Who: Ford Harper and Gigi Kingsland What: Gigi visits Ford while he's sickly When: Saturday, August 24, 2019 | around 9 am Where: Brightstar Reserve Medical Ward Warnings: Talk of serious illness and medical things
Ford pressed a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes, willing the lightheadedness and nausea to pass. The potion he'd taken an hour before wasn't nearly as bad as some of the No-Maj treatments had been, but that didn't mean this one wasn't particularly sucky. Worth it, hopefully, but he still felt rather horrific at the moment. Couple that with the fact that his mom had been hovering all morning already, and he was gearing up for a day that he was ready to get over.
Thankfully, though, Dad had convinced Mom to go back to the hotel in Billings for a few hours, so when one of the medi-staff came in to see if he was up for visitors, he jumped at the chance for distraction. He'd been on his phone and computer as much as he felt up to it, but it wasn't the same as talking in person. He was under about five dozen protection charms because of the potion stripping his immune system, which meant he couldn't touch anyone, but just haven't someone other than his parents in the room would be a welcome change.
Assuming he didn't vomit, anyway.
When Gigi had been told by her sister that Ford was sick, Gigi had instantly felt some kind of empathy for the oddball that had become one of her sister’s best friends. It had ripped into her gut to see Andi so upset by Ford’s news. That being said, being sick and alone sucked. She had purchased a teddy bear and some chocolate to take to Ford in the medical ward.
She wasn’t sure that he’d be able to have them, but was sure that the nurses would give them to him or tell her that. She’d left Bailey at the New House in his shiny new outdoors, which were charmed to keep him inside the property fences. The puppy had been thrilled to run around outside without a lead.
She apparated into town and headed for the medical wing. She was still having a bit of a hard time getting used to the dressed down atmosphere of Montana, but she was wearing a pair of green trousers and a white blouse, perhaps a bit more business, but it wasn’t a suit at least. She checked in with the front desk and waited to see if she would be allowed back to visit Ford. It was a few anxious minutes before the nurse came back to take her to Ford’s room.
Ford was a little surprised to see Gigi enter the room, but the feeling was entirely overridden by the sight of the teddy bear in her arms. He stared at her for a moment and then started laughing, hard enough that when he stopped, his first word was: "Ow." Despite how crappy he felt, he gave her a wide smile. "I guess Andi told you where I was, huh? And you brought me a teddy bear."
“Would you have preferred a giraffe?” she asked with a small wince, holding out the bear for him to take, “It’s been sanitized by the mediwitch.”
She didn’t want to say that he looked awful, but he definitely looked worse than he had the first time they had met and even then he’d looked a little more like death than she cared to admit. She really wanted to give him a hug, but she’d been told to keep hands to herself and had been made to wash her hands quite thoroughly.
"No, I want the bear," Ford said, grabbing for it and immediately hugging it to his chest. It wasn't quite the same as a real hug, but he'd take it. "I haven't had one since I was maybe...five? Okay, maybe ten. But yeah, kind of the best ever." He smiled gratefully at her. "Though I'm a little surprised you didn't decided to bring me something more...what was your word? Deviant. For payback or something."
“Well this is a public space. I wouldn’t want to give the nurses the heart attack that your brother gave to me.” She chuckled as she moved to sit down in a chair by the bed. “I brought you chocolate too, but the nurse said you’d have to wait on that.” she sighed, “So it’s safe and sound with me until you can have regular foods again.”
She was glad that the bear could give him some kind of comfort. “My nanny told me when I was a kid that teddy bears were really knights that protected you from bad things when you slept…. It’s always kind of stuck with me.”
"I'm pretty sure no one ever told me stories about stuffed things. They were pretty much always just stuffed things." Ford rested his chin on the bear's head as he looked over at her. The mere exertion of laughing had taken more out of him than he would have expected. Stupid potion. Well, except taking this potion was probably going to save his life, so not entirely stupid. "How's Bailey and the new house? I'm living vicariously right now since I can't see Loki till this whole thing is done."
“I spelled the fences on the property and he’s currently exploring to his little heart’s content. He had an encounter with a deer yesterday. I wish I had thought to record it. They were so unsure of each other.” she chuckled.
She tucked her hair behind her ear as she watched him, “I’ll post more for you while you’re in here and I’ll try to get some pictures of Loki too or bug Andi to post lots of them.”
"Better your dog than mine. I'm pretty sure Loki would have chased it. He thinks he's a lot bigger than he is." Ford looked down at his hands, folded in his lap over the sheet. It still wasn't entirely comfortable for him to have people see him like this, but somehow the fact that she already knew everything, but he hadn't had to tell her made some difference. It made no sense, but it helped.
"It's only supposed to be a week or so. Until we know if it worked, I mean. And then back to the couch I go." The smile he flashed at this was dimmed by worry, but he did his best to cover it with the humor. "Though I guess my parents will be trying to drag me back home. I can't be a couch surfer forever, and since my rental house is a temporary thing that's also currently unliveable…"
“A week is nothing and you’ll be back on your feet with Loki.” she chirped and smiled to him. “Did you see that I bought a house? It’s on the East Side of Town, it’s really lovely, it has a lot of land and a couple of guest rooms. I have to get it decorated, but if I didn’t think you loved the couch at Bettina’s, you could crash at my place.”
“Is your landlord giving you a break on your rent since you can’t actually stay there?”
"It is a really comfortable couch," Ford said with a tiny laugh, though he doubted that was fooling her, given how much she'd pressed him about her sister on the past. It was easy to laugh with Gigi, he'd found, even if it was just her posts on Wizgram. "I know you mentioned it in that part about Bailey. Was there another one? Sorry, my Wizgram feed is huge, and I'm horrifically behind. Congratulations. You must really like it if you decided to buy in that quick."
He shook his head, though not enough to set of the nausea. "I'm not actually paying rent, thankfully. It's part of a sponsorship deal for my podcast, but I have a feeling they'll be cutting me off soon. My content generation has slowed a bit, for obvious reasons." He really didn't want to think about next steps right now. Not until he got past this week. His future had been in doubt for too long for him to flip that switch just yet.
She wasn’t a fool, despite being terribly sheltered to the real world. She’d been a princess in an ivory tower for longer than she would care to admit. She knew that he and Andi really liked each other, more than liked. Andi didn’t sob that way about a ‘friend’. Ford was someone special to her sister. It wasn’t the couch keeping him there. It was the dog and the girl.
She pulled out her phone and showed him the pictures she had taken of the house. “I’m rather pleased with it. I even found a farm for my stubborn sister, not that she’ll consider it yet. She likes the couch too much as well…. But for the not being tied down.”
Ford had to wind his hands together around the bear's legs to keep himself from automatically reaching for the phone. No touching. No touching. He leaned toward it and watched her flip through the pictures. "That's awesome. You do have plenty of space. Maybe I'll come crash it after all," he joked, smiling at her. "She told me about the farm. I mean, personally, I think a farm is just the thing for her. We've joked about it before, actually. But maybe one she gets to pick out and buy herself. Though, I mean, if you wanna start handing out farms, I'll take one." He had to stifle a laugh at that, quickly adding, "That's a joke, by the way."
“It wasn’t like that at all. Andi…. She’s just stubborn. The place is perfect for her and she wouldn’t have to move in tomorrow.” she muttered with a small frown, “She lit up like a Christmas Tree when she saw that land, Ford. If you could have seen the way she looked at it, you would have understood why I offered to buy it for her until she was ready to settle.”
"Well, if she wants it, I'm sure she'll get it. It's not really a small thing, deciding to lay down those kinds of roots." Ford didn't really want to get in the middle of things between the sisters, but he could appreciate that Gigi was still new to town and had fewer people to talk to who weren't Andi. "Besides, what's wrong with stubborn? I'm seeing a distinct resemblance between you two there," he teased. "Is your brother like that, too, or are you two in charge?"
“Geoff is the big brother. He’s always very…. Well…. No I guess Andi and I are just different because we’re girls. Hell Andi and I are very different. I was looking at it from a pragmatic investment standpoint. I guess emotions are just not something I considered too much in it all. She just seems so happy here, so I figured she would want to stay and wanted to help her.” Gigi admitted, “She wasn’t pleased.”
"I can see that," Ford said with a nod. "The investment, I mean. Well, and Andi seeing it differently. You aren't kidding about that. Though, I can still see the similarities, too, now that I know to look for them." For one, Gigi had been really easy to like, after that initial hurdle of Thorne's gag gift. Even though it hadn't been anything like the way he and Andi had started talking, he could feel that inherent similarities in their ability to make a person feel at ease. "There's plenty of time, right? And she can always stay with you in your investment if she decides to move out of Bettina's place. It's not like you don't have enough roots laid down for the both of you right now. With all that land, you'll probably be lucky if the two of you don't adopt a whole pack worth of animals." He grinned at the mental image.
“I came here for a different reason than Andi.” she admitted, looking to the window for a long moment, there was a sadness there for a moment, “Andi is at home here and has a place here. I don’t know that I’ll stay here long-term, but I don’t think you could pry her away from this place with a pole…. So a property here so that I can visit just made sense. I don’t know where I belong anymore and I don’t want to intrude…. I’m not trying to control her like mother and father do. I just see she’s happy here and want to make things easier on her.”
Ford suddenly wished he wasn't on restrictions right now, because he felt like Gigi needed a hug more than any words he could offer. "I get it. I really do. I like it here, and there are definitely reasons to stay…but I don't know. I don't know what my place is, either. I write and perform podcasts about being a vampire. It's not exactly a career path with distinct direction."
He looked down at the bear and adjusted the tie, which he'd managed to send askew already with all his hugging. "You've got time, though." He still wasn't sure he did, but he knew all about using what you had to its fullest. "No reason to stress about it too much yet. And if you end up somewhere else, that's what portkeys are for."
She just gave him a slightly sad smile, “I’ll figure it out eventually.” she replied, “I’ve thought about opening an event planning company here in Snowcap. Even if it is a tiny town, they have to have things like birthdays and weddings and public events, right?’
"I mean, I assume so?" Ford said with a shrug. "Where I grew up was a lot bigger than this." He'd done a lot of chatting with random residents, getting a feel for small town life and generally learning about the people, but his thoughts had admittedly been more focused on Thorne and his podcast—and the strange fact that he still had this list of Beings who resided in Snowcap, but he wasn't sure why.
"You know who would be a good person to ask? Thorne." His grin at that was a little devilish.
“Your brother would be the best person to ask? Really? Why do I get the feeling that I would fall down some deep dark rabbit hole that would have some fat lady threatening to behead me?” she asked with a small laugh. She only knew a few things about Thorne and so far he was every kind of person she tried to avoid.
"I did not say best," Ford said with a laugh. He was definitely going to need another nap after this. "I also make no guarantees about dark holes, though I can mostly reassure you there won't be any beheading? Not really his style. He's more...caterpillar-like?" Especially after Thursday's adventures.
“Oh goodie, I’d just hallucinate about getting big or getting small.” she laughed and wished she could hug him. He was a good guy and she could see why Andi liked him, even if she had originally thought he was a deviant.
“Do you want me to let you rest? You look really drained.” It was better than saying he looked like shit.
As Ford's laugh died out, he was tempted to ask her to stay longer, but he knew that rest was a thing he genuinely needed. "It probably wouldn't hurt. Though I'm really glad you came by. It's...well, it's a lot easier to not think about all the what-ifs in front of me, you know?"
“Hey now. The power of positive thinking, Ford.” she said, sternly, “It’s not what-ifs. It’s when I am.” she advised him.
It wasn’t like she knew what he was going through, but she knew that if you focused on all the things that could go wrong, you didn’t get better. “You make goals to reach and you beat this crap.”
She wasn’t going to accept that he could possibly die. She wasn’t going to even put that out into the universe to consider. Ford was going to live, that was that.
Ford gave her a little salute as he sank lower on the bed, bear tucked in at his side. "Yes, ma'am. I'll do my best."