"your words cut deeper than a knife. Now I need someone to breath me back to life."
Lieutenant Emily Miller had seen some shit in her life.
She had treated every injury imaginable, severed arteries, broken bones, gunshot wounds, plasma burns, you name it.
Even though she had seen the worst that could be done to people, somehow she knew that all of that wouldn't hold a candle to what she was about to see.
She road in the back of a troop transport warthog across the base and to the airfield, dreading what she would find there for the entire ride.
She knew logically that it was Daniel being airlifted in after his convoy had been hit, but her mind simply could not accept the fact that he of all people had been injured. By all accounts, he had a slim chance of surviving.
He couldn't be injured. She had allowed herself to be attached to him and if he died she wasn't sure what she would do.
She had already watched so many nameless, faceless soldiers die on an operating table, she didn't want him to be next.
However, when the troop bay door of his pelican opened and he was rushed out on a stretcher, his BDU soaked in blood and his body covered in wounds that had been hastily filled with biofoam, the realization that this was her friend laying in front of her hit her like a freight train.
She wanted to stop, give into her nausea and cry out, but she couldn't. Daniel needed her now.
She had been a fool never to tell him how she truly felt about him, and if he died before she could she wasn't sure what she was going to do.
She helped load his stretcher into the back of the hog and sat next to him, monitoring his vitals as they rushed him to an operating room.
She fought back the urge to cry as she pushed his gurney through the door and into the sterile, white operating room, immediately beginning to work in him.
They took an image of his entire body with a portable MRI and immediately identified the problems.
He had a concussion and was internally bleeding, a round had torn through his left forearm, nearly severing an artery, shrapnel had impaled his midsection, and a piece of glass was lodged in his leg, dangerously close to his femoral artery.
If they moved it wrong, it would cut the artery, and probably kill him.
There was no room for error. She pulled on a surgical mask and gloves before grabbed tweezer, a scalpel, a small, plastic, clamp meant to hold severed arteries shut just in case.
She began to remove biofoam from his wounds before allowing another surgeon to begin to stitch them up.
Biofoam was only ever a temporary thing. Once it degraded or filled with too much blood it would begin to break down, and if the wound hadn't been treated or healed by then it would be back to square one.
When she was finished, she moved her attention to his leg, where the pice of glass sat near his artery.
She made incisions around the piece of glass to make it easier to remove. It was thick, ballistic glass, so at very least she didn't have to worry about it shattering inside his leg, just all of the dangerous things it could cut.
She carefully grabbed it with the tweezers and began to pull it free of the wound, pulling it almost all the way through his leg before her hand slipped, moving the glass ever so slightly to the side and nicking his artery, causing a squirt of blood to gush from his leg.
The spray of blood covered her BDU's in thick, red blood.
She wanted to throw up, and she wanted to cry, but she couldn't. She was on autopilot. If she didn't act now, he would die.
She pulled the glass free the rest of the way and had an orderly apply pressure on his leg while she retrieved the clamps from their sterile container and placed them above and below the artery.
The pressure stopped the flow of blood enough for her to grab a tissue patch and fuze it onto the artery with a handheld laser.
She pulled out the clamps, sewed up the wound, and started a blood transfusion the second she could. He had already lost a lot of blood, and most of it had gushed onto her, tinting her BDUs bright red.
It was all becoming too much.
One of the surgeons picked up a drill off a nearby table and consulted his tacpad for the best place to preform a craniotomy and alleviate the internal bleeding from his concussion.
She couldn't watch. She could almost feel the Daniel's pain radiating through her. For the first time in her entire UNSC medical career she was sure she was going to vomit.
She tried to cover her face with her hands so no one would see the anguish in he features, and ended up spattering her own face in his blood.
It was all over her. It ran into her eyes, through her hair, down the sleeves of her shirt, under her BDU blouse, there was no escape from it.
She began to hyperventilate. The thought of how much of Daniel was on her made it hard to breath, hard to think, even hard to move. Before today she had always been able to dehumanize her patients and make them seem like strangers, or empty bodies even, but this wasn't a stranger, and imagining that it was was impossible.
One of the orderlies noticed her breaking down and placed a hand on her shoulder.
"It's ok. I think the rest of us can take it from here," he said.
She wasn't even coherent enough to recognize who it was that was talking to her, despite how long she had been working with everyone in this room, but she headed their advice none the less and left, slumping against a wall outside the operating room.
The moment she hit the floor she tore off her gloves and surgical mask, and burst into tears.
She had seen so many people bleed to death over the years, and it seemed for every one she saved ten more would die. Even though she knew he wasn't the worst case she had ever had, the though of how bad of shape he was in still sickened her.
If she could, she would have tried to block him out of her mind and tell herself she didn't love him, she never had, but it didn't work, not in the slightest.
He had to survive, it was as simple as that.
She didn't move, not even to change BDUs or to clean the blood from her face and hands.
She simply let the tears run down her face through frequent sobs. It was all she could do until she knew for sure if he had survived.
"And now that I'm without your kisses, I'll be needing stitches."