Hiya. First of all, I do have to admit that other people know more than I do about this series. Hopefully, what little I do know is correct. Second, this will be short. Finally, I am indeed a newly graduated medical student, and while I don't know a lot (goodness, I learned more about writing than about medicine in med school), I do know a few things about the life.
Dedicated to sapphi-chan. Because I couldn't do Aoshi nor Sendoh nor Gaara with any decency. Hope you like. Also dedicated to narrizan, who makes me remember I'm still not too old for this kind of thing.
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Everyone was asking everyone else by now.
What will your specialization be?
It is a common enough question among medical students and medical interns. It is the grown-up equivalent of the question, what will you be when you grow up?
The field of medicine is so wide that graduation from medical school is only the beginning. Medicine is subdivided by major fields, or specializations, which are now so disparate from each other that one has to choose one field, and stick with it. Medical school merely gives the basic language of communication with all the major fields, and gives the graduate the idea of what each field does for a living.
Now that he and his classmates were now halfway through the final year of med school, many of them now had firm ideas and plans for their future. Several guys liked being in surgery, and talked about becoming surgeons. A few girls wanted to become pediatricians. Yet others wanted to be internists.
But he was not interested.
When asked the question, all he did was shrug.
He was not interested in medicines. He was not interested in operations. He was only interested in death.
How people died. How the heart stopped beating. How the cardiac machines changed displays from wavy lines to a terrible straight line. How the face grew pale, and the lips turned white. How the chest stopped rising. How the eyes stayed frozen open, even as bright lights passed through them. It was interesting, how death came. Really interesting.
The residents and house officers dreaded the duty nights with him, because whether they liked it or not, people will die. Not because of negligence, but out of sheer misfortune. Someone would come in of a heart attack too late. Someone would drown and be past saving. A stab wound to the heart. A gun shot to the head. A duty night with that sullen medical clerk would have a death before the sun rose.
Did he want to go into pathology, then? Not in the least bit. He was currently in that rotation, and it was boring. All those microscope slides, all those silent inanimate objects. Boring. He liked seeing how people became the inanimate objects he saw on the cold metal beds. But not the inanimate objects themselves.
"What the heck are going to be then? A doctor of death?" his classmates chided him.
It wasn't so bad an idea, actually.
Besides, his future was not his biggest problem. His biggest problem was his hands.
What in the world were these bloody things coming out of his hands?
For the last few days and weeks, when he woke up, he found his hands blood red and soaked wet. Sometimes, the hands would even have unusually sharp things sticking out of them. The things looked a little like bone, and a little like steel, maybe a little like both.
So he kept his hands inside gloves, and inside pockets, as much as his work would allow.
It was a warm afternoon as he went home from the pathology laboratory. His gloves were in his pockets, and his hands were free. So far they were clean and unbloody, and unsuspicious, so he left them ungloved. He sighed as he went home to his apartment two blocks away from the hospital. Another boring day was over.
But as he turned the second corner, it suddenly became less boring.
Someone grabbed him from behind, and yanked him into an alley.
"Hands over your head, doc," the person behind him breathed into his ear. He felt a pistol touch his side.
"I'm just a clerk," he clarified while he placed hands over head. "Med student."
"I don't care. Fork out your wallet."
"I have no money."
"That's a bluff."
And the other man pulled out his wallet from the side pocket. The wallet was opened and its contents shaken out, but no paper bills or coins fell to the ground.
"Used it all over lunch," the student shrugged.
"ATM?"
But he cleaned it out last weekend, before the allowance came again. "Come back for me tomorrow, and you might get something out of it," the student rolled his eyes.
His heart beat hard and fast inside his pericardium and thoracic cage while he tried to keep his sweat down and his voice calm. Weapon. Weapon. Need a weapon. He thought in his head. Pen? Too small, too weak. Karate chop? He had not had decent practice in a while. Weapon. Weapon.
He felt his hands, and the bones in those hands. Those odd things, combined bone and steel, that kept sticking out of those hands. If only they would form something sharp enough that he could use.
Sharp. Small. Sharp. Small.
Like a scalpel.
Indeed. Precisely. A scalpel.
Blade 10. The first knife. Large enough and strong enough to pierce skin and draw blood.
That will do.
Hand, make one for me.
As one of the men punched him in the abdomen, as he fell to the ground, he kept feeling the movement of whatever it was in his anatomy that worked for him. Scalpel. Blade 10. Scalpel. Blade 10. Hurry.
"The PIN code to the card, doc! Spit it out!" the second man kicked him in the stomach. He groaned and spat blood.
Inside his arm he felt something slender and sharp at one end, ready to come out.
Another kick to the stomach and on his back. "The PIN code, doc!"
He gave the PIN code. "But there's nothing in it. Come back tomorrow."
He let out the bloody scalpel from his writing hand. He smiled.
There would be no tomorrow.
He grabbed the bony scalpel. Slashed at the man's face. The other man was stunned for too long to react. He was now in control. He dashed in and struck.
Carotid artery. Jugular vein. Brainstem. Heart. Two slashes at the neck, one at the nape, one at the heart. Soon the man was down, dying a painful gasping death.
Interesting. He smirked. Interesting, indeed.
The other accomplices took to their heels and ran.
Well. One was already down. What were two more people that no one would miss?
He willed out two bony scalpels from his right hand. And two more from his left. He threw them at the running two men. The bony blades hit them at their backs, near their hearts. They writhed in pain and fell onto the street. Gasping, then not gasping, staying still, deathly still. Smooth and bloodless, too.
Interesting. Very interesting.
He stayed and watched as all three of the men came to their sudden ends of life. He looked at the blank, stunned, and staring eyes that stayed open. He watched as fresh blood trickled in slower and slower paths around and beyond each man. He saw the bright red mark that each slash and thrust had made. He had made those marks himself.
He looked well at the hands that made those small, light, but effective weapons. The wounds that came from the scalpels were starting to close, and the bleeding from the exit points was stopping.
He smiled.
Those bloody scalpels. He would learn how to use them, and use them well. An unusual medical specialization that would be, if there ever was one.
He shrugged. Yeah. Maybe he could use to do some good with them, those things in his hands. Maybe not.
In any case, they would let him see death, as much as he allowed…as much as he wanted.
A doctor of death. He would be one. Why not?
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See? Told you it was short. And I'm insane, I know. Thanks for reading, and thanks for indulging a visitor to this area.
EK out.