Molly Toombs
Tuesday night, and Molly Toombs is
working trauma in the emergency room. She's been stitching and cleaning
and rushing and tubing and just working hard all night long. Someone
was taking a vacation, it was an odd night in that it was busier than
they'd expected. But, thankfully, that tapered off around eleven o'
clock and things started to slow down.
Sometime around then, Molly
sought out René Jacobs wherever he may be in the hospital that night--
probably happened across him, they both worked with the same patients
after all. She'd ask:
"I need to speak with you. Can we go to your office?"
Later,
was the answer. Her shift would end at two in the morning and the good
doctor was pulling an overnight. Whatever it was that he had to finish
up, he told her to wait. Not right now. When he was done with what he
had to do.
One way or another, they'd end up in Dr. Jacobs's
office, or walking toward it. Molly in her dark blue scrubs with her
hair bound up in a high ponytail, bangs pinned back and away from her
eyes and eyebrows. She looked humorless, but that's how she usually
looked at work. She was always good at openly ignoring the other
nurses, but now she was fine if there were impressions about her and the
new European hunk doctor. It was better that people think one thing
than the extreme and true other-- that she knew this man on an
outside-of-professional level because the dead walked and drank the
blood of the living.
René Jacobs
When Molly found
him earlier Dr. Jacobs was sitting in front of the trauma bay's
computer terminal staring at imaging studies he'd ordered earlier. The
care team was trying to decide if this patient would need surgical
intervention to remove a bullet they'd found in his torso. The patient
was a male in his early twenties and had presented with blunt force
trauma after an altercation. He was in police custody.
Handcuffed to the
stretcher. Inebriated. The bullet had been there for years according to
scar tissue and the patient's self-reported medical history such as it
was he being belligerent.
The patient was sleeping in room 28
while they waited for someone to come collect him. All of their other
beds were either waiting for new emergencies or the patients were
resting in a similar state as this one. Going to surgery or going to
observation or going to the morgue. One of their patients is going to
the morgue.
Jacobs rubbed his temple like he had a headache and
told her yeah sure. They'll go upstairs. And then he got up and went
outside and smoked a cigarette by the NO SMOKING sign.
They've
left the ER and gotten into the elevator. By now the nurses are used to
Jacobs' presence and have accepted that he isn't going to fall for their
advances. He's still grieving for his dead wife supposedly but then he
goes striding off with Nurse Toombs and that looks suspect. He doesn't
care. He doesn't look like he's doing anything wrong or trying to hide
what he's doing.
The corridor leading to his office doesn't light
up until their footsteps take them past the motion sensors and the
fluorescents click on. Jacobs reaches into his pocket to extract the
keys to his office. Other than the clicking of the lights and the
clinking of the keys and the clunking of their footsteps silence is with
them for a time.
Then they round a corner and he assures himself that no one's there.
"What happened now?" he asks. Exhausted and wary and preemptively annoyed.
Molly Toombs
Jacobs
was wary of her. He was right to be. She was nothing but trouble.
She pried where she oughtn't and he'd told her things in a fit of trying
to steer her off course from her own demise. Now she was absolutely
trouble, always, so he was right to be annoyed when she asked for his
ear. He knew that it wouldn't be good news, because it never was with
her.
It was yet to be determined if she was actually worth the trouble, though.
When
they entered his office, she closed the door behind her, then moved to
sit in one of the chairs across from his side of the desk. She sat
leaned forward, feet flat on the floor, and rested her hands on the tops
of her legs for now. Not eagerly leaned in but not comfortably leaned
back just yet either.
She watched him, returning the wariness when she recognized it was what she was being given. Kind of a well fuck you too, then.
"I want to talk about Your Guy. And, more to the point, someone who's got it out for him."
René Jacobs
His
imperviousness to insult and upset is as much a product of his age and
his strength as it is his origins yet most people are willing to write
it off as his being European. Molly was one of those people once. She
thought him handsome and intelligent and infuriating. Same as all the
other women who found themselves attracted to him. Problem was Molly did
not want to be his lover. She wanted nothing from him and then one day
she learned the hard way that he was a ghoul. That he not only knew
about vampires but was enthralled to one.
In the office with the
door shut Jacobs paces to his desk and drops himself down into the
chair. Picks up a coffee mug that has doubtless been there since this
morning when he sat up here to answer correspondences and glances in at
the dregs. He is not that desperate. He sets it back down and runs a
hand through his salting hair.
"I'm afraid you will have to be more specific than that," he says. Not even trying to be funny.
Molly Toombs
Molly blinked at him when he answered.
He wasn't even trying to be funny.
"Wow,
he's that popular a guy, huh?" She sounded genuinely sympathetic, in a
way, for a second. But then she moved on with a shake of her head.
Started to settle back in her chair-- at least her spine was touching
the chair's back at least. Her hands came together in her lap. She
crossed her legs at the knees.
"Apparently he was at some strip
club a few nights ago. Ran into some tall blond woman with a bad
attitude. Decided that it would be a great idea to take over her will
and force her to hug some stranger for a minute." She'd pause, gauge if
René had already heard about this happening or not. Let the odd, small
humor of the situation against the bleakness of the reality of it set
in before continuing.
"Well, she's a bounty hunter, and now she's
on a death prowl. She knows my friend, so she came over to our table
because she overheard us talking and I'd mentioned something about mind
control--" she felt like he may interrupt here, ask why the fuck she was
talking about mind control outside of this specific context in the
first place, but she pre-emptively waved him off, dismissed any
interruption he may try to come up with, and continued. "and came up
demanding to know what I know.
"She described your guy, and
apparently I have a shitty poker face," sorry, René, "because she got
all up in my shit demanding to know who he is and where to find him."
She
stopped. That was the end of her story. She wasn't going to regale
him with her awkward escape from interrogation. But she did add:
"I
figured you should let him know. Maybe in a way so that he doesn't
just outright murder her when he finds out she's sniffing."
René Jacobs
It's
still fucking funny if one is able to overlook the fact that what she
is saying is that István who is over a hundred years old and so powerful
that he could have probably killed everyone in the fucking room before
anyone had time to pull a cell phone and call the police thought it
would be a good time to hijack a woman's will and make her hug someone.
Not just any someone. His fucking research assistant.
If
Jacobs doesn't laugh at the situation he's going to throw himself off a
building. He doesn't even truly laugh though. Just snorts with the
reminder and suppresses the urge to shake his head. Christ. And now
here's Molly talking about fucking mind control out in public with one
of her cotton-brained friends.
"Just how much sway do you think I
have over him?" he asks. He sounds curious. Maybe a little bitter.
She's
seen the way Jacobs looks at the guy Laurel called Eurotrash. She
hasn't seen a return glance. Just the threat of violence in a parking
lot. "If she threatens him, I can tell you this right now: he will kill
her, and he will call it self-defense, and no one will ever find her
body. So maybe you should let her know that death prowling her way to
his front door is not such a fine idea, eh?"
Molly Toombs
She
looked a little bit offended by his throwing questions back at her like
this. The way her shoulders set and how her nose buttoned up and
wrinkled a little at the bridge in insult suggested as such. She
thought she was doing him a favor, after all.
But something he said had her raising her eyebrows and looking at him pointedly.
"I
figure he wouldn't keep you around as long as it seems he has if he
didn't need you in one way or another. You probably have some kind of
sway on account of that." Or so she figured. She shrugged, all the
same, and continued on.
"I'm not seeking her out or telling her
shit. She looks unhinged. Like,
drive-cross-country-on-uppers-to-shoot-a-guy unhinged. She's not my
friend. But...."
She paused. Not sure why she's here in the first place for half a second. Then she goes on:
"I
don't know. I figured I could wash my hands by doing my part and
providing some kind of warning. Or heads up. Maybe he can just cut her
off at the pass and, I don't know, erase her memory or something like
that. Hopefully just not kill her."
René Jacobs
No
wonder Jacobs is going gray even though he does not age. Molly does not
entirely understand the physiology of it. The science behind it. But
she knows enough that she is a liability. And Jacobs knows that she
knows enough that he needs to be seriously fucking careful about what
comes out of his mouth.
He rubs his forehead as she tells him what
she was hoping to accomplish by speaking up and then leans back heavily
in his office chair. The hinges don't squawk because tall as he is he
is not a heavy man. His head collides with the headrest and he cants his
dark eyes up towards the ceiling.
Help me Jesus he does not say. Jacobs gave up his faith in the Christian God decades ago.
"If
he were to cut her off," he says, "how do you think she would react?
Eh? Do you think she would be willing to sit down and--" Forced nasal
American accent here. "--'have a chat'--" It drops. "--with a person who
she knows compelled her into an action she wouldn't otherwise do but
can't explain why? The only 'sway' I have over him is..."
And he
starts to think about the relationship. She can tell he's thinking about
the absent man. Fondness and devotion and love strong enough to stop
his heart brief in his gaze. Snap out of it Jacobs.
"I could talk to her myself. Try and reason with her."
Molly Toombs
"I
didn't mean--...," she'd started, but his eyes had gone distant for a
few seconds. He was daydreaming about the man he referred to as his
associate. When he snapped out of it and said he could talk with Laurel
instead, he'd find that Molly was sitting there looking at him with a
look that said: really?
"Pull yourself together, man,"
she told him, and shook her head. Clearly there's some kind of disdain
growing for someone who is a willing Ghoul. Pity, yes, but he told her
that he went back.
"I didn't mean that he should go and talk to
her and explain things calm and civilized. I meant, like, wipe her
memory or something. Isn't that something some of them can do?" She
looked a little unsure of her own knowledge here, but then shrugged
dismissively.
"You could. I don't want to, though. Bitch looks like she's itching to knife me for information."
That might be her way of warning him to be careful.
René Jacobs
Her
disdain doesn't touch him nor does it mean anything. They've already
established what he thinks of what she supposedly knows. It couldn't fit
in the smudge of a used bit of pencil eraser so far as Jacobs is
concerned. Compared to how much is out there her youth and her mortality
are both dings against her.
"Anyone who would knife you for information would be stupid enough to try and fight him the second she saw him."
Molly Toombs
The
nurse furrowed her brow at the doctor's comeback. One arm folded under
her chest, and the other moved to flip him off. The gesture was
infantile, really, but brief. She put her hands on the armrests of the
chair she was sitting in, as though all at once deciding that she was
done here.
"That's precisely my concern, anyways. I'm worried
that she's going to come pounding on my friend's door to make him wring
information about your guy out of me. Which only spells trouble for you
because I'm sorry but I'm not withholding his information if this crazy
bitch decides to try pulling a gun on me or something."
Apparently,
she wouldn't put it past the bounty hunter to pull this off. She was
about to go shake down some rich looking lady who just wanted to eat
lunch, all because she might have information about this supernatural
guy. She didn't seem to think her decisions out too particularly well,
in Molly's opinion.
And, indeed, Molly did stand. Smooth out the
front of her shirt, tug the hem back down where it belong and straighten
the fabric where it sat on her chest and shoulders.
"I appreciate your time, doc. It's always a pleasant time, chatting with you."
René Jacobs
Though
he interrupts her attempt to leave alarm does not come across Jacobs.
If his associate really wanted to find this broad he has ways of doing
it. As she stands to leave he rests his jaw on the heel of his hand.
Index and middle fingers lain against his cheekbone and his tarnished
wedding band visible in the light.
"I'm sure it is," he says. "How do you call this, ah... crazy bitch? What's her name?"
Molly Toombs
Molly's
hands dipped into her pants pockets. She had stepped out from between
the chair and his desk, was standing at the corner of it now and not
quite near to the door just yet.
"Laurel. I never caught a last name. I don't know that I could find it out, either."
She
shrugged apologetically. She'd come here to put this warning on his
plate, this responsibility on his shoulders, but not give him nearly
enough to go off of.
"If you happen to know which titty bars your
boss likes to hang out at, you may want to check there. She's probably
going to end up hanging around there again trying to see him once more.
That's what I'd probably end up doing, anyways."
René Jacobs
Jacobs
scowls first at the phrase she uses. Then at the idea that his 'boss'
hangs out in the them. Then at the invitation to go there himself.
That's what he's going to have to end up fucking doing. Like he has
nothing better to do than track down unhinged borderline-personality
women who have grudges against his -
"Fuck," he says. Drags his
hand down his face once-twice and then hides his brow behind his palm.
He does have a headache. "Go back to work, Toombs."
He doesn't even have the energy to insult her. That's a historic first.
Molly Toombs
The
poor man. He looked exhausted. She could only imagine, having to
field all of the bullshit that a bored and ancient immortal would leave
in his wake, he probably had a good reason to seem this exasperated. He
scrubbed his hands over his face, and she pulled one corner of her
mouth into a frown while he cursed, then simply told her to get back to
work.
She glanced at the clock on his wall and announced to him
quietly: "I clock out in seven minutes." As though thoughtful, just to
herself.
But then the doctor was just sitting there with his face
in his hands looking miserable. Molly's frown turned sympathetic, and
she moved from the corner of his desk. Not toward the door as he'd
instructed, but nearer instead. To the closer corner of the desk,
standing beside his chair instead.
She reached out and rubbed his
shoulder nearest to her with a few small, assuring circles before
patting a few times instead. With that shared, she turned around and
walked to the door. "Sorry." She didn't sound too sorry, but
at least she seemed like she probably meant it to some degree. She felt
sorry for him more than she felt sorry to do it to him.
"Goodnight, Doc."
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