Chương 453: 214.Cardiac Arrest 2

When I woke up, my throat was so dry it felt like someone had ground the entire Europa ice sheet into powder and poured it down my windpipe with a funnel in one go. Every breath carried a faint, subtle sting, like my alveoli still weren't fully convinced they deserved to keep working. My head was heavy too—heavy as if last night hadn't been an assault on an Imperial submarine but a whole night asleep with Asgard lying on top of me. My vision focused, slowly.

The ceiling was the standard, depressing white of a medical bay. Professionally white, boringly white, white like a reminder to every patient: congratulations, you're alive, and so are the bills and the embarrassing records that come with it. I tried to move, and a tugging sensation came first, from the back of my left hand. An IV. My right flank still hurt, and my shoulder felt like someone had taken it apart once and put it back carelessly. Fine.

That meant I hadn't passed out gracefully, and hadn't been rescued gracefully either. Life is like that sometimes. You want so badly to keep a little leading-lady dignity in a critical scene, and reality packs you up like half a salted fish and dumps you straight onto a hospital bed. Then I remembered. The recovery deck. My vision going black. Jess. I pushed myself up almost instantly.

"Nng—" Good. That proved my abdominal muscles hadn't fully died yet; they just wanted to take me down with them.

"Where's Jess?" When I spoke, my voice was raspy enough to make even me frown. There was no one at the bedside. The medical bay was quiet in a way that wasn't normal. By rights, someone just dragged back from outside with her condition not yet stabilized should at least have a medic watching her, or—worse—Maki standing at the foot of the bed giving me that "you'd better think about how to write your report" look. But there was nothing.

Only a few low voices beyond the curtain, and an atmosphere I couldn't put a name to. Very quiet. Wrong-quiet. I pulled the IV needle out, roughly. To be honest, that behavior isn't worth encouraging. It hurts, it bleeds, and it's an easy mark in your medical file. But when the nerve in your head labeled "Jess" suddenly stretches to the point of snapping, people usually don't think about nursing protocols first. I stepped down barefoot and shivered the moment my soles touched the floor.

Medical bay floors always carry a kind of hostility toward people, as if their attitude toward every patient is: those of you who came back alive, kindly keep it down, don't interfere with my sterile image. I pulled the curtain aside. Several people were standing outside. Lan was at the front, and her eyes were red. Not the usual red of being angry enough to flip a table, not the red of staying up until nearly making peace with the world—genuinely the red of having cried.

Two others stood behind her with expressions just as wrong, each heavier than the last, heavy like they'd all walked into a graduation speech segment early. My heart sank hard. No. No way. Don't play this joke on me. When Lan saw me up, her shoulders gave a small twitch, and then she turned her face away quickly, as if she didn't dare look at me. That detail was worse than any sentence. Because Lan isn't like that.

If Lan wants to yell at me, her eyes can stab straight through and strip the dignity off on the way out. Now Lan wouldn't even look at me, and that was as absurd and terrifying as the sun suddenly announcing it didn't feel like shining today.

"You're awake?" Lan spoke, her voice very low. I stared at Lan.

"Where is she?" Nobody answered immediately. The air felt like someone had closed a hand around it. The dull pain still sitting in my chest suddenly grew heavier. Not physical—something more troublesome than that. A nasty feeling, like you've just been dragged out of ice water and then someone tells you the thing that's really making you cold is still ahead.

"Medical... did everything they could." After Lan said it, she raised a hand and wiped the corner of her eye. In that moment, I genuinely went blank for half a second. Not a dramatic spin of the world, not the "the world lost its color" line from some literary work. Nothing that pretty. It was closer to someone taking a wrench and knocking one very specific part out of my head.

Thought stopped, breathing stopped, even the pain from before seemed to be pulled out along with it, leaving nothing but a very ugly emptiness. Then I heard my own voice.

"... Say that again?" It was very soft. Soft enough to scare even me. Lan bit her lip, and her nod was slow, like she was stretching every second out.

"Jess. She didn't make it." The two behind her lowered their heads too. One of them even sniffed hard. Too real. So real I started hating them for being that real. I didn't ask again. Because asking again meant actually hearing it a second time. People are strange sometimes. The first time was already enough to cut the heart open, and still you're afraid of the second. Some wounds are like that—knowing they exist is one thing, having them traced over again is another.

I walked in the direction Lan had made room for. The bed closest to the window had half its curtain drawn. Someone was lying on it. Covered head to toe with a white sheet. Very classic. So classic I wanted to curse for a second. A scene like this belongs in cheap detective dramas, haunted-house courage tests, or campus ghost stories with mediocre taste. But when it really shows up in a medical bay, when it really shows up in front of your eyes, cliché doesn't make it hurt less. It just makes you angrier.

Even death had to go through a process that tacky—the living deserved better manners than that. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. I stood by the bed. I didn't reach out right away. Honestly, I was afraid. That's not a flattering confession, but I really was afraid then. Afraid that when I lifted it I'd see Jess's face—the one that was always so punchable—suddenly quiet like it belonged to someone else.

Afraid those eyes, which always looked at everything like they were hunting for the fun in it, would stay shut and never open again. Worse, afraid that only at this moment would I admit it: I was nowhere near ready to accept this. Jess could fool around, could run her mouth, could crack jokes at the worst possible time, could handle every danger like a weekend club activity—but Jess couldn't just lie here under a white cloth. This was too much.

Enough that I wanted to drag the universe's screenwriter out and ask if he had a problem with me. Just then, a few images flashed through my head—pieces of a past I didn't want to look back on, trying to crawl their way up. I reached out. My fingers were trembling a little. How embarrassing. I'd just clawed a life back out of gunfire and vacuum, and now I couldn't even lift a bedsheet without shaking. But the body is sometimes far more honest than the mouth.

The mouth is still debating whether to stay calm, and the hand has already told you that you're about to fall apart.

"Jess..." I called her name softly. No answer. Then that discomfort from before grew stronger, and a stranger's face—a girl's face—surfaced. Stranger? No. I should know her... Who is she? But my body seemed unwilling to let me remember; I felt a wave of nausea. My throat tightened, and the hole in my chest seemed to be widening, until even air couldn't fill it. I pinched a corner of the white sheet and lifted it slowly. Slowly. Like I was afraid of disturbing something, or afraid of actually confirming something.

And then—"WAAAH!!" The sheet flipped up in one whole mass. A face so familiar, so utterly punchable, popped straight up from underneath. Jess had the white cloth draped over her head, laughing like a problem student who'd just successfully blown up half the academic affairs system, her eyes bent into two arcs of supreme disregard for consequences.

"Haha, scared you—" The rest of that word never got a chance to land. Because I punched her. Not the lightweight, heart-soundtrack kind of scuffle. A real punch. The sound of my fist landing on Jess's shoulder was very solid—solid enough that even Lan gasped. The white sheet slid half off on the spot, Jess got knocked sideways into the bed, and her expression snapped from smug to stunned.

"Ow!!"

"Fuck you, you absolute bastard—!" My second punch followed right behind. This time it was an open hand, straight onto Jess's head. A clean smack, crisp and efficient; every conscience in the medical bay probably flinched along with it. Jess curled back with her arms over her head, still trying to drag the sheet up as a shield, and I grabbed it and hauled her and the cloth off the bed together.

"Wait, Hoshino, calm down—""Calm your head!" I didn't want to calm down. Who calms down. I had believed it. I really had. I really walked over. I really stood there, looking at that white cloth, picturing Jess never opening her eyes again. The cold feeling in my chest from those few seconds still hasn't faded, and this bastard had been hiding under there, waiting to jump out and scare me. This wasn't a prank anymore. This was a secondary detonation on someone who'd just crawled out of trauma.

"You think this is funny?!" I seized the collar of Jess's patient gown and shook her hard.

"You think this is funny, Jess!"

"W-wait, I just—""Just what! Just checking whether I'd be scared to death, and testing whether the medical bay has enough stretchers?!" Jess got shaken back into the pillow, and that usual face of unbothered composure finally showed genuine panic. Lan, who had been leading the crying act, saw things going wrong and rushed in to pull me off.

"Hoshino, wait, really wait, not the face!"

"You were in on it too, weren't you, Lan?" I didn't even turn my head. I swung a pillow backhanded. Lan dodged sideways and the pillow caught one of the accomplices square in the chest; he let out a very unimpressive grunt.

"No, we just wanted to scare you a little—""A little." I turned my head and smiled. Probably the same smile as the villains I hate most.

"You call that a little." The people behind went silent as a group. Good. So they finally understood what they'd done. I turned back to continue dealing with Jess. This time Jess was actually dodging, curled up in the corner of the bed with half the white sheet wrapped around her arm, looking like some extremely cheap ghost prizefighter. The problem was that Jess's mouth still hadn't fully learned to close.

"B-but it worked really well, see, you were really scared—""You still dare say that!" I planted a foot on the bed frame and reached for Jess's cheek.

"Ow ow ow, Hoshino, my face, my face will warp—""Better to rebuild the whole thing!" At that point even the medics charged in.

"Hey, patients can't hit patients!"

"Don't touch that equipment!"

"The bed! Lock the bed wheels, who unlocked the bed wheels!" The entire medical bay turned into a soup that had lost all military discipline. The white sheet was on the floor, the curtain hung crooked, the IV stand rattled and chimed, and Lan was laughing so hard tears came while trying to hold me back, which fully exposed that the earlier sobbing was half acting and half fear of what was coming.

The accomplices in the back were even more useless—a moment ago they'd been willing to play out a farewell to the deceased, and now they were just scattering around the room, shouting "it wasn't my idea" and "I thought this was a bad idea from the start," the classic accomplice-cut-loose scene, executed at admirable speed. I was about to add one more to Jess when my wrist was suddenly caught. Not very hard. You could even say the grip was a little weak. But I stopped anyway.

Because the one holding my wrist was Jess. Jess looked up at me. Half of that punchable energy was still there, but something else had finally surfaced underneath. Not a plea for pity, not pure begging. Closer to a late-blooming awareness that she'd taken the joke past the line.

"... How was I supposed to know you'd be this scared." After she said it, Jess drew a small breath, as if that punch to the shoulder really had hurt. I'd been ready to yell more. A lot more. Ideally all the way past Jess's twentieth birthday. But the moment she said that, I got stuck. Because I could hear that Jess wasn't mocking me. Jess was genuinely a little thrown. Jess had probably assumed I'd roll my eyes, go speechless, and toss the cloth back over her head with a "next time just bury yourself."

She hadn't expected my hand to shake when I walked to the bed, and hadn't expected that the blank second earlier wasn't anger—it was fear. More embarrassing: I was still shaking. I looked down at my own hands. Pathetic. Punching that hard, and my hands were still trembling. Jess clearly saw it too. So Jess blinked, very lightly, and then, in that tone of someone who's still lying in a hospital bed and still utterly incorrigible, added something quietly.

"Though... that also means you looked for me first when you woke up." I glared at Jess. Jess looked back. For that second, the whole medical bay felt like someone had hit mute. Lan stopped moving, the medics stopped yelling, and the accomplices in back had the sense to freeze where they were, all wearing the same subtle expression of "ohhh, so that's the direction this is going." The antiseptic smell in the air suddenly became a little too distinct. My ears went hot. Damn it. Of course it had to be now.

Right when Jess had just finished her prank, just taken her beating, her hair still a mess from fighting a bedsheet—that's when she dropped that line. Not a serious confession, not even a nice-sounding sentence, and honestly still a little deserving of a punch. But that was exactly why it was so Jess. So much like Jess that for a moment I couldn't tell whether the more urgent thing was to keep hitting her or to deal with the heat on my face. In the end I chose the most correct and least graceful option.

One more punch. I pulled it this time; it just landed on the blanket over Jess's chest.

"Don't flatter yourself." I said it through my teeth. My voice probably wasn't perfectly fierce. Because Lan let out a very obvious "ohhh—" beside me.

"Oh what?!" I turned immediately. Lan raised both hands, shoulders shaking with laughter.

"Nothing, I just thought—someone's expression just now really looked like a widow—""Lan." I smiled.

"Would you like to try a white sheet too?" Lan shut up instantly. The medics finally seized the chance to separate Jess and me, pulling me back while straightening the gown and monitoring leads I'd wrecked. Jess lay there, shoulder hurting enough to bare her teeth, and couldn't stop laughing. That laugh was annoying, carrying a bit of getting away with it, a bit of pain, a bit of after-fear, and something that made it very hard to stay angry to the end.

I stood by the bed catching my breath, head still a little dizzy, eyes a little warm. I hate this. If I cried now, I'd lose all my momentum. So I could only glare at Jess and try to force what had nearly spilled up out of my chest back down. But Jess apparently thought she had too much life left today, because she actually held a hand out to me.

"Hoshino." I ignored her.

"Hoshino." I still ignored her. Jess paused, and this time her voice was lower.

"... Sorry." For half a beat, nobody said anything. Not because "sorry" is such a rare word, but because out of Jess's mouth it's rare enough to warrant sample preservation. Lan looked like she nearly wanted to pull out a terminal and record it for the archive, labeled "Incident of Rare Sincere Speech by Jess," for the ship's future historical education. I looked at Jess. Jess looked at me. In the end, I still reached out. Not to take Jess's hand.

I grabbed the white sheet off the bed instead and slapped it back down over Jess's head.

"Shut up and rest." Jess laughed muffled under the sheet.

"So mean."

"Keep it up and I'll really send you out as a body."

"At least it'd be you delivering me." My temple twitched. Lan was laughing hard enough to nearly kneel over. And I stood there, seriously considering whether to request a different room, different friends, or a whole different life line right now. Unfortunately none of the three options looked realistic. So I just let out a long breath and turned my face away, so nobody would see that I wasn't really angry anymore.

When it comes down to it, the truly frightening part of this farce wasn't that Jess almost got beaten to death by me. It was that when I lifted the white cloth, I genuinely believed I was about to lose Jess. Once is enough for that. If it happens again, I'm packing the white sheet and the person together and throwing them into medical waste recycling.