1198/A Nurse's Nightmare

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A Nurse's Nightmare
Date of Scene: 29 June 2017
Location: Astral Plane
Synopsis: Nightmares accost Claire Temple, as the Coyote's mind attacks her. Mercy-Coyote steps in to help her friend.
Cast of Characters: Mercy Thompson, Claire Temple, Winter Soldier




Mercy Thompson has posed:
The world has changed.

The four within the small clearing now find themselves within the psyche of a Coyote. In a place that's affectionately called or known as the Astral Plane.

Possibly half the party understands what this is, while the other half is likely quite clueless. Soon those that are clueless will likely gain a glimmer of what this means. Or if they don't, they'll find themselves lost within its precarious grip.

For Claire Temple her awareness returns slowly. When her eyes and mind focus she'll find herself back in a familiar setting. The ER. The smell of antiseptic, harsh cleansers and hospital is all around her. In some ways possibly a comforting scent. A known smell. But even with that familiarity around her she might still have a sense of something wrong. A nagging niggling feeling that something isn't right; wasn't she just somewhere else? Didn't something happen? Something /important/. Something dangerous. A garage, beer bottles ...

... But no matter how hard Claire focuses upon those snippets of emotions the memories slip away, a tease that doesn't right itself, no matter how hard she tries to pull it forth. Soon though, it becomes a moot point, as suddenly a fellow nurse pokes her head into the small room they use for a break room, and sometimes sleeping. "Claire! We've got several level one traumas coming in, hate to say it, but your break is over." And just like that the daily grind returns and the world settles into a known pattern.

Stepping out Claire will continue to find the routine all around her. With the known traumas coming in crash carts will be pulled out, departments will be paged and put on alert, and the team awaits for the first ambulance to arrive.

Claire Temple has posed:
Someone calls her name.

Claire Temple comes to between blinks, with wide eyes and a turned head, taking in every quick, harried word shouted her way. "Who needs more than five minutes, anyway," she answers amiably, her voice infused with the weary sigh she does not feel, "not like we're unionized or anything."

The laugh she gives is rote. Her abandoned coffee, left to cool, is rote. This is rote, the urgent jog she takes down the familiar, labyrinthine corridors of Metro-Gen.

She lightly slaps her face to wake up. Where was she, anyway? Must've fallen asleep. Been too many long nights, because, of course -- it's her -- and probably did the dozing with open eyes thing again.

Weird dreams about --

There's a twinge in her left arm. Claire forgets about it a moment later, shouldering open the doors to emergency, making a quick and visual count of the spare beds -- spare machines -- while waiting on the paramedics. "Room for five," she relays. "I can think of four more ready to discharge if we need more."

She pushes her hair back behind her ears, rolls her neck, exhales. Her lucky habit to do in the calm before the storm.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
"Let's get them discharged." Is the lead physician's words, when Claire offers the assessment of the filled rooms within the ER. "Before this shit show gets started."

And after one patient is discharged, the storm commences.

It's nothing that Claire hasn't seen or heard before.

The entrance for the ambulance slides open with a nearly silent whoosh and a gurney with a victim upon it enters. There's two EMTs; one is bagging the victim, while the other shouts the old man's stats. "Losing a lot of blood here." The second EMT says, "BP almost non-existent." The first EMT takes the narrative up again, the two working in tandem thanks to the long hours they pull. "There's more on the way. Something about an active shooter in Harlem. We're lucky to get these ones out. The police were blocking us from going in."

Which makes sense, rarely when an active shooter is around do they let the emergency medical technicians in. "Supposedly it's a one man shooter."

When the nurses and doctors roll up to the gurney they'll find the old men perilously close to death. An experienced eye will be able to tell he won't make it. The wound is too catastrophic and the man is too old and frail. His body will give up the ghost of a fight sooner rather than later, no matter how much they try to stop the bleeding, administer specific drugs to raise blood pressure, and work tirelessly to save him.

For Claire, and really the whole team, they'll see the gunshot wound prefect placed. It's dead center in the man's chest.

A familiar looking shot that speaks of military training, or at the very least SWAT and Sniper training.

And as the man codes upon the table, the heart monitor offering that familiar flatline tone, a second victim arrives.

The movements repeat -

- Once again two EMT workers rush through the entrance, the lighter of the two working on the victim, the stronger pushing the gurney. The victim this time is a woman; "Female in her thirties." Barks one of the EMTs, "BP dropping. Awake, semi-coherent. Collapsed lung, internal bleeding -" The technicalities of the hospital roll of the tongue of the EMT quite effortlessly, but for Claire, they might not be heard. She knows this woman.

Mercy Thompson.

And it doesn't look good.

Claire Temple has posed:
Active shooter in Harlem. The words make Claire's heart twist.

Hasn't been the first she's ever heard of. Won't be the last. They keep saying New York's getting safer, getting cleaner, getting beter, but it seems to be just as much that crumbling cesspool as was her childhood. It makes her feel afraid, angry, animated -- to want to /kill/ this creeping infection that won't leave her town.

All she can do is treat the symptoms of the disease. Treat the innocents admitted in, one after another, bleeding out from gunshot wounds.

One man shooter, she overhears. Police caught him yet? Claire wants to ask the EMTs, but there's no time, no place, not when she's already rattling off conditions and treatment plans with the supervising physician. He's just a kid, two years out of medical school, and looks to her with big doe eyes for agreement of his choices. She knows how to play the game; she patiently corrects, diplomatically encourages, even while people around her are dying.

The old man won't make it, she knows. Claire in her first year doing this cried too many nights away in sympathy for men and women like that. She doesn't want to say her heart is hard, but it's definitely callused from overuse. It's a sad sight, but she's going to see it again. A hundred times. He needs painkillers and a quiet place free of this noise and chaos, but even that is not possibly. He'll stay in the furor of emergency, talked over by a dozen strange voices, and die into the congestion and clamour. Because that's how this system works.

She examines his trauma, and her gloved hands, already bloody, do not need to search long to find irreparable damage to the pulmonary artery. What the hell kind of trick shot is that?

He codes. She already stops thinking about him. She has to. It's the only way she can do her job.

Think of them too much as people, and then it's impossible to give them the help they deserve. Emphasize too much, and lose the precious objectivity that will save their lives. Be a machine, treat them as the same, nameless, faceless anatomical diagram -- find the trauma, treat, save, discharge, and, whatever you do, never --

-- get too attached. Claire stares a whole unnecessary three seconds at Mercy Thompson's quiet, ashen face. Paler than she's ever looked. Paler than she should be. Dying.

"Jesus --" she snaps at herself, immediately at the woman's gurney, trying to hear through the pounding in her own ears at what the EMTs are saying. It's like she can't hear. Claire stares down desperately. "We need -- pericardial tube -- call surgery! Call -- where the fuck is her wallet? We need -- blood type -- and -- " Oh god, oh god, it's Mercy, someone hurt Mercy.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Claire's calloused heart matches many of those around her. It's what has to be done, what happens over time. While the hospital is hardly on the front lines of a war zone in some ways it is.

Tired souls have to make those crucial life or death situations. Souls that'll end up far more battered than those that work in a more mundane setting.

It's a heavy burden to carry, but one that must be.

The man codes and just like that the team moves to the second victim. When Claire stops in her tracks for those (very long) three seconds, another nurse turns a sharp eye upon her. She was just about to call the other woman's name, but finally the Night Nurse lurches back to the present. With that awareness back, the second nurse turns back to Mercy Thompson. The coyote's clothes are already being cut away, lead lines for the heart monitor being stuck to skin, an IV inserted into a viable vein.

The bullet wound upon her chest is exactly like the old man's. Perfect placed. Center mass. Military.

The pericardial tray will be gathered, even as a bag of O negative is hung from a pole.

As for Mercy Thompson, the EMTs were correct. She is semi-conscious. Enough so that when Claire's face hovers within her field of vision the coyote fights to focus.

The struggle lasts for several seconds, before finally Mercy strikes out with a shaking hand. Those fingers of hers will grip Claire's arm with surprising strength and with a lurch, Mercy will pull Claire closer.

"Claire. Careful." Gasps the coyote, blood staining her teeth and bubbling around the corners of her mouth. The red stain upon her lips a macabre imitation of lipstick.

"Shooter -" Continues the strained and pained words of Mercy, "Yasha. Don't know what he's doing. Don't know what's going -"

On. That's the word she's looking for, but can't quite find. Not when those familiar brown eyes of Mercy's abruptly roll upward and back; consciousness leaving the coyote's form.

The lines of the heart monitor swiftly tell the story of what's happening. Mercy Thompson's heart has stopped and she's dying. "Dammit!" Snarls the emergency on call doctor. "She's coding."

Just like the other. Mercy is young, however, so the team continues to work. Chest compressions, the bag of blood being squeeze to force more into her vein, a defibrillator being charged. Surgery being called, the air being let out of the lung to try and relieve the pressure within her chest cavity.

All for naught, however.

Claire Temple has posed:
And she's conscious.

"Mercy?" Claire asks breathlessly. "Mercy, it's me. You're safe, you're safe, we got you. Stay with me, OK? We're taking you to surgery and I'm not going to leave."

She thinks she's moving, thinks she's walking, helping to push her bed towards surgery. But Claire cannot even feel her feet. Cannot see the halls moving past. She feels odd things, strange things, unnecessary things, like the rough, fibrous brush of hospital bedsheets against her fingers -- they're always so rough -- or the aching beat of her heartrate inside her back molars.

Unnecessary, inconsequential things, as she looks down on the face of her friend, and absolutely refuses to believe Mercy Thompson is dying. She has so few friends. They are precious, so precious, and especially this one -- so kind to her, so good, and though Claire still barely knows her, she's /always there/. She won't lose her.

"Don't talk," she pleads against the first of Mercy's words. Not against her collapsed lung. It wells fresh blood up from the wound she's packing with her hands. Even through her gloves, blood burns hot. "Just don't ta --"

Shooter. Yasha. Don't know what --

Those whispers ghost free. Claire can't answer. Can't speak. Can't think.

She won't think. She won't think it true. Not Yasha, not this, it's not happening, he wouldn't ever. But he can, answers a chill that runs down the bones in her back. But she's seen him so quiet. So gentle. So lost.

And then she codes.

The team works. Claire looks on, hearing only the alarm of the machine. This is why you don't get attached. This is why you don't let yourself feel. You freeze.

"No!" she snarls. "No! This isn't -- you're not -- " Claire doesn't feel herself shoulder aside one of her colleagues. She doesn't feel her hands taking over, applying fast, fierce, furious compressions that snap ribs but don't do much else, forcing blood flow through a dead body. Her hands are numb. She's not even sure when the heart stops beating.

She's not sure when the tears first come, streaking silently down her cheeks. But they do not stop.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Ribs snap, oxygen is given, as well as drugs to try and restart the heart. Even a shock at the highest jules can't return Mercy Thompson back to the living. Her spirit is gone, her face lost of all its animation, all that made Mercy who she was. Now it's just a body.

And when time of death is called and the staff take a step back they'll turn to see their colleague crying. Shocked silence reigns quietly within the room; this is Claire Temple. A nurse who has weathered so much. A nurse who rarely cries. Someone who's strength can always be depended upon. That strength always there.

And now it's gone.

And with that realization the team realizes that Claire knows-knew, yes knew, the victim.

"Claire." Begins that same nurse who now realizes why the other woman stopped in her tracks just moments before. "Claire, I'm so sorry." While her voice has said these words so many times before, this time it's given new meaning. One of their own has lost a friend. "Come on, honey. Let's get you out of here. They'll clean her up." The words are gentle, as is the touch upon Claire's arm to remove her from this particular scene.

"Let's get you cleaned up and I'll take the rest of your shift. Go home."

And the staff will not be taking anything other than a yes from Claire. A yes and seeing the woman /leave/ the ER.

Claire Temple has posed:
She's dead.

Claire knows it, but she still refuses to believe it, as her hands force cooling blood and phantom life through a heart that no longer beats on its own.

She doesn't care. She doesn't CARE because she's not losing this one, not another. Not after her father, not after her uncle, not after friends and teachers and co-workers and that sweet old lady at the bus stop -- dead by gun shots. Dead by bullets. Not another.

Her shaking hands make Mercy Thompson's dead heart beat for thirty pointless seconds before the other staff carefully pulls her away. Claire barely feels any of it. The gentle grasps on her arms. The blood on her hands. Her dark eyes stare forward, sightless, hollow. They are sieves, and the rest of the world drains straight through.

She thinks she fights them, persists, does something stubborn, but they win, she loses, and the battle is over. She switches out of the scrubs that have Mercy's blood. They'll be clean of Mercy by tomorrow, put through the laundry. They'll be worn again by someone else tomorrow. It will be as though she never existed. One more body through the revolving door.

If people talk, she might answer but does not hear. If she feels the change of the air, stepping out into the night from Metro-Gen, it's only because it chills the wet paths scouring her cheeks.

Her friend is dead, and all Claire has left in her pathetic life is to go home.

Her apartment is dark when she keys the door open. She doesn't want to turn on the light.

Winter Soldier has posed:
The night has fangs, and all their needle points rest right on the already frayed-nerved of Claire Temple as she lets herself into her darkened apartment. Fear and disbelief scrape them raw with every passing moment.

The silence is sepulchral. The darkness presses heavily on searching eyes, but right now Claire does not want to see anything too clearly. The only light is wan starlight that comes through the the windows, and it illuminates the familiar walls of her home, its sparse furniture, its lived-in accoutrements, and the man seated in waiting silence at her kitchen table.

Only his eyes move. They follow her as she passes by.

"I would have expected you to run. Hide, at the least," he finally observes. He turns the 9mm in his hand, looking at it, before he thumbs the safety back on and makes it disappear. His gaze lifts back to hers, incurious and impersonal. His eyes are as blue and remote as the peaks of mountains hundreds of miles off.

They do not recognize her, nor care about her in particular, except as assigned prey.

"I really don't know why they wasted my time with something so simple," he continues, cordial enough-- or confident enough-- for gentle conversation before he begins work.

Claire Temple has posed:
There is only one reason why Claire Temple does this, and it is because she believes she is completely, totally alone.

The first sob hitches free, and with both hands palmed up to cradle and hide her face, she cries.

She makes little noise and even less fuss, her weeping simple, neat, and utilitarian, coupled with the mechamical way she shoulders off her backpack and slips out of her coat. She steps three paces deep into her home, heavy with dizziness, and needing her couch to sit --

-- when someone speaks from the kitchen.

Claire takes her face out of her hands. Her eyes, bright and raw, veer on that figure in the dark. Sitting in her kitchen. Gun in his hand. It's exactly like the first night she met him. The first night he forced himself into her life.

Mercy's dying words haunt the darkness and dead air between them.

"I'm tired of running," she rasps back, even as she feels her heart breaking. "Tired of hiding."

Claire wants to ask if it's true; if he did it. If he was the one who put that bullet into Mercy. But she already knows the answer.

Her hands fall slack at her sides. She asks instead, a whisper, "Did they find you?"

Winter Soldier has posed:
She is tired, she says. Tired of running and hiding.

"Then don't," he says. His head lifts, canting slightly. Shadow drowns the left half of his face. "You wouldn't be the first person who I thought I was doing a favor..."

His gaze goes briefly distant, staring through her-- past her at something only he can see. "Not the first in the least."

He stands up, a slow deliberate movement like a blade unsheathing, rounding the table to draw in close. His head tips down to regard her. The look in his eyes is curious as he reaches up to touch her face, fingertips trailing down the tracks of the tears drying there. Did they find him? she asks.

His hand drops to her throat.

"They never left me," he says, as his grasp tightens. There is a blank, suffering patience to his eyes. This is as rote to him as breathing. "You should have let me die. It was my one chance to."

Claire Temple has posed:
He stands. The unfolding movement unsheathes a row of blades along her wall, refracted moonlight repeating the long, lethal line of him a hundred times.

Claire said she's tired of running. Tired of hiding.

She's a liar.

Because the moment he steps toward her, she steps backwards, desperate to keep distance between their bodies, begging with what little fight she has left to keep him away. She retreats until her front door stops her, solid against the bones in her back, a holding wall that serves her still for the Winter Soldier's slow claim.

Her fingernails scratch noisily in fumbling for the handle, but he's already there, already too close, drowning Claire in his shadow, and scouring her under the burn of his blue eyes.

A coward for so long of her life, she turns her head and looks away, afraid to look, afraid to see what she already knows is there. Not him, not the man she promised to protect, not the main she failed. He touches her face, her tears run hot over his fingers. Claire shudders in barely-restrained panic.

But she doesn't -- she doesn't want to be afraid anymore.

Something compels her eyes open, and they look up. They find his, in the dark, an instant before his hand finds her throat.

Shock opens her face to the slow tightening of his fingers. His hand, his right hand, flesh and blood and alive on her. She reaches reflexively for his wrist, trying to pull him off, trying to hang on. "Yasha," Claire begs, a squeeze of her eyes disagreeing with his final words.

She can't breathe. Her eyes desperately search him for something she hopes is still there. "James --"

Winter Soldier has posed:
She backsteps and he follows. Her retreat brings her inevitably to the terminus point of her front door, the fragile bones of her spine hitting it as she fumbles for the handle. She touches it, grazes it with her fingers--

--and he is in front of her. His right hand takes her throat with a leisure that is almost insulting. There is no need for steel, not for someone as fragile and despairingly normal as she is, and sometimes he likes the tactile feel of a pulse in his hand. His prosthetic is not so sensitive, and he dislikes the inefficiency of holding on obliviously after the heart has already stopped.

He doesn't seem to notice her hand clutched at his wrist. Her whisper of his assigned name earns only a corrective tightening of his grasp. He looks through the begging shine of her upturned eyes. His own are empty, bored, bland, already hours and miles away. She is already a corpse to him, and he is thinking of the next kill after this. And the next. And the next.

James, she pleads.

He pauses. His blue eyes flicker. A twitch runs through his expression, some desperate last-ditch firing of damaged neurons trying to carry some thought to the forefront of his mind.

Then he breaks her neck.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
And just like that Claire's psyche schisms. Not shatters, thankfully, but the discord created from that perceived death is enough to send shockwaves through the woman.

If this were real she'd likely drop to the ground, but it's not and so, the shadows begin to pool around the woman again. Intending to attack her mind and pull forth even more -

Before those shadows can sink their claws into Claire again, a familiar figure will appear. One that isn't a figment of Claire's guilt, fear and worry.

A long-legged russet and grey coyote surveys the the woman.

Upon the fur of the coyote are symbols applied with a thick red ochre paste. Two thick stripes streak across the coyote's face with one band above the eyes and another below. The marks upon her fur glowing lightly with power.

A rudimentary armor against all that's held within the other Coyote's psyche.

The keen eyed coyote will circle around the woman, the animal's bright yellow eyes sharp with intelligence and worry. While Mercy has very few dealings with this particular plane of existence, she does have some understanding of magics to allow her instincts to guide her. And they scream for her to wake Claire up.

As such, the coyote allows a sharp YIP to shatter the oppressive silence.

Then another and a third and with each strident call the miasma of torture and pain around Claire begins to fall away, until she finds herself within a blank and gray space; the shadows pushed aside. A certain coyote a handspan away.

Then a cold wet nose will touch Claire's hand.

WAKE UP.

Claire Temple has posed:
Claire Temple's eyes open.

Her first breath comes sudden and rough and /painful/, a shock of resurrection to a mind believing itself dead.

She animates with a shudder, finds her hands, and braces herself on her forearms to find life in a sharp, laboured series of back-breaking coughs, desperately gulping in air.

Her eyes open, gazing emptily down into nowhere. Claire stares down at her familiar fingers.

Then she remembers. One hand finds her throat, touching over her pulse and trachea, before reaching around to feel the still-intact bones of her cervical vertebrae. Yasha, she thinks. James Barnes. No, the other one, with his hand around her neck. She heard her own bones snap.

Nothing hurts. She's intact. She's alive. She doesn't understand --

Sitting up, her eyes open on her new world. Forever, formless grey, ceiling her from above and grounding her from below, no shape and no texture. The woman's searching eyes whorl to their whites, trying so hard to rationalize and comprehend, as the rest of her begins to tremble at the corners.

Until she realizes she's not alone. There, at her side, a coyote.

Claire remembers seeing a coyote before. Her lips part, but no sound comes free.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
The coyote watches. Witnesses that rebirth, if you will, and then the confusion, the panic.

It's almost cruel to the Nurse, but nothing can be done about it, nor make it any better. Not yet, at least.

When the woman finally turns her gaze to the coyote, Claire will find that yellow gaze still watching her. Her lost voice earns a gentler yip from the coyote.

I know. It seems to say. You're confused. It'll be okay.

Words unspoken, but perhaps felt thanks to the place they're trapped in.

And then, once Claire has shaken off the majority of her shock the coyote rises to her four feet. Before she moves, however, there's one last touch of nose upon hand. With that touch power flares arounds the Night Nurse -

- and upon her dominant hand a mark appears.

It's an old simplified geometric symbol, something the Blackfoot Tribe uses. Two diamonds set upon their sides, one in the other, and in the center of that second diamond is a dot.

North, South, East and West represent itself in that first diamond. The second lends itself to the spirit world and its the second that glows brightly with a vibrant green light.

Once Claire's warpaint appears the coyote turns away. She'll walk a few steps, stop, wait for Claire to follow and then walk again.

Their journey takes them out of the gray space and into rolling fields, the fields themselves resplendent in various shades of red.

Their destination isn't far, just across the way, where another figure resides. Trapped. Tortured. And familiar.