[Duncan/Mari] - training
Who:
Duncan
Mari
When: Tuesday, July 26th
Where: The med wing of the Hour
Rating & Warnings: Gonna call this PG-13 for corpses and surgery.
Duncan is an asshole and Mari is a teenager. Spoilers: he's still kind of fucked up after the werewolf incident.
Mari had floated through the day as though on a cloud of dreams and happiness. What a fine day for cutting up and sewing dead things back together! She'd practically run to the labs almost as soon as her errands had all been run, only stopping to get one of the apples she'd been sewing. So exciting! She was being let near bodies - dead bodies - to sew things! All thoughts of spying and assassins were put out of her mind as she skipped through the corridors, coming to a brief stop before the labs door. Was anyone in? She took a quick look around. Probably not; the sky had only just begun to be tinged with dusk.
Still, she jumped in and grinned at the room, nearly vibrating with excitement. "Hello, Mr. Evandros?"
Duncan jumped. Luckily he was not working on anybody, just waiting in a chair with The Iliad, which he dropped. He turned a glare on Mari, but didn't say anything. It wasn't like he could shout at her to knock first or anything, this lab was basically public territory.
He leaned forward to retrieve the book and stood, shoving it down into his coat pocket. "You're early." He'd been hoping to get a few minutes to himself, but that was apparently too much to ask of the universe.
"I am," good of him to notice. Now he'd started to teach her, she felt almost bad for playing that trick on him. She'd decided to be nice whenever he noticed something, to encourage a lack of obliviousness.
"What are you reading?" Did he know he'd been reading? Did he remember why she was here? She hoped so. Where were the corpses? "I brought an apple." She held it up. The stitching was lopsided and a little loose; the problem with practising on a fruit without the right texture or feel. Parts of it had started to pull away or crumble, much to her annoyance. "I've got another, so I can do it again if you want to see."
"The Iliad," he replied, walking over to take the apple from her. Not the best substitute, but he could at least get an idea of how much she knew about technique from that. It was unskilled, but showed promise. She just needed some proper instruction.
"That won't be necessary," he told her, handing back the apple. "Come with me." He started walking, leading the way to a side lab where they'd be working.
Should she skip after him? She shouldn't skip after him. Definitely not. She skipped once, then settled into a more mature stride as she followed after him, dropping the apple back into her bag. How many corpses would be in there? What would they look like? Could they dissect them? Would they look like they did in books? This was so exciting!
It was just one corpse, laid out on a table with a sheet covering it. It smelled like grave dirt and preservatives, not pleasant and possibly overwhelming if you weren't accustomed to it. Duncan was; he barely even noticed the smell these days.
He walked over to the table and threw back a corner of the sheet to reveal a slender, grey-white arm. If Mari looked closely enough she could see the curves under the sheet revealing the cadaver as female. "Okay, so," he started, his eyes on the table and not on Mari. "When I first learned how to do this, my Adept was an asshole. This it a corpse. It's not a person. It won't start screaming at you if you hurt it. It won't die if you fuck up. I'm not going to make you pretend it will and yell at you if you take too long or do something wrong. Speed comes later, technique comes first."
What an odd speech from an odd man. She cocked her head to one side, staring at him. Had he really thought it would yell at him? It was simply a dead thing. A pungent dead thing, but a dead thing nonetheless. She nodded at it. "Alright, Corpse?"
She looked back at Duncan. "I feel like establishing a good doctor-patient relationship is key." Could she say that with a straight face? No, she cracked and smirked just a little. She soon pulled her expression back under control. "So, what do we do here?"
He arched an eyebrow at her. "It's not a patient," he said, deadpan. "It's dead."
He motioned her over to his side, picking up a curved needle from the tray of tools beside the table. "I want you to show me a simple running stitch. I'll guide you through it." He threaded the needle and handed it over to her. Picking up a knife from the tray, he threw her a glance. She'd put up a good front; if she was squeamish when it came down to it he was going to be so disappointed. "Are you ready?"
A running stitch? For a second she thought about embroidery - oh, but of course not.
Still, thinking about this was a good way of distancing herself even further from any humanity the body on the table held. If it was just two flaps of cloth which needed to be stitched together - it was the easiest thing in the world. Something she'd done a thousand times before. "Ready."
It probably helped that the only part of the body visible was just an arm. Faces were humanizing. Duncan was good at ignoring faces.
Emotionlessly, methodically, he brought the knife down, slicing a line across the cadaver's bicep. He did it at a slant, tilting the knife so the flesh pulled apart and Mari would have to bring it together instead of simply running the needle through.
He gestured to it and stepped back to watch her work. Silently. Corrections would come after he saw her handiwork.
Mari stepped forward and put one hand on the arm and looked over the wound. Alright. No problem.
She pinched the edges together, holding them in place with one hand. With the other, she slipped the needle into one flap of skin and under so it came out in the other half of the wound. She drew it up and moved to the next stitch, working as neatly as she could. One or two of the stitches ended up wonky; a couple were too big. She frowned at them, but concentrated on trying to finish as well as she could. Done, she looked at Duncan for some guidance.
"Where's your knot?" was the first thing he said, looking at the stitches and then to her with a raised eyebrow.
Mari puffed, sending a bit of hair that had come to rest on her face flying upwards. Then she tied the stitches off and waved her hands at the stitching.
No, wait, he'd noticed that. Time to be nicer. She tried smiling at him.
He gave her a flat look. "The other knot."
He nudged her aside so he could point to her handiwork, noting where she'd begun the stitches. "You have to tie it off after the first stitch or they'll get thrown. And your edges are uneven, the spacing isn't consistent, you're--" He cut himself off, taking a breath and letting it out as he pinched the bridge of his nose. Annoyance with himself, not her. She was new, this was her first time. It wasn't like she knew better.
He tried it again, pointing out her flaws more gently and telling her how to correct them. Finished, he asked, "You want to try again, or do you want me to show you first?"
She blinked and took the criticism with a nod and a shrug. Water off a duck's back as far as she was concerned. She was learning! "I can do it, and if I fail this time, you can show me."
That seemed fair.
"Fair enough." He took the needle, cut the thread, threaded it anew, and handed it back to her. Then he made another slice in the corpse's arm, parallel to the first, and moved aside for her to work. He watched, quietly tapping the flat of the knife against the side of his knuckle, tilted toward the blunt back edge. His wife would kill him if she saw that particular nervous tic, probably, but she wasn't here.
Was he tapping the blade against his knuckles because he was impatient? Whatever, doc. She'd take as long as she wanted on this.
She tried again, this time going for slower, neater stitching (though some were still slightly wonky) and remembering to tie after the first stitch. It took her about five minutes to get everything done. Soon though she was making another 'tah-dah' gesture at the stitching. Find a flaw in that, grouch-doc!
Nope, it was because Duncan was incapable of standing still.
"Better," he said. There were still flaws, and it had taken her a bit long to do, but the basis was there. "You just have to keep practicing it until you get it down. You're going deep enough, at least--that's the part most neophytes have trouble with, pushing a needle through that much flesh."
She was a natural, really. No reservations whatsoever about working on something that used to be a person. He frowned, the knife stilling against his hand. Without another word he lunged forward and snatched the sheet off, revealing the rest of the cadaver. A middled-aged woman, gaunt and pale in death, with dark, grey-streaked hair. There were no signs of trauma on her, and she hadn't been opened for dissection yet. It was a human face, a human body lying on the table.
It was a whim. He didn't have a speech planned for this. He just wanted to see Mari's reaction to working on something with a face. Would she still be so excited?
He dropped the sheet, plunging the knife into the space between the cadaver's ribs, sawing a deep gash just over her heart. His face was a mask as he did it, intensely focused and schooled to something neutral. She would have to look at its face, this way. Could she handle that? Would she react nervously, the way he did? The way most people did? Or would she keep treating it like an apple, devoid of any reaction other than her own pride at accomplishing the task?
"An interrupted stitch," he said, tapping the knife against the wound he'd opened. "Here." Tying it off after every stitch would force her to slow down and watch what she was doing. More time for it to sink in.
"Wouldn't she die if you did that in real life?" Mari scratched her cheek, eyeing the cadaver.
If this had been Justin, Marijke, Rowan or Lucia, someone she liked she would have found it difficult. If it was Wellington even, she would have found it hard. But this was a stranger with a strange face. It was a body with all humanity, anything left that she might have connected with, fled from it. It was easier in that case to look at the body as a simple collection of limbs, pieces of a puzzle that had to be put together. This wasn't someone's breast, something her children might have suckled upon, or laid their heads upon for comfort. This was two halves of flesh, a piece of dress which needed to be patched.
She slid the needle in, watching for it to come out the other side, then made a knot from it. She repeated this process over and over again, until the stitch was tight and would hold, then cut the string and moved onto the next smoothly. She had to lean back to see what she was doing, so far back she probably could see the woman's dead face. Still, her eyes stayed focused on the wound she was closing, trying to perfect it. "When would you switch from a running stitch to an interrupted one?"
He narrowed his eyes at the question. Of course she would. That wasn't the point.
Mari didn't even flinch. She reacted methodically, emotionlessly. It wasn't even a body to her. He watched, waiting for a hint of discomfort, hesitation, something, but there was nothing. There was just concentration and her fingers working the needle and thread.
He caught her wrist, maybe more tightly than he'd intended to, and leaned in to loom over her, looking her in the eyes. He'd been easygoing so far, casual, if a little annoyed. Right now he was serious. Intense. It was a far cry from the Duncan who had stood there pensively fidgeting with a knife a minute ago.
"Why do you want to be a doctor?" he asked. His tone was cold and firm, but not angry or accusatory.
She looked down at the hand holding her wrist with confusion and slight bewilderment, but there was a storm brewing on the horizon, a rising annoyance which showed itself in the way her eyebrows knitted together and her entire arm stiffened. "I like medicine," she began. Her list was short, but she held her reasons close to her heart. Having someone grab her wrist and demand to know them was infuriating. Still, she stared right back at him, her gaze level. "I want to help people when they need it. I know I can help people when they need it."
'I'm fucking good at it when people give me a chance' was on there, but didn't make the cut. A muscle jumped in her jaw, her anger getting closer to the surface.
Could she? He wanted to drag her out of the room, show her one of the waiting vivisection subjects, slash a wound into its arm and tell her to sew that up. Would she react then?
Was she the type of person who could hold somebody down and carve them open, examine their organs while they still worked and take notes while they slowly bled to death? Was she the type of person who could stand over a colleague and slit their throat simply because they'd had the misfortune of being bitten by a rampaging wolfman? Even he had been nervous and squeamish the first time he'd practiced on a corpse, so what kind of doctor would she be?
For a second he considered it, seriously considered it. His fingers tightened as a prelude to jerking her away from the table and down the hallway to a holding cell. But then they loosened and he released her, his eyes falling away from hers to the gash he'd made for her to sew up. "You use an interrupted stitch for shorter wounds. Holds together better."
She jerked her hand back, her eyes still hard on him.
"Good to know," she told him from between clenched teeth. For a few seconds she went back to her suturing, but she was soon seeing red. Of course, she had an idea of what that grabbing was about; more than a few people had brought up her lack of sympathy to her. Still, this was a doctor. Not only that, but one who'd made not one, but three cuts for her to mend. He had introduced her to cadavers almost the second she'd walked into his lab. If that was really the reason why he'd gotten odd, she would not be impressed.
"Why did you ask, first?"
"It's an important question," he said, without hesitation. He looked to her, sidelong. He'd made her angry, even he could see that. Good. Anger meant something. "Everyone answers it the same way. 'I want to help people.' But most of them say that before they really understand what helping people means. Before they've had to saw a limb off to stop the spread of infection. Before they've had to dig through someone's abdomen for an arrowhead that broke off inside. Before they've had somebody die under their hands because they just. Couldn't. Work. Fast enough."
He tilted his head to face her. "Most people won't have you work on cadavers straight off. I do, because there is no substitute for the human body. You need to get used to the way it looks, the way it feels under a knife or a needle. But working on a corpse is easy, compared to a living, breathing human being."
He reached out, laying a hand on the cadaver's forehead. "Don't think of it as a piece of meat." He lifted her eyelid with his thumb, revealing a half-circle of blue. "It used to be a person. If you don't think of it as a person, how will you ever be able to work on people?"
It was a hypocritical speech, he knew. Bodies were nothing but meat. When you broke a human down, it was no different from a pig or a deer. Muscle and bone and organs. It was only form that made it different. Seeing humans as meat, stripping down their personhood, was the only way he was able to do the research he did.
His voice went quiet, as he looked into that blue eye. "Killers think of bodies as meat. Doctors think of them as people."
"If you're so good with them, then why not refer to her as a she? 'It' is meat, 'she' is human. Why are you slicing into her? I'm the one mending; you're just randomly cutting-"
Mari felt her heart pound and her vision cloud over and she had to take several deep breaths to keep herself from shouting at him. Trying to retain some semblance of calm was important. It wasn't that she particularly cared for the woman on the table, but the hypocrisy of slicing randomly into a corpse then lecturing her about viewing them as a piece of meat rankled. She'd unconsciously balled her hands into fists and was staring holes into Duncan. Despite this, her voice was level. "Do you think I came to Balfour for the clear air? The views? There was a reason I left my country. Don't think of me as some naive little Tyrolian who's had everything handed to them on a plate and only wishes to play doctor because it seems like good times. You can think to shock me with your stories, with trying to force me to look at her face and eyes to see the humanity, but I've seen worse. I have lived through far worse than a man and his corpses."
She licked her lips, eyes never dropping from the doctor in front of her. He might have been focused on the dead one before him, but there were two blue eyes glaring at his face for him to take notice of, should he ever rise from the table. "If this is how I cope with the horror of what's in front of me, I don't think you have any right to take that away from me, or try and shock me out of it."
The girl took a deep breath. "Now, do you wish to continue or not, Evan- Mr. Evandros?"
He turned to her, sliding the eyelid shut as he moved his hand away from the cadaver's face. There was a smile, barely concealed, on the corner of his lips. It was satisfying, her outrage. He didn't know why; he just wanted something out of her, and anger meant offense, it meant he'd said or done something that got under her skin.
"Lord Evandros," he corrected. If she was going to imply that he lived in an ivory tower and didn't understand the hardships of life, she might as well go all the way.
He motioned to the wound in the woman's chest, half-closed with the wrong sort of stitch for the type it was. "Please. Continue."
"Cachau bant." She hadn't meant to say it, and her ears reddened when she realised it'd actually come out of her mouth. Still she glared at him for a moment more, noting the smile and hating it, before going back to the cut on the woman's chest.
She sewed quickly, head down, finishing as swiftly as she could. Done, she put the needle down and took a step backward. Did he think what she'd said was simple teenage blustering? Was that what that condescending little half-smile had been about? Would he still wear it if she told him that she'd lain beside the corpses of her brothers and sister, caked in vomit and their blood, for what felt like hours? She wouldn't give him that. Instead she matched his with one of her own, though it didn't quite meet her eyes. "Ta-da."
He inspected the stitches, ignoring the look on her face. "You're better at interrupted stitch," he said. Some of the knots were pulled too tight, straining the skin. In a living person, they'd heal ugly, maybe pull entirely, but that was just something she'd need to work on.
He flipped the knife around in his hand, thinking. Did he want to give her another cut to mend? No, he'd angered her enough tonight already. No use drawing it out any further.
"You have potential," he said, without looking at her, his eyes focused on the middle-distance of the room's length. He walked around the table, setting the knife in the tray, and knelt to retrieve the sheet from the floor. He looked at her then. "But you won't know if you're really cut out for it until you get your trial by fire. That's how it is for all of us."
"Then I've had mine." Taking care of Rowan's injuries in the darkness after nearly getting her head taken off her shoulders by a wolf counted, in her mind. She rubbed her forehead with her knuckles, then shoved the needle into the arm of the corpse to annoy and turned to leave. "Goodbye."
Had she? The werewolves, probably. Maybe she had saved somebody's life by acting when it counted most.
That didn't change anything he'd said, in his mind. It was all still important. All still worth listening to. Maybe he was only being the arrogant expert in that case, but if so, so what? Wasn't the opinion of a doctor-turned-killer worth listening to when it came to matters like this?
"Keep practicing," he told her, reaching over to retrieve the needle. He looked at it for a second, and then at her. "Your anger was a better answer than your words."
She'd determined to walk out without speaking to him, but paused to rub her forehead again. "If you think that, then no offence, but you're an idiot."
Mari turned, folding her arms. There were other things she could say to back this, but that was mostly how she felt.
Duncan
Mari
When: Tuesday, July 26th
Where: The med wing of the Hour
Rating & Warnings: Gonna call this PG-13 for corpses and surgery.
Duncan is an asshole and Mari is a teenager. Spoilers: he's still kind of fucked up after the werewolf incident.
Mari had floated through the day as though on a cloud of dreams and happiness. What a fine day for cutting up and sewing dead things back together! She'd practically run to the labs almost as soon as her errands had all been run, only stopping to get one of the apples she'd been sewing. So exciting! She was being let near bodies - dead bodies - to sew things! All thoughts of spying and assassins were put out of her mind as she skipped through the corridors, coming to a brief stop before the labs door. Was anyone in? She took a quick look around. Probably not; the sky had only just begun to be tinged with dusk.
Still, she jumped in and grinned at the room, nearly vibrating with excitement. "Hello, Mr. Evandros?"
Duncan jumped. Luckily he was not working on anybody, just waiting in a chair with The Iliad, which he dropped. He turned a glare on Mari, but didn't say anything. It wasn't like he could shout at her to knock first or anything, this lab was basically public territory.
He leaned forward to retrieve the book and stood, shoving it down into his coat pocket. "You're early." He'd been hoping to get a few minutes to himself, but that was apparently too much to ask of the universe.
"I am," good of him to notice. Now he'd started to teach her, she felt almost bad for playing that trick on him. She'd decided to be nice whenever he noticed something, to encourage a lack of obliviousness.
"What are you reading?" Did he know he'd been reading? Did he remember why she was here? She hoped so. Where were the corpses? "I brought an apple." She held it up. The stitching was lopsided and a little loose; the problem with practising on a fruit without the right texture or feel. Parts of it had started to pull away or crumble, much to her annoyance. "I've got another, so I can do it again if you want to see."
"The Iliad," he replied, walking over to take the apple from her. Not the best substitute, but he could at least get an idea of how much she knew about technique from that. It was unskilled, but showed promise. She just needed some proper instruction.
"That won't be necessary," he told her, handing back the apple. "Come with me." He started walking, leading the way to a side lab where they'd be working.
Should she skip after him? She shouldn't skip after him. Definitely not. She skipped once, then settled into a more mature stride as she followed after him, dropping the apple back into her bag. How many corpses would be in there? What would they look like? Could they dissect them? Would they look like they did in books? This was so exciting!
It was just one corpse, laid out on a table with a sheet covering it. It smelled like grave dirt and preservatives, not pleasant and possibly overwhelming if you weren't accustomed to it. Duncan was; he barely even noticed the smell these days.
He walked over to the table and threw back a corner of the sheet to reveal a slender, grey-white arm. If Mari looked closely enough she could see the curves under the sheet revealing the cadaver as female. "Okay, so," he started, his eyes on the table and not on Mari. "When I first learned how to do this, my Adept was an asshole. This it a corpse. It's not a person. It won't start screaming at you if you hurt it. It won't die if you fuck up. I'm not going to make you pretend it will and yell at you if you take too long or do something wrong. Speed comes later, technique comes first."
What an odd speech from an odd man. She cocked her head to one side, staring at him. Had he really thought it would yell at him? It was simply a dead thing. A pungent dead thing, but a dead thing nonetheless. She nodded at it. "Alright, Corpse?"
She looked back at Duncan. "I feel like establishing a good doctor-patient relationship is key." Could she say that with a straight face? No, she cracked and smirked just a little. She soon pulled her expression back under control. "So, what do we do here?"
He arched an eyebrow at her. "It's not a patient," he said, deadpan. "It's dead."
He motioned her over to his side, picking up a curved needle from the tray of tools beside the table. "I want you to show me a simple running stitch. I'll guide you through it." He threaded the needle and handed it over to her. Picking up a knife from the tray, he threw her a glance. She'd put up a good front; if she was squeamish when it came down to it he was going to be so disappointed. "Are you ready?"
A running stitch? For a second she thought about embroidery - oh, but of course not.
Still, thinking about this was a good way of distancing herself even further from any humanity the body on the table held. If it was just two flaps of cloth which needed to be stitched together - it was the easiest thing in the world. Something she'd done a thousand times before. "Ready."
It probably helped that the only part of the body visible was just an arm. Faces were humanizing. Duncan was good at ignoring faces.
Emotionlessly, methodically, he brought the knife down, slicing a line across the cadaver's bicep. He did it at a slant, tilting the knife so the flesh pulled apart and Mari would have to bring it together instead of simply running the needle through.
He gestured to it and stepped back to watch her work. Silently. Corrections would come after he saw her handiwork.
Mari stepped forward and put one hand on the arm and looked over the wound. Alright. No problem.
She pinched the edges together, holding them in place with one hand. With the other, she slipped the needle into one flap of skin and under so it came out in the other half of the wound. She drew it up and moved to the next stitch, working as neatly as she could. One or two of the stitches ended up wonky; a couple were too big. She frowned at them, but concentrated on trying to finish as well as she could. Done, she looked at Duncan for some guidance.
"Where's your knot?" was the first thing he said, looking at the stitches and then to her with a raised eyebrow.
Mari puffed, sending a bit of hair that had come to rest on her face flying upwards. Then she tied the stitches off and waved her hands at the stitching.
No, wait, he'd noticed that. Time to be nicer. She tried smiling at him.
He gave her a flat look. "The other knot."
He nudged her aside so he could point to her handiwork, noting where she'd begun the stitches. "You have to tie it off after the first stitch or they'll get thrown. And your edges are uneven, the spacing isn't consistent, you're--" He cut himself off, taking a breath and letting it out as he pinched the bridge of his nose. Annoyance with himself, not her. She was new, this was her first time. It wasn't like she knew better.
He tried it again, pointing out her flaws more gently and telling her how to correct them. Finished, he asked, "You want to try again, or do you want me to show you first?"
She blinked and took the criticism with a nod and a shrug. Water off a duck's back as far as she was concerned. She was learning! "I can do it, and if I fail this time, you can show me."
That seemed fair.
"Fair enough." He took the needle, cut the thread, threaded it anew, and handed it back to her. Then he made another slice in the corpse's arm, parallel to the first, and moved aside for her to work. He watched, quietly tapping the flat of the knife against the side of his knuckle, tilted toward the blunt back edge. His wife would kill him if she saw that particular nervous tic, probably, but she wasn't here.
Was he tapping the blade against his knuckles because he was impatient? Whatever, doc. She'd take as long as she wanted on this.
She tried again, this time going for slower, neater stitching (though some were still slightly wonky) and remembering to tie after the first stitch. It took her about five minutes to get everything done. Soon though she was making another 'tah-dah' gesture at the stitching. Find a flaw in that, grouch-doc!
Nope, it was because Duncan was incapable of standing still.
"Better," he said. There were still flaws, and it had taken her a bit long to do, but the basis was there. "You just have to keep practicing it until you get it down. You're going deep enough, at least--that's the part most neophytes have trouble with, pushing a needle through that much flesh."
She was a natural, really. No reservations whatsoever about working on something that used to be a person. He frowned, the knife stilling against his hand. Without another word he lunged forward and snatched the sheet off, revealing the rest of the cadaver. A middled-aged woman, gaunt and pale in death, with dark, grey-streaked hair. There were no signs of trauma on her, and she hadn't been opened for dissection yet. It was a human face, a human body lying on the table.
It was a whim. He didn't have a speech planned for this. He just wanted to see Mari's reaction to working on something with a face. Would she still be so excited?
He dropped the sheet, plunging the knife into the space between the cadaver's ribs, sawing a deep gash just over her heart. His face was a mask as he did it, intensely focused and schooled to something neutral. She would have to look at its face, this way. Could she handle that? Would she react nervously, the way he did? The way most people did? Or would she keep treating it like an apple, devoid of any reaction other than her own pride at accomplishing the task?
"An interrupted stitch," he said, tapping the knife against the wound he'd opened. "Here." Tying it off after every stitch would force her to slow down and watch what she was doing. More time for it to sink in.
"Wouldn't she die if you did that in real life?" Mari scratched her cheek, eyeing the cadaver.
If this had been Justin, Marijke, Rowan or Lucia, someone she liked she would have found it difficult. If it was Wellington even, she would have found it hard. But this was a stranger with a strange face. It was a body with all humanity, anything left that she might have connected with, fled from it. It was easier in that case to look at the body as a simple collection of limbs, pieces of a puzzle that had to be put together. This wasn't someone's breast, something her children might have suckled upon, or laid their heads upon for comfort. This was two halves of flesh, a piece of dress which needed to be patched.
She slid the needle in, watching for it to come out the other side, then made a knot from it. She repeated this process over and over again, until the stitch was tight and would hold, then cut the string and moved onto the next smoothly. She had to lean back to see what she was doing, so far back she probably could see the woman's dead face. Still, her eyes stayed focused on the wound she was closing, trying to perfect it. "When would you switch from a running stitch to an interrupted one?"
He narrowed his eyes at the question. Of course she would. That wasn't the point.
Mari didn't even flinch. She reacted methodically, emotionlessly. It wasn't even a body to her. He watched, waiting for a hint of discomfort, hesitation, something, but there was nothing. There was just concentration and her fingers working the needle and thread.
He caught her wrist, maybe more tightly than he'd intended to, and leaned in to loom over her, looking her in the eyes. He'd been easygoing so far, casual, if a little annoyed. Right now he was serious. Intense. It was a far cry from the Duncan who had stood there pensively fidgeting with a knife a minute ago.
"Why do you want to be a doctor?" he asked. His tone was cold and firm, but not angry or accusatory.
She looked down at the hand holding her wrist with confusion and slight bewilderment, but there was a storm brewing on the horizon, a rising annoyance which showed itself in the way her eyebrows knitted together and her entire arm stiffened. "I like medicine," she began. Her list was short, but she held her reasons close to her heart. Having someone grab her wrist and demand to know them was infuriating. Still, she stared right back at him, her gaze level. "I want to help people when they need it. I know I can help people when they need it."
'I'm fucking good at it when people give me a chance' was on there, but didn't make the cut. A muscle jumped in her jaw, her anger getting closer to the surface.
Could she? He wanted to drag her out of the room, show her one of the waiting vivisection subjects, slash a wound into its arm and tell her to sew that up. Would she react then?
Was she the type of person who could hold somebody down and carve them open, examine their organs while they still worked and take notes while they slowly bled to death? Was she the type of person who could stand over a colleague and slit their throat simply because they'd had the misfortune of being bitten by a rampaging wolfman? Even he had been nervous and squeamish the first time he'd practiced on a corpse, so what kind of doctor would she be?
For a second he considered it, seriously considered it. His fingers tightened as a prelude to jerking her away from the table and down the hallway to a holding cell. But then they loosened and he released her, his eyes falling away from hers to the gash he'd made for her to sew up. "You use an interrupted stitch for shorter wounds. Holds together better."
She jerked her hand back, her eyes still hard on him.
"Good to know," she told him from between clenched teeth. For a few seconds she went back to her suturing, but she was soon seeing red. Of course, she had an idea of what that grabbing was about; more than a few people had brought up her lack of sympathy to her. Still, this was a doctor. Not only that, but one who'd made not one, but three cuts for her to mend. He had introduced her to cadavers almost the second she'd walked into his lab. If that was really the reason why he'd gotten odd, she would not be impressed.
"Why did you ask, first?"
"It's an important question," he said, without hesitation. He looked to her, sidelong. He'd made her angry, even he could see that. Good. Anger meant something. "Everyone answers it the same way. 'I want to help people.' But most of them say that before they really understand what helping people means. Before they've had to saw a limb off to stop the spread of infection. Before they've had to dig through someone's abdomen for an arrowhead that broke off inside. Before they've had somebody die under their hands because they just. Couldn't. Work. Fast enough."
He tilted his head to face her. "Most people won't have you work on cadavers straight off. I do, because there is no substitute for the human body. You need to get used to the way it looks, the way it feels under a knife or a needle. But working on a corpse is easy, compared to a living, breathing human being."
He reached out, laying a hand on the cadaver's forehead. "Don't think of it as a piece of meat." He lifted her eyelid with his thumb, revealing a half-circle of blue. "It used to be a person. If you don't think of it as a person, how will you ever be able to work on people?"
It was a hypocritical speech, he knew. Bodies were nothing but meat. When you broke a human down, it was no different from a pig or a deer. Muscle and bone and organs. It was only form that made it different. Seeing humans as meat, stripping down their personhood, was the only way he was able to do the research he did.
His voice went quiet, as he looked into that blue eye. "Killers think of bodies as meat. Doctors think of them as people."
"If you're so good with them, then why not refer to her as a she? 'It' is meat, 'she' is human. Why are you slicing into her? I'm the one mending; you're just randomly cutting-"
Mari felt her heart pound and her vision cloud over and she had to take several deep breaths to keep herself from shouting at him. Trying to retain some semblance of calm was important. It wasn't that she particularly cared for the woman on the table, but the hypocrisy of slicing randomly into a corpse then lecturing her about viewing them as a piece of meat rankled. She'd unconsciously balled her hands into fists and was staring holes into Duncan. Despite this, her voice was level. "Do you think I came to Balfour for the clear air? The views? There was a reason I left my country. Don't think of me as some naive little Tyrolian who's had everything handed to them on a plate and only wishes to play doctor because it seems like good times. You can think to shock me with your stories, with trying to force me to look at her face and eyes to see the humanity, but I've seen worse. I have lived through far worse than a man and his corpses."
She licked her lips, eyes never dropping from the doctor in front of her. He might have been focused on the dead one before him, but there were two blue eyes glaring at his face for him to take notice of, should he ever rise from the table. "If this is how I cope with the horror of what's in front of me, I don't think you have any right to take that away from me, or try and shock me out of it."
The girl took a deep breath. "Now, do you wish to continue or not, Evan- Mr. Evandros?"
He turned to her, sliding the eyelid shut as he moved his hand away from the cadaver's face. There was a smile, barely concealed, on the corner of his lips. It was satisfying, her outrage. He didn't know why; he just wanted something out of her, and anger meant offense, it meant he'd said or done something that got under her skin.
"Lord Evandros," he corrected. If she was going to imply that he lived in an ivory tower and didn't understand the hardships of life, she might as well go all the way.
He motioned to the wound in the woman's chest, half-closed with the wrong sort of stitch for the type it was. "Please. Continue."
"Cachau bant." She hadn't meant to say it, and her ears reddened when she realised it'd actually come out of her mouth. Still she glared at him for a moment more, noting the smile and hating it, before going back to the cut on the woman's chest.
She sewed quickly, head down, finishing as swiftly as she could. Done, she put the needle down and took a step backward. Did he think what she'd said was simple teenage blustering? Was that what that condescending little half-smile had been about? Would he still wear it if she told him that she'd lain beside the corpses of her brothers and sister, caked in vomit and their blood, for what felt like hours? She wouldn't give him that. Instead she matched his with one of her own, though it didn't quite meet her eyes. "Ta-da."
He inspected the stitches, ignoring the look on her face. "You're better at interrupted stitch," he said. Some of the knots were pulled too tight, straining the skin. In a living person, they'd heal ugly, maybe pull entirely, but that was just something she'd need to work on.
He flipped the knife around in his hand, thinking. Did he want to give her another cut to mend? No, he'd angered her enough tonight already. No use drawing it out any further.
"You have potential," he said, without looking at her, his eyes focused on the middle-distance of the room's length. He walked around the table, setting the knife in the tray, and knelt to retrieve the sheet from the floor. He looked at her then. "But you won't know if you're really cut out for it until you get your trial by fire. That's how it is for all of us."
"Then I've had mine." Taking care of Rowan's injuries in the darkness after nearly getting her head taken off her shoulders by a wolf counted, in her mind. She rubbed her forehead with her knuckles, then shoved the needle into the arm of the corpse to annoy and turned to leave. "Goodbye."
Had she? The werewolves, probably. Maybe she had saved somebody's life by acting when it counted most.
That didn't change anything he'd said, in his mind. It was all still important. All still worth listening to. Maybe he was only being the arrogant expert in that case, but if so, so what? Wasn't the opinion of a doctor-turned-killer worth listening to when it came to matters like this?
"Keep practicing," he told her, reaching over to retrieve the needle. He looked at it for a second, and then at her. "Your anger was a better answer than your words."
She'd determined to walk out without speaking to him, but paused to rub her forehead again. "If you think that, then no offence, but you're an idiot."
Mari turned, folding her arms. There were other things she could say to back this, but that was mostly how she felt.