A/N: Here it is, the one that started it all, Bejerot's Diagnosis. Enjoy.

---

The world had become... very slow.

He was vaguely aware of his eyes blinking and the blurred vision of Lisa Reisert standing over him. His entire body was numb with pain and his breathing laboured from a mixture of the poorly done cricothyroidostomy and the fact that it felt like the last bullet may have nicked his lung. Although his mind was telling him to reach up and take Lisa's pale neck and squeeze, his body wasn't obeying the order.

'I'm going to die,' he suddenly realised as he began to hear the heavy, hasty footsteps of the paramedics and the police. The world was getting blurrier and his field of vision growing more and more narrow but before his eyes closed, a feeling of absolute relaxation overcame him.

A very startled Lisa looked down at him as his icy eyes closed. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before she heard him take a shuddering breath. Inexplicably, a tear wove down her face but she quickly reached up and brushed away before she was shoved aside by a paramedic who dropped to his knees beside Jackson and began his work. He was aided by a female paramedic who had just run in with the rest of their supplies. She looked up at Lisa as the male began to do his ABCs on Jackson. After pulling a notebook from her bag, she looked at Lisa expectantly.

'Do you know his name?'

Lisa swallowed. 'He called himself Jackson Rippner, but—'

'R-I-P-P-N-E-R?'

'Yes, I think, but that might not be his real—'

'How old is he?'

'I... I think his identification is in his pocket,' she said, but the woman didn't make a move to look. 'I'd guess he's... 26?'

The woman nodded, scratching down everything she said. 'What happened?'

'Jesus, looks like he's already been ventilated,' her associate said and the female paramedic looked down as he removed the scarf completely. 'Badly.'

The female paramedic raised an eyebrow at Lisa, who was looking at her like a deer caught in the headlights. 'What happened to him?'

'I stabbed him in the throat an hour or so ago, I—I think,' she said, shaking as her father came over and set a hand on her shoulder. 'With a pen, a ballpoint pen. Here, I broke a, uh, vase over his head, stabbed him in the thigh with a heel and… I shot him.'

'Only once,' her father said as the paramedic opened her mouth. 'I'm the one who hit him in the chest.'

The two paramedics, seemingly speechless, simply turned their backs to Lisa as another paramedic led her off to the connecting room. She was sitting in the living room, the paramedic cleaning the cut on her head, when they rolled Jackson out quickly—his neck was stabilised, a tube sticking out of the area where she'd stabbed him with a bag attached to it being pumped by the female paramedic. His pale and slightly bluish torso was exposed with big squares of gauze covering his chest and lower abdomen. The male paramedic was attempting to talk to Jackson, but all that Lisa could see were his lips moving soundlessly. Just as they got him through the door, she saw his eyes open lazily in response to something the paramedic said, but it was apparent that he wasn't anywhere near full consciousness.

'I'd say he's about a nine on the GCS,' she heard the male paramedic say before his voice was covered up by the sound of the LifeFlight landing outside, and then he was gone.

---

A bright light came into Jackson Rippner's field of vision and for one blissful moment, he was convinced that he was actually heading towards Divine Judgment, but then he realised that rather than a pure, white light, it was the piercing, yellowish light of a handheld flashlight. There was a loud thumping noise and what seemed like a slow drawl with a questioning tone. He tried to move his lips but nothing came out.

'Mrrrarn hgaanrm neachnonthe GCS,' the voice said and Jackson's eyes suddenly came into focus. A man was standing over him and a woman squeezed a bluish bag that seemed to be connected to his throat, if the pressure was telling him anything.

'Okay, one, two, three,' a person at his feet said and he found himself being lifted closer to the blades of the helicopter then into the body of the vehicle. People swarmed around him; the frequency of thumping increased as the door closed and the helicopter lifted off of the ground. Over the sound of the rotors, he could hear the pilot reporting into the trauma unit on the ground.

'Yes, our ETA is two minutes. We'll need a surgery team standing by—the patient has two gunshots, one to the epigastric region near the subcostal and the other to the right hypochondriac region, almost on the midclavicular.'

The next two minutes were a blur. He could feel pressure here and there as the medics pressed stethoscopes to his chest and jabbed needles in him for blood testing, but his body wasn't responding properly to their pokes and prods. He felt when they landed, but it wasn't until the doctors appeared that he knew he was at the hospital. A team of doctors and nurses descended upon him and the surprise of the moment seemed to jolt his system out of lethargy. All at once, he began struggling for breath, dripping sweat and choking.

The lead doctor noticed all of this and screamed to her team as they all scrambled to move Jackson as comfortably as possible from the helicopter and onto the gurney. He choked and gasped as the collected doctors began wheeling him quickly into the building. 'Let's get him to the OR now! I need a sonographic scanner for immediate pericardiocentesis!'

The bright fluorescent lights flashed quickly over his head on the way to the OR. The general surroundings grew colder as his body did the same, and soon he was in the sterile atmosphere of the operating room with an anaesthetist bearing down on him. He could feel the bandages being pulled off of him and was shocked by the pain of having the tube taken from his neck. The wound was cleaned and covered as a nurse explained in low tones what was about to happen, but he didn't hear much because on his left arm, the anaesthetist was inserting an IV and seconds later the Versed took effect.