"It's fine," she grunts, glaring at the wall in front of her. "I'm fine. Doesn't even hurt," most of the time. 

Ji-woo is good enough at this to detect when a patient is downplaying their own pain, but doesn't call her on it. This is probably the best she's going to get, really.

"Okay. How's your flexibility? Can you show me your range of motion without straining anything?"

"Yeah, fine."

She stretches out, pushing herself just a bit further than is comfortable, twisting until it hurts, trying to eke out just that bit more range, closer to where she should be. She bears the pain with angry huffs as cover. 

"I said without straining yourself," says Ji-woo, drily, but she's not particularly surprised.

Yeah. It's about what she thought.

Which means she has some bad news to deliver. She removes her hand from her patient's back, and moves to face her.

She could try to sugarcoat it, but Ji-woo is both not a sugarcoating kind of medical professional, and her patient wouldn't appreciate it anyway.

"Everything looks pretty stable, and I think it'll hold for at least a year without babysitting as is, but. I'm afraid this is as far as my powers and current medical technology can take you. I'm sorry. I know it's not the answer you want to hear."

"So when can I get back to work, then?"

She straightens up, covering a wince with a swipe at her hair.

"Couple weeks? Months?" 

Heeeere they go. This is gonna suck.

"If by 'work' you mean 'resumption of combat esper duties,'" she sighs. "Then I do not recommend that course of action, at all. If you mean other types of non-physical work, then you're good to go right now, you're as healed as you're going to get from me."

"What?" 

"-No, I'm a- I'm fucking Pendragon, I'm a combat esper! I'm the combat esper, you can't be fucking serious!" 

"I am afraid I am. Any major stress to your spine would lose you the ability to feel, let alone move, your legs. Frankly, it's a miracle we got you to the point where you can walk at all."

"Aren't you supposed to be a miracle worker?! You can't- isn't there more you can do? I'm walking, right, they told me that wouldn't happen, who can say you won't get more out of the damn bones if you give it another go?" 

"Pendragon. There is not enough left of your spine to work with. What is left of it it is a bundle of nerves I painstakingly pieced together, held together by titanium, scar tissue, and dreams. I cannot conjure bone out of nothing."

"Find someone who can, then! I'm not about to fucking retire to live out my life as a goddamned desk jockey!" 

(Right, because it's her job to do the footwork, like she hasn't already done a damn miracle by giving this woman back her ability to walk.)

Getting angry back will not help. Pendragon is grieving the loss of everything she ever really wanted. As someone who also finds her job her everything: she relates. She'd be this angry, if she were told to stop doing what she does. Hell, she's been this angry upon being told to stop. So she can't be angry now.

"There are no active espers currently on record that are capable of inducing the necessary regeneration required to regrow a spine in another. And that is what you need. We have tried everything else possible, with every known healing esper we could find, and stitched them all together with surgery and teamwork. This is the best that modern medical and magical science can currently do."

Bet isn't really listening to the explanation. All she can hear is no. All she can hear is never going back to combat again, and the prospect looms over her like the grim fucking reaper. If she can't fight she might as well be dead, what did they do all this for if she can't fight-?

"What the hell am I supposed to do, then? I can't just stop." 

Sigh.

"This is not," she says, gently, "an 'it can never be solved.' The world is wide and full of wonders and horrors, a new esper might finish awakening tomorrow that will have the exact right power to fix you. Someone might figure out that some dungeon rock is the stem-cell of bone matter. I do not think it will be impossible forever. But right now, it is. So you have to stop, because if you don't, you will not live to see someone figure it out."

"Fuck. Right." She rubs a hand over her face, growling when the movement makes something twinge, "Fuck. Fucking tabloids will have a field day. God, I was pushing it, wasn't I. Should have retired three years back like they all said I should. Pushing my fucking luck at forty-eight. How old will I be by the time some perfect solution comes up? No one's gonna waste that shit on a fifty-year-old hag." 

"Hey, espers all a bunch of stubborn crazies. It's the hellweek, and then after it deciding to do it again, but on purpose. It does shit to us." Ji-woo was not, and has never been, one to tell Pendragon to retire. Sighed at her for getting her spine broken, yelled at her for staying in that fucking dungeon with it shattered, and thereby losing all of the pieces to the dungeon's disappearing.

But tell her to retire?

No.

She couldn't ask that of herself. She's not going to ask it of someone else.

"So. You never know. And if nothing else, you can yell at the newbies how they're being stupid before they get themselves killed. You know the dumbasses need it."

She snorts, and a little misery lifts for just a moment.

"Drill Sarge Pendragon, huh? Maybe. Got the lungs for it, anyway." 

She sighs, "Hell, kid. Uisa, right? Or you like your name?" 

"Oh, that only caught on because I actually respond to it," snorts Ji-woo. "Your superhero name thing on this side of the world is wacky. 'Uisa' literally just means 'healer' in Korean. Ji-woo's fine."

"Ji-woo then," she elides over the rest of that, "Didn't mean to tear you a new one. You got me walking again, it's a shite way to repay you." 

Snort.

"Ma'am. I am a magic healer whose backlash is literal agony. I regularly sit on a plane to fly around the world to poke people to see if I can miracle fix them through sheer determination and spite. I have been doing this for the better part of a decade. I have had worse."

"Well. Doesn't make me feel better for doing it, but good you're tough enough to handle it," she decides.