Theme: #84 - He
Genre: General/Drama
Version: Crystal Tokyo/AU
Rating: PG
...
Beautiful Broken
...
He knows she only visits when she needs a distraction (and she always needs a distraction). He doesn't like to consider that she visits because it's one of the last places he'd go, shunning the sterile tile and smell of disinfectant like a vampire shuns the sun.
The orderly halls, bags of fluid, and miles and miles of chart work had once been part of his world, but he had decided a long time ago that he didn't belong there. Unless she was there, of course, acting as a temporary lifetime pass. A lifetime pass to disease, drugs, and the perpetually broken. Damaged. She surrounded herself with death and destruction, but not because she enjoyed it.
She wanted to fix it.
A Rubik's complex. A messiah complex. She had to solve the problem; she had to help. As if giving up her hopes and dreams to the world wasn't enough. Maybe he was more selfish than she was. He couldn't understand the drive, the need that brought her back to the clean, white world of Tokyo's medical district when she was already running on fumes to begin with.
So, he just tried to fuel her. She gave him a small smile as her fingers curled around the cup of coffee he'd brought her, and she let him sit next to her on the cold, hard bench outside the nurse's station. He tried not to focus on all the pictures of monkeys and strange, fanciful animals that smeared the walls of the children's wing, and instead stared at her knuckles. They were white, tensed around the cardboard cup protector.
"We're ridiculously short staffed," she explained unnecessarily. There was a brief pause as she sipped her coffee, and then, "Why don't you ever volunteer?"
He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees and studying how red his hands looked in the harsh lighting. And then he glanced back at her, and she was staring back at him with those blue eyes of hers, innocent and critical all at the same time. He wetted his lips and turned away.
"I wasn't a very good doctor," he answered. There was something dark and gritty under his thumbnail. He picked at it without success.
"I don't believe that," she said.
He almost chuckled at her confidence, her faith in the unproven abilities of others. Or maybe it was just in his abilities. He let the thought slide around inside his head for a while.
"You have to have something special to be a good doctor, a great doctor," he elaborated. She was staring at him over her coffee cup again. He watched the toe of her beige pumps tap nervously against the air. "Knowledge, drive, practical application. They're all important. But they don't make you any better or worse than anyone else. Well, unless you don't have knowledge, drive, or practical application." He smiled over his shoulder at her. "I mean, they don't give you an idea of what it's like to be lying alone, somewhere unfamiliar that smells like the inside of a bleach bottle, and not have a damn clue if you're going to be walking out of there in the future. Great doctors are..." The monkey on the far side of the wall was grinning at him, probably already knowing what a mistake the next few words were going to be. "Great doctors are as damaged as the people they treat. I wasn't damaged enough to make a difference."
Silence. Her lips were still pressed around the rim of her cup, but she wasn't drinking. She wasn't looking at anything in particular. She was just thinking.
"So, you think I'm damaged?" she asked at length, her voice soft and neutral.
He let the weight of his answer roll around in his mouth before he finally answered, "Yes."
When he glanced up at her, she didn't seem offended or angry. Her gaze was cool. Her foot had stopped fidgeting. It was his turn to squirm.
"And you don't think you're damaged?" she asked.
"No." He glanced away, back into the acrylic jungle across the hall.
Her hand was warm and small, pressing through his shirt, against his skin. She smelled of flowers, the first hint of spring, mixed with something heavy and medicated. He resisted looking at her, seeing the white coat over the soft, white sweater she'd worn to dinner. He wanted to strip the hospital off of her, leave her naked and broken.
She was his Rubik's complex. He wanted (needed) to fix her. He was obligated.
"You're damaged, Zoicite," she said, ignoring the way he flinched from her. "That is something I firmly believe."
And then she was gone. Her touch was gone; the warm space she had occupied was undeniably empty. Zoicite was left alone, in a hallway that smelled like the inside of a bottle of bleach.
The monkeys were laughing at him.