THE HARD BENCH WAS unforgiving in the sterile emergency room. Dallis wanted to move but she was rooted in place. Her feet were glued to the floor, the soles of her boots leaving horrible red stains whenever she moved. Dallis was terrified for them to spread. The irrational sense of fear continued to eat away at her stomach until she swore her insides had rotted, threatening to upend its contents across those shiny tiles.
There was an alarm ringing somewhere. Nobody moved to answer it. What if it was urgent? Dallis couldn't begin to comprehend how these doctors and nurses seemed so unaffected. If something happened, did they not feel the crushing weight of knowing they could've done something, changed that person's fate?
Dallis let her head hang. She squeezed her eyes shut. The white reflection of the room bounced off the insides of her eyelids. She couldn't escape it. It made her head spin, her stomach dancing with violence once again. She let out a frustrated cry, rocking back to press her head against the chair.
Suddenly, there was a hand on her shoulder. Someone was saying her name. She knew she needed to answer, but her voice had been stolen along with Garcia's body when they took her away in that ambulance, abandoning Dallis on the steps of her apartment building, painfully alone, the flashing red and blue lights swallowed by shadows.
"Dallis," the voice said again.
She realised it was Hotch. He hadn't hesitated to come to her when she made that call. She couldn't remember what she said, how she managed to find the words Garcia has been shot and put them together in a sentence. Now, he and JJ waited with her for everybody else to arrive. JJ had tried to hold Dallis' hand but she was quickly and firmly rejected. (She couldn't pass that red stain onto her, too. It would be Dallis' burden to bear. It had to be.) Instead, JJ settled for sitting beside her, as close as Dallis would allow, sniffling into the space between them. Hotch had started pacing the length of the room and was yet to stop, learning the steps from one end to the other.
"Prentiss and Dave are outside," he was holding his phone.
Dallis hadn't heard it ring.
Where was her phone? It wasn't in her pocket.
Her thoughts were thoroughly scattered. Inhaling deeply, she encouraged herself to just keep breathing, one after the other. Her lungs would relearn the familiar pattern sooner or later.
"Prentiss has a change of clothes for you," Hotch continued when Dallis merely blinked at him.
Shock was an alarming thing. She knew the symptoms of it -- knew she had it -- but it had consumed her without remorse. There seemed to be no light waiting at the end of the tunnel.
