(Trigger warnings: car accident, brain injury, firearms)
BEEP
Ugh. Ow.
BEEP
She was injured enough that she couldn’t make out - or worse, couldn’t understand - the voices of the doctors and nurses around her. But the pure tones of the machines monitoring her failing body still came in loud and clear.
BEEP
Damnit, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this! She’d done everything right this time, hadn’t she? Found a community? Used her resources to keep them together? Twenty years of work, gone like that, because she got too bold defending her people.
BEEP
Keep it together, Doreen. You’ve done this before, and in bodies and minds failing more quickly than this one. Just find an opportunity and get out of here. You can grieve for yourself later.
But “getting out of here” wasn’t that easy anymore. Apparently the pandemic had caused better adherence to infection protocols, and the doctors and nurses caring for her broken body and brain all wore gloves, denying her precious skin-to-skin contact.
BEEP
She knew the tones were counting off lost seconds of her life. They always were, but those seconds became greater treasures the fewer of them there were.
She became aware of the presence of someone in her room. Another doctor or nurse - time to be ready if she got touched. But she never got a chance to learn whether this person was gloved - they attended to one of the many machines she was connected to, then departed.
BEEP
Instead of lamenting the advances in medical technology that allowed her to be kept alive without actually being touched, she chose to gather her thoughts and recollections as best she could. She’d never had to move on after a head injury like this before, and she wasn’t sure if the things she was struggling to remember now would come with her mind or soul or whatever part of her was allowed to live indefinitely across bodies, or if they would be lost forever in her old self when she became someone new.
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She’d come here in pursuit of… someone. A woman. Name wasn’t coming, but it wasn’t important. She’d hurt one of her family - Terry? Teri? Tori? No, Tara! She’d hurt Tara, who was a shapeshifter, and stopped her from being able to become those other people!
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The woman had… something that she’d needed. Something that made her and her community unsafe. She’d tried to get it with money, with threats, and failing those, with violence.
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This was making her tired, but she couldn’t afford to sleep, not yet. If she slept, she might never wake up, and she couldn’t let that happen. She had to remember.
The woman had attacked her. She’d fought back, and the woman drew a gun on her; she should have thought about that before confronting someone in Texas. They struggled, the gun went off, and the woman collapsed. She grabbed the woman’s purse and ran.
She took everything out of the purse that she thought would help Tara. Then…
BEEP
That’s it. That’s all she could remember. Fuck. That’s not enough. She had to know whether she got caught. She had to know who the woman was and if she was working with someone, she had to know…
Ouch! Fuck!
She had to know that thinking this hard would hurt like hell and probably speed her decline.
BEEP.
As her mind drifted, she considered that she was losing her name but not her gender, even though she’d had them both for the same amount of time. Tara and Marti would have laughed at her. Funny that she could keep their names in mind but not her own.
Her reflection was interrupted as footsteps approached her room. She mentally prepared herself - although she couldn’t remember for what - and was disappointed when a gloved hand replaced one of the tubes connected to her arm. She wanted to be touched, needed to be touched. But why?
BEEP
The sound of the monitor brought her back to her senses - some of them. She felt her heart race in fear; she wasn’t just losing her body and mind, she was losing her exit strategy, her opportunity for further existence.
This wasn’t right. She’d chosen her last transplant carefully so that she’d have more time! She’d been counting on at least forty years!
BEEP
Regrets began to fill her mind. Regrets that she hadn’t been honest about being a Hop instead of a Swap. That she hadn’t worked harder to find love instead of just friendship. That her relationships in this life weren’t so damn transactional.
She knew, in her heart, that these were the regrets of the dying. Her time was almost up.
BEEP
In a panic, she tried to reach out for her call light, but she couldn’t make her arm work the way she wanted. She flailed and heard a loud BANG, then her arm went limp. She heard footsteps hurrying her way, and then - yes, finally - she felt the touch of someone’s skin as they took hold of her arm. She mentally lunged and then-
BEEP
Maria Gutierrez snapped out of her daze and gasped, the absence of tubes and needles and the ability to breathe without the aid of a machine startling her briefly. She dropped the patient’s arm, and it flopped back down to the side of her bed. The patient didn’t respond, but she wouldn’t, would she? There was nobody in that failing body anymore. As transplants went, this one - from injured to uninjured, from confusion to clarity, from dying to living - was more extreme than her others. And when they only happened every thirty years or more, you never really got used to them.
BEEP.
She did remember from previous experience, though, that she had to move fast. Especially since - she checked this body’s memories - she was technically off shift. That’s why she wasn’t gloved when she went to lift Doreen’s arm and put it back on the bed. That one choice, that small act of compassion, would send Maria’s life in an entirely new direction.
BEEP
She looked in the drawer, where patient personal effects were usually stored, and found a bag. No clothes - unsurprisingly, those were ruined beyond keeping in the accident. But Doreen’s purse was here, and Maria was delighted to see that it still had not only Doreen’s phone, wallet, and other effects, but also the phone and flash drive she’d been able to get away from Courtney during their fight. She’d be able to fix Tara’s ability to shift.
BEEP
Maria smiled. She’d just learned one more detail to her ongoing, eternal life - that Doreen’s damaged brain hadn’t stopped her memories from following her “soul”. All her financial and personal resources, carefully obtained and managed over a series of lifetimes, would still be hers.
She stuffed the contents of Doreen’s purse into her own, but left the purse itself. No need to make her “theft” obvious – if anyone noticed things were gone, they’d suspect her, the “Mexican” girl, first, and Maria was fairly certain “no, you don’t understand, these things are actually mine because I used to be the white woman whose name and picture are all over them” wouldn’t work as an alibi.
BEEP
Maria left Doreen’s room and headed to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror through new eyes. For a transplant made in desperation, this wasn’t bad! She was pretty, with a dark complexion and long dark hair tied behind her head in a ponytail. She was younger than Doreen - only 25 years old, so plenty of natural years left - and had no rings on her fingers. Maria rolled her eyes at herself, remembering that she wouldn’t be wearing a wedding band or any other ring while at work because they’d put holes in her gloves, and mentally confirmed she was unmarried and romantically unattached. She turned her body back and forth to get a look at her sides and back in the mirror and was a little disappointed, finding herself lacking in the curves and boobs department. She shrugged it off; beggars can’t be choosers, and at least she won’t have to go through puberty again this time.
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She did have an extended family to take care of, with parents unable to work in this country and siblings who weren’t able to find work with all the harassment from that fucker Abbott and his followers. Her skills let her find and keep a job more easily, but money was still tight with supporting her family. Thankfully, once she got found her legs a little better, Doreen’s money would go a long way toward helping with that.
Maria blinked, realizing that she wasn’t certain whether her antipathy toward the Texas governor came from Maria’s feelings and attitudes or the ones she’d brought in from Doreen. She supposed it wasn’t important anymore. It was probably both of them anyway.
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And that was the reason for the secrets, wasn’t it? The lines between what used to be “Doreen” and what used to be “Maria” were already blurring, and by the end of the day, she’d just be one person with the memories of Maria, the memories of everyone that she’d brought over from Doreen, and a sense of self created by what parts of Maria she’d decided to let influence her personality. If her friends found out she was a Hopper instead of a Swap, they might figure out that she wasn’t just traveling from person to person, she was taking them. Most Hoppers, when they moved on to a new body, left the person they’d been inhabiting behind, but she didn’t work that way. She took everything and left an empty shell; she didn’t know how to do anything else.
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She sighed and struggled to hold back her tears, at least until she was safely in her car. She’d wanted to get back to the community Doreen had built, to the bar and Gendr, sooner rather than later, but with this many people counting on Maria, she couldn’t just up and leave. She’d have to send word - and the flash drive and phone - to Tara and explain the situation. Maybe she could get back in a year or so? Hopefully before Quinn and Celia’s little one was in kindergarten? Thank God she’d remembered to put Tara’s new identity on her trust before she flew out to this awful state.
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Maria checked her watch. She had to go. It was going to happen soon, and she didn’t want to be stuck trying to resuscitate a body that she knew couldn’t be kept alive.
She washed her hands out of habit and walked out of the bathroom. She smiled and waved at her colleagues as she made her way to the hospital exit, thinking about how she was going to spend her first night as Maria. She almost made it to the elevators when she finally heard the tone signaling the end of her old life and, by extension, the start of her new one.
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-