Participants:
| Scene Title | Fixer-Upper |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Dr. Bianco temporarily trades his mansion and Mercedes for a visit to an abandoned Italian restaurant on skid row to help fight the good fight in the form of pulling out Deckard's stitches and making sure he doesn't die of a horrible infection. |
| Date | January 15, 2008 |
Deckard gives pretty good directions. He knows his way around the city. Unfortunately, he has a tendency to give good directions to bad places. This one is a pretty fine example.
What was once an Italian restaurant in Chelsea is now a structurally dubious, creaking husk. There are signs that the place might have been occupied at various points over the last several months — a moldering sleeping bag pushed back into the corner and a couple of long-dead cooking fires on the floor — but nobody looks to be squatting here now. Just Deckard. He's sitting at a small square table with a deck of playing cards dug out of who knows where, seven stacks arranged into the familiar ranks of a game of solitaire.
The lighting across dusty tablecloths is fair considering the lack of electricity. A pair of large windows at the restaurant's front wall filter plenty of grey sunlight in from the gloomy weather outside.
Sonny is a New York boy. He knows the city very well - and he knew the moment he heard the address to this place that it was going to be seriously dodgy. There is however, a certain confidence that comes with the anonymity of a different face. Ever since he was coerced to work and effectively short-term kidnapped, he's been more cautious. So it's in the face that goes by the name Reg Cooper that the doc shoulders open the door of the ex-restaurant.
He looks a bit like a thug himself, which is decent camouflage. Normally Sonny just dresses down and pushes a toque down over curly hair. With a backpack, he looks like a college student. The disguised face is a bit more angular, a bit more obviously in his late twenties. So with that and the addition of well-worn clothes, he sticks out far less. The downside being, Deckhard won't recognize him, nor does he match the picture on the Ferrymen files. He -did- tell Deckard over the phone he'd be coming in disguise, but that's the kind of thing that can slip from a paranoid man's mind. "Mr. Deckard?"
The majority of his winter gear already shucked to save on time, Deckard is left in a leather jacket, a non-descript white shirt and jeans. Stitches cut black across the ridge of his left brow, then again over his cheekbone, making his identity nigh on unmistakable. Not that he's hard to pick out at a distance without them. Sonny doesn't look like Sonny, though, and he's not wearing a rubber mask.
Flint's right hand drops off the table and under his jacket accordingly, but it's the 'Mister' that really cements the lines etched flat across his forehead. "Yep."
"I know I don't look it, but I'm Sonny Bianco. We met once before," and then, a brief chuckle. "Seems appropriate. When we first met, you gave me a different name. Now you're seeing me with a different face." He steps forward and shrugs off his backpack-slash-medkit. "I'm here to remove your stitches."
That is true. Doesn't change the fact that way too many people are walking around with the wrong face lately. The irritation that is Felix having the potential to become anyone qualifying as that 'too many people' all by himself. Skeptical annoyance persists, but Deckard lets his hand fall down into his lap while he looks Not-Sonny over again more carefully.
"I think some of them need to stay in." With all the other things he could have said in reply, that's positively friendly, even if it's followed up with an irritable sigh. "Just call me Flint. The 'Mister' thing is weird."
"Flint," says Sonny with a nod. "Hope you don't mind if I keep this face on. It uses up energy for me to change it back and forth, and I'd rather not be seen by anyone leaving here as myself. I've had some problems lately, and the last thing I want is to lead the people who want to use me to the Ferrymen."
He motions to a spot beneath a bar light bulb and pulls up a chair of his own. The hand motions seem to indicate that he wants to be positioned in a spot with decent light. He opens up the backpack and pulls out a set of shining stainless steel instruments, which he lays out on the card table. "Are you on any painkillers?"
"I don't care. I don't care if you aren't Sonny as long as you can take these things out of me." Brows lifted, he stands up at the gesture, drags his chair over closer to the light, and drops himself heavily back down again. "My arm's still a mess." More of a mutter to himself than to Sonny, he shrugs out of his jacket before resting his shoulders back against the chair again. The shirt sleeves beneath it are rolled, exposing the back and forth slash of red and black across his previously cut-to-ribbons left forearm. "Not right now. Why, are you?"
Sonny chuckles roughly. "No, no. Just a shot of tequila." Hard to tell if he's kidding or not. He snaps on a pair of gloves and rolls up his own sleeves. Then he leans forward to check the stitches. "Do you want to be on painkillers? I brought some Tylenol 2." Then he removes a pair of surgical scissors from his kit. Deckard's head is tilted gently to one side.
"You know…" a beat, "…I saw a very flattering mugshot of you. But, don't worry. I know the Ferrymen wouldn't be helping you if you were guilty." His words are mostly to distract Deckard as he pulls out the first of the stitches. That stings juuust a little.
"If you have them, I'll take them." Nevermind that Deckard's almost certainly had a shot or two of something already today, assuming his breath is less of a liar than he is. He flinches against that first pluck, not expecting it just yet, but the ones that follow get less of a reaction. Pupils dilated up after the light bulb in an opposite dayesque feat of biology, he's remains quiet for a while post mention of his mugshot.
"Maybe I did do it, but I'm valuable enough to their endeavors that they don't care."
"Well, either way, I trust their judgment. I just do what they ask me to do and don't ask too many questions. It's not safe for anyone for me to know more than I need to." Sonny works at pulling out the stitches as quickly and efficiently as possible. He's a good doc and has steady hands, so it's as comfortable as he can possibly make it. "This place is a shit-pit. I hope to god this is just a meeting place. Else I'm going to be treating you for festering infections next."
"My other shanty doesn't have as many rats." That sounds promising. Adam's apple knocking against the weird angle his neck is at while Sonny works, Deckard peers back at Sonny, possibly wondering after the weirdness of yet another person talking to him out of the wrong skull. "I have places to go. And you should always ask questions."
"I ask them when they're necessary. But the Ferrymen haven't lead me astray yet. They've earned my trust." Sonny continues to efficiently remove the stitches, careful to wipe away any blood that appears and disinfect the area. "If this leaves a scar, I can help you with that as well."
Deckard does wince against the disinfectant, eyes flicking to focus elsewhere for the time it takes Sonny to clean the mostly-closed cuts. Ow. "I've only met a few of you, and I have no idea why any of you care enough to bother. There's always room for suspicion when you don't know the why." Maybe if Deckard trusted people more, he'd have less lines in his face. "I'll keep that in mind if I ever stop feeling pretty. Are you going to get offended if I take my shirt off? Because most of the rest of them are under there."
"Horribly offended. How dare you remove clothing in front of a doctor?" Sonny's tone is wry, but distracted. He pulls out the last of the visible stitches, then leans back. He blinks to re-focus. "Would you like a painkiller? Or I could use a topical."
"Give me the painkiller." The answer comes as soon as the question is posed, suggestive of lingering soreness where stiffness has at least had the good manners to ease off some over the last few days. Deckard's shirt is unbuttoned, mostly with his right hand while the less flexible left gets in the way, then tugged off. The wife beater beneath it follows less gracefully.
More stitches, tattoos, old scars, bones, and wiry muscle are bared at poor Sonny while he maneuvers the shirt off his arm and down into his lap. An extra pair of faded blue eyes peers out from beneath his collar bones, a snake is roped thick around a cross on his right shoulder in more recent black. Someone took a makeshift knife to his side at one point, it looks like. He's led a fun life. The majority of his latest damage occurs across the flat of his chest and left shoulder. Most of the smaller stuff has healed up decently, but the few slices deep enough to cast down into muscle still look kind of gross.
"Fine, fine," says Sonny with a light chuckle. He goes to his bag and pulls out a bottle. He knocks some of the pills out of one prescription bottle into another, then caps it and tosses the bottle so that it lands on Deckard's lap. If he doesn't catch it. "That should do you. Don't take more than two at a time if you can help it. Else you're going to run out pretty fast." He carries over a plastic water bottle and hands it out.
"Well. Looks like someone tried to kill you." Astute. Sonny seats himself again and examines the wound. "Times like this that makes me wish I had the magic healing touch. You'll have to settle for stinging antiseptic. And…yeah." He leans in to examine the bared wound. "…I'm going to give you some antibiotics. You're not allergic to penicillin, are you?"
Run out fast, and maybe die of accidental overdose. For now, though, if two is the acceptable limit, might as well start there. Cap popped off the bottle, he takes the water and downs the paired pills together. "Do or do not," ascribed to one of his older murder attempts, he scuffs one of his boots idly against the dirty floor while Sonny does his examining thing.
"Can't have magic healing touches around all the time. Lulls people into a false sense of security. Keeps them from learning from their mistakes." See if he thinks jumping out a window is a good idea ever again, for instance. Another idle scuff and he shakes his head. Not allergic.
"You may be right about that. Faith healers in particular. Some people might think a prayer'll make it all go away." The way Sonny says this suggests he's not…much of a religious man himself. "I have had the pleasure of fighting with a Jehovah's Witness over a blood transfusion."
Then he's back to being distracted as he removes the rest of the stitches with an expert hand. Once that's done, he moves to the bag again and searches around. Another bottle is removed and handed to Deckard. "Two pills twice a day for a week and a half. Don't forget, and don't stop taking them. Or you might really want that faith healer around when your face starts dripping pus." Lovely.
"If faith healed people it wouldn't need to be called faith." Which isn't really a reply that dares to tip one way or the other on the basic religious issue. There's an earnestness to it anyway, borne of the fact that Deckard's been giving the matter a lot of thought lately.
Even so, the St. Rita pendant Teo gave him for Christmas is conspicuously absent over his sternum. Ferreted away in a pocket somewhere in anticipation of imminent semi-public shirtlessness, maybe.
"Two pills twice a day for a week and a half." Assuming he doesn't run out and get drunk immediately, he probably can remember that. Especially with the threat of dripping pus as a warning. "Any particular reason you're in on the whole helping people like me thing, Sonny?"
Sonny snaps off his gloves and goes about putting his instruments away. He's careful to keep the soiled ones separate from the disinfected ones, despite the fact that he'll have them all cleansed before he uses them next. "Because I live in a big fancy condo and drive a Mercedes. This is the least I can do." He zips his bag shut. He looks a little worn down. Or rather, the face of Reg does. "That and my day job isn't exactly one that keeps my medical skills sharp."
Resisting the urge to poke at the work Sonny just finished doing, Deckard cranes his neck down enough to squint at it instead. Satisfied that he's not about to start bleeding all over the place again, he reaches down to recover his undershirt so that he can drag it carefully back down over his head. "Some kind of rich people guilt thing, then. Cool."
"Bingo," says Sonny. Sounds like he's quite resolved to it. "Call it charity work, except no one knows I do it except the people who need the help." He checks his watch. "If there's nothing else, I'd like to get out of this neighborhood before it gets too late."
Deckard nods while he reaches for the second shirt, glancing only once to the exterior wall. No thugs appear to be lurking too close by, but it's early yet. "That's it for me. Thanks for playing doctor."
Sonny looks a tad offended at the 'playing doctor' bit, but he lets it slide quickly enough. "Take care of yourself. You know how to get ahold of me if anything weird happens. Ferrymen should be able to get you more meds if you run out. But you really shouldn't be on the antibiotics any longer than what I gave you will last." Then, the doc's heading for the door.
 January 15th: The New Guy |
 January 15th: The River |