DISCLAIMER: I don't own them. I also know nothing about medicine, so... it's a bit vague.
It's three twenty seven a.m., and she's been awake for almost twenty three hours. As always it seems like a lifetime ago that she was fumbling in the darkness for her ringing phone and rushing through the night to the plane, and onwards to this small Oregon town. Life outside the hospital walls seems like another life, lived by someone who isn't quite Natalie Durant.
There's nothing left for her to do urgently. She's left the autopsied bodies of three children from the same school behind her in the morgue, and she's run every test she possibly can, with no more success than eliminating dozens of viruses. There are six more children lying in a row in sterile white beds with anxious parents hovering beside them. Two of them might not make it to the morning. A nurse is taking care of them, which means monitoring their vital signs and keeping them pumped full of drugs. There's nothing more anyone can do, and there's nothing more Natalie can do right now.
She watches the ward through the long observation window. Everything she's done, everything Stephen's done, everything Miles and Frank and Eva have done seems completely futile. She's used to battling monsters that are bigger than herself, but that doesn't mean there aren't times when she wishes that this was someone else's job.
"Natalie."
She turns around. The blueness of Stephen's eyes is always the first thing she notices. They used to creep her out, but now she regards them as just another part of being Stephen. "Get some sleep," he says.
"Yeah," she says, and turns back to the window. The nurse bends over one of the patients, checks something, and makes a note on his clipboard.
She's well aware of the need to sleep. Everyone else disappeared an hour or two ago; she suspects that Frank is asleep in one of the spare rooms, and she's found both Miles and Eva, crashed out on the sofas in a waiting room. There is another sofa in there, but Eva was muttering something in her sleep, just loud enough to be irritating.
"Natalie," Stephen says, laying his hand on her shoulder. The human contact makes her feel a little bit more real. "You need to get some sleep so we can find out what's killing these kids."
"So do you."
Stephen nods, shrugs, smiles wryly. "Probably." He sighs.
"Why are we doing this?" Natalie asks, not quite intentionally. Even as the words leave her mouth she's aware of putting Stephen on the spot. It's always Stephen who has to answer these questions and inspire the rest of them to keep going.
Who inspires Stephen?
"To save lives," Stephen says softly, his eyes drawn with hers to the two furthest beds, where a six year old boy and an eight year old girl fight a losing battle against an unknown virus.
Natalie is running out of hope for Joshua and Caitlin.
The half-expected sound of an alarm jolts Natalie into sudden action. She's rushing through the door into the ward, Stephen right behind her, to where Joshua's heart, strained beyond endurance by the virus, is giving up. She works automatically, frantically, in the sudden sea of noise around Joshua's bed.
"Clear!" Stephen barks, and she jumps backwards with the nurse as the defib paddles come down on Joshua's chest, sending a current through his body. Joshua's heart rate monitor is still registering a blank.
Stephen tries again, and again. Each time she holds her breath, hoping to buy some more time for Joshua and his parents.
As Stephen tries one last time, the seconds that pass seem like forever.
There will be no more time for Joshua.
A nurse pulls the curtains shut around the bed as Joshua's parents fall on his body.
It will be Natalie's job to run a scalpel down the centre of Joshua's chest, to take out his heart and slice it up. She will hold pieces of this little boy in her gloved hands, and hope Joshua's body will give her the answer she needs to save the others.
Stephen's voice is low, troubled, as he tries to comfort Joshua's parents. They don't want comfort. They want their son back.
Natalie slips quietly out through the curtains, back to where some desperate hope remains. Caitlin's mother is sitting at her daughter's side. "Joshua Dalton is dead, isn't he?"
Caitlin's heart rate monitor shows that her heart is beating much less strongly than it should be. Her face is obscured by the mask that is the only thing getting oxygen into her body. Natalie looks down at the little girl, and back up at her mother. "Yes."
"Can you stop Caitlin dying?"
Oft-repeated platitudes rise up in Natalie's stomach as she looks at the girl. We're doing our best. We're doing everything we can. "I don't know," she says eventually, because there is no other answer she can give.
Caitlin's mother is gazing at her daughter's hand, nestled in her own. "She has a horse show at her barn on Saturday," she says, "She wants a blue ribbon. She's been practicing so hard..."
Even if Natalie can save Caitlin, there'll be no blue ribbons on Saturday and perhaps not ever. She doesn't want to guess at the long term effects of this virus.
"I'm so sorry," she says.
"Have you got children, Dr Durant?"
"No." Natalie waits for the familiar reply - that she must not understand because she doesn't have children.
"Lucky you," says Caitlin's mother. She gestures at Caitlin, at the tubes and wires and machines.
"Dr Durant," says Stephen from behind Natalie, saving her from the need to reply. She follows him out of the ward into the silence beyond. "Natalie, get some sleep before you do Joshua's autopsy."
"Caitlin Reynolds will be dead by then." Natalie's head is clouded with grief, desperation, worry. She can be cool, calm and collected during the day, but the shadows of the night heighten her emotions until she is walking a strange tightrope.
"Nat," Stephen says, and she can see and hear that he shares her desperation. She thinks of Miles, Frank and Eva, and wonders how peacefully they're sleeping.
"What if we can't save Caitlin? What if we can't save any of them?" What if Natalie has to cut them all and try to be as dispassionate as a good scientist should be, as she dissects childish bodies with alien tools?
What if she's finally losing it? What if this feeling is all the stress and pain of long years descending on her like a train wreck?
"Then we just keep on going like we always do."
Natalie nods. She wants to go back to her makeshift lab and do something, anything, to make it seem like Caitlin and the other kids have the chance, and to do anything other than cut up a little boy. But she's tired, maybe so tired she'll accomplish nothing.
Stephen puts his hands on her shoulders. The hands which, ten minutes ago, wielded defib paddles to try to save Joshua's life, feel unexpectedly warm through her shirt. "Nat, I need you rested and thinking so we can get to the bottom of this." His thumbs brush over her collarbones like benevolent ghosts.
"I know that," she says, finally.
"Good. Go and get some sleep then. There's an empty room next to the waiting room where Miles and Eva are."
Natalie nods, a little relieved that someone has taken the decision-making out of her hands. She might not sleep, and she probably won't forget about the virus, but at least it will be quiet for a few hours.
Stephen hasn't taken his hands off her shoulders.
"What about you?" she asks.
"I'll find somewhere."
She knows Stephen. He'll wander the corridors of the hospital, and when she and the others are up and about again after a snatched sleep, Stephen will be going on with his work as though sleep was an irrelevancy to him. Stephen Connor - man or machine?
Natalie almost makes a suggestion, but it dies before she can open her mouth, and an instant later she's relieved. "Well, make sure you get some sleep," she says. "There's a spare sofa in with Miles and Eva."
Stephen pulls a face. "Eva talks in her sleep."
Part of Natalie wants to ask how Stephen knows about this tendency of Eva's, but he's probably too tired to tell that she's teasing him. Eva talks in her sleep on planes and everywhere else they've stolen some sleep, and everyone knows she does it.
"And don't even suggest Frank. He snores."
Natalie, amused despite her exhaustion, raises an eyebrow, and doesn't mention the most obvious choice. "Well, find somewhere."
Stephen nods, and finally takes his hands off her shoulders. "Sleep well, Nat." There's a look of something she can't quite place in his eyes.
"You too." Natalie turns, and makes her way through the corridors to the room Stephen mentioned. Sure enough, it's empty. She sets the alarm on her cellphone, takes off her lab coat, kicks off her shoes, and almost falls into bed. It's a relief to be horizontal.
She doesn't expect to sleep, but somewhere in the place between wakefulness and sleep, she thinks she sees Stephen looking in at her.
The sun hasn't quite risen outside when Natalie makes her way back to the lab. She's not surprised when she finds Stephen in there, sitting in her chair. "Hey."
"Morning." He tosses a Mars bar at her. "Breakfast."
"I'll get something from the cafeteria, thanks. What's been happening?"
"We've had another kid come in. Daisy Elliott, seven years old, same symptons. And Caitlin Reynolds died half an hour ago. Heart failure. Same as all the other kids."
Natalie was expecting this, but she still has to lean against the edge of the table. She nods. "Were you there?"
"Yeah," Stephen says, looking older than she's ever seen him. He's a father, she remembers: so often she tends to leave that out of the equation with him. "Joshua's body is waiting for you. Caitlin's will be there soon."
Natalie nods, dread rising in her stomach. "I'll find an assistant. Where's Miles?"
"With the other patients. I'll assist."
"You don't have to," Natalie says routinely, but she wants Stephen more than Miles, or a strange nurse. He understands these things in the same way she does.
Stephen spins in the chair and his eyes meet hers. "I won't ask you to do anything I'm not willing to do myself."
"Let's do it, then."
Natalie has autopsied more bodies than she cares to remember. Most of the time it doesn't even bother her, and she thinks of what she's doing in terms of science, medical research.
When she's met the patient before their death, it's harder. Natalie finds herself, as she looks at a dying person, preparing to cut them open, but when they lie on the table, all she sees is them as a person rather than a dead body.
Joshua still has a plaster on his elbow from some childish accident. Natalie wonders, as she readies his body, what he was doing. If she was to close her eyes she could probably see Joshua on a school playground, running, climbing, with Caitlin Reynolds chasing him. The other kids, living and dead, are all there. All on the playground - wait.
Joshua has his sticking plaster. Eden McKenzie, the first victim, had a fresh scab on her knee. Victim number two, Jeremy Davies, had grazes on his palms from falling at school and landing on them. Number three, Bailey Sampson, had a skinned knee. Natalie had seen them all, noted them all, seen them as childish accidents.
But what if this is it? What if there's a commonality in all these injuries? What if they all happened in the same place, or were treated in the same way?
"Natalie?"
Natalie spills out her theory. Surely she's right, she must be right. The look on Stephen's face suggests he's thinking the same thing. "Nat, check those kids on the ward. If they've all got wounds like that, find out where and how they happened and take samples. I'll get Eva to talk to the school and get the sick bay records. I'll send Frank down to the school and get him testing the playground, asphalt, anywhere it could have happened."
Natalie nods, feeling more alive than she has since they arrived in Oregon. She tears off Joshua's plaster and takes a sample from the wound. Stephen has disappeared, clearly to round up Frank and Eva.
In the ward, most of the kids are asleep. Natalie quizzes their parents, and they respond eagerly, catching the hope in her voice. Daisy Elliott, their newest patient: tripped over playing tag on the asphalt at school, grazed her knee, had it treated by the school nurse two days before she'd begun showing symptons. Mikayla Olsen: cut her forehead when a boy in her class pushed her over, three days before her symptons appeared. Toby Henderson: another grazed knee from the school asphalt, treated two days before he got sick. Lucas Morris: scraped elbow, school asphalt, three days before the appearance of symptons. Jacob Martin: cut his chin falling over his loose shoelaces, on the asphalt at school, two days before he got ill.
Natalie dashes back to the lab with samples in her hands. She talks to Stephen, who gets Frank taking samples from every foot of the asphalt at the elementary school, and sends Eva to wake up the school nurse and get her records. The bodies of Eden, Jeremy and Bailey yield similar samples, and she begins to run them, one by one, aware of Stephen standing behind her, trying to stare into the microscope with her. Her breath and heartbeat seem to be mingling with his as she works: this has to be it. It has to be.
"I've got it!" Natalie understands why King Archimedes leapt out of his bath. "I know what this virus is." How the kids got it is still a mystery, but Frank and Eva between them will no doubt come up with the solution.
"Can we stop it?" Stephen asks breathlessly.
"Yes." They can't reverse the damage done to the children's hearts, but no more of them will die. Of that Natalie is certain. "I'll get NIH to find the nearest hospital with the drugs, get them sent in - " She reaches for the phone, and in her enthusiasm does her best impression of Eva Rossi, although simple Natalie Durant would have sufficed.
"Good work, Nat," Stephen says when she hangs up the phone.
"If only I'd gotten it earlier - " If only she'd gotten it earlier, Joshua and Caitlin and probably Bailey Sampson would still be alive.
"Don't play that game, Nat. You gave it everything you had."
"But it wasn't enough for those kids." Her euphoria is rapidly dissipating. It was so obvious, she'd noticed wounds on each of the dead kids and never put them together. She failed those kids, and she failed those families. "I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner."
Stephen shakes his head with sadness in his eyes. "You can't think like that, Natalie. You'll lose it. I know, I've been there."
She nods. Stephen is talking sense, of course he is: he always does. And this job does get to them all after a while; it's why they're provided with counselling.
But that doesn't mean that right now she's not feeling lost. "What are we doing?"
"We're saving lives, Natalie. I know what you're thinking, but we save more than we lose. Nat, if it wasn't for us, how many more people would be dead?"
She doesn't want to think about that.
"Come here," Stephen says quietly, and she lets him put his arms around her. It occurs to her that Stephen Connor is probably just as lonely as she is. What a pair they make, she thinks, resting her head against his shoulder. She couldn't do this job without him. It's a slightly scary thought. "Are you okay?" he asks.
"I will be," Natalie says, closing her eyes. She doesn't want to see the lab. "What about you?" She feels Stephen's head against hers.
"I will be," he whispers into her ear.
She nods. She's pretty sure she understands what he means.
THE END