Title: Room 426
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Characters: James Hook, Eleanor Druse, Peter Rickman
Prompt: Triangle
Word Count: 1,230
Rating: PG
Summary: Three sides of grief; three people who shared a significant event in their lives mourn the loss of a young girl and the loss of any chance to get to know her.
Hook had gotten to know grief on an intimate and personal level as a neurosurgeon. Later there had been a diagnosis and he had gotten to know a different kind of grief that happens before a loved one dies, watching the slow retreat of life from empty and shallow cells until there is nothing left but the quiet pass of dignity. He got to know grief a little better when he started working the ER, a screaming and frantic grief that knows nothing but its own pain and the attempt to deny a hole that exists for only a few hours before the numbness starts to fill it.
He's made his own little catalogue of different types of grief, a twisted attempt to cope, like the graveyard in what passes for his apartment. Probably, if Chris found out about that, she'd call it sick, too.
What he doesn't know is what the word is for this kind of grief, the kind that seems as though it's a little unjustified. He didn't know the woman, after all, and she's twice over dead. Both times long before he was born.
One hand covered the edge of the door and Hook leaned in the doorway and stared at the empty bed. It was supposed to be a good thing, albeit a miraculous thing and one quite unexplainable by modern science. After what he'd seen and done, modern science could sometimes go hang.
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