Linked | Ironstrange

Death

The emergency room was not particularly crowded that day, but the majority of doctors and nurses ran behind the gurney that was just brought in.

"What do we have here Palmer?" Stephen asked making his voice heard over the general noisy commotion of the place, while Levi and the red fox zig-zagged their way to get under the gurney.

He tried to take a peek at the patient, curiosity bubbling up in his chest more powerful than the increasing disdain he felt towards feeling it at all, he had always hated the concept of being bonded to another being by something so intangible and out of his control as fate, so he decided he didn't want a soulmate since he was old enough to reason and here he was, thirty or so years after that, made a complete bundle of nerves, trying to anticipate how his soulmate looked like.

Well, his soulmate was dying, and there was probably no point in anticipating anything anyway. In any case, there was a big crowd of people and medic equipment surrounding the gurney and he wasn't able to discern a thing from where he was standing.

"A little busy here Stephen," Christine peeked her head over the crowd to look at him for a moment and then went back to work on the patient.

"Yeah, I can see that, need some help?"

"Have you seen the guy? I need all the spare hands I can get!"

For a moment he wanted to make a witty comment about how obvious it was that he hadn't seen the patient, since he was asking about what had just arrived at the emergency room, a question that miss Palmer had spectacularly failed to answer by the way, but before he could make any comment on that, he noticed the other more remarkable thing she said.

"Guy? What guy?"

"It's Anthony Stark, there was an explosion at his lab, apparently," a nurse that was attending a patient in the gurney beside them told him as if it were the most noteworthy gossip of the year.

"Move away," Stephen demanded one of the nurses assisting Christine and she complied handing him a pair of gloves.

Genius weapon manufacturer Tony Stark lay in front of him with a giant hole in the chest and doctor palmer's hand buried in his thoracic cavity up to her wrist.

"He has a considerably big amount of shrapnel pieces trying to pierce his heart and I can't see a way to stop his bleeding apart from this," she informed clogging the injury with her hand.

"Find an OR, " Stephen told the nurse he had switched places with, "Call in an tell them we are on our way, doctor West was just finishing his surgery, find out if that OR is ready, and someone please order as much O neg units as they can give us, let's go people!"

With no need for any further invitation, Christine jumped over the gurney and the rest of the team pushed it to the elevator, there was no space for all of them in there, and only Stephen and Christine for obvious reasons took the elevator with the patient to the OR.

"Weren't you operating with doctor West? Why is he finishing your surgery, Stephen?" Christine asked when they found themselves alone in the elevator.

He was going to tell her whatever lie crossed first through his brain, but at that moment the patient that he thought was sedated woke up screaming.

...

Anthony Stark woke up to the pressure of a person straddling his lap and a hand buried in his chest, his first reaction despite the excruciating pain he was in was to fight and try to remove the hand he felt drilling a hole in his chest, but his attempt at this was stopped by two strong hands on his wrists, he looked up and found a pair of blue eyes looking down on him.

"Mr. Stark you had an accident, we are doing our best to help you, I know it hurts, I'm sorry," the baritone pitch of the doctor's voice had a calming effect on him for some reason and despite the pain, he stopped fighting.

He grunted in pain, praying for some morphine or a good old fashioned blow to the head to render him unconscious.

"We need sedatives, Stephen,” the woman with the hand in his chest said, but the doctor holding his wrists didn't move or dropped his hands to do as she told him, he just stood there rubbing circles on his right wrist over his inactive soul tattoo and suddenly the pain stopped and the room went black.

...

"What was that? Why didn't you give him the sedatives?" Christine asked frantically.

"He fainted,"  Stephen replied as if that was the fact that sealed the deal of his inaction and he delicately dropped Stark's wrists onto the gurney, right before the elevator door opened at its destination.

There was a team already waiting outside the door and the OR was ready for them.

Stephen went to wash while the rest of the team pushed the gurney with Christine still on top towards the operating room.

He took advantage of finding himself alone, to take a peek at his right wrist, where the rounded soul tattoo that in the morning was inactive and grayed out now shone iridescent in all the spectrum colors.

He finished washing and pulled the sleeve down when a nurse came to inform him they were ready for him, so he put on some surgical gloves and entered the operating room.

He noticed Levi and his newfound red friend perched at the corner of the room in their butterfly form and he immediately moved his gaze away before anyone could even think of following it.

"Alright everyone, when Dr. Palmer removes her hand from the injury we are going to need immediate suction so I can proceed to remove all the shrapnel fragments, is everyone ready?" He asked and there were several nods, "Christine—, " he nodded as well and that was the only clue she needed to pull her hand out.

Blood bubbled behind her hand, there was so much of it that the suction machine wasn't keeping up to clear the area from it, however, Stephen still managed to remove at least ten pieces of shrapnel before the patient went into a cardiac arrest due to the continuous blood loss, which was not remotely proportional to the amount of blood they were currently transfusing him.

Stephen was paralyzed for a moment and Christine had to intervene and take care of the paddles to revive the patient before he could take on and remove more fragments from his chest.

Stephen found that if he thought of Anthony Stark as any other patient, despite the tangible and highly unwanted bond he recently found out they shared, it was easier for him to take impartial medical decisions while trying to save his life, which, one would think should be very easy for a person that decided they didn't want that bond from a very young age, anyhow the man laying on the table was a stranger to him and someone he in other conditions would have never wished to ever meet. And yet he felt the distress in his breath every time the ECG monitor showed an unusual heart rate after that first cardiac arrest.

Despite his major efforts in not getting involved, when the second cardiac arrest struck Anthony and none of the several attempts Christine made to bring him back worked, he felt how his lungs were vacuumed of all the air inside them and he punched the operating table with all he got.

But even the kind of pain that now crawled from his knuckles to his elbow and would probably keep him out of the OR for at least a week, could not distract him from the immense emptiness he felt settling down inside him. It fought all reason and was ridiculous in every thinkable way, but it was there, tangible and completely unbearable. Sorrow and loneliness consumed his insides in a blink as if he had mixed antimony pentafluoride with his morning glass of water and all his internal organs had suddenly been corroded into a big pile of mush.

"Stephen?" Christine looked at him concerned, "we have to call time of death, he's gone."

AN/: I don't even know what to write here, I'm sorry?