Dr Liam Skyler

It's remarkable, really, how easy it is for medical specialties to be ignored.

And then the head diagnostician of one of the city's main hospitals is... on the battlefield along with every other orderly or intern, because most of the other doctors are already busy enough as it is, on this field or any of a hundred others like it.

Liam thinks, absently, as he sews the girl's leg back on, that he could very easily grow to hate war. And that's rather interesting, really, the thought continues a few hours later, because he'd never particularly expected he'd ever find something to hate.

Dislike... that's different.

Also not really the point, at the moment, as missiles fly overhead, and he pulls away his scalpels to wait for the shock of impact. A moment later the electricity flickers, but he's working nearly blind anyway, and enough lights come back that he can still see what he's doing, as he pulls crumbled-brick and shrapnel from the young man's stomach.

It's the sort of scene that, no doubt, should be shot in slow-motion with mournful violins in the background, as the doctor stands at his post while the world falls apart around him, trying to keep the good redshirt nameless character alive. The injured boy is here only to show the doctor off to advantage, after all.

Ian Klanderman is an eighteen-year-old with a fondness, if no talent, for calvinball. He's just a boy. His parents work, as nearly everyone works. One cooks. One is a mechanical engineer with the army.

And now their boy is close to dying, bleeding on his table, in the middle of a war that's growing closer and closer to completely losing sight of whatever goal it may have originally claimed.

Missiles scream overhead, again, and he sighs as once more he pulls blades away from flesh, to wait.

This time they land much closer, and this half-destroyed building is nothing but wreckage. It's long moments before he manages to push himself to his feet, pulling himself up with the aid of the table.

Ian Klanderman was an eighteen-year-old kid, and now he is a broken wreck of a boy with half a wall dropped on top of him, ruining what little progress Liam had made.

When his eyes adjust to the dark enough that he can find one of his scalpels again, in the light of fires and distant explosions, he leans across the table and slices the boy's throat. Nothing to be done for him, now, and at least this way he'll die before regaining enough consciousness to feel the pain of a broken body.

Liam slumps to the floor again, propped up against the wall in a corner of what's left of the room, looking up at stars and smoke and death.

Waiting for death, either to come closer or to go away. To kill him, or to leave the area so he can safely leave the building and find some other room in which to work, to do what he can to help the people of his city.

Perhaps he sleeps, for when he opens his eyes again there is light, if it is a murky twilight. And there is silence, or at least no more machines, no more explosions. Not even the quiet roar of fires. Just silence.

And there is a woman, perched on a half-fallen wall, long silver hair blown into her face by a breeze he can't feel, down here in the remains of the room. She's watching him, fiddling absently with something in her lap while she waits.

It could be a gun, although he doesn't really think it is. She's not pointing anything at him, and she could have shot him whenever she first arrived, if that had been her plan.

He could be wrong, of course. But faced with someone whose skin is, of all colours, a light peach, his attention is perhaps understandably distracted.