Odyssia has been floating in darkness for the past few centuries.

Being surrounded by blackness is neither comforting nor terrifying. It's urbane, a natural state of life that every human goes through at some point, and to hover on the surface of such an abyss is no remarkable feat. Time has no place here, and when seconds tick by, they instead take the form of physical manifestations rather than the vague human definition given to them since the beginning of timekeeping. The pit itself feels less like a mental concept and more like gel, thicker than water but thinner than wet cement, curling about her arms and dragging her upwards to an unknown end. This is all the universe has ever been, and this is all the universe will ever be; an endless march of darkness unto light, stars devoured by obscurity.

When Odyssia exits the darkness she does not do so with a bang but with a whimper. Her legs begin to tingle after eons of paralysis, and pins and needles impale her arms as her soul falls, back into a body it had vacationed from for so long. Hearing returns next, going from silence to a high-pitched siren to bubbling as the hum of an HVAC system reaches her body, and the beeping of a life support machine redefines time for a woman so separated from the mere concept. Then, she opens her eyes, and she's alive again, consciousness returned in bits and pieces over hours at a time.

Light supersedes momentary blindness, albeit faintly. When the only thing she can control is her eyes, Odyssia is forced to observe her surroundings with only her pupils, straining from one end of her deep brown eyes to the other. Her eyes pass across a grimy brick wall adjacent to her spot in the tiny room, to a small steel end-table on her right, to the hospital bed she fits snugly into, cradled by deflated white pillows and thin, disturbed sheets. Medical devices are scattered all around her, from monitors to drip IVs, and machines hum away in her subconscious, performing designated tasks in the background as Odyssia returns to the world of the living. As her eyes scan the room, she eventually finds a small, plush chair to her left, and within it, Doc.

He doesn't look good. While his facial structure has never been something challenging to look at, with an angular jaw dotted with a five-o-clock shadow and a sharp nose, to peer into his eyes is to peer into the maw of death. His hair, dark at the top, graying near his sideburns, is messy and disheveled. Dark circles hang beneath his lower eyelids, and his once bright, intelligent eyes instead seek to devour all light that enters them, a bottomless pit for a hopeless situation. The man has always carried the weight of the world upon his shoulders, but in stark contrast from the first time Odyssia saw him, he looks to have finally succumbed to such pressure, the only moment such a thing has ever occurred.

Even so, such darkness does not remain for long. As if Doc can sense Odyssia's eyes on his features, he glances up as Odyssia finds him in the room, and their eyes lock for seconds at a time, fate interwoven between their heavy gazes. Shock fills him, his mouth open and gaping like a fish, before he suddenly rises to his feet and surges to the bedside.

"You-You're awake!"

Not even Odyssia can believe it. She looks down at herself, trying to gauge whether her physical form is an ornate hallucination or truth. "I guess I am," she breathes, drawing a deep breath into her lungs. The air is cool, and for the first time in weeks, it doesn't taste of blood and gore.

Doc crosses her bed, going from left to right so that he may inspect the monitor standing at attention on her right side. "I need to tell you—"

Odyssia interrupts him. "What day is it?"

Doc's hands still as he glances down and at Odyssia's face, clean this time, youthful as it was before, though not as bright as it should be. He had once been smiling, with his eyes crinkling up in the corners, but now his expression goes solemn. His face pulls into this form with ease, as if he is good friends with such emotion now, walking side-by-side with the devil through life. A deep breath precedes his answer. "March twentieth."

The date lays on Odyssia's mind like noxious fumes for moments at a time, but she can't discern why. Her face is blank, her eyes searching, and then it occurs to her. The date of her extraction had been March 6th. All at once, the events of that day rush back into her mind, bowling into her memories, mingling with her thoughts and feelings and ideas.

In the absence of any other support system, Odyssia looks back at Doc's face. "You mean I've been out for—out for—" she stumbles over her own words, and her heart leaps into her throat as her expression despairs. "—two weeks?"

Doc's face is solemn as he nods.

So much time, lost to the endless march of the universe. She needs to get out of here. She needs to save Truth or Consequences. The despair on Odyssia's face is rapidly replaced by determination and misguided fury as she swings her legs over one side of the hospital bed in preparation to tear her IVs from her arms.

"Doctor," Doc manages as he rushes forward, gently holding Odyssia back from the hospital bed's edge with his palms flat on her chest and shoulder. "Doctor, you need to stay here—"

"No," Odyssia spits, bullheaded as she attempts to spear past Doc's blocking chest with her meager, recovering strength. "No, there are people that need saving out there!"

"Eliza already has it covered," Doc returns, their struggle greater now that Odyssia attempts to exert more force than usual in her desperation to escape Doc's hold. "We have teams out at the hospital as we speak—"

"I need to look at the samples! Doc, let me go, let me go goddamnit—"

"Odyssia," Doc suddenly growls, his voice low and hard, more intense than Odyssia has ever heard before. His insistence is enough to make her sit back and tilt her head up to look into his eyes—his face is not angry, but he is frustrated, and his fingertips dig into her shoulders as he leans down in an attempt to make his point clear. "Look down at yourself. Look at your shoulder."

Odyssia pauses, suspicious, her eyebrows lowering in caution.

"Please, just do this for me. Look at your shoulder."

Hesitation melts away from Odyssia's mind with every second she spends looking at Doc's face, and though caution remains, her eyes avert. His eyes burn like beacons, glowing deep into her soul like heat-seeking lasers, and truth glitters deep beneath the choppy waves of his pupils. Down, down, down her eyes go, from her chest to her right shoulder to…

Where her arm should be.

"No," she breathes. "No, no, no no…."

It's gone. Odyssia had felt it there for every second after she woke up, but it is only now that she recognizes its absence. She could have sworn she moved it before; she knows that her fingers twitched, and yet what her eyes see differs from what her body feels.

All at once, everything streams into her mind—guilt, anger, emptiness, hatred. She's so cold; she's so warm. Everything hurts; everything's numb. Broken and whole, empty and full, nothing makes sense anymore. Overwhelmed, filled to the brim with nothing more than panic and chaos, all Odyssia can bear to do is lean forward into Doc and begin crying. He is everything keeping her tethered, and he is the only light in the dismal darkness.

He is hesitant at first, unsure how to react, but moments pass, and then his hands gently descend upon her back, rubbing calming circle into her spine as her chest heaves with emotion. "I'm sorry," his chest rumbles. "I had to amputate it. I couldn't save your arm."

Odyssia only sobs more. Time passes like this for what feels like hours, with her arm wrapped around his body, his around hers, pressed into one another as if they are the only people left on Earth. Odyssia might be mistaken, but if she listens closely, she can sometimes hear Doc over her howling cries, sniffling his own rhythm as his hand rubs into her hair. But, when the reserves in her eyes dry up, and her throat goes tight with dehydration, she musters the courage to pull away from Doc's chest, and he leans back as well, his face looking at hers again. She's a mess, with her cheeks stained red, her waterline swollen. Her long black hair is free to cascade down her back compared to its updo in the hospital, but now it chooses to cling to her face again, wisping across her eyes in long, willowy strands.

In the silence, she manages a quiet phrase. "I don't—" she clears her throat. "—I don't know what to do now."

Doc senses a conversation, so he pulls the chair from the left side of her bed to the right side, and he seats himself there, his lab coat billowing around his knees as he steeples his fingers in front of him. His eyes look into hers, seeking, urging her to continue, so Odyssia does.

"My arm, it was—" she stops, opens her mouth, then closes it again. She's unsure where to start, so she may simply need to start from the very beginning.

"...You guys probably have me on file as Doctor Odyssia Aubin, right?" she finally queries, looking Doc in the eye, to which he nods. "I figured if this group knew me enough to seek me out specifically from the hospital, you'd also have my name."

Doc smiles wearily. "Although you still don't know who we are, right?"

She posits a wild guess. "Military?"

"...Close. I'll explain later. Continue."

A mild nod. "Right. But that's not my full name," she continues, voice rough. "It's Mary Odyssia Aubin. My mom named me for the Virgin Mary."

Doc raises his brow. "Religious?"

"Very. I still remember what she told me when I was a little girl," Odyssia says, and her voice breaks at the next part. "That my god-given duty is to submit to my husband. To give him what he needs, to bear him children, to be the happy stay-at-home mom while he goes off to work and does whatever the hell he wants."

A solemn nod reaches Doc's head as he leans forward on his knees. "I imagine you didn't listen."

"How could I?" her voice comes out louder than she means it to be, so she forcefully quiets her tone with a deep breath. "I just—you know when you see someone so amazing, and you tell yourself that you want to be just like them? That's what I saw with my dad. He was a doctor, and he saved lives every single day, and I wanted to do exactly what he did."

"But… It stopped being about my dad and started to be more about my mom. I saw being a doctor as a way of—a way of… I don't know. It felt like I was proving her wrong. That I was capable of being more than what she told me I would be. With my arm gone…."

Doc catches on. "You feel like you can't do that anymore."

Not even Odyssia was ready to arrive at such a conclusion. She leans forward, her eyes heavy, her palm clenched into a fist so firm that her knuckles go white. She bites her lip in preparation to stifle her cries, but Doc grounds her again. His hand reaches forward, and it connects with her hand as she sits on the hospital bed, her legs hanging over the side. He worms his fingertips in between her fist, his skin delicate but calloused, and he forces her hand into a tepid state of relaxation. When Odyssia glances upward, she finds his eyes on her, his smile calm and kind.

"That's why I'm here," he murmurs. "To help you."

"Doc—"

He holds his other hand up. "Please," he says. "Just call me Gustave. It's nice to meet you in different circumstances."

Odyssia's brow quirks. "Gustave Kateb?"

"You must have read some of my studies," he laughs.

Odyssia's laugh mirrors his, the first time she's laughed in a while. It feels good, like milk and honey running through her chest and soothing her pain. "How couldn't I have? You were a serology celebrity."

He laughs again. Odyssia likes the sound, feels it in her bone, like violin strings in an auditorium. "I wouldn't cut yourself short," he continues. "I've read some of your studies too."

Odyssia can barely stifle her blush. She averts her eyes, glancing down to her hand and where his connects to hers. His eyes trail down to the same connection, and upon noticing, he slowly disentangles their palms and returns his arms to their place on his knees. She doesn't dare to look upon his face, but she hears him swallow thickly, and she takes this to mean a shift in conversation.

"A-anyways," he continues, clearing his throat as they recover. "I've been in contact with some of the best technicians on our team while you've been out, and I've made one of our partner companies modify an arm for your use."

Odyssia's gaze raises. "An arm?"

Gustave smiles. "Yes, an arm," he affirms. "I wasn't sure if you would like a prosthetic or not, but I wanted to give you the option, so I'm bringing an operative here with a technician to fit the prosthetic to your shoulder."

"Operatives," Odyssia repeats, struggling to wrap her mind around her situation. "You still haven't told me what organization you belong to."

He gives an apologetic quirk of his lips, and he raises his right palm to gently tap himself on the head. "Ah, right," he continues, voice curling into a delightfully foreign tune; French, probably. "This is a lot for you to take in. I should probably go from the beginning."

"The floor is yours," Odyssia says, gesturing with her remaining hand.

Gustave pauses for a moment, staring down at where his fingertips intertwine with eachother, curlingg his lower lip beneath his teeth as he determines the best path forward. He seems to find words at some point, and continues, albeit not without a significant amount of hesitation, eyes going upward at some points as he sifts through and filters information from his mind. "I am an elite operative of an international counter-terrorism unit known as Team Rainbow," he begins, voice slow, embracing every word with a curve from his tongue. "A team of operatives and I were deployed here, in Truth or Consequences, to resolve the mysterious virus—and to save you."

Thoughtful, Odyssia nods. It make sense now that it's explained to her. "You must have known I was working on a cure."

"Precisely."

Odyssia's gaze trails down to herself, fingertips trembling where they rest upon the surface of her upper thigh. She's to continue working on the cure, then; it was not implicitly stated in Gustave's explanation, but she's smart enough to read between the lines, and she knows better than most that the only reason she was specifically sought out was so that she could serve as Team Rainbow's first defense against the virus. But not even such an elite group of counter-terrorist operatives could have possibly predicted that she would lose her arm.

Her lip curls. Her right arm had been her dominant hand, the only way she could relieve herself from her mother's pressure, the only path towards saving Truth or Consequences, and now it's gone. Team Rainbow places pressure on her shoulders nonetheless, looks to her for guidance in virology, and she can already tell that she's beginning to crack. Her chest wells up in her throat as she speaks next, curling her fingers into her thigh.

"And you want me to continue working on the cure."

Gustave catches on; he's remarkably empathetic, an endearing trait that Odyssia can imagine might incite friction between him and his teammates on the field. "Once you adjust, of course," he murmurs, swift in speech, eager to be heard above her swarming thoughts. "But… Team Rainbow needs you, Odyssia. Truth or Consequences needs you."

She's silent, her lips trembling, a dark haze across her upper face as long strands of dark hair fall across her face. Gustave presses on.

"You mentioned wanting to save people, Odyssia," he continues, voice urgent. "This will save people."

His words strike Odyssia to the core. Her soul aches, yearning for something that no longer exists, something impossible, and the pain mounts to the point where she wishes to be somewhere else entirely, but now is not the time for needless longing, now is the time for action. There is nothing she can do to change where she is right now, but she can choose to change where she will be a week from now, a month from now, even a year from now. Duty trumps emotion, responsibility wins over tragedy. She has a task to complete, and she will complete it.

She raises her head, and she clears the hair from her face. "...You said you had an arm for me?"

Gustave's face brightens. "Yes, they're on their way."

"...Alright. I want to get to work on analyzing the blood samples from Patient Zero as soon as possible."

A relief for Gustave, it seems. Spontaneously, his shoulders rise and his heart lifts in his chest, as if he no longer carries a monumental weight upon his back. A smile finds his face, and small strands of his dark hair drift across his forehead. "You cannot possibly know how relieving it is to hear that," he admits with a small, exhaled laugh. "You'll need physical therapy—I'll help with that—but I'll do my best to get you back into your own body before long."

Odyssia gives a keen nod.

"Just…" Gustave continues, and though he thinks better of his next words for a moment, mouth parting only to close soon after, he does eventually press through his own reservations, albeit his tone is beneath the hush of a whisper, as if speaking unknown secrets into the world. "Don't push yourself too hard. You need to take care of yourself just as much as we need your help in saving Truth or Consequences. Please, don't ruin yourself for this."

Another nod, this time more hesitant. There is a glint of familiarity in Gustave's eyes, as if he speaks from experience. Nonetheless, Odyssia nods; she's accustomed to long hours and late-nights, forever the fate of a doctor. At the very least she is allowed to do everything on her own time.

At Odyssia's nod, Gustave allows his grave features to fade away and he rises to his feet, clapping his gloved hands together to make a soft clapping noise. "Perfect," he muses, eyes bright. "I will retrieve the agents responsible for your prosthetic and return with a calendar for your physical therapy. Remain in the bed, please, and keep your IVs in. We just need to monitor you for a few more hours to ensure the coma doesn't have any immediate detrimental side effects on your physical state."

Odyssia smiles. She's noticed, in her few moments spent with Gustave, that he has a habit of rambling, speaking with great fervor on topics he has passion for. For every important point in his life, he allows himself to speak where his mind takes him, rumbling down an eminent stream of consciousness until he arrives at a point in conversation he had meant to arrive at. Listening to him speak at length about the next steps draws a blank smile to her face, and it remains even as Gustave guides her back to earth with a gentle tip of her head.

She stumbles back to her own thoughts with a brief tremble of her head. "Right, right," she manages. "Got it. Don't worry, I'll stay right here."

"Thank you," Gustave murmurs, perfectly genuine. "I'll be back soon."

Gustave begins to leave, moving to the edge of Odyssia's field of view to exit the ajar doorway at the room's far left corner, but before he can fully disappear into the hallway, Odyssia draws her hand foreward, and his name issues from her lips. "Gustave!" she says. As soon as she says it, she regrets it. Her mind goes blank, entirely unsure of what she had meant to say to him.

Her mind stumbles. Perhaps she had not meant to say anything to him at all. Some part of her simply doesn't want him to leave.

But, with Gustave looking back at her, clipboard in hand, that gentle smile on his face, she knows that must say something. A moment passes, and then her heart finds the right combination of words.

"...Thank you, Gustave," she says. "For everything."

His eyes crinkle in the corners. "I'm happy to help."

Then he leaves. Once again, Odyssia is alone in the hospital room, cradled by the same white sheets, but everything looks different when compared to the moment she first woke up. The room is darker in some places, cooler on her right side, inky blackness near her right shoulder, coagulating and clotting, but the room is bright near the doorway Gustave just exited from, so bright that she cannot look at it directly.

A tiny smile reaches her lips. She braves the sting nonetheless.