The room was already too quiet—like the silence before thunder—when Teddy and the medic team moved in with practiced urgency. Someone called out, half-coaching, half-commanding, as if the right words could buy seconds.

“How are we doing this?” Teddy asked, bracing himself for the next instruction, the next adjustment.

Indie didn’t waste time. His voice turned clinical, focused. “Um… I’ll go under. You can pass me the tourniquet.”

Teddy nodded once, then again—passing what needed to be passed, obeying the rhythm of survival. The moments didn’t feel like conversation anymore. They felt like a countdown you couldn’t see.

But then the human panic slipped through anyway.

As the team worked, a man—Peter—spoke fast, almost pleading, as though being overheard by fate might change what was already set in motion. He was talking to someone close to him, someone he clearly trusted, someone he didn’t want to lose.

“Can I just get through? Is that all right?” he asked, not to medical staff, but to the world itself. Like if he could just push past this one obstacle, everything would go back to normal.

Then, suddenly, a sharp emotional edge cut the air.

“Oh, don’t leave!”

“I’m not going anywhere, darling.”

Those words landed like a promise spoken to the wrong storm. Peter’s voice wavered, his fear leaking through every sentence. His concern wasn’t only for himself. It was for the people tethered to his life—especially the one he loved, the one he couldn’t bear to watch drift further away.

He tried to steady the conversation, but grief doesn’t wait for permission.

“Yes. Yes. So I can never get on a bus again,” he said, as if the worst part wasn’t the blood, not the danger, not even the pain—just the sudden end to routine. “Say that again, darling. I couldn’t hear.”

He looked for reassurance like a drowning man searching for a rope. Someone else—maybe a nurse, maybe a paramedic—kept bringing him back to the facts, back to what mattered. Back to what could still be controlled.

And the staff did what they always did: they made the chaos measurable.

Teddy turned to the others and delivered the update with the blunt calm of someone who’d seen too much to be shocked. “Bleeding was controlled by Celox, Blast bandages and two tourniquets.”

Even that sounded like a miracle explained in technical terms.

“Tourniquet time is coming up to two hours, so probably best keep an eye on that.”

The words should have been comforting. Instead, they only made the clock feel louder.

From somewhere nearby, a clinician confirmed, “Vitals are per the pre-alert.”

The case moved forward—procedures, checks, the steady grind of emergency medicine. But behind it all, Peter kept fighting for normalcy, for the familiar structure of daily life, because without it he couldn’t understand how close he was to losing everything.

“She has Alzheimer’s,” Teddy said, and the admission changed the temperature in the room.

Peter’s involvement wasn’t limited to survival. He carried the weight of other people’s confusion too.

Sometimes she became agitated. Sometimes she didn’t understand where she was. Sometimes kindness had to be spoken twice because the first time didn’t stick.

And then the details poured out, not in a neat report, but in fragments—like a life trying to explain itself in the middle of crisis.

Teddy mentioned the man’s history, trying to make sense of him. “I taught at the university for 45 years. Linda worked in the labs.”

A couple of brainiacs, then? someone asked—half-joking, half-curious.

Peter let out something that might’ve been a laugh, if it hadn’t been edged with sorrow. “Oh, no, no. We were just a couple of jobbers.”

But the truth was never just “jobbers,” not when their daughter became what they’d always quietly imagined for her.

“Our daughter, Annie,” he said, and the pride in his voice turned the hallway momentarily warmer. “She was the brainiac.”

“She’s a particle physicist.”

And not just any physicist—someone connected to the cutting edge, to the kind of work that made the world feel bigger. “She works on the Hadron Collider in Switzerland.”

Even as he spoke, Peter sounded like he was trying to anchor himself in facts—because facts were reliable. Facts were solid.

Alzheimer’s wasn’t.

The staff acknowledged the