Work Text:
Obviously it was fucking stupid to me that Gurathin didn’t want to take any of the freely available and effective pain medication the MedBay had on offer, but something in the look he’d shared with Dr. Mensah told me now really wasn’t the time to figure out why he was doing it. I’ve always thought that the ability to dial my own pain sensors up and down at will was one of the better parts of being a SecUnit, but I probably wouldn’t like it if something external turned them down for me with no way to get them back on except waiting it out, so maybe it was something like that. Who cares, I didn’t need to know.
Dr. Bharadwaj pulled a set of medical restraints from a supply cabinet and began attaching them at the foot end of the recliner chair. It looked like she had just enough to secure his lower legs so he wouldn’t kick her in the face or mess up his own surgery, which I guessed meant I would be taking his torso so he didn’t thrash so bad he fell off the platform entirely. I could do that. I could do that easily. I leaned down to the chair’s levers and began adjusting its height and incline.
Gurathin twisted his head up to look at me. “What are you doing?”
“Propping you up,” I said. “For the best grip, I’ll need to wrap my arms around you from behind.”
He looked doubtful, the same way he did every time I opened my mouth.
“The angle still works from here,” said Dr. Bharadwaj, pulling on her goggles and gloves.
He considered, the platform slowly bringing him upwards and to a sitting position, and he nodded once. “Okay.”
Arada squinted. “If the logistics are hard, then in our personal supplies we have--”
“Babe, no,” said Pin-Lee, fast and sharp.
“It’s just--” she turned to address her spouse face-on “--we know they’re safe for human bodies.”
“Absolutely not,” said Gurathin, eyes widening.
I decided I didn’t want to hear any more of this conversation nor risk having to see what they were talking about with my actual eyes. I got behind the chair and said loudly, “I am also safe for human bodies.”
“Y-yeah,” Gurathin stuttered. “What it said.”
I wrapped my left arm across his shoulders and the top of his chest and my right lower down over his ribs, trapping his own right arm. I got the feeling that he’d want to be wet and mushy about Dr. Mensah like Navigation Officer Hordööp-Sklanch was about Captain Hossein in episode 377 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, the one where he’s bitten by a specimen of unknown alien fauna and the entire episode is a hallucinatory dream sequence, so I let Gurathin’s left forearm stay free to hold her hand. It’s not a type of reassurance I understood, but I’d noticed that Dr. Mensah always seemed to reach for people on instinct when she thought they were in pain, so I didn’t want to impede her.
I tightened my grip on him. I didn’t like being touched, but being the one to do the touching was alright sometimes if I was in charge of how it happened. “Struggle, see if you can escape.”
I felt him strain under my arms and kind of ineffectually squirm against me, tiring himself out just trying.
It wasn’t even hard. Between me and the leg cuffs and his already weakened physical state he was not gonna budge no matter how hard he tried, he was as stable for surgery as we could hope for. And if it meant I got to pin the fucker down and watch something painful happen to him in a way everyone else was okay with, I could also be okay with that. “Are you sure that’s ‘struggling?’”
He stopped wriggling like an anemic eel with bad taste in media that also had gangrene. “Just get on with it already.”
Dr. Mensah stepped forward to take his free hand (called it) and Dr. Bharadwaj said, “Okay. Ten minutes, maybe less, starting now.”
He didn’t immediately start screaming and thrashing. I was glad for the lack of screaming, but I kept my hopes up that there might be at least a little bit of thrashing as the procedure progressed. As it stood, it almost felt like I was superfluous; the surgery started and he went completely rigid and silent. It’s not that it wasn’t hurting him, I could feel how tense he’d gotten, but it was like he’d locked himself in place. It barely even felt like he was breathing. Yes, actually, screaming and thrashing would be a lot better than this, I hoped he’d start screaming and thrashing soon.
Dr. Mensah was bent over to his face and had the thumb of her free hand stroking over his cheek, though his gaze seemed to be angled at her ear. She was half-whispering to him in one long steady stream. “Just keep squeezing my hand, it’s okay, you won’t break me, just stay with us, we won’t let anything bad happen, it’ll be over soon.”
His vitals in my internal display were doing things I didn’t like, but Dr. Bharadwaj glanced at the MedBay screen for herself before I had to say anything. “His blood oxygen’s dropping. SecUnit, are you constricting his lungs?”
“No, it’s not me.” I hadn’t even interfered with his respiration when I’d grabbed him by the throat, I know not to mess with humans’ or augmented humans’ airways. “He’s holding his breath.”
Dr. Mensah looked up at me with a tight, worried expression, then went back down to Gurathin. She pulled herself into another smile. “Come on, Gura, breathe for me, we can’t have you passing out.”
His eyes did something wide and shiny and his face went even more taut. I felt a couple of rapid shallow inhales against my arms, barely enough for any air at all.
“In and out, darling, please, I need you to breathe.”
A jagged exhale stuttered out of him, accompanied by a tiny, thin wail of pain that almost looked like it hurt him more than the sharp metal bodies currently picking at his flesh. Gurathin usually loved taking the first opportunity to moan and whine about anything, he complained all cycle long like it was his only job, if I wanted I could have put together a video file of everything he’d tsked and ughed and yeeshed at since we arrived on the survey sorted from “annoying” to “most annoying,” he was not one to ever censor his petty discomforts. This sounded different to all that. It sounded raw and unguarded and fucking miserable. I didn’t like it at all.
“Good, yes, keep going, keep breathing.” She had her mouth open and was exaggerating the rise and fall of her chest, trying to lead by example. The rhythm was familiar, and I realized if I played the “crystal air” clip along in my periphery then it matched her exactly. Probably a good call not saying the words out loud when it came to Gurathin.
He was trying to follow her, I could see him straining to inhale, but it was like something was fighting back. He grit his teeth and, just barely, opened his mouth for the first time since the procedure started. “If I breathe I’ll scream,” he spit.
Dr. Mensah nodded quickly several times. “Please do, scream as much as you like, that’s alright, it might help.”
Around the room there were a few assenting murmurs of Screaming is allowed, I love yelling, It’s just another form of communication, and We can scream about this.
It wasn’t gonna work. Maybe some of that would stand a chance at getting through to him in a situation where pain wasn’t giving him tunnel-vision, but he couldn’t think straight and every choked down groan of agony was making my performance reliability drop another two percent. If he wanted to stay quiet, we’d need to keep him quiet.
“Dr. Mensah,” I said. “I think you should cover his mouth.”
It took her a second to get what I was saying, then the understanding broke across her face in a flash. “Yes, yes. Thank you, SecUnit.” She moved the hand that had been caressing his cheek and placed her palm and fingers flat over his mouth, carefully leaving space so she didn’t block his nose. “There. Try screaming now, you won’t be too loud.”
He stayed petrified and silent for a moment, almost shocked even further into shutdown. His irises drew downwards and locked on to the hand gripping his jaw. Then he screwed his eyes shut, heaved in a ragged deep breath through his nose, pressed his face harder into her hand, and started writhing against me and fucking shrieking.
Apparently I didn’t like the screaming and thrashing, either, but at least it made it seem more like he was still alive.
“This healing gel has a slight numbing agent but it’s not psychoactive, is that alright?”
The chair was back down at its regular level and Gurathin was shakily sitting up on his own strength, Dr. Mensah resting a hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, that’s fine,” he croaked. Even if his mouth had been covered, his throat was still probably pretty raw. Dr. Bharadwaj continued dressing the wound and I picked up a small bottle of potable water (different from saline water, which was also there, because humans can have salt and water and salty water but not some kinds of salty water for some reason) from one of the carts and passed it to him, trying to keep a reasonable distance after having been so close. The room felt pleasantly empty now that the other three had gone to talk alone upstairs. “Thanks,” Gurathin said under his breath, taking the water.
“You okay?” said Dr. Mensah.
“It hurt a lot, and--” he stopped sharply to gasp as Dr. Bharadwaj applied something to the site-- “It will continue hurting for a while, but yes, I’m okay. Just need a minute to, to cool down.” He paused. “I don’t feel any bruising anywhere, either.”
“It will definitely be more than a minute, you should stay down here overnight, but good. And you, SecUnit?”
“It was extremely physically easy and I sustained no damage.” I would have difficulty not returning to the memory of someone writhing in agony under my hands for a sustained period of time, but that was a different thing.
Dr. Mensah looked at me like she definitely noticed my word choice and very deliberately turned her head to deliver her next sentence just next to my eyebrow. “Thank you for helping, that likely would have taken several of us and been much more trying without you.”
Yeah, because they were all squishy humans who weren’t built for inflicting and facilitating pain. “It’s my job.”
Gurathin didn’t open the water yet, he just glared at it in his hands. “Sorry for--”
Dr. Mensah made a sound high in her throat.
He rolled his eyes, but not in the way that made them go white, just in a normal exasperated way. “Thank you for the breathing thing, I know I get kind of weird sometimes. I hope it wasn’t uncomfortable. And that I didn’t hurt your other hand.”
She laced her fingers together and cracked her knuckles (eugh). “No harm done, it was no trouble.”
Dr. Bharadwaj finished putting away all her supplies. “Okay, I’ll be back to check on you later, but right now I really need to eat something. Mensah, dinner?”
“Sounds excellent.” The pair left MedBay, literally arm-in-arm.
Then it was just the two of us.
He still hadn’t opened the water. Fuck, was he too traumatized for basic self-care or something? He had just been bound, gagged, and tortured. After being shot, explicitly as a form of torture. And seeing someone’s head get exploded. So. There would be stranger ways to react.
He looked sidelong at me. “What? Do you want something?”
“Are you… upset?”
“…No?”
“You seem like you’re upset.”
“No, I seem like I’m tired and in pain, which I am. I’ve got nothing to be upset about, you all did exactly what I asked. Don’t you have a perimeter to check or something?”
Well screw you, too. Be that way. I put my helmet up and stalked out.
I kept an eye on him through the MedBay security cameras, just to make sure he didn’t curl into a ball on the floor or something while no one was looking. He finally twisted the top off the water bottle and moved to bring it to his mouth, but then he stopped and pulled it away again. He brought his empty hand up to his face and hovered two black-painted fingers in front of his lips. The camera angle made it hard to see, but I think he just barely touched them to his mouth. Then he took a sip.