Content Warning:
Graphic description of injury

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The metallic tang of blood and the sharp scent of cryoprotectants enveloped him as he stepped through the door of the examination room.

Leah looked up and gestured him to come closer. In front of the examination table stood a man in ragged clothes, who turned to look at Cyril as he approached. The look on both of their faces did not instill any further confidence in him. He knew what would be waiting for him – Leah's message had been brief but clear - and he should have been prepared. Still, the sight before him caught him off guard and made him falter for a second.

On the table between Leah and the man, there was the body of a girl. Her blood vessels shimmered bluish through her skin – she had clearly just come out of prolonged cryostasis. She seemed so pale that she was almost translucent, like a blue and silver ghost. Leah had hooked her up to life support already and the faint beeping of the machines and the data displayed on the screens next to the bed were the only things reassuring Cyril that she was, in fact, still alive. With the two of them standing beside her and the way she looked, the sight was rather reminiscent of a corpse being laid out.

After what he just talked about with Amy minutes before coming here, it felt like she was a ghost that had come from his past to haunt him.

The girl's injuries were worse than what the short message Leah had sent him could have conveyed. In stark contrast to her almost paper white skin, the girl's shirt was drenched in dark, dried blood, as was the cloth that covered a part of her face. Her hair looked ginger, but Cyril quickly realized that it was originally a pale shade of blonde and had just been dyed red by all the blood. The makeshift bandage above her eyes was completely soaked, and yet fresh trickles of blood had begun to trace down her temples and cheeks. Cryostasis had probably saved her from bleeding to death, but now she was thawing.

"How did this happen?" Cyril asked in a low voice as he stepped up to the table.

"Hunters..." the man next to him just said. His face was grey and he looked weary and pained as he held the girl's hand, caressing the back with his thumb. His clothes were blood-stained too, but there were no signs of injury on him. He had probably carried her here in his arms.

"Are you her father?" he asked.

The man shook his head. "Uncle. Her parents are dead."

"Don't worry," Leah reassured him. "You are safe now. We will take care of her."

Her voice was calm and compassionate, but Cyril knew her well enough to see that the sight of the girl shook her just as much as him, despite their years of medical experience. But they both had to retain their composure and professional demeanor even in situations as gruesome as this. Cyril gestured the man to stand back to give them room to work. He let go of the girl's hand reluctantly, but obeyed.

As Leah began to untie the bandage, the girl twitched and a muffled moan of pain escaped her lips.

"Isn't she anesthetized?" he asked Leah.

"She is. But I can't ramp up the dose any higher or her organs will give in. She's been out of cryo for barely twenty minutes, and her system hasn't yet cleared out all-"

"Increase the dose," he cut her off.

Leah looked up at him and raised an eye brow.

"She is suffering," he explained, barely keeping his voice from wavering. "The pain she's in could cause her body to give in from the shock just as well. Increase the dose, I can fix whatever organ damage that will cause later."

She nodded slowly and turned to one of the machines to follow his suggestion, while Cyril equipped his scanner and scope. He noticed that his hands where trembling as he slipped on the glove-like device. He rarely regretted not having any augments, but that moment, he wished he had one of those perfusion pumps that could inject all sorts of drugs into your system to keep you going. Although he couldn't quite say whether he would be in need of a stimulant to get him through another sleepless night, or a sedative to calm his nerves and stop him from shaking.

Leah turned back toward their patient, but when she touched the bandage, the girl cried out and her hands shot up, pressing the cloth against her eyes. Or what was left of them.

"Honey... I need you to take your hands away from there," Leah spoke to the girl in a soothing voice.

"No.... mother..." she whimpered and tried to turn her head away.

The girl's uncle tensed up, his face turning from a pale grey to a sickly green as Leah and Cyril fumbled to restrain her without causing her any more pain. Cyril had to close his eyes and take a deep breath to calm down. When he opened them again, Leah met his gaze for a moment. In her eyes, he saw that she felt just like him. There was something reassuring about the fact that she shared his uneasiness. It helped both of them to remain calm and carry on.

The anesthesia would start to act soon, she wouldn't be in pain. At least that was what he told himself as he held down her hands so Leah could undo the bandage. All the while the girl shivered and whimpered faintly.

"They killed her mother," the girl's uncle whispered, watching the two of them work. "Even though she didn't even have anything... she just stepped up to protect her child, who wouldn't? And Juni here, she didn't have a lot. Just corneal implants. She was born on Vithrak, one day there was a solar shield failure. She was only three years old, so she didn't understand... She looked up, and it burned right through – and then, she got the implants and we thought it'd be alright. Everybody thought she'd be alright...."

"Her name is Juni?" Leah asked. The girl moaned, as if to respond.

"Juniper. But we call her Juni for short. I mean... I do. I'm the only one left..." he answered in a flat voice.

As the bandage came off, the whole extent of the injury became evident. Her eyes had been gouged out in such a crude and brutal manner that the structures of her skull around her eye sockets were fractured beyond hope. Shards of bone were lodged between tatters of flesh, and he could see structures inside the girl's head that were never supposed to be seen, to be exposed to the open. The effect of the cryostatic agents had begun to wear off and her heart rate picked up its pace again, causing fresh blood to gush out from her wounds and run down her face like streams of bloody tears.

Juni cried out again as Cyril brought his hand up to get a scan of her face. She tried to cover her face again, but this time it was Leah who held her hands down.

"The scan won't hurt her," Cyril explained to her uncle. Perhaps he also had to remind himself of it.

"So what happened, exactly?" he asked again while he continued the scan and Leah began to work on stopping the bleeding. The girl seemed to finally calm down as the anesthesia set in, her trembling stopped but her chest continued to rise and fall at a quick and erratic pace.

"Did somebody try to strip her?"

"No," the man said, his voice cracking. "That was the hunters. They brought her before the village and... they said that they would... they wanted to..."

Cyril heard something rustle behind him and stopped in his motion. He glanced over his shoulder and spotted another ghostly figure, dressed in a white hospital gown. Amy was lurking in the corner of the room, her eyes fixed on the girl. He hadn't even noticed that she had followed him, nor when she had entered.

"They wanted to make an example of her," Amy finished the man's sentence for him as she stepped out of the shadows. The expression on her pale face seemed blank, but he could see that her hands were clenched into tight fists.

"After they... were done, I took her... brought her to a shuttle... we just ran," Juni's uncle continued, "We had nothing left there. My brother died to give us a chance to escape. I put her in cryo as soon as possible, but-"

"You did well," Leah said, looking up from the girl's face to give him a warm smile. "You did just the right thing. We will take care of her now. Don't worry."

"I fucking can't believe those bastards," Amy growled as she stepped up to the examination table.

Juni's uncle looked at her with a puzzled expression. "Are you a doctor here too?"

"No, she isn't," Cyril said gruffly. "Amy, I need you to leave."

He looked up from his patient and met her gaze. Her face was still an impassive mask, but to his great surprise, her eyes betrayed everything she felt in that moment. It was like there was a hurricane in her organic eye, and the black augment had turned into a bottomless pit. She was furious, and looked like she was about to murder someone.

Under normal circumstances, the sight would have made him shudder uncomfortably, but these circumstances were anything but normal. He was tired - he had gotten about three hours of sleep since she had barged into his practice and he had another long night of work ahead of him. He was exhausted – he had spent hours performing nanosurgery on Amy, and his fingers still felt stiff and tense from the strain of the micromanipulators.

He really didn't have the patience for any of her mood swings now.

"Amy. Leave." He repeated, his voice almost a snarl. "Go back to bed."

"Cyril," Leah interrupted him.

She was focused on her patient one hundred percent, completely ignoring Amy. She handed over a tablet with scanner data.

"I will stop the bleeding and clear the wounds. We can start bone and tissue reconstruction right away. The frontal lobe is unharmed, but there is too much damage to the optical nerves. I don't think she'll..."

"What?" Juni's uncle asked, his voice cracking.

Cyril glanced over the scanner data and heaved a sigh.

"She'll be fine, but... she'll remain blind," he said. "There is too much damage to her tissue to reconstruct anything, and too much damage to the nerves to replace them with regular augments, and we don't have the kind of hardware to -"

"You do," Amy interrupted him.

He blinked at her in surprise. "We do?"

"Well, I do," she said. "I'll have Higgs bring it over right away. It's only one, though..."

Once again, Amy Larsson left him speechless. Whenever he thought he had figured out what she might be doing next, she would surprise him. As she cast him a glance with her differently colored eyes, he had a hunch why she might be having such an augment in her possession, and why she hadn't included it in the initial donation to the hospital. Yet she didn't even hesitate one second to give it to this girl now.

Amy lowered her gaze and looked down on the girl's mauled face. Her expression softened and what was flickering there underneath her fury was not just compassion, he realized, but pain. In that moment, he finally understood why she always seemed so irritable. Her impassiveness was not the mask that covered her anger. Her anger was the mask that held the pain in check – almost all the time. He could only imagine the extent of it, considering that according to what she had told him, she had been hurt in a way that was naturally inconceivable to anyone alive.

"Well, one is better than none," Cyril said, smiling at Amy. And to his surprise, she smiled back.

~ ~ ~

Sixteen hours later, Juniper was sleeping off the effects of the anesthesia in a hospital bed. Her eyes were covered by a bandage again, but it was pure white against her cleaned up skin, which had finally begun to regain a rosy color.

The eye augment that Higgs had brought them had been implemented in her left eye socket. Cyril had been able to successfully wire it up to the remainder of her optic nerve. Leah had reconstructed the facial bones of her forehead, temples and cheek bones. The skin was the hardest part, but they had managed to fuse the artificial graft without any bigger scars. She'd likely only retain very faint ones near her hair line and under her cheek bones. They had reconstructed the socket and eye lid for the other eye as well, in the hope of perhaps finding another suitable augment one day.

It was late evening when Cyril entered Juni's room to check up on her, and to his surprise, he found Amy sitting by her bed. She had replaced her hospital gown with her black clothes from before, and he knew immediately that she was about to run off again.

"Why are you up?" he asked her with a weary sigh, not really expecting her to answer.

"I wanted to say goodbye...," she said. Her gaze was fixed on the girl who was still sleeping peacefully.

"So you'll at least wait till she wakes up?" he asked as he stepped closer.

"...to you," she said and lifted her head to look at him.

He stared back at her, completely speechless for a few seconds. Once again, Amy managed to take him by surprise. He could not read the expression on her face at all, but for a second, he could have sworn that he saw a hint of a blush on her cheeks. It was probably just wishful thinking.

"Ehhh... well. Okay," was all he managed to say over the heavy pounding of his heart in his chest.

Amy looked down at Juniper again for a moment, then she got up and placed something on her bedside table.

"Is that-"

"Yeah," she just said.

Cyril recognized the sleek black fabric now - Amy had worn it a lot during her early days on New Elysium. She had stopped eventually, probably when she had realized that here, of all places, nobody cared about her augmented eye.

"That's very thoughtful of you," he said with a smile.

"I had a spare one," she just said with a shrug.

"When she wakes up, I'll make sure to let her know what you did for her. Not just the eye patch... So she can thank you properly when you pass by the next time."

He knew that it was futile to argue with her and make her stay longer. The block on her combat augments would last another couple of hours, so at least she wouldn't get into too much trouble right away. Hopefully.

"I'm not certain if I will," she mumbled.

"What? But-"

She turned away from the girl and stepped up to face him, causing his breath to catch and his heart rate to kick up another notch. Something about the way she was looking at him made him forget everything around him. His job, his patient, and the fact that he hadn't really slept in thirty six hours. He was ready and willing to sacrifice another hundred hours of sleep just to have her stay.

She was close enough for him to touch her – not like he would touch a patient, he had done that hundreds of times, but it was different. Empty. Composed. Professional. And very hard for him. Just as it was very hard right now to resist the urge to touch her – even something as small and insignificant as taking her hand - in a very non-professional way.

They stared at each other in silence for a few seconds, and then he realized that she was about to go, and he was simply blocking the door.

He cleared his throat and stepped to the side, but she didn't move.

"You have to come back, you know," he said, and she looked up at him with a questioning look.

"Who else will fix you up if not me? There aren't many NCs around any longer, remember?"

He managed to crack a crooked smile at her, and to his surprise, a hint of a smile flickered across her face, too.

"Of course," she mumbled. "Well, I'll definitely come back then. For you."

For a split second, there was a strange expression on her face, a fast flurry of emotions that were too complex for him to understand. She furrowed her brow and cocked her head slightly, as if she was listening to something only she could hear – perhaps a transmission to her communication augments. She seemed conflicted about something when she looked back up at him, but he didn't get a chance to ask if something was wrong.

"Thanks for everything," she said, and for the third time in less than twenty four hours, she took him completely by surprise, as she got up on tiptoes to place a fleeting kiss on his cheek. Her lips left behind a strange tingling sensation on his skin, and for a whole second, his heart stopped its fast paced beating entirely.

Cyril Harper stared after Amy Larsson as she left without another word, and he thought he was perhaps not so unfortunate anymore. All things considered, he rather felt like he was the luckiest man in the galaxy.