[Trent Brumby] It had to happen sooner or later. He had worked security plenty of times before and brawls happened more often then he cares to remember. Several times he had a few cuts or near misses, but Tuesday evening he found himself eye to eye with a very angry, drunk individual, who he had sought to remove from the premises along with his friends and rival group. It wasn't that he was too slow, that he wasn't prepared, it was simply the fact that there were too many for him and his work colleagues to watch and hadn't seen it coming.
Time, after that, had been snippets in his memory and fractured thoughts. The pain hadn't been all that bad, and at first he hadn't thought it more then a scratch. But the blood leaked through his black t.shirt and his body didn't co operate with his brain. Feet shuffled around him, yells continued, and the crowd moved back. He thought how strange it was, how it couldn't be, how utterly ridiculous the whole situation was. He thought of Kora and what she'd say. He wondered why. He berated himself. He flickered in an out of consciousness.
Paramedics asked him questions. The bumpy roads jolted the bed. He remembers telling them about Kora and his phone, and how they insisted he rest and relax. Then the transfer from van into the hospital hall and more faces looking at him. There were plenty of questions. Time jumped and shifted him from one place into the next. Before he knew it, he was moving into surgery, and the mask descended him into darkness.
---
Kora had a phone call at 12.36am Wednesday morning. The number wasn't anyone's she recognized, and whether she picked it up or it went to message bank the result was much the same: Trent Brumby has been admitted to hospital and was undergoing emergency surgery. If she would like to come to the hospital to come to the front desk, but not to worry he's doing fine and isn't in critical condition. The name of the nurse is Suzy Monroe.
[Kora] These are the hollow hours of the night - two a.m., three a.m. - when the city is bound deeply into a sort of waking slumber. The bars are closing or closed, shift change at the few remaining factories is hours away. The downtown office towers are closed except for the flicker of lights on and off in the silent rooms as the overnight cleaning crews work their way through the floors, the hum of the vaccuum cleaner, the quiet strains of some Spanish-language AM radio station an old-fashioned transitor radio.
The El runs all night, empty trains rattle over the tracks, every one an express. The interiors are brilliantly lit, all flourescent, this stark, white light framing the few passengers against the tinted windows, the passing darkness of the city spread out below. The stations are nearly deserted: the industrial green tiles spell out the station names in the sickly glow of flickering orange lights. The people who linger here at these hours are either unlucky or unsavory or both.
Call her unlucky. Call her both - the young blonde with directions to Bon Secours-Mercy Medical Center scrawled in stubborn, angular handwriting on the back of a Chinese take-away menu, her features drawn, her lean frame tense and alert, something wrong with her, something dangerous about her, watching the station names flick by. Watching the doors sigh open, then whisk closed, as the empty train rattles through station about empty station until she is where she's meant to be.
And when the line runs out, or branches off - when the right station comes - she exits the train alone and jogs down the unmoving escalator to streetlevel alone and walks past the hole-in-the-wall pizza places and the check cashing joints and the seedy, after hours clubs and the drug dealers and the thrift stores and the designer knock-off joints and the liquor stores and the smoke shops and the bodegas and the apartment blocks until the hospital - all white and cream and illuminated, its blocky architecture still somehow a cool, sharp contrast to the haphazard development of the city around it - is in sight.
--
She has to walk in through the Emergency Department, then cut through a back hallway to the front desk. The waiting area of the ER is full, is a sea of faces that she ignores as she cuts through it toward the front desk. Half-way there, Kora ducks into the restroom first, and washes her hands and her face with the institutional pink soap twice to be sure that she is as presentable as she can be. In the bright lights of the bathroom, her skin seems too white, her eyes too dark, her pale hair washed out, her jaw set, her features taut.
"I'm here to see a patient," she tells the clerk, her body language tight, her dark eyes direct, a certain tension shaping her voice. Her left hand, on the desk, taps out some errant rhythm. The right hand is curled into a fist in her right front pocket. "Trent Brumby. I'm meant to ask for Suzy Monroe."
[Trent Brumby] The nurses at work are always busy doing something. There's plenty of paperwork to fill out, patients to push through, families to direct or console, and yet they always have the time to chat to one another. Maybe its a way to keep their spirits up with all this sickness, violence and misery that gathers at the emergency ward twenty-four-seven. It takes certain people to work in the medical field and to be the front lines at desks like this. Most are brisk, no nonsense attitudes and very clear on what they will and won't do, but beneath it all majority have some sort of compassion, a willingness to help those in need.
The woman behind the desk is a little overweight and wears her glasses part way down her nose; this is how she looks at Kora now when the young woman comes in to ask for a patient. She doesn't know them off hand, but she does know who Suzy is. They've worked the same shift for the past year. She pushes from her wheelie chair to stand, pausing part way. "Your name is?"
Kora Williams, Suzy had used. Once given, the nurse heads off and isn't gone before she comes back and tells Kora to take a seat, it won't be long. It wasn't. But fifteen minutes can stretch on forever when surrounded by the sick and the tired, and those getting impatient and angry with a slow overworked medical system. When Suzy comes out, she looks around until she spots Kora and approaches part way with a small smile.
Suzy is in her early forties and is holding it well. She's a brunette with honey brown eyes and a warmer demeanor then those behind the desk. She's the nurse that works closely with patients as they're in the recovery ward. "Ms. Williams? Come this way."
They walk off through the security doors, her card swiping them through the way, and into the back where patients are already in beds, nurses and doctors are moving around, and the curtains cube off for privacy. As they're walking, she's telling Kora; "He came through surgery well and just recovering now. He's a little groggy and we're going to keep an eye on him for awhile," her tone is easy and calming, "there was some internal bleeding that we had to fix up, but it all went well. We just want to keep an eye on him for awhile." It's a drill she's gone through plenty of times over the night, different stories and cases, but it's all the same reassurance.
They pass by beds, long desks with medical staff sitting behind it on phones, ruffling through papers, communicating about this patient and that patient. But she spots him before they get there, the curtain opened at the end of his bed to give a clear view of the wards station. He's hooked up to an IV drip and lays out on a bed, in white sheets and thermal blankets with a hospital gown that makes his skin seem darker against it, even though he's pallor is more ashen from blood loss. His eyes are closed but his chest rises and falls comfortably. Blood pressure and oxygen levels are monitored, as well as a steady heart rate.
[Trent Brumby] [edit: kick out one of those repeated sentences!]
[Kora] Kora has not heard her last name - the real one, the legal one, the one she knew used all her human life - attached to her first name, attached to her self, so often since her first change. The passport in her pocket and a debit card are her links to that life. Thin threads. And here - amidst the packed wards saturated with too-bright light, the antiseptic smell sharp in the air, cutting through the other scents, of unwashed skin, of things-gone-rotten, of illness, and sorrow and death - she hears it again and again, and looks startled whenever someone calls out her name.
They walk through the hospital, Suzy in her scrubs, a stethoscope around her neck, her shoes as quiet on the linoleum as her manner is efficient. Kora is taller than the nurse by several inches, sharper too, particularly underneath lights like these, that cut across the edges of her features.
Hands in her front pockets, Kora ghosts after the nurse, her dedicated clothing dark and worn - the old t-shirt, snug against her body, the worn jeans, fitting close, the heavy black boots anchoring her against the bright linoleum. She studies the woman, tense, and listens to the reassurances the woman offers without comment.
--
The sight of him - unconscious, ashen - stops Kora dead in her tracks and steals away her breath. There is a moment where the rage underneath her skin is coruscating, so hot if feels as if it might split her open, the way lava splits through its skin of cooling earth, reasserts itself, all molten. Maybe Suzy - ahead of her - walks up to check the IV, to pull back the curtain, to study one of the charts or electronics ticking away beside the bed -
- and Kora, all she wants to do is tear Suzy's head off.
So here they are, this wolf-girl, in the hallway, shaking with the effort required to control herself, to find her way back to the center of herself, to tuck the beast back into her body and remember: hospital. and remember: rules, of the human life all around her. Maybe, nearby, someone sleeping a fitful, narcotics-induced sleep dreams of wolves hounding him to the ends of the earth, cries out in the sleep he can't break.
Maybe Suzy is strong enough, mind and body, that she barely notices - that she expects this, this moment where the visitor is still and startled by the vulnerability of her lover, stretched out in a hospital bed. Maybe she's that strong but feels it anyway - the momentary assertion of the wild night outside the ordered walls of the disordered ward.
This is what happens: Kora takes a deep breath. Takes two deep breaths. Uncurls her fingers in her pockets, one-by-one, circuits the foot of the bed to the visitor's chair and makes herself sit. There are a half-dozen questions she wants to ask the nurse before the woman leaves the bedside, but Kora does not yet trust her voice.
[Trent Brumby] Suzy feels it, but doesn't let it distract her from her task. There are many upset patients and family members that she sees on a daily basis; when emotions ride high and make perfectly reasonable people turn into something other. Kora isn't a reasonable person, but Suzy is not to know that. She checks the monitors, which she had done before coming to fetch Kora in the first place, but as she does Trent opens his eyes and turns his head towards her. His eyes are sleepy, the effects of drugs working in and out of his system, but he breaths in through his nose slowly, tongue licking his dry mouth as he finds his voice. "Still alive, doc," he tells Suzy in a somewhat huskier, cracked voice.
He swallows twice and shifts an inch on the bed before resettling. His eyes are half closed again, hands resting outside of the blankets - he sleeps like that, arms out and blanket part way down his chest, Kora's seen the way he prefers to sleep on his stomach with an arm tucked under his pillow and legs stretched out, but he's flat on his back with a few pillows under his head.
Suzy smiles at him, looking up from checking the IV line. "Yes you are and there's someone here to see you," she tells him, offering the same smile towards Kora. Trent's attention flickered open again and he looked towards where Kora sits in the chair by turning his head on the pillow. "Hey, Kora, baby," he'd never say it that way usually, but the tone is much the same, pleased that she's here with him.
"I'll be back later to check on you again." Suzy makes herself scarce, not bothering to pull the curtain closed around them as she wanders off again and to other tasks that keep her occupied for a good few hours yet.
[Kora] "Hi," the visitor's chair drags on the linoleum as Kora scoots it closer and then closer, until her knees are flat against the pneumatic bed, the plastic bumpers that are up to keep the patient from falling out. Her hair is pulled back into a loose French braid tonight, thicker than her wrist and tucked under itself to keep the length from swinging down her spine. More than a few wisps of fine, pale hair have fallen loose, and these frame her as she leans over the edge of the hospital bed and looks down at him.
"Hey there, hi." He calls her baby - that same tone - and the words hit her in the solar plexus too. Maybe it's just the way he opens his eyes, the way he sleeps, on his back, as he never would outside of his place. Something cuts loose and just as quickly as it asserted itself, her rage deserts her. She is breathless with its sudden, crawling absence as she leans over the edge of the bed and reaches out for one of his hands, ghosts her own hand over his, her fingers opening, the scent of the cheap pink soap from hospital washroom too-sweet and grainy with it as she reaches for his hand, for the arm not attached to the plastic tubing of the IV. Her voice seems wafer-thin to her ears, all wrong - but out of her body is has a low resonance, back of the throat and raw.
Suzy promises to return later; and Kora doesn't hear the words, just the shape of them, just the way the nurse leaves the room, the curtain open, the hallway quiet with that electronic hush of hospitals, the rhythm of the monitors, the low drone of a television somewhere. After Suzy has left, Kora half-rises from her seat,leans over the plastic rails to kiss him - on his forehead, on his mouth - so gently that it almost hurts her, to hold herself back like that.
"You can sleep, baby," she tells him, leaning close to his ear, the loose threads of her pale hair brushing across the crown of his head as she does so. "I'll be here when you wake up."
[Trent Brumby] He doesn't like the way his body isn't co operating with his thoughts, it's sluggish, tired and heavy. But he forces his eyes open some more, breathing in deeper as if the air would kick his brain into high gear. It doesn't work but he's focusing a little better, enough to smile when she leans over and kisses his brow, and his dry mouth. His skin is a little warmer, not fever warm, but his body is working through trauma and drugs, kicked into overtime. Trent is a healthy young male, in his prime, with good recovery time.
"I wasn't sure if you would come," he tells her honestly. It's not because of her, but because of what she is. Garou were funny about things like that. He didn't expect her to be here so soon, though soon as a funny concept since he has no idea what time it was, only that he's still fresh from surgery, only an hour out.
Turning his hand, he curls his fingers and thumb over hers, not holding onto it tightly, but keeping it in his grip. His tongue licks his lower lip, wets his mouth and he swallows. He blinks slow, enjoying the way her hair falls over him and her familiar presence gives him some sort of calm. "I was thinking," he's got a lot to say, "about a nursery." Apparently some of that thought to mouth filter had been removed for the time being.
[Kora] He wasn't sure if she would come, and she says, "Shhh," brushing her thumb over his knuckles as he curls his hand into hers. This is automatic, the quiet shushing sound, as if she had been programmed to say it in just such moments. The tension in her body is in her spine now, in her hips, in her thighs, as she leans over the bedrails to look down at him and finds that her mouth works perfectly well in this place, too - as she smiles at him, an expression made tremulous not by fear or pending tears but rather by the glut of adrenalin in her system, the spike of rage and its resolution. " - you should," she begins again.
- except, no. I was thinking he says, and so she hushes herself, swallows whatever paltry advice she was going to offer him about sleep or rest and reaches through the rails to with her right hand to brush her fingers through his back half-curls. This is soft, too, the touch of her warm fingertips so slight it feels like benediction. Her nails are blunt, are painted peeling black, and there is a hint of soil underneath. They smell like hospital soap, all antiseptic and too sweet.
about a nursery.
Kora breathes out a singular breath, all-at-once, her nostrils flaring with her. Her hand goes momentarily still - like this: her fingers are hovering over his forehead, her thumb hovers over his knuckles. And then she breathes in, swallows the rest of her reaction, holds it carefully inside herself.
And says: "Yeah?" her voice is strained; it has been since she arrived. It is unlikely that he will hear the change in it, through the haze of post-surgery painkillers and receding anesthesia. " - tell me about it."
[Trent Brumby] "I could paint the walls," he tells her, perfectly compliant to her suggestive tones. His eyes had closed as she starts a rhythmic stroke through his hair and across his knuckles. There are pauses in between his words, longer then he had meant them to be, as he gathers his train of thought through the artificial sleepy lull. "Do some furniture. Like, make a crib..."
Suddenly his eyes open, his train of thought has shifted as he remembers something. He searches her out but doesn't have to look far she's right there. "Those bikes have been offered a good price." Kemp's bikes, the ones he's worked on and finished, and, apparently, already put up for sale and advertised. He wanted her to know the offered prices but he can't remember them then. There's no rush, though, and he registers that. "Wanted to see if you're good with it before I go ahead."
He shifts in the bed slightly, lifts his head with a small sound in the back of his throat and lays it back down again. There's enough drugs in him not to be in much pain, to keep him relaxed and not to agitate work done by surgeons. "You should kiss me again." The way he looks at her, with a half smile on his face and the way warmth still bleeds through heavy, glassy eyes is all familiar.
[Kora] "Maybe a bookshelf," she adds, to his slow litany of nursery-things. It's meant like this:l a soothing thing, another prayer in the litany, but instead she can see it, against the wall, some ordinary room, the sunlight sheeing through the windows. She sees the bookshelf and the walls and the crib and Trent painting, and she thinks: I am going to kill whatever did this to you. Which means, her thumbs stop stroking for the space of one heart-beat, tighen around his palm, in his curls. Then there's a sigh from some machine like a bellows, and she shoves calm back trhough her body, opens her hands and begins stroking his again.
She's right there, her head over the side of the bed, her features cast in shadow by the low lights left on overhead, her eyes dark, her mouth a tense curve across her familiar features. She's right there, touching him, in unstudied time with the beating of his own heart. The rhythm is called out by the monitor to which he is attached - she can see the wave of it if she looks up, the electrical impulse etched out in red lights above them. That's his heart. That is what pushes the blood through his body, keeps him alive.
"I trust you," she tells him, when he mentions the bikes. "We can go when you're better. I'd like to see them again, before you sell them, yeah? Sort of: say goodbye." One more thing. One last time.
The memory of her clotted anger is still sour in the back of her throat, is still this shadow-play through her muscles, the tension that feels almost entirely internal, and then: you should kiss me again, he says, smiling at her, warm and familiar.
"Okay," she tells him, all quiet, stroking his hand and his hair. "I'm going to kiss you again."
She does. She half-rises from the deep chair, bending fully over her bed. Her loose hair curtains out around them, and even the loosely woven braid, tucked under as it is, falls over her shoulder as she bends down over him. Her clothing is familiar, dark. If he looks down her body, he has this view - the sharp line of her nose, her cheekbones, her mouth. The pulse in her throat, fasted than it should be, faster than his own, her breasts underneath the black cotton, PIXIES across them, moving with ever breath, her torso twisting away, sidelong from them, this torquing motion, the capillary flush around her neck and shoulders that is the physical remnatt of her bout of coruscating rage.
Her mouth: he sees her generous mouth curving, as she bends close, kisses his brow again, his left eye, his cheek, and finally his mouth. Every touch of her mouth is gentle, steady, chaste.
[Trent Brumby] The bookshelf is a good idea, but he doesn't say that aloud. He doesn't tell her that he agreed, she should come and see the bikes now that they're done. Trent almost always thinks on the same levels as she, even if in different ways. He doesn't say anything about them because he's wrapped up in her closeness and the way her lips drift over his skin, making him smile more and more, until he's kissing her mouth and his chin tilts to capture her full lips across his.
It makes his heart beat a little faster. He likes it, a lot. It makes him happy more then sexual now, thankfully. It would be awkward if they got carried away as usual. That he doesn't is clear indication of how gentle she is being and how drugs and injury has effected him.
"You don't have to stay," he murmured to her, inches from her mouth when she pulls away. His hand squeezes hers too gently. "I'm okay. Go get rest."
[Kora] "Maybe a bookshelf," she adds, to his slow litany of nursery-things. It's meant like this:l a soothing thing, another prayer in the litany, but instead she can see it, against the wall, some ordinary room, the sunlight sheeing through the windows. She sees the bookshelf and the walls and the crib and Trent painting, and she thinks: I am going to kill whatever did this to you. Which means, her thumbs stop stroking for the space of one heart-beat, tighen around his palm, in his curls. Then there's a sigh from some machine like a bellows, and she shoves calm back trhough her body, opens her hands and begins stroking his again.
She's right there, her head over the side of the bed, her features cast in shadow by the low lights left on overhead, her eyes dark, her mouth a tense curve across her familiar features. She's right there, touching him, in unstudied time with the beating of his own heart. The rhythm is called out by the monitor to which he is attached - she can see the wave of it if she looks up, the electrical impulse etched out in red lights above them. That's his heart. That is what pushes the blood through his body, keeps him alive.
"I trust you," she tells him, when he mentions the bikes. "We can go when you're better. I'd like to see them again, before you sell them, yeah? Sort of: say goodbye." One more thing. One last time.
The memory of her clotted anger is still sour in the back of her throat, is still this shadow-play through her muscles, the tension that feels almost entirely internal, and then: you should kiss me again, he says, smiling at her, warm and familiar.
"Okay," she tells him, all quiet, stroking his hand and his hair. "I'm going to kiss you again."
She does. She half-rises from the deep chair, bending fully over her bed. Her loose hair curtains out around them, and even the loosely woven braid, tucked under as it is, falls over her shoulder as she bends down over him. Her clothing is familiar, dark. If he looks down her body, he has this view - the sharp line of her nose, her cheekbones, her mouth. The pulse in her throat, fasted than it should be, faster than his own, her breasts underneath the black cotton, PIXIES across them, moving with ever breath, her torso twisting away, sidelong from them, this torquing motion, the capillary flush around her neck and shoulders that is the physical remnatt of her bout of coruscating rage.
Her mouth: he sees her generous mouth curving, as she bends close, kisses his brow again, his left eye, his cheek, and finally his mouth. Every touch of her mouth is gentle, steady, chaste.
[Kora] "Okay," she lies, easily, quietly. "I'll go get some sleep. And you," all quiet, this admonition, "you too, yeah? Sleep. Rest." This while she is leaning over him, her body obscuring his view of the sterile hallway, the ward desk, the activity outside his room, beyond the curtains closing him in.
Then she kisses him again on the forehead and straightens, and this is how fine the lie is: her shadow against the curtains, disappearing into the hallway, off to find the nurse.
Except: it is a lie. When his breathing evens, when sleep returns with some new late-night narcotics dose, or sheer exhaustion, she returns, night-creature, sits this vigil all night, watching him, guarding him.
Come morning, she is still there, dozing in the early hours of the day, sprawled uncomfortably across the visitor's chair. When he wakens - the doctors come by for grand rounds, or the nurse's aid nips in for an early morning vitals check - she is still there.
Time, after that, had been snippets in his memory and fractured thoughts. The pain hadn't been all that bad, and at first he hadn't thought it more then a scratch. But the blood leaked through his black t.shirt and his body didn't co operate with his brain. Feet shuffled around him, yells continued, and the crowd moved back. He thought how strange it was, how it couldn't be, how utterly ridiculous the whole situation was. He thought of Kora and what she'd say. He wondered why. He berated himself. He flickered in an out of consciousness.
Paramedics asked him questions. The bumpy roads jolted the bed. He remembers telling them about Kora and his phone, and how they insisted he rest and relax. Then the transfer from van into the hospital hall and more faces looking at him. There were plenty of questions. Time jumped and shifted him from one place into the next. Before he knew it, he was moving into surgery, and the mask descended him into darkness.
---
Kora had a phone call at 12.36am Wednesday morning. The number wasn't anyone's she recognized, and whether she picked it up or it went to message bank the result was much the same: Trent Brumby has been admitted to hospital and was undergoing emergency surgery. If she would like to come to the hospital to come to the front desk, but not to worry he's doing fine and isn't in critical condition. The name of the nurse is Suzy Monroe.
[Kora] These are the hollow hours of the night - two a.m., three a.m. - when the city is bound deeply into a sort of waking slumber. The bars are closing or closed, shift change at the few remaining factories is hours away. The downtown office towers are closed except for the flicker of lights on and off in the silent rooms as the overnight cleaning crews work their way through the floors, the hum of the vaccuum cleaner, the quiet strains of some Spanish-language AM radio station an old-fashioned transitor radio.
The El runs all night, empty trains rattle over the tracks, every one an express. The interiors are brilliantly lit, all flourescent, this stark, white light framing the few passengers against the tinted windows, the passing darkness of the city spread out below. The stations are nearly deserted: the industrial green tiles spell out the station names in the sickly glow of flickering orange lights. The people who linger here at these hours are either unlucky or unsavory or both.
Call her unlucky. Call her both - the young blonde with directions to Bon Secours-Mercy Medical Center scrawled in stubborn, angular handwriting on the back of a Chinese take-away menu, her features drawn, her lean frame tense and alert, something wrong with her, something dangerous about her, watching the station names flick by. Watching the doors sigh open, then whisk closed, as the empty train rattles through station about empty station until she is where she's meant to be.
And when the line runs out, or branches off - when the right station comes - she exits the train alone and jogs down the unmoving escalator to streetlevel alone and walks past the hole-in-the-wall pizza places and the check cashing joints and the seedy, after hours clubs and the drug dealers and the thrift stores and the designer knock-off joints and the liquor stores and the smoke shops and the bodegas and the apartment blocks until the hospital - all white and cream and illuminated, its blocky architecture still somehow a cool, sharp contrast to the haphazard development of the city around it - is in sight.
--
She has to walk in through the Emergency Department, then cut through a back hallway to the front desk. The waiting area of the ER is full, is a sea of faces that she ignores as she cuts through it toward the front desk. Half-way there, Kora ducks into the restroom first, and washes her hands and her face with the institutional pink soap twice to be sure that she is as presentable as she can be. In the bright lights of the bathroom, her skin seems too white, her eyes too dark, her pale hair washed out, her jaw set, her features taut.
"I'm here to see a patient," she tells the clerk, her body language tight, her dark eyes direct, a certain tension shaping her voice. Her left hand, on the desk, taps out some errant rhythm. The right hand is curled into a fist in her right front pocket. "Trent Brumby. I'm meant to ask for Suzy Monroe."
[Trent Brumby] The nurses at work are always busy doing something. There's plenty of paperwork to fill out, patients to push through, families to direct or console, and yet they always have the time to chat to one another. Maybe its a way to keep their spirits up with all this sickness, violence and misery that gathers at the emergency ward twenty-four-seven. It takes certain people to work in the medical field and to be the front lines at desks like this. Most are brisk, no nonsense attitudes and very clear on what they will and won't do, but beneath it all majority have some sort of compassion, a willingness to help those in need.
The woman behind the desk is a little overweight and wears her glasses part way down her nose; this is how she looks at Kora now when the young woman comes in to ask for a patient. She doesn't know them off hand, but she does know who Suzy is. They've worked the same shift for the past year. She pushes from her wheelie chair to stand, pausing part way. "Your name is?"
Kora Williams, Suzy had used. Once given, the nurse heads off and isn't gone before she comes back and tells Kora to take a seat, it won't be long. It wasn't. But fifteen minutes can stretch on forever when surrounded by the sick and the tired, and those getting impatient and angry with a slow overworked medical system. When Suzy comes out, she looks around until she spots Kora and approaches part way with a small smile.
Suzy is in her early forties and is holding it well. She's a brunette with honey brown eyes and a warmer demeanor then those behind the desk. She's the nurse that works closely with patients as they're in the recovery ward. "Ms. Williams? Come this way."
They walk off through the security doors, her card swiping them through the way, and into the back where patients are already in beds, nurses and doctors are moving around, and the curtains cube off for privacy. As they're walking, she's telling Kora; "He came through surgery well and just recovering now. He's a little groggy and we're going to keep an eye on him for awhile," her tone is easy and calming, "there was some internal bleeding that we had to fix up, but it all went well. We just want to keep an eye on him for awhile." It's a drill she's gone through plenty of times over the night, different stories and cases, but it's all the same reassurance.
They pass by beds, long desks with medical staff sitting behind it on phones, ruffling through papers, communicating about this patient and that patient. But she spots him before they get there, the curtain opened at the end of his bed to give a clear view of the wards station. He's hooked up to an IV drip and lays out on a bed, in white sheets and thermal blankets with a hospital gown that makes his skin seem darker against it, even though he's pallor is more ashen from blood loss. His eyes are closed but his chest rises and falls comfortably. Blood pressure and oxygen levels are monitored, as well as a steady heart rate.
[Trent Brumby] [edit: kick out one of those repeated sentences!]
[Kora] Kora has not heard her last name - the real one, the legal one, the one she knew used all her human life - attached to her first name, attached to her self, so often since her first change. The passport in her pocket and a debit card are her links to that life. Thin threads. And here - amidst the packed wards saturated with too-bright light, the antiseptic smell sharp in the air, cutting through the other scents, of unwashed skin, of things-gone-rotten, of illness, and sorrow and death - she hears it again and again, and looks startled whenever someone calls out her name.
They walk through the hospital, Suzy in her scrubs, a stethoscope around her neck, her shoes as quiet on the linoleum as her manner is efficient. Kora is taller than the nurse by several inches, sharper too, particularly underneath lights like these, that cut across the edges of her features.
Hands in her front pockets, Kora ghosts after the nurse, her dedicated clothing dark and worn - the old t-shirt, snug against her body, the worn jeans, fitting close, the heavy black boots anchoring her against the bright linoleum. She studies the woman, tense, and listens to the reassurances the woman offers without comment.
--
The sight of him - unconscious, ashen - stops Kora dead in her tracks and steals away her breath. There is a moment where the rage underneath her skin is coruscating, so hot if feels as if it might split her open, the way lava splits through its skin of cooling earth, reasserts itself, all molten. Maybe Suzy - ahead of her - walks up to check the IV, to pull back the curtain, to study one of the charts or electronics ticking away beside the bed -
- and Kora, all she wants to do is tear Suzy's head off.
So here they are, this wolf-girl, in the hallway, shaking with the effort required to control herself, to find her way back to the center of herself, to tuck the beast back into her body and remember: hospital. and remember: rules, of the human life all around her. Maybe, nearby, someone sleeping a fitful, narcotics-induced sleep dreams of wolves hounding him to the ends of the earth, cries out in the sleep he can't break.
Maybe Suzy is strong enough, mind and body, that she barely notices - that she expects this, this moment where the visitor is still and startled by the vulnerability of her lover, stretched out in a hospital bed. Maybe she's that strong but feels it anyway - the momentary assertion of the wild night outside the ordered walls of the disordered ward.
This is what happens: Kora takes a deep breath. Takes two deep breaths. Uncurls her fingers in her pockets, one-by-one, circuits the foot of the bed to the visitor's chair and makes herself sit. There are a half-dozen questions she wants to ask the nurse before the woman leaves the bedside, but Kora does not yet trust her voice.
[Trent Brumby] Suzy feels it, but doesn't let it distract her from her task. There are many upset patients and family members that she sees on a daily basis; when emotions ride high and make perfectly reasonable people turn into something other. Kora isn't a reasonable person, but Suzy is not to know that. She checks the monitors, which she had done before coming to fetch Kora in the first place, but as she does Trent opens his eyes and turns his head towards her. His eyes are sleepy, the effects of drugs working in and out of his system, but he breaths in through his nose slowly, tongue licking his dry mouth as he finds his voice. "Still alive, doc," he tells Suzy in a somewhat huskier, cracked voice.
He swallows twice and shifts an inch on the bed before resettling. His eyes are half closed again, hands resting outside of the blankets - he sleeps like that, arms out and blanket part way down his chest, Kora's seen the way he prefers to sleep on his stomach with an arm tucked under his pillow and legs stretched out, but he's flat on his back with a few pillows under his head.
Suzy smiles at him, looking up from checking the IV line. "Yes you are and there's someone here to see you," she tells him, offering the same smile towards Kora. Trent's attention flickered open again and he looked towards where Kora sits in the chair by turning his head on the pillow. "Hey, Kora, baby," he'd never say it that way usually, but the tone is much the same, pleased that she's here with him.
"I'll be back later to check on you again." Suzy makes herself scarce, not bothering to pull the curtain closed around them as she wanders off again and to other tasks that keep her occupied for a good few hours yet.
[Kora] "Hi," the visitor's chair drags on the linoleum as Kora scoots it closer and then closer, until her knees are flat against the pneumatic bed, the plastic bumpers that are up to keep the patient from falling out. Her hair is pulled back into a loose French braid tonight, thicker than her wrist and tucked under itself to keep the length from swinging down her spine. More than a few wisps of fine, pale hair have fallen loose, and these frame her as she leans over the edge of the hospital bed and looks down at him.
"Hey there, hi." He calls her baby - that same tone - and the words hit her in the solar plexus too. Maybe it's just the way he opens his eyes, the way he sleeps, on his back, as he never would outside of his place. Something cuts loose and just as quickly as it asserted itself, her rage deserts her. She is breathless with its sudden, crawling absence as she leans over the edge of the bed and reaches out for one of his hands, ghosts her own hand over his, her fingers opening, the scent of the cheap pink soap from hospital washroom too-sweet and grainy with it as she reaches for his hand, for the arm not attached to the plastic tubing of the IV. Her voice seems wafer-thin to her ears, all wrong - but out of her body is has a low resonance, back of the throat and raw.
Suzy promises to return later; and Kora doesn't hear the words, just the shape of them, just the way the nurse leaves the room, the curtain open, the hallway quiet with that electronic hush of hospitals, the rhythm of the monitors, the low drone of a television somewhere. After Suzy has left, Kora half-rises from her seat,leans over the plastic rails to kiss him - on his forehead, on his mouth - so gently that it almost hurts her, to hold herself back like that.
"You can sleep, baby," she tells him, leaning close to his ear, the loose threads of her pale hair brushing across the crown of his head as she does so. "I'll be here when you wake up."
[Trent Brumby] He doesn't like the way his body isn't co operating with his thoughts, it's sluggish, tired and heavy. But he forces his eyes open some more, breathing in deeper as if the air would kick his brain into high gear. It doesn't work but he's focusing a little better, enough to smile when she leans over and kisses his brow, and his dry mouth. His skin is a little warmer, not fever warm, but his body is working through trauma and drugs, kicked into overtime. Trent is a healthy young male, in his prime, with good recovery time.
"I wasn't sure if you would come," he tells her honestly. It's not because of her, but because of what she is. Garou were funny about things like that. He didn't expect her to be here so soon, though soon as a funny concept since he has no idea what time it was, only that he's still fresh from surgery, only an hour out.
Turning his hand, he curls his fingers and thumb over hers, not holding onto it tightly, but keeping it in his grip. His tongue licks his lower lip, wets his mouth and he swallows. He blinks slow, enjoying the way her hair falls over him and her familiar presence gives him some sort of calm. "I was thinking," he's got a lot to say, "about a nursery." Apparently some of that thought to mouth filter had been removed for the time being.
[Kora] He wasn't sure if she would come, and she says, "Shhh," brushing her thumb over his knuckles as he curls his hand into hers. This is automatic, the quiet shushing sound, as if she had been programmed to say it in just such moments. The tension in her body is in her spine now, in her hips, in her thighs, as she leans over the bedrails to look down at him and finds that her mouth works perfectly well in this place, too - as she smiles at him, an expression made tremulous not by fear or pending tears but rather by the glut of adrenalin in her system, the spike of rage and its resolution. " - you should," she begins again.
- except, no. I was thinking he says, and so she hushes herself, swallows whatever paltry advice she was going to offer him about sleep or rest and reaches through the rails to with her right hand to brush her fingers through his back half-curls. This is soft, too, the touch of her warm fingertips so slight it feels like benediction. Her nails are blunt, are painted peeling black, and there is a hint of soil underneath. They smell like hospital soap, all antiseptic and too sweet.
about a nursery.
Kora breathes out a singular breath, all-at-once, her nostrils flaring with her. Her hand goes momentarily still - like this: her fingers are hovering over his forehead, her thumb hovers over his knuckles. And then she breathes in, swallows the rest of her reaction, holds it carefully inside herself.
And says: "Yeah?" her voice is strained; it has been since she arrived. It is unlikely that he will hear the change in it, through the haze of post-surgery painkillers and receding anesthesia. " - tell me about it."
[Trent Brumby] "I could paint the walls," he tells her, perfectly compliant to her suggestive tones. His eyes had closed as she starts a rhythmic stroke through his hair and across his knuckles. There are pauses in between his words, longer then he had meant them to be, as he gathers his train of thought through the artificial sleepy lull. "Do some furniture. Like, make a crib..."
Suddenly his eyes open, his train of thought has shifted as he remembers something. He searches her out but doesn't have to look far she's right there. "Those bikes have been offered a good price." Kemp's bikes, the ones he's worked on and finished, and, apparently, already put up for sale and advertised. He wanted her to know the offered prices but he can't remember them then. There's no rush, though, and he registers that. "Wanted to see if you're good with it before I go ahead."
He shifts in the bed slightly, lifts his head with a small sound in the back of his throat and lays it back down again. There's enough drugs in him not to be in much pain, to keep him relaxed and not to agitate work done by surgeons. "You should kiss me again." The way he looks at her, with a half smile on his face and the way warmth still bleeds through heavy, glassy eyes is all familiar.
[Kora] "Maybe a bookshelf," she adds, to his slow litany of nursery-things. It's meant like this:l a soothing thing, another prayer in the litany, but instead she can see it, against the wall, some ordinary room, the sunlight sheeing through the windows. She sees the bookshelf and the walls and the crib and Trent painting, and she thinks: I am going to kill whatever did this to you. Which means, her thumbs stop stroking for the space of one heart-beat, tighen around his palm, in his curls. Then there's a sigh from some machine like a bellows, and she shoves calm back trhough her body, opens her hands and begins stroking his again.
She's right there, her head over the side of the bed, her features cast in shadow by the low lights left on overhead, her eyes dark, her mouth a tense curve across her familiar features. She's right there, touching him, in unstudied time with the beating of his own heart. The rhythm is called out by the monitor to which he is attached - she can see the wave of it if she looks up, the electrical impulse etched out in red lights above them. That's his heart. That is what pushes the blood through his body, keeps him alive.
"I trust you," she tells him, when he mentions the bikes. "We can go when you're better. I'd like to see them again, before you sell them, yeah? Sort of: say goodbye." One more thing. One last time.
The memory of her clotted anger is still sour in the back of her throat, is still this shadow-play through her muscles, the tension that feels almost entirely internal, and then: you should kiss me again, he says, smiling at her, warm and familiar.
"Okay," she tells him, all quiet, stroking his hand and his hair. "I'm going to kiss you again."
She does. She half-rises from the deep chair, bending fully over her bed. Her loose hair curtains out around them, and even the loosely woven braid, tucked under as it is, falls over her shoulder as she bends down over him. Her clothing is familiar, dark. If he looks down her body, he has this view - the sharp line of her nose, her cheekbones, her mouth. The pulse in her throat, fasted than it should be, faster than his own, her breasts underneath the black cotton, PIXIES across them, moving with ever breath, her torso twisting away, sidelong from them, this torquing motion, the capillary flush around her neck and shoulders that is the physical remnatt of her bout of coruscating rage.
Her mouth: he sees her generous mouth curving, as she bends close, kisses his brow again, his left eye, his cheek, and finally his mouth. Every touch of her mouth is gentle, steady, chaste.
[Trent Brumby] The bookshelf is a good idea, but he doesn't say that aloud. He doesn't tell her that he agreed, she should come and see the bikes now that they're done. Trent almost always thinks on the same levels as she, even if in different ways. He doesn't say anything about them because he's wrapped up in her closeness and the way her lips drift over his skin, making him smile more and more, until he's kissing her mouth and his chin tilts to capture her full lips across his.
It makes his heart beat a little faster. He likes it, a lot. It makes him happy more then sexual now, thankfully. It would be awkward if they got carried away as usual. That he doesn't is clear indication of how gentle she is being and how drugs and injury has effected him.
"You don't have to stay," he murmured to her, inches from her mouth when she pulls away. His hand squeezes hers too gently. "I'm okay. Go get rest."
[Kora] "Maybe a bookshelf," she adds, to his slow litany of nursery-things. It's meant like this:l a soothing thing, another prayer in the litany, but instead she can see it, against the wall, some ordinary room, the sunlight sheeing through the windows. She sees the bookshelf and the walls and the crib and Trent painting, and she thinks: I am going to kill whatever did this to you. Which means, her thumbs stop stroking for the space of one heart-beat, tighen around his palm, in his curls. Then there's a sigh from some machine like a bellows, and she shoves calm back trhough her body, opens her hands and begins stroking his again.
She's right there, her head over the side of the bed, her features cast in shadow by the low lights left on overhead, her eyes dark, her mouth a tense curve across her familiar features. She's right there, touching him, in unstudied time with the beating of his own heart. The rhythm is called out by the monitor to which he is attached - she can see the wave of it if she looks up, the electrical impulse etched out in red lights above them. That's his heart. That is what pushes the blood through his body, keeps him alive.
"I trust you," she tells him, when he mentions the bikes. "We can go when you're better. I'd like to see them again, before you sell them, yeah? Sort of: say goodbye." One more thing. One last time.
The memory of her clotted anger is still sour in the back of her throat, is still this shadow-play through her muscles, the tension that feels almost entirely internal, and then: you should kiss me again, he says, smiling at her, warm and familiar.
"Okay," she tells him, all quiet, stroking his hand and his hair. "I'm going to kiss you again."
She does. She half-rises from the deep chair, bending fully over her bed. Her loose hair curtains out around them, and even the loosely woven braid, tucked under as it is, falls over her shoulder as she bends down over him. Her clothing is familiar, dark. If he looks down her body, he has this view - the sharp line of her nose, her cheekbones, her mouth. The pulse in her throat, fasted than it should be, faster than his own, her breasts underneath the black cotton, PIXIES across them, moving with ever breath, her torso twisting away, sidelong from them, this torquing motion, the capillary flush around her neck and shoulders that is the physical remnatt of her bout of coruscating rage.
Her mouth: he sees her generous mouth curving, as she bends close, kisses his brow again, his left eye, his cheek, and finally his mouth. Every touch of her mouth is gentle, steady, chaste.
[Kora] "Okay," she lies, easily, quietly. "I'll go get some sleep. And you," all quiet, this admonition, "you too, yeah? Sleep. Rest." This while she is leaning over him, her body obscuring his view of the sterile hallway, the ward desk, the activity outside his room, beyond the curtains closing him in.
Then she kisses him again on the forehead and straightens, and this is how fine the lie is: her shadow against the curtains, disappearing into the hallway, off to find the nurse.
Except: it is a lie. When his breathing evens, when sleep returns with some new late-night narcotics dose, or sheer exhaustion, she returns, night-creature, sits this vigil all night, watching him, guarding him.
Come morning, she is still there, dozing in the early hours of the day, sprawled uncomfortably across the visitor's chair. When he wakens - the doctors come by for grand rounds, or the nurse's aid nips in for an early morning vitals check - she is still there.
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