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Seifer Almasy (sorceressknight) wrote in wariscoming,
@ 2011-04-24 22:16:00

Entry tags:

seifer almasy, simon tam

Who: Seifer and anyone else that might be in the infirmary. (OTA!)
When: Around 8:30-ish. Right around the same time as this
Where: Complex infirmary
What: Holy shit, why was I in a coma?
Rating: PG? PG-13 at the worst.
Warnings: Yeah, absolutely none at this point.

Why was a question that Seifer was asking himself a lot lately. Why he’d let himself get so twisted up? Why fate saw fit to spare him when so many of his victims were in pine boxes or in pieces across battlefields? Why did this seal pull him through instead of Squall? The last question bugged him the most. Squall was the big damn hero. If this seal was pulling people through for the war effort, Squall would have been the better choice. No matter how Seifer felt about what he’d done, Squall was the legendary leader that had saved the world. Seifer was the enemy of his whole world and he’d go down in history that way. His legacy was nothing but brutality, suffering, and a pathetic puppet position. Seifer didn’t brood about it, or at least not often. That legacy was no less than what he deserved. No matter what, Ultimecia had never directly possessed him. She’d never even used her magic to screw with his mind. Every choice he’d made had been his own, and if his name became synonymous with horror and genocide for it, he would just have to deal with that.

But what was he supposed to do here? He wasn’t a hero. He was more insecure about that now than he ever had been before, and that was saying something. He wanted to help, but could he? Could he trust himself not to make the same mistakes he had back home? Sure, there was no megalomaniac wearing a face that was important to him here, but so what? He hadn’t believed Edea was in control of herself for most of the conflict on his world. He’d been so wrapped up in the glory and prestige that came with being her Knight that he hadn’t even cared. For a tiny little while, Galbadia had loved him.

For the tiniest little while, he’d felt loved.

That was why he’d done what he’d done, when you scraped away all the rationalizations and boiled it down to its simplest point. The little orphan boy that couldn’t remember his parents just wanted to feel like somebody gave a damn about him. It was why he’d initially been taken in by Edea’s face and why Ultimecia had been able to twist him around her little finger. The woman was nothing if not manipulative. So how could he be sure that wouldn’t happen here? Confidence had never been Seifer’s strong suit, despite outward appearances to the contrary. It was why he was always so loud and reckless, and why he always had to be better than everyone else. That tendency had been curbed somewhat since regaining his sanity, but at least part of that came from the calming presence of Fujin and Raijin. They were his friends, his posse, probably the closest thing to a family he’d ever have. Without them here, all Seifer could do was try to mask his insecurities the best he could.

Squall, on the other hand? Squall always seemed so self-assured. Everything seemed to come so damn easily for him, and he didn't seem to care about any of it. Maybe that was just Seifer’s perception of him, but the guy just infuriated him. Everything just seemed to fall in the guy’s lap. Squall just meandered around, stoic and totally clueless about the love people were just heaping on him for no reason. Why was it that the guy who always acted like he wanted people to go away got droves of friends without even trying? Why was it that Seifer couldn’t have the same kind of luck when he actively tried to put himself out there? Why was it that Squall had to be a gunblade specialist, and why the hell did he have to be better? Why did he get to be the hero? As much as Seifer did respect the guy for his ability, he just couldn’t quite get rid of the irritation, either.

It wasn’t that “why” that was bugging him right at that very moment, though. The why that was bugging him right then? Why the hell summoning Bahamut had put him into a freaking coma for almost sixteen hours. That was absolutely not supposed to happen. Seifer hadn’t relied on Guardian Forces quite as much as Squall and his merry band of heroes had, but he’d summoned more than his fair share during his training, and none of them had ever hurt him during the summoning. Bahamut may have nearly killed him during the fight to acquire him, but that was it. He hadn’t heard of any Guardian Forces, not even the probably evil Diablos, that hurt the summoner during the summoning. So why had summoning Bahamut last night dropped him? Why was he still feeling like warmed over roadkill? What the hell was going on with his summoning?

It was bugging him, but it wasn’t a question he would be able to answer, either. He wasn’t a moron, but he wasn’t an intellectual either. Maybe Quistis would know what was up with Bahamut, but she wasn’t here. Without her around, there was simply no real chance of finding an answer to the question. So with no answer on the horizon, Seifer wasn’t going to just lay here in some infirmary bed and ponder the question. Brooding was Squall’s thing. Action was Seifer’s. If he couldn’t do anything about the conundrum of Bahamut, then he would focus on something he could do something about: The bugs. He still wasn’t really sure how to kill them, although if what held true for hive minds on his world held true here, it could be as simple as killing the leader and then picking off all the little guys while they ran around in an disorganized chaos. The question then became where was the leader? Another question he didn’t have the answer to, and without knowing more about who the leader was, it was another of those unanswerable questions. So all he could really do was just get back up on his feet and go back out there.

It was the getting up part that was currently posing a problem. Seifer felt weak. Weaker than he had in a long time, and that was just laying there. Would he even be able to get up? Rolling out of bed proved fairly quickly that the answer to that question was a resounding barely. He was on his feet, but even that was enough to send the room spinning. His legs felt like gelatin under him, just barely solid enough to hold him up while still. “Okay. Alright, you can do this. C’mon.” He took a deep breath, hesitated for a second, and tried to take a few steps forward. He managed two steps before his legs started to betray him, and while he was able to stumble sloppily into the wall to keep from falling, this wasn’t good. Whatever summoning Bahamut had done to him, it was more serious than he’d first thought. “Whatever. You’ve dealt with worse. C’mon…” Taking another deep breath, he tried to make it a few more steps and stumbled back to the bed, where he slowly leaned on it for support. “Alright. Okay…” He was standing. Sure, he was pale as the grave and a little green around the gills, but he was standing. He was walking. He could fight. He was a damn soldier, he could fight through this. He just needed to get back out there.

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1/2 (whatever, shut up IJ character limit, you don't know me : / )

mysisterisaship
2011-04-25 04:44 am UTC (link)

Someday, Simon decided for at least the thousandth time as he threw his empty coffee cup into a waste bin in the complex lobby, he was going to literally sleep for a week. He had actual fantasies about it—how he would arrange food for River for the duration of the hibernation, assign his cases at work to other doctors, fill Lauren in on what she’d need to know during his absence in the med lab, the way he’d arrange the office so that his temporary replacement could find everything easily… all in all it would be accurate to say that Simon envisioned preparing for this imagined coma the way some men fantasized about meeting their mistress, reveling in each of the little preparatory details. He realized, however, that for the duration of this…attack of the giant insects (he had almost given up the fastidious mental shudder with which his normally orderly mind encountered the illogical snags this place threw into the normal order of things, but only almost. It was like the mental equivalent of setting Jayne loose in his med bay aboard Serenity sometimes, trying to make sense of everything that happened here) the fantasy was going to remain just that.

He’d actually gotten fairly little resistance from River about staying in the complex, the hive mind seemed to bother her, but he still had injuries to deal with from those staying in the complex and, even more troublingly in some ways, from people in town. That there was nothing he could do for the venom these things carried after an initial window where it could be drawn out through bleeding was troubling, but not a crisis to the people in the complex. They had other healers. The Weasley girl who had volunteered to help in the infirmary and especially that young man who had asked about where to find illegal drugs, Caleb, Cade, something like that, and a whole host of other powered individuals willing to speed the injured along to him.

For the civilians of Lawrence, however, the invasion had been devastating. Ten percent of the population the so-called prophet (he still couldn’t accept such things easily, no matter how long he had been here) had said. He suspected that Mal, and others who were used to fighting, would call that an acceptable loss given the situation. Simon had done the math. Lawrence, Kansas, as of the 2009 census, had a population of roughly 92,000 people. Ten percent was 9,200 give or take a few lives. Give or take a few lives his steps quickened in agitation as he moved towards the infirmary. Simon was steady in the face of crisis, with the capability to divorce the faces of his patients, the idea of them as sisters or brothers or parents or lovers, from the flesh under his scalpel. It was the ability that had enabled him to treat his own sister, the ability to switch seamlessly back and forth from doctor to brother, but he was still only human. 9,200 give or take a few lives and when the bugs, the killiks they were called, had come he had been the only doctor at the clinic or the hospital who had any warning. There was no way to tell them without giving the others away, and nothing he could do for the cases that stumbled through the emergency room doors too late. Those cases, the ones where it had already been too late, where there was no question of slipping into his role as a doctor, had been the ones he hadn’t been able to shake yet, the ones that followed him home like a silent coterie of expectant ghosts.

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2/2

mysisterisaship
2011-04-25 04:44 am UTC (link)

But he’d left the hospital for the day, his emergency shift over, and had headed back to the complex with the idea that he would make sure there had been no new injuries and check up on the young man who had been brought back by his patrolling partner after…summoning some sort of dragon. He sighed and flipped open the folder he was carrying, having retrieved it from his briefcase when he entered the complex, the patient file he’d put together after the young man had stabilized, his at first alarming symptoms evening out into a state that would probably mean near crippling exhaustion and weakness as his body recovered from what seemed to have been almost unbearable stress on several of its functions. Should have run more tests, even if he was stable this morning, I could-- his thoughts were interrupted, however, as walked into the infirmary and then, abruptly, into the patient in question who was inexplicably stumbling around the infirmary unattended.

He shook off the surprise and reached out automatically to steady his patient, but didn’t think to apologize. He’d forgotten the social conventions, as always, in his mind’s rush towards what it meant that the patient (Seifer he reminded himself after a quick glance at the file) was awake, the questions he should ask, the vitals he should be taking and analyzing.

“You’ll want to lie down again I think,” he said brusquely, having already turned back towards a counter along the far wall to retrieve a pen light. “Is this the first time you’ve had anything like this happen?” he asked as he turned back, fully expecting to find that Seifer had followed his instructions and would be perched on the bed waiting meekly for an exam, much as dealing with River (and a residency in the ER) should have taught him otherwise.

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sorceressknight
2011-04-26 02:36 am UTC (link)

Seifer stumbled back as a fairly young man pretty much walked into him. Usually he'd have just stood his ground and let whoever it was bounce off of him, but with his current physical weakness, that was pretty much impossible. That wasn't a good sign, although Seifer refused to admit that to himself. Even feeling as crappy as he was, his mind was sharp. While he was stumbling back, he was sizing up the guy that walked into him. It only took him a few seconds to size the guy up, a skill that any soldier would tell you was essential for not just the job, but survival.

Seifer didn't flinch away from the man's hand. He wasn't behaving hostilely. Normally that wouldn't be a concern, as Seifer felt fairly sure that he could take the older man if he were in a better physical condition, but his cockiness about his own abilities kept him from considering the older man as a threat even now. It took him a second longer to recognize a few familiar behaviors. Balamb Garden had an infirmary, and a wild child like Seifer ended up there more often than most. Seifer's more than passing familiarity with the brusque doctor there, Dr. Kadowaki, allowed him to connect a few dots quicker than most would have.

It also helped that the guy was walking into an infirmary while reading a file.

The similarities only grew as the guy talked. It was pretty clear as the doctor turned that he expected Seifer to be a good little patient and get back down on the bed. Unluckily for the doctor, Seifer was probably the furthest from a good little patient anyone could get. Instead of going dutifully prone on the bed, Seifer pushed himself off again and began half-stumbling, half-walking toward the exit again, snagging his gunblade from where someone must have left it near his bed. He glanced at the doctor when he heard the man's question and gave him a weak shrug. "That's the first time. Summoning doesn't do that," he waved carelessly toward the bed with his free hand and nearly lost his balance, but caught himself at the last second, "that, to you. It's not supposed to, and it never did back home. I wasn't expecting it." He added a weak smile and a quick, "But I'm fine now!"

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mysisterisaship
2011-04-29 02:18 am UTC (link)

Simon sighed audibly as Seifer started towards the door. Of course, he though dryly as he moved to intercept the younger man, completely heedless of the strangely shaped blade he’d picked up from next to the bed except to make a note to have someone hide the weapons even from comatose patients in the future, my patient during a crisis would have to be difficult. That’s just way the ‘verse works. He got between the door and his patient and held his hands up, the gesture somewhere between ‘hey, no weapons here’ and ‘stop’.

“As much confidence as your stunningly coordinated exit from the bed where you have spent the last day and change in a coma has inspired in me I’m afraid I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you to submit to a few tests, just to make sure. Having people on patrol suddenly drop to the ground and begin bleeding from every orifice is something the combat side of this operation frowns upon, I believe, even if it does result in startlingly effective fire-breathing dragons” he said dryly as he motioned Seifer back towards the bed again. He wasn’t sure if the younger man was going to follow his instructions or simply try to plow out through the door again, and so he planted his feet and simply stayed where he was, located so that Seifer would have to physically shove him aside to get out of the infirmary.

“This ‘summoning,’” he began, obviously perfectly content to ask his questions just like this until Seifer either sat down or simply collapsed on the floor, “what can you tell me about it? What are the usual effects? Also,” he brought the pen light up, “if you wouldn’t mind holding still, I’ll need to check your pupil dilation.”

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