2019-07-24 - Hallway Processing

The hallway is extremely cold and Lilith isn't feeling too much at the moment, but she feels that. She has been pushed to wait outside the doorways of OR being prepped for herself, Alexander, and Byron. Magnolia has already been wheeled ahead for her leg into one of the OR doors. They've put Lilith right near Byron, maybe that was Cherish catching on that she was groggy full panic about thinking she killed him. Alexander is just over to the left too.

It's finally quiet again, for them. There's been so much commotion ever since this all started and unconscious pass out, for her, at least, wasn't even nice, dark, and blissful. It's rife with images and dreams that are just as awful as being awake... and having it all start to trickle back into place.

She was an ungodly terror and she knows she could have been even worse. What did she do? She knows. She doesn't. She can't head wrap the things she knows entirely. She can barely look over at Byron dozing in and out. She's terrified to look and even see if Alexander is awake. Because... now she thinks it was his blood that she felt hot on her before she passed out.

Drifting in and out of consciousness with fragments of memories of what they'd all just been through, Byron Thorne has a difficult time keeping his eyes open. Whatever dosage of sedative that Alexander administered did its job and the recipient was only now fighting to pull out of an unpeaceful sleep. The ring no longer had a hold on him; releasing him from that maddening grip of obsession and greed. His right arm still throbbed, but the meds that he was on were dulling that pain.

At this moment, his eyes begin to open and stare blankly, at first, towards one of the non-descript hospital walls. The last thing he'd dreamt of in his uneasy sleep was that noose around Lilith's neck and the fact that he shot her. He didn't want to do, but the sound of the revolver unleashing into her echoes within his mind. Followed by that final scream. This is the most that he's been alert since Clayton had sedated him, only now realizing that they were no longer at the Stone Bridge.

It was definitely Alexander's blood. The man's habit of walking everywhere and the season have given him a workman's tan, but underneath that, he's shockingly pale, and has already been set up with a transfusion to try and replace some of the blood that poured out of him on the bridge. His leg is mercifully covered, and prepped for the king's horses to try and put it back together again. He's been out like a light this whole time - shock, perhaps, but also that his body seems to have seized on any excuse to shut down after weeks of sleep deprivation. Still, the movement of the beds, the jouncing of it on his damaged limb, is enough pain to bring him up to a gasping wakefulness. "Where, where?" he mumbles, and starts trying to get out of the bed.

And then chokes back a cry and flops back down when the movement pulls at his leg. He groans, looks around. "Dead?" The questioning word is given no context.

Lilith has already been re-dosed with something anti-anxiety through her IV because of the way she woke up and thankfully, it's making her a little bit numb when she notices Byron starting to move and rouse more nearby. Then she hears Alexander definitely awake, and wondering...

Dead. Who else was there? Who isn't here? Who else is dead? What did I do?

She knows. She doesn't know. Her mind is all one now, but the fracture splits that happened leave her trying to click things into place as actual or nonactual, lots of details are missing, things she would have noticed and seen as herself. One time she remembers is all silver and sparkly chrome. One time is red and hot and violent.

Tick Tock. The rope creak sinks into her with subconscious memory. She shudders and buries further down in the sheet thrown over her to try and keep warm, to try and hide, to try and...

Finally, she turns her face to look at Alexander, at least, though, and she whispers through ragged voice, "You aren't."

Byron remembered hearing voices earlier in the emergency room when they were first brought in. Some were familiar but most of them belonged to doctors or nurses. The voices that he hears now are far more familiar. That said, he's about to drift off to unconsciousness again, but this is something he tries to fend off. Where were they? He knows full well that he's not alone, the voices tell him this.

The crack of the revolver firing off is what greets him when sleep tries to win him over, that very sound not jolting him awake. The bed which he lays upon creaks at this abrupt and almost violent action and though he doesn't sit upright both of his hands, the good and the bandaged begin to feel their way around the hospital bed, his eyes finally turning to look on the other faces here. Where were-- A hospital. They were at a hospital.

He spies Lilith first as she's right next to him near his bad arm. God did that break feel uncomfortable, even painful when he tried to move. "You're alive, I thought." He's not even quite sure what he thought. He heard her scream, the noose was still around her neck. And then the moment that he fired off that shot comes to mind. He was fighting with ring's compulsion at that moment where part of him was still Byron, "Oh god. I didn['t mean--"

"Oh," Alexander says, in response to Lilith's helpful words. He thinks about that for a long moment, twisting his head as he tries to think past the pain and the drugs he's already been given. "Good." He licks his lips, and adds, mostly to himself, "Probably good."

He hasn't had the effect of the supernatural compulsion muddying his thoughts, and as his wakefulness spikes with his pain, he remembers more of the scene on the bridge. Even vaguely remembers wrapping the bag around his leg before passing out. For some reason, the memory makes him cough. No, that's a laugh, low and pained. He refocuses on the two of them, his head craning to see Byron. "Also alive. Good." His eyes close, before he mumbles, "Sorry about the stick. On you both."

"Mags... she's... somewhere here." Lilith remembers seeing Maggie and she figures that might be related given Alexander is here too, even though she really just remembers lashing out at the beacon of light that was lashing at her and trying to get the ring free and her off of the edge. So that at least answers maybe one more question about 'dead' or not. It's hard for her to know who all was actually there. There might be more dead. There might be...

Tick. Tock. The ropes. Who's at the end of the ropes, Lilith? Not you. It was supposed to be you, wasn't it?

Her voice is raw while she tacks on that somewhat thick and thoughtful tidbit for Alexander, her eyes briefly going far away. Then Byron speaks. And if she was pale before, she's lost the rest of her coloring when her head jerks with turn his way as fast as it can manage in her current semi-underwater state and haze of drugs. She stares at him like a wounded animal, but it's hard to know really why from his perspective, perhaps. Is it because of what he did?

Or is it because she lived the nightmare? She broke him. She didn't know how and where, really, automatic defenses took care of that part, she remembers feeling herself go into his body, not to heal it or sense that sturdy familiarity of the way he's made, no. She got in there and broke. And it could have been... deadly. She thought it was at first. She remembers seeing him laid out before she went down.

Stick? She has no concept of needle. Instead, after a moment of trying to swallow down in her garishly scuffed and bruised throat while staring at Byron, she tears eyes away to look back at Alexander mournfully, "No. If you needed to hit me with a stick to make me stop... you don't be sorry. You don't ever be sorry for that. Ever."

The more that he moved his wrist the more it hurt and Byron was learning this the hard way. It's been stabilized, for now, so his hand isn't flopping about uncomfortably where the bone gave way. Perhaps, it's out of morbid curiosity, but he starts to unravel the bandages covering that particular injury. The shock of pain when it initially happened is far from his mind now, though there are parts that he remembers. He knew that something happened, it took him by surprise. At that time, all he could do was focus on the ring and, in a sense, on Lilith. This blindness made it easier to shrug off a lot of things.

Clayton was here, he realizes, his own features pale when he makes eye contact with the other man. Alexander was something else that he'd not noticed on the bridge, but he does recall the aggravation he felt towards the other in the moments leading up to his arrival at the bridge. The hand at his bandaged wrist stills, leaving it partially covered. "What happened? All I can remember was," He had to take the ring and he had to stop Lilith. Though the ring no longer possessed him, he remembers that much. The pawnshop and what he did to it.

Never ask Alexander a question unless you actually want an answer. Especially when he's in pain, on morphine, and his already tactless nature is registering an epic lack of fucks to give. At Byron's question, he says, bluntly, "The ring. Miss Winslow had it. You were hunting it. You had a gun. She has a mind like a buzzsaw. It did not work out well for anyone, really." He blinks a few times, lets out a harsh breath. "If it makes either of you feel better, you seemed to regret hurting each other. Even in the madness. Two were dead. Don't recognize one. Hank, the other." It's all recited tonelessly, but his face contorts with remembered anger, remembered shock.

Hank. Hank. Hank. No.

Lilith doesn't want that confirmation of where her mind's silvery overlap was real in the middle of all that was hazed red and real too. So she doesn't touch it. She doesn't react when Alexander says the name, she doesn't remember the snap (she does but..) or the swing or why he was up there to begin with. Because of her, because of what she did weeks ago, what she did when it was time to... to...

Lilith lifts her good hand to put the heel of a palm up against her head between her brows, as if she's literally trying to help denial along by force or trying to sort something. Then she lets it fall, looking at Byron doing the unwrapping on his wrist. Her breath intakes, as if she's about to speak to stop him, but... she should see, shouldn't she? She looks at Alexander's leg after and her jaw twitches some, but the anti-anxiety does its part overall. Mostly she just kind of takes turns staring.

"Alexander... I don't have words for... I'm so sorry. I wasn't... I can't even blame it because... I'm so sorry. Thank you. Thank you. I-- he and I might have both been..."

She looks back at Byron and blinks her misty eyes a few times fast. They might have honestly just killed each other, tried to save each other in their own delusional ways at the very same time. What if it had just been them?

Byron knows Lilith isn't a crier. Sometimes when she got real hurt or bloody trying to keep up with a bunch of boys and compensate by going twice as hard, she'd cling and clutch and do the hidden bury-tears thing on him so no one else could see, but...

Drugs are kind of wearing into that and it really looks like she's about to choke on a sob.

Much of the past few days really is a blur. It's hard for Byron to perfectly recall just how much sway and influence the ring had over him. He did a lot of things and told a lot of lies to everyone, but that is how he operates naturally when placed in a situation that required him to. That envy and desperate need to possess that damn ring forced his hand and now he was having a difficult time recapturing that feeling in all its intensity to justify the things that he'd done.

See, for Byron, while he may have felt the snap, he's wasn't 100% sure what had caused it. Even without fully unbandaging it now, he has a faint memory of it happening. Maybe he just has to see for himself. He's still a little dazed, confused by what had happened. And here Lilith is apologizing for everything. Did she do this to him? I mean, he did sho-- "I shot at you, Lilith. I didn't mean to, but I had little control over myself. I remember it happening and wanting to stop." That's one of the few semi-clear memories that he has of the incident.

When the bandage is undone, what he's left with is that brace and the gauze beneath. Just the need for his wrist to be stabilized should speak volumes of the various things that she could have done to him. Did she break his bone? Did she try to severe his wrist? Or both.

Alexander's words does get him up-to-speed, his mind going back to the wrecked pawn shop now. How could he forget that. His mind also lingers on the fact that, yes, they tried to kill one another and Byron did all that he could to stay one step ahead of everyone else so that no one would be able to stop him in what he needed to... what he thought he needed to do. He was feeling nauseous now, led on by the pain but also this heavy feeling of guilt and dread.

Then it dawns on him that Hank was dead. Dead is how Byron's voice sounds right now, with his throat dry and just this swell of dulled emotions breaking out into the light that has him choked up, "I'm sorry, Lil."

Alexander swallows, hard, and turns his face towards the ceiling, his eyes closing. "It's fine," he mumbles at the thanks and the apology. "Wasn't me. That other kid, the Jones girl. She was there. And it was the ring. Not," he stops talking for so long that with his eyes closed, it might seem like he's passed out again. But there's a soft breath, and then he continues, "It wasn't entirely you, either of you. You're not only the things you're capable of."

Lilith hasn't been home since the shop was broken into twice and her loft pitched and thrown into upheaval after forced entry. That'll be a fun homecoming when she's discharged. More chaos and fallout to clean up. But she's not thinking about the shop right now. Part of her knows what her office, at least, looks like, but that's far away.

"Maybe not. But you being there... that was you. That was you. And I--" Lilith really doesn't have it in her to dig in on how sorry and thankful she is to Alexander now that she's being washed with a number of realizations piece by awful piece in her state of hazy wakefulness. But the weight in her hoarse, broken tones, it's enough. It was everything that he was there. Because he's him. And that speaks volumes about Alexander Clayton as far as she's concerned, it's clear.

Words are so hard anyway, though, from the looks of her, because Byron is talking about shooting her when she looks back his way and giving his own apology. She looks at his wrist instead of his eyes, though, and she can't... seem to actually make words his direct way, even though she's talking around him and about him to Alexander. Her throat makes a noise like she's trying, though, and can't actually work it out into form. She swallows down hard, which would be painful if she were feeling more at the moment-- drugs and other pains are precedent.

But eventually, she gets out to him, "You're alive. It's all that matters. It's all that matters."

"I could've killed you, Lilith" Byron says, his voice trembling as he shifts within his bed to lean off to the side and in her direction. "You had that noose around your neck and I had to stop you from jumping, but I shot at you instead." There's more emphasis spoken now, his voice holding firm, "I could've killed you. What if you'd fallen?" Then her neck would have snapped like those other men, but he barely noticed any of that when it was going on.

"You were in pain. I heard you screaming and I thought if it was because I'd shot you. I couldn't tell what was going on, being so blinded by.." That ring. Now that's in a better position to look on her, he studies her. It's obvious that her hand was damaged, but had he shot her there? Did he do that? He doesn't stop there, however, trying to determine what more she may have suffered through.

"Magnolia was there?" Yes, he'd seen her for a moment, around the moment where he'd heard Lilith's cry of anguish. He then turns towards Clayton as he, apparently, holds on the information, but Lilith remembers seeing her too, "Is she..?" Clayton said that two were dead, but he's trying his best not to make Lilith think that she did whatever happened to Magnolia.

Alexander has to think about it. After his calf shredded, everything became a little fuzzy, but up until the moment he passed out, "Last I saw, she was alive. Hurt. Leg? Something. There was bone. But alive. I think I remember her when the sirens came, talking. Probably alive." He grimaces at Lilith's hoarse words, withdraws as much as he can while huddling on the bed. "No one was gonna let you idiots kill yourselves over a piece of jewelry. Stupid reason to die. Suicide. Always stupid. Just survive. That's all."

For just a moment when Byron is playing the what-if game with all the awful possibilities (which face it, that's Lilith's thing usually) at hand and into the air... Lilith shifts in her hospital bedding and looks like she's about to crawl over onto his bed to make him stop. Her body turns to hip, but something in all that movement makes her wince because, yes, she was shot, and yes, her hand is bandaged to shit with one finger deliberately separated from the rest of the bandaging.

She stops moving and puts her cheek to her pillow instead, whispering at Byron like he's breaking her heart with that trembling voice naming all the awful terrible. She could have crushed his ribs and punctured his lungs when she lashed out, she could have killed him if the gun wasn't priority to her defenses and needing disabled first and foremost, she could have ripped him open like Alexander, rage shot him like Mags to bring her bone through the skin of her leg, tried to set him on fire. Maybe she could have snapped his neck and called it a day, too, she doesn't know, she isn't sure, everything was...

It was like the nightmare that ripped them apart first.

"Stop. We're okay." The whisper is raw. Pleading. They're not okay. But they're both here, she needs to focus on that right now because if she doesn't... she's blinking more tears that are starting to roll rather than mist. She focuses on what Alexander is saying instead, the jewelry, the cause (?) of all of this chaos that's been so prominent in her life for weeks now. She realizes she can't feel that anymore, that she's terribly torn apart and pained but... she's her own Lilith now, too. It's not a great thing to be at the moment, but it's lighter. She's not marked with weight and darkness disguised as warmth and light anymore.

"... it's really gone?"

There's a feeling of restlessness, or perhaps the better word is anxiousness now that things that were said, things that Byron's being reminded of have set off these alarms within his head. The bandage which was once wrapped around his wrist float off to the ground, being shoved off of the bed when he sits upright, the arm with the IV stuck in it being tugged. He's going to get off this bed, or that's what he's planning on doing.

He could hear the hurt in Lilith's voice, but he mistakes it for something else. Fear? Misplaced guilt? Byron was the hunter in all of this. Not Lilith. None of this was her fault and would never have happened if it weren't for him. But then what would've happened? She would've hung herself like the others.

It's at that moment when a passing nurse tries to get him to settle back down, reaching to re-insert that IV back into his arm as others come to help. Was that what stopped him from doing everything in his power to reach Lilith now, just as he'd been thwarted in this same mission before? When his gaze meets with Lilith's seeing those glossy, tear-filled eyes and those words of pleading, he stops, allowing them ease him down and onto his back, his own gaze now staring up at the ceiling again. He's quiet. He knows what he had done.

They're having a Moment. Alexander's not really an expert on Moments, but he doesn't have to be an empath of any sort to feel the intensity of the emotions between the two, the difficult waters they have to navigate with each other and themselves as they come to terms with the events of the last several nights. He rouses, briefly, when Byron looks to be getting up, but the nurses are far more equipped to do anything than he is, so he settles back down and closes his eyes, unconsciousness threatening in the depths of his mind once again. He seems content to be silent and lost in his own thoughts.

Alexander is quiet again, she thinks he's gone back out into unconsciousness and can't answer on the state of the jewelry in full, but she knows anyway. She knows enough. She felt the loss as well as the pain and rage when it was pulled from her, she knows the way it felt when... she saw it flying... then falling? But for the first time in weeks, she's not mentally stuck at needing to know where it is like a compulsion. There's other things. Byron is moving and trying to get up.

She just lies there watching him, dimly aware of how hot one of her escaping tears is on her cheek in the middle of the cold, cold hallway awaiting the adjoining OR doorways. Lilith should say something, she should stop him, she wants to, he needs to be still and rest, but... she wants him to get there too, where he's no doubt aiming, right for her, deep down. The nurses interfere and stop it. She's twinged with disappointment, shot with relief that he's back still again and once more appearing some semblance of quiet and restive too.

While he's staring at the ceiling, she keeps watching him, unmoving, barely blinking, her eyes at a far-away half-lidding during that time. Then finally, she starts to speak in that hoarse quiet that's like echoes of what almost was, her voice damaged from the pressure of the noose and screaming. She's very slow with it.

"Byron. Do you remember..." A pause, "You got a note once. In your locker. It just had a heart on it. It could have been from any girl, the way they used to look at you." Junior year. She'd been so diligent about avoiding his eyes, his presence, his attempted hellos so long at that point, already. It felt like an eternity. He might not have even began to think it was -her- given all that.

It was a note, folded and folded and folded again, all to unfold into a single heart inked black in the middle of the page. That's it. Could have even been the wrong locker placement, for all he could have been thinking at the time.

If they weren't letting Byron out of the bed, the least they could do was give him more freedom to move. Right now, he's being pinned down with one of the nurses putting pressure against his shoulders and practically blocking Lilith from his view. She can catch glimpses of him from the spaces that the nurses do not fill, the way their bodies are positioned and shifted. One of them is working on wrapping up his wrist again, while another gets a mild sedative prepared in the hopes that it will keep him calmed and less mobile.

His neck and shoulder strain against the pressure keeping him down, the set of his jaw shows his agitation, but none of that stops the medical team on doing what they need to do. That's what he thought at one point too. He would do everything in his power to get that ring. It was what he needed to do.

Lilith comes as a distraction now, his headrested upon the pillow. She's talking about things that happened in the past, such random things. Probably nothing he'd thought about for years.

That black heart

Does he really remember it? It should have been something faded from memory. Nothing important, but for some reason, he does remember. Perhaps it stood out to him, the mystery of it all. Had he gotten a reading from it though at a time that Tobin had warned him that using their powers was dangerous. "I imagined it was from you." He stops in his struggling, eyes never diverted from the ceiling above, "I was never sure. But I told myself that it was. I even tried to figure out who sent it. It was never a clear read and since nothing came of it, I must've stashed it away somewhere. Realizing that I was wrong."

"It was me." Obviously. Lilith confirmed that the moment she asked the question, as much a confession as an inquiry there in that breath. Then she's very quiet. Why bring that up, right now? Drugs? Filling air? She's watching him with nurses, she's seeing him dosed, she's watching him resettle, she's feeling... oh. That's why. Drugs, too, yes, but...

"In English class, we were reading the Telltale Heart. I had been so strong and decisive for so long. I didn't know I was sitting there, making a single heart in the middle of the page. I didn't really hear the story. I just needed to give you a telltale heart when it was done. Even though it was all black." A pause, "I feel like that now. But I don't want to give you a blackened heart." Another pause, "There's no words for each other right now, I think. Or maybe too many words. I--" Drugs are admittedly making this a little hard. It makes sense to her, but also it sounds strange and thick aloud and she knows that, she knows he was just dosed too.

Lilith waits and tries to think how to finish that. They've hurt each other. They've done damages. They've embedded fear of each other at the same time they've embedded fear for each other, unwittingly. But in the end, she waits for the nurses to move and get out of the way and down the hall. Then she reaches with her good hand stretching to grip at his bedrail, pulling their two beds askew and angled toward each other just enough. Just enough to... she reaches.

Byron feels her fingertips at his forearm above the bandaging edges, crawling across to try and reach part of his chest atop the gown. She's almost to the heartbeat, but not quite. Doesn't matter though. Her finger starts to tick with a pulse that she matches with his. She syncs them back together in such a drugged and backhanded and desperate way there in that moment because she doesn't know what else to do. But she whispers what comes across as something they're going to make happen, not something she's stupid enough to believe they're anywhere close to being.

"We'll be okay."

Lilith may have used her good hand to pull with all that reaching, but it's the horribly maimed and bandaged one she puts to rest on Byron's gown to tick the index finger that's left out of the rest of the bandaging.

For all Byron knew, at that time, the black inked heart was put there by Isabella. If they weren't one-upping one another, they found ways to prank each other. Though in their case, that was a form of one-upmanship too and Byron never let on to her that he'd received the folded piece of paper. If he went on a wild goose chase because of it, that would mean Isabella had won if she was the planter of the black heart. Then again, the folded note could have meant he was marked for death. It was a humorous enough thought.

Instead, Byron lay upon his bed all that evening with the unfolded paper in hand. If Lilith had sent it, maybe that meant that she would be more open to meet with him again. But that never happened and he was foolish to not have returned the favor in the form of another folded piece of paper. That was all in the past now.

"You have read the Tell-Tale Heart since then, right? Do you think it still applies?" The drugs are beginning to take over and where there was frustrated aggression trying to get him out of bed, the sedation starts to soothe him. Now that he won't be any more trouble until after they are treated, the staff do go on with their business. His eyelids are heavy and though no one is holding him down against the bed anymore, his gaze stares almost blankly now at the ceiling still. That is until he feels the touch to his broken wrist. He's slow to respond, but he finally turns to look down at the bandaged hand touching his own wrappings. He didn't even realize she had moved his bed and for all he knew, their beds really were this close the whole time.

He doesn't quite smile, but there's something almost resembling one that forms on his lips, the side of his head resting on his pillow. She was right, they had survived this. Even though they'd hurt one another, some of which were in ways that went far beyond just physical pain. His own voice comes out in a dry whisper, that almost smile still lingering, the drugs taking over, "You're right. We made it. Together."

"Yes. But at the time I just was fixated on the title. After I read, it, though? I felt the heartbeat of what I killed too. There was no walling it off no matter how many walls I put up. And sometimes I still do." Lilith admits in her whispery and raw little voice after a tiny moment of pause to consider Byron's inquiry. She watches her hand in partial rest against his chest, that one unbandaged index finger poked out with her thumb on the bad hand ticking away and... slowing as his bodily functions adjust to the sedative that he was given.

Having her hand there seems to be helping her too and she's lucid enough, they were a little afraid to give her too much before she had to go signing surgical treatment consents and all, especially since she came in unconscious on an unknown dose and has already been hit with something else since after an unpleasant awakening spurred by her own dreams and misunderstandings of what actually happened. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. She counts them awhile. She gives up.

Together. Separated. Together.

"Yes, Byron. Together."

She wants him to sleep now. She might even want to sleep now.

She killed together a long time ago. Didn't she?