Participants:
| Scene Title | Heal Thyself |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Before he can make heads or tails of Mu-Qian's involvement with Feng Daiyu, Deckard has to draw her out of obscurity. |
| Date | September 13, 2009 |
Manhattan and Staten Island
It's a fine morning for a robbery.
The sky overhead is as blue as it gets – warmer than it's been, but tempered by a crisp breeze and the occasional blot of light cloud cover across the bleached round of nine o'clock sun. Pigeons bob and waddle thick between between tags of garbage strewn ragged across handicap parking spaces, their efforts overseen by a pair of craftier grackles making short work of an old McDonald's bag.
Nearby, the automatic glass doors of a side entrance to St. Luke's slide open and creak closed.
An elderly gent with a walker plods out at a predictable pace, one rickety step at a time. Too old.
Flint watches from the cabin of a parked car that isn't his, sniffing experimentally at a half-empty bottle of warm beer that isn't his either.
Smells ok.
Next out is a younger couple pushing a wheelchair with a ten year old bound up with a broken leg and another sibling touching at the near wheel despite being warned to keep her hands off. Too many of them.
It's half an hour before the beer is empty and Deckard's thumbing the lock down to lever himself up out of the passenger's side of the coup he'd holed up in to endure a steady stream of too temporary, too likely to have a heart attack, too poor and so on. He never used to care. But this lady is perfect. Scarf on head, drawn, middle aged, alone, oversized purse. Too weak to run when she sees him coming.
She barely has time to gasp before he's smothered a bare hand over her mouth and jerked her over stiff behind the blunt back of her own parked van, free arm hooked around her middle from behind to grasp after her purse while she writhes against the black of his mask and the zipper of his hoodie. The struggling is unexpected – his shoulders bu-bump against the rear windows and he can't get a grip on his knife or her wallet until he twists around to shove her bodily into the same vehicle she's been bouncing him off of. She cries out against his hand but cuts the wrestling around, shoes scuffling a little frantically between his boots when he leans out enough to be sure that the piece of shit security guard hasn't noticed anything.
He hasn't.
That's when the warmth starts. It bleeds slow through her system, muzzy and lax as a stagnant swamp against him. Another muffled scream tears out of her throat in terrified protest, wide eyes squeezed shut against the reflection of his eyes raking cold after her face framed in the tinted window. Another scream, and another, and bit by bit the cancer devouring her from the inside out dwindles into itself and disappears.
He's breathing as hard as she is when it's done, sweat glazing at his buzz smashed flat under the mask, and there's somebody coming, now —cautious footsteps further away in the parking lot at his back when he finally grips the wallet and bolts. One last shove racks the woman hard off the bumper and to her knees.
By the time anyone's managed to draw a gun, he's gone.
***
Seventy-five percent transparency is all it takes for Logan's smile to switch to a smirk, which— on his face, is not a big change. He lifts a shoulder in a shrug, his other hand coming up to fidget with and fix his own ascot tie. "Fair. No kids, girls, or kittens. Just drug pushers. Cross my heart. You could probably see it as a good deed, if you wanted to." The Englishman's hand doesn't move, nor does he shy away from the focused tension the flaunting of stuff has gained.
"As long as we understand each other. I'd hate to think I didn't leave enough of an impression during our last heart to heart." Deckard's eyes widen with exaggerated sincerity, almost polite except for all the ways in which it isn't when he reaches his left hand out and makes graspy motions. Drugs please.
The look fixed on Deckard frosts over, Logan's brow crinkling. Why'd you have to go there! There are approximately two chilly seconds that go by before he lets go of an indignant sounding huff of breath, and his hand moves swiftly from bar to graspy hand to clap his palm onto Deckard's. Rather than immediately pull away, his fingers abruptly encircle the older man's hand, and the spike of euphoria, low and invasive, is a hot shimmer that simmers in Deckard's system. Logan's eyes flare green once more. "Pleasure doing business with you. Enjoy the cocaine."
Frost evokes a half-smile that is not particularly Deckardish in its level security for having Gone There, coolly confident without being all that chilly in return. And it all seems justified enough when the give of the bag is warm in hand, and hhhhhhnooo. His immediate instinct is to tug stiffly back when Logan locks on, coyote to snare with tail curled down and ears laid back flat against the catch alone. Predictably though, it's what follows through that really gets him — bafflement expelled in the slow sink of a breath that lets the bone and tendon locked into Logan's grip go just a little lax.
The corner of Logan's mouth upturns in a half-smile right back, his hand squeezing warmly around Deckard's, that little crinkle-crinkle of plastic between their palms barely audible. There's an analytical twitch of Logan's head to the side, as if listening to something no one else can hear, which doesn't stop him from saying, his voice pitched somewhere husky; "Talk to you later." And with that, he lets go, picks up his drink, and goes to insinuate himself around Deckard and move on away, taking euphoria with him.
It's so overt on top of being entirely unanticipated — Deckard's effectively been shut up and unsettled such that he doesn't think to glance after the brush of Logan's departure until he's already been standing there looking bothered for longer than they actually talked. Thank god there's no one around to see him flounder a second look back over his shoulder a minute or two later. Right?
…Right?
***
Disinfectant, antiseptic, alcohol, white latex gloves and a vial of viscous proparacaine. The disinfectant's blue. The antiseptic is orange. The vodka has no color at all.
“S'this everything you wanted?”
Flint scratches at the back of his head, scuff scuff scruff and turns his list over again, the papery receipt he'd scribbled it all down on three days ago ready to fall apart in his hand.
“I think that's everything. …Cash okay?”
***
A phone call had been placed some time after church had ended and she'd done what she'd done with regards to something else. Something else that had set Abigail on edge. Which would explain why she was deciding to go against the doctors choices when she'd offered to heal Rebecca before. "Flint, I need you to help me, help someone. I owe them." The start of another awkward conversation that had landed them in the hospital, and casually walking around like they belonged there post visiting hours.
Helps that Abigail's known to others as a healer and they're used to her with a 'handler' to take care of her afterward. So that means the trip to Rebecca's room goes off without much of a hitch. Only difference is that it's Flint who's going to be healing and Abigail who's there to wait hand and foot on him during and afterward. Bad mood and all.
Blonde hair in ponytail - no Tracy Strauss power pony here - she peers in to see if the woman is awake or asleep before the door whispers open the whole way and she's ushering the hulk of a man in behind her with very little speaking. At least none until the door is closed and she's approaching the bed. "They said tumors, cancer in her brain. They're going to cut her open tomorrow."
Deckard is quiet, which does not necessarily nullify the fact that he is also 6'2”, brutish and gangling. Like trying to smuggle a great dane into an apartment complex that doesn't allow animals. He stands out. People turn their heads, look and squint — but Abby's with him, and short of her throwing a sheet over his head, he's not going to get any more invisible.
So she leads and he follows, and soon enough he's standing dimly in the semi-dark at the foot of an unfamiliar girl's bed, suit dusky and face drawn sullen in the low carve of a permeating frown. This is weird. This is a weird thing to do.
"What's her name?"
***
A line of cocaine down and three shots deep it's time to go. Cracked mirror polished to perfection, door open to let in light, gloves on, antiseptic smudged orange over white latex and bled yellow into the hollow sink of his eye socket when he forces himself to breathe deep and focus on his rough hewn reflection. His face is too long – eyes bugged, narrow jaw freshly shaved clean. The scruff bothered him while it was there, now it will bother him that it's gone.
The motel room cramped in outside the bathroom is dusty and claustrophobic. Whiskey and smoke stink thick enough even he can smell the way it saturates the curtains, the sheets, the carpet. The walls.
A rake of gloved wrist against white-flecked nasal drip is accompanied by the cold flash of his open knife against searing lamps that constrict at his pupils and highlight a sheen of sweat cloying cool over his brow. Either his hand is shaking or the rest of him is. His heart's dry in his throat and pulsing cottony in his ears, but he can feel the pit of Mu-Qian's nothing sucking at the back of his eye almost before he turns Abby's ability inward.
Still there.
He forgot the drops, so he nudges orange aside and slips the knife back down into disinfectant blue, nearly sneezes coke everywhere before he reaches for the dropper. It takes a couple've scattered tries to get the liquid in dead center, and when he finally looks down, his left eye is nearly as yellow as the iodine antiseptic that stains the sink basin sterile.
Then the knife's back in his hand and he's tilting forward, clear blue looming up next to the muddier green and yellow, tracing every corroded flaw in the mirror surface in acute detail on the blade tip's way to prodding carefully at cornea. There's a delicate, tentative sliver past the surface; a lift. Pressure. Sliding, oily progress into the socket. Viscous pain rotting back in resonant waves through his skull.
A drizzle of something glides past the clench of his grip on the knife and down the side of his neck; soaks warm into the rolled cuff of his sleeve and through his collar. He has to stop and squeeze his good eye shut long enough for a held breath to shudder out through his teeth – tattered muscle already crawling against the knife's progress. Trying to repair itself in slow motion.
He cleaned his hand out four months ago.
Maybe this time he's close enough to where she nests to get her attention.