, and her self-doubt swallowed her whole. "I'll find out about your sister as soon as I can, I promise. I'm sure one of my co-workers in the trauma department will know something. What's her name?"
"Probably Melissa Riley, I guess," said Katie bitterly. "Bobby kept her maiden name because technically speaking, he was born just before that jerkface back there married my sister. And then Kevin made no secret of how he doesn't care about the kid at all, so here we are. God, why am I even telling you all this?"
"It seems like something you've been holding in for a while," said Nurse Jennings thoughtfully. "Sometimes, it helps to just get everything out in the open."
"Maybe," sighed Bobby's aunt, finally twisting the doorknob before her boosted courage failed her again. "Thanks for your help, I should get in there."
"Good idea." Nurse Jennings smiled at her encouragingly. "I'll be back as soon as I know more, good luck."
When the door to Bobby's room clicked shut behind Katie, the pediatric nurse made her way to the trauma center of the hospital in search of more information on Melissa's condition. Everything she had learned about Kevin gave her an uneasy feeling about the fact that he had a considerable head start in that department. Before she could find any of the trauma surgeons, she passed the nurses' station and was hailed by the same co-worker who had told her about Katie and Kevin's arrival. "What's up, Jan?" she asked the troubled-looking blonde. "Did someone die on you?"
"No," said Janet, shaking her head slowly. "I just had a call from a Nurse Amy Miller at the psychiatric clinic in Atlanta. She said one of their residents broke out without permission, and they're calling all the hospitals in the area to keep an eye out for her."
"That's not good," frowned Nurse Jennings. "Did it sound like we've seen this patient to you?"
"We sure have." The look on Janet's face filled Nurse Jennings with a dreadful sense of foreboding. "It's the aunt of your car crash kid, Bobby. Did Katie Ryan seem crazy to you?"
"Bobby's Dad certainly seemed to think so," said Nurse Jennings, feeling slightly sick at the revelation. "From what I witnessed earlier, his temper is more dangerous than Katie Ryan."
"We're still obligated to keep an eye on her," Janet pointed out regretfully. "She's technically a fugitive now, who knows what she's capable of?"
Katie Jennings only half-heard her co-worker's concern; her heart was too heavy with Bobby's distress to absorb any more bad news. "That poor kid is in way deeper than any eight-year-old should be," she murmured. "Look, Jan; we can worry about Katie later, okay? Right now, I need to go find out about his Mom, I promised…twice!" Before Janet could say another word, she turned and continued on her quest for an update about Melissa's fate. No possibly crazy woman or raging cop would stop her from putting the desperate kid first.
A / N As usual, with the pure OC chapters, I'm not so sure about this one. But it did kind of start to stir up sympathy for Katie, who I hate in canon for making Clinn suffer. Anyway, enjoy everyone, and thanks for any feedback! xx