Eight hours in theatre.

A double car crash.

They'd managed to save one but not the other and Lawrence only felt a hollow sense of defeat at the outcome. The grief of the families didn't touch him, even the grief they were deftly avoiding addressing in the individual that remained, feeding them vague answers to a question they couldn't physically endure hearing seemed mechanical to him.

At the moment only pride mattered and in this matter he'd gone head to head with death and death had won. He was exhausted, his body wracked by the hours without breaks. When he was in the zone, he forgot to eat, forgot to think, all that he was became was his tools, honed towards their craft and towards holding a human being together.

He held them together and sometimes the fragile spark in them went out anyway.

Driving home was a blur to him. His wife had said once that he shouldn't drive when tired, but she was gone and so was that advice. The road was a spool of lights, headlights flashing past him that didn't matter, red and white and red and white. The sky was smotheringly dark, but after the blinding lights of the operating table, it was like a comforter to lose himself in.

He showered and shed his clothes, scrubbing his skin raw. As he exited the shower he teetered, bracing himself against the wall with a hand. He hadn't remembered to eat, he hadn't remembered to meet the basic sustenance to keep his own body together.

In the mirror his pale blue eyes cast steep shadows across his face.

He went head to head with death, but could always feel death right behind him, looking over his shoulder.

Now he served two masters, two subtly opposing masters. He spent his days doing his best to keep people alive, playing this game he'd set himself to keep himself sane, rolling the dice, stemming the flow of arterial blood and giving people a recovery, even if it wasn't the recovery they wanted. He watched the disasters roll in, catastrophic ills that snatched people from their lives without warning. And then at night he helped feed another machine, one that desired nothing more than the same life force he tried to sustain.

It would have been easier if he just took the energy from the people on his table, but bitter and sullen pride refused. He would not sway his own odds, his own efforts for this other agenda. The idea of skewing even one night at his post to grease the wheels of his other life was abhorrent in a way he couldn't quantify.

He played tug-o-war with himself, and it was interesting.

He'd sooner surrender inches from his own life than lose a single roll of the dice.

Death was his opponent, and he was cunning and relentless, that was undeniable. But Lawrence was playing with new powers, new energies that no one had ever seen before. He was still rolling the dice, but now his dice were loaded.

And it was anything but boring.

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