Nate Marszalek
They moved him from the ICU to the orthopedic floor last night and he's been fucking miserable ever since.
Anyone
who has ever met Nate has been able to describe him using words that
could just as easily attach themselves to water or mild-mannered
canines. He's polite and soft-spoken and respectful. Even when he's
drunk, which he gets easily because he has the tolerance of a
14-year-old girl, he is a happy drunk. And he keeps his hands to
himself. If one is willing to ignore the fact that he hasn't had a
haircut in months and his fashion sense could use some work and his skin
tone is a few hues away from 'cadaverous' on a good day 'cute' shows
up.
Even though he's a six-foot-tall former Marine who looks like
could at least hit hard in a fight despite his back and his cigarette
habit limiting his speed and his staying power Nate has a benign
temperament. Underneath the chronic sleep deprivation and the lingering
cigarette smoke he's a decent man.
Normally. But normally he isn't
recovering from a collapsed lung and flail chest and a couple of
cracked vertebrae while being weaned off of narcotics because the
attending in charge of his case doesn't want him becoming addicted to
morphine. He's been in bed partially paralyzed since last weekend. They
sent the physical therapist in to meet him this morning. She'll be back
before dinner.
Molly arrives to find the post-surgical wing of the
floor in a state of half-assed decoration. Orange and black tinsel and
recycled decorations and plastic skeletons hung up everywhere. Some fake
cobwebs strewn up around the nurse's station. Full-length X-ray films
of the clinicians' skeletons adorn segments of wall.
Just so
happens she passes the physiotherapist as the woman, who is smaller than
Nate and much darker in complexion, stands chatting at the station. The
nurse and the receptionist both laugh at something she says and then
the therapist and the nurse disperse.
Inside the room Nate is
lying atop the bed wearing the wholly dignified hospital uniform of
slip-resistant socks, boxers Molly had to bring from home for him, a
gown that doesn't cover his ass even when he's been upgraded to wearing
it tied in the back instead of hung open in front, and hair that's even
curlier than usual because he's had nothing but sponge baths for almost
seven days straight. Even before she enters the room Molly can hear him
panting like he just ran up four flights of stairs. Which means he's
alternating between panting and coughing.
Which means after the
second cough his pain levels overwhelm his bullshit tolerance and he
lashes out at the bedside tray that was just sitting there minding its
own business.
Molly Toombs
Today was Halloween,
and it was Molly's regularly scheduled night off this week. Things just
worked out that way, and nobody begged her to trade so that they could
go party because all of the parties were happening tomorrow or Saturday
night instead (although a few jumped the gun and were hosted last
weekend as well, she'd traded shifts to help cover a nurse who wanted to
party last week already). She didn't have any big plans for tonight,
the few friends that she did have were busy with their own lives-- one
had to work, and the other had a wife and child to be with tonight
instead.
She'd been visiting Nate regularly. Not necessarily once
a day reliably over the past week, but at least every other day (though
there was one point where she'd visited twice in a row). She had moved
Lucifer the Kitten into her apartment for the time being, specifically
because one of Nate's neighbors had asked her while she was unlocking
his door if that cat was sick or something because it yowled miserably
all night. Since that point, she hasn't needed to go back into Nate's
apartment for him for much at all. He wasn't exactly the garden-owning
type.
When she locates Nate's new room and makes her way up the
hall, she's caused pause at the doorway when she hears a panting noise
followed by a loud, sharp clattering sound. Nate had only enough time
to draw his arm back to himself after hitting the bedside tray before a
curvy figure appeared in his doorway.
"So, I take it therapy was awesome, then?"
Molly's
dressed in a form-fitting black dress whose hem stops just above her
knees. The neckline is high, close to her collar bone, and the sleeves
are long enough to touch her wrists. She's also wearing sheer black
stockings, a pair of black ankle-boots with dense wood-colored heels,
and a red peacoat that she has unbuttoned. Her tote bag is, as always,
at her hip, and she's carrying a paper cup of coffee in her hand.
Colored-in eyebrows lift at him, hesitating only briefly before walking
into the room and closing the door behind her.
It doesn't take long for her to shed her coat and bag and find a place for them, either.
Nate Marszalek
He's
glowering at the doorway before he even realizes who it is. All it took
was her shadow breaching the threshold for him to shoot his eyes at it
and she missed the physiotherapist's visit but it isn't a stretch to
imagine he was geared up to yell at the next healthcare provider to come
into his room.
At least it's giving the staff something to laugh
about. More than half the beds are empty this week. It isn't
ski-accident season yet. His neighbors are quieter than he is. He's the
only spinal patient in here but he's recovering so there wasn't room for
him on the floor with the people who run a legitimate risk of never
walking again.
Doesn't mean he isn't sweating profusely. He is.
They took out the chest tube and the intravenous line and left him with
an order for Vicodin and nicotine patches. The tray lies on its side,
wheels spinning, and Nate puts his hand over his ribs when Molly starts
settling in.
"These motherfuckers are trying to kill me," he says.
Molly Toombs
"Well,
they're paid to do the opposite," she advises him in a mellow tone.
She's been coming to visit him regularly, even through the morphine haze
he knows this. The way she let herself into his room without asking
for an invitation, without giving pause and making sure that he's in the
right mood for a visit, speaks to that point. She's more comfortable
with and around him, so she's not being coy or reserved with him when
she tosses her jacket and bag in a chair and moves around to the side of
the bed where the tray was tipped over with its wheels spinning and
clattering.
He has fewer tubes and lines in him now. His cheeks
hold a little bit of color, but they were always lacking in that
department to begin with. He won't believe her if she tells him so, but
he looks better. He feels like shit, but she saw him when he came
through those doors. He was lucky to be able to sit up now.
"What've
they got you on?" The question comes from a place of professional
evaluation. She's determining what they're giving him and comparing it
against what she would probably recommend in her mind-- or that's the
plan, at least. That's kind of how she's been each time she's visited.
She has a habit of evaluating other's work and occasionally tweaking or
fixing things here or there. Once before she'd completely removed his
bandages and reapplied them, muttering all the while, and then gone out
to have a talk at the nurse's station to explain to some poor hapless
new guy how he'd messed up something as simple as not getting the
bandage tape on the fucking wound.
She hasn't stooped to pick up
the tray for him, though. She might have fussed over him while he was
doped up and fighting infections in an ICU bed, but Molly was about to
start erring on the side of tough love. In her opinion, and experience,
physical therapy wouldn't do him any good if he was coddled about it. A
part of that was enabling him to do things for himself outside of
therapy sessions as well. Like picking up after himself when he has a
pain-and-frustration-induced tantrum and knocks things over.
Rather,
she stands near the side of his bed and folds her arms comfortably
over her ribs and decides this is the best place to be right now.
Nate Marszalek
His
mattress is still canted up at an angle so he does not lose his breath
when he lies down but it's not so steep as it was up in the ICU.
Upstairs Nate took most of his meals through a straw because he was so
doped up that chewing was beyond his capabilities and he did not become
frustrated or angry because he couldn't feel anything. Anything anyone
asked him to do he would at least make an attempt and if he couldn't do
it he would laugh.
Now the numbness is wearing off and the full
force of what landed him here in the first place is rearing its ugly
head in his face. Nate looks as if he hasn't slept since the last time
she sat at his bedside and watched his eyes close and his respirations
and pulse slow on the monitor.
He's not on a monitor anymore. They
have to physically come in and check his blood pressure and his
temperature. They've got him taking pills instead of absorbing his
medication through his bloodstream. In three days they'll talk about
discharging him, with twelve weeks of outpatient physical therapy to
look forward to.
Twelve minutes of it today was enough to piss him
off. Molly has an inkling of how stubborn this guy can be. She saw how
hard he fought when they brought him in strapped down and covering in
blood and broken glass.
To answer her question: "Antibiotics as
big as your fist and... fucking... I don't know..." He's not traipsing
through his sentences because he can't remember anything. She can hear
him wheezing a bit. "... Toradol?" He grunts and grimaces as he uses one
arm to push himself up higher on the mattress. "Sorry for swearing." He
coughs and grimaces again. "This sucks. How are you?"
Molly Toombs
Her
only question had been what medicines he was taking, but even as he
adjusted and answered she was evaluating him. It couldn't be helped--
it was important to her that Nate make it back to his home and continue
his life and stay on his toes because she needed him to be her anchor in
between worlds. No, not that she was going to cross into the World of
the Dead anytime soon and that would require her to keep a Medium
around. Rather, he was a human, just like she was. He lived in the
normal world amongst men and women, he worked a job and paid his taxes
and all of those good things. But he knew about Vampires too. He
acknowledged that they were real, he's met and interacts with them like
Molly does.
She knew that she needed him because he'd keep her
from falling in with the Vampires and never resurfacing. What she
wasn't positive of was whether he was in the same situation in their
relationship or not.
She found that he wheezed still, but that was
to be expected. He wasn't gasping for air and his lips weren't tinged
blue, and he seemed alert enough to recognize that his next couple of
days were going to be a regular fucking party. He didn't seem feverish
or flushed, so she wasn't worried about sickness or infection either.
Nate was still healing, but he was getting there just fine.
When
he apologized for swearing she smirked and waved a hand in front of her
dismissively. Her nails were painted a deep deep red in celebration of
the holiday. "I've learned swear words in all different languages
working here. I'm no blushing maid, they don't burn my ears any." He's
settled back, though, pushed up higher and more comfortably on the
mattress. Molly pulled a chair over to his bedside and settled in,
leaned back into her chair with her legs crossed at the knee as was her
usual. "I'm fine. No oddities to report, aside from you rolling into
my E.R. last weekend. No midnight visits from pulseless friends or
anything, either."
There's a pause, then a note of concern when she asks him: "What about you? Any visitors?"
Nate Marszalek
What about him.
Nate
coughs again and shakes his head. The wheezing continues as he starts
to relax but he is not distressed by it and she can read the state of
his body and its recovery by scanning his nail beds and his skin color.
If he were sick or deteriorating it's like as not she would notice
before the nurse assigned to him would.
She also notices he does
not pick up on any possible insinuation present in her question. Six
nights on the intensive care unit did a number on him. His first night
there Molly saw him attend to something she could not see and he did not
backpedal away from the questioning when she called him on it.
Morphine is a hell of a drug.
"A
few people from work came by while I was in the other room. My
editor's... man. Such an asshole. A bunch of us... the night before the
crash... went to an awards dinner... ceremony. Sort of situation. I
guess now he's saying Marszalek got... third place in general reporting... and he thinks that means he don't gotta come to work? Yeah, dude. Fucking... lying on the beach drinking frozen drinks with little straw hats, over here."
He coughs.
"How's Lucy?"
Molly Toombs
Nate
is slow in his speaking, but that's due to the wheezing. It's
difficult to carry enough air to speak normally when one of your lungs
is still recovering from as much trauma as what comes from being bruised
and battered by free-floating ribs and being deflated from such
forceful impact as a car accident. Molly is patient to listen and hear
his story. Her eyebrows knit together some in the middle, skin creasing
between them with appropriate empathy and moderate offense with what
she was hearing.
"Wow, that guy is a dick. I thought my coworkers were catty bitches."
There's
a cough and she doesn't flinch away from it, even if he fails to cover
his mouth. She's not sitting nearly close enough to his face to be
bothered by some coughing. He asks how the cat is, and Molly chuckles
and smooths the hem of her skirt, pulling it so it sits closer to her
knees than her thighs (which was the direction it tried to crawl when
she'd sat down).
"Oh, she's a kitten. Tried to scratch up the
leather on my couch but I bought her one of those cardboard
'scratch-the-shit-out-of-this' boxes and she's been happy to switch
between mangling and cuddling that thing." Molly trails off here, is
quiet for a moment, and then observes quietly: "You know, I'm pretty
sure you're gonna be out of here before next week. Are you gonna be
alright at home alone?"
The question is uncomfortably direct.
They're valuable to one another in pragmatic and concrete ways, but they
aren't necessarily close. It'd make sense for Nate to shift a little
under Molly's clear and sincere gaze while she's waiting to hear what
his plans are for when he moves back home. He probably knows that he's
going to have a tough time for another few weeks. Oh, he'll manage, but
there's always risks and obstacles and difficulties to take into
consideration.
Nate Marszalek
That guy is a dick.
He pulls a breathless-amused face that says I know, right?
and lies still on the mattress to get his wind back. The beauty of
anti-inflammatory drugs is they relieve pain without dulling one's
mental faculties. The problem, then, is that he's still aware of the
fact that he feels like he was in a car crash. That his back insists on
continuing to hurt and three of his ribs are broken.
Lucy is a
kitten. She's destructive and affectionate within the same window of
time. The thought of taking care of her when he gets home seems to drain
some of the energy out of Nate's body. And then Molly asks if he's
going to be alright alone.
"Yeah," he says. "Should be. I was way more messed up when I got back from Afghanistan."
That
blank space where the truth would have come tumbling out under
morphine's influence and Nate rubs at his sweat-salty forehead with his
left hand. His veins are thick and blue beneath the skin.
"Hey... could you do me a favor?"
Molly Toombs
To
Nate's answer insisting that he will be fine, Molly furrows her brows a
little and comments in a quiet voice: "I imagine that you had people
living with you when you got back from Afghanistan." Or he was in the
barracks, or the veteran's hospital, or something like that. But the
tone to that comment suggested that even though she insisted on having
the last comment, she wasn't going to press the matter any further.
A
hand rubs across his face, and her eyes flit to the veins in his hand
before returning to the haggard, tired brown eyes that had briefly been
shielded by it. He asks if she could do him a favor, and she answers by
adjusting her posture. Shoulders wriggle some within the stretchy
confines of her dress, her weight adjusts how it sits on her rear end,
and she uncrosses her legs only to criss-cross them at the ankles once
more. Only the toes of her boots touch the floor for how she has her
feet tucked underneath her chair now. Hands move forward on her
stocking-covered knees to settle there instead, leaving the hem of her
dress to mind itself.
"More than likely," comes her answer. "It depends on what it is, though."
Nate Marszalek
Nate
writes about crime for a living and veterans for self-actualization.
For living in the black-and-white of print media and the glow of a
computer screen he has a fertile imagination.
Blame that or the
amount of pain shining through the last dose of ketorolac. Either one
has him looking at her with confusion stitched between his brows. Mouth
hung open as if he was about to respond before he started imagining what
all he could possibly ask her to do that she would need to know the
conditions before agreeing to anything. He sighs a heavy sigh that
briefly closes his eyes and then shakes it off.
"Jesus," he says.
Look what the vampires have done to them. "No, I just... if go by the
apartment today, could you... there's an envelope on the desk. In my
office."
For being a bachelor working sixty hours a week and
taking a class on top of that Nate's apartment isn't a pigsty. The
occasional sock failed to make it into the laundry hamper and he'd left
dishes soaking in the sink the night Shannon died but nothing is going
to rot or gain sentience in his absence. The top of the desk is home to a
laptop and an empty water glass and a plate he didn't bring into the
kitchen. The envelope in question. Spotlight shone on it in her mind now
that he's pointed it out.
"If you could burn it for me, that'd be great."
Molly Toombs
The
fact that he appears a little hurt that she needed to hear what he
wanted before agreeing to do it didn't phase Molly at all. He uttered a
low 'Jesus', but she neverminded it in favor of what followed. He'd
told her there was an envelope, and he'll watch her eyes slide away from
his, somewhere past his ear and out of focus while she pictures his
workdesk and how she can remember it. Plate and water glass she had
moved into his dishwasher (or sink if he doesn't have the appliance),
the closed laptop that she left the hell alone out of respect, and now
that he'd mentioned it-- yep, an envelope that she had overlooked.
When she focuses her eyes on his again, he finishes the favor request by asking her to burn it.
This
catches Molly's interest, and that's clear. Her eyes light up with
curiosity, and a slow smile works its way onto her mouth. She leans
forward now. Her elbows find the edge of his bed and she puts her chin
on top of the heels of both her hands, which curl fingers down and in so
that those burgandy-red nails touch her round cheeks. It's downright
playful, but oh so sincere, when she croons at him.
"Ooooh, that sounds downright incriminating. Nathan Marszalek, what are you asking me to burn?"
Nate Marszalek
If
Molly thinks she can use her feminine wiles against a guy who's so
depressed it took copious amounts of alcohol and an assertive lady
friend to break a dry spell then she is somewhat mistaken. This might
have worked on him if he weren't laid up in a hospital bed. But he is.
He also smells like acrid sweat and healing stitches. His hair is a mess
and he could blend in with the white sheets if the lights were off.
So
she tries a trick that would work on a vampire. This is what happens
when she uses it on a young man with a broken back and wires holding his
ribs together:
"Nooothiiing."
And then he buries a cough in his elbow.
"You won't be an accessory to anything. I promise. I just... need it burnt."
Molly Toombs
[Perception 3 + Empathy 2: What aren't you telling me, though?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )
Nate Marszalek
[manip + subt: PFFFFT. -1 because he's jacked up.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 6, 6) ( success x 3 )
Molly Toombs
Nothing.
She
tried to be flirty, not laying it on thick and heavy as she's capable
of doing, but playful instead. Just a little. She wasn't trying to get
in Nate's pants, he wasn't even wearing any to begin with. Of course
it's a giant stereotype just waiting to happen, that after breathing
life back into his lungs, visiting him and fixing his bandages when some
idiot manages to not even do that right... That after all of that she
may fall for him. It was a common enough thing in the Wars that jokes
would be made about the subject matter in television shows generations
to come.
When she gets a stone wall the act falls away. She's not
trying to impress him enough to let her into his bed. She was just
trying to pry information out of him was all. When it didn't come, she
tried to catch a confirmation of her suspicions from the expression on
his face. The problem was that he smoothed his expression enough and
stared back at her, waiting for her move now. She couldn't pick
anything up from him, so she dropped the tone. This didn't mean that
she was moving from where she leaned against his bed, though.
"Oh
come on, now. If it's personal you can just say so. I just want to
know what the story is, is all. I mean, how often does someone ask you
to find an envelope, of all fucking things, and burn the mysterious
contents inside? Not shred, not throw away, not pay a damn bill for
them, but burn.
"Given everything that I know, about the world and about you, it has to be pretty understandable why I'm curious."
Nate Marszalek
So
she leans against the hospital bed. He lies against it. She takes on a
facetious flirtatious tone in hopes of weaseling information about the
envelope out of him. He teases her.
For as much as the Hollywood
trope would have her falling for him after having threaded a tube into
his lungs and changed his bandages and let herself into his apartment
just as much risk exists of Nate growing fond of her. A degree of
intimacy comes when people care for each other like this. When he can't
get up and cross a room to put distance between them he has to kill his
own expression.
Even as she dials back the flirtation Nate keeps
his head turned towards her and his eyes aimed straight at hers. His
eyes lift at her assertion that he can tell her if it's personal. He
tries not to smile at the use of the word mysterious. Flat-out grins - would have been laughter if not for the broken bones - at the word burn.
And then he calms down again. Lifts his eyebrows in a wordless Oh you think so? Eventually he deigns to answer her.
"And what do you know about me, Miss Toombs?" he asks. "Other than I can really fill out a hospital gown."
Molly Toombs
At
least he takes her forwardness with a good grain of humor. She's got
him smiling, even though she's clearly wriggling and prying for
information.
It would be understandable of something sparked
between the pair. There are rumors down in the emergency room and
trauma ward now, where Molly and her coworkers spend their time in the
building. Her fellow nurses have since figured out that Molly knew the
man that came in from the auto accident that resulted in one fatality
last week. They're now well aware of the fact that Molly comes to
visit-- that she walked out with his keys, that she'll pop in and visit
him before her shift starts on the other end of the building. Someone
read his file and found he's a veteran, and now the jokes are flying.
No, seriously, he's a solider and everything.
Truth
be told, it seems that Molly and Nate have ups and downs when it comes
to chemistry. Once or twice they've been caught in a dance with one
another. When they first met each other at the bar and Kragen had
interrupted them. When she rubbed his arm and held his shoulder, and he
rested his morphine-numb hand on top of hers and they simply sat.
Now,
while she looked up at him from the edge of his bed and he laughed at
her coy efforts to get him to tell her what was inside the envelope.
Then,
there were other times where the vial broke and that potential romance
spilled and trickled through the cracks in the floorboards. Like when
she told him not to chase after Flood's information any longer and his
trust in her fell away because clearly she was working for the enemy.
She
cast her line now, though, baiting him to come out and tell her what
was going on with the odd request. She'd said that she knew something
about him, and he challenged that. Just as she'd coaxed a grin out of
him, he did the same for her with his jest about filling out a hospital
gown. Casual and uncouth as can be, she glanced down somewhere level
with his broken ribs to sell the joke. "I'll say. I've seen that thing
on you both ways."
Then her eyes hop back up to his. "You see and hear the dead, Nate."
Nate Marszalek
[pfffft]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )
Molly Toombs
[Perception 3 + Subterfuge 2: Come on, now.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Nate Marszalek
One
moment he's teasing her despite the pain shot through his nerves and
muscles and it seems as if they've swung back around from the chill and
the separateness born in the wake of her first and only visit to his
apartment while Nate was present.
And he had been favoring his
back then too. Easy enough to ignore it then because Nate was tense and
suspicious and both of them were skirting around the same issue. They
both knew something the other would not cough up. They left without
anything more than superficial farewells bereft of assurance they had an
ally out there in a world that could end them in a heartbeat.
Molly
now wants to know more about the task into which he has reeled her. She
knows better than to waste time with this one. When she comes right out
and tells him what she thinks she knows about him he's still locked
onto her.
One moment he's teasing. The next he's forcing a smile.
His face conceals the truth of her statement but Molly is looking him
right in the eye and that's where she catches it. It wasn't just the
morphine talking. That night upstairs had planted the seed and that
first night in the ICU watered it.
He can't hide it from her now but he tries anyway. That forced smile becomes a forced laugh.
"Oh-kay," he says.
The
forced laugh left a frown in its wake and his lie didn't take. His eyes
flick towards the door lest he say too much as a doctor is walking in.
No one is paying any attention to them. This is not a massive hospital.
Word has reached the staff that the Marine in room 6 is somehow
connected to one of the ED RNs.
Nate closes his eyes and sighs
heavy and hard and scrubs his face with his hand while he's not-looking
at her. If she gets the impression he doesn't grant too many people that
bit personal trivia, Molly is more than right.
Molly Toombs
Even
though there's a bloom of victory in her chest, Molly doesn't show that
to Nate. He'd pulled the corners of his mouth tight into a smile, but
it was fake and Molly could see that because it sat so differently, so
stiffly when compared to the one he'd been wearing a dozen seconds
before. She stares at him unblinkingly, eye contact is held, and she
sees the truth. He sees that she sees it, and frowns and sighs and rubs
his face.
There's a certain thrill to be found, in discovering
that there's something else supernatural in this world. People who can
talk to and see ghosts. Ghosts themselves. And apparently ghosts were
more than just odd pushes of force and remnants of strong energies left
behind on walls, because she remembered distinctly Nate reassuring her
that the 'someone' he was talking to had simply been confused and then
set on his way.
Vampires. Wizards. Ghosts. Psychics. Psychic? Maybe that wasn't the word.
Regardless,
she can tell he's none too pleased that he can't lie his way out of
this one. Molly knows his secret, and he's coping with that by saying
nothing and looking exhausted, exasperated, and bothered. The glee and
excitement in Molly's face lessens, but she doesn't frown or reach to
reassure him. She does drop her hands away from her face, though, so
that her forearms are flat on the bed and she's sitting with a
straighter back and shoulders even though she is still leaned forward.
He's
worried about someone overhearing, but the door is closed and doctors
and nurses are supposed to be knocking before entering anyways. She
clearly doesn't share the concern, but respects it enough to keep her
voice low.
"Nate. I'm not saying I'm unwilling to do what you
asked. I'll go, I'll burn the envelope, because I trust that you've got
reasons for it. But if there's something that's gonna happen when I
do, or the chance that something will, it's only fair for you to tell me
so, right?"
Nate Marszalek
"That's not..."
Why
he's hiding his face. The hand closest to her is the one that scrubbed
at it and it stays in place after Molly's voice has come back to him.
Even with his eyes off her he can feel the shift in weight against the
mattress.
Official Presbyterian St. Luke's visitor guidelines ask
that one not sit or lean against the bed. It doesn't say why. It just
says not to do it and expects the literate to comply.
So Nate's
hand stays where it is. Molly can read the jut of the bones in his wrist
and the flimsy plastic bracelet clipped around the joint. The veins
coursing over the tendons in his hand and the errant cuts where
plexiglas and god knows what else sprayed him during the collision. The
lingering pain and the exhaustion in the pallor more pronounced than
usual.
The entire time she's known him Nate has looked tired.
Pieces come together now. He lives in an older building. He was
stationed overseas in a war zone, two. The membrane between worlds is
thinner on certain nights and certain times of night. He probably wakes
up at three o'clock in the morning, all the hairs on his arms gone up
for no goddamn reason more often than he doesn't.
"I found it at
the Oxford Hotel," he says as he drags his hand down off his face. Again
addressing the ceiling. "A shade led me to it." So that's what he calls
them. Not ghosts. "Said he'd find me and if he didn't... find me
in the next seven days I had to burn the thing and I... I don't know
what's supposed to happen after seven days. That's all he said. He
wasn't the only one talking. There were... jesus. A lot of them. Five, I
think, altogether. I don't know what happens if you don't burn it after
the seventh day but that was the night before the crash. Tonight's the
seventh night. So. Nothing's gonna happen to you if you do it. If you
find the time, is all I was asking."
He looks over at her before he goes on. His eyes haven't gone fear-wide but she can see a rising oh shit why did i say that in him.
"Molly. I swear... if you repeat that to anyone, they're gonna lock me up. Please don't tell anyone I told you that."
Molly Toombs
And this is how Molly learns everything that she knows.
She'll
coax information from whoever it is that she's put in the hot seat.
This may be by leading and goading the person into oversharing (her
little brothers, every time she went to visit and picked up on them
hiding something from her or their parents), or by wriggling her way
into the mind, attention, and care of the person (Flood, he'd said so
himself, and maybe Kragen-- why else would he have warned her about what
Ghouling is?). Other times, like now, she'll just sit there and poke
holes in the lies until there's nothing left to do but fess up. With
poor Nate, exhausted and having gone through much recently, it took a
locked pair of eyes and a clear read between the pair of them.
When
he'd realized he was caught in the lie, and when Molly insisted that he
tell her what's actually going on, he complied. While he was talking,
telling her the story about the night before the crash and the envelope
that he was supposed to burn, Molly is silent as the grave. She soaks
up what he has to tell her, commits the tale to memory, and is already
going through it picking for details and creating half-assed theories as
to what could be going on, why the envelope was important and what
could come of it being burned.
Then Nate's looking at her,
pleading her not to share the tale. This catches her attention, and her
focus is clearly back on him, no longer sorting through theories and
pieces of the story he'd told in the back of her mind. Her brow creases
again, and she puts her hands flat on the bed and sits up straight once
more. No longer leaning on the bed, but her hands stay there at the
edge. It felt too formal, almost, to just sit back in the chair while
he rested. It felt fair to be near enough to give him the chance to
grab wrist or hand to stop her from something, or to swat at her for
crossing a line.
"I've seen vampires and wizards and ghouls, and the apartment above mine is haunted. Nathan, why would I go ratting you out to the mental health crowd?"
Nate Marszalek
"I don't know."
And
as he's saying it his eyes take on the characteristic of a sky once
gray gone doom-dark and bringing with it dampness you can feel in your
bones.
All the time they've known each other Nate has been tired
and Molly has been hungry. Whatever she could learn about the world
around her she could absorb into herself and take with her through it
stronger and smarter than she was before. This makes her a brilliant
nurse. It means she does not stagger with the weight of seeing someone
with whom she'd shared beers and coffee and sofa space come into her
hospital so close to death she could see where his spirit would have
climbed up out of his body if they hadn't worked as quick and seamless
as they did downstairs.
She doesn't sit back now. Maybe that
aggravates him that she's so close and confrontational when he's too
wounded to do anything about it. Nate doesn't need coddling though. He
was a soldier once and now he's a reporter. He's tougher than he looks.
Especially now when his tear ducts are flushing up and he's sniffing
hard to clear them.
"Ugh." He swipes his hand across his eyes and
pulls himself together. "Other people can at least see vampires and
wizards and fucking... ghouls, Molly. It's not same thing."
Molly Toombs
"Ho-..."
She'd
started to call him 'honey' by reflex, not as a pet name that couples
would use on one another in a relationship, but more sympathetically
than that. His eyes were glassy and he sniffed hard and scrubbed at his
face after confessing that he didn't know the answer to her question.
She wanted to comfort and brace, but she knew full well that reaching
for a man on the verge of tears would only make things worse. He opted
to pull himself back together rather than allow himself to wallow,
though she wouldn't have judged him for breaking for a few minutes. She
wouldn't hinder his progress and do anything that might make tears come
rushing bitterly back once more.
So she licked her lips, took her
hands from the edge of his bed, and sat up straight at the edge of her
chair. If he looks, she'll see her expression a touch hurt-- in
sympathy for him, not because he's done anything to damage her
sensibilities -- and resolved beyond that.
"I think you and I both
know by now that we can't just rely on our eyes to tell us what's real
and what isn't. Just because you can see something that I can't? That
doesn't make you wrong, it just makes you different." The word
'different' isn't used as an accusation or a negative. It's simple,
straightforward, like she'd plucked it straight out of a dictionary.
Then,
soon enough, she's rising to her feet and balancing her weight on those
heeled boots of hers. "I'll make sure it's taken care of, alright?
And I'll let you know if anything happens."
Nate Marszalek
She
does him a mercy in not cleaving to him that he might find his pain
drawn to the surface by her compassion. For as much as they know about
the weirdness in each others' worlds they had not near as much knowledge
about each other a couple of months earlier.
A couple of months
earlier Nate was wearing nicotine patches not because he can't smoke in a
hospital room but because he didn't want to reek of tobacco smoke when
he was sat at a coffeehouse with her. Now Molly can drag up his lab
results and his typed-up clinician notes. She can see he has reported no
clinically significant family history and his vitals do not support any
underlying pathophysiology and he did report beginning a pack-a-day
cigarette habit when he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2005.
Eight years a smoker and it was a tractor-trailer almost killed him.
They
don't know a lot about each other but they know that each has had a
run-in with one of the immortal damned and now she knows he sees the
spirits of those who don't pass on easy. As Molly goes to leave she says
she'll make sure the envelope is taken care of and he's nodding. That
could have calmed him.
Then she says she'll let him know if
anything happens and Nate's hand shoots out to grab her by the fingers.
He stares up at her like he can dredge up enough wisdom to tell her how
to stave off anything happening. She can see him searching.
Same
as she can see the moment when reality hits him. Twenty-six years old
and he's kept this at arm's length his entire life. He doesn't know a
goddamn thing that could keep her safe. Nate sighs and forces another
smile and lets go her hand.
"Try not to set off the smoke detector, would ya?" is all he has for her.
Molly Toombs
There's
that pause, when she's about to go for her coat and bag and leave him
to rest his body, stretch his toes under the sheets of the bed, and
watch something on the television that could hopefully entertain him
enough to eat away some of the monotony that was the inside of a
hospital recovery room.
She stops when his fingers wrap around
hers, and looks back at him where he's propped up in his bed. Their
eyes search one another's, and she reads that he wants to say something
but realizes that he has nothing to say after all. So he sighs and
forces a smile, but before he lets go of her hand she grabs hold of his
more securely and gives it a squeeze, then follows up with a bracing
smile that trumps the fake one he'd put up for her.
"I'll do my best not to," is what she reassures him with.
Then
she lets go and gathers up her coat and bag. When she's got her coat
on (not yet buttoned, though) and the tote bag strap up over her
shoulder, she pauses by the door, prior to opening it, and glances back
at the veteran in the hospital bed. "I know you've got another few days
of this left. I'll bring your laptop when I come back around-- that
way you're not stuck watching day court."
And with a flash of
smiles and promises (I'll burn the envelope, I'll bring you something
back from home), Molly was on her way out.
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