[Fanfiction] Boffins and Brutes
Title: Boffins and Brutes
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Genre(s): Drama/AU/Steampunk
Character(s)|Pairing(s): Prussia/fem!England
Rating/Warning(s): R, vulgar language, somewhat gruesome descriptions of medical procedures
Word Count: 5,536
Summary: Sergeant-Engineer Gilbert Beilschmidt and Doctor Alana Kirkland. A match not quite made in heaven when one loses an arm and the other needs a guinea pig.
Notes: Part of a fic/art trade with katamanda . She requested “Prussia/fem!England, steampunk/cyberpunk”.
Losing his left hand hadn’t hurt nearly as much as it should have. Perhaps that was a blessing (though he wasn’t going to admit how much it hurt). One minute he had been gripping the rounded contours of the smoke bomb and the next minute- poof! There went his hand, as well as a good deal of his arm.
Gilbert had stared at it stupidly for a moment before he had stripped off his neckcloth and wrapped it around and around the stump. He stretched the cloth tight, gritting his teeth and knowing that there should be pain but unable to feel anything much. Not when his heart roared in his ears like the incoming howl of a steam train, not when he refused to feel the pain and let it hinder him in any way. The cauterization in the sickbay afterwards had sent him into a fever for three weeks.
He woke up in the military hospital in Berlin, ten pounds lighter (including the loss of half his left arm) and but a little less than a pound heavier thanks to an Iron Cross, Second Class. At the same time, he was heavier with the prospect of honorable discharge looming over his head. The thought pissed him off to no end, of course. He was Sergeant-Engineer Gilbert Beilschmidt, second youngest to get the rank (admittedly promoted by necessity, common sense, and an unfortunate boiler accident), and his damn brass stripes hadn’t even had the chance to rust.
Until he was asked to be a lab animal.
Gilbert didn’t have that much against scientists. After all, where else was he going to get his phosphorous and other weird, amazingly dangerous chemicals that kept an airship purring and soaring? But those nose-up, sneering, pompous little bitches who went to the hulking University, who couldn’t find their asses with both hands and map? Those giggling maniacs who shot lightning at corpses and sewed up animals into bizarre creations from nightmares and twisted fairytales? No fucking thank you.
The military higher ups phrased it with all the pretty words and bullshit that they were capable of. Some doctor from England was visiting the University, some genius in replacement limbs. The doctor had heard about Gilbert’s particular case and had shown much interest and was even graciously deigning to stay indefinitely. It was the promise of continued service that hooked Gilbert, on the other hand, though he wasn’t completely adverse to the idea of a new limb. Not that he was going to say anything about that.
They brought the doctor to him the next day. To his surprise, the mad scientist he had been expecting was- female.
She was not particularly tall, but she held herself ramrod straight, her sharp chin jutting out imperiously. A stiletto sized hatpin held a small black hat and veil to a thick, sandy blonde knot of hair and she wore a severe and somewhat plain dark green dress, tight sleeves down to the wrist and lace around her neck. She carried a very battered black leather valise case. The only remarkable things about here were her brilliantly emerald green eyes and her thick, dark arching eyebrows. Those eyebrows distracted him long enough for him to be surprised at the intensity of her eyes, both in the color and in the sheer force of the gaze with which she observed him. For the first time, he found himself considered like a specimen waiting a pin or a formaldehyde bath.
One of the accompanying officers cleared his throat officiously, before saying in English, “Miss Kirkland, this is-”
“Doktor Kirkland, if you please,” the woman replied frostily in more than adequate German. She had the peculiar, slightly stilted accent that hinted she had learned most of her grasp of the language from books. “Or just Doktor will do. You may leave.”
Both officers stiffened and she paused and seemed to reconsider, before adding, “You may get me a chair. Then you may leave.”
Astonishingly, the order was followed swiftly and without protest and with a cursory salute, both officers left, their expressions carefully stoic. The doctor sat in the procured chair and brought her leather case onto her lap. She made a production of pulling out a slim sheaf of papers and a battered notebook.
“I haven’t seen anyone get Lieutenant Hauser to shut up like that,” Gilbert said conversationally, making his own production of raking his gaze over her as slowly and thoroughly as possible. “Much less a woman.”
The doctor smiled thinly, not seeming to acknowledge the very obvious and lascivious scrutiny. “It is a necessary skill in my field.” She pulled out a long charcoal pencil and balanced its point upon the papers upon her lap.
“Since when are women doctors in England?” Gilbert asked idly. “Not enough men to go around?”
“Since we recognized ability, not sex,” replied the doctor coolly.
Gilbert snorted. “Must be at the bottom then.”
Her bright green gaze could have cut through steel. “Sergeant, I learned to read using medical texts and anatomical manuals. I was more than qualified to enter Cambridge University by the time I was fifteen. I earned my medical degree in the University of Paris at the age of nineteen and I was recognized as a practicing physician by Saint Mary’s Hospital in London at the age of one and twenty. I can also claim a degree in mechanical sciences at the University of Paris should I so wish. Would you care for me to continue or is my sex so repugnant to you?”
“I just want my damned job back,” Gilbert snapped. “Not your life history.”
“And use of your left arm,” the doctor said. Her face was composed, save for her eyes, which still blazed. “I can ensure that.”
“How?”
The doctor smiled her thin, wintery little smile, the expression reaching her eyes just barely. “It depends on how much you cooperate with me, Herr Beilschmidt.” She picked up her pencil again.
“Feldwebel,” he finally managed to say.
“Feldwebel, then.” She treated him with another one of those long, thoughtful gazes. “And I am Doktor Alana Kirkland.” Then she added, with more than a trace of irony, “At your service.”
“Really?” He favored her with a slow, crooked grin. She didn’t deign to respond.
…
Gilbert ended up living in the bottom room of a small house the doctor rented in one of the better quarters of the city. Gasps of impropriety were stifled, even as the doctor firmly and politely stated that she would need to be able to monitor her patient at all possible hours. And she stuck to that.
He would find himself woken up in the middle of the night, hustled to her surgery in the basement. The room in question wasn’t dark and dank and smelled strongly of acid, lit by so many lamps that it was often brighter than day. A particularly nasty night resulted in him trying to sleep upon the hard steel table-bed, needles embedded into his skin and connected with copper wires to bubbling beakers and tubes.
Naturally, he was soon bored. The first nights, she had laid down rules for him and he had made a point to break each and every single one (he didn’t quite succeed with number 8, if only because the owner of the attractive legs in the pink silk skirt hadn’t been explicitly forbidden). Later, Gilbert awoke to find himself strapped to the table within the surgery.
She looked down at him, her hair caught up in a strip of white cloth. Mutely, stoically, she let him struggle as best he could and hurl verbal abuse when he couldn’t overcome the leather straps. Her hand held a curved, many toothed saw.
“I forgot to inform you,” she said in a low, almost sweet voice. “Anesthetic is in fact optional in my treatments. In fact, it’s best if I don’t use it. It makes integration of the attachment all the better.”
“You bitch!”
She leaned in just enough that he could smell the sickeningly sweet traces of ether. Her head jerked away just in time to prevent losing her nose to his teeth. Infuriatingly, she almost seemed amused, her eyes glinting curiously in the light.
“You can cooperate with me,” she said mildly. “And I will… overlook your indiscretions. You do not cooperate with me-” Then her mouth twisted into an utterly mirthless smile as she delicately tilted the saw in her hand to catch the light. “-You see what else you can lose.”
Surprisingly, Gilbert found himself more inclined to be agreeable after that little chat. It also helped that she pulled a service revolver to his head when he came into her bedroom in the middle of the night.
He hadn’t quite thought out what he meant to do to her once he had caught her off guard but plans fluttered out the proverbial window as he looked down the barrel of the sizeable pistol held too confidently and comfortably in her hand. As soon as she had woken up, the lamp by her bed had flared to life, illuminating the room with soft gold light through a milky porcelain shade.
“I would go back to bed, Beilschmidt,” the doctor addressed him quite coolly, her hard voice even more brittle and with a hint of a rasp. It raked across the ears like sharkskin and wool.
“You wouldn’t shoot me,” he said without thinking. “You need me.”
“Functionally, yes,” she admitted hoarsely. “But not the whole of you.” The revolver slowly, slowly shifted its aim southwards. “And I would treat you and I would do it thoroughly and well. But not painlessly.”
“It’ll be the closest you ever get to a good time,” quipped Gilbert with a grin.
“I rather doubt it,” she replied. In the dim light, her eyes seemed almost black.
He had been in his share of women’s bedrooms but this one was different. It didn’t have decorations and ruffles and pictures; it lacked anything distinctly feminine though it did smell faintly of roses and citrus (the latter could have been a remnant of the carbolic acid she used, though). Some small wood boxes and colored glass bottles rested on a table with a mirror. But otherwise, there was no extra touch, no personality, save for stacks upon stacks of books scattered across the floor, one particularly precarious stack right by the bed with the top most book just within easy reaching distance. Oh, and a massive tiger skin rug, with the head still intact and set with bright yellow glass eyes.
“Ever had a man in your bedroom before?” he asked carelessly.
“Not that it is any of your concern.”
“No wonder you’re a scientist. You get a man on a slab. He can’t run away from you. You can cut him up however you want.”
“And you see women as disposable,” she replied. “To be chased, conquered and discarded.”
“I make it worth the time.”
“I rather doubt it.” A stray strand of slowly curling blonde hair had fallen into her eyes.
“You killed a man before with that?” Gilbert asked, seemingly unconcerned as he gestured to the pistol. It looked like it could take off his wrist with the recoil, never mind her own very thin, very fragile looking arm.
“I know enough not to miss,” she said shortly. She smiled faintly. “And I killed that tiger.” She jerked her head at the rug.
“Who finished it off for you?”
The temperature of the room seemed to rise and fall sharply at the same time. In one swift movement, she raised the gun and fired a single shot. Gilbert felt the bullet sear a sharp, hot path through the air, grazing his hair, as his ears rung from the sound. A moment later, he felt something hot steadily and slowly trickle down his temple and onto his ear.
The doctor stared at him levelly. “Get down to the surgery and I’ll patch that up,” she said and he found his legs moving to obey before his mind caught up.
He later dug out the bullet that had embedded itself into the wall. The hair never did grow back the same around that spot on his head, nor was his hearing quite the same again.
…
The first arm the doctor made for him was all metal, somewhat more sophisticated than the hooks that he’d seen other men sport. It had joints and moveable fingers that he could twist and arrange into different positions. In concept, it was impressive. In execution, it was ridiculous and he told her as much.
“Too damn heavy,” Gilbert complained as he adjusted the leather brace that fastened the arm to his stump and shoulder. “And it rubs.”
“It is merely a prototype,” she replied absently as she dripped oil onto the hinge joint of the elbow.
“You think I’m going to haul this piece of shit around? It’s going to rust right off me.”
She paused and she looked at him levelly. “What do you propose then?” she inquired and strangely enough, she sounded quite sincere. Her eyes held no derision but only a level calmness and perhaps a bit of curiosity.
“Lighter alloy,” he said promptly. “Lighter than this.”
“At the expense of structural integrity,” she swiftly countered.
“Not if you use fewer pieces,” he replied. “You have too many joints and welds here and there.”
The doctor pursed her lips. “I will take it into consideration.”
“By the way, your welds are shit,” he felt compelled to add, even as he saw her reaching for a rather long spanner.
The second arm was simpler, less elegant in design. But it was lighter, for all that he lost some of the dexterity afforded from the intricately jointed fingers. The doctor studied him as he picked up a carefully weighted metal rod with both hands.
“The failing point is at attachment,” she noted.
“Yes,” he grunted as he hefted the rod upwards horizontally.
“I believe that can be fixed quite easily.” She watched him as the grip on the metal hand failed and sent the rod crashing to the floor in a clang and then a clatter as the weights on either end scattered.
At this point, Gilbert looked at the metal examination table with a sort of ironic cheer and slid on it with little more than a snide suggestion for improvements. He watched her prepare her instruments, the familiar bone saw and her gleaming edged scalpels and her carbolic acid mister.
“It is a better attachment point for the arm,” she said as she scrubbed her hands up to her elbows.
He eyed the gleaming stout metal rod on the tray by his head. “You did this before?”
“Of course I have. It is what earned my entrance to the Academy of Sciences.” She picked up the ether tank and its accompanying mask. “Breathe in deeply and stop fighting it, for heaven’s sake.”
He held his breath as long as he could, just to annoy her. The last things he saw were her furrowed brow and narrowed green eyes, and the sickly sweet smell of the gas chased even that away.
Gilbert had no idea how long he was under; he just recalled vaguely waking up because of a burning sensation that he dimly thought of as his left arm. Flickers of pain registered across his consciousness, searing but too quick to grasp. Along with the pain came the smell of blood and burning flesh overlaid with the sharp, biting scent of carbolic acid. Maybe he screamed once, when the fire tickling at his stump of an arm was just too much.
He woke up to find himself staring right into her eyes again. That kind of green was unreal, he realized absentmindedly. “What-” he croaked. She shook her head.
“Take another deep breath,” she said, her voice seeming to come from a long way and through a storm. “Another one and stop fighting it.”
As Gilbert struggled to hold his breath, he stared at a spot right above her head, concentrating on the light surrounding her face in a soft, steady white glow like a halo. He closed his eyes as the light flared too bright for him to stand and he took in a deep breath of the too-sweet gas. It felt like those moments on watch when he leaned against a wall and closed his eyes for just a few minutes, vaguely aware of where he was but not caring. After a few moments, he opened his gummy, sticky eyes and thought he could feel the fingers of his left hand again for a single moment. Then he hissed as pain erupted up his left arm and paralyzed his left shoulder. He breathed through clenched teeth and let the pain fade to a dull throb at the shoulder and at the end of the stump.
His eyes flickered this way and that, noting that he was in the small recovery room next to the surgery. Next to the creaking wheeled bed was a rickety chair and in that chair was the doctor, seated with arms folded across her chest, her head lolled forwards. She snored with every other breath.
“Oi, you,” Gilbert croaked as loudly as possible.
The doctor continued to snore, exhaling the kind of snore of someone who never had to share a bed with another human being. It whistled and grated, having no pretense of gentility. Her normally pristine clothing had wrinkles and creases, her hair struggled out of its tight, complex arrangement.
“You,” he tried again, voice straining. She continued to sleep.
“Kirkland!” he rasped, mouth stumbling over the unfamiliar syllables.
Her eyes opened immediately and she straightened in her seat as if burnt. “God’s blood!” she cursed in English.
Gilbert gave his own version of a mirthless grin, his lips parting from his gums reluctantly. Without prompting, she reached over to the bedside table and poured out a cup of water, standing up to tilt the rim to his lips. He guzzled the far too welcome drink though his mouth still tasted and felt as if he had swallowed sand. She poured him another cup immediately and after finishing that, he felt far more human again.
“How long?” he asked, shifting in the bed.
“Better part of a week,” she said, tucking strands of hair behind her ear. “Not only did your body start rejecting the scaffolding, you were in the first stages of blood poisoning.”
He glanced at his left side, only able to see neat white bandaging and the gleaming rounded end of the metal rod he had been shown. No blood spotted the bandages or the sheets on the thin mattress beneath him and he didn’t smell anything like infection.
“It isn’t over yet,” she said shortly. “Your body may yet reject the attachment. Even should it not, it will still take about a month for it to be strong and stable enough to install the rest.”
“It won’t,” he said without thinking.
She arched one of her dark, heavy eyebrows. “If you say so.” She got to her feet, having to rest her hand on the back of her chair to support herself for a moment.
“Get some sleep, Kirkland,” he said.
She shot him a curious look but didn’t comment on the choice of address. “I intend to.”
He patted the sheets of the hospital bed with his good hand. “It’s a little tight but you’re little enough to fit. Even if you snore.”
Her only response was a very crude gesture before she stalked out of the recovery room, his hoarse, raucous laughter chasing after her.
…
Once he recovered sufficiently, Gilbert was surprised to be given a work area for his own use, with his personal tool set neatly arranged on a newly bought bench and with several catalogs of supplies ready for his perusal. Kirkland smiled wryly at his response, which was in no way emotional or sentimental.
“You need to build up your strength and your dexterity,” she said as she watched him undo the leather roll that held the finer, smaller tools. “I see no better way than to have you tinker. And your government is taking care of the bill.”
She may have regretted this particular gift when he developed a small working cannon that fired loud enough to shake the townhouse on its foundation.
Nonetheless, they had come to an accord with one another. They kept up their separate workshops yet it didn’t stop either of them from dropping in to demand a particular tool or part. More than one night, they stayed up until dawn arguing over mechanical and chemical theory. Things grew even more cordial when he discovered that she drank beer just as well as he did.
“I drank so much wine in France that I grew sick of the stuff,” she said one night, nursing a pint of a particularly good bitter.
“Why France?” he asked. “You don’t seem like the type. Prissy but not nearly enough.”
Kirkland scowled at him only briefly. “It was that or the Americas and I had no intention of going there.”
“Hm? What’s wrong with that?”
“Industrialists and puritans,” she sniffed. “Oh, and dry grocers.” She leaned back in her chair in a position that no lady was supposed to take, completely at ease and almost as boneless as a cat.
“You’d fit right in then.”
Her reply blistered the air and he laughed in response.
Gilbert also came to discover that Kirkland also had a strange sense of whimsy. Her desktop held at least half a dozen models of hands, a macabre graveyard of detached limbs in varying positions and of different materials. Iron and steel, polished wood and brass, with too many joints in the fingers or none at all. In the pride of place was an entire skeletal human arm, the joints connected with gleaming silver wire (Whenever he could, he rearranged it into various amusing configurations). But at the same time she also kept a small kingdom of strange clockwork figures.
The smallest one was about the size of his thumb and the largest was enough to take up an entire tabletop. “Kingdom” was correct to describe the collection for they all could have come from fairy tales. Fairies flapped delicate butterfly wings. A unicorn trotted a few steps before crumpling on its side. A crowned lion opened its mouth to roar but could only tick sharply.
The largest one was the strangest because it didn’t have any keys to wind the mechanism. It consisted of a pearly gray castle with crooked towers upon a green hill. All upon it were the thin outlines of latched doors that wouldn’t open, even to his prying fingernails. When he was investigating it, he didn’t realize that Kirkland had come up behind him.
“It won’t open like that,” she said and he prided himself on not jumping.
She had a cup of tea in her hand. Not a delicate cup but a thick mug that rivaled a beer stein in size and weight.
“I was getting to it,” Gilbert said.
She snorted, set down her mug and went over to the contraption. From a shelf, she brought down a strange metal box that sloshed faintly as she moved it. From the metal box, she unwound two differently colored cords that were held by bobbins on its top and connected them to the underside of the hill. There was a hissing nose, a sound of gears moving and creaking, and the far too familiar smell of acid. And the castle came to life.
The drawbridge opened and a knight upon a horse jerkily galloped upon it and reared. Upon the crooked towers, windows opened and a plump king with a tilted crown peered out while above, a princess waved a scarf. A maid shook out a sheet and a herald blew a trumpet. And upon the hill, a door opened and out came a bright red dragon, unwinding its snake-like body and head and its wings unfurling and tightening in slow, uneven jerks.
The figures moved erratically, and the sound of creaking gears grew louder and sharper. Kirkland swiftly pulled one of the cords away from the castle and the whole thing shuddered and halted.
“It’s not clockwork,” Gilbert finally said.
“No,” she replied as she pulled the other cord from the castle and began winding the bobbins.
“And it’s not steam.”
“Not at all.”
“It’s… electricity?”
She paused and she smiled slightly at him, though her bright eyes held her surprise and faint pleasure. “Yes.”
“Keeping up the sustained current is the problem, isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately,” she admitted. “I have had difficulty with surges.” She started to gently push the figures back into the castle, folding back the dragon and locking it back once more into the hill.
Gilbert’s left arm twitched in memory of the copper wires and bubbling acids. “And that’s what you’re going to use,” he said.
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life having to reconfigure your left hand?” she asked simply as she pushed the knight back and pulled up the drawbridge.
He shrugged. “Wasn’t complaining,” he said. “As long as I don’t get my ass sparked every time I want to scratch it.”
Kirkland snorted and her fingers were almost tender as she gently pushed down the princess’s extended arm and put her back into the tower.
Time passed as it always did, in spurts and lengths. A few weeks later, she prodded at the slowly healing flesh around the metal rod upon his left arm. “No signs of blood poisoning,” she announced after a moment. “And your body isn’t rejecting it any longer. We can begin primary attachment soon.”
“About time,” he said.
She paused as she carefully set down her magnifying glass. “The surgery will require you to be fully conscious,” she said at last. “Without anesthetic because I will be reattaching your nerves.”
“Didn’t realize I lost them.”
Kirkland frowned at him. “You can decline it,” she said. “I won’t push you into this if you will not.”
Gilbert arched a sardonic eyebrow at her. “How nice of you,” he replied.
“Miseratione non Mercede,” she said. “Erbarmen statt Gewinn-streben. ‘For compassion, not for gain.’ That is written on the surgery where I performed my first attachment.” She smiled thinly and said nothing more.
He snorted. “Do it. What kind of coward do you think I am?”
“You could very well die,” she said at last. “The shock of the pain…”
“I won’t die,” Gilbert snapped. “Or it’s all your fault for being a shitty doctor.”
“I’ll make sure to bring in a priest for your final absolution then.” He couldn’t quite tell if she was joking or not, not when her lips thinned and curved upwards in a smile at the same time.
…
The arm didn’t look like one, not when it was dissembled upon the gleaming metal tray with its screws neatly placed along side the appropriate joins. Gilbert looked at it for lack of anything else as Kirkland made her final preparations. He knew it, inside and out. After all, hadn’t he done half the casting for it? But still… it seemed strange to him, broken apart neatly and with corresponding hinges and bars and screws placed in painstakingly exact order.
“Why don’t you have a nurse?” he asked her, examining how the light caught on the shining pewter surface of the artificial bones.
“I rarely had a dresser or assistant,” she said. She tilted her canister of carbolic acid and made sure the sterile paper cover on the atomizer was still intact. “I learned to adapt. Now I can’t stand them.”
“Huh,” he said, finally looking away from the dissembled arm and at her as she covered her mouth and nose with a sterile gauze wrap. She looked like a ghost, all swathed in a clean white cloth except for the gray canvas apron.
“You can talk to me during the procedure,” Kirkland said. She reached for the atomizer of carbolic acid. “Except don’t scream too loudly, I’m liable to drop something.”
“I never scream.”
She might have smiled; in any case, the corners of her eyes crinkled slightly. “If you say.”
“You believe in God?” Gilbert asked her when she was finishing in securing the metal forearm and hand to his new elbow.
“I go to church when I can,” she replied absently as she moved the joint back and forth experimentally.
“Do you believe?”
“I believe in more things in this heaven and earth than dreamt of in mere philosophy.”
“That’s not the same.”
“You never struck me as a devout man.”
“A man has to believe in something,” he said. He pointed at the Iron Cross that hung from his throat, where it had always hung on a short length of steel chain.
Kirkland paused as she picked up a bottle of oil and she met his gaze. “It is at times harder to believe in what I can see and weigh and measure, much less something that has even less evidence,” she said quietly, before bending her head to drip some of the pale liquid onto the metal.
He found himself laughing at that. “That’s not the point of faith,” he replied in between rasping laughs.
She shrugged and didn’t reply as she set down the oil and picked up her scalpel. Gilbert didn’t hiss when the first incisions were made. The initial prods with the charged wires felt less painful and more disturbing than anything else, as the muscles remaining in his arm twitched at the current. He watched the entire procedure without saying much for once. After some time, he had difficulty in realizing that it was his own arm being cut up and probed like that.
“So that’s why you are a scientist,” he said conversationally as a particularly painful surge reached all the way up to his shoulder. He gritted his teeth. “You’re bitter about something.” He’d seen his share of disillusioned men in the military, more than one embittered chaplain.
Kirkland snorted, half in derision and half in laughter. “Most of faithful see God as a figure to beg sweeties from, as far as I’ve seen. Or a connection to launch you to upper echelons. If I were God, I’d be half tempted to send more than a few plagues down to teach what real suffering and martyrdom is!”
“You’re not different at all from the other scientists then. They think they’re God too.”
“Or trying to kill God?” she asked. Her hand twisted slightly and he bit back a curse as his shoulder spasmed. Sweat beaded on his brow and made a slow, torturous path down to his eyes.
“Yes-!” Gilbert hissed, salt stinging his eyes and lightning licking up his arm.
She bent her head, seeming to be lost in concentration with some tricky bit of attachment. He gnawed on the inside of his mouth as the pain sparked all along the left side of his body and slowly along the right side of his head. Yet he still tried to keep an eye on what she was doing and spied her fingers seeming spin webs of gleaming copper and silver wire all together. Gilbert was put in mind of a spider as she put together something that seemed too impossible and too fragile to ever work. But then again… what did he know about the impossible?
“Impossible” was nothing for him. And he had a feeling that it was the same for her.
Finally, Kirkland pulled away from his arm, detangling wires that ran to the capacitor that rested upon a nearby table. He looked down at the new… thing attached to him. It gleamed in the light of the surgery, all metal joints and bars. Along it ran spindly wires, seemingly fragile as spider webs, gleaming gold and copper and silver. The fingers had an entire net of bright filaments, suspended above the joints and knuckles like the tightropes for a Lilliputian circus. It should have looked strange, unnatural. But it didn’t. Somehow, it looked no less unnatural than a knight’s metal gauntlet. He looked at the curved, bent fingers and without thinking, he reached forwards. And the fingers slowly, ponderously straightened. It was a small movement, such a tiny gesture- and he stared in unashamed wonder at his slowly relaxing new fingers.
“A lot of critics call scientists the enemies of God,” Kirkland remarked, perhaps not for his benefit. “But really… it’s not that we hate God. Or at least, most of us. The point of it all, the point of science for many of us… it’s to understand God.” She smiled faintly. “It’s to see the beauty and the intricacy and the whole meaning of some sort of Purpose for us, for the world, for living.”
Gilbert didn’t really hear the last of her words as he found his eyes closing. He had never been gladder to be feeling a throbbing pain all along his left shoulder, the throbbing slowing and matching his heartbeat as he drifted off to sleep.
Notes:
-Boffin - a British and Commonwealth slang term for a scientist, mostly researchers and professors but can also tentatively include medical doctors.
-I think I have too much of a sick fascination with lopping bits off Prussia. This is the second time I’ve made him lose an arm.
-Feldwebel - German Army ranking equivalent to Sergeant (Army Sergeant in British Army and Staff Sergeant in American). I may end up doing more serious research into military rankings to accommodate specialist positions in alternate steampunk worlds; “Sergeant-Engineer” is my current favored ranking for Gilbert.
-Most of you probably know that prosthetics is still a rather rough, new field that doesn’t get much in the way of developments. But prosthetic limbs have been around since almost the beginning of human civilization with varying degrees of success. I based Gilbert’s new arm on a mixture of what I know of robotics (Mythbusters, documentaries and some very interesting engineering students) and Fullmetal Alchemist’s automail. Then I tossed in some remembered lessons from Human Anatomy, particularly in describing the joints (hinge = elbow, etc).
-Carbolic acid is the antiquated name for phenol (C6H6O), a multi-use chemical that’s used in manufacturing and industry. It was one of the first disinfectants used in surgery thanks to the work of Sir Joseph Lister. Interestingly enough, it can be used to specifically target and temporarily shut down nerve activity.
-Ether, or specifically, diethyl ether (C4H10O), was known for its analgesic properties since ancient Greece, but was used in surgery as a general anesthetic in the early 1800s. Though effective, it has the unfortunate quality of being flammable.
-Admittedly, fem!England’s impressive academic record wouldn’t be incredibly plausible at this time. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first openly female woman doctor and she graduated from GenevaCollege in New York on 1849. The first medical university for women in England wouldn’t be opened until 1874 (Elizabeth Blackwell was co-founder) though there was the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania (founded in 1850). I took some major liberties with medical history and practices.
-Blood poisoning, or septicemia, is still a major problem and risk of surgery, often caused by contamination of surgical sites.
- Miseratione non Mercede - “For Mercy, not for Gain”- The motto inscribed on St. Thomas Operating Theatre in London, England (No longer in use, now part of a museum).
-Alana’s last monologue about scientists and God is based on an actual lecture a teacher gave me in high school. That was also not the last time I ever received a variation about the false incompatibility of science and religion.
-I lied somewhat about this being steampunk because of my introduction of electricity into the world. Is that allowed? But in any case… the ability to harness and control or at least understand the principles of electricity would have been necessary in the development of Gilbert’s arm, by understanding nerve function and how to integrate it. However, by the mid-1800s, scientists did know that electricity could be used to stimulate dead muscles (discoveries which actually inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). Batteries were used in industrial applications starting from after 1836, particularly in telegraphs. On the other hand, I’m taking major liberties in history, engineering and the laws of physics and biology. Whoops. That’s what creative license is for, I suppose.
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Genre(s): Drama/AU/Steampunk
Character(s)|Pairing(s): Prussia/fem!England
Rating/Warning(s): R, vulgar language, somewhat gruesome descriptions of medical procedures
Word Count: 5,536
Summary: Sergeant-Engineer Gilbert Beilschmidt and Doctor Alana Kirkland. A match not quite made in heaven when one loses an arm and the other needs a guinea pig.
Notes: Part of a fic/art trade with katamanda . She requested “Prussia/fem!England, steampunk/cyberpunk”.
Losing his left hand hadn’t hurt nearly as much as it should have. Perhaps that was a blessing (though he wasn’t going to admit how much it hurt). One minute he had been gripping the rounded contours of the smoke bomb and the next minute- poof! There went his hand, as well as a good deal of his arm.
Gilbert had stared at it stupidly for a moment before he had stripped off his neckcloth and wrapped it around and around the stump. He stretched the cloth tight, gritting his teeth and knowing that there should be pain but unable to feel anything much. Not when his heart roared in his ears like the incoming howl of a steam train, not when he refused to feel the pain and let it hinder him in any way. The cauterization in the sickbay afterwards had sent him into a fever for three weeks.
He woke up in the military hospital in Berlin, ten pounds lighter (including the loss of half his left arm) and but a little less than a pound heavier thanks to an Iron Cross, Second Class. At the same time, he was heavier with the prospect of honorable discharge looming over his head. The thought pissed him off to no end, of course. He was Sergeant-Engineer Gilbert Beilschmidt, second youngest to get the rank (admittedly promoted by necessity, common sense, and an unfortunate boiler accident), and his damn brass stripes hadn’t even had the chance to rust.
Until he was asked to be a lab animal.
Gilbert didn’t have that much against scientists. After all, where else was he going to get his phosphorous and other weird, amazingly dangerous chemicals that kept an airship purring and soaring? But those nose-up, sneering, pompous little bitches who went to the hulking University, who couldn’t find their asses with both hands and map? Those giggling maniacs who shot lightning at corpses and sewed up animals into bizarre creations from nightmares and twisted fairytales? No fucking thank you.
The military higher ups phrased it with all the pretty words and bullshit that they were capable of. Some doctor from England was visiting the University, some genius in replacement limbs. The doctor had heard about Gilbert’s particular case and had shown much interest and was even graciously deigning to stay indefinitely. It was the promise of continued service that hooked Gilbert, on the other hand, though he wasn’t completely adverse to the idea of a new limb. Not that he was going to say anything about that.
They brought the doctor to him the next day. To his surprise, the mad scientist he had been expecting was- female.
She was not particularly tall, but she held herself ramrod straight, her sharp chin jutting out imperiously. A stiletto sized hatpin held a small black hat and veil to a thick, sandy blonde knot of hair and she wore a severe and somewhat plain dark green dress, tight sleeves down to the wrist and lace around her neck. She carried a very battered black leather valise case. The only remarkable things about here were her brilliantly emerald green eyes and her thick, dark arching eyebrows. Those eyebrows distracted him long enough for him to be surprised at the intensity of her eyes, both in the color and in the sheer force of the gaze with which she observed him. For the first time, he found himself considered like a specimen waiting a pin or a formaldehyde bath.
One of the accompanying officers cleared his throat officiously, before saying in English, “Miss Kirkland, this is-”
“Doktor Kirkland, if you please,” the woman replied frostily in more than adequate German. She had the peculiar, slightly stilted accent that hinted she had learned most of her grasp of the language from books. “Or just Doktor will do. You may leave.”
Both officers stiffened and she paused and seemed to reconsider, before adding, “You may get me a chair. Then you may leave.”
Astonishingly, the order was followed swiftly and without protest and with a cursory salute, both officers left, their expressions carefully stoic. The doctor sat in the procured chair and brought her leather case onto her lap. She made a production of pulling out a slim sheaf of papers and a battered notebook.
“I haven’t seen anyone get Lieutenant Hauser to shut up like that,” Gilbert said conversationally, making his own production of raking his gaze over her as slowly and thoroughly as possible. “Much less a woman.”
The doctor smiled thinly, not seeming to acknowledge the very obvious and lascivious scrutiny. “It is a necessary skill in my field.” She pulled out a long charcoal pencil and balanced its point upon the papers upon her lap.
“Since when are women doctors in England?” Gilbert asked idly. “Not enough men to go around?”
“Since we recognized ability, not sex,” replied the doctor coolly.
Gilbert snorted. “Must be at the bottom then.”
Her bright green gaze could have cut through steel. “Sergeant, I learned to read using medical texts and anatomical manuals. I was more than qualified to enter Cambridge University by the time I was fifteen. I earned my medical degree in the University of Paris at the age of nineteen and I was recognized as a practicing physician by Saint Mary’s Hospital in London at the age of one and twenty. I can also claim a degree in mechanical sciences at the University of Paris should I so wish. Would you care for me to continue or is my sex so repugnant to you?”
“I just want my damned job back,” Gilbert snapped. “Not your life history.”
“And use of your left arm,” the doctor said. Her face was composed, save for her eyes, which still blazed. “I can ensure that.”
“How?”
The doctor smiled her thin, wintery little smile, the expression reaching her eyes just barely. “It depends on how much you cooperate with me, Herr Beilschmidt.” She picked up her pencil again.
“Feldwebel,” he finally managed to say.
“Feldwebel, then.” She treated him with another one of those long, thoughtful gazes. “And I am Doktor Alana Kirkland.” Then she added, with more than a trace of irony, “At your service.”
“Really?” He favored her with a slow, crooked grin. She didn’t deign to respond.
…
Gilbert ended up living in the bottom room of a small house the doctor rented in one of the better quarters of the city. Gasps of impropriety were stifled, even as the doctor firmly and politely stated that she would need to be able to monitor her patient at all possible hours. And she stuck to that.
He would find himself woken up in the middle of the night, hustled to her surgery in the basement. The room in question wasn’t dark and dank and smelled strongly of acid, lit by so many lamps that it was often brighter than day. A particularly nasty night resulted in him trying to sleep upon the hard steel table-bed, needles embedded into his skin and connected with copper wires to bubbling beakers and tubes.
Naturally, he was soon bored. The first nights, she had laid down rules for him and he had made a point to break each and every single one (he didn’t quite succeed with number 8, if only because the owner of the attractive legs in the pink silk skirt hadn’t been explicitly forbidden). Later, Gilbert awoke to find himself strapped to the table within the surgery.
She looked down at him, her hair caught up in a strip of white cloth. Mutely, stoically, she let him struggle as best he could and hurl verbal abuse when he couldn’t overcome the leather straps. Her hand held a curved, many toothed saw.
“I forgot to inform you,” she said in a low, almost sweet voice. “Anesthetic is in fact optional in my treatments. In fact, it’s best if I don’t use it. It makes integration of the attachment all the better.”
“You bitch!”
She leaned in just enough that he could smell the sickeningly sweet traces of ether. Her head jerked away just in time to prevent losing her nose to his teeth. Infuriatingly, she almost seemed amused, her eyes glinting curiously in the light.
“You can cooperate with me,” she said mildly. “And I will… overlook your indiscretions. You do not cooperate with me-” Then her mouth twisted into an utterly mirthless smile as she delicately tilted the saw in her hand to catch the light. “-You see what else you can lose.”
Surprisingly, Gilbert found himself more inclined to be agreeable after that little chat. It also helped that she pulled a service revolver to his head when he came into her bedroom in the middle of the night.
He hadn’t quite thought out what he meant to do to her once he had caught her off guard but plans fluttered out the proverbial window as he looked down the barrel of the sizeable pistol held too confidently and comfortably in her hand. As soon as she had woken up, the lamp by her bed had flared to life, illuminating the room with soft gold light through a milky porcelain shade.
“I would go back to bed, Beilschmidt,” the doctor addressed him quite coolly, her hard voice even more brittle and with a hint of a rasp. It raked across the ears like sharkskin and wool.
“You wouldn’t shoot me,” he said without thinking. “You need me.”
“Functionally, yes,” she admitted hoarsely. “But not the whole of you.” The revolver slowly, slowly shifted its aim southwards. “And I would treat you and I would do it thoroughly and well. But not painlessly.”
“It’ll be the closest you ever get to a good time,” quipped Gilbert with a grin.
“I rather doubt it,” she replied. In the dim light, her eyes seemed almost black.
He had been in his share of women’s bedrooms but this one was different. It didn’t have decorations and ruffles and pictures; it lacked anything distinctly feminine though it did smell faintly of roses and citrus (the latter could have been a remnant of the carbolic acid she used, though). Some small wood boxes and colored glass bottles rested on a table with a mirror. But otherwise, there was no extra touch, no personality, save for stacks upon stacks of books scattered across the floor, one particularly precarious stack right by the bed with the top most book just within easy reaching distance. Oh, and a massive tiger skin rug, with the head still intact and set with bright yellow glass eyes.
“Ever had a man in your bedroom before?” he asked carelessly.
“Not that it is any of your concern.”
“No wonder you’re a scientist. You get a man on a slab. He can’t run away from you. You can cut him up however you want.”
“And you see women as disposable,” she replied. “To be chased, conquered and discarded.”
“I make it worth the time.”
“I rather doubt it.” A stray strand of slowly curling blonde hair had fallen into her eyes.
“You killed a man before with that?” Gilbert asked, seemingly unconcerned as he gestured to the pistol. It looked like it could take off his wrist with the recoil, never mind her own very thin, very fragile looking arm.
“I know enough not to miss,” she said shortly. She smiled faintly. “And I killed that tiger.” She jerked her head at the rug.
“Who finished it off for you?”
The temperature of the room seemed to rise and fall sharply at the same time. In one swift movement, she raised the gun and fired a single shot. Gilbert felt the bullet sear a sharp, hot path through the air, grazing his hair, as his ears rung from the sound. A moment later, he felt something hot steadily and slowly trickle down his temple and onto his ear.
The doctor stared at him levelly. “Get down to the surgery and I’ll patch that up,” she said and he found his legs moving to obey before his mind caught up.
He later dug out the bullet that had embedded itself into the wall. The hair never did grow back the same around that spot on his head, nor was his hearing quite the same again.
…
The first arm the doctor made for him was all metal, somewhat more sophisticated than the hooks that he’d seen other men sport. It had joints and moveable fingers that he could twist and arrange into different positions. In concept, it was impressive. In execution, it was ridiculous and he told her as much.
“Too damn heavy,” Gilbert complained as he adjusted the leather brace that fastened the arm to his stump and shoulder. “And it rubs.”
“It is merely a prototype,” she replied absently as she dripped oil onto the hinge joint of the elbow.
“You think I’m going to haul this piece of shit around? It’s going to rust right off me.”
She paused and she looked at him levelly. “What do you propose then?” she inquired and strangely enough, she sounded quite sincere. Her eyes held no derision but only a level calmness and perhaps a bit of curiosity.
“Lighter alloy,” he said promptly. “Lighter than this.”
“At the expense of structural integrity,” she swiftly countered.
“Not if you use fewer pieces,” he replied. “You have too many joints and welds here and there.”
The doctor pursed her lips. “I will take it into consideration.”
“By the way, your welds are shit,” he felt compelled to add, even as he saw her reaching for a rather long spanner.
The second arm was simpler, less elegant in design. But it was lighter, for all that he lost some of the dexterity afforded from the intricately jointed fingers. The doctor studied him as he picked up a carefully weighted metal rod with both hands.
“The failing point is at attachment,” she noted.
“Yes,” he grunted as he hefted the rod upwards horizontally.
“I believe that can be fixed quite easily.” She watched him as the grip on the metal hand failed and sent the rod crashing to the floor in a clang and then a clatter as the weights on either end scattered.
At this point, Gilbert looked at the metal examination table with a sort of ironic cheer and slid on it with little more than a snide suggestion for improvements. He watched her prepare her instruments, the familiar bone saw and her gleaming edged scalpels and her carbolic acid mister.
“It is a better attachment point for the arm,” she said as she scrubbed her hands up to her elbows.
He eyed the gleaming stout metal rod on the tray by his head. “You did this before?”
“Of course I have. It is what earned my entrance to the Academy of Sciences.” She picked up the ether tank and its accompanying mask. “Breathe in deeply and stop fighting it, for heaven’s sake.”
He held his breath as long as he could, just to annoy her. The last things he saw were her furrowed brow and narrowed green eyes, and the sickly sweet smell of the gas chased even that away.
Gilbert had no idea how long he was under; he just recalled vaguely waking up because of a burning sensation that he dimly thought of as his left arm. Flickers of pain registered across his consciousness, searing but too quick to grasp. Along with the pain came the smell of blood and burning flesh overlaid with the sharp, biting scent of carbolic acid. Maybe he screamed once, when the fire tickling at his stump of an arm was just too much.
He woke up to find himself staring right into her eyes again. That kind of green was unreal, he realized absentmindedly. “What-” he croaked. She shook her head.
“Take another deep breath,” she said, her voice seeming to come from a long way and through a storm. “Another one and stop fighting it.”
As Gilbert struggled to hold his breath, he stared at a spot right above her head, concentrating on the light surrounding her face in a soft, steady white glow like a halo. He closed his eyes as the light flared too bright for him to stand and he took in a deep breath of the too-sweet gas. It felt like those moments on watch when he leaned against a wall and closed his eyes for just a few minutes, vaguely aware of where he was but not caring. After a few moments, he opened his gummy, sticky eyes and thought he could feel the fingers of his left hand again for a single moment. Then he hissed as pain erupted up his left arm and paralyzed his left shoulder. He breathed through clenched teeth and let the pain fade to a dull throb at the shoulder and at the end of the stump.
His eyes flickered this way and that, noting that he was in the small recovery room next to the surgery. Next to the creaking wheeled bed was a rickety chair and in that chair was the doctor, seated with arms folded across her chest, her head lolled forwards. She snored with every other breath.
“Oi, you,” Gilbert croaked as loudly as possible.
The doctor continued to snore, exhaling the kind of snore of someone who never had to share a bed with another human being. It whistled and grated, having no pretense of gentility. Her normally pristine clothing had wrinkles and creases, her hair struggled out of its tight, complex arrangement.
“You,” he tried again, voice straining. She continued to sleep.
“Kirkland!” he rasped, mouth stumbling over the unfamiliar syllables.
Her eyes opened immediately and she straightened in her seat as if burnt. “God’s blood!” she cursed in English.
Gilbert gave his own version of a mirthless grin, his lips parting from his gums reluctantly. Without prompting, she reached over to the bedside table and poured out a cup of water, standing up to tilt the rim to his lips. He guzzled the far too welcome drink though his mouth still tasted and felt as if he had swallowed sand. She poured him another cup immediately and after finishing that, he felt far more human again.
“How long?” he asked, shifting in the bed.
“Better part of a week,” she said, tucking strands of hair behind her ear. “Not only did your body start rejecting the scaffolding, you were in the first stages of blood poisoning.”
He glanced at his left side, only able to see neat white bandaging and the gleaming rounded end of the metal rod he had been shown. No blood spotted the bandages or the sheets on the thin mattress beneath him and he didn’t smell anything like infection.
“It isn’t over yet,” she said shortly. “Your body may yet reject the attachment. Even should it not, it will still take about a month for it to be strong and stable enough to install the rest.”
“It won’t,” he said without thinking.
She arched one of her dark, heavy eyebrows. “If you say so.” She got to her feet, having to rest her hand on the back of her chair to support herself for a moment.
“Get some sleep, Kirkland,” he said.
She shot him a curious look but didn’t comment on the choice of address. “I intend to.”
He patted the sheets of the hospital bed with his good hand. “It’s a little tight but you’re little enough to fit. Even if you snore.”
Her only response was a very crude gesture before she stalked out of the recovery room, his hoarse, raucous laughter chasing after her.
…
Once he recovered sufficiently, Gilbert was surprised to be given a work area for his own use, with his personal tool set neatly arranged on a newly bought bench and with several catalogs of supplies ready for his perusal. Kirkland smiled wryly at his response, which was in no way emotional or sentimental.
“You need to build up your strength and your dexterity,” she said as she watched him undo the leather roll that held the finer, smaller tools. “I see no better way than to have you tinker. And your government is taking care of the bill.”
She may have regretted this particular gift when he developed a small working cannon that fired loud enough to shake the townhouse on its foundation.
Nonetheless, they had come to an accord with one another. They kept up their separate workshops yet it didn’t stop either of them from dropping in to demand a particular tool or part. More than one night, they stayed up until dawn arguing over mechanical and chemical theory. Things grew even more cordial when he discovered that she drank beer just as well as he did.
“I drank so much wine in France that I grew sick of the stuff,” she said one night, nursing a pint of a particularly good bitter.
“Why France?” he asked. “You don’t seem like the type. Prissy but not nearly enough.”
Kirkland scowled at him only briefly. “It was that or the Americas and I had no intention of going there.”
“Hm? What’s wrong with that?”
“Industrialists and puritans,” she sniffed. “Oh, and dry grocers.” She leaned back in her chair in a position that no lady was supposed to take, completely at ease and almost as boneless as a cat.
“You’d fit right in then.”
Her reply blistered the air and he laughed in response.
Gilbert also came to discover that Kirkland also had a strange sense of whimsy. Her desktop held at least half a dozen models of hands, a macabre graveyard of detached limbs in varying positions and of different materials. Iron and steel, polished wood and brass, with too many joints in the fingers or none at all. In the pride of place was an entire skeletal human arm, the joints connected with gleaming silver wire (Whenever he could, he rearranged it into various amusing configurations). But at the same time she also kept a small kingdom of strange clockwork figures.
The smallest one was about the size of his thumb and the largest was enough to take up an entire tabletop. “Kingdom” was correct to describe the collection for they all could have come from fairy tales. Fairies flapped delicate butterfly wings. A unicorn trotted a few steps before crumpling on its side. A crowned lion opened its mouth to roar but could only tick sharply.
The largest one was the strangest because it didn’t have any keys to wind the mechanism. It consisted of a pearly gray castle with crooked towers upon a green hill. All upon it were the thin outlines of latched doors that wouldn’t open, even to his prying fingernails. When he was investigating it, he didn’t realize that Kirkland had come up behind him.
“It won’t open like that,” she said and he prided himself on not jumping.
She had a cup of tea in her hand. Not a delicate cup but a thick mug that rivaled a beer stein in size and weight.
“I was getting to it,” Gilbert said.
She snorted, set down her mug and went over to the contraption. From a shelf, she brought down a strange metal box that sloshed faintly as she moved it. From the metal box, she unwound two differently colored cords that were held by bobbins on its top and connected them to the underside of the hill. There was a hissing nose, a sound of gears moving and creaking, and the far too familiar smell of acid. And the castle came to life.
The drawbridge opened and a knight upon a horse jerkily galloped upon it and reared. Upon the crooked towers, windows opened and a plump king with a tilted crown peered out while above, a princess waved a scarf. A maid shook out a sheet and a herald blew a trumpet. And upon the hill, a door opened and out came a bright red dragon, unwinding its snake-like body and head and its wings unfurling and tightening in slow, uneven jerks.
The figures moved erratically, and the sound of creaking gears grew louder and sharper. Kirkland swiftly pulled one of the cords away from the castle and the whole thing shuddered and halted.
“It’s not clockwork,” Gilbert finally said.
“No,” she replied as she pulled the other cord from the castle and began winding the bobbins.
“And it’s not steam.”
“Not at all.”
“It’s… electricity?”
She paused and she smiled slightly at him, though her bright eyes held her surprise and faint pleasure. “Yes.”
“Keeping up the sustained current is the problem, isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately,” she admitted. “I have had difficulty with surges.” She started to gently push the figures back into the castle, folding back the dragon and locking it back once more into the hill.
Gilbert’s left arm twitched in memory of the copper wires and bubbling acids. “And that’s what you’re going to use,” he said.
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life having to reconfigure your left hand?” she asked simply as she pushed the knight back and pulled up the drawbridge.
He shrugged. “Wasn’t complaining,” he said. “As long as I don’t get my ass sparked every time I want to scratch it.”
Kirkland snorted and her fingers were almost tender as she gently pushed down the princess’s extended arm and put her back into the tower.
Time passed as it always did, in spurts and lengths. A few weeks later, she prodded at the slowly healing flesh around the metal rod upon his left arm. “No signs of blood poisoning,” she announced after a moment. “And your body isn’t rejecting it any longer. We can begin primary attachment soon.”
“About time,” he said.
She paused as she carefully set down her magnifying glass. “The surgery will require you to be fully conscious,” she said at last. “Without anesthetic because I will be reattaching your nerves.”
“Didn’t realize I lost them.”
Kirkland frowned at him. “You can decline it,” she said. “I won’t push you into this if you will not.”
Gilbert arched a sardonic eyebrow at her. “How nice of you,” he replied.
“Miseratione non Mercede,” she said. “Erbarmen statt Gewinn-streben. ‘For compassion, not for gain.’ That is written on the surgery where I performed my first attachment.” She smiled thinly and said nothing more.
He snorted. “Do it. What kind of coward do you think I am?”
“You could very well die,” she said at last. “The shock of the pain…”
“I won’t die,” Gilbert snapped. “Or it’s all your fault for being a shitty doctor.”
“I’ll make sure to bring in a priest for your final absolution then.” He couldn’t quite tell if she was joking or not, not when her lips thinned and curved upwards in a smile at the same time.
…
The arm didn’t look like one, not when it was dissembled upon the gleaming metal tray with its screws neatly placed along side the appropriate joins. Gilbert looked at it for lack of anything else as Kirkland made her final preparations. He knew it, inside and out. After all, hadn’t he done half the casting for it? But still… it seemed strange to him, broken apart neatly and with corresponding hinges and bars and screws placed in painstakingly exact order.
“Why don’t you have a nurse?” he asked her, examining how the light caught on the shining pewter surface of the artificial bones.
“I rarely had a dresser or assistant,” she said. She tilted her canister of carbolic acid and made sure the sterile paper cover on the atomizer was still intact. “I learned to adapt. Now I can’t stand them.”
“Huh,” he said, finally looking away from the dissembled arm and at her as she covered her mouth and nose with a sterile gauze wrap. She looked like a ghost, all swathed in a clean white cloth except for the gray canvas apron.
“You can talk to me during the procedure,” Kirkland said. She reached for the atomizer of carbolic acid. “Except don’t scream too loudly, I’m liable to drop something.”
“I never scream.”
She might have smiled; in any case, the corners of her eyes crinkled slightly. “If you say.”
“You believe in God?” Gilbert asked her when she was finishing in securing the metal forearm and hand to his new elbow.
“I go to church when I can,” she replied absently as she moved the joint back and forth experimentally.
“Do you believe?”
“I believe in more things in this heaven and earth than dreamt of in mere philosophy.”
“That’s not the same.”
“You never struck me as a devout man.”
“A man has to believe in something,” he said. He pointed at the Iron Cross that hung from his throat, where it had always hung on a short length of steel chain.
Kirkland paused as she picked up a bottle of oil and she met his gaze. “It is at times harder to believe in what I can see and weigh and measure, much less something that has even less evidence,” she said quietly, before bending her head to drip some of the pale liquid onto the metal.
He found himself laughing at that. “That’s not the point of faith,” he replied in between rasping laughs.
She shrugged and didn’t reply as she set down the oil and picked up her scalpel. Gilbert didn’t hiss when the first incisions were made. The initial prods with the charged wires felt less painful and more disturbing than anything else, as the muscles remaining in his arm twitched at the current. He watched the entire procedure without saying much for once. After some time, he had difficulty in realizing that it was his own arm being cut up and probed like that.
“So that’s why you are a scientist,” he said conversationally as a particularly painful surge reached all the way up to his shoulder. He gritted his teeth. “You’re bitter about something.” He’d seen his share of disillusioned men in the military, more than one embittered chaplain.
Kirkland snorted, half in derision and half in laughter. “Most of faithful see God as a figure to beg sweeties from, as far as I’ve seen. Or a connection to launch you to upper echelons. If I were God, I’d be half tempted to send more than a few plagues down to teach what real suffering and martyrdom is!”
“You’re not different at all from the other scientists then. They think they’re God too.”
“Or trying to kill God?” she asked. Her hand twisted slightly and he bit back a curse as his shoulder spasmed. Sweat beaded on his brow and made a slow, torturous path down to his eyes.
“Yes-!” Gilbert hissed, salt stinging his eyes and lightning licking up his arm.
She bent her head, seeming to be lost in concentration with some tricky bit of attachment. He gnawed on the inside of his mouth as the pain sparked all along the left side of his body and slowly along the right side of his head. Yet he still tried to keep an eye on what she was doing and spied her fingers seeming spin webs of gleaming copper and silver wire all together. Gilbert was put in mind of a spider as she put together something that seemed too impossible and too fragile to ever work. But then again… what did he know about the impossible?
“Impossible” was nothing for him. And he had a feeling that it was the same for her.
Finally, Kirkland pulled away from his arm, detangling wires that ran to the capacitor that rested upon a nearby table. He looked down at the new… thing attached to him. It gleamed in the light of the surgery, all metal joints and bars. Along it ran spindly wires, seemingly fragile as spider webs, gleaming gold and copper and silver. The fingers had an entire net of bright filaments, suspended above the joints and knuckles like the tightropes for a Lilliputian circus. It should have looked strange, unnatural. But it didn’t. Somehow, it looked no less unnatural than a knight’s metal gauntlet. He looked at the curved, bent fingers and without thinking, he reached forwards. And the fingers slowly, ponderously straightened. It was a small movement, such a tiny gesture- and he stared in unashamed wonder at his slowly relaxing new fingers.
“A lot of critics call scientists the enemies of God,” Kirkland remarked, perhaps not for his benefit. “But really… it’s not that we hate God. Or at least, most of us. The point of it all, the point of science for many of us… it’s to understand God.” She smiled faintly. “It’s to see the beauty and the intricacy and the whole meaning of some sort of Purpose for us, for the world, for living.”
Gilbert didn’t really hear the last of her words as he found his eyes closing. He had never been gladder to be feeling a throbbing pain all along his left shoulder, the throbbing slowing and matching his heartbeat as he drifted off to sleep.
Notes:
-Boffin - a British and Commonwealth slang term for a scientist, mostly researchers and professors but can also tentatively include medical doctors.
-I think I have too much of a sick fascination with lopping bits off Prussia. This is the second time I’ve made him lose an arm.
-Feldwebel - German Army ranking equivalent to Sergeant (Army Sergeant in British Army and Staff Sergeant in American). I may end up doing more serious research into military rankings to accommodate specialist positions in alternate steampunk worlds; “Sergeant-Engineer” is my current favored ranking for Gilbert.
-Most of you probably know that prosthetics is still a rather rough, new field that doesn’t get much in the way of developments. But prosthetic limbs have been around since almost the beginning of human civilization with varying degrees of success. I based Gilbert’s new arm on a mixture of what I know of robotics (Mythbusters, documentaries and some very interesting engineering students) and Fullmetal Alchemist’s automail. Then I tossed in some remembered lessons from Human Anatomy, particularly in describing the joints (hinge = elbow, etc).
-Carbolic acid is the antiquated name for phenol (C6H6O), a multi-use chemical that’s used in manufacturing and industry. It was one of the first disinfectants used in surgery thanks to the work of Sir Joseph Lister. Interestingly enough, it can be used to specifically target and temporarily shut down nerve activity.
-Ether, or specifically, diethyl ether (C4H10O), was known for its analgesic properties since ancient Greece, but was used in surgery as a general anesthetic in the early 1800s. Though effective, it has the unfortunate quality of being flammable.
-Admittedly, fem!England’s impressive academic record wouldn’t be incredibly plausible at this time. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first openly female woman doctor and she graduated from GenevaCollege in New York on 1849. The first medical university for women in England wouldn’t be opened until 1874 (Elizabeth Blackwell was co-founder) though there was the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania (founded in 1850). I took some major liberties with medical history and practices.
-Blood poisoning, or septicemia, is still a major problem and risk of surgery, often caused by contamination of surgical sites.
- Miseratione non Mercede - “For Mercy, not for Gain”- The motto inscribed on St. Thomas Operating Theatre in London, England (No longer in use, now part of a museum).
-Alana’s last monologue about scientists and God is based on an actual lecture a teacher gave me in high school. That was also not the last time I ever received a variation about the false incompatibility of science and religion.
-I lied somewhat about this being steampunk because of my introduction of electricity into the world. Is that allowed? But in any case… the ability to harness and control or at least understand the principles of electricity would have been necessary in the development of Gilbert’s arm, by understanding nerve function and how to integrate it. However, by the mid-1800s, scientists did know that electricity could be used to stimulate dead muscles (discoveries which actually inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). Batteries were used in industrial applications starting from after 1836, particularly in telegraphs. On the other hand, I’m taking major liberties in history, engineering and the laws of physics and biology. Whoops. That’s what creative license is for, I suppose.