So Out Of Her League

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huruma2_icon.gif megan_icon.gif

Scene Title So Out of Her League
Synopsis RNs are not surgeons. And suspicion and despair are rampant.
Date December 14, 2011

Pollepel Island


Coming back is a blur. There is not far to go on the island, and while Huruma wanders, she always returns. She has a job to do too. But this — returning to news of an assault — Kaylee? It sends a boiling tumult down through her stomach when she hears what has happened. There is not much to do apart from wait.

So wait Huruma does.

The guard posted on her is doing fine, if dripping with guilt, and Kaylee herself is — well — stable? As far as stable gets her. There is nothing to read off of her. Huruma has taken to hovering a wing away from medical, stalking the halls in a pace. That is, until people diverge once more and leave those working in the wing on call again.

Once this happens, she's gone again, silently padding down the corridor towards medical so she might overhear the results.

As it turns out, there's someone else that needs her more.

Huruma's elbow moves open a door near medical, the quiet nature of a hunter filling her senses as she fills the shape of the doorway, searching.

The person who is the Ferry's only actual fully trained and qualified medical personnel? She's a Registered Nurse. She's not a surgeon. Sure, she's a combat-trained medic as well, but … she's not a surgeon! And yet here she is, dealing with life-and-death injuries that truly should have an emergency room and a trauma team and a good surgeon to fix. But they're stuck with HER.

Megan's learned a lot over the years. Even surgical stuff — qualified or not, she is all they have. And she's done her best, but she's… scared. Terrified. That her best is not good enough. That she's missed something. That Kaylee's perforated intestines will poison the young woman and she'll die in agony. That the lung will collapse again. That she missed something in the nicked liver. All of these possibilities… despite her best, Kaylee might still die.

And finally, overwhelmed by all of it, the redheaded nurse had to find a hidden corner where she could curl up in a fetal ball, bury her face in a pillow on her knees, and quietly lose her fucking mind.

Hysterical sobs are silenced in the pillow, which is soaking wet with tears and other things. She's still wearing the scrubs with dried blood on them from taking care of Kaylee.

Huruma's silence lingers, even as the room reveals stifled sobs and a storm of doubt, fear, and frustration that washes out into the castle beyond, blending with similar. The despair in the castle is getting to be too much. Dark sleeps on Bannerman, and there is nothing Huruma can do to make it subside. Nor is there anything she can do to stop it from sinking its teeth into her back as well, an invisible lamprey, leeched on where her arms cannot reach, calling others to fresh blood. But there is no going back from it — and all she can do is force it back, further and further.

Huruma's nostrils flare in a subtle intake of the smell of blood as she steps inside the room, closing the door behind her with an audible click and stepping to where her shadow falls on the other woman's feet.

The initial opening of the door escapes the woman who is mid-breakdown. But there is a moment where survival instinct kicks in. Perhaps it's the click of the door, perhaps it's just a primal awareness of another being in the same space. But Megan's head comes shooting up out of the pillow, and despite the blotched features and red nose, she's coming up fighting, trying to scramble backward with her feet to a standing position in that corner she's pinned into with her back against the wall.

Then she registers who the arrival is and simply stops moving. Silently she stares upward into Huruma's eyes, unable to even attempt to quell the upwell of sorrow and fear, despair and rage, that she's feeling as she usually would for the empath.

It's nothing more or less than a simple trust in the dark-skinned woman when Megan lets her features crumple once more and she convulses with another gut-wrenching sob. She does try to bury the sound in the pillow again, but … she doesn't try to hide it.

The picture that Megan Young paints — fearful, backed into a corner — is a familiar one, in concept. In practice, and from her, it is a foreign thing. She wears her mantle with a sense of grace for the sake of others, and in this place it has gone from her.

Huruma stares back when Megan meets her eyes, the ivory shade of her own half-darkened by the weight of her lids. The woman's sculpted face is set, cheekbones sharp and jaw tight, lips closed.

There is a moment that seems as if she'll leave. To let Megan have her time by doing a ghosting pivot. The shift comes, a heel dug and weight on one leg—

—faltering after a breath. The pivot turns into a step forward, and Huruma remains tentative when she turns her back to the wall and slides down its supportive stone to set herself down beside Megan.

The copper-red curls tickle Huruma's jaw, when Megan lifts her face from the pillow once more to lean sideways on the other woman's shoulder, her trust absolute. Though she is still crying, she is finally at least trying to breathe more slowly… to calm the storm that rages through her emotions.

"I don't think I can do this much longer," she confesses to the woman she's come to think of as 'friend'. The pressure-cooker that is their island, their NETWORK, is exploding around them. "Something's gotta give, Huruma… and I'm afraid that something might be me."

Huruma's arm lifts to coil around Megan's back when she changes from pillow to shoulder, hand cradling at the curve of ribcage, a soft tug pulling her in closer. While her ability stays away from pushing at Megan's mind, the swell of her moods is open like a book. The coppery tint below her eyes earns a moment's consideration, before she rests her jaw there, a reassuring weight.

"Something will, I'm afraid." Huruma was never one to bat around the bush, was she? The next words are someone stilted, as if Huruma herself is not completely sure what to say. "It could be. I have faith in you. Strength is not always stoicism."

"I'm not stoic," Megan objects on a hitched breath. "I just… have too much shit to do to be worried about my own emotions." She laughs a little, still crying at the same time. "I don't know if she's going to make it," she admits softly. "This level of surgery is so far above my pay grade. I could have done more damage than help."

She does seem to be taking comfort from the contact, though, her breaths coming slower as she rests in the strong curve of Hooms's arm.

"I never thought I'd live to see the day that the war zone would be on American soil against American forces. It's…. essentially another civil war." Megan shakes her head. "This is insanity." She goes quiet and then admits, "And we are a horribly young, somewhat spoiled country in that we thought it could never happen to us again when nearly every OTHER country in the world has been through it for centuries off and on."

Megan's words are met with an absorbing silence at first. Huruma's words of faith still stand, even if Megan is less than confident of what she has done to help Kaylee.

"As far as I am concerned, keeping her from bleeding to death on cold stone makes your work worthwhile." Huruma murmurs in response to the recent events, eyes on the wall. They drop again at the mention of war, and where they are. "I have been in civil wars before. Fought in them. Even as a girl, briefly. They always end, eventually. I do not know how reassuring that notion is for you, though…" She comes from a whole other world of those places, and perhaps her judgment is skewed, but her perspective is a new one all the same. "I want to say that this is not a futile fight. I know that for these people — your fight is certainly not."

There's a long silence as Megan absorbs Huruma's words. She knows the other woman is right. It's not futile… though sometimes it really feels like it. She remains leaning on Huruma's shoulder, taking the offered comfort and she says quietly, "I'm sorry that you had to find me like this. Me losing it just scares the younger ones. I can't do it where they can see." She snorts softly. "God, I hate it when Scott's right." She misses her friend rather acutely in that moment. She allows so few people inside her walls, comfortable with being alone, that when those few people are gone, it's a lonely place inside her head. And she's grateful for the connection that the dark-skinned woman is providing right now.

"Do not apologize… you are allowed your darkness." Huruma answers, brow knitting at the knot of something lonesome in Megan. Her chest falls with an exhale, and Huruma's other hand lifts up to brush coppery hair back from the other woman's face, knuckles brushing the tracks of sobbing on the balls of cheeks. "You know that this is all above you, but you are here for all of us even so. You are allowed your darkness." She repeats, more softly the second time.

Resting there as she is on Huruma's shoulder, she closes her eyes and lets the other woman be her comfort. Megan's sigh is soft. "Just don't let mine make yours worse?" she asks in a whisper. She couldn't bear it if she added to Huruma's despair.

"I cannot promise that." is what comes, muffled only slightly by the curve of head and hair at her jaw. Huruma controls others' emotions. Her own? There are walls— a fortress— but enough chips create a hole, with enough time. There is a thinness that she can't fight, but for now— she has one job. As Megan sighs into her, the hand at her hair rests gently across her collarbone, enveloping the other woman in a more full embrace. No promises, only this.


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