and_far_away

He meant to find a doctor, after talking to Archie. He was just going to go home quickly, check on Lucille and the babies, make sure everything was all right.

And then the door just opened on the barn, when he tried to come back.

It hasn't opened on Milliways since.

Lucille's fever isn't breaking. She hasn't got out of bed in two days, now.

And without the bar, there's not a damn thing Richard Sharpe can do about it.

"There's hard times ahead again. Look you sharp, sir."

It's not that he didn't take the warning seriously. He did. He just wasn't expecting the hard times to begin quite so soon.

Maybe he should have. When did his life ever go smoothly for very long, after all?

That's beside the point, though, really. At least, it is when the point is Lucille, in the kitchen, suddenly stumbling and grabbing the doorframe, and the pool shining at her feet, and the pain on her face.

The birth does not go well, though he sends Marie running to the village for the doctor. He refuses to be pushed out of the room, pacing anxiously in the doorway where he won't get in the way, but even he can see things aren't going as they should, and he wishes once again that Daniel Hagman was still alive and could be here now.

The doctor steps back from the bed, and Lucille's still alive, he can hear her breathing though there's something unhealthy about the sound of it, but he can see the baby in the doctor's hands, and it's not crying... oh God.

And then he remembers something else.

"Then it'd come down to always choosin' the future sir. Always, no matter it makes you bleed...that or lose it all"

He knows, somewhere deeper than he can name, that those were true words. If he doesn't... if he can't... then Lucille will die and the child will never live. And that's enough to decide him.

The next second, he's forward into the room and grabbing the baby - not dead, not dead, not yet - from the startled doctor's arms, cutting off the man's solemn words to Lucille. He doesn't wait to hear her protest before he's running for the barn, where the door to Milliways has been more often than anywhere else.

Sharpe didn't mean to sleep in the bar, but a long day's work on the farm followed by a security shift catches up with a man, and he's fast asleep in a corner booth, undisturbed.

In his dreams, he's in an inn he'll never drink at again in reality, looking around the empty room. He has a feeling he's waiting for someone, but...

Sharpe and Wells emerge from the back door and head for the closest the bar has to a football pitch.

Sharpe's grinning, looking forward to the game.