Chapter Text
“Somebody likes grapes... “ observed Mo, coming up to the doctor’s station where Zosia was staring at the message attached to an impressively large delivery of grapes.
“Hands off.” Zosia turned to look at Mo who was trying not to look like someone who hadn’t been about to help themselves to a grape. “They’re for a patient,” explained Zosia, her expression clouding as she turned back to the note.
“What’s wrong?” There was something about Zosia’s expression that made Mo abandon any attempt at humour, “whose are they?”
“The grapes? They’ve been sent to Major Wolfe…” Zosia saw Mo’s blank look and rushed to explain. “Wife of Mr Dunn, ortho consultant at St James’; she’s an army trauma surgeon, arrived here from Afghanistan…”
“Right…” Mo glanced to the room where, behind closed doors, she presumed the Major was just shaking off the last of her anaesthetic, remembering overhearing some discussion about the case earlier, “...so what’s the problem? With the grapes?”
“It’s the message…” Zosia turned the basket of grapes slightly, so it was easier for Mo to read what had been neatly printed by an unknown hand.
“Ok…” Prepared to see something highly inappropriate, Mo read the unexpectedly tame message aloud, as if wanting to double check there wasn’t any hidden message in the innocuous looking words. “Get well soon, then get back here, on the double soldier. Alex.” Mo silently read the words on the card again before looking at Zosia. “I don’t see the problem?”
“The surgery…” Zosia took a deep breath, finding it hard to believe despite having seen the situation first hand, “...it didn’t work.”
“Which one?” Even as she asked the question, Mo knew the answer: if Ollie had been struggling with the pseudo-aneurism she’d have not only heard about it, but she’d be part of the conversation to plan their next steps.
“Spine…” Zosia looked at the heap of grapes, sent with such confidence, presumably intended to amuse the Major and remind her that she had fellow officers who expected her return. “The trauma was worse than the scans showed - when they opened her neck up in theatre they discovered the spinal cord was already damaged beyond repair.” Zosia looked at Mo, not caring if she looked more emotional than her professional position suggested was appropriate. “She’s paralysed, she’s not going back.”
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The jeep had barely stopped moving before a sandy-brown blur had launched itself from the passenger seat and set off running into the Wyvern Wing of Holby General Hospital, the scrap of paper with the directions to the Darwin Ward scribbled in an almost illegible hand. Ignoring the lift and the stares she got, Alex Dawson ran to the stairs and started sprinting up them, not noticing how her body reacted to the exertion. Instead, she was propelled on by a heady cocktail of adrenalin, fear and guilt which, combined with her body being more used to the physical challenge of Afghanistan than Holby, meant she arrived at the doctor’s station in record time and barely out of breath.
“Where is she?” demanded Alex, making a beeline for the first medic she saw, her voice hoarse but firm, speaking the words quietly but in such a way that the urgency was clear - this was not a woman who was going to be dismissed with a non-answer.
“I’m sorry?” Not appreciating the tone of voice he heard, Guy Self didn’t bother turning around to look at whoever it was who felt they could make such demands of him.
“You…” Alex spun around when she heard his voice, recognising it from a lecture she’d heard some time ago. “I…”
***********
“Bernie?” Zosia made a couple of quick annotations on Ms Wolfe’s chart as she spoke, wondering if this would be the obs check in which Major ‘please, Bernie’s fine’ Wolfe would engage. It wasn’t that she had gone completely catatonic and despondent - she was far too familiar with the protocols in those situations to fall into the trap of being caught with more intrusions than the regular obs checks and Marcus hovering. Instead, she’d taken care to engage with the staff just enough to stay firmly in the ‘she’s had a bad shock, she’s still coming to terms with it, give her a bit of time before we start thinking about Psych’ zone, a zone she’d determined meant she could tune out for all her visitors and about half her obs checks, including this one. “Do you want to see your chart?” asked Zosia, offering the chart to the surgeon, wondering if this would be the moment she showed any interest in wanting to understand what her exact situation was, what her options might be.
Expecting silence, Zosia jumped when they both heard a loud crash come from outside Bernie’s room, followed by a woman’s voice, clearly hoarse with barely contained fury start to berate someone.
“I’ll shut the blinds,” she observed, thinking she’d at least give Bernie the illusion of privacy as they heard another crash.
“Open the door.” It was the first time Bernie had spoken to Zosia since the post-op checks that had gone so wrong.
“But…” Confused, Zosia pointed behind her, towards the doctor’s station where the woman, whoever she was, was clearly laying into whichever colleague of Zosia’s had the misfortune to be in the apparently extremely angry and distressed woman.
“I said open the door.”
It was in that moment, with those five words ground out through a clenched jaw, that Zosia realised that despite everything else that was happening to her at the moment, Major Wolfe had not yet abandoned her position, but was still here, lingering in a part of Bernie that wasn’t quite ready to give up the battle.
“Yes Ma’am.” The militaristic manner of address had slipped out of Zosia before she’d realised she had done it, but neither of them noticed. In the split second after Zosia opened the door a fraction of an inch, Bernie heard the voice of the woman clearly enough to know precisely who she was and began to picture her angry and determined in her uniform, whilst at the same time, Zosia gasped when she realised that this woman, whoever she was, was currently trying to replicate the Major’s C5 and C6 damage on Guy Self, the surgeon who hadn’t been able to repair it.
“STAND DOWN CAPTAIN.”
At the sound of Bernie’s voice, slightly scratchy from underuse at first, roaring through the ward, everyone stopped, not just the woman in khaki who remained bent over Guy Self, his blue scrub shirt bunched in her fist. Unable to see what was happening from her position lying flat on her back, Bernie had to try to work out what was going on from how the silence ‘sounded’.
“Release him Captain...” she continued, her voice returning to a more appropriate volume now she had everyone’s attention. “...it’s over Alex…” she continued, reaching blindly out with her right hand, not caring that she might be increasing the risk of further damage to her spine, attempting to make contact with her fellow officer who remained far beyond her reach. “I’m not coming back.”
Alex awoke with a gasp, the image of her best friend calmly accepting her paralysis staying burned in her mind even as she was telling herself it was just the nightmare. Running her fingers through her lank hair, she didn’t need to feel the dampness in her t-shirt to know she’d sweated her way through the latest rerunning of her worst nightmare, a nightmare that managed to be worse than the hell that was the reality.
Telling herself it was only a nightmare, Alex checked the time on her watch, the luminous hands the only points of brightness in the otherwise pitch black dark of her bunk: almost 3am, no more sleep for her tonight....
Pinching the bridge of her nose, trying to create the illusion of something to focus on outside of her own overactive imagination, Alex blinked rapidly and attempted to think about the countless lives she’d help change for the better once dawn broke. It wasn’t as restful as sleep, but it was the nearest she got now, thanks to the nightmare. It was the same one, always played out to the same broad conclusion: the surgery hadn’t worked, Bernie couldn’t walk, couldn’t get straight back to Alex at the double. In one single, IED fueled moment, her best friend, soulmate and lover was lost to her, taken out of her reach, broken beyond their combined ability to repair...
Working the shift at Holby hadn’t made the nightmares stop - she’d not really expected that it would, but had maybe hoped it would have helped to soften the horrors her overactive imagination was forcing on her when she finally succumbed to sleep. Instead, it kicked into overdrive, the nightmare becoming more traumatic with each night as, rather than using the shift worked at Holby to make Bernie’s recovery more in line with reality, her mind tortured her by refining the details of the Ward and medics, making the lie seem more real, more believable: it had helped turn fuzzy, not quite focussed horror into high definition, cinema quality hell.
Turning onto her right side, no longer able to sleep on her left side due to the memories it triggered of an earlier time, when her best friend had also been her lover, Alex ignored the silent tears that streamed down her face and tried to remember who was first on the list for the morning, whose life was going to be changed for the better, knowing it wasn’t going to be hers.