You Have Mustard

"Lena? Do you hear me? Do you understand what I am saying?" The doctor’s voice was there, breaking through in fragments, but Lena’s attention had drifted. The collar of the doctor’s uniform was slightly crooked, one side folded under itself as if tugged askew in a hurry. She felt a strange, detached urge to laugh.

“Lena?” the doctor repeated, as if trying to pierce through a fog.

“Yes,” Lena heard herself respond, her voice floating somewhere just out of reach, as though spoken by someone else. “I understand… that I can’t have any more de-aging procedures. That it’ll kill me.” The words sounded foreign, like a script she’d been handed at the last moment, her role in this strange performance suddenly turned grim.

The doctor’s face softened, her mouth moving in shapes Lena tried to follow, but everything felt muted, the edges blurring like she was looking through frosted glass. “Your cellular regeneration has taken a serious hit,” the doctor explained, unaware of how Lena’s gaze kept shifting back to that crooked collar. Idiot. Health ‘professional’, her ass.

“Your telomere length is rapidly decreasing, accelerating your biological age,” the doctor continued. “It means that every time your cells try to replicate, they’re—”

“Splintering,” Lena finished quietly, a smile twitching at her lips. It was funny, she thought. Almost poetic. 

The doctor tilted her head, caught off guard by the smile. “Yes, you could say that. Your cellular structures are—"

“Splintering,” Lena repeated, feeling the word catch in her throat, like she was savoring it. She glanced again at that ridiculous collar, her thoughts scattered.

The doctor’s brow furrowed, her face a blend of professional calm and something softer, something almost like pity. “It’s not just the de-aging, Lena,” she explained, fingers tapping at the holographic display in front of her, highlighting lines that Lena didn’t need to read. “Your epigenetic clock is racing forward. We’re seeing changes across all tissue types—your cellular age has accelerated far beyond what we anticipated.”

She felt her fingers twitch, almost wanting to reach out, straighten the collar, bring a little order to something in this sterile room where her entire future was being laid out in statistics. But she let her hands stay at her sides, cold and still, the urge fading just as quickly as it had arrived.

“Lena,” the doctor said gently, leaning forward, trying to ground her. “I need you to really understand. Your telomeres… your regenerative capacity has hit its threshold. Your options are few. Uploading would preserve you. It would keep Astra… everything you’ve worked for… alive in a way that your physical body simply can’t. You would—”

Lena’s focus snapped back, her voice coming out sharper than she’d expected. “I’m not Uploading,” she said, feeling the weight of the words press against her chest.

The doctor didn’t flinch, just nodded, folding her hands neatly in her lap. Lena felt her mind drift again, catching on the oddness of her own reflection in the small mirror behind the doctor’s shoulder. She looked older. She could see it, the faint shadows under her eyes, the lines starting to form at the corners of her mouth.

The doctor tilted her head, lips pressing into a faint line. “Then I suggest… taking some time to adjust. Find balance. Your body can’t afford the stress of another season at this rate.” Her gaze softened further. “It’s your choice, Lena, but if you continue down this path, those eight years could become three. No more interventions, no more de-aging. You’ll have to face this naturally.”

Lena’s lips curled again, that faint, twisted smile returning. 

She glanced up one last time, noticing how the doctor’s collar still sat crooked, a single, persistent wrinkle.

For a fleeting moment, she wanted to reach out and fix it, to pull the fabric into place and bring some small order to this surreal conversation.

But instead, she rose, her fingers brushing the chair’s arm as she left, feeling the doctor’s gaze follow her, steady, even as she walked away.