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" Everywhere I Look "Written By: Presser
Disclaimer : I do not own Gundam Wing or its characters. This work of fiction is written and shared freely without any attempt to profit financially from it. Rating : R Pairings : 1x2 Warnings : Wistful romance, AU, after Endless Waltz, and departing quite a bit from canon direction Summary: Duo Maxwell is a young, upcoming artist with a hole in his heart. He hates himself for never confessing his love to Heero Yuy, a war-weary mecha pilot running from his past all the way to the Phobos Project—the first manned mission to Mars. Duo longs for the man he loves, but doesn’t know where he is. Can they find love in each other’s arms? And what of Heero’s mysterious collapse when he arrives on Earth to search for the one he loves?
"Everywhere I Look " Chapter 12 Heero opened his eyes. His vision seemed strange. Everything was blurry, but in an odd way. More like distorted. He raised his hand over his face. Except for my hand. Why can I see it clearly, but nothing else? He dropped his hand and realized he was in a bed. He blinked several times. He saw that he was in an enclosure, a semi-opaque material draped around him. What is that? He put out his hand. His fingers came close to the barrier. He turned his head and shifted so that he could lean close enough to touch it, but a wave of nausea washed over him. As he fell back to the bed, he felt cold metal against his elbow. He looked down at the protective rail touching his arm. *This is a hospital bed. Why am I in a hospital?* Heero moved his legs to find a comfortable position, and the thin white blanket and sheet covering him slipped away to reveal an IV tube taped to his forearm. Heero stared at it, trying to understand his situation, unable to remember how he came to it. Suddenly a chill knot of panic was in his stomach, uncoiling, expanding, sending tendrils of fear racing up his spine. No. This can't be--I can't be there again, I can't-- The door opened. A woman entered. Through the plastic sheet surrounding him, Heero saw that she wore a white lab coat over a plain blue blouse and khaki pants. She stepped toward him and unzipped the side of the oxygen tent surrounding him. "How are you feeling?" Heero looked into brown eyes over a kindly smile framed by shoulder-length blonde hair. His eyes were wide, his face blank. He didn't respond. The woman looked at the monitor above Heero's head and narrowed her eyes. She looked back at him and said, "Do you know where you are?" Heero swallowed silently and said, "A--hos-pital?" "Yes," the woman said gently. "Do you know why you're here?" Heero felt his pulse thumping against his eardrums and realized fear and panic were overtaking him. Almost instinctively he clamped down on them with the techniques learned years ago in his training under Dr.--Sarin, he thought. It's Mr. Sarin now. The name of his former master--for master was the right word for the man, Heero had finally decided--brought back his trip from Luna to Earth. He remembered arriving at the Florida spaceport and saying goodbye to the old scientist, so odd-looking in a business suit. His close-cropped hair and silvery eyes were radically different from their appearance during the years Heero spent with the man, yet his enormous intellect and personality were unchanged, and this made the experience of being with him all the more surreal. He remembered popping the gravity acclimation tabs Sarin had given him, walking out of the spaceport to hail a cab, and-- "I fainted." He blinked. The woman in the lab coat waited. Heero looked over her shoulder and let his eyes defocus. "I... I was at the spaceport... hailing a cab..." He looked back at the woman. "Is this because of the pills I took?" "I'm glad you remember that much," the woman said. "No, the pills you took actually helped you. Without them you would have suffered a much worse reaction." "Reaction to what?" The woman glanced at the monitor. "Let me check your vitals, then I'll answer all your questions." Heero realized he had gradually lifted his torso from the bed and stiffened all his muscles. He released them, fell back to the mattress, and closed his eyes. The woman pulled a stethoscope from her coat pocket. She put it on and reached through the opening in the oxygen tent to slip the chestpiece under Heero's thin robe to listen to his heart. "You have a strong heart, Heero Yuy," the woman said. She helped him sit up as she moved the chestpiece of her stethoscope to his back. Heero sat patiently, inhaling deeply and exhaling as instructed. "May I ask your name?" he said. "Dr. Po," she said, smiling as she thumped his back with two fingers in several places. She pulled the stethoscope from her ears and moved both hands to Heero's neck to feel the glands there, then took his wrist with one hand and consulted her watch to measure his pulse. Done with her brief exam, she plumped the two pillows behind Heero so that he could lean back and sit upright. She removed her hands from the oxygen tent and zipped it closed. "Why am I here? What happened to me exactly? And why am I in this"--Heero indicated the plastic sheet separating them with an index finger--"thing?" Po's lips thinned in a non-smile. She steeled herself to say the one thing doctors hated saying and patients hated hearing the most. "We aren't sure what happened to you." Heero's eyes flared wide and his doctor hastened to say, "We're doing everything we can to find out. You aren't in immediate danger, but we don't know why you fainted. You're in an oxygen tent because regulating your blood gases is--" "Blood gases?" "The amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood. Normalizing them is standard protocol for someone in your condition." Heero frowned. "And just what is my condition, doctor?" Dr. Po drew breath and stifled a sigh. "As I said, we aren't sure. We're checking everything. We have a specialist going over your medical exams on Luna and the unclassified parts of your debriefing sessions. We're searching for anything that might help us understand your condition." Heero stared unblinking into his doctor's eyes. After a brief moment, Sally Po looked away. She tightened her jaw and narrowed her eyes, then looked back at her patient. "Look, Heero--" "Doctor Po," Heero said in a quiet, firm voice, "I know that doctors are trained to avoid ever telling a patient anything definitive. If you want me to sign a waiver holding you harmless, I will. But I want--I need--to know what you know whether you're certain or not. Tell me what you suspect. I won't blame you if test results you don't have yet lead you to backtrack on your diagnosis." Dr. Po breathed deeply again, this time allowing herself a long sigh. "All right. There are indications that your lungs have enlarged compared to your physical profiles before and during your Earthside training for the Phobos mission. Your red blood cell count is quite high, and--" "How high?" "Sea-level normal is five million red blood cells per cc. Yours is above eight million." Heero looked impassively at Po, waiting for her to continue. "You're hypoventilating, which is causing some respiratory acidosis, and there are pink fascies in your cheeks, which is a result of an over-saturated high hematocrit. In addition to--" Heero raised a palm. He inhaled quite slowly and said in a tired voice, "English, please." "You're familiar with hyperventilation?" "That happens when a person is panicky and breathes too fast." Heero's head wobbled gently to the side. He leaned back against his pillows. "Hypoventilation the opposite. It's also known as respiratory depression. Your breathing rate is too slow to get rid of the carbon dioxide building up in your blood. That build-up is called acidosis: your blood is too acidic because there's too much carbon dioxide in it. All this is part of why you're fatigued, and also why your reflexes are diminished and your fine motor coordination has degraded. Hematocrit is the volume percentage of red blood cells in your blood, which, as I said, is more than sixty percent above normal. It's over-saturated. Fascies is just another word for marks. The pink fascies in your cheeks are marks that result from so many red blood cells in your blood." Heero blinked so slowly that Dr. Po wondered if he had begun to drift off to sleep. He nodded at her. "Go on." "If you had walked into my practice as a new patient and I got these results from an initial blood workup, I would have assumed you'd been living at the top of the Andes or Tibetan mountains for your whole life, and that this was your first time in a low-altitude environment. But you're not a new patient. You've been living in a carefully controlled environment for--" "For the past five years," Heero said with a frown. "That's right. During the early years of space flight--" "You don't have to tell me," Heero said with irritation in his voice. "They experimented with a number of different atmospheres, from a twenty-eighty mix of oxygen and nitrogen to a hundred percent pure oxy, which was disastrous because of increased fire risk. Modern spacecraft have conventional air atmospheres and use pure oxygen only in pressure suits during EVAs." "That's right," Po said. "So the question is, what would cause you to present with Sea-level Sickness?" "I've never heard of that." "People who are born and have lived their entire lives at high altitude have no idea what sea level is. They don't know that they live in a hypoxic environment--that means an oxygen-poor atmosphere. Their natural and normal habitat is breathing air considerably thinner than most people on Earth. For them, the world is mostly mountains. When high altitude residents go to sea level, they face a relative hyperoxia--an environment with too much oxygen for their systems to handle. Their bodies experience the overabundance of oxygen as an aggression caused by what, to them, is an abnormal environment." Heero stared blankly at his doctor. "Here's an example that may help. Automobiles that are well tuned for high altitude perform poorly when they're brought to sea level. They loose strength, their valves rattle. A lot of things have to be retuned, from changing the gasoline enrichment to the explosion timing. Even tires need more air pressure." Po stopped to let her patient ingest the rush of information. "The shorthand version of what happened to you is that you're suffering from hyperoxia. Your body is acting like Earth-normal atmosphere at sea level is giving you an oxygen overdose, and it's trying its best to compensate." Heero frowned. "Oxygen poisoning? Is that what you're saying?" Po nodded slightly. "And that's why I'm so tired?" Po nodded again. "And the headaches? Because the pressure's all wrong in my body?" "Yes." "And why my eyes hurt all the time." "The good news," Po said, "is that the acute stage is generally limited to three days at most. The full hematocrit adaptation to sea level should take between two to three weeks. By then you'll have acclimatized to Earth normal atmospheric pressure. There won't be any longterm problems." Heero closed his eyes again. Po realized her back hurt and stood. The back of her calves bumped the rollered stool she had been sitting on, and it slid backward. It hit the edge of the small desk behind it, making a small noise, which prompted Heero to open his eyes. He and his doctor regarded each other in silence. Po put her hands in the pockets of her lab coat. "Your prognosis is very good, Heero. There's no reason why we can't discharge you in a--" "Dr. Po," Heero said, "there's one more thing I need to know." His eyes brightened. Po noted a firm determination in his expression and tensed as he asked the one question she had dreaded. "What possible reason could there be for me to have Sea-level Sickness?" Sally Po held her patient's eyes for a moment. "You deserve the truth," she said, "though you may not like it." "Go on." "Be patient as I explain. You need some background before I can get to your current situation, which is--" she paused. "Complicated." Heero blinked his eyes. His calm expression said, "I'm not going anywhere anytime soon." His doctor launched into her explanation. ~ * ~ |
