Primum Non Nocere (The Hippocratic Remix), by grey_sw

[bsg_remix_mods]

Title: Primum Non Nocere (The Hippocratic Remix)
remix author: grey_sw
Summary: Mutiny, memory, and three patients who stayed with an old doctor.
Characters: Cottle, Ishay, Bill Adama
Pairings: None
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Medical gore
Beta Thanks: Thanks to pigeon_angel for the beta.
Title, Author and URL of original story: brennanspeaks' Do No Harm
Author Notes: Thanks to brennanspeaks for the opportunity to remix this lovely story. Thanks also to the bsg_remix mods, lls_mutant and rosegriffes, for running the remix again!



The Marine was a mess. His blood pressure was dropping by the second, and as Cottle opened up his belly, he could see why: the kid was bleeding out of both hepatic arteries. His abdominal cavity was a slippery soup of blood and torn flesh.

"Somebody get me some clamps!" he ordered. He reached in, nudged his gloved fingers past the pancreas, and got hold of the artery on the right side, lifting it toward him. It slid within his grip, rolling between his fingers. As it did so, more blood bubbled up out of the breach in it, running down the side of the artery and then back down into the dark mess of the kid's open abdomen.

His attendant still hadn't handed him the damn clamps yet, so he looked up just in time to see Ishay as she entered the room. She was as blood-spattered as he was, if not more; her apron was covered with it. A thick strand of her hair had escaped from her ponytail, and it was bloody, too.

"Doctor, can you spare a minute?" she asked. "I've got an acute pneumothorax in..." She trailed off, her eyes on his hands.

Cottle shook his head. "This kid's hemorrhaging, Ishay. Chest tubes are on the top shelf. You've got the ball."

"I... understand, sir," she said, but Cottle had already looked back down. As Ishay retreated, someone pushed past her with a couple of bulldog clamps.

"Finally," he growled. He slipped one over the artery, squeezed it closed, and then fumbled for a suture kit. Someone pressed it into his hand, and without further thought he began to sew the wound shut, working fast.

"Goddamn mutiny," he muttered.

He ran his fingers over the edge of the wound, checking to make sure he'd sealed it, and then opened the clamp again. No blood leaked out. He clamped the left artery shut, sewed it up just as quick, and then looked over at the monitor.

Steady pulse. Good. With any luck, the kid might make it.

"Close this up," he said to no one in particular. Then he yanked his gloves off, tugged on another pair, and headed off to his right, where another medic was trying to stem the blood gushing from a civilian's femoral artery.

He shut his eyes, and allowed himself a single sigh of frustration. At his age, every patient reminded him of somebody else: some other case, some other life, some other death. Shrapnel wounds like the Marine's were always hard, damned hard. Just like the first one he'd worked on, so many years ago.

---

Sherman Cottle's father was a medic in the Caprican Navy. His grandfather was a medic in the Caprican Navy, too. His great-grandfather and namesake had been a sawbones on the Union side of the Great War, even before Caprica had a single world government. One of Sherman's first memories involved sitting on his father's knee, learning how to recite the Hippocratic Oath.

When he was fifteen, his father died on the front line on Tauron, trying to haul a wounded officer out of a foxhole. The next day, Sherman lied to the recruiter about his age. In a week, he was in basic training; in six months, he was in medical school at the Naval yards outside of Caprica City.

In a year, he was on Tauron himself, working under a grizzled old doctor named Becker.

"I'm not gonna babysit you," Becker had said. She'd seemed the very picture of a doctor to him: white coat, stern demeanor, hair pulled back in a tight grey bun. "You're a medic now, and when the shit hits the fan, you're on your own. You've got the ball, kid." Sherman hadn't quite believed her... but sure enough, when the casualties started to pour in, he found himself alone.

"Doc!" one of the orderlies cried. "Take this one!" As Sherman watched, he hauled a wounded man up onto a gurney and then dashed off again, his white coat flying behind him.

Sherman grabbed his medical bag, tore open the man's shirt, and froze. It wasn't the wound that stopped him, though it was ragged and clearly severe; it was the tattoos. The orderly had given him a Tauron.

Just like the one who'd shot his father.

He shook his head. A medic helps anyone, friend or foe, his father used to say. He took up his scalpel, drew an imaginary line down the middle of the man's abdomen, and began to cut.

Inside was a mess. The man was bleeding from three or four arteries, and shrapnel had perforated his gut. The filth that leaked forth had contaminated everything. Cottle glanced up at the man's face. He even looked a little like a bull, big and square-jawed. His eyes were open, and the whites were showing, rolling back and forth in sightless agony.

"It's all right," Cottle told him. "Hang on." He reached over, picked up a sponge, a shot of morpha, and a set of clamps, and began to work.

Forty-five minutes later, he sighed, rubbed the inside of his elbow over his forehead, and watched as the orderlies wheeled the patient away to the recovery tent. The room had gone quiet, as though the war was out of casualties, at least for now. Cottle watched as the last few corpses were taken away.

They were all Tauron.

"Don't expect him to live," Becker said later, as they stood outside the medical tent. She lit a cigarette, and took a long drag before continuing. "Infection'll set in for sure, if it hasn't already. But you did a damn good job today."

"Thanks," Cottle said.

"You want one?" Becker asked, gesturing with the cigarette.

"No thank you, sir," Sherman said.

Becker chuckled. "You better get over that. If you're going to cut it as a medic, you're gonna need something for your nerves. Believe me, these are better than the alternatives."

Cottle nodded, and then looked away, glancing over at the entrance to the tent. "What the frak is that?" he asked.

Standing beside the Captain was a tall, man-shaped machine. Its head turned from side to side, as though searching for threats; its steel hand rested upon its sidearm. Cottle could hear the noise it made as it moved, like whirring servos combined with a soft humming sound. It set his teeth on edge.

"That's a Cylon, kid. Our secret weapon. They're calling 'em the Sword of Caprica -- they're the reason why we got so many Taurons today. With the Cylons on our side, those poor dirt-eaters don't stand a chance. This war'll be over in six months."

"Creepy," Cottle said. The Cylon turned its head in his direction, almost as if it had heard him. Its red eye slid back and forth within its helmet.

Cottle shivered. "I, uh... could I have one of those cigarettes?"

Becker snorted with amusement. "Sure thing. Be my guest."

Four months later, the Sword of Caprica turned in its master's hand. The Caprican/Tauron War became the Cylon War, the Twelve Colonies were united against a terrible enemy... and Sherman Cottle was smoking two packs a day.

--

The mutiny was over. The flood of casualties had finally slowed to a trickle: a broken leg here, a concussion there. Cottle took the opportunity to check on Anders, whose head wound was much more serious.

Anders lay in his hospital bed, still and alone. The pulse monitor on the wall bleeped contentedly, right on time; though Sam Anders would most likely never speak again, his brain-stem was undamaged, leaving his bodily functions intact.

"Sorry, Sam," Cottle said. He drew a little blood from Sam's arm, for testing, and shone a penlight into his eyes. His pupils were wide and bright. They barely reacted.

"Frak, I knew it. You're probably gonna be a vegetable," Cottle muttered. He wiped a hand over his eyes, and then looked away, shoving the penlight into his coat pocket. "Poor kid. Goddamn it all. What'm I gonna tell Starbuck?"

Just then, one of his interns entered. "Excuse me, Doctor, but Ishay needs you," he said.

Cottle followed him out to the main room, where a young petty officer was bleeding out onto another bed. While Ishay went for a pulse oximeter, Cottle knelt beside the patient. She had both an entry and an exit wound, that was good... but the slow, shallow way she was breathing troubled him. He took his stethoscope out of his pocket, warmed it against his palm, and slid it over the young woman's heart, frowning at what he heard.

"Her blood pressure's down," Ishay said, as she slipped the pulse ox onto the patient's finger. "I was about to start a transfusion."

Cottle shook his head. "Don't bother. We ran out of donor blood a half hour ago."

"Then... then I'll check the records, find a new donor. We could do a direct transfusion..."

He looked back down at the patient. "Wouldn't do any good."

"Doctor..."

"Her BP is dropping too fast. It's probably a nicked aorta."

"So, surgery then..."

"Ishay," he growled.

"Could try a graft..."

"Ishay."

"I'm saying, we can't just..."

"Ishay."

"You're sure there's nothing..."

"Nothing," he said. He reached into his pocket for the pen he'd been using to mark hopeless cases, but Ishay stopped him.

"I'll do it. They need you back in surgery," she said.

He nodded, got to his feet, and squeezed Ishay's shoulder. She just looked away. Then he turned, and made his way back to the patients in the other room.

Triage was hard. It always was. Still, it was the first lesson a battlefield medic had to learn. Sometimes, there was simply nothing to be done.

---

During the third month of the Cylon occupation of New Caprica, somebody brought Cottle a One. The old Cylon had gotten in the way of a bullet; he lay, crumpled and small, in the mud outside the medical tent.

Obviously, whoever had helped him hadn't wanted anyone to catch them at it.

Cottle looked down at him for a minute or so, considering. Simon -- the Four -- was off giving inoculations on the other side of the settlement. If he wanted to, Cottle could let this Cavil gasp out his last in the mud. The Cylons would never know any better.

"Bring him in," he told his aides. "Quick. There's a spare bed by the wall."

Friend or foe.

When the interns moved him, the One gritted his teeth and growled like a dog. Blood poured from his coat. Once Cottle got it off, he could see why: the exit wound was massive.

"Looks like the Resistance got hold of a .45," one of the aides said.

"Shut up and help me with this," Cottle told him. There wasn't much to be done, though; by the time they had the Cylon hooked to the monitor, it was obvious he wasn't going to make it. His blood pressure was dropping like a rock.

"Doesn't matter anyway," the same aide groused. "It's not like he's really dying."

Cottle shook his head. "No, this is real," he said. "They may come back afterward, but they die, just like we do." He paused. "Go check on the other patients, will you?"

Once the aides were gone, Cottle fetched a shot of morpha from his bag. He knelt beside the groaning One, found a vein, and injected half a dose. It wasn't enough to kill him, or even to put him out, but it would make death a little easier. Anything more seemed like a waste -- they never had enough drugs, partly because the Cylons wouldn't give them any. The Ones, in particular, were no great proponents of giving gifts to the humans.

Cottle wasn't stupid enough to think that would ever change, morpha or not.

Still, he laid his hand upon the Cylon's, and gave it a reassuring squeeze. The One's eyes opened. He turned his head, looking at Cottle yet straight through him, and spoke.

"Mother," he gasped. "Mother..."

Cottle didn't stop to think about how strange that was, didn't stop to wonder whether skinjobs like this one even had a mother. Instead, he said the same thing he always did.

"It's all right. She's here now. Go to sleep."

The Cylon stared at him a moment more, and then let his head fall back against the bed. His hand went slack beneath Cottle's. After a long moment, Cottle stood up and left him, with one last pat on the hand.

That wasn't the end, of course. Sometimes people die fast, but they seldom die easy. Human beings have animal tenacity, the legacy of a reptilian hindbrain which fights to keep the body alive at all costs. Oddly enough, the Cylons were the same; if death was no more than a minor annoyance to them, then somebody had neglected to tell it to their bodies.

The One lived ten minutes more, wheezing as he struggled to fill his lungs. His face grew pinched and pale, and his brow furrowed, almost as if he was more angry than hurt. His hand -- the hand Cottle had held -- twitched against the bed, fingers drumming against it.

He didn't speak again.

---

A couple of hours after Gaeta and Zarek were executed, The intercom woke Cottle from a well-deserved nap.

"Doctor Cottle to the Admiral's Quarters, please."

Bill Adama looked as weary as Cottle felt; his eyes were watery and thin behind his glasses. His spine, though, was still straight, his head unbowed.

The grit in Adama's posture was good to see. Cottle didn't give a damn about the Cylon alliance, one way or the other, but he did care about the wandering signature on his requisition forms, and about the uptick in petty injuries he'd had to deal with. Things had fallen apart in recent weeks, and that was Bill Adama's fault.

Two years ago, Adama's crew had followed him into something much worse than mere mutiny: open warfare against the Admiral of the Fleet. They'd sided with him on pain of death, in the face of the enemy itself, all because Bill Adama was not Admiral Cain. Now, many of the same men had turned on him, had tried to kill him... because he was not Admiral Cain.

Things were falling apart.

"You wanted me?" Cottle asked.

"Yeah. My Marine guards gave me this. Looks like it belongs to you." He passed Cottle a white paper bag, entirely unmarked. Cottle opened it up and looked inside.

Morpha. Two doses, both unused, with Felix Gaeta's name on the syringes. More than enough for a fatal dose; enough to escape the firing squad, if Gaeta had wanted to.

Apparently, he hadn't.

Cottle sighed, and shook his head. "Oh, Ishay," he muttered.

"If this is a problem, I need to know about it," Bill said quietly. "It's not, is it?"

Cottle shook his head.

"You don't think she did it in... in support of the aims of the mutiny?" Bill asked.

"No," Cottle said. Then he snorted. "Frak, no."

Bill shrugged. "That's all I needed to know," he said. "You're dismissed, Doctor."

Cottle left the bag on the table, and walked to the door.

"Sherman."

He turned. "Yeah?"

"Thanks. For everything. It could have been a lot worse."

"As long as you realize that," Cottle said, "you've got nothing to thank me for."

---

After Boomer had shot him, Bill's recovery had been hard. The fact that he'd even survived the operation was to Layne Ishay's credit, so Cottle made sure to take charge of his physical therapy, simply to keep her out of the Old Man's firing line.

He and Bill worked together for hours: in the therapy pool, on the balance ball, on the exercise bike, and, later, on free weights and the heavy bag. They didn't talk much. Bill would simply show up, change into his tanks, and do whatever Sherman told him to, until Sherman said he could leave.

"Are we done?" he'd ask.

"No. This time, keep your back arched," Sherman would say. "Sternum high. Ten more."

It took six months for Bill Adama to fully recover. Afterward, he sent Cottle six cartons of cigarettes and a good bottle of ambrosia, along with a slip of paper which just said THANKS. The gift made Sherman grimace; he gave the booze to Ishay, stashed the smokes against a rainy day, and tossed the paper in the trash.

He'd have done the same for anyone.

---

Cottle went by the mess hall on his way below decks, so by the time he got back to sickbay, Ishay's morpha was already there.

"Looks like your package came back," he said. She just blinked at it. She was exhausted; he doubted she'd had a nap.

"He didn't use it," she said. Then, finally: "I thought it would help."

"You're damn lucky. The Admiral would've had your ass over those. What were you thinking?"

She held up a hand to stop him. "The Admiral bleeds red like everybody else."

Cottle snorted. He smacked his cigarette pack against his palm, drew one out, and lit it up, curling his other hand around the match. "Crazy kids tryin' to save the world," he muttered under his breath. "Like everything else we do isn't enough."

At last, he sighed. "Get some rest, Ishay. We have a lot of work to do tomorrow."