By the time the ambulance arrives, there’s a certain dullness to the atmosphere that should tell Melissa all she really needs to know. The lights and sirens were going, but the EMTs themselves seem to move with a certain lack of hurry in their expressions, something sagging in their shoulders and heavy in their hands. It’s a sadly familiar attitude for paramedics.
It means they lost the patient in transport.
The lead paramedic is quiet as he explains that the patient had been ‘pretty messed up’ when they arrived, and that no matter what they did in route, there was nothing they could have done to save him. He’d been too badly injured, lost too much blood, too many other variables went wrong. But maybe it’s when the EMT starts describing the patient that Melissa really starts paying attention.
Caucasian. Male. Approximately six feet. Approximately eighteen years of age. Brown hair. Brown eyes.
Long, slender pale fingers on the still, blood-streaked hand that falls free of the sheet on the gurney as they begin to walk the body to the morgue.
Familiar long, slender pale fingers. Long, slender pale fingers that have pried open Melissa’s front door a hundred times, snuck cookies from her cookie jar, clutched at her in fear and sadness ten years ago when they were smaller and more frail.
Removing the sheet will reveal the blank, hollow stare of Stiles Stilnski, out of his one good eye. The other is crusted shut, maybe not even actually there, due to a wound on his scalp. His clothes are torn and ragged, there’s significant portions of his legs missing.
For the first time ever, he’s not moving. He’s not even breathing.
They’re all waiting just inside the ambulance bay, Melissa up towards the front as befitting her time and experience. They don’t know much other than their patient is in bad, bad shape, other than it’s going to be a long night, and it never occurs to her that she should worry. She worries every night when Scott’s not home at a reasonable hour and she worries when Stiles slinks around her house, eating less than usual, and she worries because she knows now that what they’ve gotten into is dangerous. But they escape this kind of thing on a daily basis. They defy all odds stacked against them and they persevere, they survive, always and so when she’s at work, she never lets the fear that it could be one of them coming in through those doors cross her mind, because that’s a good way to drive herself crazy. So she doesn’t even think about it, has no time to prepare for what she’ll find though admittedly, at first, it’s not much. Death is common enough in her field that all she feels is sympathy for the family that has to be told that their child didn’t make it to the hospital. The EMT is speaking quietly and Melissa listens, but she doesn’t really hear as she walks with them toward the morgue, not at first. And then that bloody hand falls out from under the sheet and it stops her short, it robs her of her breath and one of the other nurses must sense that something’s wrong because she reaches for Melissa, but it’s already too late. She peels the sheet back, and maybe no one else would recognize him, but she does. God help her, she does and this is wrong. This isn’t how this kind of thing happens. It happens to everyone else, but not to Scott and certainly not to Stiles, not to Stiles, not to Stiles. (Somewhere in the distance, there’s a loud wailing, one that someone will later tell Melissa was actually her.) She stops the EMT, stops the gurney and reaches for him like maybe if she gathers him up in her arms, she can pul him back together, she can fix him, she can make this all better because that’s what mother’s do, that’s what she’s supposed to be able to do, but they pull her off of him. They pull her off of him like she has no right to be there, like this child hasn’t settled himself into her heart beside her own son, like she can’t--. Like she can’t--. She can’t. Because he’s gone. Stiles Stilinski is gone and Melissa has no idea how they’re supposed to continue in a world where he no longer exists. And beyond that... She has no idea how she’s going to tell he son.
