Chapter Text
The storm began just after midnight.
At first, it came softly enough to be ignored — rain whispering against the broad glass frontage of the Charles V. Keating Emergency and Trauma Centre as the city settled into the strange half-conscious rhythm of late-night Halifax. Warm spills of light from bars and streetlamps reflected in fractured ribbons of gold and neon across wet pavement; ambulance sirens rose and fell somewhere along the harbor; lightning flashed distantly, illuminating the low clouds over the ocean in pale violet branches before fading again into darkness. Inside the emergency department, beneath fluorescent lights and the constant noise of modern medicine, the weather remained somebody else’s problem.
By two in the morning, it had become violent.
Atlantic wind screamed against the hospital hard enough to rattle the windows in their frames, anything beyond the ambulance bay vanishing into silver sheets. Red and white glared through the tempest in blurred, distorted pulses, staining pooling water like diluted blood.
Nobody had the time to notice it worsening until paramedics and patients alike started arriving soaked through. Everything outside the department’s permanent bubble of controlled catastrophe tended to disappear on the best of nights.
Tonight was not the best night.
“BP’s dropping again.”
“I know.”
Eli reached for another saline flush, casting a glance at the trauma surgeon leaning elbow-deep over the patient on the table. Around them, Trauma Bay Three swarmed with movement — nurses crossing shoulder-to-shoulder without colliding, residents trying and failing not to look overwhelmed, respiratory therapists adjusting oxygen tubing while paramedics stripped soaked gloves from numb hands, and rainwater dripped steadily from the stretcher wheels.
The patient was maybe twenty, if not younger. Hard to remember the exact name and age that had been hastily read from a recovered piece of ID; harder still to tell beneath swelling, blood loss, and the awful blunt rearrangement of a human body after steel met concrete at highway speeds.
Motor vehicle collision. Driver ejected through the windshield. No seatbelt.
No chance, probably, though nobody in the room would say it aloud yet.
The young man’s face looked strangely peaceful under the oxygen mask despite everything else. Hastily cut clothing exposed one arm bent wrong. Bruising spread dark and ugly across his chest. Overhead, the cardiac monitor screamed intermittent alarms with the mechanical panic of a machine that knew exactly how close a body stood to giving up.
Eli pressed fresh gauze harder against the wound. Warm blood spilled steadily between her gloved fingers anyway.
“How long was extraction?” asked the resident opposite her, looking faintly green himself.
“Twenty minutes,” the paramedic answered.
The trauma surgeon swore quietly under his breath.
“Pressure?”
“Eighty over fifty and falling.”
“Push another unit.”
The patient stirred weakly beneath their hands, making a thin, frightened sound somewhere in the back of his throat before his eyes fluttered open through the haze of pain and shock. For one fleeting second, his gaze fixed on Eli’s face through the chaos surrounding him — terrified, painfully young, somebody’s child under the aftermath of a single bad decision — and something twisted sharply inside her chest before years of practice shoved the feeling ruthlessly back down where it belonged.
Compartmentalize.
Function first. Feel later.
If there was time later. Usually, there wasn’t.
“Hey,” she said near his ear, with a calm she actively had to force. “Stay with me, sweetheart. Eyes open.”
His gaze slipped away again almost immediately.
Outside, thunder rolled low as the room narrowed into logistics and urgency. Someone called for more blood products. Someone else adjusted suction. The trauma surgeon demanded another clamp without looking up, and Eli handed it over automatically, her body moving several steps ahead of conscious thought the way it always did after enough hours awake.
The boy coded nine minutes later.
Everything accelerated instantly, the atmosphere tightening like wire pulled too taut. Compressions began. A defibrillator was charged. Orders snapped back and forth across the bed in clipped succession. Sweat gathered damply along Eli’s spine and the monitor flattened into one endless, droning wail. Around the room, exhaustion sharpened everyone’s movements into something harsher and more desperate, all rough edges and adrenaline and refusal.
The resident doing compressions looked ready to collapse.
The attending looked grim.
Beyond the windows, the storm raged on, vast and indifferent.
Forty-three minutes after arrival, the trauma surgeon finally glanced toward the clock mounted above the doorway.
Silence settled in stages afterward.
Machines still beeped elsewhere in the department. Phones still rang. Somewhere down the hall, somebody laughed briefly at something — startled, almost delirious — before the sound disappeared again to the din of crackling pages and rain hammering against the windows. But inside Trauma Bay Three, something vital had simply stopped.
“Time of death: 1:47.”
Someone reached over and silenced the monitor.
The absence of sound landed harder than the alarms ever had.
Eli peeled bloody gloves from her hands and stared for one lingering second at the young man on the table, at the stillness that always arrived so suddenly in the end no matter how hard everyone fought against it.
Twenty years old, maybe. Dead before sunrise.
The sound of the fluorescent lights buzzed with insect persistence, at once too present and far too loud. Vaguely, Eli thought that she should probably sit down for at least a minute or two.
“Eli?”
She blinked.
Priya — an older RN, mouth pinched in perpetual worry — stood near the doorway, holding a chart against her chest.
“You alive?”
Eli could only assume so. The alternative probably wouldn’t ache so much.
“Debatable.”
“Good. Bay Six is asking for you.”
“Cruel.”
Priya snorted tiredly. “Your charm remains unmatched.”
By three-thirty, Eli had reset a dislocated shoulder, stitched a scalp laceration, helped security de-escalate a drunk university student trying to vape in the waiting room bathroom who had been far too willing to start a fistfight, and consumed half a cup of coffee gone cold enough to classify as a biohazard.
The storm only worsened. Rain lashed sideways across the ambulance bay now. Lightning flashed close enough to bleach the entire city white for half a heartbeat at a time before plunging everything back into darkness. Thunder rumbled over the hill in long growls and the occasional sky-tearing crash.
Still, it was all oddly removed from what could presently be considered reality.
Priya collapsed beside her in the staff lounge for exactly ninety two seconds before another overhead page dragged them both, groaning, upright once more.
“You look terrible,” came her colleague’s warm, though equally worn, comment. Eli rubbed at her eyes hard enough to see stars.
“That’s because I died four hours ago.”
“No, seriously. I’m getting Victorian.”
“Tuberculosis Victorian or haunted orphan Victorian?”
“Consumption, definitely.”
“Hot.”
Priya stole one of the crackers from her pitiful vending-machine dinner on the way to the door.
“You taking the ferry home?”
“If it hasn’t sunk.”
The older woman tsk’d. “Wouldn’t bet money on it tonight.”
A hard sigh churned gravel in Eli’s throat.
Halifax rent prices were an active crime. Normally, the ferry ride to her apartment in Dartmouth, on the opposite side of the harbor, felt almost meditative — dark water, chilled air, enough silence for her nervous system to recall how being human worked. Tonight, that peaceful commute probably looked more like God’s washing machine. Lucky her.
Her phone buzzed. Sidestepping a passing gurney, she took just long enough to slip the device from her pocket, keeping it tilted against her leg as she glanced down at the screen.
MOM
Are you coming to CB this weekend?
Of course her mother was awake to ask that at 3AM. Another buzz.
MOM
If you’ve got a day, Pop would love to see you.
She considered answering. Decided a moment later that that was probably best left for when she could afford to give it — and her family — longer than a heartbeat’s thought, and tucked her phone away again. When she lifted her head, Priya was waiting. Gratitude for the brief company bowled into her without grace.
A weak thumbs up, and the pair resumed their walk.
The triage station came into view down the corridor. Priya paused to sanitize her dry hands, hissing between her teeth. Eli walked a few steps backward, and the woman looked up to peer at her with a speculative frown.
“How many hours are you at now?”
“Don’t ask me questions I’ll have to lie about.”
“Eleanor.”
Eli grinned, which she could at least blame squarely on the fatigue. “Yes, mother?”
“I’m serious.”
And she was. She always was, when it came to any of them taking care of themselves. Or outright neglecting to.
“I know.”
Priya’s expression softened slightly. “You can’t keep doing doubles every week.”
“Oh, I think I can.”
“Until you collapse in a hallway.”
“If you say it, I just might.”
Another trauma came in just before dawn, paramedics wheeling the stretcher through the doors at speed.
The patient arrived pale underneath wet blankets, barely conscious and shaking violently as the paramedics machine-gun rattled off details: male, forty-six, winch malfunction aboard a commercial fishing vessel, significant crush injury to left arm, hypothermic on arrival.
Eli caught one look at the ruined appendage beneath blood-soaked dressing and immediately understood why the paramedic speaking looked pale.
Bad.
A glance out the windows, and something bitter pooled at the back of her throat. Any corporate bum sending their night fishermen out in such a mess deserved a long stay in a small cell.
The man screamed when they transferred him onto the trauma bed; raw, involuntary agony torn straight from somewhere animal. Eli moved so that she could lean into his line of sight.
“Easy,” she said firmly. “Easy, we’ve got you.”
The fisherman’s arm had been torn apart below the elbow. Skin hung in ragged strips, leaving visible mangled flesh and exposed bone, blood continuing to soak steadily through the temporary dressing. The surgeon — Matthews, hair grey at the temples and somehow looking far less dead on his feet than the rest of them — arrived moments later, already pulling gloves on, and the trauma bay was once again concentrated down into logistics and triage. Assessment was quick and efficient. Blood pressure. Pain management. Surgical consult. Tourniquet. Vitals. It was a checklist they all knew well, and familiarity was as sharp a tool as a scalpel when it mattered.
The fisherman kept asking if he was going to lose the arm.
Nobody answered directly. Which was still answer enough.
Matthews finally looked up from the scans and exhaled slowly through his nose.
“We don’t have a choice. Page the OR, make sure they’re ready for him.”
A fresh buzz of activity came to life, as steady and methodical as could be managed. Their patient tipped his head slightly toward Eli, eyes frightened. Involuntarily, the boy who had died on the table earlier that same morning flashed through her mind.
“Please,” he whispered hoarsely.
Eli swallowed hard. Counted backward from ten. Reached out to squeeze the man’s uninjured hand, offering a smile that felt gratifyingly softer than anything else happening.
“We've got you.”
And set to work.
Screw washing machine: the city was under assault from Satan’s pressure washer.
Eli stumbled along the waterfront sometime later with her jacket half-zipped and weariness clinging to her shoulders like wet cement. Her shift had ended eventually — somehow — though she barely remembered slipping on her boots or collecting her bag from the locker room before leaving the hospital behind.
Dawn hadn’t properly broken yet, leaving the world existing entirely in a liminal state of shades of black and slate grey. By some mercy, the power hadn’t gone out, and the city lights reflected across the churning water in fragments through fog. Gales tore viciously between buildings hard enough to sting exposed skin numb.
She should have called a cab.
Should have slept upstairs in the staff room until the weather eased.
Instead, she trudged toward the ferry terminal with twenty-two hours of wakefulness eroding holes straight through her concentration. The boardwalk was largely abandoned; most sane people had taken shelter hours ago. A lone gull shrieked somewhere overhead, nearly lost to drumfire thunder and the smashing of water against the piers below in violent bursts of white foam.
Eli shoved her freezing hands deeper into her jacket pockets and kept walking.
Then stopped.
Someone stood at the far edge of the pier ahead.
Tall. Motionless. The figure barely looked human through the rain — just a dark silhouette against water and stormlight, wind whipping long fabric around them in violent jerks and starts.
A flash of lightning, bursting white through violet and back again, and fractions of them clarified. Black boots. A long, deep blue coat. Soaked hair tied back.
Eli frowned.
“Hey!”
No response.
The figure swayed once–
Then stepped forward off the pier.
“Oh, fuck.”
Training overrode everything before fear even had time to materialize. Slipping precariously on wood, blinded by rain, Eli dropped her bag and ran.
By the time she reached the edge, the figure had already vanished completely into the black void below. There was no hesitation. She kicked off one shoe, then the other, and dove.
Eli loved the ocean. She was a strong enough swimmer; her parents had seen to it, as anyone with a modicum of reason raising young children on the coast would. But beyond that, it was fascinating. Beautiful. She could vaguely remember a time she had fallen in, off the dock at her grandfather's home in Cape Breton. The delight of watching bubbles of her breath dance towards the sunlit surface. The shimmering of fish against the rocky shallows. The way the blues shifted into the distant depths.
This was different. The Atlantic hit like concrete. Cold obliterated thought in an instant. Seawater swallowed her whole, the crashing current dragging viciously at her frame. Eli surfaced gasping hard enough to choke, and managed to catch hold of a piling.
“Hey!”
The downpour erased visibility beyond a few feet. There was no sign of the figure; no form, no shape, no substance. Nothing but darkness and the raging storm.
Panic surged sharp through her chest. She kicked harder against the current, searching blindly through saltwater and rain–
Something seized her ankle.
A hand.
Ice shot through her entire body. A jolting gasp was punched from her before she could clamp down on the instinct. A mistake.
Water rushed in where air left. Eli twisted violently, choking as cold fingers yanked downward with inhuman strength. The world spun sideways. Night closed overhead. And for one impossible second, she thought she saw light beneath the waves — gold and flickering, like lantern fire seen through glass.
Then, the harbor, and reality, disappeared.