Out, Damned Spot!

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daphne_icon.gif

Scene Title Visiting Hours Are Over
Synopsis Daphne goes to visit a recovering Hiro in the hospital but finds he's missing.
Date December 8, 2009

Daphne's Loft, New York City


Her hands drip with warm blood, a blackish red against the pale white of her skin. She stares into the rotund face of the man who apparently rescued her from running into a building, dark eyes mirroring dark eyes, wide and shocked. And then he slips away, falling, falling, falling down a hundred yards to the street below, where a cab blares its horn before he crashes into the windshield.

Daphne can only scream, the wind and roar of cars ripping the noise away soundlessly, carrying it off so that she can't even hear it.

The speedster wakes with a start, sitting upright in bed to look at her hands, expecting them to be dripping with Hiro's blood, but instead finds them to be clean. She wipes them on her thighs anyway, as if to get the phantom blood off. She glances out the open blinds of her window, the New York skyline of her penthouse apartment familiar and reassuring. It's evening, but the lights of the city sparkle like the jewels she's come to know and love to steal.

Daphne has left Detroit behind, but not before making sure that the stranger, Hiro Nakamura, would live. No visitors except family were allowed in his hospital room, of course, but once he got moved out of ICU into a private room to recover from his surgery, she sped by to drop off flowers and a "Get Well Soon" note, signed only with a 'D.' She had only told him her first name, but she wasn't going to remind him if he'd forgotten it, in case it was true that he'd run out of mercy. She half expects the man to appear in her apartment now.

She could have killed him.

That fact has tainted everything she's done in the past 48 hours. Daphne Millbrook is a lot of things — namely, a thief with a mercenary attitude — but she is not a killer. She isn't sure what she would have done had she killed the man, even if he had absolutely no reason to be rescuing her.

What about that, anyway? She chews her lip thoughtfully, arms wrapping around her knees in her comfortable king-sized bed. Why was he there to keep her from running into the wall? What was he doing up on the building? What was she doing there? Was he stalking her? Was he hired to find her? Is he one of the goons that wanted to study her? And what about the dream that came before? It didn't make sense. One moment she was in a laser field, losing her power, and the next moment she was on a H-beam of a building, her hands buried in the guts of some man she'd never seen before. How had she gotten there?

None of it makes any sense.

She slides out of bed, and makes the decision. There are no answers to be had here in her apartment; she'll simply have to zoom back to Detroit and ask Hiro Nakamura in person.


Hospital in Detroit, Michigan


Moments later, she's standing in Hiro Nakamura's private room. The bed is unmade, as if someone has simply gotten up to use the restroom or go for a test, but the little cotton gown has been left on the chair. Tubes have been pulled out and left behind; there is a near-full sack of yellow fluid attached to the side of the bed, and an IV stand with bags still attached, half empty. On the bedside table sits a mauve plastic pitcher with a tiny cup to match.

What isn't there? The cherry blossoms and Get Well card she'd left.

The teleporter must have decided to fly away home. Since Daphne isn't sure if his presence has been noted or not by the nursing staff (she suspects so, as the alarms aren't going off and the machines are turned off), it's time for her to do the same.

Her questions will go unanswered, it seems. Daphne chews her lip for a moment, brows knitting together, worried perhaps that he may be coming for her, for revenge. But he can't know she lives in New York City, and the Big Apple is a big place. He won't find her there.

He will, unfortunately, find his way into her dreams.

For tonight, Daphne will be haunted by the mysterious man, dying in a myriad of ways, each more horrible than the last — her blood-stained hands reaching out to try to save him, and failing each and every time.


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