[ Hei wants to tell Uhura to save her breath. Judging by the fading glow in Pavel's eyes, he's half off the carousel anyway, the other half consumed in morphine. The machinery sounds off -- an onomatopoeic whoop-whoop he hasn't heard since Heaven's War, when the soldier's barracks were rigged with intruder alarms. The room feels like a steel drum, sounds bouncing off the walls; his ears are vibrating. ]
[ 'Li' would opt for wide-eyed panic at this point. But Hei honestly doesn't have the patience. The faint animation in Pavel is nearly all gone already. The rest of him will soon follow. He expects to feel sadness, or at least a facsimile. But all he feels is tired. (It is tiring, the constant grief or performance of grief or the careful suppression of grief.) ]
[ From the corner of his eye, he sees the pointy spikes on the EKG descend to curvy sine waves. Without meeting Uhura's gaze, he says, ] I'll get the doctors. [ But the words come out with a dead flatness, like a dismissal. ]
no subject
[ 'Li' would opt for wide-eyed panic at this point. But Hei honestly doesn't have the patience. The faint animation in Pavel is nearly all gone already. The rest of him will soon follow. He expects to feel sadness, or at least a facsimile. But all he feels is tired. (It is tiring, the constant grief or performance of grief or the careful suppression of grief.) ]
[ From the corner of his eye, he sees the pointy spikes on the EKG descend to curvy sine waves. Without meeting Uhura's gaze, he says, ] I'll get the doctors. [ But the words come out with a dead flatness, like a dismissal. ]
[ It's already too late. ]