@akbartheolder
Location: south of the farm, isolated beach
@neshionals
The wife had found Emre, implored him to come. She was a good farmhand; but Emre didn’t know why she’d come looking for him. Or rather, Tomas might say that Emre pretended not to know why. Refused to acknowledge. Was entirely uncomfortable with the idea of being someone people would seek for help, rather than maintain a polite (or not-polite) distance.
Flummoxed, Emre followed, and became even more perplexed when they returned to her husband caught in a thicket. But that wasn’t the worst of it - one of the broken branches had impaled itself through her husband’s shoulder, pinning him there.
And even that wasn’t the worst of it all. Things where shifting around the fellow - brambles growing tiny, then big and gnarled. The branch in his shoulder could blip at anytime, bulk up inside his shoulder. Hurt him further.
“What’re you thinking, Nance?” Emre chastised. “Go bloody find the doctor, not me! I’ll stay here with Pe…Pa…”
“Paul,” the man panted sweatily, ever so helpful.
Nance went tearing off again, and Emre nodded at Paul. “Right. Let’s clear the brush around you, yeah? When the doctor comes, he’ll look after you. Make you right as rain. He’s well skilled innit. Trauma surgeon and that. Brilliant bloke,” Emre assured Paul, as he used his cutlass to clear the brush around, make room.
Nance did not find the doctor though; because Emre spotted the tall, rangy man himself only a short distance away on the beach, clearly on his own missions and volitions. For a moment, Emre felt an illogical burst of pride at the sight of the determined, helpful doctor, his heart swelling with irrational love.
And truly, he intended to shout ‘Doctor Nesh’. But his addled brain and exhausted mouth instead shouted what was in his heart: “Iyaz!”
A pause, heart hammering, as Emre realized what he’d said; now sweaty Paul was looking at Emre with a slight pitying look. Emre made a little growl, and then amended roughly and quickly. “Doctor Nesh! Oi! Got a man down, bruv!”
Iyaz..!
The name rips through the voices at the beach, through the night, through his chest and right into his heart. It picks up pace, and it beats from 75 to 130, makes his stomach turn upside down and leaves him dizzy. Iyaz. It’s Emre calling out, that he recognizes immediately. Jean, the young woman he had just knelt down beside, gifts him a confused look at the way he’s frozen into place, when he’s definitely not supposed to - trauma surgeon, and all that. Jean shrugs her pain off (her cut is small, anyways) and Nesh stops thinking and starts running in Emre’s direction - but when he arrives, there is no Iyaz, and Emre isn’t running either. No, he’s looking at Nesh. Nesh’s pulse goes from 130 to 150, and when he looks at Paul, it risks the 180.
The doctor’s head feels as if it’s exploding, and then his knees hit wet sand and he’s grabbing things out of his bag in an instant, scalpel and towels and bottle of alcohol. The tree is moving, but Nesh is moving faster, and he pulls self-made injections into a syringe, moves to inject it and- it’s gone. It’s just like in the emergency room - unsterile! yelled in a high pitched tone, and then his supplies are gone and he has to wait. It’s just that there’s no waiting here, and he has to make other choices immediately before it’s too late. “On the count of three,” he says to Emre, “we will pull him off the wood. He will black out from the pain as soon as I start working on him. You’ll have to keep checking his pulse. His eyes. Pupils and all that.”
Nesh pulls some coke mixture out of his backpack, and drops just enough onto the wound, not reacting to any complaints Paul has. His fingers tremble a little, tempted to take some for himself withdrawal he’s been facing for the last 48 hours already.
“Leave.”, he says to Nance, but he doesn’t wait for her to do so, and he also doesn’t wait for Emre to agree - they have no time left. So he counts to three, towel ready in his left hand, eyes observing the wound closely, and then he pulls.
