Leon Orcot (motherofdragon) wrote in valloic, @ 2021-10-10 10:21:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, petshop of horrors: leon orcot, ₴ inactive: james barlow |
Who: Leon Orcot and James Barlow
What: Leon gets stitches
When: After the Cauldron gets shut down
Where: The hospital
Warnings: Stitches, some ambivalence around dying, digging in of heels and being stubborn about feelings
Ten years ago, Leon probably wouldn’t have bothered much with the long, deep scratch down his forearm, which he’d gotten trying to protect his face from one of those demonic robot birds. He’d have gone home after his shift, wrapped it up, maybe tried closing it with some superglue or something, and gone about his life. But he was older now, and covered with enough other scars (ones that even criss-crossed underneath the current scratch, left behind by tooth and claw) that he didn’t need to go adding new ones just for the sake of trying to tough something out when he could just suck it up and go to the hospital.
It was bandaged right now - some short little man with way too much hair and pointy ears and run by and bandaged it up for him, appearing out of nowhere with a bunch of gauze and a lecture about going to see a healer as soon as he was able before he’d disappeared back into the melee - but already he could see red leaking through the bandages, and he was glad that the wait in the ER hadn’t been especially long.
He was a little less glad when the doctor walked through the door of his treatment room, his heart rate picking up and his face turning red. It wasn’t that he’d been avoiding James but…
Okay, yeah, he’d been avoiding James. He didn’t know what to make of the kiss, and he’d been trying to sort through his own thoughts and feelings on it before he’d gone bumbling through an interaction, and yet, here he was.
“So they really do got you sewing people up, don’t they?” he said in lieu of a greeting.
Lunch? What was lunch? Something James wanted, yes, but good fuck it was insane today. He’d been at the hospital since 6:00 in the morning and the turbocharged coffee and granola bars he’d consumed kept him going, but he was starting to feel the pangs of hunger creep in. Working the ER during a robot crisis would do that - it was just constant, a non-stop grind, and he’d almost forgotten what spending his days in a hospital was like. He was still a bit rusty at it, actually, since he’d done his residency so long ago then he had settled into 40 hours a week or less, considering his main clients had been Vorerra and had been in a private practice - but he actually sort of liked the hustle and bustle of inpatient care and the hospital life now. It was more diverse, not to mention the compensation was higher - he needed the money, he had to admit. Vorerra, as a whole, was swimming in cash and ill-gotten gains - but ever since he'd been cut off, it wasn't like he still had access to his family's fortune.
At any rate, he planned to just grab something quick and then find the break room for a fifteen-minute snooze but one more patient was on his rotation. And wouldn't you know it...
"So you really ended up in here to witness it firsthand, didn't you," James smirked, pulling the curtain closed behind him. He sat on a stool and rolled closer, bringing along his tray of supplies and slipping hands into latex gloves. “Let’s see it, then.” Gently, he took Leon’s arm to assess how deep the wound was and - would this be awkward?
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it was only as awkward as they allowed it to be which, well. James had been trying to give him space - that kiss had been kind of a last-minute decision and while James enjoyed it, he wasn’t sure if that feeling was reciprocated and it never seemed to be the right time to ask.
“Yep. I thought ‘hey, what better way to see if James is bullshitting me than to go get myself sliced open,” Leon said, almost smiling.
He swallowed when James touched him, but let him take his arm. The bandage was wrapped around nearly his entire forearm, though a line of red made it obvious that the wound ran along the side of his arm. The bird thing had sliced the black shirt he’d been wearing under his t-shirt, and the guy who’d bandaged him up had been helpful enough to cut away the rags above his elbow so they wouldn’t get in his way.
“Some short elf or something bandaged me up,” he said. “He looked like he knew what he was doing but…” he shrugged. It wasn’t like he’d taken the bandage off in the meantime. That seemed like a job for a doctor, especially since he was pretty sure actually removing the gauze under the bandage was going to suck. Leon could handle pain well enough, but it still wasn’t something he was looking forward to.
“Not a bad bandaging job,” James noted - and he had his forceps and needle and thread; a lidocaine injection too, so the needle wouldn’t hurt when he used it to stitch up the wound - but perhaps he wouldn’t need it. “Here - you won’t feel any pain. Trust me.”
He sort of thought that Leon did by now - but just in case. A few of those Latin words took care of it (sine sensu among them), and magic rippled and shimmered in the air around them. Just a brief wave of it, like a moonbeam dancing off the surface of dark water. But it was a spell that involved the workings of the mind, of course, the brain - reducing pain signals, like an electrical pulse; Leon wouldn’t feel anything at all when James took off the bandage and the gauze beneath.
Then he got to work, leaning in closer to begin stitching, dark head bent over the wound which he had in front of him when he stretched out Leon’s arm. “Hm - well, go on and tell me what else you’ve been getting up to besides fighting robots in the forest?” he inquired.
Who needed local anaesthesia when you had magic? Leon probably should have just assumed that was a thing, but the casual use of magic here was something he wasn't sure he'd ever really get used to. It was kind of weird watching someone stitching you up when you couldn't actually feel anything, so Leon didn't watch what James was doing to his arm, focusing instead on his face.
"Working, mostly," Leon said. "Adora fixed my leg and I joined the Outlander hockey team." He'd been half hoping that the busier he kept himself, the less he'd think about the last time he'd seen James, but it hadn't worked as well as he hoped it would, and now here he was, so so much for that.
"What about you? You look tired."
James worked carefully, arctic eyes focused on the task at hand. He stitched with precision using a sterilized needle and thread, cutting that excess thread when needed and using forceps to manipulate the tissue around the wound - that didn’t hurt either, since the spell would last for awhile yet. Less of an uncomfortable ‘coming off’ it too, that was a bonus. Less of a headache or pins and needles feeling that local anesthesia would give a patient.
“Isn’t that a nice way of telling someone they look like shit?” he smirked, glancing up and meeting Leon’s gaze for a moment before James shifted back down to watch what he was doing. He supposed he was tired, but it had been a long couple of days. Things would get better. “I’m alright though - it’s just the usual wave of injuries that happen whenever something shifts off balance here.” Not like it was always due to Outlanders...
Alright, most of the time it was.
“I’m glad someone fixed your leg. Must be quite a relief, hmm?” he mused. How long were they not going to talk about smashing their faces together? James really wanted to know.
"You don't - That's not what I -" Leon flushed, shifting his gaze from James, trying to find something else to fix his eyes on. Not finding anything else really worth looking at, he settled on one of the ceiling tiles, trying to see if he could see any shapes or images in the dots. There was a name for that, he thought - the tendency for humans to see patterns and images in random things - but the word wouldn't come to him.
"They managed to, I don't know, shut down the Cauldron or whatever it was. The robots aren't going all Terminator anymore, at least, so things should hopefully be calming down here soon." He cleared his throat, and thought he might've seen a particular cluster of dots that looked a little like a dragon, if he squinted. "I could… I mean, if you, you know, didn't feel like cooking tonight or whatever I could swing by with some takeout when you're done."
Smooth, Orcot.
Except he reminded himself, forcefully, he wasn't trying to be smooth. I wanted to be the opposite of that. It had been over a week since James had kissed him, and whatever Leon's feelings on the matter were (right now, it consisted largely of 'confused'), he knew he couldn't let it happen again. "Not as a date, or anything," he added suddenly. "Not that I'd think you'd think it would be a date." This wasn't going well, and he needed to make himself shut up before this became any more embarrassing, so he finished, firmly, with, "We should talk."
“Why wouldn’t you want it to be a date?” James asked, snipping off the last bit of thread. He studied his sewing job, which was quite perfect if he did say so himself - then he reached for a fresh bandage, since the wound would need to be covered for a day or so before it could be cleaned as part of its healing process.
Everything smelled like a hospital - like antiseptic and bitterness and the undertone of something artificial to try to mask that very medicinal aroma; he wasn’t sure if this was the best place to talk, but alright. James carefully applied the bandage with the same gentleness he used to put in those stitches. “And what are we talking about?”
He’d agree or not agree to the takeout, depending.
Well shit. If Leon didn't have time to prep himself for seeing James again, he would have at least liked time to get his thoughts in order, but apparently he wasn't going to have a chance to do either. Which was really just his luck, when he actually thought about it.
He had almost managed to convince himself that every Vallo local just locked lips with all their friends like the French did their little cheek kissing thing, except when he'd been looking to see it, the only people he saw kissing looked to be in actual relationships. And then he'd convicted himself that James in particular just kissed all his friends goodbye like that, except now that he was here he couldn't quite bring himself to believe it. He couldn't really bring himself to believe it was because James had any particular feelings for him either.
But that was part of the confusion too, wasn't it?
He pulled his gaze from his not-dragon and looked down at his arm, making a fist and opening his hand wide, still marvelling at the lack of pain.
"I'm not really… you know, dating," Leon said awkwardly to his hand, and then looked at James straight on. "It's not fair to whoever I'm dating if I'm not all in, and I can't be all in when I'm still trying to get home. When I'm still trying to find D. That sort of thing just hurts people, and you deserve something better than someone barging in half-assed."
James sighed. This nonsense again - honestly, Leon was as stubborn as a stone, as the saying went. But unfortunately for him, so was James. Not to mention the witch doctor was also touch-starved and fully immersed in how lonely he was; he recognized it keenly, a byproduct of not wanting to let anyone in thanks to the actual danger of his upbringing. Dragging an undeserving person into the bloodstains and shadows of Vorerra wasn’t good for him or that person - but since he’d distanced himself from them, he was trying to figure out what actual living was like.
Making connections. Feeling things. It was wild and dangerous unto its own.
“First off, I’m not asking for something like a relationship right now,” he said, slipping off the latex gloves and tossing them into the biohazard bin. “Secondly, I’m going to be completely blunt here - your efforts to try and leave this world won’t yield anything because no one leaves until the waypoints blip them out. It’s just the way the world works - you can fight it kicking and screaming all you want, but you can’t change the mechanics. You’re not that powerful. No one is.”
Otherwise, wouldn’t that have been figured out by now? The locals also didn’t have some magical MacGuffin to be able to leave, nor did they want to leave the world either - where would they go? To space? This was their home. It could be a home for the Outlanders too, if they at least tried. Sure, it was hard, it really fucking was - but lots of things were hard. Holding yourself back because of that, because of fear, only led to a dead end and a metric ton of regrets.
“Lastly, have you ever stopped to think that this obsession with whoever D is, is going to get you killed before you’ve even fully managed to live for yourself?”
“Then why did you -” Leon started, and then stopped himself because the answer to that seemed to be staring him in the face. It wasn’t that Leon didn’t know that the casual thing existed, it was just that he never knowingly entered into on (though his girlfriends had all dumped him quickly and savagely enough that he could also say that he’d never had a serious relationship either). He blushed a little, but that wasn’t the most important thing right now.
“Obviously some people leave,” Leon snapped. “There’s gotta be a reason for it. For all I know, some of them probably did figure it out before they disappear. And you’re not going to tell me the dark and mysterious leaders of ancient covens don’t know how their damn island works. I’m sure as shit not buying that.” He was aware he was digging his heels in, acting like he did when he was younger when he was sure that everything had to have some sort of logical explanation, but this was different. He could look passed a lot, but not this.
He laughed derisively at James’ get killed comment though. “I’d already be dead, if it wasn’t for D.” He didn’t know why this conversation made him so angry, but it did. “Once for sure, but probably at least three times. If you think I became a cop because I expected to enjoy my retirement plan, then -”
He stopped, blinking, anger dissipating, because that was not at all what he’d meant to say, and now that he said it he wished he could unsay it. “I don’t have a death wish,” he clarified.
“Again, for the third or fourth time, even if they do know - they won’t tell you,” James insisted. Beating it out of them, bribing them, bargaining - there was only so far you could get and none of that was going to go in Leon’s favor. But James was almost one-hundred percent certain that no coven leader had all of the answers. No one did. It was like trying to create a round triangle or, on some days, understand the complexities of the human heart. “There are some things that people just don’t know. I’ve been inside their heads. I’ve been inside the heads of many people - and if there’s one thing I’m brutally aware of, it’s that we’re not meant to know everything.”
He didn’t want to have this argument - Leon could honestly grow up and accept it or he wouldn’t. Seemed kind of silly to dig your heels in about such an insurmountable thing, but James wasn’t here to make those decisions. No, he was here to work himself to death to distract from feeling so off-kilter that stability and something solid seemed like concepts slipping through his fingers like water.
“And you’re not much of a cop if you’re just laser-focused on one person,” he said. “Quit lying to yourself and just admit that you want him for something - not to catch him, or to bring him to justice, but for something.” Someone who wasn’t even here - he couldn’t imagine revolving his life around the ghost of another person. Even if he was here, James still couldn’t imagine it - if nothing else, he was absolutely and completely done with revolving his life around anyone. Whether they were in front of his face or not.
Leon ran his hand down his face. He didn't want to argue about this anymore either, especially since every time he heard someone say it was impossible, the more he thought he might someday believe them.
"You're right, I'm not a cop anymore," Leon said. "And I'm not looking for D to bring him to justice or anything like that. He forgot something when he left LA, and I just want to give it back to him. That's all." He stood up, flexed his hand again, and said, "Thanks for stitching me up."
Sure, that was all - sure it was. James didn’t even roll his eyes, even if he wanted to. He just responded in the form of a glare that was chillier than diving into a snowbank, colder than an empty tomb.
“What does it even fucking matter? Because I’m sure even if you do give it back, your obsession won’t abate one iota,” he replied, standing up from the stool and straightening the crisp white doctor’s coat. “Keep that bandaged for a day or so, then keep it clean.” Soap and water. He didn’t need to go over it.
That was definitely a no for takeout, by the way. It was actually quite the fuck off - he may as well have it stamped on his forehead, or plug in a flashing neon sign with the letters lit up.
Leon winced. "I…" he started, and then bit his lip, because there really wasn't anything else he could say. He couldn't even say for sure that James was wrong. So what could he do?
This is what he'd wanted, he reminded himself. He'd been upfront from the beginning, and it was easier if he didn't get bogged down with friends or anything else. The only reason he felt so crummy right now was because he'd never wanted to hurt James while doing it.
"Yeah, I know the drill," he said instead. He hesitated for a moment, as if he wanted to say something else, and then he made himself turn, slipping through the curtain and out of the hospital.