FUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK

extra: oneword: 'medical'.

Today's Oneword was 'medical' so I launched off into this but I think it's too long and too explicit for that site. Unedited, probably lacking in flow or clarity. I've also never been in the army or to war or in a medical tent or anything in my life so please excuse all the multitudes of inaccuracies. This is mostly for my own fun.
---

Working as a field medic wasn't so bad, he conceded late one night. The hours were long and the work difficult in more ways than one, but he was fed and sheltered and they paid him enough to keep himself drunk during his off hours to numb his mind. He had all the practice of a veteran surgeon by now despite his young age, and when he returned home, he could have any job in any hospital he wanted. He even got his own private quarters. He would've felt greedy asking for more than that-- and the beautiful nameless woman from off-base bouncing on his lap and suckling at the prominent muscles of his neck was just another perk.

His days started far too early, and ended far too late, and he spent a great deal of his time with his hands dripping with the blood of others. His time was largely spent in triage, sprinting about and handling the most serious cases first, leaving the stable patients to wait it out for hours in agony until he could see to them. He didn't even need to leave the medical tent most days, because the injured just kept pouring in, sometimes arriving in groups, in mobs, in seas, after a bad shelling or a mortar.

He'd learned to drown out the sobbing, the groaning, the screaming, so he could function through his days without feeling like joining them in their cries. He measured his days in sutures and staples, abscesses and amputations, wondering somewhere in the tiniest corner of his mind if his work was doing any good at all. For every soldier he was able to put back together again and return to battle, there were five, ten, a dozen others who wouldn't go back to the front lines, and a good half that who would never go anywhere else but back home in a pine box.

Those last were the ones that always felt the worst-- those that burrowed into his mind and stoppered up his throat and burned at his eyes, late at night, hunched over the typewriter, tapping out a message for the families left at home with eyes that couldn't even see straight, and no words that would help anyone anymore. He felt guilty, he felt responsible, and he felt that maybe if he was able to do his job better, they would still be alive. They could have at least died an honourable death on the battlefield if not a peaceful death in their own homes, at their own proper time, rather than the slow agony of nights spent howling impotently while sepsis claimed a limb or poisoned blood, or a bleed he'd missed in his haste to attend to his other patients slowly drained them from within. If he had enough morphine, he might have at least been able to give them some relief from the slow death, but he wasn't even sure he would have enough syringes for tomorrow's onslaught, never mind any other day, or any mercy in his medical tent.

It cut straight through him to see one of his patients clench a fist in his coat far tighter than he would believe they could, and stare into his eyes and beg, plead with every breath, just above a whisper, please, please Doc, help me, please. It kills him every time a patient starts to cry, softly, beg him for life, or for death, or for something, anything, to make this end. They would try to bargain with him, or blame him, pursue him out of the room with shouts and cries and curses, or simply stare at him with shaking hands balled in his coat, making a small request of “Tell my wife I love her.” That would keep him up for hours, alternating between shaking with hopeless rage or torrential tears or aching grief. He would finally complete the death certificate and notice, struggling the whole time to retain his composure, and then tear a small corner off a sheet of paper and scribble a note on it, tuck it inside the envelope and hope the final message would make it home to its intended recipient, hope that the people who went through the mail would have heart and allow this small respite to pass. In all the failures of all kinds in his line of work, this was the last way he could think of to try and make amends for all that he couldn't do to save these lives, for all the reasons he wasn't able to send these loved ones home alive and well.

These things tore at him even now, even so far away through a thick haze of alcohol and lust, and he briefly thought of home as the pretty young thing ran her fingers along his sides and moaned long and low. These thoughts were killing it for him-- he flipped her onto her back, getting aggressive in his frustration and grief. Still, he couldn't escape it, the licking doubt at the corners of his mind that reminded him that his work here was futile, that still more people would die every endless day until the undefinable 'they' decided they had profited enough off misery to sate their greed and ended this war. Still he would not have enough bandages or morphine or antibiotics to help everybody, still he would write detached methodical letters to families at home and still he would include small scraps with sympathies scrawled on them and still he knew someone was reading this outgoing mail and removing his small token of humanity and his plea for forgiveness from each one, simply because it was best if the families at home didn't know.

He missed home, now while bedding this pretty stranger more than ever. His mind, in its inebriatede haze, compared her faked ecstasy to making love to his fiancee back at home. He missed her like nothing else, and was plagued by ghosts, seeing her where she would never, could never, be in this hellish wasteland. She was the one small motivator that helped him pull through each day, even though he knew it was very likely she hadn't waited for him, either, given the explosive spat just before he deployed. She threw his ring in his face at some point, but afterwards he found it where it had rolled under the couch and left it on the coffee table downstairs with a note not too dissimilar to those he tried to send to the grieving families, a corner stolen from a piece of something bigger, with his sharp, sloppy writing reminding her that he would always love her. If he was lucky, then maybe there was still something at home for him to return to. If not, it still wouldn't matter because he would still be far away from all this and close to her, the girl that made his heart beat a little faster. He would feel alive for the first time in what felt like forever, and perhaps for once rather than living among death and despair, he could take a stab at living life and maybe even giving life.

He closed his eyes and imagined the stranger in his bed was her and mouthed her name as he came, engulfed by the sweetest light for a perfect singular moment. It quickly faded back into the restless night in this same godforsaken tent, the stale air heavy with the fading heat from the previous day and the prostitute's perfume as she took his money and left his bed. He knew that tomorrow he would wake to raid sirens and screams and explosions on the battlefront and face a tent full of the dead and dying, but for now, it was enough to see him through.

007 - Heaven

Aster was on the verge of snapping her pencil in two, frustrated enough to flip the table, punch someone in the face and leave the room with no ill conscience. It was a very tempting scenario, but she instead chose to close her eyes and breathe deeply to quell the anger inside her. Suffice to say, this job wasn't the glamorous opportunity she was expecting. She knew what she was getting into going into research-- days and nights of paperwork and grant applications and ethics boards and bureaucracy, hours of staring into microscopes and synthesizing compounds and observing, looking for results. Hard work and not all that exciting all the time, but stimulating enough if you had a mind and a passion for it. When she'd been offered a position in biochemistry research at ASPEN, she had jumped at the chance-- imagine never having to fill out a plea for funding again, never having to use antiquated lab equipment, chipped microscope slides and temperamental spectrophotometers? And all the lab rats-- in more ways than one-- you could possibly need for your work. Of course she had said yes.

But now the shiny veneer of the Institute was fading away into a distant memory, and she was faced with the harsh reality of the situation; this was a) not what she was expecting, and b) the most difficult thing she had and ever would have to do. The work was never-ending; with no need for grants or extraneous paperwork, they sought faster developments, faster research, more papers, more knowledge, more work. If the research would progress as predicted, then that wouldn't have been a problem, but as usual when working with such variable things as biological entities, there were always deviants. What should have been a simple compilation of simple results derived from a simple theory that worked through wonderful, miraculous science, turned into a several-page-long 'suggestions for future study' section in the report, and extreme frustration for the biochemist whose name had to go on this lackluster article.

When she opened her eyes, still her disappointment turned into impartial, detached vocabulary glared up at her from the paper she was working on, and she could take it no longer. She had put in far too many hours already today, so she had no qualms against packing up her things and leaving the lab early. The urge to flip a table or throw a rack of test tubes was still tempting, but she managed to keep it together and leave the laboratories without doing something brash that she would regret later.

Embarking the elevator was reassuring only in that it meant she didn't have to think about her failed experiment anymore, and she could do with her time as she pleased. Even though the typical canned music wasn't much to listen to, it still made her smile.

At least, until the elevator stopped.

"No, no, please, no, come on..." she hissed, pressing the main floor button again and again, trying to get the stupid useless piece of machinery to respond. "Fuck, come on!" None of the buttons were responding, and pounding on the doors didn't seem to do anything, either. "God damn it!" she roared, feeling the same surge of anger return even more powerfully than before. The Southerner banged and kicked and cursed at the elevator's doors until she finally sank to the ground, exhausted, but the damn thing still didn't budge. In the midst of her button-mashing, she had hit the emergency call button, so she had some small consolation in knowing that at least someone was coming for her, but it still didn't help abate her anger.

An hour and a half later, she was finally free, but simmering in her own rage. The worst part of it all was that she didn't have anyone to blame for anything that had gone wrong today; not the cold shower this morning, not the bad hair day, not the new stain on her lab coat, not the reluctance of cancerous mice to react favourably to the drug she was synthesizing, and not the broken elevator. This series of coincidences was aggravating, but just simply that; coincidences all coinciding to ruin a perfectly good day and put more strain on Aster's already taxed mind.

The elevator fiasco meant that she missed 'dinner time'; the kitchens at ASPEN operated at all hours of the day and night, but most of the residents of her wing chose to dine at about five-thirty. Anselm could only spare so much time to come to the dining hall out here instead of in nearer to the medical wing, so that meant she shouldn't have been as disappointed as she was to discover him not waiting there for her. Her misfortunes even extended so far as to include her favourite food being served that night, but it was all gone by the time she arrived. Her dinner was quiet and dissatisfying, and the rest of her evening spent alone in the common area of the biology wing. The occasional person stopped by, but invariably they all soon left, exhausted after a long week and looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. She tried her best to be pleasant for them, but often fell flat.

Finally, around ten-thirty, the surgeon appeared, looking tired but relatively satisfied with his lot in life. He wore his clinic lab coat, a little wrinkly but unmarred by stains like his scrubs would be after a day in surgery. He stood tall and imperious in glowing white, a little roughed-up but handsomely so, exactly as the hero in any story is. When his eyes fell on her, he smiled the most genuine smile. Aster leapt to her feet.

"I missed you at di-" Aster cut him off with a tight hug, holding him as close as she could and relishing the feeling of his own tight reciprocal.

"I missed you." Aster mumbled against him. She no longer felt angry. or frustrated, or miserable. Everything else drifted away. He tipped her head back and sought her lips, a quick, sweet kiss snatched from a vulnerable place. Nobody was around to witness it, but he still felt dangerous and titillatingly risque. Her concession was potent in his mind, made him forget everything else he was thinking about and

"I missed you, too." he mumbled against the pulse-point in her neck, dizzy against her skin.

Late in the night, entangled together, sticky from sweat and happily exhausted, when the settled silence said volumes more than they could in words, Aster's fingers strayed lazily across Anselm's chest. This moment- this whole situation- was perfect. Her terrible day was inconsequential compared to how good this was, how good it was to have something to rely on in this place.

"Heaven," she sighed, the word fanning across his flesh.

"Hmm?" he murmured, opening his eyes again to observe her.

"Heaven. This is heaven, obviously." She kissed a line from his sternum to his deltoid.

"How do you figure?" he asked, meaning no offense but unable to string together his words with much tact in his exhausted state.

"Because even if everything else is going to shit, just knowing I have you here with me makes all the difference. Nothing could ever be this perfect unless I had died and gone to heaven."

"As a doctor, I can assure you you're not dead," Anselm mumbled, pulling her closer and pressing a kiss to her forehead, "But I agree. This is heaven."

--
Going out of order? Blasphemy!!
Six was just stupid, though. I couldn't think of a single damn thing for 'break away'. Maybe later.
And this one is shit, I'm aware.

004 Dark

Dr. Vivian Roth left the lights in her office off, choosing to remain slumped at her desk in the dark. She ran her fingers through her hair until her forehead came to rest against the hardwood desk with a solid thunk. It felt good to just sit in the dark like this, anonymous and invisible in the shadows, in a room that was just slightly too chilly to be completely comfortable. At least here and now she could forget about everything in her life that was grating on her fragile nerves and just breathe without someone criticizing her for the volume of oxygen she was using. Her peace was disturbed only by the constant inundation of thoughts, which was to be expected. She reflected briefly on the time when she used to enjoy this job much more, and with a start realized how much guilt she felt in the current moment.

"Geez, you're getting soft," Vivian growled. There was a time when test subjects were subhuman in her eyes, and she could poke, prod and perforate their flesh all day long without even the slightest wavering doubt about what she was doing. She got a sadistic joy out of what she did, and that quavering of fear and pain in the subject's eyes upon the insertion of a needle was one of the best rewards. There was nothing in the world better than using a scalpel on a subject, drawing straight lines of blood across their chest. Sometimes an afternoon was spent removing the ribcage so she could watch a subject's heart beat before her just because she could, fixating on the struggling throbs of the organ, the twitching of the vessels that connected it to everything else in the body, until far too soon it seized or sputtered and the subject died. Ethics didn't come into play down here in the bowels of the ASPEN facility, and as long as she continued to yield usable results and further science, very few people concerned themselves with what projects she undertook in her off time. She had worked her way to a position where she had free access to all the tools and resources she could ever want, to do with as she pleased. It had been liberating, being able to satisfy whatever curiosity crossed her mind without repercussions, and the idea that she couldn't remember when that had changed struck her suddenly as particularly unnerving.

It had to be her current work. Her mentor had started the project some forty years ago, and gave all her notes to Vivian upon her retiring. It had been fascinating work, outlining the discovery of a gene within what was believed to be genomic dark matter that could be manipulated subtly to grant unimaginable power to ordinary people. Thousands of photographs and hundreds of hours of video footage from her mentor's laboratory were handed down to her, illustrating the experiments on lesser animals, first standard laboratory mice, then other small mammals, until pigs and primates were tested, being the closest to animals. Finally, a small selection of women were selected for the experiment, and within a few years, the laboratory was keeping tabs on twenty newborn children with the altered gene. Thousands of pages of detailed notes for each child as they grew, blood samples and observations of their DNA, all observing the effects of the mutant gene to an intimately personal level of detail. Vivian had spent countless hours pouring over every page, every word, every scrap of information on the project that her mentor would give her, and so of course when the now thirty-something-year-olds were brought in to ASPEN, Vivian recognized each one immediately, and knew perhaps more about them than they themselves did.

And that intimacy with the test subjects was where the problem lay, she thought. Unlike the mice and monkeys, whose abilities that the altered gene had given them were easy to observe as they were provoked through stress and fear responses (Vivian would never forget the first time she saw a mouse burst into flame in a stress test, or a Capuchin monkey turn its fur to poisoned quills when cornered in its cage by a thickly-gloved hand).

But the human test subjects weren't responding in quite the same way-- there were very, very few examples of the abilities being provoked during adolescence, and even during the examinations and testing upon their arrival, fear tests were failing to yield results. It was frustrating, and even more difficult because it was hard to say what sequences coded for what sort of ability. There had been a few small patterns observed during the mouse studies, but it was impossible to say if those patterns would be applicable across species. It could be there before them the whole time, but too weak to be noticeable. And on the one occasion that she had decided, out of frustration and anger, to keep going with the test long after her better judgment told her to stop, the subject had died. The loss had affected Vivian a lot more than she thought it would, simply because knowing so much about the subject's whole life made it feel like she was losing a close friend, or even a child. She had underestimated the human element in this experiment, and now she was paying for it.

Vivian's fingers fumbled across the desk until they located a notepad and pen, and turned her head just enough to scribble down notes about finding more scanners for detecting ambient environmental changes during the next tests. She felt exhausted, lost, at her wit's end. If her mentor was still here, then maybe the brilliant old bat would have some sort of nugget of wisdom, or direction, or even just a kind word to help her move on, but no. She'd retired well over a year ago, and it was Vivian all alone working on this monumental, groundbreaking project that should have made her happy, fulfilled, excited, but instead she was tired, sore, humiliated and heartbroken.

A shaft of light fell across the room as the door was opened, illuminating her pathetic slumped form, much to her displeasure. She didn't want to be seen like this. She didn't want to be bothered.

"Get out. Please." she groaned, clutching her forehead in one hand.

"Vivvy? It's just me... Jesus, it's cold in here," Dr. Desmund said, shutting the door and letting the darkness mercifully swallow her up again. Maybe if she kept her eyes shut and ignored him, she mused, then maybe he would go away. "You missed dinner, so I brought you something." He set the tray beside her on the desk, close enough that she couldn't ignore how good it smelled, despite her sour mood.

Oliver moved around her office like it was his own, which wasn't unusual since they both spent a fair amount of time in each others' offices. As he searched for things, it gave her a much-needed moment to collect herself. Vivian ran both her hands back through her hair as she picked herself up off the desk with a deep breath. She started when he draped a blanket over her shoulders, but he didn't notice as he went to bring over the chair he had found.

"You should turn the heat on when you're in here. It's not good for you to be in the cold like this, and you will get no sympathy from me when you've got the sniffles," he said, sitting down (entirely uninvited, she spat in her mind) next to her, not too close but close enough that his presence wasn't able to be ignored. He sat in silence next to her, and in fact was toying with the metal globe on her desk, brushing his fingers across countries with a certain fondness.

"Why are you doing this," she huffed, reluctantly reaching for the teacup off the tray.

"Doing what?" Oliver asked, giving the globe a good spin and then stopping it with a digit, frowning gently when his finger landed in the Pacific. "The blanket? Because I seriously don't want to catch your cold when--"

"Not that. Being so nice. All the time." She enclosed the teacup in her hands, feeling it warm the numbed fingers. She hadn't realized she had been as cold as she was. "I don't deserve it."

"And what makes you think that?" he said casually, turning on the electric fireplace with one of the buttons on her desk. It chewed away at the darkness, only able to consume so much of it, and leaving the pair in the half-light of its flickering glow. "This is just a little tangle. You'll get through it sooner or later. No reason to lose all your faith in yourself."

She hated him. She hated him so much, because he had a point. She hated that he was looking after her like she was some helpless puppy or something, something unable to look after itself. She hated the way he slid the tray in front of her, studying her with a grin as she took a bite. She hated the way he was heating up her office so she was comfortable. She hated that he had so much damn faith, not just in her but in the universe and everything. She hated the way she couldn't help the little smile at her lips because his presence just now, even just sitting here in the dark with her, made her feel a little bit better.

She sighed, stabbing a piece of broccoli with perhaps a bit too much vigor. "I guess what I should be saying is... thanks."

"It's no problem, Vivvy." Oliver's eyes glittered in the unsteady firelight as he stretched out in his chair, folding his arms behind his head. "You're like a sister to me. Where I'm from, we take care of our own."

Vivian smiled softly before turning back to her meal and the pair settled into a comfortable silence. How Oliver always seemed to know just how to cheer her up whenever she needed it most, Vivian figured she would probably never know. Even in the darkest places, he was able to bring light and make the darkness bearable.

---
Shitty rushed ending is shitty and rushed. What do you want from me. Jeez. Get off my lawn.

I imagine in my actual story I won't be giving away what's going on just in the prose like this. That's just not good storytelling. But as it stands, it helps me think about my ideas and elaborate them. I don't care that this is total shit that's taken me like, what, over a week to complete?
And holy fucking shit I need to stop making such nice-guy male characters and such insecure female characters. Buhhhh.

003 Light

Spoiler warning for my own novel? Yes. Nothing huge, but this scene would fit at the very end if it were part of it.
---

For a long while, nobody spoke. The survivors stood a safe distance away from the enormous hatch they had come through, as though something might rear up from it and drag them back down again. The sun beat down on them from above, warming their backs and surrounding them like a mother's arms. That was something they hadn't been able to get right in the biosphere, Aster realized. It had been a convincing display, of course- state of the art ASPEN would not have settled for an imperfect subterranean atmosphere-- but there was just something they hadn't been able to get right about the warmth. There wasn't that localized heat where the photons glanced off your skin, it was just... altogether hot, or warm, or cool, or chilly. It had been enough to convince them all that they were above ground for quite a while, but now that they stood in the midst of nowhere, in a real, wild forest, the differences were obvious. The sharp smell of pine trees mingled with a low rich note of mud and leaf decay from the forest floor, blowing in on a perfectly imperfect, unsteady breeze. Wildflowers poked up from the remnants of a fallen tree, nestled in its broken boughs and scarred trunk. Somewhere nearby, a river ran, just loud enough for them to hear. And still nobody spoke.

Aster sat down in the dirt before her knees gave out on her, suddenly very tired, very weak. It wasn't long before the others followed suit in relative silence. Anselm sat beside her, threading his fingers through hers, and she gripped the sleeve of his labcoat with her free hand, feeling like if she wasn't holding on to something then maybe she would drift away.

There was an obvious void in the group, their number was too small, the gathering too quiet and too solemn. Worse perhaps than their deaths were the memories of each one that ran through their minds, and the knowledge that it was all because of ASPEN. That organization that the rest of the world looked so highly upon, that held the world on the end of a string and toyed with it however they pleased in the name of science and progress. This modern god who took as it needed and gave back just enough to keep itself protected, leaving the small weak-minded world to revel in the new miracle it had granted them while it stole their children from beneath their noses and ignored all lines of ethics, morality, and even sanity in its pursuit of something greater. It was too much. Aster wanted to cry, but she didn't have the energy. Still the group sat in silence.

"Well then," Caden mumbled, followed by a long sigh, and then the silence returned.

The sun drifted higher in the sky, drenching the clearing in pure white light. The idea that the sun still dared to shine after all that had happened seemed baffling; below them, thousands of miles of subterranean complex slowly burned itself to ruins, what was once the root of the world, the lifeblood of their society, was now a skeleton. The rest of the world would take a long while to adjust as the source of everything they relied on was slowly destroyed underground, but the sun still shone. There was still light.

Humans were resourceful, and they would find a way to make it by without their false idol like they had a million times before.

Nature looks after its own, and it would in time cleanse the cavernous ruins of ASPEN of all the evil it held, and reclaim it.

And as for the survivors, time would fade the memories into peaceful homages to wonderful people, slowly ebb away at the pain until there was nothing left but love and happiness.

There was still light left in this world, still good things that could be had.

"Well," Aster said quietly, "Maybe we should get moving. Find a town. Figure out where we are." The gravity of their situation slowly settled into the minds of the group, and the irony that after all they had survived, they still had no idea where they were or how to find their way home, was not lost on them. They were still metaphorical lab rats scuttling about under observation, even after finding the cheese at the end of the maze and breaking out of their cage entirely.

"We should follow the river downstream; most towns are built near water sources. It's our best bet," Caden said.

A few nods and stretches, and the survivors got to their feet, brushing themselves off and ready to move again. The river was close, gurgling along and reflecting the sun between two borders of glowing green canopy. A single green leaf fell from one of the branches overhead and landed in the water, flowing along the ribbon of light far ahead of them. Anselm slipped Aster's hand in his and matched her pace. Despite everything that had happened and everything they had just been through, she couldn't help the smile that sprang to her lips. She felt undeniably light in that moment.

The sun would still rise again tomorrow, she realized, and there would still be light. Even after everything, this wasn't an end, this was merely a course of events, winding like a river. There was still much more to come, and while the shadows of leaves overhead cast a shadow on the river's glass surface on occasion, they would always emerge into the light.

---
want to be all "B'AWW IT'S TERRIBLE" but I really dunno. Light was sort of awkward to work with. And I wrote this earlier, and only just finished it now over twelve hours later. I went out today. I was going to write two today, but I probably won't seeing as how my day went.

Also; can you tell I haven't yet decided who will live or die? I tried to be vague about the numbers because most likely I'm going to change them, and I haven't even a full cast of characters to begin with.