It took a solid two hours for the newbie to be dragged upstairs, be revived with some more professional CPR and a stupid-looking mask, and take numerous breathes of holy life-and, well, probably, the odor of the rubber mask.
Alex and Mark both stared at the entire sight from the far wall, one of them with his arms strapped in front of the chest, the other one with his hands poked into the pockets-and both of them slightly frowning.
Mark pulled out a cigarette and a lighter from his pockets-obviously, he had been the one with the hands pocketed deep in his pockets, fidgeting with his cigarettes inside.
"Want one?" he asked, sticking the thing to his lips.
-or at least, trying to.
His hand was halfway there when the Military doc whipped his head around in less than a second and raised an accusing finger at the cigarette.
"No-and I am not planning to try it anytime soon," Mars muttered his reply as Mark saggingly put the thing back into his pocket.
They stayed silent like that once more-the only difference from before was that Mark had a deeper frown on his face than before.
"So, what do you think was the cause?" Mark jerked a pocketed hand at the hospital bed and the limp form and the medic buzzing around the bed, checking stuff on a clipboard.
"Why're you asking me, in particular?" Mars asked, but, of course, he already knew the answer.
'Cause I'm a Prod, that's why-and Prods are supposed to know everything, Alex thought.
"'Cause you're a Prod," Mark said.
Mars stared at the dirty lamp above his head for a second-though Mark was too busy frowning to witness it-, then shrugged. "He just fell to the ground on his face-how can I know why he did that? Besides, Prods don't know everything,"
"I didn't say that Prods know everything," Mark muttered, but seemed like Alex's unusual wrath had been quite effective, for the boy clammed up after that.
A few minutes went by like that-Mark dumbing himself by staring at the dirty tile beneath his feet, and Alex thinking if Lyra had been sincere when she said the words before the newbie collapsed, for imagining it to have been her true words simply thrilled him a bit.
Then after those few minutes, the doc with the accusative finger waved them over to the bed with the wave of his 4 fingers.
They all took some time looking down at the soldier; he was now asleep once more, his bruised forehead was now wrapped up in a bandage, and he was breathing heavily as if he had just fallen back asleep after awakening from a nightmare, but otherwise, he seemed fine.
"He seems fine," Mars said out loud, thankfully, this time, meaning to say it out loud.
"But he actually isn't," The doctor nearly readily answered, then pulled out a narrow paper stick from his pocket and showed it to the sergeants.
From the fact that the stick stung of a strange ammonia-ish odor, Alex Mars straight away knew what the doctor had done.
"How did you make him pee?" he asked, rather fascinated in how thorough and 'caring' of his new patient the doctor had been-meanwhile, he succeeded in ignoring Mark's cringing look.
The man shrugged, pointing at the soldier's pants-for the first time, Mars realized that the newbie had gotten redressed into a new set of clothes.
"Everyone who gets unconscious unexpectedly loses complete control of their own bodies-this guy here only had the misfortune to have a half-full bladder during his incident; so all I had to do was stick the thing to his trousers,"
"Alright-so what does it mean?" Mark asked, and I have to admit that Alex was quite amazed a the fact that Mark could ask such an intrigued and serious question.
The doctor frowned at this.
"It shows the same results as someone who ingested a drug, to tell you the truth,"
Both Alex and Mark stared at the doctor, both of them suddenly far away, but for different reasons.
Mark was reminiscing the rather bizarre taste of marijuana that his dad had gotten him when he was 16.
And Alex was thinking how silly and at the same time, intriguing the situation was.
"'Ingested a drug'." Mark, having recovered his sergeant sense, repeated.
The doctor nodded avidly.
"Yep."
On the bed beyond their conversation, the newbie flinched a bit in his unconscious state, and a second after that, Mars sighed.
"I'll interrogate him as soon as he's up."
Higgins rewarded him with a big grin and a huge clap on the shoulder.
"Yeah-find out what's wrong with the guy's mental state and tell me when you're done,"
Mars snorted, his eyes still fixed on the slack figure on the bed-his nose could still sense the odor of dried pee in the room.
"Why?"
Mark shrugged. "'Cause you seem rather interested in this. And, 'cause I gotta go text Sandra."
With that, the guy left the ward, and Mars was suddenly left to stare at the drug-ingested newbie, enjoy some company with a rather thorough doctor who was rather suspicious with his own patients, and smell the pee in the air.
-After 10 seconds of taking in the situation, he himself left the ward, pulling out his phone to brief the state of affairs to Lyra and guess together how such an event had managed to happen within the Military.

He had only interrogated someone once before, which had been exactly 4 days ago. Two newbies-on a mundane one and the other a Prod, by the way-had wrestled each other on the very first day that he had arrived to fill up the rest of his blank service. The reason had been...
Daring each other to be able to run 10 meters within 3 seconds, Alex remembered with much bitterness. Prod teens these days are as equally stupid as Mundanes.
That interrogation had been a total disaster. Both of their faces had been wrapped in bandages, thus taking away their ability to speak(though a few rogue words did manage to leak out of their disfigured lips). Mars ended up asking silly questions about their silly fight and kept getting merely the silly facial reactions and grunts from their silly faces.
-He simply hoped that this interrogation would be better than that.
So when he pushed the metal door of a room labeled 'INTERROGATION', Alex Mars was fully prepared to make things work out.
-and he was in luck.
The newbie sat still in a wooden chair right behind a dull desk. He was now suited in a proper Military uniform, which he must have gotten used to wearing by now, but seemed... rather uncomfortable, with both hands stuck in his pockets and his eyes skirting over the table as if he was following some roach on the thing.
Quite satisfied at the condition of his friend, Alex pulled out an opposite chair and slid his butt onto it.
They(which, of course, means Mark) had given him a clipboard to write down notes on and a pen, and now he took it from under his armpit and gripped it in his hands; before long, one of his fingers were playing with the pen.
He looked up at the newbie, then, taking a deep breath, began.
"We should be starting,"
That was the most basic thing you could have said to him, Al! his inner self groaned.
Thankfully, the newbie was considerate enough to respond to even that.
"Yeah. Uh-huh."
-And that's where Mars realized that it shouldn't be himself that should be getting anxious; the kid-a drug buyer after all-should be the one feeling anxious.
So Alex began at last.
"Your name?"
"Terry McCartney, sir,"
Why do you, in particular, happen to have such a name? Mars thought with a bit of dissatisfaction. Ted or John or something would have been better to call...
But with the newbie-I mean, Terry-staring at him with eyes full of expectation, it seemed like a quite pressing issue to go on with the interrogation, and thus Alex went on.
"Age?"
"I just turned 17,"
Just a year below me, Mars thought. Back then, when he had been 17, he had been busy hiding the fact that he was a Prod. In contrast, here this Terry McCartney was, being interrogated for having taken a drug.
Perhaps, as much as Alex Mars always ended up as the misfortunate one, this interrogation would turn out to be as stupid and silly as the tragic last one.
"Do you remember how you got unconscious, McCartney?"
McCartney took a deep breathe that somehow sounded like an old dog's wheeze to Mars' ears. A sign of perky nerves, Mars noted to himself, and didn't yet write it down on his clipboard.
"I suddenly got unconscious, I guess," The voice itself was unsure and quivering, and as he wrote down the boy's answer, Mars could sense the boy's eyes widening slightly through his peripheral vision.
"I am a witness to your incident myself, actually. You had been strolling around the field with a Maxim, doing nothing before suddenly falling slack like a rag doll. What were you doing right before you went dark?"
McCartney sniffed, then bit one side of his lip.
More signs of nervousness, Mars noted mentally.
"I... I was trying to clear my head," The kid answered, but his face betrayed him; from his sweating forehead and raised eyebrows, Mars could now know for sure that the guy was hiding something.
Now, I should begin to corner him down, Mars thought with a gloomy mood settled over his brain.
"In a field where your peers and older soldiers are standing guard? YOu could do it elsewhere. And, by the way, you couldn't have gotten sick or dizzy for no reason-why did you have to 'clear your head'?"
McCartney opened his mouth to say something, closed it, then reopened it. And, at one last twitch of his mouth, he closed it.
"Also, the doctor found that you had taken a dose of a drug," This caused the biggest reaction of all from McCartney-the boy winced, then shuddered in such an obvious fashion that Mars couldn't feel too much pity for the guy's situation.
"Tell me right now who provided it, why you took it, and when."
The boy started poking at a stray string on his uniform, and when his lips started to talk, his eyes would not dare look up at Mars.
"I don't know his real name, but... he said it was a Jonas,"
Jonas, Mars scribbled onto the clipboard. But his hand was only writing the name down just because he had been asked to; his brain, meanwhile, was thinking.
For people who only stated their front names, there were a few possibilities for what their true identity would be. They could be a part of an organization, or someone who was afraid of being found out by the government or police, or...
or a Prod, Mars thought with a suddenly-perked-up excitement. Never had I thought that this interrogation could be linked with the wrongdoings of a Prod.
"For what?" Mars asked in a masked sense of hurriedness that he hid behind a dose of strictness and neutrality.
"For..." The boy muttered. Alex looked up to find that the boy had now taken to pulling an innocent string from his uniform, his knuckles going white as he pulled.
"I... I wanted to be here, to get in here," It came out as a sob, and Alex listened to a sole big teardrop onto the boy's fingers and divide to fall to his uniform.
Now, everything made a bit of sense.
Inside his head, logic was being made; the boy had gotten a drug from someone who might be a Prod somehow to get into the Military. And that could only work if-
"The drug could make me a Prod temporarily," The kid sniffed.
Jesus, Mars thought and so surprised was his brain that he could have said the phrase out loud if he hadn't been in such an awkward, strange situation. He hadn't met any Prods who were experts in developing such a thing, nor had he ever thought that it could be possible. Perhaps, after the interrogation, he would start going to each of the Minors, asking about the drug.
"Where did you find that Jonas guy?" Mars asked impatiently.
"On the street beside the State Affairs department, I think; he was actually selling it publicly, saying that he was looking for someone to go through the very first trial for it,"
Mars froze. First trial?! he thought. This Jonas guy seemed as insane as McCartney.
"I took it the day before the final tests. It gave me great pain to my limbs for a few hours, but worked-I could act more quickly and acutely and I passed,"
Though what the boy had done only to get into the Military did anger Mars a bit, he was also feeling great fascination as his ears listened, his hand wrote, and his brain whirred and whizzed and spun.
And when he noticed after 4 seconds that the boy wasn't speaking anymore, he looked up and found him with tears streaming down his face.
Alex felt a tiny poke of pity and sensuality as he watched the boy; gosh, spending time with Lyra had changed him for sure.
"Nothing else, McCartney?" Mars asked in a voice that he believed had a lesser level of coldness in it compared to his other words before.
There was silence, so Mars decided to wait until a confirmed answer could come out from the boy.
"I'm terribly sorry, sir-that's all,"
Mars bit his lip, then got up from his chair, feeling an intense mix of both fascination and pity in his mind. He dug into his pockets till he found a wad of tissue, then tossed it over to McCartney. The boy stared at it in surprised eyes before dabbing his eyes like a 6-year-old after having been punished.
"Interrogation's over. I will send you for a more thorough medical test since you took a drug that was never tested before. And... I don't know how the Military will take care of your fraud," His hand touched the steel knob of the door, but he paused for a while.
"I'll check out this Jonas guy myself; I guess your statement will depend on how corrupt he is,"
Trusting that the statement would be a suitable last statement for the interrogation, Mars opened the door and left.
As he walked down the hall to the office, the fascination and pity inside his mind finally combined to create an urgent urge to find out who Jonas was.