Ruining Your Eyesight

by thebicolouredhydra

Stress can manifest in the most inconvenient ways.

2.14am. On the dot. Like last night. And the night before that. And far too many nights before that. This shouldn't be happening.

But it is, and you sit up from your mattress groggily, curses slipping from your mouth. Respawn shouldn't let this be happening.

Painkillers had stopped working some time ago. It seemed pointless to take them, so you gave up. Ice always felt good, but it inevitably melted and the pain snuck back, like a flea-bitten rat pillaging a trash-can of refuse.

Maybe you should go wander into RED territory so they could shoot you and send you back through Respawn. At least your arm would stop hurting.

You pad out of your room and toward the darkened kitchen, a small towel clutched in your good hand. Your current method of dealing with the tearing agony was a little unorthodox but it was the only thing that worked.

It doesn't take long to arrange the chairs on the table just so, right in front of the open fridge. You clamber up, stick your arm into the freezer, and lay down on your front, waiting for the frigid air to sink into your twitching muscles. And as the pain draws back, like water from the shore, you drift into to sleep.

Light stabs into your gritty eyes.

"Da fuck?"

Scout squeezes his way through the scaffolding of chair legs to reach into the fridge.

"D'ja have to keep doin' this? It's making my soda warm!"

"Eurghhhhh!" you growl at him, your cheek stuck the the seat of the chair and squinting against the sickening yellow tint of the kitchen fluoros.

"Take a fucking pill like everyone else," he tells you in an acid tone before stomping out of the kitchen.

"Turn the damn lights off!" you bellow after him.

You're rewarded with a middle finger held defiantly in your direction. "And fuck you, too!" But he does turn the lights off at least.

The next time you're dragged out of sleep, it's gradually instead of abruptly. He's making a concerted effort not to disturb you, but Heavy is rather large and he has to get more than one item out of the fridge. You watch him through half-open eyes as he methodically makes his sandwich at the kitchen bench as if you're not laying in front of the fridge with your arm stuck in the freezer. There is just enough light coming from the open door for you to see what he's doing.

He turns the plate around slowly a few times, checking his early morning snack against some measure of perfection only he can determine.

"This is not good for you," he points out in his low voice.

"It's the only thing that works," you tell him in a slurred voice, your cheek still stuck to the chair seat.

The Russian seems to ponder your words carefully as he eats his sandwich, though you can't imagine what hidden meanings he's finding in your explanation. He says nothing as he washes his plate and puts it back in the cupboard. He's one of the few of your teammates that ever bothers to tidy up after himself, which is a diametrical opposite to Scout who seems to delight in making as much mess as ten particularly disgusting pigs who've really let themselves go.

He leaves the kitchen without saying anything else - a man of blessedly few words. He was also polite enough to leave the kitchen lights off the entire time. Unlike Scout. The little bastard.

You flex your chilled fingers a few times and sink back into oblivion.

"Please do something."

"How long has this been going on for?"

"Maybe a week."

You groan. Obviously not as few words as you would have preferred. You peel your face off the chair and turn your head to scowl at Heavy. The giant bastard. He's gone and tattled to Medic which was the last thing you wanted. The Russian just lets your death glare roll off him while the doctor stares at you, hands on hips, dark hair slightly awry which tells you Heavy has had to wake him up in order to get your arm out of the freezer.

"You cannot put your arm in the freezer," Medic points out unnecessarily.

"I put a towel down."

That just earns you a tut. "It is not good for you."

"So I've been told."

"And yet you are still doing it."

"I'm a maverick," you reply morosely.

"Get down from there." It seems Medic is in no mood for your bullshit.

"No."

"Get down, or Heavy will get you down."

You engage in a bit of a staring contest with the doctor until Heavy takes a step in your direction.

"Alright, alright!" You clamber down awkwardly, holding your chilled arm to your chest. The fabric of your sleep shirt sticks greedily to the blue-tinged skin. Perhaps you'd left your arm in there a bit too long this time.

"Snitch," you accuse Heavy as you pass him. You try and slip past the doctor and back to your room, but he grabs the back of your shirt and drags you in the direction of the medibay. You know that if you resist, he won't hesitate to tell Heavy to just pick you up like a sack of potatoes, so you just let him propel you along the corridor.

"Did you fall asleep at your desk?" you ask, noting the ugly creases in his usually pristine shirt and trousers, the slightly unkempt hair and heavier than normal stubble along his jaw.

"Not everyone has the luxury of sleeping with their arm in the fridge," Medic replies waspishly and boots open the swing doors to the medibay. He pulls you over to the large wash sink and opens the faucet with a practiced knock of his elbow against the flat handle.

"Too hot!" you blurt as he pulls your arm under the stream of water.

"It is room temperature, stop whining!" the doctor tells you, holding your wrist in a vice-like grip to stop you from wriggling away. "Why did you not see me about this?"

"I figured you'd tell me to stop whining!" you shoot back through clenched teeth, bracing for the approaching return of sensation to your arm.

He chooses to ignore your pissy reflection of his instruction. "If you have pain, I will give you medication for it."

"It doesn't work," you gasp as pins and needles bloom from wrist up to shoulder.

Medic prises your fingers open out of the white-knuckled fist you had them curled into. "Relax your hand." He holds the inside of his wrist to the skin of your forearm, then your bicep, then up under the short sleeve of your shirt. He uses his hip to push you up against the sink and your shoulder under tap.

"My shirt's getting wet!" you bark, trying to squirm out from his grip and away from the rivulets of cold water now running down your back and down to your waist.

"How devastating for you," is the sarcastic response, his brows drawn down into two very disapproving lines over his eyes. "Stop fidgeting or I will sedate you."

You know he's not joking, and god only knows what he'd do to you when you're unconscious, so you stand there glumly, jammed between him and the sink as your shirt becomes increasingly sodden and the puddle of water at your feet grows.

The scratchy burr of pain returns to begin doggedly chewing a hole through your arm. You let out a tired sigh and sag slightly against the sink. Medic shuts the water off and bulldozes you over the examination table.

"Sit."

You do so, with a squelch of sodden bedclothes, and watch him drag an instrument cart away from the wall and over to the table, the contents clattering metallically in the drawers as if to act as an outlet to his annoyance.

"Why did you not see me about this? Why did you decide to put your arm into the freezer instead?" He turns the overhead light on and its merciless strength makes you groan and squeeze your eyes shut. How can you feel this exhausted and not be dead already? You slump to one side and against the angled back of the examination table, your brutalised arm pressed tight between your side and the metal, muffling the pain ever so slightly.

"I don't like doctors," you lie.

"Ja, I had realised that, and I have tried not to let it hurt my feelings."

You crack an eye open and watch him pull the medigun down in its bracket and unscrew the battered cap ring at the front. You've noticed that Medic gets sarcastic when he is in a bad mood, and right now your own temper is not conciliatory. "Their bedside manner tends to be dreadful."

That just earns you a flat look as he replaces the cap ring with another of a different shape and aperture, spinning it smoothly until it tightens. Then he grabs the damp cuffs of your pyjamas trousers and hoists your legs unceremoniously up and onto the table.

"I was wrong about that bedside manner," you murmur, untwisting yourself so you're laying on your back. Your comments are not improving the doctor's mood if the way he jams his fingers deep into the crook of your arm is any measure. You roar loudly in response to the fire of misery that erupts all the way down to your fingers and up to your shoulder. Beads of sweat break out on your forehead. Medic shifts his fingers to a different spot, making your fingers curl shut in a spasm of acidic green agony and pulling a strangled screech out of your mouth. He stops digging holes in your forearm and switches to your upper arm. The pain there is less, but still gut-churningly horrid, and the muscle fibres are bunched up into nasty little walnuts. He leaves one set of fingertips clutched ruthlessly into your tricep as he fishes out a pair of scissors from the drawer next to him.

"No, wait that's my… favourite bedshirt," you trail off as Medic hacks a giant slice in the fabric from sleeve to neck to expose your shoulder. You just stare into the medigun's darkened eye gloomily as the doctor employs fingers with the strength of surgical steel and the cruelty of a sadist up and down your arm. You hold back your keening behind clenched teeth and breathe through flared nostrils as if in defiance of his ruthless examination, sweat continuing to roll down your forehead. A little too late you realise you shouldn't have made that crack about bedside manner.

"You could have given yourself frostbite."

You look at him askance through narrowed eyes, a little surprised at the sullen tone. Perhaps he wasn't being sarcastic about his "hurt feelings", but Medic's never seemed the overly sentimental type to you. "I'll take frostbite over pain."

He hooks a bottle out of the bottom drawer of the examination cart and shakes it vigorously. "It only bothers you at night?"

"From around two until about half an hour before I have to get up."

"Nerve inflammation," he pronounces, squeezing a long line of the bottle's contents from your wrist to your shoulder. "Your muscles are too tight." He uses the pad of his thumb to drag the clear liquid out into a wider strip, rotating your hand so it rests palm up. "You need to relax," he tells you uselessly as the fingers of death try to turn your muscles into mincemeat.

You glare, unblinking, into the sleeping medigun, seriously considering begging the doctor to turn it on to give you some relief from the torture he's inflicting on you, but he sees where you're looking. "I can't use that yet."

"Christ, why not? Is it because I'm being punished? I'm being punished, aren't I?"

That just makes him sigh. "Any punishment is at your own hands. This could have been avoided if you had just told me."

"Medication doesn't work," you reply, your mood souring into rattiness, the cords in your neck standing out as he shifts his kneading fingers closer to your elbow joint.

"There are treatments other than drugs."

"This is a treatment?"

"For the symptom, not the cause. This is what happens if you don't let me fix the problem before it gets to this stage." He digs his thumb deep between the muscles of your forearm, wiggling it from side to side to push the bundles apart.

"Holy fuck, can you please turn the medigun on? Or kill me? Either is preferable to what you're doing!" You're convinced that your eyes are going to bulge straight out of your skull.

"I need to determine the cause and I cannot do that if I heal you with the medigun."

"I don't care!" you wail, drumming your heels against the table.

"Have you been doing anything different lately?"

"Other than sleeping with my arm in the freezer? No."

"Have you changed how you're holding your weapons?"

"No." You're starting to puff with the effort of remaining still while the doctor mashes your arm into an internally bleeding sock of pulp.

"Any new hobbies or activities?"

"No." Water starts to leak out of the corners of your eyes.

He shakes his head and mutters to himself in German, but mercifully stops stabbing his fingers into your arm. The flats of his thumbs strokes up from your wrist to your shoulder. Whether it's that or the fact he's not actively aggravating the sore spots in your arms means you experience the closest thing to relief since he made you drag your arm out of the freezer.

Medic doesn't ask you any more questions, and you're content to lie there like a wet rag as he works on your arm to dissolve the ropes and twists the muscles have contorted themselves into. It sends you into a peculiar twilight of consciousness, a torpor not unlike jetlag. At some point you become dimly aware that he's stopped working on your arm. Your eyes flick open to find him staring at your shoulder with a slightly unfocused look in his eyes, mouth moving silently. You watch his eyes refocus and meet yours.

"I need to cut your arm open."

"What?!"

"I need to see inside your arm."

"Isn't that what x-rays are for?" you point out, alarmed at the thought of him taking a scalpel to your flesh.

He tuts. "For bones, not nerves, tendons and muscles."

"There's no other option?"

"I could inject you with a radioactive liquid and see if that shows up any pathology."

"Then let's do that!"

"Oh, I do not have the scanner for that," he tells you, wiping his hands with a cloth rather fastidiously.

"Why not?"

"I have never asked for one." He blinks at your aghast expression. "Why would I need one?"

"But you have the radioactive liquid?"

"Oh, ja, I have that."

"What the hell for?"

He shakes his head slightly and shrugs. "Fun?"

You close your eyes in frustration. "Some other option, then?"

The doctor takes a deep breath, tapping his foot. "Well, if you can wait a few months. I am working on something with Engineer but it is only on paper now."

The thought of dealing with this pain for months makes you panic. "Cut the damn arm open! But-" You point at him with the hand of your good arm like you're nailing a portrait to a wall. "No pain, no experimental additions, and no removals except with my express permission!"

You see the doctor visibly perk up. "Ok." He drops the cloth back on to the examination cart and rubs his hands together eagerly. "This will be exciting!"

"Not the word I'd use," you mutter as he preps your arm for some medical butchery. You see him flick the switch on the medigun. "Oh, NOW you turn it on!"

"I have a new lens I want to try," he reveals happily. "Don't worry, it will be better for you," he clarifies. "No pain."

"I'll take what I can get," you sigh.

It wasn't just cutting open your arm that the Medic wanted to do. It turns out "degloving" was the term that he conveniently forgot to use, but he did it so swiftly and with disturbing efficiency that before you could object, he'd stripped the entire limb of its skin, leaving you gawking at the shiny and redly glistening insides that were now outsides. So much for "express permission". At least he was right about the lack of pain, but he kept the medigun beam at a hairline setting between pain and no pain in order to prevent the beam from actually healing the inflamed tissues before he could see them with his own eyes. And he seemed inordinately enthusiastic about the whole process which, quite frankly, just raised a sense of dread in you that this was going to escalate out of control and end up with you being completely skinless. After all, you'd heard the story about the skeleton. Everyone had heard about that, usually directly from Medic, like it was an implicit threat

He spends a great deal of time getting a very close look at your flayed arm, exhibiting the kind of focussed study that is quite frightening. But on the upside, it seems to cheer him up immensely and you couldn't see how that would be to your detriment. At long as you didn't make any further derogatory comments. So you just lay there, feeling slightly ill, and let Medic gawp at your skinned flesh. You do wonder if he is going to start pulling out various blood vessels or muscles groups with the kind of abandon you'd seen him employ when stuffing a teammate's intestines back inside a ruptured abdominal cavity as if gravel and dirt weren't foreign bodies that needed to be debrided. But he was actually being very careful, using a long, slender metal tool to push tissues aside to have a look around and under, the red exhalation of the medigun soaking into the gaps. It gives you a weird sensation, like the one that you get when you hit your elbow in just the wrong spot and before the pain kicks in… an instrument string vibrating just below hearing range.

"Is this helping?"

He peers up at you and over his glasses with his bright blue eyes. "Is what helping?"

"You looking inside my arm."

"Oh, ja, it is very interesting," he replies, smile going all the way to his back teeth. He shifts on the backless chair to get into a better position to continue his examination, knees wide apart to get as close as possible.

"So, you know how to fix my arm?"

That makes him blink. "Um, I suppose?"

"Hang on, did you cut my arm open for some other reason?"

The time it takes him to not reply is answer enough.

"Unbelievable! I only let you do this because you said you needed to see inside it in order to fix my arm!"

"I never said I needed to see inside your arm in order to fix it. I just wanted to see inside it."

"What the hell for?"

"You have the nicest arm of anyone here."

The appropriate response to that revelation eludes you, because quite frankly you're not sure there is such a thing. The doctor sees the rage contort your face.

"It is a very, very nice arm," he rushes to tell you as if that excuses what he's doing. "Very shapely, very beautiful. I just wanted to see all of it." He splays his hands apart in entreaty, drawing his shoulders up near his ears.

"You know, this is my fault," you realise instantly. "I should've known better than to agree to this. Could you just... stop poking about, fix my arm, and put the skin back on where it belongs, please?"

The doctor actually drums his heels on the concrete floor at your request, and stares with a rather disturbing longing at your arm. "But-"

"Now!"

Medic sighs heavily and rather over-dramatically at your insistence, but he pulls the medigun down and twists the lens until the beam narrows and focusses into an almost laser-thin line. He has to set the device right behind his shoulder so he can aim it directly on to your inflamed nerves and swollen tendons as he pokes through your muscle fibres sulkily, his free hand hooked around the medigun's aiming handle. You can see the thin red beam almost instantly reduce the size of the aggravated tissues. Occasionally, when his hand gets too close to the beam, you can see it deviate towards his skin, like a metal needle being pulled by a magnet, licking against him until he moves his hand away and the beam snaps straight again. You can almost feel his pique at being thwarted, but his face is more than eloquent at betraying him.

"If you do not remedy the cause of this problem, we will have to do this again," he warns you, prising aside one of your extensors with the metal tool so the beam can unfurl a ropey mess of muscle fibres.

"Isn't that what you're doing now?"

"Mein gott, I told you this is not the cause," Medic replies, clearly exasperated, sitting back from your arm abruptly, hand slicing through the beam.

Frustration.

You blink several times in surprise at him. Not at his words but at the overwhelming sense of vexation that surged in you for a brief moment.

"I don't-"

"This is not a pathology caused by a bacterial, viral or fungal agent. Nor is it caused by impact injury or cellular mutation, or Respawn would have eliminated it the very next time you went through it. This is a psychological issue you have!"

"You're saying I'm doing this to myself?"

"Stress can do these things," the doctor replies before bending back over your arm. "If you had come to see me earlier, I could have done something about it before you made this… mess." He gestures impatiently at your flayed arm.

"Yeah, I can't imagine why I hesitated coming to see you," you retort angrily, also gesturing theatrically at your arm. The tips of your fingers suck the beam off its aim, making Medic hiss at you to keep still.

You are both silent as he finishes up on targeting all your problem areas with the beam, prissily poking your muscles fibres back into place. He says nothing as he lays your flayed skin back into place, smoothing it it out carefully before reaching back and turning the medigun's lens to fatten the beam and direct it along the incision, erasing the cut until there is nothing left of it except for a split traversing the dip of your elbow. He stands up, kicking the chair out from under him and away from the examination table.

Disappointment.

You can see it in his face, in the way his mouth is downturned and in the line between his brows. He sets the metal tool aside and goes back to massaging your forearm, but leaves the beam trained on the incision over your elbow joint.

"Are you experiencing nightmares?"

"No."

You watch his thumbs slide rhythmically along the skin that is now back where it rightfully belongs, sleeking the muscles into something less rigid.

"Are you having any interpersonal issues?"

"No."

Relief.

His hands slip briefly to either side of your elbow, thumbs drawing the beam from side to side, like a candle flame wavering in a gentle draught.

"At least, no more so than usual."

Amusement.

You frown, wondering if the medigun's beam is messing with your emotions, and you open your mouth to ask but Medic forestalls you with another question of his own.

"Family concerns?"

"No."

"Drugs or alcohol?"

"Tempting, but no thanks."

That earns you a wry glance. His hands slide up to your bicep, kneading deeply.

"Are you taking appropriate time to relax?"

"I can't get that much time off from this place," you reply drily. That makes the lines in his face fade ever so slightly, one corner of his mouth turning up.

"Well, ja, that is true."

You drop your gaze back down to where the medigun's beam is dancing from side to side between the insides of his wrists, occasionally brushing against his skin as it continues to soak into your arm. Fingers roll over your tricep muscles, encouraging them to release.

Caution.

"What are you doing to relax?"

You shrug, making the beam jitter. "I read. I stretch. I chop wood."

That makes him look at you.

Disbelief.

"You chop wood?" He hesitates for a few seconds, eyes searching your face as if to try and tell if you're fibbing. "Why?"

"Because it's relaxing."

Medic looks back down, this time at your hand and takes your wrist in a light grip. "Clench your fist, please?"

You do so.

"Hmm. Maybe it is that."

"No, I've done that for years. Why would it bother me now?"

"Hmm." He tilts his head from side to side a few times before releasing your wrist and concerning himself with your shoulder, the heel of his palm pressing firmly over the curves of your deltoids. You stare off into the darkness and let him get on with it. It actually feels quite nice, which is a welcome change from grinding pain or even frozen numbness. It feels more than nice. It feels very, very good. Maybe you should ask him if he can do your other arm. Not the flaying bit, but the massage. He's quite proficient at it. Maybe he can do a bit more than your other arm. Just a bit. But which bit? You smile slightly… a touch dazedly perhaps.

"Are you fucking?"

It takes you a moment to realise what he just asked you.

"What?"

"Are you fucking?"

You goggle up at him while he looks back at you with a small smile on his face, eyes wide, like a child innocently asking if there are any biscuits in the tin.

"Are you sure you're using the right verb?"

The doctor's eyes flick to one side and then back to yours. "Ja." He stops massaging your shoulder and slides his hands back down your arm a few inches.

"You haven't missed out a word at the end, or something?"

"No." How can he look at you like that after asking that?!

A long, drawn-out pause. "Are you seriously asking me that question?"

"I can ask you more scientifically, but I have found people don't like that much," he replies with a small shrug. "Are you currently engaging in sexual ac-"

"I think you'll find that people don't like being asked if they're fucking, regardless of what words you use!"

"Why?" He seems genuinely at a loss as to the inappropriateness of the inquiry. Unbelievable!

"Because it's personal!"

"That is why I am asking you," he tells you, slightly exasperated now, throwing his hands up. "Why would I ask you if someone else is fucking?"

"You shouldn't be asking about fucking, mine or anyone else's!"

"I am not asking for the sake of salacious gossip, I am asking because a lack of sexual activity can contribute to high levels of stress an-"

"Oh, what other reason would there be for me to be stressed other than a lack of fucking?" you bark back at him, the heat of embarrassment starting to seep into your face. "You're living and working in the same place I am. Can you not possibly think of another reason I would be uptight? Could it be the bombs, could it be the mess, the fighting, the shit food, the pranks, the smell, the futile and insane ouroboros of this bonkers existence I am currently 'engaged' in?!"

Medic leans back away from your angry words, squinting. "So, no fucking, then?"

You drop your head, rubbing your eyes with thumb and forefinger. "I can't believe we're having this conversation," you sigh under your breath.

"Why are you not fucking?" the doctor persists, using one knuckle to shift the medigun's handle to the left.

Intrigued.

"When do I get time away from the base? Is there some bordello within 100 miles of this place that has escaped my attention?" You're starting to shout now, despite your effort to keep your discomfort in check at having revealed that you are, in fact, not fucking.

"Fuck someone here," he tells you, like he's pointing out a painfully obvious fact to a moron. He lifts your wrist and turns your hand palm up so he can run his thumbs over the soft fleshy mounds and up to the tendons leading into your arm.

"This is it, it's finally happened. This place has sent me through the looking-glass," you announce to the air around you. "I can't fuck someone here!"

"Why?"

You gape at him. Jesus Christ, is this the only question he knows to ask?!

"Too big?"

That just confuses you, but he mistakes it for a negative response.

"Too young? Too old? Too loud?" Is he guessing why you won't fuck someone here? "Oh! You don't like men?"

"Yes, I like men!" You instantly and inwardly berate yourself for volunteering this information, but he's driving you nuts with this line of questioning when you'd rather be talking about just anything else. "It's against the rules!" Surely that is sufficient reason for him. You hope.

Medic makes a rude noise with his mouth. "Rules! I don't know why you bother about that. Since when have rules stopped anyone here from doing what they want?" He shrugs one shoulder and goes back to massaging your hand, appearing to have abandoned the topic.

You have to consciously relax your jaw and slow your breathing down and get a grip on this anger-induced verbal diarrhea he's prodded you into. Stress. Jesus. What an understatement. It seems this place has manifested yet another way to try and kill you.

"Are you masterbating?"

"I can't- This is ridiculous. Why do you have to know this?!"

Medic shifts the position of the medigun ever so slightly to refocus the narrowed beam on a different part of your elbow.

Curiosity.

"If you are not fucking, then you should masterbate," he tells you, peering closely at calluses at the base of your fingers. You snatch your hand away from his grip and your opened elbow makes an unpleasant squelching sound.

"And you wondered why I never came in here," you retort snottily. "Did you wait until I was stuck here with my arm split open before asking me if I get myself off?"

He looks steadily down at you. "Get yourself off of what?" You stare hard at him, trying to figure out if he's being deliberately obtuse, but the guileless set of his features suggest not.

"Getting yourself off is the same as masterbating," you tell him, feeling a bit disorientated that you've had to release your irritation to slip into a lesson on English colloquialisms.

"Oh!" He seems to find this amusing. "There are so many different ways to say it. Sometimes I don't know them." He chuckles until he sees the expression on your face. "You shouldn't be embarrassed. Everyone here does it." The earnestness in his voice doesn't make the situation any less uncomfortable. There's a tickling sensation falling down around your elbow, like the languid trail of fingertips, but you know it's blood leaking out of the incision in your arm.

You suck a lungful of air in through your teeth because words are currently failing you in an inversely proportional manner to the way they seem to keep spilling out of Medic's mouth. Your disorientation is not dissipating. If anything, it's getting worse. Disorientation and, shockingly, enticement. Is this what pain relief does to a person? No wonder people get addicted to it. You find your gaze locked fixedly on the doctor's mouth and you cannot recall when that happened. You really wish he'd stop talking about masturbation. But also, you wish that he won't. You shake your head slightly as if you could dislodge the carnal thoughts that are boiling around just below the surface of your conscious mind.

"Ja. If they are not already doing it, I tell them they need to get themself off." He emphasises the last three words as if to cement the saying in his head for future recall. "But then, they are all men, so they are already doing it."

And before you can stop it, the visuals burst forth in your head, making you whimper in defeat. But, you know, it's not like you haven't thought about it before. You're not a nun. Of course you've thought about it before. Sometimes extensively. But only when you're on your own, because such thoughts tend to be hard to hide, and showing any sign leaves you vulnerable to merciless piss-taking by the others. You don't tent fabric or have to sit awkwardly the way they might, but your cheeks and neck tend to go bright red so you might as well be narrating aloud that you're imagining them rubbing one out. Maybe you should tell Medic that phrase as well. Add to his bizarre collection of masturbation euphemisms.

"You should be flattered."

"What?" Have you missed a section of conversation while thinking about your teammates firing off some knuckle-children?

"That they think about you sometimes when they are getting themselves off." Holy fuck, why does he insist on emphasising those words!

"How do you know this? Why are they telling you this? Why are you telling me this?!" you wail at him, tapping your temple repeatedly with the tips of your fingers.

"You don't find it flattering?"

"That my teammates are pumping the keg while thinking about me? Oh, why wouldn't I find that flattering?!"

There is a long and incredibly awkward pause as you stare at each other.

"Is 'pumping the keg' a-"

"It's another way to say wanking, yes!"

Medic pushes his glasses a little higher up on to the bridge of his nose. "You do know rather a lot of different ways to say 'masturbating'."

"And I'd be really happy not to say any of them aloud ever again," you point out through clenched teeth. He actually recoils slightly from that, and you fervently pray that he stops going on about wanking so that you can try and scrub out the autoplaying porn going on in your head. You glare off into a dark corner of the medibay to make it clear you're putting a full-stop to this conversation.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see him adjust the position of the medigun a few degrees.

Consternation.

"I… uh…" His hands clench and relax a few times. "I need to ask you this."

"Is it relevant?" you reply stonily, refusing to look at him.

"Ja, but I don't want you to get angry. You need to stay relaxed."

Your eyes roll up into your head in frustration, body taut. 'Stay relaxed' he says. As if you've been relaxed at any point in the last two months. "What is it?"

"You need to show me how you hold your hand when you are… ah… pumping the keg."

You smother the unexpected burst of laughter that erupts out of your mouth with your palm, but not quickly enough to hide it completely. You keep it clamped there until you feel you can compose your face into something more neutral.

"You can't-" You have to stop as your face twists back towards laughter again. "You can't use that phrase for a woman." The expression on Medic's face is so genuinely innocent that you almost forget how invasive his questioning has been. It's an expression you've often found very appealing on him, but this scenario is so left-of-field you really don't know how to react to it.

"You're German. Don't you all drink beer? Surely you know how to pump a keg."

The doctor frowns at that. "That is a bit stereotypical," he admonishes you. "But ja, I know how to pu- Oh!" He realises the point you're making. "I get it now." He makes the obscene gesture with his hand and you have to screw your eyes shut to blot it out.

"Please don't do that!" you whisper under your breath while you attempt valiantly to stuff the lewd images in your head back down into your subconscious.

"You need to show me how you hold your hand when you get yourself off."

You giggle at the way he stresses the last three words as if he's explaining it to someone who has English as their second language. My god, get a grip, you scold yourself before the image of Medic making that obscene gesture again floats up to the surface of your brain. "What does that matter-?"

"You could be making your condition worse," he explains.

"I thought you said you told the others to tear one out if they were feeling uptight!" 'Tear one out'? Was that even a real euphemism. What the hell are you saying?! You need to put a brake on your mouth before this gets even more out of control.

"Ja, but that is because they don't have the stress injury you have! If you do this-" He does that bloody gesture again that's starting to drive you crazy. "-it will make the inflammation worse!"

Inflammation! "Stop!"

"You will make the nerves swell-"

Don't think about it don't think about it don't

"Please stop talking?"

"-until they are thickened and taut and overheated-"

"I don't hold my hand like that!" you yell over him in a desperate attempt to stop him from using descriptors that are flushing your brain down the sin drain. "I hold it like this!"

Medic stares at the hand you have held right in front of his face for a few seconds. Then he leans slightly to one side to look past it and at you. "You keep it like that the entire time?"

"Yes!"

He looks back at the outstretched fingers, the middle and ring fingers pressed up tightly against each other.

Inquisitive. At an almost palpable level.

"You don't do this?" He mirrors your hand with his own and curls the two snugged fingers repeatedly in a slow, beckoning gesture that you have to exert a herculean amount of self-control to drag your eyes away from.

You shake your head and slide your hand up and down in the air, feeling the blood flow that is now inevitably staining your cheeks scarlet and pouring into… other areas in an automatic reaction to this well-practiced hand motion you are, ludicrously, performing in front of another person in the name of diagnosis.

Medic slides his grip around your wrist and holds your arm out straight until your hand is hovering directly over your groin, and then slips the fingers of his other hand straight into the open wound over your elbow and right into the writhing dance of the medigun beam.

Anticipation.

"Do it again," he tells you, glancing to one side and frowning slightly in concentration, his touch inside your arm sliding over tendons slowly.

Your nostrils flare as you try to control your breathing, watching the way Medic presses his lips together and closes his eyes, relying only on what his hands are telling him.

"Relax." He gives your wrist a little shake to encourage you to loosen your hand. Your fingers droop while his shift inside your arm until they press against a different connection, like fingertips pressing the string against the fret of an instrument.

"Again." He squeezes his grip slightly on your wrist to get you to straighten your fingers into that magically satisfying arrangement, but he's the one who moves your hand back and forth in precisely the right cadence. That you only showed him once. He turns his head a fraction, and it's then you realise that it's not the glow from the medigun reflecting off his cheekbones.

Chagrin.

This is why you'd avoided coming here. Because you knew that sooner or later you'd reveal something that cause awkwardness. Yes, you'd imagined all of your teammates polishing the sword at some time, considered carefully what they looked like when they pounded the fence post, mused on how they sounded when they wrung out the rope, but none of them as frequently as the man standing over you, ghosting you as you mimed polishing the jewel, probing inside your body to find precisely the right trigger point.

"Relax."

Because it hadn't stopped at imagining the doctor applying the handbrake. It had escalated to something far beyond slicking it stiff.

Arousal.

His grip tightened on your wrist. "Again."

It had gotten so serious that you couldn't look at him without superimposing the lurid imagery atop reality.

"Relax."

And he'd know what your blushes and your flushed neck meant.

Hunger.

"Again."

He would know what you'd be thinking when you looked at him.

Need.

"Relax."

And you couldn't have him know that you'd imagined him railing you so hard and so deep that what he spilled into you would leak out of your nose.

His gasp makes your whole body tense up, the grip around your wrist painfully tight, his eyes opening to stare at the floor in shock.

Craving.

And that's when you realise that it hadn't been your own emotions you had been feeling, that whenever the medigun's focussed beam had brushed against him and then into you, that it had pulled some fragment of his sensations with it and nudged it along your neural pathways and up into your brain.

It had been a more concentrated form of the medigun's beam that the doctor used out in the field: the one that unified and harmonised and strengthened two people into one unstoppable force… two blended and honed and sharpened into one piercing impulse.

And it all made sense. The blatant questions about your sexual activities cloaked in medical inquiry, the stark revelation of your role in mastabatory fantasies, the obliquely flattering way he'd complimented the shape of your arm… 'Everyone here does it.'

Had this been Medic's way of telling you that you weren't the only one suffering? 'They are all men, so they are already doing it.'

You cast your eyes over his rumpled clothes, the loosened tie and dishevelled hair, so at odds with the neatness and exactitude he presented during the daytime. 'I need to ask you…'

There was one way to be sure. 'You need to show me…'

And so you did. This time without hesitation. Without obfuscation, without guilt and without limit. You let it play through your mind, stark and true.

Lust.

And you see the shudder that runs through him, the way his eyes close briefly in desperation and his shoulders slump in acceptance as his own fantasy spirals up through your nerves and into your mind.

And it is your turn to gasp as he looks into your eyes, as you see yourself the way he does, as you see the way he would take you if you were willing, how he would make you arch in pleasure and gluttony for the taut feel of him inside you. Two blended and honed and sharpened into one piercing impulse. An unstoppable force.

"You know what to do," you whisper, nudging your wrist up into his grip. For one crestfallen moment, you think Medic releases your hand in denial and your whole body tenses in embarrassment that you've misread the situation so badly. The fingers buried in the opened crook of your arm slide out and push against your skin until your arm is resting back against the tilted head of the examination table and is held there until the medigun seals up the split seam in your flesh.

The sweet, yearning pressure of the doctor's hand between your thighs makes you tremble.

"You have to remember how to relax," he breathes into your ear, urging his own mental images along your nerves, ones he has played over and over in his own imagination until they have crystalised and sharpened into a florid representation of your self-pleasuring. He has made you more luscious and softer and desirable than you feel you are capable of being, but it is all there in his mind, superimposed over your exhausted, shivering, wet-clothed body beneath him. Just as your licentious daydream of his sleekly-muscled form writhing gently and addictively as he strokes his own flesh to a glorious overflowing fulfilment twists from you into and through the medigun's beam and into him.

It seems fitting that the arm he admired, outside and in, is the one to reach toward him, its hand sliding up the inside of his thigh until it cradles a ripening heat. You realise that he has you at a disadvantage, that you have shown him the way you like to be touched, but you only have your selfish guesswork of him to guide you.

"You need to show me-"

"You already know," Medic sighs into your neck, lips brushing down and along the gentle arc of your collar bone, the tip of his tongue tracing the dips and swells of your shoulder.

Each hand touches that most intimate of places of the other at the exact same time, sliding into silky warmth and around pulsing length, now overlaying imagery with tactility. As you both breathe in and out, faster and deeper, scent twines through sight and touch with a gentle and addictive fragrance that only lovers can know. And the sounds of mutual pleasure and gratitude and delight flexes the flattened fantasy into a multi-dimensional immersion. A self-gratification expanded to encompass another willingly. Two unified and harmonised and strengthened into one unstoppable force. Two blended and honed and sharpened into one piercing impulse.

The doctor lifts one leg, resting his thigh on the table under your bent knees to allow you a greater range of movement with your hand and him the freedom to thrust firmly and smoothly through your grip. You knees drift apart to allow for the width of his hand, so much larger than yours, long fingers smoothing and tantalising and precise.

Mouth to ear, you both whisper each other's name with a tenderness and enthusiasm you have never dared in reality for fear of laughter and ridicule and rejection, but that you have practiced relentlessly when alone, so often that it is now effortlessly natural.

And just as you'd dreamt, just as you'd touched, you both ascend together into that bright, convulsing point of nothing and everything, both dissolving and blending into one, you with a fluttering creaminess under his fingers and he with a plunging release that surges up your forearm, and the tickling sensation falling down around your elbow is neither the languid trail of fingertips nor the leak of blood from your body.

Your separation is not unlike that after an Uber: a wistful sense of the loss of something miraculous and powerful, something greater than the two of you apart. But separate you must, however reluctantly. You see him trail the hand he has destroyed and rebuilt you with across his throat, face flushed and damp with sweat, and he slides his leg off the examination table and turns away from you, the undulating medigun beam peeling away from him to leave you alone in its care. You sigh at the sinking feeling in your gut. He is awkward… uncertain, fussing with his clothing as if to distract himself from a mistake. You close your eyes against the brutal light above you and stopper up the emotions that had expanded hopefully outside of you and into him.

But he surprises you with gentle courtesy, wiping your arm clean with the same meticulous attention he'd given his hands while you were verbally dancing around each other, before you'd realised that you each harboured the same condition, and suffered with the same longings and restrictions. It is a sweet gesture that he kisses your shoulder, trailing his mouth down to the crook of your arm, tasting your skin with his tongue.

The doctor fishes a small notebook out of his back pocket and finds a pen in the top drawer of the instrument cart. The writing on the folded square of paper he hands you is illegible to you.

You frown at the incomprehensible loops and angles of his penmanship. "What is it?"

Medic gazes down at you with that beguilingly open expression he employs with unerring effect on you. "Prescription."

"I'm not cured?"

"We need to be sure."

You look at the paper again. "I can't read it," you confess, reluctantly.

He turns your hand toward him so he can run his finger along the script for you to see as he reads it aloud.

"Take one Medic as often as needed." He gives you a heart-stopping smile. "Or wanted."