Re: log: dylan & max (soon to be daniel & lin too)
[The man in the bed had not been having a pleasant time, and he spread his resentment equally between the world at general, the hospital staff, and the boy that never left.
He could have told them he didn’t have cancer or a blood disorder, but they seemed intent on sticking a needle through his hip to be sure the bone marrow corroborated. Daniel didn’t know the first thing about heroin in this world, but according to some people, apparently opium cigarettes and Victorian laudanum in a bottle counted for the same thing, and the drugs made his skin itch and his nose run. The alcohol withdrawal was in the running for the worse side effect, since the abrupt seizures and twisted waking nightmares freaked him out, and he wasn’t drunk to maintain the uncaring facade he usually did.
He couldn’t even be suitably abusive to the hospital staff, because in a secure room with people who were used to dealing with fucked up addicts with half as many brains and ten times the violent priors, nothing Daniel did made a pockmark on their already shitty days. He was stuck, and everybody made it clear that he was lucky not to be locked up for the heroin abuse, which in his mind he wasn’t guilty of to begin with. So he was regularly nasty to poor Lin, sometimes ignoring him with cold intensity and other times doing his best to guilt him into staying in the room twenty-four-seven.
Daniel had not been reading. His hands were empty, both of them loose in his lap over the thin hospital blanket. He was sitting upright, and he was in as good of a mood as you could expect because he’d gotten a shower that morning and a shave. He looked away from a blank stare out the window as the music was interrupted by footsteps and the sound of the door. He watched Max and Dylan enter with his full attention but no commentary, his eyes moving from one face to another and back.
He recognized the office cougar from Dylan’s description, and given what he’d learned lately and the way her posture screamed “military,” he was willing to guess that she was some kind of senior badass. Daniel was reluctantly admiring that McKendrick had managed to get a woman like that in bed, but he wasn’t going to say that out loud. Instead he focused on Dylan, who was different in a lot of ways, and Daniel didn’t approve of getting lost in doors and tortured without his say-so. He had yet to decide how horrible was going to be to these people, because he was grateful to have people to break up the monotony, and he didn’t necessarily want them to leave.