Participants:
| Scene Title | Nothing Personal |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Today's headline: crazy man abducts his own shrink. Bella and Teo circle in confined spaces. He presents a few good reasons to run away and then discourages her from doing so. Dr. Sheridan gets scared. |
| Date | October 14, 2009 |
Off The Shore of Staten Island — A Barge
There's no telling the actual time in here, but there's a thin, bladed ray of chalky white light easing down from the corner of the ceiling which seems to imply that it's daytime out for those to whom it matters. The same miniscule slot past piping and grime-matted metal that's allowing in the thinnest wisp of salt air. Which makes sense. The twelve or so minutes she had between car trunk and this place were spent trekking seawall and rotted jetty. At gunpoint, which came off as some sort of formality, a favor and simplification for both of them.
The barge itself was proportioned like a castle, as far as prisons go, despite that it left something to be desired in terms of accomodation. There's a cot. Chunky little area heater, toilet system and electronics that actually work, hot plate, array of canned goods, a captor that shows up once every few hours and seems to have very little in the way of difficulty or very much in the way of liberties locating and approaching her within the several hundred feets' armored honeycomb of interchangeably lightless rooms, cramped hallways, and steel doors she's been given to roam.
Technically, she could be waiting around the corner with a fortuitous find of lead pipe, a razor-edged scrap of rust sheared off the rebar, or— something. Still, he comes clanging. Calling: "Dr. Sheridan?"
The gun was, in its way, appreciated. Made everything rather crystal clear, power relations-wise. This is something Bella can get behind, since it's more cards on the table, allowing her to focus on the variables that might possibly be in her control. Whatever and wherever those variables might be. She's been spending her time thinking, looking, trying to suss out these hopeful points of leverage, and thusfar… no dice. It could be worse, she guesses. At least she doesn't have to piss in a bottle.
Lead pipe wielding has never been her forte, and she's a rather slight woman. She's a feeling that any sort of violent attempt at escape, unless the circumstances were crazily stacked in her favor, might get turned around on her very nastily, and why push her captor towards wiring her up to the piping, which would spell basically certain screwedness on her part. So she maintains her limited mobility, keeping mouth shut and hands visible at all times.
She's examining the nutritional facts on the side of one of the cans, all she's got in the way of reading material at the moment, but when she hears her captor coming, she scoots over to the cot and perches on its edge. "Do come in," she calls in answer, with minimized wryness. The temptation to be snarky is pretty serious when in an otherwise powerless situation, but it's one she avoids. Gotta play nice, for the time being.
Which might be like using one's gaga-baby voice on an insane person or stray dog, but could be better than nothing. Teo isn't exactly making himself out to be the paragon of stability, between whatever thin intimations their psychiatric session had afforded her and this stuff. Still, he looks normal, nothing slavering or raw about his decision to don denims and three layers against the autumn chill, though there's a rim of red around his eyes that implies some difficulty sleeping and he reeks of cigarettes.
No explanations still. Difficult to say why because she hasn't exactly asked many questions. He tramples up to the counter she's working at. The gun he pulls down out from under the back of his jacket is something of an afterthought to this initial leg of the journey, stays in his fingers with the muzzle pointed down and the safety off. Teo pokes at the hammer with a callused thumb, once, before abruptly throwing her a look of politely modulated incredulity. "Career woman? 'S that the same subspecies of punny injoke as 'Company man,' or what?"
Because this couldn't stop at just plain old unpleasant, it has to get, like, radically humiliating. Like she's the first person to ever resort to personal ads… Bella pulls herself up to her full height, which isn't much while sitting, but her backbone is straight, and her chin is lifted. "That's an agent thing, puns and injokes," she says, "My position is somewhat more ancillary." Maybe she should be denying the existence of the technically non-existant Company, but the charade is pretty clearly up, and she's not about to divulge any agent identities, nothing really sensitive. Unless torture is involved. Then Bella will be getting out her address book.
"Since we're starting a dialogue here, mind if I ask you a few questions?" The tone she adopts is somewhere between her professional therapist demeanor and a generally conversational mode, "I think it would at least help us both to be more at ease," she glances to his gun, tries not to appear nervous or jumpy, which is exactly what firearms tend to make her feel, both nervous and jumpy, "And you can put that away. I know full well that cooperation increases my chances of survival and, at this moment, survival's really what I'm after."
In the back of Teo's head, the remnant of the great and terrifying urban Ghost that used to drive around behind the wheel of this body is warning against hostages who make reasonable requests. There's power-play involved. Power-play is always involved. He studies his misappropriated companion for a few seconds, considering, finally acquiesces to resafety the Glock.
It goes in under his sweater again, shuffled away in a series of understated actions that steer his gaze idly back across the can she'd been studying, and onto the floor. He couldn't tell you what the fuck was on this floor if asked, but there seems to be a lot of it. Even in the weary scrawl of sodium light, the treads that Bella's shoes have left are obvious and numerous. He doesn't dispute that they're starting a dialogue here. On the other hand, he didn't take issue with that Bella's position is somewhat more ancillary, and he probably personally disagrees with that. "Fire away."
"The standard questions, for starters," Bella says, crossing her legs and setting her palms on the thin mattress behind her, allowing her to recline very slightly at a very steep angle, a gesture of growing casualness, serving to underline her assertion that it's a conversation they're now having, "Who are you, and what is it that you want?" Before an answer comes (or fails to), she immediately amends, "The former is just a question of convenience, so I know how to refer to you since 'Brandon' sort of feels dead on my tongue right now. I'll take more than an alias, but I don't expect it. The latter, that's much more important. Because right now we're something like a team, like a horrible three-legged-race team, because I obviously can't get away, but you wouldn't have snatched me if you didn't need me for something. So however it is we can manage to hobble to your finish line, and then get cut loose of each other, I'm on board."
On a mean of five hours of sleep a night, and recent history fraught with bad breakups and uneasy murder, it's difficult to come up with a response to the tongue comment that would fall on just this side of appropriate. Or Teo would do it. Instead, he's left staring somewhat blankly into space for a second, two, his mouth uncurling from around an incipient smirk or aborted syllable. Hmmm. "Teo.
"My name's Teo," he clarifies, clearing his throat. "I used to be the co-leader to that terrorist faction they've only recently started to take seriously— Phoenix. That ended when I was possessed by an older, meaner, time-traveling future incarnation of myself, who cut ties and went on a murdering spree. The other shit I told you in therapy was more true than less.
"I want Sabra Dalton to loan me the Haitian or some other memory manipulator so I can get rid of some sensitive information and the overall liability I present to the various clandestine organizations involved. You're here to give her a slightly better reason to listen than ''cause I want you to.'" All of it sounds like information that Ms. Dalton and her cohorts were going to learn eventually anyway; which makes a strong case for him telling the truth or else the makings of a fantastically overelaborate web of liiies.
Teo remembers, eventually, to make eye-contact, dignify the statement with interest in her reaction: "Also, I shot Minea Dahl."
On a mean of five hours of sleep a night, and recent history fraught with bad breakups and uneasy murder, it's difficult to come up with a response to the tongue comment that would fall on just this side of appropriate. Or Teo would do it. Instead, he's left staring somewhat blankly into space for a second, two, his mouth uncurling from around an incipient smirk or aborted syllable. Hmmm. "Teo.
"My name's Teo," he clarifies, clearing his throat. "I used to be the co-leader to that terrorist faction they've only recently started to take seriously— Phoenix. That ended when I was possessed by an older, meaner, time-traveling future incarnation of myself, who cut ties and did some bad shit. Everything I told you in therapy was— more true than less.
"I want Sabra Dalton to loan me the Haitian or some other memory manipulator so I can get rid of some sensitive information and the overall liability I present to the various clandestine organizations involved. You're here to give her a slightly better reason to listen than ''cause I want you to.'" All of it sounds like information that Ms. Dalton and her cohorts were going to learn eventually anyway; which makes a strong case for him telling the truth or else the makings of a fantastically overelaborate web of liiies.
Teo remembers, eventually, to make eye-contact, dignify the statement and the subject matter with an at least perfunctory interest in her reaction: "Also, I shot Minea Dahl."
Bella listens with an interest that, just by force of habit, looks polite and genuine but not deep and empathic. She visibly listens /to/ him, her cues appropriate but also muted. She is either an extremely cool cucumber, in some serious industrial-strength denial, or there is something maybe somewhat off about Dr. Isabella Sheridan, M.D. and her affective responses. She even smiles, just a little, as he explains that what he said in therapy was the truth. This is important information, since it increases the chance that he hasn't been planning this all along, and thus may have some view of her as something other than a bargaining chip/Company flunky. Not that this other view is particularly prominent at this point in time.
The admission about Minea earns a small furrow of the brow from Bella. Her head tilts. "And did this shot you fired kill her?" is her only question for the moment.
"Not quickly," Teo answers. The answer isn't quick either, leaving a socially awkward spare second or two for the good Doctor to make an examination of, the lull not quite staggered, etching a line into his brow. His eyes swivel to the left, making a brief examination of a stain on the wall, his mouth flattening, paling fractionally, recoloring again. It's altogether more expression on the purportedly crazy killer person in the room than there is on the doctor. That's ironic— maybe embarrassingly so, for him, until you calculate in her ancillary association with the Company.
You get a lot of free cold fish cool cucumber sociopathy cred when you're linked into the Company. "They make psychotherapists go through a clinical intake at least once during their training before licensure, don't they?" Straightening, he pulls one heel up to sit on the counter. "What did your test scores say?"
"Which episode of ER let in on that little tidbit?" Bella inquires, her smile small and cruel and actually kind of flirty, which marks a significant, if brief, departure from her previous attitude. She reverts just as quickly, though, back to pleasant semi-blandness, smile gone with no lingering traces. "That I register, in some social situations, low levels of anxiety, generally some hours afterwards. It barely qualifies as Axis IV, and is easily medicated," she answers.
"I can't help but note that you used a non-fatal verb with regards to Agent Dahl and, when asked for clarification, you immediately switched to evasive but ominous and threatening language," Bella says, back straightening again, hands folding in her lap, "Is this a style you think you started exhibiting after your future self merged with you, a sort of 'me, then him' process? Or has it been present since you started your violent insurgency work, before the merging?"
Vague annoyance notches Teo's nose at this assessment of his words, though it fails to channel into any further adjustment of his posture, hooked over into a delinquent slouch that is rather unbecoming of a ninja, not entirely unlike the way her face had changed fractionally the minute before. "I was trying for accuracy in a lazy sort of way. I got her in the lungs with intent to kill, but she didn't die immediately. The decision seemed important at the time. I don't think it was ER," he adds, though not in a tone of voice that indicates that that seems particularly important at this time.
"I wasn't around before the merging. I'm new." He turns up a hand at her, abruptly, palm out and flat to accept the can that she's relegated to a prop. It isn't just a prop. That's food. There are starving children in Nepal, you know. "Which social situations?"
Vague annoyance notches Teo's nose at this assessment of his words, though it fails to channel into any further adjustment of his posture, hooked over into a delinquent slouch that is rather unbecoming of a ninja, not entirely unlike the way her face had changed fractionally the minute before. "I was trying for accuracy in a lazy sort of way. I got her in the lungs with intent to kill, but she didn't die immediately. The decision seemed important at the time. I don't think it was ER," he adds, though not in a tone of voice that indicates that that seems particularly important at this time.
"I wasn't around before the merging. I'm new." He leans over to snare the can that she's relegated to scenery on her trip over to her cot. It isn't just scenery. That's food. There are starving children in Nepal, you know. "Which social situations?"
"Primarily ones that involve sort of bland socialization and small talk, especially if it involves say, hobbies or sports or kids," Bella answers. "Mind if I take off my shoes?" She doesn't wait for an answer, she just pushes them off and shifts to take a kneel on the bed, not risking even her socked feet to /this/ floor, "If there's nothing specifically at stake, funnily enough. If it's a mixer designed for elbow rubbing and networking, I do just fine. I think I have some maladaptive cognitions based around uncertainties on how to behave without a goal in mind."
She glances to the window, which is as good as a clock as she's got going on right now. The light is still thin, and could just as likely be cast by a fluorescent rather than any temporally significant source. "Right. You're an amalgam. Unless there's some development you haven't briefed me on, some loss of previous memories or sense of self. Why did you kill her? Agent Dahl, that is."
It's belated, Teo's discomfort, choreographed so it's difficult to discern what he's finally wrinkling at. He drops his foot and leans back, a minute retreat back into his personal space that doesn't temporally coincide with anything immediately apparent. It probably isn't because—
"You look pretty fucking comfortable now," though she does. There's no particular reason for him to mind that. "I killed her on behalf of Hana Gitelman, Phoenix, and myself. She betrayed Teodoro Laudani's affiliations to the organization and some other information that have changed my circumstances for the worse. She was a liability and a threat, and blithely assigned it to call of duty.
"Which doesn't make me mad, exactly; it just made her dead." The can cracks open under the pressure of thumb and forefinger on its tab, ceding a crescent-shaped seam of salty vapor. He drags the pot closer to himself and upends its contents, chunky glop of pasta, vegetables, chicken gargling down into black metal. Teo doesn't, apparently, mind if she takes off her shoes. "Goal being?"
"Very businesslike, nothing personal," Bella says, agreeably, nodding her understanding and perhaps even her complicity, "Not unlike the Company," said like she's not really part of it, "You and your comrades in arms sound like pragmatic idealists. People with vision, a stake in truth and beauty, but not afraid to get your hands dirty, not afraid to do what must be done."
She's not acting like she's dropping any sort of truth bomb. It's not as if any so-called terrorist with half a brain hasn't spent at least a little time examining the irony of their situation: those who fight monsters, abyss stares back, blah blah blah. It's presented as an observation, offered up for confirmation or repudiation. "I think I understand those motivations, but I've never been able to really cultivate them myself. Which is all for the better, since it's what makes me cooperative. Have you had any word from Ms. Dalton? Aren't you worried about what the Haitian will do to you once he gets his hands on you? I admit, due to my aforementioned not-exactly-central importance to my employers, I'm concerned you'll just end up getting completely wiped, along with it the knowledge of my location. Necessary sacrifices for the greater good. Business. Nothing personal."
A shrug pushes up through Teo's shoulders, possibly not the most singularly encouraging thing he could have thought to do. Clanking the can against the pot's rim, he discards it into the plastic bag hanging off the nearest drawer handle, excess residue tracking visibly down the translucency of the plastic inside, soupily mobile silhouettes. Pot goes onto hot plate. Hot plate comes on with a twist of the dial between forefinger and thumb, funnels heat up his sleeve. "Nope. No word from Ms. Dalton yet, though people keeping yelling at my voicemail for every other Goddamn thing. I'm not worried.
"If this goes to Hell, I don't mind going too. I know you probably don't feel the same way, but you're doing a pretty good job not worrying too hard about it, so far. Looking like it, anyway. Worried about giving me the satisfaction?" The smile that sharpens the corners of his mouth appears to be a reflex, not grounded in any particular sentiment, failing just this once to leak kinesis into the small muscles around his eyes.
Bella more or less takes her panic management lessons from 'The King and I'. Acting like you're not afraid does wonders for remaining actually unafraid, but it /stops/ working the moment you draw too much attention to the fact. Irony is the worst thing in times of crisis. As such, Teo's direct address to her lack-of-worry makes her expression tighten, a bit of that suppressed fear seeping back in through the crack Teo uses to peer in at her. She tries to remain opaque, tries not to fidget, but this only makes her seem stiff, rigid.
"Quite the contrary, I'm very much interested in your satisfaction," Bella says, after trying to discreetly take a deep, calming breath, the kind of breath you only need if you're not calm, which she must vigorously maintain to herself and the world that she is, in fact. Calm, that is. "Spiting you for the sake of it would be cornered animal behavior, and I don't think I'm at that stage yet. If I am, however, please tell me so I can start making a nuisance of myself as quickly as possible." There, that feels better. She even hitches a convincing smile to her lips, "In the meantime, is there any way I can help? Can we get out some corn syrup and red dye, rent a shitty camcorder, make me beg desperately into the lens for Dalton to please, god, please, do whatever you ask?"
There isn't exactly an overwhelming surplus of sympathy on Teo's face, which is if nothing else a reliable sort of deficiency. He moves the soup around a little, one hand around the handle, with no visible telegraph to trying to lunge across the room and melt the front of the good Doctor's head off with the heated metal. It kills a couple seconds. Thoughtful ones, judging from the line stitched into his forehead, considering, not because he finds it useful to be ominous right now but because it's a harder question than you'd think.
"No, I think that would be tawdry," he decides, after a moment. Push of a finger, and the hot plate clacks off albeit with no discernible change to the stewy savory vapors in the air or ambient temperature in the woman's dreary prison. "I don't know; I'm kind of at that 'end of my rope' stage, with the fragments and indifference rather than depressed mood or anything. I mean, Minea and I were probably— almost friends, despite the bloodshed and lives ruined. You have family or anything? Friends? Parting remarks for your clientele?" Bowls are located in the cupboard above his head, with a haphazard grab and reach of an arm bent above his head. Because this is totally conversational fare.
Canned food is distasteful even when you're hungry, but that's only when it's still in the can, cold and viscous. Who could love anything describable as 'viscous'? But as the heat hits the previously unpalatable stew, flavorful molecules go airborn, and Bella finds her response to be nigh-on Pavlovian. Her hand slips at once to her stomach, feeling her insides cry out in protest of their neglect. She bites her lip. Stupid physical needs, getting in the way of the appearance of total self-sufficiency.
"Mind grabbing two of those? You shouldn't have the whole thing yourself, there's just tons of sodium in that," and she knows because she was just examining the daily 's. She removes her hand from her belly, trying not to give away the level of urgency her body is currently feeling. "My father and mother would certainly like to know the fate of their only daughter, yes," she says, though the tension in her voice is more linked to a need to feed than to any real emotional response, "As for friends and patients, I'm sorry but I can't say I'm super eager to divulge names and addresses to you. Respect for privacy, personal and professional."
Glop-glop gurgle bargle, is the soup's only comment pouring out, thickening down at the bottom of the second bowl. Teo is being as unceremonious about doing Bella this service as he was about, you know, recapping Minea Dahl's death. Quite possibly he doesn't expect the woman to be all that impressed by either of those things. There's a brief scraping of the bowl's rim against the pot's wall, acknowledging the barely-suppressed keen of Bella's appetite. Shuffling off the counter, he carries the food over. Just hers. Leaves it apparent that they're bound to eat on opposite sides of the room, if it's all the same to her.
He likes that she hasn't started talking about Flint Deckard, or anything. Threatening him, or asking coy questions. The disassociation is preferable to all alternatives. He proffers the bowl to where she's seated herself, deciding he doesn't have to remind her not to spill. Girls are supposed to be better at that kind of thing, anyway. "I already made up the good-byes to all of mine. You know, little bit of rhetoric about how he's better off, who to call for all their murdering needs and that kind of thing." He hikes a brow. "Safe to assume you have everything worked out?"
Bella reaches out to take the bowl, nodding her head in hasty thanks, and takes the spoon that hangs out over the edge. She stirs a bit, getting a lay of the land, so to speak. As he speaks, she eats, not too quickly, but certainly not at anything like a leisurely pace. Thank god for the family-sized soup can, half a single serving can would have just taunted her insides. She uses the heel of her hand, palm and fingers tilted back and outwards, to keep the corners of her mouth clean.
"No, actually, I wasn't expecting this trip, so I didn't exactly make plans," Bella says, and she can't hide the touch of snideness that's in her voice, a touch that betrays the very powerlessness and fear she's trying to keep hidden from both of them, "But my employers will keep things clean, I'm sure, if things go south," a pause, "Mind if I ask how you got into the violent-insurgency business?"
"Teo accidentally got in a terrorist's way— kind of what you're doing now," Teo answers, his back turned in his journey across the floor. He displays little paranoia about leaving it unguarded because he sort of, psychically, has eyes on the back of his head, finds himself regarding Bella's continually blase interpretation of fear and proper procedure with the same inquisitive distaste with which he'd watched her during their therapy session, which makes everything just about normal in their creepy little world. "Ghost flipped his shit when Phoenix was assassinated in 2012 and went off civvie life for good. I just kind of didn't stop.
"How about you?" He pokes his soup with his own spoon, drinks it down slower than she does. "I mean, what do you do in there? Kind of imagine the personality disorders that form the minds behind the Rage Virus, Shanti strains 1 through 138, Level 5 and the whole 'bag and tag' thing are the ones your superiors want to keep around. Mood distortions? Or you mostly do intakes and testing, or what? Think I'd make a good Agent?" He bends his face around a grin like he's sitting for a close-up. There's nothing in his teeth. Or in the expression, for that matter.
Bella's expression snaps into one of careful appraisal. She seems to take his last question very seriously, her lips pursed and brow furrowed in the exact facial analog of someone shifting through a variety of files, all spread out on a desk. It's a pretty specific arrangement of features, is the point. After a moment she sets her bowl on her lap, one hand holding both it and the spoon in place, while her free hand makes a plane and wobbles back and forth.
"Depends. At this point, no, you'd be too hard to control. You've calcified, psychologically. We'd need a very serious source of coercion, and I'm personally rather opposed to 'gun at your temple' loyalty." She says this as if reporting to a superior. Len Denton would find this way of speaking familiar. "And my role is primarily what I'd call emotional triage. Mission debriefs, crisis management. I also do psychological evaluations," she tilts her head to the side, "You would have made a good agent at one point. You're very much like some of the late-stage agents I've dealt with. Harsh edges, resentments, fatalism," she makes a face, "It's ugly work. Particularly when you don't have ideals to gloss it with."
That all makes sense, insofar as Teo is being as nonjudgmental as someone with harsh edges, resentments, fatalism, and no ideals possibly can be. Crisis management. He's curious, but doesn't ask; suspects it will or would have been something along the lines of 'grief counselling' for Len Denton. He turns his head on an oblique angle, considering. 'Calcified' sounds rather negative, like a soul barnacled or a limb that isn't a limb anymore, and that's a little bit worse than criticism or hurled scatology. Not that they were really talking about him, as far as he's concerned.
The meat in this soup is overdone. If there had been any bones involved, it would be sloughing apart like a gelatin stir. He probably should have read the can. Probably said something about minimal application of heat; the stuff was probably all cooked already. He hunches.
"Okay," Teo says, all diplomatic, no edges. "Do you have ideals to gloss it with?"
"Hrm?" Bella says, not understanding or at least pretending not to understand at first, "What? No, no. Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant that making agents is ugly work, and that I haven't got ideals to gloss it. The best agents always have ideals, always. The best terrorists too, I'm guessing."
She lifts a limp green bean (at least she thinks that's what it is) into the light. She lets it slide back into the soup, uneaten for now. "I'm not an idealist, Teo. Not by a long shot. I'm not interested in making a better world, ushering in a new era of this or that. I can't imagine giving myself up to something bigger than myself. Not that I'm the biggest thing there is, but everything big, things like God and Country and Equality and whatever… all of that boils down to the same thing: wanting to make everyone think alike. And, as a psychologist, I can tell you that that is a fool's errand. It's also twisted and perverse and basically the only thing I'd really call Evil, that desire."
Sounds like something Deckard would say, or at least, the sort of principle the old man would skulk around the edges of without setting his foot down in any definitive fashion on the thing. No wonder he kept going to her. Teo goes squinty above something like a smile, and he finishes vacuuming the contents of his own bowl up with an expedient snuffle of his snout. Wipes his mouth dry with his fingers, leaving a tendriled goop of something on the bristle of his stubble. "Okay," he says in the tone of pending summary, features giving a quizzical flit. "So—
"You work for and with idealistic and ergo evil men and women, but you don't let it get to you, and you're about a fucking inch from being given to something bigger than youself. Assuming the Company and its goals are. If that transcends imagination, I guess at least you'll be able to say you didn't see it coming." Not exactly silver lining. Pewter, possibly. His bowl's cheap plastic drubs contact with the sink faucet, alights at the base of the metal with a hollow noise. He rinses it and his callused digits off in the same idle swat of columned tapwater, squeaks the flow off with his elbow, like he's going to go.
"It's not people that are evil. It's the way of thinking that's evil. Someone can have bad ideas and not be a bad person; few people truly choose what they believe, so it's not their fault. People aren't good or evil. They're mostly just stupid," Bella opines, dipping deep into this armchair-philosophical well as a ready source of distraction from her actual situation. She fills the silence afterwards with a few quick spoons of soup; she's still pretty damn hungry.
She perks up, though, as he makes to leave. Being left alone isn't bad, since it means she's less likely to be in physical danger. But being left alone also leaves her with her thoughts, and she's not super keen on that right now. "Going somewhere?" A pair of words that can be both a simple question, and a request for him to stay.
Both, neither, leave Teo scraping to a pause just off the corner of the counter, breathing in the close air and listening to the oily clink of her meal in session.
He is looking at the door. Or rather, through the doorway, the long progression of doorways, the round-shouldered rectangles punched through the belly of the ship and ribboning on, forward, until it meets its vanishing point up against the last rust-scabbed hatch door he customary leaves locked on his way in. The one he'll leave locked on his way out.
He twitches a frown. Turns a circle, considering, his hands swinging elastically loose, almost uncertain arcs in the empty air. It's almost playful and deceptively quick, the scoop of his hand under his sweater, like the gallop of a very big puppy across the lawn, and appropos of nothing there is the gun again, ugly, black, a deafening white spark of a shot squeeed off to slam a lead round into the folded muscle of her leg.
"I'll bring you some antibiotics, First Aid kit, clothes," he lists off, even as he picks up his feet and starts going again, without pause to check if the nick was arterial. An absurdity of an explanation stapled on in afterthought: "So you don't try to run away."
She'd have to be an idiot, Teo means, to not try to run away.
Bella has never been shot. Few civilians have been. It's nothing like what you'd expect. Most pain Bella and her ilk ever experience is rarely above the level of a nasty bump on the head, or, in unlucky cases, really awful menstrual cramp; very nasty, but essentially endurable. A bullet wound… at first it barely seems to hurt. The shock that hits Bella is totally, abundantly evident on her features. She can literally not believe what just happened to her.
Her relative speed in snapping back to (a painful) reality is due mostly to her medical training. You see some grisly stuff on rotation. "MOTHERFUCKER!" she howls at the top of her lungs, tipping sideways on the bed, blasted leg oozing blood at a solid pace. Tears stream out of the corners of her eyes. "Oh… fuck. Oh fuck." She repeats, almost making it a litany as she bends her neck, trying to level her now terribly shaky clinical eye on her own wound. It takes all her will and energy to push down the raw terror she feels and try to just determine what she has to do to stay alive.