librariansheart (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
librariansheart) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thoughtformed2014-04-02 07:10 pm
librariansheart) wrote in thoughtformed2014-04-02 07:10 pm
Entry tags:
The Medication's Wearing Off - Open Log
Who: Anyone with cause to be at the hospital
What: Visits with patients or those in the waiting room
Where: New Moore General Hospital
When: 4/2 and the few days after
Warnings: Excessive guilt, angst, depression, mention of self-harm and attempted suicide
Waiting rooms aren't hell. They're purgatory, and for some, that's worse.
After the last few days, there are a number of new patients for the New Moore hospital, and nearly everyone has someone waiting to see them. The lobbies always have someone there, uncomfortably ignoring the other people, or trying to distract themselves with limping conversation.
Looking for someone? Grab a cup of industrial strength coffee and have a look. They're bound to be around sometime.
NOTES: Tag individual threads within, or make your own - you don't need to be here for Sheska!
What: Visits with patients or those in the waiting room
Where: New Moore General Hospital
When: 4/2 and the few days after
Warnings: Excessive guilt, angst, depression, mention of self-harm and attempted suicide
Waiting rooms aren't hell. They're purgatory, and for some, that's worse.
After the last few days, there are a number of new patients for the New Moore hospital, and nearly everyone has someone waiting to see them. The lobbies always have someone there, uncomfortably ignoring the other people, or trying to distract themselves with limping conversation.
Looking for someone? Grab a cup of industrial strength coffee and have a look. They're bound to be around sometime.
NOTES: Tag individual threads within, or make your own - you don't need to be here for Sheska!
no subject
He's decided resting right now is not particularly possible, and so he's hobbled down to the waiting room just for some variety. Other sick and hurt people don't generally make great company. He's not expecting to see Sheska there.
"Hey." He makes his way towards her, concerned. He doesn't have his shades, and his expressions are completely transparent without them. "What've they got you in for?"
no subject
"Dave?" Her voice is quiet and rusty, but she straightens, and fear wipes out any other potential expression on her face. "Dave! Oh--" In her haste to stand, she almost drops the coffee, but sets it on a side table instead and sweeps the blanket off the chair, holding out a hand as though she could possibly help him better than his crutches.
"What... What happened?"
no subject
It's not technically a lie. He lets her help him sit with a slightly hitched breath, avoiding her gaze for a second while he gets his crutches arranged out of the way. Then he looks at her again like he can read the situation on her face. Unfortunately, he's not a mind-reader. He can only guess.
"So I guess you're not here to keep my scrawny ex-jock ass company." If she's seen Bro's eyes, Dave's are much the same, but sharp red instead of Bro's light amber. He's worried. "Did something happen? Are you okay?"
no subject
A little choked noise comes from behind her hands. "I wish I'd known you were here. I wish I'd..." She sighs and looks up involuntarily at the unit door across the room. For a moment silence gets the better of her before she masters a more level tone of voice. "I'm not hurt. I'm not here for me."
An attempt to meet his eyes fails seconds after contact. She can't quite face him when both of them are so openly vulnerable right now. She couldn't with Bro, either. Seeing them without their shields is too much. Still, she forces herself to continue, "It's K-Koizumi." She can't even say his name without effort. "He... He's been hurt. Badly. I don't--" Her throat closes and she has to stop and clears her throat, scrubbing at her eyes for a moment. "I'm here for him." Her own half-truth in exchange for his.
no subject
Koizumi. Dave kind of knows him in passing from the Midnight Channels and from hanging out so often around the police station. He's always seemed like a nice guy, willing to help, eager to stick his nose in everybody else's business.
Dave glances at the door to the ICU, too, then back to Sheska. After a moment, he lifts his hand. He hesitates there for a moment before he can move on; he's never been one for physical displays and hardly ever chooses to touch anyone. But he places his hand on Sheska's shoulder and pats her. Fumblingly, maybe. But he's there.
"It's good you are," he says, awkward at his most honest. He pulls his hand back to push at his shades, remembers they're not there, and puts his hand back down, feeling silly and inadequate. He looks at the tiles. "If it were me, I'd. I'd play it down, of course, but I'd like knowing my friends were looking out for me."
After another beat, he starts, "It wasn't," Mrs. Danvers,, he almost says, but closes his mouth on the question. "Anyone we know, was it," he finishes. "That hurt him, I mean. Since everyone was all messed up."
no subject
No, it's the question that makes something crack.
It's the question that runs her back through her memories, as she's been doing all morning, picking out the most painfully relevant points to highlight. Dave doesn't know - he can't. He wasn't there last night to watch her take advantage of a friend. Hadn't seen it this morning: the graceful figure laid out in an ignominious heap on the floor, the shimmer of the knife, the widening stain. Hadn't realized who and what must have driven Koizumi to such desperate straits.
It's the question that brings horrible, hysterical laughter bubbling to her lips.
Sheska bites down on it, wide eyed with shock. Laughing is the last thing she wants to do right now and yet the urge hovers, pressing, suffocatingly strong. Blinking, she presses shaking fingers to her lips and fights it back, concentrating on her breathing. She's scaring him. She's scaring herself, a little, but more importantly, she's probably scaring him. Finally she swallows, and manages to keep her voice steady. "The only people in that apartment were the two of us. It..." She may not have wielded the knife, but she had surely been the tipping point. "It was a joint effort."
no subject
"...Hey." He shifts in his seat to face her more, returning his hand to her shoulder. Once there, Dave realizes he doesn't really know what to say. He doesn't know what went down, he can't lay out the facts for her. But he doesn't move his hand this time, and his palm is warm and real.
"Listen, Sheska." He's solemn in a way he rarely is--a forthright seriousness stripped of metaphor and irony. "I know you're probably not gonna hear this, but whatever else you think, I want you to understand: Whatever it was, it wasn't you. Okay?"
It's a little too close to home, all these amazing people with all this misplaced guilt. Miss Danvers. Sheska. His leg aches, but so do other wounds: old wounds, bullet holes that didn't even leave a scar. He grips her a little more firmly, more solidly.
"I know you, and I know it wasn't you."
no subject
She ought to shy away, to remove his hand, to not let him taint himself by associating with her, but... Instead he forms an anchor, a lighthouse in the storm, and she reaches up to cover his hand with her own instinctively. Still, her vision blurs around the edges and she ducks her head a moment to wipe the damp out of her eyes with her other hand.
"It's not that simple," she says softly. "It didn't happen all in a minute. It's been a long time coming and I didn't..." An involuntary shiver makes her pull her over-sized cardigan closer. "I did something we both regret. And it was the last straw. I'm not very good to my friends. This time it almost killed someone. I'm not even sure I should be here. He won't want to see me. I'll just make it worse. But I have to know he's... That he's going to recover."
no subject
"I don't know what you mean by 'joint effort,'" he says instead, looking ahead but keeping his hand where it is, "or what it is you think you did. And I get not wanting to say. I'm not asking you to." He shifts a little, trying to find a comfortable way to hold his leg. There isn't one.
Dave stays like that for a while, circling through his thoughts, biting the inside of his cheek. Eventually, he lifts his hand from her shoulder, only to hold her hand between them. "Can I tell you something instead," he finally asks, still studying the tiles rather than her face.
no subject
She's too slow, and he takes her hand before she can open her mouth. "Of... of course."
no subject
Also she's a goddess and an artist and a horrible flute player and an amazing bassist, and she used to see the future in her dreams, and when he first met her in person on her frozen wonderland she wore a dress made of stars to greet him. She wears glasses and raised herself from the dead and moved entire planets to protect them all. She smacked the juggernaut creature that killed their guardians in the snout with a rolled-up newspaper.
But yeah. Jade Harley. She types in green and likes dogs.
Dave's hand tightens a little. "When I was thirteen, we...I found out I was going to die." He looks up briefly. "Obviously it was more complicated than that, and it didn't stick. But I didn't know that then. I just--all I knew was that I was going to run out of time. That alpha Dave was just gonna. Stop.
"I haven't even really talked about this with Bro," he mumbles after a pause, and he looks away again. The story's hard for him to get out, from the tight set of his jaw. He closes his eyes again and breathes out.
"Jade needed my help with a frog thing. A time thing. And I spent weeks with her, on my end. It was just a couple hours or something for her, but for me--I could've told her. I told myself I couldn't, because it'd fuck up the timeline if she stopped it from happening and then it would just happen anyway, but I didn't...I never even tried. Maybe some other me tried, but that me." He frowns at the opposite wall, ashamed and unforgiving. He shrugs stiffly. "That me wasn't me. And in the end." He doesn't notice, but his free hand is gripping the edge of his seat, white-knuckled, like he has to keep himself from flying the scene. "I let her shoot me in the back. I never warned her. I never let her know.
"And that's the one thing I regret most about all of it," he says, still unable to look Sheska in the eye, but suddenly vehement. "Because it didn't have to be her fault--it wasn't her fault--and I didn't give her the chance to change it. And I never...I never talked to her about it, after. I could've while she was here but I never did, and I never knew how she felt about it because I was scared, because it was the wrong thing. Not to tell her. And it wasn't her fault I didn't tell her. It wasn't on her to get that intel out of me."
He lets go of Sheska's hand to hunch forward and grip his seat with both hands. "So that's not on you, either. Even if you say it was a long time coming, even if you want to blame yourself for not seeing it, it's...that's not on you."
Dave goes silent again, contemplating the cast on his foot. In the end, he says, "If it were me, I'd be kicking myself over making you think that for even a second. And." He straightens a little, looking up at her. "I'd want to see you. For sure. I'd want to tell you myself that it was never on you."
no subject
She can't hide the way everything stops, a sickening twist to the world that has her flashing back to her nightmares, when he says that he is - was - going to die. If he hasn't spoken to his brother about this, she is the last person fit to be his confidant. Stirring, she's about to object, but he forges ahead and she remains silent instead, biting her lip and knowing that if she interjects it will be all the harder for him to tell.
So she does the best she can. Rides it out with him, even if she can't stop herself from making a soft noise of shock and denial as he lays out in bare words how it was that he died. In the end, she meets his eyes through a haze of tears not yet fallen, her heart breaking for him.
Leaning in, Sheska wraps him in a hug, expecting nothing in return, but helpless to convey the depth of emotion any other way. He's sixteen. Sixteen! He should be worrying about what he's going to do when he gets out of school for the summer, not carrying this kind of guilt around with him! He doesn't deserve this.