Chapter Text
Two minutes doesn’t sound like a whole lot of time, not even when you break it down to seconds, but truth is… Einstein was right, time is relative.
At a normal rate, a heart beats over a hundred and fifty times in the span of those same two minutes; over three hundred times during normal exercise. In reality, it can beat over four hundred times in that time span before it starts malfunctioning. Edrisa’s heart rate rarely goes over sixty beats per minute on a rushed day, and she’s fine with that.
The male orgasm lasts for about five to six seconds, while women can reach from ten seconds to five minutes, if they’re lucky in their choice of partner. Lately, she hadn’t been. She likes the cuddling part though, and that can last well over five minutes.
The coffee machine in the break room downstairs takes about three minutes to produce a decent cup of coffee, five to burn it. She drinks an average of four burned coffees a day.
It takes roughly 60 seconds for the traffic light across the NYPD to go from green to red and in those last twenty seconds, it flashes so angrily in warning for the eminent change that Edrisa usually prefers to wait for the next one rather than risk becoming one more casualty for the day. Too many maimed corpses pass though her hands daily for her not to know exactly the end result of an altercation between human body and large, heavy, metal machine; not to mention the number of crazy people that she knows for a fact that roam the city behind a steering wheel at any given time. So, she waits.
Average, healthy adults have around five liters of blood flowing through them at any given time; it takes about one minute or less for a major hemorrhage to reduce that volume to nearly half. Half is not very compatible with life.
And yet, none of those facts explain why Edrisa finds herself late night at work, after one more failed blind date, with a nasty taste of burned coffee on her tongue, frozen in place while her heart hammers violently against her ribcage at nearly two hundred beats per minute, watching in horror as JT's hands turn slowly crimson as he desperately tries to keep some blood inside Malcolm, as the brilliant profiler bleeds all over the pristine floor of her morgue.
“The ambulance will be here in two minutes,” Dani’s voice, cracking at the seams, whispers in the otherwise quiet room. Or maybe it just sounds quiet now that the sound of gunfire and pained screams has faded.
Two minutes.
All of them know that that’s too damn long. An eternity of not enough time.