Stirring her hot chocolate absently, Kyungmi stares out of the small, dark window of the staff canteen. It's an old building; the window is a newer addition, stark, clinical lines at odds with the soaring roof and Georgian curlicues.

She avoids the coffee pointedly, though sadly. Coffee would help her get through the day. The caffeine would give her a much needed energy boost. But caffeine is off the menu for at least four more months, and she promised Yixing she'd be good.

The drink is long past the point of needing any stirring, but she's taking a break from the skull sitting on the examination table in her office. The tiny, broken little thing stares at her mournfully, and though long dead, it's almost as if she can hear the child asking for help.

It's something you learn to accept, when you deal with the bodies of the dead. Though she never has to deal with with fresh bodies, the stories she pieces together are much the same as a forensic anthropologist's. A murder here, an accidental death here. The occasional suicide, even, though that is hard to determine in someone lost to history.

Usually, it's easy to compartmentalise. Bones are easy to separate from a living, breathing body, especially fragmentary ones. But sometimes, it's not quite as easy, and she supposes she should be grateful for that. It's not as if she wants to become immune to horror of a life cut short.

Especially such a young life. Maybe it's the hormones swishing around inside of her, or just the fact that she knows within the year, she'll be a mother, and that the idea of losing her child is a peculiar kind of pain she's never experienced before. She wonders if the mother of the little girl on her desk blamed herself; if she buried the body, tears streaming down her face as she recounted all the ways she could have prevented such an occurrence.

Maybe she was already dead herself. Maybe she didn't care overmuch – perhaps she was the veteran of too many infant deaths, and had steeled herself for the loss of yet another child.

Her hand sinks down onto her abdomen, rounded with her own child. She doesn't think she could be so callous, but then it was another life. Another culture. Another time.

The bones are Roman. They know that much. Procured from some dig in the middle of London, they speak of a short, violent life for the little scrap in her office. In some ways, her life would have been similar to any other child alive today – it's not as if violence is something solely of the past, after all – but the injury that killed her is horrific.

Some kind of sharp implement to the head, shoved in with such force it cracked her skull in two. Kyungmi swallows back bile, anger bubbling in her gut. Who could do that to a child? Who could do that to anybody?

It doesn't matter that it is the remnant of a battle or a fight fought so many years ago. The violence resonates, and the mystery of some people's reasoning for their own horrible actions is as inexplicable now as it was then. It's a biological necessity to keep children alive; when we find them dead, it rocks through us because of this.