Logs:Unusual Stresses

Unusual Stresses
Dramatis Personae Hive, Matt, Rasheed
In Absentia Sera, Lucien	2024-11-08 "... he gets me through this, I might have to take up gambling."
Location Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
This is one of the oldest and most renowned cancer treatment centers in the world. The facilities are state-of-the-art, the staff are knowledgeable, the treatments are innovative. But at the end of the day it is still a hospital. Full of cancer. It is not a pleasant or cheerful or comfortable place to be. The entire place smells unpleasantly chemical, not solely from the medications but their (extensive) (extreme) (necessary) sterilization practices. This room, at least, does not smell like active chemotherapy, but it's dim and dismal and chilly all the same. It has not been leavened, as many other occupied rooms, with cards or stuffies or balloons, but to experienced eyes the non-hospital-issued slippers and extra blankets and such tell a story all their own. Matt is cleanly shaven and freshly showered, in a pale blue dress shirt with no tie, gray vest, and black slacks, black penny loafers. He is somewhat ruining the sharp-ish together-ness of his outfit by slouching kind of diagonally in the visitor's chair, legs crossed and chin propped up in the palm of one hand. "You know, I was really hoping you would take one look at the images and say something like 'it's not as bad as it looks' or 'they're actually way easier to remove when they get really big'." He has a slim silver thermos cradled against his side, his thumb sliding the lock on its flip cap on and off, on and off. "But I'm glad you're here, anyway. I would bet real money at least half the med students and research fellows who keep circulating through here are studying your protocols." Slouched in a chair across from Matt, Rasheed is managing, as ever, to make his finely tailored button-down and slacks look ill-fit, hanging a little off on his lanky frame. He glances quickly to the bed and then back to Matt, rubbing tired at one (far, far greyer than even just a scant few years before) temple. "I took one look at the images and said something like shit," he's acknowledging with a heaviness that he might not, were Hive currently awake. "Could be worse. Real estate isn't bad, and he's got far more plasticity than most. Temporal lobe can lose a little mass, it's like --" He considers, hand dropping to his lap. "-- the liver of the brain." Matt had finally popped the thermos open for a sip of his coffee, but catches himself just short of spraying coffee all over Rasheed. "Is it really?" This doesn't sound like a challenge, in fact it's hard to tell whether his tone is skeptical or hopeful or something else altogether. "Isn't that where things like memories, emotions, and language live?" He squints thoughtfully. "And hearing. Why, yes, I've been compulsively googling this." He rubs his brow like he's massaging away a headache. "I know these things can grow fast, but gods. He was fine at his last follow-up." "And that was -- what, late spring? A lot can change in half a year." Rasheed shifts, going from slouching against one arm of his chair to slouching against the opposite. His chin props in his hand. "The brain can rewire itself. Couple years of aphasia is better than being dead by New Year's." He quirks an eyebrow at Matt. "I can give you more literature, if the knowing -- helps." "Mm. It certainly can," Matt agrees, kind of distantly. "This makes lymphoma look slow and easygoing." He uncaps the thermos and drinks successfully this time. "It never helped me, but fuck it, why not? I'm going to look it up anyway. Not that there's a good time to get cancer, but the timing is really quite bad." His jaw tightens as his eyes flick aside to linger briefly on Hive's phone, plugged in and charging where it's tucked beside his pillow. "Do you suppose the superhuman neuroplasticity might itself be why he's so glioblastoma-prone? His glial cells are just so very glieful to become something else." "When would you have scheduled it for?" Rasheed's mouth pulls to the side, his tone wry. His knuckles pull up at his cheek, smooshing one of his eyes squinty and askew. "I think it's definitely possible. There's so much that's difficult to study when so many mutations are so unique. I could conjecture, but without any similar brain to compare it to -- and I haven't yet seen even remotely similar brains." He gives Hive another sidelong look. His brows furrow. "You know his life better than I do, you might be better equipped to notice if these recurrences coincide with any --" He puffs out his cheeks, exhaling a soft plosive. "-- Unusual stresses, unusual exertions, unusual expenditures of energy, psionically, that might be connected here." Hive is slowly shifting in bed, the small motions more noticeable than usual given the tubes and wires he's hooked up to that start wobbling as he moves. He hasn't opened his eyes, but he does groan, at Rasheed's question. A thin smile pulls at his lips. "Unusual." Matt scrubs his face one-handed, smiling wide. "Psionically. This guy? Perish the thought!" The thought he's probably trying to perish is the very brief glimpse he's gotten recently of Hive's possibly not-so-unusual psionic exertions, of their shrieking cacophony, millions-strong. His smile doesn't exactly fade when he drops his hand and rotates toward Hive, but it does soften. "Darling, do you suppose you might have telepathied so hard you gave yourself cancer? I assure you, that question sounds absurd if you are sober, also." "Does it sound absurd? I know a lot of idiots think of psionics as some kind of magic but there's a strong biological component to what's happening there. Some psionic interactions can damage brain cells, brain structures. And you know the kind of toll unchecked biokinetic fluctuations can have." Rasheed is saying this now with a tightening of his eyes and a swell of sympathy in his voice. Flitting images of a younger, different Sera dance across the quiet white noise of prayers in his mind -- quite a number of the prayers have names interjected into them and hers joins the litany. He's turning to Hive, now that he's awakening, leaning forward over his knees as his bony fingers fold in front of him. "I'm going to do everything in my power to get you through this. You know that. But with each recurrence --" He doesn't go over the odds again, doesn't need to. The set of his mouth is grim. "And once we're past this, if there are ways to lower your risk, that needs to be taken seriously." Hive's eyes scrunch tight, his face turning in against his pillows. "Hngh. How the fuck is it absurd. You know how far I was stretched before that first time and -- well. Don't know the second, I guess, but it took a fucking lot to figure out how to hit Mendeleev and Oppenheimer. And this latest --" His teeth are grinding quietly, and stop as he opens his eyes and looks to Rasheed. "I know. I know. My chances are pretty fucked." His smile is kind of wan. "Thank God I have a fucking rock star heading up my surgery team, right?" Matt evinces no outwardly sign of distress at Rasheed's analysis or the reminder of his sister's death. Inwardly the turbulent atmosphere of his mind shifts in abrupt howling whiplash from fear to grief -- for the price Hive paid to save him -- to rage -- for the price he paid for a drug that came too late for Sera -- and back again. His power starts to press down on Hive, as if muting his telepathy now would reverse the damage somehow, but he jerks it back sharp and vehement. "Maybe it's not," is what he finally says, "but many absurd things are true." He doesn't add << and any sufficiently advanced biological fuckery is indistinguishable from magic >> aloud. Rasheed doesn't need to go over the odds again. Matt is still busily drowning his own litany of statistics before they can rise fully into his consciousness. << (this is Rasheed, not some common plebe with a scalpel ) >> comes in quiet harmony with Hive's rhetorical question. "I've always blamed the butchers who cut you open for fun and profit, but why not both?" Rasheed's hands press tighter together. "I'm sure it did," murmured quiet over a brief passing thought of his clinic strewn with Hive's exhausted-battered teammates, of finicky delicate surgeries to remove finicky delicate brainchips. His hand lifts, knuckles again rubbing at his temple. "You've beaten long odds before. I should let you both sleep. I should sleep. We've got a long day tomorrow." He rises, dropping a hand to squeeze briefly at Hive's shoulder. "We'll talk after, mm? Figure this out together." He dips his head to Matt, and shuffles out of the room. "Mnnh. I dunno how much fun they were having." Hive squeezes back at Rasheed's hand, grunting something that might be in the neighborhood of a thanks. "... he gets me through this," he says, oddly brightly to Matt, "I might have to take up gambling." Matt inclines his head to Rasheed, his murmured "thank you" low but clear. After the door closes he pushes out of his chair, drops the guard rail at the side of Hive's bed, toes out of his shoes, and fits himself carefully beside him. "Darling, please. You could make a killing with or without luck." He masks his freefall spike of terror by picturing Hive cupping a royal flush -- in the smoky backroom of an old west saloon, for some reason. He's also picturing the spell woven from colorful cord under the cuff of his shirt, the circle that didn't feel complete without his brother, the silent house that would offer no rest if he bothered going back now. Instead he curls his arm around Hive's scrawny shoulders, tucks his shaven and scarred head into the crook of his neck, and closes his eyes. "But when you get through this, you can lend me some of that luck."