(no subject)

[evowhisperer]

  

-----

"Stand aside, please, I'm a doctor!"

 

Chaos. Pure, grainy, cheaply recorded chaos. The cellphone trembles violently with its owner's hands, and frightened shouting in Spanish from all around threatens to drown out the wails of a child. The dirty sidewalk is no place to treat the wounded.

 

The seven people bleeding out on the ground may not be alive to care, soon. The child screaming at a young couple's side is unhurt, but rightfully frightened.

 

Several someones pass in front of the camera. The owner moves to the side, and a loud male voice blares out, 'Are they alright? Are they alright?' when no one answers. The owner continues to move, and a frilly sleeve is pushed out of the way.

 

There's a man in a white labcoat kneeling over one of the bodies, pressing a cloth flat against a puddle of red.

 

'Hey, are they going to survive?'  the phone owner repeats. The doctor snags the cuff of someone standing too close, and orders them to keep pressing down. They step forward with shaking hands and kneel also, and soon the doctor stands and moves on.

 

Someone's voice is rising and falling hysterically. There's shouting about police, and an ambulance. The camera turns to look, but it doesn't seem that either have arrived, and when it looks back several people have begun to grab shirts from the store's open sidewalk display, following the doctor's example. 

 

The doctor is wearing a large woman's hat with a tag sticking out of it, now, conspicuously snatched from a knocked-over shelf. He's facing a direction that would normally let the camera see his profile, but the hat is big enough to hide all but his neck. He slows as he reaches a body that stares vacantly away--it's not the first he would've reached, but it is the first the camera has seen--and moves on.

 

Finally, there's the body that no one seems ready to approach, curled up and with its back to the crowd. Broken glass litters the ground around it, and when the doctor pushes it onto its back, he kicks a gun further out of reach.

 

Someone passes in front of the camera. "Hey..." The owner complains. No response, and the owner moves around. "Hey, why's he helping that fucker when there's people here who need help?"

 

The doctor's back is to the camera. It's impossible to see what he's doing until he glances towards the crowd, loops the hat's strap tightly around his jaw, and starts CPR.

 

No one stops or helps him. The camera continues to watch, eventually panning over the wounded, and the unhurt victims still milling around. Someone shouts about the police again, and more people are kneeling over the wounded victim's bodies, pressing down more cloth. The child has climbed into a sitting woman's lap, face buried in her hair.

One of makeshift medics calls out to the doctor tearfully, but they are ignored.

 

There's an outcry. The camera snaps back to the doctor, who's lifting his head from the shooter's chest, pushing down arms that have begun to move sluggishly. More shouting, with more than a couple of screams. The crowd is starting to shuffle back, and the doctor throws up a blood-soaked hand, shouting urgent assurances. The camera glimpses part of his face, and he's young, and very clearly aware of the new dangers--both from revived shooter, and the crowd.

 

"He's not armed!" Triple checking. The doctor kneels on his wrist, shifting the man to check underneath. Quadruple checking. "He has no more weapons! He's unconscious!"

 

The shooter's eyes are glazed but open, and the confusion in the crowd eddies and swirls. Before anyone can do anything, there's armed men in uniforms of the law shoving through the crowd, taking control of the situation. The crowd's din reaches a new high, and the man with the camera is forced back. It becomes impossible to see anything else, as people move back and shake the camera every which way.

 

There's only a glimpse left of the doctor left in the clip, and it's from one last ditch effort. The phone gets held high in the air, and it shows a white coat turned to one of the uniforms, hands forward, bloody, and earnestly reassuring.

 

The clip cuts out.

 

Comments

[evowhisperer]

Caesar shoots L a sharp look, picturing L cutting into a giant celaphopod and having it come alive under the knife. Who's the one being studied here, anyway, himself or the corpse? He'd ignored the cameras, before, but something about that comment has him feeling their weight again. He's being investigated, isn't he? And wouldn't a task as grim as this be the perfect way to learn more about him?

The chest cavity is open, and Caesar drops the scalpel into a tray, reaching for more sample jars. Now that he's figured this much out, there's not really anything he can do about it. What could he say? Caesar fills the jars, ignoring him for now.

[dead_black_eyes]

Ryuzaki doesn't shrink under the sharpness of that near-glare, scarcely even reacts to it. Because of course Caesar's right about whether he's being studied. That much, by now, is probably very difficult for even non-geniuses to miss.

He moves to helpfully hand over the jars Ceasar's going for. "How does the heart look? Are you planning to take it?"

[evowhisperer]

"It looks like it's been through a heart attack. Larger. The tissues are still stiff." Not that Caesar's the kind of doctor that would have experience in this, but he knows what he's seeing, and he knows from the last few weeks that this is expected.

"And no... I'm not planning to actually take anything in its entirety. All I need are samples, and I'm expecting that you've already subjected hearts like this to every scan you have available." For all the good that information will do them. Taking a heart without his lab's scanners will mean nothing more than having a macabre paperweight.

He's picked up a circular blade and is cutting a dime-sized hole from the left lung, carefully placing it inside a jar.

[dead_black_eyes]

It's not Ryuzaki's first autopsy; he's seen these things before, even if the smell is off-putting to him to the point where he gags and lunges for the peppermint oil. He's oddly comfortable otherwise, leaning close to the organs and tissues to examine what Caesar's describing with his wide, observant eyes.

"Indeed. Every test we have at our disposal, and then more at the hands of cardiologists, surgeons and countless other medical and scientific professionals. I'm very curious to see what you plan to do that we haven't yet..."

He glances up expectantly at Caesar.

"Which one are you going to revive? The other one? Or him, once he's stitched up again?"

[evowhisperer]

His goal of ignoring him as much as possible fails, and Cesar stops what he's doing to look at him. The chunk of lung he's still holding doesn't have enough moisture to drip.

"I'm not going to revive either of them. They're too far gone."

Was this something they'd been expecting of him all along? But they hadn't told him. If he'd known that was a condition, he could've said something from the start... Just how magical did they think his cure was?

[dead_black_eyes]

"Right, that makes sense..."

He says it in a way that makes his disappointment clear, even as it sounds like he's trying to find workarounds.

"I guess that I'm just very excited to see that aspect of your work again; you'll have to forgive a little bit of impatience on my part. What's the expiration date, if you're pardon the vulgarity of the expression?"

[evowhisperer]

"On the bodies?"

Satisfied that this isn't going to be the issue he worried it would be, Caesar puts the lung tissue into a jar, moving to the next organ. The heart is still trapped behind too many bones to get as good a look or a sample as he wants, but he'll deal with that soon.

"Think of my cure as a glorified pacemaker. Its purpose was to restart the heart's natural rhythm, not reverse decay. I don't think it would do a very good job on anything that's not an otherwise perfectly healthy body, either. That would require--" Tissue reconstruction, actively moving things that don't belong, selective antibacterial efforts...

"A lot more," he finishes simply, glancing L's way but not actually looking at him. "More than it can handle right now."

[dead_black_eyes]

Ryzuaki is eyeing that pesky sternum and rib cage, and is taking clear visual inventory of the various saws and drills at their disposal.

"Less 'miracle drug' and more 'advanced machine,' then," Ryuzaki replies easily, selecting a small, chisel-like tool and hanging onto it, waiting patiently for Caesar to finish collecting his samples of the accessible organs. "But now that this has come up, it's important to me that we see the results of this 'pacemaker' on a heart affected by an attack not caused by Kira. Though it would be difficult to secure an environment where that kind of test is possible, I feel it's necessary."

[evowhisperer]

"You want me to bring back someone who's died by an ordinary heart attack?"

It's hardly the worst request an employer's ever given him. He could save a life, fine tune the nanites without Kira's influence confusing things, and prove at least four different nanite-protocol-related theorems in a single project. The only drawback would be the exposure his cure would have to the rest of the world...

... Well, it's not like anyone could do anything with the nanites after a self-destruct sequence, could they? Besides, if he adjusted the replication rates, he could do this without even depleting his supply.

"... If I'm given total control over the patient's recovery and environment until the time of acceptable recovery, then I'll do it."

He hasn't even turned away from the cadaver. One last jar is put on the table beside it, and he puts a pointed instrument in the tray beside the scalpel, and he turns to the saws.

Safety mask goes on, and there's no hesitation here, either. He picks up an electric circular saw, fiddles until it gives an experimental spin, and then lowers it over the ribcage. Shrill whirring fills the air, and soon bone dust and cartilage microparticles do, too.

[dead_black_eyes]

Nonexistent brows raise; seemingly, Ryuzaki is pleased by the lack of a need to elaborate further around such a delicate, distasteful and morally troubling subject.

"I'm sure it could be arranged," he says with that strange, breezy confidence that Caesar's doubtless learning to associate with him the more time they spend together. "There are a lot of different countries, all with their own laws for execution, and it's just a matter of finding one with humane standards that are less stringent for execution."

He says as much as casually as if it was arranging a trip to the supermarket for sugarcubes.

[evowhisperer]

"... Execution?" The saw turns off, and Caesar pushes his goggles up look at L directly.

"I'm not sure I understand that correctly. When did this become about executing a prisoner, instead of saving a willing patient's life in an experimental procedure?"

[dead_black_eyes]

"What else would you call unnecessarily inducing a heart attack?" Ryuzaki asks coolly. "What you're describing would never be approved, or take too long to authorize, and any existing illness or conditions could affect results. No, the subject has to be in good health and scheduled for execution. That's how L prefers to operate, because a court-ordered death is very different from an experimental procedure on an innocent patient."

[evowhisperer]

""And how do we know that isolating a patient's death from natural causes would give us an experiment we could actually learn anything from?"

For the first time the jacket is clammy and restricting, but he very deliberately doesn't pluck at it. He has to look assured, not tense.

"Whatever trigger we use to induce the heart attack isn't just going to vanish. We could theoretically be giving ourselves the same problem, this time with blood and new blame on our own hands."

"Present it as a medical catalyst. Support it from behind the scenes as a fake charity cause. I think you may find more volunteers than you expect if you approach it from an altruistic point of view, and you'll get more cooperation along the way. Our goal is speed, isn't it?"

It's a fragile balance. He can't push too hard, or this will devolve into a fight. He won't just give up, because a life is on the line. Fighting this directly won't get him anywhere, he has to speak Ryuzaki's language. L's language too, apparently. He can do this. How else does anyone stay as high as he was in Providence and not be swept along like a puppet?

[dead_black_eyes]

"'Natural causes' can be fabricated in such ways that I don't think a human body would be able to tell the difference," Ryuzaki muses. "What matters is that the heart attack is not caused by Kira's means... outside of those constraints, there's actually a lot of flexibility for how the heart attack happens, but not so much on whom. Even if the idea of saving a life is more appealing to you than taking one, consider patient families, false hope, the temptation to believe in a miracle cure, and the attention that a farcical 'charity organization' would draw. You're talking about setting up an unnecessary obstacle course when we can walk right into a willing country and take the pulse out of a warm, living body without any red tape. If that goes well... maybe then some patient trials, but at the risk of sounding like Kira, if anyone's potentially going to die at this point, shouldn't it be someone on Death Row?"

[evowhisperer]

Caesar doesn't like it. He can see the logic anyway, of course, and the clinical part of him has to appreciate how perfectly efficient it would be. It wouldn't really be a death on his hands if someone was listed to die already, would it? It's nothing that Providence wouldn't do, or that Providence hasn't done already, using mutated faces to hide the men and women whose lives they were snuffing.

In the end it's the mention of unnecessary attention that seals it: if they save patients and allow them to survive, then it'll be one more group that can talk about nanites. He hates himself for it, but this really is the best way, isn't it?

"... There are still many alternatives that we haven't explored."

It's a token protest at this point. His heart just isn't into it, hasn't been into it since that damning reminder.

[dead_black_eyes]

Ryuzaki has scored a victory and knows it. Though he doesn't actually crow, there's an air of immense satisfaction in the way he holds himself following Caesar's reluctant non-surrender.

"Perhaps," he allows noncommittally, "but if they haven't occurred to me, the truth is that they're probably not worth exploring. Regardless of how you might think it sounds, that's just the way it is."

Most of his task force certainly wouldn't argue that.

[evowhisperer]

That arrogance pushes the wrong buttons in him. Who's the expert, here? Caesar makes a low, thoughtful noise, turning back to the cadaver. Biting retorts bubble up behind his teeth, and he stares at the exposed heart for a long second.

Forget this. He's not covering his tracks, he can take the whole heart today. He picks up a scalpel, sawing at fat veins and gristle.

"With all due respect, I generally disagree with that statement." Good: his voice is clipped, but under control. "It's just that very often, I've heard those words when a method was decided before the question was even formed. I hope we won't become to reliant on it."

The heart is free, and he drops it into the biggest jar they have. Splatters coat the inside of the glass, and Caesar studies them with detached interest.

[dead_black_eyes]

The vigor and apparent decision to part the entire organ from its meaty casing has Ryuzaki's avid attention, and his eyes are fairly glued to the process as Caesar works testily at it.

"I encourage disagreement," he says easily. "Opposing perspectives are, as a rule, at least useful thought exercises..."

Not that they matter in the long run, once I have made up my mind.

[evowhisperer]

'Thought exercises'. He thinks they're entertaining. Just like that Caesar's decision is made, and he opens his mouth, then closes it, struggling to reign himself in.

"L undoubtedly encourages it too. I'm sure he'll be interested in hearing the rationale for both reasons when they're presented in the actual proposal."

L could be like White Knight. That had been a boss that could appreciate the importance of good PR, and who'd used it to help bring Providence to the devastating scale it was today. What are the chances that Caesar can persuade him? If he brushes up on his better arguments for this, he could make this work. If they kept his cure a secret, but still make it morally palatable...

[dead_black_eyes]

Ryuzaki listens, head tilted, eyes wide and childish over the rim of his mask as he listens to Caesar's somewhat terse response. While admirably restrained, it doesn't sound friendly in the least; he knows that he's gotten under the other man's skin.

"You're sure...? Yes, I agree, I think he will be," he says. "He is a reasonable man, above many other things, so it's my feeling that you're correct. Not that I'd want to speak for him, of course."

Consider that a warning, but a gentle one.

[evowhisperer]

If it's a warning, then its true intent has fallen on deaf ears. Cesar simply nods to himself and presses the ribcage closed, smoothing flaps of skin over the exposed organs. The edges stay loose, and don't quite meet properly with the new dimensions of the ribcage.

"If we don't need any other samples besides the ones I've just collected, I think we're done here."

He removes his gloves with practiced snaps, dropping them in a nearby trashbag.

[dead_black_eyes]

Ryuzaki watches impassively as the other man works to make the body fit together again, even though it's a futile effort. Once a body is dead, decay is a one-way ride, and the detective's familiar with the reality of it... even if he admittedly can't stand the smell.

"I leave that to your judgment, Ceasar Salazar," he replies, peeling off his own gloves, but instead of tossing them, he seals them in a ziploc bag and slips them into the pocket of his lab coat. He is reluctant to leave any trace of himself in this room. "I'm here as your assistant, after all... if you say we're done, we're done."

[evowhisperer]

Cesar nods a little in L's direction, before packing the samples up into an insulated bag off to one side. Whoever set the room up seems to have anticipated their every need: the bag even has prepared cold-packs already inside, and it shows a level of foresight that borders on prophetic. Cesar takes it at face value.

He also takes it at face value that someone else is responsible for cleaning the saw and instruments, and actually finishing whatever fate is intended for the cadaver. Not that he doesn't know the procedure and stitches to put a body back together, but most of the times he's taken one apart, there isn't enough left to do so.

He pats the bag's zipper in a habitual check, and even checks his labcoat's pockets, confirming to himself whatever he's looking for. Then he nods a little, glances at L, and then leads the way out.

[dead_black_eyes]

Where this kind of thing is concerned, it might be best to take it at face-value. Or dangerous; it's really anyone's guess where this task force, Ryuzaki, and the still-enigmatic L are concerned, isn't it?

Ryuzaki notes his glances and pauses as he seems to contemplate the fact that the lab will pass out of their control once they leave this room. But then they're turning and leaving, and he follows, probably closer to Caesar than can possibly be comfortable for the man.

"There's a car outside waiting to take us back to the hotel. We won't be seen, but all the same, try not to draw any unnecessary attention."

[evowhisperer]

Lazarus is too close. Caesar pretends he's a particular clingy, young rhinoceros EVO that he'd once been fond of, and carefully doesn't turn around.

"That won't be difficult if everyone's already gone."

For a moment he wonders if they'll be cut down by Kira on the spot, just for irony's sake. They leave the building and its empty halls; by the time they reach the outside it's begun to snow heavily, and the wind has taken up a pained moan.

Caesar almost doesn't hear his phone over the sound of it. When he does, he stops just before actually entering the limosine's open door, stepping back. His phone was in airplane mode.

"Hello?"

"Caesar, you idiot." The voice is old, male, and deeply concerned. "Don't you remember how easy it is to track radioactive nanoanisotropes?"

Caesar's face drains of all color, and his free hand clutches at his forearm compulsively. "... Rylander? How are you making this call?" There's no one watching them. Are they sure? Rylander had no body. He couldn't have gotten to this dimension on his own. He couldn't be alone. How were they getting this call?