Work Text:
Friday 25th July 2042 (Gregorian), 15:22
216 Kleopatra's Stable Orbit Operative Station "Mark Anthony",
Commercial District C-2, University Hospital, Guests' Gardens.
If Jack thought time lost meaning in school, she had to convene that a hospital stay warped its concept in unconceivable ways no human should be made to experience, making the days blend together in a fuzz while the day itself is built so that she can tell the hour without a clock.
Her mornings for the past few weeks have been a nearly uninterrupted cycle of sleep, food, and checkups, while the afternoons have made her feel like a foreign dignitary with a schedule chockfull of audiences.
In it, Si-woong's sudden appearances — sometimes in a white coat and a seriously smug look as he follows a resident around, and others in stuff she's only seen people wear in movies to play on his phone while he hides from whoever he must have irked —, the only real cut to her otherwise clockwork-punctual hospital routine where even her pool of guests would roughly follow the same pattern as everything else in her day…
Wake up at 6:15am for the first round of visits, nurses checking her vitals and giving her medicines she's not even sure she needs, asking her how she's feeling…Beside numb, that is, to then drift to sleep again.
Breakfast at 8am. She still gets some of her nutrients from IVs, but after days of a carefully planned liquid diet, she's started seeing some color and texture again, and the nutribags spacing further away into her routine. Nothing world-changing just yet, boiled foods being the latest revolution she was afforded, but she can appreciate how the trays they give her keep the veggies away from the carbs and those away from proteins. None of those are foods she'd have considered breakfast foods before — except maybe the hot soy milk, something she'd learned to appreciate during her year on the Poseidon — but it's food she can chew, and that alone makes it comforting.
At 10am on odd days it's time for her physical therapy appointments, where she practices walking on old-style prostheses, waiting for the doctors' decision on her chance to get fancy ones like she's seen on Si-woong…While on even days a second round of visits takes place, this time with a resident — often Dr. Zhang, the head of the ward, sometimes people she'd not caught the name of quite yet — leading a gaggle of fresh-faced and duckling-like students, explaining her case and having them get some hands-on experience in checking in on patients in a controlled environment, asking them questions on symptoms they had her make up on the spot…
How to properly palpate to feel the liver, pushing with their finger pads under the ribcage while the patient's breath pushes it down. How to tell if it's swollen or if there's tenderness in the back where spine and ribcage meet to gauge kidney health and the source of a back pain. How to push on the abdomen right under the right iliac crest diagonal from the navel to feel for problems, and how an increase of pain on pressure's release there was their problem.
Not that it'd ever be hers, her appendix gone years before her legs. Neither did she mind being a guinea pig too much, any distraction a welcome reprieve in a place where even her intranet access is limited by her ability to understand its contents.
Just like with breakfast, her 12pm lunch started with a dearth of variety — mostly lightly salted broths — which then gave way to a plain porridge, to slowly re-introduce flavor and textures over the days as they saw her starved stomach get used to working again after that forced IV diet. While she didn't really mind any of that, the lack of cold drinks was the one thing she'd have loved to complain about…Had she had the guts for it, that is, the lady bringing her meals such a friendly face even as neither shares a common tongue that it would feel mean to task her with more work even if asking nicely.
At 12:30pm the first guests usually start arriving.
She would have liked being able to say who came over on what day, even just as a way to build back her internal clock and not rely exclusively on her phone to know how long until she gets to use the station's radio transceiver to talk to her gram again, but truth is that people either visit her nearly daily, or none of them has their day off be the same twice in a row.
Xinyi is usually the first one to show up, in the daily camp, and on a lucky day she'd pass by twice — the first on her lunch break, the gym she works at minutes away from the hospital, and the second in the evening with her friends or siblings — and albeit her lack of confidence with speaking in English, they have no trouble chatting, the amazon sometimes bringing her stuff to read — short stories she penned herself inspired by their chats, or the odd English editions in her collection —, and sometimes giving her tips to supplement her physical therapy with and help manage the aches from spending her days mostly between a bed and a wheelchair.
Jack has to admit, at least to herself, that sometimes she asks Xinyi to show an exercise again for her own amusement even though she's understood it the first time…Especially when Xinyi happens to be sleeveless. Nothing wrong with appreciating the fruits of her hard work, right? If else, Xinyi seemed thrilled to have someone beside her twin interested in the progresses of her own workouts…
As Xinyi gets ready to leave and return to the gym for her afternoon shift, sometimes Artem, and maybe a few of his coworkers, follow if there's the chance.
Artem is a peculiar guy.
Jack's first impression was that he'd call her a slur for breathing his way, everything from his buzz cut to his build and choice of attire when off duty suggesting the kind of trouble you'd expect from a fanatical soldier more than a firefighter, and yet he knocks even when the door is open and while it took him a while to start talking the first time, he soon ended up reminding her of her gram — talking of his pet rats like she talks of her dog, and knitting while helping her learn a few useful sentences in Chinese on the rare days in which he has the time for it…He even made her a beanie, 'for when the HVAC is under maintenance', he says.
God, she misses her gram so much…It's fantastic that they know each other fine now, but knowing her pod passed the Mark Anthony's shipment window by three days and it will be at least a year, if not more, before she can go home—
Jack sighs, the sudden nostalgia distracting her from recounting her monotonous routine to fill the time and whine about something to the flowerbeds coasting the garden's paths.
Xinyi after her own lunch, and Artem right after.
Sometimes it's the engies, sometimes it's someone she knows with in tow people she's going to see once and never again, and lastly it's Haoran, who she'd love to talk to without Si-woong getting in the way like an attention-starved cat…But even though he's seen Haoran without Xinyi on occasion, she's seen him without Si-woong only on the day in which he brought her the news that they managed to contact her family back on Earth.
It kinda sucks.
Not as much as, well, everything else, but it's absolutely a droplet in her bucket of suck, that the one person who looks like he'd understand that anxiety and fears she tries to lock away, least it is used against her, would also be the one person she never gets to actually chat to.
It's hard to confide in people who look like they got no problems of their own — even when they're professionals the hospital sends her way—, and it's impossible to confide in who looks like he is the problem, Haoran though?
She could ask him advice, and even were he to have no answers, it'd bring her comfort.
Wish only that he weren't guarded by a pale sphinx keeping tight to its riddles.
Stretching her shoulders and slapping the wheel of her chair as she grabs its hand rims, she starts making her way through the garden once more, her arms rested enough from her previous leg of its winding paths to continue her exploration of that artificial ecosystem, as beautiful as it is sterile.
There's no bug buzzing there where they can't control them, nor birds chirping where they can fly where they shouldn't and without its sounds, the little thicket of evenly spaced trees feels uncanny, like something out of an unfinished game made by someone too concerned with maximizing the amount of trees per square foot than with their flow under the eye which sees them.
They told her of the station's gardens and their beauty, but this one right here must have been an afterthought in that regard.
Just like her Fate in her parents' choice to drag her millions of miles away from home.
If only that were as easy a fix as someone taking the time and a crane to move the still young trees around.
If only that were as sensible as the simple money calculation which surely made them forego a landscape artist for this garden.
But nobody is going to fix the trees and make them look natural now that the hospital is running, just like no one is going to fix her parents' choice now that they're gone.
She'll stroll around another hour and a half, unless someone comes looking for her, and then head back in time for her 6 pm dinner.
After that, she'll read the book Xinyi lent her yesterday or the day before, until at 9pm, the nurse on rotation will pass by and ask her if there's aught she needs before sleep.
She'll switch to her phone and watch videos that must be hysterical for those who understand them, considering how they still make her giggle or cringe even now that she doesn't, and at 10pm it will be lights-out, marking a full rotation on the hamster wheel she currently lives on…