Day 10, 10:46
"What do you think happens when we die, Dot?"
Dolores turns her head to look at Nessy who is lost in the stars above.
"I don't know. It's not something I can understand, so I don't rack my brains about it."
"I think we dream," Nessy continues as if she hadn't asked the question to hear the answer. "Wouldn't that be nice? You're dying, your mind is fading, your body too old or too broken to support you and your eyes close. And then you wake up again in a dream, your favorite dream, and it goes on forever, and you can change it however you want."
Nessy looks over and Dolores smiles at the hopeful spark in her eyes. They had the same eyes. Same green, same grey. Different minds behind them, different spirits behind the Stardust.
"If I died, would you cry?" Nessy looks back up, her voice different now. As if she wasn't talking about dreaming anymore, but about reality. But Dolores knows better than to call her out on it. In moods like this one, Nessy is really like her namesake. A shy animal that will flee back into hiding at the slightest disturbance.
"Of course. I don't think I could stop crying. I mean, I would loose my best friend, my sister and my family all in one." Dolores moves slowly, taking Nessy's hand, though neither of them looks away from the starry sky."Are you? Going to die?"
"I don't know." The words sound so hollow, like a recording to be replayed at command.
"I don't want you to die. I don't want to be alone. I'm afraid of that." At that, Nessy smiled and squeezes Dolores' hand softly.
"You're an immortal soul spirit, not even Tony Stark can understand, inhabiting a body made of the age-old dust of a million stars. You don't have to be afraid of anything," she recites their line. Dolores smiles and they look up at the stars they are part of.
And then one of those stars falls. If drips down from the sky like a drop of water. Another one follows, and another one and the next one. It starts raining stars and suddenly the rain is red, red and tastes like metal. Dolores squeezes Nessy's hand, but her hand is gone, no longer there. Dolores scrambles to her feet looking around, looking for Nessy.
There she is, leaning against the chimney of the roof, clinging to her right arm which is sliced open longways, looking up at the stars, tears streaking down her face. But there is no blood, no puddles around her. The blood is falling from the sky and the world around her is slowly drowning in it, drowning in Nessy's blood.
Dolores tore her eyes open, still seeing the red rain all around her. But it was gone. She was back in her room in Stark Tower, the white walls slowly being filled up with pictures. She felt groggy and sticky. She had wanted to calm and clear her mind like she used to before surgeries and had apparently fallen asleep in the armchair. She shook the dream out of her head and went into the bathroom. The next few hours were important, probably the most important thing she had done in the last few years. She had to be as comfortable as possible if she wanted to avoid any mistakes.
She showered quickly and efficiently, keeping the bandage around her arm dry. Dressing quickly she hurried down into the lab where Bruce had managed to chase Stark away for the duration of the operation. A lost of stuff was missing from the table he usually occupied, so Dolores wasn't worrying that he might burst into the procedure. James sat on the metal table, his eyes staring into nothingness. She approached him with a smile, tying her hair back into a tight ponytail and then moving on to braid it.
"Hey. Ready?" He nodded and Dolores wondered how often Hydra had done this that he was so calm about an operation. Usually, the greatest hurdle was to calm down the patient enough, but James didn't even seem to care. The only thing he had worried about was a full narcosis, but Dolores had suggested that it might also work with local anesthetics. A full narcosis was easier, but if he didn't want it, she wouldn't force him. She had become a doctor to help, not to live out a god complex. Banner joined them just as Dolores had laid James down onto the table, making sure everything was comfortable. She had covered him from the waist down with a blanket to shield him from the cold, only his bare chest open to examination.
"Ah, Bruce. Good, then we can start. So, there's a bullet still in your arm and some shrapnel around your left shoulder and your chest. We'll work with local anesthetics and start with the arm, then the shoulder and then the chest. We will take a break after the second operation as both the shoulder and the chest will be complicated. James, you'll have to talk to me the whole time. I'll ask you questions every now and then and you'll have to answer truthfully so I can monitor how things are working out. Bruce, you'll be handing me stuff and holding it, so take a tour of where everything is." Bruce nodded and started inspecting the layout of the surgical instruments. Dolores turned to James with the first syringe of anesthetic. She concentrated on the needle, making sure everything was fine before she inspected James right arm.
"I'll inject the anesthetic now. It will be uncomfortable and maybe even hurt a bit but the area should then be numb in a few minutes. Tell me if anything feels off, in case you are allergic or something." James nodded and Dolores breathed, concentrating on the muscle beneath her hands. She quietly whispered the names of the muscle groups and the blood vessels beneath the skin, trying to distract herself from the warmth of his skin. Of course his skin was warm, she'd have seriously fucked up if it wasn't. And of course he had little white scars covering his arm, he'd been with Hydra and raising the arms was an instinctive defense mechanism. But when she punctured his skin with the needle, her thoughts went blank and blissful concentration settled in at the familiar movements.
The bullet was easily removed, Dolores swiftly maneuvering her tools to cut loose the metal. James' body had grown accustomed to the metal so much it had grown around it, making it slightly harder to extract the bullet, but Dolores managed with minimal damage to the tissue. She took her time stitching up the wound, relaxing before turning to his left shoulder.
For that, she changed position, sitting down on a chair beside his head, working through a magnifying glass. She could feel James' eyes on her as she asked him questions through her mouthguard, but by then she was so deeply concentrated on the entanglement of blood vessels, muscles, nerves, and wires that that didn't distract her in the slightest. She worked carefully, her instruments moving with the same precision as her paintbrush did, not one move unwanted, not one move a mistake. Her mouth asked easy questions in regular intervals, alternating from how he felt to what his favorite color was, but her brain barely registered her own voice. She was fully immersed in a world of raw living flesh, pulsing arteries and strings of nerves. Bruce was a good nurse, handing her instruments quickly and immediately disinfecting the ones she discarded for further use.
Dolores' decision to turn her back to surgery had not been an easy one, and today she realized again why. It was a terribly harsh, strenuous and draining profession, but Dolores had always loved the anatomy of the human body and despite the pressure, during surgery, she could lose herself in it. Bruce didn't stop her when she forgot to take the break she had announced and simply rolled over to James' chest, continuing to talk to him in a calming manner as she sedated the nerves, checked back with the x-ray for the thousandth time, and started working.
When she finally knotted the last stitch, the exhaustion of hours of intense concentration slammed into her like a train. Her eyes took longer than usual to adjust to the depths of the room after staring through a magnifying glass for hours and she pushed a loose strand of hair back behind her ear. Bruce let out a gasp of terror when he saw her.
"What?!" she asked, her tired knotted mind alarmed at his expression. James giggled and completely confused, Dolores turned to him.
"You look terrifying," he grinned. Dolores spun around and headed over to the mirror above the basin in the corner. When she saw her reflection she too had to grin. The plastic gloves covering her hands were full of his blood and over the course of the operation, she had smeared it all over her face. She turned back to them and made a face before getting off the gloves and trying to rinse the blood off her hands, face, and arms.
"Thanks, Bruce, a lot. I'll clean up here, but I'd ask you to tell Steve how things went." She turned to James who hadn't dared to move from the operation table. "If you don't mind, we can just send him down here."
"I don't mind," James shrugged, his voice betraying that he did everything but mind his best friend coming down. Dolores grinned and Bruce nodded before leaving.
"I'll tell him."
After washing up herself and putting her gloves back on, Dolores returned to her patient and started wrapping up the new wounds. She applied antibacterial salve and checked up on the stitches again. Then she washed the blood from James' skin with some warm water, making sure to stay clear of the new bandages. Again the proximity of his skin, his body, did something to her heart and mind, and her concentration slipped. When she caught herself pulling the cloth over the soft pink scar on his abdomen for the second time, she snapped out of it and quickly spun around, doing her best to ignore the look on his face. It was the same one he had had before she had tricked him in the training room, and she wasn't going to go down that road again. She told herself it was just her mind being tired after hours of intense concentration and picked up the clean shirt. She helped James pull it over, the wounds still numb to the pain. He'd have difficulties getting dressed for some time, but that was a minor problem.
By the time Steve entered the lab, Dolores was cleaning up the instruments, having moved James to the chair she had been working on cleaning the table. Seeing his best friend trying his best not to laugh at Dolores' pronunciation of different foods smoothed out the creases of worry he had come down with, and he started helping Dolores while once more admiring her ease with the new language.
Eventually, Steve and Dolores had sorted the med bay back to its original state. Dolores instructed Steve to help James walk as they went to the elevator to get to Steve's floor, though that was redundant caution. Despite knowing of his quick healing, Dolores limited James' movement even further, confining him to the floor so she and Steve could have a constant eye on him, just in case.
Then, things settled back into the now established routine, interrupted only by Bruce remembering the chip in Dolores, followed by a small operation to remove it. Dolores had completely forgotten about the chip and was relieved to know it gone. That was the only thing disrupting the rhythm of daily life. James, Steve, and Dolores would almost always be together, Steve either cooking, drawing, training or convincing them to further episodes of Star Trek, James sitting or lying around on Dolores' command, teaching her Russian words and phrases and hiding his first clumsy attempts at drawing from Steve at first, but eventually embracing his friends help, and Dolores playing with her knives, working like mad on new pictures or training with How and at the end of the week even Steve.
After four days, Dolores had decided to remove the bandages completely and pull the stitches, the wounds having healed beautifully. The three were now the smallest scars in James' collection and Dolores was not even trying to hide her pride in her work, showing the scars off to Wanda and Steve. She made sure James ate regularly and the rest of the group caught on to that routine, making sure James was there for dinner as much as they didn't care whether Stark was there too. On the evening of the operation, a whiteboard with eight differently colored markers appeared in the kitchen on Steve's floor, which was where they most commonly ate.
Dolores also continued her conversations with James, although not pushing him for anything, wanting his body to recover first. It did, however, have the side effect that by the end of the week James not only talked to her and Steve but to Wanda and Bruce as well, although he was still reserved around Vision and Nat. Dolores too noticed some improvements on her side. Her aim with her knives had improved so much that she had taken up on Wanda's offer and was now practicing with moving targets. Steve had agreed as a voluntary victim on which she could practice her own powers and at the end of the week, she not only instinctively build the barrier to her powers, enabling her to touch others without an immediate flow of emotions, she could also choose to only view parts of a persons soul, as she had gotten used to calling it, as well as showing them only parts of her own. Her Russian had also improved greatly, Wanda and Nat occasionally switching to Russian whenever they couldn't come up with the English word immediately and then continuing. Dolores, by all means, didn't understand everything, but to James' secret pride, at the end of the week she almost always got the general topic of the conversation and her accent was becoming better and better.
James had asked whether he could sleep in her room, excusing the idea with it being easier for her to check up on him in case anything happened. Dolores only too happily agreed, excusing her excitement with the fact that she hadn't had a nightmare ever since they had gotten into that habit. Because of this and him generally doing his best to constantly stay around her, Dolores noticed how restless he was getting with all the action around him. His drawing skills were getting better, nowhere near paralleling Steve's, but he was learning to draw faces more and more accurately, filling a notebook with them. Dolores hadn't asked to see it, trusting that he would show her if he thought it necessary, and she hadn't asked about it either.
It was on a Sunday, eight days after the operation, that this natural rhythm got upset.