Your gateway to endless inspiration
Thinking about how Kate had a bit of a gap between working at DIA and starting at the FBI, and knowing that she was estranged from Lucy at the time and while she was becoming closer to Tennant at that time, she didn’t seem to have many close friends, it makes me wonder how long it would have taken someone to notice if something happened to her in that period. I’m not sure what it is about Kate that makes me imagine her in sadder and/or lonelier circumstances
She's not supposed to be working right now. She'd tried to schedule so that she'd only have a weekend between jobs—wrap DIA on Friday and start FBI on Monday—but that hadn't worked. She'd been saddled with two full weeks between, and she'd tried to tell herself that it was fine, that she was in Hawai’i and people pay thousands and thousands of dollars for two week vacations in Hawai’i! She should go surfing and hike up a volcano and eat all the poke and moco loco and saimin she can handle and sleep late and use the fucking hot tub on her deck she never remembers she has.
But all of that only occupies her mind for a couple of days. She finishes at DIA on Friday, by Tuesday she's bored, and by Thursday she's breaking rules and wandering the Pearl offices, running into Lucy and making jokes that fall flat, sneaking info to Tennant about the Maggie Shaw hearing like she still has a job.
She gets slightly busted, though. Not majorly, but Dale from DIA sees her and says something about "hey, aren't you off the clock these days, Whistler?" with something like a smirk because he’s always hated her—most men do, when you're better at the job than they are and take less time to do it—and she'd had to back off.
No more field trips to Pearl, no more Lucy sightings. She spends one night drinking with Tennant but then the next week and a half are in front of her, bleak and empty, nothing to do but torture herself with memories of good times with Lucy and bad times with Cara and every single opportunity she had but passed up to make things right and get herself free and clear before it all blew up in her face.
She's usually fine on her own, not overly prone to loneliness. Or, well, maybe her usual baseline of loneliness is so high that it's hard for it to get to a level that feels significantly worse. She's not sure. But anyway, usually she's fine with being alone, and this week she's not. This week it hurts.
So of course this is the week she wakes up on her bathroom floor in a small pool of blood.
She's not sure how she got there. She's not sure why she's in the bathroom or how long she's been there. Her hand is sticky with blood. Once she can do anything other than just stare at it, her logical mind starts to slowly move forward. She takes in what she’s seeing. The blood is still kind of warm and wet, so she can't have been out that long. She finds her phone near her on the ground, the screen protector cracked. She hadn't sent anyone a text or made any calls, no indication of what happened.
She unsteadily climbs to her feet and looks in the mirror. From the floor she hadn't been able to tell where the blood had come from, but now she can see it's from her head. Or it must be from her head, because her hair is crimson and matted with it, on her right side just below and behind her ear. She looks down at the floor, and yes, there. An impact mark.
She’d fallen and hit her head on the ground.
In way this makes her feel better—head wounds notoriously bleed a lot. They always look worse than they are. In another way, this makes her feel worse. What the fuck happened? It’s seems like the falling happened before her head was hit, probably, based on what she’s seeing around her, so does that mean she passed out and then hit her head? And if so, what the fuck? Why? She’s never done that before.
She takes a few pictures with a shaking hand—of herself in the mirror, the floor, the scene, and then she washes her hands and shakily orders an uber.
It feels weird to get into a stranger’s car when she’s this vulnerable, not sure what happened or if it’ll happen again, literally bleeding from a head wound, but she doesn’t have other options. She’s not about to drive and endanger other people, and there’s no one she can call.
She thinks for a second about calling Tennant, but it’s late and Tennant has kids and just because they drank together once doesn’t mean she wants Tennant to see her like this. She thinks for five seconds about calling Lucy. If this happened to Lucy, if Lucy woke up five minutes ago covered in her own blood, shaking and confused, Kate would want to be called. She would want to get that call, to race over to Lucy’s apartment and take her to the hospital and wait for her and take her home and make her comfortable and take care of her, even if Lucy still hates her.
If she found out this happened to Lucy and Lucy ordered a fucking uber to the hospital, she’d be pissed as fuck.
But she’s not Lucy, and Lucy isn’t her, and Lucy won’t talk to her. Lucy still hates her, and Kate deserves it.
So Kate calls an uber.
She changes her bloody shirt, puts on a baseball hat and a jacket with a popped collar, and doesn’t give the driver a good look at the right side of her head. The drive isn’t long, but the waiting room at the hospital is full. She’d have thought that bleeding out of her head would get her seen quickly, but everyone seems pretty blasé about it. She waits for hours, her head aching and her vision swimming.
Other people go up to the charge nurse, saying things like, “My mother has been here for two hours, how long until she’s seen,” and “When will my daughter’s discharge papers be ready,” and “My husband is having trouble breathing.”
She wonders if she’s the only person there alone. The girl next to her doesn’t have anyone with her but Kate can see her phone, and she’s texting someone who is asking her for regular updates.
Kate doesn’t text anyone.
It’s five hours before she’s seen. She gets asked the same questions four times—nurse, other nurse, intern, resident—and gets a few tests before she gets four stitches and she’s sent on her way. What happened? They couldn’t possibly speculate. All her tests are normal. Go home.
If she had someone to text, she’d say, “Jesus I should have stitched myself up at home. What a waste of time,” or “Our tax dollars hard at work!” but instead she calls herself another uber and she goes home.
She cleans the blood off her bathroom floor and her sink.
It’s the early morning now, but she puts on pajamas and climbs into bed, wondering with every step if she’s about to pass out again, to fall again and hurt herself again. To wake up in another pool of her blood.
She thinks about texting Lucy something like, “if you don’t hear from me in the next 12 hours, can you please send a wellness check to my apartment, I need to make sure I wake up,” but that seems excessive and worrying and extreme and like something you might text a friend. Or, well, no. If she isn’t close enough to have told Lucy this happened, she’s not close enough to ask Lucy to make sure she’s okay now. She’s relied on herself up until now, and that’s how it’s going to have to be.
She sets alarms for herself for every two hours—the doctors didn’t tell her to but better safe than sorry, and she lies down on her left side.
Her head hurts. Her body aches. She’s cold and shaky and afraid. She pictures her blood sinking into her pillows, pictures someone finding her decaying body in a week and a half when she hasn’t reported in for work.
She doesn’t sleep well.
The next time she sees Lucy and Tennant, she doesn’t mention it. Tennant says, “how are you, how was your time off,” and she says, “it was fine.” Lucy doesn’t say anything at all.
[if you want a lucy part 2, lmk]