Torbjorn: Wires
Characters: Torbjorn Lindholm, Ingrid Lindholm
Themes: Hurt/Comfort, Love, Phantom pain, Dark humor, death
Words: 1,300
Rating: PG
Feels: Yes
When you live life on the raggedy edge, you don't exactly wake up, not like civilians understand it. Sand, rock, some corner of an abandoned morgue, it doesn't matter. You don't swim for the surface, you launch out of the water like a missile leaving a submarine. Like a light switch.
Of course, a lot of those times Torbjorn had been sleeping due to a concussion. Or because someone had sedated him after he refused to stop checking the defenses.
And when you went home, you might have a little trouble readjusting. Torbjorn never had. Always went right back to the swim for the surface.
When the doctor put his hand Torbjorn's shoulder, he came on like a light switch, and nearly fell out of his chair.
The doctor apologized.
Torbjorn said it wasn't the doctor's fault. Losing an arm took some adjustment.
And then he looked up.
The doctor was a young - younger - man with good, Scandanavian face. Even the cheekbones.
But more importantly, that face had the same heavy look Torbjorn had seen on a thousand doctors, when they walked into a room and said someone had lost their arm, the ability to walk, or their life.
And Torbjorn knew.
He held up a hand. The hand. It would be best if the doctor told them both at once.
Ingrid had always been the strong one.
Smart, too. And brave. She took one look at Torbjorn, one look at the doctor, and her jaw set. She swallowed, closed her eyes to compose herself. Spread her hands on the bedsheets. The heart rate monitor began to beep faster.
Torbjorn had been in a plane crash once. All he remembered - aside from the same wrench in his guts that he felt now - was some automated system going brace, brace, brace.
Ingrid said "we're ready, Doctor."
Torbjorn had once read a book, an American book. Something bad happened to a character, and his world ended. It was like every cell in the character's body went "okay, the universe is dissolved!"
As the doctor spoke, Tony understood the metaphor better. Everything slowly went numb.
There had been complications -
There went his left arm - again - and Jupiter.
- a heart flutter -
The toes on his right leg. The spiral arm of the milky way. Poof.
- stopped breathing -
The ribs on his chest.
Someone was touching him.
"Bär?"
Ingrid looked worried. Of course she did. He reached for her hand, and responded in kind.
Vogel.
Bird.
She also called him Blitz sometimes, but that was how they got in this situation in the first place.
He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but there must've been a short circuit somewhere, because he suddenly couldn't breathe, couldn't keep the tears streaming from his eyes no matter how much he pressed his hands to them-
It hurt.
Everything hurt.
Oh God.
Oh God.
Ingrid's arms wrapped around him. Something dripped onto the back of his neck.
The doctor coughed. Would he like to see her?
Torbjorn just stared. Would he like -
Ingrid shook her head. There was, yes, there was a thin, wry smile on her lips, even though her eyes brimmed with tears. "No. But we need to, anyway."
The doctor nodded, and left the Lindholms alone with each other, and their grief.
Their daughter was dead.
One of the lights in the hall buzzed. It was off-sync. Possibly intended for another country-
Their daughter was dead.
The crash cart had had one bad wheel. They had to push a little harder to muscle past it, and the cart kept pulling to the left.
Their daughter was dead.
The ambulance didn't take corners well. It was top heavy, of course, it was an ambulance, but with better stabilizers-
"What are you thinking of?" Ingrid said.
He said he was thinking of efficiency.
Ingrid looked at her husband, chewed the inside of her cheek, and did not make a joke about his juggling career. Yes, he had that worrying blank stare at nothing in particular, but...he needed some time. Let the tension break naturally.
Slowly, thoughtfully, he began to speak.
Maybe if he had -
"Stop," Ingrid said.
- if he hadn't been -
"Stop."
- injured, maybe the stress wouldn't -
Ingrid yanked his head around to face her. She was tired and pale and needed a bath and she was still beautiful. She pressed her forehead to his -
"What are you basing that on?" she murmured.
Well...
A smile. "A good engineer can't make conclusions without data."
But he wasn't an engineer right now. Just a father.
"And you are still wrong. I knew what I signed up for. I married you, for better or for worse. All of you." She reached over, and touched the stump, for the first time. "More or less."
Something loosened in his chest. "I love you."
She squeezed his hand. "I love you too."
She was always stronger than him. Solid Solingen steel, all the way through.
Someone coughed.
The nurse stood there, not smiling. She had a perfectly deniable tremble to her lips, however.
Torbjorn tried to jerk away, like he was ashamed to be seen - what? Holding his wife? Ingrid held him tight, lifted her head a little, and faced the nurse.
"Yes?" Ingrid said.
Were they ready?
Ingrid was if Torbjorn was. And, to his own surprise, he was. As much as one could be, anyway. He blinked a few times, ran his hand over his cheeks.
The nurse nodded, went out into the hall, and wheeled the box in.
Strange. They were automated these days. It could wheel itself in. Then the nurse made eye contact with both of them, and he understood.
No child would be shoved around, like an object, like a delivery, like rubbish.
The nurse left the three Lindholms without a word. Torbjorn looked at the box.
She was so small.
Torbjorn let go of his wife and reached out with both hands -
Oh. Right. How easy it was to forget.
He reached out with his right hand. His fingertips touched the smooth plastic of the incubator. Drew back. Touched it again.
"I have -"
He stopped. Swallowed. His daughter's name was on the side. In marker, not some display. Another personal, inefficient, human touch.
ANNA LINDHOLM
Ingrid rested a hand on his shoulder as the tag blurred, as his voice roughened: "I had big plans for you."
-OWTW-
"Wires", by Athlete is a song about #the premature birth of the lead singer's daughter. Fortunately, the singer's daughter turned out better than Anna did. I first heard it a long time ago, on a Firefly fanvid by obsessive24 about Simon and River which, I just noticed, is actually a shipping vid.
Uh... I'm just going to pretend it's not. I reject your reality and substitute my own.
The book Torbjorn read was Kurt Vonnegut's weird classic Breakfast of Champions.
Ingrid is from Solingen, Germany, a town well known for their steel cutty things, like Merkur razors; some call it the City of Blades.
Since Tor-bjorn is Swedish for "thunder bear", Ingrid's nickname for him is Bär, German for bear. Blitz means lightning, and has connotations of speed and overwhelming force.
Ingrid does not use it in public. There's a reason the Lindholms have so many kids.
Vogel may make Ingrid sound small and delicate, but remember, eagles, hawks, and cassowaries are all birds.
This was going to be a fan-comic, but I sat on it for a year. I noticed Torbjorn treated his turret like a kid or grandkid. Which made me think about how he treats his actual kids. And the "big plans" soundclip...
Executive summary: I wrote this whole gut-wrenching story just to make a single random character line feel dark.