No Distance Left to Run
Lokoa

E-mail: mehlk@netzero.net
Disclaimer: Pfft. It’s all Joss. The title is taken from a song by Blur and the quote belongs to Raymond Carver.
Rating: PG-13? Story matter. It’s dark.
Pairing: B/A
Timeline: This really doesn’t have a significant timeline. Just think future.
Summary: “Things must be as they may” – Shakespeare
Author’s Note: This is not my usual style, and I really don’t know where this came from. But when the need calls, you feed it. Take it as you will.
Author's Note 2: There's significance to the numbers chosen. Oh, and I think the tense is a bit shifty. I like it that way.
Dedication: Huge thanks to my common inspiration, Chrislee. She rocks – go read her stuff. Also to M, because, well, I love you.
-----------------------------


And did you get what you wanted in this life even so?
I did.
And what is it you wanted?
To call myself beloved. To feel myself beloved on the earth.



Tuesday, March 10, 2008

11:23 p.m.

What does it mean to be a doctor by today’s standards? I fear I have lost its meaning if indeed it was ever mine to claim.

I heard stories all through Med. School of the disillusionment that often befalls men of my profession. They realize it truly isn’t about the money, that the deaths take their tolls, and the ones you save maybe shouldn’t have been. I believed them to be no more than tales, perhaps with some truth, but for the most part, to weed out the students who didn’t truly belong. But I wonder now if it isn’t somehow an inevitable realization for the medical world.

What broke me? It’s a very simple answer, but full of such complexities that I don’t know if I even understand it all. But I can tell the reason: it was Them. They broke me. My life held no resemblance to what I believed it to be when they were done. What I had hoped it to be.

I was so innocent the moment my page went off that night. The almost mocking sound of cheery music to signal the arrival of a trauma patient. My hand had snaked into my lab coat pocket in a practiced move I had done a million times, and disengaged the signal that dictated my life in those bleached hospital halls.

There was nothing special about that night. No feeling in my gut, no storm raging outside. There was just nothing. Possibly a signal in itself. But hindsight always has perfect vision, and had I known what that night would do to me, maybe I would have walked away and never turned back.

But there was that innocence, even that cockiness that seems to run in the blood of those in my profession. Men that play God.

So it was with an annoyance that I abandoned the serenity of the break room and my first bite of food within eleven hours – at the call of the patient. Always the patient.

The elevator, playing a continuation of music that would later seem so foreign to that night, echoed quietly. It was the late hours of midnight, and the hospital life was in its rare act of solitude.

But that solitude was pretentious, a mirage, and I knew this as the doors opened to a whirlwind.

He was the one I noticed first. It would have been impossible for the human eye to not focus on the bulk of his body, the shoulders and presence that swallowed the empty space of the room and shrunk it so that it seemed to be only inches from him.

But it was the eyes, the horrible awful look to them, and the way he clutched her in his arms, tight against his body, that could not let you turn away.

I got the strange sense of a caged animal as I approached him, all but on top of the nurse as she called out procedure questions, with nothing but the limp female body in his arms between them.

Her blood soaked his shirt.

“Stretcher,” I ordered the nurse as I strode over, taking in the new female companion at his side whom I had initially overlooked. She was quiet, mousy, and very much in shock.

His head snapped to me, wild eyes, gentle hands, and I pushed aside the slip in my gut that formed.

“She needs help, god, please.”

The stretcher arrived at that instant and I threw out my arms toward the man, reaching for the woman, and began calling out all supplies I would need to the nurse.

But when a moment passed and my hands remained empty, I turned and saw his lip curl at my outstretched hands and he tilted his body from me.

“I won’t leave her.”

“Sir, you’ve got to let us help her.” I spoke calmly and forcefully. “She’s lost a lot of blood, she needs medical attention. You’re only hurting her by keeping her from me.” My hands remained out, reaching.

His eyes widened, and he seemed to cave in on himself as if my words showed him something he did not want to see. Instead, he turned, strode to the stretcher, and in an act of such concentration and gentleness, placed her battered body on the cotton sheets. His hand still gripped hers even then.

“Help her,” he said.

I was at the stretcher, griping its metal rails within a moment of his demand. The nurse bustled along beside me attaching an oxygen mask to her face and hooking her to a system of fluids.

Her skin was pale, waxy, and her shirt so wet with her own blood. ‘Useless’, I thought, but only allowed it to live for a second.

When we started moving down the halls, the younger woman finally blinked out of her detached state and hurried along with us as we moved to the surgical room.

He was watching the woman whose hand he held the entire time, whispering in words I couldn’t make out, rubbing his thumb in an unconscious manner over her cold skin.
“Fight it,” I picked out from his personal conversation with her. “Strong”, and something about “Forever.”

When the doors were in sight, the nurse turned, one hand still resting on the pump of the oxygen tank. “I’m sorry, sir, ma’am, but you must wait here.”

“No,” he spoke. “She hates hospitals.” It was raw and broken. “I can’t let her go alone.”

“I’m truly sorry.” And she was. “But I cannot allow you beyond this point. It is for her safety.”

To this day, I swear he growled. “I. Will. Not. Leave. Her.”

“Angel.” It was the first word his companion had spoken and she did so with a hand to his shoulder. “Let them do their job.”

He looked so pained then that I thought we would have another patient on our hands. His devotion to this woman who lay on this stretcher stirred something inside of me, and I knew not what to make of it.

He bent down and placed a kiss to her temple, barely brushing his lips against her flesh. “Take care of her,” he told me. And as we passed the barrier in which they could not enter, their hands broke – it was the saddest sight I had ever seen.

*                *                *

We worked on her for hours, but the wounds were too extensive. She had an incision along her belly, my guess a large knife or blade of some sort, where most of her blood had spilled. Bruises coated her skin above her lungs and her left ankle was set in a deformed angle. It was her earlier loss of blood, and her internal bleeding, that had sent her body in shock and had done the most damage. She had lost too much. Too much.

I will admit only here that I worked on her treatment longer than I would any other patient. I trust my instincts, know when they tell me things look hopeless, and yet I was compelled to fight that instinct, to strain my brain into thinking of other solutions that I knew did not exist.

She was a fighter. Even in her condition, she refused to slip away. Her heart was slow, uneven, but it pumped. I did not know for how much longer, but I admired her for it.

“I’ll take her up,” my assistant offered, and with no more emotion than that.

The ‘up’ she referred to was the wing of our hospital set aside for the dying, the ones we know are lost, the ones we practically consider already dead. This disturbed me and for whatever reason, I could not let her go there.

“No,” I said, “not there. Anywhere but there.”

My assistant hesitated, but didn’t argue. Here, you follow chain of command, without questions.

“Room 119 is available,” she offered.

“Fine.”

I didn’t watch as she wheeled her away. Instead, I walked to the sink, the unnaturally large crater of stainless steel, and watched the red water spiral down the drain. I disposed of my gloves, threw away the flimsy cap, and made my way to the lobby where I knew they both waited.

They say this is one of the worst things about being a doctor – the delivery of the news that their loved one is not going to make it. I agree down to the bones of my body.

The elevator door opens to the lobby designated for surgical patients, and I spot them right away. They are not alone in the room; there is an elderly man sitting in the corner who looks to his watch every two seconds and there is a young couple who sit, the lady pressed against the male’s chest, both lost in thoughts of the private sort.

I look back to the people whose world I am about to shatter, and take a second to compose myself. His arm is around the younger woman and her cheeks have tracks running down them where tears once dripped. Her hand squeezes his at random intervals and he lets her.

I take a step towards them and then another, and he is the first to look up. He is on his feet before I can even register the movement and he stands slightly in front of his friend. Shielding her.

I think he knows before I say it. She surely does as her body jerks and her eyes go wide. But he is more stubborn, more defiant.

He lifts his chin as I open my mouth to speak. Fast and quick. It is the only way to do this. “I’m terribly sorry, but we’ve done all we can in surgery.” Here, the mousy woman lets out a whine and collapses in a chair, curling around herself. He is still watching me, his face unreadable. “She’s a very strong woman, she’s still holding on, but…we have a room for her if you’d like to see her.”

He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t move. He just stares at me, and somehow this is worse than any reaction.

When he speaks, he says one word. One word only. It is “Buffy.” And what that word did to me, I cannot describe. I think I knew then, without a doubt, I was done with this. All of this.

A tear escapes, a single one, and its lonely journey is heartbreaking. He makes a choking sound and he has fallen to the ground. The noises that come from him are wretched, disgusting pitches, and the young woman in the chair throws herself down to the ground, over his large back, and rocks with him.

The elderly man in the corner has gotten up, and walks over to the sobbing man on the floor. He reaches out an ancient hand and touches the man’s head, sorrow in his eyes, before proceeding to the machines behind the wall.

I wait patiently, letting them grieve the first heavy waves, before crouching down next to them, and asking softly, “Would you like to see her?”


*                *                *


He’s been in there with her for the third hour.

Dawn, I’ve now learned, waited with him for the first hour, and is now curled by the community hospital phone outside of the lobby, weeping to some stranger on the other end.

I’ve run my rounds, and find myself back to their room again. I knock softly before opening the door and stepping inside.

She looks fragile, blonde hair spilling around her tiny face, small tube spilling out of her mouth, but I know she is not. The machines beep rhythmically and I absently realize that I hardly ever notice them anymore.

He doesn’t look up from her, still seated at her side in the exact place I left him. I brought him a blanket earlier, a pillow, and a cup of coffee that has by now grown cold and untouched.

He’s got one of her hands wrapped in both of his, his head resting on them, and watching her. Silence lies over the room, oddly comforting, before he asks, “Why couldn’t you save her?”

I don’t know what to say to this. I try anyway. “Her internal damage was too severe.”

“Don’t.” His voice is so cold, so lost, that I don’t.

“This is your life,” he says, not looking at me. “This is what you’ve dedicated yourself to, and you failed. You failed her.”

My throat constricts and it’s painful. “Maybe I did.”

“She saves everybody. How come nobody ever saves her?”

He bends his head down to their joined hands and his shoulders jump.

I walk out of the room.

*                *                *                *


The first patient that I called my own was Mr. Hornby, a middle aged school teacher with two kids. He had an odd obsession for jelly beans and laughed like Santa Clause. I was on top of the world when I signed his release papers, knowing that I had done my part in saving his life, in seeing that the seventh grade English world would not be a teacher short.

I haven’t felt like that in a long time.

When I got the signal on my beeper from room 119 my heart shuttered. I had given him my personal number should anything happen, and I shook now to hear it go off.

I steeled myself at the door before pushing it open. He still sat by her side, no longer a surprise to me, and her hand was still clenched in his. “I have to ask you something,” he spoke.

My eyes closed for a moment, and I was almost ashamed at the relief that nothing serious had happened.

“I need you to take out this…this tube from her mouth, the needles in her hands.”

This was against procedure. I knew it. And I think he knew it as well. I was not allowed to do this. But I did it anyway.

I walked over to her bed, and released her from the cords, tubes, and wires that monitored her body, only leaving the heart monitor in place. When she was free, he reached out a hand to caress her hair.

“She’s beautiful,” I said.

“Yes.”

I hesitated, then asked. “How did you meet?”

He didn’t seem at all insulted or surprised, and a ghost of a smile tugged at his mouth. “It was a lifetime ago, and our stories are different. I fell in love with her the first time I saw her.”

I didn’t hesitate anymore. “Is she your wife? Girlfriend?”

His smile faltered a little but he appeared to truly think about the question. “I don’t know what we are…what we ever were.” Then, “Soulmates,” he says quietly. “She told me that once.” He lifted his head to look at me then, the first time since he entered this room, before looking back down to her. “We were starting over.”

He doesn’t speak for a long moment.

“It sounds like your lives weren’t easy.”

“Easy? No, no they were never easy. But they were worth it. I feel it now.”

I don’t know any more about them now then I did at that moment. But I knew they shared something, lived something, that seldom few ever do. I think I would have liked the woman as much as I do the man.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Me too.”

And when her heart readings on the machine became sporadic and the flatline ran across the screen, I turned it away from him so that the sight would not haunt him for eternity.

*                *                *

That night will never escape me. It will be with me always. And it is the reason I am writing this, my last entry.

I resigned today. Maybe it is selfish, but I can’t do this anymore. I feel useless in a cold world.

I got a letter. From Dawn. There is a tearstain on the corner and her words tell me that Angel is gone. To where? She doesn’t say, for she doesn’t know. She thanks me for my help that night, and really for watching Angel. I don’t think I deserve the thanks.

But it was necessary for me to share this story, to put it in physical form so that perhaps it won’t become lost. They touched me in a way that goes beyond words, beyond explanation, and I’m compelled not to shelter this experience exclusively in me. So here they will have a place.

Here, they will live.





END

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