Roll the Dice - Chapter 1 (2/9)

[mangacat201]

Prologue

35N 23’ 32.40’’ – 103W 53’ 41.84’’

1800 hrs LT 06/13/2009

The sound of the ventilation system grated into the depth of Jensen’s brain, straight to where a serious migraine wanted to form, but he set part of his frontal lobes aside to meditate it away, or at least he liked to think of it
that way. Normal people called it denial, or so he’d heard. He hated migraines though, so he just didn’t get them, mind over matter, or something like that. The little pop-up window in the corner of his screen told him that he had missed dinner – again – and that there was a new arrival due today. He skimmed the file cursorily and then left his lab to walk down the bare concrete corridor that led up to elevators to the surface. Chris was waiting for him close to the sliding doors already, and he huffed out a gruff greeting when the door swished open for Jensen, before turning to look out into the hangar with his hands buried in the dented pockets of his lab coat.

“We got an ETA yet?”

“Station said something about ten minutes. What do you think of this one? Read the file?”

“Skimmed it. I’ll have to have a look myself, but that sounds like some pretty extensive damage.”

“Yeah, from what I heard, they barely got him stabilized enough for transport. Sometimes I wonder why they even bother with those cases, since most of them only end up in the can anyway.”

Jensen grinned a little cynically. It might sound conceited, the way they treated the subjects more like things than persons, but it was really the only way to get by in their job. If you got attached, you got hurt, period. Didn’t mean that Jensen was very good playing by the rules, but for the most part he managed to keep his distance. He had to, or he wouldn’t have been able to be good at what he did. The best even.

“Yes, but you know you like a challenge. And this one’s surely going to be one, no doubt about that. But if he’s a fighter, he’ll pull through.”

Chris looked at him out of the corner of his eyes and then back out the opening of the hangar where a cloud of dust was visible, blown up by the chopper that approached the airfield.

“Well, it looks like the party’s about to start then. Let’s put those tax dollars to work, shall we?”

Jensen found himself back in those bleak corridors about five storeys underneath the surface of the earth, following the familiar blip of a heart monitor on the way to his lab. He always marvelled at the way big, agile young men seemed to be reduced to looking small and whimsical in hospital beds. Maybe it was because his patients were without exception largely comatose, and so close to death that they were beyond the help of ordinary medical means. No one else was ever considered for their program for good reason. Jensen rubbed at the bridge of his nose under his glasses. Sometimes he wondered if they had the right to play god like this. He attempted to prolong lives by any means available, since an ordinary clinical trial was not exactly an option for their methods. But then he reminded himself that they were saving lives, the lives of young and dedicated people who had put themselves in harm’s way for their country, and the argument about whether they had the right to withhold the treatments that could save them fit just as well the other way around. What they learned this way would someday revolutionize medical procedures and trauma therapy all over the world, or so he hoped. It was a fine line that Jensen had to mark out and tread anew every day, but most nights he lost little sleep about his musings. Maybe it was because he didn’t sleep all that much anyway.  

A tall and imposing figure waited at the entrance of his lab, clad in a pristine uniform, cap tucked neatly under his arm. He looked as smart and unruffled as every time he brought Jensen an order for a new arrival, but as the med-techs rolled the bed into the lab and began to set up the equipment, Jensen hesitated in the door where he noticed the fatigue deepening the lines on Lieutenant Commander JD Morgan’s face.

“Commander,” he received a curt nod as a greeting, nothing new there. ”The journey went without a problem, I hope?”

“Sure thing, if you call a nerve-wracking three hour ride through the desert, and two code blacks in the air ‘without a hitch’, be my guest.”

Jensen looked beyond the glass door that had slid closed in front of them before glancing back at the Lieutenant Commander. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t had before, not even close to the worst actually. Still, the tension was palpable, but he couldn’t really put his finger on what was different.

“Is everything alright?”

“Yes, sure. Let’s get this over with then, alright?”

They’d done this often enough, but protocol couldn’t be circumvented and records had to be kept in order, no matter how top secret and confidential your work was.

“Prof. Dr. Jensen Ross Ackles, through the power invested in me by the government of the United States of America, I grant you permission to start emergency restorative treatment on subject 0719-J11854T-P82, order effective immediately. Good luck, Doc.”

Jensen took a deep breath and nodded at Morgan.

“Good to have this over with, I always feel like I’m about to get married when you start that speech.”

Finally, Jensen saw a small smile twitch at the edge of Morgan’s lips, but the concerned frown never left the man’s face. He stepped forward to the opening doors to get to work when a hand on his arm stopped him in his tracks.

“Ackles, I… I’d rather you save this one, alright?”

Jensen looked back at the Commander’s hooded eyes and couldn’t shake the feeling that it was strangely personal this time around. Normally he wouldn’t be bothered by that, couldn’t be, but he still felt the need to reassure the man he’d worked with for several years now.

“You know that if anybody is going to be able to do it, it’s me.”

There was no bragging involved here, just a simple truth.

With those words, he left the Lieutenant Commander standing outside, while the swish of the doors indicated their closing behind him. He had work to do.

Jensen stepped up to the control panel where Chris was already sitting, tapping away at the keyboard with his eyes fixed firmly to the screens.

“What have you got?”

“Enough to open a scrap yard, once we’re done here. Polytraumatic injuries, patient in haemodynamic shock, grade III haemorrhagic renal failure, with hypercalciaemia and billirubinaemia and another grade III open comminuted fracture of the femur with rupture trauma to the abductor group and the patellar tendon; add spontaneous supracondylar humeral amputation due to disruption trauma on the right side and that’s not even counting all the soft tissue damage due to the shrapnel and the head region. Plus, I think we might get a problem with pulmonary decompensation real soon. Where do you want to start?”

Jensen looked at the preliminary scans and diagnostics sharply, ignoring the bustle of the medical personnel behind him with practiced ease.

“I’d say let’s work our way outwards. Take care of the lung and heart first, then see if the kidneys are salvageable. Then we take care of the extremities and leave the head for last, he’s going to need to breathe a lot more urgently than he needs to see. Get the shrapnel out as much as possible if it’s in our way, but leave it for later if it’s not in our immediate reach. I don’t really like how the muscle damage is looking around the fracture, we’re probably going to have to add compensatory enhancement to the left side as well.”

Chris nodded and added the note to the preliminaries. Then he stood and barked out the orders to prepare the operation now. Jensen sat down dragged the keyboard near, keeping an eye on the less than stellar vitals and the cameras that allowed him to follow the surgical procedures while he started calibrating the labs interface for pulmonary tissue replacement. This was going to be a long night.

He remembered the summer when he’d fallen out of the big oak in his Granma’s backyard and broke his arm. He had played in that tree countless times without ever so much as wobbling, but the branch he’d stepped on had some loose bark halfway up, and his foot just slid off sideways when he put weight on the patch. There was a stuffed and heavy feeling in his head in the stretching second he just floated in the air, a lurch in his stomach when he felt like he was just going to stay suspended in midair for a moment, before the ground rushed towards him with dizzying speed. He remembered how the thud had reverberated through his whole body, and that there was little pain in the first couple of seconds. Only him blinking, stunned and thinking about how funny his Gran looked when she raced off the porch in a speed he wouldn’t have thought was in the old girl at her age. They had rushed to the hospital instantly after, and he had spent the night puking from a mild concussion, vertigo making the world fuzzy and nauseating, but thankfully overlaying the experience of getting his arm set and plastered up to above his elbow. He hadn’t been able to move his arm for half the summer or go swimming, which was way worse in his book. Also, the sweat on his skin in the cast itched something fierce, and there wasn’t really anything he could do about it. And he sure remembered the scolding he’d received from his Momma when she’d found him trying to scratch on the inside with a stick.

The same itch was assaulting him now, and he couldn’t move his arm to rub at the irritated skin.

Come to think of it, he couldn’t move much of anything right now.

Somehow he thought that should have bothered him more than it did.

It was just annoying. Just a little itch.

Like blood flowing back into a limb that’d fallen asleep, nothing more.

“Jensen, you gotta leave. Right now, I mean it, you haven’t been out of here for about thirty-six hours, and if you go on, you’re just going to faint from exhaustion and be no use to him for days.”

Jensen swatted Chris away like the angry flies that had been buzzing around his head for hours. His partner was quite a bit more persistent than the buzz and dragged Jensen up from his seat like he was a toddler. Come to think of it, he felt quite like one too, legs buckling under his weight like they were made of straw. Nevertheless, he reached out to the keyboard, only a couple of calculations left until they were set, but Chris didn’t let him get near the
controls.

“Jensen, Jen… come on, you gotta get out of here. We’ve got the internal damage under control, he’s going to make it through the night, you hear me? You need sleep, or you won’t be able to work your magic on the cosmetic bits, alright? Now, let’s go.”

Jensen opened his mouth to say something. He wanted Chris to let go and let him get back to work that instant, but nothing save for a garbled sigh came past his lips as he was wrestled out of the lab and down the hallway to his suite. He vaguely sensed how Chris dragged his lab coat off and wrangled the shirt over his head without bothering with the buttons. When he was down to his boxers, his friend shoved him into the shower cubicle and the shock of icy cold water jolted his system into gear in half a second flat.

“What the flying fuck, Chris, you ASSHOLE,” he shouted over the slowly heating water.

“I had to get you awake enough to not fall over and crack your head open in the shower somehow. I’m not going to be the one shovelling the grey matter back in if you break your skull, we’re not at neuro-cortial tissue yet.”

Jensen let the strong spray of the shower beat down on him for a moment to work past the tremors caused by the cold.

“And you put me in here in my boxers, you fucker.”

“Ain't interested in your junk, buddy. I don’t play that way, you know that. Next time I’m shoving you in there fully clothed, just for the record.”

Jensen scoffed and turned off the water, stepping out to be enveloped in a huge fluffy towel, nose to nose with Chris.

“You love me, bitch.”

“Don’t get to full of yourself, self-sacrificing prick. One of these days I’m just going to leave you there, drowning in your own drool.”

“Wouldn’t.”

“Totally would. Now get your ass to bed, I’m not carrying you there, princess.”

“Don’t call me princess, hate that.”

“I know, go to sleep, Jensen.”

The last thing he heard was the emphasis in Chris’ worried mother-hen voice before he went under.

Jensen took a deep breath and coughed when the air rasped over his parched throat. He blinked groggily into his dimly lit room and then turned his head to rub his nose into the pillow to see if he could do the elusive sleep thing again, since he’d had approximately a two hour cat nap, and he was going right back under, thank you very much.

“There you are, princess, back among the living.”

Jensen contemplated pushing his face fully into the pillow and subjecting the mattress to a fist flying temper tantrum for a full second, but he was thirty, and such a thing would be unbecoming. Instead he cracked one eye open to glare at Chris and asked with a hoarse voice:

“How l’ng ‘ve I b’n g’n?”

Chris raised an eyebrow to indicate how slurry speech was so not funny, but he made a show of looking closely at his watch before he answered.

“Way I see it, about… hmm… fifteen hours? Max.”

That had Jensen jack-knifing off the bed, only just realizing that he was completely bare under the sheets, but in the adrenaline rush, he was fully prepared to race out to the lab clad in simple linen.

“Shit, gotta check up on Jay. Why didn’t you fricking wake me up?”

“You looked like you needed, badly. Still do in fact. Hold your horses though, he’s breathing. And how many times do I have to lecture your about giving them names?”

“You know that I don’t like to talk to numbers. I’ve just shortened the file designation to sound like more of a person than a piece of military equipment.”

“Jensen…”

“I know, I know, you keep telling me, and I keep doing it, can we move on? So, he’s breathing? Really?”

“Well, it’s not like we can really trust him to do it on his own as long as he’s in an induced coma, but yes, the preliminary readings look surprisingly promising. If he stays as stable as he is right now, we should be able to start on the fracture and the muscle restoration today.”

Jensen swung his legs over the edge of the bed and scrubbed his hand through his tousled hair before getting up to dress.

“That’s excellent news, I’m going to go in, finish those approximations, and then we get into it. And for the record, I’ll kill you next time you let me stay out for that long in such a crucial period.”

“For the record, you maybe the brains of this operation, but there’s capable people on this team that put a lot of money, time and intelligence into their extensive professional education, and you should stop offending them by trying to do everything on your own.”

“Chris, I know that…”

“Nothing! You overwork yourself like that again, and you might not be at your best when it’s really needed. Which means that first, you’re going to take a shower, then you’re having a healthy breakfast, pardon, early dinner, and then you can go into that lab again; we clear?”

Jensen wanted to tell Chris that the times he had to be at his best were all the time, and that he couldn’t ask things of his people that he wasn’t prepared to give himself, but they’d had this discussion so many times that he could play it in his head without even opening his mouth. Jensen would get into a problem and get lost in his work, and Chris would be there to drag him out and make him take care of himself. Didn’t mean that he had to like being kept from the lab any longer than absolutely necessary, but the doe-eyed pout worked on everyone BUT Chris, so he had little choice except to accept his fate and relent.

When he was back among the familiar beeps and ticks that made up the sound of his lab, Jensen felt his breath rush out, and the tension in his shoulders ease. It wasn’t that he was particularly keen on not taking care of himself, or that he was completely anti-social, but he was very dedicated to his work and felt most comfortable if he could put his considerable intelligence to work for the well-being of others. He could feel his mental Chris lecturing him about savior-complexes in the back of his head, but that didn’t change the fact that he owed this debt. For the first time in a long while, he didn’t head for the control panel immediately though. Normally, he would do his best to fix whatever was broken, and, while he really didn’t like to think of their patients like impersonal file numbers all the time, there was no particular need to get invested in their persons beyond that. Yet this time, he stepped up to the sturdy plastic barrier that cordoned off part of the lab to create a sterile environment for the treatment. Jensen couldn’t step behind it without suiting up, but even though the material blurred the edges a little, he had a good enough view of the man who was enclosed behind it, tubes and nodes measuring his life in blips and swishes. Maybe it was the way Lieutenant Commander Morgan had made it personal. Maybe it was the very intriguing data he’d received from the first neuronal readings, but had hardly had time to pursue in depth, but Jensen felt a strange pull towards this man. It was nowhere close to actual attraction, or anything, after all he only knew the man’s looks from the scarce photographic evidence in the file – which didn’t really compare to the battered body in that bed five feet away right now. And certainly not due to a sparkling personality since comatose patients were not exactly famous for their stellar conversational skills.

“What is it about you, Jay?”

His only answer was the steady sound of a heartbeat, and the quiet, timed swish of air pumping in and out. Jensen shook his head and called himself a fool in his mind, turning back to his work table to continue his calibrations. Still, he couldn’t help throwing a glance over his shoulder and wondering.

~*~

The small space was awash with activity, urgency palpable in the air, and Jensen was right outside, helpless to interfere and wondering where the hell they went wrong.

He remembered falling into the narrow shaft, foolishly falling backwards in play and hitting his head on the rim before he slid down the narrow tunnel, scraping his elbows on the rough wall until he hit the damp ground with a dull thud. He lay there at an awkward angle, feet over his head, and a crick in his neck, not enough space to scramble around and right himself so he could get back out. He was stuck, dizzy, heart racing from the fall, and it was difficult to breathe in the position he was in.

“Chris? Chris! Give me a fucking update, what the fuck is wrong in there?”

Static crackled over the intercom and Jensen was one second away from barging through the thin plastic walls, protocols be damned, but he had to stay out here to remain in control of running programs.

“Everything was working fine and suddenly his vitals went completely haywire… hold, hold that, Christ, keep it stable… Jensen I think… hell, I think he’s waking up.”

It was dark and smelled, and the faster he breathed the harder it was, panic lacing through his mind as he tried futilely to find purchase against the walls closing in on him. Bright spots danced in front of his eyes, and he started fighting the dizziness that threatened to drag him under with all his might.

“What? That can’t be, if he wakes up now the shock is going to kill him.”

“I know, Jensen, I’m doing my best to keep him from seizing and messing up all the structures, but we can’t just flood his system with sedatives and be done with it. If he doesn’t calm down, we’ll lose him.”

Jensen looked blankly at the screens, fingers hovering over the keyboard and brain wiped clean of any coherent thought. When his mouth opened, he startled himself with his own words.

“Let me talk to him.”

“What? Jensen, you…”

“Let. Me. Talk. To. Him. Christian.”

He couldn’t see anything clearly, not the walls, not the light from above that had to be there, shining into the shaft. It wasn’t that deep, he remembered. Something was very wrong, and the fear that gripped his insides wouldn’t even let him call out, so that someone might hear him. Someone had to be there, didn’t they? He hadn’t been playing alone, he knew that. Why was nobody coming to help?

A voice reached him, muffled as if through layers of cotton.

“Can you hear me? You gotta hang in there, little brother.”

“Jeff? Are you there?”

“I’m here, I can get you through this, but you have to calm down.”

“But it’s so dark down here, I’m scared!”

“I know it’s hard, but you’ve got to relax, buddy, so we can get you out of there, alright?”

“I… I don’t know if I can.”

“Please, if you don’t calm down, we can’t help you. Just take slow, even breaths, and we’ll have you out of there in no time.”

“O… okay, I’ll try.”

“That’s it, you’re doing great, just keep breathing slowly, and we’ll have you fixed in no time, alright?”

Static crackled back over the line for a second.

“Jensen? Jensen, you see this?”

“Yeah, I can see it, don’t stand there and gape, get to work NOW.”

Jensen sat back in his chair and looked at the screens in amazement. Jay’s vitals were stabilizing, and his body was settling down, so that team could continue their work. He’d never expected it to actually work, but there it was, right before his eyes. Suddenly there didn’t seem to be enough air in the room, and he felt as if the walls were closing in on him. Jensen could barely stay long enough to make sure that the team would be able to continue their work without further interruptions. He gasped a hurried “Gotta go for air” at Chris over the intercom and dashed out of the lab.

The ride in the elevator was agonizing. Normally he didn’t have the slightest problem with the enclosed space or the bare walls, but at this moment the tightness and the movement were nauseating. Perspiration sprang up on the skin of his forehead, sweat ran down his back, making his shirt stick uncomfortably to his lower back. He tapped his fingers anxiously against the cool metal of the doors, just stopping himself short of prying them open with his bare hands when the elevator finally reached the surface. Jensen stumbled out into the spacious, shady room of the derelict hangar building that housed the entrance to their facility, but it wasn’t enough. Breath coming out in short gasps, he hurried to the gate and fumbled at the latch with shaky fingers until it gave, and he stumbled out into the baking desert heat. For a moment he just stood there under the bright, open sky he rarely saw anymore, shielding his eyes from the glaring sun with both hands, and wondered why the heck he had just lost his shit big time in there.

Jensen lost track of how long he just stood there, bending down to prop his hands on his knees, closing his eyes to just breathe and sort his thoughts out. It could have been anything between thirty seconds and an hour to the moment when he flinched at the screech of the gate and the presence of another person cast a shadow over his head.

“What the fuck, Jensen?”

He kept his mouth shut in a tight line, ignoring the furious lilt in Chris’s voice and concentrated on breathing, and the way the sun burned the exposed skin of his neck.

“Seriously, Jensen, what the fuck did you think?”

“I didn’t.”

“What? Don’t bullshit me, how did you know it would work?”

“I didn’t”

He looked up at Chris with a glare that could have cut glass, grateful that he could finally focus his confusion and anxiety onto a target, turning it into a much more clear-cut emotion.

“I had NO IDEA, ok? I just went with it.”

“Jesus, Jensen you established a rapport down to what, level four, five, and you say you just went with it?”

“What you want me to say?”

“That you have seen it too.”

“I… what? The anomalies? Yes, I’ve fucking seen them and I don’t fucking know what to make of them, is that what you want to hear?”

“What I want to hear is that you haven’t done anything stupid.”

“What? No, you know that I don’t treat him any different than any other patient we’ve had.”

“Do I now?”

“Yes, and cut the crap, I don’t know how it happened, it was a spur of the moment thing, but it worked, didn’t it?”

“That’s not the point. You can’t just go lone wolf like that, leaving your team in the dark.”

“Wait a moment, what are you saying here? Are you implying that I… really, Chris? I didn’t fucking do anything, that’s all him.”

Chris looked stumped, then intrigued for a moment, and Jensen didn’t really know what to do with the fact that his best friend thought he was so far gone that he’d gone cackling mad scientist behind their backs, but he didn’t really have time to process before Chris pushed on in a completely different direction.

“Alright, alright, but that doesn’t explain why you ran out of the building in a full fledged panic attack after your patient just about died. Unless…”

“Unless, what?”

“Unless you did something real stupid. You get invested, but you don’t get attached. You can save them, but you can’t keep them. That’s the deal, Jensen, you know that.”

“I know that, Chris, and I’m not attached.”

“Doesn’t look like that to me.”

“You know what? Screw you. He’s still alive, and we didn’t completely wreck our work, I count that as a win. I can handle the rest myself, trust me.”

“Just see that you do, or you’ll get your ass stuck in some deep shit.”

Jensen huffed and scrubbed his hands over his head before turning away and walking back towards the building without another word. Good thing about arguing with Chris was that he’d cleared his head and could get back to work. A thread of unease lingered though and stayed with him the whole day.

Chapter Two