A House in Dorset (1/2)
Title: A House in Dorset (1/2)
Author: shan14
Rating: M
Pairing: Helen/John
Word count: 1395 words
Summary: Speculative 3x19 (Out of the Blue) fic.
Spoilers: Out of the Blue. Don't read if you don't want to be spoiled for next Monday's episode, 3x19 Out of the Blue
They have a house in Dorset that is empty.
Pink curtains drift lazily in the breeze of their daughter’s bedroom. A dolls house set has been scattered across the floor and its inhabitants sit along the bed, waiting for their furniture to be returned.
Helen refuses to move anything. Refuses to close the window at night even as the chill seeps through the floorboards to their bed. Ashley’s dresses and skirts and hair clips and shoes lie throughout the house in various stages. Some clean, some dirty, some where the young child had dropped them after a hot bubble bath at night.
Helen refuses to touch anything their daughter left them, and John refuses to touch her. Instead they dance around each other and their house whilst the ghost of a little girl giggles quickly down corridors.
--
Their daughter’s death goes something like this:
John was cutting someone open.
Surgery, to be precise. Something performed countless times over. He’s never forgotten the thrill of whispering a scalpel down warm skin; the beat of a heart held steady beneath his fingertips.
He saves peoples lives when he cuts them open.
--
Helen was painting.
The back garden, to be precise. A little fairy with blonde hair was running throughout the flowers, chasing butterflies in the mild afternoon sun. The phone had rung and Ashley’s bicycle was out the front and Helen had to answer it because it might be the curator.
“Don’t go out the front until I’m back,” she told the little girl sternly.
Ashley nodded angelically.
Her eye was caught by a butterfly overhead and she scampered back into the flowers. Helen slipped through the door and caught the phone as it rang.
It wasn’t the curator. Merely someone selling products. She closed her eyes in annoyance and instead listened to a car screech down the road out front.
It was when the screeching had been followed by an unearthly scream that Helen’s heart had stopped.
--
It hasn’t beat since.
“She was chasing butterflies,” she murmurs softly, lips pressed to the stiff collar at John’s throat. His arms are wrapped around her, rocking them slowly, and the plastic hospital chair digs painfully into his back. He wriggles deeper into it and holds his breath through the pain.
I’ll keep sitting on this if you let her survive, he thinks carefully. I’ll sit through the pain, and try to be home more on weekends, and won’t schedule meetings during Helen’s shows to avoid Nicolas and will stop disappearing with Nigel to go fishing and will be there. Just please let her survive.
It takes him a moment to realise Helen is still whispering to herself, so he tucks her dark head further under his chin and grips her tightly.
--
Gregory returns for the funeral.
John’s not sure where he came from. He thought his father-in-law had been traipsing through India. The last he’d seen of Ashley was at her second birthday party when he’d presented the child a raggedy doll that could have been from the Victorian Era.
Helen had smiled warmly at her father and steered him towards the library, signally subtly for John to extract the decaying toy from their young daughters mouth.
“I’m so very sorry John,” Gregory murmurs as the church fills with mourners. “I only wish I’d had more time to get to know her,” his father-in-law continues, and John feels a rage course through him. He steps forward, raises a hand to grip at Gregory’s tie and wants to spit that if he’d bloody been here the past 5 years he could have seen his granddaughter at any moment.
“I only wish she’d gotten to know you, but I guess she died long before you gave her the chance to know her own grandfa-”
He’s yanked away by James’ steady hand only to struggle until Nigel drags him backwards.
People are watching now. Helen is watching a few metres away, as Nicholas stands close by her.
Fuck this, he thinks and pushes his friends from him.
It’s his daughter’s funeral. They should all be glad he didn’t turn up in the coffin next to her.
--
Their house in Dorset is quiet. Empty.
John continues to cut people open and Helen watches shadows across a blank canvas in the morning sun.
This continues for a week until John doesn’t return home one evening.
Helen only notices when he fails to wake her in the morning.
She creeps across the floorboards in socks and peers down the stairs. She can’t see him in the front room. Nor is he in the kitchen. Or the bathroom. She finally braves the cool morning and tiptoes out front. His car isn’t in the driveway.
Her heart is beating erratically and her hands fumble against the door as she pulls it closed. She must ring James, she decides. James will know what to do about her lost husband.
She’s mid way through dialing his number when the flashing light reaches her gaze. She slowly presses the phone to her ear and listens to the message bank.
Helen, it’s James. I want you to stop panicking. John is fine. He’s asleep in my front room. I’ll drop him back home when he wakes.
She goes to interrupt the message, aware of the absurdity, but equally aware that John has surgery scheduled the morning.
I rang the hospital as well Helen. They were a bit frazzled, but understanding. They’re pushing for him to take some extra leave…I think it might be a good idea.
But we’ll talk about that some other time. So stop worrying darling and get some more sleep. You need it.
Slowly she pushes the phone back to its cradle. She collapses against the hallway and sinks to the floor, resting her head in her hands. Something, a pure emotion, floods through her. She’s not sure what it is. Certainly it should be relief.
But it’s not.
It’s something like a bone deep weariness; though she’s slept more in the past month than ever before. In her dreams the blonde fairy in the garden is alive and twirling with laughter and she wants to stay in that bright world forever.
Perhaps it’s living that leaves her so weary.
--
John is returned to her in the afternoon, his clothes smelling like an alehouse. She doesn’t speak to him until the following day.
--
A month later he sits in his office, sifting through files until he stumbles across his current patient. Documents scatter across his desk as his eyes fall on her photo.
She is young. Perhaps 15 at most, with long blonde hair pulled back messily.
Her bright smile sparks something within him that he’d rather not think about.
He slams the folder shut.
--
Later that afternoon he watches as nurses congregated around the 15 year old on the table. His hands have been scrubbed and gloved and he can see the scalpel resting on a tray beside her body. His heart beats loudly, blood rushing past his ears.
“John?”
He startles.
“Are we ready?” he asks the nurse who’s been calling his name the past minute.
“All except you,” she quips, and he feels a trickle of dread down his spine.
--
It starts with the young ones. Young girls, to be precise. Young, blonde girls are perhaps the very worst.
He can’t help but see his daughter in them.
He catches one smiling with her brothers and parents days after surgery and grips a pen painfully to halt the desires within him.
Why on earth should he spend his day saving these young, blonde children when his fellow doctors could do nothing to save his own; his only daughter, who was infinitely more important and beautiful and special than any of these?
He treats a middle aged woman who’s smoking has destroyed her body and drowns himself down the pub hours later to quell the urge to sabotage everything.
Why the hell should he save someone who’s willingly destroyed their body when his innocent, laughing daughter had died chasing butterflies?
He downs another glass and slams it to the bar top. It cracks open in his hand and with a start he realises he can’t feel anything, despite the jaded shards shattered through his skin.
Warm, thick blood seeps slowly through his fingertips.
He lets it.
...