Human Error ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book IV}

Chapter XCIII - Best Served Cold

-Emily-

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I sit a sombre spectator.

The air is thick; it presses me between its palms, one oppressive at my front, the other unrelenting at my back. Breathing is difficult, here. I shift my chair a little closer and turn to the side.

She lies with her chin upturned, her neck exposed. The sheets have been pulled up to her collarbone –  a grim maintenance of modesty – and her arms laid like brittle pieces of white chalk in front of her. I marvel at her angles: she is shockingly, brilliantly skeletal, her skin quite drained and tinted a very pale, very delicate blue. The colour intensifies around her mouth. I focus on her lips with macabre fascination – they've thinned with the rest of her, darkened as if bruised or dusted with powdered lead. The lines around those lips hint at endured agony. They delineate pain like a map: a topography of suffering, etched into the translucent paper of her skin in a way that doesn't come across entirely natural. What is left of her hair is spread out either side of her head. I have the ghost of a memory in my mind – an intangible time many eons ago, when that same hair shifted and settled on her shoulders like loosely coiled satin. She used to compress the split ends between the pads of her fingers when she was nervous, rub them together, twist the strands of hair until she solved the puzzle or moved on to ordering the kitchen shelves.

Those same fingers are unrecognisable. They belong to a different woman. I follow them up to her wrists, then her arms. They provide the colour: daubed with greens and greys and pale pinks, smattered with pinprick scabs that sit on her skin like fragments of shattered garnet. She wears her self-inflicted injuries like evening gloves.

I exhale, sit up, and run my thumb along the cut-curve shadows beneath my eyes. It's raining outside. It could be night for the lack of light; there's a silhouette of the window across her sheets, pale grey in the black room, flecked with bullets of rainwater. They tap at the glass in mourning. Opposite me is Sherlock. He's treading the fine line between sleep and consciousness, eyes narrowed against the outdoor onslaught, his arms folded tight across his chest and coat collar obscuring the lower portion of his face.

The door swings open, fracturing the heady silence of the hospital room.

John crosses the room with military stiltedness in his step and pulls out the plastic chair beside me. Addy follows suit, her legs working like little pistons under the corduroy of her dungarees: she has both hands in her mouth and a look of tired inquisition in her eyes as she comes to a halt by Millie's bedside. I move over to make room. John sits down heavily –  he's aged considerably in the last three weeks, rapidly, his hair fully grey and the beginnings of a beard beginning to form around the line of his jaw. Insomnia breeds unkempt.

He turns to me, his voice soft.

"I spoke to a nurse. She said she'll send the doctor with painkillers on his next round."

"I don't need painkillers," I lie.

John doesn't bother arguing. He closes his eyes and presses his knuckles to his forehead as if to diffuse the tension manually.

"I couldn't get a straight answer from her."

"Who?"

"The nurse. She said they've moved the baby from ICU, but wouldn't tell me where. Something about patient discretion."

I begin picking at a stray hangnail. "They've stabilised it, I take it."

"Yeah." There's bitterness in his tone. "Our little miracle."

I smile humourlessly, thinking back to the night we all congregated in the hospital lobby. Millie had been carted off to the Emergency Unit like some prize to be won by an ambitious junior doctor: they'd already stolen her relief from her, shocked her cocaine-saturated heart in the back of the ambulance, forced life down her throat. The baby was all but dead when they found it –  malnourished and inhuman and more illegal substance than blood – but again they worked their twisted magic and gave it life it never consented to receive. They hooked it up and enclosed it in plastic and pierced its miniature veins with butterfly needles, pumped it full of better drugs, better blood.