She Lay There Dying

4/28/2020

TW: Suicide, racism, sexism, transphobia, death

"We're losing him! Increase it!" Ms. (Mr.) Cordova-Watanabe seized on the table as a white lab coated man jacked a Cat-5 cable into her (his) head and several sharp power plugs into a small flesh covered, oval disk lying bloody on the operating table besides her (him). "Ramírez, try the connection again!" A thin and befuddled bespectacled man sitting on a laptop in the corner of the room looked up in horror at the scene in front of him, brown eyes transfixed on it, unable to look away. "I, I'm trying." He said, snapping his head back down as if attempting to imitate the animal his turtleneck was named after.

It was, Hikari Watanabe decided, a horror show.

It was no surprise she viewed it this way, given that it was after all her ex wife's (husband's, a small voice echoed in the name on the whiteboard, and the bracelet, and the medical chart, and the interactions of everyone around her) body lying open on the operating table.

She stood there, in the air, floating above it all and wondered how many other women got to see this, the last dying breaths of their loved ones, like this. In the operating chamber. She knew by the energy she could sense that no, she was not going to make it.

She didn't know how she thought about that.

"Mrs., Mrs. Cordova." She didn't turn her head at first, and a nervous looking man in a pair of well worn scrubs shambled over to her, accompanied by the pine tree of a G-man who had shadowed every conversation since she had entered this godawful place. There was an uncomfortable cough, "Mrs. Cordova." She was jerked back down to her body.

Hikari turned to face the pair, her eyes drawn first to the shielded lenses of the agent, and then to the slouching, downcast face of the mousy brown haired man standing just in front of him.

"Ms. Watanabe" She stated, and the dimunitive doctor let out an uncomfortable cough and somehow shrank further into himself and muttered some sort of apology she didn't care to try to catch.

"I, am so sorry to tell you this but..Your husband was…As you know we…" The G-Man finally spoke "like a family…and…. We take care of our own…"

(No you're not, she thought)

These people were not her family, not her friends, and not her allies.

These people were not even close.

They had already made up their mind about her years ago, and although she had changed plenty since then, they had not.

Since the moment she had arrived, they had seen her not as someone losing a loved one, but as the ice cold inhuman (literally) bitch who had seduced a faithful husband, gotten herself pregnant, and driven his wife to put a gun to her temple.

They did not, and never would at this rate, assign any blame to the "man" that lay dying on the table inside the hastily sterilized room. They would not consider that that man had not loved that woman, that that man had been miserable, trapped in a relationship that he had not wanted trying to solve a problem with himself he could never solve through following society's scripts. That the woman, had been a dependent neurotic leech who had latched onto the first individual who could not effectively say no to her, and that the young technician who they blamed for "starting" the whole "affair" and for "ending" the life of a lady who produced a note so self righteous, racist, and transphobic that Hikari and Cordova had ended up burning it the night they found her body, was not the Dragon Lady that they had told stories about for years, but a sapient individual who had endured years of pain keeping the secrets of someone who refused to make any effort to change the things that were making her miserable.

These people did not care about her. They had never cared about her ex wife, either. The wires alone were evident of that. These were people desperately trying to make up for something that could never be made up for. And here they were, denying her even the comfort of watching her ex wife's death throes in peace.

She simply turned to them. "Thank you. I know." Turned back to the glass, and began the process of raising herself out of her body once again

She couldn't decide at first what was so horrifying about the situation. She had seen her like this before, wires trailing from the back of her forehead, from the auxiliary ports on her arms, from the center of her stomach. From every cursed pit on her body, Watanabe could see the wires protruding. But when she had gone in for maintenance, she had seen this before. When she was Called to assist, she had seen this. And she had seen what the doctors never would, her looking in the mirror and longing, longing for the pain and trauma that had been inflicted on her to vanish with the ports; only to realize that she would also be Missing Something. Always be Incomplete.

No, that wasn't what made it so goddamn horrifying. What made it horrifying was the way her daemon, her soul in animal form, lay at her feet, defeated. Blood from the operating tabled dripped over onto the floor, spilling right through her.

Watanabe had never before seen the wolf this dull before. This lifeless. Her eyes stared ahead. It was so wrong. When her wife had taken a bullet during the Invasion, she had sworn a storm. And even without being able to tell what was said between them, Watanabe could see Sarafina's concern for her charge. The way that she nipped at her, encouraging her at first then practically dragging her towards the waiting arms of the soldiers and medics even though she couldn't actually physically interact with her. The way she paced inside the ambulance across from Watanabe, and never once showed the pain that her daemian must have been going through, and the way she sat, protectively defensively, never budging from her spot next to her throughout the entirety of those long uncertain nights, as if her presence next to her could ward off Death Itself.

But now, she lay there, on the floor. Defeated. Blood dripping on top of her head and falling through it to the ground below. Lying under the table as the doctors encircling her wife walked through her as they jabbed her with more and more useless cables, more and more machines. Watanabe frowned. She would not have wanted it to end this way, of this she was certain.

She would not have wanted it this way.

And despite what everyone else thought, neither did Hikari Watanabe.