Suspicion

Lux

[*suspicious* Matching Entry messages? What fell darkness doth this portend?!]

Nate

He had about five minutes in the back of an ambulance and five minutes in the trauma bay at St. Luke's Hospital to slap out a text message before they took all of his things and stripped him down to a gown and wheeled him up to the surgical floor.

When Lux awakened on Thursday night she was greeted by this:

Minor accident. @ St Luke's. Going to surgery. Should probably talk when I get out.

At some point they gave him back his phone but he was too doped up to figure out how to use it. Lux however could figure out by his last name alone where he was in the hospital. He wasn't an unlisted patient and there were no other Marszaleks in the city. He was in a post-surgical wing of the hospital waiting to be stepped down to the neurology inpatient floor.

It's winter. Darkness falls early. Even though visiting hours are over at eight o'clock she has enough time to drop in and make sure he's still got all his pieces.

Lux

[Art?]

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Lux

Lux isn't familiar with the hospital, but she has no trouble finding Nathan's room. Perhaps because Lux has no problem dealing with people, even the tired and jaded medical staff of a hospital like St. Luke's where concerned friends and family are rote problems to be dealt with and they are just another face. Perhaps this is because she is so godamned beautiful it compells something more than indifference. Perhaps this is because she is actually an intelligent creature, sharp and careful and alas for her very willful, and just now her will is to find Nathan Marszalek and visit him. And so,

and so, Nathan Marszalek receives a visitor. A visitation, Lux, standing in the door of his room. Isn't she decorative? Her gloom-dark hair is shadow-throttled even under the sterile hospital lighting, her bones fine beneath skin so pale as to be almost translucent. Did she bring balloons? No. But she did bring a small moleskine journal, one with un-lined pages, and the moleskine journal has been turned into a (hasty, admittedly) work of painted art to illuminate a stop going to the hospital point. There's about an hour until visiting hours is over, perhaps a little less than that, and - Lux standing in the doorway, having drifted past other rooms, shadow-on-silk, inquisitive, until she found the right one and -

"Hey Nathan," not spoken quietly, but not loud or buoyant either. "You awake?" rests her weight mostly on one ankle like she wants to stretch but hasn't given into the urge yet. Precision. Poise.

There's so much blood in the hospital: being spilled, waiting in bags, so many hearts fluttering, working off-rhythm tilting off-kilter, and Lux

well, that bloom of health in her cheeks, that warmth in her skin, that's somebody else's brush with death, somebody else's survival story.

Nate

Whatever happened to him could have killed him.

For the moment that she stands in the doorway with the beeping and the bustling behind her in the corridor Lux can see that Nate is lain on his back with his head tipped away from the so that it may rest on his right cheek. The gown is tied up in the back which is a good sign. Blankets up around his hips.

The bad signs present themselves thusly: he is on a cardiac monitor. He has a pulse oximeter clipped onto his index finger and an IV line plugged into the back of his hand. He wears a nasal cannula piping oxygen in out of the wall. Both of his forearms are wrapped in white gauze. So is his head. The gauze is meant to cover up his left eye and whatever else happened to that side of his face. He's not unconscious but he's not his usual easily-startled self either.

But then she says his name and asks if he's awake. Nate clears his throat and lifts his head so he doesn't lean on the left side of his face when he looks towards the door.

"Hey," he says and lets his head drop back. "I think so."

Lux

"So this is what a minor accident looks like," Lux says, thoughtfully. "I wondered."

The dark-haired young (forever, for ever ever after [this is the happily?]) woman doesn't stay by the door, but walks over to Nate's bedside. Doesn't sit at first, looking at the monitors and the IV line and then at his bandages and then at his expression at his eyes and she doesn't sharpen her senses here too many shrill beeping things too many sudden disruptions or potential disruptions down the hall but she looks at him, her eyebrows lifted.

A pause, and then, "Brought you something. Not another ipod, though if you give me your keys I can go get it for you," a brief, lopsided smile, faint impression of one; it's automatic, impulse. "Want it now or when you're 100% you're awake?"

Lux

ooc: 100% sure you're awake

tyyyping, grr

Nate

"I'm not sure there'll be a hundred percent sure."

He says it gentle like he's talking about the weather. It's a dark translation of everything the doctors have told him so far but that's how his sense of humor is anyway. Every morning he wakes up he does so with ghosts. Of course his sense of humor is dark.

Up close she can see the vital signs spelled out on the monitor over his bed. If she can translate them she'll find them low but not desperate. He's on painkillers and anti-emetics and lord knows what else.

His right hand is the one responsible for the pulse oximeter and the IV line. The left lies nearer to the door. It bears no jewelry and even if it had when he came in they would have cut it off of him. He holds out a hand like to find her arm. Just to make sure she's actually there. Like she needs him to prod her to get her attention.

A weak tap against her elbow and he points to the chair in the corner. A big sea-green plastic bag sits there.

"Keys're over there somewhere. I heard 'em earlier."

Lux

"You one hundred percent sure you're not sure?" Lux says, pretty quick-on-the-draw, insouciant nonchalance drumming up the ghost-of-a-smirk that's surprisingly sharp at one corner. Knife-point. Lux can't read medical anything, and it would be a lie to say that she isn't concerned. But the concern's sublimated by poise, only comes out in the way her eyes continue to linger whenever they return to Nathan on this or on that like the detail's a thing she's going to remember for later.

"Keys over there. Got it." A beat. "So what happened, Marszalek?" 

Nate

Her retort has the drug-flattened man laughing a slow quiet laugh and settling back against the bed. White sheets and white gauze and those are the only things that make him look as if he's not so pale. Contrast darkens his skin. He looks like shit. The one eye she can see is bruised like the blow hit him hard enough to rattle all of his organs around inside of his skull.

If the claw had gone an inch further it would have severed his optic nerve if it didn't completely eviscerate his eye. He would have had a basilar skull fracture on top of everything else. All things considered he's lucky. He gets to keep his eye and the sight it gives him.

Not that Lux can tell from looking at him if he has an eye underneath all that gauze. Nobody told her nothing.

"Oh," he says in a sigh, "I don't know. It was dark. Want me to start from the beginning?"

Amber

A week ago one could be sure the woman named Amber would never be seen willingly walking toward Nathan Marszalek.  Not in a bar, not in a hospital, not even in a faded, dusty used bookstore over by one of the most expensive private universities in the country.  And yet, sometime within the visiting hours of St. Luke's, she is walking through the halls.  And there is only one person that she knows in this place (one person that she's aware of who would be in this place), and that is one Nate "that asshole" Marszalek.

She moves with a prowling stalk of a gait, shoulders hunched where just a few days ago she would have been walking tall and belligerant if not at really proud.  Her hair has been left to hang in waves of brown, with streaks of red framing her face.  They're expecting snow later tonight, but it's warm enough yet that she's got on a sweatshirt done in shades of purple, with an elaborate design of some sort.  Baggy jeans bunched around a pair of black and incredibly scuffed combat boots complete her ensemble for the afternoon.

Her eyes, a stormy green when she's in her "better" moods, have dark shadows beneath them.  Her sleep between yesterday and today was fitful and erratic at best.  Even so, she felt compelled to come.  He should be out of surgery by now, maybe ready to see people, and hopefully too hopped up on painkillers to remember later that she was ever here.

She stops at a desk being watched over by a hawkish nurse, asks for the room, and continues on her way.  In between a woman's voice asking what happened and Nate saying Oh, Amber reaches the door, which she wraps on with the backs of her knuckles before she realizes he already has a visitor.  And that visitor is...Amber's eyes widen with surprise.

Oh.

There's a list a mile long of "last person Amber expects to see here," each just as unlikely as the other.  Lux is on that list somewhere.  Her presence makes Amber look at Nate, bandaged and bedridden, with new eyes.

"Oh, uh," she says, and frowns, tilts her head away, still watching them uncertainly.  "I...sorry."

Lux

Want me to start at the beginning?

"'Fiat Lux,'" she says, the smirk re-surfacing; drawing a glint-of-edge from her eyes. Lux is all shadow-and-light, huh? "Genthtō phōs. Way less pretentiously, yeah. Beginnings come first for a reason."

Look. Lux is an academic (Anarch [Revolutionary].) Latin and Greek'll happen, and now Lux strides long-legged thing over to the chair with the green bag, presses the toe of her boots against the leg of the chair before pulling it away from the wall. Hasn't been bolted to the floor, the green bag makes a hush-a-bye crinkle sound and--

Oh, uh. I, sorry. An Amber!

Lux looks absolutely surprised to see her Tag-the-City (Fuck-this-Place) lady friend or aquaintance or what-have-you, buddy ol' pal, and see this is how you know she's surprised: it threads through her crystalline gaze like air trapped in ice, freezing light; it gleams like silver-gilt there, and it informs the shape her shoulders make, the lilt of her weight from one foot to the next (precise, balanced on the edge of this-or-that).

"Hey," and that 'hey' communicates surprise in case anybody didn't notice it. Tone, man. All about the tone. "Are you -- you know one another?"

Nate

He doesn't speak Latin or Greek and he doesn't begrudge her the use of such prolific expressions either. They're there and they prove her point and Nate has become one with the mattress and the pillow with his bed inclined at an angle so he doesn't choke on his tongue in the middle of the night with all the depressants he's on.

Here comes the chair and then Amber appears in the doorway surprised. Apologizing like she's interrupted something and Nate is oblivious. He lifts his head to see the doorway past the rucked-back curtain again and when he sees who it is his head falls back. They must be cool now. He doesn't react.

"Amber," he says. Amber is probably more used to his voice sounding like this. All loose from substances. "Hi. Lux, that's Amber. She saved my hide yesterday."

As inscrutable as his tone always is this isn't an attempt at humor. He's not trying to be cute.

Amber

you know one another?

And Amber doesn't know what to say.  No?  Up until yesterday afternoon she hated him with the fire of at least two suns?  That's not really knowing a person.  Knowing a person is closer than that, and all Amber knows is half whenever Nate's around aggravating and annoying things tend to happen.  Yesterday was mostly an extreme of the norm, only it ended with one of them saving the other and ending up...well, a little better off in each other's company than they had been before.

This, though.  She looks at Lux, who she has literally painted the town (or parts of it) red alongside.  They have never spoken about supernatural things, but Amber knows some things she didn't learn from the Toreador.  She sees Lux sitting there, looking like she belongs there just as she always looks like she belongs everywhere, and she can't help but wonder why she's here.  Has she come to eat Nate?  Is Amber going to have to try to defend him again?  Could she, against someone like Lux?

Nate's voice, blurry and loose, draws her gaze toward him.  The corner of her mouth twitches.

"We've run into each other a few times," is all she says.

Lux

[Let's see. Is Lux all like, empathic and shit right now 'coz we all know that is totally her thing?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Lux

"You did?" save his hide.

Lux is a passionate creature. Truly: she runs on passion because what else is there, year after year? Whining about how it's not there? Fuck that. Lux is a passionate creature because she is. So the surprisingly sharp curve of one corner of her mouth hook upward impulse kiss of a grin-thing is abso-fucking-lutely sincere, is presaged by the surfacing of some pleased shadow in her already shadow-dark eyes, something that re-arranges their brightness, polishes up that tarnish to make 'em that much clearer.

Amber saved Nate's hide? There aren't many things in the world that could get one into Lux's good books faster-

That's what that smile means, compass-sudden. Good books, man.

Even though. Amber knows some things she didn't learn from the Toreador and Lux gets an inkling of that from the way Amber looks at her. She hadn't noticed it the last time Amber and Lux ran into one another at some dive bar down in dive bar down where all the dive bars cluster together and Lux was carrying around a pool cue like she'd forgotten she had it and her senses were as wide as the moon and everything was beautiful and it was all too too too. Ironic that something tips her off now when she isn't, something that gives her pause. If Lux's breathing were something her life was tied to, something that still pulled the strings of her soul and gave it animation- she might've held her breath for a moment. As it is- no.

Leave it. Nate's hide. Let's go back to that, huh?

Time enough for paranoia later.

Lux was in the process of moving that chair over, and she has it leaning against her thigh, resting on its back two-legs. She spins it closer to Amber as an offering, says, "Then I'm glad you've come.," thanks. "Maybe you can fill in the blanks Nate's going to leave when he starts talking about what happened."

A flick of a glance for the hall; nobody else coming. Habit, though.

Nate

"I thought I could convince it to go."

Here he goes with the it again. Like that makes any sense. Like anyone could see anything down in that basement other than a middle-aged man with a red mouth opened up in his throat and another man's blood soaking his hands.

Even Amber couldn't see anything other than a middle-aged man. Maybe she saw claws in the second she had between flying downstairs and tackling him off of Nate. It was dark and everything happened so fast and she was long gone by the time the medical examiner and his technicians zipped the body into a bag and carried it out of the basement.

Nate closes his good eye. Or it closes of its own tired volition. It's late and he's drugged.

"That'll teach me to think."

Amber

Lux isn't the only one a little concerned about possible eavesdroppers.  The other eternally beautiful, forever young woman glances at the door, and Amber glances back over her shoulder.  Then, before she goes to accept that chair with as little trepidation as she can muster, she closes the door gently behind her.  It won't stop the staff from coming in when they need to come in, but it may give them some warning for when to stop talking about, you know, dead bodies made animate, or the slaying of such things.  They've already - or rather Amber has mostly answered most of the questions (an ordinary, drab-faced lawyer standing near her elbow, her own unlikely protector) the answers posed by the police officers, so chances are someone already thinks she's crazy and maybe Nate's crazy and the whole thing is crazy.  But the last thing they need are gawkers come to hear the crazy tale anew.

Amber's boots scuff on the linoleum tiles, forever marred with countless such marks, but she goes to take the chair.  She is uneasy in this room, too many memories of some other time, but also.  Lux.  Vampire.  And Nate who knows her, who introduced Amber to her as though Lux were the better known of the two of them.  Perhaps Lux isn't here for an easy meal, then, but if not that, then what?  This hadn't been a concern of Amber's last time she saw the woman.  Lux hadn't looked at Laurel like she was going to stalk her out of that dive bar, and so there was no cause for alarm.

Slowly, she eases her way into the chair.  She had her own injury, but it's long since healed, its bandage thrown in the trash, no scars remaining to mar her dusky skin.  She nods, the only show of polite gratitude she can muster for Lux's offer of that seat.

"It?" she asks, leaning forward, propping her heels up on the legs of the chair so she can rest her elbows on her knees.  Even seated in a posture that diminishes her size Amber seems a storm wrapped in human skin, a force of nature bursting at the seams.  But quiet, the howling winds a distant feeling.  "You mean that guy..." she trails, images of his dead eyes staring up at her, her knife buried in his throat, his blood splashed over her hands and thighs and her stomach gives an unpleasant lurch.  Squeezing her eyes shut, Amber folds her hands together in a white-knuckled grip, her head tilting away a moment.  No no, you.  Don't you dare throw up in front of her.

"The guy in the basement."  Yeah, that really fills up that gap, Amber.  Good job.

Nate

"No, not Al," he says. "I wanted Al to stay."

Lux

[Conscience will make my decision for me.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (3, 9) ( success x 1 )

Amber

[wits+ uh, alert?  what are you talking about, you drugged up bastard?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Lux

Lux has far too many conversations with Nate when he is on pain medication or out-of-it for some other reason or half-talking to dead men she can't also hear. Lux is getting used to reading between the lines when he gives her barely anything to go on. Such as 'I thought I could convince it to go. That'll teach me to think.' + 'It? You mean that guy. That guy in the basement.' + 'No, not Al. I wanted Al to stay.' = not much without context. Lux gives it some context and see- her eyebrows wing together sharply, etching a delicate line between; sometimes she is all delicacy, Lux, all sharpness, all paper-cut fineness, the kind that'll cut. Linger. After-image, echo. Close your eyes.

Lux puts one hand into her pocket- pulls out the moleskine-which-is-a-gift, an illuminated master-work, and rests it (with a smack) on Nate's chest. Badum, heartbeat echo, and she looks from Nate to Amber, and-

Yeah, questioning. Deliberating. Because Amber looked at her like she might know something more, because Lux didn't miss that sick-look-when... But-

"So there was an it," beat, "and a guy in the basement. What'd the 'it' do to the guy in the basement? And who did what to you?"

"Were you injured too, Amber?" That line's still between her eyebrows- the concern impartial, shared between.

[Les subt + manip.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Lux

[Hypothetical Will Lux Lose Her Humanity Roll.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (4, 10) ( success x 1 )

Amber

[i can haz empathy?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Nate

The cardiac monitor weathers the clap of the moleskine against the patient's chest. Only a brief blip where she rattles the electrodes taped to his chest beneath the gown and then it rights itself.

Nate does not jump the way the monitor does. He drags open his uncovered eye to look at what it is she just hit him with and then his hands find it. Makes a small noise in his throat like he's trying to ask a question but doesn't want to interrupt. Right index finger sticking out with the oxygen meter making it cumbersome to move.

"You remember the hotel?" he asks Lux. Closes his eye again and doesn't ask a follow-up question.

Maybe Amber will think he's just blitzed out of his skull.

Lux

[will jess frenzy on another tied roll.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (2, 7, 10) ( success x 1 )

Amber

Amber does not think Nate is blitzed out of his skull.  She knows.  This is not her first time in a hospital.  She sees the IV drip and she can guess what's inside of it, though she doesn't remember the names of the drugs anymore.

Be that as it may, just because Nate is blitzed that doesn't mean his words should be dismissed out of hand.  Her own dark brows furrow together, she folds her hands together, and she thinks.  There has to be a reason why there are two.  'It' was not 'Al,' and 'Al' must have been the shopkeep.  Amber doesn't know, she'd never been inside that place before.  It takes time to work it out, time that isn't helped by interruptions from this (to Amber at least) completely unlikely duo.

She looks up when Lux asks her pointed questions, frowning, sitting up a touch and leaning back as if to put the slightest fraction of extra distance between herself and the vampire.  Amber looks at Nate.  And she starts to feel left out.  Deliberately.

The ghoul sits up a little straighter still, puffing up really, the anger that has become a close-second-nature, so close it seems true, like it's her and who she is, who she always was, who she'll always be.  Perhaps one of those is right.  She sits up, straightens, the furrow of her brow darkening toward a scowl.

"I'm fine," she says, words short and sharp.  If there was concern in Lux's question to her own wellbeing it was completely missed.  Amber starts to rise up from her seat.

"It cut him," she answers, standing up to full height.  This is the Amber that Nate has seen, surly and aggressive.  Angry.  Lux has seen something different.  She's seen the storm at rest, joyful even in their spray paint rebellion through the back alleys of the city.  "And then I killed it."  She looks at Nate, laying in his bed, wounded, bandaged, and for a second something turns her face soft.  It doesn't last, though, it never does.  "I didn't mean to interrupt."

Lux

[Aw, but Amber. I want you to get along and feel welcome, especially since you might maybe know shit about me, sorry not letting that go, but I like you just fine anyway. Charisma + Empathy! Chillax! +wp coz of point b.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]

Lux

"Yeah. The concierge disappeared afterward. Did you know that?"

Does she remember the hotel? Lux does remember the hotel. The way her mouth compresses into a firm line remembers the hotel. The sweep of her long lashes downward remembers the hotel. Look at her. Eye make-up is cat-eyed tonight andd ark and dreamy, not a throw-back, not in 2014, that look is in again. Adds a touch of inscrutability, a dark frame to whatever her eyes are expressing. The stillness of her when she mentions the concierge remembers the hotel. Nathan closes his eyes. His eye. She can only see one after all. Doesn't know what's left behind those bandages. And then Amber, Amber who leans a touch away at her pointed questions, Amber starts to become a tempest in a teacup, starts to huff-and-puff, gather herself up all Wolf-at-the-Door, and Lux-

well, Lux doesn't want that right now. Not from Amber (and c'mon for Lux love-is-always-a-weapon,is-always-war, is always a bright sword--she's a social shark, can sense blood on the waterbefore it spills-

She listens to the ghoul intently. Amber killed 'it.' Her face softens when she looks at Nate, and she didn't mean to interrupt. Lux gives Amber a look- or touches her with a certain kind of look. Amber, Amber- who do you want to be looked at? Lux didn't always consciously know, that's not how [Lucifer-girl, Rebel, Rebel, darling-eyed] creatures like her necessarily work- but she'd hit on it. Maybe it's a certain slant of light- but she turns her charm up, [just like Charlie taught her, eh?] and says,

"That's all right; I meant it when I said I was glad you've come. You're here," conspiratorial curl of an almost-grin- shadow expression. "Don't go, unless-"

"Nathan, are you asleep now? You want we should go for now?"

Jingle of keys in bag.

Lux

ooc: Er, not Nathan are you asleep now. *I* want to be asleep now soon.

"Nathan, you sleeping now? You want we should go?"

Nate

Nate's being asleep and Nate's wanting that they should go are not mutually exclusive. They aren't arguing semantics though. Lux wanted to know what happened and Nate tried to evade direct confession as Nate tends to do when Nate has to answer for the things he does in response to things other people can't hear or see.

If he knew who Amber was or to whom she owed her having the veil pulled from over her eyes it would be different. But he doesn't. He doesn't know Amber and Lux know each other either. They all have that in common. They're connected and they don't know how exactly.

She asks if he wants they should go. By the sound of her voice and his tenuous grasp of spatial relations Nate takes his hand off his torso and lays it on Lux's elbow. A frown appears between his brows. The nurse won't be in to give him the medication that will knock him asleep until after visiting hours are over.

No he's not sleeping. No he doesn't want they should go.

"You didn't interrupt," he says.

Amber

Lux.  First creature Amber met in years who awakened something other than fury in the young woman.  Granted, the awe that blossomed in her heart was put there, did not grow on its own, did not awaken by Amber's will, but that moment stuck with her.  Lux is glad Amber is here?  She meant that?  She meant that.

Nate.  Asshole, caught her in a bad moment, caught him in a bad moment, and then they kept causing bad moments to happen around each other.  They each thought the other a jerk, and rightly so.  Nate says she didn't interrupt.

They put Amber on uncertain footing and that's never a good place for her to be.  She hates it there, and she takes that hate and lashes out at others, pushes them back.  Well fine!  Fuck you!  Fuck everything!  Anger and fury and so many broken things follow.  Broken ties, broken bones, broken walls and furniture and things.

She starts to go because why on earth did she walk into this room, see that Nate was still not-dead, and not immediately walk right back out again?  Why did she think things would be different, that they could be different?  Amber starts to go and the strangest thing happens.  They speak up, reach out, don't go, stay, you're welcome here, you're not an intruder, and Amber

does not

know what to do with that.

She doesn't go, then.  She stands there like she's been caught in some sort of spell, one foot closer to the door than the other, body balanced between them.  One hand clamped over the other forearm.

Lux

Lux's response to Nate's hand on her elbow is to glance at him. The glance is the same kind've glance you give a kitten when it, lying beside you, reaches out a paw and just rests that paw all delicate-like on your arm. The glance is one-part charmed one-part charming [c'mere Amber, don'tcha wanna burn brighter than the Morning star too--stay] not just from fall-out her desire for Amber to stay and what it shapes her into but because it's difficult for someone to be charmed and not charming when they're quiet about it. Don't say a damned word. Don't pay it much mind. A glance, and then the glance is back at Amber. The lift of her eyebrows, still a touch conspiratorial.

"All right. Where were we? Talking more about 'it,' looking at your present, some other option or- " a hesitation. "Is your eye going to heal?"

It's not that there aren't beautiful things which aren't visual but-

Lux is a visual artist. Being blind would be a horror, even if it would make things easier. Safer. For a given value of safe.

Lux

[Oh, another Manip + Subt, I guess!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Nate

His hand stays loose around her elbow. What strength is still in him doesn't assert itself in his grip and despite the coolness in the hospital air and the medication dampening his metabolism the fingers and palm are warm.

When she concedes to stay and asks what they were talking about his hand drifts away. He holds the moleskine against this torso like he's familiar with it and not like something he needs to explore.

"Yeah," he says of his eye. "It was just a scratch. Could've been a lot worse."

Amber doesn't need to hear how it could have gone worse. She is the reason it didn't go a lot worse. Lux doesn't need to hear details either. He peels open his good eye and looks down at the moleskine.

Amber

Lux is not the only one horrified by the idea of losing their vision.  She has dreams, see, and those dreams are for more than the feel of the wind of some other place on her skin, the earth of some other country beneath her feet, the smell of another place in her lungs.  Not being able to see.  It would be the last straw, the last thing life could take from her before she took herself from life.

That's why, when Lux asks about Nate's eye, Amber glances away.  She saw what he looked like, that "scratch," just after it happened.  The lacerations on his face and arms, the way his face swelled up, ugh.  No.

Just a scratch he says and a low rough sound escapes her.  She doesn't correct him, though.  It's going to heal?  She hopes that's true.

It seems strange, standing in a hospital room with Nate laying there with his hand on Lux's elbow.  Amber looks away and up, examining the ceiling tiles, uncomfortable and out of place, but wondering.  Maybe he's like her.  Maybe Nathan is to Lux as Amber is to Flood.

She clears her throat, breaking a momentary quiet.  Counting the ceiling tiles in her head, Amber says, "What do you mean you thought you could convince it to go?"

It's not exactly the question that's been bothering her since yesterday, but it's the answer to it.  Why did you go down there?  Well, I thought I could convince it to go.  What?

Lux

Right. The moleskine. It's a (hastily done, admittedly; nobody'll ever be able to tell) piece of art. Moody, broody ink spilling over the binding and the cover all blues and blacks and a red thread gleaming between it's atmosphere it is atmosphere well-wrought well-conjured-up follow the red 'thread' which is- okay. The center of the moleskine has a rectangle cut into it. Through which one can see the vanilla page. See a a hand waving through. Thread leaves the cover, circles the hand, which is holding an apple. Then follow the thread as it slips shivers twists around the rectangle giving it a loose border then to the back of the moleskine where- well but fuck it Nate isn't turning it over yet. The cardboard moleskine brown-base shines through all the moody gorgeousness of color and lends it some warmth and depth. The stark black ink of--more threads along the top? Naw, you'll see when it gets turned over.

Conversations have rhythms. This conversation's rhythm doesn't mean she's going to ask anything on the tail-end of Amber's question. She wants to hear what Nathan's going to say.

Amber

[i bet i can tell!!!  percept uh, crafts (painting!)?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 7, 7, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Amber

[Lux asked for a pretty thing so I'ma make a pretty thing sometime!  dex+painting]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Amber

[4 suxx, Amber you can do better than that!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Nate

"The shade."

He doesn't know what he's talking about. Any explanation he has he can cobble together from his own experience but that doesn't make him an expert. Lain there in a hospital bed with more gauze on him than clothing he does not look like an expert in paranormal activity. He looks like a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and then made a conscious decision to go into an even worse place.

As he answers he runs the unencumbered fingers of his right hand over the surface of the book.

"Sometimes you can figure out what they want and talk to them and they'll stop what they're doing. This one didn't want to talk."

He breathes out hard and flips over the moleskine. Even if he'd lost one eye he could still see it. Nate isn't thinking like what it would be like if he'd woken up and the surgeon had taken his eye for not being able to salvage it.

"Did you make this?" he asks.

Lux

[Lux: Ee, I'ma get a good painting from a promising young artiste. *is a true Toreador!*]

Amber

There are people who'd make certain assumptions about Amber based on the way she conducts herself and the way she dresses and any of a dozen other little things about her.  Too brutish, too aggressive, too mean to be smart.  Some of her choices and actions leave her intelligence suspect, as well.  She doesn't know what Nate or Lux think about her (she could have guessed about Nate before yesterday, but not now), doesn't know if they think her dumb.  It's not the sort of thing to come up while spraypainting the walls of shops and things.  But believe it or not there is a brain in that pretty little head of hers.  Amber is more clever than she even gives herself credit for.

Nate doesn't come right out and say ghost or spirit, but the point is, Amber gets it.  Just as there are undead creatures like Lux and Flood, there are dead things that move in their own ways.  Sometimes they can be spoken to, this one didn't want to talk.  It wanted to scare the living hell out of a couple of dumb (yes, dumb) mortals and maybe drag one or both of them to wherever it had found itself.

Amber's brows pull together, but she nods, just the once.  Then Nate is asking Lux about the moleskine-turned-work-of-art he's holding and she turns away again.  Takes a step toward the door but stops herself from simply wandering right out of here.  Makes herself not give in to her own discomfort.  This feels like it's turning into a private moment.  It's obvious by now that Lux is not here to harm Nate.  There is something there and Amber doesn't want to look at it too closely, lest she see something that tweaks old pains.

Turning back, she says to Nate, "Look, I'm glad you're okay.  I need to go, though, so uh."  Jesus how long has it been since Amber said goodbye rather than storming out into the night?  "I'll see you around."  This for both of them.

Lux

The other side resolves into a less abstract image. The thread is being held by a woman in evening-smoke-ink-smear-shades hair an improbable Aubrey Beardsley thing, smudgled by a deliberate thumb sharply enough that it's deliberate but you'd never think it was no never- clouds. She's along the very edge. Open the moleskine and look at the main page, and the hand holding the apple is held by a little satyr-boy who is sitting scrunched up on a bicycle seat and looking at it in the light. He's got on a p. i.'s hat and a trench. Just ink on the page. Expressive little satyr. Above that are the words Detectivin' Book For Serious Reporters.

Lux doesn't ask Nathan any more questions about the shade that beat him up. That hurt him badly enough that he has to stay overnight here. That Amber 'killed it.' Whatever that means. (And she'll be asking, rest assured.) That line re-appears between her eyebrows, fleeting shadow-thing- and then she grins.

"Yeah. Next time you're in the hospital, I'm going to make you something ugly," and the grin fades, because she's remembering a frustration (recent), and because she is distracted by a) Amber's tactful departure and b) her cellphone going off. Sure, maybe she's not supposed to have her cellphone on here- maybe she is. Lux doesn't know, Lux doesn't care, 'cause rules are to Lux as yes is to know- complementary sometimes, but about very different things.

She doesn't answer, but a moment later there's a text and she looks at that- says, "I need to go, too. But I'll bring your ipod by later. Wait up, Amber. Walk you out."

And with a ruffle of Nathan's hair while texting- grace! For modern things too-

The credits will roll. Finis. There is no more.