Work Text:
He makes them live.
But their hearts don’t beat.
He stops giving them hearts after a time, because he knows there is no point.
He hangs from the ceiling as it creaks and groans and pieces of drywall fall atop their bodies.
He crawls as though he is afraid of the floor.
Clings with stunted legs and reaches down towards their bodies to give them heads and arms and throats.
He doesn’t fear the floor. But he no longer sees a reason to use it.
He still washes his hands because he remembers it being good for the patients.
But he never washes the tools because that wasn’t his job.
He saws at still corpses (are they corpses if they're not alive yet?) with reckless abandon and shoves those pieces onto other bodies.
He never wonders if they feel pain.
How could they, with no heart?
But they move, so they live, so he continues.
...
He creates new beings to replace the old ones, or perhaps only to give himself patients and purpose.
A reason to still live as himself.
Though he is sagging flesh and struggling lungs.
A grub on the ceiling.
And his entire world is the hospital.
He will never leave it.
Outside of the hospital there is no life.
He is sure of it.
But he hears the music on an eternal loop, quiet though it may be.
Even when there are no televisions inside his hospital world.
He cannot hum the tune even if he tries, and he does try.
Sometimes he tries to form words.
To speak to his patients.
His beautiful bodies that do not move unless in the dark.
He doesn’t remember any words.
Not even sure he has a tongue to speak with.
He grunts and breathes heavily instead.
Thrumming his vocal cords because he knows he has those.
…
The doctor has one patient that has a heart.
The monitor beeps to remind him.
The patient breathes too, though it has no face.
He thinks he loves this one.
Thinks he would burn every newly created patient for the one in that bed.
He doesn’t extend that thought when he is away and tending the other patients or performing surgery.
He has rounds to do.
But he fears every time the heart falters.
He screams and crawls desperately to the bed and tends to the body with shaking hands.
He mewls in a sad attempt at comfort for the patient and its heart.
Or to comfort himself.
…
He never questions just what he is saving this life for if there is nothing but the hospital.
He merely lives as he knows how.
And no matter what,
he always gets the heart beating again.
~fin~