Blood Blockade Battlefront: Do No Harm

[jordannamorgan]

Title: Do No Harm
Author: jordannamorgan
Archive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: PG.
Characters: Leo, original character.
Setting: General.
Summary: In the hospital after an accident, Leo learns a doctor’s secret.
Disclaimer: They belong to Yasuhiro Nightow. I’m just playing with them.
Notes: Written for the prompts of “Type” at fan_flashworks, and “Vampires” at genprompt_bingo.



Leonardo Watch was pretty sure he was dying.

And he wasn’t even dying in some spectacularly weird way befitting of Hellsalem’s Lot, either: something like getting eaten by a literal monster truck, or melted in an ill-advised hug from a creature with acid-secreting skin. Nope. He just had the stupid bad luck to get smashed up in a plain old ordinary traffic accident.

Since he joined Libra, he’d gotten used to seeing quite a lot of blood, both spilled on the streets and shaped into fantastical weapon forms… but he’d definitely never seen so much of his own.

In contrast to the wedge of random skewed view that remained crystal-clear straight through his eyelids, the voices that wavered in and out of focus around him were faint and muffled.

“—atient is… severe hemorrhagic shock…”

“—this kid ev… alive with this much internal bleed…?”

Huh. Nice to know his body was putting up enough of a fight to impress the doctors. It might as well be his epitaph that although he wasn’t strong or smart, at least he was stubborn to the end.

Things might have been different if he’d been taken to Bradbury General, but that was not the hospital he’d caught glimpses of as his gurney was rushed down the hallway. There were no vines on the walls, for one thing. And not a clone of Doctor Estevez in sight. If he was there, surely she’d have had at least one of herself to spare for someone in his condition. He was probably at St. Araniad instead.

Maybe it was just as well. By all accounts, Magra de Grana was extremely sparing with his more magical treatments that could heal a patient at the cost of their humanity… but for a Libra agent who once helped defend the infamous Phantom Hospital against a Blood Breed, he might have made an exception. As far as Leo was concerned, having all-seeing eyes was complicated enough. Even to save his life, he wasn’t really sure he would have wanted to end up any more freakish than he already was.

…Speaking of which. Someone with a penlight lifted his right eyelid to have a look—and jumped back with a violent oath at the sight of the glowing blue orb underneath. The babble around Leo heightened for a moment before a more authoritative voice shut it down, saying something about this is Hellsalem and investigate later.—Which probably meant when he was a corpse to be autopsied.

Maybe now they thought Leo was some kind of Beyondian weirdo himself, instead of just a plain old fragile human. It was kind of funny, really.

“—ood pressure’s critical! We need—nsfusion stat!”

The fragments of medical jargon were getting boring. Leo let his attention drift, supposing his last thoughts should probably be of the people he cared for. Michella and his parents, his comrades in Libra, Black and Vivian and Nej and all the other amazing friends he’d made in Hellsalem… It was a bit too deliberate an effort to qualify as his life flashing before his eyes, but it seemed like the most proper way to go out.

And then, with his eye so rudely left open by the doctors, something ghosted across the edge of his vision that made whatever was left of his blood run cold.

It was an aura.

Red. Feathery. Delicate, almost. Not as intense as the others like it that had given him nightmares since he stared into the void and it stared back, but still unmistakable. …Hauntingly beautiful in the way it swirled around a single latex-gloved finger that skimmed over his chest, to gather a trace of his spilled blood and raise it to equally crimson lips.

“B-Negative blood type,” a woman’s voice declared confidently… and the scream Leo tried to utter emerged only as a strangled moan.

Blood Breed… Blood Breed! I’m dead!—I’m even more dead than I was before!

Leo couldn’t move. He didn’t know whether it was terror, his injuries, or some power of the Blood Breed that paralyzed him, but his desperate internal struggle to leap off that gurney and make a run for it was unrewarded. All his panic succeeded in doing was making his heart pump blood all the harder out of his compromised arteries. He was dimly aware that the doctors’ frenzy around him increased, shouting garbled new instructions to each other as they fought to save his life…

Yet he knew that battle was already lost. It had been from the moment one of those monsters walked into the room.

A needle stabbed sharply into Leo’s wrist, and before his next breath, all his fear was engulfed in a rush of blackness that swept him far away from the world.



Sometime later, Leo was incredibly surprised to flinch awake.

Everything hurt. He drew a ragged breath and raised his head a little, taking in his surroundings. A quiet darkened room lit only by distant streetlights, faint traffic noises beyond the window, the bland uncomfortable hospital bed he lay on, the I.V. bag steadily dripping clear fluid through the tube that tethered his left arm.

And finally, as he cracked open one eyelid, the shimmer of crimson shadow-wings furled around the being who sat on a chair in the corner.

…Yep. Still dead. It just wants to gloat before it finishes me off.

Noticing the soft blue glow of his half-open eye, the thing rose to creep closer. Like a child in fear of a monster under the bed, Leo uselessly screwed his eyelids shut over eyes that still saw it anyway, and braced himself for his last moments of life.

“…You’ll be alright now. The transfusion was just in time, and your wounds have been treated. Your panic attack didn’t make it any easier for us… but I realize that was my fault.”

It was the same feminine voice that had identified his blood type by taste in the emergency room. Utterly confused by the benign gentleness of the words, Leo turned his head to look directly at their source; and with the aura shut out by his closed eyes, he finally saw the proper form of the creature beneath.

A beautiful young woman, perhaps in her early thirties, wearing a lab coat over green hospital scrubs. Golden-brown skin and statuesque features that suggested Indian descent. Tufts of long brown hair working loose from what must have once been a tight, professional-looking bun. Dark, dark eyes that stared back at him intently—with concern instead of malice.

For a moment Leo was convinced he must have been wrong, just hallucinating the aura in the shock of his injuries; but when he opened both eyes wide, he saw the red phantom wings shrouding her again.

“You’re—!”

“Not what you think. …At least, not completely.” The monster in a doctor’s shape looked strangely sad. “I’m not going to hurt you, Leonardo Watch. I promise.”

Somehow, that lonely expression of hers actually made Leo begin to believe it.

“…Who are you?”

“My name is Amrita Prakash, but you can call me Rita.” Her sulky too-red lips turned upward just a little, taking on a faint smirk. “And I’m the doctor responsible for saving your life. If you don’t believe me, you can ask any of the other doctors who were in the ER at the time. I hope that’s enough to prove that I don’t mean you any harm.”

“But why?” Leo ground out through a painful hitch in his left ribs. “You saw my eyes. Something… someone like you had to know who I was, and who I work for. You knew I could see what you are. Why would you let me live?”

Rita sighed and bowed her head.

“A long time ago, a being you call a Blood Breed found his way to this world. Gentle and curious like a child, he didn’t fit in where he came from. He only wanted to get far away from others of his kind—because unlike them, he didn’t care to cause other creatures harm. Instead he was fascinated by humans in particular, and spent years living among them peacefully. He settled early on in New York, where it was always easiest to get lost in the crowd.” The doctor raised her piercing eyes. “Eventually, he even fell in love with a young intern fresh out of medical school. He was so kindhearted that he couldn’t bear to live a lie with her, so he showed her what he really was… but she still loved him, all the same.”

“That person was you?” Leo wondered in a whisper.

“We lived a happy life together for six years… until the Great Collapse.” Silent pain shadowed Rita’s face. “I was crushed under the rubble of our apartment building. He dug me out easily, but I was too badly injured for any doctor to save me—if we even could have reached one who wasn’t overwhelmed with trying to save others in the chaos. There was no one to help us… so instead of letting me die, he sacrificed himself to keep me alive.”

Leo’s breath caught. “Are you saying a Blood Breed gave his life to you somehow?”

“I’ll never understand exactly what he did. I just know that I could only lie there, unable to move, feeling my body heal… while his body withered away before my eyes.” Unshed tears glimmered in Rita’s eyes, and she looked down at her hands, closing them into fists. It was almost as if she was trying to clutch the remembered fading hands of the inhuman lover she had lost.

“I’m sorry,” Leo said softly.

The sentiment was impulsive, but Leo realized he truly meant it. He didn’t dare to presume he was the keenest judge of character in a city and world so full of illusions and lies; but even for him, this young woman’s sad sincerity was unmistakable. And besides that, even though he’d been staring at her with wide-open eyes for several minutes, no eldritch name had sparked across his vision. Rita simply didn’t have the kind of name Blood Breeds did—because she really wasn’t one of them. Whatever kind of hybrid she might be now, she had been born human, and that humanity was still at the core of her.

“It changed me,” Rita acknowledged in a sigh. “I don’t have a fraction of the power he did, but there are things I can do… I can manipulate other people’s blood. At least to some degree. That’s how you’re still alive. Back in the ER, I used that ability to hold in as much of your blood as I could until you were stabilized.”

“Thank you,” Leo murmured, still too exsanguinated for the awkward blush that wanted to fill his cheeks. “But using your powers on the job like that—do your colleagues know what you can do?”

“It’s common knowledge among the staff that I can detect various things in someone’s blood just by tasting it, like the way I identified your blood type. A few people are aware that something happened to me in the Great Collapse, but most think I’m just another alterworld freak. …Either way, as hectic as this place is, no one really cares what I am—as long as I can use my powers to help diagnose patients quickly.”

“Uh, yeah. …So, about that whole tasting-blood thing…”

“It’s true that I need blood to live. But I’ve never hurt anyone for it—and I don’t have to.”

With that, Rita stretched out a hand toward the bundle of Leo’s bloody clothes at the end of the bed. He watched in fascination as hemoglobin peeled away from the threads of his jacket, forming microscopic droplets that hung in the air as a fine scarlet mist no ordinary human eyes would see. The mist drifted into Rita’s open palm, and was simply absorbed through her skin.

“Do you have any idea how much blood gets spilled in an emergency room every day?” Rita chuckled humorlessly. “You gave me more than a full day’s nourishment yourself. I get all I need to survive this way, and no one has ever been the wiser… until you showed up.” Her eyes met his unflinchingly. “But as a doctor, I swore to do no harm. Even to save what’s left of my life, I won’t break that oath… so I’m ready to accept whatever you and your colleagues believe you must do with me.”

For a long moment Leo was very still, trying to process the dilemma they both found themselves in.

Blood Breeds were not subtle about their habits. If Rita had been anything like them, Libra would have heard about death and mayhem at this hospital long before now. All signs indicated that the no-longer-human doctor really was telling the truth: she had been living quietly under the radar all this time, not only meeting her needs without hurting anyone, but actively using her abilities to save lives. She was so opposed to doing harm, she had even spared Leo when she knew he could expose her. Someone so compassionate and good-willed didn’t deserve to be caused any trouble…

But.

But anything having to do with Blood Breeds was potentially dangerous. Leo was sure of that, even if Rita never meant to be a threat, and even if he wasn’t sure how she ever could be. So much was unknown about those creatures. Could it be safe to ignore the fact that a human partially imbued with their powers was just walking free around the city?

…Apparently she was just something else he would need to keep his eyes on.

“I won’t tell anyone about you,” Leo decided firmly, causing Rita to give a start and stare at him. “But there’s one condition.”

“What would that be?”

“Promise me you’ll at least consider coming to Libra on your own.” Seeing a grimace form on Rita’s face, he added quickly, “You want to help people. The biggest way you could do that is by helping us understand more about Blood Breeds. Not just through the way your partner changed you—but through the experiences you had with him too. Just the fact there was one who felt so differently about humans could be important.”

“I understand what you’re saying,” Rita muttered. “I know Libra’s work is crucial to this city’s survival—and I have no sympathy for Blood Breeds who kill. Before my love died, he warned me that if others of his kind found out about me, they could want to kill me as a hybrid abomination whose existence they can’t tolerate. So you see, even I have a very personal stake in seeing them defeated first.” Her gaze shifted away with a wince. “I just don’t want to become some kind of lab rat in the process. Not for my own sake, but only because… that’s not what he gave me his life for.”

“It’s not like that. Trust me.” Leo grinned awkwardly. “I mean, my eyes make me a pretty unique specimen myself—but Libra’s never demanded anything from me that I wasn’t okay with.”

Asked him, yes. Persuaded him, definitely… but they had never forced him to risk his safety in the use of his eyes. When he did so voluntarily, it was by his own choice: because he wanted to be useful, and to do what little he could to help protect Hellsalem and the world. He had no doubt his colleagues and friends would show just as much compassion to an inadvertent half-Blood Breed as they did to a hapless kid with magic eyes.

Rita exhaled slowly. After a long moment of thought, she turned and moved toward the door; but there she paused, looking back at him with a visible conflict playing out upon her face.

“I promise to think about it,” she said softly. “I just need a little time.”

“Sure. Take all the time you need. …I’ll be waiting,” Leo answered in a warm voice, and watched the not-so-inhuman doctor slip out of the room.

When the tired and injured young man finally slept that night, he was not visited by nightmares about crimson wings.

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© 2022 Jordanna Morgan