People Like Us Part III [MxFxM]

02

Nathan was still reeling, just a bit, as he made his way back through the ward to the lab, holding the syringe from Dr. Nhik tightly. He'd just seen his son flatline, and he didn't even have a chance to be able to take that in, as well as the fact that Nhik both helped him and got another sample for Nathan to work with, without even being present for more than ten minutes. No, instead Nathan was getting right back to work as he entered the lab, deciding to make the slides himself just to give himself something to do. If he asked Iara or someone else to make them again, he'd have a few minutes to himself to sit and think, which he didn't want to do. If he sat and thought, he'd inevitably think back to River flatlining, and Nhik's comments about his son, and he didn't have time to deal with his feelings concerning both of those things at the moment. He had work to do, and saving River's life was more important than getting pissed off because the guy who was supposed to help save him was more concerned with how cute he was.

Nathan didn't spend much time in the lab itself once he got there, working quickly to make up the slides he needed before taking them back into his office to see what they were dealing with. The liquid in the syringe looked pretty gross, to say the least, and Nathan knew it was the infection River was dealing with. They just had to see how bad it was, and hope to come up with a way to fix it. Once Nathan was back behind his desk, he turned his computer on and pulled the microscope toward him again, fitting a slide into place and turning to the monitor to see what was going on. Immediately Nathan knew it was Sepsis, and a very bad case from the looks of things. That wasn't much of a surprise, he was expecting that. Looking closer, however, he found more interesting things. The whitish-yellow areas of the infection showed to be white blood cells, probably dead from the looks of the infection, and the green parts were already decomposing cells.

The frothy bits were the infection itself, and as far as Nathan could see, it had traces of blood and epithelial cells. That confirmed the infection was from River's reproductive tract at least, not that it was really unexpected. Nathan sighed and pulled the slide out from the microscope, switching it for another one mixed with Iodine. The handy thing about things like Iodine and HCl was that they stained certain substances in the samples, to give a better idea of what was being looked at. Whatever Nathan couldn't see regularly became visible once it was stained a different color, and it was interesting to see little bits of purple floating around. The problem was that there were only trace amounts of whatever the Iodine was staining, which was probably just glucose. It wasn't anything particularly useful, and he doubted the HCl would show much of anything either; not anything they could use. He checked that slide anyway though, just to make sure he was right, before putting everything onto the tray he'd thought to grab earlier. He wanted everyone else to look everything over, and he had to have someone make up vials to take to the Tox Lab for a better analysis. As soon as he had the door shouldered open, Nathan started talking, setting the tray down on a nearby table.

"Greg, I need you to make some test tubes, take them down to the Tox Lab to be analyzed, preferably quickly. Andrew, it's your turn for coffee duty. Iara and Miles, I need you guys to look these slides over, tell me if you see anything, if something sticks out, whatever you find."

Iara looked up from whatever she was working on and nodded briskly, walking over to take the slides Nathan mentioned while Greg got started on making those tubes.

"Anything of importance we should know about Dr. Vogel?" Iara asked. "So we don't waste time."

"There's traces of glucose." Nathan answered. "That's really all I managed to get though."

"Hey, what size coffee?"

The new voice had Nathan glancing over Iara's shoulder to see Andrew hovering by the door, making him sigh because the man could've been halfway there already.