Chapter Text
Adam wakes slowly. His head is foggy, and he has a dim memory of someone screaming, and the loud retort of a pistol, but it’s all a hazy mishmash. A bad dream that’s already fading beyond his ability to recall it.
His eyelids blink open, see nothing but vague shapes of light and shadow, then, heavy as they are, slide closed again, and the blackness takes him once more.
An indeterminate time later, he wakes again. This time the room is dark. There’s a bright white light, coming from the hallway. The distant squeak of rubber soled shoes on tile.
A hospital, he thinks dimly. I must be in hospital.
The next time he wakes, there’s a nurse, with quite a lot of red hair and a high pitched, squeaky voice, asking him questions he can’t answer. She shifts him this way and that, cleaning his body with perfunctory swipes of a damp, warm cloth, and he is helpless to do anything but lay there and be subjected to her ministrations, like a newborn child. He’d be humiliated if he had the strength for it. Whenever he tries to move, a sharp pain blossoms in his chest on the left hand side.
The red haired nurse goes away, and Adam slips back into unconsciousness.
The next time he opens his eyes, it is night once more, his senses are clearer, and best of all, Miskin is there. She’s seated in a chair by his bed, her head bent over a book, but when he moves and makes a soft moaning sound, she looks up quickly.
“Sir?” she asks.
“Kate?” He peers at her, wondering if she’s an hallucination. Her face, in the dim yellow light of his bedside lamp, is soft and pretty, like that of an angel.
It isn’t until her face changes to a look of surprise that he realises he’s said that last bit out loud.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. “They’ve got me on a lot of drugs.
“It’s alright, sir. You just focus on getting better.”
“What happened?” he asks.
“The Baldwin case,” she says, and god, she’s so good. Another officer might have told him not to worry about what happened until after he feels better, but she jumps right into it. A dyed in the wool detective. “You went after him down a dark alley apparently, even though your partner warned you not to.”
There’s a slight note of disapproval in her tone. He gets the feeling he’s being gently scolded.
“Oh. And I suppose he shot me, did he?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did we get him?”
“Yes. He’s being held at the station for processing.”
“Good.”
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you do it? Go running after him like that? It wasn’t safe. You had men that could have done it for you.”
Adam shakes his head groggily. “I was the only one who knew him and knew what he’d do next,” he says, fighting to get the words out through a swell of drug induced dizziness. “If I hadn’t, he would have gotten away.” How can he explain that his own life means nothing if it can’t be used to stop someone intent on taking the lives of others?
“But. It was risky,” she says, elegant brows drawing together in concern. “You-” she stops abruptly, and Adam isn’t sure why, until she begins speaking again, only this time in a voice thick with emotion. “You could have died,” she finishes, and is that a tear he sees, making a wet line down her cheek?
“Don’t cry,” he says, and uses all the strength he possesses to reach for and enfold her hand with his own. “Don’t cry. I love you.”
It seems to be the appropriate thing to say at the moment, and it has the added benefit of being true. He does love her, quite dearly, and it dawns on him that he’s never told her this before. Why is that, he wonders? She’s so lovely and so good. So smart and so brave. Of course he loves her. He’s been quite silly, not letting her know sooner.
Only his words don’t make her feel better at all. Instead, she withdraws her hand from his and stands abruptly. She wipes at her face with her fingers, and takes in a deep, shuddering breath. “It’s time for me to go,” she says, sounding even more upset than a moment ago.
Adam is confused. “Please don’t,” he says. “I like you being here.”
She seems torn. She glances swiftly at him, then at the doorway, her dark eyes still glimmering with tears.
“No, it’s best if I leave,” she says, sounding resigned. “I’ll return tomorrow, and the next day, if you’ll have me.”
“Of course. You’re always welcome.” he says, as if this is his home, and he’s inviting her to come back for tea next Sunday.
“Very well. Goodnight, sir.”
“Goodnight, Kate.”
She leaves, and Adam drifts back to sleep. The last thought he has before unconsciousness claims him once more is of her dark, tear-filled eyes, and he wonders what he could have done to make her so sad.
_____________________________
He grows steadily better. Depends less and less on the pain pills as the days turn into weeks. The memories of Miskin’s late night visit, her tears, fades away as the drugs loosen their hold on him. He’s unsure exactly what was said, but he remembers her crying. He supposes he’d scared her quite badly by getting himself into this state, and feels a pang of guilt over it. He’s unsure why her opinion matters so much more than everyone else’s, but it does.
Apparently, the bullet had blazed a path very close to his heart, yet had miraculously missed several major arteries. It had fortunately passed clean through him, hitting the wall behind him, and hadn’t lodged somewhere in his spine. He had indeed been very lucky.
The doctors pronounce him well enough to go home a month after he arrives. He can almost not believe he’s spent this long in hospital, but acknowledges that fully half of that time was spent slipping in and out of consciousness, full of painkillers.
“You can’t go home on your own,” the doctor is telling him. Miskin is there. She visits daily, just like she’d promised, and Adam is endlessly grateful for her company, and for the news she brings him of the goings on in their shared profession. “Your wife here will have to help you around the house and clean your wound.”
Miskin goes pink under her dusky complexion next to him, and Adam clears his throat. “My wife died, several years ago now,” he says, his voice devoid of emotion. He can feel Kate stiffen at his side, and wonders if she knew. He certainly hadn’t told her, but the way office gossip works, he wouldn’t be surprised if someone else had.
"Who is this then?" asks the doctor, jutting his chin at Kate. He’s a cocky bastard. Adam knows the type. The sort who thinks a medical degree entitles him to consider himself a God among men.
He opens his mouth to defend Kate, but she speaks up, loudly and assertively.
“I’m his former Detective Sergeant, but you can call me Detective Inspector Miskin,” She replies, and one sideways glance shows that her eyes are sparking with defiance.
“Do you have any other relatives?” The doctor asks Adam, ignoring Miskin.
“None,” Adam says, and he wishes it wasn’t true, but Sarah’s parents had become distant after their daughter and grandson had died. His friends from uni weren’t around any longer. A few had died off. A few had found families of their own. He didn’t have a social life. He was married to his work.
“Sir, can I speak to you in private?” Miskin asks, pulling him from his thoughts.
“Certainly. Doctor, would you excuse us for a moment?”
The doctor looks offended in the extreme, but he makes a curt nod and leaves.
“I doubt we’ll be seeing him again for a while,” Adam says, after the door to the room closes behind the arrogant man.
“I’ll do it,” Kate says, and he looks at her in mild confusion.
“Do what?” he asks.
“I’ll come take care of you,” she says. She’s looking at him with a fierce determination in the set of her girlish features, and he isn’t sure how to take it.
“But, you’ve got a job,” he says.
“Yes, and I’ll still go to work. I’ll just come home a bit early each day, and if you have a spare room, I’ll stay with you. Cook and clean a bit and help you change your bandages. My father had heart surgery when I was little. He wasn’t allowed to lift anything heavier than two or three kilos, and he couldn’t leave the house to go grocery shopping. I’d say you’ve also had heart surgery, of a sort anyway. It’s not an easy situation, and if you tear your stitches open, that’s more time in hospital.”
She’s clearly put some thought into this, and she has a point. Only, he can’t quite picture her living inside his home. It seems too intimate for the way they’ve typically spent time together.
You’ve typically spent time together peering at dead bodies, his mind supplies helpfully.
“Very well,” he says, his voice going gruff, and face going hot. “If you can manage it.”
“You’ll be paying me,” she says.
He’s surprised by her statement, as he’d be glad to pay her, but hadn’t thought about it. Why hadn’t he? Because she’s a woman? Because caretaking is her job? No, he’d never believed that. Perhaps he’d wanted her to do it from some sort of labour of love? That’s ridiculous, and he shakes his head a bit to dislodge the idea before it can put down roots.
“Of course,” he says. “Name your price”.
“Just enough to cover petrol and groceries and a little extra as I’ll need to go home daily to care for my plants and pick up the post from my own flat,” she replies with a rueful smile. “I promise not to bankrupt you.”
“Excellent. It’s a plan,” he says confidently, though inside, he’s already a bundle of nerves. He’s accepted her offer without fussing, but that’s mostly because he’s desperate. He knows she’s right. He can’t live on his own. At least not for the next few weeks. He still feels stiffness and pain from his bullet wound, and gets dizzy when he stands for too long. He sits now, on the bed, as the thought of Kate living under his roof and cooking him supper is making him dizzy as it is.
“Right. I’ll talk to the doctor about what I’ll need to do for you. I’ll return to help you to the car,” and with that, she’s off. Out of the room before he can say another word.
She’s changed a lot since he last saw her at the district meeting several months ago. She’s a Detective Inspector now, with her own team to manage, and she’d taken well to it. When he’d first met her, she’d lacked confidence. She’d not known when she could speak up. She’d been pushed around by Masterson.
Fucking Masterson. He can still see the man’s frightened eyes when he’d cornered his former DS by his desk the next day.
“You lied to me, and you lied to DS Miskin,” he’d said. Calmly stating facts, when what he’d wanted to do was shove the young man up against the cork board behind him and rearrange his face. “You put her life in danger. You put that little boy’s life in danger.”
The fear on Masterson’s face had been replaced far too quickly with arrogant derision. A flawed coping mechanism that did him no favours. “Yeah, well, she got on my nerves, always runnin after you like a puppy dog. She needed to be taken down a peg or two.”
“She’s a far better officer than you’ll ever be,” Adam had said. He’d waited a beat, just to see the recognition and pain bloom in Masterson’s eyes, then he’d turned and walked away. He’d of course recommended that the young man be sacked, and it had happened, after a lengthy inquest into the lies he’d told, and the campaign of bullying and mockery he’d aimed at Miskin for the entirety of their time spent working together. Good riddens.
Kate returns shortly, carrying a pile of papers in one hand, and leading a nurse with a wheelchair.
“I can walk out to the car,” Adam says, not wanting to seem even older and more infirm than he feels at the moment.
“You can’t actually,” Miskin replies with a one-sided grin. “Hospital policy. They don’t want you calling a solicitor if you fall and knock your head on the way out.”
“If you insist,” Adam says, sitting down in the chair, and dutifully putting his feet in the supports.
She wheels him out to her car, a small, beat up thing with a scratched paint job, and helps him in. Her hand under his arm and at his shoulder feels better than he’d anticipated, and he realises with a start that they don’t touch each other.
Once he’s settled in the passenger seat, she gets in and buckles up. She looks over at him. “Ready to go home, sir?” she asks.
His mind immediately flies to the empty, dark nursery on the second floor of the house, and he feels a pang of familiar grief. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” he replies.