audrey main // ramona flowers (dyingatherfeet) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-02-05 18:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, ramona flowers |
Who: Thomas and Audrey
What: A hospital visit with a mixtape and some bad news for Thomas.
Where: Hospital
When: Recently
Warnings: None
Audrey returned to the hospital a few days after her awkward visit with Max, a CD in her bottomless bag. Work had started early in the morning, so when she made it to the hospital it was edging into late afternoon.
Weirdly, making a mix CD for Thomas had been a daunting challenge once she actually sat down to do it. What she thought would be a simple thing - put some good music on a CD - turned into a complex problem. She couldn’t pick any music that seemed too obviously romantic, or like it might feasibly be a message from her to Thomas, because that wasn’t the point. She picked a few songs because they meant something ‘Adventures in Solitude,’ well, the lyrics were all about the return of the missing. And nothing went on the CD that was overly keyed up or rocked too heavily. She had no idea what sort of music Thomas liked, and she could admit that whatever it was, it probably wasn’t what she was putting on the album for him. She also knew he was a good sport, and he’d listen to it anyway, so she wanted him to get something out of it.
Listening back, some of the songs seemed a touch eerily autobiographical, but she tried not to let that bother her. She didn’t really have much music in the middle ground she was looking for - no dirges, nothing too heavy, nothing insanely upbeat or depressing. It was hard, finding neutral, calm, peaceful stuff, and she made some concessions where she felt the quality of the music warranted it - ‘U R A Fever’ was not exactly a peaceful peace, but still downbeat enough that it seemed excusable.
When she finally put a blank CD into her laptop, she had to ask herself who she was kidding. Thomas wasn’t going to care what the lyrics were or what the feel of the song was. She felt silly for fretting over things like song choice, but then it was done. She sketched a small doodle of Thomas’ face from memory in sharpie on the cover, added ‘For Thomas,’ beneath it, and out it in a case. That was that.
The nurse at the desk seemed a little displeased about bringing a visitor to see Thomas this late in the afternoon, but she let Audrey past her lobby station. Audrey knocked on the door to let him know someone was there, then tried to open it.
Thomas had jammed the door after the last doctor left. He’d gotten back on solid food twenty-four hours ago, and he’d been sick enough for the first eight hours that he didn’t want to move any more than they wanted to let him move. There hadn’t been any improvement in his vision, and by the time the opthamologist came around to tell him there wouldn’t be, he already knew. They wanted him to get counseling and disability training, and he refused both. They talked, he said no, and they talked more, and he waited until they ran out of breath--and then he said no again. Eventually they gave up.
So the last doctor was gone, and Thomas could get to the door with a little work. If he could get to the door, he could stand, and if he could stand, he could start getting back what he lost--at least in terms of muscle and stamina. His skin felt cold outside of the covers, but he wanted the hospital shirt clean after he was done sweating and showering, so he just left the drawstring pants on.
Yoga asanas were poses, and like the Chinese tai chi, you could push as far as you wanted. Old men and women got up early in Hong Kong to find a park while the smog was laid low by the cold, and they stood under trees and did poses. If they could do it, Thomas could do it, and it made him feel better to do something besides lie in bed. He didn’t need to see to do yoga either. When she knocked he was in something that looked halfway between a pushup and a sit-up that was in the air upside down, weight on his hands and one knee under an elbow. The sound immediately broke his concentration and he dropped back onto his knees heavily, turning to see who was at the door.
Audrey watched unabashedly open-mouthed as Thomas balanced and then fell to his knees. She waved, unsure how well he could see and whether he'd be able to tell it was her. She planned on changing her hair color in a few days, but it was still blue for the moment, and her head was framed in the window in the door.
The flash of blue, sure enough, took the tension out of him, and the pose that had turned to a crouch relaxed into sitting. Her timing wasn’t the best, and he didn’t want to have to find the shirt again without letting her in, so he worked his way back to standing. He wasn’t in the best shape, and he’d lost a lot of weight very fast, but he was much more substantial without the ever-present suits. “Audrey?” he guessed, reaching the door and shoving the handle toward her so that it would give enough for him to reach the bolt that he’d stuck properly. The door gave, and he leaned against the wall to catch his breath.
Audrey nudged the door open, peeking her head in to look at Thomas collapsed against the wall. "You okay?" she asked. "The last time I was here you were laid up in bed, now you're up doing yoga and standing on your head. That was pretty fast." She was pleased to see him up and about. He'd looked pretty bad the last time she'd been there, and while he wasn't all the way to well yet he did seem considerably better.
“I wasn’t on my head,” Thomas said, finding a defense in the obvious. He would also probably have an objection to the word ‘collapsed.’ He was, after all, still upright. “Good to see you, Audrey.” So to speak. He moved back toward the bed, and he did so with confidence. He knew the distance between bed and door, bed and window, bed and bathroom door. He stopped just short of the bed and swept his fingers over the bedclothes, fishing out the loose hospital shirt and sliding it on. It looked kind of like something someone had folded out of paper.
"You were pretty close," she said, and watched as his eyes didn't quite track her the way they should. "Good to see you too," she said, with a little smile and a surprised sort of warmth. She never expected to get greeted with thanks for her presence. "How's your sight doing, if you don't mind me asking?" She didn't think there was any point in beating around the bush, and she expected that if Thomas minded her bluntness he would already have expressed problems with it.
“The same,” he said, not seeing any reason to lie. “And not likely to change. So they tell me.” He didn’t try to stand up again, turning around on his heels and leaning back on the bed to sit at the end of it.
That caught her off guard. "Really?" She didn't know how bad his sight was, just that it wasn't good, and the information struck her more heavily than she might have expected. "Have you-have you told Max?" She sat down on the edge of the bed after a moment, setting her bag down beside her.
“No. She isn’t going to take it well.” It was fact, not just discussion. He didn’t look at anything, which made it look like he was staring into the middle distance between the two walls. After a moment he shifted on the bed and tipped his chin. “How’s the job?” They didn’t have to talk about him. He didn’t have much to say about himself.
Audrey nodded. "Yeah...probably not," she said. She wasn't sure what to say. She wanted to ask how bad it was, but he didn't seem interested in dwelling on it, so she let the conversation drift on. "Same as always," she said. "I'm the fastest delivery girl in the West. Speaking of which -" She unzipped her bag, reaching inside and pulling out the CD. It only occurred to her then that he probably wouldn't be able to see more than a black blob on the surface of the CD, which wasn't so much disappointing as it was a little heartbreaking, and she felt a pang. She started having morbid, cliched thoughts about Thomas never seeing his child's face, thoughts she was fairly sure had their roots in overly melodramatic WWII dramas - but there had to be something they could do, surgery or something. Right? Right. She consoled herself with that thought. "It's a CD," she said, helpfully.
All those things about his vision, Thomas had already thought them. He thought them before the doctor walked in. He thought them before the doctor walked in the first time, and he got all his other senses back. He caught the bright slide of light off the thing she offered, and understood that it was shiny, but that was about it. He put his hand out, missed, collided with her forearm, and corrected so fast he had the CD out of her hand before there was time to say anything. “What’s this?”
She didn't call attention to him missing the CD, and wouldn't have done even if he hadn't moved so quickly to claim it. "A CD, like I said." She smiled faintly. "You're a hard man to pick music for, I hope you know. I have no clue what you like. I ended up just going with a basic rule of nothing too hardcore, and picking based on that."
“Music?” He said it as if it was the last thing he would expect to be on a CD. He looked down at it again, but it didn’t show him anything else, or rather, his eyes didn’t. “For me?” He paused, remembering. “I don’t usually like music. It’s distracting.” He turned over the CD. A second later he realized what he’d said and gave her a quick look. “I’m sure this one is good, though.”
She couldn't help but smile. "I sort of thought you might say something like that," she said, not the least bit hurt by his fumble. "You don't really seem like the type. You're not obligated to like it or anything, I just figured that even if it's bad, it's better than not having anything to do." She nodded toward the space where he'd been doing yoga on the floor. "You seem to be keeping yourself pretty well occupied, though."
“No, not really.” He didn’t need to see the nod. “Not occupied enough. At least I am discovering which members of my staff are trustworthy.” He almost smiled. Settling the CD between the tips of his fingers, he turned it this way and that and watched the light slide off of it.
"How's that?" she asked, not quite following what he meant by it. "If they decide to start embezzling because you're not there over their shoulders, I'll take my baseball bat to them, just say the word."
He smiled again. Not a lot, but there. “Embezzling. No, not yet. But they’re trying to see how far they can go before I notice. It’s one of the things that makes being in China so problematic.”
"You're in China?" she asked. "Come on now, I don't think the hospital is that bad."
“I’m in China. As far as they are concerned. I have tried to make China sound very interesting.”
A smile spread slowly over her face. "Sneaky. How are you liking the landmarks? Is the Great Wall as impressive as people make it out to be?"
“I am too busy to see landmarks. I don’t even know the weather, as there is something wrong with that piece of software, apparently. It keeps insisting that they are under six inches of snow.”
"Everyone's been getting snow lately," she said. "It might be true. Snowpocalypse was just a few days back. I think you should put your faith in the machine, Thomas." She leaned forward a little, still watching him. it was strange, like looking at someone through a two-way mirror. She could see his every expression, but... "Thomas...I know this isn't what you want to hear, but you need to tell Max. If you don't, I'm going to have to. She'd never forgive me for keeping that from her."
Thomas, who associated the word ‘apocalypse’ with dire things like war operations and religious catastrophes, didn’t even know what to say to this first observation. He heard the sound of her moving on the material and turned automatically toward her, though he saw nothing different. “You don’t need to,” he said, surprised she would take that on. “I haven’t seen her since they confirmed, that’s all.”
She nodded. "Alright," she said. How had she become the person in the middle so quickly? She couldn't tell Thomas that Max had been in the hospital, and she had to take his word that he would tell Max before that came back to bite her as well. She had nothing comforting to say on the prospect of eternal half blindness, and it didn't seem right to joke about it. She crossed her legs at the ankle, staring at the floor. "Do you know when they're letting you out of here?"
“It doesn’t matter. I’m leaving as soon as I talk to Max. There’s no reason to stay; I can take care of myself.” He seemed so confident about this that when he told her it was only with half his attention, his mind clearly on the matter of Max, and not that of leaving. He turned the CD over in his fingers.
Audrey didn't know how to say that, as resilient as Thomas seemed to be, he wasn't going to be able to do this thing entirely on his own. She imagined he wouldn't take that well, and no one wanted to hear that they weren't capable of taking care of themselves. He was, but sometimes things just weren't that simple. If he wanted to push through like it was nothing, she expected he'd do it. She just hoped that he was willing to take a hand extended to him if he needed it. "Well, if you need anything, my number's in your phone." She paused. "After Max gives it back." She pushed herself up off the bed. "I'll let you get back to standing on your head."
He nodded slowly, but suspected he was going to be sleeping, not standing on anything. He probably pushed a little too far, something he rarely did when he had the leisure to think about what he was doing. Thomas thought things would be better once he left and was out of the sun. Possibly even his vision, not that he was counting on that. “I have it. I need to figure out the voice dialing, but I’m sure it won’t be difficult.” Not compared to the rest of it, anyway. He turned the CD again so it caught the light. “Thank you for the music.” He didn’t have anywhere to play it here, but once he got home, yes.
His thanks made her smile, and she shouldered her bag. "No problem. I hope it doesn't make you crazy, at the very least." She moved for the door, and paused there. "See you later." She didn't think about the phrase until it was out of her mouth, and she found herself grateful that he couldn't see her brief, mortified expression as she ducked out the door.