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Nymphaea finds the ocean a stabilizing force, even when she is too far inland to stand at its edges. It's carried inside of her, and from that she draws her strength. No matter how far from the sea she may find herself, it feels as if a little bit of the deep currents are within her, flowing and connecting her with something larger than herself, something eternal and anchored that she can rest within.
She is not a trained medical professional. She’s not Francis, who has long worked as a physician and manager of the Rye Sanatorium. Nymphaea only manages the operations, hires nurses and allocates funds; all tasks that she was France’s acolyte for but tend to become overwhelming now that she is the sole person shouldering them. Her experience picking nurses comes largely down to having been a patient, having spent so much of her life and afterlife alternating between medical and mental hospitals.
There’s a lot she’s afraid of slipping. She wants to do right by her patients and nurses alike, but that girl who ached to drown still lives inside of her. At the end of each day, Nymphaea takes moments for herself. She breathes in deeply, closes her eyes, and feels what remains of the ocean inside of her.
As a girl, her lungs tried to drown her no matter how far from the sea she went. Called asthma by those diagnosing, she felt it as a yearning to drown. Bronchioles swelling shut as nonexistent water flooded them. Depression written on a diagnosis pad, her mind sinking perpetually ever deeper underneath dark waters. Her final living choice of walking peacefully into the waves was less of a depressive suicide and more of closing a circle that had been written by her own body.
Nymphaea opens her eyes. She disrobes for the night, fabric pooling neatly in her hamper. Her chest is a void, only the bones of her ribcage and the softly pulsing silver core that replaced her heart. She traces a finger over the glowing teal on her ribs and smiles fondly to herself.
It doesn’t hurt. It never really did, actually, after the water had filled her lungs. The ocean took some of her flesh in offering and left her with the silver core and remaining flesh that carries poison. Even if it prevents her from touching humans with bare hands or too much of her clothed body, she still views it as a gift. The ocean declared she would be able to protect others in her afterlife.
She’s studied the luminescence of her bones. Just because she’s not been able to be educated in medicine or science professionally, Francis gave much expertise and left behind both a reference library and a knowledge of how to learn more. That too is a gift from the sea. A bacteria, this one entirely peaceable, that lives atop her bones. It lives with a great many sea creatures, Nymphaea has learned, and she feels oddly pleased that its chosen to colonize her as well.
She feels like that’s what lets her feel the tides within her at all times. This softly glowing link to the sea that birthed her, killed her, held her, and sent her with the only boons the ocean can ever give. Gifts of life and death, eternity offered by a being that is distant from humanity yet attempting to be benign.
Her bones, her little collection of fischerii that she feeds with her eternally replenishing not-quite-life, provide enough dim light for Nymphae to navigate her familiar room by. It’s an important part of her grounding ritual, to view herself as a part of a whole, and that whole something vast and grand beyond herself. Her ‘heart’ beats with life that the little remains from the sea pick up. The ocean embraces her down to the very marrow.
Underneath her gentle touch, a fingertip ritualistically counting each rib as if to say goodnight to her symbionts, the luminescence flares for a moment. Biologically it’s just a touch reaction, but Nymphaea still chooses to view it as an acknowledgement of life and care. Her glowing sea will protect her, she will care for it, and in the same way that she provides for these organisms that light up her bedroom she can provide for the patients in the sanitorium. In the way that the ocean, far away as it may be, stabilizes her, she can be that same gentle island for those who rely on her.
Everything is cyclical, mirrored indefinitely into fractals. The ocean currents ebb and flow with ghostly currents in the cilia of microorganisms. Nymphaea pulls a nightgown on, and the glow of her bones is still faintly visible through gauzy fabric she chose for that exact reason.
As a child, she had a candle on through the night, something to ease her numerous worries of death and something to lull herself by watching the flame flicker. Now her bones warm her to sleep. All in the world live by cycles, life and death and rebirth, she thinks, even if those cycles are things that cannot all be seen in a human scale. One day her kind and dear little bacteria, her spots of light that link her to the ocean, will come with her as she returns to the sea when the silver core comes out, and she will be their food as they were her stability. It’s poetic, she thinks. Even a newly minted scientist can still have a bit of the poetic within them.