Who: Boyd and Rick What: Hospital visit (Completed log) Where: CCU When: During this Warnings: None, amazingly!
Shane had left.
The nurse had shooed him out, and she'd replaced the IV in Boyd's arm, clucking at her like a mother duck the entire time. Boyd, for her part, had wanted to be left alone. She'd started talking to Vaughn on the forums (courtesy of a borrowed laptop) while the nurse filled out the little charts at the foot of her bed, and she barely listened when the nurse said she was going to be transferred today, pending a psychiatric evaluation.
That got her attention.
"Transferred where?" she asked, frowning.
The nurse just clucked again, and Boyd started typing a forum post to Rick. Where was he? She muttered aloud at the screen as she typed. Vaughn didn't know where Rosalie was right now, but Boyd didn't expect that to last. Dammit.
Rick had no desire to be seen at the hospital. Fortunately, he had the means to avoid that. He located the blonde in the waiting room that Boyd had mentioned, and also Shane from #601. The blonde, identified as someone he recalled seeing around the building, looked like hell, and Shane looked grim--though Rick couldn't imagine how anyone could look anything but grim when their face was scratched up like that. Recalling Ella's vines, he smiled without amusement, and then made his way down the halls, winding past security, moving past patients and staff alike, all unseen.
He located Boyd relatively quickly. He was in the room already when she had her conversation with the nurse, but chose not to reveal himself just yet. As a gesture towards her state of mind, Rick looked over his shoulder at the closed door, reached backward, and knocked.
Boyd had stopped her missive to Rick midstream to go back to arguing with Vaughn, and she stopped typing just long enough to call whoever was at the door inside. She looked pale, tired and completely frazzled. Her eyes were clear, however, which lent to the panic in them. When she looked up, she looked like a rabbit caught in a trap; one that had just realized that even if she bit her foot off, there wasn't going to be any way to escape.
Rick thought a moment after she allowed him in, and then, finally, turned the knob, opened the door, and positioned himself so that he appeared inch by inch, as if he was coming through the door on the other side--while avoiding the chance that anyone in the hallway would see him. This is the kind of thing he had been working on for the last few months; it had required the purchase of some large mirrors and a great deal of practice. He shut the door again once he had "come in" and gave Boyd a calm curve of a smile. "Sorry I'm late."
She pushed the laptop aside, but didn't close it, and she looked at him for a moment with wary eyes, as if she was trying to make a final decision as to her course of action. She didn't bother hiding her arms or how thin she'd gotten since she'd last seen him; she looked rough, and she knew it, and she didn't care. It had been a hard month.
"Rose is in the waiting room. Ya need to take her somewhere Vaughn can't get to her, and you need to do it even if she don't want to. Vaughn near beat her to death the last time, and she's threatening to kill her if I don't toe the line, and I don't know how long I got toeing the line in me," she admitted, resigned and realistic. "I'll try and keep it up long as I can, but-" she motioned to herself, assuming that would be self-explanatory.
Rick nodded. "That is probably a good idea." He was surprised by a sudden stab of guilt. This girl was supposed to be his responsibility; it didn't matter how little the people who assigned him that responsibility actually cared about her. He blinked and shifted, slightly uncomfortable. He was in a smooth beige and subtle green today, and with the tiger's eyes, he looked oddly out of place in the stark hospital white room. "I think it would be best if you went with her. There have been developments, and it's not safe for you at Bellum right now." He drifted nearer, almost idle, and pulled up a visiting chair.
"Developments?" she asked, her eyes narrowing in on him carefully. She might be young, and she might be generally regarded as stupid, but she was far, far from dense when it came to dangerous things. Rick worked for the Family, and any warning from him came from them. "If Vaughn finds out I'm with Rose, Rose dies. What developments?" The statement was followed so quickly by a reprise of the sentence that the two sentences almost ran together as one.
She pushed the laptop further away, and she swung her bare legs off the bed toward him, but didn't stand. "You come here," she told him - an order, albeit a tired one. "Closer."
He stopped mid-movement in sitting, and effortlessly straightened up again as if he had never moved. Without protest he drifted nearer her bed and observed her with those new, strangely green eyes. At least he'd lost the cat pupils. "Developments with your family. I think they've gotten tired of waiting, and it's probably better if we didn't give them your forwarding address." He made it casual, but his grammatical phrasing had been extremely purposeful. "If you tell me who did this, I can make them really sorry for you after you're settled." He grinned a wide white grin that was, perhaps, a little feral.
She reached up a hand and touched just under one of his eyes. Her hand was uncertain in a way she normally wasn't, and her fingers trembled a little. "These are different," she said observantly, but not scared. She wasn't scared of serial killers and vampires, she was hardly going to be frightened by his eyes going strange. "Who did what, sugar?" she asked, pulling her hand back and letting it fall uselessly onto her lap. "Put me here? I did. I ain't gonna blame anyone but me for walking through a door and puttin' myself in the middle of something stupid." She sighed, stood, and she looked down at her fingers, which were tugging at her hospital gown. "Someone's got the money. The Family's money," she explained. "I can't say nothing to anyone, or people will get killed." She sounded tired when she said it, like she was just ready for all of it to be over. "I been thinking of just telling them I lost it," she said hopefully, looking up at him. "They wouldn't go after anyone if they thought it was me, would they?" she asked.
He didn't move. "They are greener," he agreed, letting the grin fade until it was just a comfortable smile. "From the building, last month. You should sit down," he advised, again, not moving to put her there unless she chose. His eyebrows climbed a little. "Stupid situations are one thing, but it wasn't your hand." His eyes drifted to her arm, then back to her face. "You can talk to me," he told her, hardly hollow, but real enough in that he wasn't trying to convince her. "I don't talk to anyone." And that was fact.
He gave her a wise look. It was very New York. "No, but they'd just kill you and get it over with. You're a little bit of a liability, Red." Some people were born into the Brady Bunch, and some people... well, weren't.
"Killing me ain't so bad, not these days," she said truthfully. "You gotta promise me things. You'll take care of Rose, and you'll check in on Daniel, and you'll keep a real good eye on Shane. They're all real soft and delicate, even if none of 'em say as much. And you gotta make sure the Family don't start looking at none of them. If I take the fall, it's so they don't," she said passionately, the speech sapping what was left of her energy. She sat back down on the hospital bed, and she leaned against his side. She knew she shouldn't, that the need for affection was often misconstrued and got her into trouble, but she was scared, and Rick always looked at her like she was five years old.
Rick's eyebrows climbed up into his hair. He had seen Shane, and he did not think the man was anything like 'soft and delicate.' R1 seemed, at best, dangerously unstable, and he could not think much of the blonde's choice of company. However, now was not the time to argue. "Alright," he said, without a hint at uncertainty. "No reason you can't keep in touch yourself, though. No matter what this Vaughn says." When she leaned on him, and looked so very young, Rick gave her a little hug around her shoulders, the same kind he gave his grown sisters when they'd had particularly hellish days. "I'll take care of it. Now," he continued, propping her up a little, "I think we'd better get you somewhere safe before these people get it into their heads to track down one of your cousins." Other than the one he'd chased off, that is. The one that used to be watching the front of the hospital from his car. People did the most obliging things when you made bits of your face disappear where only they could see. (And it made identification a bit tricky.) "How do you feel?"
She tipped her head and looked up at him. "She said she'd go to the Family," she said, but then she lost track of what he was offering her. "How are you gonna take care of it?" she asked, glancing toward the laptop and back at him. "I'm tired," she admitted, "and I want my pills," she admitted, "and I'm scared, and I don't know how to fix all this," she added honestly. "I'm not supposed to get close to people, I don't think. If she knows I went somewhere, she'll probably tell me I gotta come back to Bellum Letale, Rick," she explained. "If that happens, you gotta promise you'll make Rose stay safe. She don't realize that people are dangerous the way they are," she told him, and she closed her eyes and scooted closer to his side trustingly. Rick had never been particularly kind to her, but he was strong, and she didn't think Vaughn could hurt him, even if she tried. It meant a lot, that last bit, at least right now.
"Hmm," he said, as if he was thinking. "Her showing up here might put her in danger from the Family as well. Maybe it's better if she comes with you." This talk of not knowing anyone at all concerned Rick. It was an effective tool against someone as obviously vulnerable as the girl. She was stubborn enough to isolate herself and young enough to believe it would be easy--for a time. "Vaughn has made you believe you are responsible for her actions. You are only responsible for yourself. Try to remember that. I am going to get you some clothes, and get your friend. Turn that thing off; she's not worth your time. You can come stay with some friends of mine. You'll be safe there until I figure out this mess with your Family." He stood.
It seemed so easy when he said it. Like she could really just go somewhere and he would figure it all out. She wasn't stupid enough to believe it would actually work; she didn't believe anything worked out anymore. But it would get Rosalie safe, and Vaughn would have no reason to think Rosalie had been with her at all. She could slip back to the building when Vaughn told her she had to, and Vaughn would be none the wiser.
She nodded, almost surprised at herself when she acquiesced so easily. "Alright. For now," she said.
He smiled. It wasn't one of the frightening unnatural ones. "Good." He gave her another little squeeze. "I'm going to show you something so you're not startled if I need to use it in front of you," he told her, standing back a little ways. He put a hand up and tapped his temple at the corner of his eye. "It's like the eyes."
She tipped her head, and she watched. "Is it something from your tale?" she asked, thinking of wolf claws and vampire fangs. She didn't scoot back on the bed, and she didn't look frightened. Whatever it was, he wasn't going to hurt her with it. His smile was strange, yes, as were his eyes, but he was being nicer to her than he'd ever been before. Whatever he was going to show her, she'd take it as a trade off. She hugged herself, feeling a little sickly because of the lack of pills in her system, and she watched.
Slowly, like a bad television, Rick faded from view.
Boyd was on her feet in an instant. Even with the warning, someone disappearing was unexpected. "Rick?" she called, suddenly frightened. "Rick?" She walked around the room, looking everywhere, and then she stopped, and she forced herself to think. She turned back to where he had been standing, and she watched the empty space for a moment longer.
Then she walked over, and she reached out to where he had been.
He was still there, exactly where he'd been. To prove it, he chuckled.
She yanked her hand back, and she gave him a very stern look. Her hands went to her hips, and she pouted at him. "Rick, you come back here right this minute, or I'm gonna scream this hospital down, and you know I'll do it too."
The grin appeared first, though he managed to do something so that the tops of his teeth were still invisible, which simply left a white crescent at about Rick-height, much less macabre than seeing the skull-like roots of his teeth. The rest of him materialized quickly to fill in the gaps, though.
She sat down on the bed's edge slowly - well, no, she dropped. She stared, and she dropped down on the mattress. "What story is that?" she asked, honestly not having expected that. Ever since the ghosts had started talking to her, she saw them less, and she didn't realize other people's abilities were getting stronger until this moment. "You can control it proper?"
"The cat in the Alice story," he said, with a detectable hint of pride. "And with practice." He lifted a hand, snapped his fingers, and his sleeve was empty. Dipping his elbow, he brought his sleeve back past his face, and there was another click of his fingers--now visible. He smirked.
It was the hint of pride in his voice combined with a smirk that made her smile. "Well don't you look all proud of yourself?" she asked, a bit of a laugh in her voice. In all the time she'd known (and been intimated by) Rick, she'd never seen him sound like that. He also wasn't being as condescending as he normally was, and she wondered if it was because his story was about a little girl. Maybe whatever happened when they all changed had made him more understanding somehow. "You find other folk from your story?" she asked, glad for the distraction from her problems in a way she hadn't realized she was.
Naturally, it would not occur to Boyd that perhaps the man was simply allowing himself to feel sorry for her. He turned his profile to her in a transparent (pun intended) show of offended pride. "That took a lot of work, Miss," he said, from under arched brows. Dropping the act, he came closer again. "Lie down," he requested, before he would continue the conversation. "Not so far. I'm not in a hurry to involve her in my business, anyway. I imagine a girl like that will have plenty of her own problems." Smile. "Like you."
She crawled under the blankets when he asked, and she quickly typed a last response to Vaughn before shutting the top on the laptop. She curled onto her side, and she watched him when he talked about the girl in his story. "You gotta promise to be nice to her once you meet her," she cautioned. "No yellin' at her like you did me," she said, a sleepy soft smile on her lips. She reached out a hand for him, motioning him closer. "All of you. Not just bits," she warned playfully.
"Perhaps she won't be as stubborn as you," he mused, noting the activity on the laptop with a distrust he calmly kept from his features. "What shall I tell your friend in the lobby?" He presumed that 'hello I'm here to kidnap you' wouldn't work.
"Rose is real dumb when it comes to being safe," she said with a small roll of her eyes. "Even worse than me, if you can imagine. You're gonna just have to stick her in a sack." She looked at him with eyes that turned serious. "She can't let Vaughn know I'm with her, Rick, and that means she can't tell Daniel or Shane. She's real awful about keepin' quiet - you understand? It has to be secret, or somethin' bad will happen to someone, and I can't have that on my head." Her expression said she was serious; she couldn't handle it if that happened. And she didn't trust Rosalie, Daniel or Shane to keep quiet.
"What happens from here on isn't on your head." An unseen horizontal line traveled up his body, leaving nothing--quite literally--in its wake. He grinned as it reached his neck, disembodied head bobbing for the door. "It's on mine." With a soft squeak of hinges, the door opened and closed, but no one was there.
She didn't argue with him when he left, simply because she couldn't think to. She wasn't accustomed to disembodied heads yet. She closed her eyes, letting exhaustion overtake her, and hoping Rosalie could be convinced of the need to stay quiet just long enough to get her someplace safe.