One of my passions in life is writing. I've been trying to get back into it recently by writing random little pieces of ideas that pop into my head. Usually this ends up happening at odd hours (like 1 AM) so most of the time they don't make much sense. Fair warning. But here we go.
“You’ve got to cut her open.”
Brin blinked hard a couple of times. He – what?
“I what?” Brin turned to look at James. They had lost a lot of things the last couple of weeks making this trip – blood, sweat, tears, money, his favourite pair of jeans, several years off his life. But Brin hadn’t realized James’ fucking mind was one of them.
James made a vague hand motion in the general direction of the girl unconscious at their feet.
“You have to cut her open, reset her tag.”
“What?”
“I don’t understand where I’m losing you here,” James replied on an exasperated breath. Brin blinked at the face identical to his own and tried to figure out how far back they’d have to track to find the good sense that had clearly been knocked clear from James’ head. Perhaps the scuffle with that drunk idiot from the bar in the last community they had stopped in? He had been all muscle and bulk and had managed to land a pretty spectacular punch to James’ face despite his lack of coordination. Maybe –
“Are you concussed?”
James’ face scrunched in confusion.
“What? Now isn’t the time for your random attention lapses Brin.” James didn’t understand what Brin was having a hard time following. There was a girl, unconscious and very probably stepping into the afterlife, right at their feet. This wasn’t the time for games. “You’ve got to cu–”
“If you tell me I have to cut her open one more time, I will cut you open! Are you hearing yourself? I’m not a surgeon or a Tech. I can’t just cut some random person open in the middle of nowhere!”
“You cut people open all the time! What’s the difference?”
Brin closed his eyes, pressed his thumb to the space between his eyes and rubbed hard where he could feel the pressure of a headache building. Sometimes he wondered if his brother was willfully obtuse.
“I’m a Reaper,” he says slowly, “I take tags from the dead. She’s a bit more alive than what I usually work with. Why can’t you do it?”
“You know where to cut, you do it all the time, it’s the same thing. Just – ”
“It’s not the same thing! I don’t have to be careful with anything in the dead! She could die!”
“If you don’t do it she’ll die anyway,” James pointed out. He dropped to one knee to take a closer look. Tag malfunction. The telltale spiderwebs of green creeping up her neck and over her face told him she had maybe five more minutes.
“Well if she dies that way, that’s not on my hands,” Brin answered.
He wasn’t particularly proud of the high pitched hysterical thing his voice was doing, but he wasn’t sure it could be helped. He wasn’t a surgeon or a Tech. He could kill her. Tags were implanted into the base of the neck and fused with the top of the spine. The actual cutting part wasn’t the main issue. He didn’t know his way around functioning tags. When people came into his lab, they were dead and so were their tags. He just took them out. If he went poking around with this girl’s tag and did something wrong, he could literally fry her brain.
James gave his brother a flat look. He had known his brother’s job had slowly been sucking the life out of him, but he hadn’t figured he had been losing his compassion too.
“You’re not the type of person to just let someone die. You never have been.” James stood again and reached for his backpack. “Look, just make the cut the same way you always do. Or maybe a bit more carefully than that.”
Brin sighed, rubbing at his forehead again.
“Okay, but I still don’t know my way around active tags.”
“That’s fine. I’ll tell you what to do.”
Brin didn’t bother to question why his brother knew his way around active tags.
“Then why can’t you do it,” Brin asked again. James shrugged his shoulders.
“Experience,” he answered, like that was a proper argument. Brin closed his eyes and heaved another deep sigh.
“I don’t have a knife –”
“No worries,” James said and held out a pocket knife that he pulled from… somewhere? Brin hadn’t been looking at him so he wasn’t sure where he had pulled it from. He didn’t have any pockets and his backpack was still closed.
“I don’t have anything to sterilize it wi– ”
“Gotcha.” James crouched down to his backpack and unzipped it, producing a large bottle of vodka. Okay? Brin didn’t know when he managed to pick that up. He had rummaged through his bag earlier that morning to steal snacks he knew James was hoarding for himself and couldn’t for the life of him remember seeing that bottle.
“I’m still going to need to close up the cut after. I don’t have bonder or –”
James reached into his bag again and pulled out a first aid kit and a roll of bandages.
“What are you, a fucking boy scout? I was in your bag this morning and I don’t remember seeing any of this.” What kind of Hermione bottomless bag Harry Potter magic. James just smiled serenely and gestured for Brin to get on with it.
Nervous and fresh out of excuses, Brin sucked in a deep breath and dropped to his knees. He shuffled over to her head as he exhaled through his teeth. Shaking his hands out, he flicked out the blade and uncapped the vodka, drenching his hands and the blade. The girl’s hair was short, cropped close to her head, so he didn’t have to worry about getting it out of the way. Looking down at the back of the girl’s bare neck, he regretted every decision that had brought him here. He poured some of the vodka on the back of her neck before setting it aside.
Blade in hand, Brin took another deep breath. He was sweating profusely.
“You’re fine. Come on, the tremors are starting. She doesn’t have long,” James reminded. Steadying himself, Brin counted five finger paces from the base of her skull and felt for the implant scar. Pressing the blade to her skin, he cut in horizontally. He pried the incision open enough for him to see the tag.
“Now what,” Brin asked on a wispy breath.
“There’s three switches near the bottom of the tag. You’ll have to feel for them. They’re all really tiny and really close together. You need to press the one on the right, then the one in the middle.”
Brin tucked a finger in, tracing along the bottom of the tag.
“Whatever you do, don’t hit the one on the left. You’ll short circuit her brain,” James continued helpfully. Brin’s breath caught and he let out an involuntary whine of distress.
“Right. No pressure,” he mumbled, more to himself than to James.
Once Brin had located the switches, he paused. James hadn’t been kidding. There was very little space between each switch which left quite a lot space for error. Brin switched tactics and bent his finger so he could get at them with his fingernail instead. She jerked once, violently and his hand slipped. Breath caught, he pulled his hand back while James reached forward to steady her head and shoulders.
“Go on,” James encouraged.
Heart hammering in his chest, Brin inserted his finger and found the switches again. Running across them a few times to make sure he had the right ones, Brin pressed – right, then middle.
Brin withdrew his finger and held his breath, watching what little of the girl’s face he could see. It took a tense minute, but slowly, the green webs started to recede. Exhaling heavily, Brin dropped his chin to his chest and gave himself a moment. His eyes were definitely not stinging, and his lashes were definitely not wet.
“See, that wasn’t so hard, was it,” James chirped. Brin lifted his head enough to glare at him from under his clumped lashes. James’ smile never faltered. “Close her up, brother.”
Smothering the urge to stab his brother with his own knife, Brin set about cleaning his hands so that he could close her up.
Feel free to leave (constructive) comments. I'm always looking to improve. :)