#it only lasts a few months anyway | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

skyloftian-nutcase · 2 months ago

Text

Outbreak Pt 3 (LU in Healthcare)

(Content warning, this is a plague fic, it will likely hit close to home, and there’s dark humor and character death in this part)

It started off as a whisper, but the whisper became a chatter, a groan, constant and disturbing and growing ever closer.

Cases were on the rise in the city, though the surrounding area seemed unaffected still, for now. City officials were growing concerned, and restrictions were starting to be enacted. People were asked to stay home, if possible. As for the hospital and squads…

Hyrule squinted at his email. "Wait. Didn't... didn't they say we could use alcohol wipes to clean the equipment?"

"Yeah," Mo called from the kitchenette in the station.

"Now it says we can only use bleach wipes."

Mo groaned. "Isn't that like the third policy change this week?"

"I'm still trying to figure out if we're doing a specific isolation truck or not anymore," Aurora mumbled. "Like we just had one truck dedicated to the high risk iso cases, and now we're getting so many calls for it that it's a moot point anyway."

"I think the last email said put plastic over everything for Arfy patients and then wipe everything down that you use," Mo replied.

"Wait, which email?"

Hyrule sighed. This was getting ridiculous. And he was getting just a little nervous. “When in doubt, just bleach everything, I guess.”

Aurora huffed. “Did you see the email about the respirators?”

“Which email?” Mo threw his hands in the air, exasperated. “I’ve got twenty new emails!”

“I suppose that means you’ll actually have to read them now,” Aurora noted with a snort.

“Do you all think it’ll get worse before it gets better?” Dawn asked, wringing her hands worriedly. “The OMD made it sound like that would be the case.”

“Our medical director knows more than I do,” Hyrule shrugged. “If he says it’s going to get worse—”

“No, he didn’t just say that, he said ‘it’s not a matter of if the wave hits us, but when,’” Aurora quoted, standing. “He scared the hell out of Dawn.”

“They’re pretty foreboding words,” Hyrule commented darkly, looking away. It was the main reason he was getting nervous. But he was also steeling himself. If they were in for a fight, he would face it head on.

“Okay, but what does any of this have to do with the email about the respirators?” Mo asked as he scrolled frantically through his email.

“Oh, we’re supposed to wear N95s now,” Aurora answered with a wave of her hand.

Hyrule blinked. “Wait. Aren’t—aren’t we supposed to get fit tested for those?”

“Oh, yeah,” Aurora nodded, rolling her eyes. “Here’s your official fit test: pick a mask that fits.”

“We’re all going to die, aren’t we?” Dawn questioned worriedly, hugging herself.

“Nobody’s died from Arfy yet, I don’t think,” Mo noted. “At least not here.”

“People have died,” Aurora corrected.

“Well, maybe we’ll die, then,” Mo amended.

Hyrule laughed while Aurora swatted his partner. Well… at least they’d die fighting. But he really hoped it wouldn’t get to that point.

While the rescue squads struggled to keep up with policies and slapped shoddy safety regulations into place, the hospital clamped down even further. Visitor policies had officially been revoked as of today, and it made all the providers somewhat uneasy.

In some aspects, it was helpful. In others, it made things that much harder.

Arfy patients were medical patients. Which meant the medical floor and ICU was quickly filling up while other parts of the hospital either maintained their quota or decreased as people stayed home. More and more, Four found himself floating to his friend’s ICU, and he felt fairly out of his depths about it. The one good thing was that he got to spend time with Dot. But as cases rose, so did the stress, the worry, and the heartache.

The ICU felt less like a unit where critically ill people got better and more like a place to go to die.

Four and Dot had the same patient assignment for four days in a row. It was the same assignment because nothing had changed with the patients. Intubated, sedated, paralyzed, some proned. The amount of sedation required to keep their patients under was far more than Four was used to, and it was insane how little it would take for their oxygen saturation to drop. Any semblance of activity in the body increased oxygen demand, and the instant oxygen demand increased, no amount of intervention from the ventilator seemed to help. ECMO was a word Four had hardly heard in his trauma ICU, but he heard it on a near daily basis now, being considered at rounds, being initiated with someone else’s patient.

Four was exhausted. His face was breaking out from wearing a respirator for twelve hours at a time. His feet and knees and hips hurt from standing in isolation rooms for three to four hours at a time trying to cluster all his care. And now, with the visitor restriction enacted…

Visitors were hit or miss, particularly in Four’s world. Trauma precipitated drama, and while family could be infinitely helpful and supportive, he’d also seen things go awry, had to deescalate fights or call security. In some aspects, he was thankful there were no visitors while all of this was happening; he was tired of having to explain that yes, you have to wear this gown and gloves and mask, no you can’t kiss your loved one while they’re intubated and sedated with a contagious disease… but still. He couldn’t imagine how hard it was on the family - the patients were sedated to the point that they shouldn’t be aware of anything, but the family had to agonize over the matter at home.

He didn’t like it. He understand the logic. But he didn’t like it.

And so here he sat, holding a patient’s hand while they withdrew care. Here he sat, being the only witness to someone’s last breaths while their family mourned from afar.

Four watched the heart rate steadily drop. He watched the oxygen saturation plummet. He muted the red alarms as the monitor screamed that his patient was dying, that something should be done, like an accusation and call to arms when Four knew this particular fight was over.

He wasn’t a particularly religious person, but he said a prayer for the patient and the family either way. He found himself praying a lot these days, honestly.

While the visitor policy took its toll inside the frame of work, the restrictions both inside and outside the hospital were causing further stress on everyone. Warriors had basically banned Wind from seeing him, opting to stay with Time and Malon instead, leaving the kid in the apartment. He brought food deliveries to the door, asked if Wind needed anything, but he always did so when Wind wasn’t awake - the teenager had swore up and down that if anybody got Arfy he’d take care of them, and Warriors was terrified of that promise as it was basically a threat. Time agreed that Wind didn’t need to get involved, much to the teenager’s chagrin, and Wind found himself already struggling from the loneliness and the frustration of trying to study for classes online when nobody knew what they were doing or how long this would last.

Meanwhile, Wild sat in his room, fingers aimlessly tracing over each other, the smell of bleach so fresh in his nose from scrubbing everything relentlessly for hours on end that he might as well have inhaled a bottle of it. His chest hurt. Not to mention that new disinfectant they were told to use made him cough a lot.

And he worried. Because… it had been a few days since he’d seen his father. Legend had given him updates through his sister (and made Wild swear not to tell anyone about her), and it had sounded like he was improving as expected. But now, he… the rest of the family…

It felt like a blessing and a curse. It was a guarantee that Wild couldn’t run into his mother or sister by accident, but it was also a situation that his mind screamed that he address.

He couldn’t just… he couldn’t just leave his father isolated and alone recovering in the hospital in the midst of an outbreak. He couldn’t.

But what if visiting him made things so much worse? What if it stressed his father’s recovering heart? What if it triggered more traumatic memories for Wild? He was terrified of getting anywhere near the man while he was awake, but his heart screamed that he go to him.

Wild refused to be a coward. And he refused to be heartless, despite how anxious this entire situation made him, despite how his mind screamed he keep away. So that night, when he got on to work, he took a delivery to the cardiovascular ICU and paused in front of a doorway, looking hopefully for a familiar nurse.

“Link? Wild?”

Jumping, Wild turned around to see the nurse in question, watching him scrutinously. She smiled (or at least, he assumed she did, based on how her eye crinkled above her mask) in recognition. “I thought it was you. You here to see your dad?”

Wild swallowed and nodded.

“Good, because the drama I’ve been trying to avoid has been driving me insane,” Legend’s sister said lightheartedly, but despite the casualness of her tone, the words sank into Wild’s stomach like a stone.

“Drama?” He questioned quietly.

“Nothing like… bad, I suppose, but still,” the nurse explained. “I’d be in there taking care of him and overhear him talking to his wife and he’d mention that he swore he saw you. I’m not entirely sure she’s convinced. She seems hopeful, though. But I figured it was best not to bring it up myself since I, ah, don’t know what’s going on.”

Wild felt his blood freeze. His father remembered? And he’d told his mother?

Great. This was… this was just great.

“Go see him,” Legend’s sister prompted gently. “I can tell he loves you very much and just wants to know you’re ok.”

Wild’s eyes unexpectedly burned with tears in an instant, and he was grateful he was wearing a mask to hide his expression. He nodded, hesitantly making his way towards the room.

It all seemed so normal, seeing his father sitting in a recliner looking at his phone. Wild wasn’t even entirely sure he’d recovered memories of his father like that, but somehow it seemed familiar. Abel hadn’t noticed him yet, engrossed in whatever he was looking at, brow slightly furrowed. That expression drew memories, a familiar scrutiny that he would often give Wild himself or his sister, a quiet concern and sternness that made Wild want to stiffen up and simultaneously run to him.

Damn it all, he’d missed him.

Wild swallowed his fears and stepped forward, hoping that this wouldn’t be a disaster. He knocked on the door, initially so quietly that his father didn’t hear him over the chatter of the news on the television. He knocked again.

His father looked up. Stared a moment. Went a shade paler.

Wild hastily stepped forward. “W-wait, don’t get worked up—”

His father stood, seeming mostly steady on his feet, and tried to walk to him, heedless of the cords and oxygen tubing attached, and Wild hastily met him part of the way before he ripped everything out of the wall. Abel immediately pulled him to his chest in the tightest hug Wild had ever felt, and…

And Link sank into the embrace, crying.

#writing #If you see any typos no you don’t lol #My iPad keeps editing medical terms without me noticing ugh 😩#lu in healthcare #lu hyrule #lu mo #lu dawn #lu aurora #lu four #lu dot #lu wild #Abel #sorry if this isn’t quite up to snuff as usual I don’t even know how much sleep I’ve gotten in the last 48 hours #And I want to bury myself in a hole and never come out lol #It’s been a stupidly long week and the next few months are only going to be longer and I’m already very freaking over it #Anyway there’s my mild rant for the day I guess LOL enjoy the writing

55 notes · View notes

tennessoui · 9 months ago

Text

wip wednesday (early cause im offline tmrw)

When the dust settles, Obi-Wan is surprised to find himself still standing.

It takes all of him, he thinks, the end of the war. It takes everything he has.

He used to wonder, in a distant, nebulous way, what it would feel like in the aftermath. How his life would return to the routines he held before Geonosis, if the cadence of Temple life would feel strange and unfamiliar to him after so long spent in the trenches. If he would miss the sound of his men behind and around him, the steady stream of words and laughter and presence of others, at all times, surrounding him.

It’s only when the dust settles, when the first grains of sand whip through the arid desert air to sting his eyes, that he realizes that every time he ever allowed himself to think about the end of the war, he’d always assumed that they would win. He had never truly thought they would be defeated. That the Jedi Order, the Temple itself, so strongly entrenched in the galaxy and in Coruscant and in Obi-Wan’s world view, were capable of falling.

He had cautioned others against the same assumptions the moment he heard them. He had warned his own padawan to not look too far into the future, to not plan too much for the war’s end. He had told many people—clones, civilians, holonet reporters, other Jedi—that it was dangerous to think of the war as something they would inevitably win. Nothing was inevitable, especially not victory.

But he realizes now, only now, only as he traverses the desert on the back of a stolen eopie, wearing robes still smelling so strongly of volcanic sulfur that his eyes are stinging with reactionary tears, that he’d thought. He’d always thought.

He’d never really considered…this.

This aftermath, where he is still standing on shaking legs and everything that he has ever cared for in the world has become ash, has become the dust settling around him.

Everything he has ever known and loved and fought for has slipped through his fingers. When the dust settles, when he looks down at his hands, he expects to find them empty.

Instead, there is a baby in his arms.

And he knows—he knows intimately how much damage these hands are capable of. What hurt these hands can inflict even on those he loves. Loved.

He knows, as the homestead rises up in the fading light of the two suns, that these hands should not cradle this baby. Not the son of the man he has murdered. Not his brother’s son. Not his padawan’s. Not Anakin’s.

He knows the babe is safest here on this farm in the care of this couple. He knows he must leave the child with them, to raise and love a thousand times better than he is capable of. He has tried before. He has failed one Skywalker already.

He knows.

And he can’t. He cannot let him go.

While the Galactic empire rises on one side of the galaxy, the dust settles on the other and Obi-Wan Kenobi looks down at the babe in his hands and realizes that he cannot let him go.

Not another Skywalker.

#omg i went to tag this obikin and then realized that it's like #only obikin implied #it's finally a canon compliant until the last scene of rots fic from me :0 #anyway #obikin #fuck it it felt weird lol it's the fic where obi-wan decides to raise luke #and talks to him to keep from going insane in the first few months after the war ends #because he's a baby so he wont be able to repeat or remember anything #so obi-wan can just get a whole lot off of his chest #and then luke sort of vaguely remembers that obi-wan is in love with his dad later #not because he ever said it but because he felt all that love in the force as a baby #the last angsty thing i write for february!!

67 notes · View notes