Alternate title: Haemoglobin. The Medic muses on the quality of his life whilst puking his guts out. Some Heavy/Medic, and a shittonne of German Expressionism. Sideways companion to “No Joy in Mudvilleâ€. ___ A single wall still standing in Market Square rises like a massive headstone over the ruined plaza. Fire and gutted vehicles, nearly 4500 dead, a stain sits heavy and ugly in the centre of that one resolute portion of what might have been a bank, or a church; it is a man— no, a corpse, strung by the wrists between the thin windows like a parodic crucifixion. The stubbed bullethead of his helmet marks him a fallen supporter of the Reich, but his boots are missing, his socks foetid with trenches and death, both within and without. Standing directly below allows a view into his open eyes, so clear and blue under the shadow of the helmet. Then they are gone, either rotted out, or dried out and frozen, or plucked out by the marauding crows. It does not matter. Still, he seems to grin, seems to have a knowing smirk. Medic jolted out of bed, drenched in a cold sweat, tripped in his sheets, but managed, just barely, to thrust his head into the basin of the stainless steel sink in the next room before the contents of his stomach splattered against the cool metal. Distantly, he remembered to set the water running. The smell of bile, specifically his own, would not help matters. He spat several times, gut giving a great quake, and he clutched at his midsection with a shudder. The pain only intensified, and he found himself with the incomprehensible urge to writhe. He knew, however, that medically, that wouldn’t have any effect. He glanced at the Medigun on its stand… no, he really shouldn’t rely so heavily on it. He’d undertaken medical training for a reason and would hate to get rusty. He thought about dipping into the morphine, but opiates tended to give him nightmares— not that THAT would be anything new for the evening. It would have to be aspirin, then, he thought, going by feel to a cabinet over the counter. He was glad he’d organized his storage by strength of the drug; he didn’t feel like turning on the lights and the Bayer bottle didn’t have a particularly distinctive shape. It should be next to the Bactine, though, which did. His hand fell on the metal lid and he unscrewed it in the dark, the capsules tinkling against the glass and sounding loud in the silent infirmary. Unconsciously, he pressed his middle against the counter, his body seeking relief from the roiling pain within. Two aspirin, then, and perhaps an alka-seltzer. Ach, how pitiful. A man of medicine ought never suffer pains he doesn’t intend to, and shouldn’t have to resort to drugstore remedies. The Medic sighed and filled a cup with water, perfunctorily splashing some Lysol disinfectant around the sink and vowing to enact a more thorough cleansing in the morning, with a scouring pad, and the oxygenated cleaner. He swallowed his aspirin and his anti-acids, and washed his mouth out with a generous swig of Listerine. If he looked as tired as he felt, he was glad he couldn’t see his reflection in the mirror. An hour later (give or take), he was bent over the basin again, and this time he did turn on the lights to look for something that would help him to at least get a few hours of rest. That’s when he noticed the gritty, red-brown look of what he’d coughed up. He inspected his throat in the mirror, and was caught by another bout of spine-twisting pain. It had been years since the last time this had happened. Well, the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory over-the-counter drugs he’d administered an hour or so ago would only exacerbate the immediate problem, but induced vomiting would further aggravate the related symptoms. And all of those were merely side effects, comorbid, links in a chain. Nothing, in terms of biological function, exists in a vacuum. Still, he could not believe he didn’t realize sooner what was occurring in his own body, but so accustomed was he, since signing that non-negotiable contract with Reliable Excavation and Demolition, to horrific pain, so jaded was he, since long before then, to night terrors that would send bile up his throat to seep between his teeth, he had thought, he had thought, it was a night like any other. Ah, but the ghosts of one’s past do come to haunt at the most unexpected of times. It had been so long, though, and he pressed a bare hand to his chest to feel the fluttering pulse there, to be assured that blood still pumped, oxygen still flowed, his body would continue to function around his core, around the sheafs of striated muscle that ticked out his life like a wayward metronome. He breathed deep. He calmed his heart. He waited for the rush to pass. At university, the dissections he’d attended had been bittersweet; yes, the thirst for knowledge, the sick drive to thrust his hands into the open cavity of a fleshy body to examine its working parts— those had been slaked, somewhat, at least for an hour or six at a time. But, to have the cadavers wrapped as they were, heads and hands smothered in plastic, it erased the mind’s best forms of identification, of personal relation— quite purposefully, he assumed, as the students could not afford to sympathize with their designated corpses, but robbed of the distinguishing characteristics that would tell him otherwise, it was all too easy for the young Medic to impose his own image (40 years or so hence) on the wrinkled body he carved into so deftly. He was approaching that age, now. The human heart fit so easily into his cupped hands, like it was meant to be held thusly. Poets could describe it, metaphorically, at great length, but could never aspire to the truth of the action, of feeling the hardened myocardium like the shell of a large acorn against his enraptured palms for the first time. This was why he sought with such tenacity his medical degree. This was what he lived for. This was how, and why he lived. The cadaver allocated to him and his team of undergraduate colleagues had died of acute myocardial infarction as a result of coronary occlusion. In short: a heart attack. He’d been almost disappointed to have something so ordinary to study, at the time. It was so obvious, he could have guessed it from across the room, seeing the body: white male between the ages of 60 and 75, slight deposition of body fat throughout, and indeed, when eventually he got to the lungs, significant damage so as to suggest a consistent smoking habit. Still, every new development in his investigation— pre-cancerous cells in the aforementioned pleura; a 13% enlargement of the liver, compared with mean statistics of the individual’s demographic— was a delight to him. He could almost ignore the vague pains in his own body. More than simple regulatory electrical impulses, he needed something that would improve his heart, something that, rather than merely spurring it awake with jolts of power at predetermined intervals, would drive its power in its own right. And, he needed something to power that, or even to regulate it, for if he succeeded in his goals, he would harness the power of the gods, and he knew no mere mortal body could withstand that. Oh, but he would cheat Death, and bluff on the hand he’d been dealt. Death, in fact GOD Himself, would fear him. He would not be deterred. So, initially, it had been for himself, that he’d worked tirelessly to develop this miracle of medicine he’d wrought. It had perhaps been a step too far to show the operating theatre that he could remove every one of 126 bones from a living body, and set the ligaments around the incisions to knit together once more, tendons finding points of insertion where never existed one before, and yet keep the organs functioning, so that the body was still technically alive, afterwards. He merely wanted to demonstrate with perfect clarity what he could do. What he could DO. They called him a monster. That, however, was in 1932. They would see more monsters than he in the years to come. He looked less than monstrous, now, tired and haggard as he appeared in the mirror. The Medigun still sat, emitting a faint red glow behind him, and he allowed himself a wan smile. It was a crowning achievement, a glorious thing, but the Medigun, like any other form of insurance, did not cover pre-existing conditions. —- In his youth, he’d been barred from sports, from any great strain on his physical body. Puberty came and went and he’d ignored its cloying compulsions. It did not matter; he had dedicated himself to the pursuit of science, not pleasure. Or, so he told himself. Then, the breakthrough. He was invincible. He could accomplish anything, anything; the world was in his grasp. Was it any wonder that, having fled the University to hide in Paris among the other expatriates, protecting his invention first and himself afterward, he sought out every carnal pleasure he could imagine? These things he had denied himself so long, he glutted on them, and before long, the novelty wore off. Though, he was always fascinated with how far a woman’s body could stretch— certainly it was built to accommodate an infant, but to experiment with it himself was something other, entirely. With the patience required of a man of his profession, he had opened them up under his practiced hands, watched their reactions, pained or pleasured. He found he was willing to try most anything once. Or several times. He would joke that this, after all, was the scientific method. His first threesome involved a young woman of whom he was very fond, for a period, shortly after he emigrated to the United States. He would not say he loved her, no, but he appreciated her enthusiasm. She was of the sort that equated self-actualization with vast and varied sexual experimentation, and was quite amenable to every suggestion the Medic remembered ever having made. The arrangement, actually, was her idea, and having introduced her pretty friend with the wide-eyed expression and the slow hands (Medic could but chose not to hypothesize) they set to work devising ways to make much of time. When his lover asked later what he thought of the experience, he said it was pleasurable but overly complicated, for what it was. Unabashed, she asked if that meant he wouldn’t try again, with another man, instead. She explained that ever since he’d managed to fit both hands inside her, she’d wondered what it would be like to be penetrated by two men at once. Her frankness was one of his favourite attributes. He’d thought at the time it was a symptom of her being a New Yorker, but found that there were no fewer liars and cheats in the Land of Opportunity than anywhere else, and she was merely special. They were not exclusive, however, and once he discovered he was not adverse to sexual relations with men, of course he set about seeking new experiences. How could he not? And furthermore, it wasn’t as though he was unaccustomed to keeping secrets. Despite the reports that should bolster belligerent spirits (he never thought his hometown would be on the front page of the New York Times), he had to tell people he was Belgian, if questioned about his accent. So, what was a little sodomy between friends? Reports of Central Station aflame, “R.A.F. Hammers Stuttgart Againâ€, no way to contact anybody, no way to know if his grandparents, former colleagues, even little Greta were alright. He sought escape and refuge between the sheets of strangers. After all was said and done, however, when his sweaty body stuck to the covers or to his partner’s legs and he breathed deep, no amount of pleasurable activity could stave off the nightmares. It was humiliating then, to awake screaming, or worse, whimpering, with a bewildered or heaven forbid pitying bedmate to contend with. He was a grown man, and a doctor, at that, and to have strange women attempt to comfort him in the wee hours of the morning by pulling his head into their bosoms, by petting and cooing at him, was onerous and unacceptable. His love affairs infrequently lasted long, if for no other reason than his dread of stagnation, but for strangers to presume familiarity enough to coddle him— he couldn’t deign such treatment. Humiliating as it may be now, to be awake again, a decade or three later, still yoked with the same choking dilemma, he at least stood on his own two feet to face himself in the mirror. 1945 changed everything for him. Rather, it put everything back where it was meant to be. How envious, how deeply sick with jealousy was he, when he saw the effects of atomic fission levied on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and knew what work must have been done to develop such a technology, to make solid the wrath of Man-as-God. As the world stood and stared, as a handful of scientists somewhere in New Mexico wondered what they had done, the young Medic wondered, what on earth had he been DOING? There was research to be done, experiments to run. In the shadow of the mushroom cloud he was reminded that he was still alive. Despite everything. Even despite the daily attempts on his life, the frequent eviscerations and explosions and still other violent deaths, he still lived (such as it was) to stare down his reflection and regulate his breathing and pretend he wasn’t sweating and dizzy. He passed a hand through his hair, wondered at the greying strands. Further nights like this, certainly, would add to the count. These nightmares— Dr. Freud would be bored with them, he imagined. He hadn’t been back to Stuttgart, no, but he’d seen a few photos, between 1941 and 1944, and the dreams filled in the rest. Sometimes he’d see Greta, in his nightmares, with her hair in braids around her dainty little head. He’d see her in the skirt and tie of the Jungmädelbund, or in her summer nightgown, soaked in mud and smeared red and squalid. He wrote a letter home, after the war. It was returned, nearly a month later, address unknown, and yes, he saw Greta in his dreams that night, standing atop a frozen hillock, bare feet gripping dirt clods, shouting his name but unheard over the howling wind as she wiped tears off her dirty face and her hair flew around her. He saw her at 8, as she was in 1931, dressed in their father’s shirt, and asking tearfully where her green velvet Christmas dress was. She wanted to wear it to see their family. He should get dressed, too, it was already late, she said. He’d awoken and wondered if that were true. As he understood, membership in the BDM was compulsory for young German girls. What would little Greta think (if she was still alive somewhere, she would be in her forties— not so little anymore), what would she think if she knew that he not only slept with men, but that his current lover was a Jew? He’d met enough of them, in New York, and initially the rush of bedding a Jewish girl was a heady thing. He’d been somewhat disappointed, actually, to learn that they did not have horns, as a neighbour had conspiratorially claimed when Medic was a boy. He’d wanted to study the phenomenon. Oh well. He thought himself lucky that the Heavy allowed him to study his physiology with exacting and exhaustive thoroughness. Initially, glancing at the team before their first physicals, he thought that the Heavy Weapons specialist, like the cadaver back in medical school, would show some signs of cholesterol blockage in the arteries, or high blood pressure, perhaps even advanced atherosclerosis. Instead he found the man to be in peak physical condition, save a bit of wear on his knees, and was confounded. When he finally got a look into the terrific specimen’s inner workings (not to mention the Heavy’s impressive bloodlust) he was amazed. Amazed and intrigued and a little aroused. The lungs were huge and powerful, and his tolerance for pain was truly remarkable, but his heart— his heart was massive, worthy of the Latin root ‘crown’ in ‘coronary’. It was larger than his two hands together. It was a shame that it did not survive the initial testing of the über device, but, in science, there is always room for improvement. His fascination only grew when the Heavy’s body accepted the mega-baboon transplant absolutely without incident. After that, well alright, from the beginning, he’d taken every opportunity to get his hands on or in that huge body, and the Heavy noticed early on that he went without gloves to work on him. One day, as the Medic let his fingers flutter over the expanse of the Heavy’s diaphragm under the pretense of checking for silicate in his lungs (a hazard in the windy desert, you know), his actions caused a bout of hiccups. He could not stop staring at the way the muscles of the man’s thoracic cavity spasmed with each of the diaphragm’s irregular contractions, the way his severed ligaments twitched, the way the diaphragm itself pinched in on itself, and the Heavy was forced to hold his breath until the seizing stopped. “Wait!†the Medic had cried, before he could help himself, then clapped a bloodied hand over his mouth. The Heavy, still with his chest and abdomen cut wide open, turned calculating eyes on him. “Doktor.†Everything was in his tone. He did not need to say anything more; the Medic knew that the Heavy knew. The Medic felt as if he needed to turn away. This was uncharacteristic of him. He glanced to the electrocardiogram. “You are blushing,†said the Heavy. That was really as much as he could take. He had to concede. “Yes, I am.†The Heavy stared at him for a long moment, then raised one enormous hand to brush a bit of dried blood off the Medic’s jaw. It was a simple enough gesture but the Medic was undone. He grasped at the hand, almost desperately, squeezed and then seemed to realize what he was doing. He released the hand, along with a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, and, solidly, haltingly, patted the Heavy’s knuckles, as if in camaraderie. The Heavy’s wry expression made his stomach quail. The Medic laughed, and it was a high-pitched, nervous thing. He got a snorted chuckle in response. “Turn on healing gun, Doktor.†His smile was light and teasing, not at all the broad, snarling grin he showed as his minigun mowed down enemies, not even the slightly sadistic quirk of his mouth he’d get when he was winning at cards. The Medic felt more blood rushing to his face. “Er, va-vas, I mean, vhat— what?†He tried to enunciate, pushed his glasses up his nose, couldn’t believe he’d been reduced to this. Still smiling, the Heavy said, “Turn on your healing gun. Then I will kiss you.†—- The pain subsided enough that he believed he might be able to sleep again. For comfort’s sake, he checked on his birds, peeking under the drapes over their cages, which were hung around the infirmary for the night. Aristotle, in particular, had him concerned as the little fellow had plucked out a few blood feathers the day before, and the resulting bleeding attracted Archimedes, whose attentions into the affected area were clearly not appreciated if the flapping and agitated hooting were anything to go by, and the Medic was worried such an episode would cause Aristotle more undue stress which would cause him to overgroom even more and Medic HATED removing broken feather sheaths. He could saw through a sternum without breaking a sweat, but ask him to take the tweezers to a damaged feather, to pull it out of the struggling bird and halt the growth of a still unfulfilled pinion— oh, he hated it, hated it. He looked at Aristotle’s slightly ragged plumage and tutted under his breath as he smoothed the shade over the cage again. Poor thing. Poor thing.