Participants:
| Scene Title | Price Of Blood |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Abby gets an early morning phonecall that scares her shitless, comes to heal Teo and scolds at him. There's an argument that ends in a conclusion of dispirited, approximate agreement that some shit might be worth kidnapping little girls for. |
| Date | December 7, 2008 |
Ferry-ming Safe-howse
She knows her way in by now, and after the door is unlocked for her, after a few turns of hallway and the stairs down, she meets the Ferryman who had been assigned to oversee and assist at the facility-cum-prison. The woman reviews the situation for her quickly as they hang a right conspicuously away from the direction that Eileen's room lays in.
The sun will be coming up soon, but you can't tell that down here. What windows that there are face into walls, more walls, windows, corkboards now empty of medical or other bulletins. There are no clocks. Teo's been watching his cellphone instead. He's lying on a bed in a room that's entirely like the one their prison was relegated to, but for the fact that the mattress is stripped. Bit of blood leaked and smudged onto it instead of cloth.
His face is uncharacteristically pale in the severity of his features, rumpled head propped up on the cold flat of a wall, apparently indifferent to the atrocious angle that puts his neck at. He's holding a dense pack of gauze to his belly despite that it's already taped down, his shirt turned up.
Blood has gotten on most things: shoes dripped on, pant leg stained, somehow even the tip of his nose scabbed on, sweater a soiled blob on the floor, a decent quantity of loss despite the lack of melodramatic puddles or handprints.
She'd finally gotten to sleep, calmed enough, stashed away at the garden. She'd been woken though, and driven over to this one with only the words that she was needed. Visions of mass slaughter running through her mind, that Ethan's cell had found Munin. Teo however, with a wound to his abdomen and the blood was not on her list of what to expect. Brian yes, Teo no. "Oh heavenly Jesus" Being told it and seeing it are two different thing. Quickly a psalm spills from her lips, Winter jacket being shrugged out of and tossed to the side. Still in her work cloths, no sleeves to push up. The brunette pales. She's been seeing blood far too often of late and it's getting to her. Her hand covers his on the the gauze, lifting and placing it to the side, her other hand looking below the gauze, before sliding her original hand over the wound, finger slid into the wound without so much as a sorry for how uncomfortable it would be. Easier, healing get to whatever's been cut inside him.
By now, the adrenaline's drained out and the endorphins have faded, leaving a sharp burning ache that seems to radiate from the middle and go straight through a considerable cross-section of him without having any proper sense of shape, direction or depth to it, the sensation of pain itself lacks real accuracy. Teo blinks at her, making his greeting in wordless Morse.
Obediently, he moves his handful of gauze when she instructs him to, tape detaching with a snnnik of adhesive; his skin is lukewarm, his fingertips colder than his knuckles. He doesn't expect her to just shove her finger in.
His jaw tightens and he jerks in place, probably would have made a more reasonable effort to get away if there was anywhere for him to go. Instead, his head blunts against the plaster and his hand squeezes tight around his handful of bandaging until blood seeps out between his fingers. Not much; the larger part, by now, has dried up on those fibers, clogging the sterile padding with stiff, chunky browning-red. "Abby." It merely hurts. It isn't deep.
Two and a half inches. Intestinal membrane is thick: the knife had merely pushed it aside, slid between the tubes and left a narrow mess of severed muscle and epidermis skin its wake.
She can feel that nod, the warmth not going past her fingertip but the flesh around her knuckle and she pulls the digit out letting her hand settle with a sickening slippery sound over his abdomen. "Shut up." Abby's starting to shake. "Shut up. I don't wan tot hear what idiocy brought this on. But I'm tired of seeing it. I hope to god that she's still alive and that you all didn't opt to gut her. I assume it's her who tried to gut you." Abby can't even meet his eyes while she's chewing him out, watching and concentrating on the red spots on her hand and on forcing what she can to mend the flesh below.
Ridiculously, that actually hurts him. Chastised first by the pain and second by her rebuke, Teo finds himself blinking stupidly in the fluorescent light. He looks at the Ferryman over her shoulder, then away, and keeps right on blinking. The Sicilian's upils seem to have eaten up his irises, leaving their ordinarily bright blue circles gleaming black and strangely blank underneath the glassy glaze of trying to be somewhere else.
He looks, for the moment, as if someone had tried to blind him with an eyedropper full of ink. Behind her, the Ferryman goes and comes again. The fragrance of coffee steals in and out with her and there is the click of cardboard cup against the floor.
"Orange juice for him. I can fix this, I can't fix what blood he's lost" She would have frankly, oddly, preferred the slaughter. She works quickly, occasionally lifting her hand to look and see how the flesh is knitting till she pulls her hand away, flesh beneath repaired, the blood looking orphaned on his skin, devoid of any home from which it sprung. "Your done. Where is she?" The words spill from Abby's mouth quiet like, not even glancing at the coffee that was left, just wiping her hands on her thighs, trying to eliminate as much of Teo's blood on her hands as possible.
Breathing gets easier when the pain is gone. Seeing, oddly enough, does not. Probably because of what she had explained: blood loss. Gets in the way of sensory perception. His vision's still furred at the edges by the infinite dots and colors of static. His shoulder curls against the ergonomically incompatible corner of the room. For the moment, Teo stares at the ceiling in silence. Either no answer, or the answer is No.
"So she's dead then?" Abby presses her lips together and just rocks her head back and forth, her hands clapping together. "What part of we're not monsters was not understood Teo. Tell me. Seriously." her lips are sucked in, tongue sliding back and forth before abby turns and kicks the cup of coffee across the room. "This all you need me for?" Her voice still fairly quiet. She doesn't have it in her to yell.
Nor does Teo. He's a little done with defending himself for tonight, even if the vast majority of his retaliation never reached actualization before Brian hauled him away and he started thrashing enough to bleed himself out. Another expression shocks through his pale face, in and out like an electric current: bordered on a glare.
"Don't be an ignorant asshole, Abby. She's not dead. I haven't killed anybody in self-defense. I broke her nose after, that's all." The words come out clumsy and low with exhaustion. He raises a hand, closes callused fingers on the wall thin ledge and begins to pull himself up to sitting position with a painstaking torque of muscle underneath skin.
He stares over the edge of the bed at the spreading pool of coffee. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
"I'm a mean volatile rude woman in need of positive attention now and then. That's what" She turns then, grabbing her jacket. "I'm at the Garden. When you want her healed, send someone. I'm going back" Abby shoves her arm into a sleeve as she heads for the door. "Eat red meat. Orange juice. Sleep."
Knuckles grate on plaster as Teo props himself up, somehow without capsizing head over heels or rolling onto the floor. "Wait. Please," he adds, ever incapable of ending on an imperative. Unless he's lost his temper, or if— if the other person isn't Abigail Beauchamp. "Please wait. Tell me what's wrong." If he ought to be aware that this is at all in any way backward, it manages to escape him somewhere between not having blood and residual pain signals still rolling around in the lobes of his brain and nervous system.
"What prompted you to pull this stunt?!" Abby shoves her other arm into the jacket, zipping it up. "You stole one of theirs. You took a girl and deadly she may be, you still took a member of Sylar's cell. Do you know what they're probably doing right now? Searching for her. If they took me, you'd be doing the same thing. Maybe not the rest of phoenix, but you would. And then god help the people who took me, you'd slaughter them and you don't have a gift like her's, or like Alexanders. I came here expecting everyone to be dead and coming to try and save who I could. I had visions of a burned building. This is stupid Teo. What are you doing to do with her? Hold her forever? Hold her till they're gone, and it's safe to turn her loose? Know what they say? They say it's the quiet ones you have to be careful of Teo. They're the ones you need to be wary of. I'm tired, I've had only a few hours sleep if that, I'm not in my bed, and I had someone who might have been Sylar at the coffee shop. I'm going to go sleep. Unless you want me to fix her face, or do you want her to wait and think hard on her actions?" Her scarf's now wrapped around her neck and she's looking at Teo with an utterly unhappy expression on her face.
Through some coincidence of physical anatomy and wall angles, Teo manages to wedge himself roughly upright, one leg flung over the side of the bed and his spine steepled between bedpost and wall with some difficulty. He hasn't had much in the way of sleep, himself. His nerves are frayed, and he isn't sure if he can remember how much they had told her; how much they hadn't, or if there's anything he shouldn't say.
She isn't taking this well. Nor, for that matter, is he. It may even be a little embarrassing, how not well he's taking this.
"A hundred dead kids, a corpse at the bowling alley," he counts off a little listlessly. "And something worse coming. Something that could take you, Al, Hel, Elvis. Flint Deckard. I do this because of that: I do this because we need her fucking help, we need what she knows and what else she could bring us. She has names, locations. She has their trust.
"I don't take girls because it's fun. I don't do any of this because it's easy, or safe, or because I love to see you worry, bella. I do it because we have nothing else to go on." When he inhales, he rattles slightly. Looks up from the distended puddle of coffee and into Abby's face.
"I need sleep, Teo. And I need to go to church. I need to change before I do that. See if Elvis has Lazarus done yet. We can talk later. Neither of us are in the right mind to be doing this right now." Everything he speaks, it can be seen hitting home on her face. "Nothing will take them, so long as I'm alive. I won't let god take them." She turns towards the door, wrenching it open.
God takes what He wants, Teo understands, but such is the eternal balance that hangs between single destiny and the free will of six billion human souls. The words had failed him. He should have made himself more clear: cited Sylar, invoked the Flood, explained something. That they had made headway, perhaps. Some token comfort in the face of—
He wishes he hadn't said anything. If wishes were horses, and all that shit. He wants to ask her not to go too, concidentally. He nods his head. "It— it wasn't Sylar." He runs blunt fingertips down the line of his jaw, blearily. "Just so you know. The man in the cafe. Owen checked him out. Buona notte, mia cara," he adds. "Be careful."
"If he was, I would have been dead. Eat something, Teo. Tighten your security" Abby's heads out the door. "Stay safe" Thrown back into the room before her footsteps are head clumping down the hall towards the exit.
 December 7th: 2.5 Inches of Steel |
 December 7th: Of Hugs and Car Jackings |