Hiya. Chapter 4. This took a while, because I've already moved from ICU to the floors, and there was more paperwork and other stuff to do.
Disclaimers again: I'm a half-crazy medical clerk channeling frustration, Samurai 7 ain't mine but this story is, he's still a pronoun but that may change, as you might notice with the current progression of things.
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"Save…yourself…go already…save yourself…"
It was now the fourth day of her sentence, and each day had been different from the previous one, each one posing its new punishment to her.
Today began with the most difficult challenge yet. The young man began tossing and turning, rather violently, calling out and shouting. Nothing that was said calmed him; nothing that was said even reached him yet. He kept waving his arms and shaking his head, calling out to someone to "Save…yourself…"
"Calm down! Calm down, please!" She desperately held down his shoulders. But he was stronger than her and managed to wrench free.
"Go…away! Leave me!" he kept saying. "Save yourself!"
"But who?" she asked. "Save who?"
He suddenly stopped and panted, his forehead soaked in cold sweat.
She quickly waved the light over his eyes, checked his pulse and breathing. His heart was beating much too quickly and he was breathing much too fast, but his eyes were responding to her light…he even shut his eyelids tightly and turned his head away. Everything seemed better from the medical officer's point of view, Honoka thought, the way she had been told. But she was worried about him, thrashing about and such. His healing brain was worried about something, and she did not know how to help out.
Funny, how she was worried about him now. How, just a few days ago, she did not care.
Poor Honoka was at a loss what to do. "Can't you make him sleep, at least?" she begged the medical officer.
"Yes, we could," came the answer, "but we have to be sure he is already stable. If he isn't, he dies. Can he take it now, in your opinion?"
She was worried, yes. But she was still callous. "Yes." Live or die, it did not matter to her what happened to him.
"Very well."
The medical officer called in a few other people, who arrived with a syringe filled with a clear substance. As a group of brawny men held the redhaired young man at the head, arms, and legs, the officer drove the needle into the patient. The officer and the men then backed away and left.
He shook his head and waved his arms for a while longer. But the movements became slower, and the screams softened to whispers. "Katsu…kun…get away…save…yourself…" Finally he drifted off in a sedated slumber.
"Katsu?" Honoka asked her sister, who helped wipe off the sweat on his forehead. "Does he mean Katsushiro-sama?"
"Probably," Mizuki answered her.
"What happened?"
"I don't know, nee-san, I'll go ask around," her sister said, and walked off to find those she needed to ask.
Thus, Honoka was left alone again with a silent, still, almost lifeless human. She sighed.
One thing concerned her, though, and she knew that it was making the medical officer worried as well. In his thrashing about, all that moved were his head, arms, and torso. His legs did not move at all. The officer showed her the body scans. His spine had been partly crushed. The first operation was only to save what could be saved of his internal organs. They still had not addressed the fact that he was paralyzed from the waist down.
The feisty fire-haired mechanic, not being able to walk. For some reason, she found a life for him that way as very terrible. It would be just punishment for the pain he had caused others, condemning them without hearing them out. He would be condemned without being heard, for being a liability.
She should have been rubbing her hands in glee. She was not. She felt sorry for him. She did not know why.
Mizuki returned with news. "Well, according to the Shikimoribito, they found him pressed under a Raiden cannon. The cannon was part of the stuff that fell when the bottom half of the floating capital was separated from the main ship. That's about it. I still don't know why he was calling out to Katsushiro-sama, though."
He probably heard the last sentence. His eyes opened, and he began to look up and around him. "Katsushiro-kun…go already…you've done enough…don't worry about…me…"
Honoka sighed, as she ran her hand through his hair and shushed him. "Where is Katsushiro-sama now? Dead or alive?"
Mizuki smiled. "Alive. But he was REALLY shaken by it all, the Shikimoribito said." She shook her head. "Poor guy…"
"Shaken?"
Mizuki explained. "They said they found Katsu-sama in the fields, just where the floating capital fell. He was just…LOOKING…at those fields, they said. He was mumbling something….someone's name…"
Honoka pointed at her patient.
"Maybe," Mizuki answered, "but they couldn't make out what he was saying."
The young man suddenly reached up. "Not yet…not this way…I wanna live. I wanna eat rice…I wanna live!"
Honoka grabbed at his hand with her own two hands. She held on as he continued to wave the arm just above his chest. She brought the arm down to the bed, and held on tightly. "But you are alive. Do you understand me? You did live."
"Katsu…Katsu…" he wailed.
"He's alright….he's alright…" She placed her head over his hand, and rubbed his arm. "He's alright."
"Katsu?"
"Yes, Mizuki said he's alright. Now go back to sleep. Everything is alright."
That was not exactly true. But it would have to do for now. Anything to keep him quiet.
He squeezed her hand, and continued to hold her hand, as he drifted off again.
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The next evening, they began the operation on his spine, to salvage what they could of his spinal cord.
The operation went well, but as with the first operation, the wait was long. Honoka went to sleep, but her sleep was disturbed by all his screams that she kept hearing in her head. She dreamed up what Mizuki described to her: the floating capital disintegrating, the lower half of the ship falling in one huge piece, his small and weak body crushed under a cannon, and his screams as the capital exploded.
The recovery phase afterward was long was well. Once again she had to check heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, eye response, for a good many hours. For many hours she was alone with her thoughts, now more about her patient than about anything else.
Most of it was about his future. What would happen to him after he got well? What would his life be? He lived alone, and moved alone. With all the work done to him, living alone would now be impossible.
The Shikimoribito realized this as well, she realized. She was summoned to a council of the masked leaders. The topic was the redhaired patient.
"As you know, the territory of the Shikimoribito is open to everyone. It is neutral to all territories. However, even you realize that our resources here have limits. We take in those who need to be taken in, but only if they have nowhere else to go, as was in your case. In regard to the case of our young samurai, we have the option to report him as alive and give him over to Kanna. The transfer will occur in two weeks, once he is stable enough to move on his own. Are you agreeable to this?"
Actually, it would have been better. He would be out of her life, and she would never see him again.
But something made her say no.
"Please. Let him stay here."
"Are you sure about your request, Honoka?" the elder asked as the Shikimoribito looked on.
No, she was not sure. But she remembered that thin, weak body subjected again to the elements of nature, and now even more weakened by operations to organs and spinal cord. "Yes, please, let him stay here. At least he can be cared for better here."
"There are no more free huts. He would have to live with you."
She had already managed to be with him for five days. All the terrible thoughts she could think about him had already been thought, and she had no more angry thoughts left to give him. Having him around for a little while longer, until the time he might decide to leave, no longer bothered her.
"This was a punishment, Honoka. You are accepting the sentence for a longer period. Are you sure?" the elder kindly asked.
"Mizuki will help me." That was all she said.
"Very well, Honoka. As you wish. But there is no turning back on this decision."
"I understand."
The council was dismissed.
The medical officer and a group of three followed Honoka back to where the young man was placed.
They found him looking around the room, no longer with a blank stare, but knowingly. He felt his head, and looked down at his toes. He tried to sit up, then howled in pain.
Honoka was quickly by his side and lowered him back to the bed. "Take it easy, Heihachi-sama."
He panted for a while, then looked up at Honoka.
Honoka distinctly saw his shock and terror upon seeing her face. "Are you sure you know who I am?" he asked with wide eyes. "Because I'm the one who wanted to….."
"That's in the past, Heihachi-sama, and I deserved it," she answered calmly.
The medical officer approached him. The officer checked his eyes, asked him to lift his arms, asked if he could feel his legs, asked if he knew where he was. The samurai answered the questions as best as he knew. The questions were rather straightforward, anyway.
But he still looked rather confused, as the Shikimoribito left the bed, and Honoka was left alone with him again. He did not know what to ask. "Um, um, how…"
"There were a few of them who rode to Kanna soon after all of you left – as a precaution, according to one of the leaders here," Honoka began to explain. "He said they would help should the help be needed. They did not intervene, because the five of you had things under control, they told us. They were supposed to go back already, when they found you, unconscious and bleeding."
He looked away. Honoka saw that he had clenched one of his hands into a tight fist. "They should've left me…"
But Honoka continued to explain. "They found you pressed under a heavy pillar, among the debris left by the capital. They were the ones who got you out. When they saw you were still breathing, just barely, they stopped what of the bleeding they could, did other emergency measures, and rushed you here."
"You don't understand….." he muttered between tightly clenched teeth. He pounded his fist onto the bed.
"So that's the story, so far. Report has it that you and your friends won. Amanushi is dead. Kanna is safe."
He shouted. "You don't understand!" He pounded hard on the bed with his fists. "You don't understand."
What was wrong with him? Was he still delirious? What was going on? How should she handle this situation? She decided to play along. "No, I do not understand. Please explain."
He kept staring at her, seething and sarcastic. "Or maybe you do understand." He grinned a terrible grin at her, then frowned. "Haven't you felt that? Haven't you felt so sick of yourself for being a traitor that you want to stop living? Haven't you felt sorry that you couldn't take it back, do something good for a change?"
What he said did…not…sink…in. Why…why…why did he know what was going through her head? Why did he know? Could he read her mind?
He looked at her with pained, angry eyes, then shouted at her. "I had that chance. You took it away from me. The chance to finally do something good, then die. The chance to pay back my betrayal. You stole that from me!"
HIS betrayal? What was he saying? "But, it wasn't….."
"Now I have to keep living with myself. Worse, I have to be a burden to someone now."
He stared at the stalactites, and clenched his teeth.
He did feel it. That just punishment. That terrible sentence. Of being alive, but no longer being in control.
Still, it stung. To have been forced to care for someone who did not want to be cared for in the first place, for someone who wanted to be dead as much as she wanted him dead. She had wasted her sleepless nights and her lonely hours, on someone who did not care.
There was only one thing she could tell him.
"Ungrateful jerk."
She tossed her head, raised her nose, turned around, and walked out the door. She walked to a tree, the tree where she sat together with the tall, dark entertainer. She sat there again, hidden from the underwater lake, from her sister, and from the rest of the village.
"A jerk…a jerk! Such a jerk!"
She slowly and calmly wiped the tears that managed to fall from her eyes.
"And I don't know why…why…I didn't let him…die…"
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Those of you who read "Tenshi" will of course recognize the last part of this chapter as being old stuff.
This will be done by the next chapter. I don't have much left to say, anyway, and my rotation in the internal medicine department will soon be over. Thank you for reading, and I hope you come back for the last chapter.
