The instinct to run toward danger when Torrie is in trouble is as ingrown in Solomon as self preservation is in most people. It never so much as occurred to him to think twice in the minutes that it took for him to hurry from his desk, to grab a few supplies, his gun and knife, and commandeer a vehicle. He didn't think twice about the fact that the men who took Zik were actually trying to take him, or about the dangerous neighborhood, or about his recognizable face. It wouldn't have mattered if he had thought it, he would have come, but it's revealing that he just plain didn't. Solomon and mortality have a tenuous relationship at best.
It isn't often in their lives that Torrie asks Sol for help. Of course there have been instances, but all of them stand out in Sol's mind. Each one, it seemed, a marker of a shift in her life - and thus in his. He doesn't really know if this is that or something else, but he's on the watch as they settle into the exam room to wait.
He lifts his moss-and-mud eyes up to his sister's face, brows lifted, and scoffs easily. "What, you think I have something more important to be doing?" he asks. It's weird, sitting here in the visitor's chair with her there on the table with her bandages and blood, even after all these years. Twenty-one years as of March, cancer free, though nobody's tested him for anything in ages now. He remembers a hundred, probably a thousand times that Torrie sat in waiting rooms for him, missed school for him, spent birthdays in treatment rooms for him, lived without half of her family for him. Held his hand when something hurt. Did homework in a too-familiar hospital family room. Sat at his bedside and said goodbye to him when he'd accepted he was dying and she was barely old enough to know what that meant. So his look is sardonic when she gives him the out now.
"Only way I'm leaving is if you kick me out," he says, because, he supposes, she still has that right. Patient privacy and all of that. But he's comfortable enough to presume that she might rather him around than not. Sol peruses a jar of tongue depressors, not surprised that they still have a stock of these things because he and his lists know that they do, but that doesn't mean he hasn't started to wonder about it. There are other things to wonder right now, though. "What were you doing over there, Tor?" he finally asks, with maybe concern, but no accusation.