It’s still Monday (at least for me, which means I’m not late for TOTA Takeover Day 1, dedicated to Rosalie Garrity.
So enjoy a little ficlet, which is. So so sad. I’m sorry.
(And also totally not a projection of my own OCD symptoms)
The halls of St. Jude’s are quiet and it takes Rosalie a moment to understand why: Campbell Bain isn’t running through them like a bat-out-of-somewhere-she-can’t-say, because of some nebulous Bad Thing that might happen if she does (she doesn’t know what that thing might be, and she doesn’t want to know). Normally Campbell keeps the hospital lively, an excitable outlier among patients who are kept largely sedate by their medications. The days when he’s not gamboling his way through the ward usually indicate a slide into depression so black that it hurts to look at for too long. She’s got a soft spot for Campbell that she tries not to overthink because it always leads her back memories of Robbie, who she’ll never see look that grown (if you can call Campbell that: there’s still something of a puppy that has not grown into its extremities about him). She’s taken to sitting with him when he’s in a bad way, chattering about the goings-on elsewhere in the ward. It seems to comfort him, and it’s nearly a distraction from the knowledge that she’s fighting a one-woman war for cleanliness on the losing side. Not quite, but nearly.
She makes up her mind and makes her way to his room. Through the latticed pattern of the window in his door, she sees him lying in bed, curled in on himself. His face isn’t visible, he’s just the back of a loudly patterned tee-shirt and a tuft of hair. She raises a gloved hand to knock on the door.
“You don’t want to go in there.”
She nearly jumps out of her skin. Fergus emerges as though from thin air, as he’s wont to do. He’s as stone-faced as usual, staring through dark bangs. Fergus is intimidating, but she’s never felt intimidated by him, a paradox that she can’t quite unravel. “And why ever not?” She demands. He nods his head towards the window and she peers inside just in time to see Campbell move from a state of total stillness into a coughing fit that rattles his whole frame.
So that’s why he’s not roaming the corridors. He’s ill.
“Oh Lord,” she says, taking an instinctive step away from the door. A wave of shame washes over her. By the time of Robbie’s death she had been so pathologically afraid of germs that the very act of stepping into the hospital—a hospital for proper sick people, not loonies—to visit him had been nearly impossible, an exercise in terror and a battle that she lost almost as often as she won. Many afternoons had been spent waiting in the car, sobbing, while her husband made the visits alone. She knows she’ll never get those lost moments back. The floodgate to her memories opens and she’s struck full force by them as she sees Campbell sick in bed.
“Just thought you would want to know,” Fergus tells her. Then he’s gone, as quickly as he appeared, and before she can thank him.
Rosalie stands outside the door, at war with herself. She wants nothing more than to be able to step into that room and sit on the edge of Campbell’s bed, rubbing the ache in his taut shoulders away when another round of coughs consumes him. It would be like penance for Robbie, a way of doing better for someone else than she had for him.
But she can’t. Once she thinks she’ll just crack open the door to ask after him, but she can’t even wrap her fingers around the handle, no matter how she tries.
In the end she stands there, frozen in place, for the better part of twenty minutes, until Stuart comes and asks her with a sneer if she isn’t afraid of the germs sneaking out through the crack under the door. Then she has to retreat to change her clothes and wipe down her shoes, a feeling of shame heavy in her chest.
Her brief guardian angel presence goes totally unnoticed by Campbell, who never uncurls himself from his protective posture, and never turns towards the door.
