[Nash] The grocery stores in this neighborhood are not the dimly-lit corner stores that provide nothing but the bare essentials necessary to sustain life. There are aisles upon aisles devoted to vitamin supplements, to magazines in a variety of languages, to wine that costs more than ten dollars a bottle. This is not the sort of place one typically wants to go when one is covered in blood and suffering the lingering aftereffects of a concussion, but it's the latter that has him thinking this is remotely a good idea anyway.
On a Saturday afternoon, the place is packed. If he had come in the pneumatic front doors earlier, perhaps one of the sales clerks or cashiers would have noticed him earlier. Any other patrons in the store would have, faster, as well, but group mentality and the blinders that human beings require in order to go on about their business in crowds gives him some leeway at first.
Then he ends up in the aisles, separated from the main drag of onlookers, and people start noticing. They notice, but for the most part, they do nothing. A lot of them have children, and usher them away from the long-haired man in the leather jacket. There's blood staining the strands of his hair, his eyes look like a raccoon's, and he's holding his right arm against his body as if he'll lash out at anyone who comes near it.
One brave soul asks him if he's alright. The response he comes up with sends that woman scuttling at a pretty quick clip, and he goes back to fumbling gauze and antibiotic ointment off the shelf.
[Slaughter] "You're leaving blood on the floor." An accented voice comes from Nash's right, the same direction from which the previous woman had spoken on her errand of mercy. The tones could not be more different.
She is on his right, then, the slight woman of red hair and a rather unflappable disposition, for once dressed in jeans and a sweater made of some pleasant, expensive woven material. Angora, perhaps. Maybe Alpaca.
Her eyebrow arches as she looks at him critically, her gaze flicking down then up again.
"Yeh going to make it out the door?"
[Nash] "Made it in here, didn't I?"
He asks, as though this is as much of a joke as anything else. The man walks through life as though it's all mighty fucking hilarious, as though just being alive is mighty fucking hilarious, and though last night clearly didn't go as well as even the most pessimistic of Kinfolk would have thought it to have, he's still alive.
Of course, he smells like wood smoke and despite the cursory wash job he did he still has traces of fetid water on the hems of his jeans, so Imogen isn't exactly coming out of left field with her question.
Though bleary, he seems aware of his surroundings and mentally present enough to reply to her questions with smart-assed retorts.
"Lemme ask you something," he says, wavering slightly as he shifts to the left to grab a box of sterile pads. He's holding everything in his left hand, as though the idea of a hand basket or a cart hadn't occurred to him. She may very well think he's about to ask something sarcastic, but that isn't what comes out of his mouth next. "They sell needle and thread in these fancy-ass stores? I really would hate to leave more blood on the floor than I have to."
The elderly man who shuffles into the head of the aisle and hears that isn't convinced. He shuffles away again.
[Slaughter] Her lips thin as she looks at him - the question is not a hard one. Nor even a complicated one. It is a yes or no answer, or maybe even an 'I don't know' answer.
Still, a pause.
"I have a suture kit in the car," she says finally, half-resigned. "Give me those, I'll take them through cash." Imogen has a basket over her arm, within it a variety of fruit, some bread and eggs.
[Nash] "What?"
He doesn't give up the small cache of supplies in his left hand. A brief glance at her reveals the lack of thorough comprehension as it tugs at his brow and squints his bruised eyes. Nash isn't the sharpest tool in the shed on his good days anyway, but his quick wit and the speed at which it leaves his mouth tends to obscure this fact. Multiple blows to the head isn't helping him.
"Don't have health insurance, Doc," he tells her. It's probably supposed to be funny.
At some point he realizes he can't grab the antibacterial soap from the shelf with all of the other stuff he already has on hand, and with more resignation than Imogen had displayed in offering to help him, reaches across his own body and turns slightly to dump the white-and-blue boxes in her hand basket to free up his hand.
[Slaughter] "Don't worry," she retorts to his half-hearted joke, "I like to keep up my practice on the living from time to time. Consider it a fair trade."
One hopes she is joking. One imagines Nash may be too injured and bleary to care.
"Here, give it me," she says, as he takes down the antibacterial soap as well. "Yeh look a mess and yeh're drawing attention. Go -" a pause as she undoes the clasp to her handbag and removes a set of car keys - "sit in my car and try not to bleed on the upholstery. It's the Aston Martin. I'll get what yeh need."
[Nash] If she's not joking, he is in no state of mind to tell the difference; Nash laughs, the sound hoarse and ending in a brief coughing fit that he stifles with the crook of his left elbow.
An instruction to give her the soap, followed by the rationale, and Nash flicks his eyebrows in slow consent, an unspoken Alright that has him handing her the bottle of orange liquid rather than depositing it in the basket that's already half his supplies.
When her car keys come out, he squints. Her key would probably cost more to replace than his entire truck. The only instruction is not to bleed on the upholstery, and he doesn't have some cute remark about how much she trusts him.
It has nothing to do with trust. The fact that he managed to drive his stick-shift truck all the way back from Rogers Park either means he's more stubborn than he looks, or he's a goddamn idiot, but regardless, he is in no shape to do it again with a strange vehicle.
"Alcohol," he remembers, with a jingle of keys rather than a snap of his fingers. "Forgot alcohol."
He doesn't specify if he means the breed meant for imbibing or the breed meant for dousing filthy wounds, but he starts off anyway, walking a remarkably straight line up until the point that he's nearly hit by a heavyset woman with an overloaded cart.
"Jesus, lady," he says, loud enough to be heard from several yards away as he keeps moving, "learn how to drive!"
It's a wonder no one calls security.
[Slaughter] Alcohol, he remembers.
"I'll get," she repeats deliberately, slowly as if he were mentally incompetent, "what you need. Go."
She had begun to turn back when he had the altercation with the heavy woman with her heavy cart. At the sound of his rather over-loud voice, she turns, and takes a few steps forward, watching him as he plods his way toward then through the front doors.
Then she returns to the first aid section.
--
A little later the driver's side door opens to the Aston Martin, Imogen pushing back her seat to drop her grocery bags into the back. There are two of them, one of her food, the other for his wounds.
She gets into the driver's seat, pulling the door shut firmly behind her and holds out her hand for her keys.
"Where d'yeh live?" she asks.
[Nash] At the moment, he exists in a tenuous state between being recognized as a mentally competent adult and being declared mentally incompetent. Were he intoxicated, or were he still actively bleeding from head trauma, were he incapable of recognizing Imogen or where he is, he could be forced into accepting medical care by whoever stumbled upon him first.
He's out of it enough that he doesn't bristle or offer up a retort to her deliberate, slow speech. Perhaps he doesn't hear her. She doesn't see him again, at least, until she makes it out to the car.
When the driver's-side door opens he starts awake, his left hand moving as though it's going to retrieve something from beneath his jacket before he sees who it is. Recognition has him drawing a heavy breath before relaxing, and once Imogen is seated, he deposits the keys in her hand.
Where does he live.
"Six North Summit Street, Fairhope Alabama," he says, as if she's reached an automated response system rather than a human being. After a heartbeat he realizes she doesn't want his home address. "Oh, here." This strikes him as briefly entertaining. "Sorry Doc, I'm stayin' at the Marriott on East Randolph. Shit."
[Slaughter] He answers with a street address which, for her, is nonsense. "And in Chicago?" she asks with elaborate patience, before Nash clarifies.
He finds it entertaining, and she lifts an eyebrow in his direction. Her studied regard has more meaning than it might in someone else. She looks at his heartbeat beneath his jawline, at the colour of his skin, if he is diaphoretic or not. She looks at the rhythm of his breathing and if his lips are blue.
"Alright," she says, fitting her keys into the ignition. The engine roars when it starts. "We'll go there."
She backs the car out of its parking spot and points it toward the exit. Music plays softly on the speakers. Something classical - Bach's Goldberg Variations.
She does not ask him yet what or how or why. Silence reigns in the car again.
[Nash] Even if he hadn't gone to the hospital, Nash had the common sense and foresight necessary to recognize that if he didn't do something to treat the wound that Imogen still has not laid eyes on, he was going to be worse off than he is now. A quick visual assessment, made easier by the fact that after his self-amused speech he leaned back against the passenger seat and closed his eyes, reveals what she likely already knew.
His respirations are shallow and slow but unlabored and even. The normally swarthy man has gone pale but not blue, and both eyes are bruised from intracranial pressure rather than his typical brand of sleep deprivation. He left for Rogers Park at sunset last night, and given how he smells, he did not come straight back to town. If he was going to die from a head injury, it would have happened already. That isn't what will kill him, although it's bad enough that he'll be out of commission for several more days as he recovers.
Infection from whatever had necessitated his raiding the first aid section of the grocery store hasn't set in yet, but that's what could kill him.
He's awfully calm about it, considering.
"What about you?" he asks, eyes still closed, apropos of nothing and after they've already gone several blocks.
[Slaughter] She lifts an eyebrow, turning her head to glance at him for a brief moment before returning her gaze to the road. They whizz past buildings and streetlamps, storefronts both darkened and well-lit. There are people on the sidewalks heading from one bar to the next or from the bar to home or - well. Whatever, really.
"What do you mean, what about me?" she asks.
[Nash] "You ain't from around here, neither."
His voice is still strong. It had been in the store, strong enough to give strangers the impression that he has a viable and visible temper, but he isn't decompensating or lapsing into unconsciousness now that they're in the car and out of sight.
"Where're you from?"
[Slaughter] "What was yer first hint," she answers in a tone of vague amusement.
"England," she answers, before elaborating it to: "Cornwall."
[Nash] "Huh," he says. "I woulda guessed New Hampshire."
He sounds as amused as she does--that is to say, vaguely. Unless she returns fire, offers up another question or a retort for him to respond to, he falls asleep. His instructions were not terribly specific, yet there is not a great distance Imogen can go on East Randolph before she runs into the Marriott.
It's not a very nice motel, either, which helps narrow it down considerably without having to endure talking to Nash to figure out which one it is.
[Slaughter] "Bite yer tongue." Fired back.
Perhaps he does, and what follows is that he dozes off.
When he wakes, she has parked the car near the front door of the rundown hotel and Imogen is removing her seatbelt. She casts him a glance, appraisingly for a beat before she says: "I'm going to assume yeh can get out of the car." With that, she gets out with an apparent ease and virility he might envy. The idea, right now, of painlessness must be an impossible dream. Beyond his scope; pain like this often feels like it might last forever.
She retrieves one of the two grocery bags in the back and shuts her door, waiting for him to close his own before locking the car with a chirp of the alarm.
[Nash] The gliding of the car to a stop doesn't wake him up, or the removal of the keys from the engine, or the clicking of the seatbelt. For someone who looks as though he doesn't sleep very much, he sleeps deeply enough when he does that it might be concerning if he also doesn't have notable parental scarring.
He wakes up when Imogen speaks.
It is not a smooth awakening, either, but a jerking like he had when she opened the door to get in, as though Nash was surprised to have found he'd dropped off in the first place. She's going to assume he can get out of the car.
"We shall see," he says, blinking heavily. Though he's on the passenger side, he does not try to open the door with his right hand. It stays protectively pressed to his stomach, and he fumbles the handle with his left hand.
Getting out was harder than getting in; the Aston Martin is lower to the ground than his Ranger. He stumbles a bit, catching himself on the frame of the car rather than the door, then claps it shut so the medical examiner can lock it.
He doesn't try to take the bag from her. It's enough for him to lead the way up the concrete exterior stairs to the first-floor motel room, his boots clanging against the steps two at a time. When they get to room 204, which has the Do Not Disturb tag clipped to the handle, he pulls a key card out of his interior jacket pocket, briefly revealing his shoulder holster, and opens the door.
"After you," he says, holding the door open with his backside.
The room inside is deceptively neat for a place without room service, left in the care of a bachelor. Both beds are neatly made, there are no clothes left strewn on the floor or over the furniture, and the bathroom isn't a disaster area.
Will wonders never cease.
[Slaughter] She had watched him as he exited her car. She has awareness of him while they walk toward the stairs and she walks just a half second behind him up the steps. Imogen is not the type given to bouts of caring or sympathy. However, there is a sense that were he to stumble, or fall, he would find her hands supporting him up, getting him back on his feet.
But while he walks, she touches him not at all.
Inside the room, her eyes flick over its appointments and then touches on the open door of the surprisingly clean bathroom. A lift of her chin indicates it. "I'll get yeh to sit in there," she says. Though he had not asked, it would appear he was going to get her assistance with whatever wounds he might have.
[Nash] Once the slight kinswoman is inside, Nash casts a shadow-eyed glance down the walkway outside the room before stepping aside to let the door fall shut. It hits him in the flank, and he eases it shut the rest of the way as though the door is the one requiring assistance and not the operator. A quiet click sounds once the electronic lock is engaged, the Do Not Disturb sign rattling beyond their sight.
"Oh will you?" he asks, as if following a script he has not committed to heart, and shrugs out of his jacket. The trouble is not with his shoulder, although once the jacket comes off Imogen can see the light-colored button-down shirt he'd had on yesterday is stained dark rust-red on the left shoulder, near his neck. His hair, clumped together in places from blood that had been loathe to wash out with bottled water, conceals the fact that he's still bleeding slowly from a wound on his scalp.
His right forearm is where the bulk of the blood is. She can see the edge of what appears to be paper towel sticking out of his unbuttoned sleeve. Not a clean inch of space remains on the once-white fiber, but the bleeding appears to have slowed.
Jacket off, he tosses it in the general direction of a desk chair. It lands several feet off-target, hitting the ground with a heavy thump, and he flicks his eyebrows in a shrug before continuing into the bathroom. It's as large as some people's closets, with a coffin for a shower and the toilet wedged between it and the vanity.
He slaps the lid of the commode closed and drops himself down onto it. It puts his injured right arm near the shower rather than the flat surface by the sink, and he stares at the arrangement for a few seconds as though something isn't quite right.
"Well, shit," is his verdict.
[Slaughter] She removes her jacket while he throws his toward a chair and misses, rolls up the sleeves of her sweater to free her forearms. She is removing a wrapped suture kit from the bag when he curses, and she glances up to see the logistical problem his injury presents.
"Alright," she says after a beat. "Why don't yeh sit on the floor and prop yer arm up on the side o' the tub, then."
A brief glance toward it - then she leans down to remove her shoes, peeling off her stockings. It will make sense later - when she has to crouch in the tub for the right angle to suture his arm.
[Nash] "This is why you get paid the big bucks, huh?" he asks.
A younger man might have just dropped himself onto the floor without a moment's hesitation. Nash is hardly ancient; while gray whiskers have infiltrated his facial hair, the hair atop his head retains its pigmentation, and he's spry enough to think breaking into an abandoned house after dark is a worthwhile use of his time.
If he'd caused himself minor injury during that process, it's overshadowed by the other problems he has at the moment.
Using his left arm for a ballast, Nash eases himself down onto the bare tile floor, heels of his boots scuffing a few times before he lands with a thud. When he rests his arm on the edge of the tub, he doesn't lie it flat, but lets it rest on his elbow with his hand in a supine swoon. The paper towel juts out, and he eyes it for a moment before sighing and reaching over to wrench the thing free.
He flinches when it tears at the coagulated blood hidden beneath his sleeve, but doesn't make any noise. The waste bin is outside the bathroom. Nash frowns, then lets the beyond-soiled paper towel drop on the lid.
[Slaughter] She starts to speak when he tears the papertowel off, but by then, it is too late. She grimaces faintly as she enters the bathroom bag and suture kit in hand. They are put down on the tiled floor as she steps into the bathtub sinking to a crouch to take his arm. Her hands are cool and firm as she gently turns the forearm so she can see wound, pushing back the sleeve of his shirt.
"Was this from last night?" she asks as she watches carefully for the flow of blood. She does not expect any pulsing jets, but she confirms it anyway.
[Nash] It likely looks worse than it actually is, but when she applies pressure to his arm he sucks in a breath through his nostrils and grits his teeth. Though the rest of him is still relatively warm, the extremity and skin of his right arm have gone cool from blood loss; his fingernails are pale but not blue, and the skin itself is too drenched in blood to read much from it.
Nash rests heavily on his elbow to keep from leaning backward and forcing the doctor to contend with hardware as she works. As she pushes back his sleeve, he watches, as though to do otherwise would imply he's squeamish.
What he brought home with him is a puncture wound--a bite, to be more precise, though not from a dog or any other four-legged animal in the canine family. It would be identifiable as a rodent's nip were it smaller, but the bite itself is several inches in length and has both an entrance and an exit wound that come in laterally. The possibility of one or both long bones being fractured isn't out of the question, but if they are, they aren't visibly deformed.
He got lucky: no arteries or tendons were severed, but it bleeds dark deoxygenated blood, and heavily now that he's torn off the makeshift bandage.
As she inspects the wound, he says, "Yeah. Fella didn't like me snooping around his place, I guess."
[Slaughter] "Here," she takes his hand in her's and puts it to the opposite elbow, tightening his grip over the brachial artery, "Hold there."
Blood is dripping down his elevated arm, running around the edge of his wrist to drip on the floor. "I hope you're not fond of that shirt," she says as she tears open a packet of gauze pressing it back to the wound. "I believe I'll be cutting it off."
[Nash] Considering his reputation for being difficult, Imogen doesn't find him a terribly argumentative or combative patient. Blame it on the head injury; he presses his thumb where she instructs him to, and the oozing from his wrist slows. Without the paper towel, though, or the pressure from him pressing his wrist to his midsection, there is now a pattering rhythm from the blood hitting the tile.
He hauls another breath in through his nostrils when she presses the gauze onto the wound, and when she speaks of the fate of his shirt, he laughs.
"Imogen," he says, the way he would call anyone else darlin' or sweetheart or some other nickname she'd already told him was not at all appreciated, "I think I can handle takin' off my own shirt."
[Slaughter] "Nash," Imogen says echoing much of his tone as she straightens up, "When yeh remove the shirt, you will have to take that sleeve," a point toward the one pushed up past his elbow at the moment, "over that wrist." The same finger indicates the wrist. "Currently, the blood is being slowed by the fact that the wound is above yehr heart, because you have your hand on an artery and I have my hand on gauze on the wound.
"None o' these are possible while yeh struggle t'get out of the shirt. Yeh will cause yerself more pain, cause yerself to lose more blood, all very unnecessary as I happen t'have a rather thorough first aid kit wi' me.
"Personally, I'd prefer to cut off yer shirt. If now, you insist on wanting to remove it," she tilts her head slightly, an eyebrow arching, "so on yer head be it."
[Nash] He makes a valiant effort to pay attention and listen to what she's saying to him. Green eyes made brighter by pain are locked on her face, as though she's the only solid object in the room right now; he's holding his right arm so tightly tendons pop like guitar strings beneath the skin of his dominant hand.
A muddled combination of fatigue, concussion and blood loss have him mutedly laughing at her conclusion, the way she so neatly sums up her lecture on what will happen if he decides to wrestle off his shirt rather than sitting the fuck still and letting her operate on his clothing. When he responds, his brows lugubriously lift and his eyes nearly close.
"And you say my English don't make no kinda sense," he tells her, then draws a stabilizing breath and lowers his brows. His eyes open again. "Alright. Fuck it. Cut the sumbitch off."
[Slaughter] "My English makes perfect sense," she answers. "You just ha' a head wound."
He agrees and a ghost of a smirk crosses her mouth, but she says nothing. She leans over the edge of the tub to retrieve the first aid kit, larger than one might have traditionally in the car. This is a doctor, however, and a doctor for whom first aid is perhaps better qualified as 'combat medicine'.
She retrieves the trauma shears, moving the kit so it is half leaned against the wall of the bathroom, steadying it.
Trauma shears have blunt tips, a bent blade. They cut through the fabric of his shirt like a knife through butter. The pieces are left on the floor with the drops of blood and the beyond-soiled paper towel.
There is an almost comforting pattern, even to trauma, even to something like this. She knows it, and follows it without much conversation. The first step is to slow the bleeding. The second is to clean the wound. He had asked for alcohol and got saline and iodine instead - the iodine leaving an orange smear over his skin. She does not worry much about the blood dried and smeared over his forearm.
Her movements have always seemed precise. Imogen is a graceful woman, but only in the fact that she wastes no energy in her body. She walks when she has someone to go, lifts her hand when she has something to reach, a gesture to make. She wastes no energy on the beauty of motion, and in that there is something compelling. She is simply as business like in this.
She does talk a little, not so much engaging him in conversation, as providing him information. Normally, after this long, one would not stitch a wound, but all things considered (and she does not specify) it would likely be better that she does. He will need antibiotics to combat the pain, and if he wants it, she will provide him with narcotics as well.
When it is time to stitch, she warns him, then gets to work.
[Nash] Though he's effortlessly and somewhat confusingly charming, though he can keep up a conversation with someone as educated and scathingly intelligent as Imogen without possessing credentials or brains necessary to otherwise impress her, Nash is at the distinct disadvantage of being badly injured at the moment. Wit and charm are not high on his list of things to accomplish: staying upright and not swooning, however, are.
That said, as she works, he talks but doesn't chatter. His head injury does not make him goofy, or talkative. If anything, it's sedated him. He's tired but not fighting for consciousness, and as Imogen works, methodically and confidently, he occasionally makes comments.
Some of them are amusing. Some of them he just thinks are amusing. Some of them are so laden with colloquialisms and Southern turns of phrase she likely doesn't have a clue what he's saying.
The shirt falls away like wrapping paper at the hands of a small child, giving up no fight. Clothed, he doesn't look like much. He's tall and spindly, looks as though he'd go down easily in a fight. Missing his shirt, Nash is hardly a pillar of strength and vitality, but time and age have not left him completely flabby, either. Beneath a healthy layer of fat there is definition in his musculature, along with a sense that he would be in far better shape if he visited a gym occasionally.
It goes without saying he has scars. They are not innumerable, but they are prominent and would be difficult to explain to humans. 'Car crash,' is what he tends to tell women he takes to bed. Imogen knows better: he didn't get out of the way fast enough one time. All it took was one time: the only set of scars on him that are supernatural are a trio of claws raking across his chest.
His appendix was taken out before the dawn of laparoscopic surgery.
On his right upper arm, looking more like a battle scar than a tattoo, is the Fenrir glyph. The ink is so faded, it's obvious that it is both several decades old and the work of an amateur, if not a Garou with no formal training.
In good health he would have cracked a joke about being half naked in front of her, but he just shivers and bitches about the weather. Within seconds he has goose flesh.
Choosing betadine over isopropyl alcohol was not something he would have thought to do, but when cleansing the wound doesn't make him curse everyone who ever existed, he says, "I gotta take you shopping with me more often."
He says this, and then he has to endure somewhere in the neighborhood of fourteen stitches being threaded into either side of his arm. His breathing accelerates and he sweats despite previously complaining of cold, but he doesn't try to jerk away from her.
"Do I wanna know how an ME gets a hold of antibiotics?" he asks--out of nowhere, like his last question. "Y'all can't write scripts, can you?"
[Slaughter] There is now blood on her hands, and it is worth noting that she does not bother with universal precautions. It is perhaps a nod to a simple truth: neither of them are truly human. The rules are different. The smell of sanguine sharp in the air, familiar. Though she had looked at his scars, she does not stare at them. His tattoo receives a longer linger; she has seen the glyph before. She refocuses then. Tells him about the antibiotics. Starts to stitch.
She keeps one hand firmly on his forearm, her grip cool but a reminder for him not to jerk away, and protection for them both should he actually do so. She can feel the tension of his tendons and muscles beneath her hand, the way they stand out as he strains to remain still.
If she needs to, she reminds him to breathe.
He asks a question, seemingly out of the blue and she glances up at him once, before turning her attention back to her work. The small curved needle slowly pushes through one end of the wound and out the other. She is performing a double layer closure. It will take some time.
"Really what you should be asking," her mouth twists, seen in profile as she is bent over her work, "is how will an ME get ahold of narcotics."
A beat. "I ha' a licence to practice medicine in the state o' Illinois. I can write prescriptions. My malpractice insurance providers would not be thrilled, but I imagine you aren't going to sue, are you?"
[Nash] "The thought hadn't crossed my mind yet."
Science waffles on whether men or women have higher pain thresholds and better tolerance for nature's warning system. Nash seems, at first, to think holding his breath is an effective means of weathering the suturing procedure. His breathing, whether or not he's speaking, is audible and ragged, but it's better than nothing.
"Suin' you wouldn't do no good, anyway."
He ducks his head and blinks several times as sweat courses down his brow and into his eyes. He doesn't have any hands free.
"Sue you, who's gonna get me antibiotics next time I get the shit bit outta me? Narcotics I can get no problem. Dealers in this city ain't too subtle."
A beat.
"Not that I'm buyin'. Ain't too many other reasons you see cars pullin' into motel parking lots at three o'clock in the mornin'."
[Slaughter] "Well and besides," a few strands of her hair have fallen free of her chignon, brushing her temple where they fall down her profile, not quite in her eyes, but not quite out of it, either. "If yeh were to sue me, the antibiotics and narcotics would be low on the list, wi' bathroom surgery bein' on the top, I should think.
"But," and here she does look at him for a moment, smirking, even as her attention flicks over his white face, touching on the sweat beading his brow. "thank you for your reassurances."
Her attention turns back down, "Yeh should be able to release your elbow now," she says, fitting in another stitch with perfect precision.
[Nash] Laughing at the bone-dry nature of her response could throw him off of concentrating on hauling in each unwilling breath and letting it go again, but if anything it gives him something to concentrate on than each burning stab of the suture needle into his skin as she stitches. Though her touch is firm and professional, that does little to change the concentration of nerve endings in the human epidermis.
It's a small prick, but it happens repeatedly, and she's putting in a deeper layer of stitches to keep it from gaping later on. He'll thank her one day.
Maybe.
He's grown paler since the procedure started, but he at least has sweat securing his hair in place. It doesn't fall in his eyes until he tips his head forward to try and blink the salt water out of existence, and he leaves it where it is at any rate. Watching Imogen work, he doesn't see her shake her head or otherwise try to move to get the strands back off of her skin.
The go-ahead to let go of his arm comes, and Nash does so slowly, as though he's expecting the oozing to start again as soon as he releases his own artery. In jerking stages, he moves his hand away, until he's holding it airborne as though a gun is aimed at him, or he's otherwise removing himself from a sterile field.
"Whoa Nelly, will you look at that," he says, before swiping sweat from his orbits with the back of his now-freed wrist. He sits breathing his arduous breaths for a few seconds, studying her with that hazy cast to his gaze.
Whatever he decides, he doesn't announce with the necessary number of words. Nash says, "Here, hold still," but doesn't say what he's doing before he reaches across his body to brush the hair from her temple.
[Slaughter] Her reaction is instantaneous and stunningly accurate. One hand had been laid on his forearm, a continuous pressure to keep him still. It leaves his skin, even as her other hand stills. Her head tilts away from him as she catches his wrist, her gaze lifting to meet his eyes.
A second passes, and she lets him go, deliberately, her hand lifting to her face to brush back her hair herself, again a deliberate motion.
"Thank-you," she says, mildly, before she turns back to her work.
[Nash] Though Nash is considerably larger than Imogen in every sense of the physical word, though he could break her grip if he truly wanted to, that doesn't mean she could not fell him in a heartbeat. She knows where the weak points in the human body are, and she has him in a fairly delicate position right now: she could rip out his stitches, puncture his radial artery, do Lord knows what else in the amount of time it took his bruised brain to come up with some way to physically overpower her.
Her delicate hand is hardly able to encircle his wrist, but its presence at all makes him stop. His hands were shoddily rinsed off before he left Rogers Park but remnants of the night before exist in the form of soot and blood and dirt on his knuckles and ground into his nail beds.
When she looks him in the eye, he looks back, unblinking, equal parts curious and amused. While she focuses solely on his eyes, his own take in the whole of her face up until the point where she releases him. He wiggles his fingers, then returns his hand to his bent knee almost as deliberately.
"Don't mention it," he replies, suppressing a smirk, and returns his attention to the structure she's introducing to the mess on his forearm.
[Nash] "You say that now," he says, though he doesn't appear to be too concerned about it. Either he doesn't want to be all that concerned, or he simply isn't; perhaps he realizes that the task of wrapping up his forearm is far too monumental to attempt one-handed, in his current state. Whatever it is, after that segue, Nash returns his elbow to the blood-smeared lip of the tub. "Takes all the fun outta sayin' I told you so if you're dead."
[Slaughter] She watches him lower his forearm back to the tub, her gaze moving briefly toward the Kin, before reaching out to take it, beginning to wrap the wound. The initial contact is painful, then a release of it, as the tension in the bandage begins to ease the inflammation in the limb. The effect does nothing to improve the healing of the limb, but is a relief nonetheless.
"I'll keep that in mind, shall I?"
[Nash] The kinsman's nostrils flare and his teeth grind down against vocalization of impact when Imogen none-too-gently presses pads down on the wounds and starts to bind his forearm. It's been too soon for infection to set in, yet the soft tissue injury is deep, and his suppression of an outcry may very well be indicative of a hairline fracture somewhere. His color is terrible and his respirations are still shaky and ineffective, yet if he was going to lose consciousness, he would have done so already.
"Please do," he says. A pause to reach up to swipe sweat out of his eyes again, and he adds, "Or, y'know, bring some goddamn backup with you, Annie Oakley."
[Slaughter] "I think between the two of us, myself whole and you wi' a good balance o' yer blood outside yer body, I might just ha' the upper hand when it comes to lecturing about risks," she observes, as she pauses in her wrapping, glancing from the arm to Nash.
"Yeh might ha' fractured the bone," she warns. "I'll check mobility and such before I go, shall I? But you're goin' to have to be bloody careful for a while."
[Nash] "Yeah, yeah, yeah," he says, grousing in response to her observation, his general demeanor making it difficult to assess whether he's truly irritated or whether he's affecting such a thing. It's half-hearted, in either case. Likely he's too concussed, too exsanguinated, to truly impress upon Imogen just how little he approves of her being right.
Then she says he might have fractured the bone. Nash looks up as sharply as is possible, given his lugubriousness, and narrows his eyes at his forearm, as though it's its fault that they're in this mess. He hasn't tried to move the fingers of his right hand since they embarked upon this endeavor.
"Careful's my goddamn middle name."
[Slaughter] "Is it now. I've not heard much relation between names and actions," she smirks faintly. She is finishing the last wrap of the bandage, and snips the gauze before she tapes it in place. The bandage is tidy, neat - almost a work of art, if one can call such a thing so.
"But then again, my last name is Slaughter," she smirks, glancing up, arching an eyebrow. "So what do I know. Show me yeh can move yer fingers will yeh?"
[Nash] Imogen's one-two punch of a joke has Nash making a noise that would have been a laugh were his breathing not being partitioned in favor of providing him with a palliative effect on top of oxygenation. He has enough energy to flick his eyebrows, to nonverbally agree with her, and then she's telling him to show him he can move his fingers.
"You can't just take my word for it?" he asks.
Of course she can't.
Were he not still in the throes of a head injury, he might have been able to move his fingers. As it stands, he's incapable of moving them with any true purpose. Imogen asks him to move his fingers; he flexes his wrist by minute degrees instead, making a miscalculation somewhere along the line, and doesn't see the point in staying quiet this time.
"Ow!!" he yells, wrenching his arm back toward his torso, as though it's her fault that that happened.
[Slaughter] Her hand is on his arm still, and she catches it before he can wrench it, closing on the uninjured part of the limb. "All right." Her response is abruptly quiet, even calm, a sharp contrast to his outburst of (righteous) pain, the near violent reaction.
"Fingers," she says, her hand now lightly touching his wrist. "Just tell me if yeh can feel this." A spare suture needle is plucked from the kit.
The upside of testing his nerves is it will likely test motion as well - the jerk and reflexive pull away from the small pricks of pain.
[Nash] It isn't the same as attempting to treat a Garou, with the threat of frenzy looming over their heads, and Nash is so thoroughly injured that he would have about as much coordination and effectiveness as a drunk in a bar brawl, yet his physical advantage over her and the threat of adrenaline bolstering testosterone is enough to cause fear and hesitance in a normal woman despite his being human.
Imogen is hardly a normal woman, and despite the almost animal nature of his agitation, she doesn't shrink away from him. Her quiet tone, her persistence, has him calming after a few shaking breaths.
"Fingers," he repeats, as though he'd misheard her the first time. "I thought you said 'The whole damn thing,' sorry Doc."
Her neurological exam, as she continues along, reveals what she'd likely suspected before they began this affair: he has no peripheral nerve damage from whatever bit him, his sensory input remains unaltered, yet he's dampened from the blow to his head. Response to pain comes out of reflex rather than reaction; his grip with his uninjured left hand is likewise weak, though not weak enough to cause alarm--he had, after all, managed to drive his truck back from Rogers Park and manipulate items in the grocery store--and his pupils are equal despite being unreactive.
He knows both of their names, knows where he is; he gets the date wrong. He thinks it's still Friday.
[Slaughter] She inspects his head as well, her fingers firm though careful (gentle is not quite a word to be used with her) on his hair, pressing against his skull, feeling the shape of it while she watches his face for the telltale signs of pain.
"It's Saturday," she corrects him once, quietly. "Not Friday."
A little later she gets to her feet. The tub's tap leaks gently, leaving a dampness on the porcelain. Her feet are damp. She steps out, careful of what some might call her patient, and her own bearings, thoroughly aware of herself.
"Haven't slept since this happened, have you?" she asks.
[Nash] His scalp is bruised where he took several blows to the head, and he winces and hisses in a breath and snarls "Ow" as though it's part of a conversation rather than a reaction to pain; where his scalp actually split is where Imogen elicits the greatest reaction, and while it could use stitches, the bleeding has slowed on its own.
Being told it's Saturday has him flicking his eyebrows again, as if to say Well how about that.
Even as she rises, Nash stays parked on the linoleum, his arm elevated by virtue of his elbow being set on the edge of the tub, eyes lazy in their tracking of her. At her question he scowls, as though the thought of sleeping is a foreign concept, or else he simply can't remember.
"I'll be damned if I know," he says. "Y'ain't gonna tell me I can't sleep, are ya? Thought that was just for kids and people with shit leakin' outta their ears."
[Slaughter] "No, I'm not," she says, stretching her body out with a series of nearly invisible movements that elongate the cramped muscles she has from nearly an hour of immobility. She glances briefly out toward the main room, more an action of thought, rather than to see anything - from this angle, all she can see is the mirrored doors of the sliding closet, her shoes on the carpeted floor.
"Can yeh stand?" it's not the first time she's asked him this question.
[Nash] "'Course I can stand," he says, as if she's asking him something completely ridiculous, like if he speaks English or if he's male.
A handful of seconds go by, perhaps while Imogen waits for him to actually begin the process of standing, and Nash looks at her with his eyebrows raised in bleary cross-examination before it dawns on him what exactly it is that she's asking.
"Oh you mean stand up?" A slow blink, a lowering of his eyebrows, and he concludes, "Shit. Hang on," as though getting himself off the floor unassisted is something that simply slipped his mind. It's far more daunting a task than getting out of the Aston Martin had been: he has to get his legs under him while maintaining his balance. He gets his left hand on the lid of the toilet, then sits cocking an accusatory eye at it.
[Maialen de Xove y Miasol] (OH MY GOD THEY ARE IN CHINATOWN.)
[Slaughter] "Stop," before he has a chance to actually attempt to get to his feet. A muscle in her jaw moves, repeatedly, reflexively as she regards him for several seconds.
Imogen does not touch others lightly. This has already reached her threshold.
She steps forward, crouching down by his good side, looping his arm over her shoulder. Her feet planted steadily on the floor, she places a steading hand on his chest as her other hand comes around his back to curve a hand at his shoulder.
Then, presumably he has allowed her to do all this, she says: "Ready?"
And lifts with her legs.
[Maialen de Xove y Miasol] (messes up another of jamie's transcripts. MAKES A FACE.)
[Slaughter] (*GASP* FAIRIES)
[Nash] The legal investigator is a full foot taller than the forensic pathologist. Nash being on his ass on the floor is the only thing that has her standing over him; all she needs to do is help him get his legs under him, and he has demonstrated he can handle the rest.
At this moment, she has to be thankful that the man is not entirely cognizant of what is going on around him. There are no witty comments about their height disparity or how she's spending an awful lot of time with her hands on him today. He would have to be blind to not have been able to tell, from their encounter in the elevator if nothing else, that Imogen does not relish touching strangers.
A delicate hand on his bare chest finds the lungs beneath still pulling for air in the fog of pain and head trauma as though he's having difficulty catching his breath. His skin is coated with diaphoretic sweat; she can feel his heart slamming even if she only holds a hand there for a moment.
Ready?
"Yeah," he says, in that lazy way of his.
He isn't deadweight; he helps her get him standing, and once he's there, his breathing deepens, quickens, as though he's going to faint. It doesn't come to that.
"Hoo," he announces, once he's standing. An appraising glance at her, his eyes having lost their typical gray coloration with the invasion of pain, and Nash huffs out a laugh. "I thank you kindly."
[Slaughter] Her hands tighten on him as he gets to his feet, and briefly unsteadies. "Don't mention it," the doctor answers, waiting a moment before stepping back slowly, watching him.
"C'mon," she says. "I'll wake yeh in two hours."
And so she will - and then two hours after that. It is a steady series of repetition he may be fortunate enough to forget. His name, her name. Where they were. What's the date.
Eventually, she must be satisfied that he will survive unconscious without her intervention. When he fully wakes, he is alone in the room. The bed opposite him is not slept in, but the coverlet is faintly mussed where she had sat, her back against the wall doing - well. He had not been conscious enough to know.
The bathroom is wiped clean of blood, the towel she had used for her own hands, taken away. The first aid kit gone. Two bottles of pills by the sink - each with a yellow stickie with their use ("Antibiotics" "Painkiller") and instructions written in an angular and tight hand. Beneath, the bottles are labelled with a false name. The bag of supplies is left for him - supplies to change his bandage, clean it and disinfect it.
And that is it.
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