I do no own.
It's really funny, because I'm starting to realize just how much inspiration I'm getting from Lost. I had the idea for Lin's character before I was ever introduced to Jack, a total kick-butt doctor who I really couldn't care less about until I realized just how hard-core he was.
Or maybe that description should be changed to 'demented,' because that's how people get when little things like death start getting in their ways. I started seeing other similarities, too, with their ideas on destiny. I have her saga planned out, I have her not believing in fate for a reason, and I get the feeling it's the same plot-twist Jack is going to have to face.
Psht. Doctors.
97. All That I Have
Demented.
It was the word that stood silent, waiting on Lu Ten's lips. The weird thing was, he had to be catching it, too, because he knew that there was a carriage outside that would return him to the palace and deliver him from this hell.
But here he stayed.
Lin surrounded herself in carnage. Submerged herself in it. There had to be something wrong with her, something wrong with anyone who chose to work in medicine, because this exposure was not natural. It belonged far away on a distant battlefield, with faceless soldiers the victims.
This was the soil of the Fire Nation. These were the streets of its capital city. This was chaos, where it clashed with balance, here within the walls of a hospital.
Normalcy had defined the day up to five hours past the sun's zenith. It was hot, the dog days of summer. Because heat stroke was not a chance to indulge Lin's theory of exposure in curing Lu Ten's phobia of blood, she treated her patients while the prince watched, the long hall silent as she paced along the rows of beds, pushing aside a curtain here and there to converse with a patient.
A sailor had come in the day before with a broken fibula(Lu Ten only remembered that it was the small bone in the leg). Lu Ten had guess bar fight, but the sailor insisted giant squid, and cited a serious case of bad Karma. Beyond being superstitious, the man was a fortune teller, a raving lunatic among the many in a crew filled with misfit scientists and retired seamen (and women; their captain was a woman, but they were funded by a family of merchants).
Despite being a 'woman of science,' who 'didn't believe in destiny,' she put a lot of weight to the sailor's 'abilities'.
That was what they were doing now. Or, that was what they were pretending to do. Lin was on break, sitting with the crippled sailor, and Lu Ten had better things to do than watch her flirt. The problem was, the entire floor was so quiet that the two could have been shouting.
"Every kid reads I Ching in school," the crazy was saying, "but no one really looks any deeper. Not many people, anyways. But the I Ching is a tool of prediction."
She doesn't believe in destiny, stupid. Lu Ten wanted to stand up and scream it across the room. He wanted to throw the patient manifest at the sailor and get him moved to the ward for severe cranial trauma. But Lu Ten was the only psych case at the moment.
"Could you give me my reading?"
Lu Ten couldn't have told anyone just why he laughed, but Lin and her patsy looked up. "It, um . . . phalanges," he said as an explanation, holding up one of the medical periodicals. Lin gave him the weirdest look, but immediately turned back to her 'patient.'
"The I Ching can only help answer specific questions, like how something would be affected by certain circumstances." So, in other words, it's hippo-bull crap. "If you have a question in mind—"
"How will the influenza pandemic in the Hu Sin provinces affect the outcome of the war?" The Hu Sin provinces provide most of our coal. Mining operations have already slowed, everyone is getting sick. Even I could tell you that's a recipe for disaster. Fortune telling wasn't that hard.
The sailor pulled out a deck of cards and began to shuffle them. "Our first Firelord, Fu Xi, composed the system of fortune telling based on the eight trigrams, and the sixty-four ways that they can be combined. Each combination has its own meaning." It was just sickening how she payed attention to it. Hypocrite. "Different combinations of the cards can mean different things, too, as yin changes to yang and back. Now choose a card."
Lu Ten watched Lin pull a card, her back to him, and lay it on the table by the patient's bed. "Gou," the sailor said. "Now one more, and leave this one face-down." The healer did as instructed. "Gou is the combination of Heaven and Wind, vitality and grace. It is a good time for meeting people." That corny smile, that stupid laugh, those horrible teeth, and that uncultured accent all screamed 'I'm a person!' "I would say, in relation to your question, you, or maybe the higher ups, should begin seeking out allies. The pandemic in Hu Sin will unbalance the entire region.
"The next card, Pi, tells you to be wary of this in the future. You will need to re-evaluate the factors that drive you, and adapt to a changed world. Your best efforts may not be enough, they may even hinder your goals, if you are running in the wrong direction."
"That's funny, because—"
And that was the moment that time stopped.
At first, Lu Ten, prince of the Fire Nation, had been terrified, petrified. His mind raced back to six years old, when the only thing that could have caused an explosion of that magnitude was a volcano. He raced to the roof of the building, didn't even stop to help Lin to her feet; she was already running. They arrived there, winded, but instead of smoke billowing from the caldera, it came from the waterfront, the munitions factory.
Relief flooded him, knowing that his home wasn't burning, knowing that his family was safe, but when he heard the light tap of Lin's feet as she raced back down the stairs, he had to follow. His family was safe. Others were not so lucky. He was a prince. He should be able to do . . . something.
The factory was only a few blocks away, and it continued to explode, to spread fire over the district. The fire crews raced through the streets, shouting for people to evacuate the district from their rhino-drawn steam-driven water-pumps.
A carriage was waiting outside, with a terrified driver, caught between a raging fire and a raging Firelord who would have him executed if the prince died as a result of the driver's panic. He sighed in relief as the Prince half-limped, half-walked out, supporting two patients who could not walk on their own, and lifting them into the quickly-cramped carriage, as other doctors, nurses, and healers carried or walked their patients outside(those who could walk ran, without looking back).
Lu Ten's order to the carriage driver was simple: "Get these people out of here!"
"But sir—"
"That wasn't open for interpretation!"
There were other carriages and other people, and commandeered wheeled vehicles that transported the rest of the patients out of the path of the fires, now spewing enough chemicals and acerbic smoke to sting the eyes and the lungs, worse than any volcano. Lin paused, turning to watch the flames envelop the building nearest the hospital, just across the street.
Lu Ten didn't wait to ask permission; he grabbed her arm and would have dragged her back to the caldera at a flat run if she hadn't broken his grip. At that moment, several things happened at once.
He shouted at her that they had to move, as he coughed into his sleeve; the roar of the fire escalated to a deafening noise that culminating in another explosion; and Lin slipped into a form that the prince had known of, but never seen used. There was a blinding flash and a peal of thunder, and a piece of flying, flaming debris was diverted from the hospital. Probably a useless gesture, as the lightning ignited a pocket of flamable gas, but that was now the problem of the fire control crews.
Lin said something, but too softly to be heard over the fire. Lu Ten wasn't concerned enough to hear it; his main focus now was to get them out. It was sort of surreal, the way everything was unfolding as if he wasn't really there. Lu Ten was a bistandard in his own skin, disconnected from the part of his brain that was making all the decisions to run and help people and keep a good hold on Lin's wrist so that she wouldn't be lost in the crowd.
It took him a while to realize that she was shouting at him to go to the forum. "That's where they'll send all the evacuees," she shouted when she got his attention. The greatest noise to deal with now was the crowd. "The emergency medical units will be set up there; that's where I have to be!"
They got there with the rest of the crowd. By that time, the red tents with their white and red flags were set up, with rows and rows of cots where people screamed and were sedated and were lost or saved by whims of fate.
Unless Lin was their healer. Those ones were in her hands, and she did save the ones she could and the ones she couldn't. This was Lin's world, she lived there, among the carnage, outside of the world where tragedy was not supposed to strike. This was where she lived and what she was used to, so she could withstand it where others could not.
Lu Ten, Prince of the Fire Nation, fit into this 'could not' crowd. He watched her numbly, followed her orders blindly, could barely feel when he was rubbing some sort of herbal remedy into the burns that would not be, or could not be sewn shut. These people would be scarred for the rest of their lives, and there was little anyone could do besides drug them up and hope it was enough to dull the pain.
Healing, with burns especially, was a long, slow, doubtful process. Some of the people being treated would never walk again. Some might never move. Still more would succumb to infection, because there was simply not enough penicillin in the city to treat everyone who would need it.
"Why do you have to keep fighting a losing battle?" he asked finally, when they had both pushed themselves too long, when the sun was high in the sky on the day after.
"It's only a losing battle if you quit," she said, her voice tight. "Do you think I should just give up?"
"On the people you can't save? Yes! Focus on the ones you can help."
"There are other people who can help them. My colleagues are very capable. I'm here," she said, "to save the ones everyone else has given up on."
"You know you can't save everyone."
"Then why are you wasting breath telling me something I already know?"
That day passed in silence. It took officials from the palace that whole amount of time to locate the prince and the Head Healer's apprentice, who was late for her usual duties by more than twenty-four hours.
These officials and friends from the academy half-carried Lu Ten to a waiting palanquin, to be taken back to the caldera, giving half-formed answers to sleep-addled questions. Lin remained in the field hospital. It was, after all, her home.
Rope burned her hands and charcoal scraped her legs as Lin made her decent into the pit that was once her hospital. Burned fragments of wood cracked beneath her feet but failed to stir the ashes in the damp air. A blanket of fog had rolled in off the sea as the rains finally stopped, reducing her fellow doctors and healers in the distance to fuzzy silhouettes.
There was one form that was closer, more defined. Lu Ten glanced around the ruins, lost in his own musings.
"Some day," Lin said, her voice falling a little flat, and far short of the banter she had aimed for. "Guess it'll be your last day. Your month is about up, and we won't get this place up and running again for a while—"
"Do you know what started the fire?"
Lin walked forward carefully, her mind buzzing through where she would be in the building if it wasn't a pit full of ash and charred beams. "Dynamite sweats when it gets to over ninety degrees. It destabilized and someone handled it improperly."
"And how many people died?"
"Now might be a good time to follow your own advice and worry about the people you can save." She walked in a direction where no shadows seemed to roam. Lu Ten was crunching along behind her, his steps slow and stiff. He was feeling it still, the effects of standing for hours on end, running to and fro, and the more than physical fatigue that weighed down the bones and refused movement to the limbs. Lin knew the feeling; she had not been born to that world, but she had lived in it long enough to be able to at least confront it.
The trick was being able to function through the pain, while being aware of it. It was important for a healer to know his or her limits, or a patient would suffer the consequences.
It was three days after the explosion and subsequent fires. Lin had slept most of the second.
Lin sifted through the remains of a large oak desk, reading through the half-burned documents in its draws, while Lu Ten brushed aside ashes on the ground. "How many people do you think we can save?" he asked, his face a mask.
"That depends on what we recover in this little salvage mission. Any medicines, patient records, they can all help us treat people." She stood up again, as one of the documents crumbled in her hands. "This work was my everything. It's all that I have."
"We'll make sure it's rebuilt," Lu Ten said, still sifting through ashes. He had found a box, which he picked up gingerly. A look inside must have revealed what he wanted to know; he snapped in shut quickly and walked over. "And you could never go long without a job regardless. It's a useful last possession to have." He handed her the box. "But we probably could add to that list."
Lin took it, a little wary of what might be inside of it. Lu Ten wasn't this inscrutable. He had always been so easy to read, except right before the explosion; then he had been acting a little — "I can't believe this."
Inside the box were many small, well-wrapped bottles of penicillin, all unbroken. "We need to get these to the field hospital right away," she said, closing the box and walking as quickly as she dared.
"So I don't get a thank you?"
"I told you I don't have much," Lin said, turning around.
"I can take a rain check. Just . . . save those people that I said you couldn't a few days ago."
"That I can accomplish."
A/N: The Sailor always appears in these morbidly long chapters. But hey, what better way to celebrate his sailor-ness? (For those of you just tuning in, yes, that was the sailor from 'Into the Flames.')
Fu Xi actual only came up with the eight trigrams, but a few other people were responcible for the fortune telling system. I just used Fu Xi because 'Firelord Wen' sounded funny. Both were emperors of China, or at least parts of China.
On another grrreat! note, I have high-speed internet at my house now, but for anyone who thinks I might update more regularly, guess again.
School wants my soul.
It's like there's no time anymore. There are a bunch of great fanfics, great books, great movies, and great TV shows that I just don't have time to explore. Like I would love the chance to get into Psych and Monk, but those time slots are reserved for Star Trek, Law and Order, and Lost, currently. Then I have band, which rules over all with an iron fist.
Sigh. The life of a writer.
Please Review!
