I have half a mind, it's cracked and breaking

[sipthehoneylikeabutterfly]

The ragged stump of Ienzo's arm had been a mangled mess. Szayel had carefully trimmed away everything ruined beyond repair, playing conservatively with how much of Ienzo's arm he left behind. He didn't have enough to be useful; all trying to save more of the arm would get anyone would be a higher risk of later complications. In the end, he removed everything left below the shoulder joint, which also gave him enough undamaged skin to cover the amputation wound somewhat tidily. It was still going to be scarred, but at least it wouldn't be twisted and puckered scar tissue on the end of a stump.

The very first thing he'd done, once he'd cut away enough damage to see what he was doing, had been to seal off the blood vessels. Ienzo had lost a lot of blood, and Szayel hadn't needed to get a band around his good arm to know his blood pressure would be dangerously low. Nel had worked on that, feeding drips into his veins and casting curative spells to accelerate his body's own replenishment speed.

Szayel had put aside what he'd removed in a kidney dish, temporarily focused solely on the task at hand. With Lumi hovering over his shoulder, he hadn't expected to get a chance to keep so much sample tissue anyway, but he'd hoped that if he pretended to ignore it then Lumi would also pay it little heed.

Once the obvious wound had been covered Szayel turned to a more detailed examination of Ienzo, a task which required stripping him of most of his clothing. There were parts that seemed as if he'd be bruised and sore, but no other obvious, major injuries seemed apparent, and Szayel couldn't find evidence of any internal injuries that required attending.

Nel carefully applied bandages to Ienzo's arm and up over his shoulder while Szayel cleaned away his things, simply moving them to the back of the infirmary for the time being. He wanted to take the excised tissue and store it, safely, but that would only make things look obvious to his audience. Instead, after moving things out of the way, he returned to Ienzo's bedside, as if he'd only been intending to do that, and gave him a dose of the antidote for the sedatives they'd used.

They needed to see if he was capable of consciousness, after all.

"He's going to need close monitoring," he said, mostly to Nel. "Through the night as well." It might in the least be another chance for him to get his hands on some samples, too.

Comments

[thesilentstorm]

Lumi stayed in the infirmary for the operation. It was fortunate, with all of the excised tissue and general medical gore, that Lumi was not at all squeamish. He lingered in the room, watching Szayel carefully, observing where he put things, even when he didn't want to be noticed putting certain things in specific places.

"I daresay Even will volunteer," he said.

Otherwise, he was quite prepared to stay. He didn't need as much sleep as most, after all, and he could deal with a sleepless night in an infirmary chair in the interests of preventing Szayel getting his paws on information on the Nobody-type Ryoka.

He wondered how Marluxia's meeting with Even had gone. He was a bad tempered sort, so he rather hoped he wasn't in the mood for shooting messengers. Or freezing them. Lumi didn't want to have to kill Even after Nel and Szayel had managed to save Ienzo's life.

[sipthehoneylikeabutterfly]

Szayel eyed Lumi out of the corner of his eye and adjusted his glasses with one hand. "Even won't be much use," he said, his tone more than a little disparaging. "He's not trained for this, and he's too personally invested."

He looked down at Ienzo, his expression sinisterly thoughtful. "If he begins to deteriorate, he'll need someone that can help on hand." Szayel gave a resigned sigh. "I should start charging you Ryoka for my services. By the hour."

He turned a little, so he could look at Lumi. "Will you allow me to give him a course of antibiotics?" Lumi had flatly refused the same for himself, but gods knew what had done the damage to Ienzo's arm, and how. He'd removed and stitched what he could, but infection was a serious risk, especially with such an open wound.

[declaregamuza]

Nel was too busy checking Ienzo over again after the shot of anti-sedation drugs to launch into arguing with Szayel immediately. Ienzo could do without this at the moment too, she knew, and you'd have to be a fool to think Szayel wasn't acting out of self interest.

It would be good for Ienzo to find a familiar face standing guard over him through the night, too. Even was probably the best candidate there. Certainly better than Marluxia or Lumi.

She half wondered whether Ulquiorra would show his face once Aizen was done with him. He might be staying away for now anyway; there were too many questions about how Ienzo had come to be injured.

"If it's such a burden on you, Szayel," she said, airily, "I can stay."

[thesilentstorm]

Lumi arched an eyebrow at Szayel's first response, but didn't bother to tell him that he wouldn't be there to watch Ienzo, but Szayel himself. He suspected he knew that already. Szayel wasn't stupid, just idiotic.

"I don't think that will fly when he got hurt under the protection of one of you Arrancar," Lumi said, shrugging his shoulders. "Give him the antibiotics."

He highly doubted that Ienzo had an immune system like his and after a wound like that, he would need all the help he could get.

[sipthehoneylikeabutterfly]

Szayel huffed, giving Lumi a brief, irritated look. "It's a little early to jump to conclusions, isn't it?" he asked, before he turned his attention to Nel. "You should be supporting me, not backing up them," he sneered.

He turned away from them both to go and fetch a vial and a syringe. "I'd say Ienzo owes Ulquiorra his life, personally. If it had been any other Arrancar he was with, it could have taken too long for them to get back here." Not to mention that tail had done surprisingly well as a tourniquet. "So let's not jump to conclusions about who is in whose debt right now."

He turned, drawing the contents of the vial into the syringe and throwing Lumi a glance. "As it stands, two of you owe me your lives." And here they wouldn't even let him obtain samples. It wasn't as if he was asking for much by way of payment.

[declaregamuza]

Nel looked at Szayel as he stalked off, and rolled her eyes. She flashed Lumi a brief, apologetic look. Being in Szayel's presence for an extneded period of time brought out her urge to apologise for every breath he drew.

"Might I remind you who did the actual healing?" she snapped, pointedly. It always annoyed her when Szayel went taking the credit for anyone that successfully walked out of the infirmary when Nel had put in a lot of her own work to make that happen, too. Szayel was a medic, she was a healer, but he seemed to think that the science bit was more important than the magic part when all of his patients would be dead without it.

[thesilentstorm]

Lumi rolled his eyes.

He knew that he probably did owe Szayel a certain debt, but he was of the opinion it was entirely likely that he had paid off that debt tenfold by not killing him every he had annoyed him in the weeks since he had been so kind as to remove that bullet from his chest.

Nel had been responsible for all of his extensive follow-up treatment. While Lumi still considered magic to be somewhat nonsensical, it certainly worked well enough.

"How long before he comes round?" Lumi asked, casting a look at Ienzo's face.

[sipthehoneylikeabutterfly]

Szayel threw Nel a poisonous glance. An unusual streak of self preservation made him refrain from saying that white mages were ten a gil, that enough potions would do the same job, and that sufficiently smart beasts knew how to heal themselves, so there was little point in demanding respect based upon one's ability to cast a cure spell. He thought it all, but the inevitable answer that he didn't know how to cast one would get thrown back at him.

Of course he didn't. He'd had better things to do with his time, like learn how to fix bodies without magic. Szayel wasn't incapacitated if anyone managed to get a silence spell to land.

Someone needed to use one on Nel more often.

Instead, Lumi served as sufficient distraction, and Szayel cast his eyes at Ienzo and gave a small shrug. "A few minutes," he said, "unless there's more serious damage underlying his unconsciousness." Blood loss, trauma, low blood pressure, pain, all of them could keep a brain from fighting back to consciousness, but with those fixed, the only thing that should be keeping Ienzo under was the sedatives.

"We've reversed the sedatives, so if he doesn't start coming to, he may be brain damaged." Szayel spoke almost cheerfully. There hadn't been any outward signs of head trauma, but who knew what had happened prior to his arm being torn off?

[declaregamuza]

Nel gave Szayel a sharp look before she turned to Lumi and added, "Or just badly concussed."

She threw Szayel another look and then shook her head. She despaired of him, she really did. He was poking at every angle to try and get Ienzo written off so he could do some further testing, and get some more samples.

[thesilentstorm]

"He was out before you sedated him," Lumi said, giving his shoulders a shrug.

He wasn't particularly medically minded. He didn't have the training, or the interest. The closest he got to medical procedures was having them performed on him, usually, though he had removed a bullet from his own arm once and bandaged enough of his own injuries.

It might be that Ienzo wouldn't make it, even after a neat sealing of his wound with medicine and magic, but Lumi doubted it. Ryoka seemed to be fairly hardy compared to some of the locals.

He still kept one eye on Szayel, even as he watched Ienzo for signs of consciousness.

[sipthehoneylikeabutterfly]

Szayel chuckled, happily, and stalked up to Ienzo, syringe at the ready. He took the tube from the cannula in one hand, and inserted the needle into it with the other before he slowly depressed the plunger, giving Ienzo a shot of antibiotics.

"Perhaps he'd be better off if he didn't wake up," Szayel said, smirking down at Ienzo before he glanced up at Lumi again. "Life without an arm," he added, and trailed off into a shrug of his shoulders. "I suppose he's lucky he still has his other three limbs."

He really did want to know how it had happened. A part of him, a significant part of him, hoped that Ulquiorra had done it himself. He enjoyed it when Aizen's little golden boy got himself into trouble, even if he did worm his way out of it again. If he kept it up he was going to develop a reputation.

[declaregamuza]

"Hopefully that was shock," Nel said, quietly, "or Ulquiorra's reiatsu," although judging by how Lumi and Marluxia had stood up to it, she doubted Ienzo would have been felled by that alone, "or the combination of the two."

Ienzo had never felt especially powerful to her. Strong yes, but as weak as he was right now, Ulquiorra's reiatsu in that form could have finished him. The emotional toll it took, that horrifying sense of sorrow, and defeat, and as much as Nel tried to push it out of her mind, that horrible echo of crying children it had left in her head, could have been enough to kill, to make someone in a precarious position give up the will to fight. Ienzo had survived it, and he'd survived the sheer pressure of it.

He was stronger than she'd ever given him credit for.

He wasn't allowed to die, anyway. Not after everything Ulquiorra must have put on the line to bring him back. If Ienzo didn't make it, Nel wasn't sure if Ulquiorra would survive it. They'd been friends these past few months. Ienzo was the only person Ulquiorra trailed after as much as Aizen, and after feeling just what Ulquiorra really contained inside his head, she didn't want him to have to face another loss.

"We'll see him through the rehab," she said, softly. "An arm isn't worth a life."

[thesilentstorm]

"True enough," Lumi said.

Where he was from, anybody who lost an arm, or leg, or other a variety of parts, could get them replaced with a variety of high-end prosthetics. They could be so realistic it was barely possible to tell the difference. Here on Spira... well, Lumi doubted it. He had a feeling Ienzo would be lucky to get a functioning hook to attack to the stump.

"Alchemist or not, he's still a Ryoka."

That had to count for something. Lumi had no special talents. No interesting elemental alignment, no ability to summon a weapon -- not that Khamja knew about that --, nothing else of note. Ienzo had his Alchemy, but he could no longer clap to activate it. He could still draw the circles, though. Normal examples of his Class did that.

He saw Ienzo stir slightly, a crease appearing on his forehead, between his eyebrows. He was coming round, but it would be slow going.

[sipthehoneylikeabutterfly]

Szayel rolled his eyes, giving the infirmary ceiling and the inside of his own eye socket the once over as he did. "Yes, the power of friendship will heal what science can't," he muttered.

He watched Ienzo stir, and moved away to discard the needle he held. "Can Ryoka regrow limbs?" he asked, almost pointedly. "Because if not, he's still going to be crippled."

[declaregamuza]

Nel turned her attention to Ienzo as he moved, brushing his hair from his face with her fingers gently. "Szayel," she said, sharply, aware that Ienzo might be able to hear what was said at present but was unlikely to coherently remember anything said in this exact moment, which was for the best, "shut up."

She brushed at Ienzo's hair with her fingers again, talking to him softly, even if he wouldn't remember it. A soothing, calm voice was the point, rather than him coming round to the sound of Szayel calling him a cripple. "It's all right, Ienzo, you're safe. We've got you."

[thesilentstorm]

Lumi eyed Szayel, an eyebrow raised. Well, one of them could. None of them in the palace, that was true, but the answer to the question was still almost a yes.

"It's a shame this backwards world lacks the technology to correct limb loss," he said quietly.

They seemed to dislike the notion that their technology was somehow sub-par compared to what some of them knew, but it was just a fact. Even had made replicas of people, from what he'd heard. The tech on his own world far, far outstripped what he'd seen on Spira, too.

He watched Nel from the corner of his eye. Ienzo wasn't quite awake. That would take a few moments. He was weak, and seemed to struggle to open his eyes. It could easily be a lingering result of the sedative as anything else.

[sipthehoneylikeabutterfly]

Szayel turned his head to eye Lumi, a slight sneer on his face. Backwards world, indeed.

"We do," he said, snippily, "it's called automail." He'd trained to install it. Yylfordt had trained to build it. Together, they were able to design it. It had proven to be a monumentally bad idea to attempt it when he and Ylfordt couldn't get along for more than five minutes at a time in order to do so, however, and Szayel had gone and taken the job in Draklor while Yylfordt had gone to his precious airships.

"Unfortunately for him, it takes months to be fully rehabilitated." Szayel sniffed, "Not to mention, it isn't cheap if he does last long enough to be worth the effort and expense."

[declaregamuza]

Nel cast Szayel an irritated glance, but proceeded to ignore him as she brushed the backs of her fingers over Ienzo's remaining hand. She wanted to just gather the boy up in a hug, but he'd probably be in too much pain if she did that just yet.

"We've got you, Ienzo. You're in the infirmary."

[thesilentstorm]

Lumi tilted his head, interested. He had no idea. Either it was so unrealistic people covered it up, or it was rare due to the expense Szayel mentioned, or people preferring to live with a missing limb because of the lengthy rehabilitation time. Still, he had to admit to himself he was a little impressed they'd managed it with their level of advancement.

He scowled a bit when he wondered how much magic was involved, but turned from Szayel to Ienzo.

[theschemer]

Ienzo felt numb, and fuzzy.

He felt like he'd just woken from a very long sleep, the sort of sleep that gave you a headache and made it hard to ball your fists for half an hour or so. He felt too warm, too sluggish. He wasn't sure where he was. The bed didn't feel like his own and he could hear a voice somewhere far away, but he couldn't open his eyes. Sleep wanted to pull him back down.

[declaregamuza]

"Come on," Nel said, encouragingly. Ienzo was trying to come round; that was definitely a good sign. She'd be happier once he'd opened his eyes and focused on something. "Ienzo? Time to wake up, now."

Time to wake up and face an unfortunate reality. Nel wished Ienzo had some other friendly faces present. Ulquiorra hadn't shown himself, yet. Nel didn't know what had happened, none of them did, yet, but if he wasn't responsible, she couldn't help but feel he should be here for Ienzo.

She'd have to find him, once Ienzo was secure and comfortable.

[sipthehoneylikeabutterfly]

Szayel took a moment to watch Nel gently encouraging Ienzo to come round, and then turned away, shaking his head. If it was him, he'd be smacking Ienzo on the cheek, and that would be him being nice about it. Right now, he was inclined to check his pupils with a torch, but Nel was unlikely to let him close enough.

He discarded the needle before he turned back. His attention briefly fell to the removed tissue from Ienzo's arm, but he made himself continue to ignore it.

"Perhaps you should go and tell the others he's waking up?" he suggested, to Lumi.

[thesilentstorm]

Lumi stayed precisely where he was and folded his arms, raising an eyebrow at Szayel's suggestion. he didn't dignify it with an answer. He wasn't about to go anywhere until somebody else turned up to relieve him of Szayel-watching duty.

[thechillyacademic]

Even was still shaking with fury as he left the library.

He had gone to have a ... conversation with Aizen which had ended up being less of a conversation and more of a one-sided argument about the incompetence of his underlings. Even didn't care that he was still on a sort of probation within the Clan, in spite of having joined willingly, he didn't care that Aizen was considered to be one of the single most powerful within the Desert Palace and he certainly didn't care if he was overheard.

Aizen had offered him an explanation. The two of them had, on an excursion, run into something entirely unexpected and that unexpected thing had, in short, torn one of Ienzo's arms off. Ulquiorra, his supposed bodyguard, had been apparently unable to fight off the thing, or save his charge in spite of the power he was reputed to have had.

Even made a conscious effort to un-grit his teeth as he strode towards the infirmary, sure that Ienzo's hopefully life-saving surgery would have reached completion by that point. He had left it a little while before seeing Aizen, after all.

The sight that greeted him was what he expected. He was conscious, but ... still dazed from the medication, and the trauma, and his arm was bandaged from the shoulder to where the limb finished abruptly. He looked up at him when he entered, but didn't say anything. Even wasn't even sure if he recognised him or simply responded to the sound and movement of the door being pushed open. Nel was at his bedside, obviously concerned. Lumi stood a little back, arms folded, as though he was on guard duty, and Szayel was hovering.

Even narrowed his eyes at the surgeon and scanned the rest of the room. The signs of an operation were fresh. He glanced again at Lumi, who turned his head just enough for him to follow his gaze to the back of the room, where a dish contained what had been excised from Ienzo's arm.

"Well?" he snapped, not sparing Szayel any of the ire he had shown his boss.

[sipthehoneylikeabutterfly]

Szayel had plenty of excuses to lurk. It was his infirmary, after all, and he currently had a patient.

He'd taken some readings from Ienzo; blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, general appearance, and marked them on a chart. He'd need to be monitored through the night, checked for brewing infection, or sudden deterioration, but for now the fact that he had his eyes open and was responding was good progress.

He felt the approach of Even's reiatsu before the other Ryoka appeared, clearly in a fury.

"Well what?" he asked, giving Even a cursory once over from his feet to his face and fixing him with a defiantly nonplussed look. He gestured to Ienzo with one hand. "I take it you know what's happened?" he added, unnecessarily. Of course Even knew what had happened; Marluxia had probably toddled off to tell him as soon as he could. "The operation went as well as can be expected. He'll live. For now."