Lux Aeterna [Marak]

[Paladienne]

Her apartment was empty for the first time since... well. Since she’d first moved in. Gone were the pictures on the walls, everything she had decorated her home with, leaving only blank discolored spaces. Those would be painted over when the crews came in to give the place a good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint, to make it livable for its next occupant. There was still some kind of bittersweetness to it all for Tempest, though. This had been her home since graduation, since her brother’s death, since she’d been accepted into the various programs that had allowed her to reach where she was today, since...

Tempest steered her mind away from that dark path, doing her best not to remember what had happened to her months ago. The scars had long since healed, save for the one constant reminder that she had kept on purpose, and the pain had long since vanished. Yet, despite that, the memories still had the power to trigger a flight or fight response from her, and she still felt the familiar twang of anxiety and fear and uncertainty that she had felt back then. It was enough to make her want to curl into a ball and breathe deep until she felt calm again, and it was a struggle to keep from doing that, even after so much time had passed. Yet, as she always had before, Tempest pushed those feelings away to the deepest, darkest, part of her mind and locked them away there using the same techniques she used when she was dealing with a stressful situation at work. When a patient was dying or in arrest or some other kind of emergency, there was no time to panic. There was no time to feel afraid or uncertain. You locked down every self-preservation response and you dealt with the situation with cold, clinical precision. It was when that situation was over that you could feel again.

Yet, Tempest had never felt comfortable addressing the feelings that came about each time her mind thought back to that incident. She never felt comfortable expressing the fear and impotent rage and everything else that she had felt, and exorcising the demons that now chased her in her nightmares. Perhaps she didn’t want to admit that she was damaged. Perhaps she didn’t want to admit that she still hurt. Either way, the fact didn’t change that Tempest was now, essentially, running away from the memories of her past and the stagnancy of her present.

She loved her job, she did. She loved her patients. But there was too much of the familiar, too much of the same. Too many reminders of what she had once had and what she had lost, too many reminders of the past that ate at her constantly and scraped at her until she was certain her soul was raw and bleeding and no amount of bandaging and self-help was healing those wounds. She had finally come to the decision to move after a long, long debate with herself. It had been a constant push-pull of arguing and counter-arguing, of making a decision and recanting it, until finally Tempest decided that she needed to just do and take that leap and see whether or not she landed on her feet or fell flat on her face.

She had started small, putting out applications to other hospitals in other domes and going on interviews if her applications were accepted. Most of the interviews had fell through. They hadn’t liked her for some reason, or found her overqualified, or not qualified enough. Tempest heard it all, and each rejection made her wonder if she wasn’t being foolish. She had a good thing where she was. She should just be happy with her lot and accept that Haviah would be where she would stay. But then...

Her application had been accepted in the main hospital in Amristah. Her interview had gone extremely well, and before Tempest had even been able to walk out of the lobby afterward, an offer had come through. What she would be accepting was much the same as she had now - the same pay, the same hours, the same shift rotations - and the only difference came in the fact that she would be assigned to various floors rather than just one. She would even have a rotation in the emergency department every other month. It was new and exciting and Tempest knew she wouldn’t get a better offer than that. She could hold out and keep looking, but she could read between the lines well enough to know that if she refused this offer it wouldn’t be given again.

So she’d accepted it, and then had been embroiled in a whirlwind of packing boxes and moving out furniture and spending weekends emptying her current apartment and setting up her new home in Amristah. Every weekend for four weeks she spent arranging her new apartment and exploring Amristah, becoming familiar with the dome that would become her new city and her new home. And now the time had finally come for her to say good-bye to everything she had known and welcome everything she was about to embrace.

Picking up her last bag and last box of her belongings, Tempest walked out of the empty apartment and locked the door behind her. She headed down to the main office to turn in her keys and then headed for the rail. She had already said her good-byes to her patients and her coworkers. She had outlined her plans for her patients with her fellow nurses and those who would be taking over for her. Whether they followed those plans or not, she wouldn’t know, but she hoped they did. Soon, as bad as it sounded, it wouldn’t matter anymore.

Tempest stepped onto the rail as soon as the doors opened and found herself a seat. Then she immersed herself in a book to while away the hours until she reached Amristah.

----

Tempest settled in easily to her new routines and her new patients and her new everything. Some things were difficult, but when she became used to them, they were things that were easy to ignore for all their difference to her old life. She found that she was happier, that she felt freer, and those she worked with and took care of seemed to like her, if not at least respect her. The work was still hard, and there were still difficult and sometimes unmanageable patients, but Tempest enjoyed the challenge of winning those people over. For everything that had changed, Tempest knew, much had stayed the same.

The weeks had passed quickly for her, it felt, as she was kept busy and had little free time while at work in which to think about what had been and brood upon those feelings she never quite addressed. She had too much to do really to dwell, and she found that the new things she had discovered - such as new restaurants, shops, entertainment venues, along with the natural beauty of Amristah itself - provided enough of a distraction that the shadows that hung over her were more like spider webs than storm clouds. And, she knew, that a strong breeze could get rid of both. She just didn’t know when or where that strong breeze would come from, but she would know it when she found it. In the meantime, the remedies she had discovered on her own, and was still discovering, were enough to lift her spirits and make her believe that everything was going to be just fine, that everything was going to work out, that everything was going to be perfect and she would be able to live and continue on without worrying overmuch about what had been, what could’ve been, and falling again into that dark place that, perhaps, made her more terrified than the actual experience that had caused her to go there.

Tempest hadn’t been able to dwell much lately, anyway, or go to that dark place in her mind. The hospital was always busy, and she was kept busy, too busy to really give much thought to what could drag her down. She had only just managed to take some time for herself today to find something to eat and was heading down to the cafeteria when she saw a rush of movement and heard the commotion of yells and cries and commands being given down the hall from the elevators. Suddenly on high alert, and curious, Tempest moved to go see what was going on.

All she saw was a crowd of nurses and doctors surrounding a bed and a growing puddle of red on the floor. Near the middle of the pack was a man dressed in the white coat of a doctor, with feathered black hair and pale skin, leaning over the patient with a look of absolute consternation on his face, as if he couldn’t understand what was going on or why whatever he was doing wasn’t helping. The fact that he was trying to save the patient’s life wasn’t lost on Tempest, but she could see that whatever it was he was trying to do wasn’t working in the way he intended or wanted. Tempest finally managed to get close enough to see the truth of the situation and realized right away what was happening. And she could also see that whatever he was doing wouldn’t help until the bleeding was stopped.

Was no one here a hemokinetic? Or had they not realized that the patient was bleeding out from the wound?

It didn’t matter.

Tempest pushed her way through the cluster of nurses and doctors until she was beside the man in the white coat. She caught a glimpse of narrowed amber eyes behind black-rimmed glasses and decided the man’s expression was startled. It could’ve been hostile, but then, the look Tempest gave him could’ve been hostile too.

“He’s bleeding out,” Tempest said, keeping her voice low so only the doctor beside her heard. “If you close the wound as it is now, you’ll cause ballooning and he’ll lose the limb. Move over.”

She didn’t give him a chance to argue before she gave him a light shove to the side but not completely away from the patient. He was a doctor, after all, with more training and more letters to his name than her. And Tempest really didn’t want to be fired. But once she had room to work, she slid her fingers into the gaping wound until she found the source of the bleeding. Then it was just a matter of attaching her will to the plasma in the blood and halting the flow of crimson.

Once she had, and once she’d removed her hands, she glanced up at the doctor beside her, her emerald eyes meeting his amber. “There, now you can do what you need to do.”

[Marakai2.0]

There wasn't much to the life of a certain strange Combat Operative slash doctor in Amristah. Life was short and fleeting, and it could either be exciting or drab or a hundred other things that one could make of it. Hardly anything was interesting, not to him. Life was a constant state of motion and work, an unending tide of events that would continue until life ended. Busy, busy, busy. How people didn't notice it was far beyond the knowledge of man.


But Grayson, or Suture to his colleagues, he loved it. It didn't matter what he was doing, whether it was saving a life or ending it - the tide, for him, moved both in and out, after all, considering his profession -  he could never get tired of the hustle and bustle of being a what he was.

The hospital was busy today, though that wasn't unusual. Suture, as well as a host of other professionals in various fields of medicine, had been summoned for a particular patient. He'd been informed of the case in question and had received it with an arched brow. A Pilot Cardinal, graduated only very recently, had taken a bullet on the field through actions that could only be called reckless, in an environment that, already hazardous, was made even more so due to a very particular locale.


The bridge of Suture's nose still hurt from how hard he had pinched it. But that was neither there nor here, as there was work to be done.


He'd called immediately for a hemokinetic to control the bleeding from a nicked artery, as there was literally nothing that could be done until the bleeding was stopped. There was no way to properly bandage the wound due to the spores of a certain mutated plant that had both thinned the blood considerably, as well as forced a rise in blood pressure and an accelerated heart rate. It never surprised Suture just how many ways this world could come up with to kill a man...

"Where is that hemokinetic? Has anyone gotten a response back?" Suture demanded, not looking up from his patient. He was holding a hand over the wound, fighting the urge to coax the layers of the kids skin to fuse together and trying in vain to somehow stem the flow of crimson streaming steadily from the wound. "This boy is going to bleed out right here on the floor if we don't do something immediately."

There were a few rushed, scattered responses. Someone said they'd call again, others simply replied in the negative that no one had, in fact, sent a response back. Suture grit his teeth in irritation, biting back words that would only cause more problems. All he could do was wait and hope that someone would get their head out of their ass and come to do their damned job.

And then, perhaps minutes away from losing his patient, Suture witnessed a miracle happen as a nurse, one he either hadn't seen or didn't remember ever seeing, moved into his space and shoved him aside. She mentioned the bleeding, and he had to bite back a scathing response. After all, she at least seemed to have the guts to do something. If she knew what she was doing and could save a patient that was otherwise going to bleed to death all over the triage floor, so much the better.


And, as luck would have it, she did, indeed, stop the bleeding. He let out a breath in a long sigh, and shouldered his way back into his previous space, focusing his will on the Pilot's flesh, grabbing hold of it with his gift and coaxing the delicate tissues to thread together again.


Once he was finished, leaving only a small gap of raw and opened flesh to keep an eye on in case of future complications, he stepped away to regard the woman that had saved the day. Or, rather, this particular set of moments, as the case may be.


"....Well done." He lifted a brow at her, though, looking at her. "You're a nurse. You're not the doctor that has apparently been ignoring their com for the last eight minutes or so." Usually, he would make a comment about stepping in where she was not wanted nor needed, but the fact was that she was needed, since someone else couldn't be bothered to show up.


"...well, good work. I would shake your hand, were my own not both completely covered in blood."

[Paladienne]

Tempest paused as the doctor turned to look at her, talking to her about the fact that she was something that he hadn’t expected. Or rather, that she wasn’t what he’d wanted. Tempest pursed her lips, but she knew better than to argue. There wasn’t a point to it, not when they had just saved a patient’s life. Then, at the sound of the compliment, Tempest blinked, uncertain how to reply. Usually, she’d been snapped at for stepping in where she wasn’t supposed to, but that had been her old job, where she had been expected to fulfill a certain role and a certain role only. Here, maybe she would be able to explore something more than what she was. Maybe the doctors here were different. Maybe. She glanced at his face but couldn’t read any emotions there. Then she glanced over his shoulders at the other emergency personnel that were still attending the patient, and saw their glowers as clear as neon lights. Ignoring them, or trying to, Tempest turned her attention back to the doctor.

“You’re welcome,” Tempest finally replied. She glanced at his hands and then her own, which were equally covered in blood. “I guess neither of us will worry about shaking hands. At least not now. Maybe some other time. You have a patient to attend to now.”

She didn’t know what else to say, so she inclined her head to him and headed away from the entire scene. She found a nearby employee-only bathroom and entered it, stopping by the sink to scrub her hands free of blood. Tempest looked up into the mirror, studying her reflection. What had she been thinking, stepping in like that? Stepping in where she had no business being? She wasn’t a doctor. She wasn’t even a surgeon. She was just a nurse. Tempest sighed, and moved to dry her hands. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten yet. Tossing away her paper towels into a contamination bin, Tempest left the bathroom and headed toward the cafeteria.

She still felt as though everyone was staring at her, though, as she walked through the halls. News traveled quickly here, too, Tempest decided. She avoided talking to anyone, at least more than she needed to. Hopefully, everyone would just forget this little incident and life would continue on as normal for everyone. It was only a fluke, she told herself. Just a random thing of life. It won’t happen again. And it isn’t like I’ll see that doctor or patient again, anyway.

Tempest sighed as she got her food and moved to find an empty table.