I don’t need you to say you love me. I only ask that you stay.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs
Current Date: October 11, 2022

Character: Hanna Mitchells
Race: Human
Age: 40
Current residence: Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia
 

---

I really feel as though I don’t need any drama at work. I’ve had enough of that while I was out and about and, you know, there’s plenty of drama to be had from certain of our patients. Not the whole lot of them, certainly not, but some do end up actually dropping by more often than not and it’s not because they need any physical help, they’re just being butts about things and they seem to think that some of us here owe them the world for some reason.

Mrs. Bartleby is one of those who seem to think that we all owe her our never-ending gratitude because her husband—her dead husband, so everyone honestly calls her widow Bartleby—is one of those men whose money went into the town to keep it alive and make it grow. I hate to be the one to tell you this, sugar, but from what I’ve learned of the late Mr. Bartleby, he rather liked to offer his money, sure, but only to particular women who were rather scantily clad.

The old widow is more than aware of this, but it seems that she would rather opt to overlook that completely when she comes to us with an invisible booboo, demanding that we take care of her first and foremost, ignoring anyone else that might have been there before her. At times, that’s not so much an issue, it’s quiet and the person or three that might have been there already, waiting to be seen, know her and they’ll let it slide. It isn’t as though she won’t be sat in a room and left on her own for a short while as is, anyway.

I was the poor sap stuck taking care of her, the last time she came around. Her wrist hurt, or so she claimed, she must have broken it, or so she cried but we checked everything, saw her getting in and out of her coat without an issue, saw her handling her ridiculously big purse without a problem and, well yeah.

While we were doing our check-ups to make sure that she was indeed fine—hypochondriac she might be, but we’ll still at least check most things—she started regaling us—or so I’m sure she believes—about how there was this young man she had known when she had been but a teenager. A young man she found herself fancying in ways that were not for the young ladies of her age group, back then.

She often offers different spins on the same general story of how she met this young man—he rarely has the same name twice, but her general age and that of the mysterious young man are often the same—and how she was ready to give all of her precious little heart away to him and that she’d told him that he had no need to tell her that he did love her. All she needed was for him to stay at her side but, alas, life had other ideas in mind and her parents were set on her marrying the man who did become her husband and just, it’s a whole lot of everything for not much of anything in the long run.

Once or twice, one of the older workers will seem to grow tired of hearing her talk endlessly about the same thing and will remind her that she and the now-deceased Mr. Bartleby met somewhere romantic, fell in love, were married within six months and it always seems to set her off. She’ll start crying and flailing and claiming that we’re calling her a liar and that she knows she loved this mysterious young man from back then and that she never loved her husband and man, I can’t deal with it.

I get that it might be her way of, I’m not sure how to put it, dealing with the fact that her husband had little affection left for her at the end, but the stories she seems to believe in are so fake that I could pluck every single thing that’s wrong with that very story and tell you why it’s wrong. I don’t have time for this. At times, I feel as though her children should be spending more time with her because she’s clearly just a lonely old woman, but I learned early on that they had no children of their own. They had plenty of dogs in prior years but once he passed away, the dogs were no longer part of the picture because she supposedly had never had a single care in the world for them. There’s just so much to unpack when it comes to her.

On certain days, I wish I could just dump her off to the psych ward, but I don’t think they’d have much they could help her with and, well, a man can dream at this point, a man can dream.

I wish her no ill will, mind you. I just would like for her to stop dropping by because she thinks she’s got all the ickies in the world.

Final Word Count: 855

You should probably not do this without a disguise, but I can’t make you listen to my advice.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs
Characters: Hanna Mitchells
Race: Human
Age: 39
Current residence: Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia
Final Word Count: 766 words
 

---

The stories you hear from some of the patients are out there, I swear. There are days when I just don’t know where all of the stories are coming from. On certain days, I can only blink in absolute confusion as someone comes to me with a broken arm and tells me that they were just trying to see how superman managed. That was the short version.

The longer version was that this idiot had been drunk, had decided to jump off of a second-floor balcony and had wanted to see how far he could fly. Because, yeah, he’d been drunk off his arse and he’d somehow thought he could fly. He’s lucky that the worst of it was the broken arm.

Worse than these, I think, are some of the X-rays I’ve seen of people and what some have either swallowed or, you know, put up their arse. As someone who would potentially like something up there, I’d still only opt for something attached to someone living and breathing, or something with a flared enough base that it couldn’t really go anywhere but I digress. I’ve seen X-rays of people with these types of toys shoved up so far, despite the base, that yeah. It’s uncommon, though.

It was before we came back here, the last hospital where we spent time. I had someone with, yup, a sex toy stuck up their arse come into the ER. X-rays were taken, things were looked over and the guy was put on a table. That thing was stupidly long and I don’t even know how he managed that as, all the while, he was blubbering about how his friend had told him that it was all done on a dare and that they wouldn’t share the videos and that he probably should have worn a disguise anyway just in case because his friends were arseholes anyway and that it was going to just ruin him forever.

Eventually, the thing came out, one of the nurses helping actually fainted and I’m still not over that one. Yeah, it was long, I’m pretty sure it was one of those things you were supposed to use on two people or, well, it’s what I assume anyway, but it was nothing worth fainting over. Or so I figured but I later learned that she was a very fervent Catholic woman and she’d probably never seen anything of the sorts before. That’s fine. To each their own.

It’s been so much quieter now that we’re back home. I don’t really regret settling back down, though. I don’t miss the Third World countries. I did miss, for a while, just being out there and discovering new places but not at the price of the high-stress environments. That’s where we were usually stationed. Places with war, with gangs, with bad things, just generally happening.

A bit of quiet, at this point in my life, feels like it’s deserved. I mean, I’ve worked this hard, and this long already, it’s not my whole life yet but it’s been a chunk.

There’s not that much that happens here. We’re in a spot that means we get people from the neighbouring area too and you know, that’s all right. I think that always seeing the same people day in and day out would get repetitive, and I’d probably go a little weird in the head. Not that I mind treating anyone, but if anything can be understood from the fact that I spent the first decade of my doctor-life out with docs without borders, is that I need to not fall into a very repetitive routine. I need change. That change doesn’t need to be drastic, but I still need to see new faces every now and again.

The funny part, I suppose, or so Murdoc might try to state, is that this only applies to my working life. As far as my personal life is concerned, I’m more than content to settle into a comfortable routine and were it not for the big guy, I’d probably always be eating the same thing over and over again. I can’t help it. Once my work day is done, I sort of switch off and I leave everything work-related behind.

This is one of those things about how life was before, while we were out there. There never really was any proper end to the work day. You’d never know if someone wasn’t going to pop up needing your help. Maybe that’s why I’m so relaxed when I get home, now. I don’t see what else it could be.

You’re never prepared, but things will work themselves out, as they have before.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs
Characters: Hanna Mitchells
Race: Human
Age: 37
Final Word Count: 667 words
 

---

During our year touring different hospitals in the country, I met a lot of different people. I don’t know that I expected to have quite as many good memories as I did, but I do. It was a good time in our lives; I’m certainly not going to lie. It wasn’t the high-stress of being out in Third World countries, helping in places where war and famine were the norm but it still was different from working at home and Murdoc had been right to bring that option up to the surface.

I wasn’t ready to go back to those war-torn countries, not even because I felt as though I’d left part of my heart back there, but due to the stress of it. I used to work best in these environments but too much stress will do anyone in and I’m sure Murdoc still remembers me waking up screaming a few nights a week after we’d come back home.

On the year away from home, though, we stayed within the country but we spent a few weeks in one hospital here, a few weeks in another one. We mostly went into littler places, places that needed a bit of a friendly outside help or places that were in bad neighbourhoods, it was a good way to change things up a little but still stay away from truly high-stress places.

We met quite a few people, some who left their marks on us, others who clearly didn’t but there was one particular old woman, she told me she’d worked at that little hospital all of her life and while things didn’t always work out and they couldn’t always be prepared for what came their way, she reminded me that while some people would see some things as not working out, she believed that they did in their own way, as they always did before. When they would lose someone, no matter the effort, it was because it was their time and God had come to fetch them back above.

She was one of them. I mean no disrespect to anyone who believes in any type of god, if someone wants to believe that there is an entity up there, watching over us, they can. If they want to believe that people die because they’ve done their time, they can, but I’m not the type of person who believes in these things. I don’t judge, but I don’t believe.

I have a hard time believing when I see a little boy come in, all bruised up and broken because his mother is in a drunken rage, dying on my table because his mother did so much damage that he couldn’t be saved. I can’t believe that ‘God’ would do this. This little boy, he did nothing wrong. He existed, he was trying to live, to have a life of his own; if not for the alcohol in his mother’s system and her anger, he could have had a chance, he could have grown up, he could have had a life away from this hell but no, he died there, in my arms.

Thankfully, we left that particular hospital just a day later because I couldn’t take much more of her preaching about how her god had called that little boy back up to heaven. That wasn’t right, it just wasn’t. I may not be a believer in a higher power but I do believe in making sure people pay for their acts and I took care of things so that his mother would pay for his death. Mind you, I didn’t do anything illegal, quite the contrary, I just did everything I legally could and it paid off. At least, when I checked in a few weeks after I’d left, it had paid off.

It won’t bring that little boy back but at least now I can have a small bit of peace of mind in knowing she likely won’t repeat this particular mistake.

Then they showed me the door.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs
Characters: Hanna Mitchells
Race: Human
Age: 37
Final Word Count: 721 words
 

---

When I stepped back outside, Murdoc was waiting for me, an amused smirk curling his lips. I couldn’t help but huff softly before I walked over to him and, waiting for him to straighten from his perch against the railings, we went on our way. He stayed quiet as we walked for a few minutes, waiting for me to say anything before he uttered anything in return and this was usual for him and I adored my friend all the more. He knew I needed time to digest what had just happened; it didn’t stop him from looking amused, however.

“So… they told me to get out.”

“Clearly,” he offered in turn, the single word low and laced with his amusement still, “as we both knew they would when you barged in there—”

“I didn’t barge in there; I had an appointment like everyone else!” I knew I sounded offended and it would fade with time but at that particular moment, I was offended and, in the long run, it would be fine, right at that point, however, I needed to be offended.

“—Hanna, you went in there to tell them that their equipment was outdated and barely worked and that it was why they were losing more patients than they were saving.” His voice hadn’t changed; it still was low and amused.

I knew he had a point. Yes, I’d gone in there to give them a piece of my mind about how their refusal to update their equipment—they could afford it—was the reason why they were losing so many patients; it wasn’t the area the small hospital was located in that was the issue, as they liked to claim.

I wouldn’t have done this if we’d not been leaving just hours later for another work place. I was glad that Murdoc had talked me out of going back to Doctors Without Borders, I was still struggling with some mild effects of my PTSD and I couldn’t handle the stress of the job unless they sent me somewhere more peaceful than all of the places we’d been before and I knew they wouldn’t.

As someone who had a huge note in my files about how I worked perfectly well under high-stress jobs, I did better in high-stress environments where the people were usually pouring in because I could still stay focused on the task at hand and not get distracted by the number of new people piling in. At least, I used to be able to but too much stress will do anyone in and Murdoc had to pull me away. I couldn’t handle it, not anymore.

That was some years ago at this point and a couple of years back I had told him I felt ready to go back out there but he only just gave me a single look and scoffed at me. He told me to think that one over some more because he knew I wasn’t ready.

So instead, we spoke to the higher-ups at work, they okayed a year away as we would be travelling to a few other hospitals—still within the country—to help, and that’s what we did.

I can’t even begin to explain how grateful I am for Murdoc stopping me from going back to DWB because it would have killed me. Even just this going from place to place every two months has drained me and as we ended up in a few places that were a little more ghetto than not, the stress and my PTSD have climbed back up the ladder I had carefully oiled to keep them from bothering me.

“Bags all packed?” His words startled me out of my thoughts and I only gave a small nod, the only thing keeping me from sinking back into those lost memories was the feeling of his large palm sitting against my back, not far from my shoulders. He was guiding me back to the car, letting me just think about anything I wanted because I needed it now and again but never for very long.

“I’m ready to go home, yeah.” Home, the place we’d left more than a year ago, though we’d dropped in one weekend a month to make sure everything had been clean. I longed to be back there.

There are some things you shouldn’t keep to yourself.

Timeline/World: Modern Monotony – Ticking Clocks
Characters: Hanna Mitchells
Race: Human
Age: 35
Final Word Count: 533 words

---

Says the guy who keeps a lot to himself. I guess it’s not all that surprising after everything I’ve seen and all of the places I’ve been but I can’t help it. I’ve seen so much horror and not all of it because of war. If only it’d been just because of war. There is more to life than war, though. There are drug lords, poverty, malnutrition, thieves and so many other things that will leave an area in need of me, of us.

I’m one hypocrite among many, I know. I don’t like to talk to others about what bothers me because I can see that they already have their plates full with what is bothering them, so why should I lug in my problems with them? Mine are minimal for the most part, though the big brute would say otherwise. We’ve been working together for far too long for him to not be able to read me. He’s the only one.

He’s my oldest friend, the one who’s been with me through it all, the one I can count to when it gets bad and I need someone to hide me away from the world even for just fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes is what I need, or so I tell myself. I know on some days I need more than that but I can’t afford more than that.

Of course, after the hell that made us back out of Doctors Without Border—me more than Murdoc, he just followed me through my decision—I needed more than fifteen minutes but I had them, we’d found a place in a quiet city, work at the hospital and while I’ve seen some horrors there was nothing quite as bad as seeing her head rolling at our feet. The image is still vivid in my mind’s eye, even though it’s been years.

I’m not sure why I told Murdoc I felt ready to go back to work out there. I don’t really feel that ready, I feel like I would actually be pushing myself in a way that might just break me completely. I’m that way, he knows it. I push hard, harder than I should most of the time but the side effects of that pushing have never been really bad. Just temporary and not lasting.

Looking back to my decision of wanting to enlist again, however, makes me wonder if I’ve really kept my sanity intact. The first few years were good, I miss the passing friends we’ve made though I’m not sure if they remember us or not. Some of the later years were far less than ‘good’ but that’s what I get for picking this job, isn’t it? Nothing is easy about helping those who cannot afford the help of hospitals or doctors, or those who live in areas where these two things just don’t really exist.

I do believe that shamans or tribe doctors can do a lot to help their people but at times it’s just not enough. There’s need for something a little more and that’s where we came in.

Am I ready to face potential hell to get back out there in the world? I don’t know.