Who: Toby, Erin and Colt What: Difficult patients, meddlesome nurses and infuriating men Where: Aubade 106 When: Immediately after this Warnings: Colt likes to curse when he's angry, which is always.
The building didn’t so much as hulk itself up out of the evening’s thin and pale light so much as it loomed -- as though you simply hadn’t been looking and you turned your head and it had snuck up on you. It was the old kind of stone that said money and if the stone didn’t say it comprehensively enough, the chorus line of large and rather beautiful windows and the smart cut of the doorman’s sharp black suit sang it out loud and clear enough for the cab-driver pulling up to the curb to look round at the woman in the back, dubious. He had been driving his cab long enough for the dashboard to be cluttered with little plastic tchotkes and nodding dogs and a little wooden and garishly painted figure of a Hawaiian hula dancer, whose eyes were layered blackly painted eyelashes, lowered demurely. The air-freshener swaying from the rear-view spread a thin and tinny pine smell, like toilet cleaners, over cigarette smoke and spicy food and it danced and spiraled to the ululating moan of the female singer on the radio.
“Here?” he said, craning his head past the passenger seat to compare the building and its quiet opulence to the woman in the rear seat of the car -- but she was already climbing out, a fistful of very crumpled bills dropped into the well of the stick-shift, and the door banged behind her. She didn’t look much like a resident; a much faded and shabby coat slung over very old jeans and a tee-shirt that looked like it had come from a sale-bin and it probably had -- but the doorman jumped with the quickness of being expected, and Toby slid from the creeping cool of encroaching evening to the expensive hush of the reception-hall and then was shown along the hall with a rapidity of pace that was presumably hard to keep to, when you were that short. The doorman rapped against the door labeled 106 for her, with impeccably white gloved knuckles, and with the odd forcedness of a smile, slid away and back to his post. Toby gave him about two seconds’ grace before she had her hand on the handle, and pushed the door open into the chaos within.
Colt had been sitting on the same stool he had been for the entire afternoon, his hand clutched in Erin’s clammy one, his patience fishing-line thin and nowhere near as strong. The sound of the door opening (again) made him want to lash out at something, made the angry impotence that was so near the surface roar to life again, and it was only the fragility of Erin’s hand in his that made him contain himself.
He steeled his jaw, and he called out as he had earlier. “In here.” He sounded angry and tired and frustrated all at once, the words forced and far from friendly. It better be the damn nurse, because his gun was still within reaching range, and he was itching to hurt something just to prove he could.
Erin hadn’t much moved, either. The mattress was on the floor of Colt’s study, off to one side of the recliner, and it had one sheet under her and three blankets over her, but it was as out of place in the general chaos as Erin was. She looked like someone who had been ill a very long time; she was naturally pale of complexion but in the last few hours she had gone from waxen to corpse-like, and her eyes, though closed, were sunk deep into her face, and the lashes were almost doll-like. For all intents and purposes she was sleeping, but it was clearly not a restful sleep and the bandages on her hands and (hidden) legs were still white and untouched, so it seemed unlikely that they were ailing her more than the expected discomfort. Other than the occasional restless shift, the room was disturbingly silent, as Erin made no sounds in her sleep and her breathing was much lighter than Colt’s.
Toby followed the sound to its end, through rooms that looked both empty and overturned and stopped in the doorway to make assessment -- she looked like the kind of woman who might do it usually, stop and wait and look before making her remark, but this shrewd summing look that swept from the mattress on the floor and the bundled figure in it, to the empty recliner to the man crouched over on his stool the way they usually sat beside bedsides, until security could convince them to wait outside, was the professional kind. To look at her, she wasn’t much -- for a second or two of that looking, she was just a diminutive little blond with a too-heavy bag on her shoulder and her hands dug deep into old pockets, who stood on polished floors in ancient sneakers like a college student taken up and set down in another setting, like a joke, like a game, ‘which of these things does not belong?’ It would have taken a moment’s more scrutiny that neither occupant of the room was really prepared to, to see the hands were tucked away where they couldn’t touch anything inadvertently and that she stood looking with frank blue eyes, smudged by shadows (long shift) that took it all in with a competence and a quickness that saw everything, down to the way the woman’s wrist hung in the man’s hand.And then the next second, you didn’t notice the smallness of her at all, because she moved too quickly.
She slipped that bag off her shoulder and down to her knees beside the mattress before she said anything at all, and the coat was off and cast aside and out of the way in the same moment as she had a pair of hospital-standard gloves over her skin, and was both easing the blankets back with her left hand, two fingers of her right taking the woman’s pulse with the efficiency of having done it quite a thousand times before. She was making a faint noise, a soothing kind of hum, and as she turned aside to scribble down a pulse-rate on a notebook dug out of that bag, eyebrows raised, she began to speak.
“My name is Toby, my love, and I’m going to try and help you,” it was patter, the kind of patter that came quickly and easily off the lips and tongue, the same soft warmth way of rubbing at you insistently as there was in any hospital, with any nurse -- but the quiet push of sincerity underneath it. For however long she was here, for however long she was bent over a woman whose pulse was thinning away into a thready nothing, it was clear that she would be Toby’s love and Toby’s concern for however long it took. She kept up the murmuring of pleasant and cheerful nothings as she thumbed up the very edge of Erin’s eyelid to examine the pupil beneath -- it was only then that she tossed something over her shoulder at Colt.
It was evident in that moment that Colt was very much not Toby’s concern or love -- the words snapped out briskly with hospital trimness and efficiency, polite but without the merest smattering of that warm cooing she was giving Erin. “What has she taken?” Her hands were running up Erin’s wrists, examining the bandages too professionally done to be anything other than someone who did it for a living, lifting Erin’s hand to see if it dropped at usual speed. It was a whirl of snap-quick movement dancing along to an accompaniment of soothing, hushing sounds.
Colt didn’t much care for her tone of voice, and he’d sat back almost the moment the woman had neared the mattress. That she was the nurse was unarguable; that she wasn’t going to be the most pleasant of women was undeniable. He didn’t give a shit about any of that, not if she could help Erin. Colt could be an asshole, and well he knew it, but this wasn’t about him. “Nothing,” he said truthfully. “The doctor came, and he didn’t know why she was like this. He said it might have something to do with her being a Creation, but hell if the man could do a bit of good to help her,” he explained. “Shock of some kind. She witnessed something we aren’t going to talk about, you and me,” he said bluntly, adding, “ and she’d not going anywhere, so don’t even go mentioning it.”
Erin surfaced very slowly out of wherever she had gone, and she reacted well to the appearance of Toby, who she clearly did not recognize but also did not take as a threat. Perhaps it was the blonde femaleness of her, but Erin just stared at her for a long time, and reacted no more to her puttering and examination than she had anything else. She tried to catch her wrist as it dropped, and the reaction was slow, but she did put some resistance from gravity, particularly when Colt moved out of her field of vision. She seemed to have difficulty carrying out her wishes, as she shifted as if to sit up but in the end did not. “I’m tired,” she said in a soft voice, as if this particular explanation was the one that everyone was looking for. Then she coughed, a new sound because she had not coughed before, and she looked as surprised as everyone else to hear it. If it was shock, she had recovered enough that her pulse and pupil-size had returned to normal, but not enough that she could beat the anxious effect or sluggish reactions.
Toby was well-used to men who stood over their women in the small bay-beds, who looked at her with flat, say-nothing expressions and who were either indifferent or desperate but who cared enough to tell her what they would not tell her. It didn’t much matter, and she didn’t much care -- if there was any curiosity whatsoever, there was nothing in the frank blue gaze to indicate it. Something, perhaps irritation but not quite fledged enough to be known as such, lodged itself there when Colt told her what to do -- and the set of her jaw was stubborn, and her movements were even crisper. Toby didn’t much like being told how to do her job, but she held her tongue and she dug through that bag of things as the flat of her hand checked for fever and all she gave him was a look that seemed to be withering and considerate at the same time. It wasn’t usual and it certainly wasn’t standard nurse-fare, but then neither was Toby, so it fit.
“This isn’t shock,” she said, putting what they now all knew into matter-of-fact words, as Erin’s pulse beat beneath her fingertips into something approaching normal, “Even if she did see --” a look back to Colt, where he sat, “Something.” And then Erin spoke, and Erin coughed, and there was a flurry of that same activity with reassurances, as Toby put a firm but kind hand against her shoulder when she lifted herself and produced a stethoscope from that bag. It wasn’t black and chrome, the sort that swung from doctors’ necks with efficiency, but it wasn’t a toy at all -- it was battered and pink and there was a sticker of a Disney creation on the dome of it. It wasn’t usual either, for nurses to have those, but Toby used it the way she’d done everything else -- routine, quick and clean and gentle, and whatever she’d heard was enough to fold it away and back again, and she sat back onto her heels, perplexed.
It was like something out of a book, like Flaubert or Dickens or anything where the heroines lay pale and wasting from something without a name -- except those heroines’ ills had been catalogued and named and quantified. And then, very slowly, Toby peeled away the latex gloves and balled them into one in her palm, her expression quietly thoughtful.
“What are you doing?” Colt asked the moment the gloves came off. He was close enough that he could lean forward and grab Toby’s wrist, and he’d do just that if he didn’t like her answer. It wasn’t a question; it was a demand.
She scowled at him then, none of the nurse in that -- and she folded her arms across her chest to tuck herself out of grabbing range, because that wasn’t unheard of, either in a city ER with bad people. “Thinking,” she answered, shortly, because he was the kind of man that required an answer but she didn’t have much of one to give just yet.
Colt’s gaze moved from Toby to Erin and then he dragged his hands back through his hair and threaded his fingers at the back of his skull. “I’m not paying you to think, woman,” but there was no true venom in it. He’d just spent an hour listening to Erin breathe, and he knew whatever was happening wasn’t related to shock or whatever had happened earlier that day. He’d seen injuries - his own, his fathers, his officers,’ his cadet.’ This wasn’t that, and he’d been clinging to hope this woman could do something the doctor hadn’t been able to do. “I got a bedroom set coming. We can get her comfortable when it comes.”
She wasn’t listening at all to him, because she was doing precisely what she’d told him she was doing -- thinking. It took effort to switch from the medical knowledge that Toby was entirely comfortable with, learned so deep it came as easy as breathing, as stroking the hair back from Erin’s face that she was doing now absently -- arms unlacing themselves as soon as Colt withdrew. Creation knowledge was harder to handle, like catching something unexpected and spiked when expecting a ball. Toby didn’t much play with hers. The first few times, it had been without intent and then there had been the afterward -- which was why she now worked where she did, but Toby didn’t much think about that, either. With a deep, uneven breath, she laid her hand against Erin’s with a steadiness that didn’t match the jumping, skittering beat in her own throat now, at what this might do. It took skin, this kind of thing, not the barrier of latex gloves and knowledge and she only vaguely heard Colt’s voice in the background, and didn’t turn from looking at Erin, when she said impatiently, “Hush up.”
She looked around the room for something living -- a plant kept well and healthy and alive, with green wide leaves and roots full of sunlight and water would be nice, too much to hope for in this room of mess and chaos and a hard-eyed man. A pet would have worked, too - something lazy and indolent that spent all day sleeping and fat, or a bright eyed terrier that chased at sunbeams and yapped -- she didn’t like terriers, but right then, Toby wished she had one more than anything. But there wasn’t; there was herself and this man and the woman lying like an old doll, and of the three, there was one to push into and no one to pull from. It would be wild, the way it had been the first few times, and Toby closed her eyes and closed her fingers around Erin’s, and felt.
She wasn’t words; wasn’t pretty pictures painted out of thin air and sounds and if you’d tried to make Toby describe how it felt, how it was, she’d get quickly cross and busy herself with something else until she snapped. But it felt like pouring a jug of water into a cup, only she was the hand holding the jug, and the jug itself and the water, and she couldn’t see the bottom of the cup but only feel for it, blindly and learn its contours as it filled. What it filled full of had taken learning, had taken those disastrous first few times and with blind desperation, Toby threw out the net as wide as could be, beyond the walls and spaces of the building itself, stretching for trees and sunwarmed stone and grass and people who wouldn’t miss it, and added the strand of the room itself, of herself and the man who said distracting things when she was concentrating . There was no way of judging what it would do, to a person, this flood-- if it would do anything at all if Erin’s cup was full enough. All Toby had was how fast it moved through her to judge, what she filled the jug with, and the way it felt, like water and movement and sunshine and burning all at once and then she knew a way she couldn’t explain just how empty Erin’s cup was, how filling it would take more than she could take without fear, and Toby untangled her fingers, as her own pulse beat itself down to regular again, and she opened her eyes to examine her patient, half-fearful.
Up until this point, Erin had felt as if her body would not listen to her. She tried to think thoughts, to move her fingers and form words, and it was like fighting through molasses. Fatigue was in every pore, and it was difficult to do anything at all, and she felt as if breathing was a great effort and something that required an awful lot of her attention. She had been tired before, very tired, and it was this kind of tired that Erin that that everyone felt when they said they were “tired.” Not to this length, but still, the general idea was there. A lack of understanding of the difference between this much fatigue and an ordinary “I didn’t sleep last night” tired meant that when they asked what was wrong with her she said she was tired, and to her it was true.
Whatever Toby did made her awake. Something burned away the molasses with an effect like hot water under her skin. Erin abruptly felt better, but the kind of better that came from a sudden stimulant, and it made her feel sick and dizzy as she shot upright into a sitting position with a gasp. She swayed from the jolt of it, and though it was not as if she had gone home and slept two days, she no longer felt like she was incapable of movement or feeling. A faint, surprised “Oh,” was her general reaction, and color flushed from her neck up into her cheeks.
Colt had been watching Toby’s fingers on Erin’s, ready to call whatever the hell was happening off if Erin seemed the slightest bit uncomfortable. He had been doing so, that is, until an overwhelming sense of exhaustion overtook him. It was immediate and draining, but there was no sense of where it came from or what had happened - merely a sense of exceptional fatigue. But in the same moment, Erin sat up with a gasp, and fatigue be damned. He grabbed for her hand, and he looked at Toby. “What the hell’d you just do, woman?”
When Toby’s eyes had opened, light had flooded in -- a little like tilting a face to bright sun after darkness. If she’d been tired before, twelve hours and counting on her feet and moving, her head was now reeling as if she’d been drinking away those twelve hours instead and she was dry mouthed, her tongue thick and still like she hadn’t spoken in years. But it wasn’t unexpected or an unknown feeling, and she had her fingers wrapped around Erin’s free wrist and taking that pulse again with dogged determination -- even if she wasn’t quite the whirligig of speed and efficient motion she had been before. Satisfied that now it was bright and clear, and that a little color had seeped into her patient’s cheeks like the touch of ink into water, she finally sat back against her heels, and stopped long enough to answer his question.
“I did what you asked.” It felt like speaking down a tunnel might, words losing their crispness along the way until they were out. “Got any coffee?” It wouldn’t help, not much if at all, but it was familiar and a normal, a human response to feeling so tired after such a staunch reminder of not being so. If she reached out and took just a pinch more -- but Toby set her chin and Toby sat back and folded her arms and Toby refused, at least for herself. “I can make it less heavy,” she said, and it was sort of an apology, but not at all, “If you need it. You kind of got,” a vague sketching of one hand, “In the way.”
“What happened?” Erin’s voice wasn’t slow anymore, but it was confused in its sharpness and there was some force behind the demand for information. Colt’s assistance was accepted though she winced a little at the pressure to the bandaged cuts and, immediately after, gave him a oddly intent look, the one she gave him when he did something particularly unexpected and she didn’t know why. Her fingers closed before he could pull away, and she did not let go. She steadied on the mattress as some of the dizziness drained. She coughed, but it was a sort of clearing from her throat, as if she was just fighting off a mild cold. She now felt tired, but not so inexplicably mired.
The odd look made Colt realize he was behaving like an utter lovestruck jackass, and he immediately started to pull his hand back. Erin’s fingers, the way they closed on his and did not let go, however, made the effort seem less important, and so he stayed where he was. He felt like an idiot, mind, but he’d done plenty of that today. “I could care less about your coffee,” he told Toby, not even sparing a glance her way. The kitchen was easy enough to find, close enough too. Instead, he looked straight at Erin. “You are the stupidest woman I’ve ever met, Erin Gracewater.”
That was a look she’d seen over hospital beds, too and it was the kind that had nurses draw the curtains around the beds and leave them be. He might have begun the way most did, cold and stony about it but the way their hands had linked above the blankets said something different. Project manager. Right. With a little effort, Toby pushed herself to her feet and ignored the two of them -- more interested in a glass of water and a breath of air than watching two people more than half in love with one another make faces about it, and disappeared into the region of the kitchen. She didn’t quite make the glass to the tap though, half falling and sitting into one of the chairs that were askew around the table there. It had worked, an experiment on a grander scale than she’d tried before but now, with her elbows propped against a stranger’s kitchen table, waiting to be either summoned or dismissed, Toby couldn’t quite summon the energy for anything other than vague satisfaction that it hadn’t gone wrong.
Erin would have protested that she was, indeed, a project manager and she did it very damn well, thank you. Being summarily dumped on a mattress bought hastily from a neighbor and brought back to life by a human defibrillator didn’t change her professional effectiveness. At least, she would prefer it didn’t. “I am not stupid,” she said, not in the least insulted. “It is not my fault I don’t recover properly.” She frowned at this new revelation, and having never experienced significant health problems or emotional upheavals, she didn’t know that her lack of energy late in the day extended to medical emergencies. “Toby,” she said, but she was already gone, and Erin was left looking again at a loss.
“This has nothing to do with your damn stubborn inability to heal yourself like a normal person,” Colt argued, vaguely unaware of (and discomfited by) the fact that there was a strange woman walking around his house. “It’s about getting your neck involved in whatever the hell you walked into and having to be dragged back here by some clown in facepaint that’s barely out of britches, all done on account of being curious,” he said, his southern showing more the redder his face became. It was worry that caused it, of course, and the relief that she wasn’t looking like a dying sparrow any longer, but he refused to admit it. “You got a responsibility, and getting yourself killed would be breaking our contract.” There. Pride saved. “And now there’s a damn woman wandering around the house,” was a muttered afterthought.
“There was shouting,” Erin said, stubbornly, glaring at him as he changed colors before her eyes. “There was shouting and breaking things, and you would have stopped too.” She pointed at him with one hand, the free hand, and her argument was not exactly substantiated by all the white bandaging over her palms. She scowled. “And it is not my fault that you cannot hire anyone or carry on a decent conversation. What did you say to the Corbinian, he was helping and I bet you said something horribly unforgivable!” Well enough to at least yell back, if not in top form. She resembled the same woman he had told to go home because she looked tired--at around this same time of day, too.
“Of course there was shouting,” he shouted. “This is Seattle. Everyone here thinks it’s their job to save the world, and they’re all going to end up this side of dead. You dial 911, and then you bring your ass home.” Home was markedly not in the Bathos on that sentence. He raised his voice a moment later. “Woman, get the hell out of my kitchen!”
The raised voices did not contain themselves; clearly those using them were more concerned with the argument they were having below the surface of what was being said to bother much with being heard. Toby, with the careful patience of being entirely used to it, had been almost asleep in her chair, chin propped in her hands. When Byron bellowed, it took a moment or two to filter that she was actually supposed to hear that, and when she appeared in the doorway once again, her face was schooled into something purposefully expressionless. She looked at him, and she looked at Erin and back again -- noticing without any change of facial expression at all which was probably all the more maddening, and then she folded her arms and leaned against the door post because for a person concerned with his woman’s lack of energy, he was wasting the new stuff awfully quickly.
“Yep?” she offered, and it sounded very much like, ‘you done raising the roof and acting like children’ might, but in one word, and without saying anything else.
Erin gave Toby a rather warm and grateful look that was completely out of character, but she said nothing. She interpreted the look Toby gave her correctly, however, and suddenly changed color. She let go of Byron’s hand.
Colt, being a man in a snit, had no idea what had just happened, not beyond it being some unspoken woman thing, and so he crossed his arms and pretended he didn’t give a damn. Because he didn’t, give a damn, that is. “You’re staying here until we’re sure you’re alright,” he told Erin. “There’s furniture coming.” Then he looked at Toby, who he suspected had to be single based on her impertinent attitude alone. “You’ll come daily and check on her.”
Toby looked back with the outward nonchalance she didn’t feel at all -- calculating what it might be like to have workdays that ended when they should, and money tucked into the box beneath the bed as well as in the account that seemed to never fill up but only empty and wanted very much just to say ‘yes, sir’ in the neat and dutiful way one spoke to ward sister. Except her eyes slid past him to look at Erin (and at the blush, the corner of Toby’s mouth curled into something quickly suppressed) Listening to an argument held in another room didn’t say much about people, even when you read them quickly, as Toby did, and if they were broadcasting what they were -- as both of these two did. But it was enough for Toby to bite her lip at arguing with someone who was probably worse to argue with than the hospital administrator in charge of paychecks, and then she wasn’t five foot two of tired blond, but the stern and bossy caretaker instead.
“Nope. Not going to work.” Toby’s voice was brisk and clear and factual with nary a hint of apology (or the possibility of backing down). “She doesn’t have a bed here, she will want to go home where her own things are familiar anyway which is just about sound medical advice from where I’m at, and --” a look to him, “I don’t trust you not to argue with her when she’s supposed to sleep. Sir,” she added, as an afterthought of appeasement.
Oh, Colt had just about had enough of the nurse. “Get out.”
Toby peeled herself away from the wall, and began with quick and brusque movements to clear what had been pulled out of the bag back into it and hoisted it up onto her shoulder, after giving Erin that same soft smile that she’d given her before, when Erin was white and gray and pallid on a mattress as though she weren’t going to wake up. It was a little like someone momentarily lit a candle, and then blew it out before it was there when she swung around to walk past Byron without comment. She could have stood there a moment, scribbled a bill on the back of a cigarette packet or a receipt and handed it over the way the consultants did, on private house-calls, but that would have meant asking or even wanting to be paid for what had transpired, and with a very efficient summation look given Byron that now was withering, she strode past him, a tiny figure that was quite straight and determined.
“Now just a minute,” Erin said, with the air of someone about to run a footrace, “You can’t throw her out like that, she just--just...” (she was unable to come up with an appropriately descriptive verb) “helped me.” She brought one hand up and smacked Colt high on his arm just below the shoulder, as if he was being a very stubborn child. Obviously the hand was damaged and so was Erin, so it was like being fluttered at with a handkerchief, but the purpose was there. “And I am not staying here, I am going home.” She looked down at the mattress as if seeing it for the first time, because she did not remember its arrival and she was certain it had not been in the study before. She rallied well, however. “I am much better now and I want to go home.” She weakened a little and the last ended up being a little more of a plea than an argument, but she took what she could get. She now attempted to stand up. Badly.
The slap to his arm actually made Colt smile, but he didn’t make any move to stop the retreating nurse. “I ordered her a bed,” he said to the retreating form, however, contradicting her previous statement about Erin not having a bed. “You almost died today, and you’re not going anywhere until we make sure you aren’t going to get worse,” he said, holding out a hand to keep Erin from standing. He couldn’t stand, which meant he couldn’t chase after her, so keeping her down was his best bet. “I’ll let her stay if you stay, alright? Don’t go being all foolish,” he said, making a failed attempt to be placating. “And I paid her good money. She’s making 50 dollars an hour,” he added, because that would clearly help matters.
He hadn’t; in fact the trip from Northwest over to the Aubade had cost her nearly too much to make, but the prospect of making that kind of money (and the knowledge it wouldn’t have been her asked unless it was an emergency) had tugged Toby into digging deep. Almost to punctuate Colt’s point, or to hammer the nail in of the coffin-lid, the front door to the apartment banged closed as if someone had just left it to shut behind them. Toby stopped in the hallway for a moment, though and that bag swung down from her shoulder to the ground and she sat down beside it as though she hadn’t intended to sit at all but was surprised by doing so. She rested her forehead against the spread fingers of her hand for a moment, closed her eyes and ignored the curious look of someone stepping past her in the hallway. An ordinary day left her tired, ready to dump whatever she’d left stewing in the crock-pot into plates, to fold herself across the couch and cuddle an armful of soft and warm and good-smelling child as if it made up for having been absent all day. Playing conduit to energy left her hollow, as if all that hot bright stuff that was alive burned away the insides and left her bones feather light and listless. She dug in the capacious bag for a cell phone, and dialed.
It was effortless for even Colt to keep Erin sitting, and she was more dismayed at this revelation than angry at him for displaying it. “Now she’s gone,” she fretted, pushing at the covers and looking, astonished, at the state of her dress, which was speckled with blood and dirt and torn in places. Her modesty, however, was intact, and she was gathering her borrowed energy again. “How do you know if fifty dollars is adequate to what she just did, are you an expert in abilities then?” It was a rhetorical question that she did not know was particularly apt. “And now she has gone, you idiot.” Her head swam a little and she scowled at the state of things.
Shit. Colt reached up for Erin’s shoulders, and he pressed her back toward the bed without standing. “Sit down before you fall over,” he said gruffy, and then he swallowed his own damn pride and called for the damned nurse. “NURSE!” he yelled, loudly enough to carry to the hall. “Toby,” he corrected, but not quite as loud. “PLEASE GET YOUR ASS BACK HERE BEFORE THIS WOMAN GOES AND KILLS HERSELF OVER YOU LEAVING.”
Toby’s hand slipped over the cell phone’s mouthpiece but she hauled herself to her feet with the sluggish steps of one gearing up to do battle when not entirely finished with the first. She was still on that cell-phone when she had walked back through that hall and toward that study; it was purple, and it had stickers, too. She took one look at the tableau, and then she turned her back, murmured something into the phone and slipped it into her jeans pocket.
“What?” she asked hotly, but there was little substance to burn in her voice, “You told me to get out, I got gone. Make up your damn mind.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Erin cajoled, anxiously, “he’s always ordering people out or in or around. Please don’t go--yet,” she amended. “You must be a doctor, yes? You fixed it so I can go home now.” She jerked a hand at Colt. “Tell him.” Erin’s understanding of the medical profession was just that: you were a medical professional or you weren’t. Personally she wasn’t at all convinced she was ‘fixed’ but if she was going to be sick she wanted to be sick in her own home.
“She’s a nurse,” Colt said bluntly, because there was a huge difference. Nurses took shit doctor’s didn’t; they also gave you shit back. In the end, both members of the medical profession were swayable with enough money. “You can be absolutely sure she isn’t going to have another episode all alone across town?” he asked, exaggerating the distance. “Where she might not be able to get up or dial for help?” He knew she couldn’t guarantee that, not unless she knew more than she was saying, and he crossed his arms and smiled sweetly at the damn nurse.
Toby wasn’t. It wasn’t how it worked, nothing as precise as anatomy books and scalpels or something easily rectified in the starched white surrounds of the hospital. It just was, like plunging hands into a dark and cool well and reaching for the bottom and hoping it came soon. It was terrifying and it had taken more than she’d come prepared to give, to use it and the scowl she gave Colt wasn’t that of a nurse at all but a tired and irritated and much wrung-out woman. He was baiting her, the way spoilt brat children did, and he had also abruptly interrupted a conversation she’d been enjoying, and her hand came up and raked into her hair, tugging with the frustration she couldn’t ground out at him.
“You, I don’t want to work for,” she told him flatly. Because she hadn’t begun here to settle in with Creations, wanted to avoid the whole mess and a 401(k) and paid vacations couldn’t make up for being drawn in whole into the chaos that Toby was now quite sure pervaded beyond this particular set of rooms. “Screw your fifty dollars.” That said, full of what she wasn’t saying, Toby looked toward Erin. The expression in her eyes, the way her face fell into softness was the sort of maternal that didn’t consider ages and skirt suits and business relationships. It was a desire to comfort and a yen to apologize for the world, and Toby shook her head.
“I can’t make the promise he’s on about, sweetpea,” she said regretfully, “And I’m not a doctor. I don’t know how it works, but it wasn’t fixing, it wasn’t enough.” Her hands shaped out something in front of her -- perhaps that cup, that well of nothing that had been so empty. “It’s not something for hospitals, or I’d take you there myself. It’s something Creation.” The word got said as though it tasted bitter, but Toby didn’t notice, or seemingly didn’t. “I can’t stay with you myself,” and that was very definite, like fact -- Colt’s pronouncement of swaying medics for money would hit up against it and find her unmovable, “But what I did should hold you over. For a while.”
Erin’s disappointment was so heavy and so obvious that it was tangible, a thick gray blanket that fell over what little color had been lent her, and her shoulders sagged a little back into the support of mattress and, oddly enough, Colt, though the direction wasn’t at all her original intent. She looked, for a moment, very much like she was about to cry, but then she didn’t. Eyes yet dry but lowered, she tipped her head without looking at Colt and said, softly, “Then what?”
Colt didn’t like anything the nurse had just said. “What do you mean for awhile?,” he asked, even as his hand reached out for Erin. “We’re not doing for awhile.”
When Erin’s expression wobbled and changed and fell, Toby was clearly struggling. Her hands twitched and she folded them together, and then into her pockets and then back to tucking them under each arm as she crossed those, instead. She looked at the bowed head and she made a sound between frustration and a sigh and rocked onto the sides of those battered sneakers, as if that helped.
“I don’t know,” and clearly, the anger was easier to find for Colt than it was to deal with whatever Erin inspired. “It’s not something I’ve practiced! I don’t know how it works or what it does. I’m not a doctor.” That came out defiant. And then she looked at Erin and the fight went, and Toby bit her lip. “It’s energy. At least, I think it is. I can feel what’s there already and put more in, but you weren’t just --” Tired, her head supplied, but it wasn’t sufficient. “It’s kind of like different stages of empty. You can add in to what’s there already and feel what isn’t, and you were more than exhausted. I could’ve put more in, but it has to come from somewhere. I couldn’t take much more from me and him, and I don’t like taking when I don’t know where it’s coming from.” She looked at the ceiling, studied the smoothness of the plaster there, and addressed it instead of looking at either one of them.
“But it didn’t do anything else. Just woke you up, so maybe if you sleep?” she suggested, “But you were almost asleep here, and that wasn’t working.”
This was getting worse by the minute, and Colt was overdue for painkillers and the damn stool he was sitting on wasn’t helping matters. “So, you’re saying it will happen again?” he asked, glancing from Erin to Toby. He didn’t let Toby answer before continuing with his train of thought, however. “Then she’s going with you. I’ll pay your rent, and the 50 an hour while she’s there, until we figure this out. I’ll ask on the damn forums. Someone has to be able to figure this damn shit out.” He sounded drained, and therefore none of it came across as particularly aggressive. The worry was back in his voice, and it completely sapped him of his anger.
Erin said, “I don’t feel that bad.” She felt like she felt at the end of a day. This was not unusual for her, but she did understand something had happened that was not usual at all. She didn’t know why and she didn’t know how and she was not willing to admit how much it scared her. She really didn’t want to admit it to Colt, either. Something about the look in his eyes made her feel incredibly guilty, and she wasn’t sure why that was, either. Guilt was not an emotion that Erin was prey too very often. “Really.”
Toby looked at Colt again, flatly. It wasn’t a look given to the relatives of dying patients, because despite his reaction, he wasn’t one, and he was frightening Erin, which was worse. “I told you, I’m not working for you, and you’re certainly not paying my rent.” And Erin wasn’t coming home with her. A strange woman who was clearly comfortable in the grandeur of the Aubade, who was wearing something which (whilst destroyed) probably cost more than her shiftwork brought in in a week, in her one bedroom apartment with the leaking tap and the Disney cartoons, and the bathroom where Lily’s clothes were hanging to dry over the tub? No. It wasn’t shame exactly, because Toby wasn’t ashamed of her home as it had taken a great deal to make it so, but it was intrusion and she shook her head strongly, before Erin spoke.
“I guess,” she said doubtfully. Toby didn’t do doubt very often, and it showed. “I could go with you. If you can’t just call if it’s necessary.” It looked like a struggle, Toby giving something very reluctantly and very hard-won, but giving it, all the same.
“No,” Erin said, with absolute solidity. Her independence was hard won, and she was not giving it up. Not for Colt, not for herself. Then, turning her face up at Colt, “You can’t make me.”
He wished more than anything that he could just shut them both up by insisting he go with Erin to Bathos, but he couldn’t and that was that. There was nothing he could do for it, nothing he could do about it. “You can’t be alone, Erin,” he said, rubbing his eyes with tired pain. “Let me send a nurse with you then. Not her, someone else, someone who can at least pick up the phone if something happens.” He paused, and he gave her a very frank, very direct look. “Why are you being so DAMN stubborn about this? It’s for your own good.”
He had a pinched look that she ought to have seen earlier. Coupled with the awkward movement and its lack, it spelt out something Toby was irritated at having missed, and annoyed with both of them -- for his insistence and for her stubbornness and for the whole damn situation which had become a vast, colossal mess bigger than anything she’d wanted to get herself into. Toby unfolded her arms, dug her hands deep into her pockets until her index finger split the thin cotton of the pocket inside, and cleared her throat.
“Look. I don’t want to go home with you and you don’t want me there, and I can’t have you in my home.” Directed to Erin, clear and factual and without any of this nonsense emotion. “But it would help if someone watched over you at least tonight. He doesn’t look like he can go anywhere -- where doyou keep your meds?” this last to Colt, with an enquiring look, “And you need sleep. So, can we agree on a damn compromise that involves everyone staying in their own homes, and if there’s a problem, she can call me.” This to Colt, with a warning look, daring him to argue with her.
Erin had not known that Colt was on meds, or that Colt needed meds, and she turned her head and gave him a startled look that jolted her entirely out of her thoughts. She didn’t look him over, she just stared at his face and looked for some sign that she had missed, and that unfamiliar feeling of responsibility returned. “You’re sick?” she demanded, with a new brand of anger henceforth unseen.
He hated the nurse, with her pink-stickered stethoscope and her assumptions and her fucking impossible fucking nosy nature. “I’m not,” he said, teeth gritted, the response entirely intended for Erin (even if he didn’t look at her when he said it). “Fine, go home. See if I care,” he told Erin. He didn’t want to see an ounce of pity in her eyes, and this shit all stopped now. “Take your new friend with you and GO.”
Ah. She’d assumed, with the way the two looked at one another, with the solicitous concern and the way he’d acted as though they were bound up together and tangled that way -- and the way she had been with him -- but clearly, it was a whole lot more muddled and complicated and so very much not her concern anymore. As if it weren’t obvious to anyone who looked (when their attention wasn’t distracted by another, more pressing patient) that the way he moved wasn’t right, and the way he looked -- Toby’s expression and the look in her eyes was one beyond caring, and she looked at Erin instead, to see if she needed anything more before she could go and leave the whole damn mess in its expensive surroundings behind her.
Oh, that wasn’t going to work this time. Erin’s chin lifted dangerously and she got an imperious glint in her eye, and though she was tired and she had quite certainly been through hell, she was not going to let him order her around any more than she already had. She turned to Toby and said, in a voice quite earnest and not at all like her usual orderings, “Thank you. I can call?” That was assent, as it had been Toby’s suggestion, and Erin effectively let her off the hook from any further encounters. She looked back at Colt, and if he was brave enough to look, there wasn’t any pity in there, not one bit. She was very angry at him, and if she’d been at her usual height of energy, she probably would have been shouting and pacing already. “You should have told me.”
“I’m not sick,” he said through gritted teeth, because sick wasn’t the right damn word, and he was perfectly content to cling to grammatical nuance at this stage in the game. And, oh, he looked at her alright, his gaze entirely defiant and a little dangerous, a warning. “You’re the one who almost dropped dead after chasing some nonsense you had no business chasing, Erin,” he said, attempting to turn the tables. His knees were bent, placed firmly in front of him on the carpet, and he didn’t look any more horrible than he normally did. Ergo, this was all the fault of the meddling nurse, and he cursed her under his breath.
When the phone on the desk rang, just out of reach of both of them, he looked at it but made no move to answer, though the muscle in his jaw twitched with annoyance. “It’s probably the doorman about the damned furniture .”
Erin looked past him toward the phone, and then back at his face. It rang again in the silence, and then again, and she finally looked away. It beat a dead horse, but she was tired, and though she wanted him to talk to her about whatever was ailing him, she thought he would just begin accusing her of things and it would take more energy than she had to shout him down. “You should have told me,” she said again, instead, giving him the resentful look of a small child watching people talk over her head about something important. She thought about getting up to answer the phone, but standing hadn’t worked before and it probably wasn’t going to work now.
Abruptly, she lay down instead, and reaching a bandanged hand down for the coverlet, she pulled it up and rolled over with her back to him. She was staying.
Once she’d covered up, he reached for the phone with a groan of discomfort. The front door was open, he told the doorman. There’s be a generous tip if he handled having the furniture installed in the downstairs bedroom.
A moment later, the sound of furniture being delivered could be heard outside the door, but Colt didn’t move. It was only after a few long and quiet minutes that he reached down and touched the coverlet at her shoulder. “I was just worried about you, woman. Don’t go getting all mad at me,” he said, missing the point entirely in a way that spoke to very little practice in the actual communication department with women.
Throughout it all, throughout the unspoken things that were being said, Toby had stood and waited -- leaving hadn’t been optional until she was quite, quite certain that she wouldn’t be called back, to heel as if she did work for the man. She was tired and she was irritated and inside it felt itchy, as if after all that burned-away hollowness, something was trying to close it over and heal the way a scar might. As the doorman disappeared and Colt gave the woman just about all the gentleness Toby thought he might possess, Toby turned and slipped out. This time, the door didn’t close -- furniture men heaving and shifting and grunting and calling back and forth. Home -- although it meant another damn cab.
“Never mind it,” Erin said, in her most careful voice, muffled by the coverlet and sounding sufficiently emotion-trodden. She didn’t want to share health issues right now, because she was the one on the mattress and she would inevitably lose any argument concerning them. “Don’t fuss. I’ll be fine.” And, with a lingering doubt she felt just as surely as Toby felt her lingering hollowness, Erin closed her eyes.
Colt waited until she was asleep to find his pain pills and down them with a strong shot of whiskey, then he settled in the recliner he used as his own bed, and he closed his eyes. He listened to her breathing, and he didn’t fall asleep until morning.