Unspeakable

Vice Versa

"Kate, I love you. I love you, Kate."

Her focus blurs, everything disjointed as she hovers in the disconnect, the phantom breath of his words sweeping down her neck. The crisp edge of reality flickers, its temperamental existence unravelling in ephemeral lapses between blue and red. She turns and turns back, sways, dazed. Lanie crashes into her and knocks her away.

She catches a shock of Alexis's hair and she goes to reach for her but Ryan is there, pressing the girl's shoulder and she's gone. Everyone is moving. Going. "Beckett!" Sound comes muffled and distant as Esposito shoves at her, rough and impatient. She stumbles and his palm pushes hard against her spine. "Go, go," he yells, as the doors shutter him out.

The space is too small and Lanie keeps pushing, feet knocking into Kate's and shoving her on. Lanie twists over her shoulder and her ordinarily soft mouth scrunches up, revealing something frightful and vicious. "Move, Kate, move!" she hisses.

"Sorry," Kate wheezes and shuffles back. She presses herself away, awfully aware of her size, the clumsiness of her too tall, uncompromising body. Her shoulder blades flatten against the back of the driver's seat as she focuses on making herself small, giving them space. "I'm so sorry," she whispers, because it's all that's left.

They tip roughly into a ditch in the road and everything lurches forward. Kate's knees buckle and her body skitters down beside the stretcher with a sickening crack. "God, I'm so sorry," she repeats. The warmth of his blood leaches up through her dress blues and a sob claws its way through her chest as she bends forward to press a desperate plea into his hair, "Please stay."

"Beckett!" Lanie snaps.

Kate raises her head and realises the paramedic is rushing on, barking questions at her that she's unfairly surprised to find she answers quite instinctively. "Codeine," she says, "He's allergic to codeine, and he had a stomach ulcer about ten years ago."

Blood. There's too much blood, she knows. Lanie is frantic, body surging up and into him and the EMT's shouting, pushing her away. Lanie knocks her hands away and his body jerks and crashes, electricity surging through him. It's only a second and they are all back on him. Lanie is fast and all she can think is Lanie, I can't do this, don't let him die.

The doors fly open and she's too slow. His hair slips out of her fingertips. She's running, her shoulders crash against the swinging doors as they sweep out behind him and she keeps moving. Her heel slips in the stream of blood they've left behind and she goes down. Her hip connects with floor and she pleads, wails, "Please!" though she knows no one can hear her. Nobody is listening.

It's too bright and they're leaving, they don't have time for her. She gets to her feet to go after him, to just stay with him. She rounds the corner and catches sight of Lanie, still straddled over him, pumping furiously at his chest and scolding him, scolding him even now.

She hears Lanie's voice, strict and demanding and drifting further away, "Come on, Rick, don't you die on me. Stay with me, stay with me."

After that everything is muffled and broken. She can barely make out the voices, stuttering and talking over each other, fast and sharp and useless.

"Come on, Rick, do not die. Do not die."

"Set up for a chest tube, Trauma 1."

"Switch, we got this."

"This is my friend, you understand me, he's my friend."

"Then let us save his life."

It's the last thing she hears before they disappear through another set of doors and she falters, body wreaked and trembling, frozen. Please, don't leave me.