completelycrazy | in the night: ic inbox

Mm.

[He vaguely meant for the grunt to be words, he just hadn't quite decided on which when she started tugging at his shirt. It's odd, but the only thing he wants to do now that he's home is drink a bunch of water and sleep. The adrenaline and panic he's been running on for the past three days have all but worn off—and god, does that hurt—and he hasn't slept because you don't sleep when you get abducted by aliens.

Which is what he's been calling it, abducted by aliens. To himself. Aliens are the only analog he can think of—like, you don't get kidnapped by, whatever, monkeys or something. Macaques aren't out in the world snatching people off the street and squirreling them away to do strange experiments on them. Even the Kaiju didn't pull this kind of thing. Dealing with things in nature usually means you die, or you don't, and either way, it's a quick thing. There's no greater purpose to rationalize beyond the basics: you were food, you were a threat, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But what was the point of this? Abducted by aliens. It doesn't make sense to him, and it should. It should.

He sits forward on the couch so that he can pull his shirt off. There's a deep gouge running down the length of his side, the edges of the wound ragged from how the spirits clawed at him. That'll need the most stitching. The cuts along his stomach and chest aren't nearly as bad.

But, ah, it's the sleeve that gives him trouble. He grits his teeth as he eases away the fabric, and then the crude bandages that once upon a time were an undershirt. His right arm has been torn to shreds, his skin flayed beyond repair. It looks like the spirits had the mind to peel away his flesh starting at the shoulder, but gave up partway through and resorted to raking it off in strips instead. The bandages were mostly there to just hold it all in place.]

I think... it took them a while to figure out it wasn't a shirt.

[His tattoos, he means. The spirits seemed confused once they'd gotten down to his bare skin. So they experimented. Alien abduction. They were learning.]

It's superficial.

[The last word comes out in German—will she notice? something about an automatic translation, he remembers that was a thing—because that's a hard word to remember in English right now. His head is throbbing and he's dizzy and cold, all typical with blood loss but still irritating to deal with. God, he really just wants to sleep.]

. . . I see.

[Thank god-- thank god-- she'd watched Booker die a few times. Not many, not before Comstock cottoned on and had them killed, but enough. She's seen gore. She's smelled blood and watched brains splatter over tile.

Because while she's played doctor over these past few months, broken legs and shallow scratches aren't like this. This is-- this is like her eye, this is sickening levels of gore, gore that one can't just stitch up and walk off, and good god but it's nauseating.

So thank god she's seen it before. Thank god she can keep a level head right now.]

You need to tell me what you need done.

[Because while she can hazard a guess, he's the one who knows better. Just here, just in this one area, and she'll never admit it when this is done, no matter how he needles. And he will needle, because he will be alive.]

Hold still.

[Because she's slipping an IV into his other arm, gripping his wrist and stretching it out, doing it with practiced ease.]

[Oh, a task. Having a goal helps, actually, given that otherwise he's stuck staring at his mess of an arm. Right, what would he do if—but then he drifts to thinking about her in this state and how much he'd hate that, and then how he selfishly collapsed in on himself when he realized she wasn't with him in the hospital. What? Anyway.]

Get the, um. There's glue on the table. Stitches here, glue here.

[He nods to his side and arm respectively, and then takes a long moment to think... but nope, that's all he's got.]

I'm not a doctor.

[He pauses, remembering something in all the chaos a few hours earlier.]

Who were those people?

[Glue, and it's a little alarming how quickly she moves to grab it.]

I know you're not a bloody doctor, I'm--

[It's a terse reply for a sentence that wasn't all that combative, honestly, but she's focused on getting him ready. Dragging a chair over, she rolls up her sleeve and makes a fist. A vein emerges, and easy as anything she slips a needle in. Blood shoots from her homemade IV (and isn't she proud of it) towards him, and Rosalind sighs sharply.

Good. One task done. Now another, and she leans in, her hand steady as she gets to work.]

They call themselves the Wild Hunt. They arrived soon after you were taken and offered their help. I don't know much more than that; I was a bit busy preparing to ask them questions.

[Terse again, but whatever, she's concentrating.]

Oh.

[Another sound he didn't quite mean to make, but he hadn't realized what she was doing with the IV until she sticks a needle into her own arm. That's... numbing in a way that brings the dizziness back, so he closes his eyes. This is dangerous, he thinks; his body could reject the blood transfused outright like this, and—oh, but Rosalind has thought of that. That's right, she invented blood. Created it from nothing. How incredible. He couldn't even do that.]

What questions?

[He doesn't actually care much about the answer, not right now, but this will be better with a distraction. That's how he made it through the worst of his tattoos, keeping up some kind of conversation with his artist. He holds his arm as still as he can while she pieces him back together, but this sucks a hell of a lot more than a tattoo.]

What?

[He's talking again. Why is he talking? Can't he see she needs to concentrate? She's not a doctor either, and even the best trained ones wouldn't do stitches while giving blood. But she's extraordinary, and anyway, he needs it, so what choice does she have? But honestly: this is hard enough without Robert distracting her.

But she'll try.]

Who they are, I suppose. Why they haven't shown themselves until now. What kind of name is the Wild Hunt. Things of that nature.

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