She fumbled with my mask for a second.

“Lower,” I informed her, “The mask and body part of the costume overlap just above the collarbone.”

Useful information.

She found it, separated the two, and touched a fingertip to my throat, like she was taking my pulse.

The pain left in an instant.  My breathing became easier, and I felt a steady pressure deep in my broken arm.

😀

“You have a brain injury that’s not fully healed.”

“Bakuda’s fault.”

She still has traces of that concussion, huh? It’s been a while.

Granted, I’m no expert on concussions. For all I know, this could be normal.

“Hm.  Outside the scope of my abilities.”

Hrm, you sure about that? I seem to recall something from Interlude 2 about you not wanting to mess with brains even though you technically can.

Ominous, but I wasn’t ready to put too much stake in what she told me, and what she might be leaving out.

“Okay,” my voice was stronger, without the crippling pressure in my chest and back.

It’s seriously very nice to see Taylor feeling better. 🙂

“Microfracture in your shoulder, nerve damage to your left hand, reduced fine dexterity.”

“Really?  I hadn’t noticed.”

It’s not like she’s been using the left hand much since the arm injury.

“It’s there.  I’m not going to bother with that, either.”

“Wasn’t expecting you to.”  Couldn’t let her ruffle me.

I guess that’s fair. If Panacea stopped to deal with every little thing wrong with every patient’s body, she’d never get anything done.

Especially when the patients also distract her with moral philosophy.

It wasn’t really a choice.  A long, hard road to recovery, possibly with no recovery at all, fraught with any potential health complications that the universe decided to hand my way, or healing for a broken back, with the potential health complications that Panacea decided to give me?

Yeah, I think this is a pretty clear decision.

I mean, whatever she deigned to inflict on me would be calculated to make me miserable, if she went that far, but at least then I’d have someone to hate.

Hehe.

“Please,” I spoke, “Use your power.”

She nodded at the PRT uniform, who left the enclosure.  Then she approached the side of the bed.

Nice.

So judging by the comment about Taylor’s suit covering her skin, I guess this means Taylor will have to find some that she can bare.

“I’m going to have to move some of your mask aside, to touch your skin.”

“Permission granted,” I spoke, “Though I’ve been wondering since the bank robbery – why didn’t you reach up and touch my scalp?”

Huh? Was Taylor’s scalp exposed at some point in the robbery? I don’t remember that.

“No comment.”

Ah.  Something about hair, maybe?

Hm. Or maybe something about not actually wanting to follow through on the sorts of threats she came with.

A weakness in her power.  Maybe it was mucked up or confused by ‘dead’ tissue?

But yeah, this is also a possibility, and given the track record, Taylor’s probably right.

“Then you’re either ignorant, deluded or you have a very twisted perspective.”

“Maybe.”

I for one think intent matters a lot. That’s the crux of this, I suppose: Amy is following a philosophy of intent whereas Taylor follows a philosophy of consequence.

She went on, “Don’t really care which it is.  If you’re going to call yourself a good person,” she paused, shook her head a little, “Then don’t waste my time.  Give me an answer, one way or another, so I can get on with helping people.”

Yeeah, a debate over what makes someone a good person is very much not what Panacea came here for.

“Are you?”

“What?”

“Are you a decent person, Amy?”

Amy is… I’d say she’s good-hearted but vicious if crossed. What remains to be seen is whether she holds a grudge enough to stay vicious weeks after the crossing.

She gave me an offended look.

“I envy you, that it’s so easy for you to think of things in terms of black and white.  I’d like to think I’m a good person, believe it or not.  

Actually… this might be something Taylor needed to be called out on. She has been thinking of a lot of things in black and white. It was only thanks to her time with the Undersiders that it seemed to occur to her that villains aren’t necessarily bad people, that heroes aren’t necessarily good people, and that there are different degrees of badness.

And hell, just look at her encounter with Mr. Gladly last chapter. He did one thing that Taylor saw as a betrayal, and because of that, Taylor was almost ready to let him die.

Or the Dinah Alcott situation. Taylor left the Undersiders because she realized they weren’t willing to put themselves at risk to save Dinah – none of them making that decision out of malice – thus making most of them plummet into the “bad person” category in her view.

This is a world of gray and black morality, and that line does not quite follow the line between hero and villain.

Everything I’ve done, I did because I thought it was right at the time.  In hindsight, some of the ends didn’t justify the means, and sometimes there were unforseen consequences.”  Like Dinah.  “But I don’t think of myself as a bad person.”

That realization in the middle there is important. If Taylor takes this to heart and applies it to herself and the Undersiders, they might be able to get past their differences.

“That’s not reassuring.”

“It’s not meant to be reassuring.  I suppose maybe you’ll just have to either trust in the fact that I’m a decent person or refuse my help,” she shrugged, glaring at me,

She may not be helping her case, but at least she’s being honest. Putting all the cards on the table for the patient who’s about to make an important decision regarding consent is important.

“There’s a kind of poetry to this.  Like, a thief fears being stolen from the most, a scumbag… well, you get the drift.

Heh.

The more horrible a human being you are, the more you’ll agonize over what I might have done to you, with a time delay of minutes, hours, days, years.

Honestly, I have a feeling that this knowledge is revenge enough for Panacea. The seed of insecurity that gets Taylor to worry about Pan for years after the fact.

That said, she’s wrong. Sure, being a horrible person can give you some imagination as to what she might’ve done, but there are definitely more horrible people in this story who wouldn’t think about it nearly as much as Taylor would.

Yet if you’re a decent person, you’ll be more inclined to think better of me.”

I suppose this part might be accurate, though.

“Um.”

“Just agree, so I can move on to other patients.”

Panacea sounds very tired of all this.

I can’t blame her. She’s probably been healing non-stop for several hours now.

“What was it you said during the bank robbery?  You’d make me horribly obese?  Make everything I eat taste like bile?  What’s to stop you from doing something like that here?”

“Nothing, really.  I mean, you could sue me after I did it, but you’d have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and that’d be damn hard if I gave the symptoms a time delay before they showed up.

You’re not helping your case, Pan, by bringing up a detail of your power I didn’t know about that invalidates my argument for why Taylor could trust you.

Plus I’m a valuable enough resource that I could get help paying the legal costs.  And, let’s not forget, Carol, my adoptive mother, is a pretty kickass lawyer.

Ah, yeah.

Whatever you did by trying to sue me probably wouldn’t cripple me as much as what my power did to you.”

Yeah, I suppose that’s true.

“I’m sure you have,” she frowned.  Her hood and scarf were down, so I could see her face, much as I had during the bank robbery.  She had dark circles under her eyes that looked painted on.  She spoke, sighing the words, “I need your permission to touch you.”

“What?”

That might not be the best way to phrase it.

But yeah, it makes a lot of sense that Panacea would be required to ask consent, especially considering she can run her power in reverse, so to speak, and make matters worse if she wants to.

That said, Panacea doesn’t necessarily need touch to affect someone… although it seems her power is vastly weakened if she doesn’t. I guess that’s why she complained about Taylor’s outfit covering everything back in Agitation – if she had been able to touch Taylor’s skin for just a moment, she might’ve been able to do so much worse than give Taylor a headache.

“Liability reasons.  Someone overheard you say you’ve got a broken back.  There could be other complications, and that takes people, time, equipment and money that the people in charge of this hospital are reluctant to spare at a time like this.

Yeah, that’s all fair.

You could refuse to let me touch you, make the hospital give you the X-rays and MRI, get months or years of treatment paid for by the Preservation Act, all under oppressive confidentiality agreements that could cost the hospital millions.  It’s an option, but the treatment wouldn’t be as fast, good or effective as it would if I used my power.  You’d be shooting yourself in the foot for the sake of being stubborn.”

Taylor has literally no rational reason to decline this. I mean, she’s butted heads with Panacea before, and Panacea could do some nasty stuff to her, but if Panacea really wanted to be that spiteful here, she might as well do it without asking permission. She’d get in trouble either way unless she kept it subtle.

A handful of cockroaches from near the kitchen made their way through the walls, through an air intake grate in the wall, and up to my bed.  They gathered on my stomach.

Hi, little friends. (Might want to avoid the sight of the hospital staff if you want to stay alive.)

I gathered them into a pyramid on my stomach, let them collapse.  Made a kaleidoscopic starburst pattern, then moved them all in sync to expand out into a perfect circle.

😀

“You’re so creepy, you know that?” the voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

Ooh.

Hm. I’m going to guess that this is Panacea. It would make sense for her to be walking around here, visiting patients, she’s someone whose voice Taylor has heard a while back, and it sounds like something she might say.

“I’ve heard worse,” I replied, opening my eyes.  Panacea was entering my curtained enclosure, shutting the curtain behind her.  There was a PRT uniform with her.

Yup!

Nice to see you again. Are you going to help Taylor move her legs again? 🙂

Minutes ticked on.  No more than three seconds passed without someone screaming or shouting orders or updates regarding a patient in crisis.

This place is hectic as fuck.

It would have been interesting to listen to, if I could make out more than half of it, and if the half I could hear wasn’t so horrible.

Yeeah, not exactly a pleasant audio backdrop.

The anxiety over my circumstances and not knowing what was going to happen was gradually overriden by a maddening boredom.   I couldn’t move, had nobody to talk to, didn’t know enough about my present situation to think up contingency plans.

Relatable. Waiting at hospitals tends to be pretty dull, whether you’re in the bed or a visitor.

I closed my eyes and used my power, because it let me be outside my own body in a way, because it was something to do.

Nice.

Boredom is usually one of the feelings people hate most. Most people will prefer mild pain over boredom, just because it’s some kind of stimulus. Taylor, fortunately, has remote access to a stimulus most people don’t.

“Okay,” I spoke, quiet, my thoughts going a mile a minute.

“The phone call, I can let you use my cell phone if you promise not to…” she trailed off, as if realizing the possibilities of what could happen if a villain had her phone number, contact info for her friends and family.

Aw. I like this nurse-in-training.

Yet she could hardly back out, not without potentially upsetting a bad guy.

Whoops.

I shook my head.  “No.  But it’s really good of you to offer.  Thank you,” I tried to put as much emphasis on the thanks as possible.  “With that kind of empathy, I’m sure you’ll become a great nurse.”

😀

Absolutely.

She gave me a funny look, then backed out through the curtain.  I could have called after her, asked for something for the pain, asked if maybe I could get some help, but I suspected she didn’t have the power to give me any of that.

Yeah, probably not.

Besides, she has other patients to visit.

I had no idea how long I’d be here, and I suspected it’d be worth more to have a potential friendly face around than go for the long shot and risk seeming manipulative or alienating her.  That, and I didn’t want to get her in trouble.

That’s another good point. You’ve pushed the boundaries a fair bit already, might want to take a break.