#through Jays thick skull and then force him to realise that no. no jays still incredibly fucked in the head and does not understand his own

[squarebracketsmileyface]

Thinking about Jam again and how angsty I can make the next fic after My Girl

Found this on a discord server I'm on lol and immediately went "me and the urge to make angst as angsty as possible"

[spaceprimcessleia]

Still Worth Saving 3

A seagull squawks in her ear; she throws a chip to the end of the dock. It flies after it, splattering its faeces on the wood and Sam crumples the empty wrapper and shoves it in her pocket. She can see enough from her vantage point to know that Dylan isn’t alone on his boat. There are shadows moving across the windows, a blurred outline that’s definitely not him.

She strides along the dock and knocks firmly on the door. It’s there again, that same scrabbling sound along with Dylan hushing whoever’s there. Sam rolls her eyes. Dylan can be great at keeping secrets as long as there’s very little actual evidence to hid; his social awkwardness to blame for both. She tries the door and it opens.

Dylan stares at her. “Why does no one understand the concept of private property?”

Behind him is a boy. Maybe eleven, twelve. His eyes are fixed fearfully on Sam.

“Dylan, who is this?”

He sighs. “Will you at least shut the door?”

Keep reading, or:

Read on A03

Bea slides up to her when she’s trying to have ten minutes of peace and a coffee between call outs. It used to be that she never had a moment off of her feet and it was how she loved it.  In some ways it’s like being back in the army: working with Iain again, waiting for the crackling of the radio that will give them their next job, scenes of carnage and horror- but in too many ways it’s not.

“Hey.” Sam smiles tightly back. “How are you? I mean after-”

“No lasting damage.” She wants to say better than a four year old who has permanent lung damage.

Bea slides her hands into the pockets of her scrubs. “It was amazing, what you did. Insane, but amazing.” In her awe, for a moment,  Sam remembers how it felt to finally be doing something more than picking up the patient and driving them to the real doctors.

But to Bea, she just shrugs. “Once a soldier.”

“Soldier?”

“I was an army doctor, along with Iain.”

Bea’s eyes widen, but at least she doesn’t ask what everyone else does when they hear that.

Did you ever kill anyone?

~*~

“You never did tell me what happened with you and Tom,” says Iain while she’s driving the ambulance. And it’s casual, but there’s something else there too.

Sam ignores him She ignores her heart, fluttering like a trapped butterfly beating its wings against glass, ignores her breath that hitches in her throat. She ignores them, and watches the road.

“Oi.” Iain pokes her knee. “Give me a sob story and I might even buy you a drink later.”

She unglues her teeth, peels the words from her lips. “You got it right. I cheated.” (What else is she going to tell him?)

“Knew it. Bet he wasn’t as good as me though.” She doesn’t glance at him, but she knows he’s winking at her. Like they’re still in a bunker, crammed onto a bed meant for one and he’s making her feel like she doesn’t have glass in her chest.

Now, he’s making her feel like it’s a boulder.

~*~

He drove them home afterwards with a face carved from marble. Sam sat slightly slouched against the door from the gin.

“You had fun.” Tom’s voice crackled through the silence like distant thunder, but Sam wasn’t in the mood to blunt the edge in it.

“I did actually.”

“You made me look like an idiot, draped all over him.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Who?”

“Come on, Sam. I have eyes.” Right then they weren’t on the road.

“You mean Jay?” His fists tightened on the wheel.

Jay, an old friend she hadn’t seen since she left the army, once almost as important to her as Iain. Dylan hadn’t minded that time he had come to visit on the boat and thrown her into the sea. She didn’t think it was the moment to tell Tom, though. “He’s my lover,” she said instead. “We’re running away to the Caribbean together to open a lemonade bar.”

The silence was worse than his jibes, but she didn’t take hers back. His speed crept up, even though the headlights barely cut through the dark and fog. “Speed,” she warned, but he took it as an invitation.

There was nothing else on the road, not yet, but they were going too fast to stop.

“Tom, slow down.” The bravery the alcohol had given her crumbled into terror as the engine roared beneath them.

He flicked off the headlights, shutting them in darkness.

~*~

The blanket smells a little like dog but it’s thick and soft (and it smells like him too). He throws up the heat and by the time they reach his boat she’s almost warm again.

Dervla runs to greet her as soon as she steps inside; she runs in circles around her, yipping when she realises who it is. Sam scratches behind her ears and the dog takes her place at her old co-owner’s feet. Dylan shakes his head. “I explained to her that you wouldn’t be around any more.”

Sam’s eyebrows lift to the ceiling. “You explained the concept of a divorce to a dog?”

“No. I simply told her you had gone away but that time you wouldn’t be back.”

“Did you tell her I still loved her very much and none of it was her fault?”

“If you’re just going to take the mick you can get  the bus back to your own house and have Indian alone.”

She throws up her hands in surrender, but she can actually feel a smile creeping onto her face. It’s been a long time since anything has been easy between them. There had been a few peaceful weeks, after the cave, an almost truce. Then he had dressed up to ask for another go and she had served him with divorce papers. Maybe she deserves his rejection.

But then he notices her shiver and ushers his dog away so she can sink onto the sofa where there are more blankets. “Tea,” he announces before disappearing into the kitchen.

//

“He didn’t consent,” Sam tells him ten minutes later with her sleeves pulled her her hands- those wrapped around a mug of tea hot enough to blow clouds of steam into her face. “He was...scared. Confused. He just kept begging us not to take it.”

Dylan looks at her , almost softly. “If you hadn’t amputated, what would have happened?”

“He would have died. Maybe his sister too if we couldn’t make her leave him.”

“Well then,” he says as if that settles it. To him it does. To Dylan it’s always black and white, it is or it isn’t. To her, it’s another layer of guilt.

~*~

A woman is rocking her dead child, her fingers brushing his hair as though he can still feel it. She looks up, her eyes locking with Sam’s. په دوزخ کې اوریدل.

Burn in Hell.

She turns and runs, her feet pounding on the hot sand even as she screams at herself to turn back. A sun scorched steering wheel burned her skin as she drove, kicking up dust behind her, but the woman and her child never got any further away. They grew bigger.

Her head turns towards the passenger seat. There’s a man sitting there, a  gaping hole in his forehead and tears streaming down his cheeks, running paths along the soot on his cheeks. In his fist he holds his inhaler. Silently, he mouths at her. Help me. She fires another hole into his chest.

Dylan’s body slumps in the seat, his eyes wide but with the kind of emptiness of a school at midnight. She screams. Tom clamps his hand over her mouth, crushing her nose against her skull. She tries to breathe but it just makes her chest tighter. He pushes her into the bed.

“Don’t say his name.”

She squeezes her eyes shut and turns her gaze away from what he’s going to do.

When she opens them she sees darkness. Shadows cast against the walls and a figure in front of her, dark and small and speaking words she can barely understand. “Wake up, Miss Samantha. Wake up.”  

A dream. Thank god.

(Except it wasn’t entirely).

She forces herself to sit up, her limbs stiff and tingling from the way she’s slept (on Dylan’s sofa, apparently). There are thick blankets draped around her and she throws them off, even as she shivers at the sweat cooling on her skin. “Where’s Dylan?” she asks Sanosi, fighting the impulse to reach out and switch on the light.

“Asleep. You were having a bad dream,” he adds, like she might not have figured it out.

Her heart is beating so hard she feels sick. Sanosi squints at her through the darkness, his forehead crinkled. “Shall I get Doctor Dylan?”

“No!” Sam says, too quickly. “It’s all right. I’m okay.”

The boy doesn’t look convinced.

She switches on the light. “I think we both need a hot chocolate.” Sanosi’s face breaks into a grin.

She knows her way around the kitchen as if there’s a map drawn into her brain; she even remembers to flick the button twice because it takes Dylan’s ancient cooker a while to wake up. She makes it in the pan, the only real way to do it, melting chocolate into the milk (she still knows where Dylan keeps his stash for his more-frequent-than-he-would-ever-admit cravings).

Sanosi has a curve of milk foam around his top lip before Sam’s has even cooled enough to drink (she added a little cold milk to his). But there’s still a loud part of her tugging her limbs to move, to get out of there because it’s the middle of the night and she should not be on her ex-husband’s boat making hot chocolate for his stowaway.

“I have them too,” he says when his hot chocolate is almost gone. “I see the men with guns, and my family.” He doesn’t go on. He doesn’t need to. It’s the same things she sees- children with stumps where their legs used to be and dead women with arms still wrapped around their baby’s corpse. Herself holding the gun.

“He said you were one of the good ones.”

A sudden crunch of agony crushes her so tightly she wants to curl in on herself. She hasn’t been good for so long- in too many ways to explain to a child. And she can hardly think of herself as a soldier any longer.

She doesn’t, can’t, say anything but Sanosi doesn't seem to expect her to. He steals another marshmallow from the bag and she doesn’t say anything about that either, but she does take the bag away after he’s had his sixth.