Dottie Pendragon is smarter than you think. (falsereputation) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-01-09 20:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | han solo, howl |
Who: Hal & Dottie
What: Making sure he stayed alive.
When: A couple of hours after this (Pre-Zombies)
Where: A secret facility.
Rating: Safe and sound!
Dottie had started to dose off slightly, when a doctor finally came out to the waiting room and tapped her on the shoulder. She came to full conscious within a few seconds as she remembered where she was. The doctor turned out to be “Doc” who was actually really named Doctor Gopner. That’s about as much information she got from him, but Dot decided that he looked respectable enough to not be suspicious. He took her to a room where Hal was lying, peacefully asleep in a bed and she felt slightly more relieved. He was going to be alright.
When the doctor left, Dottie suddenly felt like maybe her face wasn’t the first one he wanted to see upon awakening. Maybe she should have asked that girl to be here instead. Biting her lip, Dot tiptoed around the bed as quietly as she could, maybe she could call her now and leave a note in case he woke up before she got here. Looking in the drawer for a pad of paper, she didn’t even realize that Hal had begun to stir in the bed beside her.
Hal felt like shit. It wasn’t just “end of a hard day” kind of shit, or even “wow, I hurt” kind of shit, it was a brutal, exhausted kind of shit, and it was punctuated by stabs of pain through his side whenever he so much as twitched. He moaned first before he even got his eyes open, like waking was the worst thing that had happened to him yet, and it just so happened that she was the first thing he saw upon waking.
“Am I dead?” he croaked, after a minute of looking at her and wondering if he was supposed to know her.
His voice startled her a bit, but she just closed the drawer and gave him an awkward little smile. He sounded terrible, but she wasn’t surprised. Anyone who didn’t sound like that after going through what Hal had been through the night before, probably had other problems they should be worried about. She met his gaze and suddenly realized that he didn’t recognize her at all.
“No, you’re alive,” She put on a small smile that was halfway between worried and amused, “How do you feel?”
“Like somebody got it in dere head to drag me behind a truck a stretch,” Hal said, Louisiana thick and not bothering to hide it. He looked at her and you could see the thoughts moving warily behind his dark eyes as he tried to remember where he’d been. There was a job... a drug job... “Who are you?” he asked, giving up trying to place her and willing to ask just to appease that sense of déjà vu.
The accent surprised Dot, had he sounded like that the night before? She couldn’t remember, but she hadn’t understood much of anything that he tried to tell her, the night before. He closed his eyes and she watched as he tried to put together his night. The look on her face was sympathetic when he couldn’t remember. “I found you after your car crashed. Do you remember that part?” She was trying not to overwhelm him with too much information at the same time. If she’d been through the same thing, she wouldn’t have wanted all of it shoved down her throat all at once.
He stared at her for a little while longer. Normally Hal was a loud, talkative person, with a great number of gestures that said, look at me, I am very friendly and you want to know me. Right now he couldn’t gesture and he didn’t know where he was, so that didn’t make him particularly loud. He was, however, disarmed by Dot’s relatively unassuming appearance. “I remember... bein’ hurt.” He gave her a questioning look. “I know you? Seem like I know you.” The “I” was increasingly open, like a lazy “Ah” kind of sound, especially as he was increasingly distracted.
Dot shook her head, no. She wouldn’t count the interaction they’d had thus far as “knowing each other”. But it was good that he recognized her at least a little bit. She tried to feed a little more information to him, slowly, “I think you were already hurt when I found you. You were shot in the side and you told me to call ‘Doc’. That’s where we are now.” She took a seat in the chair next to bed, wondering if she should mention anything about her ability.
Hal’s eyes widened slightly, showing white around the edges with the realization. “De car.” Yes, he remembered the car, the soundless impact, his headlights on the red bricks. The dark. He blinked hard. “Ah hit you wit’ de car?” he asked sharply, suddenly alarmed, looking down what he could see of her for injury.
“What? No!” Dot shook her head vigorously, eyes wide with shock for a second, “No! I’m fine. I found you after the accident, pulled you out of the car and everything.” She remembered that she still had his cellphone in her pocket and she took it out, then. She placed it on the table beside his bed. “I called a couple of your recent contacts, I hope you don’t mind. One girl, Chat, wanted to come see you. She sounded worried, I think you should call her back,” She pronounced Chat in the English way, clearly not the way Hal had meant it to be pronounced, but Dot had no way of knowing that.
Hal looked from her to the phone, and he relaxed back into the pillows as she said that she was not injured on his account. “I remember you,” he said slowly, looking at her face again and picturing the room darker. Then, belatedly, back at the cellphone. “Chat? Oh. Non, cher. Chat.” He pronounced it with a softer “sh” though not as soft as the English version. “Le chat. A girlfriend. You call her?” He sounded worried.
She nodded slowly, wondering if he remembered all of it. She decided that he probably only remembered her face. If that was the case, she wasn’t going to say anything about her ability unless he asked. “Chat,” Dot echoed Hal. Oh, like in French. She had never paid a lot of attention in her French classes, in high school, but she could remember a few words here and there if she tried. Wait, a girlfriend? But she said... She stared at him, openly confused for a second before she found the strength to mask it, “Yeah, she said she wanted to come see you, but she wanted to make sure it was okay, first.”
Hal fell silent. Being in a hospital bed and waking up with a gaping hole in your side was a sobering experience, and his usual jovial nature was temporarily dimmed. After a moment he said, "Yeah, she come. She already know, and she de type to worry 'bout dis sorta t'ing." He lifted one hand and rubbed at a very scratchy chin, eyes dark. After a moment, he gave himself a little shake. "Quel nom, cher? What you doin' out on a dark street all alone?"
Dot smiled and nodded, she picked up his cellphone and sent the girl a quick text. “She said that you have never been shot, in the time that you’ve known her,” But it doesn’t seem like this is the first time. She only thought the second part, but it might as well have been implied in her tone of voice. It didn’t help that she couldn’t forget the gun that fell out of the glove box when she opened it. Nom, name. “I’m Dot, Nice to meet you,” She gave a small smile, “I like taking walks at night. You know, to clear my head.”
“To clear yo’ head,” Hal repeated, as if this was a marvel. He was silent for a little while, meditating on the gun in the box, but he couldn’t bring himself to care a great deal about the gun or whoever had shot him. It was a first, really, and he wondered if it was a normal for people to not care who shot them. After a moment he looked at her closely again and said, clearly, “It’s a dangerous job.” A moment later he added: “It seem like I owe you a favor. Don’ be afraid to call it in when you need it, yeah?”
She nodded as he repeated her. Her gaze never left him as he fell silent, though she wondered what he was thinking. His reply wasn’t really a reply, and she really didn’t know what his job was, so she just nodded again. This time her eyes wandered the room for a few seconds before landing back on Hal. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Dot shook her head and held out her hands defensively, “You don’t owe me a thing!” She was just glad he was alright, she supposed. It was and odd feeling, she suddenly realized. She could describe what she was feeling as almost a proud moment. She had saved his life and that was a big deal. A genuine smile spread over her face as these thoughts crossed her mind and the next words slipped out before she realized they didn’t make much sense without context, “Thank you.”
The smile faded a bit, but didn’t leave her face as she reached over to where his cellphone lay and handed it to him. “I promised ‘Red’ that I would leave as soon as your other friend got here,” She explained, “She sounded really worried, you should really give her a call.”
Hal chuckled. It was a tired thing, but you could hear from the timbre of it that it was usually more generous, if just as deep. “Yeah, mebbe my life seem not such a big deal to you, cher, but it is to me.” It was a tease, a gamble that he read the smile correctly, and Hal was nothing if not a gambler. This night he just got a really bad hand.
He groaned just a little bit. Red. Oracle. Great. He could probably kiss another job from them goodbye. They didn’t seem to like it much when people got shot, and it was pretty damn clumsy of him. “I’ll do dat, thanks.” He lifted one hand on his good side and gave the general direction of his phone a little wave. “You put yo’ number in dere and I’ll let you know mine in case dat favor comes to you.”
She looked skeptical for a second, making friends who had dangerous jobs and maybe had a tendency to get shot in the middle of the night was not exactly Okoye’s definition of staying safe. Well, she doubted it was anybody’s definition of staying safe. But after a moment’s consideration, she decided that she really didn’t care about any of that and entered her number under “Dot”. “Okay, thanks. I hope you feel better,” Another genuine smile, she was being generous this morning, or maybe it was just the exhaustion talking, “I should let you get back to sleep.” She placed the cellphone back in his hand before leaving the room and shutting the door gently behind her. She could wait in the sitting room until the other girl got here to take care of Hal.