Eight Surgeries Later
Title: Eight Surgeries Later
Characters: Adam Monroe, unnamed female medical technician, unnamed female resident doctor
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Word count: 1000
Setting: Sometime before season 2. For the purposes of Confined RP, this is the night Sylar is brought in. This follows My Sweet Cherry Pie.
Summary: Adam muses on whether to save the life of a stranger.
Adam watched as they worked feverishly around the body on the operating table. He hadn’t seen the first attempts to revive the man, which was normal. The abnormal part was them bringing Adam in here, to the operating suite. It was an attempt to save every possible second, which told Adam a great deal about the urgency of the situation. For at least the second time, the patient’s eyes flew open, he gasped hoarsely, and the cardiac monitor began beeping irregularly before flatlining. Again. Death was such a fluid concept.
Orders were barked out; another draught of blood was drawn and transfused; he witnessed another macabre rousing of the tall man’s form. There was a limit beyond which Adam’s blood did not restore life. They had to be on the cusp of that, because the magic being spent did no more than keep the man alive, doing nothing to cure the fatal injury.
Some sort of chest wound, Adam thought, craning his neck in curiosity. He felt a certain responsibility for the life he could give to people. He would have liked to have more control over it, but lacking that, he at least wanted to know what use it was being put to, to know if he should feel shame or pride at what had been accomplished due to him.
The man was white, and from what Adam could see, tall and lean, with brown or black hair and day’s growth of stubble. His clothes had been stripped from him, cut away and thrown to the corners of the room to facilitate the ongoing operations. A shoe, separate from the rest of the clothes, lay a few feet from the wheelchair Adam was shackled to. He assessed the size. Yes. Tall. It was a difficult thing to judge on a supine form, after all.
The technician carried over another bag of Adam’s liquid cure, walking into an argument between the two doctors stationed here at Hartsdale. The disagreement was over whether to even bother. The older, more established supervisor didn’t see a reason to continue the effort - their patient was so much worthless flesh, only a random special and not one of the privileged ones employed by the Company. The resident doctor felt she had an obligation as a medical professional. Adam smiled a little, impressed with her passion. She was new here, obviously. Since the bag was on hand and already drawn, the doctor arguing for life prevailed for the moment. The other left huffily in an attempt to get a ruling from Bob Bishop.
Bob should have been here. An exciting event like this always drew him in. Adam wondered if the circumstances surrounding this man’s death were keeping Mr. Bishop busy, possibly coordinating clean-up operations. Adam was largely out of touch with what was going on in the world beyond his prison cell, but he knew that operations had stepped up in the last year. He’d also caught, earlier, a mention of concern about controlling the subject’s abilities, plural.
He turned to the technician who had returned to his side. “Who is he?” he asked, jerking his head towards the patient. Or perhaps, corpse.
There was a moment of indecision as she made a nervous glance around the room. Adam wasn’t supposed to be given any information that wasn’t need-to-know and he certainly didn’t need to know this. But human politeness worked in his favor so often, now as ever. With everyone else focused on other things, she told him, “They called him Sylar.”
“Sylar,” Adam repeated softly. Alive or dead, he had a name now. That made him so much more of a person.
Several busy minutes later, there was a lull while the resident doctor stared at the monitors. “I need another bag,” she said tonelessly.
The med tech didn’t exactly argue, but she did nothing to follow the direction. “I’ve already drawn four pints. The protocol-“ Her voice cut off as the doctor whirled around and stalked over to Adam. They’d already taken more blood than most people could survive, much less be alert and oriented, but Adam’s power was keeping up - so far. The resident was not so new that she wouldn’t have read the guidelines for using him. Doubtless she was now weighing the dilemma - endanger Adam, their most precious resource, or let the man on the operating table die?
She stopped a few feet in front of him, brusquely kicking the shoe out of the way. “You know your ability better than any of us. What can I do to keep him alive?”
Not ‘is there anything else I can do?’, which Adam would have understood as a request for absolution, begging him to say ‘no’ and let her off the hook. No, she remained determined to save this stranger. Adam could hear the desperation in her voice. Cynical as he was, her compassion, so rare in this place, still touched him. He didn’t know the man on the table from … well, Adam, but her concern made him feel concerned. He waited a few conflicted seconds they might not have to spare as his healthy desire for self-preservation battled it out with his frail sense of humanity. It was David versus Goliath, yet the internal struggle ended with him breathing out in resignation. “Hook me up for direct transfusion. Give me fluids and drain me dry. That should buy you time to finish whatever cross-stitch you’re making over there.”
“Will you survive it?” She sounded dubious, but she was a beginner in the world of abilities. So many things were possible that seemed unbelievable.
“Probably,” he said with a wry smile. The problem with the limits of his ability was that if he ever found one of them, then he’d be dead for good. He’d lost all his blood before and lived to tell the tale, but what he was proposing now was a step beyond - refill and empty; repeat as needed.
He hoped this ‘Sylar’ was worth saving.