Work Text:
There’s a lot to be done when taking care of a dying man. Amanda learns this quickly enough, whether she wants to or not.
When Lawrence is around, he shows her what to do. How to give medication, how to read the various monitors, how to put in an IV if needed, among many other things. He’s got steady heads and a seemingly endless amount of patience for the amount of repetition needed in order for her to truly absorb what he’s teaching.
(Sometimes, impulsively, she wants to push him. To see how far that cool, calm, doctor act can stretch before he reacts in anger. To ask about how busy he can possibly be, with a wife and daughter that won’t speak to him. To ask if he feels reborn in any meaningful way after John’s test. She doesn’t though. Her own anger fuels itself without his help.)
His teaching helps, it does, but he still isn’t around often enough for her liking. It all falls on her shoulders, something she loves and loathes in equal part. It keeps her much closer to John than the other two. It also feels like a punishment to see him like this, so sick and frail and both of them utterly helpless to change anything.
One day, early on, she frets over him, not leaving his side until she notices a slight stinging across the length of her wrists that gradually increases until she has to look down. Her cuts have split open and are steadily dripping blood down her arms. The same cuts he was there when she caused, he held her bleeding wrists together like he could fix them. She believed that he could at the time.
(To her dying felt like a rush, something fast and stomach-droppingly terrifying. She doubts it feels the same to John. It looks more like decay, more like the slow decline with no clear end in sight.)
Lawrence is there that day and tells her, firmly, to leave and take care of that when he spots the spattering of blood. So she does, dousing the cuts in enough alcohol to make her hiss as it burns and covering it all with bandages. It’s sloppy and the white of the gauze is already starting to cloud over with red but she doesn’t care. It adds to the fading punctures from all those needles, marks from a test that was never even meant to be hers in the first place. Hadn't he said that part of her life was behind her, her mind says to her sarcastically.
For all she does for John there’s still eternities of time that she needs to fill on her own. The fluorescent lights of the warehouse have a sort of timelessness to them, it’s hard to tell when it’s day or night or whether an hour passed or just a minute. Her watch feels like a lifeline at times like this, watching the minutes tick by to keep herself steady and grounded. It only works some of the time.
(When she was a little girl she wanted to be a nurse, she wanted to help people. She also wanted to have a father who loved her and didn’t leave her in the dark for hours while she screamed. She supposes she got her wish, but it doesn’t feel nearly as fulfilling as she imagined.)
She can’t let herself get lost in her own head, she refuses to let that consume her. She pours over the medical encyclopedias like they hold a secret answer that she’s missed before and tosses them aside when she can’t find anything but the facts. She makes and remakes devices in a frenzy, destroying them if she finds even one flaw in their design.
(The one she doesn’t touch is her own reverse bear trap, sitting upon a styrofoam mannequin head. It feels almost reverent and a little bit mocking at the same time. Her very own false idol.)
Most of all though, she spends her days at John’s side. There’s where she truly wants to be, even if some days are better than others.
There’s days where he’s barely lucid, doesn’t even seem to realize that she’s there at all. Those are the hardest. He confuses her for other people when he speaks or he doesn’t say anything at all for hours.
(She never realized how long a day without any sort of conversation can be. He wants her to be someone else and she feels like a pretty pathetic replacement for whatever he could ask for. He calls for his son once in the height of his delirious state and something in her shatters just a little bit. She’s sickly grateful that he’ll never know that it was her that took that from him, and she doesn't mention it once his senses come back to him.)
But there are also days where he’s well enough to leave the operating room, albeit in his wheelchair with a tank of oxygen close at hand. It’s good, it feels like it’s just the two of them and nothing else. She still wishes they could get some sunlight and not just the darkness of the tunnels, but they have what they have and nothing more.
(He offers her words of advice, of encouragement as they work and she rides the high of praise for the next several hours. Up until he falls into a coughing fit that leaves her right on the edge of panic and sends him back to his hospital bed with his oxygen mask.)
Hoffman is there sometimes when he’s not busy pretending to be a cop, in the warehouse or in the tunnels. She’s torn on whether she wants to hate him for being there or for not being there. But she has an advantage, she is John’s true disciple and she can hold that over him until the end of his days. That makes his presence more bearable, if only by a little. He means nothing, just a source of extra muscle for her and John.
(He’s also never been tested like her, hasn’t suffered like her. If she believed in rebirth, really truly believed, he still wouldn’t qualify in her eyes. Maybe that’s where part of her hatred towards him comes from, but that’s not something she dwells on. People don’t change, after all.)
She hopes John doesn’t know about her slowly fading faith in the tests as he himself is fading away. Ever since her experience at the nerve gas house she feels a strange sort of unease, a crack in what was once a solid foundation. But her devotion to him is unshakeable.
(She still doesn’t know what she’ll do when he’s gone. She doesn’t want to think about it, but the time for that seems to be rapidly approaching. No amount of anger or force can push it back, but that won’t stop her. She's not going to change.)