The inside of the tent smells like copper and has far fewer screams than I expected. More shouting though, and it feels less like a funeral parlor and more like the shop on its first frantic day of business.
"I need a unit of AB blood!"
"Next person!"
"I can't fix this, wait for a better healer."
A pair of twenty-somethings with power washers and mops are desperately trying to keep the floor clear of gore. Operating tables are spread out across the room with at least one person in a costume by each. I see Othala manning two on her own, switching between each patient every few seconds while Victor barks commands to the orderlies around him at the table next to her.
"Take her to Sanguine to be cleared of potential contaminants, the danger is over for now."
"Wake up, wake up!"
"I need another bucket of hash!"
Kid Win is working with a pair of people in lab coats, three small cylinders floating above a man's open chest cavity, light glinting off the humming metal. There's a cape with red hair and skin that looks like it's made out of scabs standing next to a pair of people in domino masks laying down on stretchers, tendrils of blood flowing from him into each of them from his outstretched hands. In the background I can see half a dozen teams of conventional surgeons hiding their own patients from view behind translucent curtains.
"I've got a cape who can fix broken bones!" the EMT shouts. I shake my head, pushing back against the sudden sensory overload. Right. Helping people. Why I came here.
"Broken ribcage over here," one of the surgeons at the back of the tent shouts. "Can they fix that?" I have a flashback to the time I spent volunteering at the hospital. Yeah, I can fix that.
"Show me the bones," I say, leaving the EMT behind and weaving through moving bodies to get to the table. "I need line of sight on everything, along with all the pieces." Isidis could just graft in replacements, but I haven't see her in this tent. I'll need to find her at some point, see if she-
"Patient got thrown into a wall and broke all the ribs on her right side and several bones in her right arm," the surgeon says, disrupting my train of thought and bringing my attention to the cape on the operating table. She's a girl not much older than me, with her costume cut open and skin peeled-back to show some gently-bleeding meaty bits. "There are splinters of bone in the surrounding flesh. We've picked out most of them, but-"
"Not a problem," I interrupt. "Hold the bones near one another." I've seen this before. Not this exact fracture, but this type of injury. It sounds (and is) bad, but I also figured out a way to fix them. The surgeon shoots me a glare but complies, pressing the two fragments of the highest rib on her left side towards one another, close but not touching. Perfect. I reach out and pull, willing the solid bone to flow like liquid. Tiny bits of white leak out of the surrounding tissue and the separated parts of the rib, fusing the break together. I'm not sure if all the bits are actually a single whole, but it's good enough for now.
"Not sure if the fix is perfect," I caution. "I usually have Isidis check it over." Don't want people re-breaking these because they weren't properly healed.
"Less talking, more fixing bones," the surgeon says, hands already holding the next two fragments close. I grit my teeth and pull again. Same shit, different location.
Eventually, the girl's rib cage and shoulder blade are in their proper shapes again. She gets picked up and dragged away, another person replacing her. I settle into a rhythm with the surgeons. Find the broken areas, fix them in order of most to least serious, send them to somebody else for faster healing, get another patient, repeat.
I don't always fix them fast enough. A man in a white robe and domino masks stops moving as soon as they put him on the table, and halfway through straightening his femur the lead surgeon shakes her head and pulls me away. Another time it was a semi-conscious Changer, partially made of metal, and no matter how hard I pulled her spine wouldn't change. They gave me three tries, and after that I kind of...
Stopped thinking so hard.
Bone. Melt. Reshape. Make right. Right-er. Focus on the most damaged parts. Follow the surgeon's instructions. Wait for another patient.
There are two hundred and six bones in the adult human body, but every patient I see has the same three injuries: limbs, ribs, and spine. That's probably because anyone with a skull broken by Leviathan isn't getting back up, and any fractures in the smaller bones are something for better healers than I to worry about.
Working at the hospital felt like what I imagined a fast food job would be like. Banal, with brief moments of activity but generally low-effort and low-engagement. It paid the bills and it wasn't hurting anyone, but I'd never be happy there.
This?
That same level of fulfillment, but with twice the panic and more urgency because every second someone was here in front of me was a second they weren't fighting Leviathan, a second where a hold up on my end might mean that a heavy wound turns into a fatal one. It's a special kind of hell that would make me sick to my stomach if I hadn't pushed all of the vomity parts of my mind so far beneath the bone that I couldn't feel them anymore.
I keep working, patients keep coming, and rain keeps pounding against the top of the tent, a constant reminder of what precisely is responsible for all these broken people.
Eventually, I make a mistake.
"Fuck, that is not how a knee is supposed to look!" a surgeon shouts, snapping me out of my daze. He's right. It is, however, a perfect tulip blossom.
There's another impact on my shoulder and I turn to look down at the source. The head surgeon has green irises. I didn't notice that before.
"Can you undo that?" I nod, then look back to the knee and fix it. When the patient gets taken away, I feel a tug on my arm. It's the head surgeon again. I follow her and end up in a slightly-quieter corner of the tent where she pulls down her mask and looks me in the lenses. She has a smattering of freckles across her nose, crows feet, and the corners of her lips are turned down in a slight frown.
"How old are you?" she asks. I stare at her. She can't be serious. She snorts. "Fine, what level of school are you in?"
"...high school," I say quietly. The head surgeon sighs and rubs her temples.
"Fucking- okay. I need you to take a break." When I start to protest, she raises her hand. "Apapap, none of that. Right now you're wiped out mentally, and that's only going to do bad things to your patients, who are also my patients. Go out, get coffee, get something to eat, and relax as best you can for at least ten minutes. I don't want any more slip-ups, okay?" After a moment of hesitation I jerk my head up and down. "Now get," she says, shooing me away. "Trust us grown-ups to handle things for a minute."
The urge to hang this presumptuous bitch by her own spine is positively feeble and I manage to get it under control without so much as a finger flex. I'm just too fried to put in the effort. Instead, I turn around and exit the tent, stepping around a pair of EMT's carrying a stretcher between them.
For a while I just wander in the rain among the tents, taking in the frantic action and furious movement, the sea of desperation and manic energy. I'm not entirely there, but I manage to keep out of the way of everyone. At some point I end up under a pavilion where half a dozen people in raincoats try to keep food and beverages flowing between different groups of clustered capes.
"I'm getting bad vibes from that plan, man, you gotta not do that y'know?"
"Okay, so we're thinking too hard right now, how do we get Leviathan-"
"Dead doves! Dead doves everywhere!"
"More bad vibes!"
"Oh hell, does anyone have anything concrete for me?"
"Schrodinger won't die today, barring interference from the individuals who can't be predicted."
"I'll be sure to tell him not to be worried about anything other than the fucking Endbringer!"
I move past the capes bickering around a bank of computers and head for a table covered with food. One of the attendants sees me and immediately loads up a coffee carrier. Once I'm within grabbing distance he shoves it into my arms.
"There's a tent for non-Thinkers that way." He points to the left and I follow his eye. Yup. three capes, sitting or standing under a covering, barely out of the rain. I grab the carrier and walk over to them. Listening to circular arguments isn't going to help me get my head back in the game.
It's a strange group. One of them is dressed in expensive-looking street clothes that hang off him in a way that I assume is supposed to be fashionable, smoking a cigarette as he reclines on a trio of chairs pushed together to create a makeshift couch. A dozen indistinct shades surround him, the same blue-grey as the ashes on the ground next to him.
Another cape is pacing clockwise around the perimeter in long, even strides. A dead white overcoat with mud stains nearly up to their knees conceals their gender. Some sort of morph suit derivative covers their head completely, and as they pass I notice that there aren't any openings for the eyes or mouth.
The third is a nervous wreck, hugging his legs to his chest and pressing his chin into his knees. The dollar-store first-day-out vigilante costume that he probably threw together at the last possible minute is covered with dried mud stains, and the balaclava that's supposed to be protecting his identity is pulled down around his neck, his entire head sticking out through the mouth hole. He's got brown hair and a boyish face that's at odds with his otherwise mature frame, and I think he'd be kind of cute if not for the miserable look on his face and the trembling shoulders. I recognize the type from some time I spent in the pediatric ward. Short breaths, long exhales, tight eyes, and a gaze that's focused on something other than what's in front of him. The look of a child getting ready for their shots, or for surgery, or for something that the kid knows is going to hurt.
"Café," the guy on the chairs moans, making a grabby motion with one hand at me. I pause for a moment, then walk over to him, stepping between the shadows and getting a better look at his face. He's got a pair of snowboarding goggles around his eyes and his hat pulled low, with his hands folded neatly on his stomach. The goggles are glowing slightly, so I assume it's tinkertech of some sort. I leave the cup just out of arm's reach on the ground and move on to the person circling the tent. "Puta," he groans, but the words don't have any malice in them, and when I turn back to glare at him he inclines his head slightly before lifting the cup to his face and chugging away.
I decide to move on and walk over to the striding person to offer them a cup. They take it without so much as a thank you. Rude. They hold onto it in silence for a moment, still walking, but eventually I see their arm come up to their face. No mask change though, so the fabric must be liquid permeable?
I'm distracting myself from the crying elephant in the room. I grit my teeth, turn around, and head over to the last person. When he doesn't look up at my approach, I nudge his shoulder with the half-empty drink carrier. He startles, almost upsetting the remaining cups, but a few spikes of bone in the right places stop his error from compounding. Once he's got his breathing back under control he looks me up and down, eyes wide and jaw open. I shake the container.
"Coffee?" I don't know what to do. I never talked to Amy about helping people through emergencies, or how to deal with shock, or anything close to counseling. So this? Not a situation I should be trusted with at all.
On the other hand, I'm the only one here that seems to care.
He nods and takes a cup, holding it between his legs in both hands. I stand by awkwardly for a moment, then violently shatter a rib to get my ass in gear and sit down next to him, forming a bone chair that places me on roughly even level with him.
The silence isn't. The rain is deafening, echoes of esoteric abilities carry over from the frontlines, and there's the constant splat of the person in white's boots.
"How-" the boy stops. I wait for him to continue. He makes a few noises, then smacks the side of his chair with his hand helplessly and whimpers. "How do you do it?" I take a sip of coffee. I never liked the taste before I became a cape. I blame Amy for getting me hooked.
"Do what?" I ask. Lie to my father half a million different ways every day I see him? Fight people who have a good shot at killing me and are known murderers? Maintain a shred of something that, if you squint and have a particularly profound disdain for the literal meaning of words, could be called neutrality? Manage to fuck up one of the easiest jobs in the world because I got fucking tired?
"How do you deal with the pain?" I blink. "I mean, how do you go back to it? Like, I thought I'd be okay 'cause a guy shot me once and I walked it off pretty easy but I tried going after Leviathan and I got thrown into a wall again and again and again and it just..." He shakes his head and sips at the coffee, grimacing. "It was bigger than getting hit with a forty-five. Like my whole body was wrong for a second. I can take it, I know that." He's rambling now, not really talking to me. "I tested a lot of stuff, figured out what I could get away with. Turns out that's pretty much everything. Fell off a skyscraper once, y'know?" He tries to make it a joke. It's not.
Another silence.
"I don't like getting hurt." It comes out as a whisper. "Is that wrong?"
I almost laugh. Almost. Instead I take a deep, shuddering breath, hold it, and let it out.
"No. It's not." He looks at me. It's a fragile gaze, one that's equal parts scared and hopeful, craving affirmation. Not one I should be trusted with, but one I have to respond to. "I don't think you should be forced to get hurt. I don't think we should be here." He doesn't react to that, but the guy in street clothes is looking at the two of us now. "This is a job for people who know what they're doing. For heroes who don't think twice before they act." People who wouldn't want to get paid for healing. People who don't have to suppress the urge to slaughter their former friends. I look down at my coffee. "I'm not one of them."
"¿Entonces dónde están?" Street-Clothes is looking at me, leaning forward with both hands resting on his thighs, white knuckled. He makes a show of looking around, shading his eyes with one hand, then lifting both hands helplessly.
"I believe she means the Protectorate." The person in white's voice sounds staticky, like it's coming through on an AM radio frequency. I twist my head to look at them, but they're still pacing. Street-Clothes shakes his head, eyes still locked on me, the glow of his goggles brightening slightly.
"Ellos no son héroes. Son una pandilla que le agrada a la gente." My Spanish was never great, but I can decipher enough to get the gist and shake my head.
"I don't mean the Protectorate. They get paid to do what they do. It's their job to stop crime." I pause, trying to get my thoughts in order. "I mean people like Vikare. People who tried to be heroes before anyone else knew what that meant. Like, going out there?" I point towards the city. "That's extra. Way extra. We shouldn't have to fight that."
"¿Quien es Vikare?" Street-Clothes looks towards the person in white.
"The second parahuman. He was never a member of any official team," they reply. Street-Clothes pauses at that, then looks back at me, leaning into his chair a little.
"¿Enserio?" he says, a note of surprise in his voice. I meet Street-Clothes' gaze and resist the urge to duck my head.
"Random, fucked-up people who have no idea when they're really in the right shouldn't be called on to do public service. Maybe it'll work out for a while, but eventually they're going end up in a situation that they can't deal with, one that forces them to choose between what they want and what's right. And they'll make the wrong choice." I take a sip of coffee. "On the other hand, you're right. There aren't a lot of heroes around."
"Somos los unicos." The words are flat. I nod in agreement.
"I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust me with this." I form a bone spike in my free hand, sharp and fast. The boy next to me shivers a bit and I wince internally. Damn. "On the other hand, I can't give it away and I can't make it hurt less. So I found a way to make it do what I want anyway." I form the spike into a rose. I've spent so much time working with flowers it's practically second nature by now, but there's still something pretty about the process. Something soothing. "I hurt every time I use my power. So I made the hurt useful. I work with what I have. We don't have heroes. I do have this." The rose turns back into a spike.
"...so what should I do?" The kid's words draw a bark of laughter from Street-Clothes.
"Lo que quieras, niño." I don't remember enough basic vocab to understand what he said, so I turn towards the person in white.
"He says to do what you want, and I am inclined to agree." They stop pacing and look at the boy. "Feel free to ignore our advice. We are not good citizens." Street-Clothes snorts and goes back to laying down on the trio of chairs even as White Coat resumes their walk. "On the other hand, we did show up. There are worse people to emulate."
"Cabo entrando." One of the shades flickers out, revealing a man in some sort of black desert robe and jet black sombrero, positively soaked. He stumbles for a moment before shaking his head, shedding water left and right.
"Cuttin' it a little close there amigo," he says, his voice a tad more clipped than I think someone talking to a friend would be. Street-Clothes waves his hand dismissively, then holds it out for a high-five.
"Mi nombre es Snapback, gringo," the other cape (Snapback?) says, still just as apathetic as when he called me a bitch. The man in the desert robes nods reluctantly and slaps Snapback's hand. Another ghostly image springs up roughly where he's standing, and Desert Robes walks up to White Coat.
"How much longer am I good for?" White Coat looks him up and down once, unnaturally still while they examine the other cape.
"Seventeen minutes. Near the end you'll experience decay on the effect. I recommend not being mounted." Desert Cloak snorts.
"Don't need to tell me twice." He stomps the ground twice and a massive horse erupts from the mud, at least ten feet tall and made of what looks like solid shadow. The cape in black staggers for a moment, then steadies himself and motions at the beast. It kneels, huffing in irritation as he mounts up. After it stands, he tilts his hat at the two of us.
"Ma'am." Then he's off, a positively bloodchilling whinny tearing its way through the night. I watch him go for a moment, then turn back to the kid.
"What have you been doing?" I ask. He chugs the rest of his coffee, then puts his feet on the ground and squeezes his knees with his hands.
"I heal. Really, really well." I nod. If that's it, then he doesn't really- "They were cutting pieces of me off for some... pool. Filled it up with a lot of body parts, then sort of" — he makes circle with his hands — "cut it up. A girl went in and started healing people." He takes a breath and leans back. "They were flushing it out, preparing for a new batch that has the right mix of stuff again and I" — he shudders — "I needed to take a break." I think I can hear the mucus in his nose.
Oh.
I finish my own coffee, thinking about the time I provided tissue for Isidis when Triumph was injured. Then I take away my pain tolerance.
That'd be a problem.
"Can you do it?" I ask. He shudders, then stands up.
"It's what I've got." He pulls up his balaclava then nods to me. "Thanks, um?"
"White Rose. Yours?" I stand up and absorb my chair back into my armor, then step next to him. He barely reaches my shoulder.
"I don't really have one yet." Hmm. Healing, no costume themes, afraid of pain.
"Dorian." He thinks about it for a moment, then nods.
"Dorian." He extends his hand and I take it. It feels strange, like foam wrapped around steel. I pump it once, then let go.
"Come on. There's work to be done."