OOM: But will it ever be enough?

[sunbaked_baker]

(From here.)

Quite often, when a long night out with Con had gone from bad to worse, when Rae's humanity felt scraped raw from the things she had seen and done, she found herself fervently wishing that somehow there could be some sort of human comfort at the end of it all. Kind words, a soft blanket, a hot cup of tea, human kindness and reassurances to bring her back to her daylight self and remind her that who she is in the dark isn't all of who she is.

Now she was finding that she could hardly stand it when she did have that comfort pressed upon her.

The SOF headquarters had an extensive infirmary - of course it did - and the staff there seemed used to dealing with civilians who had gotten caught up in something decidedly and messily Other. They seemed to Sunshine like they were more used to civilians being shocked beyond their ability to cope by whatever they'd been through. Well, Rae remembered how it had felt to reach that point, but she wasn't that person any more, and the constant care and company the staff offered felt stifling rather than comforting.

The SOFs had gotten her to an almost-private room in the infirmary, and checked her over to rule out anything more dire than some spectacularly lurid bruising along her back, ribs and legs to go along with the angry red burns on her hands, neck and throat. They had given her some painkillers, and the infirmary staff had also cleaned and put some sort of blessedly cooling and numbing ointment on the burns marking Rae's neck and hands. It was difficult, but Rae tried to keep from moving her fingers too much, despite the nervous urge to fidget. Even if her hands didn't hurt nearly as much as they had, thanks to the painkillers and ointment, moving them too much sent jolts of pain through her hands and up into her wrists.

The staff had brought her blankets - though even soft as they were, the fuzzy fabric might as well have been steel wool, so she left the blankets alone - and had brought her iced tea to help soothe her throat. It was... not very good tea, but it was soothing and cold in her pained throat and Rae drank it down greedily. The tea was in a gigantic travel mug that looked ridiculously over-sized to Rae, but she recognized that this was so she could lean and drink from the straw rather than have to pick it up wit her hands. Her poor hands - there was no way those burns wouldn't blister. Her thoughts kept straying to the little bottle of kenet ointment Autor had given her, safely tucked away and frustratingly out of reach in her room at Milliways. If the stories were anything to go by, and so far they had been, kenet could do a lot for speeding the healing of burns as well as numbing the pain of them.

She had to change into a light blue robe or gown-like garment before they could check the extent of her injuries. The gown was bearable, if only just. Better than the weird, terry-cloth onesie they'd offered her the last time her clothes had been damaged beyond salvage by something SOF-related. The terry-cloth would've been hell against her burned skin, anyway.

Rae had to admit that her blouse was ruined and was going in the trash once she got home, from the extent of the burns near its collar. She felt a little bad about it, as it was one of her nicer shirts, though some part of her mind recognized her irritation at the loss as just something to keep her mind off the pain. She supposed she had lost the burned scarf and little silk necklace cord in the confusion as they left Director Misra's office. Her jeans... should be fine, and her shoes had survived the light singeing. Sunshine only reluctantly allowed the infirmary staff to convince her to remove the ring from her finger so that they could treat the burns there, though she recognized the need. She had only agreed after they said she could keep it in the pocket of her robe, and even then it was a trial getting the ring off without feeling like the effort was taking the skin with it. It didn't, thankfully, but it sure had felt like it.

All of that attention and SOF's clinical ability to take injuries and strange reluctance on the part of their patients in stride was... well, not great, not by a long-shot, but it was comforting in its own way. The feeling that her experience in Director Misra's office wasn't beyond the normal scope of SOF dealing with SOF business was somewhat less comforting, but she could feel the SOF infirmary staff's genuine desire to help, and see it in their (sometimes oddly-textured) shadows. It wasn't their fault uncertainty, pain, and the room's lack of windows were making their patient irritable.

Really, Rae felt if she could just get them to stop talking at her, and wanting her to talk back, then maybe she could get her head on straight and her thoughts in order. Even beyond the pain and scratchiness in her throat making talking difficult and unpleasantly cough-inducing, what Rae needed more than anything the time to process some of what had happened that morning - time alone - but she wasn't getting it. Always there was someone else coming in to run another test, or to apply some other medicine that might help, or to make sure she was comfortable, or to ask how she was feeling, or to simply refill her gigantic mug of iced tea. But it was a near constant stream of people.

Eventually, Rae reached her limit. She claimed the need to use the restroom: a completely plausible request, given the size of that mug of tea. But she could walk across the room by herself thank you very much, no she didn't need any help. She felt the wave of relief rush over her when she heard and felt the gentle click of the restroom door behind her, blocking out the people and sounds of her infirmary room.

A moment later, that cool wave of relief from the resulting quiet crashed hard into the upwelling of emotion when she saw herself in the restroom mirror.

She was an utter mess. Rae had never been vain about her looks, and her concerns about her myriad scars had always been more for the need to hide them or else have a way to explain their existence, rather than anything to do with beauty. But... at least most of her previous scars had been easily hidden. The colorful bruises beginning to show on her face and shoulders hardly fazed her, neither did the aching awareness of the more extensive bruises along her back and the backs of her legs. Her neck was a wreck of color. Bright, glaring, hateful red, the skin already beginning to blister and seep under the thick, shiny layer of ointment, and she didn't need her Dark Sight to see the corona of deep red-purple-blue-yellow bruising under and around the burns. She supposed she should be glad her neck was more or less evenly burned, not burned in an obvious shape of a hand, but she didn't really have the capacity to be glad just at the moment. Her hair hung loose and short on that side of her head, their ends frizzled unevenly. Rae thought she could still faintly smell the scent of burnt hair.

Her hands were less badly damaged than her neck, but were a vicious, angry red that would assuredly blister before the burns healed. Between the tightness of her burned skin and the numbing ointment, Rae's hands felt stiff, clumsy. Her mind wanted a bath, to feel clean again, but there was no way even the touch of even lukewarm water would do anything but hurt.

Sunshine stayed in the restroom, watching how her shadows moved along her damaged fingers, and tried not to think of how she would explain this. To Mel. To her mother. To anybody at the coffeehouse. Rae felt she knew what Charlie's expression would be, if she came in looking like this, and it hurt to contemplate. She hoped her apprentice was up to some sudden responsibility being dumped on them - there was no way Rae could knead dough until her hands healed. And her neck...

Rae's eyes, still hurting somewhat from the brightness of whatever the Goddess really was, burned a bit as they watered.

She would need more scarves and kerchiefs. She would need... She didn't know what she could need that would make this any better.

Some time later, there was a faint tapping at the door.

"Rae?" It was Theo, his voice soft. "Whenever you get a moment, we should talk."

Great.

Very reluctantly (and gingerly), Rae pressed the door handle's lever down with the back of her wrist, and stepped back out into the infirmary room.

She deliberately missed Theo's expression upon seeing her by not looking at him.

"They chec' you out, too?" she asked him, her voice quiet and broken from the damage to her throat. Rae sat and took a long drink from the huge mug of iced tea. Someone had topped it up while she was in the restroom.

"They gave me a once-over and said I'd live," Theo replied in his gently wry way.

"Pat okay?" Rae glanced at him then. Words were difficult. Each utterance threatened to scratch her throat into another coughing fit, so she did her best to keep them short.

"He might not be as pretty as he was, maybe, but he'll recover fine, they said."

She felt some of the tension in her release at that. Pat had... she hadn't been able to see what happened to him, against the glare of the Goddess' brightness, and hadn't been letting herself think too hard about what might have happened.

"Director Misra was shaken up and sports some bangs and bruises almost as colorful as yours. He'll probably be pressured into taking it easy for a bit, which'll be interesting since his office is practically a ruin now, but he'll power through. He's a tough one," Theo added.

And he no longer has a second-in-command, neither of them reminded the other.

"I'm glad," Rae replied, quiet but fervent. She hadn't lost anyone. No one died. But there was still a hollowness sitting like a cold pit beneath her breastbone. "What about the..." she started, then hesitated, dreading to ask because it would only lead to an answer. "The evidence?"

Theo grimaced. "Burned. Destroyed, for the most part."

"And the file?" Rae hated how her voice broke as she asked. "On the Blaises?"

On my family?

"It burned, too."

Rae turned her head away, pretending to herself the prickling of tears at the corners of her eyes was only because of the pain in her burned neck from the too-quick movement. Theo stepped closer, and Rae recognized in the movement the need to ease someone's pain.

"But, Sunshine, that was just the local copy."

She turned to look up at him so quickly her overbright eyes really did water from the pain of it. "What?" Her voice cracked on the word, her aching throat tight.

"By law, copies of official SOF case records are archived at three geographically disparate locations, plus recently a digital back-up," Theo replied. "They're government records, Sunshine, and high-risk ones, at that, as we've seen today. The Goddess isn't the first person or even the first SOF to try and destroy SOF records to protect themselves."

There was a note of irony in his voice that Rae didn't have to ask about.

"Were the... the records you used as part of the evidence...?" She could feel the tiny swelling of hope in her chest.

"They hadn't been archived yet, being recent, but Pat and I copied them before adding the copies to what we were bringing," Theo replied, smiling as he saw the relief on her face. "Most of what we brought, we can recreate from the copies, either from here or from the other regional headquarters' archives. It'll take a while, but we can do it. All we really lost were the fetch, the Delete-laced tea, and your recording of the conversation from that day. Which is hellish, because those really were the clinchers that connected the Blaise case to the Goddess' actions."

Rae gave Theo a faintly watery smile, feeling a little giddy, and not just from the cocktails of painkillers in her system. "I, ah... made of a copy of that recording, too. Weeks ago, before I ever gave that copy to you and Pat."

Theo's hand clasped her shoulder - gently, mindful of her bruises, but with feeling - and he looked at her very seriously. "Do you still have it? Is it safe?"

Rae nodded before her burned neck reminded her why she shouldn't. "Yes, I still have it, though not with me. And..." Struck with a thought, Rae stepped away from Theo, looking around the small infirmary room for her small pile of belongings. On the side table beside the small infirmary bed were her damaged clothes folded atop her singed sneakers, with her small shoulder-bag resting against the pile. Her ointment-covered fingers were numb and clumsy with the zipper, so she stepped aside and nodded to Theo. "Open it. Look in... there's a little tear between the leather and the lining. If it didn't get too hot, it should be okay. I remembered to start it when we were getting out of the car..."

Theo unzipped the small purse, and breathed, "Oh, Rae." And he pulled out the small listening and recording device Rae had stashed in there before leaving her house that morning, a few hours and a lifetime ago.


(Continued here.)