Narrative - stock pilfering (with dead people)
Who: Sarah, Adam, random nurses/doctors When: Jan 14th, the very early hours of Saturday morning (Forward dated due to RL) Where: Lima Hosptial What: Adam needs yet more help to pass on messages; Sarah's not overly enthused at the situation. But at least she's not committing more felonies. Mostly. Warning: Potentially grotesque imagery, dead people talking, the mouth of a 'former' Puckerman.
At this point, Sarah was used to not getting too much sleep. She was fortunate enough that her parents had chosen to attend some benefit at her father's work which left her on her own in the house. Not just because Richard was coming around again (seriously, they could just go wherever they wanted, how awesome was that) but because Adam had, once again, shown up at three in the morning and requested another field trip.
"I am not breaking into another pharmacy."
"No breaking in required, this place never shuts it's doors." She should've known then that this was a terrible idea. At least they could drive. She put on her 'tatty' clothes again, the hoodie and jeans still a little dusty and thread worn from when she last wore them, and tied her hair up. He was mostly quiet on the drive, giving her directions since he knew much better the layout of the town and telling her where to go was better than trying to let her navigate herself.
Parking her car, amongst quite a few others, she frowned at him. "The hospital?" She'd been to the Lima hospital once before, when she was little and still lived mostly in Lima, when her leg had gotten cut badly while she'd been playing. She had a scar from where it needed stitching. She wasn't sure if she liked the idea of walking around a hospital now. "Are we visiting someone?"
"Something like that." Adam stepped out of her car, through the door and started to walk along the car park, towards the doors. She had to run a little to keep up with him. "There's something super important that we need to get. They might have it already, but we need to be sure. It's an important factor in a baby's development you know." She didn't know, she didn't even know what he was talking about.
He still led her through the lobby of the hospital, Sarah getting just a few glances before they turned into an empty hall and then Adam vanishing into a cupboard. Seriously? If he wasn't dead she'd be wondering about these motives of his. Looking around, Sarah twisted the handle and opened the door, slipping in behind him and closing it carefully behind her.
"Why are we in a supply cupboard in the hospital at half three in the morning?" She really wished Adam wouldn't be so damn secretive. Why couldn't he just explain things to her and then let her do them? Playing the magical mystery game was only fun when you weren't sleep deprived, cold and wondering if you'd be charged with a list of felonies as long as your arm afterwards.
"If you put the bucket on the bottom, you should be able to climb the shelves and get up into the vents." He was serious, looking at the shelves and then the vents and Sarah just started shaking her head. "You said you'd help!"
"I said no more felonies."
"You said no more breaking into places. We're not breaking in. We're already in. We're sneaking." She had to stare at him, because damnit he was right and she had to be much more specific from now on with Adam.
"We are going to be having a long discussion later about you and plans and running them by me before we're out places. This is not how I should be spending my morning. It's utterly ridiculous. How can you possibly--" she muttered away to herself as she climbed up, bracing a foot against a wall while reaching up to pull the vent guard down and coughing at the dust that fell from it.
She was at least getting a bit of a work out with Adam. Climbing through windows and walking for miles and now hauling herself up into tiny, enclosed spaces. She wasn't too concerned with the lack of space, the chance of rats (it was a hospital, surely there wouldn't be any), suffocation (it was an air vent, surely she'd be fine) and potentially falling to her death if it came away from the roof with her inside. Her main concern, really, was Adam, who appeared behind her, staring at her butt again.
"How is it you can walk through walls and can't punch things but you can sit in my car and climb through air ducts with me, staring at my rear end?" It didn't make sense to her really, they passed through solid objects all the time, but they walked on the ground and could sit on chairs and it was weird as all hell.
"I don't know, it's a thing I guess." She's pretty sure that he shrugged, she can tell that he's frowning at her because she's asking strange questions again, but really, she has a right to. "And your ass is right there, of course I'm gonna stare at it."
"You're horrifically lewd for a seven-year-old." He gave her directions through the maze of vents, going as far as to convince her to shimmy up one floor on an incline. It was cramped and uncomfortable and her knees her from the crawling and the next time he showed up she was going to interrogate him before they did anything. When they finally got where she was being led to, he just vanished through the bottom of the vent.
"What, where- I can't do that. How do I get down?" Ghosts were just so self-centred on this travelling thing.
"There's another guard thing on your left, I think you'll make the ground." He thinks? Oh, she is not doing this ever, ever again. The guard was easy to push out of place, swinging down to hang on it's hinges as she twisted around to lower her legs out first. There was a good three feet to drop when she was hanging from the vent, her knees twinging in mild pain when she landed on the floor. "C'mon, you need to get a key."
"This is feeling suspiciously illegal. Is this illegal? Don't answer that." She knew it was. She was sort of having fun.
Adam just rolled his eyes at her, nodding her over to where a key sat on top of a filing cabinet and then walking to the far end of the room where a gate stood. "These are all prescription drugs. Don't start freaking out, some of them are over the counter medicines, I just figured, you know, you didn't want to rob the pharmacy again."
"So we'll rob the hospital?"
"No, see, these ones go out to those weird out-reach programs, okay. So it's all legit and stuff, because they go to expectant teenage mothers, so this is what they were meant for." Sarah sighed, shaking her head.
"You'd manage to sell ice to an eskimo, you know that." She knew she was going to follow through, they'd come this far and he was making a decent argument so, what the hell, right? "What am I looking for?"
"Prenatal vitamins." Of course she was. "They'll need it, you know, because there are medical stuff going on. And I just think it might be useful. I've seen some pregnant people take them. You know, from hanging around and stuff?" Sarah just listened to him while opening up the store area and quickly scanning through the labels on the bottles. "I kinda want to help make sure the baby is healthy. Because it's a boy, I know it is."
"How do you know that?"
"I can feel it in my bones." Sarah stopped looking, turning to stare at him with a bottle of folic acid tablets in her hand. "What?"
"You don't have bones." She was aware he meant it as a purely dismissive comment, like those times her nana told her that she knew it was going to rain because of tingles she got (the tingles were in nana's left butt cheek and they only happened because she was sitting at an angle and her ass had gone numb).
"Don't start with me missy." Adam gave her the 'petulant child' look and Sarah shook her head again. He could go from mini-adult to seven-year-old cutie in less than a heart beat and she was constantly surprised by this. "Anyway, Noah had a girl last time, and they didn't keep her. But this time it's a boy, and they're gonna keep him. So, it's important that he's strong and healthy when he's born. So he doesn't get sick."
Adam didn't have to say it for Sarah to hear the 'like me' at the end of his comment there. It made sense now really. He obviously followed his brother around, she was starting to think a lot of the ghosts did that, when they had loved ones to follow, and Adam was clearly fed up with feeling useless. Maybe a few potential felonies wasn't so bad.
"Okay, I've got enough prenatal stuff to do the whole pregnancy and then some." Even if she was sure that Adam's brother's girlfriend had to be at least a few months along. "Anything else we're here for?" She really hoped they weren't going crazy with stuff or anything, grabbing one of the medical zip-lock bags and dropping the bottles of pills in there. She had two bottles of prenatal multi-vitamins, another two of folic acid pills and some iron pills just in case. Those were the important ones, she was sure. "How do we get out, by the way?"
"You could dress like a nurse?" The smirk on his face told her what kind of nurse he was thinking about and Sarah just shook her head.
"Look at my hair, would I pass as a nurse in here?" Adam sighed and looked around before running through the wall, leaving Sarah to wait. She locked up the store again, placing the key where she found it before having a mild burst of paranoia and having the wipe the key to make sure her finger prints weren't on it. Climbing on a table, she stretched across to pull up the vent guard and push it closed, just to make it less obvious that someone was messing around in there. She was still stretched out when Adam came running back in.
"Wow, you really are pale." Sarah glanced down to catch him staring at her bared midriff from her stretching, pushing back and jumping down from the table in order to glare at him. "What?" He didn't act at all apologetic, just smirking that smirk that was more like a leer and Sarah shook her head again. "There's a room across the hall, they've got those hospital scrub things, you know the blue outfits they were on the TV shows?"
The hall was empty enough that she could dart from one room to the next, grabbing some of the medical scrubs and looking around. There wasn't exactly anywhere to get changed. "C'mon, hurry up." The leer was back.
"Out in the hall you. Make sure no one's coming, I'm not putting on a peep-show for a seven-year-old."
"I'm totally fourteen by the way, but whatever." It was utterly insane just how knee deep she was in this; she'd never broken a law before these ghosts started appearing to her, never so much as skipped a day of school either. Then Richard showed up and she ducked out of two classes and missed curfew to dig up his body at Madame Fairweather's school and now she was stealing things for Adam. She didn't know these, well, kids and yet there she was, probably going to go to jail.
Pulling the top on, grabbing for one of the blue hat things to tuck her bright red hair into, Sarah started to look around for something to put her own clothes in to get them out. She had to make do with one of the bright yellow medical waste bags. Slipping back out the door, she gave Adam a nod before he started them down the hall, walking a few feet ahead of Sarah. Her heart was thumping in her chest again, much worse than at the pharmacy because this time there were people around. She could hear voices in rooms and the click of footsteps and squeak of wheels, there were constant announcements over the intercom, it just gave her steady bursts of adrenaline almost constantly.
"We'll go out the kitchen." Adam didn't bother whispering, but Sarah didn't bother answering verbally, too afraid that she'd draw attention to them. Or at least to herself.
The kitchens, unlike the rest of the hospital, were mostly deserted. Likely due to the fact that it was approaching five in the morning. They'd probably start filling up in a few minutes, an hour maybe, and then Sarah would've been in for it. The back door wasn't even alarmed, so once she and Adam crossed out of the building, Sarah didn't think twice about breaking into a run, her biological waste bag clutched in her hand with her clothes and loot hidden away.
"You are such a bad, bad influence." Sarah panted for breath, pulling the drivers door open and climbing into the car, trying to steady her heartbeat long enough to drive home.
"Admit it," Adam just grinned from his place beside her, "you're totally having fun." She laughed slightly, shaking her head but not denying it, because maybe it was fun, but she was still heading for some serious trouble if this kept up.
"C'mon, lets just drop the stuff off."
She left the car by the sidewalk when she got home, dashing into her room to grab a brown envelope big enough to hold the pill bottles and grabbing a sheet of paper to write a note for it. She wrote Noah's name on the front and jammed the note in with the bottles before sealing the envelope and clumping down the stairs again, still dressed in her hospital clothes.
Adam gave her the directions to his old house, she noticed the way he stared longingly at the building and she wanted nothing more than to be able to hug the kid right then.
"Hey, you're being a pretty awesome little brother right now you know." She didn't bother mentioning what she'd put in her little note, getting a small nod from him as she went and left the envelope in front of the door for later. "You staying here, or coming home with me?"
"I'll come back with you," Adam spared another look at the Puckerman house before materialising in the car again. "At least you talk to me, right?" She could tell he was warming up to her.