archimedes |b. allen|

it's hard to say i can, when i can't

it's hard to say i can, when i can't

"You look incredibly forlorn," I comment, eyes narrowing as I watch Bennie's face drop even more at my words.

"That's a nicer way to put it," she scoffs, plucking a boat of gauze from the shelf. "The resident earlier told me that I have Resting Sad Face."

I frown, scrunching up my nose, "What a dick."

The nice dinner with Bennie's girlfriend was quickly approaching, only four days away. And with every day that passed, the closer we got, the more shipwrecked her eyes looked and the deeper her brow furrowed. I wish I could take any amount of this anxiety off of her, I really wasn't sure why it was there in the first place. Maude and I had both had girlfriends at one point, so I really don't know why Bennie was so nervous. It lead me to believe that maybe her new girlfriend was actually the anxious one, and all that stress bled onto Bennie, who would happily soak up any amount of pain for the ones she loved.

All she does is blow air out of her nose, letting out a deep sigh. She grabs another armful of supplies, as I grab my own for a blood draw. I open the door for her to let her out when she stops suddenly and turns to grab two isolation gowns and shoe covers.

My eyes narrow. "Where the hell are you going?" I ask, intrigued what she needs all this gear for.

There might be tears prickling the corner of her eyes as she begrudgingly reveals, "Maggots in a stage four pressure injury."

I let out a dramatic shaky breath, eyes looking up to the water-stained tiled ceiling and pleading to whatever deity is up there that I get my good karma from this.

I start to unpile the supplies from her arms while she looks at me with puzzled eyes. "You are gonna do my ABG, and I am going to do your dressing."

It's the first time in days that I've seen her eyes brighten. "Are you serious? You'd do that?"

I playfully roll my eyes, flicking the packaged ABG syringe toward her while trying to balance all the dressing change supplies I now had in my arms. "Of course I would... But you're getting my next admission."

"Deal," she says with a beaming smile, prancing off in the other direction after I tell her what room the lab needed collected in.

Dear god, why did I do that?

I could handle anything in the ER, but god damn it, I did not do bugs.

But I loved Bennie, so maybe I could handle bugs if it meant seeing her smile.

⚡︎

Dr. Wells keeps mumbling to himself on the other side of the glass as I shake out my arms and spread my feet shoulder width apart for what must be the eightieth time tonight. I crack my neck before placing my arms in front of me, focusing, feeling, forcing something to shoot from the palms of my hands. He was hellbent that there was star power in me.

We'd had something like success early on in the night, a tiny spark erupting from my left hand. But it quickly fizzled out, gone before you could blink, and it never showed up again.

So Harry wasn't even watching me anymore. No, he was tinkering behind the glass wall that separated us and talking to himself like a madman as he did it. I was only hoping that he was working on my cure while he did this, and maybe all this sweat and work wasn't for nothing.

The way Wells thought I'd be able to elicit my undiscovered star powers was from the inside. He said I should feel it in my gut; it'd be like a swirling of the light and the dense, and then a glow. But we'd barely had any evidence that that was even possible, at least to the extent he proposed.