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It had all gone by too fast, far too fast. Sevika grunted as she practically rammed the door to Silco's office open using her shoulder. Thankfully it wasn't locked, she wouldn't have been able to get in then, considering her arms were currently occupied with carrying the owner of the room she just busted into.
His body was slack but blazingly warm. She made her way over to the sofa and propped him up there, silently swearing under her breath. She should have expected this. Unreliable contacts, guns, high tensions. He said he wanted to talk to them himself. She was such a fool. Maybe she could have been faster. Maybe she should have insisted Silco not come at all.
One in the leg and one in the abdomen. The pain had made him unable to stand but he'd gaged himself that they didn't hit any vitals. Sevika couldn't be sure until she checked. A combination of lack of presence and refusal to practice from the nearby clinics had led her to be responsible for this kind of thing at the moment. They had a doctor, at one point. But he was flighty and unreliable, here one moment then gone the next. Always a little too absorbed into his own projects to be there in an emergency. She swore again. If he ever crawled out of the hole he'd dug himself into, she'd find a way to fuck his face up even worse than it already was.
Silco, in contrast, was awfully calm about the whole thing. Well, calm wasn't quite right. His breathing was quick and shallow and his thin body shook with the pain his new wounds had caused him. His eyes flitted about the room but his expression conveyed a certain amount of familiarity with it all. He didn't cry or whimper or scream, he just sat there while his chest rose and fell uncontrollably and waited for her. He groggily pivoted his head to look up at the ceiling beams.
"Is she-?" Sevika half-asked as she took her cape off and slid it under her boss in an attempt to not let the blood ruin the couch.
"No. And she shouldn't be, at least for a bit. But let's make this quick."
He seemed relieved to know his daughter wasn't seeing him like this. Probably less out of a fear he'd appear weak to her and more out of the worry that she might have another one of her episodes. All the more reason to sort this out ASAP.
"Right."
Sevika left the couch and started rummaging through the drawers. Candle, needle, thread, tweezers, clean rags. She lit the candle and cleaned the tweezers in the flame. She was not doctor, but she didn't need to be. She'd been an expert at cleaning wounds since she was twelve, something she had been very proud of at the time but eventually grown to resent. It was useful, but she often wondered what she'd be good at if she hadn't needed to learn it. If she lived in a world where she had the freedom to choose, would she ever even have thought of learning? Would she have learned something else?
Finding the sterilization sufficient she turned to Silco, who predictably hadn't moved an inch from where she'd placed him. He stared at her expectantly and without a word Sevika climbed onto the couch and manuvered her robotic arm to pin his chest and arms to the couch. She tried her best to use her knees to press his legs down without irritating the wound there. Silco didn't react to this. After all, he'd asked her to do it after the first impromptu wound cleaning ended with her getting a black eye and him in worse pieces than he already was. Self-addmitedly, he had a propensity for "fighting back" when recieving medical care. Like his breathing and the shakes, this was involuntary on his part. His body would simply react whether he willed it or not, making him claw like a cornered animal, desperate to escape.
Sevika had treated people who reacted strongly to the pain before. Squirming, crying, shaking and yes, even people who struck back. She thought she'd seen it all, but she'd never encountered anybody with the same ferocity Silco fought against the knife with.
"Just try not to break any of my bones."
Starting with the bullet in his abdomen, she pulled his dress shirt up just enough to get a view of it. She gave a quick glance up at Silco, who was looking back at her, still motionless underneath her grip and about as excited to do this as she was.
"Here I go." She said as she jammed the tweezers into the bloody hole the bullet had left.
Silco made a sound that could be closest compared to a growl and his body jolted and writhed violently, his restrained hands desperately trying to find purchase on the fabric of the couch, Sevika's metal arm, anything. Several profane words left his mouth and Sevika grunted and pressed her boss further into the padded back of the couch so he wouldn't get any leeway to escape. She dug the bullet out and threw it on the ground. Placing a rag over the now open wound to slow the bleeding she paused to let him rest for a moment. His breathing was rougher than before and he was sweating, his usually slicked back hair starting to unravel itself.
"Don't wait too long." He panted "Finish it quickly."
Already in the process of cleaning and resterilizing the tweezers Sevika nodded and quickly went in for round two. She was always impressed with the strength he displayed. He'd always been regarded as quite frail, and to this he'd usually say something like
"Animals who are desperate can achieve things they cannot even imagine when they are safe"
And she supposed it was true. When he writhed in her grip there was a specific gleam in his eye. A roaring tide bursting out of its host and seeking to ruin anything in its path. It was a good thing, then, that Sevika was a very solid dam.
When it came to sewing the wounds shut, Silco was often a bit nicer. She still held him, but the first few outbursts usually tapped all his energy, transforming him from a crushing wave back to the wounded man on the couch who was just desperate for this to be over. Now she just needed to clean the wounds and dress them.
"It was stupid of me to let you come. I should have gone alone." She snipped a piece of cloth into a bandage.
"I insisted. You did exactly as you should have." Silco's voice was hoarse from the outbursts, she could barely hear him as he spoke.
"What if you died from this, huh? What do you think would happen then? You're the future of the undercity, it won't exist without you. Why would you carelessly throw yourself into danger like that?"
She heard him hiss and she felt his body tense as she went over a particularly nasty part of the stitched-up hole
"I wanted to see our clients for myself. I didn't die. And I won't."
He weakly raised his hand to grip Sevika's metal arm, who was still holding parts of his body pinned to the couch.
"I'll sort it. I need you to trust me to."
She sighed as she finished dressing his wounds, getting off him and letting herself sink into the couch next to him.
"I know you will. I do."