Darker London

It may have been an odd space for an injection, the back yard, but Peter had refused to leave his house just so Abby could shoot more Disulfiram into his body. It was a drug which reacted with alcohol and made anyone who drank while on it feel absolutely awful. Peter wasn't going to go out of his way for that. In fact he had been avoiding Abby entirely for two weeks and when she had shown up at his house he had unequivocally told her he would only let her inject him in the yard, out of view of his kids.

They didn't need to see it.

( HALP )

Peter hadn’t seen his kids, aside from wonderful Tasha who had been beside him almost every day, in nearly two weeks. Sometimes that hurt so much it felt like a physical ache in his chest. He wanted to keep the young ones from seeing him like this, however and Lydia was the child of two addicts and had lost her birth mother to addiction. Peter didn’t really want to make her fear losing her father as well.

( Context )

Thomas could tell the second he walked in the door, that Peter was in a terrible mood. Not only did he look visibly thinner than he had a week ago, there were dark circles under his eyes; his face twisted with annoyance. "Er," Thomas paused around the door frame, his hand still in Stephie's. He had already been dreading this conversation, and now Peter looked like he wanted to throw every single person he'd ever met through a window.

"Hey," Tasha said, catching sight of Thomas, Stephie and Deirdre as they entered the room. She rose to greet them, looking apologetic. "Dad's been uhm- I think the best way to put it is 'verbally sparring'? - with the doctors and nurses for the past hour. They just left."

"They're being dicks," Peter insisted from his hospital bed.

"I rather think everyone in this room was being a dick," Tasha corrected him.

"Do- Should we come back a different day?" Thomas asked, worriedly. This was the most coherent Peter had been in a week, but what if bringing up the past now only made things worse.

"Please don't go," Peter spoke up. "I'll try really hard not to be a dick to you. You're not trying to medicate me against my will."

There was something up with Peter and Thomas thought he might go out of his mind with worry. Thomas was supposed to be the impulsive one who made stupid decisions and Peter would make his disappointed face and Thomas would either shape up or do the stupid thing anyway.

He wasn't so great when it was Peter doing the stupid thing.

He dashed into the hospital, heading towards Stephie's location. There was nothing about this situation Thomas wanted to face alone, because he had a sinking feeling he knew what this was. "Stephie," he hissed when he found her, his expression grave. "I think he's downstairs."

The issue that Josie hadn’t anticipated, when she’d gone to Yvonne to say shoot me full of drugs and make me feel human, was that Yvonne didn’t have those drugs just… lying around.

Sure, she’d been working on different theories about what different formulas might work, but there was not a syringe at the ready. Josie was at the ready. Josie had been building herself up to this for what felt like a very long time and to be told she would have to wait maybe a couple of weeks – that was hard. That was almost ‘sweep everything off the table and pin Yvonne to the wall by her neck to hurry her along’ hard.

( ... )

Peter pulled up outside of the Littleton duplex in the afternoon to pick Tasha up. While he was relieved that he hadn't had to come intervene in the middle of the night, he was still very glad to be picking her up. Sure Tasha hadn't been in his direct eyeline for the entirety of the last few years, but she had been in his hospital which was still technically under his supervision. He was learning how to let go again, and it was incredibly difficult.

( Best )

The darkness is the worst part of it. The vast, all-encompassing darkness, which claims sight and time both at once. There's a chill to his skin, though the cold stab of fear in his belly is a chill of another sort.

( Das dumb )

Hospital, Stephie’s orders had been. Hospital, fight, and then come home, Josie.

Josie didn’t know how. She wanted to. She wanted to exorcise the demonhood out of her. She wanted to figure out a way to save herself. Fix herself. Stop herself doing stupid shit that would only lead to her hurting Stephie again, or Jinx, and losing them both.

She was so fucking staggered that Jinx hadn’t left her after what she’d done to Stephie. So fucking staggered. And grateful. And desperate to stop anything like it happening again.

( ... )

"I still don't understand why you want to talk to her?"

( Want is a strong word really. )

After taking a few days away from the hospital to give his mind a break from the topic of the Templar, Peter was trying his best to get back into the swing of things. That wasn't entirely made any easier by a visit from Thomas earlier in the day, which had then lasted several hours, but Peter was hardly going to complain. As distractions went, Thomas was absolutely one of his favourites.

( So stupid )

Daria had done pain before. When Pat cut her left arm open using her right, when he’d stabbed her hand, her throat, cracked her ribs while she was still healing from her c-section. She’d done pain, and while none of that was pain like this, the ghosts of the old pain crowded into the hospital room with her. The threat of being overpowered, incapacitated. Made it hard to think straight.

She’d got down to a contraction every three minutes but around four in the afternoon they’d dropped back to eight minutes apart and after the second eight minute wait she’d thrashed her pillow with her fist in frustration. Then another hit, just before the five minute mark, and the peak of it was so bad she held her breath, fists gripping the blankets while she waited for it to pass. “Breathe, Daria,” Neil reminded her.

( ... )

How they had gotten him this time, Peter didn't even remember. He just knew he was back in that damnable Templar work room, even though he was blindfolded, because he could feel the thumbscrews biting into his fingers as consciousness found him.

( BLAHHHH )

Peter's children usually announced their presence in very loud, distinctive ways, which was why when Peter heard a heavy backpack drop onto his office floor, he had a fair idea it was Lydia before he even looked up. She tended to drop it anytime she could, and it was always full to nearly bursting with school books and leisure reading and everything else a teenager apparently feels the need to lug around on her shoulders. He looked up from his computer and smiled warmly at her. "Hello, Lydia. Everything okay?" She didn't usually come to visit him at the hospital, but she didn't look sick or injured.

( It's a thing that is happening )

Josie woke up from surgery wrecked.

She had wanted to wait till they got news that Stephie and Peter were back safe before letting anyone put her under, but by the time Katia had found someone who knew how to cut a person open and dig around inside them, and done an ultrasound to figure out exactly where the bullet was and how to get it out, Josie was starting to go into shock from internal blood loss and they couldn’t put it off. The last thing Josie remembered saying before the anaesthetic dragged her down was threatening Razvan’s life if he let anything happen to Stephie, and then next thing she knew it was the early hours of the morning and she was in recovery.

( ... )

The fact that it was April Fools Day had not gotten past Peter as he frantically searched the hospital for one of his helicopter pilots.

Abby had made the call to Dr Rothschild in Bristol and security was now keeping an eye on Amaris. Peter did not, however, assume that would be enough to keep her from harming anyone in the long run. They needed to get to Bristol and retrieve her so she could be safely contained in RMMH. He could not, however, find any of his pilots anywhere.

With shaking muscles, thanks to his hell of a seizure earlier, Peter traversed the hospital and texted Thomas to see if he knew where Stephie was.

He hadn't yet told Thomas that they knew where Amaris was.

When Thomas messaged back that Stephie was in the hospital with Tasha, Peter did a 180 and headed back towards his daughter's room. There he found both of them, cuddled up together, and he smiled gently at the sight of it. "Sorry to interrupt," he said softly, "I uhm...Stephie? I need to ask a favour and I really hate to ask it."

Thanks to pharmaceutical intervention provided by the genius of Yvonne Miles and Dr Wentworth, it had been years since Peter had had a seizure during a vision. The stress of the search for Amaris meant he had been less than stellar at taking his pills regularly and on-time, however, and he had less than three seconds of warning before the vision slammed into him and his body seized and he lost consciousness.

( Well that just sucks )

Tasha was sitting on Peter's desk, legs crossed, facing the door, when he stepped inside. Her stomach twisted at the look of relief on his face when he caught sight of her, and she took a long drag of her e-cig, letting the steam curl out of her mouth slowly.

( That life goes on without you awake? )

"I want to keep them in at least another twenty four hours" Katia had said, and then added out of pure fucking vampiric spite: "If not two days. You need to take it easy, Josie."

Josie didn't know if she was angrier at Katia or at herself for not healing fast enough.

She planted herself firmly in Peter's office, in his chair, and was not going to move till one of two things happened. Either he came back, or Katia appeared at the door, her attitude toward taking out Josie's stitches miraculously reversed. Josie pulled out her phone and messaged Peter, furiously.

( ... )

Stephie was dreaming about frantically trying to hide. She was trapped in the helicopter hangar running along the wall searching for a way out, but there was nothing, no doors, not even her helicopter to hide in. The roof of the hangar had been ripped off and everything was freezing and her whole body was already set with dread because she knew something terrible was going to happen.

She was also pregnant – heavily – and it rolled and jerked inside her when she stopped running, and wouldn’t stop, though she tried to put her hands on her stomach and press and calm and stop but the movements continued under her hand. She’d been here so for long, she’d been trying to hide and she’d been running for so long and the fear was overwhelming.

( ... )

Peter hadn't even realised he'd been reading for hours, but when someone entering his office ripped his attention away from the manuscripts splayed out on his desk, a glance at the clock revealed it was three in the afternoon. He'd started this all around ten in the morning! No wonder his eyesight was starting to go fuzzy.

( THIS GOT REALLY LONG! )