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+--- Thread: Winter - Chapter 1 Anatomy of Devotion (/showthread.php?tid=77)
Anatomy of Devotion - Sister Eulalia - 26-01-2626
The morgue was quiet.
Not silent, nowhere was silent for her, but quiet in the way that mattered. The dead here had settled. They weren't confused anymore, weren't clinging to the threshold between breath and whatever came after. The woman on the second table had been watching Eulalia work for the past hour, but she asked nothing, demanded nothing. She simply observed, as the dead sometimes did, waiting for answers that Eulalia could not give her.
The heart sat in a steel dish beneath the examination lamp.
Sister Eulalia had extracted it herself, following the procedure Dr. Crane had demonstrated three weeks prior. The Y-incision had been precise. The ribs had separated with the crack she'd learned to anticipate but never quite grew accustomed to—that sound of structure yielding, of the body's architecture opening like a reliquary to reveal what it had hidden. The lungs had been unremarkable. The liver showed the expected damage from years of determined drinking. But the heart.
The heart was why she'd stayed.
Her gloves lay beside her sketchbook, fingers bare for the first time in hours. She could not draw with the leather between her skin and the pencil; the lines came out wrong, imprecise, and precision was the entire point. The heart would not transmit anything. It was muscle and valve and vessel, emptied of blood and memory alike. Whatever the man had felt, whatever loves or griefs had made it race or stutter, had departed with the rest of him. The organ that remained was simply meat. Beautiful meat, but meat nonetheless.
She sketched the left ventricle wall where it had thickened, the muscle grown dense and stubborn in its effort to compensate for what the valves could no longer do. Hypertrophic. She wrote the word in small, neat letters beside the drawing, then added the measurement she'd taken with calipers. The illustration was taking shape beneath her pencil—not an anatomical diagram from a textbook but something more careful, more attentive. She drew what she saw. The striation of muscle fiber, the pale fatty deposits, the place where the tissue had begun to fail.
The man himself stood near the door, watching her draw his heart.
"You might have mentioned the chest pains," she said without looking up. "They would have caught this sooner."
He shrugged. The dead so often shrugged. Didn't seem worth the fuss, he said, or something like it—the words arrived more as impression than sound. Thought it was indigestion.
"It was not indigestion."
I know that now.
She added shading to the left atrium. The ghost drifted closer, peering at the sketch with the peculiar interest of someone seeing themselves from the outside for the first time.
That's quite good, he offered.
"I know...Thank you."
The cold of the morgue had settled into her bones hours ago, and she welcomed it. Her cell at the convent was never cold enough; the Mother Superior insisted on fires in the grates, as though warmth were a kindness rather than an intrusion. Here, the chill seeped through her habit and found the skin beneath, numbing the constant hum of sensation that never quite left her. Here, she could almost think.
The woman on the second table had stopped watching. The man with the failed heart had wandered back toward the door, his interest in his own organ apparently exhausted. Sister Eulalia turned the page of her sketchbook and began a new study—a cross-section this time, showing the valve where the failure had begun.
She did not hear the footsteps in the corridor.
She rarely heard footsteps when she was like this, sunk into the work, her attention narrowed to the point of her pencil and the truth written in tissue. The dead noticed before she did. The man by the door turned toward the hallway, then looked back at her with something that might have been warning.
She did not look up.
RE: Anatomy of Devotion - Daley Fairfax - 28-01-2626
He was destined for medical greatness from the moment that he was born. Some might have thought he would kick his feet up and enjoy the money that came from a title he was always set to inherit, but they wouldn’t account for the fact that it was far too boring to live life that way. Sure, there were parties and all the upper echelon events to attend. There was also education, grandeur, and a chance to do impossible new things that would go down in textbooks. The pretty nurses didn’t hurt.
He was destined because he often watched his father. The Earl was always fascinated by how the body worked. Most of the time it was posing animals that already passed away into little scenes like relics of a long past world of Victorian hobbies. However, sometimes there were human corpses delivered for that sake of learning and investigating what the father and son wanted to learn. It wasn’t something advertised. Quite the opposite, the dark depths of where they examined was one of the family’s best kept secrets.
Because of this, the morgue was comfortable. It was a place that felt a little like home when Daley felt the need to think, or when he was annoyed with a particular outcome that didn’t go as he thought it would. He needed to always know more. It was simply how his brain worked. This was one of those times. He wasn’t seeking a break or solace, he was seeking answers.
Daley’s footsteps weren’t secretive here where a morgue and cutting open bodies was normal. They nearly echoed in the clean hospital hall. Then paused. Voices. No, one voice. Unexpected as he then continued down the hall to arrive at the morgue door.
There he crossed his arms and leaned against the opening to tilt his head and look over the woman sitting there. Different things were noted regarding the habit she wore and the way the pencil so accurately shaded the parts of anatomy she was capturing. Still life. As art would call it - still life of death.
Muscles rippled through his being under his expensive suit to use his shoulder and momentum to come away from the door trim. Daley could then take another couple steps closer and really see what she was drawing. “Some day we’ll be able to fix that before it fails.” Daley knew advancements were happening all of the time. The heart could be repaired when stabbed or injured, but when people didn’t know what symptoms were or how to explain it and doctors didn’t know enough, well - death occurred.
However, the man who died from a failed heart was not who or what he was down here to see. He turned to the lady on the other table. “Mind if I move this one for another one?” His attention and words cast over his shoulder back at the nun.
RE: Anatomy of Devotion - Sister Eulalia - 30-01-2626
The ghost's warning registered a moment too late.
Her pencil stilled as the morgue reassembled around her in layers, tile and steel and carbolic, and now…someone living. Close, too close and all too sudden. She had not heard him approach, and the loss was a small theft. The precious seconds where she might have gathered herself from the depths where she worked best, the careful decompression the living never knew she needed.
She looked at his hands first. She always looked at hands first, faces were too much, eyes worse still, but hands could be studied without cost. Hands told her who held scalpels steady and who let them shake. Who scrubbed until the skin cracked and who trusted gloves to do the work. Who touched the dead with reverence and who touched them like meat.
These were a surgeon's hands. The fingers long, the nails clean, with a deliberate stillness. She let her gaze travel upward, stance, shoulders, the suit that cost more than a ward nurse earned in months, and stopped safely at his collar.
"Dr. Crane is not here." The words came out unvarnished, her voice still wearing the shape of her conversation with the dead man by the door. The living required something different. She never could remember exactly what.
She had felt his attention before she saw him, felt it settle on the drawing like light through a window, illuminating what she had made. The ventricle wall. The thickening. Hours of solitary fascination transformed into graphite and shadow, and now seen. Witnessed. More intimate by far than if he had studied her face.
Some day we'll be able to fix that before it fails.
He spoke of hearts as mechanisms awaiting better engineers. Death as a temporary insufficiency of knowledge.
She did not know if that was arrogance or faith. Perhaps there was no difference.
The woman on the second table, the ghost, not the body, had stopped her drifting. She watched the stranger now. The man with the failed heart had gone still by the door, his attention fixed on something Eulalia could not read.
She closed her sketchbook and reached for her gloves.
Mind if I move this one for another?
Her hands paused mid-glove. A hitch in the motion, barely visible, a skip in the rhythm of a gesture she has performed ten thousand times.
No one asked if she minded. Not Mother Superior, not the sisters who had tested her since childhood, not the Church that had declared her blessed and pressed a martyr's name into her like a seal in wax. Dr. Crane instructed and she followed. That was the shape of things. That was the shape of all things, decisions flowing around her, never through, the way water parts for stone.
The question lodged somewhere beneath her ribs. A wrongness of shape, a key for a lock she did not possess. She did not examine it. There was no use in examining things she could not name, and she had never been taught the vocabulary for this.
"Which one do you want?"
The practical question. Solid ground, the territory she knew how to occupy. She watched his hands as she asked, waiting. The way people touched the dead told her more than conversation ever could.
Somewhere beyond the walls, thunder murmured its slow approach. She could smell rain coming, or thought she could—ozone and wet stone, the air before breaking. The hair on her arms had risen, though the morgue was no colder than before.
She attributed it to the storm.
RE: Anatomy of Devotion - Daley Fairfax - 20-02-2626
He shrugged when she mentioned Dr. Crane. Daley could not have cared less when it came to that person’s opinion. The surgeon was much happier coming up with his own conclusions. He was far better at discerning where something went wrong. More importantly, he liked to show how it wasn’t his fault. Something only he could explain since he knew the cuts and moves he made while he was still trying to save an unsavable life.
Daley’s attention shifted to the features of her face as he asked his question. There was more response there than anything and that was what he always watched, but hers was so short that he missed any deeper meaning that might have been found. Whether it was with the nurses or nobles, it didn’t matter, an expression had so much to say. He played a game and he made a move. Perhaps the right one, so far, considering the way it seemed like she would do the work for him as she asked which body it was that he wanted traded out.
“Mmm, Mr. Thatcher.” He announced as he looked at the rows and then back at the woman. His focus looking her over and the drape of the fabric of her clothes. Just as it had for decades and centuries, the clothes a person wore spoke volumes. It explained their place in society. A place that was nearly impossible to deny or dislodge. She was beneath him, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be useful. Just how useful was what he was going to push, just because he could.
He wasn’t even sure how many bodies were currently housed in the morgue of the hospital or even the organization system that was used. It wasn’t his father’s basement. A place where he could easily pull what he needed, but here, he was going to continue to use this woman’s help. “I want to review what went wrong in surgery.” It didn’t go as planned. Daley hated when things didn’t go as planned. He liked a challenge in his women, but not so much in his surgeries.
Daley took a step back as his arms crossed over his chest. He could wait. Wait and watch and learn more about this woman he didn’t know enough about. Probably because she was invisible before this moment where they were the only two in the morgue.