Again, all copy-written work is the sole properties of their respective owners. No infringement is intended; no money is being made. I make no claims to the lyrics of "Murder" and "There's No Way Out Of Here" by David Gilmour - I just like his point of view and his liquid voice. Talented fucker...
The woman before her was dying and Rin could do so very little about it, god dammit!
"Crank the oxygen wide-open, and throw the bed all the way up, she's barely moving any air – call Respiratory now! Where are we – stepdown? Call the medical emergency team now before we have to code this lady!", Rin called out over the labored wheezing of the woman before her, grey and sweating... dying...
"I'll get the crash cart, and the chart! Does she have Pulmonary on the case?", the small blonde nurse before her called back as she hurried out of the room for the code cart.
"Dr. Sumire's group... oh my god, let anyone but him be on call!", Rin prayed and started dialing her cellphone.
Rinnnnng... Riiiiiiinnnng...
"Keep breathing Mrs. Asoka, in and out – you're doing fine, keep going...", Rin begged the woman failing before her in her neediest, calmest voice...
"This is Onigumo and it had better be good."
"Son of a fucking bitch!", Rin swore over her fate, moving to allow the respiratory therapist through.
"Dr. Onigumo, this is Taisho from Stepdown, 3 north and we have a patient in respiratory distress...", Rin let her training hit the gas, hard. Orders received to intubate, transfer to ICU, and so on and so forth... it was another day at the office.
"Any other orders, Doctor?", Rin heaved a sigh of mental relief, so glad Naraku decided to be a damn professional – for once.
"No.", Naraku's dead snarl wilted her ear as he hung up on her. Click.
The emergency team was quickly getting the poor failing woman ready for transport behind her as Rin received the ICU bed assignment. She called report as four people flew the large bed and it's unstable cargo down the hall.
Breathing a sign of relief through her mussed hair, Rin fingered a discarded electrode wrapper and tried to look at it as another one saved... at least for the time being; at least for now. Somehow, it just wasn't enough.
On your own admission, you raised up the knife and brought it down, ending another man's life...
She needed another damn job, Rin thought for the umpteenth time; saving the world one person at a time was getting damn old. Just as she was walking out on the scene of her latest tragedy – thinking to herself, time to go back out, save more lives and make a fucking difference, Rin Taisho's phone rang.
"Taisho here."
"You are going to beg me to forgive you, my girl. I am many things, but I'm not your bitch, woman."
"Naraku... how the fuck-"
"Caller id, half-wit. Meet me upstairs. Be there before me, or I am coming down there to get you. Verstaendlich?"
"But the intubation-", Rin tried to stammer through the haze of her shock.
"Even I can here them calling the code over the over-head pager, Taisho...looks like I can drive the speed limit now; the hard part will be done."
The operator was calling the code team to the room she'd just sent Mrs. Asoka to; Rin winced at Naraku's ever-frustrating penchant for being right.
What was it that brought you out here in the dark? Was it your only way of making your mark?
"I hate you so much sometimes, Naraku.", Rin growled into the phone and hung up on him.
She loved lying in the sun. Rin had moved around so much as a child, her father moving them constantly from place to place, never truly settling down for more than a few months, so she'd never decided where home was before – until she meet the beach.
Never mind that she hated swimsuits and tourists. Or the briny smell of low tide. Or the creepy feel of seaweed against her legs in the water. The ocean was home; it had no memory and made no demands.
She rolled over in the sun's hot embrace and basked like a lotion-slicked lizard on a rock.
Something kept waving across her closed eyes, dark filaments infiltrating the red heat behind her closed eyes in a most annoying way. 'What the hell, man?', she mental swore and finally swatted at the black interlopers.
They flitted away when she swatted lazily, only to return momentarily, hovering about her face, tickling her in the worst way!
"Goddammit, fucking bugs!", Rin swore and slapped in earnest, whacking the tall, languid physician looming over her sun-kissed body.
She'd knocked his blue lenses cockeyed across his patrician's face, one amused bloody-red eye swallowing her whole, his maleficent smile promising her delicious torment... later...
"Spiders, especially.", Rin huffed out and rolled over on her belly. Why the hell he'd insisted he'd come with her to lie in the sun was anyone's guess; Rin always figured Onigumo was a night-time sort of person. He looked down-right bizarre in the bright sunlight. His blue-black waist length mane of hair lay in state over his horrific scar, covering the blasted wasteland of pink and red scar tissue from the normal world around them – except whenever a sea breeze blew across them it would bell out around Naraku and once exposed, not a few beach-goers had stopped to stare. Rin wondered if he even noticed any longer. She would have.
"You're getting sun-burned, Taisho.", Naraku tossed down on her back – she could hear him grinning.
"No I'm not. I'm not the one who is fish-belly white.", Rin yawned back, not really listening.
"Oh yes you are – right here." Rin felt a finger-tip in the center of her back and then, her suit top was untied.
"Naraku! Stop it. What are you doing? This is a public place, you pervert!", she snapped back with a hiss of annoyance.
"I'm not doing anything, it's you who can't seem to tie a knot. Let me fix that for you.", the rasping voice above her smoothed out.
The tie at her neck was undone while she was expecting Naraku to fix the first one. Great... now, she was stuck!
"Naraku, dammit, stop it!"
"Oh you need more sun screen, let me get that for you." Suddenly warm liquid was hitting the dip of her back and before she could squirm away to replace her own bindings, Rin felt her demon lover's hot hand on her lower back.
"Hold still or my hand might slip."
"Oh - are you going to hurt someone with a palm full of sunscreen?"
"I don't know, Taisho – that depends. Does this hurt?"
She suddenly felt his hand on her ass, traveling in a slick hurry under the thin material and inside her wet depths before the shocked breath could leave her suddenly dry throat.
Naraku's devious chuckle against her sweating spine felt like sleet hitting her skin. She heard him reposition his large mass upon their shared blanket and felt his other, less occupied hand idly rub the lotion upon her shivering shoulders.
"Well? Am I hurting you?"
"No.", Rin managed to squeak out as he continued to finger her in broad, tropical daylight.
"No, Doctor, little nurse. Say it."
"Oh you can go FUCK yourself!", Rin lunged up and flashed a family of tourists more than just her bright red anger – dislodging her companion for his slick fun.
"Jesus – look at that crazy woman... !"
"Nice tits – check it out, dude..."
"Oh my god, what's going on over there...?"
"NARAKU, dammit!", Rin screeched and attempted to cover herself, squatting back quickly against her tormentor's grinning form, who'd thrown his hands up to cup both her bare breasts and her unbalanced weight, displaying them both in an awkward but smoldering tableau of embarrassing, wholly accidental and throughly exhibitionist sexual display. And in public too...
"Smile for the camera, slut.", Naraku whispered in her ear as a couple of tourists captured her for posterity and future laughs on their phones.
Rin was so shocked, she did exactly as she was told. Teeth and cleavage... click-click.
"It' takes all kinds, doesn't it Kumiko...?"
"Christ – get a room..."
"Glad I'm not that woman..."
"What? Babe, I wish you were..."
Rin was so ashamed, she turned around and stuck fast to Naraku, trying to throttle him and disappear from mostly-amused public view completely. The dregs of oily suntan lotion plastered them together with a gross squirt. Naraku began to laugh in earnest and gathering himself in seeming endless dignity, wrapped his embarrassed cargo's legs around his long waist and started the slow walk to his car through the hot, loose sand.
He'd come back for the their shit eventually; it was hers anyway. Maybe he'd make her throw on his white shirt and walk back to get it – she'd be nice and sweaty and wet... Naraku mused as he straighted his sore back against Rin's quivering, traumatized mass.
Naraku half-saw the gangly teenager with white blonde surfer hair jogging towards them out of the corner of his dried blood eye and had a wicked idea. He hated would-be heroes...
Rin's discarded bathing suit top whipped accusingly in the poor fool's nervous wake as he made a beeline for their slow progress through the dunes.
Naraku ignored his on-coming company and growled loudly enough for all three to hear him clearly:
"Just like you, my little hand-maiden – as at work, I must clean up all your little messes...", he trailed off with an evil giggle, nuzzling her ear just to egg the kid on some more.
"Hey, dude – this belongs to...", the nervous kid began, too loudly, panting and sand-spattered.
Naraku whipped his long face around and had just enough time mouth the joyous singular word:
"Watch."
… before Rin reared back, her oiled, gleaming skin alight with fury, screaming a shrill scream full of bloody murder for all of humanity, and slapped her dark lover hard enough to crack his neck.
Naraku caught their down-ward momentum against a convenient palm tree before they could hit the ground, obscenely delighted that the damage had been done.
The image of the tall dark man's hungry leer, red eyes gleaming over twin blue lenses in unabashed triumph and the sight of the woman, body arched in powerful fury, her face a rictus of vengeance - bare breasts swaying with the incredible elemental force of her anger, like some descending goddess of destruction, seduction... power, temptation, absolution...
Rin's top slithered out of the boy's numb fingers – and his world would never be the same.
"Behave woman, or I'll drop you right here. Someone else would be more than happy to help you home, I'm only too sure?" Naraku spoke with deceptive calm into Rin's hellish eyes, and so mortified she was operating on some motor-survival level that hearing the implied threat in his vicious voice, she squeaked back into her previous position, trying to hide as much naked self as she could against his upright body. Looking once over her dark shaking head at the stunned kid before them, Naraku smirked back a mouthful of fangs and left him adrift in the hot dunes.
"You did that on purpose, you evil prick. Didn't you?", Rin sniffed from where she'd been plopped down unceremoniously in the passenger seat, finally hidden from the sun and and the lies of men by the smoked-out windows of Naraku's beast of a car.
"I'm a giving sort of person, Taisho.", Naraku enthused dryly, cracking his neck and his sore jaw.
"I hate you, Naraku."
"Good. Now kiss me, bitch. I'm jealous of what you're going to be doing later in that kid's head. You will not raise that pretty hand to any master but me, girl. Come here." Naraku ground out in a deep purr, crawling into the suddenly small space with his gleaming, panting girl.
"Jealous of me?"
"I'm an addict, bitch. Give me my fix."
She couldn't talk back to that with a tongue in her mouth... but maybe... later...
There's no way out of here, when you come in – you're in for good. There are no answers here, when you look out – you don't see in. There was no promise made, the part you played - the path you took...
The man before her was dying – Rin was sure of it. Only she couldn't stop it – fuck, she couldn't even slow it down! Sweating, cold and gasping for air, the man before her would have been bone-white except that he was a horrid shade of icteric yellow. His liver was shot and quickly, the rest of him would follow...
Rin had the slight and uncomfortable luxury of a senior nursing student with her tonight and as the end of her shift loomed, she was left grasping at straws; finding nothing left with which pull a miracle out of the early morning chaos.
Leaving the student at the dying man's bedside with the admonishment that should he stop breathing to scream, Rin made a beeline for the computers she knew physicians magically sprouted from in the early morning, hoping for help – hoping for anything to help the poor man she cared about and cared for.
She saw the familiar violet-clad back hunched over a chart, and for once - in a thankfully very, very rare while - was overjoyed to see Dr. Onigumo's demonic presence in her stormy life.
"Dr. Onigumo. Please come to room five now. I have a patient in distress; cold, diaphoretic, and pale, gasping for breath. He says he's fallen three times in the last hour and his blood pressure is dropping...", Rin stated seriously over his stiff shoulder at his interruption. "He's had bloody..."
"Whose patient?" Naraku lobbed back at her without interest or even looking at her for that matter.
"Dr. Sumire's. Admitted last night with alcohol withdrawal and jaundice..."
Naraku turned to bite her head off, Rin could tell and her reflection in his dark red eyes pleaded back at her for any kind of help – even if she had to pay the price and bargin with the Devil.
But Naraku Onigumo, MD was no fool and he followed his fellow caregiver into the ever-present battleground of all too-temporary humanity after a mercifully short report.
After a very quick exam, Naraku grabbed the back of her neck and leaned into her twitching, adrenalized ear, whispering to her with his beautiful voided voice.
"There's nothing left, my girl."
Did she feel him kiss her ear at the bedside of a dying man? She must have be delusional, despite the bugging eyes of her over-whelmed student who soon would become splattered in chaos when the fearsome Dr. Onigumo raised his terminal voice in a controlled roar to call the Code Blue...
Funny, it only took the man 25 minutes to go from talking to her to being cold and dead.
Rin sat at the foot of her patient's bed and while she couldn't weep now, she knew she would. The tube in his still mouth looked brand-new and out of place. She expected the self-depreciating flat voice of the self-admitted alcoholic to ask her what just happened to him... she wanted to tell him. She wanted to ask him to open his eyes, except that they were open – glassy and bulging with his death throes. Was it always this awful?
The student next to her squeaked comically when the dead man before them exhaled suddenly.
Rin put her hand on the young woman's back and rubbed it a little, out of instinct, mostly. She was too numb to really notice she was doing it.
"They do that sometimes after strong chest compressions."
The pale but solid girl nodded back with a clenched jaw. Her eyes were wet.
"Do you want to talk about this for your paperwork? Let's go over it from the time I came in to give his 6 o'clock meds and found him pale, sweating..." Rin began in a grey, practiced voice, waiting for the dead man before her to join in and fill in any gaps in her memory.
"Did you see the patient hit Dr. Onigumo?", the student asked in thin, warbling voice after their discussion had ground to a slow halt.
"He did – when?" Rin asked, alive for the first time in about 25 minutes.
"I think the Doctor had just given the first round of epinephrine and the patient came up and hit him – right in the nuts."
"Are you serious?", Rin gasped with a strangled laugh, trying not to screech banshee laughter in front of the corpse.
"Uh, yeah – I'm pretty sure Dr. Onigumo was limping when I saw him call the time of death and leave the room.", the suddenly smirking student leaned in conspiratorially.
"Oh my god, that's FUCKING HILARIOUS!", Rin spewed forth with wicked glee, forgetting herself utterly – professional behavior be damned; they'd never see a mighty ICU physician get his nuts handed to him by someone who ended up getting the ultimate laugh at his expense. And both women knew it. Life inevitably went on for someone...
After Rin's snorting giggles started to subside, they both felt better. She thought she could she now see the dead man grinning around his intubation.
"Hope this guy didn't ruin him for you, Rin.", the student smiled back at her with absolutely no guile.
"Oh MY god, even you students know?", Rin hung her head between her knees and wanted to scream.
*** Second part written as catharsis for a patient I really did lose this morning, who did hit someone in the nuts during his terminal event – requiem in terra pax and so forth... I'm sorry I couldn't save you.
- The Voice in the Wilderness.