Participants:
| Scene Title | Autoerotic Mutilation |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Deckard has a booboo. Constantine makes it better. Then the potential for a fun new career is discussed. |
| Date | February 25, 2009 |
The largest, most obvious feature of Dr. Filatov's clinic is that one wall, an entire wall has been almost completely with what appear to be tall hardwood china cabinets, or possibly some other form of storage furniture from a bar, or kitchen or apothecary that have been nailed to the wall and cobbled together into some kind of uniformity. The last one may be the most likely, because every row of shelves that no run the length of the wall are covered with jars and bottles containing all manner of drugs, medicines, tonics, ointments and tinctures. The drawers below the shelves doubtlessly contain more supplies necessary for the operation of the clinic, so perhaps it's best not to question exactly what can be found in them. Besides that, the room is dominated by two large examination tables, which are really just old, well-worn wooden dining tables, with some of the matching chairs resting against the wall opposite the medicines, the closest to a waiting room the clinic has. A simple wooden screen in one corner serves as a dressing area. The unadorned wood paneling and scuffed hardwood floor are not the doctor's doing; he freely admits that whoever occupied this place last had both a thing for wood, and poor taste. The only other seemingly permanent fixture of the clinic is Ranger, Dr. Filatov's absolutely ancient bulldog, who spends most of his days lounging by the dressing screen, or wherever the sunbeams happen to pass through the steel window shutters. Besides a short hallway leading to the rest of the building (most of the space of which is taken up by the enormous examination/emergency/operating room), an unobtrusive door with far too many latches takes up a portion of an inside wall. 'Employees only' couldn't be spelled any more clearly.
Deckard is sick. Really sick. Pale, drawn, and dank with his ongoing efforts to break a persistent fever, it's early evening when he finally bites the bullet, packs up his crappy briefcase and walks the distance to Filitov's. His overcoat is still stiff with dry blood about the collar and shoulders, but the wool is black enough to keep as much from easy detection from afar. The grey of his suit and the dress shirt beneath that are marginally more telling. Dark-edged stains of faded brownish red leftover from a half-hearted scrubbing marr most territory from the chest up, with similar soiling apparent on the cuffs of his sleeves under his coat.
His face is clean, at least, left eye bound out of sight by a strip of simple white bandaging over thicker gauze. So he's sick, and there's something very wrong with his eye.
He lingers outside a while, breath fogging in the cold for a good ten minutes or so before the ache in his head spurs him in through the door, briefcase and all.
It may just be poor timing on Deckard's part, as the clinic appears to be empty.
Well, not completely empty. Laying on the floor is an old, tired bulldog that looks in Deckard's direction when he enters, although it does not bother to lift its head off the floor. It doesn't bark or growl either. Coupled with the fact that the door was unlocked (a very bad idea if you plan to be out and about), so the doctor must be in. And fortunately, he is, this fact made obvious when the unobtrusive door with far to many latches on the far wall opens and a middle-aged man, ostensibly the doctor, appears from below, apparently, taking several moments to close each and every latch behind him. "Sorry to have kept you waiting for the few seconds that you were," Constantine says, finally turning around to face Deckard. A moment of silence passes before he continues, "Let me guess. You fell off a bridge too."
The dog is noticed first. They aren't an uncommon sight in shops on Staten, for those who prefer security systems of the eating and pooping variety. So. Deckard hesitates, but only for about as long as it takes to determine that Ranger probably isn't going to leap up and latch his jaws around one of his ankles. In the time it takes him to make it a couple of wary steps in around the squat canine, Filitov makes his appearance.
It's been a long, long time since Deckard has been to the doctor. And he's never been to one with this kind of decor. He glances first to the exam tables, then to the process of latching latch after latch after latch, all in relative silence until Constantine has turned, and it seems like he should probably say something for himself. "Autoerotic mutilation," delivered at a flat mutter, Deckard holds his ground, glances back at the door over his shoulder, then resolves to carry on the rest of the way in, unlatching his briefcase as he goes. "Knife slipped."
"Well, that's… unfortunate," Constantine replies. Really, what else can be said in response to a statement like that? "Bandage off, let's have a look. How long ago did you manage this mishap? Longer than you should have waited, most likely." They always wait longer than they should. As the doctor speaks, he busies himself removing some articles from one of the many china cabinets that he will doubtlessly need for the examination. "I don't suppose you brought cash? I don't except bank notes or government bonds. Gold will do, I suppose."
"Miss Ruskin will cover the cost. If," Deckard drags a manila envelope out from the black craw of his briefcase, "she wants these." The envelope is flopped down onto the examination table he's balanced the butt of his case against, latches already turned closed to hide the rest of their contents.
He loses some momentum there, energy forced to slog through a dragging breath before he has it in him to turn around and let the briefcase fall back to his side, then down to the floor. "This happened on the twenty-first. I don't know what day it is." The twenty-fifth, for those keeping score. Another slow breath later, he concedes to reach up to pry at the edge of his bandaging, having procrastinated enough already.
Constantine regards the envelop for a moment, and then offers a shrug. "She'll be forty by the time she pays me back, at this rate." Whether it was meant to be a joke or not, the doctor resumes his job almost immediately. "Four days, then. That's a long time to have been with a puncture wound, especially to so delicate a region. Have you taken anything for this? Antibiotics, anything of the sort?" Casually, Constantine dons a pair of latex gloves, preparing himself in the event he must touch something squishy and unpleasant.
Not sure if it's supposed to be a joke himself, Deckard opens his mouth to reply and…doesn't. Whatever. As long as the guy is willing to help him.
Working the bandages free doesn't take long, meanwhile. There wasn't much holding the gauze in place, and once that comes away, well. Constantine is treated to the empty hollow of his mangled eye socket. Reconstructive surgery is out. A false eye, not likely. The eyeball itself is in absentia, along with the lids and a fair portion of the muscle and tissue that would otherwise help to fill the void. It looks less like a knife slipped and more like one dug around with the sort of enthusiasm tiny children apply to unfinished jack-o-lanterns. Only with Deckard's head instead of a pumpkin. Not so much squishy, it looks more blackened and dried out. At least on the fringes. Something's been at work there to have made more progress than an immune system could in as many days.
Having had to look at it once or twice himself already, he looks away, suddenly awkward while brown-touched gauze is crumpled into a ball in his right hand.
"Two tablets of penicillin. One or two days after. I dunno."
For a moment, Constantine stands silent and still, not at the shock of a missing eye; he's seen (and, in fact, caused) far worse than that. But simply the fact that a 'slip' could have resulted in this kind of damage. "It slipped, you say?" he asks, but it's not a topic that he elects to pursue, "Well, whatever story sounds best to you. Let's see…."
Producing a small penlight from one of his pockets, Constantine examines the wound more closely, and isn't too sure what to make of the diagnosis. "Well, this certainly isn't normal, by any stretch. That's some 'penicillin' you've been taking, friend. Even I haven't encountered anything quite this potent." At least nothing that would also light up a fluorescent bulb just by being close to it.
The back of the socket looks weirdly intact under the penlight's illumination. Rather as if part of his optic nerve attempted to regrow itself, only to give up shortly after it started. Isolated patches of softer white and angry red hint at the nastier inevitability of infection where Logan's knife gouged down into bone, all manner of things laid bare that tend to do better when they aren't exposed to open air.
The rest of Deckard swallows uneasily when Constantine draws near enough to peek inside his head, tension drawing lean lines down the sides of his neck and across the set of his jaw when he declines to comment on knife slippage or potent penicillin.
"Four days," Constantine says, flicking the light off and giving Deckard his space back. "If you'd come here immediately, you might still be seeing out of that eye. Provided you'd left it in the socket, of course." However he thinks he might have managed that miracle, he declines to comment himself. "How have you been eating? Fluid intake?"
"I've been busy." Sallow and increasingly downtrodden, Deckard lifts a hand self-consciously when Constantine finally turns away to give him the time to, but there's nowhere to put it, really. It falls back to his side and he goes back to looking sideways and down at the dog, who could probably care less what he looks like right now. "I had some Mexican yesterday. I got sick. A few fingers of whiskey. A glass this morning. Some cereal." Clearly he subscribes to the 7 year old ideal of being able to eat whatever you want when you're a grown up. And out of prison.
"Well, that's not helping you. At least take a multi-vitamin." No doctor's visit would be complete without a scolding, and Constantine does not disappoint. "As for fighting off infection, you have two choices. You can take a good old-fashioned antibiotic for a few days and tough it out. Or you can take your chances with a chemical I've been working on. It might kill you." Constantine offers another shrug as he says this. "But it probably won't. Feel lucky?"
"Sure." Deckard'll…look into multi-vitamins. His expression is distracted — not even remotely convincing. It's not a real doctor's visit without at least some bland disregard of good advice, right? Talk of a chemical brings his head 'round again though, and his remaining eye narrows, crows feet going tight on the right side and sort of fizzling into a failed twitch of muscle on the left. "Do I look like a lucky guy to you? What's the chemical?"
"Nothing you've ever heard of, rest assured." Helpful. "Suffice to say, it serves to 'enhance' white blood cells, makes them more adaptable concerning foreign bodies and more aggressive in destroying them." Either Constantine is making this up, or he's stumbled upon some medicine that he hasn't shared with the world at large. "It could also damage their biological mechanisms and cause them to attack healthy cells. It's a small risk, but the risk is there nonetheless. Normally, I offer a discount to anyone who willing accepts a treatment of this sort, but since my assistant is paying for it out of her own pocket, there's not much incentive for you to take the risk, I wouldn't think."
"…" says Deckard, still caught somewhere between curiosity and suspicion. He can't tell if Constantine is serious. Maybe he doesn't want to know.
He stands there for a minute in silence on his side of things, mulling it over in precisely the kind of way a sane person wouldn't. "What if I wanted you to forget that you saw me here? Or that you recalled some kind of competitor saying he'd been seeing a tall dark and handsome guy with one eye?"
Constantine gives a light chuckle at Deckard's questions. "I don't make a habit of remembering my patients as it is, and I don't have any competitors. Or if I do, I won't have them for long." Not for long? "In any case, you'll be resting for a few days and drinking plenty of purified water. Try to get some citrus and meat into your meal plan. And no more mutilation. I don't care if it gets you off. No more, or you'll likely be getting a guide dog. Understand?"
Won't have them for long. On Staten Island that could mean many things, and Deckard is a creative man. The fact that he doesn't actually react much beyond a downward tip at one of his brows says something about the way his week has gone so far. He nods, right hand uncurled slowly from his grasp around freshly condensed gauze. "Yeah."
"Good." That said, Constantine again returns to one of the china cabinets, and the clattering that shortly results would seem to indicate that he's busy measuring out some number of tablets for Deckard. "Unfortunately, there's not much I can do besides give you more pills and a clean bandage. Someone out there can do something more, but not me. Not yet.
"Unrelatedly, I couldn't help but notice that you seem to be in the business of procurement."
The pills are preferable to the kind of creeping, feverish brand of death that's been testing the waters in his skull. Also preferable to Mu-Qian's twisty ministrations. Deckard watches the measuring out of tablets in tired silence, premature relief slacking some of the tension hardened in around his face when he glances back down after his briefcase. "Something like that." Times are about to get a little hard, what with his offending an entire nest of very organized criminals, after all. "You need something?"
"On occasion, I need human organs." Constantine cuts right to the chase. It might be fortunate that his phrasing would suggest that he doesn't need them at this moment in time. "Surgeries like that aren't common on the island, fortunately, but every so often it becomes necessary. Especially with the sort of rabble you find in the Pancratium. Are you the right man to talk to regarding such a thing?"
Ok, so. Not quite the answer Deckard was expecting.
For a beat or two, there's nothing. Then, bless his black little heart, his brows steep themselves into a hesitant lift; one over stark blue, the other over cavernous, red-rimmed black. His jaw stretches open, then presses closed again more slowly, and at a sideways lock. "I might be."
"Glad to hear it." Finally, Constantine returns whatever equipment it was he was using to the drawers, and returns to Deckard with a small, plastic bottle as well as some clean gauze, bandages and medical tape. "Because it's very time consuming trying to get them myself, especially since they don't keep well. Take two of these everyday, morning and night, with food until you run out. By then, you'll either be cured of infection, or dead. I'd prefer you alive, if at all possible, but that's largely up to you. Absolutely no more 'autoerotic mutilation'."
"Mmm." They don't keep well, do they? Swallowing again against some identifiably unpleasant (and arguably related) sensation in his gut, Deckard takes the bottle only after fumbling his first reach, long fingers tripping over the cap before discerning the actual distance through feel. "Thanks. I'll try to control myself."
"You do that." It doesn't take Constantine long from that point to once again cover part of Deckard's face with white cloth and tape. "Not as good as new, but as good as it's going to get," he says, "If you find yourself another eye, I'll see what I can do about attaching it. No promises."
"Sure." It takes effort not to pull away from the touch of Constantine's gloved fingers. Amplified pain combined with a general desire not to be poked and prodded. The bottle turns over once in his hand, but Deckard holds still otherwise, expression bordering on vacant while he waits out the tape. It isn't like the cover isn't needed. "I'll see what I can dig up." Which is a lie. But better that than trying to explain that you want your own eyeball back because it can see through walls.
"In that case, you're free to go. I trust that Miss Ruskin will know how to contact you." His work essentially finished, Constantine seems eager to shoo Deckard away. Likely so he can return to whatever is down below, through the door with too many latches.
"She doesn't trust me. Said I could find her here." Simple statement of fact, given as Deckard reaches down for the briefcase again. It's cracked open once more, just enough for him to withdraw a scrap of paper and a pen. The former is dropped down onto the nearest exam table once he's scrawled a phone number quickly across its face. The pill bottle goes down into the briefcase, and with one last hazy look around, Deckard heads for the door. "Thanks, Doc."
Constantine pockets the phone number, intending to store it more appropriately later on. "Anytime, friend."
Friend. Right. Inscrutable in return, Deckard shoulders his way back out into the cold without another word.
 February 25th: Darkness There And Nothing More |
 February 25th: Gentle into that Good Night |