Participants:
Scene Title | A Hospital, Is A Hospital, Is A Hospital |
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Synopsis | Flint shows up at the hospital not long after everyones getting settled and Abigail asks him to heal Felix as well as assure him that she missed him and try to get him to eat. |
Date | September 26, 2009 |
St. Luke's Hospital is known for its high-quality care and its contributions to medical research. Its staff place an emphasis on compassion for and sensitivity to the needs of their patients and the communities they serve. In addition to nearby Columbia University, the hospital collaborates with several community groups, churches, and programs at local high schools. The associated Roosevelt Hospital offers a special wing of rooms and suites with more amenities than the standard hospital environment; they wouldn't seem out of place in a top-rated hotel. That said, a hospital is a hospital — every corridor and room still smells faintly of antiseptic.
A hospital is a hospital is a hospital is a hospital. Despite the way the last year of his life has gone, Deckard's mostly avoided being pent up inside amidst the sick and dead and dying. Between Abby and himself and — Constantine intermittently in between, he's kept up on his feet and stable enough to be navigating the hospital's cramped courtyard now with a head on his shoulders, two eyes, both arms and no limp. Leather jacket scuffed brown around his shoulders and hands slack in his pockets, he's kicking a boot toe blandly against the hollow base of the first flag pole he's run across out here. A couple of nearby benches and a trash can are both unoccupied to his back.
A few months ago he'd probably be out here smoking, but for now the open (smoggy) night air seems to be the brand of pollution he's after.
Joseph is sleeping well enough, dead to the world enough that Abigail felt safe enough to leave him be, leave his room. One a trip down to the cafeteria though, a glance into the waiting room and half expecting his wife to be there, she'd been surprised instead to see Flint. Some hand signals, semaphore, Morse code and a few short words later, she was detouring from her trip back to the hospital room towards the courtyard and the tall ghost that haunts there. A styrofoam container of food, plain old spaghetti and meatballs in her hand and a coffee carrier of two large as possibly plain drip coffee's.
Abby's dried out, red hair still smelling of smoke and face streaked with ash here and there where she missed it with the wet wipe. Cheapie slippers scrounged up from in the hospital and some still in process of scabbing over cuts around her mouth. Minor really. One of the coffee's is held out to him wordlessly, followed by her going up on her toes to press a kiss to his cheek. She's unsure of where they stand post white powder incident and is going to play it safe. "Joseph's gonna be fine. Smoke inhalation, some bruising. They're keeping him overnight and on oxygen" She's raw, impossibly raw voiced, from yelling, and from sucking in her own share of smoke when on high and cutting folks down.
Deckard's cheek is hollow and bristled coarse against contact, fallen into a state of back and forth flux between too much stubble and none at all. The rest of him is too thin, as per usual, and stinks of coffee rather than whiskey, which is not usual. There's a latent drift of acrid alcohol interred in the leather of his jacket — maybe threaded into his shirt, but there's none on his breath or in his hands or anywhere else, really. He's sober and awake and faintly scruffed where his hair is getting long enough to muss again, and he takes fresh coffee without resistence while he looks her over under knit brows.
"Hey." She stinks and has ash on her face and cuts at her mouth, and his free hand catches near automatically back after hers to see to that last thing, maybe even before she can protest. "Guy gets hung up by the neck and all he has to worry about is smoke inhalation and some bruising?"
She won't protest, isn't going to protest. The cuts around her lips are small, not much of a drain. It's her tongue that starts soaking up the healing as per usual, the twitch of her nose to let it be known that the pull is happening and the oddity of how it feels.
"They didn't hang him like the others, his weight was under his arms, they hung him up to make an example. They hung the other two to… to-" Nope, she's not talking about it. The cuts seam up and disappear, pristine flesh left behind as if she'd never shimmied up light poles with the knife between her teeth.
"Church is gone and Joseph right now, he doesn't want to see it rebuilt. He'll change his mind later though, i'm sure of it"
Grasp light and touch warm, Flint watches fresh cuts mend themselves on his way to turning back in to what she's actually saying and — you know. Paying attention. Didn't hang him like the others. Hung him up to make an example. The furrow in his brow etches a little deeper, baffled unease quiet in the span it takes him to realize that his hand is still wound careful around hers even after the fog and buzz of healing has seen fit to end the drain and cut itself off.
"They had him for nearly a month."
His hand falls away to scrub too casually at the back of his head and he lifts a brow, clear eyes scanning elsewhere across the paved and tiled courtyard. "You and I both know things don't always go back to the way they were."
"They don't always. Sometimes never" It's an echoed sentiment as she leans back up to place another kiss, this time on his lips, real quick. His dislike of PDA's a known factor. "Thank you" He knows what for. "He'll be staying above the bar, till he feels safe to go back home. Feel free to visit, if you think it will help him" She pulls back to start nursing her coffee, expecting a long night and early morning.
"Felix might not make it"
There's some tension against the second kiss; it creeps up taut through the wires rigged up the back of his neck and resolves itself into forced tolerance just in time for Ivanov's name to enter the conversation. PDA having been appropriately brief, he lifts his coffee cup and sips for the first time, gaze tracking maybe a little too pointedly elsewhere all of a sudden.
"He owes me still. Four favors" he's really the only one that she has studiously kept track of the favors owed. Because she's actually needed to use them. "I'd like to be able to claim them at some point. Claim them and them be useful" Hell, she'd say that Deckard doing this would count pretty fucking big in the favor pile.
"Plus, I can only imagine how pissed he'd be that he has you of all people, to thank for still being alive, if you were to say… at some point, head on up to the ICU with me at some point and we .. did what we did with Becca, enough to let super speedy keep his legs" Everything else would take care of itself on it's own with time and medicine and maybe a request to Hadley.
"You can say no though, I won't think less of you" He should know, that really, she wouldn't. She of all people would understand.
"He doesn't think that way." In favors owed or. Loyalty or honor or any of those things encompassed in a measuring sideways look and narrow distaste feathered and sketched thin into tired crow's feet. It's easy to look down on a person when you're inches and inches taller than them, and Deckard's doing a fair job of it now. Not condescending exactly, there's no denying his chilly register of persistent naivete after all this time.
"If he lives long enough to repay either of us, it'll be in the form of a prison sentence, or a bullet." Another, longer swallow of coffee later, he tilts his focus back enough to squint at a flag flopping slack in a lazy wind some ways up the pole and shakes his head dimly on the way to peering back at her again. "No."
No. Easy enough. She wasn't expecting yes. If Flint had asked her to heal Logan, she's sure that it would be the same answer. Some small part of her hoped that he would say yes. She looks away from him and his stare down at her, guilt crossing her face for having even asked the question now. Felix wouldn't toss her into prison. Maybe give her a head start. But he's right. Felix would without a doubt, take Felix and throw him under the bus without compunction.
The adrenaline of the day is wearing away, drawing down on her shoulders. Lungs a little clearer and throat a little less raw due to what he dished out to her. "You show up because you were worried about Joseph? I can bring you up to his room if you want, vouch for you. Took a little bit of fit throwing but I managed to get permission to stay in his room with him"
Guilt is met with guilt in kind, if it's of a rangier, rougher brand that barely has time to fleet over the hard jut of cheekbones and brow before it's gone again. Doesn't matter, though. Deckard doesn't change his answer, and she doesn't press for him to.
"Not worried," his brow furrows again, resentful of the implication that he ~cares~, "just." Not worried. His left hand lifts and splays — the same one he used minutes ago to take the edge off earlier injuries. "I dunno. I'm sorry I wasn't there."
"You had stuff. You can't.. you can't be everywhere at once. You can't… heal everyone, you won't be able to heal the world. Sometimes, you can only come in the aftermath and take care of what you can" She gestures to a bench that the two of them can sit on, heading there herself. Two plastic forks are produced from her pockets and some napkins. She intends to eat and intends for him to eat as well.
"No more white stuff?"
"I don't want to heal everyone." Having just made that at least foggily tangible through his flat denial of services to one Felix Ivanov, Deckard looks her over again a little warily before he turns to eye the bench over his shoulder. He follows at a drag, sits at a heavy slump. Looks at her sideways again.
"I know. You're not me" She murmurs, offering a fork and then the open container edged his way. It rests on her knee and his, meatballs there for the stabbing, spaghetti noodles and sauce. "I Have a journal for you. It's but the guy who had the gift before me. I'll make a copy for you, if you want to read it. What little bit of french, Teo's helped decipher or I went and got a dictionary" Running off the whole, I don't speak french thing. She believes him. That he's sidestepped the cocaine question, she'll live with that.
"I missed you" Take from that what you will. "It's good to see you. It really is"
"Sure." If talk of journals or Francois catches Flint off guard, it doesn't show in his face or the easier slouch of his posture now that touchy time and discussion of Felix have both passed, leaving his knee to rest idle against hers beneath lukewarm spaghetti and the fork he's taken in hand to poke at it with. As ever, he doesn't seem particularly hungry, but he cooperates enough to wind plastic tines through a clod of noodles in order to transfer them to his mouth and chew and all the stuff that eating generally entails.
At reassurances of missed time and affection, he finds himself steeped in awkward silence. But he does look at her while he finishes chewing and swallows and doesn't find anything to say back, so. There's that.
Which is nothing new. A lot of it one sided, or silently accepted. A bench in fresh air replaces a couch, and people walking buy replaces the television. She has nothing to say back, just relishing her own sliver of safety net afforded with flint next to her, steeped in the same silence, the smoke, coffee and a shit ton of emotion that is being suppressed and pushed down deep. She has people who need her. Things to do, things to decompress and shower at some point to try and take, maybe bum some scrubs off a nurse or a doctor. She knows a few. For now, she's going to grasp a hold of this moment, and hold tight till there's no spaghetti left, or she has to head back up to her Pastor who's asleep on his hospital bed.