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The ledger spread across his desk doesn't balance the way he needs it to, and he's been staring at the same column of figures for the better part of twenty minutes, pen tapping an idle, irritated rhythm against the edge of the paper.
Pantalone's latest disbursement arrived this morning, sealed with the usual understated efficiency the Fatui's treasurer brings to even the most consequential transfers, a sum meant to cover the Sumeru facility's operating costs for the month, research materials included. It is not an ungenerous amount, by most standards (Lady Sandrone could only dream of such a fortune for an entire trimester), but it also is, however, considerably less than Dottore had requested, and the gap between what he asked for and what he's actually been allotted sits in front of him now as a problem requiring immediate, careful solving rather than simple complaint.
Reagent costs, Eleazar-specific compounds: unavoidable, non-negotiable. He underlines the line twice, already certain it won't be the place he finds savings. Facility maintenance: minimal reduction possible, risk to equipment calibration if deferred further. He crosses that one out as a dead end too. Staff compensation: reducible, though reduction risks retention of the more competent assistants, which carries its own cost in training replacements.
He works through the remaining categories with the same brisk, methodical precision, trimming where trimming is possible, flagging where it isn't, the unglamorous arithmetic of keeping an ambitious research operation funded on a budget that never quite stretches as far as the research itself demands. It isn't a crisis, precisely, he's managed tighter months before, back when Pantalone and him weren’t such close partener as they are today, but it requires attention, and attention is exactly what he's giving it when the door opens without the customary knock first.
"I specifically instructed-" he begins, already irritated, pen lifting from the ledger.
"Doctor. It's the main Eleazar subject." Barnabas voice cuts through his own, breathless, urgent enough that Dottore's irritation dies instantly. "Its condition's deteriorated significantly in the last hour. Fever's spiked well past the range we flagged yesterday, and it has stopped responding properly to verbal prompts. The limb weakness has progressed too. It can't grip anything at all now, and one of the night staff reported some irregularity in its breathing pattern about twenty minutes ago."
Dottore is on his feet before the old man finishes the sentence, the ledger, Pantalone's disbursement, the entire unresolved question of this month's budget abandoned mid-calculation without a second thought.
"Its medication was doubled yesterday, per my instruction," he says, already moving, voice sharp and fast. "Has that dosage been maintained consistently through the night, or was there any lapse in administration?"
"Maintained, as far as I'm aware. I can confirm with the night shift ledics."
"Confirm it. I want the full administration record in front of me the moment I reach the subject’s room." He's through the door and moving down the corridor at a pace that leaves the assistant half-jogging to keep up, mind already working through the possibilities with the same fast, precise focus he brings to any deteriorating variable. Fever this severe, this sudden, layered onto limb weakness and now respiratory irregularity, suggests either a failure of the current treatment protocol to hold the illness at bay, or some secondary complication arising independently of the Eleazar itself, and distinguishing between the two quickly is going to matter considerably more than anything sitting unresolved on his desk.
"Vitals, current readings," he snaps as they round the final corner toward the room.
"Temperature's climbing past the threshold we set for emergency intervention. Heart rate's elevated but not critical yet. We haven't managed a full respiratory assessment for now. Subject's been too agitated to keep the monitoring equipment properly in place."
"Then we'll manage it the moment I'm in that room." He pushes the door open without slowing, already scanning the scene in front of him with fast, clinical precision. In the corner, on a visibly uncomfortable metallic bed with a mattress far too thin, small, flushed, trembling, Collei's breathing visibly labored even from the doorway, one weeping eye tracking nothing in particular, limbs twitching uselessly against the sheets whenever she attempts to move them at all.
Whatever remained of his attention on the budget, on Pantalone, on the careful arithmetic of keeping this entire operation financially viable, is gone completely now, replaced by the single, total focus of a man who has, for the moment, stopped thinking about anything at all except the deteriorating body in front of him and exactly what it's going to take to stop this particular trajectory before it becomes something considerably worse. This was so far his most successful test subject. The one who had miraculously reacted positively to almost each of his treatment and the first one in line to test in a few weeks his brand new idea: Divine residues injection. If any of his lab rat could survive it, it would most likely be this one, he had to keep it alive at least until this day, loosing such a great achievement would be detrimental for his Eleazar researches and he was already way too tigh on his budget to allow himself to loose such a great accomplishment. It could die later, maybe in a few months, and The Doctor wouldn’t bat an eye. On the contrary: it would be a great opportunity to perform a dissection on its corpse and found out what was so special about this little girl. But right now, it was absolutely out of question !
"Oxygen, now. And I want the administration record, not just a verbal confirmation," Dottore says without looking away from the bed, already crossing the room in four strides, gloves pulled from his pocket and onto his hands as he told the instruction to his assistant.
Barnabas fumbles the mask from the wall unit and passes it over. Dottore does not use it immediately. He leans over the bed, one hand closing around the small wrist to take the pulse, the other turning her face toward the light by the chin with no more tenderness than he would give a specimen jar. The scaled skin under his fingers is burning. Her pulse is quick and thready, fluttering against his thumb like something trapped.
The Doctor clicked his finger is the air in attempt to test the child attention. The weeping eye drifts and finds nothing. The other, half-lidded and glassy, rolls toward the ceiling.
"No response to direct address. Pupils sluggish." He pulls the lid back with his thumb, checks the other, lets go. "Note the time."
"Noted, Doctor."
He finally presses the translucide mask over her nose and mouth. Collei flinches, a thin sound escaping her, and her hands come up in a clumsy reflex, in attempt to keep the man away from her, but there is no strength left in them. The fingers curl against his sleeve and slide off without gripping. Dottore watches that for exactly one second, jaw tightening, because it is the third time this morning he has been told the grip is gone and the first time he has seen it with his own eyes. Then he reaches back without turning.
"Stethoscope."
It is placed in his palm. He doesn’t warm it to reduce the discomfort, announces nothing, and simply pulls the collar of her gown aside and sets the cold metal against her ribs. Collei jerks hard enough to rattle the thin frame of the bed.
"Hold the subject shoulders."
"It’s very agitated, Lord Harbinger, if we sedate-"
"We do not sedate. Sedation will mask the respiratory and reflex pattern, are both way to useful right now to discard. Hold its shoulders."
Barnabas obeys. Dottore listens. Left lung, right lung, the base, the apex, moving the base with quick precise shifts while the child under it trembles and wheezes. Her tiny voice cracked as she began to murmur a few words that does not seem meant for anyone else in the room:
"...dilly dilly-"
No one answers. Dottore moves the stethoscope lower.
"Lavenders green… bleue… hmm hmm… for I love… you."
"Fluid in the lower left." He mutters, to himself as much as to his assistant. "Not too severe, but present. That is not the Eleazar. That is a secondary infection, opportunistic, taking advantage of the weakened state of the subject." The rest of him is already moving. He straightens, strips the stethoscope from his ears, and starts speaking in the rapid flat cadence of a man laying out a plan he does not intend to repeat. "Broad-spectrum antibiotic, intravenous, the second shelf of the dark purple cabinet, not the oral formulation, subject will not keep it down. Cooling compresses at the neck and under the arms. Do not use ice directly on the skin. Bring the portable suction in case the airway fills. And send someone to find out why I was not informed of the temperature hour by hour as I ordered."
"Yes, my Lord." Barnabas is already half out of the door. "Should I-"
"Go! Fucking idiot!"
The door shuts. The room is suddenly very quiet except for the rasp of the child's breathing and the faint hiss of the mask, as she occasionally let out a few words of absolute non sense, probably because of the intense fever. Dottore moves to the rolling table by the wall, snaps open his case, and begins preparing what he needs by hand, because the night staff have shown they cannot be trusted with anything requiring more than a clipboard. Syringe. Vial…
When he returns to the bed with the needle, he does not tell her what is about to happen. He does not tell her anything. He takes her thin arm, finds the vein in the crook of the elbow with two firm fingers, and slides the needle in on the first attempt.
Collei screams. It is a small, cracked, terrible sound, and her whole body bows against the sheets trying to pull away from the thing that is hurting her, and her free hand claws weakly at the air.
"Be still. Moving could tear the vein, it will hurt more if you do so."
She does not understand him. Her eyes have gone unfocused again, wet and red-rimmed, searching the ceiling, the walls, the blurred shape bent over her. The scream breaks off into shaking, wet breaths. Dottore presses the plunger down in one slow, even motion and does not look at her face while he does it.
"...it hurts," she whispers. "It hurts, it hurts, I don't want- Please..."
"I am aware." He says clearly annoyed by her attitude, drawing the needle out and pressing gauze to the spot, thumb firm. "It will pass. You better stay awake."
She does not stay awake. Her eyelids flutter and sink, then flutter open again, and her gaze drifts across his face, the bottom half covered by a white mask. And although her yes are staring directly at his, she seems to be in a completely different world in her mind. Proabably an hallucinations, Dottore guesses, she must be seeing things coming straight up from her own imagination. It is a quite common symptom among patients suffering from fever this extreme. Her hand lifts, shaking, and catches the edge of his sleeve.
"Mama?"
The words are barely audible, because of how so so low her tiny voice is.
Dottore goes completely still.
It lasts no longer than a heartbeat. His hand remains on the gauze. His eyes stay on her arm, the vein, the faint bruise already spreading beneath the skin. Nothing in his posture changes except that something behind the cold, narrow focus of his attention seems to stop for an instant, like a gear missing a tooth.
"Mama... I forgot… I- I forget the… r-rest…"
"I am not… whatever you believe I am."
The children were never allowed to touch him. Doing so was perseved as a attack attempt and was punished severely by several days of starvation and an entire night in the isolation room.
Yet, he does not remove the sleeve from her fingers. He tells himself it is because jerking away would risk dislodging the gauze, and that this is a perfectly sufficient reason. He tells himself it is irrelevant, a symptom, the same feverish nonsense as her words about lavenders a few minutes earlier, and certainly nothing worth cataloguing. With his free hand he reaches for the cooling cloth Barnabas left on the tray and lays it across her forehead with the brisk efficiency of someone covering a gap in a protocol.
Her breathing, he notices, has begun to even out.
Not much and certainly not enough to be considered safe or healthy. But the rattle at the bottom of each inhale is shallower than it was a minute ago, and the flush on her cheeks has gone from an alarming red to a merely severe shade pink. He watches the rise and fall of her chest, counting in his head, and finds the count is acceptable. For now.
The door opens again. Barnabas returns with the compresses, the suction unit, and the administration record, breathless and wary of the silence he has walked into.
"Doctor, the night shift confirms the dosage was given on schedule, all four times. There was no lapse."
"Then the treatment held, and the infection is a separate failure." Dottore finally lets go of the gauze, flexes his fingers once, and does not acknowledge the small hand still caught in his sleeve. "Which means it is correctable. Good."
"And the, ah..." Barnabas hesitates, glancing toward the bed. "The injection you planned for the few weeks to come-"
"Will proceed as scheduled." He does not raise his voice. "She will be fit for it. I do not intend to lose her to something as ordinary as a pneumonal infection after everything I have invested for her case."
He says it with complete conviction, and it is, he reminds himself, entirely true. The investment is considerable. The data is irreplaceable. The budget, as of this morning, leaves no room for waste.
Behind the translucide mask, Collei murmurs something about a king and queen, and slides back into an uneasy sleep, still holding on The Doctor’s sleeve.
Dottore stays exactly where he is for another forty minutes, charting her vitals every five, and tells no one about those few carresses he left on her still burning forehead.