Who: Henry and Revy What: Henry plays nursmaid Where: Revy's apartment When: Same day as these texts Rating: Pretty low - Warning for Revy's potty mouth and some injuries Status: Complete!
Henry had a feeling that it was only going to be a matter of time before he got a text or call from Revy telling him she’d gotten beaten up in her dreams and that her injuries had carried over here. (Why that was a thing here he could not understand). In preparation he had dug out the first aid kit he’d had when he was doing freelance field work. Not all of the articles he’d been the photographer on had been in what would call civilization covering events, people or whatever. Some of what he’d done had been out in the honest-to-god wild where a simple cut on the foot could equal serious infection - even death - if not properly treated. Therefore Henry’s first aid kit was a little more robust than the standard household fair.
Also, Henry’s mother was a nurse. Granted most of her career had been home hospice - keeping people as comfortable as possible in their own homes while their terminal illness ate away at their lives - but she had taught Henry pretty much everything he knew about treating injuries, identifying and caring for a concussion, he even knew how to set and splint a bone. Not that he ever had to. At least not yet.
Talked out of not picking up a couple of five dollar pizzas from Little Caesars, Henry had only the kit - a bag that looked like a throwback to a satchel carried by doctors who made house calls once upon a time - as he went up to Revy’s apartment where he knocked on her door.
Revy was all human, but a tank. Years of gritty street life had molded her ability to endure the roughest of circumstances, and throw the several years of maximum security prison? She had a hide of steel, etched with scars old and new. From knives, bullets - each their own story. A full-blown battle between her and the bitch-maid with the bloodhound title had been a hell of a tango, but she emerged with all limbs in tact and alive. Maybe with a body discolored in purples and blues (a sore, walking bruise), and her face had taken most of the damage - split lip, scraped jaw, gashes under her eye and bruises on her nose and cheeks. Concussion too, probably. A minor one, just a guess.
Hence the sunglasses she insisted on wearing indoors. Helped with any bright light, from her laptop to her phone screen, and that’s how she answered the door. Freshly showered, ebony hair damp, cigarette in her mouth.
And a cold beer pressed against a contusion on her face. Dream injuries were bearable. Hurt like a fucking bitch, but bearable. “Why can’t you be a magic healing wizard?”
She looked worse than Henry had imagined, but his surprise flickered across his face for only a moment before he stepped past her into the apartment. “Sorry,” he told her as he set his kit down on her coffee table among her guns n’ things. “No wizards in my dream world.” Nope, just imprisonment and weird holes - Huh, Gaz was right, that did sound inappropriate.
He pointed at the couch. “Sit.” But, he didn’t bother to wait for her to comply before he had the kit open and had pulled out one of those blue chemical ice-packs, which he punched to activate.
Wrapping the ice pack in a hand towel, Henry turned back towards Revy. Wordlessly he took the beer from her and replaced it with the pack gently against her bruised face. “Hold it like this,” he instructed moving her hand to keep it in place. Then it was back to the satchel for bacitracin, cotton balls and a few bandage strips.
“I’ve never patched anyone up after a fight before,” he told her. “But a scrape’s a scrape regardless, I guess.” A look at her over his shoulder, eyes narrowing a little at those sunglasses. “How’s your head?”
Hm. Weird. When was the last time someone actually played nurse with her? Before her time behind bars, anyway - they had official nurses, some were cunts but there were a couple genuine gems here and there. More so when Mr. Chang had her as active muscle running errands and raining the occasional carnage on the streets; getting banged up wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. Frozen steak and bitchin’ painkillers did the trick for the job. Usually. Revy had neither this go-around. Ibuprofen, maybe.
Even with the beer free for consumption thanks to Henry providing an actual icepack, she refrained from opening it. Tempting. So fucking tempting, but she knew the drill - lay off the alcohol for a bit when the head received a couple blows. Smoking was probably ill-advised but asking her to quit that right this moment was asking too much. “It’s been better,” she replied, ass stationed on the couch (as instructed, she’d be a nice patient). Revy flicked some ashes into the tray on the coffee table, tiger eyes on him. Mostly out of curiosity. “Thanks for coming, I guess, but you don’t have to do this. I’m not bleeding to death.”
Well, she mostly meant to gloat about the fight through text. And gush about it, because while Roberta was a raging homicidal twat she had been a damn good opponent. Too bad Balalaika interfered when she did. Three of the most violent women in close proximity while the men stared on shaking in their pussyboots. Made for a hilarious story the morning after, anyway.
Henry wasn’t used to people gloating and gushing about their fights. Revy was the first person he knew who got into fights for fun. But, whatever, he’d get her patched up first and then she could gloat to her heart’s content.
He sat on the coffee table across from her, Bacitracin in one hand and a cotton ball in the other. Henry had no idea if there was risk of infection to injuries sustained in Dream World. Probably. They were real enough here to be open to any airborne nasty that human beings came into contact every day. Better safe than sorry, as his mother would tell him.
“She really fucked you up,” he said, pouring a few drops of the disinfectant onto the cotton ball. “Hold still, this might sting a little.” He gently dabbed at the cut on her lip first. He smirked a little as he worked. “Too bad she doesn’t live here too,” Henry said. “Then maybe I could see how badly you fucked her up.”
Bah, let it sting. Best to abandon the cigarette too - she let it burn in the ashtray while he tended to her mouth. “We both made each other really fucking hideous by the end of it,” Revy shrugged, bare feet shuffling restlessly. It was hard to keep completely still. And part of it had to do with feeling awkward. She had no clue why, it was hard for her to ever feel awkward, but there it was. “And I’d draw the bitch if I could draw.” Broken glasses, bloody. Impossible to kill, but so was she. Sort of.
After a minute she pushed the shades over her head, the light in the room making her painfully squint. The lacerations under her eye looked like they were about to bleed again. “Remind me to play nurse if your dreams fuck you up, alright?” she grumbled. “I’ve got Chinese covered.”
The least she could do, she figured. Friends did this kind of shit for each other, right? Revy was figuring it out in her own way - the whole civilian life thing where you hang out with friends and there weren’t any guns involved sort of ordeal. She wasn’t proud of being socially or emotionally stunted in that regard, so she was trying to break out of that mold.
Yes, Friends did do this kind of shit for one another: Finding them a new job when they lost theirs, rescuing them when they were stranded out in the middle of nowhere doing voodoo, letting them crash on your couch after guzzling most-of-a bottle of rum, patching them up after a Dream Fight. All done without question and with the appropriate amount of ribbing.
“Look up,” Henry instructed so he could get a better look at what was going on under her eye. Henry readied a fresh cotton ball with disinfectant to clean it. Hopefully, she didn’t need stitches. Henry wasn’t trained on that.
“Hopefully, I won’t need any nursing,” he told her. Another grin, this one a little more shit-eating and smug, “kinda hard to get all banged up when you’re trapped in your own apartment. Did crawl through that hole, though and somehow ended up on some kind of down escalator. Most random thing I’ve ever dreamed about.”
Looking up, Nurse Boss. No point in arguing; it’d waste her breath and she’d end up with an even bigger headache. “Don’t get too cocky,” she snorted, having noticed that confidence. “It’ll bite you in the ass, and it won’t be the sexy ass-biting.” Revy sometimes didn’t know what to even make of Henry - he was his own brand of odd, not as naive as a face like his would typically suggest, but she had a feeling he could take some shit if it all boiled down to it.
A different, quiet kind of tough. The opposite of her (which was abrasive and uncouth).
Still, there was something about his dreams that just seemed outright fucking creepy. Trapped in apartment with no one to even notice, like your existence was wiped off the face of the Earth? Gut instinct didn’t lie. Hers were fortunate enough to be pretty damn straightforward - modern day piracy living in a shithole and traveling through open waters. Tales of violent and bloody glory with a couple snags. “But that is pretty fucking random. Anything at the bottom of the escalator?”
“Dunno,” Henry said. “The escalator was fucking long. Like as tall as building or something, and there was just blackness everywhere on either side. The whole dream was just me sitting on the damn thing and riding it to the bottom. Boring as hell, but at least I wasn’t in the apartment anymore. I think I saw a subway station or something at the bottom.”
What the really weird part was - and he didn’t mention this to Revy because he wasn’t exactly sure how to explain it himself - but neither he nor his dream self actually remembered getting on the escalator. One minute he was crawling through the hole (which was really a tunnel, if one were to get technical), the next thing he “woke up” seated on the escalator traveling down at a painfully slow speed. How he’d gotten there or what he was doing were complete and utter mysteries.
Henry sat back to inspect his work on Revy’s face. Stitches may have been necessary for the cuts under her eye, but he doubted he’d be able to convince Revy to go to an urgent care facility to get them. Besides, stitches that close to the eye? Pff, he’d be hard pressed to want to go himself. A bandage would have to do for now. He’d worry about dragging her beat-up black and blue ass to an urgent care if the cut continued to want to bleed.
New cotton ball, more bacitracin and it was on to another round of cuts and abrasions. “You’re probably mildly concussed,” he told her. “You can put your sunglasses back on, by the way. You want me to hang out tonight to make sure you don’t drift off into sleepy permanent oblivion?” It was unlikely to happen, but again better safe than sorry.
Had she met anyone who had boring dreams? Midna’s was all about princesses and shit and it was giving her tattoos, different colored eyes, probably magic powers to boot. Last she heard from Neal, twisted fairytale bullshit drama. Leon’s were just fucking special (considering she was damn sure the cop had a hard on for this D guy, and he was swimming in denial). These things had a habit of starting on a slow-burn that segued into something fucked up. Revy hadn’t heard about any exceptions to that rule.
So she was awfully contemplative while Henry worked on her, no fussing or hissing. The occasional twitch that expressed pain from a sting, and like hell she’d think it necessary to go to an actual medical establishment for this. Worse had been cared for by ice and bandaids, and Henry’s insistence on ‘patching her up’ was more than she’d been willing to do for herself anyway.
But thank fuck on the ‘go’ for sunglasses. Those dim shades went back over her eyes, a relief from the aching brightness of indoor lighting. “Sounds about right,” she sighed, fingers rubbing her temples. As if that’d do a damn thing for her headache. “But, fuck it, why not. I’ll keep you fed.”
Revy smirked, grabbing his chin to playfully shake. “Thanks for making sure my face doesn’t get infected, Nurse Henry. Five stars for bedside manners.”
Henry frowned slightly at the nickname. Sure, she could call him dickcheese or asshole and smack him in the nuts, but nurse somehow got under his skin. Mother issues, probably.
He was finally finished with her face. “I got 300mg ibuprofen,” he told her, his chin still between her fingers, and his shaggy brown hair swishing over his amber eyes. He set down the bacitracin - mostly gone now - and tossed the last cotton ball into the trash. Swish. “It’s just as good as taking three regulars. It’ll take the edge off your head and the rest of...this…” he made a circular motion with his hand to indicate her torso and whatever other injury she may have sustained there. Revy hadn’t mentioned getting battered around the ribs or anything, but who got into a fight where just your face got messed up?
Everything else beneath clothes was minimal. Bruises, sure, but nothing could really help with that aside from cold things to help with the swelling. They’d go away in time - but she and Roberta had been punching each other in the face back and forth near the end, it had gotten personal. Neither of them were prissies were concerned about appearances. All part of a raw, old-fashioned fist fight after they exhausted their weapons. Ammo only took them so far.
“Fuckin’ A,” she grinned, resulting in pain she forgot to expect; hence the faltered look and irritated nose wiggle. Releasing Henry’s chin, she got off the couch with a sway and wobble, and went to grab a water bottle from the fridge. “You know, you seemed pretty comfortable messing with all that.” A motion to the first aid equipment he brought with him, and she came back to sit down and twist the plastic cap off. She couldn’t swallow pills without liquid. Sure, there was beer, but she’d give it a couple hours before she opened one. Kinda the responsible thing to do while she was all shades of physically fucked. “Do you patch your friends up often or am I just special?”
Henry didn’t move from the coffee table. He watched her get up and fetch a bottle of water and come back again. Then he glanced over his shoulder at his first aid kit. “No,” he started carefully, as if this was some kind of secret. “My mother is a nurse. The years I spent with her, she insisted that I learn first aid. She taught me a lot of it herself and what she didn’t teach me, she dragged me to clinics to learn. I don’t know, maybe she had hopes of me being a doctor or something.” He got up and circled around the table to put the bacitracin away and fish out the bottle of ibuprofen.
“It was kinda the only thing we did together,” he went on, “but she worked a lot so…” he shrugged as if that was enough to finish his sentence. Truth of the matter, for as much as his parents demanded he live with each of them to the point of constantly disrupting his life, neither one of them had actually spent a lot of time with young Henry.
“It came in handy a few times when I was out on the range or in the woods doing wildlife photography,” he said. “It wasn’t survivalist living or anything like that, but amenities were pretty scarce.”
He had dug the bottle of pills out and dumped one out into his hand. He leaned over the table to hand it to Revy. Then, with one brow raised expectantly he asked her, “Chinese?” She had said she was going to feed him, right?
Note that he said that with as much enthusiasm as he would reading a grocery list. Normal people had more life in them when they talked about their mama’s - assuming they were fond of them anyway - but Henry? Maybe it was just his general approach to things. Stoicism and apathy, but…eh. Eh.
Pill in her mouth, she swallowed it with a gulp of water. Hopefully it’d kick in soon. She could handle the soreness, but the constant ghost of a headache throbbing in her skull was going to drive her up the fucking wall in a couple minutes. But, right, Chinese. Revy reached for her smart phone - there was an app for takeout now, wasn’t that fucking handy? “You two close now? You don’t really mention your folks much,” she observed, scrolling through the menu.
Considering the holidays were approaching too. Family stuff was in the air for most people, wasn’t it?
Revy was still on the loveseat, which left him with the choice of sitting on the coffee table again or in the papasan chair, which he was looking at with a certain amount of disdain, as though it had insulted his shirt or something. He had memories of attempting to navigate sitting in a few while drunk and it had never turned out in his favor. Coffee table it was, then.
“We’re not,” he said as he sat next to his bag. “My mother…” how best to describe the former Mrs. Townshend without sounding like an entirely ungrateful bastard of a son? He didn’t exactly blame her for breaking up the family, but she never really explained why she had just up and left without so much a goodbye, nor had she ever apologized for it. Henry knew the reasons, sure. He’d been old enough to see his mother’s unhappiness before the divorce. He’d heard the fights between her and his father that had raged on long into the night.
Henry didn’t blame his father for driving his mother off either. The man had tried the best he could with what he was given both before and after the all-out war that had been their divorce, but it had changed him in the end. It had made him a cold, bitter man and not exactly pleasant to be around.
“Long ago I came to the conclusion that my parents bring out the worst in each other.” He said at last after a moment or two of thought, “Now, I’m the reason they’ll always be connected. And somehow I still get caught in the middle as ammunition for each side.”
“I call them on Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s day and their birthdays,” he went on with another shrug as though that were pretty much all he wanted to discuss the matter. “I get cards on my birthday.” He eyed her phone. “My fee for house calls are eggrolls and kung pao chicken. And that beer,” yes, that one on the coffee table specifically.
Henry could sit next to her - the loveseat wasn’t terribly big, but it was made for two, all worn around the edges from a secondhand store. Comfortable though, especially for a night of drunken sleeping. But she continued to listen, and he couldn’t really see those tiger eyes raise from the phone screen to him behind the dark lenses. Hell, his story made her glad she didn’t have to deal with forced parental interactions; her dad was probably still in Chinatown unless he killed himself by too much fucking beer consumption, and her mother was...well. Who knew. Revy had one, obviously, someone not so Asian as her father. She guessed the woman must have had freckles, though. It’d explain the few tawny ones speckled on her nose and cheeks.
“Relationships and kids, all tough things, I guess,” she said, her tone thoughtful. To have parents but not really have them the way you were supposed to - you might as well not have them at all.
But of course, the thought process of all that was interrupted by his request. Food, she got that. Beer? Well, she’d offer it - but he seemed to have his sights set on that one. The one she had pressed to her cheek when she answered the door. Revy had to kind of laugh. “What the fuck ever, dick cheese, all fuckin’ yours. Gonna give it a couple hours for my head to stop spinning before I catch up to you.”
His takeout requests were doable, and after making the selections, she pressed send and…fwoosh. Order placed via mobile phone, fuck yeah technology.
Anyway, she switched the phone out for her pack of cigarettes, pulling one out and lighting it up. No beer she could do, she was not giving this up. “Does that mean you’re stuck splitting holidays between them? I mean, the fuck do you do there, now that you’re an adult?”
Henry picked up the beer and twisted the top off to take his first gulp. Mmm, luke warm beer. Awesome. It wasn’t the taste he was going for.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Now that I’m an adult, I choose not to split time with them at all. I mean, it’s been a decade since the divorce and they still can’t let it go. My father’s convinced that my mother is dating all these men. And she keeps asking whose life he’s ruining now. They can’t stand to know the other is happy and they’re both miserable people. They make me miserable.” Another liberal glug. “There’s not much of a relationship anymore-” and there hadn’t been for a long time “-so I limit it to phone calls. Pretty ungrateful, huh?”
“No,” she answered after a thoughtful minute, cigarette rolling between her fingers a bit. “People’s children aren’t supposed to be some kind of bargaining tool. You pop out a fucking baby, the expectation is to take care of it like a human being - physically and mentally. If they make you feel miserable then you’ve got shit obligation to spend time with them unless they nut up and see going down each other’s throats is hurting you the most.” Parents were capable of inflicting a kind of damage no one else could. And he had the right to remove himself from the equation as best as he could before it ate away at him.
Revy sucked in another smoke. “Do what you gotta do to make sure you don’t end up as stupid in the head as they are. Even if it means fucking off from their lives and keeping the contact at a minimum.”
Henry watched Revy roll the cigarette between her fingers as he listened to her. She was right, of course. Logically Henry should have felt zero remorse over his decision to “fuck off from their lives”. Unfortunately humans were not nearly so logical. If they were, he wouldn’t be in the situation he was in with his family. If they were, odds are his parents wouldn’t have married at all.
“You’re right,” he said. “And I doubt they’re ever going to see it that way, but,” shrug, “whatever.” Another glug of beer. “Yeah, so anyway, that’s why I look like I know what I’m doing with that,” he nodded his head towards his first aid satchel. Do me a favor, though, and don’t try calling me nurse again.” He leaned forward and braced his elbow on his knee and put his chin in his hand, “you gonna give me all the gory details of this Dream Fight, or what?”
Man, those issues must run deep if being called a nurse bothered him - not that she had room to judge, fuck, feathers made her antsy. Henry didn’t ask for much to begin with, and not like she wanted to push away one of her very few genuine friends. So she nodded, saluting him. “Yessir,” she smirked. No more nurse-calling. Roger that.
But as for regaling him with tales of gunslinging battle, hm. Revy patted the spot next to her. “Like my face isn’t gory enough, but fine. I’ll tell you the story of the ex-military Spanish maid slash killer, and the Russian Mobster Queen that only allowed us to knock each other out and not kill the other.” Conflicting interests or some crap. Not that she’d go against Balalaika's requests, either. She was impulsive but not stupid, and knew who to carefully pick her battles with. Fucking with Hotel Moscow made you a damn idiot. “Makes me wish my life was still that exciting.”