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Blue-gloved hands push a picture across the table, positioning it right in front of her.

"Have you seen this girl?" It's always the one man who speaks, smiling a smile that never seems to reach his eyes. His partner just stands there, eying her with an intensity that makes her want to look away.

She glances at the picture of the girl, pretending not to feel two pairs of eyes burning into her. The girl in the picture is pretty, with brown hair and large dark eyes, but there is something about the half-healed bruises on her face that make her look like a prisoner lined up for a mug shot.

"Never seen her before." The answer is the truth, and she is relieved; no matter how bad this girl's crimes, she would not feel entirely comfortable knowing that she had sent these two men after her.

The men exchange glances, and another picture is placed next to the first. This one is of a boy, smiling at the camera, the cap and gown he is wearing marking him out as a student freshly graduated from school. There is something familiar about him though, something she cannot place.

"How about him? He would have been dressed as a doctor, perhaps, accompanying the girl." And then it hits her, and she knows where she has seen him before.

She remembers him from the Recovery Ward, calm and efficient as he saved the life of a patient, and then barely-controlled fury as he snapped at a doctor easily ten years his senior. And, when she thought about it, she vaguely remembered a dark-haired girl held back by a larger man, sitting in a wheelchair, smiling proudly at him.

She looks up at the two men, at their phony smiles and cold eyes and blue-gloved hands, and shakes her head.

"No, I don't think so." The shorter man leans forwards, his eyes burning into hers.

"Are you sure? One of your fellow doctors has already positively identified him."

She hesitates, thinks of that patient sitting up in bed, hugging his children, his wife crying, and that girl, her whole face alight as she looked at that boy, completely different from this fearful girl in the picture, and knows her answer.

She looks away from the pictures and straight into the man's eyes, holding his gaze steadily.

"He must have been mistaken. I've never seen this man before in my life. I'm sorry." And all she can think is that she has never been less sorry than she is right now.

This fic was inspired when I watched Ariel, when Simon saved one of the patient's life and then started yelling at his doctor, and in the background you could see a nurse, staring at Simon and checking on the patient, and it occurred to me that the Blue Hands probably interrogated the hospital staff, and that this nurse had seen them and recognized them, and I just thought that she had a story too.