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blueheronteanook2023-08-07 11:18 pm
sunlit_skycat) wrote in blueheronteanook2023-08-07 11:18 pm
Cut It Out and Restart - Chapter 1
Title: Cut It Out and Restart
Rating: Mature
Major Warnings: Medical trauma
Genre: Canon compliant, side character focus
Summary: In less than a year, the entire direction of Brie's life flipped on her -- not once, or twice, but three separate times. She went from a desperate Innocent clawing for survival to a Host of forces that most would never dare to approach, making choices that can never be taken back. Now, in a world increasingly torn with violence, Brie must decide what to do with all the time the Hungry Choir gave her. A story of Brie across the events of Pale.
By the time that Brie was 19 years old, she had developed a quiet terror of hospitals. They were cold, clinical spaces, full of unsympathetic doctors who would put her on any number of treatments at any moment in the name of her health, without once asking what she thought about any of it. For all the poking and prodding they did, the list of what was wrong with her expanded every time she saw a doctor, and none of them had any ideas of how to fix her problems for good. Her health issues kept her behind in school, and when she managed to graduate, she stayed behind with her parents and pretended she wasn’t jealous of her peers cheerfully flying off to university without her.
The one thing she had any solid answers on was her pica, which she had gone to behavioral therapy for since she was 14. Over the past few years, she had worked on reducing her impulsive object-eating to less harmful substances, less of the time, and it was the one thing she felt she had a handle on.
So when she swallowed a thumbtack one day and felt a cramping pain in her abdomen a few hours later, she did her best to ignore it. Sometimes she had random body pain that would clear up after a day or two, and she hoped it was only another case of that. When the pain increased to a searing feeling that made it hard to walk without leaning on the walls for support, let alone show up for her shift at the local Shop n’ Save, Brie asked her parents to drive her to emergency care.
“I think — something’s wrong,” Brie haltingly said. “I ate a thumbtack.”
“Oh, honey,” her mom said, lines creasing her forehead. “Again?”
In the emergency room, her mom explained the situation to the desk nurse, and Brie was given some forms to fill out. As a precautionary measure, Brie’s blood was drawn and they put her on a round of antibiotics in case she had an infection. Then it was a few hours wait for an endoscopy to check where the tack had went, as soon as they could get a room clear for it.
Brie bent over in her waiting room chair, trying to ignore the sounds of the ill and the dying all around her. Not that she was any better off herself.
They put her under for the endoscopy so she wouldn’t be conscious while a camera snaked around in her guts. One moment she was lying down in the blue chair with an anesthesiologist injecting something into her, the next she woke up alone in the room with the beginning of a headache.
One of the doctors from before stepped into the room. He had a white lab coat and glasses, with cold, appraising eyes. She didn’t remember his name.
The doctor pushed his glasses up his nose, looking down at his clipboard. “The results are in. The foreign object perforated your intestine, so I’ve scheduled you for a midline laparotomy to remove it and patch up the hole. Your bloodwork came back, too. Tell me, have you been treated for lead poisoning before?”
“Lead poisoning,” Brie said uncomprehendingly. “ What? ”
“Test results indicate that you have high levels of lead in your blood. It’s a cumulative toxicant that affects multiple body systems, with effects such as antisocial behavior, poor memory or attention span, tremors, sporadic numbness, or tingling. Those exposed as children may have permanently stunted growth or intellectual development.”
It felt like the floor had dropped out from under her. Brie clutched the chair under her, squeezing the padded side tightly.
Her friends had always joked about her terrible memory. It was funny to them, mostly, when they got to regale Brie with stories of events she had been there to witness and then promptly forgotten about. It was less funny to them when she missed commitments and couldn’t keep track of birthdays.
“Let me explain again,” the doctor said slowly, enunciating every syllable. “You have too much lead. Lead is bad for you. Lead hurts your brain. It makes you stupid.”
Brie’s grip tightened on the chair. “I heard you the first time,” she said quietly.
“Good girl! Your chart says, you have pica. I am sending you to outpatient psych treatment. Someone will teach you how to make it better,” the doctor said, in the same maddeningly slow tone.
“I already see a therapist for that,” Brie protested.
“Clearly, it hasn’t been enough to stop you from poisoning yourself,” he snapped. “You’re going to need a midline laparotomy — that’s stomach surgery, in case you don’t understand — and then stay here for observation and chelation therapy. Whatever you think you’ve been doing, it’s not working. You need to change it.”
Brie wanted to scream. How had this man not gotten fired when he was this much of an asshole? Why was he the only one to notice that something was wrong?
“Fine,” she bit out, wincing as another wave of pain rippled through her abdomen. “Can I see my mom?”
Afterwards, they sent her to a hospital bed, with a row of stitches going down to her belly button and an IV drip fed into her arm. Brie sat propped up against a pillow, browsing on her phone in an attempt to fend off boredom. All around her, machines beeped, the harsh fluorescent lights above her finally dimmed for the night. She scrolled through GoFoto aimlessly, where autoplaying cat videos, memes about the latest bad TV shows, and selfies of acquaintances she no longer spoke to all blurred together into one long sludge of content.
It wasn't enough to distract her from her thoughts.
The problem was, lead poisoning couldn't be fixed. The chelation drugs going into her arm could take out what was there right now, but it couldn't undo brain or nerve damage. Brie could never get her pre-lead body back, and with how young her pica had started, it was possible there never had been a pre-lead her to begin with. There was nothing she could do here, other than to lie down pathetically in a hospital bed recovering from her self-inflicted injury, missing every single goal her parents had had for her in life due to her other self-inflicted injury, and pretend that she hadn't been doomed from the start.
The rest of her life would only be more of the same.
Her phone dinged with a notification.
She opened up her email, which had a strange garbled message with it, with a subject line labeled, “Eat all you can.”
Later on, Brie would want to say that she had signed up here, still coming down from anesthesia and nowhere in her right mind. She would want to say that she hadn’t paid attention to what she was doing, and she couldn’t possibly have expected any of it to turn out like this.
In reality, she spent the month recovering from the surgery, investigating the website linked in the message in her spare time. She read the rules, memorized the song, found the associated wiki, and bought all their suggested equipment. It might be a scam — it probably was a scam — but she was desperate, and couldn’t bear the thought of the slow decline all the doctors projected for her from this point onwards.
Lead poisoning couldn’t be fixed by ordinary means, so she had to resort to the extraordinary. Once Brie was comfortably able to walk and run again, she navigated back to the sketchy website linked in the sketchy email, and signed herself up for the listed ritual. She refused to be a passive bystander as her body and mind slowly deteriorated from under her. How much worse could things really get?
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its just the set-up so i can't say too much yet i think, but i do enjoy the medical thought put into it. and also the choice to have brie like, pour over the site for a whole month before deciding to sign up. because yeah, sometimes you do deliberate a lot over a choice that is very silly in retrospect.
i hope we see more of brie's mundane friends also i love mundane friends
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