erin gracewater . {mary lennox} (marigoldsinarow) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-09-12 23:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | colin craven, maid marian, mary lennox |
Who: Toby & Erin, with what you might call an introduction with Colt.
What: Erin goes home, yay!
Where: Colt's apartment, and then on the way to Erin's.
When: Most recent in the succession of of this.
Warnings: None.
Five ten pm
“Shit, we’ve got a blue in bay twelve, blue in bay twelve -- Randall, get your ass in gear, you’re moving slower than molasses today.”
Five forty three pm
“Randall, can you grab the next bed over? Dressings needed before the attending gets back and there’s a GSW to the abdomen coming in so everything non-urgent needs to be outta here.”
Six oh eight pm
“Bloods needed on bed five, and -- ohshit get that cleaned up now and page the goddamn attending before--”
Six eighteen pm
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Randall. You’re walking out on goddamn overtime? ...Another hour, double-time? ....Better be fucking life or death.”
---
Six thirty three pm
The thing was, it could be.
Rain thrummed against the cab’s windows and roof and long rivulets of water was streaming so hard that it almost completely curtained out the mass of stone and wrought iron and glass that contained far more than marble floors and people with more money than sense, more money than goddamn God and the belief that they could command as much. It was a cocoon, a luxury compared to the Sound Transit Express full of tired people on tired feet and for the first moment of the last twenty-four, Toby was not in motion of her own making. The rain was a melody, an intensely rhythmic lullaby and when the cab drew to the stuttering, coughing end of its journey, the woman in the backseat of the ordinary and nondescript cab outside the Aubade for the second day in a row simply sat and contemplated exactly that, her forehead pressed against the cool of the glass for a long, long moment.
“You plannin’ on gettin’ out any time this year, kid?” His low rumble of a voice wasn’t entirely unsympathetic, but it cut into that momentary peace and he looked at the meter with its red figures that ticked on as the engine throbbed beneath the bad suspension and plastic-coated seats. He made no move to end its upward climb but rather looked pointedly at the thin and well-thumbed bills she had in her hand. She lifted her head away from the window and toward the creeping numbers and a moment later his thumb, fat and meaty, was slicking through the bills like a card-shark suspicious of cheats. She permitted herself the satisfaction of the door’s violent slam -- and then was utterly drenched whilst the Aubade’s doorman watched her with a carefully schooled and impassive face, waiting until that very last minute to press forward and pull open the heavy door with reluctant obeisance to so very undeserving a personage.
The sneakers made an unpleasant soft and mulching sound as she tracked a glistening trail of water along the polished floor to the correct door. Looking very much the way a drowned rat might, if it were clad in much-worn jeans and a far-too large hooded sweatshirt, she knocked and on the inward bark of command, grimly squished her way through the hall in search of her erstwhile ‘patient’.
Erin was asleep in the recliner, Colt having settled her there instead of the mattress with much effort exerted. She was sleeping, but her breathing was more shallow, her skin more sallow. She looked like a limp doll as she slept, delicate and disjointed, bruises blooming under her eyes like smudges on rice paper. And Colt, Colt was sitting behind his desk watching her. He had dark circles of his own, and he had a scowl, and he had an overwhelming feeling nothing was going to get better anytime soon. He was perfectly well aware that they’d come to a point where he was just trying to make her comfortable, rather than actually fixing anything for her, and it maddened him.
He looked toward the door, waiting for the blonde head of the hated nurse to come into view. He wanted to yell, just for the hell of it, but he was too worried for it. It showed.
The regular squelching sounds grew louder along the hall outside until that blonde head of hers (and the rest of her) appeared in the doorway utterly sodden and she dripped all over his floors. Toby looked as if she expected the yelling, as if that yelling might have knocked her over and apart but she would be prepared regardless and carry doggedly on. There were a matching set of deep-dark smears beneath Toby’s eyes too - as though what sleep she might have had once at home had been lost in twelve hours of running and shouting and the florescent light of the ER, but she looked at Colt and she looked at Erin lying so still and asleep and the heavy bag of whatever it was slid off her arm and slithered down her body to the floor with a quiet slump and she peered toward the nearest window with quiet, urgent need for something green and living and not so dead-exhausted as the occupants inside.
Colt’s voice stopped her search, determined and firm in the still quiet. “Quit wasting time on that. I can do with a nap after. Just do what you have to do, woman,” he said. He sounded worried, because he was. He sounded tired, because he was. And he sounded pissed at the universe and every damn person in it, because he was. “Go on,” he added, in case she missed the fact that it was an order the first time around.
She could have retorted, snapped back something quick and sharp and true about his exhaustion being quite beyond the issue, in usual Toby-fashion, but instead she was quite silent. She let go of her search without argument and accepted the added burden of leaving him with ‘a nap after’ as the sum total of the drain on the cantankerous man who issued orders with worry practically shivering itself apart from him. That stool he’d been occupying the preceding day had been pushed off to one side, and she took a little while to settle herself there and draw it up beside Erin before one very wet and cool hand curved fingers around Erin’s wrist.
It wasn’t much of a sleep since she surfaced so quickly, but what there was of her reaction was only to be expected after this long. Her eyes seemed too burdened by lashes to open all the way, and her mouth was dry, taking up any moisture with the extraordinarily shallow breathing. She didn’t so much as shift, but she did try. “Came back, did you?” she asked, very gently, recognizing the blonde. She closed her eyes again. “I keep doing that, too.”
Colt sat forward, wanting to hear what Erin was saying, and once she closed her eyes again his own lifted to Toby. His eyes had the look of a man who had seen death, who had looked it in the eyes and knew what it looked like. He was terrified. “Do it.”
It wasn’t as desperate as before: she’d thought about it for so long in the dark and quiet hours that she had spent with the warm and sweet weight of her daughter’s head against her, asleep. Calculated how it would feel, to throw out that hot-quick net of needing, out beyond cold stone and wet iron, to cup it around a world of people and things that laughed and breathed and moved and carried on their lives oblivious to what Creations were and how they worked. To coax out strands of what kept them so, and weave them together and feed them through into someone else. It didn’t work the way Toby had imagined it, there was a roughness that came of too little sleep and too little practice and the calculations of how much slipped when she glanced down inadvertently and looked at Erin, as weak-looking as a hospice patient. When it came, it flooded down through her and Toby made a small sound of something she’d have denied as pain and it burned away beneath her hands and into Erin with a fierce and glorious push of stolen energy.
It was as before: Erin took a hard lungful of air like she’d been starving for oxygen her whole life, and the recliner nearly tipped when she sat up so quickly she might very well have ended up on top of Toby if she hadn’t gripped the material very firmly and pulled herself back. She was panting, as if she’d just run a race, and abruptly she felt like she could run one ten times over. Her eyes got very wide, white and pink under the thick lashes. “Goodness,” she said, gritting her teeth. “That was... a lot.”
Colt, who had gone from feeling worried and concerned and ornery to feeling exhausted and drained beyond all reason, chuckled tiredly when Erin sat up like she did. He’d felt the power drain more clearly this time, had been expecting it, and so he just leaned back against the chair’s back with a grin on his lips. “Thank me later, and let the nurse here take you on home,” he said, nodding to Toby. “Call me when you get there, let me know she’s safe.” He didn’t mention that he’d made multiple arrangements to keep an eye on her while she slept; he didn’t think she needed to know that right now.
Toby’s lips twitched tight as Colt shrugged off praise he wasn’t owed -- much like a child magnanimously reserving the right to crow until later; her hand withdrew from Erin’s smartly and went to push back some of that dripping hair until it no longer puddled on the recliner’s arm-rest. Erin looked even healthier than she had done when Toby had left the previous time, color flushing where grayish pallor had been and when Toby’s fingers had dropped, it had been from warm skin rather than clammy and cool. She didn’t look at Colt, but kept her eyes steady on Erin -- as if by watching the end result, the reason, she could just about manage what was needed.
“Sure,” she said shortly, voice dry in a throat that felt raw with gone-away heat, but she stood and she moved with deliberation toward where she’d dropped that waterlogged bag.
Erin glanced at Colt curiously and then looked back at Toby with a very small but bright sunshine smile. She didn’t thank Colt at all, since he was so kind to delay matters. “Thank you,” she said to the nurse, pulling closed the borrowed robe and nestling a little deeper in the borrowed recliner. She was up a moment later. “I’ll just... bring your robe back later.” She said it in the general direction of the desk rather than at Colt himself.
Colt just grunted. Just like that damn impossible woman not to thank him for all he’d been through to ensure her hide stay safe.
The purple phone covered in stickers came out of the depths of the bag; Toby wiped it off against damp jeans and punched out a number before looking over at Erin in that silly blue robe -- “You’ll need to give the address,” she said, and then there was a squawk from the phone and Toby was involved in the short interchange needed for acquisition of a cab for the two women. ‘Going where?’ asked the uninterested operator, and Toby looked at Erin, and held the phone out for her to take.
Erin took the phone and recited her Bathos address, and then she politely handed the phone back to Toby. And thanked her again. She slogged through the overlong hem of the robe to pick up her briefcase in a heap on the other side of the room. Clearly pleased to be going home, she dusted off her bag and looked around for something she’d forgotten. “What time is it? Did I get very long this time?”
Colt just watched. There was a car outside, but he didn’t interrupt them. It was good to see Erin working with Toby. It meant she was doing better and doing better was the goal, even if he felt a pang and the thought of her going.
The phone buzzed in Toby’s hand; not a long wait at all but it was early enough in the evening for the demand on cabs for nights’ out to be low. She’d been watching it, too. The thanks given had produced an awkward nod-shrug combination; either Toby wasn’t used to it or she didn’t like it or something of the both and her eyes had remained averted and her body language had kept her very much apart from the room and the people in it -- but at Erin’s question, she looked up and she tucked the phone back into the bag. “No idea. Hoping you won’t need help again for a while longer,” and she turned to lead the way out of the house and out of the apartment block and out of the range of demands. And then she stopped. “Might need an umbrella.” Apparently, being abrupt was held off a little on account of rain.
“I don’t have an umbrella,” Erin admitted, smiling. “So I’ll get wet.” She glanced over her shoulder at Colt. “Are you going to come visit my garden later?” As if she hadn’t been sick at all, and a mild cold in a rainstorm were all that awaited.
He looked at her, but he didn’t agree; he couldn’t agree. “Get the hell out of here, woman.”
Outside the study and beyond, the hall still had the glistening trail that led back to where Toby had been before. Now she trod along it, her feet stepping exactly where the wet was so that Erin didn’t have to, wet bag tucked against her side and opening doors and leading the way as obeisant as the doorman was, once they were within his domain. With a snap-to of attention, he seemed to not-notice Erin’s attire with the smooth service of the very best of employees and with a look in Toby’s direction as if satisfying himself as to the correctness of his previous judgment call, he produced a very good umbrella and took Erin’s arm himself to lead her out into the street beyond the canopy of the Aubade and into the waiting cab. Toby followed, grateful for the umbrella’s appearance and that attentiveness paid Erin -- although getting quite damp as she trailed afterward. It was once the door was closed and the cab driver turned his head to look at the both of them ensconced in the back, that Toby let go a breath and her hands fiddled with the strap of the bag and then they stilled too.
Erin, for her part, seemed to only expect the courtesy and the aid, though she was a pale mussed little thing in a man’s robe. When she was well (and sometimes even when she was sick) Erin had about her a certain collected competency that only offered little spaces for everyone to act the way she expected them to act. It was, clearly, long habit, and there was no venom in it. She settled herself next to Toby and wrung out a bit of the robe hem, not responding to the driver and obviously waiting for him to get on with his job. To Toby, she said, “It was very nice of you to come fetch me.”
“Would you get moving? If that meter’s ticking while we’re sat here, you’re not getting paid,” Toby informed the man with the kind of acidity and obvious expectation of promptness that had him swivelling in his seat and a moment later the ticking over and rumble of the engine waking up from idling. After that momentary rousing, a second’s worth of holding the sort of authority that had people do as she bid, with a faint air of it being precisely for their own good, she seemed to fade back and sat quite still, with her shoulder set against the edge of the window. When Erin spoke, she looked up and it was clear she hadn’t expected to be spoken to at all -- for all the argument over employ, Colt’s clear dismissal of the help had been a role Toby had slid into with very little effort at all.
Now, she was awkward. She cleared her throat. “You needed someone. And he couldn’t.” And that was enough, it seemed. For Toby, it was simple; she was needed and she was there, regardless of what else there may be to the matter.
Erin frowned, very suddenly. “No, he doesn’t like leaving.” She looked very keenly through the passing shadows at Toby’s face. “How come you said he was on meds?” There was a certain kind of respect Erin appeared to possess for Toby, probably associated with her profession and not her sticker-stuck gear.
Toby’s face turned toward Erin, away from the sliding view of Seattle’s architecture and the people who were out walking in such a downpour. A passing streetlamp lit her face very clearly; it was as expressionless as Toby knew how to make it. “He told you he wasn’t.” It was very flat. There was only the vaguest possibility of a hint that Toby was implying he wasn’t telling the truth. “How long you known him?” It could’ve been years, from the way he’d bossed her and it could have been moments, from the way he’d looked at her, as though holding something very fragile and very precious in his hands, like a just-fledged bird had fallen into them and lain there, trusting. She looked at Erin, in her too-big, too-long bathrobe, thoughtful and wondered if the two of them had even known they were in love with one another. Probably not, or regardless of whether the man didn’t like leaving or found it too painful to do (which was her better guess) it wouldn’t have been Toby sat in the cab.
“About a month or so,” Erin said, unashamed of the short time span that she had known him. It wasn’t like she was cuddled up in his bedroom, after all. He just pulled a mattress into the study, right? “He said he wasn’t, yes, but he shouted it so I wouldn’t have time to think about it anymore, and he does that when he doesn’t want to talk about things. What are the meds for? Or did you just say it to needle him?”
A month or so. They probably didn’t, then. But it wasn’t her place and she knew neither of them beyond a pulse that butterfly-fluttered beneath her fingers and bold commands that expected to be carried out and Toby turned her head to look back out the window, not caring as hard as she could. Until --
“Don’t need to needle him. It’d be like poking a bear and expecting to get free,” Toby was not incredulous, but there was something a little like it in her words - she had the measure, it seemed, of Colt at least. She drummed her fingers against the sill of the cab window, and chewed the inside of her cheek, weighing the options. Colt wasn’t a patient -- not of hers, but she guessed still someone’s, and confidentiality was a thing tied to latex gloves and paper aprons and ‘what’s the problem today, Mr Byron?’ rather than passing conversation. But it felt a little like tattling, beyond a mistake made when too tired and too focused to think of such constructs as privacy and dignity. She looked back at Erin, the girlfriend who wasn’t-yet, and made a regretful purse of the lips.
“Not my business. Ask him,” she said, firmly, and, “I could be wrong,” added to tie it all off with uncertainty except she didn’t sound uncertain at all.
Erin looked displeased. It was a good way of putting it, ‘displeased,’ as she looked a lot like royalty with her white skin and dark hair with the shadows dark enough, and her delicate features went a sour and composed. “He never answers any straight questions. He’s spoiled and he likes to shout too much.” Erin turned her chin and gave Toby a look that was quite pleading for royalty. “But he means well, with his school and helping me yesterday.” She had lost track of how many nights it was. “He won’t tell me if there’s something wrong. You can’t tell me?”
That he meant well hadn’t been in question; despite demanding and ordering and adding Toby herself to the ranks of those he could dismiss and call up at whim, despite mentioning his money each moment as though it could buy him good favor with anyone he spoke to -- he had not had the stony coldness of men she had met before who didn’t mean well at all, and it had been entirely clear that Erin meant more than a fraction of what she had seen herself. He was also far too old to behave like a child with too many toys at his disposal and Erin herself was giving Toby a look that she ought to know better than to give. It didn’t look like she wore it much, however -- it wasn’t aristocratic, which was how Erin looked, even when sickly on a mattress in the middle of a study.
“If he’s on meds, then he’s with a doctor,” she said, and her voice softened at the edges without her meaning it to, a smoothing out and an assuaging of fear that came too-naturally to Toby to fit with the rest of her. “So it’s nothing wrong. If,” she said again, and that was firm.
Erin frowned at this series of answers, which were not reassuring to her in the least. She vaguely remembered the faces of the people who had come before Toby, but not that well, and she couldn’t remember if any of them seemed to know Colt. “There were people after he left me with Byron,” she said, almost to herself. “But I was afraid and... I can’t remember who they were. Maybe one was his doctor.” She didn’t twitch or chew her nails or play with her hair when she thought. She just spoke out loud, as if no one was there at all.
“Maybe.” Toby didn’t volunteer the fact that Colt had in fact, mentioned a doctor before, one who was a Creation presumably, because that doctor had suggested what had been wrong was Creation-based. He hadn’t been able to fix Erin, after all - but if what was wrong with Colt could be helped by pain pills, the kind that caused that same twinging expression and tightness around the eyes that were the same in any ward when it was time for meds, then probably the problem Colt had wasn’t to do with his Creation at all.
She sat back in her seat now, and began the math in her head, of how much the cab from the Bathos to the Hamartia would be, and how much that would take out of the budget for such things and whether really, she ought to walk to the bus instead and whether she was tired enough that the cab ride could be considered necessity rather than luxury. There was balancing to be done, and a mental workbook of ever-changing figures absorbed her into concentrated silence and a frown.
“Maybe,” Erin repeated, voice dreamy. The cab turned down the main road to Bathos and Erin turned to Toby with a sort of business-like anxiety, like talking to an employee when you were concerned about the status of her most recent project. “But you’ll still help, right? I know he can be foul sometimes.” She looked seriously into Toby’s face, looking for signs of exasperation, “We really do need a Creation with so much control, though. He will be terrible about the money, but just take the salary and no more and eventually he’ll forget about it.”
“I’ll help,” Toby said quietly, because she couldn’t say no, because there was no way to neatly cut the threads of a stitched-off part of life that could now be seen as ‘dealt with’. “Until you don’t need me any longer.” Toby sounded as though certainty had that lying within grasp, as though the solution for Erin’s need would end and she would slide away from the reach of both of them, except she wasn’t certain at all. “And there’s no need to pay me, for this.” There was a type of hard pride there, flinty, as though if you tapped beneath it you would find someone holding tightly on when there was nothing to hold on to. Toby looked at Erin and it was as if it would be a very bad kind of insult, to refuse it.
Erin ran rough-shod over that kind of pride. Colt threw it in her face all the time. She looked aghast as the cab pulled to a stop and they both rocked a little with the cab. “He’s not paying you?” she demanded in what was nothing like a squeak but more of a royal demand. How dare Colt be so petty as to let his temper get in the way of something like this? Doctors didn’t have time to just run around random apartments and deal with obnoxious bedside... whatever-he-was-to-her...!
Toby’s deep discomfort was palpable. Colt had mentioned payment on occasion -- an obscene amount ‘to start immediately’ as though that would be a motivator, as though she were so heartless that it requiredsuch heavy re-numeration for trying to help someone who couldn’t be helped by someone else. He had thrown around such terms, had treated her as if she were in his employ despite her refusing at every which-way, and his own quite clear dislike of even the thought of having her there. Yet it had never materialized and besides -- it wasn’t real medicine or real work or anything but using something that had had no good use before.
“I don’t work for him,” she said, because it was true and because it was a quite neat way of getting round things. “What I did with you,” Toby rubbed the palm of her right hand with the fingers of her left, the way someone with a scab or a scar might absently check it were still healing, “Not really a price-tag.” There was a smile, the first of the night and it was surprisingly bright. She didn’t look quite so tired, when she smiled. “We should get you inside.”
Erin’s manner became even more brisk and business-like, very much like autumn as the wind became very crisp and dry. “Perhaps not, but your assistance and your patience with him--and with me.” Now she smiled gently, not an abashed smile or a condescending one, but somewhere solidly in between. The cab had stopped solid now, idling, and Erin was fishing in her briefcase. She came out with a little book and a neat little silver pen, and she started writing a check (Byron’s stationary, naturally). “Who should I make it out to, then? And don’t pay the driver, I have cash.” She paused with the end of the pen at her lips, and her gaze was inscrutable. “I’d like to do this while I have... the mind to, if you know what I mean?” Erin thought she was going to wind down like a bad clock fairly soon, and she wasn’t fooling herself about the matter.
So much energy and it lasted so very little. Toby would marvel at it if it weren’t so tiresome, made the business so endless. Where Colt had had only fatalistic certainty that Erin would not - could not - get better, Toby hoped, with a little more concern than she was entirely pleased to have for a woman she had known less than a handful of days. She looked at Erin and she looked at the neatness, the tidiness of each precise little action and thought that quite possibly this whole mess of abilities was the first real intrusion of any sort of mess at all permitted. It made the obsession with money that both of them had, a little easier to bear.
“No,” she said with the kind of firmness that was kind and warm but utterly resilient to any sort of persuasion. It was the sort that came from pride and from being the sort of person who didn’t take payment for favors and she looked at the briefcase pointedly as if telling Erin to put both accouterments away. “Thank you. It would make it --” Toby floundered for a moment, struggling to put into words discomfort and the vague, sordidness of taking money for something human nature made it impossible not to give. “It’s not a job. I have a job. You need to go inside,” she said again.
Very much unlike Colt, Erin clearly knew when no was no. She looked a little longer into Toby’s resolute expression, hoping for some dawn of sensibility, but then gave it up as a lost cause. Slowly she lowered the pen, carefully tucked it back into the little checkbook, and both went back the way they came. “Alright,” she said, not even pretending to understand but accepting the other woman’s objections anyway. She tucked the battered briefcase closed and then, after giving Toby another curious but smiling look, she paid the driver. He got exactly fifteen percent tip rounded up to the nearest dollar.
Erin pushed at the door, put one ankle out, and then turned back. She pressed Toby’s hand with hers. “Thank you.” Then she got out, tucking the robe neatly about herself as if she was still in her business suit.