prompting part XXIII

[sherlockbbc_fic]

Please check the Sticky Post to find the newest active part and post your prompts there.
Prompts from this post can be filled on the Overflow Post

IMPORTANT! Spoilers for aired episodes are now being allowed on this area of the meme, without warning. If you do not want to encounter spoilers, please prompt at our Spoiler-Free Prompt Post.

Comments

FILL: "Birdsong" 1/4

[tacotheshark]

I guess saying this would take a while made me want to do it more, I don't know. I was in school and it just sort of happened, which is cool.

Read at my journal.
Read on Ao3.

Anna Milligan is a lovely woman, intelligent as well, with shining orange hair like fire, striking emerald eyes, and dreams of a beautiful future and life that she has never hesitates to share with anyone willing to listen. She’s brought so much hope to so many lives, with her smile and her words. She is everything one could want in a wife or a mother, and then she is so much more.

As Anna Milligan lies in a hospital bed, with clumps of hair that’s turned dull missing and the rest cut short, and with an oxygen tube strapped across her pale face and in her nose to help her breathe, her eyes are as bright as ever, filled with the hope and happiness that would fit anywhere but at the same time nowhere better than in the eyes and heart of a young woman who’s had cancer for years.

By Anna’s bedside, in three rickety plastic chairs, sit Anna’s husband, their ten-year-old son, and their fifteen-year-old daughter, who has the same beautiful eyes and hair as her mother. She’s so young, so full of life, it would be such a tragedy if her mother’s cancer ruined her as well.

As the beeps of the heart monitor to which Anna is hooked up begin to falter, the five working hearts in the room begin to quicken with the panic that fills them. Anna’s three family members sit still, terrified to move, with their eyes filled with the horror and despair of a million tragedies and more.

Among the two doctors in the room is John Watson, who had never before lost a patient. He has only been a doctor for a year or so, but he’s good- very good, tremendously good, as it’s been said. While his more practiced partner- an oncologist he’s assisting- remains relatively calm and skillful, John panics, but it doesn’t do a thing to save Anna’s life.

In Anna’s last moments, she mutters with a weak voice to match her weak heart, “Jeff, I love you, Megan, Joseph.” Her husband’s hand is in here, and he kisses her a final time as her green eyes go glassy and dry, with all the hope and love escaping them like a runaway phantom, a wisp of something strong that’s evaporated into the air.

John never forgets those eyes, that hair, that smile. He attends the funeral- he’s invited eagerly by the family- and the rest of his career is spent remembering that horrid moment and trying harder than ever before to prevent another. Though, it does happen, as it’s impossible for it not do, but it’s never as much of a shock as the first and it’s never do disappointing.