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xp_logsCecilia and Quentin, back in Cecilia's old neighborhood, spring into action.
Cecilia had insisted on driving. The journey, she'd told Quentin, would help her clear her mind, and it would give her time to think. To play out a few scenarios in her head, to try and come up with a plan. If they'd teleported, she would have felt like they were winging it.
This was true, of course, but she also thought that'd be a convenient and polite excuse for her and Quentin to avoid having to make small talk. She had to focus, after all.
It wasn't like the drive would take much of her energy. She'd done it a thousand times before.
Cecilia had almost laughed when Quentin told her where they were going. The South Bronx was her territory, and even though it had changed considerably since she'd left it in the 90s, enough of it felt like home. Something about it, she mused as they neared the hospital, some energy in the air fueled her. She figured it wouldn't hurt.
She turned left, following a sign for Our Mother of Mercy. "We're almost there," she announced, more for herself than Quentin. "Remind me again how you know this guy?" She took her eyes off the wheel for a second to look at him. "Can't be from the neighborhood."
Quentin, who had been incessantly texting through the whole trip, finally gave his thumbs a rest and looked up from his phone. "What, you think just because I grew up in the Upper West Side I can't have any connections to other parts of the city? Racist." His phone buzzed and he returned his attention to it for a few seconds before looking up again. "You remember those protests a couple years ago after that cop was acquitted of murdering a couple mutants? Jax was one of the organizers. That's where we met."
"Ah, okay." Cecilia kept her eyes on the road. "Not racist," she protested after a few seconds. "You seem more like a Brooklyn guy when it comes to the outer boroughs, that's all." She shrugged. "Jax. What's his deal? Visible, I'm guessing, or he wouldn't have ended up in this situation."
"I'm a man about town. And yeah. He has these . . . I don't know what you'd call them. Globules? Like the tips of an anglerfish lure. Embedded in his skin down his arms and legs. They glow, too, like an anglerfish. No idea if they do anything besides that or if he just won the genetic lottery there. But it's enough to scare off those flatscan nurses."
"Doctors too, apparently." Cecilia sighed. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as she tried to get a mental picture of what they were going to be dealing with. "I forget how easy we have it. The ones who blend. Imagine being a white man with that kind of luck."
She pulled the car into a parking garage and flicked the car's lights on. "I only have half a plan," she admitted, turning to look at him for a second. "But it starts with us going in there without making a scene." She turned her attention back to the garage. "If I needed you to get a password out of somebody's head, could you do it? This is a poor hospital, and I bet it hasn't changed all that much since I was here in the 80s, but I guarantee you they're not using paper charts anymore."
He raised an eyebrow at her instructions to ~not make a scene,~ but nodded at her question. "If you can make them think about it so it's in their head, it'll be easier to pull it out. Even just saying the word 'password' might jog their memory a bit." He was out of the car the instant she pulled into a space and turned off the ignition, and he had to stuff his hands in his pockets to keep her from seeing him fidget.
"Okay. Good to know." Cecilia tried not to remark on how quickly he'd jumped out of the ride. She popped the trunk open and scooted around the car to it. "Here." She opened a bag she'd thrown inside before they'd departed, withdrawing her white coat and a few old, likely expired hospital ID cards. She put them on and pulled her hair back before slamming the trunk shut. "Ready to walk fast, and look like you know where you're going?" She didn't wait for an answer.
---
Cecilia Reyes had been to Our Mother of Mercy exactly three times. Of the first two visits — her birth and the kind of childhood illness that drives parents wild — she had little to recall. The third trip, though, she'd made as a kid after her father had died. It was her opinion that the less said about the visit the better. The specifics weren't particularly important, and she couldn't remember a ton of them, But suffice it to say, the place had made enough of an impression on her that she made a point during her years of medical training to avoid this hospital, even if she was the kind of doctor that could do it quite a lot of good.
At least, she thought to herself as she strode through unfamiliar corridors, hospitals were basically the same. With a room number and a general idea of how places like this were organized, she and Quentin had managed to make it to the right floor and wing mostly unnoticed. Inner city hospitals like this one were so filled with chaos that two mutants from Westchester were hardly a disruption.
Finding the room itself, though, was proving to be a challenge. And so Cecilia did a thing many of her male colleagues would have never deigned to do: she'd stopped to ask a nurse.
"Excuse me," she smiled at a short woman in vibrant pink scrubs, "but I'm looking for Jax Rodriguez. Can't seem to find the right room."
"Make a right down here, then fourth door on your left. But..." The nurse, despite being some 10 years Cecilia's junior, gave the doctor a once-over that made Cecilia feel small. She looked at Quentin, her mouth drawing into a thin frown before her eyes returned to the outdated badges on Cecilia's coat. She looked back up and met Cecilia's gaze. Her frown deepened. "Why?"
"I'm a surgical consult from Columbia," Cecilia responded. It was an easy lie, since it might have been true at one point in her life if Cecilia had been more altruistic and hadn't been hiding from mutants and ghosts in this part of town. "Just here to do an evaluation with one of my med students," she nodded to Quentin. "Thought maybe this would be good for him to see."
"Oh, it's something to see all right." The woman's expression relaxed a bit, but barely. "Thank God you're here. Maybe you all can finally get that thing out of here and take him downtown." She scurried down the hall and into a patient's room before either Cecilia or Quentin had a chance to respond.
Cecilia turned to watch the nurse go, her face tense and her jaw a little clenched. "Well," she said after a second, "at least we know what we're working with. Come on."
After that exchange, Quentin felt he deserved an Oscar. He stayed still and silent while they spoke, even though every instinct screamed at him to show this woman proper medical ethics. (And the irony of him teaching ethics to anyone was not lost on him, either.) His hands, still in his pockets, twitched with every hateful word the nurse spat, but Jean's voice came to him, guiding him through the simple exercises to restrain his psychic powers. No Carrie freakout yet. At least wait until Jax was safe.
Still, as they traipsed down the hall to the indicated room, Quentin pondered all the nightmares he would plant in the nurse's head that would keep her up every night for the next month.
The young man was alone in his room. The only sounds were the occasional beeps and hisses from the various machines hooked up to him that were keeping him alive. The structures on his arms glowed faintly, pulsating in time with the slow rise and fall of his chest. A food tray sat ignored on the bedside table. It had likely been dropped off and left, no one even attempting to help the patient eat.
Another idea for a night terror came to Quentin's mind, and he filed it away for future use.
If Cecilia were a different person, she'd have made a sign of the cross before stepping in that room. Instead, she took the Lord's name in vain before knocking on the door. "This isn't right," she said, her face growing hot. That people had taken a Hippocratic oath and left a patient like this infuriated her. It just increased her resolve to help, and the determination was clear on her face.
The man in the hospital bed was sleeping, and Cecilia thought it best he not be woken up by another knock on the door from an unfamiliar face in a white coat. "While I take a look at all this," she said, gesturing to the IV drip and the equipment, "why don't you tell him what we're doing here? Once I know what's going on, we can do something about it."
Quentin pulled up a seat beside the bed and brushed away errant strands of sweaty hair from Jax's face. He had not been cleaned well, either, it seemed. Quentin would not be surprised to find bedsores, which he suspected Cecilia had already concluded herself. The neglect was almost worse than the violence that had put this young man in the hospital in the first place.
He gently touched Jax's forehead, establishing just enough contact to facilitate the short telepathic conversation and keep him asleep and pain-free for a while. By the time he was done, his face was white and slick with sweat, and he stumbled getting back to his feet. "What's the prognosis, doc?" he asked, steadying himself against the bed.
"Neglect, for one." Cecilia's brow was wrinkled as she looked at the drip. "This is — I mean, you told me, but this is worse than I'd imagined. Well." She turned around, her lips pursed. "All this is palliative. They're trying to avoid the problem, whatever it is, by keeping him comfortable with drugs. A lot of drugs." She scratched an eyebrow as she looked at his arms. The structures in them had a kind of pallid quality, and she moved to grab a pair of gloves. "It's not like I can tell what's underneath without a chart, but maybe a physical exam will give me some hints. Might need some scans."
"No," a male voice said from the door. "you won't." Cecilia, in the middle of snapping on a pair of latex gloves, looked up to find a tall man with a russet beard staring her down with a disdainful look on his face. "Because this isn't your patient." He stepped into the room, his lip curled as he looked from Cecilia to Quentin and back.
"Annie told me a surgeon from Columbia was here. But we didn't call anyone at Columbia." His focus was on Cecilia now, and he gave her the kind of once-over she associated with the beginning of her career, when the sight of an Afro-Latina surgeon was so unfamiliar to doctors of a certain age that they responded with suspicion. It made her face grow hot. "So who are you, and what are you doing here?"
"I'm here to help," Cecilia responded, her face neutral, her tone taking on a steely edge that surprised her, "because I'm a doctor. And a good one. Which, judging from what's going on here, might be more than I can say for you."
"He's barely your patient, either, the way you've treated him," Quentin piped up from beside Jax. He held so tightly onto the bed's railing that his knuckles were white. "Do your fucking job, flatscan."
"Cálmate, Quentin." Cecilia hoped Quentin could tell that her rebuke was more for show than anything else. Despite her simmering anger, she had to play good cop in order to get anywhere. "Look" Cecilia said, her voice calm as her eyes bore into him. "I've got prestigious degrees and years of experience in mutant medicine. Which makes me helpful in a patient situation in which you are clearly in over your head."
The male doctor crossed his arms and opened his mouth, but Cecilia continued. "It will also make me all the more credible when I bring several medical boards down on you and this hospital for what is an obviously severe case of patient neglect." She gave him a small smile. "And I," she nodded her head slightly, "also have a witness."
Quentin's brain felt like it had just finished a hundred weight-lifting reps just from the exertion of communicating with the comatose Jax. He probably risked actual brain damage if he pushed into the doctor's mind to make him acquiesce to their demands.
Worth the price, though.
"The sooner you let her doctor, the sooner we're all gone," Quentin said, bracing himself against the bed again as his legs threatened to give way, "and the less likely we are to generate enough media and political attention to close this place down. Yeah, all your patients would lose their care, but don't think for a second we wouldn't sacrifice the health of every human here for the life of one mutant."
The male doctor's teeth had been gritted, his jaw clenched. But the tension in his features lessened ever so slightly — slightly enough that Cecilia had a hunch Quentin had done or was doing something, even if she had no way to prove it.
"I want to treat this man," she said, the ferocity out of her voice but still in her gaze, "and I can actually help him. Which gets him out of your hands."
It wasn't the most noble coup de grace, but it was apparently what they needed. "Fine." The other doctor practically spat at Cecilia, his scowl all too present. "Just what, exactly," he cast his gaze over to the patient he'd so clearly mistreated, "do your propose?"
Cecilia couldn't help but look a little triumphant, even though their victory was besides the point. "I'm going to need labs and scans, to start. And probably surgery, if I had to guess, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Point is, this is my patient now, and I'm going to need you to not stand in my way."
Quentin sat down in his chair, unwilling to test the stability of his legs much longer. He had done enough, anyway, and if he pushed any more, then Cecilia would have two mutant patients on her hands. "You good here?" he asked her, his breath ragged. "I think . . . I think I've done my part. Now you go . . . go save a life."
Cecilia watched as the other doctor left the room, clearly in a huff, as he went to follow her orders. "Save a life. Sure. Simple as that." She turned toward him, taking him in. "Might need you to call back to the mansion and see if they can work up some phony hospital privileges, but I should be good." She eyed him, nothing his apparent exhaustion. "Are you good here? Anything a Gatorade and some aspirin can't fix?"
"Don't worry about me," he replied wryly, sinking deeper into his chair. His eyes fluttered shut as exhaustion overtook him. "Just need a nap. Wake me up once Jax's all good. And Doc . . . thank you."
Cecilia had insisted on driving. The journey, she'd told Quentin, would help her clear her mind, and it would give her time to think. To play out a few scenarios in her head, to try and come up with a plan. If they'd teleported, she would have felt like they were winging it.
This was true, of course, but she also thought that'd be a convenient and polite excuse for her and Quentin to avoid having to make small talk. She had to focus, after all.
It wasn't like the drive would take much of her energy. She'd done it a thousand times before.
Cecilia had almost laughed when Quentin told her where they were going. The South Bronx was her territory, and even though it had changed considerably since she'd left it in the 90s, enough of it felt like home. Something about it, she mused as they neared the hospital, some energy in the air fueled her. She figured it wouldn't hurt.
She turned left, following a sign for Our Mother of Mercy. "We're almost there," she announced, more for herself than Quentin. "Remind me again how you know this guy?" She took her eyes off the wheel for a second to look at him. "Can't be from the neighborhood."
Quentin, who had been incessantly texting through the whole trip, finally gave his thumbs a rest and looked up from his phone. "What, you think just because I grew up in the Upper West Side I can't have any connections to other parts of the city? Racist." His phone buzzed and he returned his attention to it for a few seconds before looking up again. "You remember those protests a couple years ago after that cop was acquitted of murdering a couple mutants? Jax was one of the organizers. That's where we met."
"Ah, okay." Cecilia kept her eyes on the road. "Not racist," she protested after a few seconds. "You seem more like a Brooklyn guy when it comes to the outer boroughs, that's all." She shrugged. "Jax. What's his deal? Visible, I'm guessing, or he wouldn't have ended up in this situation."
"I'm a man about town. And yeah. He has these . . . I don't know what you'd call them. Globules? Like the tips of an anglerfish lure. Embedded in his skin down his arms and legs. They glow, too, like an anglerfish. No idea if they do anything besides that or if he just won the genetic lottery there. But it's enough to scare off those flatscan nurses."
"Doctors too, apparently." Cecilia sighed. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as she tried to get a mental picture of what they were going to be dealing with. "I forget how easy we have it. The ones who blend. Imagine being a white man with that kind of luck."
She pulled the car into a parking garage and flicked the car's lights on. "I only have half a plan," she admitted, turning to look at him for a second. "But it starts with us going in there without making a scene." She turned her attention back to the garage. "If I needed you to get a password out of somebody's head, could you do it? This is a poor hospital, and I bet it hasn't changed all that much since I was here in the 80s, but I guarantee you they're not using paper charts anymore."
He raised an eyebrow at her instructions to ~not make a scene,~ but nodded at her question. "If you can make them think about it so it's in their head, it'll be easier to pull it out. Even just saying the word 'password' might jog their memory a bit." He was out of the car the instant she pulled into a space and turned off the ignition, and he had to stuff his hands in his pockets to keep her from seeing him fidget.
"Okay. Good to know." Cecilia tried not to remark on how quickly he'd jumped out of the ride. She popped the trunk open and scooted around the car to it. "Here." She opened a bag she'd thrown inside before they'd departed, withdrawing her white coat and a few old, likely expired hospital ID cards. She put them on and pulled her hair back before slamming the trunk shut. "Ready to walk fast, and look like you know where you're going?" She didn't wait for an answer.
---
Cecilia Reyes had been to Our Mother of Mercy exactly three times. Of the first two visits — her birth and the kind of childhood illness that drives parents wild — she had little to recall. The third trip, though, she'd made as a kid after her father had died. It was her opinion that the less said about the visit the better. The specifics weren't particularly important, and she couldn't remember a ton of them, But suffice it to say, the place had made enough of an impression on her that she made a point during her years of medical training to avoid this hospital, even if she was the kind of doctor that could do it quite a lot of good.
At least, she thought to herself as she strode through unfamiliar corridors, hospitals were basically the same. With a room number and a general idea of how places like this were organized, she and Quentin had managed to make it to the right floor and wing mostly unnoticed. Inner city hospitals like this one were so filled with chaos that two mutants from Westchester were hardly a disruption.
Finding the room itself, though, was proving to be a challenge. And so Cecilia did a thing many of her male colleagues would have never deigned to do: she'd stopped to ask a nurse.
"Excuse me," she smiled at a short woman in vibrant pink scrubs, "but I'm looking for Jax Rodriguez. Can't seem to find the right room."
"Make a right down here, then fourth door on your left. But..." The nurse, despite being some 10 years Cecilia's junior, gave the doctor a once-over that made Cecilia feel small. She looked at Quentin, her mouth drawing into a thin frown before her eyes returned to the outdated badges on Cecilia's coat. She looked back up and met Cecilia's gaze. Her frown deepened. "Why?"
"I'm a surgical consult from Columbia," Cecilia responded. It was an easy lie, since it might have been true at one point in her life if Cecilia had been more altruistic and hadn't been hiding from mutants and ghosts in this part of town. "Just here to do an evaluation with one of my med students," she nodded to Quentin. "Thought maybe this would be good for him to see."
"Oh, it's something to see all right." The woman's expression relaxed a bit, but barely. "Thank God you're here. Maybe you all can finally get that thing out of here and take him downtown." She scurried down the hall and into a patient's room before either Cecilia or Quentin had a chance to respond.
Cecilia turned to watch the nurse go, her face tense and her jaw a little clenched. "Well," she said after a second, "at least we know what we're working with. Come on."
After that exchange, Quentin felt he deserved an Oscar. He stayed still and silent while they spoke, even though every instinct screamed at him to show this woman proper medical ethics. (And the irony of him teaching ethics to anyone was not lost on him, either.) His hands, still in his pockets, twitched with every hateful word the nurse spat, but Jean's voice came to him, guiding him through the simple exercises to restrain his psychic powers. No Carrie freakout yet. At least wait until Jax was safe.
Still, as they traipsed down the hall to the indicated room, Quentin pondered all the nightmares he would plant in the nurse's head that would keep her up every night for the next month.
The young man was alone in his room. The only sounds were the occasional beeps and hisses from the various machines hooked up to him that were keeping him alive. The structures on his arms glowed faintly, pulsating in time with the slow rise and fall of his chest. A food tray sat ignored on the bedside table. It had likely been dropped off and left, no one even attempting to help the patient eat.
Another idea for a night terror came to Quentin's mind, and he filed it away for future use.
If Cecilia were a different person, she'd have made a sign of the cross before stepping in that room. Instead, she took the Lord's name in vain before knocking on the door. "This isn't right," she said, her face growing hot. That people had taken a Hippocratic oath and left a patient like this infuriated her. It just increased her resolve to help, and the determination was clear on her face.
The man in the hospital bed was sleeping, and Cecilia thought it best he not be woken up by another knock on the door from an unfamiliar face in a white coat. "While I take a look at all this," she said, gesturing to the IV drip and the equipment, "why don't you tell him what we're doing here? Once I know what's going on, we can do something about it."
Quentin pulled up a seat beside the bed and brushed away errant strands of sweaty hair from Jax's face. He had not been cleaned well, either, it seemed. Quentin would not be surprised to find bedsores, which he suspected Cecilia had already concluded herself. The neglect was almost worse than the violence that had put this young man in the hospital in the first place.
He gently touched Jax's forehead, establishing just enough contact to facilitate the short telepathic conversation and keep him asleep and pain-free for a while. By the time he was done, his face was white and slick with sweat, and he stumbled getting back to his feet. "What's the prognosis, doc?" he asked, steadying himself against the bed.
"Neglect, for one." Cecilia's brow was wrinkled as she looked at the drip. "This is — I mean, you told me, but this is worse than I'd imagined. Well." She turned around, her lips pursed. "All this is palliative. They're trying to avoid the problem, whatever it is, by keeping him comfortable with drugs. A lot of drugs." She scratched an eyebrow as she looked at his arms. The structures in them had a kind of pallid quality, and she moved to grab a pair of gloves. "It's not like I can tell what's underneath without a chart, but maybe a physical exam will give me some hints. Might need some scans."
"No," a male voice said from the door. "you won't." Cecilia, in the middle of snapping on a pair of latex gloves, looked up to find a tall man with a russet beard staring her down with a disdainful look on his face. "Because this isn't your patient." He stepped into the room, his lip curled as he looked from Cecilia to Quentin and back.
"Annie told me a surgeon from Columbia was here. But we didn't call anyone at Columbia." His focus was on Cecilia now, and he gave her the kind of once-over she associated with the beginning of her career, when the sight of an Afro-Latina surgeon was so unfamiliar to doctors of a certain age that they responded with suspicion. It made her face grow hot. "So who are you, and what are you doing here?"
"I'm here to help," Cecilia responded, her face neutral, her tone taking on a steely edge that surprised her, "because I'm a doctor. And a good one. Which, judging from what's going on here, might be more than I can say for you."
"He's barely your patient, either, the way you've treated him," Quentin piped up from beside Jax. He held so tightly onto the bed's railing that his knuckles were white. "Do your fucking job, flatscan."
"Cálmate, Quentin." Cecilia hoped Quentin could tell that her rebuke was more for show than anything else. Despite her simmering anger, she had to play good cop in order to get anywhere. "Look" Cecilia said, her voice calm as her eyes bore into him. "I've got prestigious degrees and years of experience in mutant medicine. Which makes me helpful in a patient situation in which you are clearly in over your head."
The male doctor crossed his arms and opened his mouth, but Cecilia continued. "It will also make me all the more credible when I bring several medical boards down on you and this hospital for what is an obviously severe case of patient neglect." She gave him a small smile. "And I," she nodded her head slightly, "also have a witness."
Quentin's brain felt like it had just finished a hundred weight-lifting reps just from the exertion of communicating with the comatose Jax. He probably risked actual brain damage if he pushed into the doctor's mind to make him acquiesce to their demands.
Worth the price, though.
"The sooner you let her doctor, the sooner we're all gone," Quentin said, bracing himself against the bed again as his legs threatened to give way, "and the less likely we are to generate enough media and political attention to close this place down. Yeah, all your patients would lose their care, but don't think for a second we wouldn't sacrifice the health of every human here for the life of one mutant."
The male doctor's teeth had been gritted, his jaw clenched. But the tension in his features lessened ever so slightly — slightly enough that Cecilia had a hunch Quentin had done or was doing something, even if she had no way to prove it.
"I want to treat this man," she said, the ferocity out of her voice but still in her gaze, "and I can actually help him. Which gets him out of your hands."
It wasn't the most noble coup de grace, but it was apparently what they needed. "Fine." The other doctor practically spat at Cecilia, his scowl all too present. "Just what, exactly," he cast his gaze over to the patient he'd so clearly mistreated, "do your propose?"
Cecilia couldn't help but look a little triumphant, even though their victory was besides the point. "I'm going to need labs and scans, to start. And probably surgery, if I had to guess, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Point is, this is my patient now, and I'm going to need you to not stand in my way."
Quentin sat down in his chair, unwilling to test the stability of his legs much longer. He had done enough, anyway, and if he pushed any more, then Cecilia would have two mutant patients on her hands. "You good here?" he asked her, his breath ragged. "I think . . . I think I've done my part. Now you go . . . go save a life."
Cecilia watched as the other doctor left the room, clearly in a huff, as he went to follow her orders. "Save a life. Sure. Simple as that." She turned toward him, taking him in. "Might need you to call back to the mansion and see if they can work up some phony hospital privileges, but I should be good." She eyed him, nothing his apparent exhaustion. "Are you good here? Anything a Gatorade and some aspirin can't fix?"
"Don't worry about me," he replied wryly, sinking deeper into his chair. His eyes fluttered shut as exhaustion overtook him. "Just need a nap. Wake me up once Jax's all good. And Doc . . . thank you."
