circle7 | an apple a day

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an apple a day

There came a sharp rapping on the metallic door. ~~Spoke the raven, nevermore.~~

It was near mechanical in its precision, a steady one-two-three beat fit for a quick-time waltz but lacking all the feeling and expression to make it anything akin to music. It did fit in with the whirring and slight hum of machinery that always existed on the ship - the dull, metal white noise of a its gears and engines doing good work, a constant reassurance that no one was going to get thrown into zero-gravity or sucked into the nothingness of space. It was too loud and too localized, though, for it to be mistaken as part of the regular background.

"Doctor," said the knocker, perfectly spaced between two series of three-note beats, though he stopped right after the last knock-knock-knock following the word. It wasn't a common voice to hear around the sick bay area of the ship, but it wasn't one Bentley hadn't heard before. Calibri sounded quietly commanding as normal, if a little more impatient given the bitten off end to the 'R' of Bentley's title. "Doctor, I am in need of your assistance."

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"One moment," Bentley called out. It sounded like he was with another patient, some light murmuring coming from the room. Something about taking medication twice a day, never on an empty stomach, and checking with him next week. There was some shuffling, and Bentley finally opened the door, excusing an older woman who held a bottle of pills and some papers.

"What can I do for you, Ca..." Bentley's eyes fell to his side.

Oh.

Calibri raised his eyes to Bentley, though the movement seemed sluggish even then. Thankfully his words weren't slurred, but that was hardly reassuring when a dark patch of unmistakable color was seeping through the otherwise pristine whiteness of his dress shirt, clearly visible since he had one hand pressed to the side of his stomach, pushing his heavy black coat out of the way. His face, for the most part, remained impassive, if a bit paler than his usual (which was not that healthy to begin with).

"Doctor," he said promptly, taking a small step forward. His eyes flitted to the other woman in the room, staring back at him with widened eyes. One of the cafeteria staff, wasn't she? "Oh. You are busy."

Bentley's eyes widened, and he immediately ushered Calibri in. The woman looked alarmed, but the doctor shooed her away, assuring he had things under control. She nodded hesitantly and dashed off.

"Lay down on the table," Bentley instructed, helping him walk to it, despite the chemist's unusual calm. He grabbed a towel off a nearby metal cart, pressing it to the wound to stifle the bleeding while he motioned the nurse to get him the needed supplies. "Tell me what happened."

"I was shot at far range with a low caliber semi-automated pistol, modified by the looks of the barrel. I expect the negotiations won't be working in their favor. Their shipment containers were subpar anyway - I don't suspect their coolant would have held out under high-pressure atmospheric conditions," Calibri explained calmly, swinging his legs gingerly onto the surface and gingerly lowering himself to his elbows, then back. He watched Bentley fuss about with a sort of detached curiosity and eventually added, "What anesthesia are you going to use?"

Pushing up Calibri's shirt, he frowned at the damage. It tore apart the surface of his skin, and while off to the side of abdomen, it seemed the bullet was still in there; there was no exit wound. Bentley mumbled to himself as he tried to both clean it and stop the bleeding, the hems of his sleeves starting to stain. The tissue suffered some damage itself.

"Bad aim, from the looks of it," he said among his mumbling. The nurse hurried another cart over, with bandages, tools, and a couple syringes. "Just a general anesthesia."

Though pressure was applied to the bleeding wound, Calibri's face remained impassive. A light glaze had settled over his eyes, though that might have been the sickly-pale tint of the artificial lighting at work. He watched Bentley's hands move swiftly and with purpose around the injured area, watched as that white fabric and pale skin turned dark with blood.

"That won't work - the general anesthesia," he said, as one might comment on the weather over in Erclesse. He turned his head, craning it up to look at the cart that had just been wheeled in. It was resting at Bentley's side for ease of reach, putting it level with Calibri's head. The sound of its wheels sliding across the tiled floor had been awfully loud. In fact, even the sound of his own hair shuffling against the medical-issue pillow sounded like a racket to his ears - how meddlesome.

"That won't work either," Calibri commented, reading off one of the labels on the cart. "Or that one."

What a very unhelpful patient.

Up until now, Bentley hadn't considered how calm Calibri was. It was normal for him to be so impassive, but after just being shot? (Despite being through a similar situation with Calibri, it was just as surprising.) And suddenly, he was overwhelmed with the fact that nothing he had could knock out this man.

"All right. I'm going to numb it, then," he said, swallowing his own rising panic. (He had the same worry as the last time he treated Calibri - make sure he survives, else pay the consequences for the second-in-command's death.) Bentley grabbed another syringe from the lower shelf of the cart. "Please tell me hydermonozone works on you."

Calibri frowned, looking somewhat sleepy and muddled as he did so. "Isn't that Astarian Horse tranquilizer?"

But he didn't say no.

"Something like that," he said. Grabbing Calibri's arm, the metal of his hand awfully warm for being artificial, Bentley pressed the syringe to his skin until it punctured the surface. The small amount of clear liquid squeezed out into his veins. "Count to ten." Calibri should be out like a light by five, but in light of his medical history...

Calibri gave Bentley a somewhat sour look at that, the type that seemed to say, "Don't treat me like a child," but dutifully, he let his head fall back against the pillow and began to recite, "One, two, three, four..."

At around thirteen, his vision began to swim, signaled by the abrupt cutting off of his until-then steady counting. He blinked at the ceiling, the artificial light reflecting off the lens of his glasses, and fell quiet for a moment. "Oh," he breathed out quietly, half in wonder. He sounded like a child in a toy store for the first time. "That's fascinating."

"You can't be serious, Calibri," Bentley mumbled accusingly, as though the man himself was responsible for the reactions of his body. "We're proceeding anyway, then."

The nurse, a little overwhelmed by such an abnormal patient, hurriedly nodded and started prepping Calibri. Something went into his other arm, something wet dabbed around his wound, and some tube started making a loud, suction noise. Bentley tied a mask around his face, tugging gloves on and grabbing uncomfortably long looking tweezers.

"This might pinch," Bentley said, and before Calibri could respond, he pressed in in search of the bullet.

As relaxed as he had previously seemed during all preceding encounters, Calibri stiffened at this, a hiss escaping his clenched teeth - human after all. His limbs were too lax and far away from him to really grip the medical sheets, and everything other than that short spike of pain came to him slowly, trickling down as if through a thick curtain. "Pinch," he muttered dryly.

The 'pinch' probably wasn't much compared to the uncomfortable digging around for the bullet. It was wedged into the muscle. The nurse kept the blood at bay, sucking it from the wound with the tube. Now and then she would glance up at Bentley, expression serious and focused.

"All right, I've got a hold of it," he said, voice steady. Bentley started to pull the tweezers out slowly, twisting or tilting now and then to make it as easy as possible on both parties. It had barely missed Calibri's intestine as it was - that'd be a whole new mess altogether.

With a metal clank, Bentley dropped the red-stained bullet into a metal tray to his side, along with the tweezers.

"I'm going to start stitching you now," Bentley announced, suturing materials now in his hand.

"There are fourier equations on your ceiling," Calibri said dreamily.

Bentley didn't glance up from his task, carefully bringing the tear of Calibri's skin into one, jagged line, stitch by stitch.

"You're hallucinating," he said bluntly, biting his lip under his mask. It wasn't an uncommon effect when injected with horse tranquilizer; however, most people would just be unconscious through it. It would be too risky to give Calibri another dose, despite Bentley's new belief that Calibri was superhuman, and could withstand any chemical pumped into his body. "See anything else out of the ordinary?"

Calibri shortly gave Bentley another unimpressed frown. "Of course not. I'm not drunk," he argued, which might have made sense in his line of thinking, given his particular personal history with all things chemical except for party cocktails and hard liquor. Even superhumans had their Kryptonite, apparently.

He glanced down, though he didn't raise his head to really get a good look past the mess of rumpled clothes and red rubber gloves at his wound. It was a small but ugly mess and it felt like such. Calibri frowned in distaste at how utterly unclean the whole affair was. Would that stain even come out of his dress shirt? That was troublesome. The nurse withered under the impassive stare he gave her before he turned his attention to Bentley. "Are you finished, doctor?"

"Almost," he said, sparing Calibri a concerned look. Within half a minute Bentley finished, tying the last knot and putting the dirtied needle into the tray. The wound wasn't as bad as it looked, but given Calibri's position, he was to be treated with the utmost care and emergency. (Bentley couldn't blame the nurse for being on edge.)

A cool substance was spread on the wound after; a disinfecting ointment as well as a mild, but long-lasting, numbing agent. Knowing Calibri's resistance, though, it either wouldn't work as well, or it wouldn't last as long. Perhaps not even at all. It was all procedure, though - ointment on, bandage on, wait for patient to wake up. ...Well.

With a sigh, Bentley leaned back, taking off his mask and gloves and throwing them away. The nurse wheeled away the cart.

"There. Does the boss know you're here?"

"By now, he probably does, but he is on a mission right now," Calibri answered, taking Bentley's step back as a sign that all was well in the land of the bloody and possibly insane. With a great deal more coordination than should have been possible given he was hyped up on horse tranquilizer, Calibri pulled himself up on the bed and used the headboard to sit partially up, but only far enough that he could survey the results but not aggravate the wound by bending too much at the waist.

He ran his fingers across the bandage, mouth pressed into a thin line at the slightly sticky edges, where gauze met skin. "Messy," he commented idly, more observation than not. Calibri raised his eyes slowly, pushing up the bridge of his glasses with his free hand. "You're much calmer than you were the last time we met, Bentley Foster."

Bentley bit the inside of his cheek, mulling over his new responsibilities as caretaker of the Impossibly Chemical-Tolerant Calibri. He'd have to call the boss himself, give details of their emergency procedure, turn in a medical report...

"Ah," he snapped to, meeting Calibri's gaze. (Bentley almost felt a chill from it.) "I find that a gunshot wound is much easier - and nearly routine by now - to treat than self-inflicted, self-invented poisons." He smiled nervously. "I hope you don't mind that I make a list of medicines you're immune to in your medical file." The thought occurred to him that Calibri's medical file alone would probably take up a whole binder on its own. Thank goodness for computers.

Though he didn't smile, Calibri's stare seemed a little more approving than before. He leaned his head back against the wall, folding his hands over his ribs and, for all appearances, looked like a regular patient who was going through a longer routine checkup, rather than having just come out of a bullet extraction and wound surgery. "It'd be easier to keep on file the things that work," he suggested, following Bentley's form around the medical bay with almost hawk-like focus.

"So you're all settled in," he remarked. The way Calibri said it made it sound like a question and a, "Good, so I won't have to issue a private assassination force to take you out when you run away," at the same time.

Bentley made his way to the sink across the room with a frown - Calibri was probably right. Making a list of things that worked would be easier. Once his hands were dry, he leaned halfway into another room to grab something - a digital tablet, where he started typing in notes.

It was hard to be distracted when the second-in-command was saying things that felt like they meant something frighteningly different. He sure listened carefully.

"I guess," he said, sitting down next to Calibri's bed, fidgeting. "Pretty much." He ruffled his already messy hair in thought, flicking his eyes up to Calibri now and then. He was scrolling through a list of painkillers on the tablet, wondering if any of them would do any good. "How's nimoldrin?"

Calibri held his hand out for the tablet. To his credit, his hand didn't even tremble, despite all the substances that were no doubt coursing through his veins.

"You've come in contact with a lot of our members," he commented idly. "You must have a much clearer understanding of what goes on in the Organization, and you're still here."

Hesitantly, Bentley handed the tablet over. A few prescriptions were already crossed out, and others had question marks.

"I do," he agreed, shrugging with half a smile. "I don't have much choice, really."

Taking the tablet in stride, Calibri began going through the list himself, checking or, more often, crossing out every medication in succession. He seemed to be very used to the process, considering the speed with which he was going down the list.

"Is that how you see it?"

The doctor's eyes narrowed, unsure what Calibri was getting at.

"Yes? I-I mean, it's not like captivity-" Bentley paused. "...Is it?"

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DOES CALIBRI KNOW SOMETHING

HMM DOES HE

DOES... HE.....

WHO KNOWS? B)

CREEPER...