Chapter Text
It started with a jolt.
The kind that didn’t belong in a hospital — not in an elevator, not with a patient strapped to a gurney and Carter standing too close to duck the impact. The lights overhead flickered once, twice, then cut.
A beat of total darkness. It wasn’t long — maybe two seconds — but it punched straight through him, immediate and absolute. Like someone had flipped the world off and then back on again.
Then the emergency panel kicked in — dim, orange-tinged backup lighting that made everything look jaundiced. Sick. Unreal.
He didn’t move right away.
Neither did the elevator.
He reached out, pressed the emergency button. It beeped, but nothing happened. He tried the intercom. Static. Then silence.
The silence was the worst part.
“Uh,” the paramedic muttered beside him, shifting her weight. “That’s not great.”
Carter didn’t answer.
He stared at the metal doors, then at the narrow, airless space around them. Six feet by eight, if that. A box suspended in nothing. It felt like a coffin.
The gurney took up most of it.
The patient was unconscious — blunt force trauma, head injury, already intubated. His vitals were stable for now, but there was blood. A lot of it. Dried and wet and somewhere in between. It soaked into the gauze at his temple, matted his hair, pooled along the crease of the sheets.
Carter’s gaze locked on the rivulet trailing down the side of the patient’s face. It glistened in the emergency light — not red, but black. Thick and slow. Like oil. Like it wasn’t draining, just waiting.
The smell hit Carter like a memory — sharp, metallic, with that underlying sweetness that clung to trauma. It filled the space too fast, too completely. It crawled up his nose and sat thick in the back of his throat, like something he could choke on. Like something that had choked him, once.
For a split second, he was back in it — the ER, the tiles, the blood spreading beneath him in a halo, the impossible stillness of Lucy’s body just feet away. That terrible moment between knowing and understanding.
He blinked hard. Tried to breathe through his mouth. Didn’t help. The air tasted off — filtered through metal, too warm, too stale. Every breath felt like it was circling back on itself.
The walls were too close. He could feel the distance in inches now, not feet. The steel behind him. The gurney to his left. The paramedic’s shoulder just brushing his. All of it pressing in.
“Okay,” the paramedic said, pulling out her radio. “We’ll get out of here in a second. It’s probably just a grid relay or something. Happens more than you think.”
Her voice sounded far away. Muffled, like he was hearing it underwater. Or through cotton. Or maybe through blood.
He flexed his hand once. Twice. Again. Again.
His palm was clammy. Then slick. He wiped it on his coat, but the feeling stayed — phantom moisture, nerves firing without purpose.
The lights buzzed faintly above them. They weren’t flickering anymore, but they weren’t steady either. Everything had that sick yellow hue. It flattened the space. Made the blood look darker. Made the shadows look wrong. Made it all feel like a bad dream, one of those lucid ones where you know you’re trapped but can’t wake up.
He was sweating.
The air felt thick. Thicker than it should have. Like it had weight. Like it was sinking into his lungs and expanding just to push the oxygen out.
“Dr. Carter?”
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
His vision tunneled, the edges starting to blur with gray static. His heartbeat thundered in his ears — not rhythmically, but uneven, like a warning system glitching out.
The walls had gotten smaller.
Or maybe he had.
He was back there once again. Just for a second — the tile floor slick with blood, the lights overhead buzzing like a live wire in water. Lucy on her back, her mouth open like she was trying to say something but couldn’t get the words past her throat. Her eyes had still been moving. That was the worst part. She was there. Awake enough to be afraid.
And he couldn’t move.
Couldn’t crawl to her. Couldn’t even call for help. He remembered screaming — or trying to. Nothing had come out but air. Like the trauma had reached into his chest and crushed everything soft.
His limbs had been dead weight. His own blood pooling around his hip, warm and wet, but distant. His body hadn’t felt like his anymore.
He couldn’t reach her.
He hadn’t been able to move.
And somewhere deep in his nervous system, the same script had started to play again. The same paralysis. The same terror. A body-level memory replaying without permission.
“Hey. Carter.”
A hand on his arm — gentle, grounding.
He flinched hard enough to knock into the wall, shoulder colliding with the metal panel behind him. It echoed, sharp and metallic.
The paramedic pulled back instantly. “You good?” Her voice had softened. Lowered. Like she already knew the answer.
He nodded. Too fast. Too automatic. A bobblehead reaction.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”
His voice cracked just slightly at the end. Not enough to register as broken, but enough to ring false.
He wasn’t.
His heart hadn’t slowed. His throat still felt half-closed, like it was filled with smoke. His skin crawled under the collar of his coat. Everything in him was buzzing — not like adrenaline, but like static. Too much noise in his body. Too many ghosts in the room.
His lungs felt like they were folding. Each inhale tighter than the last. Shallow. Quick. Like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the box. Like the air had turned to syrup and every breath was a fight.
He looked at the gurney again.
Blood. Straps. Stillness. A body locked in place. Silent. Just like hers had been, before the tremors started. Before the monitors screamed.
He closed his eyes.
This is not the same. You are not on the floor. She is not here. This is not that.
But the logic didn’t land.
Because his body didn’t care. His muscles were seizing. His hands were shaking so hard he had to tuck them under his arms to keep them still. His back was slick with sweat. His scalp itched. His legs twitched like they might bolt. The walls felt like they were pressing in, slow and deliberate, like the room had decided to exhale — and he’d been caught inside its breath.
He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. Hard. Ground himself against the pressure. It didn’t help. He was trying to override something hardwired — to reprogram the panic, rewrite the narrative, but it was like trying to unplug a fire alarm by screaming at it. The sound was already in him. The signal already tripped. His chest kept seizing — shallow inhale, broken exhale, repeat. His jaw ached from clenching. His thighs trembled under his weight. His whole body had turned on him, like it remembered something he wished it would forget.
Not then. Not again. Not now.
The intercom crackled.
“We’ve got you. Hang tight. Rebooting now.”
A second passed.
Then another.
Then the elevator lurched. A whine of cables. A grind of gears. The floor shifted under them.
Movement.
Then — light. Real light. The overhead fluorescents kicked back in, humming to life like nothing had happened.
The elevator slowed, then stopped.
The doors opened.
Carter stepped out first. Quick. Controlled. His hands still shook, but he curled them into fists — tight enough for the nails to bite into his palms.
He didn’t look at the paramedic. Didn’t speak.
Just walked. One foot in front of the other, like he was counting them. Like it was the only thing he could trust himself to do.
His pulse was still hammering. His body hadn’t caught up with the exit yet. The hallway felt too bright. Too clean. Too loud with its silence.
He turned the first corner he found. Found an empty corridor. A supply closet. Something with a door.
Closed it behind him. Locked it. Leaned hard against the wall like it might give.
His knees gave out first.
He sank to the floor. Sat there with his arms wrapped around his middle like that might hold him in place. Like he could keep the memories from shaking loose again.
For a minute, maybe longer, he didn’t move. Just breathed. Shallow. Through his nose. In and out.
He was fine.
He was not fine.
Eventually, he stood. Straightened his coat. Pushed his hair back.
Doctor face. Doctor hands. Doctor spine.
He opened the door and stepped back into the light.
Like nothing had happened.
Like nothing ever did.