His nosebleed spatters an erratic pattern on the white floor. Behind them, his dragging feet smear it into a broken trail, like a painter drunkenly wielding a brush.
Featuring: QPR, collapse arc, panicking caretaker, medical whump, whumperless whump
CW: Febrile state, mental confusion, seizures, nose bleed
Afterburn Arc: Purgatory ▸ F is for Functional ▸ Something Stupid ▸ 📍Cold Spray ▸ Unlaced ▸ Charmed ▸ Ballet (ongoing)
Cold Spray
RIko's neck is arched, his eyes rolled back in his head. He is convulsing where he lies, stretched halfway out into the corridor. The blue blanket has bunched uselessly under him, absorbing none of the impact as his elbows and knees jerk and thud against the floor.
Mish’s heart is pounding. She's seen dozens of people seize before.
But this is Riko. Riko shuddering against the floor, Riko arching in her grip.
Her mind flashes to the injectors she saw in his med kit. There was an anticonvulsant-- For a frantic moment, the urge to grab it and jab it into his thigh is overwhelming.
No.
She doesn't know what he's on. Doesn't know what's causing the seizures. She can't afford to make guesses.
The seizure lasts just under a minute. She knows because she times it.
Riko's last spasm sends his leg kicking out inside his room; something crashes unseen behind the half closed door.
“Riko?” she calls, and she hates how her voice cracks. He opens his eyes but they don’t track her. His throat moves without sound, his Adam’s apple shifting under blood going tacky.
She reminds herself that he's a patient and that she's a nurse.
But all she wants to do is sit here and hold him. She grips him hard, and her palms remember the sensation of his muscles bunching spasmodically against them.
His nose has started bleeding again. Blood is trickling into his hair, falling freely off his face to drip onto the floor. She can't stop looking.
"Stop it," she tells herself. "Get up. Move."
She forces her muscles to activate. Pushes herself up. And against every instinct, she turns away from Riko.
Help. She needs to get help.
Someone has to be here. They can help her lift Riko, carry him--
She bangs on doors, leaving red smears on them. Her voice comes out tight and compressed; "Help! Anyone! Someone--"
Nothing. Everyone is at the cafeteria for dinner. They’ll be here in half an hour, but right now the corridor yawns wide and vacant.
A cleaning bot hums along the seam of the wall in the distance.
Behind her, a soft scuffle against the floor. The sound of Riko starting to convulse again. The hiss of the door trying to close on him.
There is an emergency comm unit near the showers. If she runs, she can get there and--
A door cracks open down the hall. It's Grav, leaning his hefty frame out of his pod.
"Grav!" she gasps. "Riko! He--"
He takes one look at her face, flushed, stricken-- and looks beyond her at Riko’s body spilled halfway out into the corridor, his limbs twitching, blood running slick down his neck.
“Shit,” Grav says succinctly.
Behind him, Mish makes out the form of a woman, coming to the door. “Grav?” the woman says.
A head pops out. Grimma.
Grimma the facility nurse.
She's bra-less in a too-big t-shirt, black lace panties showing under the hem. Her hair is not in her usual severe bun, instead hanging loose and tousled around her face.
Mish's brain does a skip and a stutter.
Grav and Grimma. Wait till Riko hears about this.
Grimma's eyes snap to Riko. “Shit.”
And both of them are moving immediately, sprinting down the corridor.
They drop down next to Riko, tilting him onto his back. And even though Mish knows they have never officially worked together on a team, they act in tandem, as if they've been practicing.
Practicing! her mind howls, with inappropriate hilarity. The voice she hears in her head is Riko's.
They scan him quickly, the hands of a nurse and emergency med tech moving with experienced speed over Riko.
“Seizing,” Grimma says. “And burning. What the hell happened?”
“I-- I don't know-- I was trying to get him to the showers--” Mish says, tripping over herself.
“Good call,” Grimma says. “Grav, lift.”
Riko has gone still. They hoist him up, unevenly. His legs crook awkwardly, as if he's a broken toy.
They move fast, his arms slung loose around their shoulders, his skin searing the back of their necks. He hangs like a dead weight, his head swinging limp between them.
His nosebleed spatters an erratic pattern on the white floor. Behind them, his dragging feet smear it into a broken trail, like a painter drunkenly wielding a brush.
Ahead of them, Mish pushes the door open as they reach the communal showers. Riko is propped in the corner of the nearest stall, his head lolling on his shoulder.
Mish yanks at the showerhead, aiming it at his slumped figure. Swings the knob violently all the way to cold.
The blast of water hits him full on.
He jerks, limbs snapping up gracelessly; a puppet whose strings have been brusquely yanked.
“F-uck!” he yells.
His voice is high and furious, startled and cracking on the syllable. His eyes are wide and wet as he looks at Mish with a look of such abject betrayal--
Her heart clenches painfully and her knuckles go white around the showerhead.
Then his head sags, and he crumples sideways, sliding down the tiled wall. His legs fold awkwardly under him, his arms limp and extended across the tiled floor of the shower stall.
The water pelts down, uninterrupted.
His clothes go translucent, plastered against his skin. His bootlaces dangle into the drain with the weight of the water.
Mish starts to shiver. She watches as the blood on him washes away in pink sheets across the tiles, going around her work shoes.
And then, again.
His hands twitch first, and then his fingers splay and claw into shapes she has never seen Riko make. Seconds later, he goes into full-body convulsions.
He thrashes violently, his back arching. His jaw is clenched so tight it changes the shape of his face. His head jerks repeatedly, and she drops hurriedly to her knees beside him. She grips his head between her palms, trying to keep it from slamming against the tile.
Her knuckles are getting bruised.
Mish lets out a breath that sounds like a sob. But it's not. Because she's not crying, she's not. She's a nurse, this is a patient, she needs to get it together, this is just a patient--
“Hang on, Mish--” Grimma is already at the wall panel, slamming the emergency intercom.
“We have a medical emergency in the communal showers, level B12-- seizures, possible hyperpyrexia--”
Grav has picked up the showerhead and is keeping the water coming. She's completely soaked now, and there's blood pinking the knees of her uniform.
Mish holds him until he goes still again, and this time, he looks so gone that she has to press her shaking fingers into his neck to assure herself that his heart didn't stop.
He looks absolutely awful, like a bad copy of himself. As if someone ran out of colours except chalky whites and bruised greys and tried to paint him with their non-dominant hand.
She can see a sliver of his eyes through his lids, and she knows he's unconscious. Still, she peers past the clumped lashes, trying to see if she can find any spark of him in his eyes.
Blood is leaking out of his nose, spilling over her hands.
She's not a nurse anymore. She's just... she's just holding on to him.
She wonders if "fuck" is going to be the last thing he says to her.
+++++++++++++++++
The med team arrives in minutes. She tells them as much as she knows, which is nothing. Except the number of times he seized since she found him, and for how long.
They roll his sodden, limp body onto the gurney and strap him down, and as they push him out the communal showers, she makes as if to go with them.
Grimma steps in her way. Mish tries to go around her, but Grimma puts out her hands on her shoulders and grips hard enough that Mish stops.
"Mish, don't," she says.
"I have to go, in case-- maybe I can help, if they need extra hands, I can--"
Grimma shakes her head. "Mish, they've got him. They'll take care of him."
Mish's gaze follows the gurney as it is wheeled out of sight. Riko's face is white and insensate under the oxygen mask, his head tilted back. The last thing she sees as the door swings shut behind the gurney is his one bare foot, next to his boot, which is still laced onto his other foot.
"I need to go with him," Mish says. "He-- he needs his sock."
Grimma's eyes drop to Mish's hand, curled in a death grip around Riko's dripping sock. The one Mish had pulled off him as he was being strapped onto the gurney.
Grimma's gaze comes back up to Mish's face. It is strangely blank and distant.
"Don't do this to yourself. There's no waiting room where they're taking him. You'd see everything," Grimma says.
Mish blinks, as if waking up. She looks sharply at Grimma. "I'm a professional nurse."
Grimma purses her lips, and then says very kindly. "Not right now, you're not. You're his friend. And you're in shock."
A thick, soft towel comes over Mish's shoulders, enveloping her.
Grav.
He layers it over her, and holds her gently from behind.
Mish feels herself start to shake in his embrace. Her shoulders shivering. Something rattling loose inside her.
He holds her for a long moment. A slow squeeze, and then he lets go.
He hands a towel to Grimma, who accepts it, and starts to wrap it around her waist. She speaks quietly to Grav as she does so, they both look at her.
Mish feels like a child being discussed. Her fingers grip tighter over the sock, and she feels water being wrung out of it. She bends her head to look.
The runoff is pink. And Mish shudders, a convulsive, full-body shake that feels like she's a dog trying to shake off water.
Grimma is right. She mustn't go with Riko. She couldn't watch and not do anything.
"I'm going to go with them," Grimma says. "I'll let you know immediately when I know anything certain."
Mish nods numbly. Grimma gives Mish a shoulder squeeze, and then walks out the communal showers, still barefoot, a towel wrapped around her waist.
Now Grav's arm is around her shoulder, and he's guiding her out the door too. But they turn right, back towards the pods.
The cafeteria crowd is trickling back in now. Mish can see where some of them had accidentally walked over Riko's blood spatters, leaving footprints. They are hushed and wide-eyed, watching as Grav walks her down the corridor.
She's dripping water, leaving waterlogged footsteps in her wake. They are diluting the blood on the floor.
She's ok. She's fine. It's just water.
Someone is standing outside Riko's door, staring at the blood smeared on the floor in front of it. He looks up at them as they approach, concern plain on his face.
"What happened? Is that Riko's blood?" he says.
Grav makes as if to walk Mish past the room, but she stops. "I need to go in," she says.
Grav looks at her. "Did you leave something in there? I really don't think you should--"
She pauses. Worries her lower lip.
"My dinner's in there," she says. "Could you grab it for me?"
Before Grav can stop her, she steps forward and keys in the door code. The door slides open, and the man from the corridor comes up next to her, craning to look in. Mish can see the bloody cot from where she's standing.
Grav steps in, and pauses, looking around. He sees the trays she left on the counter, and grabs them, carefully stepping around the smear of blood on the floor in the shape of Riko's face.
"That's a whole lot of blood," the man says. "Is he ok?"
"No," she says. "That's from his nosebleed. I found him. He was seizing."
She turns and looks at him, and something in her face makes him say, "Shit."
And he goes silent.
Before Grav gets to the door, she calls to him. "Hey," she says. "Could you also grab the plant?"
She watches him glance around again, and reach over to pick up the plant, balancing it on top of the trays. He steps out, letting the door slide close behind him.
"Let's go," he says to Mish.
"Thanks," she says. "I don't want him to come back and find it all dried up."
She lets him guide her down the hall towards the elevators back to her floor.
"Hey, uh," the man says as they walk past him. "I'm glad you found him."
"Yeah," Mish says softly.
"He's, uh, one of the good ones," the man says, somewhat lamely.
Before the elevator doors shut, she sees the little cleaning bot trundle up in front of Riko's room. It pauses in front of the smears of blood and plays its teeny cleaning melody.
It makes something twist up inside her. Riko had whistled the same tune after spilling coffee all over himself.
It had made her laugh.
The bot glides over the blood, leaving clean floor in its wake. In a few seconds, it will be as if Riko had never bled there.
Afterburn Arc: Purgatory ▸ F is for Functional ▸ Something Stupid ▸ 📍Cold Spray ▸ Unlaced ▸ Charmed ▸ Ballet (ongoing) << Main Masterlist << Signal War Note: The cleaning bot is a paid actor.
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