Day 3: What I Fight For
I fell into step just behind my sire. The nurses-most of them anyway- gave us polite space. Crossing on the other side of the hall. Avoiding eye contact or taking a different elevator than us at the most extreme.
Respect and wariness only for his reputation of being a little crazy.
Nothing to do with me.
Probably.
He had assured me that after the incident that caused my Embrace that their minds had been wiped. No one remembered the Garou-the Awoo’s as I came to call them.
No one remembered the way the blood had been spilled or his actions. My death had been erased.
Like it never happened even though my entire life had changed trajectory.
Like a bird in a slingshot being hurtled at a building. Only I didn’t burst into a bunch of feathers on impact. Instead the building teetered.
Was that my purpose? To be flung at something to cause a reaction? To be someone’s pawn? What was I made for?
He paused by the door and looked at me.
My steps halted and looked up.
“A penny, a pint or pickle?” He asked. “I am in the mood for a good pickle.” he added.
Man I missed pickles. Especially the Ren faire ones.
He was asking for either my thoughts, my heartaches, or my troubles. It was an odd phrase that-now that it was normalized less so.
“Penny.” I chewed over my lip, trying to think of the best way to phrase it. “Why do you do this?”
He cocked his head to the side like a curious puppy, sizing me up. I stayed still under his scrutiny though my body begged for motion. As though he could see more than what was on the surface.
I knew he could.
That was how he saved me after all.
Premonitions.
A blessing and a curse.
“Do what?”
“This. Work here. Save lives. Why did…” the words tasted sour on my tongue.
But I wanted to know.
I needed to know.
My head snapped back and forth down the stretch of hallway.
Then leaned in to whisper after making sure no one was around. “You save me…?”
He busied himself with fixing the sleeves of his white coat. I tried not to think about a king keeping his armies in his sleevies.
“Because it’s access. Because I can use what few gifts this existence gives me to help people. It makes the delusions worth it. So Alice says. Here people listen. Even if the methods are roundabout. They listen, they judge, but even if the work is wrong in the math problem and you get the right answer, isn’t that what matters?”
I blinked, taking in his words. That wasn’t how we taught kids, but medicine was different.
Wasn’t it?
And as long as the patient was saved, we could spin the narrative and find the research or methodology to fit how he came to the conclusion.
Right?
I was a storyteller at heart after all.
Spin the truth
Weave the fabric
make the dress
strut the runway-
He pinned me with that look, hand still fussing with the cuff of his coat. He smoothed a wrinkle. “I saved you because you’re like me. You want to help people don’t you? You want to do this to help make lives easier. You make my life easier. You listen and record. Dangerous work, dangerous but necessary.” He stepped into the room to check on a patient.
I leaned in the doorway, listening and recording.
Through our whole shift I was thinking about it.
Was I really like him?
Did I want to be? Not that I had that much of a choice now that I was this…but I had always been thinking about what I wanted to do with my life.
I wanted to learn, to create, to just..help people.
Why am I here? What was going to drive me through these long nights as I slowly lost my mind as his child?
My mind drifted to the past fifteen years of my life before this. The house fire that left us homeless for a year while it was rebuilt. The cancer that took my father because no one had looked. No one took the smell seriously when I said it smelled off.
Rotting.
The same smell that saved my mother when she finally agreed to get checked. We had found her cancer in time. In time to be more or less cured by the time the world shut down for covid.
And then falling into this line of work-literally falling by chance.
Catch me I’m falling. Flying head first into fate.
Catch me before it’s too late-
My hands clutched at the travel mug that held a blood pouch concealed. I wanted to help people sure. To be indispensable to someone. To not have the rug ripped out from under me as it had been time and time and time again. Whenever I was trying to get to my feet life would take the crowbar to my knees to knock me down again.
“But you don’t give up,” Sybil hummed. “We’re going up up up, it’s our moment. You know together we’re glowing.” My fingers reached up to my forehead, letting my hair run through my fingers like water.
“Gonne be gonna be golden.” I breathed, conscious I didn’t need to as the golden blonde strands dropped back into place.
But the exhale helped center my thoughts.
Maybe my old life needed to die the way it did. It was unstable, unhelpful to others and myself. I could move forward and build something beneficial. Something that helped myself and not just others.
Something…stable. Even if my mind wasn’t reliable.
“My little soda pop…” Sybil hummed as I took a long sip from the cup. I considered briefly how carbonated blood would be-probably awful and disruptive to the composition.
“I shouldn’t have shown you that movie…” I murmured, finishing my drink.
But I was smiling again, a brief flash of fangs in the reflection of the elevator.
Stable.
In control.
Able to help myself as much as I helped others.
I could do that.