Out Of My Hands - 8.13.2014 [Nate]

Molly

It's late on a Wednesday night, or perhaps very very early on a Tuesday morning if you wanted to get incredibly technical about it.  Most people were settled in their homes by this point, if not in their beds and fast asleep.  The city wasn't very active this deep into the evening.

That was good.  It made it easier for Molly to haul the limp and forever-lifeless body of what used to be-- or still was?  probably still was, always was, in some way -- her friend Harald.  She got him up to her apartment using the elevator and tucked him away into her broom closet after clearing the floor out completely to make room for him.  Folded into the small space with knees up and back and shoulders to the wall.  Hideous face covered with coats from seasons that were still many weeks away.

Another animal joined the house too, and after a hissing match between Boots and Lucy the little orange female took to hiding under Molly's bed while Boots made post on the back of her couch to keep protective, watchful eyes over where his Master was locked away.  Florence got her nose scratched when she charged the new cat with too much energy and was now scoping Boots out warily from under the coffee table.

Molly went outside onto her balcony with her phone and a glass of water that she ultimately would forget to drink.  She stood leaned against the railing, looking over the street, and sent a text message:   Are you awake and can I call you?

The name 'Nate' blazed with the answer Yes on her screen soon thereafter.

And so, within the minute, his phone rang and Molly asked:

"Hey.  Are you somewhere that it's okay to talk?"


Nathan

He's used to waking up in the middle of the night not sure whether he's just fallen asleep or beaten the sun in rising whether the next thing he's going to hear is a mortar shell falling or a flurry of gunfire or a disembodied voice beside his ear whispering threats or promises or pleas or just his work cell ringing because something has blown up across town and he was the first one to respond and now the county medical examiner has to speak to him. He's used to it. One summer of going to bed and rising with the sun has not been enough time to break him of that habit.

The phone wakes him. Molly doesn't know if he is groggy or panicked when he answers. 30 seconds is enough time to read and process and respond. They have barely seen each other since their encounter in the library. Nate is afraid to see her. It's the fact that he loved her once or loves her still that he cares about her or cared about her once that she still has a pulse and that means the pulse can be stamped out and he knows if she came to him some night without a pulse but still possessing a voice that he would love and care for her still. He would not deny her anything.

Nathan is braver and stronger than he looks but when a woman who's no good for him texts him he answers. And she calls. And he answers that too.

Hard to tell if he's groggy. On the phone he always sounds as if he's just groused up out of sleep. That's the depression.

Is he somewhere that it's okay to talk.

"Yeah," he says. Deep breath and a shifting of tone. Maybe he's sitting up straighter. "I'm alone. What's going on?"

He can come get her. She knows he can come get her. He's done it before.


Molly

Nate sounded like warm and wrinkled bedsheets-- like he'd been asleep but opted to answer the phone for her anyways.  She presumed that was the situation, because she's done it to him before.

This time she doesn't need a ride, though.  Instead, Molly sighed into the receiver.  She was already leaned against the railing, but adjusted how she was standing so one arm hooked over the top of the railing and so her back stretched out some.  She sounded shaken and weary, but intact.

"This is going out on a limb, but...  I thought maybe you might have some insight."  It was situations like this where Molly kind of wished she had something to smoke.  Or perhaps something to chew on, to sip at as an excuse to pause and calm her nerves a little while she gathered her thoughts and words alike.  "In a.. uh... hypothetical situation where a vampire falls into a coma, how do you get them to wake up?"

It's one in the morning, Molly.  You couldn't have found a better way to present that?


Nathan

She can imagine that he's sprawled in bed still when he answers because he sounds as if he is and she's heard his voice when he's been sprawled in bed and his voice doesn't change much between sprawling in bed and talking to her in a sunlit bar in the afternoon wearing his reporter getup of cheap dress shoes and khakis and a button-down shirt with a tie he doesn't retie every morning but just loosens and loops over the doorknob.

Molly never met Shannon. Only heard of her. Shannon ripped on him one time for being twenty-five years old and not knowing how to tie a tie. He hadn't used the Marine Corps grunt excuse and she hadn't dug for it. She'd tied it for him and resisted the urge to kiss him and it was another six months before he got drunk enough to give into his gone-to-ember yearnings and now Shannon's dead and he struggles to tie his own tie in the morning but manages out of spite.

He doesn't take this call out of spite.

Insight. If he sighs it's quiet enough that the microphone doesn't catch it. He quit smoking months ago and vaporizers are quiet things. Hypothetical situations are not quiet things.

Three seconds pass before he finds his voice.

"I, uh..." Pause. "Why is the vampire in a coma?"

He's not saying something. Of course he isn't saying something. He knows something and both his parents are lawyers or were lawyers or served as judges his mother is a judge in Nebraska and his father teaches law at DU and he knows better than to lead the witness.


Molly

Nate and Molly have been in some stressful situations together before.  Molly knew what he sounded like breathless in the sheets, groggy and just waking up.  She also knew how he sounded when he was terrified and worried and calling out from the other side of a door.  They don't spend quite as much time together as what they used to, because Nate got in too deep and decided to wade back out toward the shore, and Molly respected his wish not to be dragged out into the riptide with her.

For the most part.  Except for moments like this.  When she needed help too badly not to call out to him for it.  Hadn't someone called him her White Knight once before?

He may be leading the witness, but Molly was willing to indulge it for now.  He's also heard her slow and deep breathing of rest in bed, heard her screams of terror when the world around her flipped on its side and threatened to fling her across a room.  What he hasn't heard before was how shaken she sounded.  Whatever it was that prompted the call, whatever she wasn't coming out and saying outright, it must have happened just recently.  She was still trying to rediscover calm.

"Severe blunt force trauma," was Molly's almost sterile answer.  It was the most honest thing that she could come up with.

"Does he need blood?"

She sounded like she really hoped not.


Nathan

And his problem is that he doesn't have a commanding officer anymore. No one telling him what to do when. Six years isn't an eternity in the armed forces but he had told her the day this all turned to shit that he worried about becoming a statistic. That he had been around enough other veterans who couldn't assimilate upon coming home that he worried sometimes.

His sister worries. His sister worries enough to reopen lines of communication with their father. Their father is Nathan's father but their father lost custodial rights to both of them when Hannah was four years old. She calls their stepfather 'Dad' and Nate doesn't call him anything. Their family is not dysfunctional in the strictest sense of the word but it isn't a family either. All he and his sister really have is each other.

Part of him knows Molly doesn't have many people she can call at one o'clock in the morning when what she knows about the world upends itself. Doesn't mean it's any easier when he's the one she calls but he has to be thankful it's a person and not a spirit.

Heavy sight she can hear. Nathan doesn't share her desire to learn about the unlit world that she does.
"He doesn't... uh... have a piece of wood. In his chest. Does he?"

So he knows that much.


Molly

There's a momentary pause.  It would be appropriate for sipping the water she brought out, but it's sitting on the wire table against her wall and has already been forgotten about.  If she smoked tobacco or grass then she'd take a pull while considering that Nathan at least learned enough to understand staking.  She sometimes wondered how much he picked up when he was trying to figure out ways to kill Flood.  Who she was also still on speaking terms with.  Molly had a lot of strange alliances, you see.

When she does answer, it's slow and forced steady.

"No, he wasn't staked.  But he is really fucked up."

Her voice broke on the word 'really', and it sounded like she was about to cry but had managed to wrangle that choked escaping sob back in for the time being.  Nate wasn't so dense as he may have come across from time to time-- there was worry in her voice and tamped-down urgency.  She was numb, but this information she was gathering was clearly intended to be put to immediate use.

Hypothetical, his ass.


Nathan

"Hey..."

He's not dense. Even on the phone he retains some semblance of perception and she can hear his tone softening and a focusing at once. His tone rarely changes. He can't remember the last time he saw Molly upset enough to have to fight back tears. Maybe the day he thrust Shannon's cat at her and told her not to contact him again but he doesn't remember that day very clearly.

"It's gonna be alright. I--where are you?"


Molly

While the sentiment of it is appreciated, Nate's reassurance still roused from Molly a dark chuckle.  He knows the sound;  it's a laugh without mirth, a laugh that happened only because the alternative was to scream or break into tears.  Molly did neither-- or perhaps she did cry?  He couldn't see if tears were making their way down her cheeks or not (they weren't), but when she answered her question her voice wasn't closed and stuffed like it tends to become when tears start to fall.

"I'm at home," she told him.  There was a smacking sound in the receiver-- it sounded like a lightweight door slapping closed.  Florence had let herself out on the balcony, had nudged the screen door open with her nose.  Nate would hear Molly's voice away from the mouthpiece of her phone, muffled in her coddling and comforting of the dog.

She didn't keep pressing him for information, but rather gave him the floor to speak instead.  Molly had figured he'd asked that question because there was a follow-up thought attached to it, so the stem of questions about blood and healing were swallowed down for now.


Nathan

And yet that doesn't answer the question he'd hoped she would answer without his having to come out and say it himself. Like so long as he doesn't ask the right questions he can maintain plausible deniability. Come over during the daylight hours and talk about this as if they're talking about a friend who's in the hospital and not a friend who is in a state of dreamless bloodless death until such a time as he comes up out of it.

That's the part that won't let Nate just hang up the phone. He knew enough to know he didn't want to know any more a year ago. What he wants doesn't matter.

"... so... where is he?"


Molly

There was a time that Molly and Nate saw one another frequently.  Even if it was just for something as simple as coffee, or maybe drinks at a bar or dinner at one of their apartments once or twice.  They could talk about things that had nothing to do with vampires, but with Molly the subject always came up.  She didn't know how to stay out of those murky waters, kept plunging back into them in search of-- what?  What treasure chest did she think existed in the reaches of those cold, shadowy waters?

It was difficult to say, but Nate had made it very clear that he was finished with the business of vampires.  He made a very clear point of it earlier this year.  They were back on speaking terms, at least, but Molly tried to respect his wishes and did her best to keep vampire shit out of his life.

What was making that difficult was the fact that 'vampire shit' was permeating every aspect of her life.  It was why she hadn't seen Devin or Michael in months, why she visited Nate less and less as well.

This situation, though?  It put her in a corner.  She had to call someone, and though it was unlikely that Nate would be able to help the alternative to calling him was much to risky, and not a step she wanted to take unless she absolutely had to.  Certainly not one she wanted to take in as emotional a state as she was in.  She couldn't expose herself battered and raw and distraught to any names on any business cards that she may hoard, but Nate?  Nate, at least, was safe.

So, she confessed in a quiet voice:

"Here.  I don't know what to do with him.  I couldn't just leave him...."

And judging the bell of pain ringing clear with her words, she really couldn't.


Nathan

"Jesus Christ, Molly..."

She can hear the groan of displeasure barely held back from his voice and the microphone on his cell does not pick up whatever it is he's doing next but she can tell from the cadence of his speech that he's out of bed now. Something rattles as he bumps into it.

"How the hell did you get him inside without--?" Don't answer that. He doesn't actually want to hear about the logistics of dragging a dead body from the scene of a crime up to her apartment's closet when she doesn't have a car. "I'm coming over."

That's not a topic open for discussion. She hears the minute click of a severed connection and when she glances at her phone's screen it confirms that the call ended.


Molly

He was coming over.

The line went dead, and Molly took the phone away from her ear to look down at the screen.  What the glowing square told her confirmed that Nathan had hung up without waiting for permission.  She slipped the phone into the back pocket of her jeans and sighed heavily.  For a time her eyes were cast out on the city view from her fourth-story balcony, but a whine from the large adolescent pup near her knees drew her attention back.  Molly murmured words of comfort to her companion and to-be-sentry, but her efforts to comfort the dog only opened the flood gates of misery in herself.

Figuring that she may as well let it out of her system before Nate arrived, Molly sunk down to her knees, wrapped her arms around Florence's muscly brown neck, and wept.

----------------------

Molly's apartment requires the front door to be unlocked, which is done through a buzzer and intercom system.  When he buzzed, the door clicked open without a verbal message to accompany within the standard amount of time it takes to walk across an apartment.  He can take the elevator or the stairs-- Molly's only ever guided him up the stairs but hey, he's a free man and he can do what he likes.  One way or another, by way of leg strength or by way of pulleys, he'd reach her door and have to knock to gain entry there as well.

When the door pulled open, he'd find Molly visible but out of the way to allow him space to walk inside.  She didn't smile to greet him.  She looked exhausted-- not because it was late and she wanted to lay her head to sleep, this was a different kind of exhaustion.  She was beginning to show bruises of poor rest under her eyes, and while that was normally covered with make-up the fact that she'd cried and scrubbed blood and dust from her face had washed all of that away.  There was a new tension to her, too, a lingering paranoia.  She seemed half ready for fight-or-flight at the drop of a hat.  No wonder she was tired.


"Come on in," she invited, and would close the door behind him once he'd stepped over the threshold.


Nathan

They haven't seen each other since the beginning of the summer. He's been busy and he's been hiding. His hair has bleached from too much sun exposure but his skin hasn't darkened at all. Bruises beneath his eyes from fitful sleep with his sister gone and Nathan looks anxious when she opens the door. Breathing heavy but not fast tension in his jaws holding himself like he's expecting a fight once he steps through the door.

It isn't a fight with Molly he's expecting. He doesn't know who's in there behind her. Dark brown eyes find her face and search it. He's wearing motorcycle boots and khakis and an olive green t-shirt. The first things he could find in the dark. Leather jacket since he rode his motorcycle and he's carrying his helmet in one hand.

Rare that she looks more tired than he does. It does nothing to take the edge out of him.

Her invitation has him looking over her shoulder listening harder and he takes a deep breath to prepare himself. When he looks back at her he has to make a concerted effort to relax. She didn't call him because she has the situation under control.

That breath comes back out in a sigh and he steps across the threshold and pulls her into an embrace. Arms around her shoulders and a hand at the back of her head. She can feel if not hear his heart beating in his chest. He's warm. His hands are warm and his trunk is warm and he's alive despite everything that's happened in their lives.


He doesn't swear or even speak for the rest of the embrace. It will end when she decides to end it.


Molly

The apartment that Nate stepped into looked intact, for the most part.  The floor showed no traces of blood or mishap (for Molly had scrubbed what blood that had dribbled from the broken, grotesque body once she'd come back in from off the balcony-- the smell was too strong, too alluring, and it had to be gone).  No figures loomed in the corners or in the open.  No furniture was overturned, no decorations ripped from the walls.

The only thing out of place that Nate would find in his scan of the open floorplan was a strange cat, not familiar, not at all a larger version of the one he'd handed off some time ago.  This one was distinctly male, and looked dusty-dirty from off the street, with a mean stare and scars cutting through his bristly fur.  He was on the back of the couch, just barely in view, and looked watchfully on at Molly and Nate in the foyer.

Molly herself looked a mess.  She was wearing a pair of dark jeans that were scuffed up in the knees like she'd taken a hard fall.  Her right shoulder and elbow were both scraped up with blood that had smeared from them still flaking off her skin here and there.  Her light and flowery blouse was dirty and smeared with something dark that one could only guess to be blood.

No major injury, though.  She was standing comfortably and breathing fine.

In seeing how his shoulders and chest moved with those deep and ready breaths, how he cautiously scoped out the apartment like he expected attack, she had started to assure him.  "He's comatose, likes  I said, you don't need to--"

Molly was interrupted by Nate's wrapping her up and pulling her against his chest.  She stiffened at first, resisting tears, but soon wrapped her arms around his middle, under the jacket, and tucked her face to his chest.  She didn't weep again, but did breathe and take solace in the comfort while it was offered.  Let him be a support while she let some of the burden of panic, post-psychosis, and betrayal slip for a moment.

Some twenty seconds or so passed before Molly finally pulled back, cleared her throat so it wouldn't be choked up still when she tried to speak, and closed the apartment door.

"Thank you," she said at first.  Then, "I'm sorry.  I've been trying to keep you out of this, but it was either you or one of Them, and..."  She trailed off, lips pressed thin together.  She looked at a loss, and had called for direction.  That's what she was hoping for when she waited for what Nate had to offer in advice.


Nathan

He doesn't tower over her but the six inches he has on Molly means he can rest his chin on her crown while she takes the offered comfort from him. Maybe the embrace is as much for his sake as it is for hers. Anyone watching them would see the expression on his face, the beleaguered bewilderment mingling with the love he still feels for her even after trying to walk away so long ago as it's been now. He rubs the space between her shoulder blades when the embrace's lifespan surpasses five seconds and just before they start to separate Nate tips his head to press his lips against her hair.

All this time the door was open but if something had come up from behind them Nate would have been between her and it. Once they're parted again he puts his hands into the pockets of his jacket like he's looking for something and lets his eyes rest uneasy on her again. Doe eyes never seem to blink and his mouth is set into an unhappy line. It deepens with the apology and a furrow digs itself between his brows. He shakes his head. Stop he says without speaking.


"Where is he?" he asks. A flick of his eyes towards where he knows the bedroom to be. He's already invited himself over to her place. It isn't a far stretch to assume he's going to want to see the state of the vampire before he gives her advice.


Molly

The hand rubbing her back, the lips and breath in her hair and the heartbeat in the warm chest under her cheek was all sanctuary for that twenty seconds.  Shelter in the arms of life, when she'd been wrapped up or pulled along by the arms of Death for so long now.  She loved Nate in a particular way.  He had never done this to her, but if their positions were switched and he'd called for help in the middle of the night she would have grabbed up what clothes she could find in the dark and come on over too.  But Nate?  He took care of himself well enough that those circumstances didn't rise.  She hadn't received texts with disgruntled hostage-held pictures of him in a long time now.

When they parted and his hands went to his jacket pockets, Molly's hands instead went to cup her elbows.  Like bracing her arms over her chest and ribs helped to keep the welling pressure and ache within her heart tamped down.

Where is he?, Nate had asked, and peered toward the bedroom door.  Molly shook her head some and nodded her head toward a different door that was basically in the same direction.  Either the bathroom or the broom closet.


"I don't know what to do with him," she repeated.  That was her crisis right now, wasn't it?  Or the one most easily addressed, the most tangible one at least.  "I need to wake him up.  It's the 'how' that I'm struggling with."


Nathan

"You can't."

Like he's talking to someone who's being completely unreasonable. If Nathan were a well man emotionally some heat would have come into his voice but he isn't and it doesn't. All she has is the light in his eyes. It sharpens the flatness in his voice. It's obvious to him but it isn't so obvious to her.

"Molly, you have to give him back to Them. When he wakes up, which..." Big shrug with his hands still in his pockets. Widening of his already-wide eyes. "... who even knows when that'll be..." His shoulders go back down but his eyes stay wide. "... he's gonna be starving. They have to eat, like, a lot, and if he's hurt and lying in a fuckin' closet until he wakes up on his own..."

That frown returns. This is giving him heartburn. He swallows thick and gives her a pleading look.

"It's not like if someone staked him. You know? You've got some control over that. There's nothing you can do to wake him up. Okay? Just... we gotta bring him somewhere else."


He's placing so much faith in that stack of business cards he saw. Nathan knows more than he'd like to know but he still doesn't know everything.


Molly

Lower lip tried to tremble again, and Molly reigned that in by catching it under her teeth.  For what might seem like the first time in, well, perhaps forever, she was actually listening to him.  He could tell in how she nodded her head slowly, faintly while he explained that Jack-- sweet Jacky, sweet Harald-- would wake and be the death of her when he did.  That he was basically a ticking time bomb because there was no way to force him awake and no way to know when he would awaken on his own.

She had to find someone to take him away, someplace for him to be.

Swallowing hard, Molly conspired.  "I thought maybe a storage unit, but I couldn't--"  She was about to say that she couldn't bear to just leave Harald locked up in some cramped cement cell like a prisoner and animal.  She was betrayed and burned and hurt and angry, but that blood-bound love-knot was tight in her stomach and would make her sick to think of doing something to risk this monstrous man's life.  "It's not safe," she expressed instead.


She worried her lower lip under a bicuspid just a bit, with wheels turning in her head though they wanted to jam up with ice and simultaneously run away in a panic.  "I didn't want to have to call one of Them, but this is out of my hands, isn't it."  A part of her knew he'd want to see what she was dealing with, but Molly made no move to go closer to the broom closet.  She hadn't even moved to sit in the living room because that would bring them closer, closer to the monster in the closet and the watchful ghoulish cat that kept guard over him.  So she stood in place, because she didn't want to show Nate the types of terrors she was associating with these days.


Nathan

She tells him that a storage unit wouldn't be safe and Nate scowls out of protest but doesn't interrupt until she's had time to come to the conclusion he could have told her the second he realized what had happened. Now that he's here and he can see the state his friend is in he can't claim to have a driving desire to see the creature that's landed her in this position.

With his hands still in his pockets and his stance wide and his shoulders tight Molly can tell he doesn't entirely trust that they're safe right now.

"It's been out of your hands since before you dragged him back here," he says. He takes his hands out of his pockets. "Molly, if you don't have anyone you can call, you don't know any of his allies, you don't trust any of your allies... you have to put him in a storage unit somewhere. You can't keep him here. Just... you work in a hospital. Right?"

He can't believe he's saying this. He's saying it as if he already has a contingency plan in place from one of his own shadowy allegiances. Long-suffering sigh cut short because this is no time for theatrics. He pushes his hair back from his brow and holds the lazy curls back. Releases them to go on:


"Go to the blood bank and lift some bags. We can put them in a cooler or something. And then we'll put them into the storage unit, with him, and... when he wakes up, they'll be there, and you won't. And it'll be fine."


Molly

Even as they were standing there discussing options, hovering in the open space of the front of her apartment between kitchen island and dining room table, gears were turning and scenarios were playing out.  Molly's eyes shifted from Nate's, landed on some point on the wall and went out of focus while she visualized the logical conclusions to different actions she may take.  The statistical chance that any ally she may call would take it upon themselves to come over too-- after all, that's precisely what Nate had done, wasn't it?  And then what?  Would they want to take Jacky and label him a prisoner of war?  She didn't know how he was aligned and because of that any person she called could be sealing his fate to a more permanent, lasting type of death than what he'd experienced god-knows-how-many years ago, and what he'd experienced tonight when the bus had broken his body badly enough to push bones through sallow skin.

Nate's suggestion was to use the storage unit, to provide blood there for him in a cooler for when he wakes up.  Molly still wasn't looking up at him, but her chin bobbed with a small, thoughtful nod as she processed the suggestion.

"...I'll need to check and make sure the bagged stuff will cut it," she said, and the tone sounded like she wasn't disagreeing with his idea so much as building off of it-- fleshing it out into a more concrete plan.  "If not, there'd be the risk of him breaking out and going berserk on whoever runs the storage unit, and that would bring questions back to me since the unit he'll break out of will be in my name."  A hand found its way to her mouth so she could tap a fingernail against her teeth.  Soon this turned into her sucking lightly at the edge of the fingernail.  It didn't occur to her that this was because of the vitae dried under her nails still, she was too distracted with planning to realize and be disgusted with herself for the behavior.

A few moments passed, her fingers splayed over her collar bone and the bottom of her throat instead, as though to protect it and smother anxiety within her both.  Blue eyes re-focused and met Nate's once more.


"Look, I know you don't want to be involved in this stuff so I'm sorry I called you-- I know you don't want to hear the apology, so that's the last time I'll say it.  But you don't need to stick around.  I'm glad you came, really, but I'm not going to ask you to help me move him."


Nathan

Those few moments don't pass in silence. He knows something or he thinks he knows something and he's agitated more by the thought of her being alone when something goes wrong than he is by having been called in the first place. If he didn't care about her he wouldn't be here right now. There's the risk of him going berserk and questions coming back on her.

"The bagged stuff is better than nothing," he says. "What other choice do you have?"

She knows he doesn't want to be involved in this stuff. That's the last time she's going to say she's sorry. Nate stares at her for the duration of her explanation and her dismissal like he's trying to decide if he ought to push the issue or not and in the end he doesn't end up insisting on helping. Awkwardness descended upon him where before had been concern and fear both and with it comes the slowness brought on by sleep deprivation and depression both.

"Alright," he says.


And then he turns around and starts to walk back towards the door.


Molly

"Nate."

He'd turned around and reached for the door.  Molly didn't reach out to stop him, not in the way that he'd reached out to her when he'd seen the state she was in by this debacle.  It was something she didn't want him involved in, and her reasons for that, she states, are because he told her he didn't want involvement in these types of affairs.  It could be that she was selfishly hoarding secrets.  It could also be that she was trying to protect him-- after all, her life was already too deeply wrapped up and submerged in the inky mire of Undead Men and Monsters Under Streets.  She was increasingly distant from her family, while Nate had been trying to build bridges back to his.

Perhaps she sent him away because she would rather that the dead man in her closet take her life instead of Nate's.  She'd rather see him live, let him see the sun and have the way out that he sought.

Whatever her reasons, she still felt wrong just letting him walk out the door on the note of 'Alright' and nothing else.  If he paused, turned, or in any other way heeded the call of his name, Molly smiled weak and shaky and small at him.


"Don't think I'm not thankful that you stopped by, okay?  I am.  Thank you."


Nathan


Nathan is not oblivious to the effect he has on the people around him and he is aware perhaps to this more than to anything else that he inspires a protective drive even in those who could claim easy that they hate him. From a distance he looks skittish and easily bested in a fight and up close he seems lethargic and uninterested in his own survival. Nothing that has happened in the last year has done anything to change anyone's opinion of him. His spine is stronger than the rest of him looks. But he has enough on his plate with the psychic power he'd ignored for most of his life. Vampires will kill him if he doesn't walk away.

He's already walked away from her once. It looks like he's doing it again now but Molly says his name and though he plucks his motorcycle helmet off the table where he'd left it he does stop. Faces the door for several seconds while he waits to gauge what the next word is going to be.

Don't.

He's looking back over his shoulder when she smiles at him and he turns more but not fully to face her. His question sounds like a non sequitur but it's not. This wouldn't have happened tonight if she had felt she had someone else to call. It's a slow realization but Nate is beginning to accept that Molly is never going to have a normal life. He introduced her to the most normal person he knows and trouble still found her. This was a choice she made tonight. This was a choice he made.


"You know if you call me, I'm going to answer it. Right?"


Molly

"I do."

The smile began as a small, weak thing-- a pilot light without much fuel to power it.  But it strengthened, if only a little, to hear Nate confirm what she professed to already know.  She had the rest of the night ahead of her, and dark hours were already becoming precious even though she had several of them left before dawn would begin to crest the eastern horizon.  She still had blood on her and her scraped skin hadn't been washed and tended to yet.  She still had a vampire in her closet and a ghouled cat on her couch.  There was much left to be addressed, but this was important enough to take extra time on, even if it was just a few minutes caught at the doorway.

"I'll try not to abuse that good fortune."  She paused, and then added:  "I'll text you to let you know how this shakes out, okay?  Go home and get some sleep."  Then, she added with a frown that tried to flavor humor into its edges but didn't do a good job of it-- "I'm probably going to have to call some folks that you won't want to shake hands with anyways."

He'd stopped with his motorcycle helmet under his arm, just a few feet away.  Molly closed the distance so that she could stretch up on her toes and put one hand on his cheek, and her lips to his other cheek.  The gesture is tender and bittersweet, a whispered acknowledgement that her goodbyes always had a stronger potential than average to be the last.


"Goodnight, Nate."