*looks around* Hello? *hears echo*

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Effie sat in the back of the ambulance and didn't think. Thinking was too hard, and might lead to her having to deal with things. That would be wrong, and bad, and hurt, so she didn't think. It worked for her.

The paramedics hadn't wanted to let her join Mark for the trip to the hospital. Something about not being family and needing the room and some other boring, pointless words. She had just looked at the woman trying to keep her out and then climbed in after the gurney. The woman had climbed in with a dazed look on her face but hadn't said another word.

She watched as they started to work on Mark. There were lines feeding things into him, lines hooked to machines that beeped and rang and had displays that showed lines. It might have been interesting to know what everything meant and what they were doing for Mark, and had Effie not been so dazed.

His lips were a little bit blue. Blue was wrong. Blue lips were bad; it meant he wasn't getting enough blood, or enough oxygen, or something. It was bad. She wanted to point it out but the two paramedics looked very busy and they knew their jobs better than she did. She looked at his lips and willed them to turn pink again, willed his heart to beat and his blood to flow, his lungs to fill and him to live.

For a moment nothing changed. A heartbeat, another, a third. Effie watched and willed and waited.

Change occurred gradually, so slowly that she didn't see it at first. Maybe she was looking too closely to see when he started to get better. It was only after she blinked that she noticed the flush of life that was creeping from the edges of his lips inward. It moved so slowly, like a drop of ink through still water, but she could see some progress.

He wasn't dying.

She would have taken the time to feel properly grateful over the news, but they arrived at the hospital. He was whipped from the ambulance and wheeled into the emergency room. Diving out of the back of the vehicle and running to keep up with them wasn't enough to secure her a place in the operating room.

She tried glaring at people again, mindlessly hoping that the tactic would work a second time, but the emergency room personal were firm. She wasn't related to Mark, and even if she was the doctors couldn't worry about having her in their space. If they let her in, she would only be in the way, and the only person that would hurt would be Mark.

It wasn't the logic that swayed her, though. Effie might have been not entirely herself, but she was still able to determine when someone was going to be more stubborn than she could influence.

She did win a small victory in her choice of place to wait. The kindly officious orderly tried to get her to sit in the waiting room but she managed to fit herself between a cart and some temporary shelving that had collected at least a year's worth of dust underneath it. The orderly took one long look at her, then decided it wouldn't be worth the trouble it would take to get her out of there.

Effie leaned her head back against the wall and tried to will Mark to good health. She imagined that she could feel him behind her, feel him trying to cling to life. That frail thread that tied his spirit to his body was being weakened by dark lines that led to his wounds. She could see them siphoning the energy needed to keep that line from breaking. The energy she thought she could feed into it was helping, as were the efforts of the doctors. The black lines were weakened, a few dropping off entirely as the doctors managed to stop the bleeding in his legs and his right shoulder. His left one was giving them more trouble, but it also wasn't quite as threatening as the others had been. Somehow Ace had managed to miss the main cluster of nerves at the joint. The payoff was that the would was not quite as accessible for the doctors, but of all Mark's limbs it was the most likely to regain full function.

If it didn't kill him first.

She tried to sever the black thread from the end she could see but it was so hard to lift from the silver cord. She couldn't get under it, couldn't get her mind around it to try to pull it off. It slipped through her mental grip like fog.

A frown flitted over her lips, echoed in the wrinkle on her brow. How could she fix this? Each attempt, each shifting of her mental grip brought her no progress.

Biting back a scream, she opened her eyes. As she was trying to not grab the nearest available object and toss it through the wall, it took her a moment to focus on the tableau before her. Someone was looking down at her, someone familiar. Someone in a doctor's white jacket and with a slightly harried look on her face.

"Effie, right?" said the neat figure.

She nodded. "Is Mark okay?"

"What? Oh. Is he here, too?" The took-perfect figure shook her head, short-cropped hair not moving one iota out of its proscribed place as she made the gesture. "You're one of Anne's friends, right?" The tone was distant, someone almost an acquaintance trying to fit a piece into its right place.

Understanding hit. It was one of the people in Anne's band. The unfriendly tone didn't register; the fact that someone was near who could understand the scope of her tragedy broke the wall. "Dawn?" Effie couldn't stop the tears that welled in her eyes. "Oh, Dawn, it's horrible. Mark is… he's… and Anne…" The shock that had kept the tears away finally broke and Effie's shoulders shook with her sobbing.

Dawn leaned down into her nook, gently grabbing her chin and forcing Effie to look at her. "Whatever happened to you? Do you have jaundice? You're eyes are all yellow."