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kastlequill · 2 months ago

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iv/v. ‘til my pulse loses time: pulsus alternans

pairing: kyle gaz garrick x f!reader word count: 2.3k synopsis: the fourth and final time you save gaz tags: whumptober, angst, gunshot wounds, feelings realization, medic!reader, 4+1, no y/n warnings: near death experiences, war ao3: read here ← prev | next →

IV.

As a medic, you could only do so much.

Stitching together sliced skin, surgically removing bullets from traumatized flesh, administering first aid in the field—all within your skill range. Hell, even resuscitating a still-warm, newly-dead body was possible on special occasions. But you were neither God nor Death, so you couldn’t breathe life into the expired corpse of a friend, nor was it your place to hold a scalpel to the jugular of a foe.

These mortal limitations weren’t to blame for the horrors that would unfold during the coming hours, however. The true crime committed there was your complacency.

You had grown accustomed to setting broken noses and relaxing muscle spasms, to staring into dilated pupils and realigning dislocated joints. With every passing day of relative calm, your worries gradually waned; and with every successful surgery, your easy confidence grew. Not one soldier had coded on your operating table, and not one soldier had succumbed to their injuries whilst under your care.

A random Thursday brought about the end of your pristine record.

Getting paged for an emergency surgery in the dead of night wasn’t anything new; sleep was a luxury few could afford out here, medics least of all. The days when you struggled waking to the sound of your pager were now a tiny speck in the rearview mirror of your professional career.

So the pager itself wasn’t the reason you were currently attempting to shove your trembling feet into a pair of boots, not bothering to untie the laces, ignoring the way your heel uncomfortably rubbed against the firm backend material. Rather, you were sprinting to the medbay because of the three chilling words you’d read on its display:

Bravo. Critical. STAT.

Once you arrived, shit really started to hit the fan.

The place looked as though a bomb had gone off. Two nurses were situating a limp masculine figure onto a gurney, skillfully sticking electrodes along his chest and hooking the wires up to a nearby monitor-on-wheels to display his vital signs. Meanwhile, three technicians tried to restrain a hulking mass of skull-faced muscle. Not far behind was the familiar mohawk of the Scotsman, with whom Captain Price was solemnly exchanging words. Which left one key member of the Bravo Team unaccounted for:

Gaz. Kyle.

You swallowed the panic that threatened to make itself known. Losing your cool would accomplish nothing except disrupt your focus and double the stakes.

“Report,” you demanded, rushing to the PPE station to don a pair of surgical gloves and tighten a mask around your face.

Next to you, the lead nurse grabbed hold of Gaz’s forearm and inserted a needle into his most prominent vein. “27-year-old male admitted six minutes ago with BP of 63/47, unconscious. Almost finished setting up the IV line.”

“He got lit up. Five shots made contact by our count,” Ghost interjected, voice gruff and posture unapologetically looming. “Maybe more.”

Too preoccupied with analyzing your patient’s current state and authorizing the nurse to administer a milligram of epinephrine, the words registered as little more than white noise, reduced to ‘five shots’. You cradled the nape of Gaz’s neck, carefully leaning him forward to hike up the bottom edge of his blood-soaked, tattered shirt. Trained eyes searched for exit wounds marring the expanse of his back and isolated a lone hole in his right shoulder before lowering him.

“What happened?”

The captain rubbed a hand down his face, and you couldn’t help noticing how tired the man seemed. “Exfil went sideways. Gaz got the worst of it, I’m afraid. Nasty hit to the shoulder, see, but ’least that one went straight through. The others, not so much. Four points of entry across his abdomen—”

You unclipped a penlight from your coat pocket and shined it into the fallen soldier’s eyes, gently lifting his lids with your thumb. The size of his pupils remained unchanged, unresponsive to the stimulus.

“—no exits.”

That earned a grimace from you; always did, always would. One of your first interactions with Gaz involved you excising a bullet from his leg, but abdominal gunshot wounds were plenty worse. The fact several small pellets of lethal lead were still inside him, possibly embedded in organs vital for sustaining life, spelled disaster.

Fingertips pressed against the cold skin of his inner wrists, you were dismayed to feel his pulse hasten yet gradually lose strength. Your pinched gaze lifted in supplication to the heart monitor, desperation verging on belief, praying a merciful god might will the EKG line to stabilize.

Instead, it went flat.

A flurry of frantic alerts pouring from the monitor drowned out any and all other sounds. The grand scale of the universe seemed obsolete as each of your five senses honed in on this singular instance.

“Code Blue!” you yelled, recovering fast. Someone reached to cut open Gaz’s shirt while you situated your right palm on the center of his chest and covered it with your left, fingers clasping the hand beneath. “Starting chest compressions at approximately zero one-hundred hours. Charge the defibrillator to 200 joules for the initial shock.”

Above him, elbows locked and pressure severe, you initiated CPR. Trying your damnedest to mute the surrounding whirlwind of chaos, to not be shaken by the sight of Gaz so motionless, so unlike the suave SAS sergeant who had burrowed into the cavity of your being.

Two paddles emerged from your peripheral and settled firmly under his left pec and to the right of his sternum. “200 joules. Clear!”

You stepped back, arms raised, watching his torso jerk off the gurney in tandem with a spike in the EKG. His body then dropped onto the padding below, and the line descended to null once again.

The current coursing through him had barely subsided when you resumed delivering compressions. His ribs began to crack during the second set, but you kept the same pace and depth for the full two-minutes.

What did a few broken ribs matter if it meant he’d return to his brothers-in-arms?

To you?

“300 joules. Clear!”

Like a dormant spore reawakened by a drop in defenses, fear unfurled within your gut, its noxious fumes suffocating you from the inside-out. The defibrillator capped at 360 joules, and if that wasn’t enough to restart the electrical activity of his heart, then—

A nearly inaudible blip from the monitor broke through your train of thought before it had the chance to spiral any further. The blip morphed into a series of beeps, which slowly but surely climbed to a less-concerning rate.

Your shoulders slackened, caving inward as your lungs expelled a heavy sigh of relief.

Gaz was alive. In critical condition and soon to be rushed into emergency surgery, yes, but alive. Which was more than could be said five minutes ago.

Thinking the worst had passed, Ghost crowded around the bed, jostling several of your colleagues in the process of attempting to catch a better look at his incapacitated teammate. He paid no heed to the toes on which he stepped, or the shoulders with which his own collided.

When it came to men like the 141, relinquishing even an inch of authority was as good as allowing them to take over the whole damn lot. True, they might be used to calling the shots out in a warzone, but, here, you had the final say.

“I won’t have your lieutenant scaring my staff shitless, Captain,” was your one and only warning. “Handle him, or I will.”

The other sergeant, Soap, had the decency to appear chastised, ducking his head a tad. In different circumstances, you‘d even appreciate the fierce loyalty on display for the man you both regarded highly.

Just not when it came at the expense of properly doing your job.

“We’ll take it from here.”

Based on the slight laxing of their stances, there would be no further protests. Regardless, no amount of posturing or glaring would’ve deterred you; at this point, anything unrelated to Gaz had no hope of receiving even a morsel of your attention.

Two technicians seized the gurney and rolled it in the direction of the operating room, the lead nurse with her portable monitor trailing close behind. You followed your team to the sinks, where you then scrubbed and scrubbed until you were finally ready to cross the threshold into the sterile field.

There, everything awaited you; a metal tray, a fresh set of surgical tools, and two units of B-negative blood hanging from a transfusion stand. At the middle of the OR was Gaz, resting on the table, covered in green drapes, illuminated by bright overhead lights. And as you stared down at him, at the dewy breaths fogging up his oxygen mask, a comforting sign of life, you found yourself confronted by a terrifying realization:

All that stood between you and someday loving this man was time.

The surgery, to its credit, went relatively smoothly. Meaning, the patient didn’t go into hemorrhagic shock on your table, and you managed to dig out the four bullets still lodged in his viscera. One lodged between his lower left ribs, though luckily not deep enough to damage the vital organs beneath; another two along his intestinal tract; and the last mere centimeters from his mildly-lacerated liver.

It hadn’t been pretty, but Sergeant Garrick would survive with only scars to remind him of the moment he died and crawled back to the land of the living.

“Alright,” the strain in your voice bringing hours of inner turmoil to the surface, “good work, everyone. Let’s sew him shut and reset shop for tomorrow morning.”

You vomited the moment you stepped outside the infirmary.

The wave of nausea that accompanied the night’s must had you doubling over and gripping both knees to support yourself against the force of the retching. With no food in your stomach to purge, there was just the sting of acid rushing up your esophagus and then clear liquid dribbling down your chin. It shouldn’t have gone on for as long as it did, but each time you recalled how the sergeant’s usually rich and lively complexion had looked so ashen in the fluorescence of the OR, that sick feeling returned with a vengeance.

When the chain-puking finally abated, you straightened your spine and wiped the grime off your mouth with the back of your hand. Not yet an hour prior, that same hand had held a scalpel to the hole-ridden flesh of the man whose smile could easily give way to your own, even on worser days. Days like today.

Only this time, he couldn’t take the pain away. This time, it was your turn to ease his ache.

You swiveled around until your body faced the medtent, gravel crackling and crunching beneath your boots at the sudden movement. As if they had a mind of their own, your feet carried you right back to him, one in front of the other in a quick, almost frenzied succession.

Inside, the lights had dimmed to a faint glow. A heart monitor hooked up to electrodes on his chest translated rhythmic contractions into a steady stream of beeps, and the sound echoed through your mind like a macabre metronome. He laid unmoving on a cot, exactly how you’d left him; Sergeant Garrick wasn’t the type to disobey an order, whether consciously or unconsciously received, not even in his sleep.

Then maybe I should’ve ordered him not to get shot up full of lead, you mused with a wry, half-hearted chuckle. Or fall out of helicopters.

No, it’d be wrong to ask of him the impossible. Selfish to demand he treat his body as more than an enlisted weapon, unfair to make him swear never to show up half-dead at your door again. In the same vein as asking you to take lunch breaks longer than five minutes, to not work yourself to the bone despite the omnipresent queue of wounded men and women in need of medical attention. Not unreasonable requests, just unrealistic for occupations built on too much blood and too little time.

So while you couldn’t very well expect the man to compromise the job to which he’d dedicated the whole of his existence, you could control your proximity to said man. A comet was best admired from afar, where its flaming tail looked beautiful rather than damning, and where its inevitable dissolution occurred beyond your field of view.

You needed to put an end to this thing while it was still in your power to do so. You needed to nip whatever feelings you carried for Kyle Garrick in the bud, lest they bloomed beyond management.

But that could wait. For now, he was simply an indisposed soldier requiring your medical oversight—no more, no less. He was Sergeant Garrick of the 141, not the man capable of turning faulty moments into fond memories and easy shifts into emotional shit-shows. Just a patient entering the next stage of his recovery.

And there wasn’t any harm in holding a recovering patient’s hand, you reasoned.

With that, you dragged a foldable plastic chair to rest beside him, settled down into the uncomfortable stiffness of its seat, and gently reached for his bandaged fist. Carefully extending his fingers, gently grazing your palm against his. Familiarizing yourself with the callouses there, the skin that had torn open and grown back thicker, stronger time after time until, one day, it could bear the very worst of the world without demanding ichor be spilled. Memorizing the feeling of warmth and weight, tracing the loops and whorls etched into his fingertips, never to again be found in another.

No harm at all.

tbc.

#icymi #happy ides of march #settled an old debt #self reblog

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