![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Inuyasha | Rhapsody in Eight Movements
Title: Rhapsody in Eight Movements
Fandom: Inuyasha
Universe: Alternate (Modern day Japan)
Genre: Mystery, Suspense
Rating: T
Warning(s): Mentions of death, the treatment of mental illnesses
Summary: When a mysterious man washes ashore on Halloween night, it becomes a race against time to uncover his identity – and the circumstances that left him there.
Links: DW | FF.net | AO3
What can I say? Shit just got real.
The rubber has met the road. The chickens have come home to roost. Heads have rolled. Pick your favorite cliche, because things have just gotten dead serious in this case. The leak to the press has forced the hospital administration into action - and here we see how that's going to affect our mystery patient. Unfortunately, the consequences are reverberating beyond just him.
Hospital administration, rather by definition, doesn't tend to move very quickly, or yield very easily. This meeting, with the entire medical team and, indeed, anyone who's come into contact with the patient at all, should signal the level of importance now leveled on this case. Such a conference would be a nightmare to arrange, much less so quickly, so everybody in that room is already feeling pretty nervous.
I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed writing from the hardass hospital administrator's POV. He certainly pulls no punches when it comes to rectifying the mistakes of his staff. Blaming the paramedics for the leak was the easiest, most obvious choice, if only because most paramedics are third-party contractors rather than actual employees of the hospital. They had the least to lose in letting this info slip, but not even their adamant denials could save their jobs. Losing a lucrative contract for an ambulance company has to be hard, especially for such a controversial reason.
For those of you crossing possibilities off your lists, we have another identified character in this chapter: Miroku's fellow paramedic is Inuyasha. I'm not sure if this was at all surprising for any of you, given the two characters' closeness in canon, and Inuyasha's impatience with Miroku's continuous pursuit of women. Speaking of which, he and Sango trade a couple of barbs here, revealing that everyone is still on edge, even a couple of weeks after the initial incident.
Rin is also a new character, one of the junior nurses in the intensive care unit who cared for our victim during his ICU stay. I thought this fit in rather well with her canon characterization - nurturing, yet somewhat fearless of the big baddies. Perhaps that was just childish innocence, but some people manage to retain such a trait well into adulthood - and being able to advocate is an important bit of an ICU nurse's job.
Our hospital administrator is heretofore unnamed, though perhaps his interactions with the other characters give away his identity :)
The only bit of outside research I did for this chapter was look up Japanese honorifics so I wouldn't embarrass myself horribly with the dialogue :P I probably made a mistake anyway, moving away from the familiar ones from canon, but here's where I found the ones I used.
Further scrutiny is about to be placed on our mystery man - all that's left is to find out if he can handle it, or if it will only drive him further within himself...
no subject