Not the exit to the dungeon, but yes the exit to the boss room she's in. Or at least, it's probably a boss room: there's a huge pile of half-melted ice in the vague shape of the pieces of a golem over yonder, and the room is large and spacious, with a single aperture through which she can see an icy hallway.

(It's cold... but she can't feel it.)

She'll... attempt to crawl that way, then. And try to think through the problem in front of her.

There's a twinge of pain from one of her legs as she moves. Her left thigh hurts. It was hard to tell, because her limbs all feel so numb and she's definitely in the 'active' portion of her backlash, but. ... Yeah, that has a hole in it.

That's alarming. She puts the alarm away, because it's not helping her get out. She needs to stay as calm as possible, and think logically and rationally. Everything is ice, which means worse comes to worst, she can melt it all and try to find an exit that way. The backlash might kill her, though. A last ditch effort, then.

Hye-jin - tries to remember how she got here. Ice dungeon, A-rank, in... it was Busan? That's not useful to her right now, c'mon, brain, do better. How did you get to this physical space? She... thinks she came down that hallway? And. There was a set of spiral stairs... the geometry was Euclidean, it just moved and shifted like a glacier and liked to squish people, there's... comm screen. She has her comm screen. Is there a beacon telling her which way the exit is? She vaguely remembers that there was... something like that, just in case. Along with the bag of extra clothes in case she burned through the set she's wearing.

Yes. Her comm screen works, and can show her the way out.

(Does she need to go? The floor is starting to look so inviting...)

The hallways have pillars, stalactites, and stalagmites, pure solid ice shaped like jagged teeth of a beast trying to swallow her whole. 

(Her limbs are like lead, and each further step is more tiring than the last.)

She's not actively bleeding, anymore, but she's covered in so much blood and she's leaving an obvious trail behind. 

(It's not, actually, that cold. It's cosy, actually, and warm. The rocking of the ground and walls is soothing like a lullaby.)

There isn't dirt underneath the ice floor. It's just ice all the way through, into whatever infinity surrounds the edges of dungeons. 

(Her eyelids are heavy.)

Some of the ice is melted, a trail pointing back the way she came. 

(Tired...)

So tired...

(If she doesn't feel cold anymore, that's worse than anything else. She remembers that very well.)

Bad. Bad. Emergency power use time. Fuck finding her way through an ice maze while injured. She carefully gets a 3D heading towards where the beacon (and exit) are, and then very uncarefully begins burning a tunnel directly to it. This is better than melting the whole dungeon, but maybe not by much.

Then when she sees a portal through the gigantic hole in the ice that she's made, she can blast herself through, like a rocket.

Finesse is for people that don't have a head wound.

Dungeon portals preserve momentum. 

She shoots out of it like a bullet, emerging into the chilly late November afternoon air and travelling a good ten metres before crashing into the asphalt and rolling several meters farther before she's finally stopped by a wall.

Her partner is immediately by her side; she can feel him before she can see him but only for a fraction of a second, as he shot after her as soon as he saw her. 

"Kim Hye-jin! Hye-jin-ah! Hye-jin-ah, please—" he begs frantically, not wanting to touch her or move her in case something bad happens but looking to be in a complete panic. "Hye-jin-ah please be alive, please, Hye-jin-ah—"

The landing doesn't even hurt, thankfully. Well. Not thankfully, maybe. It's probably another bad sign in a whole series of bad signs.

"Hi Tae-gun-ah," she mumbles, incoherent. "I think someone shot me. I'm fine though."

And that is when she decides that fixing this is no longer her problem and that her vice grip on consciousness can be loosened.

Zzzzzz...

...absolutely not. He roughly shakes her awake. "Hye-jin-ah, dealing with hypothermia 101, don't fall asleep. Stay awake. I'm here." Fuck this he's going to hug her for the body warmth—they're surrounded by media but there's a medical team so now they're being rapidly carried by his ice towards it. "Hye-jin-ah, wake up—"

Nnnnnhhhhh that's so annoying she's so tiiiiired....

"Thassa myth. Only matters if I need to get myself out of the cold," she protests, weakly. "'m out now. Shhhhhhhhhh your job is hold me."

"It's not a myth, your metabolism gets slower when you sleep and if your heartrate goes below forty that can get really dangerous, you need to stay awake, your hypothermia isn't just backlash—" He'll argue all day if he needs to, she needs to stay awake.

"Lee Tae-gun-nim, please remove her clothes," says one of the medical responders once they're in the med tent. It's heated, since Hye-jin's backlash is public and the possibility of espers getting out too backlashed to do anything is very real.

"Understood." Precision is his thing.

"'s'not sleep, it's being unconscious, those are, diff'rnt... cold's weird, not dead 'til 'm warm and dead..."

zzzzzzz.

Yeah no she's out for real.

"—Hye-jin-ah? Hye-jin-ah!"

The team has hooked stuff to her while Tae-gun was dealing with her clothes and they're looking at her vitals. "—Lee Tae-gun-nim, is she unconscious again?"

"Yes—"

"We'll need to move her to a better-equipped facility. I'm sending you the location."

"Yes. Thank you." He doesn't waste time before opening his commscreen and requesting a teleport to the medical center.

Location is Reno, Nevada. They can go straight to the trauma ICU; they knew they might be expecting her, there's a bed already prepped and a nurse assigned 1:1 for the potential admission, plus the entire unit available to step in and help out. 

(Renown Regional Medical Center is not the top trauma center in the world in general, by any means, but they've taken on a lot of care for espers and dungeon injuries in the past; there's some specialization there. Also they happen to have a relatively low census right now, which put them at the top of the list.) 

Marian has already quickly read the chart on file for Kim Hye-jin. Backlash is hypothermia, so they're prepping for aggressive internal rewarming. Dr Hulka is the trauma surgeon on call and Marian likes her so this will probably not be terrible. 

First priority when the patient arrives is to get her in a bed and arrange the room so, uh, what's-his-name, Lee Tae-gun (he is apparently pretty famous but Marian is really bad at ever watching the news) can be in continuous contact with the patient, and second priority is vital signs and assessing how serious the backlash problem is. 

This is Tae-gun's first rodeo but he's nothing but quick on his feet. A moment on arrival to orient and assess threats and then he can move Hye-jin (on a floating ice stretcher that somehow doesn't feel cold to the touch) wherever he's directed.

Patient: unconscious! Pale. Someone has put a peripheral IV into her arm already. The clothes that were in the way have been neatly sliced off of her, and there is some evidence for the beginnings of a prep for a central line as well, clearly abandoned in favor of teleporting her.

She is covered in blood. There is a visible puncture wound in her chest that has had gauze unceremoniously stuffed into it and then taped down to staunch the bleeding; Tae-gun has been given the task of keeping pressure on it, which he has been doing dutifully ever since he was told to. Being the only one present who would be teleported with the patient, and all.

Ice stretcher is very cool! Marian flashes a quick smile to the man, presumably Tae-gun, and then feels awkward about it because this is clearly not a very smiling-appropriate situation. 

Wow the patient looks very concerning! That's a lot of blood. ...Marian is suspicious that not all of that blood came from the chest wound but she's going in order here. Airway, breathing, circulation. 

She directs Tae-gun - and Elaine and Fraser have showed up to help as well - to very gently shift the patient from ice stretcher to bed, you can send sufficiently hypothermic people into lethal arrhythmias by moving them too roughly.

He doesn't need to shift her to the bed; instead, he floats the stretcher gently onto the bed and starts slowly unconjuring it from under her so that she moves basically not at all for a couple of seconds until the stretcher is gone and she's resting her full weight on the mattress.

(He can do that??? That's so cool!!! Marian is jealous.) 

- focus. 

Is the patient still breathing on her own? If so they'll put her in recovery position because she probably needs to be intubated for airway protection - and so they can ventilate her with humidified oxygen heated to 43 C to rewarm her from the inside - but that will take more than the next sixty seconds, getting her other vital signs and possibly the central line is a higher priority (that peripheral line looks kind of sketch, she's not judging the medics on the scene who probably placed it in like fifteen seconds but...okay maybe she's judging them a little). If she's not breathing or seemed ready to quit breathing any moment then Marian's priority ordering is different. 

Kim Hye-jin is breathing on her own, and seems like she's going to continue.

(And yes, there's a lot of blood, in different locations. One of them is her head. The rest of the blood is more explicable by her... having apparently crawled... in what was probably a puddle of her own blood.)

Great! Good job, Kim Hye-jin!

In that case Marian will ask Elaine to make sure everything is prepared for a rapid-fire central line placement arterial line placement intubation not necessarily in that exact order (because Dr Hulka is normally polite but not so much if you summon her to a room for a procedure and do not have everything lined up and ready for her), and Alison can help her get the patient on the heart monitor and put a blood pressure cuff on her arm and a pulse ox probe on her...earlobe, Marian decides, she has the pediatric one in her pocket and she doesn't really expect to get a good reading on a finger...and take her temperature. With the specialized ER thermometer that does not give an error message for numbers below 32° C, because Marian thought ahead. 

Her temperature is low, at 31° C, but not quite low enough to explain her unconsciousness, but - oh that heart rate and blood pressure sure clear up that mystery. Blood pressure is 80/40, and her heart rate is, in professional medical terms: yikes.

(...okay while they're busy checking on her, is there a camera anywhere in this room?)

(There is absolutely not a camera in the room! HIPAA, you know, and if anything espers tend to be more concerned about their medical privacy.) 

That is indeed a yikes heart rate. Hye-jin is compensating really hard for massive hypovolemia and Marian doesn't know how long she can keep up even that much of a blood pressure for - it's actually not as bad as she had been worried it might be given the sheer quantity of blood no longer inside her body - but plausibly not that long, 31 C isn't low enough to be that worried she'll go into V-fib if you sneeze in her direction but it's definitely bad enough to be affecting her cardiac output. 

Oxygen saturation is 95% on room air with a pretty real-looking waveform on the screen. One system is still okay! Probably not for long, now that she's unconscious, but hypothermia will reduce her oxygen needs and her backlash doesn't - shouldn't? - involve any direct fuckery with her lungs. Marian will shove an oxygen mask on her face and put intubation on the bottom of her mental list. 

There are fluids running through the sketchy peripheral IV, by gravity with the clamp wide open, but still not flowing as fast as Marian would like. She sticks the saline bag in a pressure bag and inflates it (and watches to make sure it's actually flowing and the vein is a good enough one to take it, okay looks good for the moment, moving on.) Saline is not going to help for long - pressors probably won't do much at all - she needs blood, they weren't specifically expecting massive blood loss but it comes up enough with dungeon stuff that they prepared for it anyway, they obviously know Hye-jin's blood type, and the entire unit saw them rush past with blood everywhere so almost certainly someone is on that but she should, in fact, check.

"Elaine, make sure blood is on its way?" 

Also, it's a nursing-wisdom fact, which she learned from Alison who's been working here for a decade, that exchanging bodily fluids with an esper partner helps with backlash. And they do have a machine for direct person-to-person blood transfusions, though Marian has done the setup for it exactly once.

"Hey," Marian says to Tae-gun, absently, "what's your blood type?" If it's compatible then she can take ten seconds to try to think of a tactful way to ask if he's been tested for HIV and hepatitis C. 

"A-negative." He also needs a tactful way to ask them to put some cameras in here if possible and he should be asking it already he should have ALREADY ASKED IT but it's SO AWKWARD and asking for awkward things in English is EVEN HARDER and AUGHHHHHH.

"...You know the thing where fluid exchange is even better than contact for guiding? Um, we do direct blood transfusions sometimes and you're the same blood type."

Aaaaaaaaaand how does she aaaaaask how certain he is that he doesn't have HIV. On top of everything else, he's not North American and speaks English as a second language and espers kind of have their own culture to begin with, she has no idea which ways of phrasing it might accidentally be incredibly offensive. She should grit her teeth and ask anyway because it could be really important but - 

Alison can guess what Marian is trying to ask, given that it's a box on the checklist for the somewhat archaic direct-blood-transfusion machine that looks like a robot from an 80s movie.

However, there are ways to get around it, and. There was the whole thing with the lava dungeon. That was all over the news and Alison, unlike Marian, actually owns a television. (And occasionally reads trashy gossip magazines.) 

"You use the standard guiding strategy, yeah?" she says, which she thinks is very diplomatic. 

What....is the "standard guiding strategy"? Marian feels like she should know this but she's drawing a blank on what, or what it could possibly have to do with blood transfusions. 

"It means they fuck," Alison whispers to Marian, not quite quietly enough that Tae-gun won't be able to overhear it. 

And??????

(Also did Alison just say that out loud with her actual mouth, whyyyy. Espers have hyperacute senses!!! Tae-gun probably heard that!)

...ohhhhhhh fluid exchange, they can ignore the checkbox because any diseases will probably have been passed back and forth already and it's approximately equivalent to them having already done emergency blood transfusions for guidance already. Right. 

Marian is going to make herself very busy sterilizing Hye-jin's upper chest in preparation for Dr Hulka showing up to place a subclavian central line. 

Oh my God are they actually going to make him answer that directly with his facemouth. They are, aren't they.

"Yes, we do," he says, trying not to SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST. "Use it, I mean." STOP SAYING WORDS YOU FOOL.

"Excellent. There's a consent form for it, I'll track it down once things are a little quieter." 

Elaine hurries in with a bag of hospital-supply blood to cosign with Alison and hang running into the peripheral IV, about thirty seconds before Dr Hulka breezes in with the ultrasound machine and starts donning her sterile gown and gloves to place the central line. She doesn't address Tae-gun at all, she's busy and talking to relatives or esper partners is the nurses' job. 

Marian is not desperately busy - for the next 60 seconds or so, at least, until Dr Hulka is ready for the procedure - and will make eye contact with Tae-gun and try to convey via eyebrows that she has not forgotten he exists. 

Oh cool excellent that's an opening yes how does he—business face. Public face. He can do this. He does this every day. Breathe in, breathe out, public face.

He lets go of Hye-jin's hand (not without flinching, but they're still the kind of insanely compatible that he can guide her from a reasonable distance so it's not that big a deal) and walks up to Marian. "Ms. Daly," he says, quietly. "I am not sure if you are the person I should be talking to about this, but I believe my partner was victim of an assassination attempt. The person who attempted it somehow managed to slip through a dungeon portal undetected despite numerous witnesses. I don't know of a way to counter that—but if my guess as to who was responsible for it is correct, then I believe we should want cameras here, ideally uploading their footage directly to secure external servers. If the hospital has any procedures to deal with informational hazards or illusion espers, I would request that you put those in place, or ask someone who could." He bows. "Please."

Did he just bow to her. Marian has no idea what the appropriate acknowledgement is for that! 

"...Alison?" Alison has been working here for a decade and is generally acknowledged to be one of the best nurses on the unit, and she's been putting herself out there for the Weird Esper Shit for years; she's the person to ask. "Do we have a camera system for, um, dealing with informational hazards or illusion espers? That uploads to an external server?"

She has friends on the Internet who would definitely know stuff about setting that up but they absolutely don't work for Renown Regional Medical Center and presumably the system needs to, like, be HIPAA compliant? 

...Also she's going to discreetly position herself where they can continue the conversation with Tae-gun still in reach of her patient's hand, because it's slightly freaking her out knowing that he's her esper partner and seeing him break contact. 

Alison does seem to have any idea what Tae-gun could possibly be talking about! 

"We don't have something ready-to-go, I'm afraid, this hasn't come up before. We can figure it out, I'm sure, I'll call the tech support department, but - if it's urgent I can Facetime our colleague who's off today and point the camera at her, and he can screen-record and save it? Not a secure server but I can start it right now." 

There is no way that's HIPAA compliant!!!!!

...On the other hand, an information-hazardous illusion esper assassination plot also sounds really bad!!!! 

She nods and waits for Tae-gun's response. He is down in Hye-jin's chart as having been granted prior authority to make medical decisions on her behalf and "preventing assassins by bending patient privacy rules" is arguably a medical decision. 

He nods to her and bows again. "Thank you very much, Ms. Alison—" Why is her last name blacked out on her badge. What??? Why would anyone do this???? "That would be very useful. If there is any way I can help—with this or anything else—please let me know." And then, yes, he can hold Hye-jin's hand again.

Awwww what a sweet shy man. The gossip magazines did not convey his personality correctly at all.

"Of course." And she'll Facetime Richard, another nurse on the unit and incidentally her boyfriend, very briefly explain the situation, and then attach her phone to a canister of sani-wipes with medical tape so she can have the camera pointed at Hye-jin. 

"Of course." Marian tries to smile reassuringly at him. "We're going to place a central line for fluids and blood, and a line in her wrist to monitor her blood pressure, and put in a breathing tube, and then we're going to be working on rewarming measures. Please tell me if you have questions, I know it's - a lot." 

Aaaand Dr Hulka is giving her an expectant look so she'd better focus and help with the central line placement now. 

...Tae-gun does not like this at all. The last time Hye-jin was under life-threatening hypothermia the solution was several hours of—guiding—and didn't involve any of these unpleasant-sounding things. He much preferred that treatment.

He nods, anyway. "No questions. I'll stay out of your way." To the extent possible while he's still holding her hand.

"You're doing fine." He's remarkably good at not being in the way, really. 

Dr Hulka is frowning at the hastily-dressed chest wound. "...That's not bleeding much, Huh." Obvious glance at the blood now drying over half her body, and the heart rate and blood pressure numbers on the monitor screaming that it's definitely her blood that should be in her body and isn't. "I was assuming she'll need the OR once we have her stabilized. Anything I missed in the report on her injuries?" 

"Nnnnot really." There was not a 'report' as such. "I think they moved her here almost immediately, like, all they did over there was an IV." 

"We need scans but I'm not taking her on a field trip right now. Put in for a bedside chest X-ray stat, please. - Line's in." Dr Hulka ties off the second suture holding it in place, steps back, and snaps off her first set of sterile gloves to reveal the second, fresh pair for starting on the arterial line placement. 

Marian will put a dressing on it and then carefully pause the blood products and clamp the saline line to transfer them over from the peripheral IV. 

- how are Hye-jin's vital signs holding up? Still breathing okay on her own? Now seems like a good moment to take her temperature again, too. 

She’s still breathing okay, but her temperature’s down to 30. Vitals are otherwise somewhat stable; the dressing on the chest wound must have stopped most of the bleeding.

Surprisingly effective dressing given how incompetent hurriedly done it looks. 

...The core temperature afterdrop isn't shocking, but Marian isn't a fan. Hopefully they're setting up for internal rewarming soon? 

Elaine is bringing in the rapid infuser pump for giving her heated IV fluids very fast; normally they would wait for the central line placement to be actually confirmed before running liters of fluid into it, but this is an emergency and Dr Hulka is really quite sure it's in the right place and gave them the go-ahead. 

Alison is gloved up as well, placing a double-lumen catheter for bladder lavage – it's one of the fastest ways to set up for internal rewarming and actually very effective. They'll do gastric lavage with heated fluids as well but she's waiting to place a nasogastric tube for it until after the patient is intubated and isn't going to throw up into her own lungs if they hit her gag reflex wrong. 

"...Um." She pauses. "I - think we might have an entry wound here." She gestures at the patient's upper thigh, which she had been hastily wiping clean of blood in an attempt to get her nether region vaguely sterile. 

DID MARIAN MANAGE TO MISS THAT HER PATIENT HAD BEEN SHOT IN THE LEG?????? 

"Get a pressure dressing on it if it's bleeding, I'll look in a minute." Dr Hulka is going to attempt to intubate this patient without any sedation, she's pretty deeply unconscious already and her blood pressure is marginal even with the rapid infuser hooked up and Elaine cosigning a second bag of blood-bank blood. 

....Is it in fact bleeding? Marian felt like the blood she was seeing in the legs region was mostly caked on and drying, not squirting. 

It’s mostly stopped, though there’s still a little bit oozing out; her black tights were probably doing a lot of work to stop the bleeding, and cutting them away for the catheter released the meager floodgates. But it definitely looks like the bullet missed the femoral artery, by how their patient isn’t dead. It looks dangerously close though, this woman is lucky.

(This is so distressing!!!! Why is there so much stuff!!!! If she were awake he'd just take her home and guide her and it'd be fine but this is just making him anxious!!!!!!!)

(He's mostly not showing it, though. He'll be quiet and stoic and, if necessary, useful. Hopefully it won't be.)

It can get a pressure dressing. Marian does not try to do an especially artistic job of taping it in place since Dr Hulka is going to rip it off in the next thirty seconds and possibly stick her (sterile-gloved) finger in there. Marian is not normally squeaming but seeing Dr Hulka interact with bullet wounds definitely makes her uncomfortable. 

...She's kind of mentally down-prioritized the chest wound because the sketchy field dressing does seem to have mostly controlled the bleeding, but Tae-gun is still holding pressure on it - with a little ice plate, which is very cool - but, still, using his esper power unnecessarily will give him backlash and she doesn't actually know what his backlash is. ...Also the ice is weirdly not-cold but it's still making her feel kind of uneasy having it here her HYPOTHERMIC patient. 

She will thank him for his help and slap a proper pressure dressing over it so he can be relieved of that responsibility. 

"Catheter's in." Alison steps back from the bed and starts de-gloving. "Be right back, just gotta microwave some saline for bladder irrigation. Should I start setting up for direct blood transfusion or do you think you'll be making an OR trip first?" 

"...I don't think we can take her to the OR with a temp of 30 C. So, yes, please." It's always so weird to Marian how...low-tech...bladder irrigation is. You don't even technically need it to be sterile - the saline comes in sterile bags but they usually cut them open and dump them into the irrigation kit bag rather than repeatedly connect and unconnect new bags. 

Patient intubated and on the ventilator! 25% oxygen and minimal pressure support, despite the chest wound she doesn't seem to be having oxygenation problems. Dr Hulka will put on sterile gloves and ask Marian to peel back the dressing so she can investigate the possible second bullet wound. 

The bleeding has stopped, and it… doesn’t seem quite like a bullet wound, actually? Bullet wounds don’t get smaller the deeper into the victim they go. It’s also free of shrapnel, and while it seems like it grazed the femoral artery, it didn’t puncture it properly. That and the leggings probably saved her life, considering how much blood she lost from the chest injury.

This woman: extremely lucky!

...That's a strange wound profile but it's not going to cause the patient to bleed out and so it's not currently Dr Hulka's top priority. 

The X-ray tech isn't here yet and there are other patients in the unit. Dr Hulka strips off her gloves again and pitches them perfectly into the trash can. "Call me if anything changes or if rewarming isn't working." And she's gone. 

Why does she always dooooooooo that. 

...Marian will place a triple-lumen nasogastric tube for gastric lavage; that one she does want to check the placement of before dumping liters of heated saline down it, so might as well get all of it with the same X-ray. 

Alison is back a couple of minutes later hauling the tubing setup for bladder irrigation. And a heated bag of saline. "Mmmmm. These make great hot-water-bottles. - there's a problem with the transfusion machine, I put Philip on troubleshooting it but it'll be half an hour or more. Hulka wants to give plasma in the meantime and we'll send a CBC to check her hemoglobin." 

Why this???? 

...It's okay. Hye-jin's BP is holding up and her heart rate is actually down a bit, and they've got everything they need to rapidly transfuse a lot of blood-bank blood if she starts bleeding again. 

(Though, uh, another reason her heart rate might be dropping is if her temperature is; the ventilator heating circuit is on the highest setting and she's now three liters in on her rapid-infuser heated IV fluids and the bladder irrigation is nearly ready, but backlash-caused symptoms can be really stubborn. And they should have a continuous temperature probe but, uh, she would normally do either esophageal or bladder temperature but both of those will be super wrong if they're dumping hot fluids down those tubes. And she's slightly mortified about placing a rectal temp probe with Tae-gun right there even though apparently they fuck shut up, Marian's brain, that's an unprofessional thought.) 

...She'll take her temperature again the manual way. 

Still 30 C. Not terrible, but, uh, it should be going up, not staying the same. Backlashes sure are a way.

(Is all of this really necessary. Can't he just hug her. Why is all of this necessary.)

(At least they don't seem to be panicking and she seems to be alive. Their quiet professionalism and confidence is actually doing wonders for his anxiety and he now understands what it feels like to be on this side of it on a visceral level. He's kind of cribbing notes for what affect to project next time he has to do a rescue.)

And she has bullet wounds, even if she got incredibly lucky she's going to need surgery and the longer they wait on that the higher the infection risk and they can't take her to the OR until she's less hypothermic than this and, in general, aaaaaaaah.

She needs guiding but the blood transfusion machine won't be ready for way longer than Marian feels like waiting. And, um. Even if sex is apparently standard Marian does not really want to suggest that!!! On top of all the other problems there's a catheter in the way!!! 

She could suggest they cuddle - actually, that could work, Tae-gun can do the floating ice stretcher-platform thing, he could support her while they lower the bed without moving her at all and he could slide under her and have full-body skin to skin contact - she can put a Bair Hugger blanket over both of them, now that Dr Hulka is done messing around placing lines... 

Fluid exchange is more effective, though. 

She did hear during one nursing gossip session over drinks after work that any bodily fluids work. Making out is apparently another way, though, uh, that also seems logistically complicated with the endotracheal tube in the way...

...Marian eyes the bladder irrigation bag. 

Which does not, technically, have to only have sterile contents. 

...She goes and checks the attached bathroom. There's totally a urine-collection hat in there, on the distant off-chance of a patient who can get up and walk to the bathroom to pee. 

Thirty seconds later she politely clears her throat to get Tae-gun's attention. 

"Excuse me could I please get you to go pee in this. For fluid exchange." She points at the bladder irrigation bag. She is DYING OF EMBARRASSMENT but her patient dying of backlash hypothermia is worse than embarrassment so. 

Tae-gun blinks. "For... fluid exchange?"

"Same principle as the direct blood transfusion or, um. The - standard guiding strategy." Marian is saying this with a completely straight face even though DYIIIING. "I think kissing, um, with tongue," could she possibly have thought of a more awkward way to say that, is she literally a middle schooler, "also works, but she's intubated. We're warming her that way anyway. I think after that you should get into the bed under her for more skin contact, while we're waiting to be able to do the blood transfusion, but I want to see if this helps, fluid exchange is supposed to be more effective." 

They want to put his pee?? In her????????

Okay, no, you know what, they're professionals, they know what they're doing, he doesn't, he's going to trust them. He nods and stands up. "Are there any special instructions or do I just need to urinate in this?"

Aaaaaaaaaaah????

"Don't, like, touch the inside of the hat with your hands?" She just took it out of its packaging, it's not guaranteed-sterile to the degree that you'd want for IV supplies but it's clean. "- You don't have any UTI symptoms, right?" Normal urine isn't actually sterile, that's a weird urban myth, but it's fairly clean and honestly even if he did have a UTI it's unlikely he would give it to her when they're rinsing her bladder out so thoroughly anyway. "No special instructions otherwise." 

(She's now realizing that she could also ask him to...spit in Hye-jin's mouth? Except that Marian is squeamish about one (1) thing and yechhhhhhhh. Also mouths are objectively much more disgusting than bladders, actually, and she really doesn't want to give her patient a ventilator-associated pneumonia with someone else's mouth bacteria, ughhhhh.) 

"No UTI symptoms," he confirms, and... goes to do as instructed, he supposes.

At least he gets to hide in the bathroom to do it. This is mortifying and weird and it might be medically necessary and if he'll literally jump into lava for Kim Hye-jin he will very well pee in a damn cup for her. While not thinking about it at all or, or about literally anything, actually, he has no idea what the thoughts he's not having are because he's not having them.

Marian, feeling rather pleased with her clever solution, will take the hat from him and thank him - she appreciates him being so helpful! and calm about everything! visitors who freak out about ICU things are way more stressful for her to be around - and then carefully pour his pee into the irrigation bag. (She makes a mental note to change the whole bag and tubing later if it turns out they need to keep this up for her whole shift, but it's fine for an hour or two.) 

"Right. I do think it could help to have more skin contact. If you're comfortable, er, undressing and using your ice stretcher trick to sort of slide under her, I - can turn my back," she'll still HEAR the monitor alarm if anything happens, "and I'm going to put a warming blanket over her, so you'll both be covered. Is that okay with you?" 

(Marian seems to feel that naked cuddles in an ICU patient's bed is a much bigger and weirder ask than peeing in a cup.) 

Tae-gun on the other hand finds that one a lot less uncomfortable. One, she's a medical professional, and two, the literal whole world has already seen him naked, he's literally been on the actual covers of actual magazines, at this point he's just kind of inured to it. 

"I can do that. Do you need to prepare her in any way or should I do it now?"

(Marian hasn't seen him naked! ...Or if she has it was in passing and she completely failed to make the connection that he's the same person. She doesn't own a TV or read magazines.) 

"Give me a second to get the blanket set up and check that all her lines are secured."

And that her vital signs are hanging in there. How are her blood pressure and heart rate looking now? She's only had the two units of blood, but they're running plasma in the rapid infuser now and she's had four liters of saline, though only a fraction of that will stay in her bloodstream rather than wandering off to make her extremities puffy. 

Hye-Jin’s vital signs: still hanging in there! It really does look to just be the hypothermia backlash that is the dangerous part now, her blood pressure and heart rate are slowly returning to more reasonable numbers.

Then Marian will get everything ready and tell Tae-gun when she's ready for him to undress and ice-stretcher his way under Hye-Jin in the bed. 

He strips quickly and efficiently—shoes socks he'd already taken his jacket off earlier T-shirt slacks underwear—and lifts her up into the air at the same time as he uses some more ice to lift himself into the bed under her before unconjuring the ice again. The entire process takes less than twenty seconds.

(Tae-gun's backlashing, too, but he's keeping a very tight lid on it. He took backlash meds earlier and those are helping some but he'll probably get some more obvious symptoms in a second. He's trying not to think about them, and the nurse will cover him and Hye-jin with a blanket which will make it easier, but they'll still be there.)

(Marian, if she were aware of this, would be very upset with herself for assuming he was fine to use his power - though she might have asked him to anyway, there isn't a great alternative for safely getting him in close contact with a critically hypothermic patient attached to tons of lines and tubes - and also would really, really wish he had felt comfortable communicating with her about his limits. However, Marian has no way of knowing right now and so will continue to operate in blissful ignorance.) 

Temperature check? Are any of her attempts to intervene directly on the backlash starting to have effects? 

Yep! 32 degrees Celsius! She might soon graduate to the normal thermometer, if for some reason Marian were going to swap.

...You know what, yes, actually, Marian will totally switch to the normal thermometer as soon as she can! It takes ten seconds to bring up a reading instead of thirty seconds and when it comes to knowing her patients' vital signs Marian is not a patient person. 

X-ray tech is here! 

....Wow, um. Marian. Did not think this through. The part where there's a naked man lying under her patient in the bed and they now need to wedge an X-ray board under her. (Marian decided to be slightly proactive and program an abdominal X-ray too juuuust in case the patient has internal injuries that she couldn't report because she passed out approximately the second she made it out of the dungeon.) Sure, her patient is an esper and this is not even notably weird for the week they're having but!!! still!!!

(Marian has not been working here long enough to get entirely desensitized to the fact that things like this come up.) 

Espers, man. 

...She will explain to Tae-gun through the blanket that they need to put a board under Hye-jin's body to take an X-ray. How does he think it most makes sense to do that. 

"I lift her up with ice, you place the plate wherever it makes sense to do so, perhaps supported by more ice, then I lower her back down. Would that work?"

“Works for me! If you’re doing all right on backlash yourself.”

She is not going to ask what his backlash is. Espers care a lot about medical privacy for that, understandably! And not everyone even gets medical-emergency-grade backlash. So it's not like she needs to know for professional reasons. 

They shouldn't have the warming blanket on her for this, it's got radioopaque materials in it, but she can swap it out for a sheet and then guide Tae-gun through where the board needs to go. She asks the X-ray tech to wait outside, because sure, he's seen weirder, but - being in the ICU for backlash treatment is a lot and Tae-gun is taking on a lot right now and she doesn't want to additionally make him deal with an X-ray tech staring at him because apPARENTLY he's a celebrity or something. 

Well, his acute backlash doesn't get medically dangerous until it's very very severe and his chronic backlash isn't at passively dangerous levels* so he's fine, really!

He does look confused when she sends the X-ray tech away, though. "Do they not need to help set up the X-ray?" he wonders.

* Anymore.

“Not with you here!” Maybe he’s not that bothered but Marian is.

???

"So should I... leave?"

He shakes his head. "Never mind, sorry, I shouldn't be wasting your time."

Oh no she confused him. She feels bad.

“I - no, if you're comfortable being exposed to a little bit of X-rays, I think I would rather you didn't break contact with her." The patient's temperature is finally trending upward and Marian is pretty sure that all their warming interventions were only managing to keep her from dropping further and it's the guiding that's making actual progress. "You'll be under a sheet and if you sort of move a bit to the side you won't interfere with the X-ray imagery. The tech just needs to line the machine up at the foot of the bed once I have the board in place for him." 

He nods. "Please just consider me a tool to achieve our goals." He can't bow and English just doesn't have the vocabulary and grammatical constructs for him to convey what he means. "I will do whatever is necessary to most efficiently and effectively help her recover."

...Marian thinks she gets the message and she really, really appreciates him. She still feels kind of bad but Hye-jin is, in fact, the top priority. 

She can talk him through where the X-ray board needs to go and what angle Hye-jin's torso needs to be supported at and then summon the X-ray tech - who's been having a very enjoyable break sitting outside on his phone checking his social media - to line up the machine correctly. After the chest X-ray she'll want to reposition the board under Hye-jin's abdominal region, with Tae-gun pressed against her side so he's out of the image but still in contact with a lot of skin area. 

And once the tech has departed and they have everything arranged back how it was in the bed, she will go refresh the computer until the imagery is uploaded to Hye-jin's chart! It'll be a longer wait for the radiologist to read the X-rays and put in their note, but Marian is capable of determining if tubes are in the right place (she still needs to wait for Dr Hulka's go-ahead but she does want to know in the meantime) and also can recognize, like, a massive hemothorax, though she would be surprised, Hye-jin's O2 sat is fine. 

The bullet looks like it exited cleanly, missing both of her lungs. There isn't a hint of a hemothorax building, but her sternum is cracked.

Alarmingly, there's some soft tissue damage around her heart.

....Marian spends a few moments reminding herself that she already knows everything she needs to about the patient's hemodynamics and the fact that the bullet probably grazed her heart on the way through her does not retroactively make her vital signs for the past hour worse. 

The fact that there's no sign of a bullet in her means there should be two holes. Marian isn't sure which hole the one in her chest is - proooobably exit wound given that it's the one the medics on the site noticed and put a dressing on? Hopefully the fact that she's been lying on her back put some pressure on the wound by itself, and she's not in a growing pool of blood, Tae-gun was under her and he got some blood smeared on him but it looked like drying blood from what was already all over her. 

Marian is going to page Dr Hulka - they probably want a bedside echo to see what kind of shape her heart is in and decide whether to expedite the OR trip - and then she'll explain to Tae-gun that she wants them to roll Hye-jin a little to the side so Marian can peek at her back and slap a pressure dressing on the exit wound that must be there. 

Sure, he can do that.

..........

Oh he should tell them about her regen.

"I have a thing I need to tell you that requires confidentiality."

"Oh. Um. Confidential as in I shouldn't put in in writing in her chart? Do I have your permission to tell other staff involved directly in her care if it's relevant?" 

"Confidential as in you should treat it as if you were under an NDA. Though I can't demand one right now, obviously. But that's the level of secrecy."

"...Okay. Got it." 

This comes up. Sometimes it's really critically important for a particular fact about an esper's powerset or backlash to absolutely not end up leaking to the public. There's a precedent for secrets on the level that only one nurse should know them; there's even a box in the chart for "there is an undisclosed fact about this esper" which tells the rest of the care team not to worry too much - or think too hard about it - if something doesn't make sense. Marian has never specifically been the one (1) nurse who knew a top-secret-NDA-level confidential fact about a high-level famous esper, but - this is fine. 

"She has regeneration powers," he says, quietly. "They're strong enough to survive swimming in lava for a while, and they probably mean her wounds aren't that bad." It goes without saying that her using regeneration powers causes backlash and so her healing herself is actively making her core temp get lower.

"Ohhhhh. That - makes sense of some things." Both the implausibly lucky 'escape' on her thigh wound and the temperature continuing to drop even once she was unconscious and not using her publically-known esper power. "I'll - tell Dr Hulka we should set up the blood transfusion as a top priority, not the OR. Um, do you - have past experience of how long her regen takes for - wounds this serious - I'm wondering if I should expect her to wake up anytime soon, her temp isn't low enough at this point to explain why she's unconscious." 

"No, I don't have specific experience, but I'd guess it's the blood loss and the exhaustion and the non-acute parts of her backlash."

“I can see that, yeah.”

They did send a hemoglobin after the two units of blood; Marian should go check if that’s back yet and how anemic she still is. ...And also check the non-disclosed medical information box, so the radiologist knows not to ask too many questions if the chest X-ray comes back looking like someone who was shot in the heart but has had a few days or weeks of healing up from it (at normal human rates of healing.) 

She's still anemic, but it's not nearly as bad as it would be for someone that did not have regeneration. From the hemoglobin, it looks like the bleeding has probably stopped entirely by now. Marian's patient has stopped leaking.

Plink, something falls from Hye-jin's hair and onto the floor.

...?

Tae-gun is kind of trapped under her and can't look but, what?

Um?????

…Marian bends to scoop it up from the floor under the bed.

UM???!!!!

“- Well. I guess I’m no longer confused why she’s still unconscious.” A moment later she realizes that Tae-gun can’t see what she’s holding at this angle. “Bullet fell out of her head,” she explains, and - will go palpate Hye-jin’s head to find the wound (exit wound but, like, not in the usual sense) and make sure it’s regenerating well.

(Marian hasn't actually ever had a patient with regen before. It happens ever that they need an ICU but not very often, only if their backlash is such that at some point they can't keep regenerating without worsening their overall condition. Which does seem to be the situation Hye-jin was in before they put some blood in her.) 

His heart nearly stops.

Head. Bullet. Someone shot Kim Hye-jin in the head?????????????????

Lee Tae-gun's composure has successfully been broken.

"She's stable," Marian says reassuringly. "Just need to stay on top of the backlash now." She's actually very calm about this. Hye-jin must have healed herself enough to regain consciousness long enough to get herself out of the dungeon, which is a good sign that mostly rules out non-regenerable brain damage, she was breathing fine on her own even once she lost consciousness again, and Marian has all her vital signs right up on that big screen and hasn't seen any of the fluctuations you would expect with rising intracranial pressure.

She still feels like an idiot for failing to notice but, in fairness to herself, the patient secretly has regen and so by the time she made it to the hospital at all there was not, in fact, still a life-threatening problem related to that particular injury for them to notice. Also her hair is really red to begin with, which makes it harder to pick up on bleeding there. 

The entry (and.... now technically exit...) wound is sneakily hidden in the back right temporal lobe of the cerebrum; just above and behind her ear, hidden by her extremely red hair. There's less blood than might be expected for a head wound, so probably this... came... after the other shots... when she had less blood to lose, despite head wounds tending to be notoriously bloody. And her too-bright esper red hair sure did soak up the blood well, didn't it.

It seems to be healing well, though? Probably?? There's, uh, some skull fragments and small amount of grey matter that are getting ejected after the bullet, apparently her regeneration is just throwing everything that is foreign or too broken for salvaging out entirely. The area would probably benefit from being cleaned, there's a lot of matted and bloody hair in the way.

She may be stable but whoever did this won't remain stable for long—

Focus. She survived being eaten by a dragon and bathed in lava, she survived being shot—

Except she was shot in the head which probably made her go unconscious in a dungeon that had been cleared. Which means that if she'd taken just a little bit longer to recover she'd have been trapped after the dungeon got sealed and regeneration can't heal that—

He had kind of hoped she'd have incinerated whoever did this. Even if on reflex. But no, they're probably still alive, and Tae-gun suddenly needs them to not be. Needs it very, very much. 

...it wasn't Kang Jaeha who did this, but it was almost certainly him who ordered the hit. The, the thing wearing his skin, it had his Hye-jin shot in the head.

Tae-gun pulls himself together. He pulls himself together because he cannot have feelings about Hye-jin and Jaeha at the same time, not in public like this. He'll have feelings later. For now, he'll—deal. Public face on.

...Marian does not miss that Tae-gun is very very upset about this. 

It - seems best to not make a big deal of it? Or acknowledge it much at all? (Marian certainly finds it antihelpful when she's fighting off an emotional breakdown at work if someone, like, indicates that they noticed, even if they're trying to help.) She'll...keep doing her job as though she's completely oblivious to the fact that he could possibly experience emotions. 

Nursing school does cover regen, which - like basically all esper powers - is wildly variable between people, but there are some recurring patterns. This looks like...shit nursing school was a while ago and Marian was very very nerdsniped at the time but hasn't prioritized reviewing terms for this in particular...

This looks like interior-to-exterior healing, she thinks - good for displacing foreign bodies like, uh, bullets, rather than risking trapping them in the esper's body - and...probably focused on critical functions rather than even all-over healing - from the outside, her chest wound looked like a fresh injury, just not as bad as it really was. Marian would consider Regen Internopugnica but Hye-jin is unconscious, and she's read papers on how true combat-focused regen espers can, for example, fight their way out of a dungeon while missing a limb and all their skin and suffering from severe airway scalding. Probably Internotegumenta Critica, it looks like the regen isn't going to leave her with disfiguring scars but it was clearly focused on critical function first. 

...Awwww and she can't even nerd out with Alison about whether she's classifying right and then put their analysis and classification in the chart. Because it's a non-disclosed medical fact. Rude

At least she can talk to one person about it. "Regen Internotegumenta Critica," she says, sounding very slightly smug and pleased with herself about it. "Everything looks good, the regen is pushing out some damaged tissue so I expect she'll be out a while longer while it regrows that part of her brain."

Her type clearly isn't smart enough to put displaced brain matter back even if that would go faster, you only see that occasionally with Uniformisystemica (regenerating everywhere at once evenly rather than from the inside out, and focused on the overall systemic functioning of the esper's organs) in the Velox (fast) or Fortis (exceptionally robust and resilient) subtypes. 

She should clean up Hye-jin's head a bit; the policy is that if you have time, it's recommended to, you know, tidy up loose ends so the other medical professionals don't have to try as hard to avoid thinking about what the non-disclosed medical fact might be. Also brain matter: ewwwwwww. Marian thought she had exactly two major squicks (saliva and stuff that comes out of lungs) but apparently literal grey matter leaking out of a hole in her patient's head is also up there. 

She...will put the bullet in her pocket? So it's not laying around the room where Dr Hulka might see it and speculate. 

while it regrows that part of her brain

He did NOT need to hear that sentence, actually! He didn't need to think about the fact that the brain needs to be regrown!!! It's actually really hard not to have feelings when his girlfriend's partner's brain needs to be regrown!!!!!!!

"I see," is what he says, and at least his voice is perfectly level even if he's having some trouble with the vein pulsating in his neck. "That's promising."

(It has not occurred to Marian that this might be a distressing sentence to hear. It's good news! Hye-jin may not have the strongest known type of regen, but it's pretty up there, it'll get her back to her previous baseline and it'll probably take more like hours or days than weeks or months!) 

She has time to get Hye-jin's head wound site cleaner and tuck the hair back over it before Dr Hulka sidles in for a bedside echo. 

And how does the patient's heart look on ultrasound? 

There's soft tissue damage through it, but... everything important is fine, and the damage is mostly focused around the heart, not in it.

(There's a telling line of damage that would theoretically pass through the heart, but it is possible Dr. Hulka will carefully not be noticing that kind of evidence, considering.)

Dr Hulka has been a trauma surgeon and ICU physician for twenty-five years. She does not miss the tract of soft tissue injury intersecting the patient's heart. 

However, out loud she just narrates that there's no sign of trauma to the myocardium, cardiac wall movement is normal, septum is intact, valves look okay, there's a small hemopericardium (blood in the pericardial sac around the heart) but it appears stable and there's no sign of cardiac tamponnade. They'll want a followup in an hour or two to make sure the bleeding is stable. 

(She knows that there's a non-disclosed medical fact but does not actually know who checked the box. It might not be Marian.) 

Tae-gun has managed to recover his composure after a bit. She's fine. She'll be fine. She has bullshit regeneration and she'll be just fine and she won't have permanent brain damage that will alter her personality forever because she's fine. Which means that he's also fine. That's how he is.

At least until they come up with some new extremely alarming thing to tell him she's fine.

Dr Hulka can also read between the lines. "Hemoglobin's coming up, bleeding seems to be under control," she says gruffly. "What's her last temp? Backlash is our top priority, we'll keep her here for direct transfusion."  

"Uh, 32 C but that was a few minutes ago." Marian will hastily check again. Still with the low-temp thermometer because it's not inconceivable she lost ground again, what with how the urine fluids exchange was a one-off thing and there's a whole lot of regen going on. 

It's actually made it up to 33 C!

(The whole lot of regen is still taking a toll, to be clear, but her partner is right there holding her, so. It is, just barely with medical assistance, temperature positive.)

"33 C. Up most of a degree." 

"Over, what, half an hour?" Dr Hulka scowls. "Better than nothing but we need to work faster than that. They've nearly got the direct transfusion machine up and running, they'll be over any minute to hook her partner up." 

Aaaaaand she breezes out of the room. She's got other patients, you know. 

Right. Well, Marian is at loose ends up Alison gets here, then. 

"Tae-gun, do you have any questions?" 

He twitches at being called by just his personal name like that but reminds himself as he always has to do when this happens that it's a different culture. "No, Ms. Daly." Was that pointed? He didn't mean it that way. ...much. "At least if I understand correctly, I will simply be giving Ms. Kim Hye-jin blood directly, yes?"

Marian is absolutely going to miss any subtext of pointedness; with the right prompting she migh recall that cultural differences exist around using surnames versus given names, buuuut her entire brain is currently loaded up with ICU context. 

"Yeah. ...Have you donated blood before in general? The process is pretty straightforward, we'll place a catheter in your vein and collect blood, the difference is just that it goes directly to her IV rather than sending it off to the blood bank for processing."

Her voice is absentminded; she's reading the radiologist's note on the X-ray to confirm that A Medical Doctor has put down somewhere in writing that her nasogastric tube is correctly placed and safe to use. She forgot to ask Dr Hulka, there's kind of a lot going on. (...Ugh she needs to go microwave enormous bags of saline for gastric lavage, doesn't she. She is not actually 100% sure how Alison fit them in the microwave and is tempted to delegate this task so she doesn't have to find out.) 

"I have, yes. If that is all then I have no questions."

Alison will be there three minutes later, wheeling the transfusion machine!

(It's not that complicated - basically just an IV pump powerful enough to create a gentle vacuum and encourage the donor's blood to keep coming out, and compatible tubing - but it's from the 80s, blood storage and blood transport logistics have reached the point where direct blood transfusions are no longer really a thing outside of weird cases like guiding fluid exchange. Alison thinks the hospital may have literally bought it on Ebay, replacing the frustrating manual syringe setup in use when she was first hired to the unit. Anyway, it doesn't have a touchscreen in sight, and is actually very reliable in general but the troubleshooting process is not one the nursing staff are as familiar with and you can't just swap in a different unit, they only have one.) 

She has the tubing primed with saline and set up with the adaptor for the standard blood donation catheter (and an adapter on the other end for the needleless luer lock port on the central line, the custom compatible tubing is older and still uses the needle port connection that the hospital phased out years ago.) 

"Lee Tae-gun?" Oh he's under the Bair Hugger blanket, good work Marian. "I need you to read and sign a consent form and then I'll place the catheter." She is absolutely unfazed by naked ICU patient bed-sharing. 

"Yes, ma'am." He summons a floating ice hand to hopefully nonverbally indicate that he does not need his actual hands to sign anything so they don't need to mess with the positioning of anything to free up his hand.

She's going to need his arm at some point anyway but sure, this way she doesn't have to crouch awkwardly to angle the clipboard for him. She'll read out the consent form to him rather than try to move anything so he can see the page; it's standard boilerplate, in English, and pretty short. When this comes up you often don't want to have to take long for it. 

Yeah sure that seems straightforward he'll sign it.

She likes this man’s composure. He’s probably going to be equally stoic about having a needle rather larger than an IV stuck into him to place the access catheter?

Yeah. He has to override his instinctive activation of his defensive power to allow the needle to break skin at all but he doesn't flinch.

Awesome! Then Hye-jin will get some blood pre-warmed, even which she needs anyway and should also be great for guiding. Marian has a good feeling! The pee trick got her a two-degree increase pretty quickly, and this one they can keep going for - probably nearly half an hour, the length of time that the slowest transfusion setting will take to transfuse 450 ml, the standard volume taken for a blood transfusion.

Marian is actually hopeful that Hye-jin might wake up before it's done, in which case - uhhh, actually she should get Alison to check in advance with Dr Hulka if the chest wound means they should hold the standing order in her chart that she's safe to be extubated the moment she's awake and her RN is authorized to do it without waiting for the doctro to assess her. Nobody likes being intubated and Hye-jin has zero sedation in her system. 

She'll also beg Alison for another favor and get her to bring over the gastric lavage setup, it's pretty late to be adding it but every last bit helps. 

Hye-jin begins to stir midway through the transfusion.

Oh, damn it all, she's been hospitalized again. Worse, she's been intubated. She hates being intubated, it's awful. This hasn't happened in years, how embarrassing. Ugh. Okay, where did she fuck up, it's only bad and naughty espers who can't responsibly handle their backlash that get tubed...

... it's all very fuzzy. Hmm. Fuck up to be decided upon more consciousness. She instead takes stock of her surroundings. Hospital - public one, not private, you can tell by the lack of expensive interior decoration, though this is a private room in one, which is fine. Also, she's being guided from somewhere behind her, is that - no, that's not Hideyoshi, the guiding is wrong for him, good, she does not need to commit murder today, that's - yeah, that's Tae-gun.

She makes an unhappy sound around her tube and opens an eye. Can she be free of the tube, please? She hates it so.

"—Hye-jin-ah?"

Consciousness!!! 

Marian is absolutely ready to extubate her as soon as she's demonstrated being fully alert and GCS 15 and all that. However, she will first ask Hye-jin to blink and squeeze Marian's hand and wiggle her toes, to prove that, so it's going to be a thirty-second wait. 

plz free me from tube

He's not going to cry he's not going to cry he's not going to cry in public but he'll ask, in Japanese, "Do you remember me? Lee Tae-gun?"

Esper tech is really cool and Marian is jealous.

...She has no idea what Tae-gun just said and is going to ignore it. 

"I know! Working on it - let's get you sitting up a little more -" She'll get Tae-gun's help with that one more time, and then - suction catheter ready, Hye-jin has absolutely been through this before and does not need to be prompted to cough when Marian deflates the balloon holding the tube in place and slides it out. "There you go. Better?" There's an oxygen mask hooked up and on the wall hook behind the head of the bed, in case Hye-jin's O2 sat doesn't hold up, but Marian mostly doesn't expect any issue. Regen is bullshit. 

???? she is very confused by Tae-gun's sentence, but she will cooperate with getting the hated tube out first.

She - uh - oh this is in English, that's a fun and exciting adventure she's not used to having in her hospital experience - nods? Yes? Better? She thinks that was the question asked? She's nodding anyway, it's fine.

And then she can reply to Tae-gun.

"what kind of dumbass question is that," she rasps to her partner.

He doesn't start crying. He doesn't. He's resting his forehead on Hye-jin's shoulder from behind and hiding his face just in case. Even though he's not going to cry, there's no reason to take risks. 

(His breathing goes get somewhat laboured, though.)

Kim Hye-jin: Translation!
Kim Hye-jin: Because this is a terrible time to practice my English, actually

Marian is honestly relieved that they speak a language she doesn't and can have their conversation about Probably Secret Esper Shit be actually private without any awkward having to ask her to step out? 

...Tae-gun seems upset. She is going to continue pretending she didn't notice unless he, like, hopefully makes eye contact with her or otherwise indicates that he would like some form of support. 

Oooh translation! Marian is suitably impressed! 

"You're in the trauma ICU in Reno, Nevada," she said, speaking slowly and clearly because that probably helps with ease of translation as well as being ESL. "You were teleported here about," wow what time is it even, "about two and a half hours ago. You arrived with, er, gunshot wounds and severe backlash hypothermia. - careful, you're getting a blood transfusion from your partner right now for guiding purposes, and you're attached to kind of a lot of equipment." 

Pause. 

"...How are you feeling? I should check your temperature again, if that's all right with you." 

...can he just hug her. Can he just, just, can he just wrap the arm that isn't getting blood drawn from around her midsection and keep his face hidden in her skin and in her hair and not think about anything other than the way she's still herself, she's still so herself, she remembers him and she's being herself and her brain is fine she's fine she's right here she's fine nothing bad happened she's fine—

Awwwww they're having a moment. Marian can be quiet and wait. 

Kim Hye-jin: Lots of things hurt, which probably means I'm okay?
Kim Hye-jin: Yeah go ahead for checking my temperature, that's fine.
Kim Hye-jin: Nevada is - America? That makes sense, it's - confluence, yeah? America's been doing better than Europe
Kim Hye-jin: I think. What dumbass thing did I - no, you said I got shot.

Marian really appreciates Hye-jin's resourcefulness at communicating. She's typing some of the words, probably because her throat hurts after the intubation, and muttering others. 

"America, yeah, we put ourselves on the list to take emergencies from overseas." It has, honestly, been a really satisfying week at work. Marian has called in for overtime several days this week just because it's an extra interesting time to be on the unit. "I don't know the details of what happened. We were told to prep a room when you hadn't come out of the dungeon at the expected time, and - you came out covered in blood and immediately lost consciousness.

- it's not your fault, no one is saying it's your fault." Marian will not actually go as far as saying 'you did everything right' because she has no idea, and Hye-jin might be offended if actually she remembers not doing everything right in the dungeon fight, but she's thinking it and it shows in her voice. 

(He's not going to say it's Kang Jaeha's fault. But she might guess soon enough. And he doesn't want to think about it.)

(God he loves her so much.)

Kim Hye-jin: Oh I was expecting to get yelled at for being dumb about my backlash.
Kim Hye-jin: But on reflection no I think I was incredibly justified!

Kim Hye-jin: multiple gunshot wounds in a dungeon?
Kim Hye-jin: I remember waking up and realizing it was about to close
Kim Hye-jin: and then doing entirely justified dumb shit to make it out anyway.

Marian has so little context on the scary assassin situation! She...has put together some suspicions and concluded that dungeons themselves probably do not shoot people with bullets and something - else - was going on...? Oh also she should give the bullet to Tae-gun at some point, it's not like she has any purpose for it except as a keepsake to remember this shift and maybe he can use it to...investigate, or whatever? 

"- Yeah, that makes sense." She ducks her head. "Your partner - did inform me about the non-disclosed medical info." 

Kim Hye-jin: yeah
Kim Hye-jin: It was probably really obvious
Kim Hye-jin: thank you for your discretion, it's not you, it's the crazy person that tried to kill me

Kim Hye-jin: tl;dr is that I'm real mad
Kim Hye-jin: on account of the people that are going to die because of this stupid shit.

...he's not crying but he does let out a single sob. "Hye-jin-ah, can we please not talk about this here?" he says, also in Korean.

God, she's so tired about constantly putting off the giant screaming disaster that got her fucking shot, apparently!

Probably right now is not the time to have this talk, though.

"Fine," she sighs, exhausted and mulish.

Marian will give zero indication that she heard that one sob. She's focused on Hye-jin right now, anyway, not Tae-gun. 

"I'm...sorry...that seems really - unfair." This feels like a stupid thing to say but in fairness Marian has no idea what one is supposed to say to that. "...We have you on camera, by the way. Still just someone's phone, Tech Support hasn't come back with a solution yet, but it's streaming to your, um, server? Tae-gun was able to give directions to do that." 

"Oh, good," she says, out loud, in Japanese. "Thank you, carry on filming me, if I get murdered here I want everyone to know and for -" Bad Hye-jin, not talking about it here. "- responsible parties to suffer consequences."

"We'll talk about it," he says in a whisper so soft you'd need esper senses to catch it. "I promise. But I'm still fragile. I can't lose you. I promise, just, please..."

Wow she's pissed. Pretty understandable but, uh, Marian feels awkward and is not sure what to say??? 

...Temperature check, she got distracted and did not in fact do that yet. 

Oh, it's way up! Almost to the temperature she's supposed to be, even! 36. Partner blood transfusion: really effective, actually.

Hye-jin herself just sighs and leans on her partner and bites back the desire to scream at him that she's fucking tired of tapdancing around his feelings on this topic, she's been assaulted three times over this subject, she wants it gone.

Instead she'll just. Quietly begin crying, she supposes. Emotions cannot go to yell, so they shall instead go to cry.

Oh no!!!!!! 

...Marian does not know her well enough to offer her a hug and also there are. Cultural differences probably. She can offer Hye-jin a box of tissue and try to look sympathetic? 

This is embarrassing they're having emotions in public Lee Tae-gun literally shut the fuck up. 

"It's not tactically smart to discuss dealing with a guy in public even if he does deserve dealing with," he murmurs. "Just wait until we get home."

Also she has like a billion things attached to her and a giant inflatable blanket, which makes hugs slightly complicated. But Marian's efforts earn a tiny smile from Hye-jin, who appreciates her attempt. Sniffle.

She doesn't reply to Tae-gun. It would come out too sharp to be any good for anyone at all, except maybe Kang Jaeha. She'll just - which of her arms can be moved, uh - the one with the IV is less precarious looks like, she'll grab a tissue with that one.

"Thanks," she says in Japanese. "Gotta put my airways through their paces, and all."

(She can handle the crazy ex, actually, but she doesn't think she can handle her own partner stopping her from stopping the crazy ex, actually, and if he's going to keep doing that - like he's been doing this whole fucking time, then she's done. That's it, she's done, she's out. She doesn't say that. But it's true.)

Her temp is doing really well and Marian can cause her to be attached to fewer things! The NG tube can absolutely go, and she'll at least unhook the irrigation setup from the catheter.

"Sorry, I think we should check your labs one more time before we discontinue the art line - that's this one, it looks like an IV but it's in the artery - it's for blood pressure monitoring, you lost a lot of blood and you're doing much better now," regen!! also blood transfusion!!!!, "but your vital signs were scary when you got here. Can you tell me if you're feeling weak or dizzy?" She did tape the arterial line tubing very securely, all the way up Hye-jin's arm, so she should be able to move that arm pretty freely, and the peripheral IV port isn't in use right now. 

Hye-jin is still extremely not okay and is crying a little bit about it, but she can gamely answer medical questions anyway!

"That's fine. Uh. Weak, yes, dizzy - I think I'd have to stand to tell and probably should not be doing that?"

It's very common for espers to have, well, trauma responses about the situations that landed them in the ICU. Alison at one point gave Marian some coaching on how to judge whether someone wants expressions of sympathy versus Marian ignoring it entirely versus just needing space and quiet. She thinks Hye-jin is - fine with continuing the medical conversation, and Tae-gun is clearly freaking the fuck out now that the emergency is mostly-of-the-way over and would probably benefit from her being here and calm and focused on boring hospital work stuff. 

"Yeah, better not. It's a good sign you're not dizzy or lightheaded at rest, you would be if you were anemic enough. Your blood pressure is fine. ...Do you want anything for pain?" The regen will take care of the injuries eventually but it's clearly not doing anything in the meantime about the discomfort of having been recently shot in several places. 

"Uh. No, thank you. Um. ... I might want to figure out if I can get discharged without having to deal with the horrors of hospital food?"

And also so she can go be extremely not okay in private. And probably scream at Tae-gun after he fails to do anything about Kang Jaeha, again.

Nod. "That's incredibly reasonable. I - think the main concern right now is ongoing backlash, and whether your temp will start dropping again if we stop with the rewarming interventions." She glances back at the base of the curtain to make sure she doesn't see any feet loitering nearby outside the room, and lowers her voice. "...Mainly worried that regen is still incurring backlash. My thought is we stop the warming measures and monitor your temp for an hour with just - cuddling," she is still not recommending they fuck in the hospital room especially if Marian is having to interrupt every ten minutes for temperature checks, "and then decide? But if you have, er, experience with this particular situation, you might have a better sense of - how it's likely to go? Or if you have an existing plan in place for discharge to your guild?" 

Probably Quasar will leave them entirely alone, but then Hye-jin might be incredibly dumb, and tell Tae-gun to get the fuck away from her and immediately die from her own stupidity, so uh. You know what, nice nurse's idea sounds good and smart.

"I like your idea," she says, after a pause. "Stop rewarming measures and monitor things with just cuddling, and then if I'm safe I can be free."

"That seems reasonable," he agrees in English, still without looking up.

"You've got about ten minutes left on the transfusion, might as well finish that first, and start the hour then?" 

She'll page Dr Hulka since she does actually need a discharge order. Hopefully Hulka will be in her usual tearing hurry and down to write a conditional 'discharge if temp stable for 1h' order rather than having to come back. 

Nod!

"Sounds good. Thank you very much."

Hye-jin has a very sincere and very pretty smile that she can point at Marian! Thank you Marian. Hye-jin appreciates you.

Tae-gun appreciates Marian Daly so much. She has been extremely competent and reassuring and professional and it's been so much better than it could've because of her. He can also muster a genuine smile, for that. "Thank you, Ms. Daly."

Marian does not need appreciation or thank-yous per se, patients having interesting problems she can cleverly fix leaving the ICU alive is enough of a reward, but it's certainly really really nice to have a patient and partner who are this - pleasant and polite and having their shit together. (Admittedly there's been some crying but that doesn't count as not having their shit together, in Marian's mind. There hasn't been any angry yelling even a little bit. Hye-jin was at most angrily muttering and that wasn't aimed at Marian. There has not been even one attempt to ill-advisedly remove tubes!) 

She gets her conditional discharge order from Dr Hulka, who is gruffly pleased that they're likely to have the bed free before shift-end. (Esper admissions are pretty unpredictable but they do have the advantage of sometimes resolving quite fast like this.)

Ten minutes later she unhooks the blood apparatus, disconnects Hye-jin from all her IV lines (leaving the central line in place, but it's not very in-the-way with just the ports taped to her chest), and removes Tae-gun's blood donation catheter, telling him to keep the pressure dressing wrap on it for an hour. 

Cool. Okay. Can do. And they're still naked and snuggling but that's fine, there's nothing to be done about that here, especially with how actually his mind is super far away from any thoughts of anything else, and in fact he's so exhausted from having run directly from an A-rank dungeon he solo'd to Hye-jin's to here that he very swiftly finds himself dozing off.

Fortunately they're not in public! The curtains are closed and there is, technically, a camera, but it's saving the video to a secure server, and at this point no other medical professionals have any reason to come in and Marian will make very sure they are not disturbed. Except that she does have to discreetly stick a thermometer in Hye-jin's mouth every ten minutes. And watch the monitor. And send a final CBC from the art line to make sure her hemoglobin is all good now. But other than that she can be so unobtrusive. 

Hye-jin's temperature has a mild drop when they stop all rewarming solutions, but from there it's perfectly stable with her partner's cuddly assistance. Her hemoglobin is similarly good. She doesn't doze like her partner, though she does pet him. She's a bit too - anxious, emotionally volatile, scared, maybe, to feel like she can doze off. Even if she is really very tired. But it's a hospital, and she - thinks she thought she had been safe before, in the dungeon (... from assassination attempts, anyway), and, well. Look how wrong that was. Will she get to have any safe places left she is not thinking about that right now.

Right now she's considering how one bridges international social gaps! She's pretty sure that her nurse has been great, but also, she's not sure how to... properly thank her... without it feeling Excessively Japanese and making the poor woman feel awkward. It would involve a lot of bowing, and from her minimal experience with Americans, they don't tend to like that very much. Hm. Truly, a conundrum.

Wait! Wait, she has it. The United States of America has a tipping culture! Ha! Okay, excellent, that is how she will say thank you. She has bullshit S-rank esper money, from a guild that makes truly insane amounts of money selling teleports through a nearly one-of-a-kind system, this is a solvable problem! ... The number converted to dollars looks a little sad and short to her, so she does add a zero on the end of it even if she probably shouldn't. Eh. It's fine. Call it the 'don't get shot, dumbass' tax. And if she does die, well, some of her money went to a nice person that was doing good in the world! Better than not that!

She sends it just before she's discharged.

Marian is feeling good about today! She admitted a patient bleeding to death and severely hypothermic, and discharged her four hours later in - well - tolerable health and her regen will get the rest of it and she's going to be fine. Marian is kind of FRETTING about the assassin thing but that is not actually her business. 

She removes all of Hye-jin's lines and gives her one-line instructions about keeping pressure dressings on and - wishes her good luck? This doesn't feel like quite the right thing to say but she has no idea what is. She'll have to ask Alison later if she knows anything about, uh, Japanese (Korean?) esper culture. 

Tae-gun will thank her one last time, this time while wearing clothes and doing a proper bow, but then Kim Hye-jin and he can teleport away?

Freeeedooooom! She thanks her nurse a normal amount and only bows once, and sincerely promises to be good and follow instructions. (She does not want to end up back at any ICU and be subjected to The Tube again. That takes precedence over all. The catheter and various IVs and lines are annoying but tolerable, it's that fucking tube...)

And then yes: away they disappear.

See! What a good shift!

Marian in the middle of prepping the cleaned room for a new admit (90 minutes before the end of her shift, but Marian is on a roll and she can DO this) when Alison alerts her that she has, uh, a phone call at the nursing station? From the hospital payroll department? 

...Marian is immediately panicking that she somehow...messed up entering her tax information? Or something??? Why would Payroll need to talk to her urgently??????? 

She will, with great trepidation, go answer the phone. 

So, uh.

There's $100,000 that is written to her specifically??? The only note available is that it's a tip?????? From a Kim Hye-jin??????

Payroll is extremely confused, this is not normal behavior. Is. Is this in error, or, like, should they add it to her next paycheck, or send it to her main account, or???? or????

....Alison help please.

Alison takes back the phone from her. 

"- Kim Hye-jin? That's the esper girl we just treated from overseas. Yeah. ...No, I doubt it's a mistake. ...What, you haven't seen her on the news? She's, like, big famous, she's probably got more money than she knows what to do with. ...Yes, sending it to her main account." 

She's booking them a night out at the casino. ASAP. This calls for major celebration. 

Ummmmm okay what if Marian just. Takes report on her admit. And works the rest of her shift. And asks Alison what the actual fuck just happened to her after work. 

That's a pretty sweet tip though, she must have done a good job

They teleport home. 

He immediately hugs her. "We need to kill him," he says, trying to keep his voice stable and only mostly succeeding.

...

This should be a good thing. She agrees, she wanted this. Her partner is finally on board with the obvious thing that should be done. Hooray, he agrees with her!

So why is she suddenly so furious with him?

(Is it perhaps because she came to this conclusion literal months ago, and he's been dead weight at best in her efforts to try and counter the very real and very existent threat? Is it that he needed to have her literally shot before he realized it was a problem worth solving? This was the third time he's fucked with her, he ran her out of her home, she's been unable to make any non Quasar friends in Korea even though she wanted the literal exact opposite of that, all of her fun and fulfilling projects are sitting by the wayside in favor of this person and what he could do to her.)

"Realize that now, did you."

It's not what she wants to have said, but it's what she says. She's still and unresponsive in the hug, like hugging a statue.

Tae-gun flinches but doesn't pull away. "Yeah."

What else can he say? It was probably obvious to everyone else, or not probably, Si-yeon literally wanted to murder him, and Tae-gun—didn't. Want it.

Oh, so now it's an emergency that they need to drop everything for and talk about? His problems are all neatly sorted out, onwards, full speed ahead, nothing else to worry about?

No pause to maybe perhaps ask if, you know. She's okay.

"Yeah? So, full speed ahead, onto murder plotting? Nothing else to take care of, just, okay, Hye-jin, now it's a problem? Let's actually solve it?"

Now he pulls away. "I—sorry, I thought—I'm sorry. Hye-jin-ah, how are you feeling?"

"Oh! Did you realize that my feelings matter too! Oh good, I would hate for this to be another therapy session for your problems, so soon after I was shot in the fucking head! How the fuck do you think I am!"

The flinch this time is more like he's been slapped, but—he's meant to keep holding her. "I, I, I—"

"Fuck you. How dare the first words out of your mouth after I almost died be about anything else, how dare you put anything else above my feelings right now when I have been bending over backwards and risking my life and my mind for yours."

"That's not—I thought—you'd want to—I'm sorry—"

"Yeah? Because that's what I was doing when I was trying to head off this problem before things got this bad? And now that things are this bad I'm just supposed to be fucking fine? Ha! Whatever. I don't want to go back to the hospital tonight. Your job! Is simple. You shut the fuck up about your problems and how you feel about them, and! You hold me! That's it. Do that. You jackass."

"...I wasn't... talking about how I felt." She gave you instructions, Lee Tae-gun, and they're clear as day, so just, "Sorry. Shutting up."

"Bullshit you weren't! This finally became real to you. That's it, that's why you're now on board! It's about your fucking feelings! Lie to yourself all you like, Lee Tae-gun, but don't also lie to me!"

She will, however, grumpily take his hand and start marching bedroom wards. Because she's tired, and she should actually fall asleep in the arms of her self-absorbed dickhead of a partner. (God, does she has a fucking type...)

"What are you talking about?"

"Which part! Because you lie to yourself constantly and you know it! And sometimes! That means you lie to other people, too!"

"What am I meant to be lying about here? Why—what—?"

"You want to kill him because you got scared. Of me dying," she snaps. "And my feelings and experiences didn't fucking matter, did they, I ask you for help in the hospital to know if we can please finally solve your crazy ex problem and you - you fucking - you put it off again and now you're going to swoop in and - ! Just! Don't pretend this is about me. This is about how you feel about me, and how you don't want to lose me. And I'm so sick of everything being about you."

"That makes no fucking sense. If you're going to just, just redefine words like that then sure, obviously, it's about me because I care about you, just like, like, like going out with a friend is about me because I care about them or doing dungeons is about me because I care about other people! That doesn't make it not be about you! What did you want me to do, talk about killing a man in front of a camera controlled by someone else in a public hospital, is that what?"

"I wanted you to fucking care about the woman who'd nearly died sobbing her fucking eyes out on top of you in the hospital! Instead of hearing platitudes about what is and isn't tactically smart when, actually, this cloak and dagger shit is only to his benefit! I wanted you to have listened to me when I told you this would become a problem! I wanted your help when I was trying to find ways to, to fight him, to protect myself, to - do everything I could to prevent this and you're just, just. Everything I do is wrong." She's crying now, but still perfectly capable of yelling while doing that. They have stopped moving towards the bedroom, though she's still holding his hand. Even while she gestures explosively with the other.

"I can't tell your friends what's going on to ask for help, I can't go make my own because I didn't even know this was potentially going to be a problem before he dictionary attacked me and can show up at any time if he knows where I live, I can't go grocery shopping, I can't do my goddamn job, I can't even have a fucking breakdown in the hospital after I wake up from a bullet in my head because, oh, no, that's wrong! I want you to have said that anything I ever did was right and that it doesn't matter how stupid and inefficient my feelings are, they matter to you, because -!"

She cuts herself off, and turns away from him.

"Nevermind. Just. Nevermind."

He's kind of out of words, now, because, because there's a part of him that wants to comfort her but another, louder part of him wants to be angry and he doesn't want to listen to that one but actually "I literally died for you. We survived that because of, of a fucking miracle, but I died that day, you realise that? I died trying to save you. I had no expectation of surviving it, I just needed you to be alive, how can you possibly say that I don't care?"

"Because whenever it's about him, I'm the least important person present. You've proven it! Again and again! It's about you, it's about him, it's about your friends, but me, my safety, my feelings? Having to go through a painful and intrusive medical procedure again because it was efficient to be super super careful? Feeling alone and isolated because I'm afraid to go outside? Feeling like I'm - living in the margins of someone else's life because I don't have a space of my own that is actually safe? Yeah. No. Doesn't fucking matter. You do not make attempts to help me when we're not in a dungeon."

"—that's not true!! I never, I never—" But what, Lee Tae-gun, what? "I, I didn't—" That's so unfair, he, he, "Of course I care about your feelings," and it sounds so fucking lame to his ears, and he doesn't know what to say, his words are tripping in his throat and not coming out, he has no idea what he wants to say—

"Uh huh. I can tell. Can you name a time where you acted upon that in a non-combat situation."

"I—you're—why are you doing this? You're testing me," oh good okay this is a better backlash than anger, it's much more welcome, "but you're being unfair and you know you're being unfair. You're not looking for a real answer. Are you? I'm not, it, it was so hard to let you be in my silo, and it was so hard to open up to my friends about this, and, and I'm not any good at this! This feelings thing! You know that! I don't know! I can't name times like that! And if I did you'd still be angry because you're trying to win against me right now, you're treating me like an enemy. You're not trying to talk to me or even make me understand anything."

"I am trying to talk to you! I am trying to explain myself! I'm doing this because I'm hurt and I'm angry and I'm sick of being the punching bag! And it's not coming out right and it's - I am trying to win and I am trying to hurt you, but I'm - the point I am making is there! It exists. I don't know how else to make it. You're - you're even criticizing my attempt to ask for help! I am hurt. I am lonely. I am scared. I almost died today. Don't. Don't make this about you. Especially don't make it about him."

Yeah she's full on sobbing now.

Okay he's hugging her again. "I don't want to make it about me, or him. I'm sorry. I was—this is not making it about me, I just want to explain—at the hospital I was so scared, and you started talking about killing him in public and I was scared that he could be there, listening, and I wanted to be somewhere safe before we did that, and then we were, and I wanted to do that because I thought that's what you wanted, but I didn't want it. That's, that's a thing I did because of your feelings, the only reason I started talking about it was because I thought that was what you wanted. ...it sounds stupid but it's, it's lots of things, I can't list them all, but I want you to be happy and safe and good and powerful, I want it all the time, I want it more than anything, I don't want you to be scared but this is terrifying and it's, it's correct to be scared, but I don't want you to be, I want to protect you, I want, I want to protect you Hye-jin-ah. Please believe me. Everything I want is for you to be happy."

Yeah, she'll aim her sobbing to be onto him.

"You're shit at showing it. Get better at that," she mumbles, between sobs.

"I'm sorry. Please show me how. I don't know how. I love you and I don't know how to make you believe me."

"Ask someone else, I'm tired. I can't - I can't have another relationship where I'm just - telling a limp puppet what I want him to do. I can't, okay? Been there, done that, don't ask me to do it again but with you. So. ... Please try to figure it out? I. I don't really know either, anyway."

"Can I ask Juheon-hyung and Hyun-jae-noona? For tips. Or advice. Or—is this stupid. This might be stupid. I'm sorry I'm stupid. I don't know how to do this. I just want you to be okay. Sorry you just said you weren't going to tell me. Sorry I'm saying sorry all the time. I'm going to try to shut up."

Giggle-hiccup.

"Asking them is a good idea, yeah. They seem like they have their shit together," she agrees, amused through her tears. "I can - give feedback, and make requests, just, just, the balance now is... I can't - either of the extremes are bad, okay? The, the - making me the least important person in the world when there's anything else in the way, my feelings come last because I'll sort myself out, versus making me the most important person in the world, nothing else matters, only my feelings. I hate them both. I'm. I'm just me. I'm a broken fucked up mess and I. Don't know how to thread this needle either, I'm sorry. ... I'm also sorry for yelling, a lot of what I said was, uh, kind of unfair." Sniffle.

"...you're not the most important thing in the world but you're a lot more important to me than he is." This is the kind of thing he'd definitely never say without backlash; he knows this from the way he flinches after saying it even with backlash. Though the flinch might also be coming from him noticing it's true in the process of saying it. He feels like he should be having feelings about it but actually what he feels is hollow.

"Okay," she agrees, hesitantly, even though...

... It's hard to believe, okay. She'll try, but. She doesn't, yet.

Tae-gun wants to kill him for her so he's really not sure how to convey that better here!!

And he doesn't know what to do, if she can't tell him, and if he can't ask. He can't, can't guess, guessing what people are thinking or want or need is not a skill he has. "I'm scared you'll run away because I can't figure out how to do right by you, on my own. And you'd be right to, if that's what you need from me, because I just can't and will never be able to. And I want you to do that's right for you even if it scares me or upsets me. I actually don't understand why you didn't leave when this all started, that would've been better for you. Safer. You didn't even like me that much, then, it would've been easier."

“I told you my reasons then. It’s, principle, he doesn’t get to, to take people, like they’re things, that’s for dungeons. I’d want to fight him for anyone, and it being my partner in the line of fire just means, well. It’s definitely my job, then.” Sniffle. “I don’t think you’ve done wrong by me, not really, it’s, just, I’m. I need support? That I don’t just, just set up myself. I don’t know. I’m still here?”

Is she, though? Is she really? Because right now it feels like she's already gone. 

"Let's talk in the shower, we're both covered in..." Grime and sweat and blood and grey matter.

Yeah. They are. She nods. A shower is a good idea.

"Yeah," she agrees, softly.

He's going to bridal carry her there, actually. 

!!!!!

This earns a shy little smile from her, and she settles down on his arms. After the expected squeak of surprise.

"...it feels like rubbing it in but I don't mean it that way, I just want you to know. It was really hard and scary to let you stay here at first, but I did it because I wanted you to feel safe. And I think you were right to tell my friends, and it's good that we're going to get their help, I was only upset with the—way it happened. But it was a good idea. And telling all of them about Jaeha's backlash was—a little bit for them but mostly for you. And—maybe this doesn't count because it's dungeon related or because you might've died otherwise but—actually it doesn't count, never mind."

They arrive in the bathroom and he turns the water on from afar without setting her down yet.

"... Well now I'm curious," she says wryly, some of her usual humor peeking back.

"Everything in the hospital today was uncomfortable, but especially the part where I had to—" Aaah. He swallows and looks away. "Pee in a cup so they could use that to heat up your bladder and improve your backlash."

"They asked you to-?" she begins, then is distracted by thinking about the mechanics. Huh! That would work?? That did work??? Wild. "Well, um. Thank you, I didn't know that, that sounds, um. Awkward and embarrassing and I appreciate you putting up with it for, um. Me."

"I know what it's like, you know. For, for, for love to not be about you. From experience. And, and I'd never say I loved you if I didn't mean it the right way. I know words are cheap. I know you feel unsupported," what with how she literally just said so, but mentioning that he didn't before is uncool. "I'll, I'll try to figure it out. I'll ask someone else for help, I really can't do it alone, but—I love you, and asking for help about embarrassing things I really should be able to do and can't because I'm broken is, like, the least you deserve. ...that was weird phrasing. I mean it's the least I can do and you deserve a lot more. I don't know if I can give it to you. But you do."

Nod. "Okay. Thank you. ...... Would it be rubbing it in to explain how your earlier examples didn't, um, come across that way, or...? We can stop having feelings until we've both showered and probably eaten and then slept for twelve hours or something..."

He'll gently set her down, finally, because yeah shower, he wants to stop being reminded of how she was fucking shot. "No, that would be—good. Useful data. For, um. The future." Aaaaand his backlash is starting to subside, he can feel the words starting to melt away from his tongue again.

—oh wait he's still clothed. Both of them are. Right. that's a thing that needs to be fixed before showering. He'll start with undressing her, first.

She gives a nervous nod. Her clothes are spares from the Reno hospital; they don't fit her very well anyway, and come off easily enough.

"So the silo - I knew it was a large expression of trust and letting me into your safe space and - all that, and thank you for trusting me here. But, um. ... This isn't my house? None of this is mine or for me. Like, my clothes are only here because I pushed for it? There hasn't been, like, attempts to try to help me feel safe here? A-and I mean the first time you brought me here you were backlashed as Hell and then once I'm here the secret location is probably busted, might as well commit, right, and. ... Does that make sense?"

"...I... think so? I, um, am not sure what it would mean for something to be trying to help you feel safe here." Did he get her phrasing right? His immediate auditory memory isn't perfect. "I'd—like to find ways to make this more yours or for you but—you might not want that." Clearly he likes her a lot more than she likes him so of course he feels more comfortable with her than vice-versa and would want her to live with him but he guesses that if he corrects for that (however much this makes his heart ache) it would make sense for her to want to be away from him.

"Um. I don't know what it'd look like, and I don't think I want to move in move in, but. ... I think I would like the effort. To make me feel at home somewhere. Because mostly I just feel like I have nowhere that's mine and nowhere I can just exist. I - I bought a house and I can't even live in it, no one told me it needed to be secret or off the grid or or or rated for S-rank mind control espers and it just. It hurts so much."

Whoops, she's sobbing again.

...yeah. He can relate. He, too, had to lose a house and find a new one because of fucking Kang Jaeha. "I thought you were working on getting a new one...? Um. I can try to help with that?" He also has no idea what that would even mean, how could he possibly help, what could he possibly offer her that she doesn't already have. He should write down all of the things he's going to need help with figuring out.

He'll hug her again though because watching her cry breaks his heart and makes him feel like a worthless worm who only hurts the people he loves and has no right to exist or demand anything of anyone else.

"I am trying to get a secret underground base but it's hard and complicated and making an off-grid secret house is hard, actually, and, there's, I'm, I'm already juggling so much and it feels so fucking stupid when I'm also dealing with, with. Fucking assassination attempts. In a confluence."

That doesn't actually tell him how he could possibly help but saying that would be counterproductive.

"I can help. ...if you're okay with Quasar knowing about it, I mean. They helped me get this place."

She should probably attempt proper communication or something, but instead just gives a bitter shrug.

(Fuck that discomfort too, right, who cares about her fucking comfort when she's just going to be shot in the head.)

"I don't - want to problem solve that right now," she sighs. "I want to explain this and the other times I haven't felt supported so you can see the trail of evidence that I see. Okay?"

"Okay. Sorry." Man he's bad at this. "...I'm really bad at this." He wants to say "I'm sorry" again but he said he would stop doing that so much.

"To be fair I am also kind of having a nervous breakdown of some kind and I'm the shittiest company."

He wants to say she isn't but he knows that's the rose-coloured glasses, objectively speaking this is not the most pleasant of times to be around her. "If there was ever a time when it was okay to not be okay it's now." ...is he implying that there are times when it's not okay to not be okay? "I, I mean, it's always okay to not be okay, I just mean—"

"Yeah." Sniffle. "Anyway. Um. So you never actually said that you thought I was right to tell your friends? It was. Really all just criticism about how I was risking their lives and stepping all over your feelings and it, just. I just felt cruel and thoughtless and stupid. That's it."

"Oh. I'm sorry. It was the right decision. I would've agreed with it. Did agree with it, I mean." He thought it was obvious, with how he didn't criticise the decision itself and only did the delivery, but... he thinks he gets it.

Lack of criticism is not approval, Tae-gun, it's just a lack of criticism.

"Um, what else was there, was that your full list...?"

She can't tell if the list was just painfully and pathetically short or if she's purposefully being uncharitable because she's - whatever she is right now.

"The peeing in a cup was legitimately pretty sweet," she adds, in an attempt to try to at least pretend to be fair.

"...that was the full list of things I remember... I didn't keep track in my head and I can't remember—sorry, I'm sounding defensive. ...okay I feel like I can be a little bit defensive, here, I didn't know I was meant to study for this test."

"Uh huh," sniffle. "Well. I'm having trouble thinking of things, too. And - do you have that kind of trouble thinking of things I did to try to make you and your feelings matter? With me, I mean."

God, she's still trying to win the fight, even now. (She's such a mess.)

"...yes. I've been trying really hard to sit on my feelings and let you guys—figure it out—without my feelings entering the planning at any point."

She stares at him.

"Yeah? Because that's the only thing that's ever mattered, right? That one problem that I just won't roll over and do whatever you fucking want for, because it is dangerous, and I have known it is dangerous this whole time! Fuck all that goddamned patience with your triggers, and trying to get you to reconnect with your friends for the sake of your emotional health, fuck the - the planning for how to make the fucking hand-holding silo entirely because you wanted it, fuck the constant attempts to figure out what you're feeling when you don't even know yourself, because I don't want to fucking hurt you, because, because, because..."

Yeah, back to sobbing. Raggedly, now. For some reason, it hurts so much more to hear that all of her attempts to show that she cared about him and wanted him safe and fulfilled and happy have just, just. Bounced off. In favor of fretting about the ex he broke up with half a decade ago.

Well now he's crying, too. He'd been doing so well at not doing that, he'd been keeping it together, mostly, but now he just... can't.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't know, I'm just broken, I'm sorry." He wants to argue, this feels so unfair, it feels like she's just, just been keeping score to throw it back in his face, been doing a ton of things that she felt were, were burdens, without even telling him they were burdens, and she just wanted him to guess. To magically divine that. He's sure other people can do it but he can't, he just can't, he needs to be told, if he's not told he has no way of knowing. "I'm sorry." He's breaking his promise, he's saying sorry a lot of times again, but he can't seem to stop. And he can't seem to stop loving her, either, even with how much this hurts. He feels like what he's doing, right now, just, just taking the abuse and not defending himself, that's for her, too, but he can't say that. He can't say that because, because that'd also sound defensive, and because she just said that she hates how he makes everything about himself and this would be making it about himself. "I'm sorry." He wants to pull away and go cry alone but he can't because she needs his help with the backlash and despite everything he's feeling he can't possibly leave her to deal with it alone.

Yeah.

She similarly wants to tell him to fuck off if he can't perceive the many, many ways she's tried so hard to show she cares. But she can't, because she doesn't want to go back to the hospital tonight. That wouldn't help anything at all.

They're just going to both be sobbing here, then. In the shower. Hope he has a large hot water tank.

He does. "Crying in the shower" happens to him far more often than it does to normal, unbroken people, so he needs to be able to do that without having to worry about his water running out.

They should at some point actually get rid of the grime, though; if nothing else, Tae-gun himself feels a lot better about things when he doesn't have a constant background buzz of being dirty calling his attention and making him feel more like a worm.

Yeah. They can manage that. She'll even wash and condition her hair, get all of the little bits of her own fucking grey matter out of it. (He didn't have conditioner before she started siloing with him. It's just another thing she brought in her efficient little luggage bags and put on the shelf without making a fuss.)

But then she's out of tasks to accomplish, she will just stand here miserably in the shower.

Tae-gun'll turn off the water and, after confirming it's okay, towel her off, then since she likes wearing clothes after a shower he'll get her those.

(Seeing her be so... quiet and passive... also hurts. He's not sure if it hurts more than being yelled at for what he feels are unfair reasons but it hurts differently.)

He had one more dungeon scheduled for the early evening but that obviously got cancelled when his partner was shot in the middle of a confluence what the fuck, plus of course they spent hours in the hospital, but that means it's about time to have dinner. They still shouldn't let go of each other, and this won't be the first time he's made them food while they've needed to be touching and they have a Procedure™ for it: her arms will be around or touching his waist so that he can use both hands to make food, and he can tap her if he needs to walk somewhere so that she'll come with. He doesn't say anything during this whole process, though, because he thinks that if he tries he'll start crying again and he'll become a whiny child who's complaining about how Hye-jin is being so unfair to him and he doesn't want to do that to her.

Yep. She'll just be here.

Silently holding him exactly how he directs her to, and crying very quietly and unobtrusively. Perfectly cooperative. Hollowed out of everything but what seems to be simmering anger at him in particular, but there isn't much of that, either.

After they're done eating they should... plausibly sleep. It's still kind of early but he's feeling wrung out and he doesn't have it in him to study for the dungeons tomorrow. He's not sure he'll have it in him to go to them but—no, actually, hang on. "I'm going to cancel tomorrow's dungeons. I don't want to leave you alone and I don't think it would be a good idea to do dungeons in the state we're in right now." Would it be petty for him to say that he's doing this for her? It probably would be. He won't say it.

Anyone that thought she was going to do a dungeon the day after being shot in the head is a fucking dumbass.

She just nods.

"I wasn't going to try to do any dungeons tomorrow," she agrees, miserably. Not so much for the dungeons themselves, actually, she might even find those sort of restful and fulfilling, burning everything that dares to oppose her to the ground, but. It's the everything else that is the real problem. The media, the cameras, the fear of another assassination attempt, the - partner who she kind of doesn't want to be touching right now but is medically pressured to. That. That all sucks. (All she ever wanted to do is her job.)

Yeah. Yeah.

So, absent any objections, he's going to go to bed and they can sleep.

(Or try to. He's exhausted but he's not sure how much he'll be able to, rather than just spend all night up thinking in circles.)

Well, she didn't nap in the hospital, and unconsciousness is not the same as sleep, so. Even with the intermittent and sporadic crying, it doesn't take her long.

"Give me one reason, just one good reason not to punch a hole in that guy's chest."

"He'll use you to murder an innocent person."

They convened an emergency meeting at Hyun-jae and Juheon's after they all had heard the news. Woo-young was invited too, but he's having to guide his partner after much Nightmareing.

"I can make myself immune to his powers."

"You'd die of backlash on the spot."

"I'll sniper shoot him from a distance like he himself did."

"You'd be arrested."

"It's worth it, if he'd killed Kim Hye-jin so many more people would die."

"And if you're arrested so many more people will die, too."

He grabs a pillow to scream into in frustration. "I hate him. I want him dead. I want him to never have existed. I want to, to, to never have stopped being Tae-gun's partner—uh, sorry, Chun-hee—"

"It's fine. I agree."

"How dare he! How dare he! In the middle of a confluence! Not that it would've been okay at any other time but still! How dare he!!!"

Juheon reaches for his hand to squeeze it. "I know."

"We do need to do something, though." They were all going to reconvene for their Let's Plan What To Do session on Friday evening, including Tae-gun and Hye-jin and Woo-young, but this changes things. "He'll know killing her didn't take, but he'll also know that it almost took, that if she'd been unconscious for five more minutes she'd have been trapped in the dungeon even if the actual killing didn't work. And there are other things he could've tried, like—"

"Let's not list all possible ways he can kill someone, please, Hyun-jae-ya."

"It probably wasn't him personally, whoever got into the dungeon managed to go undetected by both people and cameras, I reviewed footage of the scene."

"Where did he even find someone else who was willing to go take out Kim fucking Hye-jin in the middle of a confluence. What kind of horrible monster—"

"He's the heir to Kang Moon-il Group and money can buy you a lot of things."

"How can money buy trying to assassinate Kim Hye-jin."

"Not all espers get into guilds, or go independent, or work civilian jobs. Esper criminals exist. You know that, you've had work to capture those before."

He screams into a pillow again.

"Has anyone checked that they're not doing any dungeons tomorrow?"

"Woo-young did, he said Tae-gun cancelled his and Hye-jin hers."

"What can we do about it, though? Tae-gun would not like it if we killed Jaeha—"

"Tae-gun can go fuck himself if so, that man cannot be permitted to keep doing the shit he's doing. It's one thing to mess with people's heads but that was attempted murder—"

"That was successful murder, actually. If Hye-jin hadn't miraculously survived in a way no one could've predicted it would've been successful. And we wouldn't even have learned about how he did it, either, the dungeon would've just closed with her still inside it."

"My! Point! Exactly!"

"What I was going to say was that if Tae-gun isn't going to help us kill Kang Jaeha then we'll need to figure it out without him."

"...right. Yeah. Good point."

"But that doesn't give us a great way to make it work. The man's only doing Nightmare, now, and we don't have any criminal friends we can hire to go into it and snipe him from a distance, not to mention that I don't think money can buy someone who's willing to go into Nightmare to kill him."