Chapter Text
Fluorescent lights glared overhead as the gurney careened down the hallway. The nurse knelt with knees anchored firmly beside the patient’s torso. His hand moving with practiced thrusts, each compression firm, unyielding.
“One, two, three, four,” he counted loud and clear for his coworkers to hear, his count a mantra. Right now his whole world revolved around the man beneath him. His focus is only on saving him.
The chaos around the ER moved like an unyielding current. Coworkers shouting vitals, prepping the trauma bay ahead. Feet thundered, the wheels rattling. Someone paged, calling for blood.
HE didn't flinch. His focus tunneled in on the rise and fall of the chest beneath him as he forced the patients, heart to compress.
"It’s not over yet," he whispered, his compressions stable and unchanged, riding each bounce of the speeding bed with instinctual balance. The hallway’s fluorescent haze rushing over head. To him, the world narrowed to the man beneath him, a quickly emptying shell.
Beneath the urgency of the people around him, something cold stirred.
‘I’m not just fighting death,’
‘I’m fighting myself.'
The thought made him want to laugh. No one alive knew. To them, he was just a dedicated nurse fighting for a heartbeat in his patient.
But reality was different. He was death. He was the king of the dead. The man who wore the crown of the land after and between life and death. A crown he reluctantly bore. With duties he refused. Every compression was a rebellion against the crown he bore. The balance he was told to uphold.
“You can’t have him yet,” he growled, his words directed at the land between, whose tendrils already wrapped around the soul of his patient. With one more compression, he forced life back into the still body below him. The gurney jostled, but he didn't budge. “Not right now. Not while I’m still fighting for the living.”
A part of him longed for the green shadows, to slip back into the cold calm of the realm that waited for him. The realm that gave him comfort in ways the plan of life no longer could. But a different part, an even louder, sharper voice that smelled of antiseptic and sounded like the flatline refused.
He belonged here. Among the patients that enter this domain, he claimed. The ones on deaths door. The ones whose timer on this realm reached the end. He may be the king of death, but here, right now, he held life in his hands.
A shudder rippled through the veil between worlds. A pulse sparking beneath his fingers as the once detached soul reconnected, as life blinked back.
Cheers. “We’ve got a rhythm!”
“You can have him soon.”
He closed his green eyes for half a second, anchoring himself to both planes. He was in both the chaos of the trauma ward and the space just between. A thin, delicate thread still tied to the patient’s soul, fragile and silvery, stretching taut between this world and the one beyond.
‘I have you,’ he promised, not aloud, but to the soul itself.
With practiced care, he reached through the veil, grabbing the soul and threading a tether back to its vessel, retying loose knots that should have come undone.
He exhaled, exhaustion seeping deep into his very soul. He was not meant to stop death, he was meant to guide the dead. Extending life was not something he was meant to do.
Sooner or later, the realm he ignored on would come calling.
The break room was surprisingly empty. With just the hum of the old, barely functional vending machine and the distant beep of different monitors offering background noise.
He sat heavily on the bench, peeling off dirty scrubs. Blood, dirt, sweat, vomit and even urine. The fabric clung to his cold skin. It had been a long time since he’d had a body temp close to that of a living human. The ice core he carried naturally cooled his temp.
Taking a deep breath, he exhaled before opening them to stare at the wall in front of him for a long moment. The wall was littered with brightly colored posters. Encouraging healthy work life balance, praising the good day and other motivational phrases. Gothem hospitals did not have a great long term worker record. So these happy posters were the upper management's way to keep things cheerful.
But this wasn’t a cheerful place by nature. Closing his eyes, he could still see the patient’s chest rise on its own. The soul had been drawn back and anchored to this realm with borrowed time.
The patient’s family. Rushing across the city would make it. They’d arrive to a chance to say their goodbyes. A chance not enough had. But a chance that could be offered by the king